—
Listen to the podcast here:
Deliberately Disregard For Growth
This is the podcast where my wife and I live life carrying around a small notebook. As we see or hear something that has to do with business growth either internally with our 130 plus employees or externally as we’re at an event or in a Skype meeting or something like that, if we see somebody react strongly to either a piece of advice or a technique that was used, we both either open our phones or our tablets. We write down what went down to be sure that we podcast about it. If it worked for us internally as a case study or if we were at a conference and we saw somebody teach a principle that we know for a fact worked and it’s not theory, we want to be sure to podcast on it to make a permanent record so that our followers, our kids and everybody that reads this can see if that technique would work for you.
I’m about to do a three-part series about a question that came in, “Do you mind podcasting on growth techniques that you have never written before in your books or you haven’t podcasted before but you’re currently using in your business?” At first, I’m like, “I can do that but I’ve got to stop and think for a second.” It took me about two seconds to sketch out a few podcasts. I first want to set the table on this first podcast and we’re going to call this podcast ribbon cutting. It’s a takeoff that we had the ribbon cutting for our new building, our new corporate campus, 1001 Millersville Road in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. As a takeoff on that, growing a company is something that we’ve done as a company internally for a couple of years. I don’t think I’ve ever covered this. I certainly have not written about it. It’s a version of the ribbon cutting as you’re going to see. Up until January, I am still the record holder for Sprint. I have the most amount of contacts. It was something like under 5,000 contacts that are active in my phone. It was a lot. It took so long to convert the contacts, even though they’re all saved in Google. I still had to do a manual backup type of port over that no longer would Sprint do that in store. I would have to leave my phone and come back the next day. What I’m going to cover on this podcast, we instituted our top six people ribbon cutting. It goes like this.
The phone can be an electronic leash for many people. Click To Tweet
The centerpiece of this growth technique is a takeoff from the book The ONE Thing and Stephen Covey’s First Things First. The concept is what do you need to eliminate either in your to-do list, your activities, your habits, your relationships? What needs to leave? What ribbons do you need to cut to allow yourself to focus and perform at a very high-level? There’s a phrase that has been said by many and it goes like this, “Deliberate disregard is every bit as important as conscious concentration.” A lot of you have heard me talk about Think and Grow Rich. I often take time off just to think with a notebook in front of me. What I don’t think many people know about me is I’m not on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram and I never will be. It is a deliberate disregard. It is every bit as important as conscious concentration. I live on email and text and I only email on Mondays and Thursdays. I know you’d think, “You run a tech company with 130 plus people in two countries. How can you not be on all these platforms?” Just because I’m not on them doesn’t mean I don’t know how to use them or know their effectiveness. What I know is when it comes to my personality, I have seven of the eleven main ADD, OCD, ADHD things at a pretty decent level. I know if I’m distracted by a big to-do list or let’s say Facebook, it’s going to suck me in and you’ll never hear from me again.
What I do is I deliberately disregard things because I know it’s every bit as important as conscious concentration. A lot of people fool themselves into thinking they can create a master to-do list and then every morning, they can tighten the to-do list and even list out the top three things. They wonder why at the end of the day they did eight little things but they don’t feel like they got anything done, nothing got accomplished. That’s because they’ve talked themselves into becoming efficiently ineffective. If you want to be effective, a human being can only focus on a couple of things and that’s it. It’s that simple. You need to deliberately disregard pretty much everything in your life except a couple of key nuggets and then you crush it. I’m going to give you a few areas that I purposefully deliberately disregard. It goes like this.
My to-do list, I’m not exaggerating and I’m happy to share it someday to prove this, is somewhere in the area of 1,400 columns on an excel spreadsheet, multiple tabs. Each column has five to eight to-dos. Many of them are titled Great Ideas. Many of them are people I have to call back. It’s just countless over an eleven-year period of time of a massive amount of things I do need to do and I intend to do. Someday I might do some of them but in the meantime, I’m going to deliberately disregard most of them. I’m going to call my list on the weekends, put a very little punch list together of what I know I can effectively do between Monday and Friday. As Gary Vaynerchuk eloquently puts it, “I crush it.” I focus on a few things and I knock them out of the park. My to-do list is an area that I personally, deliberately disregard. Here’s another one and this is not going to come out right. It’s going to sound terrible. My second one is people. I deliberately disregard people. I’m talking sometimes about Kerri, my wife, my kids, our CFO, our top ten people, my brother, Bill. It doesn’t matter. Somebody could be calling. If I’m in a deliberately disregarding moment where I’m focused on something, unless it’s my wife, I don’t under any circumstance, answer the phone. The phone can be an electronic leash for many people, it is not for me. I’m in control of my phone, my phone doesn’t run me. I’m in control of email, email doesn’t run me.
Build relationships because when you do need something, the law of reciprocity will be so huge that they will move mountains to help you. Click To Tweet
Here’s a secret. The people don’t know when you are or are not looking at your email. If you go a couple of days and don’t reply, they don’t know if you’ve even seen their email. They’re not thinking about you. They’re not waiting for your reply. They don’t care. They’re so busy with the rest of their life. For those of you that live your day around incoming email, I might suggest you go one day a week and shut it off and try the Tim Ferriss method. He wrote about this ten years ago in The 4-Hour Workweek. That man runs email, email doesn’t run that man. My to-do list is number one. People is number two. Here’s a real stinger and zinger and your other marketing methods. I’m assuming by being a follower of this podcast, you’ve heard multiple times that if you want to win and grow, you have one choice. You better be always beta testing three new marketing techniques. That’s why the Fortune 500 from twenty, 30, 50, 60 years ago no longer exist because the product’s still around, that’s for sure, but the marketing methods are changing at a rapid clip. You better be testing the best marketing methods going right now. The hot one is ManyChat. I haven’t reached out to that entrepreneur although someone has desperately tried to connect us. I just have to stop my life, but I’m in a people deliberately disregarding mode right now so I can’t reach out to Mikael.
The other marketing methods mean to find out what marketing method works the best for you is, is it Facebook Ads? Is it pay-per-click? Is it a radio? Is it a TV? What is it? Stop everything for 30 days and pull a Vaynerchuck and crush that one. If you’re spending $1,000 a week, spend $2,000. If you’re spending X, spend more. Crush it and hit it from every angle. That’s number three, your other marketing methods. Deliberately disregard the ones that only work a little bit and crush the one that works. The last one, your top ten relationships. What if you deliberately disregard seven of them, but you laser focus on maybe the three most important relationships you have? Is it your banker? Is it your father? Is it your biggest vendor? Is it the agent for your book? Whoever it is, why don’t you tune your world out for a little bit and tune their world in for a little bit and say, what do they need? How can I help them? What assets, what employees, what cash? What do I have that could help them asking and expecting nothing in return? Build that relationship because then when you do need something, the law of reciprocity will be so deliberate and so huge and so deep that they will move mountains to help you. This episode is called deliberate disregard for growth. I hope this helps. Give it a shot. Take care.
Important Links:
Leave a Reply