PNTV: The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Jim Huling, and Stephen Covey

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of philosopher's notes. TV Today, another great book, the Four Disciplines of Execution. The Four Disciplines of Execution or the 4Dx by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, Stephen Covey's son, and Jim Hewling. These are brilliant guys from Franklin Covey. Subtitle of the book is Achieving your wildly important goals. I picked this book up quite a while ago when I did Cal Newport's Deep Work. He referenced them, had a great quote. We'll talk about it in today's episode. And I read it in preparation for Productivity 101. It's fantastic. Highly recommend it. And as always, we have a Philosopher's note with a bunch of big ideas. And as always, we have five of my favorite ones here. Let's walk through them quickly. So, the 4Dx, the 4 disciplines of execution. The first thing to know is that the authors tell us that if you ask people, hey, what are you pretty good at? Strategy or execution? Most people will say they've studied in business school or wherever. Strategy more than execution. And they're better at strategy, coming up with an elaborate vision of what they want to do and how they're going to do it, then executing it. So the real trick is execution. And there are four disciplines or practices or habits of execution. Here they are 1 +2 +3 +4. They are as follows. So the first thing is you need to have a wildly important goal, which we're going to talk about more in a moment. The second thing is you need to focus on your lead measure, which we're also going to talk about. The third thing is you need to keep score of the lead measure. We're talking about what that actually means in a moment. And then you need to have a cadence of accountability. In other words, you need to continue to keep score on the lead measure that will drive the important goal. The four disciplines of Execution. There they are. Let's look at them in a little more depth now. So we'll start with your wildly important goal. You can shorten that to your wig. Your wildly important goal. This was a passage that was quoted in Cal Newport's Deep Work that made me get the book. The basic idea is you need to identify what's really, really, really important to you. Wildly important. David Brooks, Road to Character author says, it needs to create a terrifying longing in your soul. You really want it. If you achieved this one goal, it would have the most significant impact in your life or your organization. So let's pause for a moment and think about it. Or what wildly important goal, if you achieved it, would most transform you and your life? What is it? And as you think about it, know that it can't be 10 things. You can't have 10 wildly important goals. You can't even have three or five. Max one to two wildly important goals. I like one. I like Gary Keller's quoting of a Russian proverb that says, chase two rabbits, catch none. One thing. What's your one wildly important goal? If you could wave a wand and create anything in your life, what would it be? That's a wildly important goal. When you have a big yes to that goal, it makes it a lot easier to say no to other goals. Here's another way to think about this. I talk about it in the note. So one of my friends and mentors is a guy named Matt McCall, who's one of the world's leading venture capitalists, right? And we were talking about some opportunities that have been arising for our company, Optimize, which has been really exciting, but it also challenges us because we've got different things we can pursue. And he says what I'm now calling the rule of 80%. He says, look, and this guy, he works with, you know, top organizations, startups, et cetera, the CEOs, entrepreneurs, et cetera, he says that most companies try to do too much. They try to do too many wildly important things. And he says if you do one thing right as a startup, you have roughly, let's say, an 80% chance of success. But what's interesting, that's somewhat arbitrary, obviously, but let's just go with it. 80% chance of success. If you add another thing, you have an 80% times 80% chance of success. So the paradox is the more you try to do, the less likely you are to succeed in any one thing. Makes sense, right? You have finite resources. You can put all of your energy into the most important stuff, or you can spray your energy into a ton of things. Which one do you think is going to give you the higher level of success? Now, he says if you go for a third thing, your odds of success go from 80% to 80% times 80%, which for the non math majors is 64% to a little over 50% success if you're trying to do three things. Now, as a guy who's mastered the process of going for too many things, I know what that's like. But the point he was making in our chat was focus on your most important thing. And he says the best businesses have very few moving parts. They do this over and over and over again. The 40x guys say that Steve Jobs was known for his relentless focus. And one time he was giving a presentation or something, he said, look, we're a, whatever we are, billion dollar business, right? 35, 40 billion dollar business or whatever they were at that point. And he says every single product that we have can basically fit on one table. They could pursue a ton of things, but they don't. They discipline themselves to do a few things really, really, really well. That's what we want to do with our wildly important goal. One other thing to think about. When you have your wildly important goal and a well defined wildly important goal or wig, you're specific. Again, the research is unequivocal. You want to be specific. They say you can define it as we will go from X to Y by whatever period of time. So for example, I can look at our business goals of going from 10,000 members to 100,000 members right by when. Well, our really aggressive goal is January 1, 2020. That's a wildly important goal. It aligns all of my energy. Everything I do is aligned that one goal. I then break it down into a creative production goal. By 2020, we're going to go from where we are now, a little over 200 plus ones to a thousand plus ones. From 450 something philosophers notes to 700 and something philosophers notes from 25 master classes to 50 to 75 master classes. I'm playing around with that one. But the idea here is you're going to go from X to Y by when. Define your wig in those terms. The third thing is our whirlwind. So you get your wildly important goal, you're fired up about it, you actually want to prioritize it. Then what happens? Then life happens. You enter what they call the whirlwind, right? The whirlwind of distractions, which is your life. You have a life to run. You have a business to run, if that's your thing. And as much as you want to do your wildly important goal, this whirlwind threatens to derail all the potential in your wildly important goal pursuits. You need to be aware of that. And they say you got to realize that sometimes, almost always, a really good wildly important goal is going to force you to face some dragons. It's a heroic commitment to say, I'm going after that. That in itself is pretty scary. That's a dragon fighting hero's journey experience. But once you make the commitment this whirlwind is actually filled with gnats. You don't have dragons flying around so much. It's gnats, it's little paper cuts. Little things you think you have to do that derail you from the wildly important goal. We're going to talk about this more in the next episode on Peter Drucker's Effective Executive. For now, my number one practice to deal with the whirlwind is I keep it at bay. And I say, look, I'm not going to do anything in the making the business work realm to hit our current goals until I've done something on my wildly important goal. I am going to be creative before I'm reactive, meaning I'm not going to hop online, check out what's going on in the world. Right. I don't do email, but if I did, I wouldn't go into my email or any other notifications until I've created something. That's my number one practice and my number one tip to make sure that the whirlwind doesn't overwhelm us. Our fourth big idea, we're getting back over here. So you've got your wildly important goal. That's what they call a lag measure. So if we want to go from 10,000 to 100,000 members in our membership program, or you want to go from wherever you are to wherever you want to be, or I want to, for example, run a Spartan race, I've now done three of them. We've done the Sprint, Evan and I, my right hand guy, the Sprint, a super and a beast. Pretty fun, right? We'll talk about those more in another context. But if I want to do my first Spartan race for my next one, that's a lag goal, right? That's going to lag after certain other things I'm going to do. So your wildly important goal is a lag goal. Right now, what we want to focus on are the lead measures that make this lag goal more likely. Most people, and it's a lag goal because it lags behind other stuff. You can't directly influence your wildly important goal. I can't directly control, rather, whether or not we increase our membership base. Now, most people look at the stats all day long. They're constantly looking at the lag measures and hoping that they change. But the best executors get really clear on what they need to do in order to give their lag goal the best opportunity to come to fruition. And then they ruthlessly focus here. They focus on their lead Measures. This is kind of like if you have the goal here, this is the systems to use the way that Scott Adams describes it, right? And how to fail at almost everything and still win big. He says goals are for losers. Right now he's being hyperbolic there. You need to have a certain target, but then you need to ruthlessly obsess about the systems, the lead, things you're going to do to make this more likely. You can say outcome and process here as well. That's the basic idea here. So you need to, once you've defined your wig, you need to say, but what are you going to do to make that goal a byproduct of something? What do you need to do? So to use me as an example, again, we have our big membership goal. That's our lag. What's the lead? The lead for me, in its simplest form is the number of deep hours of work I do every single day. So my baseline target is 4.5 hours of truly deep work. I'm all in. I'm reading, I'm writing, I'm teaching deep work. Now, in the last one, we talked about the art of learning a couple ago, the art of learning, we talked about making your best, your baseline. So my best day is seven hours of truly deep work. I mean like all in, going nuts, focus, deep work, no distractions whatsoever that I'm working to make my new baseline, right? But my basic lead measure is I'm going to show up and do four and a half hours of deep work every single day. And the note I talk about a little bit more four and a half hours every single day. That's what I'm going to measure. And that, by the way, is what I'm going to keep score on, which is our next measure. So I want to track not how many signups we have per se. That's a long game thing that lags behind what I'm doing. I'm going to show up and do deep work. I'm going to create content like this for our kind of for free, right, that we can give to everyone to help them optimize their lives. And I'm going to create even more stuff for our premium members. And I'm going to measure whether or not I'm doing that by my lead, which is how much deep work did I put in? Which is going to result in a lot of creativity, which hopefully will result over the long run if our strategy is solid in this wig outcome. So again, run your own little analysis there. What's your wildly important Goal. What are your lead measures? And then keep score. Which is here. And it's here. Our fifth big idea. Keeps score. They have a great way to describe this. They say, look, if you go bowling and you're bowling into a curtain and you can't see if you knock down any pins, how fun is that? Not fun at all. You need to know your score. You need to know how you did. You want to see if you knocked any pins down. Right. Bowling is a lot more fun when you can actually keep score. They use another example. They say, imagine Serena and Venus Williams playing tennis. Now if all they're doing is hitting the ball back and forth, okay, that's fun. That has a certain level of interest for them and for a spectator, but nowhere near as much as if they're keeping score. Keep score and then put them in the finals of Wimbledon. And then what happens to their intensity? It gets jacked way up. So you need to know what's really firing you up. Your deep, wildly important goal. Your deep. Yes. You need to know what you need to do to get there. And then you need to keep score of it. Then your intensity is up. So I know on a day to day basis, did I hit my lead measure? I'm keeping score. I'm showing up. Right. Very important. And this will also relate to the progress principle we'll talk about in a little bit. But you need to decide what you're going to keep score of. And then the fourth idea to come back to it is you need to keep on keeping score. You can't make this something that fires you up for a weekend or a week and, and then you kind of dribble off. The four disciplines of execution require that you are disciplined, you are accountable to focusing on the score of your lead measure such that you can hit your wildly important goal. That is a very quick look at the 4 dx I hope you enjoyed and we talk about this more and a lot of other ideas in Productivity 101. So if you're interested in this stuff, I think you might enjoy that. For now, think about the idea that most jumped out and landed and how most importantly, you are going to make it a more integrated part of your life. Get on that and make today another awesome day. See ya. To learn more about the 300 day Optimize coach program, visit Optimize Me Coach. Hi, this is Brian with some super exciting news. Optimize is now absolutely free. All 600 philosopher's notes, the 50101 masterclasses, thousand optimize plus ones free. So what do you want to optimize today? Your productivity? Habits? Sleep? Mental toughness? 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