451: Stop Chasing the “False Summit”: Have Better Relationships and Results with Michael Hyatt
BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast- 1,651 views
- 14 Mar 2021
Does it ever seem like working overtime is a competition? We often see people bragging about how they work 60 hour weeks, work on weekends, or spend the most time at the office or in front of their computer. Does this constant overworking actually accomplish something or is it more of a chest-beating competition?Michael Hyatt argues that working crazy hours rarely does anything for our productivity, and if anything, can make our work sluggish and dull. He should know, in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as teams were working more than ever from home, Michael decided to do the opposite. Michael lowered his (and his team’s) working hours from 40 hours a week, to 30 hours a week. The result? A profit increase of nearly 100% and company-wide productivity boost.Not only does your work quality benefit, but so do your relationships, your health, and your outlook on life when you are off of the “grind mode”. Michael believes this so much that he wrote a book about it. Win at Work and Succeed at Lifegoes through what Michael calls the “double win”: winning at life and work, with no tradeoffs!Michael lists a handful of ways you can instantly improve your work/life balance. Tips on sleep, nutrition, and getting your “daily big 3” done so you can accomplish goals that matter, instead of just being productive. If you ever feel like a workaholic, these tips will help you align back to a productive yet enjoyable schedule.In This Episode We Cover:Fighting the “cult of overwork” especially when working becomes a bragging rightHow to keep your business running at full speed while having time for your familyThe importance of putting up “hard boundaries” so your day can be respectedIdentifying the “big 3” tasks that you need to get done everydayHow to implement “double wins” in your lifeKnowing which work is important and which work can be put on holdAnd So Much More! Links from the ShowBiggerPockets PodcastBiggerPockets book storeBrandon's InstagramDavid's InstagramBiggerPockets Podcast 363: How to Work (Way) Less but Accomplish (Way) More in 2020 with Michael HyattClick here to check the full show notes: https://www.biggerpockets.com/show451
This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show for 50 one, not all work is created equal. What you want to focus on is the work where you've got passion, you've got proficiency, and it's going to drive the results in your business.
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What's going on? Up on its Brenan, Turner hosted the Bigger Pocket's podcast here with another phenomenal show with my friend Mr. David, the workhorse Green. What's up, man? It's a workhorse anymore. You've been you've been taking it a little bit light and easy lately.
Yeah, well, I don't know about light and easy, but I'm definitely taking more leverage.
You've been very leveraged lately. Yeah. Michael's interview today is amazing. First off, if you are here, get excited because it's going to be a great one.
We talk a lot about ways to basically improve your performance by looking at rest and having balance as something that isn't necessarily negative. But what we didn't talk about. But what I think is a great analogy is the fact that a Honda Civic that's used to commute doesn't need to even be looked at except every five thousand miles. When you go change the oil, they can check your tire pressure. It's a very basic car that doesn't do a lot of maintenance.
But if you're trying to be a race car, if you're trying to be a Lamborghini or NASCAR man and NASCAR needs a pit stop a couple of times a race, they're changing tires that frequently when you're trying to perform better, can you imagine trying to compete in NASCAR without ever taking a pit stop? That's how many of us are listening to this podcast have been living our lives. Yeah, because high achievers need to take that time to make sure they're focused and not just work, but like work's important.
We talk about work today. We talk about the things you can do to improve your work. But we also want things to make sure that you have a clear definition between work and life and something that I'm always trying to improve because I work life balance, like to go to court. The one thing doesn't really exist as much as work life balance scene. It's almost more of a verb than that we continually do. And so this episode is going to help you a lot with that.
Plus, Michaels has got a ton of great stories and anecdotes, and he's just a super cool guy. We actually had Michael on here back on Episode three sixty three, where we talked a lot about virtual assistants and hiring people. We talk about that a little bit today, but today we go into a little bit different. I get a different approach, more of a holistic approach to are you living a balanced life? So all that and more to come.
But before we get to that, let's get to today's quick today's quick tip is brought to you by David Greene.
Today's quick tip is ask yourself in what areas of life am I trying to make up for lack of impact with just extra what we call but in time? It's very, very tricky to convince yourself you're productive because you sat in front of a computer eight hours that day when in reality you didn't get a whole lot done. You could have worked for two hours, have been much more productive than the eight. So break yourself out of the W2 mindset that says I get paid per hour, so I just have to be at the office, be at the computer, say I'm working, and instead ask yourself what activities do I need to be taking that will make me successful and how can I break those activities down into smaller bite sized chunks that, like you said in the podcast, sometimes you could do in five seconds.
Yeah, go ask the man.
All right. Well, with that said, before we get to today's interview with Michael Hyatt, let's hear from today's show sponsors.
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I think it's time to jump in the interview. Anything you want to add right before we bring in Michael? No, this is a great one. Let's bring him in. Here we go. This is our interview with Michael Hyatt.
All right, Michael, welcome back to the Bigger Pockets podcast. Man, it's awesome to have you here. Hey, thanks, Brandon. Good to be with you. So let's let's jump into this thing.
So last time you're on the show, we talked about I mean, we talked about a lot of stuff last time, but specifically we talked a lot about assistants and hiring executive assistants for you in life, which I then did. And now I have actually have two assistants now, which is awesome. So thank you, by the way. I took.
Well, congratulations. It's been regulations. I can tell by Bell, who was just on that. You did. Well, I'm proud of you. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, she's awesome. So and by the way, I used Billey for that one.
And I know like I know you worked with Billey in the past as well, so. Yeah, they were. Yeah, they were great. So that's awesome. Yeah. They make it easy. Yeah. Very much so cool.
All right. Well let's let's jump in today. So you've got a new book out and I want to I wanted to start talking about that because I mean, I'm a I'm a reader and I know you're a reader and our audience is readers.
Let's talk about the book. So what is it? What's it about? We'll just start there and we'll dive in.
Yeah. So my new book is called When It Work and Succeed at Life. And it's basically kind of a manifesto against the cult of overwork. And so we're kind of presented today with this idea that you can win at work or you can succeed at life. And by that I mean maintain your health, your most important relationships, hobbies, et cetera. You can do one or the other, but you can't do both. But what we argue in the book and I wrote this book with my oldest daughter, who's now the CEO, Michael Hyatt and company.
We wrote this book together and we really wanted to articulate these five principles to free yourself from the cult of overwork, the cult of overworked.
And it is kind of a thing, right? It's a breaking point in today's culture of like, oh, I'm just so busy. I'm working all the time. I'm hustling hustle and drive and drive. And it's very much a status symbol, definitely a status symbol.
And, you know, woe to the person who doesn't respond in that way. You know, somebody says, well, how's work going? You go, Well, I don't you know, it's pretty manageable. And I'm working about 35, 40 hours a week. I mean, you look like a slacker. Yeah. So, yeah, that is definitely the cult of overwork, but it also comes at a very, very high price. Yeah.
Yeah. I've I'm sure we all think that meme or that the Instagram post I've seen it before and said something like, hey, I'm going to butcher it, but basically says like wealth, family, friends, something else. And it's like you can pick two and basically you can only have a couple of these things in life. And so you're saying that that's not true, that there's another way around it?
Absolutely. You know, I felt like for most of my career I was faced with this impossible choice where I could pick one or the other, but I couldn't do both. And as a result, I kind of had this unspoken pact with my wife, and that is that she would raise the kids. I would work hard, make enough money to try to fund the entire enterprise. But we kind of lived on parallel planets, basically. And finally, I just I woke up one day and I started the story in the book where, you know, I've been hired to turn this one division around at a big corporate publicly held company.
And this division happened to be number 14 out of 14. So it was dead last in every important financial metric. And so the CEO said, how long will it take you to turn this division around? Because it's a total drag on the corporate earnings. And I said, I think we can do it about three years. So I went back, rolled up my sleeves, shared with the team the vision of turning it around. And we worked hard.
We're working like 70, 80 hours a week, you know, working on the weekends, working in the evenings. I was eating junk food. It wasn't working out. I thought all that stuff could wait, but it paid off because in a year and a half, we went from number 14 to number one in profitability, in growth, every significant metric. I got the biggest bonus check I've ever received in my life. It was more than my entire annual salary and I could not wait to get home to share it with Gail.
And she's always been super supportive. My biggest cheerleader, we've got five kids. So I walked in, you know, bounced into the house. I unfurled the check and I said, look at this. Can you believe it? And I could tell there was just kind of a hitch in her giddy up, you know, she just wasn't her normal enthusiastic itself and she said, babe, we need to talk. And so she led me into the den.
We sat down, she said, you know, I love you. I've always tried to be super supportive. But she said, I got to be honest with you, you are never home and your five daughters need you. And so she started to cry a little bit. She said, even when you are home. You're not really here. And then she really started crying and she said, honestly, I feel like a single mom and that gutted me, you know, that was the last thing I wanted to do was to put her into that position.
I felt like, you know, I justified it, that I was doing it for the family, you know, the entire time. But I realized that that this was no longer sustainable. You know, the people that was doing it for I was hurting. And I said, there's got to be a better way. And I think, you know, when most people are felt, what most people confront, that that kind of choice, they do one of two things.
Either they hustle harder. They think, oh, my gosh, if I could just work harder, get the big payoff, have enough money that I could relax and give attention to my health, I can give attention to my family, pay attention to my kids, all the rest. But the problem is that number keeps growing. You know, it's like it's like an unreachable carrot. The other alternative is what we call in the book, The Ambition Break, where you say, you know, I am not going to be a slave to my work, you know, I'm not going to do what my dad did or I'm not going to do what my mom did.
I'm going to give attention to my family. I'm going to be really there for my kids. And so we throttle back our professional ambition. But the problem is for people that are high achievers, that's not very satisfying either. You know, you feel like you've got all this wasted potential and, you know, that just doesn't work. So that this was 20 years ago that set me on a quest to find a third way to say what if there was a way to win at work and succeed at life.
And, you know, is a lot of times it was three steps forward, two steps back. But I started getting momentum. And this is now something we call the double win and we teach it to our clients. We practice it ourselves with our staff and it works.
So the double win, you're winning at home, you're winning that at work. That's right. And I think that that is super important because, again, people especially like I know this is like starting out entrepreneurs, like the real estate and people listen to our show. And I was there as well.
Like, I just would go all in on something, like all the I'm on it. And I was I was there because I felt like I had to get there and had to climb this mountain. And now I always tell myself, like, I'm almost at the top. You ever, like, climb a mountain, right? Or do big hike. And you I guess you see that. You think at the top right there. And so you start you're like, oh, I just got to go over that ridge.
I'm there, I'm at the top. And you get up there and you're like, OK, that wasn't the top. I get to the next top right there on that one. There's always this other top and I never make the top of the mountain. And that's what I feel like. 15 years of my life was always saying, I'm almost there when I when I get this thing that's going to be the maybe at the top and I can relax a little bit.
And it's it's a lie.
It is inside the book. We call that the false summit. Mm. You know, it's like you think you've made it and you get up. There you go. Oh man, this is not what I expected or this is not what I hoped or did I really sacrifice all those years of my life for this. And it's very, very unsatisfying. And you know, I we pick in the book on Elon Musk and without a doubt, I mean, he's a phenomenal entrepreneur and he's become sort of an icon, especially to an entire generation of of young entrepreneurs.
And he famously said at one point, he said that unless you're working 80 to 100 hours a week, you know, you're not going to create that big thing and make a dent in the universe. And the problem is that it's just not sustainable. And in fact, it hasn't worked out for Elon. He's gone through two marriages now. He admits that is his five boys hardly speak to him. And he's basically all he's got is his work.
He's married to his work because everything else is in the trash heap behind him. You know, brings up a good point about the people we idolize in life, like we see these people like, oh, I would love to be like a Jeff Bezos or Bill Bill Gates or Elon Musk or even like, you know, anybody even in our own industry, like you look at me like, wow, I want to be like them, but at what cost?
And so I tried really hard lately to like when I think about people, I want to be like I also look at the rest of their life and do I really want to be like them the rest of the life? Because a lot of times the answer is no.
No, that's exactly right. And that's why you have to consider the totality of their lives, because life is multidimensional. And one of the things that we argue in the book is that all these different domains of life, you know, you've got a spiritual domain, intellectual, emotional, physical, financial, your vocation, you've got your marriage, you've got your kids, you've got all these different things. But they're all interrelated and they all affect each other.
And this just common sense, right? I mean, you get sick and it's going to affect your work. You're feeling stress at work. It's going to affect your marriage. You're having a spat with your spouse. You're going to drag that to work. All these things are interconnected. And that's why, you know, work life balance, which a lot of people love to make fun of today, is actually essential. And it's possible, but it depends on how we define it.
Yeah, you know, I think when I hear work life balance, I often thought it means a perfect balance of two hours a day for this, two hours a day for this, two hours a day for this. And then obviously, when you get into the trenches, you find that that is pretty much impossible to actually maintain, that you sort of swing back and forth between work needs to be more. Family needs me more. Can you maybe illustrate a little bit of how that work should work, in your opinion, Michael?
Yeah, I think that sometimes we define balance. We think, you know, that every compartment of our life, every category of our life gets the same distribution of resources, our attention, our focus, our money, our time. But that's all what it means at all. What it means is that every category of our life gets the appropriate amount of attention. And it's more like walking across a balance beam where when you're walking across the balance beam, most of the time you're out of balance.
Right. And you're trying to kind of shift your weight around to stay in balance. And that's how life works. You know, there are seasons when you have to go all in on work. You know, maybe you've got, you know, in in your world, you're launching some new development project or some new apartment complex that's coming out of the ground. I don't know what it is, but you've got something that requires all in for a period of time.
But you've got to be careful that that doesn't become a way of life. And and where it usually goes off the rails is you get seduced into thinking that situation is temporary. But one temporary emergency leads to another, temporary emergency leads to another temporary emergency. And before long, you've got maybe 10 years of being completely out of balance. And that's why, you know, you've got to visit the honest planet occasionally, you know, look in the mirror and say, OK, what's really going on here?
And the problem is work is incredibly seductive. Yeah. You know, I mean, you think about spending time at work compared to spending time at home. You know, at work. There's a defined when. At home, not so much, you know, kids, especially a marriage, these are long term projects where you see little incremental improvement and sometimes you think you're going backwards, not not forwards at work. There's a lot of rewards. There's a lot of attaboys, a lot of satisfaction at home, not so much.
You know, it's pretty thankless a lot of times. And at work, you get to experience flow. You know, where you're you're you're doing something you love, you're really good at. And time just seems to fly by because you're enjoying it so much at home. Sometimes it feels like, you know, you're watching paint dry. You know, it could be so slow. So I think we got to realize all these psychological effects on us that kind of keep us in the work mode.
You know, that's the place where we know what we're doing. Sometimes at home, we don't really know what we're doing and we weren't taught or or whatever. But but we've got to get over that if I'm going to be a long term success.
Yeah, that's such a good point. I struggle with that a lot. Where yeah. When I'm doing work, whether it's the real estate stuff I do, whether it's the educational side of what I do, like with bigger pocket stuff, like I love it, I'm in it, I just feel like so good.
And I'm like concrete things. I'm like, you know, I'm a good dude. I love to conquer things. Right. But then I go home and I'm like sitting on the floor with my mom, my daughter. And I love Rosie with all of my heart. Right.
But after an hour of playing t t games and, you know, I, I'm like, I need to go out to my office and go get some work done.
Like, I just I like I struggle because, like, it just feels so mundane to sit there and play, you know, a Tea Party for an hour or two hours because I'm not getting those dopamine hits of like I just conquered this new thing. I recorded this video or whatever. But I'm I'm really trying because I know that at the end of my life, I'm never gonna look back and say I wish I would have spent less time playing Tea Party.
I'm not exactly right or too much.
And it's hard for me. I've been married for forty two years now and my wife and I have a great marriage. You know, we occasionally don't have a great marriage, but most of the time it's pretty darn great. And we have five daughters and they're all adults between 30 and 40. We've got nine grandkids. But I'm going to tell you something. It is worth it. It is worth whatever you have to do to make sure that you give the proper attention to your family.
Because when you have kids that are grown that are among your best friends that actually want to be with you, spend time with you when you actually want to be with the person you're married to and go vacation with them. And you can't wait to get home from the office and share with them what happened. I mean, that's that's like priceless.
One of my buddies once kind of jokingly said, but it was half serious. He said that he didn't want kids. But kids are a 20 year investment in the last 40 years of your life, and I love that. And so he ended up having at least six kids right now. And like, he obviously loves kids. But his point was like, like, you have kids and then you get grandkids later and the grandkids are a lot. I'm I'm sure, you know, like they're they're fun people.
You don't have to change the diapers every time, but you still get the joy of having right around and like, yeah, you go.
Otherwise, I really do worry about like if I get like before I had kids like my wife and I kind of struggled to have kids for a number of years. I thought, well, if I went and had no kids ever like and I get sixty five, seventy years old, 80 years old with our technology today, we're probably in live to one hundred and thirty hundred and forty. Yeah. That's a long time to have no family afterwards. So like, you know, obviously you can build a good solid friendships and you can be kind of adopted to other people's families.
But that yeah, I wanted to always make sure that like that my kids were there. No one, because a good chunk of my life will be after the worst kind of years are over. And, uh. Yeah, yeah, absolutely right.
Yep. All right. So let's talk about in the book, you talk about that the double when we talk about that. So what are some things like let's go tangible here?
What are some things people should be doing to get more balance in their life to get to get the double win?
Yeah, one of the things that we talk about in the book, in fact, the way the book is structured is around these five principles of the double double win. And let me just jump to the second one, because it's super practical and it's this constraints foster productivity, creativity and freedom. So typically, we think if there's a constraint that that is the enemy of freedom. Right. We want to work in a world without constraints. If I need to work twelve hours a day, fourteen hours a day, I want to work that way.
But let me tell you story. So back after I had that experience with my wife Gail in the den where she told me she felt like a single mom, I thought I needed executive coach. I got to have somebody that helps me figure this out. So I hired a guy that I hired, a guy named Daniel Harkavy of Building Champions. He became one of my best friends. We co-wrote a book together called Living Forward. But one of the things that did in the book.
Well, thank you. Yeah. Great book. Thank you. Well, Daniel said to me, he said. As you begin to coach me, he said, I want you to put hard boundaries on your day because you don't have boundaries, buddy. He said, here's here's what your day looks like. He said you in the middle of the afternoon when you think, oh, well, that might not get this done this afternoon, you think to yourself.
And he'd coach, you know, tons of people. So he knew what I was thinking. He said, You think to yourself, well, I'll go home, eat a bite with the family, and then I'll crack open my laptop and I'll get right back to work. There's no there's no boundaries in your life. And and by your own admission, he's saying to me, he said, you're working Saturday mornings, you're working Sunday night. You don't really take vacations.
I mean, you might go with the family to a vacation destination, but you're working in the morning for most of the morning while your family is at the beach. You're taking phone calls, answering emails, all that stuff. You're not really present there. So he said, I want you to establish hard boundaries. So I said, OK, so back in those days, I decided that I would establish a hard boundary. I wouldn't start till nine in the morning and I would finish promptly at six.
Now I do a lot better than that now. But that was that was a start back then. I said I won't work on the weekends and I won't work on vacations. And that was really hard. Daniel asked me for permission. If he could call Gail periodically and check in and see how he was doing all of it. That was that was like the scariest thing ever. But I said, OK, gulp. So he did you know, he would follow up and say, you know, how's Michael doing?
And, you know, I was because I had that accountability, because I had the coaching and because I established the hard boundaries. Everything shifted right then, because here's what started happening. You know how it is like on the Friday before you go on vacation, you know, you've got all this stuff you got to get done. You've got a hard deadline and you're like Superman. You know, you get a week's worth of work done in a Friday just because you've got that constraint.
Well, the same thing happens every day when you have a hard quit time, because I would say, look, I don't have time to goof off. I don't have time to check Facebook or, you know, chit chat with this person in the hallway. I got to stay focused here because it's six p.m. I've committed to Daniel and I've committed to Gail. And Daniel's going to check in with Gail. I got to finish at six. And I can't work on the weekends, so I can't drag that work home.
So what are my priorities for this week? How can I stay focused on them and actually get them done? Now, here's what's really interesting about constraints. That's another story. OK, so back when the pandemic started. Hard to believe it's been almost a year as we're recording this, but but we have a we have about 40 full time employees and most of them are younger couples or younger parents who have small kids. Now, all of a sudden, they had no child care, they had no nannies, they had no daycare, they had no school, nothing.
The kids were underfoot. They're trying to work from home. It was crazy. What a stress. Plus, they're getting all this stress from the macro environment, you know, the economic downturn, you know, all the stuff that was happening with the summer, with the protests and the riots and so forth. Somebody is under a lot of stress. So we said for the end of March, we said, OK, as an experiment, we're going to move to a 30 hour work week.
We're going to work from nine to three. And we've already we're practicing the hard boundary thing with our previous work day, which was 9:00 to 5:00. But we're going to go nine to three. We're not going to take anybody's pay. Anybody's going to get paid the exact same they were before this started. We're going to try it for two weeks and then we're going to analyze the productivity and make sure that the constraints that we've employed have actually improved productivity or at least allowed it to remain the same.
The two weeks executives got together, we said, OK, what do we think seems to be working? We can't see any slip. We can't tell the difference honestly. So we said, OK, let's do it for a month. And then we said, let's do it through the summer. And then when we got to our strategic planning in late September of this last year, we said, guys, let's make this permanent. That's cool. I mean, I can't tell any difference.
We're working thirty hours a week. Everybody's just as productive. We just finished twenty twenty and we were up one hundred percent over last year over a profit. We were highly profitable last year. We doubled it this year. We grew our top line by about 50 percent and that was in a pandemic working fewer hours. So this stuff does work. Yeah, that's really good. And it's true for our clients too. They were they've been doing very similar things with similar results.
That's so good.
You know, to add to the to the constraint thing, what I did recently and this goes back to the comment we talked about having an assistant, one of those valuable pieces of an assistant is that she I tell her my constraints and then she makes sure that I hold to them versus like, let's say I was only going to work like that. For example, I am taking Tuesdays off for what I call just creative work. I can surf if I wanted to.
I go sit by myself in a coffee shop or I could go film a video or whatever it is, creative work, no meetings. And then Friday I'm going to take off just entirely. I don't work Fridays. Right.
So that's so I'm trying to cram everything in the Monday, Wednesday and Thursday and it's working just fine.
But if somebody asks me, Hey, Brandon, a friend of mine, hey, can you do a podcast episode on Friday or hey, can we go analyze the deal together on Friday? I would always say yes. Yeah, yeah. I got the whole day free. Like, my schedule is wide open. Right.
But as soon as I had an assistant and I told her what my constraints were and then she just made everything fit within the days that I have and now I like on Fridays, I'm like, I have nothing to do today. This is amazing. Like it's a team that alone is worth the cost of an assistant just for the amount of free time it's given me because it forces me. To not emotionally say yes to things, but to make her fit within the constraints that I've given her, so that's been huge.
Well, I'll tell you what's at play there, too, is that you're doing what Stephen Covey talks about when he says we need to put a pause between the stimulus and the response. Yeah, because in that pause, Dr. Covey says, is our freedom. The problem is when you get the stimulus, somebody says, hey, Brennan, how about we do this on Friday? I need to pick your brain. Can we have coffee? Whatever.
You know, if it's like I'm the same way, by the way, I would just say yes, because there's no pause. But now what I say is, look, that sounds amazing. Like if I didn't know today, I'd say, you know, I'd love to do with you. But I tell you what, you got to check with Jim, who's my assistant, because Jim runs my calendar and we have an agreement. I don't touch my calendar, so work it out with Jim.
We'll find a time. Exactly. And that gives me the pause, because Jim can come back to me later and say, hey, I know you kind of wanted to do this in the moment, but do you still want to do this or is it really important or can we push it out now? We've got all kinds of options. So good. Yeah.
All right. Let me play devil's advocate here for a minute. Let's say you're a young hustler. You want to do big things in life. You know, it's going to take some work to get there. And you hear Brandon say, I want Fris free. And the first thought that goes through your head is, well, that's 20 percent of the week that I can use to be more productive than Brandon. I'm going to catch him and pass him if I work Fridays and he doesn't.
Michael, is that what you found in your experience is the case?
No, I didn't find that. I think that makes. Rational sense, I think that that makes sense. That's basically the same kind of argument that Elon Musk makes when he says you work 100 hours a week because you'll work in three months, what it takes everybody else to do in a year. But the problem is those last few hours are not as productive. Now, I. I have nothing against working five days a week. I work three days a week, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
But but I had nothing work five days a week or working 40 hours a week. But the science says that once you get past about 50 hours a week, it's counterproductive. In fact, there's a Stanford study that we quote in the book that says people who work 70 hours got nothing more accomplished than those that work 50. Amazing 20 hours of just busy work or we call it fake work. And yeah, you can keep yourself you can do low leverage work.
But here's a cool thing, and this is kind of the Prado's principle. We've got this baked into our plan or the full focus planner, but we identify our daily big three. Now, based on our survey with our clients, the average person with a task list has 15 items. When they wake up in the morning that they've got to get done, they think that day, 15 items, OK, but those are all kinds of items. Some of them are really important related to a quarterly goal.
Some of them are just kind of low leverage work, you know, checking email or whatever. So. So what we say is if 20 percent of the effort drives 80 percent of the result, which is the Parado principle, then 20 percent or 15 would be three. So what are the three tasks among those 15 that if you could nail those, you could declare victory because they contribute to an important project, they contribute to to a goal. And so so that's what we do.
So I declare victory when I get my big three done for the day. And if I get things done, that's just bonus. You know, I can choose to do it or choose not to do it. But getting those big three done, if you do that every day, day in and day out, five days a week. And that's and that's where I think, David, to answer your question, it's more about focusing on tasks that matter, not on time with your butt in the seat.
Yeah. Yeah, that's so, so good. You know, Tim Ferriss in the four hour work week came out, what, 10, 15 years ago, maybe not a long time ago. But like that was of the most impactful thing he said in that book with where he said if there was a gun to your head and you could only work for hours, that's where the word came from.
The phrase came from the title came from you could only work four hours a week and there's a gun to your head and said, you cannot work more than that. What are the tasks that you would actually do to move your business forward? And so it really forces you to think, well, what would I do?
So to apply this to real estate investors who are listening right now, like if you I would guess ninety five percent of what a real estate like a new realty investor does is not contributing towards the things that's going to give them the next, get them the deal, get them in the game. Like if you're not actively, like, analyzing a property, looking at a property, talking to a real estate agent, making an offer, sitting in a bank, talking to a banker, those are the things that actually drive you forward.
What they're doing is they're reading a little bit. They're making a business car. They got a really nice logo. They got all this stuff. But they're not doing like the work because they don't have the constraints. They're not like they're just it's just they're just working here when you really boil it down to like, what are the fundamental things that you do? And the great part is you can ask somebody who is further along in any industry who is further along.
I mean, like Michael, you ran publishing for a long time. So if like if we have a publishing company, a bigger pockets, if we came to you and said, hey, we want to get on the New York Times bestseller list, what are the five things I got to do?
And like, I know you've been there, so you'd be like, OK, do one, two, three, four and five.
And then I could like now I know what those fundamental tasks are versus me, just like just wandering around trying to figure this out with 40, 50, 60 hours a week. That's amazing.
Or just doing a lot of busy stuff. Right. You know, like like I could, you know, in promoting this book, I could go out there and and be on one hundred and fifty different podcasts and probably one hundred and forty of them wouldn't matter being a big Puckett's matters. Right. This is a high leverage opportunity for me to promote the book. And so not all work is created equal. And that's a fundamental principle that we that we have in the book.
Not all work is created equal. What you want to focus on is the work where you've got passion, you've got proficiency and is going to drive the results in your business. And that's, you know, that's a few things every day.
Yeah. That's so good. Yeah, I love the whole like what are the three things you're going to accomplish. They get that done. I always also add like and I know you do as well. It's like if you can define like what is the next step to get that done today? Because a lot of people just haven't defined what that is. And usually it's a five minute task. And it's, like you said, an email. Make a text message.
Right. Make a phone call. It's like it's always like a simple little thing. Go on a website and type in a couple words. And now you've got the next step. And if you just did that, if every day people I mean, again, this I got a lot of this from reading your content over the years. If you have a vision of where you want to get to and then you boil that down. Like annual goals, quarterly goals, what are you going to do this week?
What are you going to do today? What am I going to do in the next five minutes? And if you always ask that question and it was all a line in this nice line thing, but all all success, I believe all success is a series of five minute easy tasks. Everything I mean from brain surgery is a series of five minute tasks or less. Some of them are three seconds. Right. Cut here, put here. But people aren't they don't define what those steps are.
They're doing steps that aren't actually aligned in that vertical. So like they're doing things that don't get them closer. But if that's all people dead and I'm ranting here, but this is just so important, right? If it is new, they're headed and then aligned their daily actions with that.
It's like success should not be a surprise. Would be like, well, of course, I got a six pack, I, I lined up. Of course I got a million dollar net worth. Of course I bought an apartment complex. Of course I published the New York Times bestseller because it's not a mystery.
Well, you know, it's of interesting this morning as we're recording this. It's the day after the Super Bowl and Tom Brady just had his amazing seventh championship, which just killed it. And he was like a machine so methodical, so calm, so confident, just executed one play after another. So I was talking to my business accelerator clients today and I was saying, you know, success is not an accident. Tom Brady just didn't show up to play that game.
Right. And so I found this article in The New York Post this morning and it talked about his training regimen. Oh, my gosh. Unbelievable. But it's a series of small things. It's it's him taking care of the small things, working his system. And a system will be the goal every time. If you've got a system, it'll be the goal every time. And Tom Brady has a system. And so it's what he eats. It's the fact that he sleeps nine hours every night, that he works out, you know, with the trainer, that he really works on his mindset.
He exercises his brain. He uses this app called Brain HQ. He plays it for a couple of hours every day because when he's, you know. They're on the game field and he's got a few seconds to look downfield, identify somebody that's open and throw a pass, there's got just seconds to do that. And so he's got to keep his brain sharp as well as his body sharp. But it just it just made me see that, you know, that the people that really succeed are people that have a system and they work that system every day.
You know, we think sometimes that it's got to be this massive killer deal, this big breakthrough thing that's going to launch us into orbit.
Not usually that usually. That's so true.
Yeah. Nobody's ever like I mean, I don't know anybody who says, yeah, Tom Brady just got lucky today. Like nobody like the guy like that would just be it would be horrible.
But why do we say that about every other business, like, oh yeah, that CEO just got lucky that that real estate investor got lucky. But if you look at their life like they're doing it.
And so then the twist that one further is when if you're wondering if you're listening right now, wondering why you haven't had success the past year or six months or two months or whatever, like ask yourself, are you doing the actual steps every day that should have given you the success?
And I think the answer most of the time is probably not.
Hey, let's take a quick break from this episode. We'll continue in just a moment. But first, let's hear word from our sponsors.
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That's PB dotcom slash pockets. Simplify your shipping and save with a free trial of Centro online from Pitney Bowes. Now, I want to I want to twist this a little bit and actually fire this over to David real quick, because David here is probably the most picture perfect example of somebody who is a was a complete workhorse, like to like.
I like David's whole story. We don't have to own the whole thing. But like, you worked one hundred hours a week for years as a cop. Right.
Once you explain that and then where you are today, I mean, the fact you've been just hanging out here with me for the last month in Hawaii, like, how did talk about that?
If it's in really good with what we're talking about, I'm like a case study in everything that are being sold. And to be frank, I was the most stubborn human being of all where I heard people say this and I just didn't stop. Well, as Michael, you were talking. What I realized was I would I was that person who would say, well, you work four days a week, I'm going to work seven and I'm going to be twice as successful as you.
And it was four, because in the post-industrial era to environment, you are compensated for hours in seat time, whatever you want to call that.
This is important. This is important. So I learned I was I was succeeding by having my butt in the seat. And so my brain would rewire itself to say, how can I rearrange my life so that I could be at work all the time. Right. I bought a car that I could sleep in so I wouldn't have to commute back and forth. I, I set up my life and my business is to the point where I was not responsible for buying Christmas presents.
I need someone else to do it because I had to be at work all the time. And when I got out of that world and into the entrepreneurial world, which is just a way of saying like a world where there's some creativity and freedom that will make you successful, I brought that old way of thinking into it, just like I brought a football body into a soccer match. It was the stupidest thing you could do. You just you can't keep running with the football body.
Well, my brain had been built a certain way, and I did not understand that your brain is much more like your body. It needs rest. It needs recovery, short spurts of intense activity and then a period of rest followed. Make it perform so much better. Imagine if you went to the gym and said, I'm going to get a seven hour workout in because you're only going to work out for half an hour. I'll be 14 times stronger than you when we're done, but that's how I was actually living life.
And so now I'm in this. It felt like a leap of faith. But like, what you guys are saying is what I'm trying to do. I came to Hawaii and said, I'm not going home until I like something breaks in my business and I'm needed or I think I'd be happier there than here. It's not going to be because I think my business needs me and the opposite happen of what I was afraid of. We we just put fifty one houses in escrow at this time last year.
We were crushing it at twenty eight. We've almost doubled it all during covid and I've been working less, I've been doing less of the tasks every time something comes up that needs. But in time for David I say, OK, if I have to do it I will, but I'm never going to have to do it again. Who do I have to teach? How am I going to leverage this? What do I have to do to make sure that this never actually makes its way through all the firewall it gets to my desk.
Someone else should have caught it. And I think the reason I'm being more or I'm seeing more success is that this forces me to train everybody that's underneath me. I now have ten davits of people on my team instead of a me, and I'm recognizing the less time my butt is in the seat, the more people there are that are doing this. And we're getting exponential returns like it's sort of embracing leadership as opposed to just do worship doers. And I love that.
I love that. Times Ten is such a great example. I wish we could have interviewed you for the book because it's a good example. You know, the other thing the other thing, too, that I think that illustrates, David, is, you know, tension is the enemy of performance. So I don't know if you guys golf a little bit. But the worst thing you've got. Well, well, yeah. I don't golf well, but but it's true for any sport.
If you're tense, you're not going to perform, you know. So like most of my my golf instruction, my golf instructor has just said to me, OK, just relax, you know, relax your grip. You're holding that golf club like you're trying to choke it. And I think that's true in life, too. You know, when I've got the biggest deals, I've made the biggest deals, when I've made the biggest advance in my business had the big breakthroughs.
It's been when I was in a state where I was relaxed, not tense, not stressed out of my mind, and usually when I was doing something other than work. And so one of the things we argue in the book and again, it's called A Win at work succeed in Life. But we talk about, you know, rest is the foundation. Of productive, meaningful work and, you know, sort of the cult of overall cult of overwork devalues rest.
It's like it has rest, has no commercial value. It can't be monetized. So we want to try to minimize that and get by with as little sleep as we can. I I once published a book back when I was in the book publishing business, and it was basically how to survive on four hours of sleep a night. And it was kind of the same argument that David was making that man. If I could work those four hours that my competitors are sleeping, think how much of a leg up I could get on them.
Well, that's that has all kinds of dangerous, debilitating health impacts, social impacts, relational impact and all the rest. So we argue for rest being really methodical about it. And boy, that was a thing that there was really clear in that Tom Brady article in The New York Post is that he is religious about getting to bed at eight thirty at night and waking up at five thirty because he knows he needs that much sleep in order to perform at his best.
So we talk about sleep. We talk about hobbies. You know, the way to be relaxed. You know, when you're doing something like for me, it's, you know, fishing, golfing, playing a musical instrument, you know, some of my biggest breakthrough business ideas have come not when I was working on the business, but when I was doing something relaxing like that. Yeah.
Now, I'd say a lot of my good ideas have been either driving around like, well, my kids are in the car sleeping. There's driving music or jogging. I'm just jogging. And if I'm listen, I'm I'm listening to music. When I'm jogging, it'll just be like songs that I like. So my mind just wanders and it's just like, yeah, that's where I get all that is like that resting that resting time and then sleep in general.
I like I'm not good at sleeping because I stay up way too late either working or just watching a Netflix or whatever. And then I'm like, oh, but I got to get up early, early because American Morning got to wake up early, then I wake up early. So I'm getting like six hours a night, sometimes five and a half and and I feel it in my body and then like once or twice a week I just crash as if like nine hours.
And it's a really unhealthy way to function. You get tips for just changing that about myself. And those people are listening to might be nodding along right now, like, yeah.
You know, I used to think that having an alarm to wake up, I was important thing that I don't think that anymore. I think having an alarm to go to bed on time is an important thing. But to just be rigorous about that, because sleep is so tied to performance, to focus, you know, sometimes people wonder whether they they feel like they're 8D, they may be clinically dead. So that's the thing. But sometimes we're just unfocused because we haven't had enough rest.
You know, like when you're sitting there reading the same paragraph over and over again in a book, that's usually because you haven't had a good night's sleep. We have an inability to to deal with conflict. When we're tired, we it impacts our heart health. This is what got my attention when you sleep only on average, anything less than seven hours sleep a night, you you increase your risk of heart attack dramatically. I can remember the exact stat is, but heart health and rest are key.
In fact, it's true for for every disease, you know, one of the best ways to build your immune system, you know, we all know this is getting adequate rest. And if there if there were two other books that I would recommend to you, you may read them already. But what is rest by paying and G. And he wrote another book that actually got us into the Shorter Work Week, a book called Shorter End of that book.
He presents all the scientific evidence for why a shorter work week is actually more productive, why you accomplish bigger things.
If you do that, that's because you haven't have it not read that. And but I fully believe it and I fully believe it. And that does worry me. Like, if I've heard, like, lack of sleep is the new smoking. Like it's worse for your body than. Yeah, smoking. I beg all you you drink soda every day. All day. Are you smoke every day. Like I'm way better than that.
Right. But am I. Because if I'm not getting the right sleep I need then no it's true. And I like I even I advocate and have practice now for about 30 years. I take a 30 minute nap right after lunch every day. I've done it every kind of environment. I've done it when I was working in a corporate environment, when I was the CEO and when I was in mid-level management, you know, I figured out a way to do it and that, like, completely reboots my system.
That's another thing that's worth studying is the value of naps. Yeah.
One hundred percent agreed. And I read that somewhere out there. What book? I read it and at one point but I do this, I had never taken a nap from the time I like four up and I think I was thirty two, maybe three years ago maybe I started like trying to get and what I, I did a couple of things. One they say drink a cup of coffee. You've heard this before. Drinking coffee right. Before you take a nap you take.
Yeah. Drink a cup of coffee and you fall asleep and then twenty minutes later the caffeine hits you and wakes you back up again. And that's worked really well for me. If I sleep more than about twenty five minutes though, I'm shot for the next four hours. But twenty five is like my like fifteen to twenty five is like ideal for me.
Well, what the science says is that twenty six minutes is the ideal length, really? Yeah, I just said my doctor told me that. That's funny. Yeah. If you go over that, you just start feeling worse and the longer you're not, the worse you feel. Totally.
So don't turn your computer off, but hit control, delete.
Let it restart. Quick restart. Yeah. It's a reboot. Yeah.
That's exactly one thing that has actually improved my sleep dramatically.
Probably one of the if I had to pick an app that's changed my life the most of all the apps in the App Store on my phone that I've used, I have the app. Com that KLM. Right. It's a meditation app but I actually don't use it for the meditation really, because I just can't get myself into the habit. But the sleep stories on calm have like I went from taking an average of an hour to fall asleep every night, which was very, it was very like typical hour, hour and a half, two hours.
I fall asleep, my brain just won't stop working. So I put on a stupid sleep story like a train ride through the Switzerland Alps or something like that. I don't know.
And like within five minutes, almost every single night, I fall asleep. So the his story, it's a literally a story. They just like they're like you get on the train at the stop and there's the clouds out the window. And they did this tell you the story. And sometimes it's like reading things like childhood stories like Alice in Wonderland. But it's just it's engaging enough to keep you interested, but not enough so that your body fights sleep.
And it changed my life.
So I still struggle with actually turning it on and going to bed because I just want to stay up because I'm like I like staying up late.
But for people who struggle with the mind, like just relaxing. And so then they have another one called Mashi for kids. And this works for my daughter as well. She'll take a half hour to fall asleep at night, just wiggly and whatever. But I'll put on this Mashi app. It's like a story about these little Mashi characters, little stuffed animals, basically. And within a minute she's she's out. It's just something about getting your brain focused in on a fairly dull story that just changes lives.
That's cool.
This could be a whole new market books that are boring. Yeah, it could be, yeah. What is it like?
Read them very, very dry, boring books and let people fall victim. Yeah, I tried doing it with like fiction. I can't do it.
I was like into this like into the book. Wonder what comes next. It's a terrible idea but or like real estate I start listening to like strategies or business stuff. I just can't do it. But a story about a train ride through the Alps and I'm out. My books are perfect for this. Your books are. So if you're having trouble sleeping by any of my books, they will put you right out and they will make you more productive the next day.
It's actually why I wrote terrible books was because I wanted people to be more successful.
I love it. It was a public service.
Yeah. Good man. All right, man. Well, as we as we slowly move towards the back half, like, I'm wondering where like let's talk about some more tangible things people can do. I know you have the five the five things that leaders can do to implement the double win. I mean, we talked about one of them, but what else can you throw at us?
Yeah. So if you want to implement this in with your team and all that, which I think is really important, one of the things to do is to make sure that you're modeling it, that you're leading by example. And I think this is true for anything that you want to change in your company, because I don't just want to double win for me, I want to double win for my team, Honda. Right. Because I want them not to burn out.
I want to retain them. I want them to show up at the as the best version of themselves where they're highly focused, highly productive and actually get it done. And so I think that that starts with us as leaders, because if we're saying one thing and modeling something different, guess what people are going to do, right? They're going to they're going to follow our example. I used to have an executive back when I was at Thomas Nelson Publishers, who was a total workaholic.
I mean, he literally and he was he was running a major division. Our company had hundreds of people working for him. And he would work till seven o'clock at night, eight o'clock at night. And I said to him, Buddy, I said, this is contrary to the kind of culture that we're trying to build here. By this time, I was like, you know, an alcoholic that gotten sober. And I was on this, you know, big thing to try to get everybody to not work so much.
And he said, well, I just I just can't do it. I said, well, here's. And he said, I don't have any kids at home. It doesn't matter. And I said, But what about for the people that are working for you to do have kids at home? They're here trying to keep up with you instead of being home with their family. Their kids need them. I can never get him to do it. But it's got to start with you.
It's got to start with you. You've got to model the behavior that you expect. And I think to teach on this and to give explicit permission. And by the way, when we say double win, we're not talking about compromising your professional goals. We're not talking about somehow putting the brake on your ambition or pulling back on what you want to achieve. If anything, my goals are bigger today than they've ever been. And so I say to my people when I teach this, and I think you've got to if you if you want to have a company that's practicing this and and actually benefiting from it, then I think you've got to give them a lot of reason why.
And one of the reasons I keep telling them, I said, look, I want you to not burn out. I want you to be highly focused when you're here and we expect you to be productive when you're here. So modeling it, teaching it, giving people a lot of why. And then I think also modeling it in terms of corporate culture, like don't don't be sending emails. You know, after hours now, I know the real estate business, you know, that could be dicey, right?
Because, you know, depending what kind of real estate business you're in, you know, that may be evening work, but don't be sending emails after hours or text messages. Don't do it on the weekends. Again, real estate may be an exception, but there's got to be some parameters. There's got to be some boundaries that you respect as the owner or as the leader and that you also expect your people to respect. And if you do that, then the benefit is that everybody in the company is their most focused, most productive, best self.
And that's good to make sense.
One hundred percent. And I will be honest, I'm a real estate broker. I run a real estate team and a lending team. So this is a thing where you have to work weekends. When you're a real estate agent, you're there for your clients. They're free in the evenings, they're free on the weekends. You have to be there for them. However, that is not an excuse to become a workaholic. We have created and are working on creating systems to where when somebody has a question like this is something I'm working on right now, I haven't talked about it.
I want to chat feature where anybody who's buying a house with us when they get that moment of anxiety at 10, 30 at night saying, oh my God, what about this or what are my closing costs going to be? Do I have enough money that they can immediately get a hold of somebody who will who will respond to them, acknowledge what they're feeling and say, we will look into this and get back to you in the morning and then they can have some peace and calm?
OK, I got it out of my head is being worked on, but that's not an agent taking a 10 30 at night phone call that turns into forty five minutes of listening to somebody go on and on about how scared they are.
There are all kinds of things we can do which which I found usually if this stuff pops up where you have to do something because you didn't put a system in place ahead of time to prevent that the oh my God, where are the toilets leaking? What am I going to do? Landlord phone call is because you didn't explain to your tenants what to do when the toilet would break.
So I guess what I'm saying, Michael, is I found that is often an excuse to say you have to do it. I have to do it. It has to get done. That is justifying some other motive that we have. And I was wondering if you would share what you found in your experience is the best advice for the person that maybe is a workaholic because they don't have a family life or because they have bad eating habits and they don't like working out.
And this just becomes a distraction from everything in their life that they don't like so that they can get started breaking themselves out of that cycle and maybe recognizing that they're lying to themselves when they say things like it has to get done.
Yeah, no doubt.
And I think, you know what? I've the conversation I've had with people is the trajectory conversation. You know, if you continue like you're doing, where does how does the story end? You know, we don't have to guess. We know how this story ends. You know, when people are workaholics, here's what's going to happen. You're going to probably go through your marriage. You're going to probably, you know, have your kids go off the rails in some way.
And the thing that you're trying to protect work is going to be dramatically impacted. You know, for ask anybody that's had a divorce or the kids have gotten on drugs or the kids, you know, something else, they just want to talk to them. You know, those have vocational impact. And I think that, you know, if we don't take care of those things, then the whole thing comes unraveled. So I think to have that trajectory conversation say if you continue on this present pace, where is your health going to be in twenty years?
Yeah. You know, are you kidding yourself thinking that as soon as I get this next big deal, you know, as soon as I get this this next thing sold, then then I'm going to take time for myself and I'm going to really work out then usually work. And that's how people nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I think I'll have a heart attack. No, that was that was years, years and years of doing little things that led to that heart attack or to that relational crisis.
Yeah, it's actually kind of a counter or the flip side of the coin we talked about earlier, which was success shouldn't be a surprise. But heart attacks are rarely a surprise either. Failed marriages are rarely a surprise either. They're a product. So as much as like the things that we do give us, the great things in life, the things that we do, give us the bad things in life, too. Now, there is the occasional like, hey, you had a brain aneurysm, right?
Or the accident happens.
But a lot of the times like. Yeah, like it just is there. I mean, this is going to sound horrible. I say this, but like, I just spent like a couple of days, my parents and I was like I told my wife when they left, they just left back to the mainland. And I was like. I mean, I love, love, love my parents, but I worry every time they leave, it might be the last time I see one of them because they know the way they they eat and take care of themselves is it will not be a surprise if either one has a heart attack.
Will not surprise me at all. I hope they don't. I really hope they don't.
I'm trying everything I can to get them to eat some vegetables and take a walk. But like, it's hard because it's like it's that's that's the penalty or that's the consequence of a life that you lead and it won't be a surprise. So I guess that's the question for everyone right now. It's like, what what in your life right now is not a surprise. It's not going to be a surprise if it happened.
That's a wake us up endocast in a more positive light. You've been looking forward. You know what we do there. But to be thinking about, you know, where would you like to be in twenty five years? You know, if if you could really impact the quality of your most important relationships or your health or your finances or your vocation, where do you want that to end up twenty five years from now and go ahead and, you know, write a paragraph about what that looks like.
You know, we do that in the book, looking forward, talking about a life plan. That is something that that I've done now for twenty years, regularly review it so that I don't lose focus, you know, sort of in the fog of war. I don't lose sight of the destination. You know, I, I my marriage like it is today. And again, it's not perfect. Yeah, but it's not an accident. You know, it's not an accident that I have a great marriage or that I have a good relationship with with my kids or my grandkids, you know, I kind of see life as like a recipe.
And the cake that you've got is because you use certain ingredients and cooked at a certain temperature. Right. And if you want to change the cake, if you want a different cake, then the cake you've got right now, because the cake you've got right now, which is your life, is a result of all the ingredients that have gone into it up until this point. But if you want to change it, you can. That's the good news.
But you got to change the recipe. You can't keep doing the same things you've been doing and expect a different result. Or the worst thing is the wishful thinking, the lottery kind of thinking that, you know, once I win this big deal, once I do this big deal, you will be on Easy Street. That just that just doesn't happen. That's just that fantastical, fantastical thinking. That's a really good picture to the cake thing.
I'm going to totally use that analogy in the future with people because it's exactly like there's a recipe you're build in your life right now and there's ingredients that are added to this cake and it's going to create something. And so if it's not something you want and you better find another way, and that's why I said earlier, like, you can ask a person who's already got the cake in their hand that he took the cake last week. How did you make your cake?
And they could tell you what ingredients to put in there. Yeah, it's not a horribly complicated thing. Let me let me ask you one more question here.
About what? About people who listen to us a lot.
We talk a lot about family, right? Because I'm a family guy. I got a couple kids at home. You got your kids and grandkids. Now, what about those who don't have the kids yet? They're young, they're young, or that there have been single so far. They don't have a significant other in their life. Why shouldn't they just work and and just hard core work for 80, 90 hundred hours a week?
Like what's what's the other reason besides just spending more time with your family that this is important?
Well, one of the things that I'm doing that Pat in the book is there's basically 10 domains of life, at least ten domains of life. And so marriage and parenting are two of the ten, but that still leaves eight. And so if you're if you're going to focus on vocation, which is one to the exclusion of the other seven, not including parenting or marriage, that's going to produce a very lopsided. Life, yeah. And and it's going to make you still got your health needs to be concerned about you still got your emotional health, your intellectual development, you still got your finances, your hobbies, friendships.
Man, I'll tell you one of the things that is key to longevity and I've done a lot of study on this, you know, in the blue zones and all that kind of stuff that a lot of reading about that a lot of people think it's just diet and exercise, diet, exercise, diet, exercise. No. The quality of your relationships with other people that you have social connections and deep friendships are as important to heart health, to combating the autoimmune diseases and to longevity as your diet and your exercise.
So you just can't hunker down and don't mistake thinking just because you have relationships at work with other people, that those are the same as friendships. They're not. Those are based on the luxury of proximity. You just happen to be in the same office or whatever, but you're not really doing life with them in the sense that you do with with your friends. And you need friendships outside of work, because if you suddenly lose your job or your business collapses, most people can be resilient as long as those other domains of their life are fleshed out in healthy.
But if you've got all your your eggs in one basket and it's work and you lose that, it's a crisis and I've seen this happen. My successor at Thomas Nelson Publishers, he was a guy that that his work was everything. And when suddenly I became the CEO as his successor, he was lost as last year's Easter egg. He didn't know who he was. He literally said to our CFO, he said he said, if I'm not the CEO, who am I?
His identity was so inextricably linked to his work that without his work, he didn't know who he was. He was lost. Yeah. And, man, I don't want to get to that place in my life. I want to have a life that's bigger than my work. Yeah.
You made another point that I really like and want to highlight. And it's that not just because someone is in close proximity to you does not mean you have a deep, authentic relationship with them because someone's been your friend for 20 years does not mean you are actually deep friends with that person, even if you're married. I think there's a lot I'm not married, but I think there's a lot of married couples that are going through life because it's convenient, but they're not connecting very deeply.
And it's easy to trick yourself into thinking, oh, I spent time with my family, but you don't know your kids very well. They know that. You don't know that very well. Those are the kids that go off the rails. That then takes a lot of time that you've got to go after him and try to to bring it back, that it's a good practice to know. Like the reason we're investing our money wisely and working on self growth is just to have a better life.
And you're not going to have a better life if the relationships that you do have are convenient and shallow rather than a deeper, meaningful connection. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the quality of your relationships equals the quality of your life.
That's a great way to put it. And when you don't have that, I guess this is what I was getting at. You're more likely to throw yourself into work. You don't consciously think of it, but you're like, well, what else am I going to do? This is what makes me feel better.
Yeah, it's all you've got. And I mean, you know, I think we have to admit to people medicate with work. Yeah. You know, they feel the discomfort of having to engage at home or having to work through this issue with, you know, your spouse or with your kids. And it's just easier to to you know, people run to the bottle, they run to drugs. So people run to work. You know, they don't call it being a workaholic for nothing.
It is addictive. Highly addictive.
Yeah, it's a really good point. Well, speaking of kids and family, I'm going to go see mine in a few minutes. Let's start to move this towards the end here, OK? And I got jiujitsu in a little bit, too, which I have a really good analogy for jujitsu. I was thinking about this, too, before I jump into the famous for I was thinking about how and so David and I have been we're starting our jujitsu process and we're working on this wrestling stuff.
And what we're learning from Jerry, who's our it's kind of our private instructor is how much like when you first jump into jujitsu, your first get into it, you, like, expend so much energy and you're pushing and pulling and all gives you so much and you work up a sweat in like three seconds and you're dead for the rest of the day. But when you roll with got rolling, when you wrestle with someone who's like really good. And what we're learning is how little energy they use because it's all very controlled, controlled movements and a lot of holding, a lot of that.
And it just made me think about how like we talked earlier, like you could just do a whole lot of different activities in life and get burn yourself out really well and work 80 hours a week because you're just doing everything in life fine. But like the Masters, that at any kind of martial arts that they're controlled, they're not sweating even hardly like Jerry doesn't mean sweat when we roll like the guy, because he just it's this he's doing the right moves at the right time because he's practiced it so many times and he's intentional about it.
So anyway, this is another I like to throw a great one, but now, like, that's a great one. I mean, you saw that with Tom Brady. Yes. He didn't look like he was breaking a sweat. No. Patrick Holmes looks like frantically trying everything that he could, you know, minutes he was getting killed. What scares me about what Brandon just said is that he was showing a couple of guys yesterday. I completely have no idea what they're doing.
You guys, after the Super Bowl, a couple moves and they were throwing everything they had at him, just exhausting themselves. And I remember watching, thinking, you look like a bozo.
You think you're going to impress him like that. Why are you doing that? And now I'm realizing that I work eighty hours a week. I work one hundred hours a week is telling. Yes. The successful business people, the people that have life. Right. I'm a bozo. I look just like those people looked.
And so that's funny. It's great. Hats off the bat. Well, before we get out of here, let's move over to the last segment of the show. This is called Our Famous for this is the famous for.
It's the same for questions we ask every guest every time. And we've asked this before.
But maybe your answers have changed to the first question, which we've tweaked a little bit.
Is there a habit or trait you are currently trying to develop in your life? Michael? Yes, I am trying to be more consistent in health. Clean eating, in fact, I just started a 14 day cleanse today, and it's basically version of the Mediterranean diet, but my wife and I are doing it together, so, yeah, that's cool. And we're we we were eating good already, but yeah, we're trying to take it to the next level.
All right, Michael, next question. What is your favorite business book other than your own?
I would have to say I don't know if this is a business book or a personal development book either. The Seven Habits of highly effective people. I just keep coming back to that again and again and again.
Yeah, that's a good, really good one. All right. Number three. All right. When you're not changing the world and helping improve people's lives, what are some of your hobbies?
I love bass fishing. I love fly fishing. We bought a lake house in August and I've got access to both now, which is amazing. That's cool. I also play the Native American flute. It's awesome. So that's a fun thing. Local and then golfing.
I just watched the video this morning and I am shamefully going to admit it was on Ticktock, but it was this guy who was like teaches men how to be like it was one of like his whole thing is like how to make men more attractive.
Is that the number one thing? The number one thing you can do to be more attractive to women is to learn an instrument. That's what he said.
And he said, wow, they've done, I guess, apparently studies that says that's one of the number one things that you can do is learn. So, Michael. And check it out.
I'm still trying to win the same girl I'm married to.
There you go. You got it. You got to keep up in the game. So the flute is definitely doing it. All right. Last last question for me. What do you think separates successful entrepreneurs to kind of boil it down to one or two things? What separates successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or just never get started?
I think the really successful ones have a real clear vision of what it is they're trying to create and they're just dogged in pursuing it till they get there.
Love it. Love it. All right. Well, this has been a great interview. I appreciate your insight into this. I think that there's a lot of people that are doing well and they think that they're they are doing everything they can be. And this will open some eyes as towards the fact that we can all do better and and have a more balanced life instead of just being successful. One thing. So thank you, Michael, for your time today and sharing that.
Thanks, David. For those that love this, where can they find out more about you?
Yeah, well, you can find out more about the book and Win and Succeed Book Dotcom, Win and Succeed. Book dot com forward slash bigger pockets. And if you buy the book from your favorite retailer and go there, you can get what we call the double win cheat sheet, which is an amazing visual that will keep all these concepts front and center. So when you're tempted to veer off, you know, you stay in the straight and narrow.
So, yeah, my main website is just Michael. Hi, Dotcom. And that leads to my podcast. Everything else we do. Very cool, man.
Will everyone go check it out, go get the book and. Yeah, super cool. Are you on Instagram as well?
Are you like Instagram and Michael Hyatt? OK, well you're all right, so I'm going to go. I already follow you there, but everyone else go follow Michael there and and wherever else you can find them. And I guess that's all we got. So thank you, Michael. It's been amazing. Thanks, Brandon. Thanks, David.
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