Once you’ve identified what’s true for you with a reasonable degree of accuracy, your next task is to fully and completely accept the truth. This includes accepting the long-term consequences of your predictions.
Consider your physical body. Is it healthy, fit, and strong? Or is it unhealthy, flabby, and weak? What do you predict will happen if you continue with your current health habits? Do you accept the truth of where you’ll likely end up? Are you willing to live with those consequences?
What about your finances? Are you creating such an abundance of value that you’ll never know scarcity? Or are you headed for the poorhouse? What do you honestly expect to happen if your current financial patterns continue? Do you accept the complete truth of your situation?
The closer your internal model of reality matches actual reality, the more capable you become. Greater accuracy means greater fitness for life as a human being. With an accurate map, you’re more likely to make sound decisions that will take you in the direction of your desires. With an inaccurate map, you’re more likely to experience setbacks and frustration.
Total clarity is a rarity. When you pursue a particular career, you’ll never know if a different one might have turned out better. When you’re in a relationship, you can never be certain that a more compatible partner isn’t right around the corner. Whenever you make one decision, you’ll never know what would have happened if you made a different choice.
The worst part is that even when you do feel certain, that’s still no guarantee you’re correct. You’ve been wrong before, haven’t you? History says it’s a safe bet that there’s something you think you know right now that will later prove to be false.
Prediction is the mechanism by which you learn from experience, thereby enabling you to discover what is true. As you observe any new situation or event, one of two things can happen: either the experience will meet your expectations, or it won’t. When an experience meets your expectations, your mental model of reality remains intact. But when an experience violates your expectations, your mind must update its model of reality to fit the new information. This is how you learn from experience and discover new truths.
Your predictive powers are extremely flexible. When you learn something new, your mind tries to generalize from the experience. It favors storage of general patterns instead of specific details. Your ability to recall the finer points will be fuzzy, but you’ll normally have a strong recollection of high-level patterns. For example, you can understand written language, but you don’t recall when and where you learned each word. You know what certain foods taste like, but you don’t remember every meal.
Perception is the most basic aspect of truth. If you want to improve some part of your life, you have to look at it first. For example, if you want to know how your relationship is doing, a good place to start is to ask yourself: How do I feel about this relationship? What parts are working well? What parts need improvement? Ask your partner the same questions and compare your answers. Figuring out where you stand will help you decide what changes you’d like to make.
Perception is a key component of personal growth because we react to what we perceive to be true. Facing the truth of your situation causes you to trigger new desires. When you step on the scale and see that you weigh more than you’d like, you think, I want to lose weight. When you get clear about what you don’t want, you gain clarity about what you do want. These new desires can help drive you in a positive new direction, but nothing will change until you first admit that you’d like it to.
Truth is the first principle of personal development. We primarily grow as human beings by discovering new truths about ourselves and our reality. You’ll certainly learn some important lessons no matter how you live, but you can accelerate your growth tremendously by consciously seeking truth and deliberately turning away from falsehood and denial.
Genuine personal growth is honest growth. You can’t take shortcuts through the land of make-believe. Your first commitment must be to discover and accept new truths, no matter how difficult or unpleasant the consequences may be. You can’t solve problems if you don’t admit they exist. How can you achieve a fulfilling career if you won’t admit that your current job is wrong for you? How can you improve your relationship situation if you refuse to accept that you’ve been feeling empty and alone? How can you better your health if you won’t accept that your current habits don’t serve you?
5 Permissions to Multiply Your Time Rory Vaden
20150106
About This Book
You are about to radically alter the way you think about time.
And if you’re like the Multipliers you’re going to read about in this book, then chances are you’re (justifiably) protective about what you allow to enter into your mind and whom you allow yourself to learn from.
The ideas in this book come from a variety of disciplines, but one thing you can be sure of is that they have been tested through the fire of real-life situations—including my (Rory Vaden) own. Like most business books you will read, my writing includes original data from polling and statistical sampling that we have done, as well as through synthesizing existing publications and academic research. At Southwestern Consulting, however, while we do appreciate academic research, we pride ourselves on being practitioners, and on providing strategies that are of real value and not just a pithy pitch.
Imagine if every single person in your organization, team or family were a Multiplier.
What if each person on the team was doing exactly his or her next most Significant thing at precisely the best time?
What if you reduced the amount of time being spent on insignificant activities?
What if you completely got rid of everything that didn’t need to be done in the first place?
What if you used a system like Infusionsoft that automated everything that was happening over and over again?
What if every task was delegated to the perfect person with just the precise skill set and the appropriate decision-making ability to handle the challenge at hand?
What if your entire team had the perfect mix of patience and action?
What would that look like for you? Can you even imagine how big, awesome, fun and profitable that would be? What kind of impact on the world that would be?
You would truly be multiplying.
That would be what we call a Procrastinate on Purpose culture—or a POP culture for short.
Work double-time part-time now so that later you can have full-time free time.
A priority is any task that rises to such a level of Significance that it is beyond the convenience of what your schedule allows. You force it to be the first focus.
Until you accomplish your next most Significant priority, everything else in life is a distraction.
The Focus Funnel is a tool to help ensure that—as much as possible—you’re always spending your time on your next most Significant thing. The critical question you have to always be asking yourself is: “Is what I’m doing right now the next most Significant use of my time?”
Once a task passes through all the checkpoints of the Focus Funnel, you can have confidence that it is the right thing for you to do and that it must be done at that moment.
Temporarily ignore the small stuff so that you can Concentrate on the big stuff.
UNEXPECTED FINDINGS
We have a very emotional fear of letting other people down that causes us to sacrifice our priorities for other people’s.
“Concentrate” serves both as a great verb to remind us to take action and also as a meaningful noun that represents the skill of quickly identifying what the next most Significant step will be.
Your highest obligation to other people is to be your highest self.
Most Multipliers have a general distaste for e-mail and view it as a way of “organizing other people’s priorities” rather than as a tool to help them focus on what is Significant.
As a Multiplier, it is your obligation to spend time on things today that create more opportunity for those around you tomorrow.
