You can do anything, but you can't do everything.

And that is what I wanna talk about today ruthless

focus,

laser like focus for twenty twenty four.

I have not been great 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 year? 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. I I'm gonna show you What works for me? How do you get more focused? How do we get the laser like focus that 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 a 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. Alright. 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 to be wired. 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 up. 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 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 can 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 my bar today and take my yeses 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 and it's gonna be amazing. That might be a hell yes for you. Go for it. But make sure you are you have a premium quality on your focus and what you are 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 Polygram 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's schedule. This is what their calendar looks like, and this is what a maker's schedule look like. This is the artist. Right? Somebody's a builder. And so for a lot of people, they have this. Nine AM, nine thirty AM, ten AM, 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. 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's schedule. A maker's 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's schedule. And so the maker's 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. Be able to 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, 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 set your your day get 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 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 schedules 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 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 why. And so let's say you're Elon Musk, your mission for SpaceX might be

you know, make humans interplanetary

species, a multiplanetary 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 say, 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 and 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 really great because you wanted money and you didn't have money. Alright? Like, whatever it is, the key here is honesty because you could write a fancy mission, but if it's not your honest mission, it's not gonna help. It's not gonna do anything. It won't have any emotional resonance. 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 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 FIA goal,

and then I have the floor goal.

And so I set kind of a range here. I 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 FAI 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, oh, man, really, we didn't we didn't get there? And the FDA goal is we're high fiving, we're toasting towards it. I 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. Alright, everyone. A quick break to tell you about HubSpot, and this one's really easy for me to talk about because I'm gonna show you a real life example. So I've got this company called Hampton. Join Hampton dot com. It's a community for founders doing between two million all the way up to like two fifty million dollars a year in revenue. And one of the ways that we've grown is we've created these cool service And so we have a lot of founders who have high net worth, and we'll ask them all types of questions that people typically are embarrassed to ask, but provide a lot of value. So things like how much the founders pay themselves each month, how much money they're spending each month, what their payroll looks like. If they're optimistic about the next year and their business, all these questions that people are afraid to ask But, well, we ask them anyway, and they tell us in this anonymous survey. And so what we do is we created a landing page using HubSpot's landing page tool it basically has a landing page that says, here's all the questions we asked. Give us your email if you want to access it. And then I shared this page on Twitter, and we were able to get thousands of people gave us their email and told us they want this survey. And I could see did they come from social media? I can see did they come from Twitter from LinkedIn. It's basically everywhere else that they could possibly come from. I'm able track all of that. And then I'm able to see over the next handful of weeks how many of those people actually signed up and became a member of Hampton. Other words, I can see how much revenue came from this survey, how much revenue came from each traffic source, things like that. But the best part is I can see much revenue came from it. And a lot of times, it takes a ton of work to make that happen. HubSpot made that super, super easy. If you're interested in doing this, you could check it out hubspot dot com. The link's in the subscription. And I'll also put the link to the survey that I did so you can actually see the landing page and how it works and everything like that. I'm just gonna do that call to action then.

And it's free. Check it out in the description. Alright. Now back to MFM.

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 are we gonna be a year from now? And that's what you're gonna work back from. So then you work backwards, 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 finance?

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 try 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? Then 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 set a product goal. 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 protocol. That is a benchmark that we are trying to achieve. Is it faster than a poor and is it 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 one year mission. And lastly, is 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 were 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 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-in 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 him. But he he said, He shared this, this simple slide that he made for himself.

And I loved it. 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 and I like the way he framed it. So I wanna share it with you. So he had his goal, the mission that I called 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'd 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 know, he wrote, like, a fantasy fiction book, right, 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 blissed out walking 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 a generic off the shelf goal, like, be successful

or,

make money or whatever. Right? Like, set it set it for real. 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 liked 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. And it blew my mind at the time. I'd never thought about half of the concepts in there. And I was, like, just insight after insight page after page of inspiration in 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 replanned everything in my life. That was very impactful for me. Thank you, Tim Ferris.

There have 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 year 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 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 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 what I'm saying yes to. 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 of tim ferriss coming on. We booked, Tony Robbins and a 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 don't like when 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 to? So what are the things I have to say no to? Well, I have to say no to starting a company. I sit on this podcast every week and I come up with ideas for businesses. Gotta say no to actually going and doing them because if I now am 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? I have to say no to avoiding hard conversation. I have to say no to,

my old habit of blah 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 chase this above all other possible things I could be doing with my 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 an 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 in 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.

So that you could do anything, but you can't do everything. It's a very powerful idea,

and it's gives you that focus as a superpower.

People say that, but they don't tell you how you focus. So I hope today you learned 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 a 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 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.