Transcription
If you want to get more done in 10 weeks than others do in a year, there's really only one skill you need, and it's not focus or prioritization. And the 100 productivity books that you and I have read oftentimes just beat around the bush of that one thing so they can fill enough pages and satisfy the publishers and call themselves a bestselling author.
The founder of the most valuable company on earth is the [snorts] one who preached this all the time. And if you look at the growth of Apple, then you see something that has nothing to do with this topic. um, you see that their growth is exponential. This only goes until 2015, which is when they're worth 250 billion. Now they're worth 4 trillion, which is more than that. My point is, results are exponential. You see this everywhere, right? Like with my YouTube channel, for example, it took me 9 months to get my first 3,000 subscribers, and then it took me 3 months to get to 100,000. Let's say you want to get in shape, for example. Well, you don't want to exponentially lose weight, but it gets easier over time, right? You start losing some fat, you start building some muscle, you look good in the mirror, you build the habit, working out is more fun, and over time the results compound, and then you end up being fit for life. So, that's the first thing. Results are exponential, or at least they compound.
However, in the beginning, it is very difficult to get compounding results because no one reads your blog, so no one can share it. Working out just sucks, whatever. And you just don't make that much progress. And to get compounding results or momentum, you need escape velocity, which is like this very strong push in the beginning to get these compounding results. A rocket, for example, uses 90% of its entire fuel tank to get out of Earth's gravity, right? So it can float in space. That's 90%. Makes you wonder why they don't just drop it off the side of the earth, which is anyways, results need a ton of focus in the beginning to take off. For example, when you're launching a business, right, or you want to take your business to the next level, if you only spend 50% of your focus on those things that actually move the needle, then you're not going to really get any results. If you put 75% focus there, you get somewhere. Whereas, let's say you go all in, you pause all other projects and distractions, you not just get 100% of the result, you get more than what you might initially set.
Now, let's get to the uncomfortable part. How many projects are you currently pursuing in your business, in your life? Maybe you're trying to build a personal brand. Maybe you're also trying to get in the best shape of your life at the same time. And how much of your tank is really going towards each of them? I remember in my early 20s when I would set goals for the year, I would set multiple ones for each area of my life, right? Like I want to go on this many dates and maybe I'll even find a girl that I really like. Then I want to add 10 pounds of muscle. I also want to triple my business. And I basically split up my tank into all these different buckets, and by the end, sure, I made some kind of progress in each of them, but none of the goals were really achieved, and I was kind of in the same spot as before. It's like firing five rockets with 20% fuel, and they none of them really take off. I mean, they kind of land somewhere, you know, we made it to the North Pole, but we're not transformed. We're not in space. And it's crazy because I worked so hard. I was relentless, and by the end, sure, I added a couple pounds of muscle, sure, I, you know, business did better, but not really.
And this is where the number one skill comes in so that you hit escape velocity. And here's how uh Steve Applearma guy applied it. You see this dip here in 1995? In 1997, Steve Jobs came back, and he cut 70% of the product line. And then that same year, they had massive profits again. And then from there, they started getting compounding results. The number one skill is not focus. It's saying no. Focus is not really a thing because we say, "Oh, I've got these three projects or these three priorities, and I got to focus on this one right now." We can't. We're just collecting them. People think focus means saying yes. But it means saying no to the hundred other good ideas. Take my hand, my friend. By the end of this video, you and I are going to quit one project or goal that we should have quit a long time ago, but we just haven't had the balls or the ovaries to do it yet. Okay? And after that, we'll experience massive growth with way less work. We'll have a lot more apples, too. And everyone watching this has one of those things, too. Even if you only have one business or you say you're really focused. And if you're new here, oh, hey, I'm Leon Hendris. On this channel, I share what I learned from the mistakes of other people who took my advice. Consider unsubscribing. Let me walk you through seven things that really helped me say no and decide. And the first one was already understanding escape velocity.
Now, in this next one, let's identify what we should actually say no to. Let's get specific. And maybe you already know what it is in the back of your mind. Cuz the problem is we might think, "Oh, I say no all the time. I prioritize what's most important." But that's not the point. People who worked for Steve Jobs said that he would often ask them, "What have you said no to recently?" And this one guy was saying that over time he learned, "Okay, I should probably have an answer ready. I should prepare something to say." And whenever he would do that, Steve Jobs' response was, "No, no, that doesn't count. That's an obvious no." Cuz we're already saying no to a lot of things, right? But they're obvious nos. And the point is, it's not about saying no to unimportant stuff or bad ideas. It's about saying no to something that is really important, that is a really good idea, that will work really well, and maybe you've already put a lot of work into it. That's the thing that we must say no to, not the obvious stuff. Cuz when Steve Jobs cut down 70% of his apple trees, it wasn't cuz, you know, they were obviously bad products and they weren't performing at all. Cuz anyone could have done that. That's easy. It's the thing that you really want to do, but shouldn't. At least maybe not right now. And just put it to the side.
And I have earned the right to poke you with this because I recently did it myself. For the past year, I have recorded podcasts, right? And I've tried different formats and and I took a break from this main channel because I was just kind of burnt out from it and directionless. Decided to come back, and I realized, okay, this is really the most important thing. If I build this main channel, then it builds up everything else. It's the most profitable. It's working, and it will actually support the podcast. And so all of a sudden I had two projects, right? Main channel, podcast, and then also I wanted to monetize, maybe launching a school community, and then also started working with entrepreneurs again, right? So all of a sudden I had these three or four things on my plate, and I knew that if I reduced the number of projects that I'm working on, I will get way more results. And listen, on the podcast, I have best-selling authors coming on, uh, billionaires that are coming up, uh, role models of mine, past mentors of mine, and it's tough to say no to that because it's like, ah, I've been putting so much work into it, and like, uh, let's just pause it for now.
Now, what is yours? What's this one project or focus or thing that you're trying to grow or maintain where you feel this resistance coming up now as I'm challenging you to shut it down potentially? And your mind starts racing telling you, "I've put so much work into this," or "It doesn't take that much time. It's okay. It's kind of adjacent." And that's your mind telling you. But maybe deep down, your gut, your intuition, that quiet whisper is telling you, "I think he's right." When you have the courage to follow that whisper, you're about to experience massive growth. And once you decide, "Okay, I'm going to pause this at the very least. I can always come back to it." There's relief. And for now, just cut it because you can always come back to it again. If it's truly important enough, you will focus on it again. You will bring it back. Cuz if you're not adding back 10% of what you cut, you're not cutting enough. Said by the guy who literally hits escape velocity all the time and shoots actual rockets into space. It's just the law of the universe that there's order and chaos, and the default is just to add more, right? To do more until it becomes unmanageable. And then oftentimes it just takes an outside pressure or force or a bad event for us to say, "Okay, I can't do this anymore. I need to stop doing this." And until then, you keep paying the price of massively diminished output. Unless you just decide right now.
Now, this next one will actually get you excited about saying no to that one thing. Here's a good way to visualize this. If you have the courage to cut one of your priorities or projects or goals that are distracting you from the most important thing, the one goal that would make everything else easier or unnecessary, then let's say you go from 20% focus on your main thing to then 40% because you reallocate that focus. Your surface area doesn't double, it quadruples. And with it, you get exponentially more results. Going back to the previous visual that I showed you, if you go from 40% to 60%, it's even more. If you were to go from 60 to 80, even more. If you go to 100, that's when you're a complete psychomaniac who is having no life, right? And all you focus on is that one thing. But the results you get are not even comparable to the person that only puts 20% in. It would be so easy for me to say, you know what, I'm just going to spend one day a week on the podcast, just interview someone, then get a new guest and whatever. But I knew that if I spent that day and that focus on the main channel, it compounds even more. If I focus on better packaging, better videos, I will get more views. I will therefore make more money. I can pay my editor more. I can get better videos going because of that. And it just compounds over time, right? And that's where you hit escape velocity. And massive momentum is built.
And let's say there's another creator who, you know, let's just say he's a competitor. He also makes videos, and then he also has a podcast, and he also has a second channel and a newsletter, and he's also writing a book on the side, and then also runs a business, and he's also launching a software company. I celebrate because I know they won't be able to compete with me on this, which is the most important thing, because if you don't have videos that perform and that are really great, none of the other things are going to work. The best athletes, they celebrate when they see their competitors going to the clubs and signing advertising deals and just splitting their focus because they know, "Okay, I'm going to be spending more time in the gym, more time practicing, and I'm going to smoke them on the field." What would happen if your only goal this year was the most important thing on your list? Whether it's transforming your health, getting jacked, or it is massively growing your business, or it's transforming your love life, while everyone else is trying to do all these different things at once, you will actually do it. And again, going back to Apple, while all these other companies were splitting their focus on all these different product lines, they were stacking their focus to get massive leverage. If you leverage focus stacking, you will outcompete everyone.
This next one will prevent the biggest trap that we fall into when we're taking on too many projects. Let me know if you can relate to this. There's something that you're doing right now, or maybe that you have done, that only takes a little bit of time. So, it's very easy to justify, "You know what, I'm already spending 90% of my time on the important stuff. This doesn't really take that much. It this this other thing, I can keep this." But here's the thing. Time is the wrong measure because you could only spend one hour a week dealing with something, but it takes up 50% of your headspace. This might rub some people the wrong way. Uh, friend of mine is running an AI company that is doing really well. He has a couple of co-founders. They're crushing it. Massive billion-dollar potential. And it's it just lends itself to his zone of genius. Like he's super smart. [snorts] And he also has some real estate on the side that's already set up. He's already put in all this work, and he has tenants that pay him every month. But it's so funny, while he was living with me, I would hear him on the phone with his tenants trying to resolve some conflict that they had. That actually, I think the the roommates, they were not getting along, and he was trying to like fix that. But it only takes one hour a week. It only takes every once in a while checking in, right? And every time I have a friend who has some real estate, the nightmare stories you hear, they don't take much time, but they take a ton of headspace. And I just wonder [snorts] I just wonder what would happen to his productivity, his headspace, his possibility if he just got rid of the real estate. He sold it off, even though he put in all this time, and it only takes an hour a week or like a few hours here and there, and he had all this headspace to purely focus on his AI company. It only takes one hour in a week for you to fight with your significant other, and the whole week you're spending most of your time thinking about that and stressing about that. So maybe just break up with... No, no, I'm not saying that. Maybe a bad example. And it's always funny when I hear this from a friend who says, "Oh, I can probably just hire someone to run the business for me." And then it's fully automated, but who's managing that person? It's still you. It still takes away from your headspace. My point is, it's not about the time you spend on it. You must prioritize your headspace.
This next one is fascinating, and it ties straight into it. You may have heard stories of scientists like Einstein or inventors who were chewing on a problem, and they just couldn't find the solution to the math equation or whatever it was, and they would take a nap, and in their dreams, they would literally have the insight, and they would wake up and scribble it down, and boom, they had the solution. There are countless examples like that, or Beethoven would literally go for walks to get inspiration and and and come up with these beautiful symphonies. And you and I know this. When we're in the shower, we just have some really great ideas. It's because our brain waves change, and we, yeah, we have a different level of consciousness that taps into different ideas and possibilities. And then you often times have the best breakthrough ideas when you're not working, when you're doing, let's call it, passive thinking. And whatever your most important thing is, it's probably something difficult, something that, you know, it takes some time to chew on it, and you really have to like consider all these different possibilities. However, when you have multiple priorities and multiple things that you're working on, there's only so much time that you can spend on it, and you're really only going a foot deep when you should be going like 10 ft deep to really crack through this problem and and transform it. And if you've ever been single-mindedly obsessed about something, you come up with such great solutions and ideas because you keep going another foot deep, and another foot deep, and another foot deep, right? Like I know that when I play chess for a while with my friends, I would literally have dreams about it. I would think about it all the time, like just passively, and I would toss and turn at night, and I would be like, "Oh no, the rook is going to get me. Watch out for the knight. I'm going to get forked." If I want to become a chess master, that's great. But if not, that's wasted real estate. That's wasted opportunity because I could be thinking about the biggest bottleneck in my business right now, the biggest challenge that I have in my life right now. And a good rule of thumb is whatever is occupying your mind most, that's where energy goes. I didn't intend for that to rhyme, but that's that's fire, dude. If you're having girl or boy problems, I feel bad for you, son, cuz you have 99 problems in your mind at a time, and a person shouldn't be one. So, limit the number of things that occupy your headspace to use the power of passive thinking.
But let's be real here. It's not realistic to say, "Okay, I'm only going to be thinking about one thing." Life is really busy. There's always things that are coming up. This next one will help with that. I've heard this really good analogy where life is like juggling these different balls, right? Like you have health, you have a relationship, you have finances, all these different areas. And a lot of these balls are made of rubber, right? So, if you drop them, it's just going to bounce back. It's going to be fine. But there's one or two that are made of glass. And if you drop it once and it shatters, it'll be really hard to recover it. The glass balls that you don't want to shatter, uh, your health, your marriage, raising your kids, right? Yeah. Like, you can't just be like, "Hey kids, I'm uh I've just saw this video. I think uh I'm going to focus on the business for the next three years. See you then." So, how do we get insanely focused while also not completely dropping the other areas of our life? The solution is the difference between immersion and maintenance. I was talking to Dr. Mike Israel about this when he was on my podcast, and we talked about building muscle, and he confirmed it as well. People way underestimate what it takes to actually grow muscle, and they way overestimate what it takes to just maintain. And he told me, "Yeah, when they look at the studies, they're continuously stunned by how little it actually takes to just maintain a great body." I think he said that even if you're jacked, it really only takes 2 hours a week of, I I I think a mediocre workout to maintain what you already have built. But in order to build muscle, you need to eat way more than you think. You need to train way harder than you think, especially if you've already advanced. And a lot of people are just right here where they're not doing enough to actually grow, but they're doing way too much if they just wanted to maintain. And really, that's all they're doing. They're just maintaining muscle right now. You know, people talk about the slight edge, which is this idea that if you just do a little bit every day, then you will get great results over time. I think that's that's bollocks. I don't even know what bollocks means, but I think yeah, I think it's a good way to describe it. What is bollocks? Oh, it means testicles. Okay. Yeah, it's testicles. I think in order to create breakthrough results, you need immersion. And then once you have those results, then I think the slight edge is great to maintain it. It's great for maintenance. How much time and effort does it take to find a life partner, get to know them, date, propose, wedding, and get married? And then from there, yes, relationships take work. But do they really take that much work? Because if all I do is spend five minutes every day on acknowledging my partner, checking in with them, right? Surprising them, like just 5 minutes every single day, I think you'll have a great marriage. Am I wrong? Am I I'm not saying spend 5 minutes with them, but spend 5 minutes checking in, surprising them, like coming up with something that that makes their day. And I think the reason why most marriages fail is because of that 5 minutes. So the point is to strategically oscillate between maintenance and immersion.
This next one is if you are worried about making the wrong decision about what to focus on, cuz you might be like, "What if I miss a great idea? What if I make the wrong choice and I focus on the wrong thing?" This one's going to allow you to pick the best one. I wonder if you can relate to this. How many times have you had such a great idea? You talked to a friend about it, or you were in the shower, you did some idle time, passive thinking, and you're just like, "Oh my god, this is so genius. I have to do that." And you start writing it down, and you get excited. You make progress on it. You you start taking the first few actions. It happens to me all the time. I get excited about an idea, and I like, oh, I'm going to have to pursue this. I mean, if you look at my desk right here, I have so many sticky notes. I'm like, "You have to do this. Wow, this is so great." And after a while, I look at these, and I'm like, "All right. I mean, it's good that I wrote it down, but eh." Now, the reason why I have so many sticky notes out here is because it just helps me with my impulse. Because what I used to do is pursue these ideas immediately. I would communicate it to a friend. I would be like, "Oh, I'm we're going to do this." Or I would tell my team, "Hey, by the way, we're changing directions." Very bad idea. And what I do now is I just write these down, and I get excited. Maybe I even journal about it, and it makes me feel good and fuzzy. And then I just put them to the side. I capture them somewhere. I have a document, and um, maybe you've already heard this from people like Homozi, but just try it out. Just have one document. Great, incredible ideas. The moment I capture it there, I feel safe. I feel like, okay, I've captured it. I have it. But the key difference for me now is I don't share it with anyone. I don't communicate it. I don't tell my team, for sure, right? And I just leave it there, and I move on with my life because I know that if it keeps coming up and I keep coming back with this idea, maybe I should look at it. And 99% of the time, that's not the case. But the best ideas will stick. It's like this this fear that we have that when we're reading a book, and we're like, "Oh, I I have to I have to remember this. I have to remember this thing from this podcast that I heard or this conference that I went to." And we try to write everything down. We try to capture everything. But the best things that matter most, they will stick. And if you just have that trust, like it will come back to you. So for now, just capture your ideas and review them later.
So what is the thing that you get to say no to right now in your life? How much headspace and leverage and power and freedom would open up? And what incredible results will you be able to get with way less work and way less time because of it? If you want to get insanely focused and find the highest leveraged tasks in your business to know what to say no to, I've got an incredible resource below that you can check out, and this video right here on how this random guy made $100 million in 12 months using a simple journaling exercise. See you there.