Josh Friberg

Getting things done begins with getting started. You can accomplish more than you think by getting started--each and every day.

With just 15 minutes of focused effort, you will most often find motivation as you see results and the beginnings of success. And more often than not, you will actually work longer on the things that matter most.

More than that, by making small progress each day, you will continue to be motivated toward that progress, rather than feeling guilt and frustration that lead to demotivation.

What do you need to start on today? Give it just 15 minutes.

When it comes to our business, we can learn a lot from simplification. Specifically, evaluate your money, time, and service offerings using the standards of simplifying.

In the simplification movement, the standard for keeping something is not "some value" but "High-Value." In business, we should not get just any benefit from an expense, use of time, or service offering, but multiples of ROI.

Value is often confused with price. And while price is often determined by value, many things and ALL people are valuable irrespective of their price, their productivity, or what a person can do for me.

Yet many of us run cost/ benefit analysis on people all the time. This is favoritism, which shows up ALL THE TIME in our businesses.

Today, ask yourself, even though my business does not serve everyone, and not everyone belongs on my team, how does my business respect the value of ALL PEOPLE?

Talking to a powerhouse Real Estate Team Rainmaker, I asked what she looks for in a great Realtor. In less than a second, she responded, "Integrity, Heart, Hustle."

Do you have these three characteristics? Are you doing the work to increase these traits?

Integrity- Do what you say
Heart- Do What's Right for others
Hustle- Do what it takes

Accountants and Financial Wizards know how to calculate Net Present Value, that is the present value as compared to some future projected value.

We can do the same with our time choices. What is the value of the activities you are deciding between...not today, but well into the future.

The Net Present Value of kid's soccer games, of executing on a business plan, of eating and exercising right cannot be measured in short time scales. Instead, they should be measured in lifetimes and legacies.

Are you looking for a simple secret to massively increase your productivity? It may be right under your nose...Your health--physical and mental--impact your productivity more than you realize.

When you are physically healthy and mentally sharp, you show up to your work able to make a much larger impact. One of the simplest ways to increase your productivity is to take charge of your nutrition, exercise, and management of sleep and stress.

How has your health impacted your productivity? How would a change in your health change your productivity?

Many real estate agents have a sharp understanding of how price works with product and goods.  In service industries though, understanding price is much more challenging.  

Intuitively, we know a retailer won’t sell something for less than they paid for it (at least not for long).  But in services, the cost of production is much harder to identify.  For this, we must look at the value of the providers time to arrive at a price to charge.

More importantly, service providers must increase the perceived value of the service in the mind of the buyer, because that’s where the money really is!

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...

I've had a lot of side conversations with folks out there about what is the blend of my faith life with my work life. I want to take time on Fridays to have a little conversation about faith and work, we'll call this faith and work Fridays.

Specifically today I want you to think about in your work and in your business is how do your values show up at work? You see, many of us have a firewall between our work and our personal life, between our convictions personally and the work that we do. And as long as our work isn't too objectionable to us, we'll continue to do it. 

This is one thing that, that Jeff Van Duzer calls Enron with a smile, right? If you remember, Enron ended up being this kind of nasty company. They were real crooks and maybe even a Ponzi scheme involved.  They ripped off a lot of people of their money. And if we did that but had a nice little smile on it and maybe you put a little religious symbol on it, we would somehow sanctify that it.  Well,...

243 years ago. These words were penned, signed in an act of rebellion, and then mailed to King George III.

"We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

What is often missed is that the end of the declaration, those who signed it agreed to this:

"For the support of this declaration with a firm reliance on divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor."

As we celebrate freedom and the independence, let's not forget to, to consider how we are spending our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to protect those inalienable rights for others.

How is your business structured to help you spend your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor to protect the inalienable rights of others--of customers and clients, of bosses and subordinates, of contractors and vendors, maybe...