A Method To x100 Your Productivity: Robin Sharma (Transcript)

TRANSCRIPT: 

Hi, it’s Robin Sharma, author of The Leader Who Had No Title, founder of The Titan Academy. And welcome to this Mastery Session.

This Mastery Session is all about a method to x100, (to increase by a factor of 100) your productivity. And we live in a world right now where productivity and in particular, what I call exponential productivity has never been so important. Here’s a brain tattoo for you to consider. “An addiction to distraction will be the death of your creative production.”

Here’s another brain tattoo for you to consider: “We live in a world where focus is more valuable than even your intelligence.”

I mean if you watch most performers today, you watch most people in business today, you watch most people in your community today, and they are walking while checking their social feeds. They are addicted to the entertainment of video games. They are spending the best hours of their days watching dancing cats on YouTube. I mean it is incredible right now how consumed people are with their tiny white screens and yet if you look at the A-Players, if you look at many of the most creative and productive people on the planet, they’re doing and working in such vastly different ways because if you want to achieve the results only 5% achieve, you’ve got to think and produce and behave like only 5% of the people on the planet.

And the best people on the planet in terms of creativity and productivity are not spending their finest hours addicted to distraction. They are doing work that matters. They’re not doing fake work, they’re doing real work. And so in this Mastery Session I want to walk you through a number of protocols that will really help you multiply your productivity in the finest of ways and I’m going to get right into the first one which is “The 90/90/1 Rule.”

Now I’ve become pretty well known for this. I’ve taught it to a lot of people who attend my annual event, The Titan Summit. And they have used this one tool alone to create vast amounts of productivity that have scaled their businesses, scaled their impact on the world, and created world-class lifestyles.

So I really invite you to pay even more attention to The 90/90/1 rule. And what’s that all about? It’s pretty simple like any great rule. For the next 90 days, spend the first 90 minutes of your workday on your single most important opportunity to move the needle in your industry. And I’ll repeat that again with great respect because it’s so important, I believe, to your productivity.

The 90/90/1 Rule is simply: for the next 90 days spend the first 90 minutes of your workday on your single most game-changing opportunity because what happens? A lot of us get to work and we spend our best hours on our least important activities. We get to work and we start checking our social feed. We get to work and we check our texts. We get to work and we chitchat at the water cooler about the latest TV show that we watched last night. And research has shown that the morning hours are when you have the most focus, when you have the most energy, and when you have the most willpower. And so you wanna use that first 90 minutes. That is, that is game time. That’s show time.

The second piece of technology to create exponential productivity is what I call “Tight Bubbles of Total Focus.” Your environment is so important and if you look at B-performers or C-producers, they really don’t pay a lot of attention to their environment. And so they get very distracted.

There’s lots of noises, their phones are going off. Maybe there’s news in the background. Maybe there’s messy environments all around them. Maybe there’s toxic people.

What I’m suggesting to you is the second piece of technology to really x100 your productivity is this. Install environments of Tight Bubbles of Total Focus. The way I run my work life on certain days, I am very hard to reach. And I challenge you with great love and respect. Be very hard to reach during key times of your week.

I mean I see a lot of people and it’s not judging them, it’s just observing them. Every time their phone rings they check it or they have these loud notifications, so they’re constantly being distracted. And we know what the research says. The research says, we spend 21 hours a day in distraction. We spend, and it takes 21 minutes to refocus your focus after you’ve been distracted.

So if you are being distracted by notifications, checking your phone, checking your Twitter feed, checking your Facebook feed, looking on Instagram, checking all the different platforms, that is gonna destroy your focus.

So the second piece of technology is create these tight bubbles of total focus and the way I do it, is I have certain days that I label as creative days and on those creative days, I actually go device free, and on those days I’m very hard to find. And on those days I’m in total solitude. And on those days I go to certain places. I call them my Menlo labs just like Edison had his Menlo lab.

And these places are very minimalist and there’s no one there and that’s where I do my best work. So install these tight bubbles of total focus and create these Menlo labs where you’re sorta, you’re completely distraction free. And then you will find your brain will drop from the beta state into the alpha state. Where you will do your best work and get your best ideas.

The next piece of technology that will help you create exponential productivity in your work life so you truly impact the world around you, is choose your peer group really really well. There’s a lot of excellent science coming out and a lot of excellent research coming out that says the number one way to improve your behavior is to surround yourself with a peer group or social circle of people who are also playing at the level you wanna be playing at. So if you wanna be a high performer in terms of your productivity, populate your life with high performers.

Now here’s the science behind it. In the brain we have something called the mirror neuron system of the brain and it dates back to thousands of years ago when we were living on the savanna. And this mirror neuron system allowed us to model the behavior of the dominant people in the tribe.

So if someone figured out a tool or figured out fire or a better way to survive, subconsciously this system in the brain allowed us to model the behavior. And I think this is pretty fascinating information. Now here we are in the modern world and what happens? Subconsciously we are modeling the behavior of the people we spend most of our time with. And so if you are around victims, you will start behaving like a victim.

If you’re around people who are mediocre performers, you will subconsciously start behaving like them. If you’re around people who gossip, who are not A players, who do not produce very much, you will subconsciously, because of the mirror neuron system in the brain start performing like them.