Reflections on Ferriss
Timothy Ferris has a great rule, and I think it is worth reading over and over again: Do not work more to fix overwhelm — prioritize.
If you don’t prioritize, everything seems urgent and important. If you define the single most important task for each day, almost nothing seems urgent or important. Oftentimes, it’s just a matter of letting little bad things happen (return a phone call late and apologize, pay a small late fee, lose an unreasonable customer, etc.) to get the big important things done. The answer to overwhelm is not spinning more plates — or doing more — it’s defining the few things that can really fundamentally change your business and life.
I seem to need reminding of this often. (Daily?) Part of the problem is that I lose sight of the big important things, and allow myself to get caught up again and again in the small, unimportant, endless petty things that scream for attention and seem to intrude from the start of every day.
Learning to set solid priorities and stick to them is one of the marks of high excellence in life. Two habits from Zen-To-Done can help here. The first is to establish the habit of conducting a weekly review every Sunday, setting down on paper the 3 (only three) big important things you want to work on in the coming week. The second habit is to decide upon 1, 2, or 3 MITs (most important tasks) at the start of each day, and to discipline yourself to tackle the most important of the bunch first thing in the morning, before you do anything else.
I have to think that mastering only those two habits could spell a radical transformation in your life, and all the more so if they are established and maintained in pursuit of those “few things that can really fundamentally change your business and life.”
If your priorities are big enough, and if they mean enough to you, and if you reflect upon this often — daily, weekly — and bend your efforts toward moving forward on a dream worth dreaming … All of the bother and bustle of the day would lose its ability to invoke overwhelm and confusion.
The Big WHY
I wanted to mention just one element from the first CD in Anthony Robbins’s Mastering Influence course — the most important factor in selling, according to Anthony Robbins, who had interviewed hundreds of the very best salesmen, people earning a quarter of a million or more each year in selling. And what he found was that while they stood out in about ten specific areas, one factor unified them all as far and away the most important of them all and accounted for 80% of why they were as successful as they were.
The one factor was a set of compelling reasons to succeed.
>p>Eighty percent of of success in influence is finding a big enough WHY — only twenty percent is figuring out how.
An exercise I think we could all do well to reinforce would be to spend an hour really putting our WHY down on paper (and then reviewing it every day).
- Why is mastering the world of online marketing a MUST for you?
- Why is mastering the ability to create strong, lucrative campaigns a MUST for you?
- What are the most compelling reasons for mastering this skill set NOW?
- And how will it impact the quality of your life and those you care about?
The Crux of the Matter
Robert Ringer identifies one of the most important aspects of succeeding in any business as learning to focus on the crux of the issue, meaning the point or points upon which success or failure rests. You must learn (and train yourself, and build your life in a such away) to avoid getting caught up in peripheral issues that cannot create a payoff no matter what their outcome.
The first step in this direction is to make a conscious effort to get out from under the endless tidal wave of bullshit that inundates us day in and day out. You have to avoid (and again, train yourself and build your life in such a way) that you will not get sidetracked for hours at a time.
Second, you have to learn to say NO to projects that don’t really matter. You work and work and work at something, and then look up, hours later, and say to yourself, “Why am I even doing this?!” You have to stop letting yourself be a slave to non-crucial matters or projects that won’t really have much of an impact whether they are completed or not. If something doesn’t have a serious role in helping you accomplish your main objective, cross it off your list or delegate it, and move on to something that will move your objectives forward.
Train yourself to ask these three questions before starting anything:
- Does it matter?
- How much does it matter?
- Does this project have to be done at all?
It might be interesting, even fascinating; you may be really good at it; and it might look pretty when you are finished. But how important is it? Does it really matter?
The quickest way to finish a project is to cross it off your To-Do list.
It’s compulsive and wrong-headed to think that you have to get everything done. This goes back to Tony Robbins again, with his RPM system. Start with the RESULT you want to achieve, and then the PURPOSE or why it is important to you. Only then, only if it is a worthwhile Result and Purpose, look toward the plan for getting it done — and even then, know that you don’t have to do everything, just the very few highest-impact highest-return actions that will get the job done.
Time is a highly limited commodity.
My sole objective needs to be: finding viable offers and rolling out campaigns and tweaking them to make them successful … not working on projects that don’t produce income. In a perfect world, you would hire out all of your deficiencies and spend 100% of your time nurturing your greatest skills and working only on (what Jim Camp calls) payside activity. The closer you can come to that ideal, the more deals you are going to find and close.
So that has to become a very early decision: eliminate the bullshit, and create focused blocks of time to concentrate 100% of your attention on finding and putting together winning campaigns.
If you don’t make it a priority to focus on the crux of the matter, you will let it slip … and days will run into weeks will run into months will run into years.
Want to be a top-level CPA marketer? Start acting like one. Learn to focus on the crux of the issue, and eliminate the extraneous nonsense that is muddling your life.
Some quotations worth thinking about …
Money alone is not the solution. There is much to be said for the power of money as currency (I’m a fan myself), but adding more of it just isn’t the answer as often as we’d like to think. In part, it’s laziness. “If only I had more money” is the easiest way to postpone the intense self-examination and decision-making necessary to create a life of enjoyment — now and not later. By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves the time to do otherwise: “John, I’d love to talk about the gaping void I feel in my life, the hopelessness that hits me like a punch in the eye every time I start my computer in the morning, but I have so much work to do! I’ve got at least three hours of unimportant e-mail to reply to before calling the prospects who said ‘no’ yesterday. Gotta run!” … Busy yourself with the routine of the money wheel, pretend it’s the fix-all, and you artfully create a constant distraction that prevents you from seeing just how pointless it is. Deep down, you know it’s all an illusion, but with everyone participating in the same game of make-believe, it’s easy to forget. (Tim Ferriss)
In every important sphere, we work out where the 20% of effort can lead to 80% of the results. And we relax. We calm down. We work less. We target a limited number of very valuable goals, where the 80-20 principle will work for us, rather than pursuing every available opportunity and doing every task that someone else asks us to do. Most of all, perhaps, we make the most of those few lucky streaks in our lives, where we are at our creative peak, and somehow the stars seem to line up to guarantee us success. (Richard Koch)
True entrepreneurs make the transition from working for someone else to working on their own much differently. Entrepreneurs invent businesses that work without them. Technicians create businesses that work because of them. The entrepreneur is liberated from what I call the “tyranny of routine,” and the technician becomes a slave to it. In the entrepreneur’s case, the business works. In the technician’s case, the technician works. And that’s why most of the 500,000 new businesses that are started every month in the U.S.A. will fail. (Michael Gerber)
Problem: Unlike dancing, painting, or playing a musical instrument, you can’t practice dealmaking at home. The only way to become a profit-producing dealmaker is to jump in and “do deals.” There’s no spring training, no preseason, no practice sessions. You can do a certain amount of preparation for each deal – which you should – but you cannot practice the art of dealmaking itself. When it comes to dealmaking, it’s strictly baptism by fire. And that means being willing to jump in and get your feet wet … which, in turn, translates into rejection … embarrassment … and, yes, even failure. The willingness to fail is important, because no matter how good you become at the nuances of dealmaking, your bottom-line results are tied to the law of averages. Which is to say that the more you work at dealmaking, the better you get at it and the more deals you close. (Robert Ringer)
I have said that faith and force are corollaries, and that mysticism will always lead to the rule of brutality. The cause of it is contained in the very nature of mysticism. Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding are possible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind — a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence. ~ from Philosophy: Who Needs It (Ayn Rand)
