Transcript of Robin Sharma’s talk on How Billionaires Set Giant Goals
Listen to the MP3 Audio: How Billionaires Set Giant Goals by Robin Sharma
TRANSCRIPT:
Robin Sharma – Author
Hi, it’s Robin Sharma, author of the Leader Who Had No Title, founder of The Titan Academy, and welcome with this Mastery Session called How Billionaires Set Giant Goals.
So when I look at my social media feeds a lot of people are asking me “Robin, can you walk us through how the best in the world set and achieve great goals?”
And so I’d love to do that for you and here is a sequence. You don’t have to do it 100%, but part-time performance leads to part-time results. And if you do do it 100%, you are going to get some phenomenal results in your pro life, in your financial life, in your physical life, in your private life, and in your spiritual life.
So let’s get going. Starting point number one, step one in the billionaire goal setting process, and you probably know, just to give you some context, I’ve worked with many of the most successful and celebrity billionaires on the planet for going into my third decade, and I’ve worked very intimately helping them scale their empires, get their financial lives to the next level, and also calibrate their lifestyles, because a lot of these people are very successful in business, but their personal lives are a mess.
And their interior lives are even more difficult, because they haven’t spent a lot of time refilling the well, building self love, working on their physical fitness, dialing in their nutrition, doing things like meditation, a lot of these people journaling is new to them, a weekly nature walk is new to them, my proprietary protocol the second wind workout is new to them, the 60 minute student ritual that I teach is new to them.
So literally they’re great in business, but the rest of their life is often, let’s just say in a state of acute deterioration. So I’ve worked a lot of the most successful on the planet in their business lives. I’ve taught them this goal setting process. I’ve worked with a lot of the most successful firms on the planet, you know whether it’s a Starbucks, a General Electric, I’ve worked with The Coca-Cola Company senior leaders there, Microsoft, IBM, Nike, FedEx, it just goes on and on, and I only mention that to simply say this process has worked very well, it’s been fire proofed and battle tested with many of the most successful business leaders in the world, and also some of the artists and athletes that I work with.
And it doesn’t just apply to your business life, I want to make that very clear. It’ll apply to every core area. So really this is the goal setting process for empire makers, whatever your empire looks like. It could be financial empire, a business empire, a creative empire, a spiritual empire. Let’s go.
Starting point number one of this process: Clarity is the DNA of mastery. So if you look at the titans of business, the true leaders in finance — these people literally will say look at my charts. If you look at a great military leader, you look at a great athlete, in a world of superficiality they have shifted to massive granularity, so they know in intimate detail exactly what their future timeline will look like.
Why? Because clarity breeds and builds and is the DNA of mastery. You want to have a very clear vision of what your future is going to look like.
So one of my clients is a company called 1-800-GOT-JUNK, and the founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK Brian Scudamore is a fan of my book, Leadership Wisdom From The Monk Who Solid his Ferrari. And he said “Robin”, he came to one of my live events on leadership and elite performance, and he said, “Robin, when I read that book what I did was I literally created”, his words, “a painted picture “of what I wanted 1-800-GOT-JUNK to look like. The kind of people that would be there, literally what the rooms at the office would look like. Before it even happened, what the finances would look like, what the brand would stand for, a complete painted picture of 1-800-GOT-JUNK.”
Now, we have a lot of science coming out that that kind of, with a lot of the work of positive psychologists will tell you. An intimate clear written picture of what your future will look like recodes and recalibrates your subconscious mind. And then you start blocking out the noise and you listen to the signal, because every day we’re allowing in thousands of influences. It could be the air conditioner, it could be the noise in the background, it could be the cell phone, and when you know in intimate detail what your future will look like, then you automatically, subconsciously as well as consciously, can say no to the important, so you say a giant yes to the few things that are most important.
You’ve heard me share this before, Confucius said it so well, the person who chases two rabbits, catches neither. And so what I’m encouraging you to do is this exercise before you go to sleep tonight. Let’s make this very tactical. I call it The 100 Year Timeline, on a single page, a single page, from where you now are, 100 years out into your ideal future.
I want you every single milestone on a single line, to say here’s where I now am, here’s what’s going to happen next week, next month, next quarter, next year, three years, five years, ten years, 25 years, 50 years, 75 years, 100 years, until you have a 100 year timeline.
On the other side of the paper, and we do this at Personal Mastery Academy, and one of my friends who has founded a company called Spiritual Gangster told me, this one exercise transformed him and the results that he experienced 12 months after being in the room at Personal Mastery Academy.
And on the other side of the piece of paper, with crayons, so you tap into your part of the brain responsible for creativity, your right brain, with crayons draw out your ideal family life one year away, draw out your business life one year away, draw out your adventure life one year out into the future, draw out your financial life, draw out your material life, literally on a page with crayons, so you’re not thinking, because here’s, I think, a needle-moving insight, world class comes from instinct versus intelligence. You get your best ideas when you get out of your thinking.
And just to give you some neuroscience, the seat of reasoning is the prefrontal cortex, but there’s a phenomenon I teach in my live events called transient hypofrontality. This is the secret of genius. Geniuses don’t get their ideas for Uber, Amazon, the electric bulb, Tesla, Shakespeare, the polio vaccination, SpaceX. Great ideas don’t come from the intellect, they don’t come from the neocortex reasoning and thinking, all great heroes, and great inventors, and great creators dialed into something deeper.
When you get out of your neocortex through solitude and my life structure that I teach called The Tight Bubble Of Total Focus, and when you get away from distraction, and you immerse yourself in deep creativity and creation, and you find your laboratory, or what I call your Menlo Park, like Edison had his Menlo Park, which was with the wilderness away from the world. What happens? The prefrontal cortex gets silent, and it’s called transient, transient which means temporary, transient hypo, small frontality.
The neocortex, the seat in your brain of thinking actually shuts down for a short period of time. This is profound information, and will confirm your brain is built for genius. But if you don’t do the right things, you’re not going to be able to allow the genius to see the light of day.
I’ve spent a lot of time understanding, researching this, building out calibrated models on transient hypo-frontality, so you can understand the genius lies in your brain right now.
When your brain goes into transient hypofrontality, the prefrontal cortex shuts down, and you actually, your brain finally becomes quiet. If you’re like most people, your brain is going all day long, you’re never going to get to genius, because you’re caught up in thinking, not your instinct.
Your brainwaves, when your prefrontal cortex shut down temporarily, go from beta, which is everyday, down to alpha, and perhaps even down to theta. You drop into a state, the first time I ever read it was about 20 years ago, one of my favorite books, Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, University of Chicago, the subtitle of the book is The Psychology of Optimal Experience. He found the best hockey players, Gretzky, remember what Gretzky said, “I go to where the puck is going, not to where the puck is.”
The great athletes, the great inventors, the great writers, when you do a yoga class, and your thinking stops, it’s because you have dropped into a state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called Flow. When the Navy Seals do amazing things on their military missions, we are now finding through research, they are in a state of flow. They’re not in there thinking, they’re in the deeper state of genius that lies within every one of us. This is revolutionary information. It means that every child, man, woman, entrepreneur, creative person, firefighter, police officer, pizza maker, taxi driver has genius within them, but very few people have been taught this information that you’re getting for free in this Mastery session.
And obviously, if you want to go deeper, you’ve gotta be in the room at Personal Mastery Academy, my live event, and I’ll tell you at the end how you can get in the room. The key point I want to offer to you here is when your brain drops into transient hypofrontality, and when you reach that state of flow, your brain actually starts to create a pharmacy of mastery, you release dopamine, the inspirational neurotransmitter, so your brain starts feeling like it’s alive. It’s like your brain on steroids. That’s not a good term. It’s like your brain is supercharged, you release serotonin, the pleasure neurotransmitter, you feel happy, you release oxytocin, and your brain becomes next level superhuman.
You have this within you. I need to repeat that. We don’t learn this in school, we don’t learn this in business, we don’t learn this in a lot of courses, live events. Transient hypofrontality is the DNA of genius. A lot of great geniuses, Edison, Einstein, Tolstoy, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sergei Brin, the Google guys, Zuckerberg, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, Mother Teresa, a lot of the great geniuses, they didn’t know this process, because now science is catching up with what the philosophers have said for thousands of years.
We have greatness within us, and now because neuroscience, and research, and psychoneuroimmunology, and the new emerging field of epigenetics, which confirms your thinking turns on certain genes, which affect your immunity.
Now we believe in positive thinking, because positive psychology is now giving us some hard data on the value of journaling and the self-fulfilling prophecy, and things that I talked about in The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, 20 years ago that a lot of people were dismissing me. And I wrote a book called Leadership Wisdom From The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, 20 years ago, and I go paycheck to purpose, link your income to a larger cause. Turn down your ego and find this mighty mission to give your life over to, find that purpose.
People in business were laughing at me then, and I’m not saying I’m a pioneer, I’m not saying that, what I’m simply suggesting to you is I was sharing these things in the wilderness, and so were other people in the field of personal mastery and leadership.
And now because science and data wonderfully is backing it up through research, society now embraces positive thinking, society now embraces epigenetics, society now embraces a culture of caring and compassion, society now builds enterprises like Whole Foods, and Tom shoes, one of our clients, and loves companies like that, where there’s giving back.
Society now understands you know what, you can be a great leader, but go take your nature walk. Society is now talking about mindfulness, and meditation, like at Google. It’s amazing what’s happening in the world today, phenomenal, I’m just suggesting to you, there were people thousands of years ago who were onto the greatness, and the hero inside of you right now.
And the beautiful thing is, neuroscience, for example, is confirming, yeah you have a genius level brain, but you’ve gotta work it, and you’ve gotta hardwire it, and you’ve gotta re-engineer it through doing the right things every day.
And this is not the right episode to share exactly the right habits. I’ve done previous episodes on it, like The Tight Bubble Of Total Focus ritual, The 20/20/20 Formula, based on my five AM club concept that I’ve been teaching for so many years, The 60 Second Student, Second Wind Workout, The Two Massage Protocol, all of those daily rituals will change the way your brain works.
When you change the way your brain works, you automatically start to re-hardwire your performance to world class. So you want to just understand the brain is a muscle, you don’t have the brain that you were born with, you have the brain that you’ve earned right now.
Whoa, that was a lot of information on the first point about how billionaires achieve goals, but I hope it’s been valuable to you. Let’s move along pretty swiftly now.
The second part of this process is once you know your 100 year timeline, then I work with my one on one clients, the billionaires and the icons, to reverse engineer, reverse sequence the next 100 years. So you literally say, okay, here’s where I want to be at the end in my legacy, because 100 years, maybe you don’t have 100 years, having said that, Ray Kurzweil over at Google, who’s really hacking the longevity, said live long enough, so you live forever, and a lot of people are saying, if you live another 35 years, with the technology, and medicines, and supplementation, you’re going to be able to live for hundreds of years. And if that’s a disruptive idea, great, because that’s my job, and that’s what the science is starting to show us through epigenetics, and supplementation, and the new advances in medical technology.
Larger point, you’ve got 100 year timeline, reverse sequence it, reverse engineer it back to today. So you just say, here’s what needs to happen 75 years out, 50 years out, et cetera, et cetera. In a world of superficiality, really build in some granularity. That’s a gargantuan competitive advantage.
In a world where a lot of business people, a lot of leaders, a lot of your friends, what needs to happen next year for this to be the best year of your professional life, your personal life, your financial life, your physical life, your spiritual life, your love life? I don’t know. Most people spend a lot more time on their summer vacations, a lot more time flipping through the social media versus architecting a world class life.
You want to be one of those rare air few, you know my brain tattoo, to have the results only 5% of the population have, you’ve got to be willing to do what 95% of the population are unwilling to do. And one of those things, don’t be superficial, don’t live a superficial life, don’t have a superficial game plan.
Fireproof yourself against superficiality, and really understand this concept I’ve been teaching called granularity. When I work with the NBA athletes who come into my rooms at my events, when I work with the titans, the billionaires, the celebrity CEOs you read about, these people are anything but superficial. They are granular.
And you can call them obsessed, you can call them obsessive, you can call them weird, freaks, cooks, misfits, so what, call them what you want, that’s just a label. I’m reporting on reality. These are people who will say, let me show you my battle plan for the next 80 days, and the next five years, and they will walk you through the reverse sequencing I’m sharing with you in step number two of How The Billionaires Achieve Giant goals.
Step number three: the morning review and the nightly debrief. Five minutes, front end of your day. While the rest of the world is asleep, I’ve shot another, a previous mastery session on how the best in the world run their mornings, and I deconstruct The Five AM Club, that I’ve been teaching for so long, I first wrote about it in The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, and the 20/20/20 formula, which is the base of The Five AM Club morning ritual.
But during that morning routine, in the second pocket of reflection, all you need to do, five minutes, look at your game plan, and then before you go to sleep, ask yourself this question: Did I live out my plan for today? Your days are your life in miniature. All you need to do is not worry about the next week, the next month, the next year, forget about that, that’s a waste of time. Own your day.
Your days are your life in miniature. As you live each day, so you craft the rest of your life, and the days slip into weeks, the weeks become months, the months become years, before you know it you’ve lived a legendary life, because all you did was dial into gorgeous, brilliant, productive, creative, loving, healthy, soulful days. Your days are the pockets and instruments of genius, get those right, your life will take care of itself.
Step number four: hardwiring strengthening scenarios. So now you have your 100 year timeline, now you’ve reversed engineered it into a battle plan with granularity and details on exactly what needs to happen, because clarity breeds mastery. Step number three is you have locked in the morning habit of a review of your goals, and a nightly debrief around how you executed around them, because with better awareness you’ll make better choices the next day, with better choices, you’ll get new results.
So what do you do? Step number four is you lock and load. You’re like a Navy Seal, you’ve got the mission plan, now you execute it.
Here’s the key, the more you do difficult things, the more you’ll be brilliant at doing difficult things. You get better at what you practice. If you complain, you’re going to be Picasso level at complaining. If you eat bad food, in terms of your nutritional plan every day, you’re literally going to hardwire the neuro-circuits so that you become Roger Federer level at eating bad food.
If you’re a victim, or a toxic person, or what people call a drama mama, and that applies to men and women, and if you do it every day for 10,000 hours, thank you Anders Ericsson who did the research on the 10,000 hour rule, you’re going to be F1 champion driver level performance at being a drama mama.
If you cut corners in your craft at work every day you are literally hardwiring in and practicing, and if you practice it over ten years, 10,000 hours in total, you’re going to be Mozart level, Shakespeare level, Elon Musk level, Richard Branson level, Steve Wozniak level, Shaq level, Kobe level at that, practicing mediocrity.
You will get brilliant at what you practice every day, consciously and subconsciously. Step number four in this process that I teach to billionaires and the Fortune 500 firms that I work with, when I work with their leadership teams, is you want to hardwire in strengthening scenarios.
And all that means is on your game plan, just like a Navy Seal, like a SWAT team, and I mention that because those are people who are BIW at execution, because lives are at stake in a military scenario, in a military, you know the word I’m talking about here, in a military campaign.
And so you want to look at your plan, and then you want to say wow, this is going to be difficult today, but you do it. And if you do it every single day, here’s what’s going to happen, the power that you gave to those difficult things that you’ve been procrastinating around, you take your power back. This is how you build power.
You say, here are the things I’ve been avoiding, now I must do them, because these are things that I do want to do, and they will get me closer to where I want to be 100 years from today. And the more you do it, the more you start to set up these neuro-circuits in your brain. These neuro-circuits are a lot like a grassy meadow, if you do it every day the meadow becomes a trail, if you walk the trail every day, through your daily behavior around these key pursuits, the grassy meadow turns into the trail, and the trail becomes a road, and if you do it every single day 3.44 hours a day for 10,000 hours, which is the starting point, the necessary work you need to do to reach world class performance, what happens?
The meadow turns into a trail, the trail becomes a road, and guess what neuroscientists will tell you? What you do every day consistently over time becomes a super highway in terms of your neuro-circuitry. And that’s why Gretzky could see where the puck was going versus where the puck was. That’s why Beckham could bend the ball like Beckham. That’s why Steven King can write the way Steven King writes. That’s why Jean-Michel Basquiat could create the art he did.
That’s why Kevin Systrom over at Instagram, that’s why Travis Kalanick over at Uber, that’s why Zuckerberg can see around corners. It’s not because they’re gifted, it’s because they practiced just a few pursuits, they built the neuro super highway, they literally had otherworldly powers, because of what their brain could see, and your behavior always follows what’s going on in your brain.
Fifth and final point is deliberate rewarding. So when I work with the billionaires, when they achieve the win, I say, what are you going to do to celebrate? And that creates fire, that creates momentum, that creates joy. Some of them say, oh I’m going to get another Ferrari. No judgment, if that’s what they want, I am there as their private advisor to help them get that. Some of them say, I want a faster Gulfstream, some of them say, I’m going to go take a vacation in the Caribbean. Whatever is going to make you happy.
If you’ve eaten super clean for seven days, then say, I’m going to go to my favorite scone shop, or I’m going to go have an ice cream cone. You know, the bow too tightly strung is easily broken, says one of the proverbs. Balance is a gorgeous thing.
So be monomaniacal in your execution around your high value targets, your HVTs, your mission plan, but also, build in some rewards, and that’s going to send a gorgeous message to your conscious and your subconscious mind that hey, this daily practice of execution around my deliverables is a beautiful thing. And you create this thing called momentum.
In The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, I went back and I saw this recently, I think there’s a whole chapter on momentum, and you become like this, I love skiing, you start off small, but as you go down the slope you pick up momentum. A lot of people say, Robin, where do I start, I want to start a new business, I want to become a better artist, I want to find the love of my life, I want to be a world-class creative, I want to multiply my financial life, where do I start? You just start, you just start. There’s great power in the start.
And when you start, life starts supporting you. Let me end on a little bit of philosophy.
Life helps those who help themselves. You’ve gotta make the first start to scale Everest. You’ve gotta make the first phone call, before you become a world-class salesperson. You’ve gotta do your first painting before you become the Van Gogh of your field right now. You’ve gotta eat the first avocado if you understand the value of avocados in clean eating.
You’ve got to start that first positive thought to recalibrate the neuro-circuits of negativity. You’ve gotta start with that first act of love to let go of maybe the anger you used to have, and being a cranky person on your rise to being an epic person.
So I hope this episode has been informational, educational, as you know victims love entertainment, leaders love education, leaders love learning, the ordinary performers, they just love leisure. And so you being here with me right now in this mastery session, I just want to say, bravo. I want to say, good on you, I want to say, you do have world-class within you, and what you are doing is so smart by investing your time in your learning, in a world where the majority is spending so much time unlearning, in distraction, in entertainment, in gossiping, in criticizing, in being busy being busy.
You are one of the rare air few who are calibrating your craft, dialing in your mindset, working on your heartset, elevating your healthset, and nurturing your soulset, and to me, in my books, that makes you very special. If you wanna spread this message, I’d be very grateful, I do these podcasts with love in my heart, and I just want to give, and I want to be an instrument of service, I do them for free, if I’ve delivered great value, share it with three of your friends, three of your teammates, three or your family members over the next 60 minutes so we spread the message. The world needs more heroes, why wait for them when we can become a hero.
Secondly, I’m always asked even now, Robin, what are the details, how can we get into your live events? Pretty simple, if you want to get to Personal Mastery Academy, if you want to get to my flagship event, The Titan Summit, just go over to robinsharma.com, you’re going to find all the details there.
And finally, there’s huge buzz around the world for something that I’ve waited 20 years to do. I’ve been asked for over two decades, Robin, could you make a program every month and deliver the content online at a budget-friendly cost for everyday heroes?
And so I have launched with a lot of love and a lot of sweat equity, and I’ve got a great team who works with me, Robin Sharma Nation, and this is an absolutely world-class program. There’s nothing like it available today, and I coach you over the net, online, every single month on exponential productivity, transforming your Mindset, opening up your Heartset, because you know you can’t rise to world-class if you’re angry, or sad, or stuck in the past. I will help you calibrate a fantastic Healthset, so you have energy, because you know energy is more valuable than intelligence, and one of the ways to own the game is just don’t die, outlive your industry peers, and then finally, I’ll work with you on building a great company, building an epic career, and most importantly, living a life that makes history, because no matter how long you get to live, life is really short.
Do not postpone being the bigness, the love, the creativity, the productivity, the human being that you were designed to be, and we both know that you have the potential to become.
I’d love to help you. If this doesn’t sound right for you, no problem, use this content in this Mastery Session, and just run with it. If you would like my help as a mentor every month, go on over to robinsharma.com, and find the information on Robin Sharma Nation, or you can go directly to RobinSharmaNation.com, and just remember, I might not know you, I love you.
I send you all green lights, it’s your turn, this is your time, go be genius. I’ll see you in the next Mastery Session. Lots of love, bye, bye.