1KHO 797: Win at Work and Life | Michael Hyatt, Free to Focus

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I just said you know I don't mind doing that podcast again because I felt like you and I had such great rapport. It's such a bummer to lose it because it was such a fantastic conversation but I know obviously we get a chance to have another one. And everything happens for a reason. That's really nice of you to say. I am a huge fan. I've been a huge fan for a really long time so when we realized that that one didn't record I was like are you kidding. Like really for Michael Hyatt's but I've got a lot of your books I showed you last time but I have got free to focus. I have your best year ever. I have mind your mindset that you wrote with your daughter which I think is just one of the coolest things and then I also have living forward. So I've had these for years and it's just such an honor to get a chance to talk with you. I also have your planner. This is an incredible planner. I have never seen a planner like this. This is called the full focus planner and this is about having streaks and like making sure that in the nine domains which you talk a lot about in your best year ever and you talk about on your podcast. Like life is not all about work. Like how's your family? How's your community? How are your hobbies? How's your work? That's one part of it. You know how is you probably know them all. How's your body? How's your mind? How's your spirit? And so you're working on your all your domains. You have motivational sayings that you could put in there. What are your key motivations or you know how are you going to celebrate all of that kind of stuff. So this is been deemed the best tracker ever right by Forbes. Best daily planner by Forbes. Sold over 1.2 million copies. Can we kick it off? Talk about the planner. We didn't talk about that last time anyway but can you talk about how you came about with this format and obviously it works. I mean there's so many people that are using it and it helps you to not just be like a one track person. Yeah so basically it's the operating system for putting what I teach into practice. Yeah so I would say that two of the most important books and the books that have really informed our work at full focus are free to focus. How to achieve more by doing less and then your best year ever. Yeah and so the first one is on productivity. The second one is on goal achievement and by the way I make a difference between goal setting and goal achievement because it's one thing to set goals. It's another thing to achieve your goals and so I'm all about the achievement of the goals. So Joel Miller who is married to my oldest daughter Megan who's the CEO of full focus. He's our chief content officer. He came to me and he said I've got an idea, a publishing idea. Well as it turns out both of us had spent decades in the book publishing industry. I more than him because you know I'm twice his age but at any rate he said I think we should publish a planner and I looked at him and I said you got to be kidding me. Wow it turned out to be a fantastic idea. I know it did but at the time I felt like there's so many things I don't like about book publishing. Now the least of which is you have to front all this money to print the books and then hope they sell and so best case scenario you have a lot of liquidity or cash tied up in an inventory. Yeah. Worst case is you end up having to write off a lot of books you couldn't sell. So I said to him I said okay I said what's the minimum amount we can print to test this and he said and we can actually get it smaller today but in 2017 he said I think we need to print at least 10,000 and I said wow I mean first of all almost but probably 85 to 90% of all books published don't sell that many copies shockingly and I said okay let's do it and so we put it on sale he said this is going to be beautiful because we're going to collect the money before we ever go to press and so you don't have to put really anything at risk and I said okay so we sold out of those 10,000 copies after about 30 days before it was even published and so we had to get back on press and order additional ones just to meet the demand and I know I told you 1.2 million copies last time but I thought to myself that didn't sound quite right so we did some deeper research in it and it's a little over 2 million now. So you're just hoping you break even with the 10,000 wow I mean I am not surprised it's phenomenal I've got this beautiful like canary yellow one but there's all these different colors that you can get and it and it really is about having your best year ever that's what it's about and how to get what you want out of life. You're exactly right it's really designed to help people get greater productivity so that they can really do less of what they don't want to do and more of what they do best so that they create margin for those other eight domains of life and all the things that you mentioned. Yeah so you told me this story last time and I hope that you're okay to share it again because nobody heard it. It disappeared into the wind but I am super impressed with Thomas Nelson. I think it's a really cool book publisher and I love how their books are always in the store and several of my friends have published with them and so I always think they're like the premier when I talk with in my friend circles with people who have published books I'm always like oh we talk about Thomas Nelson and I learned through reading all about you that you were the CEO of Thomas Nelson publishers but you started off where they gave you this division that's like sinking it's like a sinking ship it's doing the worst of all because a publisher will have all these different divisions they give you this one it's doing the worst they're actually losing money and they put you in this position like can you turn this around so can you talk about that story about what what you did and then your the response from your wife. Sure okay so that's kind of become a signature story because it was such a defining moment for me but I was initially flattered that they asked me to take over this division as a general manager and at the time Thomas Nelson had 14 different book publishing divisions we had a children's book division we had a bible publishing division we had gift books we had all different kinds of books and so he gave me this this one and I was really flattered until I learned that they probably realized I couldn't screw it up because it was so bad it was performing so badly and so I the CEO said to me he said how long do you think this will take to turn this around well I never turned around anything you know I had never done anything like this I just was guessing but I didn't want him to know how stupid I felt and so I just said well I think it's going to probably take about three years like I'd really analyze this and was scientifically giving him an answer and he said well that's kind of what I was thinking too so why don't you have at it and if you need any help you know shout I said okay great so I went off for a private retreat for a weekend just me a legal pad and a pen and I started writing down everything I'd like to accomplish within three years and I boiled it down to a set of 10 bullets and I stated it in the present tense like it had already happened and so I was pretty jazzed about it and I went back but it was it seemed all like borderline what's what I'm looking for delusional so I said you know we're going to go from number 14 to number one in being the most profitable division we're going to go from number 14 to number one in terms of revenue growth and we're going to publish you know over the course of this time we're going to publish like 45 New York Times bestsellers and so I thought I don't know if that's going to happen but it does motivate me so I went back and shared it with the team I think for a few minutes they wondered you know if I was sober but they said but they said okay and they kind of got energized and I convinced them I said look what's the worst that can happen I mean maybe we you know get halfway there but that'll be a big of improvement of where we are now right so we rolled up our sleeves we got right to work and all of us were working long hours I'm talking 12 to sometimes 15 hours a day we were working weekends we weren't taking vacations none of that but and this was the shocking part of it I was shocked we went from number 14 to number one in revenue growth and profit and number of New York Times bestsellers in not three years but a year and a half 18 months unbelievable wow so everybody in my division got a big fat bonus check which of course turned morale around everybody's very excited about that yeah and CEO called me to his office and he was thanking me and then he slid a check across the desk to me and I opened it and it was more than my annual salary I'd never seen a check that big and it was just kind of like giddy and they're not not even expecting it no not even expecting it now this was back before we had smartphones and all that stuff so I had to wait to tell my wife till I got home and so I drove home just knowing that she was going to be floored she was going to be soulmates and this would validate all the hard work yeah except that when I walked in and I showed it to her you know ta-da she wasn't that impressed and she looked at me and she cheered up just a little bit and she said honey we need to talk oh well I immediately intuited that I was in trouble and I wasn't wrong so I went in and sat down in the den and she started off incredibly gracious she said first of all I want to make sure you know that I appreciate all your hard work and what you've accomplished and I see that and I value it but I also have to be honest and then she cheered up some more and she said if I'm honest you're never home and you're five daughters I have five daughters now grown need you now more than ever because all of them were somewhere between you know 10 and 20 yeah and then she began to cry and had a hard time getting it out and she said if I'm honest I feel like I'm a single mom well that was a gut kick because that was not what I was going for and I realized suddenly that I had sacrificed or almost sacrificed everything in the name of my own ambition but I felt really confused because I felt like I've got two choices here it seems like in fact I called it the impossible choice when I wrote about it later I said I felt like on the one hand I could keep leading at Thomas Nelson and now my team was excited you know and expectations for the CEO were even bigger it's like well wow if you could do that in 18 months you know so I felt under pressure there yeah but on the other hand I felt like I was about to lose my family and probably my health because I could tell that there were things happening in my health that weren't good just from the sheer grind yeah so that sent me on a on a search Jenny where I was searching for a third option and I thought there's gotta be a way where you can win at work and succeed at life but I didn't know how to do it and that's when I had a conversation with one of our authors who had become a mentor by that point John Maxwell and I said I think I think what I need to coach and and back then this would have been like 2003 there coaching wasn't like it is today you know that was like a really an outlier yeah and I said well okay and so you recommended one name to me got named Daniel and I actually went to the CEO and I said would you guys pay for this and because there was a lot of money felt like a lot of money at the time and he said to me he said well he said uh why do you need to coach you know you're running our top performing division now you basically turned this division around I said and I said to him I made this argument just came to me on the fly I said well even Tiger Woods best golfer in the world has a coach it's true so I need a coach so he agreed to it and that first meeting with my coach kind of changed everything what a thing and I just think it's an incredible story because it's so understandable you talk about in your books you're like I've got five kids you know obviously finances are important and I got to make sure that I can support these kids but had your wife not been honest that you know that was a catalyst a catalyst to where you are now I mean I know you went on to be CEO of Thomas Nelson publishers now but now you have your whole thing so people can find it full focus they can find these and I'll put the link in the show notes but all these books and the planner you have your own podcast you have like all this double wind stuff right like when at work but also when at home and you really focus on these nine domains of body mind spirit love family community money work and hobbies I don't hope I didn't miss any of them but and then and then you're able to have your daughters be involved and also a son-in-law he's like helping to kick off this planner thing that sold over two million copies so I mean it's just incredible and I think that a lot of people would feel that there is no answer there's no answer there's no way to double win and if I'm honest you know it it's not like oh I hired a coach and everything turned around the next week I found the answer you know life is nothing but you know unicorns and rainbows it wasn't that way at all it mean it took a long time and in fact in that first conversation with my coach he listened to me you know he's kind of asking me about my life and why I had come to him and I was doing my very best to be honest with him and I said uh or he said to me it sounds to me like you basically have no boundaries around work it kind of leaks into everything else in your life right and he said tell me if I'm wrong but he said my guess is you get up at the crack of dawn you're the first one up in your family and you start processing email and try to get a jump on the day and then you spend a lot of the day in meetings and all the while the work's accumulating so you feel even under more stress because you haven't made a dent in your to-do list and so then you kind of reluctantly go home from the office to have a quick meal with your family put the kids to bed and then you're right back on your laptop and I said guilty is charged that's that is my day and he said my guess is that on the weekends you have good intentions to spend time with the family but you think to yourself well I'll just work on Saturday morning a little bit and you know try to catch up and maybe Sunday afternoon but you know your work bleeds into the weekend and I said that's exactly right and he said and my guess is that if you take a vacation and we haven't talked about vacations but if you do take a vacation you're probably not very present because you're still working and still thinking about work and I said this exactly right and so he asked me this question he said would you be willing to create a hard boundary around your work so you have a start time and a stop time and you hold that with a level of commitment because you know that it's really important for everything else to function in a healthy way in your life and I said I kind of sighed and I said well what do you have in mind and he said well look it's not my life it's your life what do you have in mind and I said well I'm willing to not work first thing in the morning and do what I know is the most important thing which is to spend time with God and prepare myself for for work and I'm willing to stop working at six and not pick up the computer till the next day. I mean those are those are huge changes. There were huge changes and it seemed like I didn't know how to do it and I think I said to him I said I said I said I want to commit to that and I won't work on the weekends on vacations but here's a question how do I get it all done? That's right because it's just like my to-do list is not shrinking it's like playing a giant game of whack-a-mole every time I cross a few things off you know three things replace it yeah and he said well I think what you're going to discover is that when you establish a constraint around your work that's when the innovation happens and he said it's like kind of like if you're going on a vacation on a Saturday morning you're going out of town and the Friday at the office is uber productive because I mean you're just like totally focused super productive you're getting it all done and he said what's going to happen because you know you're quitting work at six you're not going to engage in small talk you're not going to engage in any distractions and we didn't have social media back then because that would have been a huge one but he said you're going to be more productive than ever because you know that there's a deadline approaching and he was exactly right and it took a few years to walk that out but that third option became sort of the foundation for everything that followed and now you're teaching other people how to do it as we move towards summer everything starts to look a little different the schedule loosens up there's more time outside more travel more life happening and that's a really good thing but it can make consistency a little harder to maintain having something flexible that supports learning through those changing rhythms can make a big difference and that's where ixl fits in so well ixl is an award-winning online learning platform offering interactive practice in math language arts science and social studies from pre-k through 12th grade it adapts to each child's level keeps them engaged and gives parents clear visibility into progress what i really appreciate is how simple and organized it is everything is laid out by grade and subject so you can quickly find what your child needs whether that's staying sharp over the summer or getting a head start for the next year and because it's personalized kids can move at their own pace which helps keep momentum going in a natural way make an impact on your child's learning get ixl now and 1,000 hours outside listeners can get an exclusive 20 off ixl membership we may sign up today at ixl.com slash 1,000 hours visit ixl.com slash 1,000 hours to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price you talk in the book now this is free to focus which i just absolutely love to think it's so practical no matter where you're at in life like are you an employee are you an employer are you a mom at home trying to like manage your kids wherever you're at in life it's so applicable because you talk about how we we just spend so much time on these things because especially now because of the smartphones professionals with smartphones engage with their work more than 70 hours a week 70 hours if you have a smartphone well pretty much everybody has one of those the average american work week is closer to 50 hours than 40 one in five works 60 hours and more and then i want to talk about this rule of 50 because you say when you squeeze an orange at some point there's there's no more juice but i i want to say this before we get there and this is interesting talking about your story at thomas nelson because you said this is 18 months you're basically working these 15 hour days 17 hour days and there was a study in your book free to focus where they um i guess they had studied some bankers and they said that the debilitating symptoms which were physical and psychological both that they showed up starting at year four so it is tricky michael because you you know you're in there for 18 months you're like okay maybe my body feels a little off but mostly i'm fine and so it it almost is like a lie to your body yes that it's working but after a couple years it's going to show up physical and psychological but can you talk about this this rule of 50 because actually there is a ceiling for productivity there is and what the research shows that after you spend about 50 hours working that there are no productivity gains in fact you you begin to go backwards it's counterproductive i think all this could relate to this um i i certainly can because there have been times when i've tried to work into the evening and i feel like i'm having to reread the same paragraph again and again i'm having to reread the same page again and again because i'm i'm fatigued you know i'm exhausted and sometimes my wife will say to me you know what why don't you go to bed you leave fresh in the morning and it'll take you another three hours if you work on that tonight you could probably knock it out in 45 minutes in the morning and she's a hundred percent right that's exactly true and the research bears that out and so the rule of 50 in the case of those investment bankers um and by the way this i've known a lot of investment bankers because when i was running uh thomas nelson we were a publicly held company and we had investment bankers doing all kinds of things particularly when we took the company private but they work unbelievable hours huh and here's what's here's how it can relate to the rest of us i think the reason why we're willing to endure that kind of pace that kind of intensity is because we lie to ourselves we convince ourselves that it's only temporary right we think yeah okay this is just a season but the problem is when the season doesn't end it becomes a way of life and we go from we sort of careen from one crisis to another and i used to tell my wife this i'd say honey look i know this is really intense time but uh i'm kind of working two jobs because my director of marketing resigned and so now i'm having to do my job and his job but as soon as we get through this you know everything will be okay and and then it was like well but then we have a product lunch or we have sales conference coming up it was always something yeah and to her after a while i mean she just called me out on it and she said you know i don't think this is a season i think this has become a way of life for you and thank god we've been married 48 years this summer coming summer and a lot of that's because my wife is has two impeccable qualities she's kind and gracious but also very direct and a truth teller and i've benefited from that and wise it's a wise outlook and and you were wise to listen and so you were able to make these incredible changes now you have i think you told me last time is it 11 grandkids yes so cool what a cool life oh my goodness we have five kids so someday i hope that we also have 11 grandkids and this change that you may gives people hope and people can read about it in these books of yours free to focus because everybody feels the same way you do which is well then how is it supposed to get done but you do figure it out and you tell you have all sorts of practical ideas in the book but then also this push and the motivation and the planner will help you too the planner can help you get there as well you talk about wanting to have the freedom to be spontaneous and the freedom to do nothing and that creativity depends on those times of disengagement so one of the things that you talk about that is specific in this book free to focus is flexing the no muscle and you have this concept called the not to do list but can you talk about how your calendar you use your calendar and i thought this is really a wise way to do it your calendar says no for you even when it's the time so you call it time blacking even when it's the time where you're writing and you could say yeah i'll meet you for coffee or yeah you know i can have a meeting right now but you don't because you say you have a commitment to this work that you have to get done so your calendar can be something that says no to you and then you also have the yes no yes the yes no yes strategy as well because people are like can you uh can you look at my book proposal which happens frequently yep i'm sure it does yes yeah i think what we have to understand is that unlike every other resource time is fixed you have 168 hours i have 168 hours president trump has 168 hours and so does a homeless person we all have the same exact allotment of time so when we say yes to something we're also and this is the deception of it we're implicitly saying no to something else so somebody says to me hey can we grab coffee tomorrow morning at 7 a.m well if i say yes to that i'm saying no to my workout or i'm saying no to my quiet time okay it's a trade-off yes i can do it but most of the time we're not aware of what we're trading because we we have an erroneous view of time we think that oh we can just you know time will expand we can just jam more stuff into it and you know we're like the person going up for seconds that hasn't chewed what they have in their mouth so yeah i think we we can really let our calendar help us by really seeing that there's these fixed blocks and so what i encourage people to do is to make sure that they and i got this concept from dr steven covey put the big rocks in first so make sure that the things that are the most important to you and certainly that would be family certainly that would be time for your health certainly that would be time for god if you happen to be a believer but you put that in first and and what dr covey demonstrated there's a wonderful youtube video that you can find on this where he's actually putting the he has these three different sized rocks so big rocks medium rocks and a bunch of gravel and so he puts in the gravel first and then he has this lady put in the medium sized rocks and the big rocks won't fit it's full but then she puts in she takes another strategy she puts in the big rocks first then the medium sized rocks and then pours in the gravel and it all fits beautifully and i think that that's what we have to do nothing is all going to fit that's kind of the part of the metaphor that doesn't work but but what it does mean is that the most important things get done and so i encourage people to schedule even time for themselves and even as it relates to work what are the two or three things where you make your biggest contribution at work and your biggest contribution to the world those are the things where you need to really focus and those are the things that are important and because they're not urgent they often get pushed aside and so i'll get to it sometime in the future but when you schedule it on your calendar and like writing is a good example i think when we were together last time i said you know i have three three mornings a week are scheduled for writing and that's what i did this morning and so when somebody asked me could i take a meeting at that time that's scheduled for writing i don't go into any detail i just say oh i've got another commitment then could we find it another time right and sometimes it might have to be pushed out two or three or four weeks right but i'm not going to give up on that commitment that i know is one of the big rocks that's really important it's such a smart way to do it you just say i'm committed you know i'm committed to these other high priority tasks you don't like you said you don't even have to go into detail but you know yeah you're committed and you can do this in a lot of ways in fact actually so uh it seems like small potatoes but like we're just trying to get outside right we're really trying to prioritize hands on living in this heavy screen world and people ask sometimes what's the hardest part about it and i think they think i'm gonna say something like snow or bugs you know those those darn mosquitoes but really it is it is scheduling it in it's it's creating the time pocket to make sure that kids aren't on screens all the time and you have to be intentional about that and so i think for a lot of the things that we want to do in this day and age especially with these nine domains that are important hobbies and money and community and family and love and your body and your spirit it's like you have to be intentional about where your time's going so then you have this way that you tell people the yes no yes which is um it just a clear but kind way to tell people and people can read about that in the book for you to focus you know that i'm excited about your book proposal no due to my commitments you know i'm unable to look at your book proposal but then you end with a positive yeah so i got this concept from dr. william urry who's a professor and he wrote a book called the power of a positive no i think it's the title it's it's probably footnote of there um but essentially he gives me he gave me this yes no yes framework so when i get an email or an invitation i first of all want to thank the person for thinking of me and inviting me into that thing i don't just take it for granted you know that people are going to ask me to do things and it's you know they've honored me in a way so i commend them for that you know so if somebody's asked me to review a book proposal that i would likely say to them well first of all congratulations on getting this far because a lot of people say they want to write a book and precious few actually write a book proposal not to mention a book so good for you that's the yes here's the no unfortunately and this is the magic phrase due to my in order to honor my existing commitments yeah i have to say no now i've been clear and i've been unequivocal here's what i've not said you know i'm really busy right now could you check back next week or could you check back in a month because the truth is there's not going to be a good time and there's no world in which i'm going to say yes to that so it's not a kindness it just strings him along so i give him a clear and unequivocal no that's the no and then i end with the yes and i might say something like you know you might want to consider looking for an agent who would be happy to review it because that's kind of what they get paid to do or look i've got and what i do in the situation is i've got an essay on how to write a winning book proposal and you might just take a look at this make sure that what you've written conformance to that because thousands of authors have gotten published using that essay or that template on how to create a book proposal now here's what's really interesting jenny is that sometimes um or my tendency because i'm such a people pleaser i like to say recovering people please uh is that i would let a request like that languish in my inbox because i didn't want to say no right and so now the person's getting ticked off because they're like gosh you won't even respond to me but when i respond by the way using a template and then i fill in the details so i don't have to overthink it or muster the courage well then when i get back to them almost not not always but almost always somebody they'll write back and they'll say well thank you for getting back to me and thank you for being clear i totally respect that i wish i had the guts to do that wow and so nobody's ever gotten offended by it and so um yeah it's that simple and they have direction and then also they learn this new skill because they're like oh michael just did this i'm sure they take that skill into other situations where someone asked something of them so you're talking this book so much about your time your time is fixed you also have to think about your energy as well and so when you're talking about this double win which is just making sure that your life as a whole is going well and then your podcast that you do with me again talking about all of these different domains i what i love about your books is you say i do these things like i want to be more efficient not so that i can work longer hours you know not because success sometimes we get success which is good but it's not good if then you're you're stuck because you're getting more projects you say i i want let me actually read it so i don't mess up your words i'm after productivity not efficiency which means ensuring significant margin that enables me to be fully present wherever i am you say the important people in my life deserve the very best of me productivity should ultimately give you more time not require more of you so then you talk about all the things that you know these listeners are interested in which are play sleep movement nature unplugging you know you say we need to make sure that we unplug and you say we're not robots so can you talk about how your life has expanded so obviously i know it was not a quick turnaround you get the coach you um obviously you moved up to ceo at thomas nelson then you branch out into your own thing but can you talk about how does your life feel at this point you know thinking back to when you were the 15 to 17 hour days turning turning the ship from the lowest branch to the highest branch in 18 months all these new york times bestsellers but how do you feel today i know you take some time off in the summer like your life seems like it's enhanced even though 100 your work output has also gone up too well first of all i my life's not perfect and i want people to understand that human flourishing is not a destination it's a way of living in the midst of chaos and in the midst of a lot of demands you know you choose to make thing time for the things that are important and and certainly my life even to this day ebbs and flows but to give an example uh and this kind of goes back to the first chapter about spontaneity is one of the freedoms yeah is that um yesterday first of all all five of my daughters live in nashville where i live uh three of them have between them the 11 grandchildren they all live within five minutes of my house so there's almost always somebody over every day so yesterday was an absolutely beautiful day it was like 78 degrees out and a couple of families were over my one of my granddaughters was on her way to south africa on a mission trip and so a bunch of people had come over i decided i was going to get my i have a lady that comes to buy it comes to my hair every three weeks and i said to her i said let's let's get some outside time let's just go cut my hair outside beautiful day for it and i can be with the family while you're doing it so we did that and it was just it was just amazing but the key to that was not to over program my life you can't be spontaneous if every moment is spoken for and so i try to have blocks of white space that are unclaimed just so that i could be spontaneous when somebody shows up and i can have a conversation and that's a lot of people that might be showing up if you have five children and some are married i don't know if they're all made of an 11 grandchildren it's like an incredible amount of people just within your own immediate family you know that's like 16 plus people that might just be showing up we almost need name tags sure i love that you're able to make that change though it gives people a lot of hope and i know you were very clear it didn't happen overnight but over the course of time and that is what your books focus on this concept of double whim i wanted to talk also about your best year ever the subtitle here is a five step plan for achieving your most important goals and i was hoping to talk about this and i feel like it fits really well because so we recorded this podcast together i thought oh gosh i really connected with this guy it was like incredible conversation i thought so valuable and then i don't know an hour later it hadn't uploaded and i was like where where is it you know and so then there had been this whole banter back and forth between me and my husband about just the tech blip that we messed it up and then i was like oh he's so busy has so much going on i don't even know if i'm gonna get a chance to talk with him again and so one of the things you talk about is when you want to quit because at that moment i was like i can't do this anymore and it's not even you know it's not the biggest deal but but it is your time and it is embarrassing but you have one of this is step four in the five step plan for achieving your most important goals which is finding your why and i thought this was a huge statement michael you say everything important requires work and sometimes there is a long arc between the dream and its realization some of us are more prepared to accept this and others i mean we've had a long arc our business story has been a pretty long arc and there's been a lot of times where you just kind of want to hang your head and quit you talked about in your case even just um getting up and moving after surgery like you know like i've done it for a bunch of days isn't shouldn't that be good enough and there was this quote that said everybody looks good at the starting line and i was like oh that's a great quote but can you talk about this finding your why what are some of your why's and how that helps you to combat the urge to quit i think this is a great secret to achieving anything and most fundamentally of having a deeply rewarding life is that you have to get in touch with your why because like i said in the book you know everybody looks great at the starting line and i've run several half marathons in in my life over the last two and a half decades and you know everybody is so amped up at the start you know we have this uh rock and roll marathon here in nashville and you know it's amazing but there are like 30 35 000 people you know at the starting line and you just feed enough each other's energy and inevitably especially i did this my first few races i would go out too fast you know i was just like i couldn't throttle myself back because i was running on excitement and enthusiasm but inevitably you hit the messy middle and this is where you can't quite remember why you decided to do this and that's your motivation and it's like what the heck was i thinking when i started this because this is painful or it's it's boring or the results aren't happening and this is literally in every field of life this happens in marriages it happens in parenting it happens in starting a business it happens in writing a book it happens in product launches but yeah so i think at the beginning of the project it's important when you're clear on what you want to get also clear on why you want it why it matters what's at stake like if i if i do this thing like for example i had one half marathon and i'd been sick right up until the half marathon and i was hoping that my physician would let me off the hook and say yeah you're you're too sick to run this half marathon and unfortunately he was a runner and he said well actually this is one of the best ways to clear you know a cold out of your life is like going a long run like this and i was like oh that's not helpful so i ran it but at about mile 10 i was ready to quit and then i remembered that the reason why i was running this because i'd run several before was because i was raising money for a local school that i really believed in private school and so i mean it's kind of funny to say it out loud but i was i was doing it for the children and so i thought i thought to myself at mile 10 when i wanted to quit and i'd run several so i wasn't i didn't have to prove to myself that i could do it and i'd been sick i had all kinds of excuses and i said no those children are counting on me and so i was able to muster the energy to finish you know wasn't my best time but i finished in my marriage i've been married as i said for almost 48 years there have been times when i wanted to quit and i know there have been times when my wife wanted to quit and this is where the power of a question can really serve us or remembering that questions are powerful and so i could ask myself this question i could ask myself why do i want to get out of this marriage now the way the human brain works is that it will muster its ability to answer a question that's been given and if you ask a bad question you're going to give get a bad answer and recognizing that one of the things i asked myself i've logged on this at one time is what are the reasons i need to stay in this marriage what's at stake and i started a listing it shows me have to think about it now all the reasons why i want to stay in this relationship why i want to stay in this marriage and it moved me then and it still moves me to this day yeah so i think getting in touch with your why my wife gail says when people lose their way or when they when they lose their why they lose their way and so i think it's really important to identify your why and and to have a list like that not only for the goals you're pursuing at the moment but for the areas of your life that are important because parenting just to use one other example is hard there are times when you just wonder what were we thinking you probably wondered this having five kids people sometimes ask me on an airplane that's you know i'd be traveling and somebody'd say well how many kids do you have well i have five wow how many do you want to have and i'd say well three but we're we're too late for that so raising kids is hard and there's times when you want to give up but i can tell you with five adult daughters now between the ages of 35 and 45 totally worth it i am so glad that gail and i hung in there because these humans are our best friends now you know if they've made our lives richer and i hope we've made their lives richer so usually things that are you want to bail on are worth staying but you won't stay in them if you lose your why yeah what's at stake you got those 11 grandkids that could be wearing nametags that's so many of them what's at stake but that's the long arc and i think what's tricky about it michael is that you don't know what's at the end of the arc and so you have to have this solid why and you can put that in your planner because a planner includes all the spots to really think those through and you actually gave an example i thought was a phenomenal example in the book your best year ever where you were talking about your piano lessons and i thought this was a huge statement so i play the piano i love to play the piano and it's just such a gift that my parents gave to me they took me to lessons and my mom did it was like a hard drive to get to the place it was expensive and and you said you started piano lessons too same similar age to me you're like at five and you said this and i thought this was a huge statement i started at age five but didn't enjoy it until the ninth grade and i thought michael you know your parents whoever took you to lessons and helped you learn that is such a long time that's like eight or nine years where a kid doesn't like it and is like i don't want to practice and these skills and it wasn't until the ninth grade and then you're like doing a band and like it's really cool but that is sort of a parallel to life how many people have you met in your life that are like i wish i wouldn't have quit my piano lessons pretty much everybody says that but but they quit because they they're you know they're complaining about it the parents probably sick of them complaining about it not practicing but there's a long arc there and you also told the story about your book platform you have to turn in your manuscript by november and you got a lot of work to do and it got busy and you're like you're not going to make any progress and you're going to miss the deadline and you said you were discouraged you said honestly i got discouraged i didn't see any way to get it done and despite all the work i'd already invested i wanted to give up then i remember something my wife had said to me many times before people lose their way when they lose their why and so you wrote down your top motivations which was to help tens of thousands of other authors and artists and creatives who've been turned away because they don't have a platform number two you want to establish your authority as an expert on platform building and it would help you get speaking engagements and you wanted to prove that you can create a platform and use it to sell books so you grabbed your why and then it went on to be a new york times bestseller no one was more shocked than i was and i i remember when i turned it in i said to the editor and this wasn't very smart but i just said you know i want you to read it but i don't feel that great about it and if you think it's not publishable because i thomas nelson was publishing it and this woman used to work for me and i didn't want her to feel the pressure although i was still chairman of the company so she probably did feel some pressure but i said i want you to be honest with me because and she came back and she said this is better than you think and she said there's a little bit of work to do for sure but this is better than you think and i was so relieved because i'd lost so much perspective but it just as you read it was those top three reasons it kept going kept me going when i wanted to quit and i would say that any endeavor that is meaningful you're gonna face the messy middle and you're gonna face resistance and i think that's what forges our character is the ability to keep going when the results aren't quite indicating success and in fact we may not win at all but that's where characters formed right right you just don't know what the outcome is going to be and so you just have i mean there's fantastic the books are fantastic you talked in the free to focus book about how back in 1925 and there was a picture of it in the book there was this guy that was like i keep getting distracted so he makes this helmet that looks like when you go scuba diving or or into space almost so he's like so no one will bother me so back then it was even an issue but now in this like attention economy that where the average employee you wrote faces a distraction every three minutes you talk about focus and bounding in your time and how this is going to really help you to accomplish what matters the most can we get one more topic this topic is from your best year ever so i've got four of your books here but you have written so many books you have spent more than four decades helping thousands of business owners ceo's leaders high achievers parents grow without losing themselves in the process and i mean the amount of books i have written down here mind your mindset win at work and succeed at life vision driven leader free to focus your best year ever living forward platform that we just talked about no fail habits entrepreneurs will save the world no fail communication your world class assistant no fail meetings i mean and you've got a bunch of courses people can go there's a free to focus free to focus course where you talk about reclaiming up to 20 hours a week who wouldn't want to do that so there's there are other things there as well a goal setting and working with executive assistants so i'll make sure i'll put all the links in the show notes but in your best year ever you talk about belief you have to believe and one of the things that you combat is the idea that we don't have enough resources and so you wrote this it's real clear resources are never and i mean never the main challenge in achieving our dreams in fact if you already have everything you need to achieve your goal then your goal is probably too small there's a wide range of ages that listen in and often kids listening with their parents to the podcast so i would love for you to address that i think there is a misconception like i need seed money i don't you know i don't have what i need and you say resources are never the main challenge they're not i would say usually the challenge is having a vision and being clear enough with that vision that you can communicate it to other people so that you can enroll them in the vision because a right-sized vision is you can't do it all by yourself you're gonna need other people you're gonna need to be able to sell them or enroll them in that the other thing i've noticed about resources jenny is that i don't care if you're the ceo of apple or if you're just starting a new business or you're working in a church some place as a staff member if you're a person who can envision a bigger better future you will never have enough resources because the vision always outstrips the resources so i've i've heard people complain about this for my entire career you know if i if they would just give us a bigger budget or if i just had a couple more staff people or if i just had more time let me tell you i don't care you if i gave you all of that you would accomplish the thing and then you would dream of the vision that would outstrip your resources and so the thing that's great about not having enough resources and this is a complete reframe the thing that's great about not having enough resources is it forces innovation now you if you think of one of the least and this is like a broad statement but if you think like what's the like most least innovative organization in the world it typically is government why because they have too many resources if they were forced to live on a budget and most of them don't i found that my own county that i'm living in right now is a billion dollars in debt and there's so much more i can say there but i don't want to get political but it's just like really in a county in Tennessee a billion dollars in debt well the resources are never the problem and the constraint forces the very thing that you need which is innovation and every great innovation has come because people didn't have enough resources they somehow made it work yeah isn't that the truth you say human creativity that is your ultimate resource these are phenomenal books michael thank you thank you for being so unbelievably gracious and coming back for a second time it's been such an honor well i'm getting spending two hours with you so i want to end with the question that we always end with so that people can hear your answer we always end with the same question what's a favorite memory from your childhood that was outside i could remember what i told you last time and i'm gonna tell that story again because it really was my favorite memory from being outside with my dad i was five years old and i want you to picture this we're on the shore of a lake standing on a rock big rock and i have shorts on my dad has shorts on we both have white t-shirts on and i have a pair of red cowboy boots and i've got a little bitty fishing pole my dad's got his fishing pole and we had a whole bunch of minnows and so we started catching crappie and we got we we probably caught 70 crappie and then they were still biting and we ran out of bait and so my dad says no worries he pulls out a pocket knife and start starts cutting off pieces of his t-shirt and putting those on the end of both of our hooks and apparently the fish didn't know the difference because they kept biting just like they were before so we caught over 100 fish that day and i mean it was just like one of the best all-time memories ever and probably explains why i have such a love of fishing to this day absolutely what a memory and it goes right in line with human creativity is the ultimate resource you ran out of your resources ran out of the minnows and that was like the human creativity like oh maybe our t-shirt will work what a story michael thank you this is a life-changing work that you're doing i know you know that thank you i know people tell you that all the time but this full focus planner this will change your life it's constantly reminding you about those nine domains it's reminding you about your morning ritual how do you want to start your day how do you want to shut down your day what's your evening ritual like all of these things it really is what um would you say your son-in-law is joe joe joe it really is what like you said at the beginning when joe said let's do this planner that um it is taking these books and putting legs to it like here it's it's so actionable and i was just blown away by how much of these books are incorporated into this kind of way to organize your life what is your ideal week these are things you talk about so what you could do then and you know it's like we're kind of ending the school year here if people are you know they've got kids you kind of hit the summer and you're thinking about what your fall is going to be like right and like oh these books this would be like a great thing to do would be this summer to read free to focus and your best year and and your best year ever and then try the planner because it all just coincides so well and then people can check out your podcasts and your courses and all the other things that you have to offer michael hi it thanks for being here jenny thank you loved it