Do What Matters Today...It Matters

As we talk about mastery, the first thing that we're going to have to master is mastery. We're going to have to get really good at getting really good and so some of you have heard about research that was done on how we get to expert level performance. This was made really popular. The research of K Anders Erickson was been really popular by Malcolm Gladwell as he taught us this rule as to how many hours it takes to get to mastery and how many hours have you heard it takes? 10,000 hours of doing something. Now I want to warn you, it's not just 10,000 hours of doing something right? The golf courses of America are littered with evidence that just doing something a lot does not make you good at it, don't you agree? In fact, what Anderson proved was that it's 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, which is going to require deliberate actions and feedback. So over the next little while here, we are going to go through a three step process. The first thing we need to do is we actually just have to discover what matters most.

At one point you may be called your mom and told her how excited you were to be in this career and said, this is what I get to do. These are the things that mean a lot to me and they're really important. And do you remember the last time you actually got to do those things. In real estate it looks like this. Oh, I love people and I love houses. And then you sell real estate for a year and you hate both of them. When do we get to get back to doing the things that matter most? We need to identify what brings the most value to your organization. To Your Business, to your clients.

The next step that we have to do after we've discovered what matters is we need to make time for what matters most. We need to carve out time. And the biggest challenge we're going to have, I'm sorry to tell you, is sitting right next to you. It's people. Wouldn't your days be easier if there weren't so many people involved? Yeah, mine too. And yet we have to figure out a way to carve out and protect our time and train the people around us. That includes our CEO, that includes everybody in the organization. And we need to train people how to help us protect our time for what matters most and not only to protect it, but actually become advocates for you. Wouldn't you love it, if instead of seeing your coworkers or the people down the hall as enemies to your productivity, to actually see them as allies in your productivity, great.

We're going to give you some tactics today that'll help you get there. And here's the last thing we have to do. We've identified what matters most. We've carved out the time to work on what matters most. Now this is the hard part. We have to do it. We actually have to do it. And here's the thing, we don't feel like doing it. And we have all these things that are getting in the way of us doing it. Most of us spend most of our days just trying to clear the desk so we can actually do the things we care about. So we can actually do the things that matter most. Of course, it takes all day to clear the desk and so we go home once again, defeated, having not accomplished the things that really mean the most to us we're going to give you some tools today to actually go out and do it. And what many of us do is we wait to feel like doing it. Does anybody wait to feel like doing it? Maybe I'll feel like doing it tomorrow.  Maybe next week. But the feeling never comes does it.

I'm going to teach you a little secret right now. Do it in spite of not feeling it. You See, when we act, we get a result. Sometimes our result moves us toward our goal and sometimes that result teaches us away to not get toward our goal. Don't you agree? Absolutely. But here more than anything is it actually starts to give us energy. You see, we get that result and then we are energized to do more activity, which gets us a result, which energizes us to do more activity. And now all of a sudden we've created a virtuous cycle instead of the death spiral that most of us are living in caught in the chaos and whirlwind of our days, we actually start to create our own cyclone that moves up.

This is what we're going to do today. So that your organization becomes a productivity specific environment in the same way that your kitchen just tells you it's time to eat and your living room just tells you its time to watch TV. Your office is going to tell you to be productive. You won't even know how to not be productive when you come in and want that make a big difference for everyone.