Sam Carpenter explains how to build systems that let you earn more while working less. He breaks life into linked processes, uses a project-engineer approach to fitness, and argues that 98% perfect beats chasing the final percentage point.
Hey, everybody, Ramit Sethi here from I Will Teach youh to Be Rich and Ramit's brain trust. You know, one of the things that really surprises people is that I spend less than one hour per month on my personal finance system. That means that my savings are automated, my investing automatically happens, and I know exactly how much I have to spend. Now, once you perfect that system, which I describe in my book, you can take a similar systems mindset and you can apply it to all different kinds of areas of life. You can apply it to health and fitness, you can apply it to business, you can even apply it to relationships. And that's why I'm so excited to speak to our guest today, Sam Carpenter, the author of a book on systems. And he went deep into systems, the psychology, how to use them, common objections that we all have, and how you can best apply these to all parts of your life. Take a look.
Thank you, Ramit. So Sam Carpenter and I wrote the book Work the the Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less. And I love talking about this. The systems mindset is my passion in life, and I very much appreciate, Ramit, you having me here today.
Sam, thanks for being here. Very excited to talk to another lover of systems. So I want to jump right into the mindset behind systems, because systems are one of those things that we all know we should do, but when it gets down to it, there's a lot of objections and barriers we have. So what is a systems mindset?
Well, most of us go through life with the idea that our lives are a mishmash. What I like to say, what I like to describe as a swirling mass of sights, sounds, and events, and we're kind of struggling for survival. And I went through 50 years of my life like that. And about 15 years ago with my small business, I had what I call a mini enlightenment. And what I realized was that my life is a collection of independent, unrelated systems. And I go through every day seeing that. And one leads to two, leads to three leads to four equals a result. So every result in our life is preceded by a process. Most people don't get that.
But what you're really talking about is taking an experimental or engineering view of your life instead of this life happens to me. You've described yourself as a project engineer, right? I wonder if you can share a little bit about.
Sure. Let's talk about the gym, because I go to the gym too. So I'm a project engineer when it comes to my exercise. So as project engineer, you look down on a task to be done. And typically a project engineer has a lot to do with the design of a project. And I come from a power background. Electricity power, high voltage background. And I was a project engineer. I talk about it in the book, but I looked down on this project of what kind of a body do I want? I don't want to. I don't want to be all big on top. I want to be an aerobic kind of a guy. That's what I decided. I want to be thin and lean and agile and flexible. So I looked down and on paper. Well, maybe it wasn't on paper, but in my head, it took me a few seconds to realize I need to do yoga. I need to go to the gym and get on the Stairmaster. And I broke that down. The StairMaster has to be so hard you can barely breathe. You. If you're reading on a StairMaster, it's not hard enough. And I just have to do it for 30 minutes.
So you talk about another philosophy, which I think is really interesting, and you say Perfect is being 98% accurate. Can you talk about that?
Well, Tim Ferriss talks about it in a different way. He says, you want to be. What is it? Efficient rather than.
You want to be effective rather than efficient.
Effective rather than efficient. That's it. Effective rather than. It's the same thing. So the trying to get that extra 2% perfection is really kind of stupid in most cases, unless you're firing off a rocket ship or something. But the time you spend in that last 2% doesn't really matter. But it takes a lot of time to get something perfect.
I learned this in college. And you could get a 90% with, you know, with relative ease. If you were good at the subject and you'd studied to get a 92, 93%, okay, you could do that. To get a 98, 99 is prohibitively difficult. You could do it, but it might take you an additional 40 hours. So the question is, where do you want to fall on that spectrum? Is it worth it? And I think so many of us are guilty of this. We just think I have to be 100% on everything. But that's not true.
It's crazy, because the rest of your life suffers when you do that.
