Creating Conditions for Success | Ep 708

Primary Topic

This episode is about how entrepreneurs can strategically manage their time and attention to foster conditions that enhance success, particularly focusing on the differentiation between high-leverage activities and daily operational tasks.

Episode Summary

In this episode of "The Game with Alex Hormozi," the discussion centers on creating optimal conditions for entrepreneurial success. Alex introduces the concept by drawing from a metaphor involving a horse: to make it drink, one must create conditions that leave it no other choice. This approach is applied to business, where Alex stresses the importance of setting up an environment conducive to productivity and focus. He advocates for dividing work into two types: "maker" and "manager" modes, each requiring different scheduling and focus. Alex's insights delve into the nuances of prioritizing tasks that drive significant business outcomes over routine administrative duties. By managing one's "decision juice" carefully and creating an environment with fewer distractions, entrepreneurs can significantly enhance their effectiveness and achieve their goals more rapidly.

Main Takeaways

  1. The importance of creating an environment that naturally leads to productivity and success.
  2. Differentiation between 'maker' and 'manager' work modes and optimizing each for maximum efficiency.
  3. Strategic management of decision-making energy to prevent fatigue and maintain focus on high-impact tasks.
  4. The value of structured scheduling to minimize disruptions during high-focus periods.
  5. Tips on saying 'no' to preserve time for high-priority tasks and reduce inefficient multitasking.

Episode Chapters

1: Introduction to Success Conditions

Alex Hormozi discusses setting up conditions for success in business, drawing parallels with a metaphor about leading a horse to water. He emphasizes the importance of creating an environment that fosters the desired action. Alex Hormozi: "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. But if you salt the horse's mouth, you can guarantee it will drink."

2: Maker vs. Manager Schedules

The differentiation between 'maker' and 'manager' work modes is explored, emphasizing the need for uninterrupted time blocks for creative or strategic work, contrasting with the manager’s schedule filled with short, frequent tasks. Alex Hormozi: "A maker's schedule should be empty to allow for deep, focused work, whereas a manager's schedule is optimized by filling every slot available."

3: Managing Decision Fatigue

Alex discusses the concept of 'decision fatigue' and how managing one's mental energy can lead to more productive workdays and better business outcomes. Alex Hormozi: "Willpower is a finite resource. Decision fatigue sets in by the end of the day, so prioritize your most important decisions earlier."

Actionable Advice

  1. Define Your Work Mode: Clearly delineate when you are in 'maker' vs. 'manager' mode to avoid context switching that can drain your focus and productivity.
  2. Optimize Your Environment: Like Alex’s use of blackout curtains and strategic scheduling, tailor your work environment to eliminate distractions and enhance focus.
  3. Manage Your Energy: Be mindful of decision fatigue and plan your day so that tasks requiring high cognitive effort are tackled when you are most alert.
  4. Learn to Say No: Protect your time by declining meetings or tasks that do not align closely with your key goals.
  5. Create Success Conditions: Actively shape your daily habits and physical workspace to naturally lead towards productive behaviors.

About This Episode

“Thinking through conditions first rather than willpower first has been incredibly helpful for me.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) shares productivity tactics and strategies for success, inspired by B.F. Skinner's behavior theory. The discussion includes managing time and attention, distinguishing between 'maker' and 'manager' roles, prioritizing deep work, and practical tips for goal setting and minimizing distractions.

Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.

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Transcript

Alex Hormozi
If you look back a year from now, the only things that will have really moved the business forward is the deep, non urgent but incredibly important work. And so you just never want to sacrifice. And I'm just telling you, like, the amount of times that having somebody come butt into my life has really been a positive just gets smaller and smaller over time.

Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer and how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe. Today's theme is around goal setting. So let's rock and roll. In the first direct podcast I've done in a very long time, creating the conditions of success.

And I think this is going to be really, really tangible for many of you entrepreneurs, business owners, is how you manage your time and your attention and the specific tactics, first off explaining conceptually and then underneath of it, the specific tactics that you can use, or at least that I have used, that have worked really well for me. And so if this rings for you and rings true for you, share this with your employees or share this with your team because it may help them understand how to work with you better. But I wanted to talk about something that continues to be this repeated theme that I've seen from business owners, actually at all levels. And it will end up blocking you at some point in your career until you get unstuck from it. And so some people, it blocks them at 10,000 a month, some it's 100,000 a month, sometimes it's a million a month.

But once you hit this wall, you cant get through it. And so I think for somebody whos listening, or maybe many of you, this may be like the missing link. And so what I want to talk about if I were to put a theme for this is something that ill call conditions for success. And theres this quote from BF Skinner that I just recently made a post about that has always just like really stuck with me, which was you can lead a horse to water, but you cant make a drink. But thats not true, right?

Because if you salt the horses mouth, you dehydrate it, you leave it out in the sun, and then you put a bucket of water right next to its mouth, you can veritably guarantee that it will drink. And so thats a paraphrasing from BFS and said in a completely different line, if you hang out at a barber shop long enough, you're going to get your hair cut in aa. They say hey, don't go where it's slippery, right? If you go to the bar long enough, you're going to start drinking. And so I think we can take this concept and apply it to the behaviors that we want.

And so Jerry Seinfeld, for example, was known for his creative process, was he would lock himself in a room with only a pen and paper and he didn't have to do anything, but he only could write jokes. So it was either write jokes or be bored. And so some days he was just sit there for 30 minutes doing nothing because he had no other distractions. And then he drank the water, right, because he had basically salted his mouth, dehydrated himself from any external activities, and made the one thing that he actually wanted himself to do, the inevitable only action that he could do as a result. And I think that entrepreneurship is inherently a very distracting thing, right?

It attracts people who are a little bit add anyways. And then it is arguably one of the most add professions you can possibly have, right? Because you've got, you know, customer support emails, you've got marketing stuff you have to do. You've got leads you have to follow up with, you've got sales consults, you've got employee issues, and you've got slack notifying you every single day. And then you're like, how did that post do?

Or whatever it is, right? And so you've got all these different things that are coming in, and at the same time you're like, how do I move the few things that matter forward? And so what I want to do is give you a handful of things that have worked for me. And the big, the TLDR on this is that, like, if you feel really burnt out and you feel like you don't have the willpower or the discipline or whatever, the famous good word is for this, that this will kind of help you. Willpower, from all the stuff that I've seen, is a finite resource, meaning there's things called decision fatigue.

Like by the end of the day, you feel cooked, you're completely cashed, you're like, man, let's save that for tomorrow morning, that big decision or whatever. So you have this juice in your head that you have to manage how you're going to spend it. And the thing is, is that in my opinion, the brain doesn't differentiate between what am I going to wear, what am I going to eat for lunch versus which post am I going to make or what edit do I want or what topic do I want to talk about? And obviously, one of those things is higher roi than the other. And so the idea is, it's absolutely great to have willpower and discipline.

Like, I'm, I'm never going to say that that's not a good idea. I think that's a great idea, but you want to save it for the times where you have a condition you cannot control. And so the idea is that we have conditions every day that we, that enter, we have new variables that enter, and then you're like, shoot, I gotta, I gotta adjust, right? And that's when you use up that valuable resource, use up that brain juice to make an accurate or good decision. But the thing is, is that 90% of the conditions that we're exposed to in our lives are conditions that we've seen before.

And so I always was amazed by salespeople who would go on a hot streak during one kind of condition and then not try to recreate that condition. And so I think in a lot of ways, the things that have helped me move forward, this is just what worked for me. Do whatever you want. Move faster. Is I look back at periods of time where I had exceptionally high output for desired behavior.

So if it's like, man, I made really good content during this period of time. Rather than think like, oh, I just need to try harder at making content, I like to look at all the other things that were around that time period. So it's like, okay, well, what was, what did my day look like? What was my schedule look like? What did, what was I wearing?

What time of day was I doing it? Were there, were there people around me that, that helped me create better content? Were there conversations that were having on a regular basis that have stopped? And so I like to look at what are the conditions that have changed? And as a total side note for business owners, if you had a period of time in the business where sales were good or marketing was good, or customer success was good, you can take the same concept to think, what are the conditions?

Rather than trying to just grind on the team and say, hey, try harder, we did better last month, like, what's wrong with you? I find it more useful and easier to create sustained success and sustained output at a higher level by simply saying, let's ignore willpower altogether and try and control for every other variable and make it so that we are the horse and we can salt our mouths and we can dehydrate ourselves, and the only thing we want ourselves to do is drink the water. The thing is that this, I think, can apply to fitness. It can apply to relationships, it can apply to, obviously, business, which is the context that I talk about. But thinking through conditions first rather than willpower first has been incredibly helpful for me.

I think if you were to look at your environment and look retroactively first, what was the times I was making the most money? Or what were the best months where I did for this particular thing? Because ill bet that if you look backwards every month in the past, you were not maxed out on everything, right? Like, you had some months, you were like, sales went well or customer success went well, or content was good or whatever, right? And think, okay, what I want to do is if I want to improve marketing, I want to look back at the time where marketing was best, and I want to look for all the conditions that are around that.

So let me give you an example. So the best content that I've looked at, so I've just, I've been doing a deep dive on media because I'm looking at the next 24 months and thinking like, what are we going to do@acquisition.com? To continue to reach more people, help them make real business education accessible for everyone. And one of the things that I found that worked better for me is when I have a live audience, I tend to do better knowing that people are actually listening and watching in real time. Now, some people are reversed from that.

They're like, I hate that. I actually really like a more pristine setting. But at least for me, I like talking about real business stuff to real business owners rather than hypothetical business stuff to hypothetical business owners. Maybe that makes sense. And so the thing is, is like so many of the smaller entrepreneurs and I, and I say this not in a diminutive way, use up so much of their juice on things that don't matter.

And so it's even like the, it's, I mean, I get, I'm going to drill down on this, too. You have employees in your business right now that use up like 35% of your total bandwidth for the business. Total bandwidth. Because there's this one person that, like, when you're at home and you're talking to your spouse, you're like, man, I've got this person. And you wake up in the morning, you're thinking about this person, and then you have a conversation with that person, or they have a weird exchange on slack, and you're like, man, in all this time, there's all, all this juice, there's all this bandwidth that's getting used up.

But if we think to ourselves, okay, well, how do I control this condition so either I have to reset the boundaries in terms of how I'm going to, how I'm going to talk to this person, or I might need to eliminate this person altogether because it's using up the single greatest resource that you have, which is your time and your attention. And so the best entrepreneurs that I've seen have exceptional skills at managing their attention and managing their time and putting all of that into the one bucket of managing their conditions. And so I remember the first time I had an experience with this was I was talking to a guy who's doing $400 million a year. I was 27 at the time. And so he was actually going to set us up with payment processing, a massive payment processing company.

But he ended up, we met through mutual connection and he just took a liking to me. And so I remember trying to call him and it didn't go through. It just like, the call immediately just didn't happen. And later I got on the phone with him and I was like, what is that? He was like, oh, yeah, my phone rejects every single call that's not on my list.

And this was before iPhones had some of these features. This is super early days. Like, he had programmed his phone so that he was a kind of tech guy that no, no contact zero. So no one who he did not already know, like, no new friends, no one could contact him. And from a scheduling perspective, he basically didn't respond to emails and he had this space that he would work in that was just completely quiet and clean.

And that's how he managed his condition, because he knew that when he had those conditions, he created the most output. And so I'm going to zoom out for a second. Now, some of you are like, well, what about, like, what if I still have to run the day to day, right, of the business? So how do I handle that? So I see this as having two hats, right?

You've got your maker hat, which is your big creator hat, and then you've got your manager hat. And most entrepreneurs need to go and wear both at different times. And so what's really important is understanding which hat you're going to be wearing. And so for me, I have a maker hat, which is where I do, like, when I write the book, like, I have to put my maker hat on. If I wanted to prepare for, you know, doing something like this, I'm going to put my maker hat on.

And the thing is, is that this is going to be really impactful for a lot of you, so please listen to this. And this took me too long to figure out. We even wrote a memo internally and it changed how we do. Business makers have long periods of time where they need zero interruption. So a super productive maker calendar looks like a completely empty calendar.

So for those of you who, like, wake up one day and you have nothing on your calendar, are you like, oh my God, this feels amazing. I'm going to get so much stuff done today, right? Feels good, it feels light. You feel like you can immediately get into flow and just kind of lose yourself in your project, right? Like, you can show me some hearts if you're getting this right.

Okay, cool. So on the flip side, right, if you're a manager, then you have 2015 minutes time chunks per day. And the objective of a manager schedule is to fill every time slot. And so a perfectly optimized manager schedule is zero blank space. And so on one hand, you've got a maker whose entire objective is to have entirely blank space, and you've got managers whose entire objective is to have entirely filled up space.

And you're like, how can, how can both of these be the objective? And I'm an entrepreneur and I need to do both of these things. It's because they're different roles. Right now in your company, there are roles that are more maker heavy. So if you have editors, you have copywriters, you have any kind of creative developers for coding.

Like, all of these are deeper tasks that have more complex problems that you have to solve, and you have to, like, drink in lots of information, kind of have it swirl around your head, and then you can really get into flow and start working on it. On the flip side, if you were taking customer support calls, that might be much more of a manager type role. Or just managers, literally in general, who are managing their team. Now where this gets interesting is that if a manager is managing editors, copywriters, etcetera, when someone's performance does a drop, what do they do? They increase the number of meetings.

But by increasing the number of meetings, you increase the number of interruptions that person has and actually hurts them from doing the job that you want them to do. So in understanding this, we, I try to approach my calendar and saying, and my team knows this now is like, is this a maker day or is this a manager day? And I think maker days, at the very least for me, is a half day. So I basically only have two maker slots a day. I've got one before lunch and I've got one after lunch, and that's about it.

And if you're going kind of Hercules mode, because you're in, you got to work double time. Right now, it might be three shifts. You might have a six hour block, second six, and then you've got a late shift and that's it. Those are the only blocks you've got. Whereas the manager has 20 plus time slots a day.

Now, if one manager takes a 15 minutes time slot and slides it into my maker. Morning. They kill my whole morning. They don't get that because for them it's like, what's the big deal? It's only ten minutes.

It's only 15 minutes. I just want to touch base. It's like, but, dude, I now know I'm going to have this meeting. I'm going to have to set an alarm so I don't lose myself into my project. I start thinking about what I'm going to have to say, then I have to start winding down my work so that I can prepare for whatever that call is going to be.

And then after that call, I have to try and get back into the flow, which is basically impossible. Real quick, guys, if you can think about how you found this podcast, somebody probably tweeted it, told you about it, shared it on Instagram or something like that. The only way this grows is through word of mouth. And so I don't run ads, I don't do sponsorships, I don't sell anything. My only ask is that you continue to pay it forward to whoever showed you or however you found out about this podcast, that you do the exact same thing.

So if it was a review, if it was a post, if you do that, it would mean the world to me, and you'll throw some good karma out there for another entrepreneur. And so the idea there is that even though it's more efficient for that manager, he cost a half day of that maker's time. And so, to be clear, it's not that makers and managers can't interact, they do. But I think having managers understand the nature of work for makers. And if you're the entrepreneur and you're the maker for the business, it's actually making sure that your team understands this as well.

And so, for example, we have an executive team and an executive assistance team. So we have three assistants that work between Laila and I in terms of managing our time. And so a simple, you know, litmus test is like, what do we make in a morning through the business, right? Or what do we sell my time for if we're ever going to, like, put, put a time price on it, if someone's going to put a meeting on my calendar. They have to be able to make a very strong argument for why that meeting is going to make us x or why it's worth x.

And if they can't make that argument, then I'm not going to have the meeting now. You might think, okay, well, then how do meetings even happen if you were a maker? So this is what I do, and do whatever you want. So I'll talk about different periods of my life from an entrepreneurial perspective. So in the earlier days when I still had to do a lot of work, work in terms of like, I had to do a lot of the day to day, I started so early.

I started at 04:00 a.m. And I would work until ten. So I get 6 hours done before people were awake. And that way at 10:00 a.m. I would basically start my fire putting out for the day.

And the rest of my day was shot. And you guys know what I'm talking about. Nothing really moves forward besides just making sure that you live to fight another day. But at the end of the week, I would have five or six maker blocks that I got. I move the big stuff forward and that's what, when you look back on the month, the only thing you're going to remember that you made progress on is the maker stuff.

It's not going to be the manager stuff, but you need to do the manager stuff, otherwise the business is not going to exist. Right. And so in the beginning you might like, wait, does that means I'm waking up at four, I'm working 6 hours and then I'm going to work until like five. It's like, yeah, it's an eleven or twelve hour workday. Welcome to entrepreneurship.

I also find it funny when people are like, I started a job so I wouldn't have to work so hard. I literally had somebody tell me that and I was like, well, somebody sold you a bill of goods, my friend. That is, I got some, I got some swamp plan for you anyways. So if, if you have this time that you allocate in the morning, then you can. I work better in the morning.

And so if you're like, if you're a mom or you're a parent and you're like, I, I can't do that in the morning, my mornings are chaos. Well, then do it at night when the kids go to bed, and then you've got your four or 5 hours at night where you're uninterrupted. I have noticed across all the people that I know they have a time. It's either like I'm a morning person or I'm a night owl. I'm not religious about either of them.

I think what's important is that you have time that you can set aside so you can do your maker work. Now, over time, I was able to go to a second chunk of maker work for at least one or two days a week. So it's like, okay, I went from just mornings, like early, early mornings to being early until like noon. And I would say that was kind of like the second phase of my entrepreneurial journey is I could go from like 04:00 a.m. Until noonish.

And then I'd start all my stuff in the afternoon, study all my meetings in the afternoons. Now, if we fast forward to today, my day, my days actually look more almost entirely maker. And when I say maker, sometimes it's strategic decision making. So if we want to, we want to roll out a new product line in one of our portfolio companies, I'm not going to just say like, let me hop on a meeting and talk about it. I'm going to do a bunch of research in terms of the market.

I'm going to look at customer segmentation data. I'm going to look at our survey results. I'm going to look at the reviews that we have. I'm going to look at what our ascension rates are, and I'm going to look at other competitors that have comparable products, and I'm going to say, okay, what kind of price points can we look at? What kind of ascension rates can we expect?

And trying to put this together and then try and translate that into a presentation that I can make to an executive team to say, here's my reasoning behind why I think we should make this bet or make this strategic decision that's still going to be maker time for me, just to give you context in terms of like, the types of work that would be involved there. But regardless, if we fast forward to today, I have Mondays. My whole day is manager time. And so that's from 10:00 a.m.. On.

So I still have another hour before my manager. I still have, I have to do some maker work. Otherwise I feel terrible about myself. But 10:00 a.m. Onwards on Mondays is just stacked with meetings.

Now if someone, for example, says, hey, so and so wants to connect and they can't make Monday, you have two options. You say, then I guess we're not going to meet, or you decide to make an exception. Over time, I have found that I have lost significantly less in my life by just saying, I guess we're not going to meet. And you know what's interesting? My life just keeps moving on.

There's a lot of people, and some people are going to be willing to do that. And if you're like, if someone's above you, or let me put it this way, if you need something from someone, then I think you should be the one to accommodate their time. And if you need something from them, then it should be worth an entire maker block to go pursue that person or that connection or that introduction or whatever. Now, if you can't justify that it's worth a maker's block, then why are you connecting to begin with? Right?

On the flip side, if you're the one who's getting asked stuff all the time, then it's like, well, you're going to be asking me for things and so you're definitely not going to take a maker block from me and ask me for stuff. Like, if we're going to do it, then we're going to meet on my terms and some people aren't going to like that. And you know what? Life is long. You're going to die.

So are they. And I will say that when I look back the months of my life where I just said no to everything, guess what happened? I move forward faster when I see myself getting distracted by introductions and collaborations and let's see if we could sync up. I wonder if there's some synergies here. What if there's some opportunities we could pursue?

Right? All of that stuff. You guys have seen these DM's, seen these messages from friends. I got to introduce you to satellite. No, you don't.

You don't. My life's been great before so and so, and it'll probably be fine afterwards. And a lot of people are uncomfortable with that. A lot of people don't know how to say no. And so let me give you a little tactic on the little pro tip.

If you want to say no to a meeting without offending someone, just say, I'm in an absolute season of no until. And just put some milestones for me. It's like, until my book launches, I'm not taking any outside meetings besides this time. And by saying that, it's a not, it's not, it's not no forever, it's just no for now or you meet within these terms. And so that's helped me.

So pick a project that you're working on that's really meaningful to you. Set that as your date. Maybe it's six months out. And be really, I'm gonna tell you a secret. Six months from now, I'm gonna have another project that, until I'm done, that project, I'm not taking any other meetings outside of that time.

But that's just between you and me. All right? Don't tell anybody else. And so, and so, thinking about this for your day. So let's bring this back to, back to Earth.

Look at your calendar. Explain to your team. There are two types of work. There is meetings work. There's managing work, where we have to come together, and my time.

I want you, if we're going to have one meeting in the afternoon, put 20 in there. Like, stack the hell out of it, because I'm not going to just, like, all of a sudden start writing a book. Right? So stack everything you possibly can in this time, on these other days or these other half days, nothing. Because if you put one thing there, you ruin the whole morning or you ruin the whole afternoon.

So either do or don't. Just no half measures when it comes to this stuff. And in thinking about managing my time this way, this has made me so much more productive in terms of my output per unit of time, is knowing what type of work I'm going to start doing. And so I think many of you, especially if you're actively, really, really running the business, like you're operating and, or sometimes delivering or, and, or selling and, or still doing the marketing or whatever it is, if you know that, then you have to put this time so you can do the deep, strategic thinking, do the deeper work that really moves the ball forward. Because if you look back a year from now, the only things that will have really moved the business forward is the deep, non urgent, but incredibly important work.

And so you just never want to sacrifice. And I'm just telling you, like, the amount of times that having somebody come butt into my life has really been a positive, just gets smaller and smaller over time. And so that is my, that is my note of encouragement, is it's absolutely okay to say no. If you do say yes, make it on your terms. And making sure that when you are trying, at least for me, setting up my condition, so it's inevitable that I succeed.

And so let's get a little bit tactical on that part, too. So that was a little bit from the time perspective, but let's talk about surroundings. So for me, that means I have earplugs in, I have headphones on, I have blacked out curtains, because I don't like to see light. I don't like to see time passing because it makes me feel like I'm. I don't know.

I just don't like to. I don't want to look out a window. I want to have the work that I have in front of me. And I think a lot about Jerry Seinfeld that way. It's like he just had a pen and he had a pad of paper, and he's got 2 hours on the clock.

And most of the most prolific writers that I know who churned out a lot of high quality content in terms of books they wrote the same way, is that they wrote either open to goal, which is like, I have to write until I get 1500 words, no matter what. And sometimes, and they just have a flexible end date. Or the alternative strategy is I do 2 hours every day, rain or shine or whatever, I have to do this period. And if I get there and I don't feel like writing or I don't feel like creating concert, I don't feel like doing whatever, fine. But I can't do anything else.

And so by putting those constraints, by salting your mouth, by, by, uh, by dehydrating yourself and then just putting the water as the only really convenient thing that you have, then you tend to do more of it. You tend to drink the water, you tend to do the activity want. And I think this applies for fitness stuff, too. It applies for marriage stuff. Like, if you're somebody who's, like, trying to be faithful to your wife or trying to be faithful to your husband, don't go to a singles mixer with your single friend.

Probably not a good idea. Not a good condition for loyalty, right? If I was trying to, like, how do I create the condition for loyalty? It would not start there, right? If I wanted to create the condition for a six pack, what would I do?

I would probably make sure that I removed all the extra stuff in my house that's not conducive to me having a six pack, and I would have my meals prepped for me when I go to work so that I have limited options. So not only am I get is my default option a six pack, because I don't have to think about it. So, like, I want to make it easier to do the right thing and harder to do the wrong thing. And if you do that, not only do you save willpower for the things that matter most in terms of making money, you also buy side effect, get the other things that you want too. And so I think that really is the key to, quote, having it all is that you make the rest of the things that you have default.

So it's default that I. That I work out because I put it, I go to the gym. That's literally the closest place that I possibly can. So for me, I've almost always had a gym that's in walking distance, if possible, so that my walk is a way for me to clear my mind. And then I go to the gym and I look forward to it.

Right. From a food perspective, the food that is literally just right nowadays is literally placed in front of me. So I don't, I don't have to think about it. I don't have to make a decision. I just have food.

And it always comes at the same time. So my stomach starts gurgling at, like, five minutes before it comes because my body knows, it's like, hey, food's coming. And so the food's in front of me, and then I eat it, and then I just move on with my life. And. And so for each of these things, it's, how can I remove as much friction as humanly possible for doing the absolute right thing that I want to do and then create a.

As much friction as I possibly can around the things that I don't want myself to do? And I think that has saved a lot of willpower and allowed me to make better decisions over the long term. And I think that better decision making process, that juice for when things don't go your way, that is what, on a long time horizon, stacks to your advantage. And from the outside, people are like, how does he keep making progress? How does she keep making progress?

And reality is that you do less of the things that don't make you money, you don't use your decision making juice on things that are a waste of time, a waste of energy, and you don't let other people interfere with the time that's most productive to you. And explaining this is a key point. Explain to the people who are closest to you how you work and the different types of work, because what's going to happen is you explain this like, hey, why are you having a meeting? I thought this was maker time. It's like, no, this is actually a manager block.

So I'm actually trying to do this right now. On the flip side, if you're in maker time, you explain, this is maker time for me, and I'm trying to maximize this by having a clear schedule. And so as long as you can understand that, you can explain it to your team or your employees or even your customers, or the potential synergies that you can just say no to. Because remember, we have a big project that's coming up in six months. No.

Until then, if you, if you have that at the top of mind, I can almost guarantee that you will, you will get a lot more done and you will be surprised at the rate of progress you have. And I think this happens at any, this applies to any level of business, is that you just keep clearing and clearing and clearing your space so your output per unit of time for the most important things continues to go up. Hey, if this helps you understand how to work better, or you think this would help your team out so that they understand how to work with you or a vendor or whoever, it also tells me that this type of content is stuff that you find valuable as business owners. Share it, tag me in it and I'll do more of it. And if this isn't as valuable, then don't do any of those things.

But if it was, then please let me know by doing those things, by sharing it, because then I'll make more of it.