Act with Urgency

And so a big thing that richer people do is that they will act with urgency. And I would say this is just not even richer people. This is entrepreneurs specifically that I'm making this video for is that they act with urgency. All right?

And so you can tell in some ways how how successful someone's going to be by how quickly they do things. The gap between thoughts and action. And so this is something I personally work on a lot which is like how quickly between when I make a decision to do something does it actually occur. And you can improve your potency as a person, how powerful you are. By decreasing the gap between thoughts and action.

Like if you think about the hypothetical extreme of this, the god figure if you will, thoughts and reality are one and the same. He thinks planets and universes and they appear. And so that would be the ultimate demonstration of power in my opinion. And so we can approximate that. We can get as close to that as we can by shrinking the time it takes between when we think and when we decide and then when we ultimately do.

When you don't have any more information to collect in order to make a decision, then you make the decision. And you make the decision by eliminating alternatives. So like literally the word decide comes from decadere, which is Latin for to cut off. And so the question is, what thing are you eliminating by making the decision that you're going to make?

And a really easy tactical thing is is whenever you say, "I'm going to get this done by the end of the week," ask yourself, "Can I get it done by the end of the day?" And that seems like a very small hack, but that increases your pace of progress by 7x. And so if you hear that, you're like, "Wow, 7x." It's like, yeah, and for that reason there are people who are working 100 times faster than you. And I think that this is a really good cultural thing which is, uh, you can just say end of day, not end of week, and not end of month, end of week. So in each of the instances, this is a 4x increase, this is a 7x increase, right? And you can even go end of day goes into end of hour.

Now, this is one that Ila talks about a lot and she's a master operator is that she heard this from a mentor. She said, "If it's a five-minute task and you have five minutes, do it now." And so, the amount of times where I'm like, "Hey, we should do this thing," and then literally in 60 seconds it's handled by Ila like while I'm just walking around talking, just like shooting ideas out there, is baffling. And so her speed of like, that's a great idea, it's already been, you know, delegated out, like she doesn't keep things on her plate.

And so there's this big falseness that I think is propagated by a lot of the social media world because it feels good and to get lots of shares because it gives people permission to be lazy. It gives people permission to tell themselves that they're great just the way they are. I wholeheartedly reject that entire notion. The idea that they sell you is that you're young. You've got time. And I think that is false because all this does is extend how long it takes you to remember that number one, tomorrow isn't guaranteed.

Like I just looked at my newsfeed this morning and I, there was a guy that I knew who's my age and he just died of stomach cancer. Really sad. Really nice guy. Wife and three kids, into fitness, really in shape. Just a freak thing that happened. And so the assumption that you've got time assumes that you know you're going to live forever, that you know you're going to live to 100. And we know that that's not true.

And let me put this in perspective. Three out of 10,000 people live to 100. And so everyone has this assumption in their mind that they're like, "Yeah, I'm at 50, so I'm going to make it to 100." Yeah. Well, you've got a 3 in 10,000 shot at doing that. Very unlikely. More realistically, you'll die at the median, which is 74 for men in the US, which means that at 37, you're actually at the halfway point, just in years.

But if you adjust for the increase in speed of time, so the same reason that your kid at five years old thinks that something takes forever when you say it's going to happen next year and when you're 40 something that happens next year feels like you blink your eyes and it's there, is that when you're five, one year is 20% of your life. When you're 40, one year is 2 and a half% of your life. And so it very much in real way is nine times faster than it is for your five-year-old. And so it's my belief that as we get older, we don't become more patient. Time just moves faster. And so if you adjust for that time speed, your midpoint isn't 37. It's closer to 21.

And so this is also why in my opinion when you think back on your life, you have so much meat in the first 20 years. So much stuff happens, all these material life events. And it's because in that time period, it was half of your life. And then after that, everything happens real fast. And so what you have to realize is one, tomorrow isn't guaranteed. Two, nothing is going to be easy. Just get over it. Every time you think, "Oh, this could look," just get immediately skip to, "Oh, that's not true. There's something I don't know about that." Just skip to it.

The faster you can train that muscle that as soon as you have this FOMO, just slow down and realize that you don't know enough. Three, it takes time to get good. There's no one who's good at anything that was immediately good at it. And the people who are immediately good at it, I remember telling a professor, I was like, "You know, I've just naturally been good at languages." He was like, "When you were a kid, did you have multiple languages in your household?" I was like, "Well, yeah, I'm bilingual." And he's like, "What are you even talking about? like you literally started with that. So of course languages are easier for you." And so the thing is is that the people who have things that come naturally to them, they just only came because they forgot the work that generalize to the new skill.

Once you realize that it takes time and repetitions to get good, then you also realize that the sooner you start, the sooner you get. And don't stop until you do.

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