Eben Pagan David DeAngelo: 3 Effective Time Management Habits That Will Change Your Life Forever!

I think the first one that made a really big impact on me was Peter Drucker in the Effective Executive. And right in there, he says, work in focused blocks of uninterrupted time on single focused projects. Minimum a couple of hours, you know, and like ideally longer than that. Because if you stop and start things, it's very unproductive. You know, this idea that if you get interrupted while you're doing something like a focus project that takes a while to do, you. You get interrupted and then you come back to that project and you start again on the project. From when you start again, it takes about 20 minutes just to get to where you were when you got interrupted. You've got to get back up to speed and get your mind back up there. I mean, I'm a child of hippie parents who dropped out of society and moved to the backwoods of Oregon when I was a little kid at 2 or 3 years old. So I kind of grew up in that reality. And then in my 20s, I was a long haired rock and roll guitar player. And that didn't work out for me. So I decided I wanted to be successful. So I got a real estate license. That didn't work out for me very well. But when I was doing real estate, I realized that I needed to get clients. So I found sales and marketing. And I started listening to tapes back in the day and reading books about sales and marketing. And when I finally realized that you could take a message and broadcast it out into the world and then get people to come and buy stuff from you, it was a, you know, it was a game changer. Like it was for you, right?

Totally.

For a lot of us. And, you know, then I went through a phase in my late 20s where I was socially awkward and kind of, I didn't have any success with women and dating. So I went and made friends with a bunch of guys who were really successful, you know, at meeting women and learned how to do that, got an amazing girlfriend, then wrote a book of dating advice and took my marketing knowledge and my dating advice and learned Internet marketing. And our mutual friend Dean Jackson showed me some great stuff he was doing. And I built a business called Double youe Dating. Built a really successful company, taught a lot of relationship and dating advice to men and women. And then as I built that business and became successful in business, because I'm a learner and I, you know, like, you like to learn about a lot of different areas. As I was building the business, people were asking me, how are you doing that? I showed Them, you know, that went on to me starting to teach business and entrepreneurship and time management and productivity. Started investing in technology companies about, I don't know, seven or eight, nine years ago as well. So I've done maybe five or six of those. Got married, I have a little daughter now. And putting a lot of my attention onto learning about parenting. And you know, that's helping me go back and revision all the things I learned about dating and the things that happened with my own family. And you know, so looking at the future a lot nowadays, I don't know, that's a little bit.

What are the things that really cause people to have success and failure in business? I mean, what causes the failures? What causes successes from your experience? Because you've literally, I mean, millions of people have read, listened, studied stuff that you've put out there and you've read probably, I'm sure in the thousands of books, articles, videos, you name it.

Yeah, well, the way I look at it right now, I kind of divide success. You said success in business. But the way I think of it is there's kind of success for yourself and then there's success for your relationships, you know, your family, your friendships, your community. And these are two different things. And one of them is about doing things for you to make you strong, you healthy, you energetic, you happy, you growing, you actualized. You have meaning and purpose in life and you success physically. Money. Live where you want to live, have the lifestyle you want to live, not have any hassles in your life. That's kind of individual or personal success. And then social success, having relationships that really work, having good bonds with people, good long term friendships where you feel like you support each other, where you, if you needed the person and they needed you, feeling like you're part of a community that is stable and that, that takes care of the people that are within it. And to do that, in a lot of senses, you have to kind of put your own needs aside and you give to your family, or you give to your friends, or you give to that community. And I think that real success, like I would call capital s success, is where you balance those two things. Where you take and you get and you kind of create and then you also give and you're, you're kind of generous. And if you get those two things in balance, which is more art than science, if you get those two things in balance, you can have more fulfillment and more joy and more happiness, I think. Do you want me to talk individual?

Yes. Yeah. Because I mean, here's the Thing most of the business stuff is viewing successful people from either fame, materialistic aspects, how much money they have, and there's a real sense of contribution where you can, I am a big fan of whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt somebody. And preferably it really helps others. You know, pursue it, achieve it, get it, go after it, don't feel bad about it. At the same time, not all money is created equal and there are trade offs that people are will make in order to, you know, success is literally waking up and feeling excited about what you're doing, feeling proud, knowing that, you know, I mean, I've always loved the saying, you know, if you haven't, if you think money can't buy happiness, you haven't given enough of it away. Because you can make a lot of people happy with things that you can do that they don't have resources or they've not, you know, something happened to them, they lost their health or something and you're able to step in. And in some cases, I mean that brings me a tremendous amount of joy when I'm able to do those things. And I think anyone watching feels the same way, wanting to take care of. There's many people, they're barely sustaining, paying their bills and surviving from a financial standpoint. And then they have their parents and when their parents get to. And so when you're able to have that level of success, that's different than I bought a Lamborghini, you know, I mean, it's a much different sort of thing. So yeah, talk about it as deeply as you want.

Yeah. A question that I ask myself, and I've been asking myself for years is what is value? Like what does the word value actually mean? And when you, when you get down to it, each of us has a different way that we value things and a different way that we get value from things. And if you take a more like a triune brain model, there's like physical bodily senses and like physical pleasure, the kind of pleasure you get from eating food or from having sex or from being in a hot tub or from exercising or being in the sun or doing something that physically feels good. And then there's more of the emotional, like what your emotions are, whether you're feeling happy or feeling joy or gratitude or compassion or some of the more elevated kind of emotions. And then there's mental, you know, again, like having meaning and purpose and learning things and growing conceptually and having the world make more sense. And these are different things, but they're all part of One complex of happiness, I think, is to have as much of that growth and that pleasure and joy as you can. And you mentioned a great thing to be as successful as you can without hurting another person or without necessarily making someone else pay for it, in a sense. And I think a lot of us that are interested in success and really studying it, a lot of us come from backgrounds where we were poor or where we had less than other people, or where we felt afraid like something bad was going to happen. And so there's a lot of fear that drives the creation of a lot of success. But there's also, in a lot of cases, I mean, this is sometimes cultures and religions and families and things, they make it wrong when you're a child to take what you want. You know, so you're three and you're grabbing the cookie, and someone's not just saying, you know, we can't have cookies right now. They're saying, you're bad for having taken that cookie or you're bad for having, you know, grabbed that thing. And so I think it's really important for us to be able to go through a phase of our lives as, as humans, as we're growing, where we can take what we want without guilt and without shame, to be able to just purely take what we want and to have that be okay. And then later, when we get to the age where we can start understanding, wait, taking that thing for yourself, you just took someone else's thing and they're going to feel bad because of that. And you can understand why that is. That's when I think it's more appropriate to have maybe an adult or a parent or a culture start teaching you about guilt and shame and so forth. But a lot of us got guilted and shamed and manipulated when we were so young. So then you kind of get this obsessiveness about it. And a lot of us, and I know probably you and me and a lot of our friends when we first started having success, there's this like, I gotta get as much of this as I can because I might not be okay. There might not be any later. And so, and I say this because I really believe that people should go through a phase of their life where they make themselves very successful. I think every person should go through a phase where they essentially focus on themselves, develop themselves into their highest potential, develop themselves and to be able to create lots of value and get lots of value in return, produce value for others in the world and make money and get success and learn all of those things, but I give that little kind of, that intro to it or that frame because we have to remember not to, not to let our shadow or our demons from the past control us and have us believe that that's going to be the whole game. You know, if you're going to come into a phase of your life where it's like success time, maybe it's a decade or some phase of your life or maybe 20 years or something, don't forget the relationship and the family and the community. Maybe you go 80%, but you make sure and keep in mind other people and stay in relationship to other people and make sure you're doing things that are kind of ecologically and socially sustainable. Because if you get too far off in this, just get for yourself and get more money and more success and more sex, more power and more of these kinds of things. You go through that cycle you were talking about earlier where you have another big win in business or you have another big success in your life, but then you go through that despair moment and you feel empty even though you got the success and, and then you got to go get a bigger success. And then before you know it, you know, people don't like you or socially your family's falling apart or you find yourself now, you know, not feeling good about what you do, so, you know, success, all for it. I think all of us need to go through life and go through a phase where we learn all the success principles and we learn the ways to do it and we learn to create success for ourselves without having a lot of guilt and shame doing it in a way, of course, where we're not harming other people, but we're really learning how success and how generation works. And then of course, I think we also need to go through a key phase of our life, maybe it's first for some people where we create social and community success and we learn those skills as well.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I sit and think about what you're saying here and I think the what you get versus the how you get it are two different things. And I think the how one gets it is from an integrity standpoint, from a long term sustainable satisfaction standpoint is more important than the what, because there are many ways to just go out and get money. And some people are extremely skilled at amassing tons of it while simultaneously leaving lots of destruction, a lot of shrapnel in people's asses, lots of reputation trade offs, lots of, you know, either never developed relationships or wrecked relationships and it's real easy these days to just show pieces of that life and hide the dark parts, too. You know, I mean, when I sit and look at Facebook, I mean, I sit and look at some of my friends whose, you know, that will do videos on culture or they'll do videos on, you know, anything that that gives a piece of what life is like and how inaccurate a lot of it really is. I mean, I always say to people, too, it's like, remember how people used to say the media is bullshit, but then we have this whole thing called social media. Does that mean, like, social media? And it's amazing. I was doing yoga today at my house with Trent Shelton, who's a former NFL player and has millions of people that follow him online. And he started FaceTiming, like, towards the end of us doing yoga. And, I mean, thousands of people. You know, last time I looked, it was like 54,000 people had watched the video, you know, a couple hours after, after we'd done it. And I said to him, I go, how amazing that we can just broadcast this to so many people and we could say cool things and we can inspire people. That's, you know, that's neat. And at the same time, you can broadcast things that you say you do, things that you say you are that have no bearing on reality. And so it's not the tools, it's how the tools are used. It's debate with others about marketing. People are like, marketing is bad. These marketers, these advertisers, the marketing industry. And I'm like, you know, I don't even think you could call marketing like an industry. It's like saying, oxygen is an industry. I mean, it's just everywhere. Marketing is used not only to sell products and services, but it's getting dates. It's used for influencing everything. And so it's just one of those things that you do business, and work is just one of those things. So the whole concept of work, I got a career, I've got a job, I've got to go to work. And different work produces different results. Some people love their work. They get up every day, they're excited about it. Others have their moments where it's enjoyable, but it's obsessive or it's difficult. And being an entrepreneur, some days it's going to war. I mean, it's just. You don't know what the hell you're doing. And I've always liked the analogy. Some days it's like driving a car hurling down the freeway at 80 miles an hour. And you Got to change the tire. And you just got to do it because you can't make. You just can't stop. You got payroll, especially if you build a much bigger company. So there's levels of responsibility. But the whole notion of work and what work produces for you, for your family, for your mind, for your body, for your bank account, how would you even define what work is? I mean, it sounds like a stupid, simple question, but a career, I've got a career. I've got this work. Because people that are producing anything are going to engage in work. And so to make work better, to make work. I mean, people come to guys like me and you because they want to do better in business. They want to be, you know, they want to make work better. But just how do you think about it? So if you have access to books or trainings or knowledge or techniques or strategies or, or processes or all of the buzzwords that are used, best practices and, you know, how do you interact with it? What is it?

I've got an idealistic vision for this.

Where.

I really feel like everyone should love what they do. Everyone should love the work that they do. And if they don't, well, I'm saying, I realize that's idealistic, that's not perfectly realistic, but I just want to start at that end because I'm going to go backwards just a little bit here. But I really, I feel like everyone should love what they do. And because of the Internet and because we don't live in a village somewhere and there's 100 people that live there and there are only a few things that we need to do there, and most people work in growing the food, you know, and then a few people work in, like the blacksmiths, whatever, there's not many options. So if, like, your only choice is to, you know, I don't know, grow corn or work at the blacksmith, there's not as many options to love what you do. But now with the Internet and with all the different types of roles and the knowledge society we live in, and you can find the people that you can work for virtually around the world, I'm getting closer to believing, like, you know, we're in a place where everyone could love what they do, so that's the end of it. But kind of going back to the, you know, the other reality here, you know, work used to be go find food. You know, a million years ago, you know, you wake up and you need to. You were hungry, you got to go find some food. And that was going and foraging or maybe hunting you know, or trying to chase down an animal. And it was a different time. And so work had a more direct result. You'd go forage and you'd find like a root and you'd eat it or you'd go hunt an animal and you'd eat right there. And fast forward to today and let's say that you have a business and you go to work at your business and you do whatever you do there and you invest some money and some time and maybe you run some ads and you get some people that come and they get on your list and then you follow up with them and then you go make some products. And it might be from when you do some work until you get the reward in terms of money, that might be three months or it might be six months or who knows, if you have a job, it might be two weeks or a month, or if you're self employed, maybe a few months. That whole instant gratification like I'm going to go out and work and then I'm going to get something back for it, which is intuitive for a human and for animals. That's kind of broken down. And so I think we've forgotten for one that work is about getting results that we want in life. We think more like, okay, I have to do something and then that's to get money. And then we think money is the end. And then we kind of. Then we also know we can take some money and buy some things. So we've become very disconnected from this. And I think we've got to put it all back together and start thinking more from an idealistic design perspective of what is the life that I want, what do I want to be doing with my time? What energizes me, what am I good at, what are my gifts, what kind of personality was I born with, what kinds of things am I attracted? What's my talent? And I think we've got to go try a bunch of things out in our lives and we have to try really diverse things. We have to try some things that are again, more like physical and, you know, practical and pragmatic or where we're building things or fixing things. And we've got to try things that are more emotional and social and we've got to try things that are more intellectual and find combinations of those until we, you know, kind of home in and go, oh, wow. There's this whole area of study where people are doing this little niche or this little vertical of something over here. And that's my calling, like that's what I'm actually supposed to be doing. And then when we find that, we need to find a way to make that so that it also pays us back. Because a lot of people say, well, I'm made to be a dancer. That's what I was made to do. But it turns out that for every one dancer that makes enough money to support themselves in life, there are probably 275 that feel like it's their purpose to be a dancer. And so we have to find something that's also pragmatic. But work is essentially expending energy in order to get a result that we want. And I think we've gotten confused. I think we've gotten really confused in that if we know ourselves better and we learn some skills and we find the right environment and we find the right kind of thing that we can do, so many more of us could love what we do.

So you said expending energy to get a result that we want, and the more that we get to know ourselves. So let's just use that as a jumping off point. So I believe it was Socrates that said, an unexamined life is not worth living. And I've thought of the reverse. An unlived life is not worth examining. And you say get to know yourself. Well, how in the hell does someone just get to know themselves? I mean, I constantly am thinking, who am I? What do I want? What matters? What makes sense? And the whole analysis. And I think a lot of time can be wasted in these mental games of trying to figure out some things that maybe just you figure them out. When you quit trying to figure them out. It's when self help is no longer helping, when self help actually becomes a problem. And when I say self help, I talk about it in regards of being a seminar junkie, trying to read everything, trying to figure something out versus just living, because you can. I can't imagine some of the dark sides of social media is how many people's lives they quit living because they're observing other people live life that isn't really the way they live. It's just what is projected and how it's interpreted.

Yeah, it's tragic. A life that looks like it would be great to live, but actually isn't even that great to live. So they're envying something that isn't even that.

It's not even real. Yeah. And I say this from like, this context is ever since I launched the Artists for Addicts platform and I've been having so many people reaching out to me and it's just going to get more and more as the weeks go by. All of the people that are being reached with the stuff that I'm doing, just trying to put out what I think to be helpful, useful information about the causes of addiction. The treatment of addiction is people that are really out of control and really miserable. But then they are building up. I mean, they're addicted to this image management of portraying a life that they don't really live. And one of the things is saying, you gotta just stop that shit because the more you put that representation that really isn't you out there to the world. You know, Instagram posts, Snapchat things, Facebook, you know, all these different things to try to make your life look so cool. But you're doing drugs, you're acting out sexually in an obsessive way. You're gambling money away, you cannot stop working because this compulsivity, if you have to live up to this Persona and the Persona is imprisoning you, that's sort of a difficult thing. So one, it's about, to what ends does one go? And what have you learned that has been an utter waste of time? And what have you done that has been really useful that you could legitimately and with confidence say, this is a way that I think about this, this is the way that I approach this. Because I know, I mean, you out of all people have done a tremendous amount of work expending energy to figure things out. And I think you've made some incredible insights.

Yeah, you asked a couple of things. So how do you get to know yourself? How do you figure these things out? We're also talking about kind of the social media. I went to a doctor's office recently and he had one of those security cameras, you know, the big industrial strength looking ones. And it was in the office, like pointing into the office and on the front it was holding a selfie stick and it had a cell phone on the front of it. Like it was taking a picture of itself.

Oh, that's funny.

It was really nice. Okay. And I saw an article I read, I don't know, maybe six months ago or something about this woman who, she said she took one of the big super famous Instagram stars, one of the Jenner girls, and she followed her and she tried to follow this girl's life and do exactly what she did. So if she would color her hair like all blue, she would go and like get her hair colored blue. And if she had different outfits or was going, and she was like just saying, okay, what does it look like to keep up with all these details. And she was exhausted by the end because the whole thing was a performance.

Right.

It's kind of like, it's one thing to live your life, but it's another thing to, like, if you, if you. If like, let's say you're in Lion King or something, you're one of the performers. There's. You gotta go and get ready and get your costume on and do all this stuff in order to give the performance. And at the end of the day, unless you're one of the very, very, very few people that got lucky enough to, for whatever reason, be on the show, on the stage that we like to watch, that stuff's actually all counterproductive because it wastes so much of your time to try that, to get that extra little bit of. I, you know, kind of look good. Another thing too is, I mean, the people that we see on TV and on Instagram and whatever they are, they tend to have part personalities that are incredibly narcissistic. And I don't say that in a judgmental way. I say it in the sense of they tend to really enjoy getting a lot of attention and they like doing that extra little bit to get the extra bit of attention. They. That's kind of what they're good at, if that makes sense. They're good at doing that thing. And so if you're not. If you're not good at doing that extra stuff in order to get a lot of attention, then trying to copy someone who's really good at it is kind of like being a short person trying to play basketball against someone that's seven feet tall and who loves to play it. You're never gonna win that game. So don't. You know what I mean?

Don't. It's super exhausting along the way.

Totally. Exactly. So then back to how do you find what you are good at? What is your talent? And I go back and forth with some of my friends, Is talent inborn? Are you talented when you're born, or is it something that's developed? Is personality inborn? And I think that generally speaking, the kind of nature versus nurture, it's about 50, 50, about 50%. You're kind of born with whatever it is, and 50% is you learn it from your family and your culture and your peers and your social experiences. But both of them are extremely influential, right? Extremely influential. So we have to take both of them into account. And if you talk to parents who have kids, this is a pretty standard story. We had One child. And we just thought, okay, this is the way kids are. And then we had another child, and they were totally different. And so they get to see the difference in terms of inborn, like, innate personality, kind of. And then, of course, you can see two people go through a similar experience and, you know, come out the other side and, you know, one of them goes to a concentration camp and, you know, says it was the worst experience. And then you get Viktor Frankl goes to a concentration camp and comes out and he used it as this self development thing and, you know, invents a whole psychotherapy or psychology, you know, around it. So you got what you got in terms of your genes, you got what you got in terms of your personality, your inborn personality and your talents and so forth. I think the game is figuring out what are those things and then where would those be useful in reality so that I can be myself more or I can be my greatest self, or I can develop into more of what I already am or reach my potential, actualize my potential. And in order to do that, I think you got to try a bunch of things. I think you have to go out into life and you have to have novel experiences with different types of people. And one of the challenges here is that cultures, cultures and subcultures, all the way down to a family, which is a little subculture, whether it be religious or whether it be a regional culture or whether it be a national culture or a whole, you know, culture of a whole hemisphere, cultures tend to. Most cultures, they tend to be pretty exclusionist, even if they think that they're more open. If you really look into it, what they're trying to do is either keep you from going and experiencing other cultures or get other people to come be part of theirs. A culture can't survive by saying, leave our culture and go get other cultural influences. No culture would survive that way. And so this creates kind of xenophobia or like being afraid of other things. But you gotta go try it, you know, you gotta go try it out. Robert Anton Wilson, I mean, he's kind of extreme in this way, but, you know, he says whoever you think is a wacko, whoever you think are the crazy people, go and go live their life. Go get into that reality for a second. Like, if you're a, you know, whatever, a super liberal, animal loving whatever, you know, like, go read hunting magazines and go hang out with some hunters, or if you're a conservative religious person, like, go hang out with some wacko ecology hippie cult that takes drugs or something. Like that. It's like, get out of your comfort zone and go see another way that people do things. Go to other countries, go to other businesses, get out a little bit and just go there and see what they're like. And for the most part, what you're going to find if you go immerse yourself in it is you're going to realize, oh, these are humans that have a different way, they've learned a different way of doing things to get different results, and they actually work really well for what they're up to. And yeah, they've got some wackiness. Maybe they're a little bit too extreme in, you know, some area. And I'm not saying to like, go join a terrorist organization or, you know what I'm saying you don't want to go all the way. But you find, oh, these are people and they have a different set of values or they have different personality types, but they're actually pretty cool and they're up to their own thing here. And I think that's how you find this stuff. You get it reflected. You know, sometimes people say, like, you know, Evan, do you believe in psychics? Who was. Somebody was just asking us that yesterday.

The day before, someone was saying, like.

Evan, you got to go to my psychic. You know, okay, some people think psychics are wacky. You know, where could a psychic or. And some people are really into astrology and psychics and tarot cards and things like this. How could those things be useful? Well, they can be really useful because we can't see ourselves. Just like your eye can't come out and look at itself, we can't see ourselves. And one way that we see ourselves is in reflections. It's just like if you're a dancer, you need a mirror so you know what you look like and you practice so that when you come back out here and dance, you look good. And you know you look good because you looked at yourself in the mirror. Things like this, even things that are quote, unquote wacky, like psychics and tarot cards and astrology, if you go and you're with someone that is intelligent and has a lot of different modalities, listening to them say things about you, even if 50% of them are right, half the time you're going to go, wow, yeah, that pattern is true about me or that particular mythological thing, and it'll give you insight just because you got a reflection. Now, I think there's better ways that you can go than this in a lot of cases. But go check out Some personality systems. Go read about the Myers Briggs. Go take a couple of tests online. Take a Colby test. You, you know, go read about the way that personality is sliced and diced and try some of these things on and say, okay, what's my type? And talk to other people about theirs. Try a lot of things out and you'll find, wow, there's something out there that I never would have guessed where I can be myself. It kind of calls on my natural talents. It draws out the best in me. And there are other wackos like me there. There are other crazy people.

Yeah. And you'll find you're Evan Pagan. And that would be a really bizarre sort of like an acid trip almost. Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. Well, let's talk about energy management. And I don't just mean like from a physical sense, but just like a mental sense, because you've done a lot of programs on one of your programs, wake Up Productive, and you've done a lot of ways to accelerate, advance your ability to get things done, gain clarity, be more persuasive. So you've dwelt a lot into that world. And if anyone, what are the things that you have found that for the most part, an entrepreneur that has ambition and drive, I mean, as stupid as that sounds, let's use that as the caveat. If you don't have any ambition and drive, you know, you must gain that if you're going to like. Because if I give a strategy to someone that is driven to build their business, and that strategy would work if it was used, if I give that to someone that has ambition, they can do something with it. If I give that tool to somebody that does not, they in many cases will blame the tool versus blaming themselves because they're like, well, this didn't work. Well, it does work when it's used, and if it's not used, it does not work. So with that being said, I'm going to just assume, which is always dangerous, but I'm going to assume that the person listening or watching us right now is doing that because there's enough in them to say, yeah, I want to learn something that I can then use to gain perspective Get a result, that sort of stuff. So what could you share that if the person listening or watching that does have ambition, if they did, would improve their life? And anything you want to talk about, from their sleep to their income to their marketing to their relationships, whatever, because you've studied a lot. Great.

So I'll talk to that person that has the. What you're saying, ambition and kind of drive. Also, if someone doesn't, I'll make distinctions here. I'll talk to that. I also want to make sure and include the other type of folk because I've been learning lately that a lot of people, some people, and it's actually kind of the minority, have this ambition drive that you're talking about. There are a lot of folks who they need to be around one of those type of people, and then that's what activates them.

Gotcha.

And neither is better or worse. They kind of can collaborate. But you and I do work around a lot of the more drive, ambition kind of people. So I just want to say that. And then as you were talking, I was thinking about Wyatt Woodsmall, who's a mentor of mine, and he taught me the distinction between a motive and motivation.

Okay.

So motive is that thing that you're going for, that thing you're moving either toward or away from. Right. And then the motivation is the thing inside is the feeling. There's like the inner game and then the outer game. So to feel motivated, you usually need a motive, Right? And when you have a motive, that's what kind of helps you feel motivated. And there are a lot of models around this. David McClelland, he broke down motivation into power, affiliation, and achievement. And we either move toward or away. So we either move towards success or away from failure. We move toward love and affection and approval or away from rejection. We move toward having power and influence, and we move away from loss of significance. And when you figure out which one of those you are, you can start using that to motivate yourself more. So I think you need to know what your motive is. And if you don't know what your motive is, it's hard to get yourself motivated.

Right.

You know, a lot of people talk about the why, you know, and this whole notion of if you have a big enough why, and this, I think is a little. There's a finer distinction there of what the why is. So looking into motivation is important here. You talked about energy management. So when we're talking about productivity and time management and just getting more things done, there are different strategies for this. Some People are machines. They wake up and they just get shit done. They can't stop getting lots of stuff done. Now, this is the, you know, the tiny minority of humans. And when we look at those people, we all just kind of. They make us feel bad because they're just getting. You know, they're whatever. They're the CEO of a rocket company and the coolest car company in the world. Like, each one is their spare time or something. You know, like, holy shit. Like, how does that person, you know, do all this stuff? And some people, they're just kind of that way. I remember reading an article with Elon Musk's mom, and she was saying, like, oh, yeah, my kids, this. And she's like, elon, I don't. I don't know what happened with him. Like, he's just. I don't know what happened, you know? So you get one of those once in a while.

Do you think he's an alien?

No. He could be the first instance of AI, but we don't know.

I mean, I've met him twice. He's an interesting guy. Yeah.

And so basically, if you're not one of these, like, wake up and just are, you know, productive, like, all by yourself, you have to figure out how to make yourself be that way. You got to figure out how to program yourself or habitual. Like, put habits in place and kind of ritualize it, kind of. Anyway, so the ideas for this. I've learned a lot of this stuff from other kind of masters here. I think the first one that made a really big impact on me was Peter Drucker in the Effective Executive. And right in there, he says, work in focused blocks of uninterrupted time on single focus projects. Minimum a couple of hours, and ideally longer than that, because if you stop and start things, it's very unproductive. You know, this idea that if you get interrupted while you're doing something like a focus project, that takes a while to do. If you get interrupted and then you come back to that project and you start again on the project from when you start again, it takes about 20 minutes just to get to where you were when you got interrupted. Because you've got to get back up to speed and get your mind back up there. So if you get. On average. If you get interrupted every 20 minutes, there's no way to get anything done. So this idea of focus blocks uninterrupted time. So that was really influential to me because that's not intuitive. And a lot of this stuff around multitasking A lot of people say I'm a multitasker, but that's super inefficient. I saw an article recently that said on average a human has a shorter attention span than a goldfish. Did you see that one? Yes, the eight second goldfish attention span or whatever. So, you know, so we're dealing with all that kind of stuff. I was also very influenced by Jim Lehrer and Tony Schwartz and this idea of in order to manage your energy, you move from managing actions to creating habits. And so this is kind of a profound insight of we only get a little bit of willpower. And there's a lot of research that shows that we get a kind of a little bit of willpower and we burn it up. And a lot of the burning up of the willpower is in internal conflict. So we're all in a lot of internal conflict for the most part. Most of us are. So we've got this cognitive dissonance and we've got these things that we're worried about. And as you grow up and become more of an adult, there are more and more things pulling on your attention in time and kind of conflicting values that you have. I mean, this idea that we were talking about earlier of like being selfish or generous and you've got to make the decision, am I going to do for other here? Am I going to do for self? So we burn a lot of our willpower in there trying to make decisions, because decisions are. Decisions are one of the biggest energy drains that we have. Making decisions is extremely draining on us. So what do you do? How do you get yourself to do another thing? Because you can't just keep trying to will yourself and do it. That doesn't work. And we're already creatures of habit. And so the idea is to create a ritual that is a specific set of steps that will put a new habit into your life. And then every day for 30 days, do that at the exact same time of day. And if you do that same thing, then you ritualize it. You actually put it into yourself as a habit. That's great energy management, I think. Focus blocks of uninterrupted time and then create rituals and use your willpower to do the ritual over and over until it's a habit.

So when it comes to habits and conditioning, it is just not an intellectual choice for people to just say, oh, I'm gonna. If you're so revved up, I mean, if I could stand up, which I'm not going to, I could stand up. But if I was gonna run across the room and as fast as I could, I couldn't just stop, you know, I mean, there's sort of like a body of motion tends to stay in motion. A frenetic person tends to stay frenetic. So there's a period where you actually have to recondition yourself, where you have to. Now certain things can just be, you know, I mean, what's that other Peter Drucker quote? You know, if someone tells me what they value, I might believe them, but show me your calendar and your bank account and I'll show you what you value. So based on people saying, oh, I want this, I want that, well, show me your calendar, show me your bank account, and we'll actually see if you really value success and making money, if it's that sort of thing. So what are your thoughts about just building rituals that work because you have studied and learned and identified and I've talked to numerous people about productivity. I mean, I can't imagine how many hundreds of hours that I have spent in the study and the research of these sort of things and even how difficult it is to change. You know, getting your. You trying to be funny here? Okay, if you're going to be funny, just try to just be funny. So getting your body to do the things your mouth is saying it's going to do are two different things. So how does one do that?

I mean, in a sense, the most powerful force for a human being is their social circle, their social group.

Right.

We were all hearing this research that if you kind of average out the people that are closest to you, you're that person. You take the five people closest to you, that's your level of self esteem and health and income and all that kind of thing. In a certain way, the self sculpting or the self development game, it reaches, I think, its pinnacle when you figure out where you want to go in a particular line or developmental vector of your life, whether that be your physical health or emotionally, how you want to feel, or your relationships or your success or money or whatever it is, where you want to live, how you want to live, figure out that one thing and then go and add a social influence to your life who already has that in their life. That's the formula, right? So if I'm bad at marketing, I don't know marketing. I don't know how to get customers. I could go read books and that works. I can get that knowledge. But it's nothing like coming and sitting down. Like with you. For example, we had lunch with, remember we had Lunch with that woman, what, a month ago or something in la? We were both at a conference. You had lunch with your friend? We sat down with her. She said, here's this whole thing. She really didn't understand marketing kind of at all. We wound up having lunch with her for maybe an hour and a half. We gave her a bunch of feedback and by the end of it, it's not just that she got what to do, because she did. We gave her some ideas on what to do. But we're so far to the next level in our own marketing development, our own lives, we're saying what we're communicating, what our kind of body language and the cultural little milieu that was set up there is communicating, is. It is totally normal to have the kind of success that you're trying to get here. It's not that big of a deal. Just go do the things you need to do and then. Can I get some more water? And that transmission is what you need to get for yourself when you're trying to achieve something because you read it in a book and it's like, I don't know, this person could have just written that down because they wanted to, you know, whatever. Or it's abstract or maybe it's not taught the way that you want, but when you go watch another human being do something and you go, oh, oh, you can do this. Dan Kennedy, I heard him talk and he said this great thing, he said, I think we should have National Bring a Poor Person to Work Day. And I thought that was really a great insight so that, you know, someone that doesn't do as well financially could come to work for a day with someone that does and watch what they do. Not to learn what they do, but to just realize, I could do this just to raise their esteem and like, what's possible. So the social influence is such a big deal because the ritualization, so there's like focus blocks of time, there's the ritualization and the habit building, which is, you know, very self empowering and so forth. But it's not. These are nothing like adding social influences to your life. If you're saying like, well, I want to go work out every day, you could do these other things and it's great. You could focus on that block of time. You could create the ritual, you could set it up, you could start doing it. But man, make friends with two or three people who work out every day and have been doing it for 10 years. And who, that's an absolute, rock solid cornerstone of their life. If you don't do that. Something's wrong with your life and you go make friends with them, you start hanging out with them, you figure out other ways to add value to each other's lives, but being around them, you're going to start going to the gym every day, not because you ritualized it or you had willpower, but because there's freaking no choice.

That is a huge insight. I mean, now, because thinking back at that lunch, because we talked to her, oh yeah, yesterday, and she said that thing you talked to me about worked and she talked about I got my slides and it was like a game changer for me, blah, blah, blah. And that also gave me some insight as to what happens with Genius Network. Because I now running the highest level marketing group in the world and it's an expensive group. People pay $25,000 for Genius Network. They pay $100,000 a year for Genius X. And it's the being around all of the. And there are people that show up there that are really successful. And I've heard this dozens of times. You know, when I came to my first meeting, I felt like, you know, in my world, I'm this really, you know, successful person. I came here and I feel like this. And I always think that's a funny statement because it's like, no, you're a total badass. But. And then once they come to a few meetings, they realize, oh, you know, this is kind of like a family. I feel comfortable around these people. And so it's given me a deeper understanding of what I've actually created without even thinking, thinking about it that way. Because people be like, well, I already got too many ideas or I don't have time. It's not about that at all. It's about the relationships. It's about. I always say that what I do in Genius Network, all of the great content, the 10 minute talks, the $250,000 ideas, all this thing that's structured around sell people what they want, give them what they need. They usually want more money. But when they show up there, we talk a lot about workaholism, we talk a lot about hiring amazing people. We talk about getting in much better physical shape, taking free days, all of these things that aren't as appealing initially as I want to have a lot more money. What happens though is I come there and we put on as good of a curating a amazing discussion around important issues as we can. But I always say that the speeches, the talks, those are just excuses for me to bring amazing people together so they can meet each other. Because once they meet each other, all kinds of stuff happens. Okay? So just seeing the outside perspectives. So in terms of the word hack gets thrown around a lot. And some days I like it, some days I don't. For this conversation, what are some shortcuts, hacks, things that you have done, learned, employ, that just simply make things work better. I mean, it just allows you to be it environments, be it certain, be it technology, be it, you know, meditation. It could be, you know, from the totally normal to the, you know, weird. What have you done or do that just makes you more effective.

Because we're looking for leverage here. It's kind of like an investing. We want to get as much leverage as we can. And I don't mean like borrowing money. I mean, we want to put something and get the biggest return. We want to get the greatest return. And I think in life, this social influences thing is really a big deal. I'd also like to talk. I'll just put a little marker here in collaboration. Collaboration is a really important idea for big effectiveness. So make sure I don't forget that one. So social influences. So this idea of Dunbar's number.

Yeah, 150.

Yeah. This guy went and kind of studied primates and looked at brain sizes and social group size and figured out that we probably come from tribes or groups, social groups of about 100 to 150, that kind of range.

I think I can. I think I'm one of the few people that can go beyond his number, but I'm not sure.

Well, you're a primate and your brain's. You can see your cranium's a little larger there. So you're probably at like 153 or something, right?

Perhaps.

Okay, so just judging by the shape.

That'S how I shave my head. Give the appearance that it's swallowing.

So that can judge better the number.

If I have any hair, it just looks even bigger than it.

Yeah. And so this idea is that we came from these tribes that were about this size, but now we don't. I mean, even the nuclear family has broken down. First it was the tribe, then clans and families, and now more of us are being raised by single parents in America and this whole thing, but we still have all that wiring, and it's still the most influential thing that we can do. And so I think of this as that for our adult life, what it's our job to do as adults is to build that tribe in our lives, but build it intentionally. Sometimes I call it a Tribe 2.0. Sometimes I call it a super tribe. So the idea is that maybe every quarter in your life, every 90 days, you want to find one of those people that you want to add to your tribe. And if you do it every 90 days, you know, that's for a year, over 25 years, you could put 100 people into your life. And so we all, you know, these days, online, offline, whatever, we all meet lots of people. And if you follow what I said earlier, you want to go into different environments and meet different people. And when you meet people, when you meet lots of folks, once in a while someone will just resonate and you'll realize you, you're different enough from me, but yet we can meet on some things and I can feel that there's some synergy here. You would be a great addition to the tribe that I'm putting together. Now. We're all multi group, we all have several that we're kind of members of, so that's fine as well. But if you do that and you build a tribe full of people and connect them not only to you, but connect them to each other, you eventually create a really powerful attractor field, a social influence.

That's pretty much what I've done. I mean, that's sort of my life as it relates to, you know, connecting people and developing relationships. You know, I think it was Bill Gates that says, you know, most people overestimate what they can do in a year, but underestimate what they can do in 10 years. Yeah. And so there is a lot that you can do in a handful of years. And a lot of people where they get frustrated is they like, what do you want to do in the next 90 days? What do you want to do in the next year? And they have these goals that there's so much that needs to be set up in order to do it and they don't do it. And therefore they don't. Look at. If you were just using Your example of one person every 90 days doesn't sound like a big thing in a year, although it could be, it could be huge. But in 10 years, in 15 years and five years, I mean, it just multiplies and someone said can be a.

Complete transformation of your life.

Not only can it be, it will be, it is the way, you know, it's like the books you read, the people you meet and the decisions that you make. I mean, a year from now is going to make up how this year is going to play out. Yesterday during our group discussion, someone I can't remember who Said it, I think it might have been Jeff Walker. He said, who's someone that you want to go to dinner with a second time? And as simple as that statement was, I thought about, I've had dinner with a lot of people once, but during that dinner, from like the ability to connect, you know, contribution, you said, talk about collaboration will come. You know, it's just, I wouldn't want to go to dinner with them a second time, you know, because I meet a lot of people. But I sat and thought about that going, yeah, if I just sit and look at my life, who are all the people that I would want to go to dinner with? Over and over and over again? And it really, you know, it really helps me think about why do I interact with some of these people, what am I getting? You know, a lot of people will go meet with people that they want some. Something from business deals or whatever, but they don't really like the person or they don't really have a lot in common with them. So it's kind of begrudgingly. And that's just not the way that I think one enjoys living their life. And so, you know, it's kind of. To take a chapter out of Maria Kondo, you know, the life changing magic of tidying up about physical items that, you know, socks, you know, does this bring me joy? The question that you ask, I think about that as it relates to people, as it relates to projects. Does this person bring me joy? Does this project, does this book bring me joy? I mean, everything that you interact with, if it doesn't let it go, there's a lot to be said. So anything you want to say about collaboration?

Yes, thank you. So collaboration is interesting because collaboration done right creates emergence. It creates something in a different dimension that individually you could never have created. So if you take Adam Smith's pin factory, this idea of one person trying to do all of it, like draw the wire and cut it and make the pinheads and sharpen them and put the things together. If they just made pins all day individually, they can make a little handful of pins, but whatever, 10 people that have all divided that labor up and have specialized equipment, and one of them draws the wire and one of them cuts it, they just keep practicing it over and over, can make like whatever, 10,000 pins in a day. It's this huge, you know, the specialization and then, but it's the specialization and then the reintegration. That's the key. That's the power of collaboration. But collaboration, the exponential collaboration, where there's an Emergent property. There's something that is one plus one is three or one plus one is 11. It happens when diverse people figure out how to respect each other's differences and do things that neither of them, neither of the other could do. And it becomes like having it's. You know, having two eyes is great because you get binocular vision, but having eyes and ears is a whole other thing. And you want to have collaborations where one of you is eyes and one of you is ears. So that. And then figure out how to make those two things work together. Right. And so a lot of us, we inadvertently have, you know, this fear of other or fear of different type of people. And I think along these lines of people that are more ambitious and, you know, create success for self, or people that are more selfless in a real sense. Like, they really feel more like life comes on when they're around another and they can be part of whatever's happening. For the group that you want to find that combination of people, you want to have at least one of each of those around in different collaborations that you're doing, because that's when you're having a more ecological or a more sustainable kind of a collaboration where both the individuals and the group and the environment are all being considered, rather than just something where you're being with someone because they're just like you and they've got ideas just like you. So, yeah, in collaboration, that idea that we can find another person where each of us have complementary. Different but complementary skills, and then each of us can do our thing, but they're tessellated and synchronized together, and they're put together in a coordinated way that, you know, that's what creates the real power. So we want to look for. We want to look for diverse people that are very different from us, but who we can work with. And when we find those overlaps, you know, that's when the. I think the, you know, the big potential is there.

Right. I love it. I love it. Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. You're over here. Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you. Watch them.