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I welcome back to the show everybody. So today we're going to talk about time. I think it's probably one of the most important topics you can possibly cover because it's the one thing you can't get back in life. It's every single second that goes by in your life. You have fewer and fewer of them remaining. And I want to talk about it today because I think over the years it's been one of the great keys to me amassing.
You know, the amount of wealth that I've been blessed to acquire, things like this podcast, the businesses I've built, relationships, friends, et cetera, has a lot to do with the way that I view time. And it's an interesting topic because I've taught it for many, many years. There's actually a couple of funny clips on social media of me teaching it where I misspeak a couple of times about it. And I don't think most people that see those clips know that I've built hundreds of millions of dollars with these strategies in my own life and built a bunch of businesses and
been blessed to help a lot of people. And I think the way that you view time matters. And so I'm gonna go through a couple of principles with you today and then I'm gonna show you some strategies on managing your time, managing your day that I think will serve you and hopefully I can do it in a way that is articulate and makes sense. So the first thing I want you to know is that I think in the top three keys in my life the last 30 years has been my viewpoint and the way that I manage and I think manipulate and use time.
in my life. And so we all have the same 24 hours in a day. We all get 60 minutes in an hour, but how we use them and how we look at them means everything for a few reasons. Number one, what is scarce in life is valuable.
And so when you believe that your time is valuable and you treat it as if it is a scarce commodity because it is, that all of a sudden other people begin to treat you and that meeting and that time with you as if it's more valuable. It's just off the top, you beginning to value seconds and minutes in your day matter. This isn't one of these things about being superhuman and working all the time. Listen,
I take a lot of time to rest. I love Netflix and chill days. I love laying on the couch. If you knew me very well, you'd know I'm inherently an actual very lazy person. When people meet my family, they'll say, what's it like living with him? And they'll have to go, probably not what you think.
I love to relax. I love to not work. I love that. And so because I'm that way, I had to build rituals, disciplines, viewpoints and structures around time to make sure that I was hyper productive and successful because left to my own devices.
I would not be successful. I would not be productive. And so I've run something called many days now for many years. It was a concept I was taught more than 30 years ago by a mentor of mine. The idea that comes from this premise that as technology has increased, our way we view time should have changed with it.
Yet if you think about of all the constructs of society, the one thing that's really never changed is our perception of efficiency, our perception of time, and how we manage it and use it.
to our advantage. And so it is really something that's pretty silly. When I was a kid in school, if I wanted to do a report, I had to get my mom and dad to drive me down to a library. I'd have to go into the library, search for the book, write it out by hand out of a book, then go to a typewriter and type it. If I mess up one letter, you got to rip the page out. It took forever to type a report.
Now, you can just go on the internet and type it. They can get chat GPT, they can download, they can get all the information that took me hours and hours and hours, sometimes weeks to do in 30 minutes.
So that day should look different in the way I perceive time and what I think I can get done in an hour should be different. And so I started to look at days differently, meaning, have you ever had a morning where you go, man, I crushed it. I got so much done. I got more than done this morning than I get done in most days, most weeks sometimes.
Well, that's true in almost everybody's life. So why not start to look at time differently? In other words, I also think one of the fallacies nowadays is that meetings need to always be an hour long. Well, why is that? I mean, if I have Zoom, I could maybe do a meeting in 30 minutes that used to take an hour, right? So these things we should start to look at our time differently.
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So I started running something called many days, many, many years ago. Now again, before I get into this, let me be very clear. A regular 24 hour day for me many times is I am laying on the couch all day Sunday after church, watching football, doing nothing else in my sweats. That's a day.
And that could also be one of my many days. So please don't think this is some personal development. Oh, we work and grind all the time. It is not that. What I am saying is it's insane to look at time the same way now that we did even 30 years ago, pre internet, pre chat GPT, pre Google, pre text message, pre email, pre mobile phone. I'm old enough to remember that I would have to go to my house and there was a rotary phone.
We could only have one person on the phone at one time and I would have to dial and hope you were at your house to pick up.
I remember before they were answering machines, this is how old I am, then we went to pagers, then we went to cell phones. It's crazy that the same time would be measured the same way. When now everybody's reachable. So having said all of that, what are these many days? My first day starts from 6 a.m. to noon. And in my mind, I in this day and age should be able to get done in those six hours with someone 30 years ago, took them 24.
And so I manage a day that way. And so it's 6 a.m. to noon. Now sometimes that entire time is doing nothing like you do on other days. But oftentimes I try to get the most meetings, production, working out, fitness, fun, spirituality in that window of time. Here's what it's called guys. Compressing timeframes. That's all this is. You're compressing timeframes so that you begin to view it differently.
And so the other thing it does is I measure differently. So now that day ended at noon. Most people at the end of a day, a 24 hour day, take an inventory. What did I get done? What did I not get done? What did I miss? What do I need to double down on? What went well? What am I grateful for? Right?
So they do that at the end of a 24-hour day. I just do it at the end of my six-hour day. So there's a clock that kind of just goes off now in my head around noon every day. In fact, I'm coming up on it at the time I'm recording this in about 15 minutes. It just subconsciously is like an alarm. It kind of goes off and around noon. Like, okay, what did I get done today? And I look back at it and I'm grateful and I take an inventory. What did I miss? What do I need to double down on? Did I not get a chance to relax or whatever it might be? And then my second day starts from noon to 6 p.m.
And this is another day in my mind of getting things done and productivity, work, et cetera, working out, relaxing, family, friends, but I've shrunk the timeframe down. Why that matters is a few reasons. Number one, I'm more efficient. I'm also measuring and giving myself an evaluation and a course correction more regularly than most people do. But more importantly, maybe myself and everybody around me values my time differently.
values my time. I'm in a little bit bigger hurry. I'm a little bit faster. Things with me became more valuable to myself and other people because it was more scarce. Diamonds are worth more than paper because they're more rare. When you have rare or time, you become more valuable. You begin to walk and talk and behave like a successful person, maybe even before the results are there because of the way you're looking at time. So my second day is noon to 6 p.m.
And in there, I want to get whatever it is. Maybe it's a whole day of fitness. Maybe it's business and work. Maybe it's family. But I've now used those six hours. Would you agree with me that based on technology compared to even 30 years ago, or you ought to be able to get far more phone calls or text messages done in an hour now than you did 30 years ago? Would you agree with me on that? So why is it that you're still measuring time like they did then?
That just seems silly to me. And so I am now using those six hours as a day in my mind. And then at 6 p.m., I kind of have a little clock that goes off again.
What did I get done? What did I not get done? What am I grateful for, et cetera, et cetera? And what I need to double down on, what did I miss? So it gives me an other chance for evaluation, for reflection, for awareness. And it just happens really quick. And then the third day is 6 p.m. to midnight. And of course, in some of that window, you're sleeping, you're sleeping. I go to bed at 9 p.m. So that day is not as long, just like a normal 24 hour day, you're not awake the whole 24 hours.
But somehow that's a third day. And in that day, I'm compressing timeframes, I'm being efficient. Many people will tell you, I hear back from that a lot, 7.30 at night, 8 o'clock at night. A lot of times that's when I return emails and phone calls. And by the way, a lot of times for me, it's having a cigar and a bourbon and I'm returning 30 calls. But I'm using that as a day, right? And so now I got three days in one day.
And so I begin to give myself more opportunities to be efficient, more opportunities for efficiency, more opportunities for me and the people around me to perceive my time as more valuable. And I believe I am running time in my life, according to what technology provides it to. I'm under no illusion that everybody needs to do this, but I can tell you it's been significant for me. So by the way, at the end of a given week, I've had 21 days, so to speak, for evaluation, for reflection, for recalibration,
I've shrunk meetings down to where they're more efficient. This is nothing new with being superhuman or crazy or 10 million cold plunges or any personal development mumbo jumbo. This is just having time catch up to technology in the way it's measured and calibrated. To some extent, the way that you manipulate it. And again, we all the same 24 hours. We all have the same.
60 seconds in a minute. But at the same time, how we use them has everything to do with how our life. You show me your schedule and I'll show you your life. You show me how you use your time and I'll show you how happy you are, how fit you are, how wealthy you are. And I say this again, I've been blessed to create hundreds of millions of dollars of net worth.
and, you know, and help lots of people in my life. And it's certainly not because of my talent level or my high IQ. It's because of the way that I've used my time. Now there's other factors, but one of it is I've just looked at my life differently. Also, as a person who struggled with health later in my life now, time is more important to me.
family, how I use every minute. I'm blessed for another day every day. And so for me, it's time is precious. And I want to make sure that I'm using it to my advantage that it doesn't use me. And I think it's an archaic idea to measure time like everybody else. If you're going to get a life that's different than other people, you've got to do something different than other people.
And one of the things you can do different is just begin to think and use time differently. And maybe it's not my many day concept. But for me, it's a great hack to expiration of productivity, prosperity, peace, success, and bliss.
You know, one of the things that this also does for you is I start kind of looking at like shaving minutes. So for example, I try to do things that would normally take say 30 minutes. I try to schedule them in 20. I think you will find out that a lot of things that you think take a period of time if you just give yourself the construct of a smaller window. So one of my routines, for example, is that when I'm
training and working out. I'm really timing what I do in between my workouts. I realize that in the gym, there's a lot of empty time of conversation that's not productive. And so I now work out with headphones on. I don't have conversations. It's just me. It's just the way I like to train and work out. But I just I always want to feel efficient. I want to feel neat. I want to feel like what I'm doing is what greatness is.
And if average and ordinary people are kind of wasting minutes, what does that do at some point? You know, have you ever had a conversation with a friend and they left the lunch or you left it and you went, gosh, that wasn't what I was hoping it was or a date or a talk with your children. And it's the worst feeling in the world that feel like you wasted time.
Isn't it? And I don't want to waste time in my life, particularly as I get older and I realize there's only so much more time left. You know, Jesse Isler and I talk about this a lot, but when my dad was alive, Jesse asks me, he goes, how many times a year do you see your dad? And my dad at the time was 70. My dad, I believe, passed at 75. And I said, I forget the exact number, but I ended up saying, you know, I see my dad like four or five times a year.
And so Jesse said, well, then if he passes at 75, I'm paraphrasing here, by the way, but he passes at 75. You don't have five more years with your dad. You have 20 more visits. And then it got us Jesse and I talking and I, we and I have this running thing where I'll text him and go, Hey man, we've got 20 more summers.
You know, we've got 15 more September or whatever it is. And when you begin to look at it differently, it becomes so precious. Also, the people that you meet with become more precious and valuable.
You begin to take more of life in when you evaluate time. You do. It doesn't just fly by. You know, when I was eight years old, I didn't think about time. But when I started to, I remember when I turned 30, I thought, my gosh, I'm so old now. You know, I'm 30 years old. I remember when my mom turned 30. And all of a sudden, as you get older, everybody listening to this, well, you'll attest to this. Time becomes more precious.
And when you add a little health issue like I've had to it, it really does. And so every moment matters. Every second matters. You know, one of the great blessings you and I have right now is we're still here. We're still here. You know, 170,000 people didn't wake up today. And that doesn't just affect them, but their families and the people that love them.
Literally over a million people today have been affected by the fact that someone didn't wake up today. They don't get another second. They don't get another minute. And you and I do. And shouldn't we start to appreciate those minutes more? God's given us all these blessings of technology that can shrink time. And we still think about a day the same way we did 30 years ago. Shame on us. Time is precious. People are precious.
Today you woke up. Today I woke up. Let's make the most of the day. Let's start to look at every hour as if it counts. Let's look at every day as if it counts. How about every person as if they count? Every meeting. What if more and more this meeting meant something because it's scarce? This meeting meant something because we don't have forever to have them.
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Now, are there things in my life where I don't want to schedule on it? I just want to, yes, there is, and there are, and there always will be. But I want to get to those things as fast as I can by getting done with the things that I don't want to be doing. And there's a lot of times in life. I just really believe this. If you were to ask me why are certain things happen in my life, I've just outworked most people.
and most successful people at the end of it will tell you, I outworked them. I did more. And they do more because they look at time differently. They just do. And I think the happiest people look at time differently from many perspectives. Not only are they want to be more efficient and more productive, but they feel more blessed to have it. As you get older in life, you'll find your circle of friend shrinks.
It doesn't get bigger at some point. The people that matter to you are so precious to you. Time with them is the greatest blessing in your life. And so why not begin to treat your life with that level of grace and blessing and preciousness now? And you do that by honoring the minute. You do that by honoring the hour.
You do that by honoring yourself and all of the people around you with how you look at this precious time. Because when you meet with me, you're not only in your hour, but you're in mine.
People ask me all the time, why do you put out content like you do this specific, most people charge thousands of dollars for stuff that's not as good as you put out for free every week? It's because you've chosen to spend this time with me. You don't get this back. And neither do I. And so if we're going to spend some time, let's do it. Great. Let's have some fun. Let's learn. Let's grow. Let's kick some tail.
Right? If you're going to live, you might as well win. If you're going to live, you might as well dream. If you're going to live, you might as well help. If you're going to live, you might as well get to know God better. Right? This is awesome. Time is finite. And I could tell you this. When my dad was passing away, I could promise you this. My dad wasn't saying, hey, bring me my possessions. Bring me all of my awards. Bring me my money. My dad said, bring me my family.
Bring me the people that I love. Bring the people that are precious to me. Living a good life is treating and honoring people with the time you spend with them. Treating and honoring yourself. See to me, you're honoring God when you're saying thank you for this moment, God. Thank you for this minute. Thank you for this day. I'm gonna get the most out of it. I'm gonna help as many people as I can. I'm gonna have as much fun as I possibly can. I'm gonna do everything I can to honor you and the people I love around me. Thank you.
I think the way that you pay God back is how you honor Him with the time you spend here and not wasteful with it and not spending it frivolously. You wouldn't do that with your money. Why do you do that with your time? You can get some money back. You can get some friends back, right? You can get some stuff back. You can't get time back. And so to begin to look at it like people who have lived pretty well look at it might serve you.
And it's something I'm very passionate about. And I could tell you that when they do click my lights out someday and this thing's over, I want to look back and go, man, I did it. I maxed out my life. My first book was called Max Out. My hashtag on Instagram for years has been maxed out. I want to max out every moment of my life.
I want to max out every opportunity, every relationship, every emotion. Life's about getting all of the juice from life and you don't do that by wasting time. You don't, and you certainly don't do it by building the habit that your time doesn't matter. Other people's time doesn't. Another day, another dollar. I'll get around to it procrastinating. All these things is you're basically saying, right now it doesn't matter. You don't matter and I don't matter.
And I think you're better than that. And if there was a system that could help you get it, you should take advantage of it. And I could tell you, for me, 30 years ago, a mentor taught this to a room of about 30 people, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only one of those 30 people who did anything with it. But I went, you know what?
I think that might be a little bit weird at first, but I'm gonna make a run at this. I'm gonna start starting. Okay, my day just started at 6 a.m. Let me see what I can get done by noon. Round noon. Let me just evaluate a little bit. Let me see if I can compress timeframes a little. I'll get this second day around noon. By the way, the man that taught me it was worth a couple hundred million dollars, was married once in his life, very involved in his church. So this guy's got a pretty good life. This sounds like a key.
And of those 30 people, I'm real sure I'm the only one who did anything with it long term. And life is not about comparison. And I don't even know where most of those people are, but I could tell you from the day I learned this technique and strategy thought process and system to now some pretty good stuff's happened. The day I learned it, I had no money. Nobody knew me. I was broke, right? Body not in shape. All I could tell you is 30 years later, it's turned out okay. I'll take it.
Now are there things I would fix? You bet. But one of them is not the way I've used my time and manipulated time and honored the time, my own and that of other people. And so at the end of this life, you're going to add up all those minutes. And I'm convinced of this. Life really comes down to a handful of moments.
If you think about your life right now, I said, tell me about your life. You describe a handful of moments that stand out in your life, wouldn't you? It's that relationship that happened or that degree you got or that promotion or that time you reconciled with somebody or that walk on the beach or that beautiful place you saw or you went to or that something you felt somewhere. There's these magic moments, aren't there? You just thought of a few of them, right? And to me,
A great life is just more of those moments. If you get to the end of your life and there's three, or you get to the end of your life and there's 300, who had a richer life? You had more of those moments. And I believe when you begin to look at time as more precious, you begin to use it differently. You create more opportunities for those moments to occur in your life than they would otherwise.
and they are a handful of moments. At the end of my life, I want the people I love around me, and I want to be reminiscing on those moments. And the longer that list, the more rich it was, the more it was shared with people that I love, the better my life was. And I got a funny feeling the way I look at time, both theirs and mine and God's will create the opportunities for you and I to have more of those moments in our life than we would otherwise. And it is wrong to look at time
Like we did 30 years ago, when we've got the blessing of all of these advantages now, we got a chance to live a better and greater life if we begin to use a system of time like these many days. There's this great Chinese proverb that says, if you want to know the road ahead, ask those coming back. And if I'm one of those people in your life that's coming back, I can tell you one of the hacks for me is I've just looked at my life and time very differently. I don't always explain it very articulately.
But I know how I use it. And I know what my life looks like. I know that in about eight minutes, it's the end of my first mini day. And it'll just be a split second of reflection, doubling down, moving on. I know that it's coming up on noon and I have already done, let's see that I have worked out already today. I've had my prayer, my morning walk. I did my little cold plunge. I actually am on my second podcast of the day as we're doing this right now.
And I also had about four phone calls this morning that I already had on three or four phone calls. And so that was a pretty productive day so far. And that's because of the way that I look at time. And I can tell you that this is a game changer for those of you that understand it and use it correctly. And so if you want to have a different life to most people, you got to do some things different. And I can tell you right now, the way you look at time, and by the way, you do this for a year or two and just your overall efficiency. But you know what you're going to have more of? Free time. You're going to have more of more fun.
You're going to have more of more days you look back on ago. I left it all out on the field today. Man, I got it all out of that day. I if this was the last day of my life, I had a great one. And that's in some extent, when I coach people one on one, I always say, if this was your last meeting, if this was your last day,
This is your last conversation with your daughter. How would you handle it? Your son? How would you handle it? Your spouse? How would you handle it? Well, if this was the last day of my life, how would I want to have looked at time? And with all of the blessings and advent of technology and influence, and by the way, everybody around you having that same access, this idea that you can only get three or four meetings done in a 24-hour day, or that every meeting needs to be an hour or 90 minutes long, or that we should only evaluate ourselves around 9 p.m. every single night, seems silly to me.
When everything we do, this podcast 30 years ago would be impossible for you to even watch or get on your phone if that's where you're getting it or on your YouTube. So this idea that you can watch some of you are listening to the content today on one and a half speed, aren't you? And that is an indication that you are compressing timeframes that to some extent, by the way, I don't recommend that. I think you should hear nuance and listen to an entire show.
But it's an indication that you already have technology that can help you speed things up. Email is faster than regular email. Mobile phone contact is a whole lot faster than dial up is. I could tell you that typing something on a typewriter compared to using Word on your iPad or your Mac is not as efficient. That things have gotten much more efficient. So I should be more efficient. I should be in a bigger hurry. Successful people understand there's a rhythm to success.
and it's a little bit faster. Successful people walk faster. Just a little bit. Talk faster. Think faster. Act faster. Just a little bit. It's just a little bit different pace for the people that are successful in life or productive in life if they want to be. And so this is a hack in order to do that. How about that? Every time, every day, having three times where you look up and go, what did I get done? What do I need to double down on? Did I have enough fun? What did I learn? You know, evaluation.
doing that and stacking that up over a period of time, I believe can help you become more productive, more successful. I think your whole view of the way life in the world works can slightly be altered by the way you look at time. And it makes you appreciate it. If anything, what this does is you're now evaluating the one commodity in your life you can't get enough of.
which is time. Of all the topics in person of all, mindset, breathing, exercise, thinking, anti-aging, working out, all these things, right? You know the topic not talked about almost ever time.
which is what we're talking about today and how we use it, how we view it, what it can do for us or what it can do to us if we let it get away from us. You know, if you ever want to know if time can feel differently, take the last three minutes on a treadmill, right, when you're running. Can that not feel like an hour and a half, the last three minutes there?
And then take three minutes in the greatest moments of your life with your children or your spouse and how quickly that goes by. The same three minutes, one person's on that treadmill, clicking away feels like an hour and a half. And the other person's in that blissful state of passion or ecstasy or joy or peace. And it's like a flicker.
Same amount of time, completely different feeling and emotion. And so how you view time, how you view the emotions of it, the value of it, the productivity of it, the blessing of it alters everything in your life. I will tell you the ripple effects of this are so many over a long window of time, over a month, over a year, over a decade of your life. I believe you have a happier and more productive life. I believe people will respond to you differently.
And I believe you'll have created more abundance, more prosperity, and more peace in your life. If you begin to look at time a little bit differently, my hack is many days. I recommend it to you as well. God bless you. Share this episode. Max out. This is the environment show.