The 10-80-10 Rule for Creative Productivity

Today I'm going to talk about the 1080-10 rule, which is something that I talk about in my book, Buy Back Your Time. And this morning I was on my bike ride. I saw a YouTube video come up about a guy named Caleb Ralston. Caleb is the previous videographer for Gary Vee or Team Gary Vee. He built his TikTok account. He also has been working with my buddy Alex Hermozzi on his social media. So Caleb knows his stuff. And one of the things that I love to do is study masters, study people that have worked with the best of the best, because I want to kind of learn and unpack how they build process, think about creative, et cetera. Like at the end of the day, what I do is try to replicate myself. Buy back your time. The book talks about the buyback principle, which is you don't hire people to grow your business. You hire people to buy back your time. And in doing that, then you grow your business. So if you listen to this, I believe, hour-long interview with Caleb talking about the work he did with Gary, you will see a masterclass. You will hear a masterclass in what does it mean to get leverage? What does it mean to do the unscalable? in the stories he shares is how Gary posted every one of his videos to Gary V at Gary V on all social profiles, how he replies to comments, how he maximizes his time, how he does all of his meetings so that he can, you know, get as much as he can get done, how he leverages his executive assistance to coordinate with his team on the ground to ensure that he having the meetings he needs to be having how he structures his life how he creates content I mean it is inspiring If you curious how does somebody like Gary do so much Watch this interview Now here what I going to share with you. A lot of people say to me, artists, creatives, I don't have the time to do like hire an assistant and teach them how to do stuff, et cetera. I don't know how I have people do what I do. And here's what I would say is if you do something that only you can do, okay? And I would argue, you know, leading the team vision wise, if you're the CEO of the company, you have to provide vision. If you're creating, you're the creative mind behind the innovation, you have to do those things, right? Steve Jobs comes to mind, Tom Clancy, the writer, Oprah, Buffett, etc. All these people have this like artistic component of what they do, what I do, this video, my trainings, the events, the SAS Academy, there's expressions of who I am in there. But that being said, if you look underneath the hood and you see how we execute, how we produce, how we create, there is process that follows this concept called the 108010 rule. So what Gary Vee does is he looks at all the different outputs he wants to accomplish, but he identifies the things that he doesn't necessarily have to do. He doesn't necessarily have to be the person that posts on the social media. Does he want to be the person who writes a caption? A hundred percent. Does he, so, so even his writing, the LinkedIn content, he literally has his videographer team extract snippets of content from the, the video to send to his writer that they transcribe, clean up a little bit, and then if they have follow-up questions to provide more utilitary or entertainment or education in the content they sit down with him and ask them those questions get his answers and his words and then puts that in and that gets published The 10 rule is this Collaborate on the first 10% of the output, have the other person do the 80%, and then get involved in the last 10%. Here's how that shows up in Gary's world. He collaborates on creating the content. His whole philosophy is document, don't create, which I'm the same way. I don't create content. I literally have two cameras recording me all the time as I'm having meetings, as I'm doing coaching calls, I'm having conversations. And then my videographer team literally pulls the feed of those recordings and then decides what they want to produce for social media, right? I do these Monday morning mindset videos. I share some philosophy, some thoughts, some ideas, some strategies, and then the team grabs this content and snippets, micro content puts it wherever they think fits, right? Transcriptions, et cetera. And so Gary is involved in that first 10%. Then 80% of the heavy lifting goes off to his team, Gary. Okay. And there was at the height, 29 people. So some of you guys see Gary or they see Alex or Mosin. They're like, how does he do all this stuff? It's an investment. Buy back your time requires for you to invest in you. Invest is in the output. Invest in the process. If you think these things just magically occur, that just you end up adding millions of followers on social media or build this thought leadership just by happenstance. No, it's dedicated, focused repetition and attacking the problem. So that's the 80%. And then the last 10% is the integration of the work. How does that creative get integrated into the output? How does it get added to the product How do you publish it to the website And that where there the final tweak So the way I do it is I love to sit down with teams and work on strategy and creative and then it can go to somebody else to do research. I mean, same thing with writing my book. Like I was heavily involved in the book outline. That was, that was where 50% of the effort went into it. And then all of the rest of the book was transcriptions from video researcher. And then My writer, Paul, went in and he cleaned everything up. He restructured it. Again, all based on my ideas, my content, my words. Okay, everything was a derivative of that. All the upfront work, 80% went to the team. And then the last 10%, which is what I've been working on recently. It's just, you know, like watching what my copywriters and my designer put together to like make sure that the book flap is awesome. Make sure that even the hardback color and inside the book, I care about those. Does that last 10%? And I think for a lot of people, they think, well, if I have somebody else do this, I won't know the quality of their work. And what I'm telling you is just like Tom Clancy, who has, I think he's not even alive. He publishes dozens of books per year. He's not even alive, right? He has a whole team of writers. You got people like Oprah who does the interview, but everything else, all the creative, all the other stuff is supported by somebody else. And if you do that 10-80-10 rule for all your executive leaders, your direct reports, the people that produce things, you can buy back your time but still be incredibly creative and have your fingerprint touching all this stuff. I mean, that's what I do. All my video stuff, I have a video chat in Voxer. And anytime something goes along, there's this big chat and we just feedback, feedback, feedback. Try this. Do this. Try this. Change this. That's the last 10%. And that's what I want for all of you guys. I hope they find you awesome. Have an amazing rest of the week. We'll talk soon. Peace.