Get LASER FOCUSED for 2024 (in 18 minutes)

Shaan Puri

You can do anything, but you can't do everything. That is what I want to talk about today: **ruthless focus**—**laser-like focus** for 2024. I have not been great at focusing in the past. I have let myself get distracted. I have set a goal at the beginning of the year, and by the end of the year, I check in and think, "Where the hell did I go? What did I do all year? Why did I drift?" It's not something malicious; it's not a total fail, but it's just this drift that I didn't like, and I wanted to get better at it. I'm going to show you what works for me. How do you get more focus? How do we achieve the laser-like focus that all the great ones exhibit? Whether it's in sports, where you see Kobe Bryant completely obsessed; in entertainment, where you see Mr. Beast just completely locked in; or in business, where you see someone like Mark Zuckerberg laser-focused on one thing, trying to make that happen. They don't let themselves drift the way the rest of us do. Here's a little visual: This is you, and this is all the things that you might do. This includes some new thing that's going on, the election, "Love is Blind" Season 5, an investment someone wants you to make, an email you got from someone who wants to do a call and pick your brain, and that side hustle that's not really going to go anywhere. That's all the things. Then, the blurred thing is the thing you actually want. This is the thing that you would feel proud of at the end of the year if you made it happen. So, what we need is **laser-like focus**. We do not want the cone to be wide. I'm going to show you how we do that. The first thing you want to do is think about your **yes threshold**. Let's write that out. This is your yes threshold. Before, it might be here, so you might have your yes threshold right there. What you're doing is saying yes to anything above that line. If it's below that line, you're able to say no, but you're able to say yes to everything above that line. Now, the after: All we have to do is acknowledge and bring our awareness to how low our yes threshold is and raise it. Raise your standard for yes. Instead of saying yes to things that are pretty good, maybe interesting, or might be worth doing, it needs to be a **hell yes**. That is the easiest thing you could do. So, we're going to raise the yes threshold. We're going to take it from here up to here. And you know, this sad guy becomes this happy guy, and he's taller, so you get 2 inches of height at least, and your yes threshold is even higher. Alright, so that's the first thing you do: bring your awareness to where your bar is today and take your yeses to only doing **hell yes** things. That doesn't mean you don't do things. If a friend comes and says, "We're going to Costa Rica, and it's going to be amazing," that might be a hell yes for you. Go for it! But make sure you have a premium quality on your focus and what you are willing to do. Next thing: **time management**. You may have seen this as a famous Paul Graham essay that I've turned into a cartoon. The Paul Graham essay basically shows the difference between a **manager's schedule** and a **maker's schedule**. This is what a manager's schedule looks like: 9 AM, 9:30 AM, 10:30 AM, 11 AM... Oh, I'm double booked! Oh, shit! They end up just in a puddle of tears. They are overwhelmed, stressed, and busy themselves to death. Why didn't I get everything I wanted to done in life? Why didn't I achieve my goals and dreams? Because I was too busy. Listen to that sentence; it doesn't even make sense. You didn't do the things you needed to do because you didn't have time. You filled it with other crap. Most people, by default, especially those in jobs, will be opted into a manager's schedule. What you want to do is switch to a **maker's schedule**. A maker's schedule is basically long, uninterrupted blocks of time, usually in the morning. You need at least 2.5 hours of uninterrupted time; usually, 3 is ideal. Then, take a break where you can have lunch, exercise, go for a walk, play with your kids, walk your dog—whatever you do. Then, have another uninterrupted sprint. For some people, the real great ones, they have another break and then a third night sprint. But you don't have to do all that. You need to switch to this maker schedule. The maker schedule is the one thing you can do with your time where, in the same number of hours, you can get more done. Why? Because when you get into these uninterrupted blocks of time, you get into flow states, and you're able to actually lock in on knocking out one whole thing without distractions—without checking your emails or being pulled into a call or a meeting about this and that. You're able to lock in. Whether you're an engineer trying to build a product, code something, or you're an entertainer needing to write chapters of your book or a YouTube video, or you're just trying to come up with a new idea, don't let your day get split. I call this the **zebra calendar**, where you're just stripes all day. That is the next thing you need to do to enable yourself to come up with great ideas. You are setting up your environment. The first thing we did was raise the threshold of yes to a hell yes so that we're just saying no to things that clear space. The next thing is we do the maker's schedule versus the manager's schedule so that you have uninterrupted time blocks where you can be your most creative, productive self. Okay, next thing: **clarity**. This is something I stole from Asana. Asana created this thing called the **pyramid of clarity**. The pyramid of clarity goes as follows: at the top, you have your **mission**. The mission is your big reason your organization exists. It's the reason you're even doing this; it's your big why. Let's say you're Elon Musk. Your mission for SpaceX might be to make humans a multiplanetary species. For Tesla, it might be to get the world off of fossil fuels and into an electric future. That's the big vision for what you're doing. Now, break that down. Write that out. By the way, little pro tip: when I first read about this, I thought, "Wow, that makes total sense." You have to have this big audacious vision. But let's say you're not building rockets and going to space, or you're not trying to get the world off fossil fuels to a fully electric energy system. You might just be building an e-commerce business designed to enable your lifestyle to be really great because you wanted money and didn't have it. Whatever it is, the key here is **honesty**. You could write a fancy mission, but if it's not your honest mission, it's not going to help. It won't have any emotional resonance. So, I try to be honest about the mission. For example, with my company, we are building a company that enables us to have an amazing lifestyle. We, the owners of the business, want to have a lifestyle where we can do what we want, when we want, with whoever we want, and only work on projects that are intellectually fascinating and creatively challenging for us. So we write that down. That is the mission of what we're trying to build. From there, you want to go down to the **1-year goal**. The mission might take 10 years or 20 years, but then you break it down to the 1-year goal. Where do we need to be at the end of the year for this to be a smash success? Specifically, I set two goals: what I call the **FYA goal** and the **floor goal**. I set a range here because I don't like static, single, binary goals. Should I just be super ambitious and risk disappointment, or should I be conservative and feel like I didn't push myself? So, I set both. The floor goal means you would be disappointed if you didn't reach this level, meaning this would be a solid win. Below that, you might feel like, "Man, we really didn't get there." The FYA goal is where we're high-fiving and toasting, thinking, "I can't believe this is how good it turned out." So, you want to set that range for yourself and say, "Alright, we have a minimum, and then we have a target that we're going to shoot for."

Sam Parr

Alright everyone, a quick break to tell you about HubSpot. This one's really easy for me to talk about because I'm going to show you a real-life example. I've got this company called Hampton (joinhampton.com). It's a community for founders doing between $2,000,000 all the way up to $250,000,000 a year in revenue. One of the ways that we've grown is by creating these cool surveys. We have a lot of founders who have high net worth, and we'll ask them all types of questions that people typically are embarrassed to ask but that provide a lot of value. So, things like how much the founders pay themselves each month, how much money they're spending each month, what their payroll looks like, and if they're optimistic about the next year in their business. All these questions that people are afraid to ask, but we ask them anyway, and they tell us in this anonymous survey. What we do is create a landing page using HubSpot's landing page tool. It basically has a landing page that says, "Here's all the questions we asked. Give us your email if you want to access it." I shared this page on Twitter, and we were able to get thousands of people who gave us their email and told us they wanted this survey. I could see where they came from—social media, Twitter, LinkedIn, basically everywhere else that they could possibly come from. I'm able to track all of that, and then I can see over the next handful of weeks how many of those people actually signed up and became members of Hampton. In other words, I can see how much revenue came from this survey and how much revenue came from each traffic source. The best part is I can see how much revenue came from it, and a lot of times it takes a ton of work to make that happen. HubSpot made that super, super easy. If you're interested in doing this, you could check it out at hubspot.com. The link's in the description, and I'll also put the link to the survey that I did so you can actually see the landing page and how it works and everything like that. I'm just going to do that call to action then, and it's free! Check it out in the description. Alright, now back to MFM.

Shaan Puri

Okay, what's the next level of this? Now that you have your overall mission clarified, and I'll show you an example in a second, you have your one-year goal. This is where we want to be a year from now, and that's what you're going to work backwards from. So then you work backwards and say, "Okay, in order to achieve this one-year goal, what do I need in terms of people? What do I need in terms of product? And what do I need in terms of finances?" These are the three categories. You break the one-year goal into the outputs and the inputs. For example, for my e-commerce company, we had a one-year goal, and we said, "We're going to try to double revenue." We did about $17 million last year, and we're going to try to get to over $30 million this year. So we said, "What do we need in terms of people?" Well, I needed to hire a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) because I was doing it myself, and I'm not the best CMO for that business. I'm not full-time on it. So we set some people targets. We needed to hire an amazing CMO who's done this before, and we needed to hire a website developer who’s going to do X, Y, Z. So you write down what your people gaps are. Then you have your product gaps. What does the product need to be able to do in order for us to hit our goal? For example, when Elon launched Tesla, he set a product goal. He was like, "How do we make a car that is faster than a Porsche and better for the environment than a Prius?" That is a product goal; it is a benchmark that we are trying to achieve. So similarly, you want to set some product goals for yourself to achieve your one-year mission. Lastly, we have finances. Do you need capital? By default, people think they do. You should question that assumption. Beyond just how much money do we need to do this, consider your margins or unit economics. We need to bring the cost down to this in order for this to work because we want to be profitable, and today we're unprofitable. So within each one of those, you've now broken your one-year goal into the different input metrics. If you do those correctly, it will lead to the one-year goal. From there, you just break it out by month. You say, "Alright, in January, what are we going to do?" Well, we need to chip away at the people goal, the product goal, and the finance goal. Let's break those into digestible chunks. Now, all of a sudden, it's like, "Let's do 20 interviews and try to find two great candidates for the CMO role," or whatever it may be. Then you go month by month, and every month you check in. You say, "Alright, as a reminder, our mission is X by the end of the year. We're trying to do Y. In order to do that, we need to hit these three things internally, and then the score will take care of itself." To get there, we need to break this out month by month into what mattered last month, did we achieve it, and what matters this month. If you do that for 12 months straight, you are going to stay on track; there will be no drift. The last thing I want to share with you, I stole this from my friend Joel Oman. He's a listener of the show, and I hope he's okay with me sharing this. I'll ask him, but he shared this simple slide that he made for himself, and I loved it. It was a killer slide that gave him clarity on what he was trying to do and how he was going to get there. He framed it well. He had his goal, the mission that I called on the last page, and his goal was to build a **creatively fulfilling cash machine**. I just love that—a creatively fulfilling cash machine. He said, "I've done each of them individually. I've built successful businesses, cash machines, and I've done things like write a fantasy fiction book, something that was creatively fulfilling but didn't make any money." So he's like, "This time, my mission is to do this because if I did this, I would be blissed out walking into work every day. I would be at my happiest in terms of my professional goals." Set a goal for yourself like this, and you want to use this as a bar for resonance. This is not a generic off-the-shelf goal like "be successful" or "make money." Set it for real. Maybe for some people, it's "make $6,000 a month so that I can quit my job and be totally independent, not have to worry about how I'm going to pay the bills." Write that whole thing out in a way that has some emotional pull for you, that it's a compelling picture. Alright, so the second thing then is your output. What are the outputs? That's kind of like I said, the one-year goal. In order to do that, we might need to do the following two things. Now here's the part I liked best: when he says, "I say yes to blank, and I say no to blank." For example, let's say for this podcast, I have a goal, which is I want to be one of those people that inspired me when I was coming up. That is very much why I do this podcast. Growing up, I remember when I was in college, somebody gave me a book called **The 4-Hour Workweek**, and it blew my mind at the time. I had never thought about half of the concepts in there. It was just insight after insight, page after page of inspiration and story. I just said, "That's how I want my life to be." I called it **catching the 4-hour fever**. I read that book, and for four hours, I went into a fever dream and replanned everything in my life. That was very impactful for me. Thank you, Tim Ferriss. There have been other moments like that—Tony Robbins and others—where I've had these people who created content that really shifted my thinking, that made me have more clarity, more insight, more motivation, and more firepower to go do what I wanted to do. So my goal with this podcast is to do that. Okay, well great. What do I need to say yes to in order for that to happen? We break that big dream down to a one-year goal, and then we break that one-year goal down to the things that we're going to have to opt into. For example, for this podcast, you might say, "Well, I'm going to have to sit down consistently, week after week, doing my absolute best to create the most compelling content out there—the best wisdom for entrepreneurs." When I do that, I am saying yes to doing my best and knowing that the numbers are not going to change every week. They might look flat for a long time, but I will do that for years, and I will not be discouraged. I say yes to doing that input, even though the numbers will take a long time to build up. What's the second thing I'm saying yes to? Well, for this year, for example, we wanted to bring on higher-profile guests. We booked a bunch of people—Tim Ferriss is coming on, we booked Tony Robbins, and a bunch of others. I said yes to doing something I didn't like to do: guest outreach. I hated begging people to come on my podcast. I just don't like when people ask me, so I didn't want to ask other people. But I said, "I gotta say yes to that. I gotta say yes to the discomfort and the ego of continuing to follow up with people and try to get them to come on the podcast." What do I say no to? What are the things I have to say no to? Well, I have to say no to starting a company. I sit on this podcast every week and come up with ideas for businesses. I have to say no to actually going and doing them because if I become the CEO of a startup, I'm not going to be able to achieve this goal. So I have to say no to some very compelling, good ideas that would make me a million dollars. Write that down. What are the other things I have to say no to? I have to say no to avoiding hard conversations. I have to say no to my old habit of blah, blah, blah. I thought this was a very useful thing because it was all about self-awareness. This is a self-awareness game. What is the goal that motivates me to get out of bed every single day and chase this above all other possible things I could be doing with my time and talents? Second, what is it about me that I know I'm going to have to consciously force myself to say yes to and say no to? Here, it's the things that are not easy for you. You don't want to write the things that you already say yes to that are trivial for you. It's your nature to do that. Here, you identify what's against your nature and write that down so that you're very clear on what you need to do. To me, this is how you can do anything. You are limitless. Nobody can tell you that you can't do that thing, but you can't do everything. So, you can do anything, but you can't do everything. This is a very powerful idea, and it gives you that focus. People say that focus is a superpower, but they don't tell you how to focus. I hope today you learned a little something from Uncle Sean about how you actually focus. This is something that, frankly, I'm still a beginner at. I'm maybe a blue belt in the game of focus, but I do know that it's important. Because it's important, I'm working at it, and I wanted to share with you the things that I'm doing that tend to be working for me. Maybe there are some more things out there. I'd love to hear from you what works for you in the comments. But that's it; that's the episode.