MBA872 Guest Teacher Matt Bodnar- High Leverage Thinking

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business, but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things, of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with Intuit QuickBooks. QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts. So doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform.

Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Product perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals.

Hey O welcome to the Hundred Doll, the business podcast that serves you up deep dive lessons to help you build the business that you want. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA and webinar Ninja. And today's lesson is a guest teacher lesson. On our guest teacher lessons we invite an expert to teach you a lesson in their area of expertise. Today's guest teacher is Matt Bodnar and he's gonna be teaching you a lesson on high leverage thinking. Now what does this mean? It means how to leverage your efforts, your time so you have a greater impact, a greater impact on other people on the world. He's going to give you some really solid examples of great entrepreneurs, past and present on how they leverage their time, their effort, what they create so they can do more and live better. To be quite honest, what I love about this lesson in particular is that it's straight to the point and it's actionable. Matt gets laser focused on two of the most important reasons why people are successful and they're able to leverage their time and have such a great effect on the world. You're going to discover the two key principles to higher leverage thinking. You're going to learn from stories about Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Carnegie, Rockefeller and more in today's lesson. The advice that Matt gives in his lesson is going to really take your business and yourself as an entrepreneur to, to the next level. And that's not some sort of cliche thing. If you're feeling stagnant, if you're feeling stuck, then today's advice, Today's lesson is gonna take everything you do and notch it up a bit. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's guest teacher, Matt Bodner from ScienceOfSuccess. Co was named to Forbes 30 under 30. He's also the host of the Science of Success podcast, which has over 850,000 downloads. Pretty impressive. He focuses on decision making, insights from experts and understanding psychology. And in today's lesson, he's going to focus on high leverage thinking. So without further ado, I'm going to pass it on to Matt. But I'll be back to wrap up the lesson and give you my takeaways. But let's get started. Take it away, Matt.

Hey everybody, My name is Matt Bodnar and I'm the host of the Science of Success podcast. Thank you for joining me. Today I'm going to be teaching you about the concept of high leverage thinking. So let's get down to business. There's a non linear relationship between time and value creation. What do I mean by that? When you look at somebody like Bill Gates, let's use him as an example. Bill Gates doesn't have any more time than I do. He doesn't have any more time than you do. And yet, when you look at the value that Bill Gates has created in the world, when you look at the value that he creates every single day, he's not creating 10x more value than you. He's not creating 100x more value than me. He's creating millions of times more value. Why is that? It's because Bill Gates is more high leverage. I've studied deeply some of the most successful investors and thinkers in the world. People like Warren Buffett, people like his business partner Charlie Munger, people like Ray Dalio, who runs the largest and most successful hedge fund of all time. People the titans of industry like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. From studying those incredibly successful individuals, some of the most successful people in the history of our society, I've discovered two fundamental principles that have made them so successful. And both of those things have to do with them being more high leverage than anybody else. So what are the two key principles of high leverage thinking? The first is to improve your ability to make better decisions. And the second is to hire people to replace yourself. Let's dig into the first idea. Improving your decision making ability. If you think about making better decisions, improving your decision making ability is like compound interest for your mind. It cascades through everything you do. A 1% improvement in your ability to think, in your ability to make better decisions, and your ability to understand reality more deeply is a 1% improvement in everything you do from that point forward in your life. So how can we improve our ability to make better decisions? The first thing is to focus on studying things that never change over time. If you understand the fundamental principles that govern reality, you're on a much better footing than someone who only focuses on studying tactics that rapidly change. If you're reading the things the next 20 strategies you can use to improve your email conversion rates, that information is going to change dramatically. It's going to be completely different information in 2 years, 5 years, or 10 years from now. If you're mastering and studying the fundamental principles of physics, of psychology, of economics, those things don't change, or they change very slowly over time. And so you're building an edifice of knowledge that's much more robust, that's much more richly grounded in reality, and helps you think more deeply and understand what's actually happening around you. I would suggest embarking on the path of what Charlie Munger calls worldly wisdom. It's the idea of building a toolkit of mental models so that you can better understand reality. We're erroneously taught in school that academic disciplines live in silos, that they're not interconnected. But in order to be true, in order to actually explain reality, all academic disciplines must reflect and understand and incorporate the truths from all other academic disciplines. So what is a mental model? A mental model is a simple conceptual idea that explains in some way a the way that something works in the world. Now, we don't have time to go into some specific mental models today, but I wanted to share a few examples of different mental models from different academic disciplines to give you a sense of what they are and how they work. From psychology, mental models would be things like the idea of confirmation bias, the concept of anchoring social proof, and many others from the 8020 principle and the concept of time value of money from economics, the notions of expected value, or the concept of base rates from mathematics, the prisoner's dilemma from game theory, the concept of natural selection from biology, or the concept of breakpoints and critical thresholds from physics and chemistry. All of these are just examples of different mental models. The way to build a toolkit of mental models that will let you better understand and explain reality, that will improve your ability to think more effectively and make better decisions is to take the top ideas from every 101 course of every major academic discipline and distill those down into, let's say the top 10 mental models from each of those courses and internalize and build that knowledge into a coherent lattice work in your mind that explains reality and that connects all of that knowledge in a coherent way. Remember, you want to focus on building a toolkit of mental models that based on knowledge that never changes over time. The way to improve your decision making ability to become a high leverage thinker is to focus on building a robust toolkit of mental models that can coherently explain reality. Now let's look at the second strategy that titans of industry use to become more high leverage. And this is hiring people and constantly replacing yourself I want to start with two different quotes. The first is from Andrew Carnegie. More specifically, this is from the book Andrew Carnegie, but it does quote the man himself. When A.B. farquhar, a Pennsylvania businessman, boasted that he was in his office every morning by seven in the morning and was the last one to leave in the evening, Carnegie laughed at him. You must be a lazy man if it takes you 10 hours to do a day's work. What I do is to get good men and I never give them orders. My directions seldom go beyond suggestions and here in the morning I get reports from them. Within an hour I have disposed of everything, sent out all my suggestions and the day's work is done and I am ready to go out and enjoy myself.

Want to buy a car your way? Of course you do. That's why CarMax offers an experience designed just for you. Want to start online, then visit the lot, then go back online? Sure. Want to talk to a real person or chat online? Either works. Want to take your time and compare all the makes and models? No problem. Then make up some time by filling out the paperwork at home and schedule express pickup or home delivery. Done. When it comes to how you buy, CarMax puts you in the driver's seat. Want to drive? CarMax delivery restrictions apply. See CarMax.com for details.

If your team isn't using ClickUp, you're wasting time. And data proves it. 61% of knowledge workers manage work more than doing it. Switching apps a thousand times a day? That's work sprawl and costs millions. ClickUp replaces 20 apps with convergence, uniting projects, docs and chats while AI super agents handle the busy work. Join 4 million teams using ClickUp to finish work 30% faster, try it free and get 15% off AI upgrades@ClickUp.com podcast that's C L I C K U P dot com podcast.

The next quote is from John D. Rockefeller when he was speaking to a young recruit at Standard Oil offices. Has anyone given you the law of these offices? No. It is this. Nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it. As soon as you can get someone whom you can rely on, train them in the work, sit down, cock up your heels, and think of some way for the Standard Oil to make some money. Let those two quotes sink in for a minute. These are two of the wealthiest and most successful people in the history of our planet. In fact, inflation adjusted, John D. Rockefeller is the richest person of all time. What they're both saying is that you don't always have to be an expert. In fact, you should be replacing yourself. You should constantly be hiring better people under you to execute. One of the most effective ways to get leverage in your life is to hire great people and put them under you. But in order to do that, there's a couple things you have to do. You have to let go of the need to do everything. Oftentimes the hardest part in doing that is getting out of your own way and, and trusting other people and giving them an opportunity to execute. You need to be able to hire people that are smarter and better than you. And mastering the art of recruiting and retaining talented people is an entire study in and of itself. You need to give these people lots of responsibility. You need to constantly be replacing yourself and figuring out what is your area of strength. What are you really good at? What is something that you enjoy doing? If you're doing anything in your life and in your work that you don't enjoy and that you're not good at, you should immediately be finding ways to automate it, to replace it, or to delegate it to somebody else. So let's recap what we learned today. The most successful people in the history of our planet didn't get there because of harder work. They got there because they leveraged themselves, they leveraged their time, and they leveraged their ability to think to the point where they were producing an exponentially larger amount of value for the same amount of time invested as anybody else. And you can replicate and deploy those same lessons in your life again. My name is Matt Bodner, the host of the Science of Success. If you want to embark on the path of becoming a More high leverage thinker and harness the incredible power of improving your ability to make better decisions. I've created a completely free guide just for $100 MBA listeners like you. It's called Four Steps to Making Better Decisions. And it goes much deeper, explains in depth and gives tons of resources to explore more on how to become a more high leverage thinker. You can get it completely for free by going to scienceofsuccess. Co. That's scienceofsuccess Co. Better. Thanks again for joining me today. Back to Omar.

What a great lesson by Matt Bodnar. I love the way he focused on decision making and how to hire people to replace yourself. These are two critical principles that you need to instill in your business now, sooner than later. I learned this the hard way. Decision making is really what takes most of my time, making decisions on a daily basis, whether that's solving problems or innovating. But if you really want to take your business to the next level past that, you also have to start thinking about hiring people to replace what you do right now. If I think about the things I did when I got started, I did everything too much. No wonder I was so burnt out and tired and have so many gray hairs now. That's not sustainable. You can hustle all you want for a year or two, but you can't do that forever. You got to start putting things in place to get people to replace you and replace what you do. And that really gives you freedom. I think sometimes we forget that as an entrepreneur, you're an orchestrator. You're the person that puts people together, gets the best talent, people that are smarter, more talented than you in all the different areas of your business and gets them to do all the work, gets them to make those decisions, give them ownership over the project. That's your role. Your role is not to do everything. You should take the time to lead and to inspire people and also to enjoy the fruits of your labor. You want to have some time, some downtime to enjoy life, but you can't do that if you are required for everything in your business. This is why I love this point that Matt makes and I love the story he gives about Rockefeller where the climate or the culture of his company was train somebody else to do what you do and move it down the line. Why? Because you can't just have one person understanding one thing in the business. What if that person needs to move on? What if that person gets sick or that person decides to, you know, quit? Whatever it is, there's got to be more than one person that understands what that person does and can just pick up the pieces and take over. If that person's you, you are not doing it right again. You're an orchestrator. I also love the fact that he highlights you have to give people responsibility. You got to let them have ownership over the project and it doesn't mean that you have no ownership again. He says that you should use your strengths and focus on that. Love this lesson. Thanks so much, Matt Bodnar for this great guest lesson. Matt wants you to continue your learning so he has a guide that you can access called 4 Steps to Better decisions and you can get that@ScienceOfSuccess co better. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love today's episode, let us know in an itunes rating interview. Takes two seconds. Just search us on iTunes the $100 NBA show and drop us a short rating and review. We'd love to read it. We read every single one of them. And don't forget to subscribe so that way the episodes find you. Instead of you trying to find the episodes, you'll have the episode downloaded and all set on your device automatically. That's it for me today guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. I really believe that businesses have different stages in life. Just like the human being. You know, we have a stage where we're babies and then we're toddlers and then we're kids. You know, we're young children and then we're teens and young adults. Then we're middle aged, then we get a little older. You get the point. And every stage, we learn things, we do things differently, we have different responsibilities, we have different priorities. And you have to see yourself in the same way with your business. What you did your first few days in your business, your first month when you're in business, your first year in business shouldn't be the same of what you did and what you're responsible for shouldn't be the same now, maybe a couple years after the business has been going than it was the first day you started your business. You got to evolve, you got to change. I love the book title that says what got you here won't get you there. Meaning what you did before is really not going to get you where you need to go in the future. It got you where you are now. You know, those actions got you where you are now, but you want a different result now. So you got to do different actions. You know, you got to take different action. That's just a reminder for first and foremost, myself as well as you. All right. I hope that helps and hope to see you in the next episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Hey, Fidelity Can I get a second opinion on stocks in the Fidelity app?

With Fidelity, it's easy to get an outside opinion from independent experts in a single score. And then, when you're ready, trade US stocks and ETFs with no commissions.

That's right.

I am always right.

Investing involves risk, including risk of loss, online, US equity trades and ETFs and retail fidelity account sell order assessment fee not included, some account types and securities excluded. Details@fidelity.com commissions Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC member NYSE, SIPC.