Organize Tomorrow Today

Albert Einstein came up with a popular (and fascinating) list of what he called the five levels of intelligence:

1. Smart

2. Intelligent

3. Brilliant

4. Genius

5. Simple

The step beyond genius? To be able to see beyond the chaos and complications of everyday life and identify the most important solutions to the most important problems.

Simplicity.¹

You don’t have to have superhuman intellectual powers to take away a powerful message from Einstein’s theory. The key is learning how to choose wisely.

We’ve talked about the scientific definition of “channel capacity,” and how it relates to the human mind. But a scientist determining how many numbers a person can remember is very different from crawling on your belly in the mud for miles, pushing yourself to the physical and mental breaking point and beyond. Let us tell you about Bobby Gassoff.

Bobby grew up the son of defenseman Bob Gassoff of the National Hockey League’s St. Louis Blues. Bob was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident before Bobby was born. Bobby was a hockey natural, just like his dad, and went to the University of Michigan on a hockey scholarship. In 1994, he was an important member of the team that won the NCAA championship.

After college, Bobby started on the traditional hockey prospect road, playing in the minor leagues with the hope of working his way up to the NHL. But not long into that process, he hung up his skates and set his sights on something much more important than hockey. He started an intense training regimen with the goal of joining the Navy SEALs—one of the most elite fighting units in the world. When Bobby got to BUDS—basic underwater demolition training—he was in peak physical and mental condition. So was everybody else in his class. They were the “best of the best” from the armed forces.

But during “hell week,” these trainees would run the equivalent of three full marathons while carrying hundreds of pounds of gear. They would crawl through the mud and sand, get dropped miles out to sea, and have to swim back—or drown. And they would do it all soaking wet, freezing cold, and on less than thirty minutes of sleep per night. This regimen would separate the toughest from the rest.

By the third day of hell week, the skin around Bobby’s armpits and groin had been worn away by wet sand. He was completely exhausted, and he still had four days to go. That night, one of his teammates—a Navy pentathlete and the best runner and swimmer in the group—rang the bell and quit.

Despite the nearly overwhelming urge to follow his teammate over to the bell and ring out, Bobby decided he would narrow his mind to a single focus point. He would concentrate on just one thing—the very next step—because the thought of what was coming the next day and the day after that was just too overwhelming to consider.

When the trainees finally got a few minutes to wolf down some food in between activities, the instructors would walk among the exhausted men and call out the laundry list of brutal things that were scheduled for the rest of the day—a tactic designed to root out trainees who could be distracted or disheartened.

A six-mile run.

Two hours of surf training.

Three hours on the obstacle course.

An eight-mile boat haul.

Bobby kept his “one step” focus, survived hell week, and graduated from SEAL training. Of the 240 men to start training, he was one of 24 to make it, and he was one of only 2 to graduate as an officer. He was—and is—one of the toughest people on the planet, and to this day, he still operates by the principles that got him through.

If that’s the case for somebody like Bobby, what does it mean for the rest of us? As we touched on in the previous chapter, one of the most common traps to fall into in business and life is to try to focus on too much and lose focus on the really important things. People have a tendency to overcommit to others and to themselves. Doing so not only causes underperformance but also has a tremendously negative impact on confidence. When you commit to doing too much, you inevitably let other people down and unfortunately begin to send a message that you cannot be trusted.

It usually starts as something quite harmless but unfortunately snowballs quickly. It could be something as simple as telling a colleague you will help out with a task or even telling a loved one you will be home by a certain time. The next thing you know, you have become overwhelmed by your own mountain of responsibilities and you haven’t left time for that colleague or loved one. You never intended to let someone else down but it just got away from you.

The problem is that this becomes habitual to the point where you know even when you are committing to certain things that there is a high likelihood you won’t follow through when the time comes. This is a prime example of not choosing wisely. If you are trying to beat channel capacity, you will always lose. When you overload the system with requirements, the same thing happens to your mind that happens with an outdated computer running heavy-duty software. You start to freeze, and decisions get harder to make.

As we keep saying, you can’t beat channel capacity.

In this chapter, we’ll talk about learning how to choose wisely and pick that one step that is the next most important one in the progression. You’ll learn how to attack that one step with your full attention, and then move on to the next—instead of overcommitting your way into mediocrity.

Doing it all—or being great at it all—should never be the goal.

Think about what the average office environment looks like. You’re sitting at your desk, working on a document that has to get out the door by the end of the week. You hear your email chime, and you see the notification at the top of the screen, telling you that the message is from one of your colleagues. You click away from the document and scan the email, then type a quick response. Then you click back to where you left off on the document, and pick up your work again.

That might sound normal, or harmless, but every time you turn into one of those attention cul-de-sacs, you’re making your mind work really hard to get up to speed on the new task, then making it work some more as you click back to where you were on the previous one. And that’s a problem—remember channel capacity—because it’s going to compromise your ability to do your best on the really important tasks.

Is it the end of the world if it happens once? Of course not. But does it ever happen just once? The reality is that we’re always answering phones, looking at text messages, sending emails, or dividing our attention by surfing the web while we talk on the phone to a client. We’re surrounded by distractions. The fact that multitasking is difficult for our brains doesn’t mean you won’t be able to juggle the balls and accomplish those other tasks. It just means that, if you constantly divide your attention, trying to do more than one thing at the same time, you’re going to use a lot more energy and time to get things done than you need to. You’re going to compromise your attention and miss some of the finer details.

You don’t have to look very far to find examples to illustrate the same point at the organizational level. We see it all the time. A company will call a big meeting—often off-site—to get everybody together so the top execs can reveal what the new corporate strategy is. Then, the group gets presented with a laundry list of goals for the coming quarter or financial year. There are eight or twelve “metrics” and “measures,” and it isn’t usually clear which ones are most important. Because it’s “important” and everybody is already together, the meeting is almost always scheduled for all or most of the day. But the reality is that everybody in the room has reached channel capacity by the first break.

Worse yet, even if the people in the audience understand the metrics and measurements and know which ones apply to them personally, they usually don’t know how to prioritize them. They don’t know which ones are the most important for them personally.

It happens the same way in the sports world. “Winning” is the same kind of top-level goal as “profit,” but all of the additional responsibilities can get an athlete spinning his or her wheels. Imagine what happens to a college quarterback who gets picked in the first round of the NFL draft. He signs a large contract, and the team is expecting him to come in and (eventually) become the face of the franchise.

When minicamps start in the summer before his first season, the quarterback has a huge amount of work to do. He has to learn the playbook and integrate himself into the team. He has to show not only that he’s willing to work hard and learn, but also that he can become a leader. In addition, the team expects him to make numerous public appearances and make himself available to the media. Not to mention the increase in expectations and demands from family and friends. It’s really three or four different jobs in one. And we’re talking about a player who is twenty-one or twenty-two years old, who has just been handed more money than most people will make in their entire career.

There’s a lot to focus on, and there are a lot of ways to go off the tracks. Is it really a surprise that the players who narrowed their focus to a few critical goals and tasks—and basically operated as sports hermits for their first few seasons—are the ones who have had the most success?

Leading up to the 1998 NFL draft, Tennessee quarterback Peyton Manning was considered to be one of the top prospects in all of college football. Manning was considered to be intelligent and hard working, but his arm strength wasn’t considered to be the strongest in the draft. Even though the Colts’ scouts favored another quarterback, Colts general manager Ed Polian decided to pick Manning. Manning hit the ground running after the draft, focusing on one thing: burying himself at the Colts’ team facility to learn the playbook. He was the Colts’ starter from the first game of his rookie season, and he would go on to become one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time.

You are more like Peyton Manning than you think. He is not the most gifted athlete on the field, and other quarterbacks are stronger and faster and younger. Yet he is a consistent winner.

He walks up to the line of scrimmage with the play that has been called from the sidelines. Once the ball is snapped, he’s going to have things coming at him from all angles. Throughout the day some things will go his way and some things won’t. There may even be a time or two when he gets slammed to the turf and has to pick himself back up and go at it again.

You walk into your office and, chances are, things start immediately flying at you from all directions. Throughout your day, you’ll feel ahead sometimes and behind other times. There may even be a time or two when you feel like a 350-pound lineman has just planted you into the dirt. Just like Manning, you have to find the strength to get back to your feet and re-engage.

Peyton Manning has been able to do it year after year after year because he chooses wisely and does one thing exceptionally well. He is relentless with his preparation—and you can be, too.

Choosing wisely is difficult because it is counterintuitive. It is much easier to put a laundry list together of all the possible things you need to get done each day than it is to actually choose your one most important task and then master it.

Choosing wisely is difficult because it is counterintuitive. It is easier to put a list together of all the possible things you need to get done than it is to actually choose your one most important task and then master it.

INFORMATION ADDICTION

Think about that big off-site meeting we were just talking about a few paragraphs ago. At many of those meetings, organizations schedule training seminars to get big groups of employees “up to speed” on new techniques and strategies. If you’ve worked in corporate America for any amount of time, you’re very familiar with the kind of training session we’re talking about.

Now, you’ll never hear us say that innovation is a bad thing, or that training employees for the skills you want to reward is a wasted effort. But think about the way the vast majority of those corporate training sessions work. You’re handed a binder when you walk in (or directed to a URL to enter on your tablet). There’s somebody standing in the front of the room with a big screen, getting ready to motor through fifty PowerPoint slides.

The information could be great. But setting the group up to be force-fed for hours at a time quickly creates an overload situation. You reach channel capacity before you even get to the first break.

And when that break comes, what happens? Everybody surges from their seats to hit the snack table to eat, drink, stretch, and chitchat about how they can’t believe there’s three more hours of this to go.

The data is important. But it’s just washing over people who are too overwhelmed by the amount of information to be able to absorb it. All of that wasted information isn’t even the worst part of it. The dirty little secret that gets left out of the accounting? Saturating people with information actually paralyzes action. Think about it: when people are overwhelmed, they typically freeze. Self-doubt slows action.

Saturating people with information actually paralyzes action. Think about it: when people are overwhelmed, they typically freeze. Self-doubt slows action.

If you are a leader in your organization and are spearheading these meetings, you’re not just paying for the conference space, hotel rooms, and catering: you’re slowing your staff from doing their jobs. It can be a gigantic waste of time and money if you aren’t giving people something that they can, with confidence, use to make a positive, measurable change. By overloading people with information you are essentially causing them to overcommit. If you are working for an organization and attending the meetings, two of the crucial skills you probably aren’t learning are how to prioritize the information being poured into you and how to understand the point of equilibrium when it becomes actionable.

Technology makes some things better, but when it comes to this subject, it often makes things worse. We have the physical ability to “receive” way more information in the literal sense—thousands of emails in a folder, tens of thousands of documents on hard drive—than in the old days. But the technology doesn’t do much to prioritize that information or steer it where it needs to go. It’s like having an enormous fire hose at your disposal—one twenty times bigger than the normal size. But the hose shoots out so much water that when you try to hold onto the end you get flopped around like a fish.

CHOOSE WISELY

This isn’t some kind of anti-progress or anti-technology rant. Cutting-edge information is the lifeblood of business, and it is crucial to understand how to digest it.

We run dozens of corporate training seminars every year for a variety of different organizations. We go into every one of them with a customized game plan, but the overall goal is always the same. Step by step, we intersperse very controlled amounts of information relevant to the business with direct, hands-on practice in implementing that information.

Even though we want to teach everything we know, we work very hard to respect channel capacity. We’ll have discussions late into the evening about whether or not we should include that latest piece of information. In the end we usually finish the conversation with one of us saying, “When in doubt . . . delete.” It’s a lesson Jason learned from one of the greatest coaches of all time.

Dan Gable’s wrestling teams at the University of Iowa won 15 NCAA team titles from 1976 to 1997. Individually, his wrestlers won 45 national titles and 106 conference championships during that time. Before becoming a coach, Gable had one of the most dominant careers in the history of wrestling, going 117–1 during his time at Iowa State, and winning the Olympic gold medal in Munich in 1972 without giving up a single point. He knows something about elite performance, and what you have to do to achieve it.

Years ago, Coach Gable told Jason that one of the basic fundamentals of his approach to competing—both as an athlete and as a coach—was “choosing wisely.” To him, that meant not over-committing. Gable learned the importance of identifying the right “critical factor” and directing his energy toward moving it.

In Dan Gable’s world, not overcommitting allowed him to remain focused on what was most important, practicing every night until he was physically exhausted. It doesn’t have to be so dramatic in your world, but it’s important to understand the point.

At every seminar we teach, we introduce the attendees to the rules you’re learning about in this book. Once we’ve covered what they are and how they’re used, we ask everyone to choose just one thing they want to “nail”—to execute as completely as possible. Whether we’re talking about NFL players or business professionals, the ones who set the records and make All Pro are the ones who choose wisely and relentlessly focus on improvement one step at a time.

Does this have the potential to sound simplistic, or even goofy?

Sure.

THE POWER OF ONE

What Dan Gable instinctively knew at a young age—and what we try to establish in all of our work with athletes and businesspeople—is this: focusing on one primary task makes action much more realistic—one simple, positive change builds momentum and primes you for the next success.

Focusing on one primary task makes action much more realistic—one simple, positive change builds momentum and primes you for the next success.

One of our clients, a very successful small-business owner named Todd, came in with an ambitious plan for the coming year. He was determined to push his business to the next level financially. He had made plenty of good decisions in the past to get to where he wanted to be, but he was looking for that one push he needed to move to the next level.

After hearing about the concepts you’re learning here, Todd decided that the first step he was going to take was to commit to going through the one-hundred-second Mental Workout we teach in our seminars (which we will cover in Chapter 6). At precisely 5:30 every morning, he got up and found a quiet place to collect his thoughts—usually the kitchen table—before the hustle and bustle of his day started.

During the one minute and forty seconds it took him to do the Mental Workout, he went through a series of positive affirmations that reminded him of his strengths and goals. He visualized things he had done well the previous day and the steps he needed to take in the upcoming day to achieve his “win.” It sounds like something out of an infomercial, but a year of focusing on one positive improvement later, Todd had lost fifty pounds and doubled his business.

It isn’t magic. It is the natural byproduct of a phenomenon that social scientists have recognized for decades. Inertia is a powerful force in human behavior, but it only works when you use it in a focused way.

You need to choose, and choose wisely. Focusing on one thing promotes action. Learn to do less, but more often.

Focusing on one thing promotes action. Learn to do less, but more often.

We’ve all been trained to believe that we can do vastly more at one time than we really can. This notion is instilled in us in many ways: by school, by the books we read, by what we watch on television, and even by the devices we carry around with us. We’ll bet that many of you reading this book are “available” at least five more hours per day than you were ten years ago, simply because you have the ability to answer emails and text messages anytime—whether you’re sitting at breakfast with your family or getting ready to shut things down for the night.

In many ways, that accessibility has built artificial, unattainable expectations. If information moves twenty-four hours a day, you have to be ready to act on it twenty-four hours a day—or at least that is how it seems. When expectations change—and you hold yourself to that relentless, multitasking standard—you’re destined to fail, and you will likely be hard on yourself when you do.

That’s the first step in the perfectionist cycle. It’s a trap, and most people have found themselves stuck in it at some point. You try to do everything and be everything, then you fail at it and get discouraged. At some point, the discouragement makes you stop trying.

Another mistake—besides not focusing on the one primary goal you’ve chosen to pursue—can be choosing unrealistic goals. It’s especially common when it comes to the goals that will take a while to achieve. One client came to one of our coaching sessions and told us his plan was to lose forty pounds and compete in a marathon within twelve months in addition to trying to grow his business by 30 percent. He went through all the steps the self-help books tell you to take—including telling friends about his goal so he would stay accountable and setting up a $1,000 charitable donation “penalty” if he didn’t accomplish his goal. He changed his diet and cut 30 percent of his daily calories, and he started a punishing workout routine every morning at 5 a.m. and attempted to make multiple changes to how he ran his business.

We tried to redirect him to a more sustainable, long-term goal, but his mind was made up and he refused to believe in the power of channel capacity. Within six months, he had lost the weight and had signed up for the marathon. His business was showings signs of improvement but nothing was really showing up in his bottom line.

We tried to redirect him to a more sustainable, long-term goal, but his mind was made up and he refused to believe in the power of channel capacity.

By the eighth month, the client had finished the marathon. He was so relieved not to have to follow the brutal diet and training routine he had established that he completely backed off working out. By the twelfth month he was two pounds heavier than he had been when he had started the whole process the year before and his production at work had remained flat throughout the entire year. Instead of choosing wisely, the client overcommitted. He worked harder than he ever had but really had nothing to show for it.

We don’t tell that story to make you feel like it’s pointless to set goals—or even to set ambitious goals. As you’ll see throughout the book, the opposite is actually the case. We want you to set goals and be ambitious. But we want you to learn to set goals that are attainable and sustainable. We want you to choose wisely. One success should prime you for the next success, not become a point where you can bail out. We want you to build the habit of winning—not just have a onetime win.

In the early 1990s, Edward Jones was a much smaller operation than it is now, and it didn’t have many million-dollar producers among its advisors. Tom developed an advanced training program for the company’s highest-achieving young advisors that had as its centerpiece this concept of understanding a small group of principles and choosing one to attack. They learned to stay focused on that one goal, and they learned to choose the goal wisely.

Tom kept meticulous records of how the advisors who went through the program performed and compared them to a peer group of advisors who didn’t get the training. For every dollar Edward Jones invested in training the experienced advisors, it got a return of $17 by the end of the first year—strictly by choosing wisely and respecting the “power of one.”

SAYING NO

The biggest obstacle that will block you from improvement is committing to too much and getting overwhelmed.

It’s an especially dangerous—and common—problem as you work your way higher and higher on the food chain of success. If you’re a smart, ambitious person who wants to learn and get better, your own drive and determination can work against you.

In every class we teach, we’ll see an energetic, smart, high-achieving student who goes along with what we’re presenting, and at the end grabs one of us for a quick conversation. “I can’t wait to get started,” the conversation starts. “It’s so clear and simple, and I think I picked it up pretty quickly. I’m going to start on three changes instead of one and jump-start the process.”

It doesn’t matter how smart or successful you are. Even if you can read two hundred pages a night and work twelve-hour days, you will bump up against the self-limiter of channel capacity. That’s where saying no comes in.

And it’s a talent many, many people either have never learned or have chosen to forget—usually out of desire to please others or to avoid having an “uncomfortable” conversation. If you’re going to commit to doing one thing at a time, it means, by definition, that there are some things you aren’t going to be doing.

Most people think of saying no as a “negative” thing, and that can certainly be true in some unpleasant cases. But for the most part, saying no to something just means you’re saying yes to something else. All we want to teach you to do is make those decisions consciously—and not get pushed into them by the unintended consequences of a series of other decisions.

One extremely successful client of ours is a retired athlete who still lives in the town where he was a star player. He’s a gregarious guy who loves to help, and as a result, he is constantly asked to give his time to various causes—everything from playing in charity golf tournaments to serving on volunteer boards and shooting public service commercials. For years, he was always game to help in any way he could—to the point where he was run ragged six days a week and more burned out than he’d ever been during his active days as a player.

He made one simple change: he placed a picture of his wife and kids on his desk next to the phone.

He didn’t stop making commitments to help, but every time a call came in, he stopped for a moment and thought about what he was really saying yes—or no—to. Many times, he would tell the person on the line that he appreciated being asked, but that he had to decline. “If I say yes to you, I’m saying no to my wife and kids, and that’s not the man I want to be,” he said. “I hope you understand.”

Unfortunately, most people confuse “urgent” with “important” and say yes to so many urgent things that they are in effect saying no to other things that are much more important.

Sometimes it takes some time for this lesson to sink in. When we come back to an area where we’ve recently run a seminar, we always get students who come back to attend another session. Inevitably, students will come back and take the class again, and they’ll tell us that when they tried to incorporate three or even two of the rules at a time, they spun their wheels. When they went back to basics and committed to nailing just one, they saw results even they couldn’t believe. They’d get more done by channeling that focus than they ever could multitasking on a variety of to-do tasks.

NAILING IT

What does “nailing it” mean?

If you’ve truly mastered one positive change, we call it “nailing it.” It’s become a popular shorthand catchphrase with many of our students. For you to have fully integrated the improvement and the changes it requires, it means that for three consecutive months, you’ve been able to complete the change on a daily basis 90 percent of the time or better.

Whatever improvement you choose—whether it’s Organizing Tomorrow Today or committing to doing the Mental Workout—you need to be able to do it nine out of ten days for three months straight—with no excuses. If you can’t do it, it means you need to increase your discipline or commit to a smaller level of intensity. Get started by proving to yourself that you can nail it, even if it’s a smaller commitment. You can always increase later on. An essential element of performance is for people to learn to trust themselves. When you prove 90 percent of the time that you can nail it, you can’t help but grow your confidence and self-trust.

Why does it work? Because simplicity, accuracy, and direction are a powerful combination. They provide the key to action that everybody needs—whether you’re a financial advisor, an NFL wide receiver, or a road paver for the state highway department. At the core level, learning to “nail one thing” teaches you how to believe in yourself. Your confidence grows and your self-image aligns with the knowledge that you do what you commit to doing. You literally become a “winner.”

The Big Why: The great myth of multitasking is that we’re getting more accomplished by dividing our time and energy among all of the tasks clamoring for our attention. In reality, allowing your attention to be diverted from the step-by-step completion of your most important task triggers overload. And when you overload any system, it quits working and loses energy.

When you commit to not overcommitting and nailing just one task before you start the next, you’re stacking the odds for success in your favor. Just remember to choose the most important task to attack first.

The Inversion Test: Put choosing wisely to the Charlie Munger inversion test and you get a simple output. What happens if you don’t choose wisely, and you try to do too much? Overcommitting is counterproductive. Confidence erodes, failure becomes acceptable, and losing becomes a habit. The same thing happens when you try to carry too many groceries into the house from the car in an effort to “save time.” You drop a bag and have a mess to clean up. Not only did you lose time, but you lost the eggs, too!

Act Now: Identify your “first step,” in the form of one simple fundamental improvement you want to commit to for tomorrow. It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering or complicated. Just something you can specifically identify and “nail.”

Choose wisely.

Some examples from our clients:

PRO ATHLETE

No matter what, I am going to complete 30 minutes film study. My focus will be to more specifically identify one thing I can do to be more effective against the starting pitcher’s most prominent pitch. This will be completed by 11:00 a.m. Getting it done early will give me a calm, confident, and aggressive mindset throughout the rest of my prep and into the game. What I will not do tomorrow is spend anytime playing video games.

FINANCIAL ADVISOR

The one thing I will attack tomorrow is making my proactive calls. I will make sure my first call of the day is to my most important client—NO EXCUSE. Everything after that will feel easy. I will not allow myself to spend more than 10 minutes reading headline financial news (I usually spend anywhere from 30 minutes to 60 minutes on this).

PHYSICIAN

I will process my most important overnight case report by 9:00 a.m. so the team has time to close it out before lunch. To do this, I will need to start on the case no later than 8:20.