Avoid Diminishing Returns on Your Time

The topic I'm going to cover today is important really in any period of time, but I think it's specifically important given what's been going on in the world, given what is going on in the world right now and given some of the challenges that we're all facing just as human beings. And this is I haven't done this in a while. I'm actually doing this podcast from my basement. I'm in our sunlight, in sauna. They are not. They respond to my podcast. I am an affiliate. It's an incredible sauna. I mean, here in about 140 degrees and I'm going to go, it'll probably be up to 140 345. By the time I get out, I'm going to go from here to a 40 degree cold plunge. The amount of dopamine that now releases into your system and that will release into my system is absolutely amazing. And so I can't wait. But I want to share this topic with you first. You know, I'm obsessed over the way that entrepreneurs think for most of my career. I've read tons of biographies and third party accounts, and I've talked to thousands of entrepreneurs. I've had the opportunity to spend time around some of the most intelligent and successful people on the planet, literally. And you know, I've spent time with people who are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions of dollars. And there's this consistency that I see in our personality Typekit I think we should all be aware of. And I think this awareness can create massive momentum for us if we let it. And you know, this isn't a very, very high. This is a very deep topic. I just want to want to make you aware of something so you know, for entrepreneurs, for the entrepreneurial personality type, for those of us who are evolutionary hunters who get up every day and. Do everything we can to move things forward for those of us who are addicted to momentum, who want to have that feeling of making things happen the world following in our wake, you know, putting things out there, changing the world for those of us who have these characteristics. One of the things that happens is because of the way that we choose to live our lives, because of the way that we choose to push ourselves and push those around us. We create a tremendous amount of pressure and noise in our lives. And let me just define that for you, for me in pressuring noises, anything that creates resistance or constraint. And when you're an entrepreneur trying to change the world, the very definition of almost everything we do is it it creates resistance and constraint, you know, going out and trying to do things differently, going out and not following the crowd, going out and saying that you're going to do things differently, getting up every morning and declaring you're going to make things different, making the world a better place, start a business, you know, manage people. All of those things create a kind of pressure and noise.

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority. The few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be.

What can happen, especially if we look at the events of the last couple of years? You know, I'm talking back to early 2020 and pretty much all of 2021 and 2022 hasn't started off much different. There is a ton of outside influence is creating pressure and noise. We had, you know, the coronavirus than we had the lockdowns. Then we had a lot of conflict around the vaccines. And just prior to that, we had, you know, riots in the United States, riots around the world. And you know, you look at it and it's been years now that not only is an entrepreneur dealing with the pressure and noise in their world, but the world outside of our company, the world outside of our immediate surroundings has been incredibly noisy as well. And here's what we have to understand about people like us. When the pressure noise goes up for us, it makes all of our emotions and reactions more dramatic. That's just a fact. That's just how it works for us. And if you really lean into this and breathe into it and think into it, I think you'll find that if you really think about it, that's true for you, that when there's a lot of pressure and noise, it makes everything feel more dramatic and makes you feel more reactive. That makes you have more reactions. And you know, here are the the emotions that are most often triggered by having external and internal pressure and noise, by having too much going on, by being tactically overwhelm the emotions anger. In fact, the emotion that now has been proven to spread most quickly online is anger and, you know, anger leads to emotions like irritation with people and animosity towards people. I mean, dare I say even hatred toward some people? When you look at how people have behaved over the last couple of years and especially how people in the public eye, how entrepreneurial personality types are those of us who really put themselves out there, how a lot of people have behaved. And so the reason that I bring this up for that reason that I want you to understand this and the reason that I'm in the sonnet today, the reason I'm going to be in the cold plunge. The reason that I do so much to take care of myself and lower the pressure and noise for myself and conditioned myself to stepping into discomfort like being in 140 knots, 142 been in 142 degree sauna for 30 or 40 minutes, then being in a a 40 degree cold plunge for three or four or five or six minutes. The reason I do these things is because they actually increase my ability to deal with pressure and noise. The reason that I no longer get up and just walk right over my desk and start working like I did for the majority of my 20s, and a lot of my 30s is because that heads down. I'm just going to get things done. I'm not going to take care of myself. I'm not going to recognize how I'm feeling. I'm not going to do anything to support myself might have felt productive, but I now know that in the long term, it wasn't because it was triggering and because I was continuously doing things that that felt like they were moving me forward. But in retrospect, I now know how much momentum I gave up. I now know how much noise that was causing in my lives by just keeping my head down and not lowering the noise around me. And I know, and this is unfortunate and not one of my favorite things to talk about, but I know how much anger that cultivated. I know how much irritation that cultivated and how much animosity that cultivated. Because when as entrepreneurs, if we push the noise too high in our lives, all those emotions come up. And if we push the noise to highs in pain our lives and we get into a situation that normally would trigger those emotions, maybe in a rational way. Maybe in a way that that is reasonable. We get into a place where where we can be irrational and unreasonable. And I share this with you because, you know, even though it's been talked about for years, there's still this culture and entrepreneurship. Get up every day and abuse yourself. Get up every day. And before you do anything to support yourself, grab a cup of coffee, sit down to the notebook computer or sit down at your computer and just start working and get up every day. And, you know, push yourself as hard as you possibly can and leave it all on the mat and for us as entrepreneurs. You know, when you're younger, that's actually kind of possible. But I wouldn't even recommend it for somebody who's younger. I would actually recommend that you start the healthier habit. And when you're younger, you start lowering the noise in your life and you see how much more productivity you have. See, when you are pushing yourself every day, when you're pushing yourself to the limit, every day when you're not taking care of yourself, you may feel like you have more productive hours. But I'll tell you that that in my observation of hundreds of entrepreneurs that I've coached personally and of thousands of entrepreneurs that have been in our programs, that the more we push ourselves, the more we don't take care of ourselves, the more diminishing return there is for every hour we work. And here's what I mean by that. You can work 20 hours in a day, seven days a week, and you might be less productive than the entrepreneur who's taking care of themselves, who's focused, who's lowering the noise around them, who understands their plan, who has an agenda and is working eight hours a day. And I know that sounds crazy, but we're not plowing fields here. We do work that's created. And by the way, there's nothing wrong with plowing fields. But if you just plowing fields 20 hours a day and somebody else was doing eight, chances are the 20 hours a day person is going to do a lot more. But when you jump into a tractor and pointed in a direction and you have to turn it around at the end of a field, that's a relatively low drag on our systems of creativity and creation, and of our systems of innovation and seen opportunity in the world and being able to understand what the next steps we should take are and prioritizing what we should do next and really being able to do what we do as entrepreneurs. And so if you're in a situation where you've been pushing yourself too hard, if you're in a situation where you're not taking care of yourself, if you're in a situation where you're not hydrated, where you're not putting the habits into your life that actually support you physically and mentally and you feel like you're at a plateau, you feel like you're blocked, you feel like you can't find the next step. You feel like you're not getting things to the next level. You feel like maybe you're spinning your wheels. I proposed to you that there's a very high likelihood that those two things are correlated, that pushing yourself too hard, not giving yourself time to recover, not taking care of yourself also creates an environment where it's very hard to be creative. It's very hard to innovate. It's very hard to. Prioritize and see what you should do next, and as a result, we keep working harder, we keep putting more hours, we keep doing what we think is going to move us forward, but unfortunately we keep ourselves stuck. And so if you allow yourself to absorb too much pressure in life, if you allow yourself to exist in too much pressure and noise and you don't offset that by taking care of yourself, you're going to have a very hard time with a deregulated nervous system. And when we have our nervous system deregulated, the first thing to go is creativity. The next thing to go is the ability to prioritize. The next thing to go is any type of perspective. And as entrepreneurs, let's get real. That's what we use to create what we want in the world. Navigate what we should do next and understand where we are. And so if you have been in that place where you're pushing yourself too hard, give yourself a break today. Take a walk. Hydrate like crazy. Go get an IV drip. Go, go to go. Do some red light therapy. Jump in a sauna, jump in a cold plunge. Use something that's going to put something back for you, and you'll be blown away at how much it changes what you're actually doing. In fact, next time you're creatively blocked, blocked. I've got an idea of what you just get up and go on a walk for 20 minutes or more, just 20 minutes or more and breathe into that idea. I think about the idea that you're creatively blocked around. Think about what you could be doing. I guarantee you that a 20 minute walk will give you a totally different perspective, and that may help you open up a channel, a gateway, a commitment to taking care of yourself, lowering the pressure and noise so you can do even more in the world. Thanks for being here with me today, and if you're interested in getting some help growing your business, you know we have a new Facebook group that has been growing and has awesome engagement. And once every week or two, I do a Q&A where I answer your questions about growing teams operating your business, and it is the name of the group is actually the name of our new company. So simple operations. You can go to Facebook and search simple operations. The group is simple operations. Operating a business just got simple and I look forward to seeing you there. That's a group where we help take seven figure entrepreneurs to eight figures and eight figure entrepreneurs even further. So simple operations operating your business just got simple on Facebook. I can't wait to see you there.