KF #28. Drives Results Archives - Page 6 of 10 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Erik, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Erik Fisher
You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m super excited to dig back into the goods. And I want to hear, you know, it’s been a couple years. What have you learned about productivity in that time? Or is there anything new you’d picked up or anything you decided you’ve abandoned, like, “Hey, on second thought, I don’t like that idea anymore”?

Erik Fisher
Oh, my gosh. Things change and yet, at the same as things are changing, they stay the same. One of the key things for me is, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but there’s a lot of people who’ve come out with, say, like, daily or weekly analog, meaning handwriting-type planners, you know, chucking the digital system, if you will. And, for the most part, I like that idea. I like working in analog. There’s something very satisfying to that.

A friend of mine, he’s like, “Hey, I have a digital planner and I use my Apple Pencil in it,” and I’m like, “Okay, cheater.” But, for the most part, I have still stayed digital in terms of my list and my projects and things like that. But I have gone to almost completely 100% paper books.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, interesting. So, no Kindles or e-books of any sort.

Erik Fisher
Now, I have the ability to do it and I will still look at articles. Like, I do have an iPad, the latest version, the 11-inch Pro, and I really like it. I use it for content consumption and I don’t turn it and use it like a laptop or anything like that. I like that it’s not a desktop or a laptop or a phone. And by leaning into using it that way as a tablet, a digital window interface, whatever, to all my documents and things like that, whether it’s work-related or consumption-related, reading articles. I lean heavily into that and then, by doing that, I feel like that ease of use, of using it as a multipurpose tool like that, I then don’t spend as much time on my phone. You know what I mean?

Because if we constantly have that thing on us with all that stuff with us at all times, we feel like we have to use it all the time. And I’ve been trying really hard to get my time spent on phone down because the majority of the time that I’m spending on it, I found, was very unintentional passive use that was just eating into my time.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, that’s intriguing right there. So, you’ve made a conscientious effort to reduce time on phone and you’ve seen some positive results in doing so. Could you maybe quantify that a little bit for us in terms of where were you before, and where are you now, and did you do anything else that made a real big difference in helping with that initiative?

Erik Fisher
Yeah, so a friend of mine also was noticing this and not only that, but having read Cal Newport’s most recent book that he came out with, Digital Minimalism, and talking with him for my show, we both said, “Hey, you know what, what if we went for like…?” So, the period of Lent comes up and we decided to say, “Well, what if we just…? Like, we can’t quit our phone and not have it on us, but what if we quit using our phone for every little thing, and just see what we can get away with?”

So, we sat down together and we started cataloging all the different apps. It was kind of a challenge between the two of us to see how many we could offload or delete, and what was the bare minimum of installed and active apps we could have on our phone, and how far we could get with doing that. And it was amazing because, after having done that –

I have an iPhone. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the iPhone’s ability to offload an app. It means that you can remove an app, the app will stay there and your credentials, and you’d be logged in and all that, but you have to click the download button again, and it then fills in the hollow shell of an app that is sitting there with all the content again. So, effectively, you can’t use it without re-downloading the app, which is like a safeguard or a boundary from you using the app again.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it sort of keep all the info that you’ve stored about your login and your historical data, but it’s not kind of taking up any space, and it’s a little harder to get to because you’ve got to spend that time to re-download it.

Erik Fisher
That’s exactly right. So, effectively, yes, the shell of the app is there, the inside of the app is not there except for, again, it maintains all the logins and things like that. So, we went through that and we checked in with each other about three days in, and we said, “How much time are you using it?” I was like not even carrying my phone with me at that point. I have my Apple Watch on me, and I would respond to a text through that, and phone calls, I would still do those. Are people still doing phone calls? Yes, they do.

Pete Mockaitis
Or text me first.

Erik Fisher
Yeah, exactly. And I just noticed that suddenly I wasn’t reaching for it every 5 to 10 minutes to check something or look something up, etc. And that’s not to say I wasn’t allowed to look something up somewhere, like on a desktop, or even on my iPad, but I wasn’t allowed to do it on my phone. And by breaking the phone being on me and ever-present and always able to be dove into as this dark pool of information that I could always access—you just don’t understand!

Like, when you have that on you at all times and you can always jump in, then you constantly will. And because you constantly will, then you will even when you do or don’t want to. And so, it’s really about cutting way back to the point where, then, it’s almost like, think of it as a digital diet metaphor for a physical diet. It’s like you can enjoy the stuff that is bad for you on occasion as long as you’re not eating it constantly all day every day, which is what we are doing digitally.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well-said. I like that. And what was so cool is you made it sort of like a challenge and you had some accountability there, a buddy, and you sort of reframed, I guess, what triggers your reward centers in your brain. It’s not like, “I am so powerful because I have so many apps, I can do anything.” But rather it’s like, “All right, let’s just see how disciplined I can be and how winning is now reducing apps instead of having more apps and feeling powerful as a result of having those apps.”

Erik Fisher
Yes, exactly. And then, of course, the time period was over when we could add apps back on. And, honestly, it was like, “Well, wait a second, I just never came back.” There were months later where I would suddenly be looking for an app on my phone, I’m like, “Wait. Didn’t I have that app?” And I realize I had never put it back on, and it had been months since I’d last used it, so why was it on there? “Oh, just in case.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And that slows you down too. Like, the actual, I don’t know a ton about how all this hardware devices worked. But it seems like in my experience, generally speaking, the more stuff you have installed, the slower things run. Is that fair to say for the phone as well, the number of apps?

Erik Fisher
Potentially. I think Apple would say, “No, no, there’s nothing different with it. Buy the biggest one and install as many apps as you want. There’s an app for everything.” I don’t know. I would say here’s the thing, that means you have subconsciously maybe a need to organize all those apps in different places so you’d know where they are and have the ability to use them quickly. So, in other words, it’s digital clutter on the phone that you then have to deal with, which is also taking up time, mental RAM.

So, all in all, I came out the other end and I started using my phone a whole lot less. And, even to this day, I use it more but I think I cut way back. Again, I need to do a revisit, not maybe as drastic or strategic. But, again, one of the things that I was doing was there were certain apps, like the weather app, where I realized, “You know what, I can offload it on my phone but I can literally lift my wrist on my Watch and the weather is right there.”

And so, it’s different. It’s a different feeling. In other words, it’s a different – what’s the best way to put it? It’s a different meeting of a need. In other words, that’s the thing, I think, I’m trying to get at here, is you have to be careful about how you’re meeting certain needs because, then, you start to rationalize everything as a need.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, it feels that was a big lesson that could be applied to a lot of things.

Erik Fisher
Yeah. So, you can rationalize doing your email on your phone. And some people were like, “Wait, what’s wrong with that?” And I’m like, “Dude, you have no idea how doing email on your phone can become this thing where you’re always doing email on your phone and then switching over to, “Oh you’re texting, switching over to listening to a podcast, switching over to…” Do you see what I’m saying? Like, switching over, switching over. Like, you are sitting there, hunched over with a horrible posture, and/or walking and talking, and doing something. You are basically tricking yourself with that phone into thinking you can multitask. And, again, you can. You’re just task-switching and you’re bifurcating and fragmenting your attention.

And, actually, that was the biggest thing right there was just this calm sense of, “I don’t have to reach for anything on that phone because there’s nothing there I am missing out on at this moment,” unless a rant, of course.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s beautiful in terms of describing that feeling and transformation and how that unfolds, so that’s cool. Well, hey, that’s what you’ve learned recently, and I appreciate you sharing it. Last time, we talked a lot about energy management being key to productivity, and so I want to cover some other pieces of productivity goodies from you this time.

I did a big listener survey, and a lot of folks were bringing up distractions, whether that’s internally from you’re tempted to go do email, or check your phone, or whatever, or externally, in terms of folks dropping by your desk, saying, “Hey, Erik, you got a minute?” or whatever. So, I’d love to get your take in terms of what have you found, in your own experience and from interviewing so many people, are really the best practices for maintaining clarity and focus?

Erik Fisher
So, I’ll refer you back to what we just talked as being a huge factor in that, first and foremost.

Pete Mockaitis
Just managing that phone, yeah.

Erik Fisher
Managing the phone and as well as what the phone is doing to you. Because if you feel like you need to reach for your phone when you’re sitting at your desk constantly, then you are effectively training yourself that it is okay to pick it up over and over and over and interrupt yourself, let alone weaken your ability to deal with any of the other stuff that are thrown at you from external.

Pete Mockaitis
Well-said. So, you’re actually harming yourself, you’re weakening your capacity to resist distraction because you are continually giving in.

Erik Fisher
That’s exactly right. Like, if at any moment you ever feel slightly bored—like my kids are saying—or hungry, or whatever, and you decide to go do something mindless, or go walk into the kitchen and open the refrigerator, it’s like opening the refrigerator door. Like, if you train yourself that that’s okay versus having something prepared that you know is your “snack for the day,” then there you go, then you’re going to go pull out, I don’t know, fill in blank here, of what you should not be having as a snack, you know?

So, the more you train yourself to go the opposite direction or the way you should go in terms of your habits, you just find it easy to get distracted. So, first and foremost, that’s number one, with the phone, because it’s tied in to that. Then, number two, in terms of distractions, gosh, there’s a couple of different things that I have found that really, really helped. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned the system, the audio system that I use, last time, that helps with eliminating distractions.

Pete Mockaitis
Is it Focus At Will?

Erik Fisher
It is Focus At Will. Well, I have changed.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. There we go.

Erik Fisher
Now, don’t get me wrong. I have a lifetime membership to Focus At Will but I’m not using it. I found one that I like better and it’s because it does multiple things. It’s not just focusing yourself. It has to do with brainwaves and the sound of the “music” or the—

Pete Mockaitis
You quote music. Strong praise, right?

Erik Fisher
Well, that’s the thing. Yeah, because technically it’s not music. It’s a—

Pete Mockaitis
Sound.

Erik Fisher
–Composition. Right. And so that’s the thing. But, that said, it’s still you don’t get into it like, “Oh, man, I love this song,” kind of moment because of listening to it. And if you did, then it wouldn’t be working because it would be distracting you because you’d be like, “Oh, man, I love this song.” It’s called Brain.fm.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Erik Fisher
It can do all of those stuff we talked about the Focus At Will can do. It eliminates the blinders, sorry, it puts up the blinders so your flight and fight mechanism kind of gets lulled into sleep. Essentially, it’s backed by science. It gets you to a place where your brainwaves are in position to hold focus stronger and longer when you’re doing work. And not only that though, it can also be used for meditation, or calming yourself down, or even sleep, so you can listen to it, take a nap and get a better sleep/nap by using it.

And by having that extra stuff and having it, again, I’m not talking bad about Focus At Will, but Brain.fm, which is leaps and bounds ahead of them when I found them almost a year ago, that I signed up immediately. And, in fact, they gave me like codes, not a code but a link, to let people get like 20% off for their whole first year, and people have been loving jumping on it.

Pete Mockaitis
Are you allowed to, are you able to share this in a public forum?

Erik Fisher
Yes, I can.

Pete Mockaitis
You can’t do this to us, Erik.

Erik Fisher
I gave it a pretty link so that it would be easier for people. So, it’s BeyondTheToDoList.com/brainfm.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, that’s intriguing. I mean, I love…well.

Erik Fisher
And you’ve used Focus At Will before.

Pete Mockaitis
I have used it and I appreciated what they had, but I also had kind of found a focus playlist I created, and I thought, you know, in a way it was almost because my focus playlist had gotten so many kind of repetitions of, “Oh, hey, it’s time to focus.” I listen to the focus music and I focus, that it’s kind of like ritualized and accelerated the process of having sound focus me. So, that’s kind of why, in my particular instance, the Focus At Will almost had enough hill battle against an incumbent. But what you’re saying here is, “Hey, Brain.fm does more than just that.”

Well, if we’re talking about me for a second with rituals and focus, like I enjoy, because I’ve got two kids under two, and I’ve got a home office in an enclosed porch, so I upgraded it to get a real nice sound-blocking door, but sometimes it doesn’t block enough sound. So, I’d like to put in earplugs, plus Bose noise-cancelling headphone, plus either the focus playlist, or we had a previous guest who talked about, she listens to Star Trek: The Next Generation engine idling noise as white noise.

Erik Fisher
Beautiful.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I found that and I use that sometimes. And so, that’s been the groove so far. But I’m intrigued by Brain.fm for that context as well as, hey, the power napping and more.

Erik Fisher
Yeah. So, I can tell you, one thing about the napping, as well as even the overnight sleep, which that’s a little bit tricky to do but I figured that out. Basically, you put it on as an app, and then it allows you to download an evening of Brain.fm sleep alpha wave patterns. Oh, I know where I was going. I was like, “Where was I going with this?”

When I talked to the guy that’s the head of it on my show, I told him, “I go to sleep listening to music, always have, since about junior high.” And I said, “It helps me fall asleep faster. Now why is this different?” And he says, “Well, number one, you listening to music as you go to sleep is a ritual, so it’s triggering your brain as you lay down in bed that it’s time to go to bed. And so, you’re still going to find that this has that power to it because you’re still going kind of through the ritual.”

However, the difference between Brain.fm and listening to regular music is that this is going to get your brainwaves into where you want them to go, which is deeper sleep, faster, and then keep them there because of the way that, again, I’ll use the word music, the way that it plays and it works and it keeps you calm and all that.

Now, the other thing that I have found is me, putting on my Bose noise-cancelling headphones, even if no one’s home, and turning it to the meditation or the calming setting, and doing 15 minutes of even if I’m just sitting in my desk, at my desk, in my desk chair, closed eyes or not, and just kind of breathing, “it gets you there faster” in terms of calming down and taking a break, and being able to then jump back from that more refreshed.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool.

Erik Fisher
So, there you go. So, yeah, again, that link is BeyondTheToDoList.com/brainfm. They gave me that link and said, “Hey, if your listeners ever want to listen, try it out, they can try it out for free.” And if they sign up, which it’s not expensive.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I thought it would be more but I clicked pricing, I always make a guess before I actually click pricing, and it was well below my guess.

Erik Fisher
Brain.fm is cheaper than the one that I was using that I have for lifetime anyway, which is Focus At Will. Brain.fm is cheaper, and I was just like, “Oh, gosh, this is a no-brainer.” But you can get 20% a year with them, which is great.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, very cool. All right. Boy, you’re delivering the goods. So, we’re going to talk about specific means by which you are maintaining clarity and focus. We talked about the breaking of habits with the phone and the reduction of apps and such. We got the Brain.fm. Any other biggies?

Erik Fisher
Let’s see here. So, I have one other one that’s a secret weapon.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d like if you disclose.

Erik Fisher
I will. I don’t know if you’ve ever talked with Jaime Masters before.

Pete Mockaitis
I know the name and the face but we’ve never talked.

Erik Fisher
So, she was on my show again recently. She and I did not plan on talking about this, but she shared this with me. She was doing these group mastermind things where she’d get people to come to like a big, a giant Airbnb somewhere, all these different leadership people and whatever. And they’d do these surveys afterwards, and people would ask them, she would ask the people, sorry, “What were the things that stood to you the most?” And she, embarrassingly, shared with me that the thing they were talking to her about was they would say, “Jaime’s drugs.” And she was like, “What? What are you talking about?” And she says, well, because she would bring something called nootropics with her.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Erik Fisher
So, have you heard what this word is?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve heard of nootropics. I’ve been a little spooked to ingest them myself.

Erik Fisher
Yes. So, here’s the deal, she had no idea that I had already tried one, yeah. And what I did was, basically, it’s called Alpha BRAIN. And she was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s one of the best ones.” And she said, “Here’s the thing, on Amazon you can go to the reviews, and it’s either, ‘This was amazing. It worked amazing for me,’ or, ‘This did nothing for me,’ and it’s really based upon who you are and your brain chemistry and all that kind of stuff.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, they got even three stars out of over a thousand reviews. Lovers and haters.

Erik Fisher
Yeah. And so, she said, “Here’s the thing, the issue with that one is that it works great for some people and does nothing for others, and it’s not inexpensive to get a hold of it, to start with, and try out and everything.” I said, “Well, hold up. They actually sent me some for free to try.” And then when it worked, because it did, and I’ll explain what it felt like in a second. She said, “Oh, that’s awesome.” And I said, “Yeah, I even wrote the guy back and said, ‘Hey, could I have a little bit more?’” in true drug, you know, the first one is free, so, “Could I have some more?”

And, anyways, what it came down to they had actually realized that if they could get it in the hands of the people to try out cheap, then people would actually notice that it worked or not for them and then order more. And so, basically, I have a deal on this one too where people can get it. They can get a bottle of it with like 14 pills of it, and even just taking one a day, or even two a day, is enough to see if it’s going to affect you at all, and you pay like five bucks for the shipping and that’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’m intrigued. And I guess what’s kind of kept me out of this is like, “Is it addictive? Is it dangerous? Is it, you know?” And it’s like, well.

Erik Fisher
No and no.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Erik Fisher
Here’s how I’ll explain it. So, I was concerned with it. Let me first say this, before they ever approached me, and before Jaime and I ever had talked about it, months ago I saw in an Instagram story Michael Hyatt holding the bottle and saying he was taking it and loving it.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s something about Michael Hyatt, he’s such a standup guy. It’s like, “If Michael Hyatt takes this, it must not be dirty.”

Erik Fisher
Exactly my take too. And I love him and so I took a screenshot of it and just forgot about it. And then months later, it kind of bubbled back up into my head, and I was like, “Yeah, I should probably check that out.” I think it was only a matter of a few weeks later, somehow. I assumed maybe they found out by searching through the photos on my phone that I had looked at it or something, I don’t know. That’s when they sent it to me.

So, my predisposition to it was Michael Hyatt, and he kind of clears the path for me on a lot of things, to be honest. And so, I took two of them. There was like 14 of them in the small bottle and I took two of them on a Thursday, or it was a Tuesday. And so, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of a very tough week, I was taking two of them in the morning, honestly, just without even thinking about it. And then I just never gave it any thought.

But then I realized come Thursday later afternoon, and then even Friday morning again, it occurred to me, “Do you realize you haven’t felt like you needed to like crash and take a nap, or have two or three extra cups of coffee these past few days? But you also don’t feel like you are wired and jittery and whatever like you would’ve had if you’d taken those cups of coffee, and it’s just not as much of an effort to like, focus?” And so, to myself, I said, “Yes, you’re right, I have seen that. I have noticed that.”

And that’s exactly what it was. It wasn’t some kind of, “Oh, my gosh, I drank five energy Red Bulls or something.” It was like—oh, this is the best way to put it. You know how if you’ve ever lost any significant amount of weight, you don’t suddenly feel, but over time, you feel like you have so much more energy. It’s kind of the equivalency of that with your brain, but after having lost like 10 or 20 pounds, your brain just feels like it’s not weighed down as much.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing.

Erik Fisher
That’s what it felt like. That’s what it feels like. And so, once they said, “Hey, here’s this code in case anybody is interested. They can grab a bottle for free. They just pay shipping,” I told two of my friends right away. I said, “Hey, not kidding you, I’ve tried this. Check out this page. If you’re interested, there you go.”

And one of them was like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m now taking one in the morning and one in the afternoon.” And he then said—and he loves coffee, by the way so he’s still having it—but he found that he was able to get so much more done over the course of the week than he was previously up to that point. So, for him it worked. For the other one, it actually didn’t. It didn’t really do much. So, that was actually interesting to me to find out.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m encouraged to hear that it hasn’t produced any dangers and it hasn’t produced any addiction.

Erik Fisher
No, because there are days I don’t take it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s nifty. Well, hey, everyone be safe and do your research, but I’m taking a gander at it. I don’t see anything terrifying on the Amazon page. So, yeah, what is this link?

Erik Fisher
Oh, yes. Sorry, I didn’t even think to give you that. so, again, I made it easy, it’s BeyondTheToDoList.com/alphabrain.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Erik Fisher
So, there you go. Yeah, you can get it or not, and it’s cheap. You just pay like five bucks. Basically, think of it this way, one cup of coffee at a Starbucks and you might get, cost-wise, and you can see if this works for you. And if it does, again, you can kind of low-key take it, try it, whatever. And if it does something, great. For me and for some other people out there, it does a lot of good.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cool. So, we got the nootropics, and we got the phone discipline, we got Brain.fm. Any other things that have been really key for you when it comes to keeping the clarity and focus on track?

Erik Fisher
So, this is the other big thing, and this is actually huge for me. And, again, this is another thing that I kind of was a believer in, but not a stickler about to a certain extent until I talked with Michael Hyatt about it, and it’s sleep and napping.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m a firm advocate of that and I think we got that point covered. We’ll just kind of add one more check mark of support from Erik Fisher on this one.

Erik Fisher
I think you’re there. And, actually, I track it. Like, I wear my Apple Watch at night to track my sleep, and I just know weeks and months where I’m in a better sleep groove, I am struggling less throughout the day. And, again, to do back to the Brain.fm thing, like I, literally, was able to see like, funny, night and day difference when it came to getting more rest in my day because it tracks even those naps, my app does. So, the more sleep I was getting, the more awake I was during the day, the better off I was. So, there you go.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. That’s great. Well, I guess I think sleeping and napping is huge and important. It takes time but it’s time well-spent. Are there any like tiny things that just have huge leverage in terms of, “Hey, this takes less than five minutes a day, but when I do it, it’s game-changing versus when I don’t”?

Erik Fisher
Yeah, I would say, I call it passing the baton to my future self. So, I’m near the end of my day today, and instead of, when you and I are done recording, jumping off and saying, “Okay, what’s for dinner?” and walking out the door, like actually sitting and cleaning up my desk and arranging my list of stuff. Now, again, I’ve already gone over what the list of stuff is for tomorrow on a weekly checklist kind of a basis, on a weekly review kind of thing.

But doing a closing, or a shutdown, or again passing the baton to my future self tomorrow morning, that shutdown, that ritual, is what’s going to make tomorrow morning, even if I feel maybe out of sorts or say something happens and I don’t get enough sleep and I’m struggling, I don’t have to struggle as hard or as much.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds like a nice visual metaphor in that your future self appreciates that, you’ve taken some time to hook up future Erik with a nice environment to flourish, so that’s awesome. Any other quick yet high-leverage things?

Erik Fisher
Cutting stuff off the list.

Pete Mockaitis
Amen. No, absolutely, it’s the fastest way to shrink your to-do list is to decide not to do it.

Erik Fisher
Or, better yet, better said, is decide not to do it now.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, is the now mean you’re going to do it later or you’ve decided now that you’re not going to do it ever?

Erik Fisher
It can be both but I was referring more to, “When is the right time to do it so that you’re not trying to overpack your days and your weeks?”

Pete Mockaitis
I dig.

Erik Fisher
So, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, maybe we’ll zoom out a little bit. So, we kind of talked about some really super precise like tools or tactical things to do. But I’d love to hear kind of big picture. Boy, you’ve been running Beyond the To-Do List for, is it seven years now?

Erik Fisher
Yeah, we’re basically at the seven-year mark.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so amazing. Well, congratulations. And you’re an inspiration for my podcast when I was thinking, “Does anybody want to listen to this kind of stuff? Let’s take a look around. Oh, hey, a good many of them do and Erik Fisher and Beyond the To-Do List is one good example.” So, thank you. Who knows if I hadn’t found a couple of inspiring examples, where would we be? So, thank you.

Erik Fisher
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, what are some themes that have come up again and again and again in terms of when people, they’re trying to be focused and productive and then take care of what’s really meaningful in their work and lives? What are kind of those foundational principles that pop up repeatedly?

Erik Fisher
Well, I kind of alluded to it a little bit just a moment ago with taking things off the list as well as kind of paring back and simplifying again the use of the phone, and I don’t want to go back into those things per se. But it’s just this idea that I think we have the wrong perspective when it comes to productivity. We think that, and I even had a conversation with, oh, I’m blanking on his name, Mike Sturm, that’s it, a couple of months ago, the idea between, “What’s the difference between the word efficiency and productivity?” And there was even another word, I forget what it was, but anyways.

Pete Mockaitis
Effectiveness?

Erik Fisher
That is it. I feel like you’ve listened to that episode.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m spying on you everywhere.

Erik Fisher
Nice. So, it was this kind of, and it was a real productivity whatever geek-out moment for me to have that conversation with him because there are different meanings to each of those three words and they’re all good in themselves and they all kind of fold in on each other. It kind of made me, I mean, it really made me think, I shouldn’t say, not kind of made me think. It really made me think. And it was just like, “You know what, in the end, it’s, ‘What are you trying to do? How much of it are you trying to get done? How much is enough even? And what’s overkill? Like, burn out and all that.’”

Again, when you go back to the whole sleep thing and whatever, but we don’t need to go there. It’s this idea that, Parkinson’s Law where work will expand to fill the time allotted. And so, if we can figure out how to more efficiently, or more fast-ly—which is not a word—get the work done to where we’re kind of breaking that law, we’re saying, “Hey, I’m going to get this work done faster than I allow for it to be done,” then suddenly you’ve freed up this time.

Then you have this question which, recently I was talking with the Get It Done guys, Stever Robbins, in one of my most recent episodes.

Pete Mockaitis
He’s so good.

Erik Fisher
And he was like, “Look, you’re sitting in a cubicle and you’re really good at getting your work done, and then they noticed you’re really good at getting your work done, and then they suddenly say, ‘Well, wait a second, we either haven’t been giving him enough work to do, or we have been underpaying him.’ They’re not going to give you the raise. Let’s put it there. They’re not going to go and give you a raise. What they’re going to do instead is say, “We aren’t giving you enough work to do because you’ve got it all done all day.”

And I’ve been in that position, by the way. I’ve been the person who hacked his cubicle and figured out how to get everything that I needed to get done, and then some, and run rings around my co-workers, and yet get paid no more than them, and have all this free time to play video games in my cubicle. More than a decade to 15 years ago now.

I’m kind of half ecstatic about how I figured out how to do that and half ashamed. But, that said, you see where I’m going with this, if you are working for yourself, you then suddenly have this quandary where if you’re getting things done faster, and you’re getting them all done, you can either start to wander into, “What else can I be doing, and add onto that, and fill my day even more?” which, again, it’s attractive to a lot of people, it’s like, “How much more stuff can I get done because I got this stuff that I was already used to getting done already done but faster?” You start to wander, though, into this place of unintentional burnout or unintentional status quo, kind of like with the phone as I was talking about earlier.

You use it originally for a few good things, and then it becomes the thing you use for all the things. And then you have booked yourself solid to where, you know, you’ve got a meeting, you’ve got five meetings a day, and 12 podcasts to record, and 29 blogposts to write, and/or videos to record, not to mention all the different Instagram stories and social media things you could be doing. It’s like, “Hold up. Which of the things that are the most…?” What was the third word? It wasn’t productivity and it wasn’t…

Pete Mockaitis
Effectiveness?

Erik Fisher
Effective. So, it’s then towards what effectiveness are you headed towards? What intentionality are you trying to get to end of the day, end of the week, end of the quarter? Actually, this is one of the biggest things since we talked, is I’ve been in a mastermind, and we’d go by the 12-week year. And, essentially, what that means is instead of 12 months in a year, there’s 12 weeks in a quarter, and we just kind of compress a year, and we say, “Okay, for this next sprint of three months, what is it that we want to accomplish? Like, for example, working on a book or something like that. And how far can we get?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and what I like about that is you call it a 12-week sprint, and there’s four 12-week periods, yields, 48 weeks, leaving four weeks for you to kind of relax a little bit between these sprints.

Erik Fisher
Yes, exactly, there’s actually more weeks in a year than the 12 times 4, so you get a little bit of breathing room in there to recalibrate, etc. But, yeah, that has been kind of the, I don’t know, the analyze everything, the, “Hold up, don’t add something new in.” There’s a lot of people out there, who’s like, “You’ve got to quit something to then start something.” That’s great and all. But also, what if we just quit something to quit something? What if we just eliminated things on the to-do list? What if we just said, “This is great to do but it’s not yielding a lot, so let’s just stop doing it altogether and not replace it with something else”?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool.

Erik Fisher
That’s where my head’s been.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I appreciate it. And, I guess, my final question was going to be, you know, what have been some of the most transformational guests and ideas you’ve come across? And it sounds like you’ve already shared a few. But if anything is missing, now is your chance, let her rip.

Erik Fisher
All right. So, let’s see, so let me see if I can think back through. So, I mentioned Cal Newport, that’s in regards to the phone. My most recent episode with Michael Hyatt, we talked about killing distractions and his approach to how he did was I did with his phone, and that’s a really interesting one. Let’s see, I recently talked with Mike Sturm, and we talked about all that productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness. That’s a good one. Who else did I mention? Do you remember who else I mentioned? I can’t remember.

Pete Mockaitis
Cal Newport, Michael Hyatt.

Erik Fisher
Yes. Oh, Jaime Masters, that was the one about the nootropics. And we talked about time tracking. And, oh, we talked about absolute yes in that one as well. So, how everybody is like, “You know, you’ve got to learn how to say no so you don’t fill up your calendar and things like that.” She goes at it from the opposite perspective, where she’s like, “I’d love to say yes to everything but only the things that I’m willing to say, ‘Absolutely, yes,’ am I going to say yes to.” So, that’s actually another great kind of reframing of how to say no to things and has to do with opportunity costs. So, Jaime Masters, that’s another one that was very recent.

And then, James Clear, the habits, the Atomic Habits, I should say his “Atomic Habits” book that came out late last year. I talked to him about that. And that, essentially, has to do with filling in the gaps and looking at, in a new light, the old adage of, basically, habitualizing things so that you don’t have to lean in as much on like discipline or willpower because you’ve created that activity, that pattern, that consistency, that groove, of making the right choices, or enabling yourself to make the right choices easier.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, Erik, this has been a real nice lineup. I’d like to hear about some of your favorite things now, if you could first give us a favorite quote.

Erik Fisher
I don’t know if I told you this one last time. Did you ask for quotes last time? I don’t remember.

Pete Mockaitis
I did. And I think it’s kind of fun if you reinforced, that’s cool. If you have a new one, that’s cool too.

Erik Fisher
Right. This is so self-centered of me to say this. My favorite quote is my own quote, it’s, “Good ideas come from many ideas.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like it. And how about a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Erik Fisher
Oh, gosh. So, actually, I’ll point back to the study, the stuff that came out of, what’s his name, James Clear, the habit book. There’s a lot of science in the book that reinforces the different ways of habitualizing, so I’m going to have to claim that because he doesn’t come at it as a book writer or a business book writer. He comes at it as, “Hey, I have all this research. How do I formulate this into something that people can get something out of it because they need to know this?” So, it is really is a study in book form.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And how about a favorite tool?

Erik Fisher
So, I probably mentioned some of those but, again, one of my favorites is to go back to Brain.fm. One of the other ones is, actually, this one is called Otter.ai.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, the transcription.

Erik Fisher
The transcription, yeah. I love, love, love that. So, being able to upload audio files into there and they can transcribe it, or just being able to like turn it on again on my iPad or my phone and I have it recorded and then send it to the cloud and it’ll start transcribing for me is also pretty cool.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, you hear them say it back to you often?

Erik Fisher
Oh, that’s interesting. I think it comes down to me giving them permission to not get everything done.

Pete Mockaitis
They need an authority figure like yourself too.

Erik Fisher
Hey, you know, you can get it done, move it tomorrow. It’s fine. As long as you’re not dropping the ball or dropping balls. Like, it’s fine. It’s a matter of which one. Again, you can’t get everything done, not all the time, not at every moment. Like, right now, I’m talking to you. I’m not doing other things but I’m, hopefully, executing well on the thing I’m doing and choosing to do right now.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Erik Fisher
Yeah, perfect. It’d be BeyondTheToDoList.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a final challenge or call to action for those seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Erik Fisher
I’m going to point people back to where we started and just say, “How much time can you go without your phone?” That’s my challenge.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Erik, this has been a treat. Thanks for sharing the good word. I wish you lots of luck with your show Beyond the To-Do List, and your many other adventures.

Erik Fisher
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Weldon, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Weldon Long
Hey, Pete thanks so much for having me. I’m really looking forward to the conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me too. I think you’ve got a fascinating story. You say that sales saved your life. Can you walk us through how that worked?

Weldon Long
Yeah, absolutely. It may sound a little overdramatic, but it actually is true in my case.

From 1987 until 2003, over those roughly 16 years, I spent 13 years in prison, in federal and state prison. I was a ninth-grade high school dropout. I was kind of a punk and a thug, running the streets, using drugs and not being a very responsible person obviously, a very dysfunctional life.

At 23 years old I ended up going to prison, was out trying to pawn a shotgun for some rent money, couldn’t pawn the shotgun, ended up getting high with a guy that I picked up hitchhiking. We had a loaded gun in the truck, what could possibly go wrong with that scenario? Within a couple of hours he and I used that gun to hold two innocent men at gunpoint. Next thing I knew I was in prison for ten years.

I did about four and a half years and I paroled. I got out. I was still a ninth-grade high school dropout. Now I was also a convicted felon, so I didn’t have many opportunities. Then I ended up going back to prison again on some parole violations, got out again at 30 years old.

Now, I’m a two-time convicted felon, still a ninth grade high school dropout. Ended up taking a job doing some telemarketing and one day the FBI showed up. We all went to federal prison on mail fraud and money laundering convictions.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh bummer.

Weldon Long
Yeah, I know.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re trying to be legit and it turns out the company is – well, did you know they were fraudsters?

Weldon Long
Hey, listen, I should have been suspicious when they hired me, right? Anyway, then I went to the federal penitentiary for seven years. But it was during those seven years that I kind of had my moment of clarity and kind of set me on the path that I’ve been on for the last 22 some-odd years.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s hear about the moment of clarity, shall we? What happened?

Weldon Long
Yeah. Well, it was June 10^th of 1996. I had already served about six years in state prison. I was just starting seven years in federal prison. On June 10^th of 1996, one of the cops walked in the cell house and handed me a note to call home. I called home and learned that my father had unexpectedly and suddenly passed away at just 59 years old.

When I realized that my dad went to his grave knowing me as a thief and a crook and a liar, it completely devastated me. Just the reality of my life was right there in front of me. I was 32 years old. I had destroyed my entire life.

I started thinking about a conversation that my dad and I had a couple weeks before he passed away. We were on the phone and I was kind of complaining about my life and my dad said to me, he said, “You know son, your life could be worse.”

I said, “Dad, how in the world could my life be worse? I’m a ninth-grade high school dropout. I’ve never had a job, never had a home as an adult. Three-time convicted felon, not getting out this time until I’m 40 years old. I had a three-year-old son that I had fathered while I was out on parole. I had abandoned him.” I said, “Dad, how could my life be any worse?” He said, “Son, you’re still breathing. As long as you’re breathing, you’ve got a shot to change your life.”

With that we exchanged our I love you’s, hung up the phone, I never spoke to my father again. That was the last thing he ever said to me. Two weeks later, he was gone. After he passed away I made the decision, I was going to change the course of my life and become a man that my father could have been proud of and the father that my little son deserved. That’s exactly what I did.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. Well, congratulations and kudos and thank you for contributing to humanity in this way and taking charge and overcoming those challenges to do an about face, that must be super challenging. Go ahead.

Weldon Long
It wasn’t easy. But it’s interesting that you said kudos on the contribution. I think that’s what it really comes down to. We all have to work for our success, but the older I’ve gotten, I realize how important contribution is to the overall success in our lives.

My first book is a little book called The Upside of Fear. I was very pleased to receive endorsements both from Dr. Stephen Covey, who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and also Tony Robbins, who’s probably the greatest personal development person in the last 40 years.

When Tony Robbins endorsed that book, his endorsement read “Congratulations on your turn around from prison to contribution.” It’s funny that you just used the exact same word because I think that’s a huge part of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then so let’s hear it. You were in prison. You made a decision. And then what happened and how did the sales enter the picture?

Weldon Long
Yeah, well the initial kind of step was that where do you turn this titanic of a life around? I’m 32 years old. I’m a ninth-grade high school dropout, a three-time convicted felon, wouldn’t get out of prison for another seven years. Where do you start? I came up with a master plan to find out what really successful people do and start doing that whatever it was, not reinvent the wheel, not second guess it, just do it.

I started reading. The first book ironically I picked up was The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. That led to many other books. As I begin to read these books, I remember reading a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche said “We attract that which we fear.” I thought, well that’s just kind of crazy. Why would I attract things in my life I don’t want? I kind of dismissed it.

A couple of months later I’m flipping through a Bible and I come across a scripture in Job. Job says, “Father, that which I have feared has come upon me.” I thought that was really interesting because Nietzsche was an atheist. Job believed clearly in God. Separated by philosophy and thousands of years, but they were saying the exact same thing.

And then I stumbled into a little book called Man’s Search for Meaning written by Viktor Frankl. Frankl said “Fear may come true.” I started thinking about this. Somehow maybe all the chaos in my life is because of what’s in my brain.

So I sat down at the little metal desk in my cell and I wrote down everything I was most afraid of. It turned out to be living and dying in prison, being broke and homeless and impoverished my entire life, never being a father to my son. That’s what I had attracted into my life. My life was a perfect reflection of the things I feared the most. So I’m like, wow, these guys are right. There’s something to this.

I decided initially I’ve got to change what’s in my brain. I sat down at that same metal desk and I wrote out for me, Pete, what a perfect life would look like. I’m an awesome father to my son. I’m wealthy beyond my wildest dreams. I’m a successful writer and entrepreneur and blah, blah, blah, all this amazing stuff.

I took that sheet of paper. I put toothpaste on the back of it and I stuck it to the wall of my cell. There it sat for the next seven years. Every morning when I got up I would read that list, I would meditate on it, I would visualize having that life, being that person. Now I didn’t know the neuroscience behind all this at the time. I was just a guy desperate to do something.

I had read in Napoleon Hill’s book, Think & Grow Rich, he said “Write these things down and imagine yourself already in possession of them.” That was just so beautiful and romantic, imagine yourself already in possession of them. Stephen Covey said, “You can live out of your imagination rather than your past.”

That’s what I started doing. I would visualize that life. I did it for seven years. There’s a lot of neurology behind it, but eventually it changed my thought process, it changed my habitual thoughts.

Seven years later I walked out of the penitentiary. Within five years I had built an Inc. 5000 company. I sold that and started writing books and speaking and training and developing others in the field of business and sales. That’s kind of how the sales thing kind of came to be.

I got out of prison at 40 years old to a homeless shelter, couldn’t find a job. I was very motivated because I had that right mindset after 7 years of telling myself I was going to be successful, but I still was a three-time convicted felon and 40 years old with no work experience. But I got a little job as a salesman. I was really good at it.

A year later I opened my own company. I grew that. Because I built a strong sales organization, I learned so much about sales primarily through books, Tom Hopkins and Brian Tracy and many of whom have become great friends over the years, but at that time I was just a guy in a cell reading their books.

The reason I say that sales changed my life is because it was the sales profession that took a guy like me, a ninth-grade high school dropout, a three-time convicted felon, it picked me up, it dusted me off and it gave me a real shot at prosperity and wealth, at having a productive life.

I’m extremely grateful for the sales profession because as an independent sales professional, if you’re good, you’ll find a chance to make a living. You can build your own business, work for somebody else, whatever, but if you’re good at it, you’re going to make a living regardless of your background. Even a guy like me can have that kind of success in sales.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so cool. Now I understand that in your very first weeks of selling, you were doing awesomely. What was kind of going on there with regard to how you were approaching it differently or what did you do that was note worthily – note worthily, that’s a word – distinct from out of other sales folks that you were just crushing it from the get-go?

Weldon Long
Well I think – actually that’s a great question, by the way. I don’t know that anyone has ever asked me that specific question.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Weldon Long
But it’s a great question. For me, initially, it was pure desperation. I’m living in a homeless shelter. I get this job at a small heating and air conditioning company. I’ve been knocking on doors for six months. I must have had a thousand people tell me no thanks once they found out about my record. But this one guy decided to give me a chance.

I went out my first month. I sold $149,000 of air conditioners sitting at the kitchen table across from mom and pop home owner. And I made over $13,000 in sales commissions.

But what was driving my success at that point was just pure desperation and need. I had a ten-year-old son that was out there somewhere. He was three-years-old when I went to prison the last time. He was ten when I got out. I was driven by the singular focus to get a job, get a place to live, get my son. Right? I was driven by that.

I was good at it primarily because I learned very quickly that good, honest, hardworking people will look you dead in the eye and say, “I’m going to call you next Tuesday,” and then they won’t call you next Tuesday.

I learned very quickly that your best chance of getting the sale is to have your prospect make a decision about you and your company and your products, and your services with you sitting right in front of them, right, because people really don’t want to say no to your face. People like to say no in business and in sales, they like to say no by ignoring an email or not returning your phone call.

And by the way, this is true. You and I were talking before the podcast that in business, we’re always selling something. Maybe we’re selling an idea or selling our boss on promoting us or giving us a raise. The key to those things is to get your boss, get your customer, get that person to make that decision about you with you sitting right in front of them. The probability you’re going to get a yes is way higher because people just tend to say no by ignoring you.

To quote a famous line from Fatal Attraction, “I will not be ignored.” That’s the key, man, making people reach a decision. You’ve got to do your job. You’ve got to build trust. You’ve got to build all the factors in sales and build relationships, investigate the problems, but at the end of the day, the real key is getting people to make a final decision about you and your company with you sitting right in front of them, even if the answer is no, by the way. I tell people all the time yes is best, but no is a perfectly acceptable answer in sales.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Weldon Long
The no’s aren’t going to kill you. What’s going to kill you is the-

Pete Mockaitis
And it frees you up.

Weldon Long
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Once you have a no, it’s like okay, I don’t have to think about that anymore.

Weldon Long
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
I can focus my energies on more worthwhile opportunities.

Weldon Long
Amen, amen.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. I wonder, so that’s sort of one sort of very specific differentiator is that you prefer to be in person when someone is making the decision about you. Then that kind of automatically tips it in your favor.

So then I guess I’m wondering in the context of hey, selling your boss on giving you a promotion or a raise, there’s some things that need to occur with regard to approvals and consideration, and on and on. How do you play that game? Do you say, “Okay, I’ll meet back with you on this day and you can tell me your decision then?” Is that how you do it or how does it work?

Weldon Long
Well, that’s part of it. I mean the key thing is and in sales and in business, just influence and persuasion, you’re exactly right. Sometimes there can be a process involved. You talk to your boss. He’s got to talk to his boss.

But what I really mean is that before they are allowed to make a final decision, so in the situation you described, you would say, “Okay, I understand you’ve got to go talk to the VP of sales, but I’ll tell you what, just promise me one thing, before you make a final decision, you’ll let me have one more conversation with you.”

You’re getting them that you’re going to be in front of them before they give you the final decision. The key then is, it’s kind of a little five-step process.

Pete Mockaitis
….

Weldon Long
It works in sales. It works in influence.

Pete Mockaitis
One, two, three, four, five. All right.

Weldon Long
One, two, three, four, five. The first thing is to anticipate the objection. You have to anticipate why they’re going to say no.

Let’s say for example you go to your boss and you say, “Hey, I want a raise. I think I deserve a raise.” He says to you, “Okay, I’ve got to talk to my boss.” He goes and talks to his boss. But you get that commitment he’s going to come back and talk to you one more time. Now you’re at that final meeting. You anticipate that the objection is going to be the budget just won’t permit it. You go in with that in mind.

Once you anticipate the objection or the obstacle, the key is then to get them to acknowledge that that particular objection should not be the thing that keeps you from getting what you want. Let me give an example. It will make more sense.

So if I know the budget is going to be an issue, I’m going to go back in and talk to my boss and say, “Boss, I appreciate you taking some time to explain whatever your final decision is. However, before you go there, I just want to ask you a simple question. Would you agree or disagree that my performance has been great the last year.” “Well, of course I agree.”

“Would you agree I’ve been on time with great sales productivity?” “Yes, I would agree.” “Would you likewise agree that those factors are every bit as important as what some arbitrary budget would be relevant to my pay raise?” What’s he going to say? He just told you it was important and you’re really good. Well, of course, there’s other factors more important than just the budget.

Then you’ve got to make your case. That’s the third step. The first step is identify the objection. Get them to acknowledge the objection should not prevent you from getting what you want. The third step is to make your case. That’s where you sell yourself.

“Boss, I appreciate you saying that there’s more factors more important than just the budget. I want to – here’s my attendance record for the last year. I’ve been on time every single day. Here are my sales records, my productivity records. I have the highest closing rate in the division, highest average … division. I make my case. I’m devoted to this company. I’m committed to this company. I make my case.”

The fourth step is to make a specific request. “Boss, I appreciate you considering all this stuff. All I would ask at this point is a simple question. Will you permit me to have this raise that we both agree I deserve?” It’s going to make it very difficult for him to say no because you’re sitting right there in front of him. Even if his boss told him no, it’s going to put him in a situation. Hopefully the big boss gave the middle boss a little authority to make the decision.

But you have to make a specific request for the thing that you want. One of the biggest people – mistakes people make both in sales and just business is they fail to make specific requests. They’ll kind of hint around toward something. They’ll kind of say, “Hey, I kind of like that raise. Heck, I probably deserve it,” or whatever. You’ve got to go in and say, “I deserve this.” You’ve got to claim it.

“What I’d like to do is get your permission to go ahead and get this raise. I’ll go tell accounting myself to change my pay structure.” Make the specific request.

And then the final, the fifth step is if they deny you, you have to remind them of their previous declarations. This is based on a lot of work of a very smart man, Dr. Robert Cialdini at Arizona State University. He’s written several books on influence and persuasion. And there’s a principle he refers to as the Consistency Principle, which is public declarations dictate future actions. What that means is we tend to take actions consistent with our words.

If I ask my boss, in step four I ask to make the specific request, “Can I have the raise?” if he says no to me, if he says, “No, I can’t. It’s just not in the budget,” I’m going to say, “Mr. Boss, earlier you agreed that there were more factors related to my raise than just the budget: my productivity, my punctuality, all those things should be just as important. Has that changed?”

“Well, no, I don’t know if it’s changed. But it’s just a budget thing.” “I understand, but we both agree it’s more than just the budget. I’d like to go ahead and ask you for that raise and to get this thing initiated.”

Now there’s no guarantee he’s going to say yes. Life is about probabilities. But I guarantee you through that little process, I’ve got a much better chance of getting my raise than if I just said “Hey boss, I could really use some extra money,” in kind of a passive aggressive or kind of a roundabout kind of way. It’s about being direct, anticipate the objections, head off the objections, make specific requests. It’s true in sales. It’s true in life.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Yeah. As you laid that out there I guess I’m thinking that the only – maybe not the only, but perhaps the highest probability gremlin that could come up the works it would just be you could call it the budget or just sort of like policy.

It’s like, “Well, a fourth-year program manager earns between X and Y dollars. You know? I know you’re the most extraordinary programmer manager we’ve ever seen in our lives or the history of this organization, but that’s just not how the policies work.”

That’s just kind of one of my pet peeves I guess is when structural policies, rules trump good, sensible thinking. It’s just like, “Well, I guess the policies that you’re going to lose the best program manager you’ve ever seen as I go elsewhere and get compensated appropriately.”

Weldon Long
Right, yeah. I hate policies too. They sound a lot like police to me. It’s – I don’t like it either.

You look at the organizations, they range kind of from the bureaucracy on the far end of one scale. The other end of the scale would be a very creative learning organization, maybe like Microsoft or something like that. The bureaucracy, let’s just take a prison as an example. Right?

The problem is that when you have a bureaucracy, the reason they have bureaucracies is because the people attracted to those jobs – no disrespect to people that work in government agencies or things like that – but they tend not to be the most creative and have the best judgment. And so often what happens is that policies are made to replace judgment because they decided we can’t trust the judgment of the person at the driver’s license bureau.

If you show up in the line and you’ve got to go two windows down, you’ve got to get at the back of the line. The fact that you are having a heart attack is not in the policy, so we’re not going to hurry you through. The policy says you’ve got to go to the back of the line at window number two because we don’t trust the judgment.

You go to a Microsoft, where they trust the judgment, and they have very few policies, right, very few rules. The policies are going to be more intense on the organizations that are less creative and the leadership doesn’t have the trust in the people to make decisions.

But the other point you made is also interesting, that you have a choice in your life. We can control the process of properly asking for a raise. We don’t control the outcome. Right? And that’s about learning to know that you can – you’ve got to focus on what you can control in life. You can’t focus on what you can’t control. It’s a big lesson that I learned. Believe me.

But like you said, at the end, then you have the choice of saying, “Okay, I’m going to find a company that appreciates superior productivity.” And then that’s an individual choice. There’s no guarantee you’re going to get the raise. The guarantee is you probably won’t get it if you don’t ask for it. If you do ask for it, you’ve got a shot because the answer is always no until you ask.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really a good thought in terms of policies replacing judgment and very well said succinctly. It just gets me thinking about how – I don’t know the right way to play this, but I guess if I were the manager who were handcuffed by a policy and then just sort of highlighting this notion, it’s like, “Oh, it’s a shame that this policy is deemed to be superior to your judgment.” I don’t know. You’ve got to tread lightly there.

Weldon Long
Right, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
It just seems like I wonder if there’s a magical turn of a phrase that could stoke just a little bit of righteous anger, like, “You know what? That is ridiculous. I don’t care for that.”

Weldon Long
But you know what? Listen, people like yourself, very creative, very ambitious type people, you don’t want that kind of policy control. Some people actually like that. Some people don’t want responsibility.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s … can be safe and calm.

Weldon Long
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like I don’t …, it’s just kind of handled. Yeah.

Weldon Long
Right. If you wake up and do something in your business with your show, for example, you do something, it’s your responsibility. Some people don’t want the responsibility. If I make the decision according to paragraph three, subsection two A, I’m not responsible because that’s what I had to do.
Some people prefer not to have the responsibility of the consequences of the decision, so they abdicate their judgment in favor of the policy book, the manual.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Well, thank you for digging into that. I also wanted to get your take on – you’ve got a book called Consistency Selling. I just want to get your take on consistency. I’d say whether we’re talking about sales professionals or any other group of folks, how – why consistency, what difference does it make and how do you develop it when you’re just not in the mood. I don’t feel like doing it. How do you do it anyway?

Weldon Long
Yeah, great question. This was really the foundation of what changed my life was learning how to consistently have more creative, responsible, powerful thoughts. It really comes down to a very simple concept. Consistent results come from consistent activities. Random results come from random activities. That’s true in business. That’s true in sports. That’s true in anything.

If you just do something randomly, by definition you can’t repeat it and therefore if you had a good result, you probably won’t get the good result again unless you do the same thing. You’ve got to do the same thing to produce those results.

When I think about consistency, you really go back to my second book, which was a book called The Power of Consistency. It’s about how do you create a prosperity mindset, a mindset that is geared and programmed to repeat the things that work in your life and consistently produce the good results.

Now, what I did is I developed a program around the acronym of FEAR, F-E-A-R. F is focus, E is emotional commitment, A is action, and R is responsibility. Through those four steps it gives us the opportunity to kind of examine our habitual thoughts. What are the habitual things I’m thinking all the time?

I tell people, you get up in the morning and you start thinking. As soon as your eyes open you start thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking about your family, thinking about your job, thinking about your friends, thinking about whatever. But how often do we think about what we’re going to think about before we think about it. That to me is getting to the essence of our decision making. Where are those habitual decisions coming from?

If I go and have lunch and I didn’t think specifically about what I’m eating and whether or not I’m going to put nutrition or taste as the higher value, if I don’t ever have that conscious decision, I just order something off the value meal, where did that thought come from? Because if I didn’t think what I think about, it came from somewhere.

We have to examine, where are those habitual thoughts coming that are driving our results in life. We’re making a million decisions a day, what I call seemingly inconsequential decisions, that determine our fate.

For example, if I go home tonight and I have an argument with my wife, I have to make a decision about how I’m going to conduct myself. If I make the decision to yell and scream and intimidate, I’m going to define that relationship. If I go home and I make a better decision and I have some love and some patience and some understanding, I have a different kind of relationship.

My relationship is not some random thing that just happened. It’s a product of my seemingly inconsequential decisions about how I react in that situation.

I’ll give another example. I get my paycheck. It’s Friday night. I’ve got the choice. I can go spend it all, have a hell of a weekend or I can save 20%. Well, I reach in my brain, I pull out a decision. If I pull out the save 20%, I pull out a piece of my financial future. If I reach in there and pull out I blow all my money this weekend, I pull out a different financial future.

Twenty years from now, my financial condition is not some random thing that lo and behold just happened to me. It’s simply a reflection of millions of seemingly inconsequential choices that we have made over our life.

Smoking is the perfect example. How long have we known smoking is unhealthy for us in this country? 100 years or so maybe? 80 years? A lot of people still smoke, a lot of good people. Smoking is not a moral thing. A lot of good people, honest, hard-working people smoke cigarettes. But why would people smoke cigarettes knowing what we know about the health impacts? The answer is very simple.

It feels good, right? It’s not a moral issue though. It just feels great. But moreover, smoking won’t kill you today. Whatever impact smoking is going to have is 20 or 30 or 40 years down the road.

But imagine this scenario, take the most avid smoker that you know, but instead of giving him one cigarette at a time, one seemingly inconsequential cigarette at a time, give him a year’s worth of cigarettes at one time, 2,000 – 3,000 cigarettes. Roll them up like a giant blunt and put some fire to it. Smoke them if you got them, pal. Would he smoke 2,000 cigarettes at one time? Of course not.

If you ask him why, he’ll probably say, “Because it will make me sick. It might kill me.” Yeah, smoking 2,000 cigarettes will make you sick and it might kill you, but guess what, smoking 2,000 cigarettes one seemingly inconsequential cigarette at a time will make you sick and might kill you too. It just takes longer.

The key is we’ve got to look at the tiny decisions that we’re making habitually about our food choices, how we interact with the people we love, picking up a cigarette, whatever, and it impacts every area of our life.

Here’s the rub on the whole thing. The FEAR process allows us to examine those habitual decisions, find out where they came from, ask ourselves are they consistent with what I want today and then change hem if we want to change them through a simple neurological process.

I don’t know how much detail you want to go into with the fear process, but it’s actually very simple. In fact, part of the struggle is it is so simple. It’s so simple people will be like, “Well, man, that can’t work,” because it’s so simple. In reality, it can move mountains.

It’s the single most important factor that turned my life around from a ninth-grade high school dropout, three-time convicted felon to a successful writer, entrepreneur and who’s created a lot of prosperity in my life. I didn’t get any smarter. I didn’t get any luckier. I damn sure didn’t get any better looking. I changed my thoughts. I changed my habitual thoughts. That’s what Emerson meant when he said, “We become what we think about all day long.”

Pete Mockaitis
This is intriguing. You take a look and you go through these four steps. Then how do we get a transformation? I guess I’m thinking about if – let’s say I’m having a thought habitually that I don’t care for, what do I do with that?

Weldon Long
Perfect example. Here’s what we do. The first step is focus. The step in focus is very simple. What do you really want? I encourage people to identify two goals in the three main areas of their life: their money, which is their career, their business, their financial future; their relationships, which is your spouse, your kids, your community, your family, friends, whatever; and then your health, your mental, spiritual and physical health.

Those are the three primary areas of anyone’s life: your money, your relationships, and your health. What do you want in those areas? What one or two things do you want in each of those areas?

Once you identify what you want, let’s say you say for example, “I want to make $200,000 a year in sales.” “What two or three things must I do every single sales call, every single day to get there?” Not 10 things, not 100 things because the confused mind says no. What one, two or three things if I did every single day.

You find out what those are. In sales it’s running every call with passion and purpose, learn to diagnose problems and recommend solutions, and learn to ask for the order every single time. If you do those three things in sales and business, you’re going to be successful. You can screw up everything else. But if you do those three, you’re going to be successful.

The next step is the emotional commitment step. I’ve got to get deeply emotionally committed to the income and the things I have to do to generate that income. So you’ve got to write it down in present, current tense and then do what I call a daily quiet time ritual. Ten to fifteen minutes a day reviewing the thing you want, the things you have to do. This turned out to be that little sheet of paper I had on my wall, stuck there with toothpaste.

I didn’t realize the impact of what I was doing, but it was changing the neurology in my brain. I’m not a neuroscientist but I’ve had neuroscientists call me. I had a guy call me one time and said – he was a neuroscientist, a PhD, a clinical psychologist. He said, “Mr. Long, this is the easiest explanation I’ve ever read in my life about the principles that are the underpinnings of rationally emotive behavior therapy and decision making.”

I’m like, “There’s a name for this?” It’s common sense. I’ve got to get focused on what I want, visualize it, it begins to change the brain.

The third step, action. We leverage a very big driver of human behavior, which is cognitive dissonance. If I tell myself I’m going to run every call with passion and purpose and ask for the order every single time, and then I go out on the sales call and I just drop off a bid, I don’t do that, I’m going to feel dissonance, anxiety, the difference between what I said I would do and what I actually do.

That dissonance starts driving the behaviors we want because we don’t want to be in a state of dissonance anxiety. We want to be in a state of resonance. We want to be integrated with our thoughts and our actions.

If I tell myself every single day that I’m going to run a sales call a certain way or if I tell myself every single day I’m going to eat healthy and then I find a cheeseburger in my mouth at lunch, I’m going to experience dissonance. The dissonance drives the behavior, like, “Oh, that doesn’t feel good,” so I order the salad.

And then the fourth step is responsibility. Everybody has problems in life. That’s the bad news. The good news is our life is not a reflection of our problems. Our life is a reflection about our decisions about our problems.

In other words, I had a bad set of problems 15 years ago. I got out of prison at 40 years old without any money, any clothes, any car, anything. But my life today is not a reflection of that situation. My life is a reflection of the decisions I made about that situation.

That’s true for everybody. Everybody’s life is product of their decisions about their problems, not necessarily about the problems themselves. I’m not saying that we don’t have problems that affect us long term because I just met a fellow named Aron Ralston. This is a guy you should get on your podcast, by the way. Do you know who Aron Ralston is? Does that name ring a bell?

Pete Mockaitis
A little bit. Tell me more.

Weldon Long
He’s the guy that got trapped in the Utah desert and had to cut his arm off to get out. They made a movie about it called 127 Hours. This dude is like the most awesome guy you’re ever going to meet in your life. It was amazing. He was there six days before he finally did it.

His life today – you know he’s never going to have that part of his arm again, right? But his life today is not a reflection of that tragedy. His life today is a reflection of the decisions he made about how he’s going to deal with that tragedy.

If you ever get a chance to read his book or watch the movie, 127 Hours, the book was called Between a Rock and a Hard Place. The movie was called 127 Hours. He’s one of the most powerful human beings I’ve ever met in my life, just an amazing story. He’s an excellent example – my life is too on a different type of way – that you can overcome any adversity if you want it bad enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Weldon, tell me, anything else you want to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things.

Weldon Long
Well, I just would encourage your listeners if they want to get more information, we’ve got some free content available on the website at WeldonLong.com. Or they can just text the word ‘videos’ to 9600 and you get three videos of the mindset, sales, and business process, all the stuff that I’ve learned. It’s free content. It’s very powerful information. I think it’s about 50 minutes worth of video content. Just want to make sure people know how to access some of that free content.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Thank you. Now, can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Weldon Long
My favorite quote is a quote from Henry David Thoreau. And this quote was written on the wall of my cell. It’s on my desk today. It’s one that I use constantly. It’s very simple. “If you advance confidently in the direction of your dreams and endeavor to live the life that you have imagined, you will meet with success unexpected in common hours.”

What I love about that quote is that if you live the life you imagined, that means to me that you had to imagine it first. In other words, you saw it first. Dr. Covey used to say, “All things are created twice, once in our mind’s eye and then in our physical reality.” I just think it’s such a powerful – it’s a beautiful quote. The words are beautiful, but it’s like it’s so poignant because you have to imagine that life first.

The last part of that “you will meet with succeed unexpected,” that means that the success, the results, will be even better than you anticipate. And that’s what happened in my life. Listen, I knew when I got out of the joint the last time, I was doing some cool stuff with my life. I was getting my son. I was getting my act together. I was plowing ahead. But man, what’s happened has been like 100 times bigger than what I expected.

That to me is one of my favorite quotes. It’s just so beautiful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Weldon Long
I would say with respect to research, it would have to be on the theory of consistency. Primarily is researched and discussed by Robert Cialdini. There’s some powerful research that he’s done.

A quick example, there was a company in Arizona that was raising money for childhood disabilities research. They would send in canvassers to knock on doors and ask people to donate money. Cialdini got involved and he kind of redesigned their process. What he did, is – by the way, about 16% of people would contribute money to childhood disabilities research. Somebody randomly knocked on your door, 16% of people would give some money.

Cialdini got the idea of having telemarketers call into those neighborhoods the week before the canvassers. Now the telemarketers did not ask for any money. They would simply take a survey. But one of the survey questions was “Do you think it’s important to do childhood disabilities research?” Of course people say yes. The next week they would send in the canvassers to ask for money.

Their rate of contribution doubled to 38% because people feel an obligation to take actions consistent with their words. It’s powerful, powerful research. I would recommend anybody who’s interested in that – Robert Cialdini – he’s written several books on persuasion and the power of influence and is just probably one of the smartest people I’ve ever read or had a chance to study.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah, his books are fantastic. Influence: Science and Practice and Pre-suasion.

Weldon Long
Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
I look forward to the day he joins us on the show.

Weldon Long
Man, he’s a smart dude. Make sure I get an email on that one because I don’t want to miss it.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Weldon Long
I think the thing that helps me the most is what I call my daily quiet time ritual. 10 – 15 minutes reviewing my key priorities, whether it’s my family goals, my financial goals, my health goals.

Life can be pretty hectic. I travel 150,000 miles a year. Literally, this week, for example, I’m in my third city this week speaking. Sometimes I wake up and I literally for five or ten seconds got to remember what hotel, what city, what I’m doing there. Life can be very hectic for everybody: families and bills and jobs.

That quiet time ritual, 10 to 15 minutes a day reviewing your key priorities in life, in other words 10 to 15 minutes thinking about what you’re going to think about before you think about it. It’s the one thing that keeps me grounded. I’m pretty high-strung, but that’s the one thing that keeps me grounded and keeps me sane. There’s nothing more important in my life than reviewing my key priorities every single morning for 10 or 15 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Weldon Long
I think – I wish I could take credit for it. I used it earlier. Emerson’s quote, “We become what we think about all day long.” I think that that’s super, super important. If people understood the relationship – I wish we had time to go into the neurology behind how a thought translates chemically to emotions, which drives some reaction, which drive a result.

But let it suffice to say that your thought, everything you think, drives how you feel and what you do and what you get, even if what you think is wrong. Even if the things you’re thinking are wrong, they can still drive very real emotions, real reactions, and real results. We call it the self-fulfilling prophecy.

My single most important piece of advice I give to anybody, whether it’s speaking at FedEx to their top 200 performers or speaking at the Nebraska State Penitentiary to a group of lifers, I tell them the same thing: you become what you think about all day long. I wish that were my quote. It’s Ralph Waldo Emerson, but I love to use it.

Pete Mockaitis
If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Weldon Long
I would point them to social media. They can find me easily there are Weldon Long. Also, on my website, WeldonLong.com W-E-L-D-O-N-L-O-N-G, WeldonLong.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Weldon Long
Yeah, I would encourage everyone to get crystal clear on what you really want. We don’t do it enough. We don’t take enough time. What do I really want? What do I really want with my family? What do I really want with my job, and my income, my financial—don’t just go along and just assume it’s all going to work out. Get very specific.

One of my favorite books is Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill, written in 1937. The very first success habit that Napoleon Hill taught was that you have to have a definite purpose. That’s specifics. That’s focus. Figure out exactly what you want and then start going for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Weldon, this has been a ton of fun. I wish you lots of luck and keep doing the inspire that you’re doing.

Weldon Long
Thank you my friend. I really appreciated it. I’ve enjoyed chatting with you.