Stop Procrastination FOREVER: Unlock Dan Sullivan’s GAME-CHANGING Strategy!

Procrastination is a very, very interesting mindset. And the reason is that it's largely secret. It's a largely secret experience that most people have, you know, so you watch Peter up here or you watch other performers over the next two days, and you'll sit there. And you have a tendency, we all have a tendency to compare what's going on, our insides against someone's outside. How many of you have ever noticed that you compare your inside outside? So you would look at a guy like Peter or Joe, and he's up here and he's really cool, and both of them are really composed and they have their act together. And you would say, that person does not procrastinate. Absolutely does not procrastinate. Okay. And I'm not sharing any secrets here, but if you interviewed them, they would say, there's enormous areas in my life where I'm just running ahead as fast as I can, but there are some areas that I'm actually procrastinating. And so what I'm going to show you, and this is just one of the things that we in Strategic coach would call a mindset gateway. So I have, over the years, I've created about 100 of these. And these are general purpose thinking processes that will actually take you through a mindset ceiling. Now what we're going to actually do is I'm going to show you how to actually use your biggest procrastinations to actually be the vehicle for telling you what the most important things are that you want to do. And you're going to take on three of your biggest procrastinations right now, where you are today. And within about 10 minutes, 15 minutes, we're going to flip them and we're going to turn them into an area of motivation. We're going to turn them into an area of energy and an energy of focus, okay? And by doing this today, I'm hoping that you can see that you can do this on any day, that you could actually, for the rest of your life, you could actually, in thinking about what's most important tomorrow, you could actually say, well, what are the three biggest things that I'm procrastinating on? And those three biggest things that you're procrastinating on are actually your best indicator on what you should work on tomorrow. And therefore, for the rest of your life, you never have to worry about whether you're doing the right things because you're procrastinating. Procrastination will actually tell you that these are the most important things, okay? And for each of you is unique. But the general principle is actually something that we can all master. And there's a great deal of loneliness with procrastination. One of the things I notice is that, generally speaking, when I talk to people about their procrastination, it's like it's a secret that's buried in the basement. But it's not just in the basement. It's in a secret room in the basement. And they actually do not want. They said, I can't talk about my procrastinations. Okay. Because the way it's set up is that procrastination is kind of like it's an indication that you're a lesser human being. You don't have your act together. And there's a moral failing here. Actually, it's a moral failing. You're. You're a sub. You know, it's not very, very good. And if you don't get your act together, you could live up to your potential. I don't know if any of you have ever had that. Okay, so let's talk about procrastination. First of all, how do I know if I'm procrastinating? So I'm just going to give you the two guides to know what constitutes a procrastination for you. And the first one is, is that it uses the word should, and it's something that you should do. So should is the giveaway. I think words are very, very important. And I think that the word should, the moment you hear the word should, you know that someone's talking about a procrastination. That's should do. Or the second one is shouldn't do. Okay. Should do or shouldn't do. And the should do is you should do, but you haven't done. Okay? So that's the first procrastination. Okay. And the second one is you shouldn't do, but you haven't stopped. Okay? So that pretty well covers the field. And I find that generally speaking, if you just hear listening, if someone in talking to you uses the word should, you know they're procrastinating. Okay? If you use the word should, and should is a guilt word. Should is a manipulation word. And it always indicates that procrastination is going on. It's just general indicator. I think it's good for 90% of the procrastinations. Two places where you can procrastinate. The first one is work, and the other one is your personal time outside of work. And just generally speaking. So I can include the whole room in the Area of work, procrastination. It would fall into these areas, first of all, planning, deciding, initiating, communicating, informing, implementing, responding, completing. Okay, so those general areas. And so when you think about your work and you think about these activities, then these activities would sort of indicate to you where you could be procrastinating. We're going to do a quick sprint, what I call sprint thinking, where I'm just going to have you brainstorm for about three minutes and actually write down a whole bunch of procrastinations that you're doing right now. And then in your personal life, it's sort of similar, but it's informing, helping, supporting, organizing, participating, discussing, deciding, solving and completing. Okay. And so you can think of all the different situations. As entrepreneurs, there's a particular indicator of what constitutes your biggest procrastinations. And I've got an organization, Babs, she's my partner. We have about 120 team members. And when I'm procrastinating, I'm being a bottleneck that's preventing teamwork. And I notice that my biggest procrastinations is where teamwork can't really be triggered using the skillful people that we have in the company. And the reason is because I'm being bottleneck of one kind or another. And it generally falls into the category of the first line. How many of you, the rest of you, when you think of the procrastinations that really keep you awake at night or not enjoying your free time, usually is where you're kind of a bottleneck, that's preventing teamwork. Yeah, it falls into that. And at home, you know, in personal life too happy personal life requires enormous amounts of teamwork with other people. And so they're doing it. So I'm just trying to give you the general landscape of procrastination. And what I'm trying to do here is saying that this is an enormous source of potential energy for you. This is an enormous sense of potential motivation. But right now it's trapped. So whatever you write down where your procrastination is, it's energy, but you don't have access to the energy. It's actually trapped energy. And how many of you have procrastinated on something for quite a long time and then when you finally acted and broke through, there was this huge burst of energy. There was this enormous burst of energy. And so the one thing I want to get across to you here is that the time you spend procrastinating is never wasted time once you get through it. And the energy that you feel that You've wasted. Procrastinating is never lost. It's just not available. It's just not available to you right now. Okay? And this is one of those areas too, where you get manipulated around the issue of procrastination. You actually get manipulated. Being a happy person, I'm very resistant to manipulation. Joe spoke about the theme of the conference. Freedom is actually freedom from being manipulated by external circumstances or external messages. So I'm very sensitive. I have spidey sense for anything where I sense that someone is trying to manipulate me in a particular direction. And so I go after any thought, form or any mindset which actually seems to be a manipulative manipulation. And then I come up with a counter, an antidote to it. I counteract manipulation so that people really are free in their own minds and they can think very, very freeing thoughts. So I really, really love helping people get a real sense of freedom about their life and not being manipulated by thoughts that come from the past or in the present or possible future. And once they're freed up in that aspect of their life, then their time gets freed up, their money gets freed up, their relationships get freed up, and also their purpose in life. Your purpose in life. See, one of the things you discover when you come to Genius network and also abundance360 is that there's a lot of very, very smart people in the world, okay? There's a lot of very, very smart people in the world. And so you don't want to have a goal that you want to be the smartest person in the room. Say, I'm not the smartest person in the room. But for something that I've really taken a look at for 40 years, I'm probably the smartest person regarding that particular thing. And each of you has a special thing that you're working on. And. And in that area, you're actually the smartest person. But the vision that Peter's talking about is a lot of really smartness all being available to everybody else. So my goal from a very early age is that I just want to be in a room where everybody's getting smarter. That's all I really wanted. And therefore my best usefulness in life as a strategic coach coach is to just show people how their performance and their achievement can continually go up just by thinking about their mindset ceilings and then freeing themselves up from it. So this is my life work on the planet. I don't know what I've done in previous lifetimes or in future ones, but for this lifetime, this is it. So I'm this. What I'm doing today is what I was put here to do. Now I'm going to give you a form. We're going to go through this quite quickly. And the first thing we're going to do is I'm going to go to a first column. So if you just look at this and I've got mine filled out so you can see what one of the forms looks like when it's all filled out. This called the procrastination priority. Okay? It's called procrastination priority, and that is your procrastination on any day that you choose to do this will actually establish your priority for the next day. Will actually establish your priority for the next day. And it's really, really neat because how many of you have, you know, and just raise your hand. How many of you have generally looked at procrastination as a negative in your life, generally speaking? Me too. I mean, me too. And I want to tell you, I've got a real partner on this in the room, and it's Dean Jackson. And Dean and I have been working on this nonstop for the last two and a half months. And both of us, you know, if there was a big room, I would introduce myself. Hi, my name's Dan, and I'm a procrastinator. And you would say, hi, Dan. Yeah, hi, Dan. I'm just. I mean, people look at me and they say, Dan, if there's one person in the world who doesn't procrastinate, it's the king of the mindsets. And I procrastinate just as much as anyone else does, okay? But we all have our unique things that. Where we get caught up. So first of all, there's, you know, the general transparency. The other thing is, I'll tell you this, just because of the experience that I've had with Dean over the last couple months, is that the single most interesting conversation that if you meet a total stranger and you want to talk about something and it immediately becomes interesting, is saying, do you procrastinate? And people would go, yeah, yeah, I do. I could write the book on it. And what I notice is that there's 7.3 billion people on the planet who could write the book on it. We're all master procrastinators. Okay.

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.

There's a reason for this. The only way that you could not be a procrastinator is to simply cease having goals that will cut it off. And if you're going to do that anyway, death is a quick way of not thinking about goals. So don't do that. So the first thing I'd like you to do very quickly, and we're just going to take three minutes and the first column. What I'm going to have you do is just write down as fast as you can, in no particular order. Just write down every area where you're procrastinating, big or small, you know, and just get it out there. Because I just want you to actually write down everything that's in your mind where you know you're procrastinating, where there's a should word you should do or you shouldn't do, personal life or business life, and just write those down. Okay. And if someone will give me the timer on, well, I've got it right in front of me, so I. I'll keep a track on you. And don't worry about the ranking. Don't worry about which comes first. All we're trying to do is get some things down on paper. How many of you have four or five and you can work with them? How many right there? Yeah, we got enough. So what I want you to do very, very quickly, and this is all emotional because procrastination is a very emotional thing. Just pick the three, which, if you got them out of the way, would give you the biggest burst of energy. Like if you got through it, this would actually give you a real burst of energy. The other thing is other people are depending upon it. I find that things where other people are depending upon me and I'm procrastinating, those are really big payoffs. If I actually take my action.

Then.

As soon as you get them circled, just go to the next column where it says the top three priorities. And in the three boxes, 1, 2, 3. Just put. Write down again what the procrastination is. Just write it down. Just write down what the procrastination is. Raise your hand. If just writing them down and ranking them, actually you can start feeling the energy. The energy is starting to come back. Yeah, because you're telling the truth. You know, you're just telling the truth. Telling the truth always has big energy boost, you know, about anything. And then once you get the three of them written down. I'd like you very quickly just to give a first statement of why you're procrastinating. So I've got these. You know, for example, I made a commitment to my team when I was 70 that over the next 25 years I was going to write 100 books. 100 books and 100 quarters. And the first seven quarters I'm good so far. But I always notice that there's a period during the quarter when I get kind of frozen. Can I pull it off again? And that's one of the things I really noticed was I would procrastinate. Even though I've done it seven times before, there's always that thing, can I pull it off again? Anyway, that's one of the ways I keep my mind alive, by the way, is it makes me really scared about the next 25 years. And I think fear makes you young. I believe that when people start desiring a courage free future is the moment that they send the universe out. They send a message out to the universe to actually take the parts back. You know, moment you want a courage free future is the moment you start dying. So I have a motto in life, not to give death any assistance. And yeah, Peter and I, I thought I was a big deal because I want. My goal is living to 156. And then the first podcast I did was with peter. His was 700. And I immediately felt like a lesser human being. And I began procrastinating even on things that would get me to 156. Never get into that type of sword, but now he's got swords. This is even worse. Now he's got swords. And I didn't know that. I didn't know about the sword. Anyway, I. Okay, so let's. I just want to do this. But how many so far? This is very, very useful. I mean, just doing this and. Yeah, and so this is one of those mindset gateways, because one of those mindsets coming along that is stopping performance and achievement is actually procrastination and looking at procrastination in a negative way rather than as a source of enormous energy and direction. So I'm going to just show you. I divide basically every person who's a performer, every person who's an achiever. There are four boxes that contribute to performance, achievement. And a lot of people will say, for example, you'll come to a certain session like these two days, and you'll say, I would take action on that if I had the confidence. How many of you when you feel confidence, it's no problem to actually take action. Yeah. And then I'll say to them, but you probably need something else to have confidence. Because I've noticed that people are only confident when they have capability. And they said, right, when I have the capability and confidence, I would take action. I said, do you have the capability and confidence right now? And they said, no, I don't. So what that means you're not going to take action.

Right?

And they said, right, when I get the capability and confidence, I'll take action. And I said, you know, it's kind of like saying, if the government would give me a loan, I would become an entrepreneur. Okay. With the proviso that if it was a failure at the end of the year, the government would forgive all my debts. Okay. That sounds pretty reasonable, doesn't it? Yeah. So anyway. But it's that type of demand. And what I've noticed, actually, that this is not how capability and confidence actually happen. Actually, there's something that happens that has to happen first when you're up against something where you don't have the capability and confidence. And the thing is, it requires courage. Requires courage. And courage is never triggered unless you have commitment. So what a commitment actually is is where you say, I'm going to move forward toward a breakthrough, toward something bigger and better, where I don't yet have the capability and confidence. That's actually what courage is. That's what courage is. Difference between courage and confidence is that courage doesn't feel good. How many of you have noticed the sharp difference in emotion between confidence and courage? The reason why we call it courage is because it doesn't feel good. And that's one of the main reasons why we admire it so much in other people, you know? So I was. I had a very enjoyable army career during the 1960s. And I'm saying that truthfully, I had one of the dream army careers that you can have. But I was drafted right when Vietnam started. Vietnam, The Gulf of Tonkin was 1965 in April, and I got drafted in June, July, and ended up two years as the entertainment director for about half of South Korea. Very, very enjoyable. I was actually sorry to come back. I really like the Koreans. Okay. But in basic training. Basic training, for the most part, if you're reasonably fit, is just kind of boring, except for one thing. Practice with live grenades. Okay. And the army is very, very intelligent that you actually understand the seriousness. These are weapons that can turn you into hamburger in about five seconds. So they would take us out the Night before. And they would show us what we're going to do the next morning. And you get down into a pit with one of their instructors and you take the pin out, and as long as you have the handle down, it won't release. But five seconds after you throw it, then it explodes, and it explodes on the other side of a big mound. And so they let you throw. See this? So that you'll sleep really well that night, which I did not do. And there was accidents. There was actually, in the group before us, there was actually someone killed and the instructor badly injured because someone dropped the grenade in the pit. So we got out there and the first sergeant, who was a World War II, Korean War veteran, he said, anyone here scared? My hand went right up, understanding that I'm a happy person, so of course I'm going to put my hand up. And he said, well, Sullivan's the only one I trust here because he's the only one telling the truth. And he said, I want to tell you the difference between fear and courage. He says, fear is wetting your pants. Courage is doing what you're supposed to do with wet pan. And that's what I really, really notice that entrepreneurism is really, you know, it really is marked by a lot of wetting your pants over, you know, at least, you know, psychologically over time, and requires courage. So you cannot wait until you have capability and confidence to start upward movement. You have to start with commitment. And commitment requires that you establish a deadline when something's going to be true and you put a measurable result to it. The bigger you have a measurement to it, the better you have a measurement to it. Now this is what happens when you. So this is really what you want to do if you're leading a really great upwardly progressing life as an entrepreneur. You want a four way system where you're continually committing to a bigger and better. You have courage. The combination of commitment and courage actually creates the new capability which gives you higher confidence. And then you do it again, okay? And that's how you constantly grow. But when you are procrastinating, what happens is that all four of these disappear. It's like sensory deprivation, okay? You're not in contact with capability, you're not in contact with confidence, you're not making any commitment, and you have no courage. And so you are in the no zone. And the no zone is no zone is no capability, no confidence, no commitment and no courage. And you're paralyzed. You're procrastinating. And it feels like you're Paralyzed and you can't move forward. How many of you have experienced that? And in some part of your life right now, you're a bit paralyzed from moving forward right now. And what I want to say is this is completely normal. Every human being on the planet does it. There's nothing wrong with procrastinating except not telling the truth that you're procrastinating. That's the only thing that's wrong with procrastinating, is not telling the truth. The moment you tell the truth, you can start the process. So what we have to do is we have to go from the no zone to the grow zone. And the way you grow is by going right back to commitment and courage, and then you're back into the cycle, and you'll be creating new capability and confidence and going back to our sheet. Now what I'm going to have you do, and this will take about four or five minutes. I'm going to have you take each one of your procrastinations, and I'm going to have you write down what the commitment is. Remember, you have to have a deadline and you have to have a measurable result. Okay? And so I'll just take you through this. So this is real stuff for me. This is my actual. And I do this all the time. So I'm naming names here and I'm naming projects. And what I want you to do is just take each of the commitments and say what your commitment is this next Thursday. So I was totally ready for something next 30. It was a measurable result. I was totally ready, and it was next Thursday. And that was it. The courage is that I had to do about four days of nose to grindstone work for about 30 hours to get ready for that interview. And I'm clinically diagnosed as add. I want you to know I'm fully medicated as I'm talking to you for this. And doing something continuous for four days requires a lot of courage on my part. How many of you in this room doing one activity continuous? Yeah, it requires a great deal of courage, but the payoff was huge. If I do that, the team gets triggered. So I'm always thinking teamwork. I'm always thinking teamwork. And so Kerry, Shannon and I are able to do our best ever first interview three weeks earlier than normal. Big gain, big breakthrough. Everyone on the team is far, far more clear, focused, and energized from start to finish with no slowdowns. And what I do day by day, the night before, I say, what am I procrastinating?

On.

And I go through this process the next morning. And I always have my three. I'm always motivated, I'm always focused. And these procrastinations are just enabling me to make very, very rapid progress. My performance increases and my achievement. And, you know, at age 72, none of this matters. There's nothing slowing me down except not telling the truth about my procrastination.

I remember, as I said, just offline, is that I was there at the beginning of the Genius Network, the very first day, the very first day where we got together and swapped ideas that you're apartment in Tempe, Arizona. And I still remember that. And I'm so happy with your success and what you've accomplished and with so many other people. It's just wonderful. You know, we talked, I believe at that time, we talked about the Mastermind concept. And that's why. And you said, well, why don't we get together in Mastermind? And so I flew over to Phoenix and taxied out to your house for the first time. And that's something that's so important in the Genius Network is the. When Napoleon Hill did his work, he said that every single person, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and so on, every one of them began to be successful and they began to mastermind with other intelligent people and just share ideas. And I have had the same experience because one idea in combination with your other ideas can change your life forever. I am, I'm happy to say, some years ago, but about a decade ago, a publisher said, have you got any books or anything that we could publish? And I said, well, I've got a book on time management. So I sent them a manuscript, and it was called double your income, double your time off. And he said, great publisher, Barrett Kohler. And he said, well, it's kind of a boring title. He said, but the chapter 15 is 21 Great Ways to stop procrastinating and get more things done faster. That's the title of the book. And he said, well, chapter 15 is entitled Eat that frog. And this is a story from Mark Twain. And Mark Twain was the most successful speaker, writer, author in America for three or four decades. And he wrote this. He said. He said, if the first thing you do in the morning is you eat a live frog, then you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that it's probably the worst thing that can happen to you all day long. And your live frog is your biggest, ugliest task. And so just get up in the morning and just get it done. He said, and if you have to Eat two frogs. Eat the ugliest one first. So if you have two big tasks to do, do the most important. And then the other corollary is that if you do have to eat a frog at all, it doesn't pay to sit and look at it for very long. In other words, get on with it. Well, so he said, let's make this the title Eat that frog and 21 great ways to stop procrastinating and then run the theme through setting the table, organizing the plates and so on. And so I did. I sent it back to him and they published it. And he just told me this week, Steve Persani, my publisher is that we just hit 2,500,000 sales in 50 languages. Wow. Which makes me the best selling time management author in history. And it has one basic concept for us with the Genius network is pick your most important task each morning and start on that task and discipline yourself to work on that task non stop until it's done. And don't do anything else. If you can do this, which takes tremendous character, takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous mental strength. If you can do this. The first time you do this, it will be very hard. You must be so distracted and you want to check your emails and make a call and get some coffee and so on. And what you have to do is you have to discipline yourself to stay at that, wherever you are and do that task until it's done. Then I say give yourself a reward. You know, the time management author Julie Morgenstein says, don't check your email in the morning. And I love that as a concept. You get up in the morning, start on your most important task and discipline yourself to stay at it till it's complete. Then your reward is to check your email. But unfortunately, what do most people do is they check their email in the morning and in the afternoon and in the evening they get up at night. They just always check in their email. And each time you check your email, the estimate it takes 17 minutes for you to get back to work, takes 17 minutes for you to get settled down and back to work and so on. And then somebody sends you an email and it goes Bing, ding, McBIP. And you stop, you do it and you check your email again. And the email is one of the most wonderful communications devices in the world, but it'll kill you if you just keep checking it. So what you do is you turn it off. There's, I always say, leave it off, leave it off. Start your task and discipline yourself. And your big reward when you finish Your most important task is now you can check your email. And if you can do that, what happens is you start to become so productive. So many people have told me that they became millionaires with the eat that frog concept. Just start and complete your most important task. But if you can't do that, by the way, you'll always have to work for someone else who can discipline you to do it, someone who will supervise you, someone who will check on you. What will happen is you'll always be in the bottom 80% and never be a big success. And remember this 8020 rule, it bites you in the bum all the time. 20% of people make all the money. The 80% of people, why do you think we're having riots today? Who do you think is rioting? Certainly not the top 20%. They're busy making money. It's the people in the bottom 80% who are frustrated and angry and upset and so on because they have too many bills and they say too much month at the end of the money, they don't know how to get out of it. The answer is, make a list of what you have to do. Pick the most important task and work at it till it's done. Your whole life will change.

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 delved 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 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 is 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 in 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, the 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 or 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? And 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 into 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 in 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. I mean, what's that other Peter Drucker quote? 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, 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, you know, and I've talked to numerous people about productivity. I mean, I can't imagine how many, you know, 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 kind of 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, we 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 it's 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 you know, 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 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 know, 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 frickin no choice.

That is a huge insight. I mean now, because thinking back at that lunch, because we talked to her, oh yeah, yesterday, 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'm 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. When I came to my first meeting, I felt like in my world, I'm this really 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. And then once they come to a few meetings, they realize, oh, this is kind of like a family. I feel comfortable around these people. So it's given me a deeper understanding of what I've actually created without even thinking about it that way. Because people will be like, well, I already got too many ideas or, 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, you know, all of these things that aren't as appealing initially as I want to have a lot more money. And so what happens though is I come there and we put on as good Of a Curating an 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, you know, all kinds of stuff happened. And so you gave me an idea, because right now, you know, I do my best not to do consulting. I'm not saying that jokingly. I make more money when I do a genius network meeting than I do. So I'm an expensive consultant. I'm 25 grand for half a day. You know, if someone wants a whole day, it's 50 grand, and that's a lot of money. And I have it that way because, for one, I'm not willing to do consulting for less than that. And secondly, it's worth it if it's the right sort of person. But I try to direct people. But here's what I want to put out there as a test at least people that listen here. I love that idea of come to work, and if anyone wants to come to work with me. And I'm not like, I'm going to spend the whole day with you, but just wants to mirror and see the environment and see what I do. I mean, I'm going to think this through, but I'm just throwing it out because I. I was like, this is a great idea.

And I could come and I could just be making fun of you the whole time while they're watching you.

That would be great. They would get both of us at the same time. But you would pay. Because I'm thinking about.

You get more value from.

No, but here's the thing. If someone really wants to do this, it's $5,000, but I don't want the $5,000. I want it to go to either Artist for addicts or I want it to go to Joe Volunteer, which are two things.

Get a group of people do this with like 10 people.

Yeah.

Really? Have a group of 10, maybe once a quarter come and just follow you around for a day and just watch what you do.

Yeah.

And I'll point out things. I mean, no watching. I'm not gonna do it for free because I want a person at a certain level.

But it's like, have them, like I said, you know, donate, you know, or like you said, donate to the thing. But watching Joe. Joe is one of the people who. I mean, I don't. I'm not totally certain of this, but I'm pretty sure who's one of the bigger geniuses in the world who doesn't actually know what he's doing to be a genius. But if you hang out with him and you observe him doing what he does, he pulls you into it and you kind of get changed by it. Yeah, I think that would be great. It would be great for you to mentor people in a group like that.

Yeah. I mean, now that's probably not as maybe noble as to bring a poor person to work if I'm going to ask people to make a $5,000 contribution. But the point is it'll cause me to have to figure out how to set it up and at least block some time. And I think it would be a very interesting model.

You know what you could do is maybe one out of three of them or something. You could get a group of young people and just give them scholarships. And so like maybe once a year or twice a year, just have that day be a group of 18 year olds who are just kind of getting into their career and they just come and that's interesting.

So.

Yes.

Well, now see my contribution to help people, people like anyone, is this putting out. That's assuming that anything you're saying is useful to people, but assuming it is and just putting it out there. I think that in and of itself is a good contribution because I don't need to do this. I'm doing it because it makes me feel good that it's going to help other people and stuff. If anyone likes that idea, then I would ask that you just how would I spend?

You can contact me.

Yeah, contact Eben. You'll pay for this.

Send me the money. Yeah, but go to his office and I'll give it to the favorite charity.

No, send an email to supportopolish.com supportopolish.com and just reference that you interview with Evan and you heard this idea and you are absolutely not like you're going to talk about it, but you will cut a check for $5,000 to joe volunteer.com. you could look at that one. Or artists for addicts.com you can buy art. You can buy $5,000 worth of art. We could do it that way so you can get some art for it if you prefer that one. And so you'll get something for the money and you'll get one hell of a interesting perspective in education. And I'll play around with that. I might do one or two of those in the next year depending on if anyone responds to you.

If you got a group together like a Brainstorm Day, almost 10 or 12 folks, you can do a brainstorm as part of it with them.

Yeah. So if you know any friends that want to do it, five grand a person. You can't do five grand and bring 10 friends. So it's like, it's.

And Joe is the best. Joe's best at putting together brainstorm meetings and making meetings that you just get a tremendous amount out of.

And that I will. I will agree with without even being a smart ass. I am really good at that. That's one thing that I. There's a lot of things I'm not good at, but I'm really good at that one.

He's good at that one.

Your book, Listful Thinking is what it's called. So how can. How do entrepreneurs use list to be? Well, your book is about being more productive, less stressed, and more successful. And I tend to think of list as using it as making an offer. So how to use lists to be.

To do lists to be more productive. Yes. Yeah. So being in tv, I had so many deadlines, so many things going on, I couldn't keep track of it all. And so I was really big into list making at work, and I wasn't making lists at home. And I was realizing that I was forgetting things. I wasn't on my game. I wasn't exactly the studious person that I was at work. Because you feel like, oh, I don't want to do the same thing that I do at home that I do at work, because that's not fun. But it also, it really helps. So for entrepreneurship, being able to keep track of everything that you're working on or the ideas that you have and capturing them in a place that then you can go back to. Oh, my gosh. It just is a game changer for so many people, myself included.

So what would be some, like, the very best advice you can give people here that would just instantly make them more productive as it relates to lists? Like, what's the very best stuff?

So I always make a list right at the end of the day. It's the very last thing that I do for the next day so that when the next day comes and I run through everything that I need to do that I have the time and I have the energy to do that the next day so that I know I can actually do this. You don't put things on that list that you won't get to. So you have to edit it as you go and know, hey, I can do this or I can outsource this or whatever it is, but do it at the end of the day and Then in the morning, when you get into your office or whatever it is that you're doing, you have a roadmap for what you should be doing for the day. It doesn't mean that necessarily you're going to be doing that. But when you get sidetracked, you can look and say, oh, what was I supposed to do today? What was the intention? So I'm really big on intention and setting that intention beforehand.

Okay, let's talk about that for a minute. Because, like, for instance, you got everyone here who's paid money and time, and they got energy devoted to being here, Right? And so if someone is sitting in this room and they're thinking, here's all these things I could do versus here's an outcome that I want to get, or outcomes that I want in my business or my life, the people that are focused on the outcomes are going to get a hell of a lot more. More out of this meaning than someone that's just going to capture every idea and write it down. Right. So when you're saying intention, how do you get your. Because if you just simply are talking about lists, how many people have more things on the list than they physically have the bandwidth to do by a factor of 10 times?

Right.

Okay. It's most people in the room.

Totally.

And those are the ones raising their hands. So the fact that they even participated like that shows that this is a pain.

Yes.

Because I could ask another question. No one will raise their hand even if you know. So the whole focus on outcomes has changed my life as it relates to making lists and right when I start. Because if you're going to go into a meeting, what's the outcome? If you're going to go to an event, what's the outcome? If I'm reading this book, what's the outcome? Mike Aguilera, who's a genius network member, I was interviewing him on a podcast and we were talking about, what do you do if you've got so many seminars, so many books to read, so much stuff to do, how do you decide? Decide what gets your attention. And he said this great line, which has been such a game changer. He says, when it comes to reading books, read something related to what needs to be solved. Ask yourself the question, what needs solved in your life? And if you don't need to read a book on how to catch catfish, if that is not going to solve something. So I ask myself a lot, what needs solved? And to me, that's another way of outcome. What's the outcome that I actually want so with, how do you take an overwhelming amount? Like if you're a tennis player and you're a really pro tennis player and there's a lot of, metaphorically speaking, there's pros that are in this room, they're really good. And I know, I know nothing about tennis, but I'm just. And you have one of those tennis ball machines and it's firing tennis balls at you at every, like, what's a normal speed that you would set at every three seconds you get?

Maybe 45, 50.

45, 50 in what length of time?

Miles per hour.

Okay, okay, okay.

So.

Okay, so a normal would be what for like a Pro Pro?

90 to 100.

90 to 100. Say you set it for 120. It doesn't matter how good that person is, they're hammered. So there's a lot of people in this room that are just, they're pros, but they're hammered. And of course I'm disguising this, that would include me. So not that anyone can pick up on that. Right. How do you deal with it? How do you take the whole list making thing and how do you simplify your life so that you're more productive? Because the title is, you know, more productive, less stressed and more successful.

What do you do?

Yeah, it is about setting the intention. So like here we're in this meeting for two days. So before I came I thought, what are the things I'm hoping, the outcomes that I'm hoping to get out of this? And as we're here in the meeting and I do this for every conference I ever go to, I open the first page of that notebook or whatever it is that you have and I have a follow up list or. And I capture and I filter as I go. Who are the people I want to follow up with, with what are some ideas? You said something, I thought it was a good pitch. I wrote that down. You know, all of these things that I want to follow up on when I get home so that I have a capture place. And then it's not only good enough to just write it down, you have to set some time to actually look at it. So I always try to set myself a little bit of extra time within that week of returning from whatever it is that I'm at to go over that list and to either make those connections or write that thing or whatever it is that I had so that I actually do the things that I, that I wanted to do. So you implement some of those things. But having that list, it's Great. Because then you can go back to it and you have it right there. And it's not like, oh, yeah, I was supposed to do a million things, and then life happens and you do none of it.

Right. Right. Great.

And I thought I'd start by sharing my screen with you. This is a picture of me when I weighed about 280. In this picture, I used to weigh 300 pounds. People who know me well from Genius, and I'm sorry I couldn't be there in person. Thank you. Canada, travel. There's. I don't exactly look like that anymore. I'm almost muscular, according to the New York Times. But I started saying, what's going on? The time this picture was taken, I had just made $6 million. I was 26. That I lost when I was 28. And I started saying, well, what can I do to biohack? And here's my first piece of advice for you in Genius Network. That's. That's really critically important, and that is pleats are not a good biohack. They actually don't work. So I'm going to suggest to you that this is not the right way to do it. But I started looking at what are the things that are going to give me more energy and maybe make my metabolism work better. I also had massive brain problems. And you're saying, dave, I think I'm going to talk about light. It's all connected to these things. And I want you guys to understand this because I think some of you may have had things like this, but maybe not quite as bad. This is my brain. Daniel Amen, who's a member of Genius Network, did this scan, or one of his people did almost 20 years ago. Decreased oxygen flow and consumption in all the parts that matter. And here's what they said. I'm an interesting referral. When a neuroscientist looking at your brain says that there's a big word for this, you're pretty much fucked. That's the kind of failure that we were talking about earlier. So I wish I was only dealing with painting a picture. And by the way, my painting is probably worse than anything you ever saw. Haven't fixed that one yet, but I have fixed my brain. And one of the things that is critically important, and I'm going to walk you guys through a little bit of the science, is an understanding that there is something you are doing every single day that has changed dramatically in the last 10 years that you don't know you're doing, that is stealing energy from your brain. And from your life.

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.

It's also taking years off your life and it is not something that is easy to notice. We are so good at knowing, oh, look, something punched me in the face. It hurt, therefore the punch was the cause. But I promise you that if someone punched you in the face last month and then it started hurting this month, you go, God, that's so weird. I wonder why my jaw is hurting. And you would have no clue. Because as human beings, even very successful entrepreneurs, we suck at putting together long term consequences. And this is why almost every talk you're going to hear today is around what do I do in the short term to write it down, to track it, to get the data. And I learned this as first an engineer designing early cloud computing stuff and then as a business person with an MBA from Wharton who's sold more than half a billion dollars in stuff now in my life. But I started applying it to my biology and saying, what are all the things that I didn't think about that are taking energy? Because if you want to be a good entrepreneur, you want to be a good human being, a good parent, it all comes down to return on energy. How much energy did you invest in your business, in your life, in your exercise, whatever you do? And how much energy did you get back? And what I discovered magically, what if you stopped wasting energy before you started figuring out how to get more right? And if this sounds kind of Familiar, this is jabraham101. I don't know if Jay's dialed in a dear friend. And what Jay will tell you is why are you going out to find new customers when you haven't fully taken advantage of helping all the customers you have today? So you just look for more efficiencies. Your biology is the same way. What if you wasted less energy? What if, what would you do if you had that energy? This is what you're going to learn today so you never have to have a brain that looks like mine did. And the thing that we're not thinking about right now is the quality of your light. Every day you eat stuff for energy and you forget, oh, I also take about 30 pounds of air and I mix them together. But there's a timing system that controls all of this. And we are completely scrambling our biology right now. And one of my companies, actually two of my companies, are working on fixing this problem right now. And that's why I'm so passionate about it. But in part because I have my entire life been affected by this without knowing it. And you have too. So I'm gonna teach you first why junk light matters. The reason that junk light matters is that junk light harms the mitochondria, the power plants throughout your body that you've probably heard me and others talk about. These are the source of your willpower. So if you're getting an exposure to this stuff, you're saying blue light. I don't look at blue light. What's going on here? Right now what I want you to do is look at the brightness control on your keyboard or your monitor if you're at home, and turn it down until you can see it comfortably. But it's no brighter than it needs to be there. You just paid for your genius network this year because if you make a habit of doing that every single time you look at your screen, no brighter than necessary. And bonus points if you turn on the software that makes it more amber or if you use a dark background called dark mode instead of light mode. What's going on here is our eyes were meant to spot stars against a black thing. They're not meant to spot black things against an illuminated sky. We're not very good at that. And it's stressful for the eyes. Here's what. The light that comes from your monitor, that didn't exist 10 years ago and comes from the LEDs above you, that didn't exist 10 years ago. It does this in studies. It increases free radicals. It's actually damaging the DNA in your eyes and it's causing self destruction. Now you might say, Dave, what the heck are you talking about here? Well, look at what's going on here on the left. Those are the numbers at the bottom are the blue link or the wavelength of light. It's more blue on the left. The cells that are shredded on the left there. And the very shortest thing, that's thickness of the retina. So as you stare at a bright monitor, as you have over illuminated LEDs, especially shining directly in your eyes, especially with no protection in place. This is 30 days. Rat eyeballs. We know this is happening. And what else does it do? Well let's see. How about all the things that you likely struggle with if you're here because I go to our breakout groups. I have lots of fun from my friends. Sleep, anxiety and depression. You should get the maximum amount of light in your eyes during the middle of the day. And then at the end of the day, if you're still getting bright light, the timing system that tells the cells in your body whether they should rest and reset or whether they should keep going. It gets scrambled, especially if you're eating a late meal as well, which we're not going to talk about. Everyone by now has heard, oh, wear blue light blockers because they help you with melatonin. Unfortunately, it's more than just blue light. But if during the day you minimize this exposure that stresses your brain and stresses your eyes, you will have more energy throughout the day. You're better able to regulate your metabolism and you'll yell at your family less. At the end of the day, if you have better light, it is essentially free to do this. It means don't turn on bright LED lights and turn your monitors down. You can have other lighting or just less light. We also know that the power plants, the batteries that power you, they don't grow as much if you have excessive light from indoor lighting. There's a study that shows a 69% increase in depression from the amount of light that leaks in around curtains in the average city today. This is why you might want to black out your room. Oh, and a tripling of breast cancer risk from excessive blue light exposure to your eyes. I'm not making any of this up. This is as big as it is. So what does it do to your brain? I promise you a better brain function. And, well, this is a brain map from 40 Years of Zen, which is my brain enhancement company, where people go in for five days and it's a little bit hard to read the whole thing. But what I'm going to tell you is you see those blue and green things where you've got large splotches of them on the left? Those are slow, meditative brainwaves. And what we have here at the top third is we have someone who has been exposed to typical indoor blue lighting. They have that beta in the front of their brain. They're alert, they're active. They're also a little bit hyper. And when we put the glasses on them, you see how the hyperness goes away. All of the blue, green stuff goes down and suddenly it's like their brain is meditating. And at the bottom, after they've taken the glasses off, the meditation state stays, literally by manipulating the light that goes into your eyes for 15 minutes. These, they put on the glasses for sleep. Here they induced a meditation like state in their brain and it stuck around after they took the lights off. This is a big deal. And the funny thing is blue light blocking won't do this. You've got to block the other filters that affect your timing. Because here's how your eyes work. It goes like this. You look at the colors of light that tell your body what time of day it is, the brightness of the light and the angle of the light, and you control all of those things, which is probably too much science, but that's what it takes. So number one, right now, turn down your monitors, block blue light, but make sure you get some blue light. Because if you block blue light all day long, you never get a wake up signal and you will wreck your biology. So this is a problem. If you paint the prettiest picture, I'm.

Like, I love that we'll do that.

And then you're.

I think you're gonna have to mute. And guys, we have time for Q and A after this. I am going to finish a couple more hacks for you for your eyes, because this matters greatly for how you perform the rest of the time. Number two, at night, sleep in a cave, turn down your lights at night. You can say, dave, you're being a little bit obsessive. No, A candlelight dinner works. And your biology, if you do this for one week, will shift so much that you go, why am I happy all the time? Why does it matter? There's LED lights in my room? Because science, this is just how it is. So sleep in a cave. Now, there's an antidote for blue light, and it's red light. Now, I'm not going to read through all the science on this next slide, but I am going to tell you that it undoes a lot of what blue light does. So let me show you a neat thing that I have here in my office. I have this cool remote control that I bought off Amazon. It's very, very fancy looking. It costs 10 bucks and I can press buttons on it. And magically, if you look above my shoulder here, you see how that red light turned on behind me? Yes. I turn red lights on at night and I have one behind my monitor during the day. So when I'm looking at blue light, there's a little bit of red that relaxes and undoes what the blue does. So what you could do right now is you could go out and you could spend five bucks on a red light bulb. And you could put it behind your monitor so that you have a more balanced color spectrum. And it doesn't take any more time and attention than that. But at the end of the day, you can concentrate better than you did before. Your ability to deliver in the world is based on how well your brain works. Your eyes are an extension of your brain.

And what.

And right now, you're punching your eyes in the face all the time, and you just don't know it. So I'm gonna talk about one more thing that's really important for you. Don't be afraid of the sun. Because sunlight raises testosterone, fixes your vitamin D, improves your mood, lowers your stress, gives you better blood flow to the brain. 20 minutes in the morning lowers blood pressure. So you need this natural light. This is a nutrient we're missing. And the final piece of advice for you is the next slide. It's this. You should do it naked. Okay, maybe you don't have to do it naked, but regardless, 20 minutes in the sun, darkness at night, and guys, I do not exist to sell you guys glasses. My life won't change if you do or don't. But I am here to change your life. You want to pick up a pair of truedarks? I made a code for you just to give back. No other reason. That is one of the companies I've working on. This is what's missing. It's not about eating this, not eating that. This is as important as what you eat. Help your eyes and your brain chill out during the day. And you will be a better entrepreneur and a better human being because you'll be nicer to others. Thank you.

Let me say this, though, Brian. I mean, I'm looking at your Instagram right now. So you got 756,000 followers on Instagram. You got millions of people that watch on YouTube. You've got all these books. You're the top selling audio author in the world every day, Literally, your ideas reach millions of people every single day. And I mean, what advice would you give for the creation of the content? Because one of the things I've been thinking about a lot is people say content is king. Well, I think content is obviously valuable, but I think context is more important than content. Communication is one thing, but comprehension is another thing. You know, being able to put content out there, not having people comprehend it, is a whole nother thing. And you have just put out so much. So many people's lives have been impacted and changed by your ideas. And we have many people here that would love to multiply that and to share what their wisdom, their knowledge and reach people not only for the selling and promotion of their products and services, their own companies, but literally just to impact people. So what advice would you give to be productive in that area? Because I mean, you're literally one of the most productive people on the planet in this particular area. So you obviously have a process in the system for writing books, for putting information out there. You've been doing it for many, many years. How do you do it? I mean, what have you learned? That if you were to be able to download here's how to Write a book, here's how to put your ideas together, here's how to. How you know, I mean, because I'm, I don't know. Out of all the books, have you written any books that you wish you would have not written that you would have not put out there? Are you pretty happy with everything?

Well, I'll tell you two funny things, but I want to start with the second thing is many years ago I was writing books and I'll tell you why in just a second. And my people in my coaching classes, people in my seminars would say, well, how do you write a book? And how do you write so many books and how do you have so many books? And I say, well, you just do this and you just do that and so on. And finally I said, look, I'll write it down. I'll write down my book writing system. So I wrote down 20 steps to write a book and get published. And I put it on my website, briantracy.com and I say, look, if you want to learn how to write a book, go and get those 20 steps. And then my partners. You know Eric Berman, don't you?

Oh yeah, yeah, very well.

Eric has been my partner for 20 years. He said, Brian, we should create a really first rate course on how to write a book and get published. Because 64% of adults dream of writing a book. They fantasize about writing a book. They plan to write a book and less than 1% will ever do it. And then less than 1% of those will ever get published. Why? And they always say the reason I, because I don't know how. I just don't know the process. So anybody here who's watching who wants to write a book, go to my website and there's a download. It's called Brian's Formula on How to write a book. 20 steps and it's free. Just go and take it. And here's the steps. Step one, step two, step three, What I call it is like a recipe. And again, it's one of the things that I learned from you and from other people in the Genius network is a recipe has a series of ingredients. And what you do is you combine the ingredients correctly. You don't cheap on this ingredient and ignore or delete this ingredient. You follow the recipe and you get a good dish. And if you practice enough, eventually you'll be able to prepare a beautiful dish over and over again. And so, for example, when I was single, I found that I was going out to restaurants to have Caesar salad. And so I would meet a girl, and I would invite her out for dinner, and we would go to a restaurant where they served Caesar salad. And one day, and I still remember this, I noticed that the guy making the Caesar salad, and this is where they brought all the ingredients to the table, and they mixed it all up in a bowl, and they put it on your plate. And so he's mixing up the salad, and it was a very good salad, very good restaurant, good salad. And I said, how do you make this salad? He said, well, they give me a recipe and the ingredients in the kitchen, and then they just had me do it. So I come to you to come to the tableside and make it. Well, if this guy, who was not very smart, this guy can make a delicious Caesar salad, so can I. So I decided, I'm going to get a recipe, and I'm going to make a Caesar salad. And I did. But what I did is I tried to cheat. Instead of using fresh romaine lettuce, I use butter lettuce. Instead of using freshly squeezed lemon juice, I use lemon juice out of a bottle. Instead of using fresh garlic, I use minced garlic from a bottle instead of this. I did that. And the salad just tasted crummy. So finally, I made this decision. I remember this because it affected everything else in my life. I made this decision. I'm going to stop screwing around. I'm going to follow a good recipe exactly, and then I'm going to work with that recipe. And I did. And now I have a recipe to make Caesar salad. I am probably, immodestly, probably the best Caesar salad maker in the world, or very closely. Everybody who has ever tasted my Caesar salad say it's the best Caesar salad they ever had in their life. And it has 14 parts, 14 steps, ingredients, the way that you mix them, and so on. And I have people who beg me, please make a salad. Come to my house at Christmas and make a salad. Can I come to your house? Because once they've had my salad, they'll never be satisfied. So people say, well, how do you make your Caesar salad? I say, well, you do this and you do that, and you put this and you put that and everything else. And I said, oh, what the heck, I'll just write it down. So I wrote it down because I have this passionate desire, like you, to help people. I just want to help you. I don't want to make money by making money good. But mostly I want to make a difference in people's lives. So I said, okay, I'll just write it down. So I wrote it down and I put on my website, briantracy.com. you go there, Brian's Caesar salad recipe. And you can download it, it's free. And everybody who's ever done that, they communicate with me and they say, I made that salad. I've never made a Caesar salad in my life. I followed the recipe, and everybody in my family said it was the best Caesar salad they ever had in their life. So therefore, if you like Caesar salad, go and download it. So I used to tell this story just the way I just told you. I used to tell this story in my big seminar, my Peter Lowe seminars with 10, 20,000 people. And I said, here's an example. And the example is that, that people don't follow the recipe for success. If you want to sell successfully, by the way, there's seven steps that I have discovered and developed, which I teach a thousand different ways. I've taught more than 2 million salespeople my recipe for selling. And many of those people have become millionaires. Chip Wilson is also a friend of mine. And he told me, he booked me. He told me, he said he was working as a yoga instructor in a small yoga studio in Vancouver, in Kitsilano, which is a neighborhood. And somebody put him through my course and had the course on video with workbooks and everything else. And he said he suddenly realized that there's no future being a yoga instructor. And so then he looked around because we teach the superconscious mind in that course, Psychology of Achievement. He looked around and he said, the money is in yoga clothes. That's where the money is. And the quality of clothes being produced, generally speaking, was very poor. So he just came up with this idea of producing high quality yoga clothes made with high quality fabrics, well put together, and the rest is history. As you say, he's worth almost $5 billion today. He told me when he brought me up to speak. We spent two days together. He told me that basically These ideas made him rich. Very, very simple ideas to set a goal, work on your most important goal, unlock your creativity, and so on. He's a super guy. He's one of those guys that deserves to be successful. You're happy for his success when you talk to him. So the key is get the recipe. If you want to be Excellent in sales, 20% of salespeople earn 80% of the money in sales. Why? It's because there's a recipe for selling. It has seven parts, seven ingredients. If you follow the seven ingredients, what will happen is it'll come out at the other end, the sale after sale, after sale. And if you don't, it won't. If you want to be successful in business, you have to have a marketing plan. As our friend Dan Kennedy says, is that whatever business you're in, you're in the marketing business. And your success or failure income, the size of the house you live in, car you drive. What happens to you in life is determined by how good you are at marketing your product. And marketing is attracting qualified people who can't and will buy your product or service within a reasonable period of time. And what I just told you is the result of thousands of hours of research. Marketing means attracting people who can and will buy and pay for your product or service within a reasonable period of time. And so therefore, once you learn how to market, you can market any product if it is a sellable product. So people have to learn how to market in selling. By the way, and I'll just give you this quickly because I produced after Psychology of Achievement, I produced a program called Psychology of Selling and Psychology of Selling, according to their research, has made more salespeople millionaires than any other single training influencer in the world. Psychology of Selling. And how do you get Psychology of Selling that you go to audible. Go to audible and there it is. And you download it. You download it on audible and listen to it. Nothing hard about that.

Well, I got. Let me do this. Don Cooper, go ahead and let me see if I can pin your video. If you can put that up on the screen again. He's got the. Let me see if I can pin. Well, I'm trying to, but Psychology of Selling.

And by the way, it's in book form. And I decided it was such a big program, I decided. Divided into two books. One is Psychology of Selling. The other is the Art of Closing the Sale. And countless people write to me and tell me, omg, omg. It made me rich. It made me rich. You changed my life. You made me rich. I hear that so many times. You changed my life. You made me rich. And it's not because I'm a genius. It's just I found the recipe and worked with the recipe. 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. They're over here.

Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you. Watch them.