STOP Wasting Time! Beat Distraction

So what do you think holds people back? They, they know what they want to do, but they just can't keep the habit. They do it once and then they fall off the train, and then next month they do it again and they fall off the train. How do you make that consistent?

Well, you just keep, you just keep working at it and working at it. The best way of all is to plan it in advance. Instead of sitting down, never start work without a list and never start work without prioritizing your list. People sit down and they say, well, before I make a list, I'll check a little email, check a little spam, send something to my friends, see what's going on YouTube, and so on and so forth. And then they look up and it's 10 o'clock and they haven't done anything of value. So what you do is you have to say, you know, well, you know, what do they say? If you start it right, it'll work out right. So start it on your most important task and do that until it becomes a habit. Now here's an interesting thing about checking email is when you check email, it triggers the release of dopamine in your brain. Dopamine is a drug. And by the way, there's all kinds of books and articles and scientific studies on this. And dopamine is the same drug in cocaine. And what it does is it's triggered every time you have a, uh, shiny object or something new or different or interesting or sparkling. If a telephone rings next to you, you go bing, your brain releases endorphins and you can't hardly wait to see what it is. So you're talking to somebody and you could be talking to somebody about something very serious and your telephone goes off, bing, your whole mind goes blank, the middle of conversation stops, you grab for your phone, you pick it up, you look at it, you check it out and everything else. And then you come back, If you're working on a task, it takes an average of 17 minutes to get back to the task. And then there's another distraction. So another 17 minutes. Average adult is checking their email between, and their phone between 95 and 145 times a day.

That's crazy.

Which means they're like attention deficit disorder dogs. They're just literally running around back and forth the whole day. At the end of the day, they're exhausted. By the way, USA Today and Harvard have proved that you lose 1 IQ point for every hour that you leave your email on. At the end of the day, you've lost 10 IQ points. You actually become stupider throughout the day, dumber. And here's, I ask this of my audiences. I say, have you ever finished a day where you don't think you've accomplished anything? You've been on email responding to bings and beeps and rings and so on all day. And at the end of the day, you go home, And honey says, 'What do you want for dinner?' And you say, 'I don't know. I don't care, anything. I just want a drink,' because you're so exhausted you cannot even decide. Sit there and basically like you've just been, you know, punched in the side of the head because your brain is dead and you lose 10 IQ points. You get stupider throughout the day. You've got to turn that darn thing off if you want to remain sharp. Develop the habit. You say, I'm going to develop the habit and I'm going to give myself my reward and my reward will be to check my email after I finished my first task. So all of success in life is task completion. Let me repeat that. I just had a long conversation with an entrepreneur and he almost fell off his chair. I was coaching him and he said he'd never heard that before. And then I spoke to this group I was telling you in Japan, I told them the same thing and they were just flabbergasted. Is the key to success in life is task completion. If you don't complete tasks, you have no future. And so if task completion is the key, then what you do is you complete more and more important tasks. And if you start every day by completing the most important task, your brain actually releases endorphins. Now endorphins is another chemical and it's only released when you do something that is life enhancing. And what that means is when you do something that is good for you, that enhances your life, that furthers you, it makes you happy. It releases energy. It raises your self-esteem. I sort of say, if you want to be a winner, how do you be a winner? Well, you win. And winning means you cross the finish line. So if you start and complete a task, you're actually winning and you get a feeling of being a winner, which gives you a suffusion of energy and inspiration, and it drives you and motivates you to want to get that feeling again. So how do you get that feeling again? You start and complete another task. So I've developed the habit, and people who are successful develop the habit of starting and completing tasks. So my wife comes in and says, 'Dinner's in 5 minutes.' So I look at my list and I say, 'Okay, there's a 5-minute task.' And what do I do? I start and complete a 5-minute task. And each time you complete a task, you get a burst of endorphin. The bigger the task, the more endorphin, the more endorphin, the more quickly you become addicted to starting and completing important tasks. And every single successful person has a reputation for starting and completing important tasks. You want the job done, give it to him or her. You want the product served on time, you want the product completed, you want the product manufactured, shipped, delivered, give it to him, give it to her, give it to that company because they always deliver. That's the best reputation you can have if you want to get rich.