Excellence Is The Next 5 Minutes - Make Them Rock

SM 024 Excellence Is The Next 5 Minutes. Make Them Rock

Welcome to the Second Mix Podcast where we reflect, revise, and remix our lives. My name is Matthew Bennett. If you like what you hear today, please subscribe and give me 5 stars wherever you can and IF you know of anyone who will find this content helpful, please join my mission and share this with them. At the end of this podcast there’s going to be a call to action -a call to take some little step to remix your life – please join the Facebook Mastermind groups Ideas and Concepts so we can keep talking about these ideas. The link is in the description.

In a world where businesses are paying money to buy your attention, the ability to focus is going to be the new superpower. I’m sure you realized before I did that the people around you, are less focused. And maybe it’s even affecting you. 

Do you post something on Facebook and check 20 times in one hour to see if you get any likes or comments? We are wired to get a dopamine hit when that happens, and it’s becoming an addiction. 

Have you noticed watching shows or movies that each scene cut happens in 2-3 seconds? This is compared to older movies that are four or five and even longer. This is an attempt to not bore the audience. It’s kind of sad that they think we’ll get bored if there’s not a scene change within 3 seconds. 

I don’t think there’s any ill-intent or conspiracies going on here, but producers know that is how to win your attention and keep you there longer. YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, any time-sink on the internet or television has that purpose in mind. The longer you stay on, the more money they make. So they use techniques to keep you there. YouTube’s “related videos” feature is a great example of this. If you’re watching a video and get bored with it the first thing you glance at is the related videos, to see if something over on the side looks more interesting. 

Because of all this attention-grabbing and productivity-destroying media, there is a window, an opening, and a winning spot for anyone able to overcome all this stuff and learn how to focus their attention on one task for a good-sized chunk of time. 

If I hadn’t learned this, I wouldn’t be here podcasting today, I wouldn’t be out in the world trying to help people start their businesses, or get them online, or be doing any consulting at all. I had a habit of sitting down at my computer to get to work, and immediately I got distracted by something, and maybe get 5 minutes of actual productive work done every hour. That’s not an exaggeration. I was working on my own business, at my own home with no accountability to get anything done, and I was unaware of the attention traps laid all over the place – and I was equally unaware of what it was costing me to fall into those traps. 

The thing that saved me was the skill of time blocking. Once I became aware of the problem I started reading about how to overcome this. At first I would block of chunks of time to get things done. I would say, “No social media, no YouTube” or anything like that from 9 to noon, which are my most productive hours mentally. The pull to hit social channels was so strong, though, that I still had difficulty remaining focused. 

To resolve this I also began time blocking my social media. Spaces of time where I could hit Facebook and go to town without feeling guilty about it. But when my time was up, I had to shut it down immediately, usually to get lunch. 

Time blocking is simply this: pre-planned hours that have a singular purpose. Whether it’s for relationships, health, family, work, charity, personal development, or lifestyle. What gets planned gets done. Let me say that again. What gets planned gets done. So if I have two hours set aside to write, record, and schedule a podcast, I put it in my planner and then let nothing distract me from doing that. Same thing with family time, exercise time, and the rest. And now, it gets done. 

Of course, things will get in the way. It’s not always going to go the way you want it to go. Don’t let that stop you. Just forget what is behind and press on towards what is ahead. 

My strategies might not work for you – the most important thing here is to be aware of the fact that it’s a problem, but also the fact that you can be a superstar at whatever you want to do if you take the time to learn the skill of focus. 

I wish that there was some easy advice to say, “this is how you learn it.” But there  isn’t. At first, learning the skill feels very boring – real life feels boring in comparison to exploring the whole world on the internet, and jumping at every dopamine-producing shiny object. But if you’re passionate about something – if you have intention, purpose, and a mission to accomplish, that boring work takes on a whole new flavor. This is why goal setting and choosing your purpose is vital. 

To build the skill of focusing, you have to do it. You’ve got to sit through the hard parts and keep working at a project, I don’t know any way around it. And you’ve got to mess up, and then try again, and mess up, and try again. It won’t be long before you begin to notice that once again, you have control of your own mind, and are able to accomplish the tasks at hand. 

Tim Ferris’s book Tribe of Mentors had two interviews that really helped me get my act together and inspired me to focus. 

The first was Gary Vaynerchuk, who said, “They shouldn’t care about the next eight years, but they should stress about the next 8 days. Everybody’s super impatient about macro. Making decisions like what am I gonna do when I turn 25, and impatient about it, but in days they’re watching Netflix, super worried about 25 when they’re 22, yet they’re drinking every Thursday night at 7pm. Playing Madden, watching House of Cards. Four and a half hours of Instagram on their feed. Everybody’s impatient a at macro, wasting your days worrying about your years. I’m not worried about my years because I’m squeezing the heck out of my seconds, minutes, days.” 

The second was business thinker Tom Peters, who said, “Excellence is in the next five minutes or nothing at all. It’s the quality of your next five-minute conversation. It’s the quality of yes, your next email. Forget the long term, make the next five minutes rock.“

I would love to hear your strategies about how you get focused, and what you need to change to gain this new superpower. Let me know in the Ideas and Concepts Mastermind group on Facebook. We’ve been having a lot of great conversations there, and I’m meeting a lot of cool people – you can too when you click the link in the description. 

Thanks for listening to the Second Mix Podcast, once again, I am Matthew Bennett. You can grab this transcript on the blog at secondmix.net. If you have any questions send me an email at matt@secondmix.net, I personally answer every email I get, and I want to talk to you! Please give me 5 stars whenever and wherever you can, subscribe to get notified about the latest episodes – and if you haven’t yet, please leave me a review.  If you know anyone who might find this information helpful, please tell them about this show – I do this to help people.  I’m gonna be here every Monday and Thursday until all people everywhere believe the moon landing is real.  

Take steps that will make your week incredible.  I’ll be back on Monday –  this weekend continue reflecting, revising and remixing your life. I’ll see you soon!