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0:00Charlie Munger in one of his seminal speeches, he talks about how to guarantee failure. How to make sure that you are failure. And he inverts the the concept of success. It's like, what could you do to make sure that you were failure? It's like, well, you would definitely get involved in drugs, drinking. He says, was it leverage, liquor, and women? That's the you know, the Charlie's Charlie's big one, right? >> [laughter] >> But one of the ones that he has, I think he has seven in his in his in his speech, is consistency.

0:27He's like, you have to make sure that you're inconsistent. He's like, because if you are consistent and you have none of the other attributes, he's like, it's you still might be successful. He's like, it's it's very tough for people who are consistent to not be successful. And he makes an especially pointed point about consistency, because in my opinion, it's one of the most difficult of the virtues for humans to do, because we're so attracted to novelty. And so, like I mean, I used to do with this with, you know, people on their diets all the time. I remember I ran gyms. And so, someone would come in and I would always ask the question, so have you been following the meal plan? And then they would say, yes. And so then I started changing the way I asked the question.

1:04So I'd say, out of the 21 meals that you were supposed to eat, how many of the 21 did you have exactly the way it was on the meal plan? And then they would be like, oh, I mean, at least half. And they would say it as though that was a mark of success. And right now, the meal plan could be your content plan. It could be your It could be your showing up to work on time plan. It could be the time that you want to put towards your side hustle. It doesn't really matter. But if there's one muscle that you can flex, it's learning to do the same thing over and over again. Like one of the one of the values that we had at Gym Launch is do the boring work. Because boring is what makes you rich, right? It's It's It's It's writing the follow-up sequence to your to the purchase page that you don't feel like doing, but you know you should do. It's running the split test for the 10th time. It's It's actually going through and prepping for 20 minutes before you have the meeting.

1:53Because it's amazing how much smarter you can appear with 20 minutes of preparation. Like, you can appear 50 IQ points smarter if you just prepare for meetings for 20 minutes. I remember I did a consulting day, which I've only done three in my entire life. And when I showed up uh to the day cuz I always want to make sure that everyone always gets more for me than I than they give me. Um I had taken I don't know, 4 hours. Not a long time, but a long time for I think some people, but for me 4 hours is nothing. I count in hundreds, so this was irrelevant.

2:24And so I put like 4 hours and actually took the time and put it in to do research on the individual. So I looked at every single page they had, every landing page, every offer, every everything. And I had seven pages of things that I thought would make them more money. And so when I started, I was like, this is what we're going to go through today and I'll walk you through line by line and you'll have this as a take line so you can execute it with your team. It was a bigger company. And the guy was shocked. He was like, never in my entire life has anyone had this much preparation. And that's when it goes back to like, you need 20 podcasts to be in the top 1%. The the bar for excellence like I have this timer that I have on my desk, which it's it's the easiest purchase you can make.

3:04I think it was like seven bucks on Amazon. It's a little twist kitchen timer. It's very easy. And it's been probably my biggest focus hack, you know, to date, which is I turn it when I want to start working. And part of it allows me to think how long I I get better at predicting how long it's going to take me to do something. So I think I think this will take me 35 minutes. So I turn the clock to 35 and I click on. And then I start working on the thing. And the moment my phone rings or I look at Slack or whatever, I stop the timer. And so you actually see that your time on task is usually significantly less than you think it is. And I think that in my early days I would spend a very long time in front of a computer telling myself that I was working with very few minutes actually on task. And that's why I think that most things are actually significantly easier than people think they are. They just don't know how to try hard.

3:48Because the harder that you try, the easier it gets. And so it's like, if you can just learn to love what trying hard feels like, then all of a sudden it becomes unreasonable that you can't win. So, like for the presentation that I'm giving, I explained a little bit earlier about what my process looks like. If you were to say, "What would it take for somebody to be unreasonably good that it would be impossible for them to not be a top 1% salesman or a top 1% content creator?" And you said, "What would that person need to do?" Irrelevant from outcome.

4:15What would be the actions or evidence that they would have to do prior to that thing that would make it unreasonable that they couldn't succeed. And then you do those things, what happens is you realize that it's actually not that hard because you put so much work into it, and the bar from other people working is so embarrassingly low that they then ask you how you did it, and it must be easy. Consistency doesn't guarantee that you'll be successful, but not being consistent will guarantee that you won't reach success.

4:45You have a productivity hack, an easy productivity hack. Instead of spending time getting in the mood to work, just start working. Confront the work. People think they need perfect conditions to start, when in reality, starting is the perfect condition. I'm married to that. I love that. Because if you think like I you know, I obviously am somebody who always wants to optimize how much work I do per unit of time. And so, I I was you know, there was definitely times earlier in my life I was really romanticized by these like very extensive morning routines and supplement rituals and like all this stuff of mental masturbation around the work that needed to be done. But when I looked at 2 hours later and nothing had actually gotten done, the moment you begin working is when your output per unit of time goes up.

5:34And so, that makes beginning the single greatest hack that you can have for everything else that you do in work. Because thing is, when you start working, you start getting in the mood to work. Right? Like everything else is procrastinating around the work that you think you should do. But like I have noticed for me at least, I have these I have some big mental tasks. You know what I mean? Like big content piece or big thing that you need to like you know it's going to take real mental effort. It takes me like five minutes of actually being in it to then get a a little bit of a lay of the land to then get into it. But I used to take hours to delay to start the first five minutes.

6:08And so my time compression of when I thought I should start doing something and when I started doing it over time it's just compressed to the point where it's like the moment I think that I need to start doing it. Sometimes I just start it because then what happens I get this open loop. And so rather than complete work at like cuz a lot of people are like I want to complete it at this really nice clean point. Stop halfway through the sentence cuz it'll drive you mad. Real quick, if you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the $100 scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page you can just book a call with my team and we will look into business, see if we can help and if we can we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.