123: “Pricing is Branding” — Anti-Time Management with Richie Norton

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Trying to make $100,000 by selling one licensing agreement is a very different lifestyle than selling an app for a dollar to 100,000. People think of the impact on your time. These are things people need to think about when they're creating lifestyle businesses or any business for that matter. Because when you remove yourself as the bottleneck, everything changes and you create ways to make things happen even when you're not there.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello, hello Free Timers. I am so thrilled to be bringing you Richie Norton. Today I saw Richie's book coming out on Amazon, this interesting compelling title of Anti Time Management and I thought I gotta talk to him no matter what. And I have to tell you, this book so far exceeded my expectations. I had so many ahas reading it and this is an area I study deeply. Richie is an award winning author. He's a serial entrepreneur and executive coach to CEOs. He lives in Hawaii with his family and is the previous author of a book called the Power of Starting Something Stupid. He also wrote one called Resumes are Dead and what to Do About It. Couldn't agree more. And the new one, Anti Time Management. Reclaim your time and revolutionize your results with the Power of Time tipping. Richie, welcome to the show.

Oh you're so good to me. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thrilled to have you. My friend Dory put us in touch. But right when you got your copy of Free Time, you sent me this selfie of you with a book and I go oh my goodness. Like you're just glowing and radiant and your energy is so positive. So it's clear that what you write and talk about is working for you.

It's Hawaii, the sunshine, you know.

Yes. Well, let's start. Tell us what is time tipping?

Let me start with what it isn't for just a quick second. Time management was specifically designed not to give anybody free time. Time management was specifically designed to squeeze and measure every drop of blood, sweat and tiers of workers to make sure that they were on task. Task management, time tipping is the opposite of that. Time tipping is the idea that a cake baked without sugar will not show up as a cake that is sweet with sugar. But if you stop timing your values and start valuing your time, you, you can bake in your values from the start, live your dream from the start, work from your dream and not toward your dream.

This is such a powerful idea and this is exactly what stopped me in my tracks when I was reading. Also because I too have a cake baking metaphor in the book because I say too, how we bake is as important as what we make. And you're saying that's awesome.

We're just a bunch of bakers.

I love it totally.

But yours took it further because you actually got really specific and you said if you don't bake the. How if you don't bake with sugar, you can't just sprinkle it on top at the end, your cake isn't going to taste good. And so what you're saying, I like how you said dreams are like ice cream, they melt.

We can't keep postponing it. And it doesn't make sense to pursue a dream without baking it into the process. And as you say, living that dream into your business model from day one.

Yep. People say they have priorities and yet they almost always put their priority last. Even though priority means prior, it means to precede and proceed. And so how do you expect to have a prioritized life if you've never lived on purpose, if you've never put priorities prior to precede, to proceed, if you're always waiting until you finally, I don't know, pay off the mortgage, your kids are out of the house, finish school, you're retired. How do you ever expect to create and develop the skills necessary to embrace a lifestyle that includes your values? It's hard. It's almost not even possible. That's why people have these major transitions and transformations is because they never actually did what they wanted to do, ever.

You tell such a powerful story in the book and her name is escaping me. So you gotta remind me where this idea of time tipping and working from your goals, not toward them, it actually changes the reality around us. And it enables things to happen in a way that seems instantaneous and almost impossible. And then you tell the story that she wanted to be a rapper. So she just got on stage week after week, and she was so bad, but she was so convinced that she was a rapper that people finally started asking how they could help because they couldn't stand to see her embarrass herself week after week. And, and that was this example of that. If she waited to get on stage until she was ready or until she was qualified, the dream would have in fact been this really linear stepwise process. But by working from her dream and acting as if, but in a very real way, it all flipped upside down. So can you share a little bit of that story with us and remind me her name, please?

Yeah, her name's Saira.

Saira. I'll put that in the show notes because she has a great talk as well.

Yeah, she's amazing and she's a really great friend. We actually met in Moldova, doing a TEDx talk there. And I asked her how she got into what she was doing and she explained the story you just shared. What's interesting is in her situation where she grew up, where she sold her Nintendo to get her dad money so he could buy drugs, in her situation where her dad died of an overdose, in her situation where she was homeless and she was taken advantage of on the streets, in her situation where she would never have the chance to do a recital or take music lessons or have all these goals that are star studded and would lead her onto this path. To a person like that, how was she ever supposed to escape except for it to show up as the person she wanted to be? And she had this thought, you need to be a rapper. And so she followed that thought and she became one. And we've heard this idea that if you say I will.

Maybe you will in the future. But if you say I am.

You show up as that person immediately. And so for her, that meant going on stage, having people boo her off stage to the point where people felt bad for her, and people then taught her, and eventually she won a Grammy. When you become the person before you become it, you create what's called a forcing function. You create an environment with positive constraints where people can come out of the woodwork, where you can leverage existing resources, where you're not waiting for more time, more education, more experience, and more money. All these things that you have or could have in the future can only help you. But to say you're not going to try because you need more only means that in the future you're going to get there and say you still need more.

Her story is so incredible. Thank you again for sharing it. And I completely forgot she had even led to winning a Grammy. You say that time collapses when something you think takes a hundred steps takes only one. And her story is such a beautiful illustration of that. Where I've sometimes run up against this in my own life and work and because probably similar to you, but I've been really into personal development for a long time and even a lot of the spiritual writings on this stuff sometimes. And I wonder if you have this experience sometimes it's hard to convince yourself that you already are the thing if the numbers aren't showing it. So for example, I am a best selling author, but I look at my book sales and I know that they're currently only whatever it's going to be. 5000 doesn't matter. Same thing with a podcast like, oh, I am a full time podcaster, but I know that my revenue around the podcast and the numbers aren't there yet. How do you close that gap in a way that doesn't put the future in front of ourself? Even when you're stretching for these big goals?

How we measure our success in the present or measure our success in the future can be flexible. And I don't mean anything about changing the goal. I'm saying the person next door to me could say they'd be successful if they wrote a book.

But then I might say I'm successful if I sell a million books. Where's the gap? It was a decision, so I actually avoid that entire situation. Goals are tasks if they're from experience.

Goals are growth if they're outside experience. Goals are not ends. Goals are means to an end. We're obsessed with goals, habits, strengths. Did we forget what they are for we've made them ends unto themselves.

Covey never said begin with means in mind. He said begin with the end in mind. So Aristotle had this thing called the four causes. The four causes went something like an acorn becomes an oak tree. So you need the material, you need the form or the design, you need the agent or the person to put it together. And then it becomes this thing. So academics look at this and they say, okay, to build a table, you need wood, you need the design, you need someone to make it. And you have a table. Time tippers look at that and say, what's the table for? Now, if you're to say it's a legacy table, it's going to be in your family for generations. Sure. Buy the wood, get an awesome design. Have someone pour that really cool blue stuff that makes it look like the ocean, and then have somebody put it together and you're going to have this table forever. But in reality, the table is probably for a nice dinner with your family or. Or with friends that are coming into town or some business associates, whatever. In that case, you could do Ubereats. You could go to a food truck across the street. What's the dinner for? Oh, it's to have a positive experience that uplifts us, et cetera, et cetera. In that case, what's the job of the goal? What's final cause? What's the success after the success? So if you're to say I, I'm an author and define that as selling a million books, I guess you could do that. But if you're to say I'm an author and that's the end of it, cool. Or if you're to say I'm an author because that one thing made one decision which eliminated all kinds of other things and created all kinds of other things for me, and you're showing up as that person, well, then you're talking to people on podcasts. You're reading your book. People are changing their lives. So you have to change the way you measure success if you want. But if you do measure your success based on something, I wouldn't identify my actual person by the goals, but by the success of the success. Final cause.

We'll be right back just after this.

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So, as we're recording this, your book is yet to be launched. It's coming right up and we'll release this right around launch day. Can you get a little specific for us? So how do you think about, of course, who you are and how you live is so central. I love how you talk about even restating these types of goals and meta goals and final cause. You offer the example. I'm living my happy thing now because with time tipping I found that all the steps I thought it would take to get here were totally unnecessary. So take us in real time to your mind right now of having goals around your book launch. But what is more important, what do you keep keep in mind or how do you live your happy thing now even as you strive for something that can seem linear or project oriented kind of in the real world. And I know you've done so many entrepreneurial ventures even beyond launching a book.

I'll answer it directly and then I'll give some like some background. So anti time management is about freeing up your time in a way that you have autonomy, availability and ability. I've written books before and it's painful, you know, like you put your heart and soul into it, you shut everything off, everything you can for years to put this kind of work together, at least the way I do it. This book took me almost a decade to write and by the way, obviously the last three years of writing it and getting down to the last two years, one year, six months of writing it is crunch time. Now some people are listening to this, going, that's a really long time. Well, it's deep. It's deep stuff. In this case, I wasn't gonna write my book and shut off my family because the entire purpose of the book was to be available for my family. So my family wanted to go on vacations. We went when they wanted to go surfing, when my kids. I'm in the middle of a deep thought. I know people are like, you're crazy, you shouldn't do this. I had to live it. When I'm in the middle of a deep thought and I'm deep into my work and my kid knocks on the door or comes in the room or sends me a text or whatever and says, hey, I want to go surfing. I dropped everything and went surfing. You know what I found? I didn't miss out on a single thing. The book did better because of it. It gave me time to reflect. That's a direct answer to your question. But the real answer is I have a son that passed away. I have a brother in law that passed away at 21 in his sleep. You know, when these things happened, it changed the way I thought about time. Like all these goals, they're not worthless, but are they worthwhile? Do they matter? I think about time and Goals and achievement very different than I think of the living, of the achievement.

Thank you for sharing that. I can imagine that. Isn't it so interesting just what you said, that your relationship to time changed when those things happened and to how you spend your time and how you value your time. And it sounds like both of those events happened at a very formative time for you and are still with you to this day. I know it drives so much of what you do because you share that so beautifully in the book.

When I wrote my last book, the Power of Starting Something Stupid, it did well, like it's in like 10 different languages. Brene Brown did a blog post about it. Like she blew it up. Lots of good things happen. People started reaching out to me to help them start their stupid idea. So, you know, I have a physical products company. We make over 100 products at any given time. Started doing coaching, consulting. People asked me to. I did courses because people asked me to. So I got into the position where I'm like learning what all these executives, all these entrepreneurs are doing and how they're spending their time. And it wasn't hard to have someone figure out their new business or to expand their existing business because when you identify a market and they want it, it's just a matter of awareness and affordability. So I know I'm oversimplifying, but it wasn't necessarily hard to scale a business. What was interesting is when they would scale the business and make all this money or change their job or do something new, is that it wasn't what they wanted. They'd say, I'm going to start this business and it's going to make all this money. And I'd be like, cool. And it would happen. And then it was so bizarre when they would say, ah, it's just not exactly what I was looking for. It's not what I wanted. What are you talking about? They didn't want the business. They wanted what they thought would come from the success of the business. That's what I'm talking about.

It's like the fisherman and the businessman parable.

Yeah. People will start businesses to try and get their freedom and time back, only to lose their freedom and time to the business.

Why?

Because they borrowed the same exact time sucking management principles and ideas from regular corporations that they've learned since kindergarten. And they brought that into their world of their own entrepreneurial pursuits. But the thing is, architects do build businesses. Architects don't build houses or buildings, they draw them. It's the same with a general contractor. They don't even pick up a hammer if they don't want to. And yet they build homes every day. So the idea of being an entrepreneur is to set things in motion, not to do everything yourself. So through time tipping, you live from the core and the center of your values. Start valuing your time, stop timing your values, and then you can create stuff that actually works and live for from the start.

What you described is so common. There are so many people I speak to as well who maybe they had all these intentions of freedom and autonomy when they started their business. I think a lot of people do. And then they just get caught in a cycle of being buried in busy work or they're not sure how to get out of it. And I think that probably a lot of people listening would say, yeah, I would switch the time tipping tomorrow if I could. But yet they feel stuck somehow. Maybe it's the chicken and egg conundrum of cash fl, like they're kind of working harder to try to pay the bills, or they don't know if they're ready yet to hire team members to leverage their time. So what would you say to somebody who's just in the thick of it right now and sort of knows and agrees with everything you're saying, but they feel stuck? Or maybe their skills and abilities as a business owner just have to get through this plateau and this kind of crucial moment of the business where you're right, they're building themselves into a corner of a lifestyle that they don't want to for the hope of future freedom.

I would say I'm not suggesting there's a right or a wrong. I'm suggesting that most of us are lying to ourselves and we're telling ourselves that by doing one thing will get us another. When they're barely correlated, they're only related in our mind, but not in reality. So, for example, someone will tell me they've been working on some business. They'll come to me, hey, I've been trying to do this thing for a year. My first time talking to him, and I go, cool. And then they'll say, I haven't made any money. I'll say, I say it nicer than I'm saying now, but I'll ask, when's the last time you asked someone to pay you? When's the last time you asked someone to give you their credit or debit card? And that's when everything changes because they become ashen. They can't remember the last time they asked someone to pay them. And that's not everyone's situation. But in many cases, if we define work as getting paid but we're not doing sales activities, then we've never worked a day in our lives unless we've done sales activities. Now, I don't believe that. I believe work is work. But if you believe work means getting paid, then the one thing that gets you paid is the thing you should be working on. So it's not about how much money you have. I mean, I work with students who have more time, freedom and flexibility than millionaires. Millionaires. Millionaires will tell you money is easy, time is hard. I know that because I've heard that from venture capitalists. The idea is to change how you're paid.

Change how you're paid, change your life, your lifestyle will be changed more to an extent, of course, I get it by how you're paid than how much. How can two people both making $75,000 a year lead completely different lives doing the exact same thing, working at the same job in the same place. One has all the free time in the world and the other doesn't. It's how they operate. So I would focus on final cause. What's your purpose? Then I would align that purpose with priorities, real priorities. Then I would create projects around those things. Then I would figure out how to get paid doing those things. It doesn't mean you can't get paid first. It just means when you decide I need to make money.

You already create a decision tree that forces you to make decisions based on money. Okay, I'm going to move to the city, get a job I hate, raise my family in a place I don't like, and have two weeks of vacation a year that I don't take. That's a decision tree. Or you could say, I would love to live by a lake in Montana. So you move there and you figure out how to make money there and you create a family there. And hey, by the way, you decide to work from your cell phone so you can be anywhere in the world. There is no two weeks of vacation. Every day of your life is one if you want. So it's the decision tree.

I love how you say your criteria as well is that you can do the work from your cell phone, which keeps you remote, mobile, easy to work from anywhere. I'm impressed that you've helped create and still do it sounds like work with so many entrepreneurs with tangible physical products, because that seems very complex and I know there's been all kinds of supply chain issues recently. You mentioned you work with JLD on the Freedom Journal, which I used while writing free time. So thank you both. How do you navigate this much complexity? You must have a gift for creating order from chaos somehow. I'm hearing it in there.

Maybe so, maybe so, but it is a learnable skill. So I have a background in making products. My first business was a social entrepreneurial company that I started in Mongolia. It was a cashmere business to help people become self reliant through self employment and expanded into all kinds of businesses in the Asia Pacific Rim and expanded into a center for entrepreneurship at a university. And that expanded into me doing my own things, obviously and writing books, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, there's experience. But what I learned was it was important that people, when trying to create a new life, to me, it was important that they got their time back. So when you say measure success or I'm saying that whatever I'm actually optimizing for time flow and cash flow, I don't think that you have to sacrifice one for the other. And if you do, you do it consciously, not desperately.

I was just gonna say I love the idea of managing time flow right alongside cash flow. That's what I'm saying. This should be on the balance sheet. It's like we're so concerned with cash flow and profit and of course that's what does ultimately keep the lights on. But time flow is as important. I'm just, we're back to the cake baking. I'm just so with you.

If you're going to start something or create something, and it's not always this way, but if you are saying the goal of the business is to make money, then you're going to make money, or at least you're going to try. If you're going to say the goal is to help my client, then you're going to help your client whether you make money or not. And if you say my projects don't take time, they create time, then you find ways to start things that put things in motion. And guess what, by the way, you can have both money and meaning. You don't have to have high money, low meaning or low money, high meaning. You can have high money and high meaning. So when I start this business to like create products for people like John Lee Dumas, like Pat Flynn, like Russell Brunson, like Chalene Johnson, like, like so many people, it's to give people their time back. That's what I care about. I care about people having their time back. Because I believe a lot of people, especially entrepreneurs in the 21st century are doing it to have their time back and they don't. I'm solving that problem. That's what I'm doing. That's what I'm passionate about. That's what I love. So the idea is, this is so important. Stop delegating means. Delegate results, not means. Everyone's becoming micromanagers, doing it themselves, trying to teach somebody how to do it, then ending up doing it themselves again. They turn one job into two or three or more and they stop being entrepreneurs, they stop being leaders. Delegate results, not means. And then you can create anything you want, even if you don't know how, because you're working with experts.

I also think it's so powerful what you said about being really mindful about how you get paid. It sounds so obvious when we both say it here, but you give the example of Tesla in the book, and I thought this was a fantastic illustration of this principle of actually sometimes it's better not to go one to many and interestingly, the product business that you work on and a lot of those products and selling widgets is smaller things to more people. But the example you give of Tesla, I'd love if you could share it with listeners here of sometimes it's better to be super, super exclusive and expensive and then you use that to fund the next steps of being more accessible. Can you say more about that?

Yeah, definitely. I was actually teaching students at college and I asked them to name an electric car company and the only one they could come up with was Tesla. And I thought that was fascinating because obviously, but then it was like, you know, there's a bunch of other ones, right? And you know that Tesla's not the first, right? No one knew that. No one knew that. And that's because pricing is branding. Pricing is branding. So when Elon Musk and his crew decided to do this hundred thousand dollar, you know, electric vehicle, it blew everyone out of the water because everyone else was way lower. Now all those other cars that were way less expensive were also expensive compared to, you know, other cars. But he went super high end. And what happened is that made it so that people who could afford it were funding the ability to create the technology for the next versions. Plus it became something to aspire to. This was all his plan too. He wrote this out. I'm not just making this up, I'm not just looking at it backwards. This was his plan. So you get people to pay a lot of money for something and then people love it whether they can buy it or not. And then guess what? He rolls out this $35,000 model which is still expensive but relatively cheap. So the idea, the concept, the principle doesn't matter what they're doing. The principle for us is people are like having a hard time making money. Sure it's hard, but how do you expect to make money if you're selling Nothing to no one for $0? And then yeah, sure, I get that you should serve and you should help and do things for free. You should definitely do that 100%. I do it all the time. It's built my career. But as far as getting paid is concerned, start high. It's easier and more helpful both to you and the client. Sometimes to sell one thing to one person for a thousand dollars than it is to sell 10 things to 10 people for $100. So the idea is to go high end. Pricing is branding and then you can scale or go wide if you want to. And it changes the way you live. It literally changes your lifestyle.

Yeah, I've learned that lesson the hard way so many times where I would sell one contract licensing for 100 grand instead of trying to sell tiny units to so many people and have to build a mass audience. It just never worked for me. Every time I would try that and try this like online course marketing model, it didn't catch and then meanwhile they're fewer and farther between. But then these 1 clients can be so game changing. When the check size is big enough.

There'S base hits and home runs. So you can go high and say I'm only going to work at that level. But you can also do smaller things. It is what it is. You do whatever you want. But the concept is think about this like think about your personal lifestyle and your time. Trying to make a hundred thousand dollars by selling one licensing agreement is a very different lifestyle than selling an app for a dollar to a hundred thousand people. Think of the impact on your time. These are things people need to think about when they're creating lifestyle businesses, or any business for that matter. Because when you remove yourself as the bottleneck, everything changes and you create ways to make things happen even when you're not there.

I meant to say too, the Tesla example seems like a good illustration of what you're talking about. Operationalizing some of this through strategic and economic moats. Can you share more about castles and moats as it relates to time tipping and anti time management?

I love talking to you because you've read the book.

Of course, I've pored over every word. See, this is what I told you. I didn't want to get into book report mode, but I almost can't help myself because it's so many good principles in there.

No, you're amazing because you're able to just pinpoint it. So good. So the idea is, you know, if you go to Europe or even in Japan and other places, if you see a castle, you'll sometimes see that they built a moat around it. And the concept is to build the castle and than the moat, build from your dream and then build a strategic moat the way you work and an economic moat around it to protect it. And that might sound okay when I say it, but it's the actual opposite of the way most people do things. And especially the way we've learned how to do it in time management. You know, often a corporation or a business is the castle. And we as workers are in the moat. And when we become entrepreneurs, we start with the moat, the work. And we never end up reaching the castle when we could have, or at least it's in the far distant future. So the idea is begin with the goal of the goal, final cause. Then you'll create a way to work that supports it, supporting it. Your priorities, your professional priorities can support and propel your personal ones. And your personal priorities can support and expand your professional ones. I'll give you a real quick example. I had a guy come to me. He was an accountant. He's making a couple hundred grand a year or whatever, and he's like, I hate what I'm doing. I don't have any time. I need some time with my family. I'm so busy. All right, cool. What are you going to do? He says he's going to start a gym. All right. He says he needs two gyms. All right, so yeah, after 10 gyms, it'll be profitable. You know, he's accountant, he's doing all the numbers. Well, what do you want to do when your gyms are successful? What are you going to do then? Side note, when you ask that question to a venture capitalist and to the people that they're funding, it's a bizarre situation because they're all in there saying they want to change the world. Not true. Half true. They want an exit.

That's so true.

I love that you're calling that out right now. Right? It's like change the world is the icing on the. But the cake they're baking isn't. Toward an exit. Let's be real.

Every time I ask it, it's a little awkward. Then they laugh because they know it's true. And it's like if you were to ask them what they would do after this thing has an exit, then you could actually really work together. Because now you're working on the same page. Now you're congruent. Like this changes the entire game. But back to this accountant guy. So he goes, yeah, I want to spend two months out of the year with my family. Which, by the way, why couldn't he spend two months out of the year with his family now? Maybe he could, maybe he couldn't. But no, he's going to quit everything he's doing and he's going to do this. So then I say, how old are your kids, man? And he goes, 13 and 18. Wait, how long is this thing going to take to be profitable? Five years. Okay, Mr. Accountant, I didn't say this, but just think about this. I'm like, so you're telling me your kids are going to be 18 and 20? Those are the right numbers I gave you. I said they were 13 and 15. Yeah, they're going to be 18 and 20 when you finally have time to go on vacation with them for two months in Italy. I'm like, you gotta rethink that. I'm not saying that you can't do a gym. Even though gyms are weird now and people taking videos of each other and making fun of each other. Even beside that.

Welcome to the world of TikTok. Even beside that kind of stuff is like, it's not what you do, it's how you do it. You could have a manager, he said he's a micromanager. You could do the thing where they go into a 247 gym where they use a card. You could do it online.

Once you realize the goal of the goal, the gym becomes obsolete. To the dream. Because he could have had any business. It's how he works, not what he works on.

Such a powerful story. You brought up venture backed startups in particular. I find this a very interesting corner of the world and it sounds like you have a lot more visibility into it than I do. We know that big corporations can get bureaucratic and that employees don't have autonomy over their time. But I cannot tell you, Richie, how many times in the last two weeks I've been listening to a podcast with startup, usually men in this case that are saying if you aren't working around the clock 24 7, you're not serious. Or those founders aren't going to succeed. And this message gets drilled home constantly. I know you and I probably in the circles we travel in, everybody Knows like hustle culture is out. We're even sick of saying that at this point. But there still does seem to be this persistent belief, especially among venture backed startups, that if they are not killing themselves to build this thing, they're not going to be successful. And I'm just so curious, like you have a front row seat, it sounds like, to a lot of these companies. So what is going on there? Why this obsession with this?

Exactly.

The story you told with the accountant who thinks he's going to spend time with his kids, but they're going to be out of the house before then. Like we could all die tomorrow. I just don't understand this way of working. But then it seems so persistent that, oh, it's the only way to show you're serious and that it's really going to work.

You could show the statistics or you could show the information on what works and what doesn't to anyone. The leader of a corporation, you can show it to anyone. That's not where I'm going to go. The thing is, you as the person working, either as the employee or the executive or the entrepreneur or the venture capitalist, whatever you are, you have a choice. That's what's different between last century, even the last two centuries and today. The difference is people aren't just being prodded and told what to do. Because the thing is, even though it's a horrible thing, it obviously gets work done and maybe only in the short term and not in the long term, but there's a reason people do it. I don't like it, but there's a reason people do it. And we have 200 years of history doing exactly that. So of course they're doing it that way. Of course they are. But as you as a person, the cool thing, the news, the good news, you know, of the 21st century is now you have a choice of where and when you work and you know it. People's minds are boggled that these kids are not taking money and spending their time on the Internet doing other things and also making way more money. The difference between last century and this century is that people have a choice and now they know it. So when what's going to happen is people are going to do what they want to do. Corporations are going to do the corporation thing. But those who want to have talented people that prioritize meaning are going to attract that kind of talent, the kind of talent that cares.

The people that work at places where they are convinced that they're going to sacrifice their entire life for the betterment of the company. We're going to see that it looks exactly like it already has in the past, only maybe in different ways. Because now when work life flexibility becomes a benefit, it's only a benefit to the corporation. They can expand their reach into your home. They know when you're going to the bathroom. Now it's called digital Taylorism. Like Frederick Taylor is the one that invented scientific management and time management, today it's digitized. So all I'm saying is to anyone who's working that way, that's your choice. I'm not here to say whether you should do that or not. I am here to say that you do have options. Now, the person listening to this podcast, you can do anything you want. If you chose that job, you also chose its consequence. So wise up.

Yeah. Ooh, I love it, Richie. So good. I think about this a lot too, that just, I guess there are some people who would say, well, they work that way. And then if, like these venture backed startup founders, if they have a 5 million, 10 million, 50 million, $100 million exit, then XYZ. But as you even say in the book, you know plenty of rich people who are miserable. You know plenty of people who have a lot of money and they're short on time or they have an abundance of both and they're still not happy that if you're not baking the cake with the sugar from the outset, you don't just get to that day of the exit and suddenly life turns on a dime and now it's a miracle and you're happy all the time. It's because these habits are weaved in every day.

No, it's true. It's true you can't control others, but you understand that time management means control. And it has nothing to do with controlling time. Time is time. It's who controls your time. So time management is they control your time. Time tipping is you control your time. Time management is they tell you what to do. Anti time management. Time tipping is you decide what you want to do. And so in this world of where we work and the things that we want to do, whether things change or whether they don't, you can always blame it on someone else. But as soon as you stop playing the blame game, as soon as you take responsibility and you start making aligned decisions with your purpose, you can start creating a different world. You can stay in a company and wait for it to 10x and do all these things. You can even sacrifice all the things that you love, but just do it consciously. I wouldn't do that. I don't think the people that end up getting there are actually that happy either. I would say you can still be in that business and make things happen and wait for it to 10x while still living your values from the start. I know you can because lots of people do. It's a choice. It's a choice.

We'll be right back just after this.

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There's something you say in the book that I just have to get on the record too that I think is so relevant for people who do have time autonomy. But like you said, maybe they're still too hands on in the business micromanaging. You talk about building flash teams and specifically this is the big gem. Experts do not require training. Yeah, it seems like a big time tipping strategy is, well then stop hiring people who need all your time and training and attention. Build flash teams of experts. And that how do you know it's an expert? They do not require training. This is like, oh, just so beautifully stated. Can you tell us more about this?

And you're reading it from the book like it's like, oh yeah, okay, obvious. But it's not obvious. If someone says they don't have money, then they're gonna figure out a way to do it without money. They might even find people to work with and do trades. Okay, then there's people that do have some money to hire someone else and they don't want to necessarily have an employee. They're gonna hire a consultant or they're gonna hire someone to do the work. And what they end up doing is because of the scarcity, mentality is they try and find someone with no experience that they can control what is wrong with people and they tell them exactly what to do and they become their micromanager and they teach them how to do it and they train them and guess what? The kid fails because they don't know what they're doing. It's their first time doing. Of course they are. They should be learning. They shouldn't be outsourced to yet when you have the choice to outsource it to an expert. An expert requires no training. They could train you. They're better at it than you. Oh, but I can't afford one. Are you kidding me? Have you never been on upwork? There are billions with a B of people online who are more expert at what you do than you. I'm not saying you have to undercut or do anything weird like that. I'm saying you put out a price out there and people will tell you whether they'll do it or not. They'll negotiate with you if they're a true expert to the point where it's worth it to them. And it gets done. It gets done. This is revolutionary. And so simple. Experts don't require training. Stop giving yourself more jobs. Delegate results, don't delegate means.

And what do you mean by flash team? Because that's also a very compelling concept.

Think of someone putting together a movie. The crew comes together for a very specific amount of time. It could be for a month, it could be for three months, it could be for a year. But sometimes it's just for a small video for a day or two. So you have the camera guys show up and the talent shows up and the lights are there. Etc, etc, etc. I won't get into all the details but a flash team means you come together for a project. Everyone is independent but working together on the project interdependently. The project is completed and they break and you can do that over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

I have come to realize that that way of working really suits my personality because I tend to go in big creative waves. I need a lot of retreat time and I don't want to be managing a lot of people and then I'll create something and then you know when it's you're in launch mode. There's all kinds of people involved in a big project and getting it out into the world. I love that you wrote about this and just shared with us here because I wonder how you are. But I'm not this like steady State most consistent entrepreneur. I'm a creative entrepreneur and I have ebbs and flows and part of the time flow for me is also being able to run really lean. And then I love that you've now put words to building a flash team which kind of gives permission not to have to have big overhead consistently. That's unchanging because I don't work like that. I'm not a machine. Some people are really good and consistent. That's not me. So what's your current team structure?

One thing is it all depends. That's why I keep bringing it back to purpose and then priorities and then projects and then payments and then prolifics. That's a really solid anti time management framework. The reason I say that is because you can do whatever you want, but people end up doing all the time things they don't want to do because they think they have to. So instead of doing a flash team they'll say I need a business partner. And this business partner is going to be a business partner as far as we know, forever. There is no end to it. Which is great if they're amazing and if they do the work. But a lot of times they bring on a business partner because they think oh, that person's going to make sales or whatever. Then they're 50, 50 or whatever it is and they don't make sales. When you could have hired someone on commission or for pay and they probably would an expert and they probably would have gotten more sales and you would have had a hundred percent of your company. I'm just saying think, stop lying to yourself. Be real. Come on.

I love how so many of them end with just think. Just stop and think or rethink.

Breathe. Breathe.

Yes Y When you say think, I mean the big theme of everything you're saying is think through the next five steps, the next five moves, the next five outcomes because you could eliminate all of them in a flash. That's what I think you've articulated so well is just. And I love all your frameworks and diagrams. I mean you have a lot of structure around this too because again I think these are ideas that people in the personal development world have probably grappled with at some point or another. But you just lay it out so clearly and directly with all your business experience that save yourself some time tip time, like even thinking of time prisms instead of time prisons is so powerful. Free yourself now by really thinking through the final cause as you call it. And maybe you don't need to do those hundred steps. They will all disappear In a blink. If you could just take time, breathe, and flip things on their head a little bit.

Yes, yes. And this doesn't just work for me. It works obviously for you and the things you're doing, and it works for the people that are listening here and has worked for my clients. It's worked for thousands of people. You know, that I've studied in this new modern world post pandemic. And before you asked how I structure my stuff, it depends on the project. So, yeah, I have a company called Proudduct. It has two business partners and we work with, over certain periods of time, thousands, thousands of contractors and. Or factories and. Or people in the entire supply chain. Prototyping, making, even designing. I used to keep going back, right? Shipping, warehousing, fulfilling like. And guess what? We have zero employees. How is that possible? It's possible. It's the way it works. It's because when you honor other people's expertise, you allow them to do what they do best. And you know what's interesting? This isn't always, always the same case, but when someone owns their own business and they spend a lot of time and money to learn and do the thing they love, they're so engaged, they want to be successful. That's why these collaborations are so amazing. That's why the 21st century is so amazing. You know, I have a company where we edit videos for creators, YouTube people. Because I saw my clients and friends going to Disneyland and pretending like they were having fun. But one was at Disneyland, the other one is at home editing videos. I'm like, that's no way to live, man. So I started an editing company. I don't know how to edit videos. But now we're editing hundreds of videos every month, more or less. For creators that have a million subs or more. These are super busy people. And you know what was funny is a lot of times when they got their time back, instead of editing videos, they would be like Spielberg, where they still get to be able to do all the creative stuff, but they have someone else editing it. And they get to make sure the editing is done the way they want it so they didn't lose out on all the things they thought they might lose out on. It's a win for everybody. I'm like, oh, gosh. They free up their time to have more time with their family. No, they just make more videos. No judgment.

I was going to say. I'm like, I think specifically the creators.

That'S a hamster wheel. I mean, just even from watching the documentaries on Hulu about like the influencer economy and creators seems like they're on a really tricky treadmill, let's call it. Because that pressure to always be creating more content if they're enjoying it, like you said, that's cool. No judgment, but it seems like, oof, that's a lot to keep up with. I know even creating content in my business is not nearly as intense as some of the ones you work with.

Yeah, but the cool thing is it's on purpose. They have a choice. That's what I'm talking about. We're trying to move from being told what to do and forced into doing it to saying, actually I have a choice, so I choose to do what you're telling me to do. It's because I chose this job and I own that. I own that I'm responsible. That's the cool thing is a responsible person will still be able to put all their family stuff, all their personal stuff, all their travel stuff first and still get the job done. No one is more productive than a procrastinator with an impending deadline. So instead of putting the breadcrumbs of time in your life for your family, you put them front and center and the work still gets done with excellence because you're doing it in less time. Work expands the amount of time given. Give it less time.

Yes, and hire experts like you.

There you go.

I'll put the links in the show notes for product. Such a good company name. And what's the video editing company?

Oh, it's called Edit today, but it's by referral. So you know, hit me up.

Right. I was gonna say I wish that if any of us have a million subs, that's already incredible. And please come over hosting. Take over hosting this podcast. Teach us your ways. So yeah, I'll put it just in case people are curious. Richie, I love all your gems. Just so many quotables left and right. If you could give business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

I would just tell them to ask a better question and they'll get a better answer. Ask a better question, get a better answer. You know, I mentioned that I have a son that passed away. I have a brother in law that passed away. I didn't mention that. I had three foster kids that came and went. We had them for years and it's so sad we don't know where they are. And my wife had a stroke and lost her memory. I had a son get hit by a car and when he was crossing the street he should be dead, but he's not. He's out doing these amazing things, riding big waves. My wife's memory is back. She's good. The thing is, what are you working for? No one, or at least very few people work for work's sake. What is the sake for which you work? Do that, then change how you work to support it.

Absolutely beautiful. Thank you so much, Richie. And just what a rich life and so many roller coasters that you've been through. And it's so abundantly clear how it's come together and your wisdom. The book is phenomenal, listeners, I'm telling you, this is one to check out. It will inspire you. It will really inspire you to think differently. Just as Richie, you've done for me even in this conversation. So, listeners, be sure to check out anti time management, reclaim your time and revolutionize your results with the power of Time Tipping. Richie, where else can we send people if they want to learn more and keep in touch?

Thank you so much. If you go to richnorton.com you'll see I have a number of resources that can help you go from where you are to where you want to be. Take your ideas, turn them into your stupid reality. A Time Tipping Toolkit. Just go to risingrenton.com and it will help you do all this work in a very practical way and help you remember the things we talked about.

I'm so excited for the Time Tipping Toolkit.

It's coming.

Yeah, that's really fun to say, listeners. You got to try that out. Mumble to yourself while you're watching the street Time Tipping Toolkit. Also, can we all just thank Richie for joining us at 5:30am Hawaii time for this conversation. Yes, Richie, you're a champ to be this articulate. I don't know if you drink coffee if you've had any yet, but you're a champ.

Only water so far.

Oh my gosh. It was even still dark at his house. Thank you. This has been such a joy. I really appreciate you being here and big thanks everybody who's here listening.

Thank you. You're amazing.

You too.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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