Unlock Peak Productivity: Transform Your Life and Business!

Okay, let's dive into this idea of peak productivity. And this is a subject that's really dear to my heart. It's something that I have been very focused on for over a couple of decades. And let me explain why. So if I go back just over 20 years ago, 2002, 2003, I was in the process of. In the process, starting the process of selling my first business. My first business, which I started way back in 1996, was my accountancy practice. I was a sole practitioner and I started passing that across to my client managers in 2003, sold it a few years later to them. And that was partly because I also then went into business with my good friend Steve Pipe, and we ran for just over a decade AVN in the UK, which was an organization head helping UK accounting firms. And it was in around that time, 2001 to 2001, 2002, 2003, I was becoming really obsessed with business success.

What made people really successful? I was doing a lot of business advisory work in my accounting firm. And so I started studying business success. I started studying people like Sir Richard Branson and started to try to figure out, well, what do these people have in common? What do they do both in their business and their personal lives to create success? And I started to notice there were lots of common themes, things that kept dropping over and over and over again that people were doing both in their business and in their personal life. And I found this fascinating. And I started practicing many of these ideas myself and working towards success. Now, of course, success means something different to different people. Your definition of success might be different to mine, but I've been on this path now for over two decades. And what I'm going to share with you today is something that I think is, well, I know is one of the keys to the success that I have in life now. I'm very lucky. Some of you do know the story. Story. Sarah and I moved to Portugal four years ago. We live in a wonderful place in Portugal by the coast. It's a fishing town. It's bright blue sky right now, pretty much every day, including today. We take an hour out to go into one of the local cafes, sit in the sun, have a coffee, something to eat. I go out pretty much every day on the bike or go running. Today was a running day and we also go into town to the restaurants to see friends most evenings. When we finish this session, I'll be going into town to meet a couple of our friends. We're having dinner tonight and I feel very lucky because also I run a business, the Value Pricing Academy. I know many of you are Value Price Academy members, which I absolutely love. This is not work to me. I love the accounting profession. I've been an accountant since 1988. I think it's a fascinating profession. And I love helping accountants and bookkeepers through the Value Pricing Academy through live streams like this. And one of the things that drives me is when I hear about the amazing successes people are having. Like Catherine Hawke, who's here.

We jumped on a little interview video a few months back and she shared her story of the extraordinary results she was getting in her business by starting to master value pricing. And that's what drives me on. I love helping other accountants just like me. And so it's not really, it doesn't feel like work to me. I have a business I love. I have a lifestyle that feels like I'm on vacation pretty much every day. Because of where we live, because of the amount of time that we take out of the business, we don't work Fridays anymore. We work a four day week. So we have a lovely long weekend. And I make more money than I know what to do with. I can't spend it. And so that's pretty much sums up my life. It's something that I'm very proud of. It's something that didn't happen overnight. It's taken two decades, it's taken a long time. Success doesn't happen overnight. It's about doing.

The things that lead towards success, consistently, consistent things. You have to keep doing the right things consistently. And if you keep doing the right things consistently, then success will come. So what I want to share with you is one of the things that for me has been a very key part of my story, and not just my story, but when I was studying two decades ago, successful people, I noticed this was a very, very common theme about how do we achieve peak productivity. And so today's session is more about rather it's more about things we can do in our personal life to be more successful rather than things in our business. I mean, we could talk about those things as well. But I want to focus on the personal side of things. And I want to start off by talking about this idea that if you want to be successful, then we want to get, we need to get more stuff done. I've always been obsessed with productivity. How do we get better results? And so that's partly by getting more stuff done, just being really, really effective with our time getting stuff done. And one of the things that I think it's something that has always been important to me. And it's also when I hire people, when I think of all the best people I've worked with over the years, including my amazing team, right now, the thing that I value in team members.

Probably higher than anything else, is simply the ability to get shit done, to get stuff done.

I just love it when you give somebody a task and you expect it done in a couple of days, and a day later they say, I've done it, what shall I do next? That's one of the things that I think is so powerful. People who just do stuff, just get on with it and do stuff. And one of the things that helps us get stuff done and be more productive every single day is about energy. We want to make sure that we bring energy to our work every single day. The more energy that we bring, the more energy we bring, the more that we will be at peak performance. The more we get stuff done, the more we're on our A game, we get better results, we're more effective. And so the question is, how do we bring that energy every single day? How do we bring that energy? Because if we don't, if we start the day feeling tired, drained, perhaps didn't sleep very well, perhaps we're hungover and we feel drained and tired, then we're not going to get much done. So we have to bring that energy. So how can we do that? How do we bring energy every single day? So let me share with you three things that particularly work for me. The first one is you need to find your rhythm. And what I mean by that is that there are certain times in the day when we are at our peak level of productivity, at our peak level of performance. There are other times of the day where we're not so and so we have to figure that out. And it's different for different people. For me, I'm an early morning person and I'm usually at my desk working by 7:30, certainly by 8:00'. Clock. And that's because that's when I'm at my best. And so a typical day for me is by 8 o'. Clock. I've planned my day and I'm diving into a big project. And I will typically spend two to three hours doing something when I'm at my peak productivity, doing something really important, usually a big project, which then means by the time I get to 11 o' clock in the morning, I've done probably more work than most people have done in a day. And so I treat myself by going out on my bike, I'm a cyclist. And then I go for lunch with Sarah down to the cafe. And then after my afternoons, I've never been an afternoon or an evening person when it comes to working. It's a morning person. I always used to, when I was an employee, I was always known as the nine to fiver, because five o' clock I would go home. I'm no good. After 5 o', clock, I want to start winding down. And what's great about the business that we have today and what's great about having so many people over in North America right now is that I have to run these sessions at 4 o' clock UK time to accommodate. I know for some of you it's probably 8 o' clock in the morning right now, and that's great because this for me is not working. I'm not working. I'm having fun, talking with friends. So that's how run my days. My peak productivity is in the morning. And that means, for example, if anybody wants to have a meeting with me, which of course these days is zoom meetings. I live in Portugal, I never meet with anybody in the morning. If somebody wants a meeting with me, it's always in the afternoon. I keep my mornings free because that's peak productivity. That's when I have the most energy. That's when I'll get my best work done. So that's the first thing, the first tip about bringing energy every day. First of all, find out, find your rhythm, when is best for you, and work crazy hard during those three hours of your peak performance and then you can play hard. Second thing, second tip with bringing energy every day is very simply let go of stuff. And what I mean by that is that we all have stuff going on in our business and in our lives that we don't want to do that drains our energy. That could be. For example, we often talk in the value pricing academy about working with the right clients. And I often ask people, think about your client base right now. Have you got any clients that you don't like that you don't look forward to meeting with and you have to exit them from your business? Why? Because if you have people that you don't enjoy working with, then that just drains your energy. If you've got a meeting with George on Monday and you don't like George because he always moans and complains, then that's going to ruin your weekend. It's going to ruin the days leading up to that, because you're thinking, I've got George on Monday. I don't want to talk to George. He's annoying, he's going to complain. And that reduces, brings our energy down and will affect you for several hours and days leading up to that meeting. So get George out of your practice. But this goes with anything that drains your energy, Things that you don't love to do, whether it's people like clients, team members, whether it's specific projects you're working on, jobs you have to do, you have to let go of those things that, that drain your energy and just focus on doing the stuff that you love, the things that you love. They're the things that you're going to do the best at. That's where you're going to bring the biggest value to your business and stuff that you don't enjoy either don't do it or find somebody else to do it. So that's number two. And then number three is to bring the energy every day. We have to look after our health. Okay, I know it's obvious, but this is so, so important when you look at super successful people. One of my heroes is Brendon Burchard. If you've ever seen him on stage, he has got so much energy. Another of my heroes in the accounting profession is Paul Dunn. I don't know if you've seen Paul Dunn. I was privileged to first meet him way back in 1999 on his four day accountants boot camp. And I do a lot of stuff with Paul Dunn and he now, along with his partner, they run B1G1. I mentioned earlier some of you have met him before. I've had him on my live streams before. If you ever see Paul, he is a bundle of energy. He really is. And I mean he's not young now, he's not a spring chicken, but he is a bundle of energy and he's one of my heroes. I always, when I first met Paul I said to myself, I said I want to be like him when I'm that age. I want to be full of energy and passion for stuff. So how can we do that? Well, it's also about making sure that we look after ourselves. And there's these two dimensions of health that are really important. There's number one is diet. What we eat is really, really important. And I know you know that, but do we actually do anything about that people? And I'm going to share with you later on in this session some stuff that's come out in the last few years that is absolutely mind blowing.

In the area of health and some of the new stuff Coming out. It's extraordinary. So I'm going to come back to the idea of diet. I just want to leave it there for now. That we have to be. If we want to bring peak energy and get more done in business, then what we eat makes a huge difference. Difference in our lives. The second aspect of health is exercise. We have to exercise. And so many of you know that I'm a cyclist. I go on my road bike most days, typically four to five days a week. I cycle on average 160km every single week, on average throughout the year, which actually means because of vacations, I'm going to Canada soon. It means actually in reality, most weeks it's over 200km on the bike to make up for the odd weeks when I'm on vacation. I also go for a run at least once a week. I went today and did five and a half, six kilometer run because exercise is so important in bringing that energy every single day. And again, I'm going to talk about some new science around exercise that you're going to find fascinating. But let's talk about. We all know that we need to look after our bodies better. We know, we do know that we need to go to the gym, do exercise and do diet. But for whatever reason, it never seems to happen. And so one of the things I want to talk about is a amazing book that I came across a few years back about four or five years ago. Fascinating book because actually when I read it, I thought that's what I've been doing for the last 20 years. But the guy who wrote the book said it in a far better way than I did. And he talked about creating daily rituals. You see, what I've learned over the years is that there's no such thing as overnight success when you look at all the most successful people. It didn't happen overnight. It was about doing the right things consistently. And if we keep doing the right things, success will come. It might take five years, 10 years, 15, 20 years, but success will come if we keep being consistent in doing the right things. I remember reading the book by Jim Collins called Good to Great. A really good book if you're looking to understand business and some of the.

Things that successful businesses do. And I remember him talking about the flywheel effect and he described it as the flywheel is that a flywheel is something that it's really hard to push it and nothing seems to happen as we push it. But if we keep pushing and pushing and pushing against this flywheel, eventually we get to a tipping point. Where suddenly it goes like crazy. And he talked about the story of Sam Walton who founded Walmart. And it was fascinating that in the early part of last century it was, if I remember right, it was five years before he opened his second Walmart store. So we think of a big company in the us it's everywhere as being it's an overnight success. No, it wasn't for Sam. It took him five years to open the second one. I think it was year nine, he had seven Walmarts open. It certainly wasn't an overnight success. But if you read about his, what he did, he was consistently doing the right things. And after about seven years of consistently doing the right things, as he got to shop number seven, it got to a stage where this flywheel effect suddenly took off and it exploded. So there's no such thing as overnight success. And a great book that I strongly recommend. I know some of you here have actually read the book, but some of you, if you've not, I strongly recommend you read Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's a fantastic book and he says in it habits are the compound interest of self improvement. So if you know, if you know you need to do more exercise or you need to eat better, but you're just struggling, this book's really going to help you. He talks about the four laws of behavior change. I just noticed by the way, out of the corner of my eye, Catherine Hawke says, yes, Paul is impressive. Paul Dunn, he is very impressive and he is like that in real life as well. I have met him and he is just full of energy. Heinrich Grove. Hi there, Heinrich from South Africa. Atomic Habits is on his bedside table. Awesome. Hopefully because you're reading it, not because you're using it as a coffee mat or something. It's a great book. And in there he talks about the four laws of behavior change and they are make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy and make it satisfying. So let me share some examples of what he means by that and I'll share some of the things that I do in my life that really helps me to be consistent in doing the right things. So making it obvious is a fascinating part of the book where he talks about this idea of creating cues.

And so a cue means that we create an association. Like for example, we do a particular thing at a particular time and, or in a particular location. So for me I realized, I realised about 20 years ago I realised that I needed to do more exercise and I, I loved cycling. I was in a cycling club back then. 20 years ago, 2004. I was in a cycling club, but I only went Sunday morning. Sunday morning was club run, but that was pretty much it because I was working during the week and so I realized I needed to go more frequently and I realized that actually as the day wears on, I get more and more lazy. So I decided I found that firstly I wanted to start. I started working from home way back then because it's easier to then go out on the bike. I started working from home in 2003. Typically once a week to start off with eventually became every day of the week and I started going out at 11 o'. Clock. 11 o' clock is the time I go on the bike. And it's got to the stage after 20 years of doing this that I don't even have to think about it. When it gets to 11 o', clock, that's exercise time. Now I didn't do that today because I went running instead. I tried to do running once a week simply because whilst I prefer the bike, I do know that running makes it works with different muscles and running also has a bigger impact on things like weight control. Running also keeps me more agile and cycling. So today I went running at 11 o'. Clock. So it's become so much of a habit that.

When I'm doing my morning work, as soon as it gets to about quarter to 11, my brain kind of knows, oh, it's now time to go on the bike. So that's one of the ideas of accuse where you attach something to either a particular time of the day that you do it or a particular location. And of course we have these habits all the time. We have habits. One of the things that as I read the book, it occurred to me that when I get up in the morning, when I get up in the morning, every single morning, there's certain things I do as part of the morning routine. One of those things is I clean my teeth. It's one of the first things I do as I get up. I clean my teeth, I go into the bathroom, clean my teeth. I also do it last thing at night as well. And when you think about it, do we enjoy cleaning teeth? I hate it.

It's so tedious and boring. I don't like cleaning my teeth, but I do it twice a day habitually. I have always cleaned my teeth. Why do I clean my teeth? But I don't do things like some press outs, press ups, workouts and so on. It's because it's a habit. It's a habit that we've. That's ingrained in us over time. And when we make something, a habit, we just do it. It's not a. We don't wake up in the morning and can I bother to clean my teeth today? I'm not sure I want to. We just do it without thinking about it because we've made it a habit.

Another way to create these hues, these cues, and he calls it the habit stacking formula, is where we create a new habit and relate it to an existing habit. So we tie things together. So one of the things I started doing several years ago is I realized that I do a lot of aerobic exercise. I go on the bike, most days, I go running. And so I'm physically very fit for my age. But I also know that from science, is that when we get into our 50s, particularly into our 50s, into our 60s, we start to lose muscle mass. And one of the things I've never been good at is upper body strength. I sit at a desk, I only need muscles to move my mouse around the table. That's pretty much it. But as we get into our 50s and our 60s, working on muscle strength becomes more and more important because we start, otherwise we lose it. And I know that I'm really lazy when it comes to the gym. I do not enjoy the gym. Many, many times in the past, I've joined gyms, all enthusiastic for a couple of weeks, and then it tails off. And after three months, I've given up. And then perhaps five years later, I think, oh, I must join a gym. I give it six months, and I then give up. That's me and Jim's. And I know that I'm not alone with that. And so I realized that I'm in my 50s now, my late 50s. This is increasingly important. And so one of the things that I realized is that I have to turn going into the gym a habit. And so we had a gym installed here. It's not a big one. It's just a few bits of equipment. And the habit that I created was I realized that one of the things I do in the morning, every morning, every morning is that I get up, I clean my teeth, of course. But when I get downstairs, the first thing I do is put the kettle on to make a cup of tea. We drink. You know, I'm English, we tend to drink a lot of tea. And so I've always had a cup of tea first thing in the morning. And so I would go in, fill the kettle up and turn it on. Of course, it takes a few minutes for it to boil. And I used to kind of just hang around, perhaps check, check my phone for stuff. And a few years back I thought, why don't I do something useful in the three minutes it takes to boil? And so about three years ago I started going into the gym to do a series of press ups, leg raises for working on my stomach. And so I do that religiously every working day. Because my habit, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday I did it this morning, I go downstairs, I put the kettle on and then I go straight into the gym and do, do a series of exercises. It's only three minutes, but it's three minutes four times a week. It's creating that habit. And I find now, and I've been doing this for nearly four years, three years. And I don't, it's not a case of, you know, the old days when I went to the gym, I'd get up, I think, can I be bothered to jump in the car? Do you know what, I'll give it a miss today. I won't bother. But once something becomes a habit, then it's on autopilot, like cleaning your teeth. I go, I'm going to put the kettle on anyway because that's a habit of something I like to do have a cup of tea. And as soon as I do that I'm straight. I don't think about it, I don't think, oh, should I give it a miss today? No, it's a habit. It's now part of this making it obvious, creating these cues. So that's the idea of making it obvious. The second thing in these four laws of behavior change is make it attractive. And that's where you pair a habit that you want to start doing with an action that you want to do. For me, for example, I want to have a cup of tea. So I will go and do my workout for three minutes and then at the end of it I'll have my cup of tea. Another thing that we can do to make it attractive is to choose social groups. So for example, I do a particularly long bike ride on a Saturday and a Sunday and that's because I'm part of a social group, a bike club. I've been part of a bike club for many, many years. When you make it social, when you involve other people, it makes it more enjoyable. In addition to that, of course there's an accountability issue as well. So make it attractive then. The third idea of the laws of behaviour change is make it easy, make it as easy as possible. So for example, doing something in just a few minutes Regularly is much easier than something big periodically. So going back to the gym idea for me, three minutes while the kettle is boiling is easy. Anybody can spend three minutes doing some press ups and other workouts. It's not difficult to do and therefore it's easy. It's going to happen. I did start off when I moved here, when I first got the gym done of going in once a week and spending 30, 45 minutes. And I soon found I came with excuses not to do it. Much better just to do little and often to make it really, really easy. You also want to remove any friction. So what are some of the things that stop you doing stuff? One of the things that stopped me going to the gym was the fact that I had. I would have to go and jump in a car and drive for perhaps five minutes, park the car up, go and get changed and I. That became, that created friction, it made it harder to go to the gym. So when we moved here a few years back, I knew I wasn't going to go to the gym. So I got some gym equipment in the house. I don't have to travel far. I have to walk about 30, 30 seconds away from the kettle and I'm in a room where I've got some yoga mats and we've got some other bits and pieces to remove the friction, make it as simple as possible, make it easy, and then also number four is find ways to make it satisfying. How can we make it so it's satisfying, enjoyable? So running, for example, I go once a week and this morning I went running at 11 o', clock, did five and a half kilometers, six kilometers and I loved it. Why did I love it? Because one of the things I enjoy in life more than anything else is listening to rock music. I love rock music and I have all my favorite songs in a playlist called Running Music. And the time that I enjoy music the most is when I'm running. Because when I'm running I have no other distractions. I can just listen to it properly. I can listen to. I'm listening to the guitar and thinking, how's he playing that? And I'm listening to the lyrics. And so listening to rock music is one of my favourite things. Doing it as part of running then makes running really enjoyable. I got such a buzz. I came back with a real adrenaline high when I finished because usually I finish the run on one of my favorite rock songs and I just have to finish listening to it when I get back into the house. So that's one of the ways that I Make it satisfying. And another way that I make things satisfying is I measure stuff. I'm a numbers person. You are. If you're an accountant, you probably love numbers. And so I pay for, for example, a Strava app, because I love the fact I can set my goals. It's then visual. I can see my progress with exercise every single time I go out. I'll check Strava and I'll see how I'm comparing with my goal. And you'll see from the screenshots that I'm pretty consistent with exercise. I do it pretty much every day, every week because the satisfaction of seeing the graphs, the charts on Strava and seeing the progress I'm making. So that's what James Clear talks about as the Four Laws of Behaviour Change. It's an amazing book. I strongly recommend you read it, if you haven't already. It will definitely change your life. Practice some of the ideas and start doing stuff that's going to improve, whether it's your exercise, diet, improving your health. The more you improve your health, the more you'll bring energy every single day. The more energy you bring, the more effective you'll be. The more you'll get done, the more efficient you'll be and your business will start to grow faster. Okay, next thing I want to talk about in terms of getting more stuff done is. Let me share with you quickly three ideas to stop your. Your precious time being stolen. Okay? Yes, we have our time being stolen all the time. And sometimes people say to me.

I'm too busy, I don't have the time to do that. Actually, we all have the same 24 hours in a day. It's about priorities. It's about doing what's important in life. You can achieve anything in life that you want. That's my belief. We just have to be focused on doing the right things consistently that are going to take us there. Unfortunately, we get sidetracked by people stealing our time. So let me talk about three of those. One of them is email. Email steals your time. All the time, all the time. And I know there's some. I know from looking at Facebook groups of accountants and bookkeepers. I sometimes see people having conversations about how you deal with email and people saying, every day I typically wake up to a thousand emails and I'm thinking, how on earth do you get anything meaningful done in terms of building your business, in terms of strategy, in terms of development, if you're dealing with that many emails every single day? Emails are just stealing your time. So you need to have Some strategies for dealing with that. One of the things, there are two things I'm going to share with you that I do which work really well. Number one is I know that the first three hours of the day is my peak productive time. And so I don't deal with emails at that time of the day. And if you haven't got the discipline, turn your email off, stop looking at it. I don't answer emails when I'm spending my three hours of the most productive time. The other thing that I do is I don't give customers, in my case our members. I don't give out my personal email address. And you could do the same with your clients. When you take on a brand new client, you could explain to them if they want to reach out, this is the email they use and you can explain why. So we always tell people in the value pricing academy and I know all my wonderful members here watching today, they respect this totally. They send the email to support. I never have to deal with emails from customers because Sarah does it. She's wonderful. Sarah's brilliant. She loves emails. She spends a day answering emails. And I know lots of people say it's amazing how she always answers emails really, really fast. Don't email me because I may not answer. Okay, email Sarah. And so I don't have that issue with emails. I don't let people email me in the first place. So think about some strategies. Think about how you can avoid email stealing your day. Next idea for protecting your precious time is another thing that I've done religiously for the last couple of decades is creating blocks of time for the important stuff you see when you deal with people's emails. For example, when you deal with emails, you are reacting to somebody else's agenda to what they want. And yes, for example, with clients you do have to answer clients questions, but you don't have to do it in your peak time and it may be you can have somebody else deal with it. There are things that are much more important if you want to build successful business, then really important things that you should be doing is working on your strategy, working on your growth plans, working on putting systems, processes, standard operating procedures in place in your business so that you can delegate more work to other people, developing your team of people so they can perform at a higher level and doing stuff that you can scale through people. These are all much more important things and use of your time than answering emails. These things have to be done if you want to build a great business. So figure out your peak productive time and block out time for doing that. I remember in my firm as a sole practitioner way back in 1998, I first met my friend Steve Pipe. I went on his three day accountants masterclass. And over those three days, and I know actually Jim Rayner's here, Jim was in the same room as me for three days. That's when I first met Jim Rayner. And over those three days, Steve just blew my mind with some of the things that we could do in accounting firms. He talked about how we can change our clients lives through business advisory. I think we called it consulting work at the time, but essentially how we could add value through advisory work. He talked about creative ways to grow our business through marketing. And I'm thinking I want to do all of these things. He talked about why we have to put systems in place in our business so we can then pass on things like compliance work to our team members. And I remember over the three days my action plan was huge. I was writing down all these ideas of things I want to do. And by day three, feeling overwhelmed. So what I decided to myself by the end of those three days is I decided that Fridays were going to be my day for working on the business. And.

Back then in 1998, we didn't have digital calendars. I had a Filofax, you might remember the old Filofaxes. And I had that with me. And I got a big red pen and I put a line through every Friday for the next few months. And I said to myself, I will never meet a client on a Friday. I will never take a call on a Friday because Friday is my day for working on my business. And over the next couple of years my business went from being. It was a mess for the first few years because I made every mistake in the book. But in the years 99, 2000, 2001, I started to really turn my business around and I had systems in place for everything. I was doing no compliance work by the year 2000 in my accounting firm because I created all the systems. I'd spend every Friday writing systems because I realized that if I wanted to build a successful business, I couldn't do everything myself. I had to have systems in place and other people to follow the systems. So that was the second, that's the second idea of protecting your time. The first one is don't let emails steal the day. Number two, block out time for the big projects. The important stuff. Number three is we all talk about having a to do list which is probably this long. But actually I think more Important is a not to do list. I talked earlier about letting go of stuff of the things we don't enjoy. But it also goes to all these things that you think you have to do is you have to ask yourself.

Are these things on my action plan going to take me closer to my goal of, of building a great practice of success, whatever your definition of success is. Or are they just doing those things because a client asks for it or because you feel you need to do it?

Can you do something different? Can you rather than you having on your to do list, can you delegate it or perhaps it's not important.

There should always be things that you take off your to do list. Otherwise you'll be if it's full of reacting to other people's requests and things, you'll never get time to work on the most important things. So there's three ideas to protect your time. Don't let emails steal your day. Create blocks of time for the important stuff and create a not to do list. Okay, last thing I want to share with you, and then we'll go to some questions. I want to go back to and share some of the stuff that's happening in the, in the area of science right now, particularly health, that I've become particularly fascinated by for the last few years, and that is this area called longevity. And what some of the scientists have found over the last few years is that they've now discovered why we age. Not just why we age, but we can slow down the aging process. And what they found is they start to find out reasons why we age and think and things that we can do to slow down the biological clock. You see, there are really different ways of measuring our age. The traditional way is our chronological age is how many years have we been alive on the planet. But actually a better age is our biological age. Because what we know is that some people age faster than others and some people age slower. Some of us have a biological age that's less than our chronological age. And so if we can reduce our biological age.

Then.

We'Re going to have more healthy years available to us, which means we can then get even more stuff done and achieve even bigger goals. And interestingly, if we study this stuff, one of the things that they found is that a lot of the things that we worry about, the diseases, whether it's heart disease, whether it's Alzheimer's, whether it's.

Cancers, whether it's type 2 diabetes, these are, they're now realizing a largely a part of the aging process. And so if we can Fix the aging process, then all those other things, we can start to either not have or push back longer before we might get those things. And I know Sarah and I talk about this regularly, that because of Sarah's mother is Alzheimer's is a terrible thing. But they now know, thanks to AI, and this is a largely AI driven, they now know what causes Alzheimer's. And there's now a lot of research in how we can keep our brains healthier and stop that happening. And interestingly, a lot of the things that will help us reduce our biological age, things that I've already talked about earlier, things will bring more energy. So we have found, for example, they know now that having good quality sleep is really important for our bodies and for our brains. And if we get good sleep, it will slow down the aging process. So sleep has become very important to me. Exercise helps. And they've now started to realize why exercise helps with slowing down the aging process. It's about causing. Creating some stress. The reason we age is because we have all these cells in our bodies that have this little program to do something. So different cells have different programs. But what happens is. And one of the experts in this area, David Sinclair, he describes it like this. We have our genes and then we have the. I think it's the epigene. I forget the name now, but it's the thing. It's the thing that reads the information. And he describes it like a CD that over time a CD gets scratched. And so the laser that's reading the music, it starts to jump a bit because of the scratches. And that's what happens in our cells. And so we can slow that down by building defense mechanisms. And we build in defense mechanisms by causing some stress in our bodies. Exercise creates some stress in our bodies and then brings up the defense mechanisms, which helps to protect our cells and slow down the aging process.

Similarly, with diet, there's been a lot of research now in terms of certain types of foods that are really healthy for us and some that are terrible, that will increase the rate at which we age. The number one, which is probably of no surprise whatsoever, but sugar is one of the worst things that we can have. And so over the last year, that's been. It's been something I've been reducing for the last decade or so now, but over the last year at a much faster rate. I have not drunk sugary drinks sodas for a long time now. I've cut them out of my diet. I don't have breakfast cereals because if you start to look at what's in those cereals. They're not as healthy as the food industry leads us to believe. They are full of sugars. And one of the great things about living in Portugal is I've realized I actually love vegetables and fish. And a Mediterranean diet is one of the two diets in the world that helps us to live longer. The Mediterranean diet and the Okinawi diet. I'm very fortunate that the Mediterranean diet is all around me here. So I mention all that because this is a fascinating, this is fascinating stuff around longevity and.

This fascinating stuff coming out all the time. I read something just a month ago where they've. Now there's a breakthrough where not only do we have. Not only can we slow down the aging process and have a lower biological age than age based on years, but they have now figured out that we can reverse it. And there's a school of thought now that by 2030 we will be able to significantly slow down the aging. So. So that we can. A lot of experts in this space are now predicting that 120 years old will be the new 70.

And so I think to myself, when I look at what I've achieved in business, it's a huge amount in 20 years. I started studying this stuff and successful people back in the early 2000s and I look at what's happened in 20 years. At times it felt painfully slow, like Sam Walton with the first five years of Walmart. Change sometimes feels really, really slow. A year goes by and we feel like our business isn't moving forward. But when you stop and look back, if I look back over 20 years, I think, wow, so much has happened in my life now. I have financial security, I have a business I absolutely love. There's nothing I don't enjoy doing in 20 years. I think to myself, if I can have a healthy lifespan to 90, 100, 110. I'm 57 right now. I'm thinking, what more could I possibly achieve in business? What other goals can I achieve? And that makes me realize, wow, the possibilities are extraordinary. And I say that because I hope I have in some way inspired you to really think about the things that we've talked about. Wherever you are in business right now, start with your personal levels of energy, health, really focus on that because you will find that if you do the things I've talked about today, you will bring that energy. You'll get more stuff done. It won't happen overnight, but you will start to see over the next 3, 4, 5, 10 years, you'll start to See faster progress towards the things you want to achieve in your business, in your life. Okay, thanks for listening. I'm going to answer some questions now and look at some comments. I also did promise earlier to mention that I am doing my first live for real in person speaking since COVID on next week in Toronto and we are closing down. We do have to close down the tickets in 24 hours. But if you are in the US or Canada and you would like to come and join me in Toronto, I'm going to ask Sarah to put a link into the comments box and we do close in 24 hours. But if you want to come and spend a day with me then it would be great to see you. I'm spending a day teaching value pricing and how we can create more value through advisory. Right. I'm going to see what questions we've got and what comments we've got. And if you've enjoyed this, by the way, if there's something you got valuable out of it, please click the thumbs up the like button. I would really appreciate that. So I'm looking right through at the moment through the chat to see if there's any questions. There's lots of comments. Greetings from Las Vegas. Awesome. What else is there? I'm looking for questions but Leslie says I'm listening to Atomic Habits right now when out biking. Okay. That's a really cool thing to do.

I don't listen to stuff because it's dangerous on the road but to have headphones on the road with traffic. But Lesley's out in the middle of beautiful countryside and so that's great.

Catherine says yoga is my go to now in my 50s. Yeah that's so is Sarah. Sarah goes.

Three or four times a week to yoga now. Nina's a yogi every day. I still can't see questions by the way so please do let me know if you've got a question about anything. I'm just going to look at the comments until a question comes in. Remember to put two QQs in front of the question. That'll help me. Although there is actually a question from there's no qqs but I did spot it. By the way the Canada event link is there.

What do you find the most productive hours in a day compared to the usual eight? I did so Sharif Everybody is different. So what it is for me is different to everybody else. For me it's the morning. I'm a morning person. I am really productive. Anytime from about 7:30 7:30 to midday is my best time. Most Productive. But that's not everybody. A good friend of mine, you may have seen, if you're into AI, you might have seen my interview a few weeks back. A month ago, on this channel, I interviewed Igor Pagani, who's one of the leading experts on AI his channel, his YouTube channel is the AI Advantage. And he happens to live in Lisbon. We get together regularly, and he tells me that for him, he's most productive in the evenings. And so I remember seeing him recently in the afternoon. We had a coffee, a chat, and then he had to disappear to finalize a YouTube video and get it uploaded. And I'm thinking, right, I'm slowing down now. And he's getting hyped up, ready for his productive hours. So Sharif and everybody is different. You need to figure out when are you most productive? When do you love working the most? When do you get the most stuff done?

Jim's awesome. 68. So still lots of time to achieve more success. There absolutely is, Jim. Plenty of time. You're still young. Candela says. What is the name of the book you last mentioned about creating good habits? That was James Clear is the author, James Clear, and the book is Atomic Habits. Atomic Habits. It may be somebody could perhaps put it in the YouTube chat for you. Okay, thank you for that question. What other questions have we got? Okay. Leslie Lesley has to listen out for the grizzly bears. That's why. Okay. I don't have that problem. Fortunately, mine's just Portuguese drivers, which don't always pay attention. Okay, thank you to Sarah for putting the link to the book. The book name, Atomic Habits. It is a great book. I don't read as much these days because I prefer watching videos. I'm a visual person. I've read so many books in the past, and I would probably put that in my top 20, if not my top 10 books that I've read. Really powerful stuff. What else have we got?

Joanie joined late. No worries. Good morning. From rural farming area near Salmon Arm, British Columbia, Canada. Another Canadian here. Awesome. I get a lot of Canadians come to these sessions, which is amazing. Thank you. Don't worry about being late. My week is international news videos, so more discipline is needed. Yes. I mean, I didn't talk about it today, but when it comes to stealing our time, there are, of course, many others. I gave three things like news, videos, tv. Social media is a big one. We have to really be mindful of what are the things that we are doing that are taking away time that are not really productive. I know many people will spend Time scrolling through social channels. I guess we're all a little bit guilty of that. And I still do it a little bit, but I am working really hard to toe that one down. I'm glad to see there's lots of people. Like Amy has got atomic habits in her list right now. Okay, we have three minutes left, but. Three minutes. This is kind of your last chance to ask questions. I'm just.

Yeah, it's not just me then. So a few of you, your brain shuts down at 3 o'. Clock. Yeah. So for 4 o' clock I do these live sessions. Those of you in the value Pricing Academy, I also teach at 4 o', clock, which is great for me because it kind of counteracts my brain shutting down. Sometimes it shuts down midway through. I forget what I'm saying. But this works for me really, really well because I find speaking is something where the adrenaline kicks in. I have energy speaking anyway. It kind of wakes me up. I tend to find around about 3 o' clock I'm starting to struggle a bit and then suddenly I'm going live. That's when the excitement happens because I love going live. I love teaching, I love interacting with people, answering questions, helping people. So this isn't work. This isn't work. This is me having fun. Jim says. What does Jim say? Just read Lifetime by Russell Foster, a great book about sleep and our body clocks. Thank you for sharing that. I've not read that or come across that particular one. I will probably. I'm not a big reader right now, but what I will do, some of you know, is I have a standard AI prompt which does book summaries for me. So what I do is I will probably Jim is I will put that into my prompt, get a book summary, read it, and then I'll decide whether I need to read the physical book or not or whether the summary will give me enough. Catherine says thanks for this, Mark. I need a kick in the ass to get me going on this stuff after summer. You are welcome. And I can't wait to see you, Catherine, for real in, in Toronto next week. Okay, we want three QQQs, right? Sharif says how do you train your employees towards productivity rather than hours worked? Wow, that's an interesting question. And let me, let me see if I can answer that. Well, firstly, firstly.

This, this kit, this, this really kicks off. Let me put back on the screen again. It kicks off with the hiring process and I was talking to some VPA members in one of our Portugal retreats a little while ago about when we are hiring people, we should hire for attitude, not skills. I know you've heard that. So what does that really mean? And so we have to hire the people. We have to have systems in place as part of our hiring process and perhaps we'll do this as a live stream sometime in the future if it's of use to you. We need to put some systems in place to hire the right people based on their attitude. And, and when we have people with great attitudes, they tend to be people that are. That just get more stuff done. So it's one of these things that it's difficult to if somebody's got the wrong attitude, if a team member's got the wrong attitude, it's really hard to change their habits. They have to make a decision to do it themselves. It's really difficult to do it for them. So Sharif, it really kickstarts with this idea of hiring the right people through attitude rather than training people. But nevertheless, we can still encourage people perhaps to read books like Atomic Habits. Perhaps get your team members to watch the recording of this particular video and tell them it might give them some ideas to help them with their health and get more stuff done. I am conscious, by the way, that we are out of time so I do have a hard finish. We always fit. For those of you who have never been before, these sessions are finish on the hour, they're exactly 60 minutes and that's partly because it's five o' clock in Portugal. And as I said to some of you earlier, I'm off out to a restaurant tonight with Sarah and some friends. So what I am going to do and thank you Clive for sharing another great book which I will add to my AI prompt and get a summary of that. Getting Things Done by David Allen. I actually know the David Allen stuff, but I will check that out. And still some more great stuff coming in. So what I'm going to do is as always, I'm going to play with some music for about three minutes. Give me a chance just to read any final comments. Please do share in the comments. What is the best thing you've learned today? What's the best thing? And if you've enjoyed it as well, give it a thumbs up. I would appreciate that. And I will see some of you in Canada next week. And for the rest of you, I'll see you in October. Can't wait to see you again very soon. Goodbye for now.