Work Smarter, Not Harder

I am your brain coach, Jim Kwik, and in this lesson, I'm going to share with you the secret to working smarter versus working harder. You hear this all the time. People say, work smarter, not harder, but how do you do it specifically? So recently, I was filming a podcast episode in an actual power plant, an actual power plant, and it inspired this story that you might have heard in different forms. Basically, there's a busy power plant, and one day, the power plant just stops. Everything stops moving. There's pure silence, and the employees are running around trying to figure out what's going on, what's wrong, what created this challenge, and how can they fix it? But after a couple of hours, they don't know what to do, and the manager picks up the phone and calls the local technician, and the local technician said, you're in luck. I'm only a few minutes away, and the technician shows up, and he walks along the floor of this power plant, and along this floor, as you can imagine, are all these beams, all these beams on the floor, and he goes to one specific beam, and on this beam, there are all these electrical boxes, and he goes to one specific electrical box, and he takes out a magic marker and puts a big X on it, and he opens up the electrical box, and inside, as you can imagine, are all these wires, all these screws. He goes to one specific screw, and he takes a screwdriver, turns it, not even half way, and then all of a sudden, bam, the entire power plant turns back on, and the manager is so thrilled. He says, thank you so much, you saved the day, and he says, how much do I owe you? So the technician looked right at him and said, that will be $10,000, and the manager was floored. He was pushed back. He thought, how can that be? You were here for five minutes. All you did was turn one screw. He was like, justify that. Give me an itemized bill, and the technician said, no problem. He reaches into his back pocket, pulls out a notebook, scribbles something on a page, tears the page, gives it to the man. The manager looks at the bill. He says, I understand. He goes over to his desk, takes out his checkbook, and writes him a check for $10,000 and hands it to him. And if you look at that bill, that invoice, it says this, turning screw, $1. Knowing what screw to turn, $9,999. Now what's the point of this story? The point is not that you have a screw loose. That's not the point. The first point I would suggest is knowledge is not only power. Knowledge is profit, meaning we live in this expert economy where the faster you can learn and think, the faster you can earn. We get paid and compensated, not just financially, but just all the treasures in our life, not from our brute strength as much as our brain strength. It's not our muscle power. It's really our mind power. You want to be able to think and solve problems, make good decisions, so you can be more valuable in this knowledge economy. But the second reason I share this story is this. Isn't it interesting that out of all of the beams, with all of the electrical boxes, with all of the screws and all the wires in that one box, that one screw turned everything else on? That screw is a focal point. It's a focal point. It's a high leverage activity that yields huge rewards. In the military, they referred to this phenomenon as a forced multiplier, a forced multiplier. It's like the same amount of input, but you get a lot of output, a lot of rewards, a lot of returns. Isn't that what you want in your life? If you're watching this right now, yes, you want to think better and you want to think faster, but the reason why you want to do it faster and clearer is because it allows you to save time because you're working smart, not just hard. How do you apply this towards your everyday life? Here's what you want to remember, the Pareto's Principle, and I know you probably heard this before. It's the 80-20 rule, the 80-20 rule. What is it? It means 20% of your efforts give you 80% of the rewards. It means that maybe 20% of your customers or clients give you 80% of the revenue. It means that 20% of your studies is actually giving you 80% of the comprehension. You find that this number is pretty consistent. What's the magic in this? Working smart versus working hard is focusing on that 20% that gives you most of the rewards as opposed to getting really good at the 80% that's only going to give you 20% of the rewards. How do we apply this in your day-to-day, in your productivity? A lot of people talk about time management. How do you manage your time? That's important because truth be told, we don't all have the same level of education. We don't all have the same network and connections. We don't all have the same income, but what we do have is the same amount of time. We all have 24 hours in a day, 86,400 seconds. I want you to imagine if you woke up every day, and you woke up to your bank account, and there's $86,000 there, $86,400 there. But at the end of the day, at midnight, that money disappears. How are you going to invest that money, reinvest that money? What are you going to buy? What are you going to put your attention to, which is really your time, so you can get the maximum rewards out of it? Because whatever you don't use, you lose at the end of the day. That's how time works. I don't even want to talk about time management, actually. The key, the most successful people, what they focus on is not time management. It's priority management. They manage their priorities. They get really good at the things that matter every single day. Now, how can you apply this again? Well, some of the most successful people out there, yes, they have a to-do list, but you're not going to get through that 200, 300, whatever, the amount of items that grows on your to-do list every single day. But what are the three or four things on that list that will give you a big win? When you came home at the end of the day and somebody asked you, how was your day? You're like, I crushed it. I won today because I got those few things done. Another thing I noticed with working with high performers, high mental achievers, is they have a not-to-do list. They're very clear about the things they're not going to spend time with because you have to say no to good to say yes to great. There's a great book, which I recommend many of you notice, Good to Great by Jim Collins, basically saying that if you're tired and burned out, maybe you're saying yes to way too many things. It's like having too many browsers open on your computer. Even if you minimize them, it's still taking up memory. It's still taking up energy. It's still taking up some unconscious focus and awareness. You wonder why you're tired all the time, or you wonder why you can't focus. You want to say no to a lot of things so you can say yes to the things that matter. Part of your filter could be heck yes or heck no. If you get an opportunity and somebody comes to you and say, hey, what about this? Or, hey, do you want to grab a dinner here? What about this opportunity? If you don't feel full on that it's a heck yes, maybe you should be saying heck no. You want to say no more than you say yes. As you become more and more successful, that becomes a challenge because you have opportunity stress. The more you grow, the more you succeed, the more opportunities and offers that come your way. You want to remain focused. How do you do this? I always suggest to people, start with this. The most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing. When you look at a word like priorities, it's only been plural, like multiples, over the past three decades, the past few decades. Prior to that, it was always singular. It was always priority. Priority is the one thing that matters in your life, or in your work, or in your relationship, or in your health. But as we grow, and technology, and we have all these demands, everything becomes important. It's kind of like somebody who's reading, and they're highlighting everything, so the book glows in the dark. That's not what you want to do, because if you make everything important, when you're learning, and you're studying, and you're thinking in your life, then nothing becomes important. Think about it as the domino effect. You ever play with dominoes as a kid? Remember that first domino you hit, and then it hits another one, and another one, and another one? Always look for that first few dominoes that's going to do a lot of the work. As you're going through your to-do list, what can you do, from your thinking standpoint, what demands your attention? You can think about it as like, okay, when I'm looking at my to-dos, I'm either going to do it, or I'm going to delete it, or I'm going to defer it at another time, or I'm going to delegate it. Four simple Ds. One of the dominant questions you could ask yourself on a regular basis is, what screw or what switch is going to be the most return on my effort? You could ask yourself, start training yourself to ask the question, what's the best investment of this moment? What's the best use of my time in this moment? Then all of a sudden, you start getting answers and answers. My question for you in this lesson, do you have a not-to-do list? If you don't, and you're interested in priority management, I would suggest you create a not-to-do list. In the comments, what I'd like you to do is share one thing on your not-to-do list. What's one thing on that list that you're non-negotiable you will not do, because it frees up energy, it frees up focus, it frees up time to do the things that matter. I'm your brain coach, Jim Quick, and I'll see you in our next lesson.