95% of Businesses Don't Grow Because of This

Summary

Have you spent hours days or weeks working on tasks and projects that you thought were important in your business only to find out that they were just meaningless? Of course, you have, it happens to all of us. And in this video, I'm going to give you a very clear framework that you can use to prevent this from happening again.

Transcript

Have you spent hours days or weeks working on tasks and projects that you thought were important in your business only to find out that they were just meaningless. Of course you have, it happens to all of us. And in this video, I'm going to give you a very clear framework that you can use to prevent this from happening again. Let's get to it.

[INTRO] Hey, I'm Leon Castillo, founder of Selfmastered, a High-Performance Training company that helps entrepreneurs scale their businesses by solving their solid bottleneck, their own performance, were transformed the unproductive, overwhelming and focus entrepreneurs into laser focused business athletes that can achieve in one day, what they previously achieved in one week.

So today, I want to end the modern disease of busyness. That tendency of the modern entrepreneur of working on 1000 Things only to find out that most of them are all of them are meaningless, and therefore they keep spinning their wheels without getting real results, they end up working 12 to 15 hours every single day and and burning out after a few months in business.

So over the years of working with hundreds of entrepreneurs, I have developed a very simple framework that is based on to KPIs that we help them implement in their work, so they can get incredible results with a fraction of the effort and time involved. Because intrapreneurship can mean different things from different people. But nobody would choose to have fewer results.

After having invested more hours, the goal is to have maximum impact per unit of time invested when you apply this framework, let me tell you, you're going to be miles ahead of anyone that doesn't because you're going to have a very clear understanding of what you should be devoting your time and attention to.

So the first KPI is leverage, which is a force multiplier. Remember, the prototypical productivity advisor focusing on the prior to law in which 20% of inputs have an 80% of outputs or results? Well, leverage is the technical term for what sits behind or prior to principles happens because the universe is powered by power laws. But what's interesting is the sources of leverage have changed throughout history. Up until the 18th century, the main source of leverage was the amount of land one hat because the more land you have, if you are a noble man, or clergy or the King, the more outputs you could throw out from that land, the more people you will have leaving you on that land, and you will have more power, so you will get more leverage on that land.

But when the Industrial Revolution came into being, the main source of leverage started being the amount of labor and machinery that you could deploy, so land didn't matter, as much as your ability to employ people and M have machines to perform the work, it was not about only producing was also about producing, manufacturing, and transforming then on a 20th century, the biggest source of leverage was financial, the person who had more capital to deploy in an intelligent manner, could not only employ the best people around but also have the state of the art machines. So finance capital was a highest source of leverage. And in 21st century, the most important source of leverage is data is your ability to discern is understanding what inputs leads to what outputs and only working on the things that actually matter. So those big data and artificial intelligence models leaving an edge to companies that know how to successfully deploy them.

In fact, in our company, we have a few companies that are working on bringing AI and machine learning to industry that traditionally don't have them just like menu.ai, which is a Spanish Fintech startup. Anyway, the point is that based on the technological evolution of the world, the sources of lovers change, but the concept of leverage remains the same extracting as much output per unit of input.

And this is something you need to be thinking about at every step of the way when you are working. And you might be thinking, well, how can I make this a reality my business? Why should I care? Well, you should care because chances are that out of the zillion things that you think you need to be doing only a few matters. And the way of judging, which is the real importance behind a task or a project is thinking about the impact it has, the higher the impact, the more important that project is importance is not something you decide it's something that you extract based on the impact of the task of the project.

So the first thing you need to do is to list down every single activity you do on any given week, and then think about the impact that each task or project will have nd strategic plan that you have set for your company and only work on the things that carry the most leverage that carry the most weight that are more Important based on this frame, it is much better to work less on important things that work more on pretty much everything else.

And if you want a very clear example of this, let's say that I want to be doing marketing for some masters, right, and I have a zillion platforms that I could advertise it and zillion platforms that are on social media that I could be posting it. But let's take the example of a tweet on Twitter and a video on YouTube.

If you think about it, a tweet is very low effort very quick to produce, but has a shelf life for about 234 minutes. After 234 minutes, that tweet is gone. So the impact of the tweet is very shallow is very smart. But on the other hand, YouTube video takes more effort, it implies having a team, there's a lot more skill involved in producing a good video, but it is SEO searchable, and it remains on the platform for years. So the impact a video can have, it's much higher, and therefore there's much more leverage in video, as there is on a tweet not only because of the leverage, but also because you can convey a lot more ideas in a video that in a written tweet or a text.

So in this case, YouTube video is a much more leveraged way of doing marketing than a tweet. And this same idea needs to be applied at every step of your workflow, what is the highest impact alternative that you have at each tasks, and only do that thing, so that's KPI number one, how much leverage one task or project has now before we get into the second KPI, remember to like, subscribe and ring the bell not only because this will allow this video to get to more people that may need it.

But also because we're running promotions and giving away courses on productivity and performance value in the 1000s of dollars, that will only get notified if you are actually ringing the bell. So don't miss out on that. The second KPI is the amount of focus that you can summon this is so important.

This is why performance is important, if doesn't really matter how skill you are, how many experience you have under your belt, if you cannot focus if you cannot actually put that into action, if you cannot remove distraction and get into flow at well. And this is important because your ability to get into deep work. And eventually flow is also related to the type of work that you are doing. And this is something very important. You cannot get into flow.

The as you know is a non ordinary state of consciousness in which you feel your best and perform your best if you are working on the wrong things. In order to get into flow, you need to be working in something that you're highly engaged in. So you care about it, you see that it's important for your mission that is sitting is slightly outside of your current level of your abilities. So it is not easy, because if it's easy, you're going to get easily distracted, it has to be hard. And three, you have confidence that you can achieve it and complete it because if you think it's too hard for you, you will not push through the resistance that is involved in achieving that task.

So in order to get into flow, you need to first do deep work. And before that you need to engage, and you need to architect your day so that you do the hardest things first and easiest tasks later. And that's how you structure your day for maximum impact and results. And when you're working on a high leverage tasks with the highest amount of focus that you can summon you get fantastic results.

That's how we have our CEOs go from a 12 hour work day to a four hour work day having the same if not better results by architecting everything they do in a way that they can be their best selves at all times. On all fronts.

Remember, it is as easy as it sounds, leverage and focus architect your business for leverage only work on the high leverage things and then focus architect your mind and body to be able to focus for hours at a time. Be strategic in how you perform work.

So I hope this was useful. Please let me know in the comments if you learn anything new and also how do you normally structure your day. Have you ever thought about leverage as a force multiplier? I really want to know