How you do one thing is how you do everything

Hey everyone, it's Sam Ovens here and Nick Fisher. And welcome to Consulting tv. So on this channel we discuss everything to do with business success, financial success, and also like your own psychology and yourself and how really to achieve anything in life, you, you really need a combination of these two things. And today's topic we're going to discuss the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. And it's a fascinating topic. And if you have any area of your life which you want to improve or make better, then this video is really going to give you a totally different way to look at it and solve problems. And I'm sure it's going to help a lot of people.

So that's the question is how you do one thing, how you do everything. Some people would say no, they say you can still have these certain things that you can do, but you can still be good at this even if you have these certain habits. Is that true?

I would say how you do one thing most of the time is how you do everything most of the time. Like, because people can have one off events. You know, sometimes a person who wakes up at 4am every single day might have a few days where they sleep until like 7, 8am so you couldn't freeze on that moment in time and say the way that guy woke up at 8am, therefore he always wakes up at 8am it's the rolling average of a certain amount of time. But I, you know, I definitely believe that the way if you track someone for like 30 days, the way they do one thing most of that time is the way they will do everything like in their entire life. So if someone's apartment is dirty on average most of the time, then it's, everything's going to be dirty in their apartment most the time. Also, their car is probably dirty most of the time. Their computer desktop is dirty most of the time. Their email inbox is disorganized. And probably in their mind, they're totally disorganized and fumbling things. And it's like a mentor told me once that when you're hiring someone go out and look at their car because he said the way they keep their car will tell you a lot about what type of person that is. I don't mean what model car it is, I mean just how they care for it, if it's clean or if it's just totally beaten up and just mess everywhere. Because if someone has a totally messed up car, like fast food wrappers everywhere, it hasn't been washed in forever, then that probably says a lot about that person.

Yeah.

And then you told them you were moving to New York, and then it became much harder for you to actually do that.

Yeah, well, no one has a car here.

Exactly.

And I never actually did that because I never really had the opportunity to go out and look at someone's car when I was hiring them. But it did make me look at. Like, you can read a lot about a person by just how they do, like, one thing. Like, one thing I notice a lot is that people who don't finish anything will never finish anything. And, like, I'll give you examples to make sense of this. So if someone always listens to a little bit of a song. So if someone's always that person in the car who's like, playing an ipod or an iPhone, and then they listen to a bit of a song, then they change, and they listen to that, and then they change. Or they're flicking between radio stations, and if someone's in one lane, out into another lane, and then they sometimes go into this gym, then a different gym, or they think they're gonna do this, then that, or they dress this way for a while, and then they dress like that for a while. And sometimes they're an early riser, sometimes they're this. Like the way someone. If someone's just like that with changing songs, then they're highly likely to be like that with everything else in their entire life. It's like, I've observed that the pattern of someone's existence in any one isolated area will. It's like fractal. So if you can isolate someone's existence in just how they play a song on an ipod, you can make a pretty accurate prediction of their existence in everything else in their entire life.

Yeah, that's fascinating. I wouldn't have thought about that with. With people. But some people are chronic song skippers when you're. When you're with them. And how that could translate to the rest of their life.

Well, these days people are like, really add very much.

So it's more of a problem now than it seems than ever before, just from.

It's because there's too much supply. Like what's happened in the modern. In the. You know, in the Industrial Revolution, there was a massive amount of demand and not much supply. And so that's how the Industrial Revolution came about. When everyone started, you know, when people started supplying things, it was about supplying steel, supplying concrete, supplying, like, all of these. All of these industrial things, or supplying cars like Henry Ford and the T model, Ford it was all about production because there was so much demand and people were so hungry for production and supply that that's what, that's what the massive race was. But now things have flipped and now we have moved into like the information age out of the industrial revolution. And so now it's not a supply game anymore. People who just supply a lot of widgets, they find themselves with a lot of widgets and they need a way to sell them. And so it's no longer about supplying, it's about being able to connect supply with demand because there's a surplus of supply and there's not enough demand. And so that's what the game is these days. The game has become optimization, not production. And so we see companies like Uber, it doesn't own cars yet it it out supplies like yellow cabs and taxi companies. We see companies like booking.com they make way more money than actual airlines. These airlines own all of the jets, they own all of the pilots and everything. This airline is just a clicking website. I mean the booking.com is just a website, but it makes more money because it's doing the optimization of the supply. And so in the modern world, it's more about what to sell than how much you can sell. And it's an optimization problem. And that's why I called it like the information age, because with information we can optimize and find what is the thing to sell. And this is why a lot of people are add these days. It's because there's so much information out there and there's so much supply out there that we, we don't know what to choose. And so really in the modern day, it's more about what you ignore than what you pay attention to. And so the best way to win in this new era is really to just block out as much as possible. And back in the industrial revolution, it was to take on as much as possible because there wasn't much knowledge, there wasn't much information. You wanted to be like a sponge and take on everything. Right? Right. And also American households were acquiring a lot of stuff. They were buying multiple cars, bigger homes and more different houses. And then we saw that crash and like, oh wait. And so now really the way to win is to really minimize and optimize. It's to find one thing which you really like and have less things so that you can focus on other areas.

Yeah, I think that's true. There's just been, it's the information age, but there's been so much information now that like the connection economy of people like Uber and Airbnb and all these guys are coming in, and that's the benefit, right, is because they're facilitating what's actually good and what's actually and what's not.

Well, I've always said learning isn't hard. The art of learning is very easy. If someone tells you to learn something, it's really easy to do. You pick up some books on it, you read it, you take some notes, then you start to understand it. So it's not like learning isn't hard, but knowing what to learn is hard. That's the real problem. It's knowing what to learn. Because if you know what to learn, then you can easily learn it. But that's the real problem we have right now. We don't know what to learn and there's too many things to possibly learn. So that's the problem everyone's faced with.

Right?

And is there a good solution to that problem? That's a tricky question.

It takes a long time to figure out your optimization algorithm to find out what to learn. I mean, I've got one for myself and my day to day business and problems and everything. But if I was to give a recommendation to most people, it's to figure out what you want. You have to look at what you want and then you have to look at what you have right now and where you are right now. You have to do a, you really have to stop and just do an accurate audit of your life and yourself, like who you are now, what you want to achieve, what you're good at, what you're bad at, and just get real honest with it. And then once you've done that, then you can see what you need to acquire in terms of knowledge and everything to achieve this future that you want. And then once you know that now you can go out and learn and acquire that knowledge to achieve that thing. So that's how you really have to like learn how to optimize information to achieve what you want to achieve. But if you don't know what you want to achieve, then you don't know what you should learn really hard. And that's what universities become. It's basically, I don't know what I want to do. So it's like, oh, you should go to university and just learn some things. And then you learn a whole bunch of things. You're like, hey, wait, I'm supposed to be smart, I've got a degree. How come I still don't know anything? It's because you have to have something which you're optimizing for to know what to learn.

Right.

So what are some things you've said no to then recently? If there is all these things you want to do and all these potential avenues, what have you learned to say no to? Because you know that there are certain things.

There's thousands of things. But like, new technologies, I would say, is mostly what I. What I don't do. Like, I don't have Snapchat, don't have the app, don't have an account. I don't have an Instagram. I barely post on Facebook. I don't use Facebook messages at all. I have one email account. That's it. I don't text anyone. If someone texts me, I don't text them back. And I pretty much give no one my phone number. And so I try and take away all of these things because I notice when I observe, like most people, that's all they do. I'm like, they don't. They tell me they don't have any time to learn something. And then I look at why they don't have any time, and it's because they're trying to manage eight social media platforms. And I'm like, okay, well there's why? And I'm like, well, maybe you should just delete them all. And they're like, oh, no, that's not what you're supposed to do. And I'm like, okay, well then just put up with what you have, because that's all you're ever gonna get.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. I've noticed that. Especially when you're jumping from platform to platform too. That's just one more. It's not incremental in the amount of time you have to think about it. You're getting pulled from one thing to another, and you have to completely reset and think about another platform now in a different way than you were on the first one. So it kind of compounds too, on top of it.

Yeah. But for most people, what they want to achieve in their life, I don't think a social network plays any part in that. I think people are using social media because that's what everyone is doing. And so, you know, when everyone is doing something, I tend to not do it because it's eventual that everyone will be wrong.

Right. Yeah.

And then, but especially for us kind of as marketers too, is that people expect you to be on social because, well, how could you. How can you market on it if you're not on it and using it yourself? Like, how are you going to learn to be able to monetize. So, like, how do you feel about that? Maybe if you're not on some of those profiles, how do you still maintain?

Well, I feel like I know how to do it better because I'm not on it.

Explain.

Well, because if I'm on it and looking at what other people are doing, then I'm only going to do what they're doing because that's how I've been conditioned. But when I never look at what anyone else is doing and then decide to do it, then I can conduct my own analysis without any bias and then decide what I want to do, regardless of what everyone is doing.

Yeah, yeah.

And then as far as people, the drain on people's resources and how they're doing, one thing that certainly contributes, right. Is that how they're doing one thing is how you do everything. And if you do everything and you're trying to learn all these different platforms, you can't possibly do a good job in whatever you've decided to make as your goal.

Well, why do you think, like, you know, millennials and people love jobs skipping around. They can never settle down because that's what they're like on their phones. They're on Facebook, then they're on Snapchat, then they're on. I don't know what these other things are. There's tons of them. And they're getting them text here, their computer's popping up here, their ipods popping, their iPads popping up over there. It's craziness. And so if we observe that pattern of existence with social media. Right. Well, that's the same pattern of existence they have when it comes to their job. We also observe that's their pattern of existence when they become an entrepreneur. They have shiny object syndrome. They're like, oh, it's this. Or oh, it's that. Oh, it's this thing. It's E commerce. They're pinging around like a pinball machine. Because if we look at everything they're doing, how they're doing one thing is how they're doing everything. So the modern day, it's people are ADD because there's too much stuff. And so that's how they're behaving in everything. So really the answer to the problem is to stop doing a whole bunch of stuff, like, really start focusing. I have a competition with my girlfriend about who can have the least apps on their phone. I'm sure most people have competitions about who's got the most. And so I got one email, I got no social media. I don't text anyone. And I take pride in that. And I also just like having as little as possible because then the things I choose to be good at, I can be great in, whereas everyone else ends up kind of average at a lot.

Right? Yeah.

And that's a bigger problem that seems to be getting worse now. And it goes back to the amount of information out there is people are just looking at everything and then wanting to jump from thing to thing.

But it's really easy to stop. Like, if the easiest way, I think, is to observe how someone rides a bike or goes to the gym. So if someone likes to go to the gym for a few for like two weeks, then they drop off, then they'll probably like doing everything for two weeks and dropping off. If someone has been an avid, like, marathon runner for a long time, that person is going to be so reliable. Like, they're going to be extremely reliable at stuff. It's like a very good way to gauge how someone works out and how someone lives is a very good way to gauge how that person is going to be in other areas of their life. And so I'm not judging people and saying that's who they are forever. That's who they are at a moment in time, but you can change it. So you want to think about, like, if you want to make an improvement to yourself, you want to think about, how do I do one thing? Am I someone who always starts things but never finishes them? If you watch a bit of a movie or a bit of a TV program and then don't finish it, if you read a few pages of a book and then don't finish it, if you, like, do all of these things but don't finish them, then you really need to become a finisher. Like, you should even look at every meal like, okay, I want to finish this meal. I want to. Okay, I've got this glass of water. I want to finish it and I want to. If I'm doing a workout, I'm going to finish it. If I'm going to start writing an email, I'm going to finish it. And you need to become a finisher if you're constantly getting stuck halfway. However, if you're someone that has only done one thing for a very long period of time and never done anything else and being ignorant to everything else, then you probably want to start doing a little bit of other things. Right. It's a very easy way to analyze yourself and see why things are the way they are for you. You can just Take any one area of your life and observe it. And then you know why everything else is like that too.

Got it. So for you, when you decided, was that ever an issue where you weren't finishing things beforehand before you started cutting that out? Yeah, I figured as much just from kind of the action you took.

That's how I know about it. Yeah, by making a mistake.

Exactly.

So.

How did you quit these things? Was it cold turkey? Did you have to work your way up? Did you start finishing glasses of water and then meals? And then you worked yourself up to bigger things?

Often it's the. So if you find that you're not committed in business, you don't want to try and become committed in business. You want to look for other areas of your life where you're not committed and then become committed there. It's often too hard to attack the one problem. Just isolated. You want to look for other areas where it's appearing. So if someone isn't committed in business, then they should look where in their personal life they're not committed. If they're not waking up at consistent times or going to bed at consistent times, fix that. If they do some things and drop off, or if their apartment gets messy all the time, they should solve those things. And it's incredible how once you solve those, it just solves here. But if you try and solve it here while ignoring these things, it doesn't happen. So that's how people get stuck all the time. You can't. Like people don't have. People don't have business problems or finance problems. They have like life problems which reflect in their business. And so in order to solve the business problem, you have to solve the life problem.

What's your morning routine like right now on a weekday?

Weekday is so I wake up at 4am and then it takes me precisely 10 minutes to get onto the cross trainer, get changed, get onto the cross trainer. I go that for 45 minutes, get off, come upstairs, make a smoothie, and then I sit on the balcony. I call it like moon bathing. So that like I sit there and I drink this smoothie and the moon's still there. Like it's 4:45 or 4:55, almost 5:00am and it's pitch black and the moon's like right up. And so I drink my smoothie and moon bathing and then I have a shower and everything, get ready, then I'm at the office by 5:30. Hasn't always been that way. That's the way I've got it now. But there's been times where I, you know, I've definitely had times where I've been lazy and slept until like 2:00pm you know, I've had bad habits, but right now I have a good habit when it comes to waking up and everything.

And the key there is just to, if you do decide to have that routine, at least have it for a certain amount of time. Right. You can't just say you're doing it for a week and then shift to a different routine and then you're waking up.

It's not a routine if you do it for a week.

Yeah.

It's only a routine if you do it, I think 31 days.

31, yeah, because everyone has a different number. I've heard 21, I've heard a month. I've heard 90.

If you can stop drinking for 31 days, you pretty much, you will find all of a sudden that you don't want to drink anything. Like, I always, like growing up, I always used to drink on the weekends because it was just what everyone did in New Zealand. And then I moved to America and then I was like, people don't do that here. And so it went, just 30 days went by and then all of a sudden I was like, I don't even want to drink anything. And so now I haven't added anything to drink for like a year and a half. And I used to think I'm not a morning person, but then when I stopped drinking, it was very easy to be a morning person. So, you know, people think they are this thing and they, it's just, just a choice. Like if you're not a morning person, it's because you think that you're not a morning person, you can just change your mind.

Got it? So the key there is with any sort of business goal or if they want to make more money, if they want to do something, if they want to meet a certain person, often it's easiest just to change one thing, change yourself.

So if you experience any problem in business or any problem with your finances, think about what that problem is. Is it inconsistency? Is it like chaotic? Like, how would you describe that problem?

Right?

And then look for where else in your life that problem is showing up. So if you're not committed to, you know, if you're not looking after your business, then you probably aren't looking after yourself. If your business is in bad shape, like bad financial health, if it, you know, if financials aren't done, if you, if you aren't up to date on all of these different things, then chances are that's how your personal life is too. And so a lot of people are like, no, no, no, it doesn't have to be that way. I can keep having my personal issues and be wealthy. It's like, no, you can't. If you do ever get the chance to have wealth and success and you don't fix yourself, you won't have it for long, it'll be gone. Yeah, yeah.

Because you see some artists who have had success and I think that's why people point to it, they're like, well, you know, Ernest Hemingway did it this way or whoever. He had a really destructive personality, but he was still able to write these world famous novels. But I think a lot of people don't see behind the scenes that that's just not sustainable for long. Like that can work and for some people maybe better than others, but overall.

Well, it's like you have to be kind of like, you have to be like a Carmelian kind of like. I'm sure Ernest Hemingway probably had like a chaotic sort of lifestyle, like doing lots of different things. That's where he got his insights from. But then he would have to become a very focus driven person to write a book from start to finish. He wouldn't have been a chaotic person if he finished an entire book. Right. It's impossible to do.

And I'm sure he wasn't getting a ghost written.

Yeah. So this is where people get it wrong. They're like, no, no, no. The secret is to be, is to be all over the place and disorganized. It's like, sure, but that's how you might learn everything that way. But you'll never get it down onto paper and never get it published unless you become the person who isn't chaotic and everything. So the trick is to be able to switch between the two. And so like you asked me about my routine. That is my routine now. But if I was trying to go into a period where I was wanting to innovate, right now I'm just looking to take action and apply a lot of things. And so right now it serves me best to have a rigid routine. However, if I went into a mode where I was trying to be creative with innovations or coming up with out of the box solutions to problems and things like this, then I would go into a mode of disorder. So I would stay up all night, then kind of sleep whenever I wanted. I'd eat all sorts of, I'd eat ice cream for breakfast and things like that. I'm not even Joking. I do this when I'm trying to break. When I'm trying to solve problems.

Yeah, yeah, because you're trying to take yourself out of the environment that you couldn't solve that problem.

Yeah. Well, if I. If I can't solve the problem, I've got to change who I am.

Right.

That's interesting. But it all goes back to that same concept, kind of how would you tie in? Because that almost sounds contradictory. If someone came in and heard how you do one thing is how you.

Do everything for most of the time.

For most of the time. I guess that should be the caveat.

Yeah, it is. It's not like I said you could find someone who, who wakes up at the same time every day, but you could catch him on one day where he decided he just wanted to eat bad food and sleep in. It doesn't matter. Like that's. That's healthy to do that every now and then. It's over time. It's. And that's why the 30 days is great. You just observe it over 30 days. And that's the only way you can learn. Because everyone can be great for one day. Everyone can wake up on time, dress well and be on. Be in the zone for one day. Like, that's easy. It's a different thing to be in the zone for 31 days straight.

Much different.

Got it.

So the. Really to like, to wrap this up, to like conclude it, I would say if you're experiencing any problems like anywhere in your life, in your business or your finances, like, try to define what that is, like what is this problem? And then look for other areas in your life where this is showing up. If you're not committed, then are you committed to going to bed? Are you committed to waking up? Are you committed to the gym? Are you committed to being healthy? If your business is unhealthy, is your body unhealthy? You know, just look where else these things are showing up and solve it here and it will solve here instead of just trying to solve it here and ignoring what's here, because that doesn't work. It's like trying to, like, it's like this hand trying to hide like what it's doing from this hand. It doesn't work very well.

Right?

Yeah.

Awesome.

And so the real way to tie it up into like one sentence is like the way you do one thing is the way you do everything when you observe it, like over a long enough period of time. And if you want to solve something, solve it in your personal life first.