The Secret to Finding More Time in Your Day | The Big Leap EP#74

Being out in front of the moment or being behind the moment, both are very costly things.

I found that what works really well for manifesting the most in the shortest period of time is upgrading your identity.

I think the body is the biggest overlooked source of wisdom we have. The educational process trains people to function above their necks.

Yeah. You can take time to take care of your body and your mind and your soul and your relationships, and, you know, if something falls apart in the meantime, most likely no one's going to die.

This is Gay Hendricks. I want to invite you to be with our new edition of the Big Leap podcast because we're talking about time hacks, how to have more time, how to have more quality time, and particularly how to stop wasting time and hanging around with time wasting, folks. So, Mike.

All right, well, here's what I loved about this episode. First of all, you really get into this big idea called Satwa and what that is and why it's super important. And also.

How meditating every day for the past 50 years has increased your ability to have more time, but also some of the core fundamental upgrades you can do to your brain to give you a lot more time and be more efficient, but also live inside your zone of genius all the time. So there's all that and a lot more in this episode, in addition to some of the tools we use, which, interestingly, are so simple, I think you'll be amazed.

All right, Gay, let's talk time hacks. Before we started, you said something that I think is super profound about what time management really is all about. You want to explain what you think that is.

A good bit of it has nothing to do with time. It has to do with how you manage your energy. And we probably got a lot to say about it, but just a broad stroke is that if you can take your attention off being a victim of time and having it be this monolithic thing that you're doing battle with, if you can befriend time and make it your own, own it, then your whole relationship with time clears up. So I want to massage that idea and I also want to look into just. Are there any specific little tools that you use or I use besides the big broad strokes that could help people really manage their. But let's start with that thing about time management is really energy management. If you think about the problems you have with time. I mean, think of the obvious ones. Like, one person will say, I consistently show up late. Another person will say, I consistently show up early. But I have a lot of anxiety about it. I have bad dreams about showing up late. Then you have people that have made the other sort of time correction, the slacker direction, where they show up late for things and are always just missing out on things because their timing is not quite right. So being out in front of the moment or being behind the moment, both are very costly things because.

They all waste energy. In other words, if you're out in front of the moment, you're operating in a state of anxiety which is burning up your fuel. And if you're behind the moment, you're always having to make up or make apologies or make corrections because you didn't get there on time. And that kind of thing, that also eats up a lot of energy. So the moment you stop, take. Take your attention away from the clock and put it on your own energy system, that's a very powerful thing to do with time management.

Yes. So I've got a few things that allow me to not waste my energy. And I even go a little bit deeper and raw than that, which is, does it make my soul hurt?

Does it?

So I have a couple first principles that have become not just guidelines, but rules. And the way I frame them as first principles for ADHD entrepreneurs, which I think we could. You know, you're definitely less of one than me, or you've managed it more effectively and now I embrace it. But my first three that are governing principles is.

How I judge a person, place or thing. So one of them is no A holes. So I say no to anything involving an A hole. The other one that I know I've mentioned before, but in a different context, is will this person, place or thing create more than 5% aggravation in my life?

More than 5%.

More than 5%.

That's an interesting number.

Yeah. So here's the way I judge it is, and I do the Gay Hendrix energy test, where I breathe in and I'm like, hmm, will this person, place or thing create more than 5% aggravation? When I just take a moment and breathe out, I can feel it and know it instantly. So I can just make a fast decision. And then I added one recently, which is antagonism. Will I feel antagonism? So I hate feeling antagonized. And if I'm in around bully energy or someone where I feel like they're trying to manipulate me or push me towards something, or I just don't feel comfortable in the environment. So now I really, really pay attention to what's the environment I'm in and will I want to be here and it's like before we started. I told you there are two places I don't like to go. One of them is Atlanta. I feel yucky energy there. Don't need to understand it, don't need to be fixed, don't care. I don't like it, so I just don't do it. And there's lots of other places that I'm happy in, like where you live. Ojai is a happy place. I feel happy every time I'm there. It's a happy place. It's San Diego happy place. I like the ocean, so it's happy. So that's. That's where I'll call that the, you know, the sum of the first principles. And I have a few more. But I'm curious just.

How do you have some first principles and some guiding rules that you judge where your energy goes before we get into some of our how to management?

Well, I think a good bit of mine has to do with.

I don't put up with people that are negative. In other words, you're calling them a holes. Another person might call them.

Creeps or whatever. But no matter what you call them, they're people that crimp your energy and make you feel bad. And I have made so many mistakes earlier in my life where I got involved over some initial resistance with somebody that turned out to have flagrant a hole possibilities. And I have had to extricate myself sometimes at great expense. And I have really learned to be very sensitive about that subject. Here's something interesting, Mike. One time, oh, gosh, it must have been.

25 years ago, a person came to my house and.

I had done some business with them at a distance, but I hadn't been up in person. And the minute they entered my house, I noticed he tried to pet both of my cats. And both of my cats just wouldn't have anything to do, Left the room, streaked out of the room. Which is kind of funny because they're very friendly.

Little girls, my cats, and they're always inquisitive and everything. But the fact that they took such a quick dislike to this person kind of raised my hackles a little bit. But then when he got a little bit more into his pitch, I saw there were elements that I didn't want to be involved with. And then of course, the challenge was getting him in a gentle way out of the house. I've evolved ways of doing that over the years, so I'm a little bit better at it than I am than I was back then. But that would be that was a moment of starting to catch on with the fact that I'd had the same reaction as my cats did, but they did it in about a split second. You know, it didn't take them any time at all. And they'll probably be around a lot longer than we are as a species because of that.

Yes. Well, here's, it's, it's interesting. So here's how I frame the same thing. And I gave myself permission to renegotiate any conversation, any deal, at any time for any reason. All relationships are renegotiable for any reason. And so it's been recent that I, you know, I see in the past five years that I really have taken it upon myself to protect myself and my energy. And, and, and it is, it's the renegotiation. So I'll give you another one.

That I've been using a lot lately. So I decide.

How to use my energy with a couple more principles, which is one of them is I only do no homework. So if something comes up and it involves doing homework, I say no. Now what I'll say instead is I've decided, you know, my billable day value, okay, what I'll call my non leverage day value is $50,000. That's the current billing rate. So if I work a seven hour day, which, you know, that's about what it work out to be, I'm usually, you know, seven to four and I may or may not take a break. So if you take, you know, let's say 50 divided by 7, what do we get? Right? That's roughly, you know, call it $8,000. Okay, for the practical. So that'll be the like, will I invest and produce $8,000 worth of value or can I reassign or delegate that to someone else? And then the other one is.

I will collaborate with someone.

So then there's no homework. So I'm really happy to do that. And I will even do it for less if I know it's creating more value. And then the other one is, will I spend 99% of my time in my superpower instead of doing something that I don't like to do and I don't want to do. Now on one hand you can say to yourself, well, there's some things you have to do. And yeah, there's no doubt about it, there are going to be some have to's here. But what it's enabled me to do is say no to a lot more things and then to find more effective ways to delegate to a who Who'd be either more effective or more cost effective so I can create more value. I want to spend all my time in my, as you would say, your zone of genius and creating value or collaborating with someone I genuinely love. So those are again, some first principles.

I love those. And those sound like all hard won ones that you had to learn the hard way, you know, by gathering away a lot of energy. Yeah, I would say the whole genius thing is probably.

My number one time management meta technique. In other words, if I stay focused in my genius zone, things seem to fall into place really well. But if I'm cheating my own genius, if I'm not spending my time delving into my zone of genius every day, then things go out of whack very quickly. And I think that there's an old saying in Sanskrit from 5,000 years ago, the word satwa, in Sanskrit, Sanskrit is a word that means purity or essence or just.

The pureness of things. So the saying goes, the means congregate around satwa. In other words, if you have a pure vision of where you want to go and you are spending your time in your genius zone, the means to accomplish that will start to gather around you because they're attracted to that state of pure essence. And so I keep my attention on that. A lot of times, if things start to feel a little wonky or they're not quite working right out there in the world, my first move is to go in here and find out if I've got some disturbance in my serenity that's creating some kind of jangle on the outside. And that's often the case. I can find a person that I didn't communicate with effectively. That's still rattling around in my system. So I can either make peace with it at the time or call the person up and talk to them. But one way or the other, I want to complete things when I become aware of them so they don't keep loading up in my machinery.

Okay, so while you're describing that.

What I've found. Getting back to time management, it's interesting that we're spending so much time on this versus some of the how stuff, but it starts with the mindset. So back to.

Setting the intention and making a decision to say yes at first. So like, if we're making a list of stuff to do again, I'll look at it through the lens of the where's the maximum value?

And.

And the next one would be.

I'd like to spend the majority of my time in a space of improv of yes, and this is why I love to collaborate and create. Like what we're doing right now, it's just more fun. And you know, as I listen to you, I'm like, oh man, I see another way to add, you know, to plus it or to 10x it. So improv is a game of yes. And. And I find that to be an exceptionally useful place to create in, which is a great use of time. But then.

This is one thing I've noticed over the past five years, spending a lot of time with business owners and founders. So the majority of the time now spent creating super valuable businesses or products or offers that impact a smaller and smaller audience versus wider and wider. So I like concentrated impact. It's like lasering. Lasering, Lasering. And I found that what works really well for manifesting the most in the shortest period of time is upgrading your identity. So when you were just talking about Sattva, the purity and essence and how things coalesce or concentrate themselves to where their best needed or best required or whatever they're more attracted to, that's at least the way I interpreted what you said. I found that your identity makes the difference. So, for example, if you were to watch a great performer, a great actor, a great musician or great vocalist, their purity of essence will attract a certain type of audience as well as musicians that'll want to play with them and the right kind of talent. And I think that purity of thought, that identity that you create, which is a character, you know, it's like that is something that's within your power. You can be completely.

Real and authentic and it's. And it is a character.

So I know that's pretty esoteric, but I spend a lot of time in that mindset nowadays.

Yeah, I just thought of a friend of mine whose sister has been a nun for gosh, ever since she was probably 20 or 21 years old. And that's basically what she's done all her life. And she's very passionately dedicated to it. And anyway, she came home for Christmas one year when she'd been a nun for like 20 or 25 years, and.

My buddy was sleeping in his childhood bedroom and his sister was sleeping in hers. And he'd wake up in the morning and he would look out into the patio in the backyard in the garden, and she would be already up out there praying. And it didn't matter if he Woke up at 5:30 or 6:30 or 7:30, she was already at it out there. And he asked her.

You'Ve been doing this a Long time. Do you really need to get up that early and pray every day? And she says, yeah, she says, I don't always wake up a nun. And I thought that was really a beautiful thing about identity that you could get so caught up in the world and relationships and things that you forget your basic commitment. And so she had a way of reviving that commitment at 5:30 or 6:00 clock in the morning by the quality of her prayer. And then she was back in the groove again. And so I meditate. I've been a meditator every day for 50 years now. Just had my 50th anniversary and.

I.

Don'T pray exactly, but I just go in and use a mantra to kind of clear everything away except for that satwa, that pure essence feeling. And that's really the purpose of the meditation I do is to kind of ground yourself in that essence feeling and then go out into your day. And so I think that one of the things that makes life challenging in the 21st century are the same things that made it challenging in the 20th century, but they come at you a lot faster now. You know that life is a lot faster than Even it was 10 or 15 years ago. I remember as I was a university professor, when I got email for the first time. And I can remember other professors who had heard about it. I was the only professor in the department that was using email. And guys would stop, our professors would stop by my office and kind of check it out and everything. And I can remember several of them saying, I don't really see how that would be that useful. You know, I don't think I'm going to do it.

Because of just the complexity of adding a new dimension to life, I think is challenging. And it brings up fear and makes you clutch to the old.

I've never quite been that way. I'm always sort of looking for what's out there on the edge of the horizon and seeing if it could be of any possible benefit to me.

Right, right.

And so I'll tell you, the first day I even heard of email, I was there in the. At that time was a branch of the science department. The computer guys were sort of shunted off in the background there, and they didn't have to wear shirts and ties or anything like that. But I learned a lot of things. You know, I said, is this email stuff for real? And I said, oh, yeah. He said, five years from now, if you're not using a personal computer, you're not going to be functioning as a member of you Know the scientific community.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

I remember.

Man, that goes back a long, long way. I go back to 300 baud modems and my first experience with. With email.

Is acoustic coupler modems with a.

Thermal printer. So this is no screens. It literally we had to buy a roll of paper, which at the time was like five bucks in the late 70s, you know, it was like insane. So there. That aged me badly.

But it also brought up a memory of that insane squealing sound that it used to make when you would connect up with.

Yeah, huh? Yep. Yep.

Well, back to the 21st century. I think the stuff that's going on now is insanely much faster coming at you than that stuff was back then, for sure.

Well, I think this is a good segue into tools and the time management systems we use, which is what I'd ask you is. Okay, gay. So let's say it doesn't matter if you're planning tomorrow or today or your year. I'm curious what you use as tools. Mindsets, Hardware, software, paper planning, you know, even how. How do you and Katie decide to plan out your year? So, for example, for the holidays you always go to Hawaii. And you know, I know you've got some set dates. You do that. I assume you must have some things that the two of you agree upon in terms of how you're going to behave. But what's go through, like your typical planning strategies, some of the constants, some of the new things.

Let's just dive into that because I know I've talked to some, but I haven't really dove into this before. I'm curious what you use.

Well, one thing we always do. Now, this is a very big picture thing, but I highly recommend it because it gets our year started off right. On New Year's Day, we go out to a place called Meditation Mount, which is about 10 miles outside of town. It's a beautiful place that's been very spiritual to the Native Americans that were here before folks like me got here 100 years ago. And so we go out there and we sit and we kind of figure out what our intentions are for the year, what's really important to us. And we come up with some general guiding principles about the things that are really important to us. One thing that's important to us is managing our money and our finances. And so we have big ideas that we work out of. Like, the big idea that we work out of now is that all of our monies are well invested, appreciating and serving people who can best be served by our money. So, for example, we have a nonprofit foundation that we and other people put money into that gives grants to. Could be as small as $2,500 for somebody that wants to complete a 30 minute film they made, or could be $50,000 for something else. But they're things like scientific studies, media projects, movies, telev, that kind of thing that have some function of making the world a better place, a more enlightened place. And so we put a lot of attention into how we're going to organize our money so we can have all the money that we need to do everything that we want to do. So I'd say that number one thing for us starts the first day of the year. And then we come down from that and we actually come down the hill and we go back home. I would say that I have to give a big basket of bouquet to my wife because Katie does a lot of the kind of like weekly, daily, monthly arrangement of our lives. And if you don't have somebody like that in your life, hire one. Because she comes to me and says like at the beginning of the month and says, we've got X number of invitations, here they are. And do you want to go to this? Do you want to go to that? And sometimes I say I don't want to go to that. But she says that she does want to go to that. Like, we had a big event coming up.

Next month and.

A big celebration, and I realized at the last minute before we were going to send in our RSVP that I didn't really want to do it, but Katie did. So we are okay about going off in our separate directions. You know, a lot of couples have stuff about that, you know, but we never have any stuff about that. In fact, the very first year we were together.

I drove my VW camper bus, which I had in those days back in 1980, with Katie in it, out to her house in Santa Barbara and dropped her off to spend Christmas there. And even though her mother couldn't believe it and tried everything to do to make me stay, I said, I'm going up to Big Sur. I want to just kind of have some space. I've been with people for, you know, last three months. I want some space around myself this Christmas. So I went up to Big Sur. I had three or four days camping up in the wilderness there. And Katie spent time with her family. And when I came back, she was really happy to get in that bus again. And you know, like they say, three days is a good Time to spend with family of origin kind of things.

So she does a lot of that planning and consultation with me. And she does the same thing on food, too. She's really good at planning food and making food. She only likes to cook.

One time a day, in the middle of the day. She doesn't like to cook in the evening or in the morning. And so she usually makes our lunch and then we don't eat dinner, really. We just kind of maybe have a little snack or something as a way of also feeling good and keeping our weight handled and all that kind of thing. As soon as I quit eating dinner, I basically lost 10 or 15 pounds in the next month because I wasn't eating a whole bunch of food and then just letting it sit there for the next eight or ten hours. So blessings to her. She does so much of that. And I'm kind of like the caboose on her freight train schedule because she has a busier schedule than I do. And she has a lot more things she gets involved with than I do. I'm by nature a little bit more reclusive than she is. She's very social person. And so when we go to a party, you know, she'll probably talk to. If there's 40 people there, she will have talked to 38 of them by the time we leave. And I will talk to the two that she didn't get around to talking. And so that's kind of the split of ourselves. But we've made it really work for us because she really enjoys handling details, you know, and I'm hopeless at that kind of thing. And I'm fine with that. You know, I tried to retool myself as more of a detail person early in my life, and I just can't do it. You know, it doesn't work for me. And so.

I have another person who's just a professional manager. That's all she does, a professional organizer. And she comes in every month. She's about to come in on the 30th and spend a week while I'm out enjoying myself in Maui. Yeah, she's going to be doing all the organization for the year that I've kind of shoved aside and everything. And so when I come back, my office will look completely different and I'll be able to breathe in here for the first time in a long time.

Yeah, well, as I listen to you, I'll give you.

Both individual and the couples and the business side, and then maybe we can move towards any specific tools that we use.

Because mine's just incredibly simple. So one of my, again, my, my guiding principles is if it isn't on my calendar, it doesn't exist. And every single thing.

I do, this is another one which is I, I just hate logistics and scheduling and planning. I make a commitment and then I do it. So one area of conflict that can happen between Vivian and I is she'll be, you know, we'll make an agreement and then there'll be some reason why things have to move around. And I'm like, then work on it with my assistant. I'm just not going to do it. I say hard nose to a lot of stuff. It created a lot of friction at first until I just told her. It makes my brain hurt and it gives me pain and I just don't want to live in any pain. So I'm okay with whatever it is. Just work it out with someone else. I don't want to do it. And that took a long time to negotiate. But so a few other things which is, you know, I don't like planning, I don't like thinking about it, but I'll make my agreement. So, for example.

At the end of each year we sit down with a great big rollout annual thing with a couple of markers and we plan out our year. And one of our goals is to do. We didn't quite do it this year, but three, three to four week trips per year. I took off the majority of April last year we went to Portugal and it was around my birthday. This year I'm taking a group to Spain and going there on a couple's trip and then an individual's trip. So it'll be like Spain and a few other countries. But we really like planning our vacations and then doing ideally a four day weekend at least once per month. So we might go to Paso Robles, for example, or somewhere interesting. And then I prefer not to work weekends. I just don't do it anymore. I turn everything off. I don't do social media any longer. I pay someone to do all that. And then we try to do three couples trips a year because we've got some couples we love to travel with who are really good travelers. So.

We'Ll work those out as well. And then.

Two other basic guiding principles are the further out the better. So I like to just plan it out for the year so I don't have to think about it anymore again. I just, it hurts my brain. Just don't like it, don't want to fix it, don't want to know why doesn't Matter. I'm really just fine.

And then ideally, don't leave Mike alone. So if it's work related, it's schedule it, plan it, have someone there so that I can delegate when it's done, or decide if it's important enough to continue. And I don't mind spending 20 or minutes or an hour on something and then decide, nope, not worth it. We'll just kill it now instead of thinking about it. But I like making hard decisions. Yes or no. Keeping it very binary instead of gray because it's pretty. You know, once you go through it, it's like. And again, you've been a great mindset maker for me. You know, like you feel into your body to check on if something's right or not. And I've really made that absolute practice. If it doesn't feel good in my body, I don't do it. I really listen to that and trust whatever wisdom's in. And I don't let my brain override my body any longer. And I think, you know, when I look back, my health and my cancer, circumstance.

Fixed, you know, that, that fixed that problem. I just didn't know it existed until you and I spent more time together.

Yeah.

I think the body is the biggest overlooked source of wisdom we have. The educational process trains people to function above their necks.

Yeah, yeah.

And. But that can be a lonely place to be because you really, your body has been evolving for many more millions of years than your cerebral cortex has. The cerebral cortex is like a coat of paint on the top of a building. It's a very thin thing. If you compare the size of the brain to a grapefruit. The cortex is the size of the rind. And all the juicy stuff is the stuff that's been evolving for millions and millions of years. Things that have to do with fear, sexuality, anger, all those kinds of things that are below the neck. Sorts of things that we really have to start processing.

Pants region. Pants region. That's. I just heard that over the weekend. I thought that was hilarious. Somewhere in the.

I remember Thomas Jefferson. I'm not Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Edison, the great electrical inventor and all that. Yeah, he. He said the purpose of the human body is to carry the head around. And I remember thinking, oh, no. You know, he's really. Look what he could have invented if he had been a whole body thing.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Ooh, that's. That is a. That is juicy.

Okay, so let's, let's just go down the tools because I have experimented with and used practically every gadget, software tool imaginable. And now what I use is so simple.

And do you want me to start with this or do you want to do yours? Your tech?

Oh, go ahead, just tell me what you do. Mine is very simple too.

Okay, so I used to use.

Note cards. I would carry around a bunch of three by five note cards and every single thing I'd think of, I just brainstorm all the time. And I kept the recipe box and I'd put it all in there. And then I'd take the cards and I'd reorder them and shuffle them based upon priority. And then I'd write down how long it's going to take and whether or not I had to do it or I needed to assign it and delegate it. And then I'd estimate its value and.

I realized that all I did is carried around stacks of crap that never got done and it would bother me. And now.

And then I went to like notebooks and all kinds of stuff. And now what I'll do is it's really, really simple. If I'm not producing maximum value and income, I'm going to be with my wife or working out or having fun, you know, or, you know, I'll say collaborating, creative collaboration, which I would put this as a creative collaboration. In other words, it doesn't need to make anything. To me, it's just really fun. And we're creating value and I know my brain's getting bigger and I'm getting wiser. You know, that's it has nothing to do with money. It has to do with kinship and friendship and collaboration and inspiration and all that.

So the act of it is good enough.

And.

So what I do then is.

I enjoy selling stuff. You know, it's like I love to pitch. I love to be put into a spot where I can create some value and see if I can create value for someone else. So, you know, I just try to fill up my calendar two to three times a month with these workshops I've been doing. And so that always gets the priority from a business and financial perspective. And then everything else falls in place. So I think the bottom line is I'm so singularly focused now that I don't need anything else than Apple Calendar, which is linked to a Google Calendar, a scheduling tool, right, that I can send out. And then I have Lori, my EA schedule, everything that can't be mechanically calendared.

And beyond that, everything's blocked out a year in advance. So it's sort of like just fill up everything else with opportunities.

And because I'm so clear on what my rules are and what my income goals are.

I've found that by eliminating all the noise, it seems to fix itself, it solves itself. I don't have to think about it. And I'm not task driven anymore. I'm result driven. And I found that if you drive by either an income goal or a play goal, the rest seems to fall in place. So that may seem like overly simplified, but I found that by having hard rules, the rest works where in the past it was task based and that's where life got complicated. I was always frustrated and angry.

Annoyed.

Yeah, well that I think automatically in a way puts you in a victim relationship with time.

And a general victim relationship with life.

I've gotten very simple. I almost never write anything down by hand anymore. I'll just put it write down on my calendar or.

Actually nine times out of ten, my administrative person, Margaret does a lot of my scheduling for me because people kind of have learned to route things through her because they're going to get a lot faster attention than if they send me some kind of a message.

I just say no. I just say go to Lori. I don't do that anymore. I'm not going to schedule, I'm not going to count her. And people try to do an end run and by no good deed goes unpunished and then it turns into your problem and then if you let it go once, they're going to be trained to come back. So yeah, you got to stop that.

I know I've twice actually this past month because Margaret's been going back and forth to the east coast for family things. I've ended up doing a couple of my own calendar entries myself and inevitably something screws up and so I really try to get out of that as much as possible.

I.

For many years I kind of duplicated what I saw Michael Dell doing when I used to go down there in the 90s for coaching him and his two other.

Guys that he, the President and the CFO and I. I always saw Michael had a three by five card in his left hand pocket of his shirt and he would go and then put it back in and I finally asked him what was on that. And his secretary would give him this 3 by 5 card with the key things listed on it so he didn't have to look at the computer, everything he could just look in there. And they prided themselves on being a 99% paper free.

Company. And I never saw Michael Dell touch another piece of paper besides that thing in his pocket that he would look at. And so I started doing that myself. I thought that was such a cool thing to do that it eliminated me having to look at my phone or look at my computer. It was always just there in my pocket. And so I did that for many years. But over the past 10 years, I've really gravitated away from using paper for pretty much anything. Sometimes maybe if I'm brainstorming something, I'll sit down and sketch things on a piece of paper. But I've gotten so.

I'm so into typing things rather than writing things out that I almost avoided any kind of handwriting person. Also, my hands have a lot of arthritis in it from.

Writing 50 books over the past 50 years, plus a couple of hundred articles. And also from playing a lot of golf. My hands have gotten kind of traumatized from hitting the ground too hard on occasion and that kind of thing. So I try to use my 10 digits here as little as possible.

Yeah.

So I can't believe I don't have issues because I coded for 15 years and I probably spent an average of 16 hours a day, six, six and a half days a week in front of a computer.

It's a miracle I don't have more physical problems than I do, which are few at this point, but I get that. And again, I don't know how to communicate what you and I just said to a younger person.

Except 95% of what you think matters doesn't matter at all. And what you're bothered by not only has no value, it's.

Literally you'll regret focusing on such low value things later on in your life. And I think it's just a necessary baptism we go through. But I can remember for years when I'd talk to people who, I'd look at them and I'd be like, how do you have the life you have? And it's like, it's easy. I just don't do much. And I simplify. I say no to almost everything. And I'd be more fascinated by how do you possibly say no to everything around you, all these opportunities, or if I don't do this, this is going to happen. And that's a fear cycle. And I think the relationship we have with fear and time.

Is just as important as victim and time.

Which is somehow I'm going to run out, I'm not going to have enough, and that all these things matter. And so I guess my question to you is, what advice do you have for eliminating.

The fear cycle or the belief that so many things are important?

Because I think I'm so close to that time or I haven't processed it quite the way I presented it. Maybe the way I'm thinking about it isn't the right way to think about it. But I just want to ask you, like, what's your observation or your thoughts there?

Well, I think that you've got your head pointed in the right direction, but you may not have gone all the way. You know that the way I explain it, it's like I had a great business mentor many years ago, Jerry Jones, who said, the best deals you'll ever do are the deals you don't do.

Yeah.

And boy, did that make an impact on me. But I had to kind of hurt it. Learned it the hard way, though, by getting involved in a couple of things where I realized my initial response was not to get involved. But then I got caught up in fear of missing out or fear of losing out on making a big chunk of money or that kind of thing. And that's always what seduced me in the door. And then later on, I would have to go to great lengths to extricate myself, usually at some cost to myself, either stress wise or.

But as far as what I would advise a person is really start paying attention. Start using your body.

As your reference point. Like, just ask yourself to get an idea of a yes or a no. Just ask yourself, hmm, do I enjoy eating oysters? Now, some people will have a clear yes to that and some people will have a clear no. But I don't think I've ever met anybody that was wishy washy about, you know.

And so I don't like raw oysters. They make me gag. Some people love raw oysters.

I hated them and then I like them now.

Yeah, well, I like them if they've been dipped in batter and fried. That's probably because anything dipped in batter and fried, you could put one of my sneakers and I'd probably eat it. But, you know, I. I have learned. I think the thing I would advise people to do is really cultivate that kind of friendship relationship with their emotional world instead of. A lot of people are so at odds with their inner feelings. They're fighting with their fear, they're fighting with their anger, they're fighting with their sadness, trying to keep it at bay. And I think that peace only comes through fully participating and fully letting in all the things that need to be let in. Your point, though, Mike, about.

You really got to keep your attention too, on what you do and don't love to do. If you can get really clear on what your value is, and you get there through acts of love. Then you don't need to think about 99% of the rest of life, because things will kind of fall into line behind that. Then your task becomes, how do I protect that without building walls that are based on fear? And that's done by saying conscious no over and over again. Just practicing a conscious no. You know, like, ha, no, not know that there's anything wrong with the other person or know for any other reason except I've tuned in and I get a no from that. And if you can say that with a smile on your face, you've done the necessary work. Just like what I now call high firing. If you fire a person from a place of fear, it's always going to come back to bite you. They'll end up suing you, or they'll end up being some kind of karmic.

Reaction out of that. But if you can get really clear and get that you're firing the person because whatever they're doing isn't working, but your ego isn't invested in it, and it doesn't have anything to do with them. It has to do with this particular thing that they're not doing up to specs. And so if you can get clear on how to do that and how to let go from that place, that way you can operate all day long without stress creeping into your system. The moment you start doubting yourself, quizzing yourself, making excuses for yourself, you're on a path that then leads to trouble. And life is going to have to show you that in some way. And so, to me, life is always giving us exactly what our intentions are calling for. But most of the time, those intentions are old, unconscious intentions that don't have anything to do with the present moment.

So what? As I listened to you, I was taking a lot of notes, and.

One word came up that summarizes everything that you went through, and that's trust.

Because there's, you know, what you were talking about is like fear of loss, fear of missing out, fear of not having enough. I know two other words that popped up as I was listening to your scenarios. It's like fear of judgment, fear of banishment. You know, making a bad decision can enter into all those. But when you trust, I remember. You know, I can't remember exactly when it was, but someone was interviewing me once and saying, you know, like, what was the biggest lesson you learned from the cancer journey? And.

For that matter, if you had any advice to give yourself.

Knowing What? You know, right now, it's like, everything's going to be just fine. It's all going to work itself out. And I know I didn't trust. I thought I had to control everything, every little detail, because if one thing broke this, this, this, this, and this, it meant this. And, you know, I'd be like, oh, if I don't do this one thing, all this stuff, and it, like, it destroyed relationships because I'd be on my phone, I'd be doing busy instead of important. And it goes beyond, you know, is it urgent and important or whatever. You know, this is a hierarchy way above that basic mindset. But I think I know I've learned to trust a lot more. And maybe the very last thing was, you know, this notion of identity.

I.

I think when I was able to really trust myself and know that I. I learned over time there isn't anything I can't work out, figure out, or solve. And you can take time to take care of your body and your mind and your soul and your relationships. And, you know, if something falls apart in the meantime, most likely no one's going to die. Right. And so I gave myself a lot of peace when I was able to finally resolve that.

Well, it sounds like one thing you're saying is that you got good at letting go of controlling or trying to control things that you didn't have any control over anyway. You were stressfully trying to manage things that weren't within your ability to manage.

Yeah, for sure. And I feel like such a little boy admitting this now. You know, when you were even describing that, I was like, ooh, boy, that's my ego. Or some old thing got activated.

Not figuring it out sooner. And.

You know, like, how could this not be obvious? But for whatever reason, these things just aren't programmatically obvious. And maybe that's an old survival instinct.

Well, also, I think too, that.

We are sometimes ourselves.

Not the first people that are able to spot what's going on. You know, that I actually, you know, I remember even the first time I caught myself in the middle of a projection.

In a relationship with a woman. This is in my pre Katie days. I realized I had had a certain projection onto my girlfriend at the time.

And I remember thinking to myself, good grief, you know, what good is a PhD in psychology from Stanford if I can't even spot my own projections? But my therap at times says, who are you, superhuman? None of us can do that.

You're lost inside the box of your own ego. And that's why they say that the instructions for getting out of the box are written on the outside of the box.

Yeah, yeah.

You need some help reading those and getting some assistance to get out.

I also, at this stage of my life, I realized that I've gotten so good at spotting trouble on the edge of the clearing that it almost never gets up close anymore. You know, like, I can spot things beginning to not work out on the periphery and then do something about it out there. See a person I need to talk to before it blows up in my face, you know, to try to handle whatever it is. And I think a lot of the problems that I've created around even something like time management don't really have anything to do with time, but they have to do with.

Not wanting to do certain things or not wanting to confront a certain thing, or not wanting to have a 10 minute sweaty conversation with somebody. And by the act of avoiding that, I create something that goes wrong in time and then it looks like time is required to fix it. But the whole thing didn't have anything to do with time in the beginning. It had to do with space. Am I willing to occupy a certain space? And so ultimately, I would say that most time problems have to do with space more than time. Because if you don't have time, if your cousin Ed calls you and says, hey, let's get together and you say, I don't have time, you're using time as an excuse. Not together, get together with cousin Ed. And it's probably for some good reason.

Yes, yes.

Yeah, like Ed or cousin Ed, you give me the creeps. And I don't like your energy. It could be as simple as that. Like, I've got a. I've got one of those. I've got a really weird cousin who's just into conspiracy theories and he doesn't lick his lips, so they're always chapped and there's crap on his face. I mean, he's just, he's the special guy in the room and he's always just been this weird, creepy dude and it's like.

He'S crazy. He's nuts. Yeah. So what I. When I heard that just now again, listening to you, maybe this is my last question is what I heard is you've developed a sensory acuity for trouble before it's trouble. So if you're going to think back to.

You know, one of the last times you saved yourself a load of trouble and you stopped a time wasting menace long in advance, or you had a piece of advice about developing that sensory acuity, and that ESP for time trouble. What shows up for you? I'm curious. Like, if you had a. A big idea, and what's a story that pops into your head?

Well, the big idea would be little trouble in the beginning, big trouble later on.

So, for example.

I've overlooked something in an initial conversation or decided not to ask a person about something or some little thing like that that has later caused problems down the line. And so one big piece of advice is get better at.

Consulting your body and owning the stuff that's down in there so it can be your friend, so it can tell you, don't do this or stay away from that. And I just work on that relentlessly. I think it's. It's practice. You got to just practice it, and that's the only way to get better at it. And so I think that.

It'S going to be something that you have to put yourself in that position over and over again until one day it dawns on you where it says, oh, wait a minute.

This is an option. To use my life energy doing this, but it's not a requirement. I was just working with one of the smartest people I know this week. A person who is just off the scale, brilliant, has made a large fortune and that kind of thing. But the problem she was consulting me about was something that. The very first. After she told me the story, I said, where did you get the idea that this is any of your business?

Because she had gotten so lost in trying to come up with solutions for a family situation that she was two steps removed from that she didn't have any control over anyway. But she was consuming her time thinking about this. And so it took me about 10 minutes of a little bit blunt questioning. But she got really clear about what she could do that she had control over and what she couldn't do that she didn't have control over. And therefore, what she had to let alone just let be. But I'll tell you that if you're attached to something and somebody comes along and tells you just to let it be, you know, that's. You know, you're going to bite their head off. Probably.

Subtle issue that Epictetus was trying to tell us about. The secret of happiness is knowing that there are some things you can control and some things you cannot. Yes, it's the Serenity prayer.

Yeah. Well, while I listen to you, I had something pop up literally right before we were together today. This is a business example. But then I realized.

There'S a couple core keys to making this work, which is how do you increase your sensory acuity to avoid the time trouble flywheel? Because that's really what happens.

Big things start as small things. It's very rare that it's a nuke in the beginning. And what got you to the nuclear option, right? It's usually small things that led to it. So.

This particular one was someone we've worked with. We've realized they're basically a time wasting pain in the ass. And you know, usually people who are broke and broken didn't start out that way. It's bad behaviors. They've been practicing for decades. You know, most, you know, a lot of people can wind up broke, but then they're not broke a very short period afterwards because it's like, ugh, took a big risk and it fell apart. But you know, how many people do you know who are wildly successful but have been broke several times until they really got it right? And in this particular case.

It'S an individual asking us to do what I consider agency work. And we have a hard, fast rule here. We don't do agency work because it's basically working hourly to solve someone's problem. That is.

An issue of.

Bad behavior that's multiplied many times over. And as the old saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. Here's the seed that turns into the time trouble flywheel is I think, having non negotiable rules and mindsets. And you were just talking about asking the hard questions and sweating it out and.

Being able to say, that's not my responsibility, it's not my problem, this person's nuts and we're values incompatible. So at the foundation of all time problems, it's having your hard, fast first principles, your rules that you don't violate. And when you do violate, it's usually because there's a little exception. You're like, ah, just this time. And that's where the little thing turns into the big thing. And it's where your beautiful, simple life suddenly becomes complicated because you did something that you should have known better.

But that's my big takeaway anyway.

Well, good. Well, let's give it a rest there and keep this conversation going. And let's encourage people also when they engage with this, to really leave us some comments and talk about a little bit how you people that are listening to this can really help us by sharing your hacks as we have done.

I'd love to hear it. Yeah, definitely leave them in the comments or head over to bigleappodcast.com leave them there. And as usual, if you know someone like a family member for example, who might benefit from some upgraded mindsets they need, a gay Hendrick operating system upgrade might be a combination of hard lessons and or common sense. Share this episode with them.

Sam.