hey what's up it's sean quick note this episode i am going over something that's very important topic and i think it's a great episode but if you're listening to this on itunes or spotify you're not gonna be able to see the the images because i i basically hand a bunch of diagrams of the frameworks that i'm talking about here and i i hold them up so you could see them on camera and they're honestly they're pretty good i spent a lot of time on this tens of minutes let's say but now in actuality it's actually pretty useful and i think the diagrams help it a lot so for this episode i would strongly recommend you go to youtube so that you can actually see what i'm talking about otherwise it might get a little funky if you're just listening you'll try to you're gonna be trying to imagine what i'm talking about but it's a lot easier if you just go to youtube so enjoy this episode and at go to youtube dot com or the app and then just type in my first mail you'll see it right there up top very easy and check it out you can do anything but you can't do everything and that is what i wanna talk about today ruthless focus a laser like focus for twenty twenty four i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days on on a roll i have not been breaking at focusing in the past in the past i have let myself get distracted i have let myself set a goal at the beginning of the year and by the end of the year i check in and i'm like where the hell what what did i do all you here why did i drift and it's not something malicious it's not like a total fail but it's just this drift that i didn't like and i wanted to get better at i'm gonna show you what works for me how do you get more focused how do we get the laser like focus than all the great ones exhibit whether it's in sports and you see kobe bryant completely obsessed in entertainment you see mister beast is completely locked in and obsessed in business you'll see somebody like mark zuckerberg laser focused on one thing trying to make that happen and they don't let let themselves drift the way the rest of us do so here's the little visual this is you and this is all the things that you might do so this is you know some news thing that's going on the election this is love is blind season five this is that investment somebody wants you to do this is that email you got from that person who wants to do a call and pick your brain this is that side side hustle that's not really gonna go anywhere right that's all the things and then the blur thing is the thing you actually want this is the thing that you would feel proud of at the end of the year if you made this happen and so what we need is laser like focus we do not want the cone to be wide i'm gonna show you how we do that so first thing you wanna do this is a before and after of how you can operate and again we have all the possible things that we could be saying yes to and you wanna think about your yes threshold so let's write that this is your yes threshold and before it might be you know here so you might have your yes threshold right there and what you're doing is you're saying yes to anything above that line if it's below that line you're able to say no but you're able to say yes to everything above that line and the after all we have to do the first thing you have to do is simply acknowledge bring your awareness to how low your yes threshold is and raise it raise your standard for yes and so instead of saying yes to things that are pretty good maybe interesting might be worth doing pretty cool it needs to you take your yes to a hell yes that is the easiest thing you could do so we're gonna raise the yes threshold right we're gonna take it from here up to here and you know this sad guy becomes this happy guy and he's taller so you get two inches of height at least and your your yes threshold is even higher alright so that's the first thing you do bring your awareness to where's is my bar today and take my yes to only doing hell yes things doesn't mean you don't do if somebody you know if your friend comes and says we're going to costa rica it's gonna be amazing that might be a hell yes for you go for it but make sure you you have a premium quality on your focus and what you're willing to do alright next thing time management you may have seen this as a famous paul graham essay that i've turned into a cartoon and the program essay is basically come showing the difference between a maker oh wait i have these flipped okay yeah hold on let's reverse that this is a manager schedule that's what their calendar looks like and there's what a maker's schedule look like this is the artist right somebody who's a builder and so for a lot of people they have this nine am nine thirty am ten am hunt ten thirty am eleven am eleven oh i'm double booked oh shit and they end up just in a puddle of tears they are overwhelmed they're stressed they sort of busy themselves to death why didn't i get everything i wanted to done in life why didn't i achieve my goals and my dreams because i was too busy like listen to that sentence it that doesn't even make sense you didn't do the things you would need to do because you didn't have time because you filled it with other crap and so most people by default especially people in jobs you will be default opted into a a manager's schedule what you wanna do is switch to a maker schedule a make schedule is basically long interrupted blocks of time usually in the morning you need at least two and a half hours of uninterrupted time usually three is ideal a break where you're gonna lunch exercise go for a walk play with your kids walk your dog whatever you do and then another uninterrupted sprint for some people the real great ones they have a another break and they have a third night sprint but you know you don't have to do all that you need to switch to this maker schedule and so the maker schedule is the one thing you could do with your time where in the same number of hours you can get more done why because when you get into these uninterrupted blocks of time you get into flow states and you're able to actually lock in on knocking out one whole thing without distractions without checking your emails without being pulled into a call or a meeting about this and about that you're able to to lock in and so whether you're an engineer and you wanna build a product you wanna code something or you're you know you're trying to be an entertainer or you need to write chapters of your book or a youtube video that you're making or you're just trying to come up with a new idea not letting your your your day gets split i call this the the zebra calendar where you're just stripes all day that is the next thing you need to do to enable yourself to come up with great ideas right you are setting up your environment so the first thing we did was we raise the threshold of yes to a hell yes so that we're just saying no to things that clear space the next thing is we do the maker schedule versus the managers of schedule so that you have uninterrupted time blocks where you can be your most creative productive self okay next thing now we're going to clarity so this is something i stole from asana asana created this thing called the clarity the pyramid of clarity and the pyramid of clarity goes as follows at the top here you have your mission and the mission is your big the reason your organization exists it's the reason you're even doing this it's your big y and so let's say you're elon musk your mission for spacex might be you know make humans inter inflammatory species multi planetary species or for tesla for him it might be get the world off of using you know fossil fuels and get them to a electric future right so that's the big vision for what you're doing now you break that down you said so you write that out and by the way little pro tip because when i first read about this i was like wow that makes total sense you gotta have this big audacious vision but let's say you're not building rockets to go into space or you're not trying to get the world off of fossil fuels to a fully electric energy system you you know you might just be building a e commerce business that's designed to enable your lifestyle to be really great because you wanted money and you didn't have money right like whatever it is the key is honesty because you could write a fancy mission but if it's not your honest mission is not gonna not gonna do anything we won't have any emotional residents so what i try to do is i try to be honest about the mission so for example with my company we are building a a company that is going to enable us to have an amazing lifestyle us the owners of the business have an amazing lifestyle we only have a couple of people in the business it's all owners and we want to have a lifestyle where we could do what we want when we want with whoever we want and only work on projects that are you know intellectually fascinating for us creatively challenging for us and so we write that that's what we're doing that is the mission of what we're trying to build we're building a vehicle that enables that from there you wanna go down to the one year goal okay so this is the the mission might take ten years it might take twenty years but then you break it down to the one year goal where do we need to be at the end of the year for this to be a smash success and specifically i set two goals so i have the what i call the ef goal and then i have the floor goal and so i set kind of a range here because i don't like static what you know single goals binary goals because you're then you're you're like should i just be super ambitious but then i might be disappointed or should i be conservative but then i feel like i didn't push myself so i set both i set a goal and a floor goal the floor goal means you would be disappointed if it didn't reach this level meaning this would be a solid win below that do you kinda feel like man really we we didn't we didn't get there and the fda goal is we're high five we're toasting towards right can't believe this is how good it turned out and so you wanna kinda set that range for yourself and say alright we have a minimum and then we have sort of a target that we're gonna shoot okay what's the next level of this now you have your overall mission clarified and i'll show you an example in a second you have your one year goal where we wanna be a year from now and that's what you're gonna work backwards from so then your work backwards and you say okay in order to achieve this one year goal what do i need in terms of people what do i need in terms of product and what do i need in terms of finances three categories and so you break the one year goal into the this is the output to the inputs so for example for my e commerce company we had a one year goal and we said we're gonna try to go we're we're gonna try to double revenue we did about seventeen ish million last year we're gonna try to get to you know over thirty this year so we said what do we need in terms of people well i needed to hire a cmo because today i was doing it i'm not the best cmo for for that business i'm not full time on it so we we set some people targets we need to hire an amazing cmo who's done this before we needed to hire a website developer who's gonna do x y right so you you write down what are your people gaps and you have your product gaps so what does the product need to be able to do in order for us to hit our goal so for example when elon launched tesla he said a product and he was like how do we make a car that is i think it was like faster than a porsche and better for the environment than a prius faster than a porsche better for better than a prius right better for the environment than a prius and that is a product goal that is a benchmark that we were trying to achieve it faster than a porsche and is it more is it better for the environment than a prius and so similarly you wanna set some product goals for yourself for for to achieve your run your mission and lastly finances so you know do you need capital you know by by default people think they do you should question that assumption beyond just how much money do we need to do this might be your margins or might be your unit economics we need to bring the cost down to this in order for this to work because we wanna be profitable and today we're unprofitable and so within each one of those you've now broken your one year goal into the the different input input metrics that if you did those correctly it would lead to the one year goal and then from there you just break it out by month you say alright in january okay what are we gonna do well we need to chip away at the people goal the product goal and the finance goal so let's break those into a digestible chunk and now all of a sudden it's like you know let's do twenty interviews and and try to find you know two great candidates for the for the cmo role or whatever it may be and so then you go month by month and every month you check in you you check on the whole pyramid you say alright as a reminder our mission is x by the end of the year we're trying to do y in order to do that we need to hit these we need to do these three things internally and then the score will take care of itself and so to get there we need to break this out month by month into what's what's what mattered last month did we achieve it and what matters this month you do that for twelve months straight you are gonna stay on track there will be no drift last thing i wanna share with you i stole this from my friend joel omen he's a listener of the show and i hope he's okay with me sharing this i'll ask but he he said he shared this this simple slide that he made for himself and i loved it was a killer slide it was one slide that gave him clarity on what is he trying to do and how is he gonna get there and i like the way he framed it so i wanna share it with you so he had his goal or the mission that i called it on the last last page and his goal was to build a creatively fulfilling cash machine i just love that creatively fulfilling cash machine and he said well you know i've done i've done each of them individually you know i've built successful businesses cash machines and i've built i've done things you he wrote like a fantasy fiction book right so something that was creatively fulfilling but didn't make any money and so he's like this time my mission is to do this because if i did this i would be and bliss out locking into work every day right i would be my at my happiest in terms of my professional goals and so set a goal for yourself like this and you wanna use this as a bar for resonance right you know this is a this is a not not a generic off the shelf goal like be successful or make money or whatever right like set it set it for so maybe for some people it's make six six grand a month so that i can quit my job make six grand a month out of my business so i can quit my job and be totally independent not have to worry about how i'm gonna pay the bills right i could be stress free and then it's only up from there and write that whole thing out write it out in a way that has some emotional pull for you that it it's a compelling picture alright so the second thing then you have your output right so what are the you know that's kinda like i said the the one year goal right so in order to do that we might need to do the following two things now here's the part i like best when he says i say yes to blank and i say no to blank so for example let's say for this podcast i you know have a goal which is i wanna i wanna be one of those people that inspired me when i was coming up that is very much why i do this podcast because growing up i remember when i was in college somebody gave me a book called the four hour workweek week and it blew my mind at the time i i'd never thought about half of the concepts in there and i was like just inside after inside page after page of inspiration and story and i just said that's how i want my life to be i said i called it catching the four hour fever like i read that book and for four hours i went into a fever dream and i'd re planned everything in my life that was very impactful for thank tim ferris there been other moments like that tony robbins and others where i have had these people who created content that really shifted my thinking that made me have more clarity more insight more motivation more firepower to go do what i wanted to do and so my goal with this podcast is to do that okay well great what do i need to say yes to in order for that to happen well we break that big dream down to a one year goal and then we break that one on your goal down to the things that we're gonna have to opt into so for example for this podcast you might say well i'm gonna have to sit down consistently week after week doing my absolute best to create the most compelling content out there the best wisdom for entrepreneurs and when i do that i have a i'm saying yes to doing my best and knowing that the numbers are not gonna change every week that it might look flat for a long time that i'm gonna do that for years and i will not be discouraged i say yes to doing that input even though the the numbers will take a long time to build up right so that's why i'm saying yes too what's the second thing i'm saying yes to well for this year for example we wanted to bring on higher profile guests we booked a bunch tim ferris coming on we booked tony robbins and bunch of others and so i said yes to doing something i didn't like to do guest outreach i hated begging people to come on my podcast and all that i just i don't know i i don't like people ask me i didn't wanna ask other people but i said i gotta say yes to that i gotta say yes to the discomfort and the ego of continuing to follow up with people and try to get them to come on the podcast and what do i say no too so one of the things i have to say no well i have to say no to starting a company i said on this podcast every week and i come up with ideas for businesses i gotta say no to actually going and doing them because if i now i'm a ceo of a startup i'm not gonna be able to achieve this this goal so i have to say no to some very compelling good ideas that would make me millions of dollars write that down right so what are the other things i have to say no to have to say no to avoiding hard conversations i have to say no to my old habit of blah blah right i thought this was a very very useful thing because it had both the it was it was all about self awareness this is a self awareness game what is the goal that motivates me to get out of bed every single day and chased this above all other possible things i could be doing with time and my talents second what is it about me that i know i'm gonna have to consciously force myself to say yes to and say no to and here it's the things that are not easy for you you don't wanna write the things that you already say yes to that are already just you know trivial for you it's it's your nature to do that it's here you identify what's against your nature and and write that down so that you're very clear what you need to do and to me this is how you can do anything you are limitless right you nobody can tell you that you can't do that thing but you can't do everything right so that you can do anything but you can't do everything is a very powerful idea and it gives you that focus is a powerful people say that but they don't tell you how you focus so i hope today you learn a little something from uncle sean about how you actually focus this is something that frankly i'm still a beginner at right i'm i'm maybe a blue belt in the in the game of focus but i do know that it's important and because it's important i'm working at it and i wanted to share with you the things that i'm doing that that tend to be working for me the things that have helped me make some progress maybe there's some more things out there i'd love to hear from you what works for you in the comments but that's it that's the episode i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a goal less travel never looking back