74: Optimize Your Time And Get More Done - #GrowYourLife

Hey, there. Thanks for listening to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremiah Krakowski, and on this podcast I talk about ways for you to grow in your life and in your business to get more results, create more money, create more sales, get more customers and clients, and live a bigger life to have more impact and influence on the world around you. Now, today, what I want to talk about is getting more done and becoming more efficient. When I go into organizations, when I coach people, they're oftentimes coming to me for efficiency because they don't know what the right things to do are that get the results the fastest. How are you going to get from 0 to $200,000 a month as quick as possible? How are you going to go from zero to $20,000 a month as quick as possible? How are you going to go from zero to $5,000 a month as quick as possible? And the same principles apply to that. The biggest one is that small steps over time compound. And a great book on this topic is the Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. This is a principle that most people ignore because they feel better about doing all the right things at once in a giant lump sum of effort, that if they can't get it all done at once, then they won't even try. And then they're gonna complain for years, weeks, and months that they're not where they want to be. And so if you can start to make incremental improvements over time, meaning if you have a podcast that you want to record, a course that you want to create, a landing page, some copy, some emails, write a little bit of it here and there. You know, when I write blog posts, I write them and then I edit them the next day, and then I launch them the day after that. Usually when I make social media content, I find as well that I need to get into my greatest flow state. And a lot of people ask me, well, Jeremiah, how do you manage your time? I'm gonna be super vulnerable and honest with you here, and I might lose some listeners of this episode just by what I'm gonna say right now. I'm not very good at time management, but I am exceptional at time management optimization. And let me explain, what I mean by that is if you have a project that would normally take you five hours to complete, what I do is figure out, how can we, instead of it taking 5 hours, make it take only 30 minutes? Some people believe that that's not possible. And that's usually where I lose people on this concept, is that belief that it's not possible. And so that's what I do, is I strategically take what takes the longest amount of time and shrink it to the shortest amount of time. So for example, when I used to make my podcast episodes, I would spend a couple hours planning them. Now I spend maybe 10 minutes coming up with the ideas for my episodes. My social media content was extremely hard to come up with content. Now I do it in about 10 minutes a day. All of the posts that I do, that's it. Blog posts were daunting because I was being such a perfectionist about them. And perfectionism is this idea that we have to do everything perfect, especially if we're putting it out there to the public. Listen, I want to tell you this. If you're a learner and a student, you don't have to do everything perfect. You see, you have this belief. I find a lot of people have this, that because they're putting it out there to a professional business page, it has to all be perfect before it goes out there because they can't set a bad first impression. And this belief keeps people stuck on a hamster wheel of failure. And two, three, four, five years later, they're still coming to me, Jeremiah, saying, yeah, I'm still trying to figure out. I'm still trying to figure out. I'm still trying to figure it out. Yeah, well, that's the thing that you have to stop doing is, is is trying to be perfect. While you're in the learning process, humble yourself to realize that you, you don't know everything that creates a seven figure business, otherwise you would be doing it right now. You don't know everything that's going to create a six figure business, otherwise you would be making that right now. And some of you are. You don't know everything of what it takes to make three grand a month in a business or you would be doing that right now. Some of you don't even know what it takes to make 500 bucks a month. This isn't a judgment or to put you down, by the way. This is to say, embrace that. Embrace the fact that you don't have it figured out, because now you're walking in humility instead of pride. And you're able to say, okay, what can I learn that I don't know so far? And my podcast, the past 74 episodes or so are all about topics that you can learn and apply to get more results and to make more money in your business. If you listen through them, go through the titles and look at the ones that stand out to you to Optimize your time in a business. You have to learn how to take the right actions that have the most impact at the right time. Now, there's a dichotomy of this. There's a process to it. There's a process of in the beginning, when you start, you're not going to do very well, you're not going to succeed, you're going to fail. You have to embrace that and be okay with it. You have to be okay with not doing all the things perfectly. By the way, I'm still a learner. You don't need to do everything perfectly. I'm learning new things. I'm learning leadership skills of how to lead teams of people in multimillion dollar companies. Not the greatest skill that I've ever had. I've been around some people that have done it successfully. I'm usually coming in with the marketing strategy, right? And I let them lead. And now I'm in a position in the organizations that I work with where I'm part of the leadership team. I'm getting invited into deeper, more sensitive conversations with the companies that I consult. Things that open up and unlock more perspective for me to do my work better. And what started that was self acceptance and not having to do everything perfect. You see, I used to think the way that you grow in the leadership role is to be more perfect. No, it's actually to be more humble. That's what it is. And humility is something that we can all learn. You know, it's funny, I used to be afraid to say, oh, I'm growing to be more humble. Right? Because that sounds like braggadocious. Now I'm like, wait a sec. Okay, that fear, that saying, I'm growing to be more humble is braggadocious. That's actually pride is what that was. It wasn't humility. So I'm saying, like, I need to be more humble. I do. More and more and more and more. And as a leader, we have to embrace the idea of growing in humility. Now, how does this apply to business and marketing and time optimization to get more done? When you're able to accept yourself fully, grow in humility, other people will want to be around you and listen to what you have to say because they care about what you're talking about. Listen, people don't care unless you show them how much you care. That's it. They don't. And so how do you get more done in your business to make more money quicker? You have to start there. That foundation of self acceptance and growing in humility asking yourself, okay, what do I know right now that I need to question the belief of? What do I think I know about what has to happen in my business that I need to question the belief of? And ask yourself as well, am I doing this for validation or a goal? Am I trying to validate that I'm good enough or because of the vision that I'm going after? And you know what? There's many people that say, no, I'm going after a vision. I'm going after a vision. I hear people all the time that say this, but they're doing it to satisfy some need that they have that's deeply seated. To just be told you're good enough. You cannot successfully optimize your time and build a business by doing it to tell yourself that you're good enough. That's it. Your goals can't be to hear good job from people. You have to kind of break that addiction of praise from other people being told that you did a good job. Because what that is, is that's people pleasing. And we will essentially do anything to please people. What's going to actually optimize your time in your business is to become more controversial, to be more on the fringes of what is agreed upon, because then that pushes the envelope further and do so with strategy and intention. And so time optimization happens when we stop trying to do it all perfect and we find our unique flow state. And I've talked about this in a couple of different episodes. The way that I get into my best flow state is I will. I'll. I'll turn on classical music, maybe play my piano for a little bit, go for a walk. I'll do something to change my state of my body for a little bit of time. And some of you might be hearing me say that and say, well, I don't have the time or the luxury to listen to classical music or to go for a walk. You don't know, Jeremiah, how much stuff I have to do all day long. The fact is that your goal isn't important enough to you. It's not a priority enough for you to shift things. If it was, you would shift them and try this. And so there's something else that's more important. And so to optimize our time, we have to find out what our current priorities are. Not the priorities that we tell people that we want them to think they are, because we wanna look good to other people either, by the way, what are those priorities? For me, it was constantly, I'm going to be super real with you being told I was doing a good job. That's it. I was just constantly wanting to be told I was a good boy, getting a gold star for being a good boy. Basically, it was a flashback to a childhood experience. All of my action, I was looking to be told by people, jeremiah, you're good. You're a good boy. You're doing good. It. That's all I was looking for constantly. And as soon as I got rid of that, snapped out of it, and stopped trying to look for the good job, the validation, the. The praise of other people, I stepped into what I was called for, okay? And so stop trying to be someone you're not. Stop trying to sound good enough and say things the right way. Good enough. Be yourself, be fully yourself and accept yourself how you are right now, even if nothing ever changes or improves for you and nothing grows in your life. When we can do this now, we activate ourselves to grow because we can step in with intentionality to learn what we don't know and get more skill. And one of the biggest things that does this is when we can get a mentor or a coach to help us along the way to do this. Many of you have access to a mentor or coach, which hopefully I can be that for a lot of you. My social media, I give you access to comment, to send me questions, and yet still I got people that listen to this podcast and have never sent me a question on my social media, for some reason or other, they think that their question isn't good enough or I can't answer it. That's okay. Solely, fine. They'll eventually come around. You will eventually come around if you're one of those people, to realize that you already have everything that you need in your life to succeed and reach your goals. But you've been trying so hard to do it on your own, to get validated and to feel good enough about yourself that other people praise you and tell you, good job, you're finally worth it to be successful. Here's your gold star, AKA your million dollars and your yacht. And many of us are waiting for other people to recognize the talent, the skills and the abilities that are inside of us and are unwilling to step into that ourselves and to create the life that we want. And so what you have to do is stop being so tethered to your past. Stop being so tethered to the past experiences. Get some help, somebody that can walk you through this. Get some help, maybe a therapist or a coach or a mentor to walk you through this type of stuff. Now With COVID there's online therapy on sites like betterhealth.or betterhelp.com and there's a couple other ones out there. There's different stuff that you can do, my friends. Stop being ashamed of the fact that your life right now, if you're listening to this, isn't going the way that you wished it could, and start making a plan of action, stepping out and doing something differently than you've always done before. Start to be real with yourself about where you're stuck in your life. Start to observe and look at what is not working right now that I can shift and adjust to reach the next level. Many times we're trying so hard to look good to other people, to not set a bad impression, to do all the things perfect, to get a high score of some kind, to perform perfectly, that we miss doing the actual thing that is going to get us results. I am a huge proponent of excellence, doing your very best. But I am anti perfectionism in a huge way because it is literally killing people's dreams. It is keeping them stuck on a hamster wheel of good job, good boy validation. And what that is, is that's actually a structure that was built to keep people enslaved, to keep people in corporate America performing for the carrot that's hanging over their head. That's what keeps people in church trying to perform and keep tithing every week to get praised by the clergy and the church. And you know what, by the way, I'm a Christian. I love God. I tithe myself. I don't question the tithing. But when manipulation is part of that and you've been manipulated to do things that you wouldn't normally do by other people that try to trigger you, to get you to do things and act out of validation, you can be easily led astray and deceived and taught a lie because it benefits whoever's above you. And so I want to activate you to break free from those mob like mentalities, those cartel like mentalities that keep people trapped and stuck performing for a carrot. That's at the end of the line. You know, I hear many Christians, they say, you know, I just want to hear at the end of my life, good and faithful servant. Well done. Good and faithful servant. You know what that does not mean? Performance to be good enough for God to say that you're good enough. That's it. That's not it at all. What that is is that when we walk in who God made us to be, that's the only option that will happen at the end of our lives because not because we performed, but because God lived through us. It has zero whatsoever to do with what we perform and how good we do. Zero has everything to do with walking in truth, authentically being honest, being trustworthy, walking in integrity, walking in kindness, walking in love, walking in joy, walking in peace, walking in patience, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. Not because we can boast on it to say, hey, look at all the stuff I did, but so that we can say, you know what? It was me and God together. Let's go after it together. And so where a lot of people are stuck is they've been manipulated in this carrot performance performing type mindset of how can I perform good enough to reach my goals at the end of my life? And they and this hamster wheel keeps people stuck, paying for coaches that aren't getting them results, tithing in churches that where they're being deceived and stolen from every single week. That's what happens in structures that keep them entrapped and enslaved to a cult like leader's mentality. Okay? And so this thought process tears down our autonomy, our own beliefs and decisions because we say, okay, wait a sec, I have to keep performing to get to the next level, to get to the next level, to get to the next level. My friends, you're already there. You're good enough right now at this moment. There's no difference between you and me right now preventing you from optimizing your time and reaching your goals. There's nothing. All it takes is a decision to fully accept yourself as perfect right now, how you are without ever having to change while simultaneously having the intention to grow and improve and get better every single day and to grow in your relationship with God, with people. To live that growth mindset, we have to get out of these fixed, finite mindsets that have limitations on them. You do not have limits on your life. There's no limits on your life. And any that there are, you have put them there oftentimes because either you believed somebody else that told you that you had that limit, or because it's comfortable and you don't want to risk stepping out of it, it's time for you to step out and risk jumping forward and breaking past the glass ceiling. Stop letting what other people tell you dictate your future when you can find your most optimal place of operating a flow state. The way that I get into this is I go either play my piano, listen to some classical music. This is something that I used to do when I was younger. I'll even play a video game. Maybe I will read a book or learn something. These are activities that, when I was younger, as a child, about 5 to 15 years old, that I did that were really fun for me. And so this is an area I want to what was something that you either wished you could do when you were a child or loved doing? Go do that thing before you do your work. Before I did this podcast, I read a book, I played my piano and I listened to some classical music and then boom. It flows. It flows. Many of you believe that you don't have the time to grow in personal development. If you're not listening to audiobooks, my friends, you need to start right now. Start listening to some audiobooks to help you grow in your life. A really great one is Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. It's a great book that will transform your life from the inside out. Learn what you don't know right now. Become a lifetime student. Your goal is never to arrive. If that's your goal, your goal is horrible. It's a horrible goal to want to arrive someday. Change it. Make your goal. How can I grow and learn? And then how can I inspire others? You see, when we make it bigger than ourselves and we make our why bigger than getting validation and being told, oh, I'm a good boy, oh, I did a good job. We can help activate other people in those areas that we're growing in. We can help activate other people in those areas of our why by lighting other people's candles. And so as you grow in this area, you want to be able to light other people's candles with what you're growing in. Whether that's a kind word, a smile, joyful, a piece of encouragement, start encouraging other people and stop telling everybody what they're doing wrong all the time. Serious. Start telling other people how great they are. My friends, you are great. You are somebody that can go after great things. I'm not just saying that because that's my podcast and I'm supposed to say that you are good enough right now to go after your goals and to start breaking the cycle of perfectionism and the carrot that's in front of you of performance. And if some of you want to talk about this, I'd love to hop on the phone with you for 15 minutes where we could schedule a free 15 minute call where we talk about what's going on in your life and how to create a strategy for you to get to the next level. If you want to win a free 30 minute coaching session with me, you can leave growyourlife on my Instagram and I pick one winner every single week on Sunday. It's possible for you to reach your goals. It is to optimize your time. How do you optimize your time? You literally get into that state of that self acceptance. You get into that flow state by finding some of those things that you did when you were younger and having fun and living your life and enjoying life again, finding the joy in life again. When you do this, you can then do the things that took you five hours in 30 minutes because your goal is to be a student and to learn, to optimize, to get better, to improve. And oftentimes I'll do this. It'll take me like a week or two to get better at something. And that's what you can do as well, is find those areas where you feel triggered along the way. That's the path for you to go. Those things. Maybe you're tired of people wasting your time. Maybe you're tired of feeling like you're stuck and nothing's working out for you. Maybe you are just tired of this. That's the way to go. Your breakthrough is on the other side of that fear. Your breakthrough is on the other side of that thing that you've been avoiding completely. Is. Is there a word that you want to say to somebody? Is there somebody that you want to call, send a text message to reach out to somebody, put something on social media, write a blog post, but you don't want to. You're afraid of rocking the boat or maybe asking the wrong questions or getting in trouble. My friends, we're repeating the patterns of our childhood as adults. That's it. We're projecting what either our parents or our guardians told us that we weren't allowed to do as kids into our lives. It's time to break free from that and step into the next level in the next season of your life and unlock your potential to get to the next level. And you can do this by optimizing your time to get more done, by getting into a flow state to where it becomes easy for you to just, boom, press record. And you're talking like I am right now. You can train that. Introverts can learn that. Literally. Extroverts can learn that. Any personality style can learn this. It has nothing to do with introvert or extrovert at all. Doesn't your unique style is going to sound and look different? That's it. It's the only difference. It's growing in confidence because you know who you are, you know whose you are, and you know where you're going and when. You know that, nothing can stop you. And so if you want some help with that, I'd love to work with you. I'd love to talk with you. Or we can just have a conversation on my social media. Doesn't waste my time. It's not an inconvenience. Send me a message and ask for help. What are those things that you need help with? And I'd love to send you some answers. Okay, grow your life, everybody, and we'll talk soon.