Transcription
If you can't sit still, ignore notifications, and focus on one task for eight hours straight, never expect to build anything great. And as uncomfortable as that is, it's also the truth.
Like, I I don't know a single incredibly successful entrepreneur that can't sit down and have hyper-focused periods of time, sometimes weekends, weeks at a time where they don't talk to anyone, and they just hammer away. And it's whether they're coding for software, or they're making some insane marketing campaign and all the email follow-ups and all the text follow-ups and and the affiliate uh you know, promotions and incentives, or someone's who's creating a product that they're designing and they're in the shop and they keep tweaking at it, or there's somebody who's who's hyper-scaling a company and saying, "I'm going to sit in 20 interviews a day for for seven days straight so I can hire 20 people this week because I need to get going." Right?
Like, if you can't sit still and ignore notifications and focus for a day, nothing great will get accomplished. Because it's not about what you want, it's about what's required. And it's and whether that's your best or not is irrelevant. It's just there's a price tag and you got to be willing to pay for it, or you don't get the thing. And a lot of times it's not what you want.
And I I've I I spend a lot of time trying to dispel the concept of like, "Follow your passion," because I think it leads more people astray than it helps. Because it's very easy for someone who's successful, who's already delegated tons of things to only then focus on their area of genius, and then say, "Here from my seat, do what I do." But there's a very big difference between doing what someone does and doing what they did to get there. And I think this is what's lost in a lot of the content that I see in the entrepreneurial space.
And to be clear, whenever I'm trying to get to the next level, I often have to take on things that I don't know how to do, and I have to learn how to do them, which means I have to suck for a period of time. And sucking sucks. But the thing is is you have to be able to embrace that period of time and say like, "This is the cost of greatness."
And so I'll give you something very tactical. So I have timers in a lot of my offices, and my team has adopted this, too, which is I like to time block, which is essentially saying how long do I think this is going to take? And you can do this on a week scale, you can do it on daily level, it depends on the level of project you're tackling. But for me, even on the most micro level, I say, "Okay, how long should this take?" I'll then crank this thing, boop, I think this should take 20 minutes, and then I hit start, and I let the timer go. And if for whatever reason something distracts me, I pause it so that I know that I didn't actually work that period of time. And so what happens is it will give you a very real look at how long you're actually working versus how long you think you're working and you tell other people working and you Instagram how long you're working.
And as I've become more efficient at work, meaning my output per unit of time has gone up, I've realized that there's just been a significant decrease in the distractions that I allow to interrupt me. Again, if you want to stay focused, staying focused is not like zeroing in and saying, "I'm going to do it just like I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to just zoom in on this thing." It's more that focus occurs when you remove everything else. What's left is focus.
And so Jerry Seinfeld has this this famous process that he talks about with writing, and I think writers are also wonderful people for talking to for deep work because it's the nature of the work they do. One of the things that he did, and he has done for years for his stand-up so he can script it out, is that he locks himself in a room that has no windows and has nothing but a yellow notepad and a pen. And he tells himself that he has to go in that room, and he doesn't have to write, but he can't do anything else. And so what ends up happening is that writing occurs as a default. And so focus kind of works the same way. You eliminate everything else by to create focus. You don't try and push harder while also having these disruptions.
So there's three easy ways that I make my phone less distracting. The first is I switch it to grayscale. And so grayscale decreases consumption across all people by 30% ish, and that's research backed, which is pretty cool. The second thing is turning off all notifications across all apps on your phone. Because you never want your app to be dictating when it's convenient for the app to disrupt you. Like how ridiculous is that? But we let apps have that permission. Most phones and people want to push notifications to you. I want to pull them when it's convenient for me. The third thing is other people. And so I have a mode on my phone where no one can get through. And when I do that, then I can reach out to them when it's convenient for me. Because if it's actually an emergency, call 911. And if it's not a true emergency, then it can wait.
And my team wanted to remind me that I don't email. I heard in I think it was like 2016 that Bill Clinton didn't use email. And I was like, if he's the president he doesn't use email, I can not use email. And so my team doesn't contact me via email. And so if you can eliminate entire channels, that's also an easier way to concentrate fewer flows of communication.
Real quick, if you're business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the $100 million scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page you can book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.