In 20 Minuten klüger wirken in Meetings

0:00It'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, because 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 four hours, not a long time, but a long time for I think some people, but for me, four hours is nothing. I counted hundreds, so this was irrelevant. And so I put to like four 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 behind so you can execute it with your team." It was a bigger company.

0:49And 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. I 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.

1:28And 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 because 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.

2:03So 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? what 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.

2:39Consistency doesn't guarantee that you'll be successful, but not being consistent will guarantee that you won't reach success. You 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.

3:06I'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, …