Organize Tomorrow Today

“YOU HAVE TEN MINUTES . . .”

Jason Selk was standing in the St. Louis Cardinals’ clubhouse at their spring training facility in Jupiter, Florida, in March 2006, getting ready for what he had originally thought was going to be a two-hour introductory presentation in his new role as the Cardinals’ director of mental training.

Cardinals general manager Walt Jocketty had extended the invitation to Jason before the season, but when he brought him into manager Tony La Russa’s office in the clubhouse, it was clear that what Jason had was an audition—not a job.

After Jason gave a brief synopsis of the two hours of material he had prepared, La Russa looked up from the paperwork on his desk.

“You have ten minutes.”

Moments later, looking out at that clubhouse full of All-Stars and future Hall-of-Famers—guys like La Russa, Albert Pujols, Chris Carpenter, and Scott Rolen—Jason decided to introduce his Mental Workout concept. The full version of the workout is designed for elite athletes, and it involves visualization, positive self-talk, and controlled breathing.

After Jason worked through the first step of the Mental Workout, pitching coach Dave Duncan asked to go through the second step. Jason was up against the time limit, so he looked over to Tony to see if it was okay to continue. He nodded, and Jason shared the second step.

When he finished, All-Star third baseman Scott Rolen chimed in and asked if he could share the third step. Again, Jason got the okay from Tony to continue.

After Jason shared the third step, reigning Cy Young Award winner Chris Carpenter stopped him and got up. “Everybody better pay attention,” he said. “This is what we need to take it to the next level.”

From that moment, Jason was accepted as part of the staff, and he built some incredible relationships with the players over the next six seasons. At the top of any professional sport, the physical differences between the teams are minuscule. The smallest mental edge can mean the difference between losing in the National League Division Series and holding up the World Series trophy. Those Cardinals teams won three division titles and two World Series championships, and at least a small part of that success came from the peak mental performance training the team got from Jason.

Working with the Cardinals certainly helped confirm Jason’s credentials in the world of sports psychology and open a lot of doors. But he got something much more valuable than a professional credential or some references out of the experience.

As he was giving that first talk in the clubhouse in March 2006, the Cardinals staff and players didn’t know much about him. They didn’t know if he had something useful to offer. But he wasn’t more than a few minutes into his talk when he noticed that the majority of the players and coaches were taking notes.

The Cardinals have long been considered one of the model franchises in all of professional sports, and at that moment some of the whys behind that reputation became crystal clear to Jason.

From the top down, they established an “obsession for improvement” as a key part of their culture. No matter how successful they got, they were always on the lookout for new information that could help them improve—and a better program for incorporating that information in an organized, efficient way.

Organize Tomorrow Today is that program.

It is a guide for using your most powerful (and often most underestimated) tool—your mind—the way it was designed to be used.

OVERLOAD

Modern life can demand an almost overwhelming amount of attention.

It isn’t any surprise that a huge “time management” industry has grown up around this reality. Amazon is stuffed with books—and devices—designed to do everything from manage your schedule to convert you to a paperless office. A thousand different calendar and schedule apps will turn your smartphone into a battery-powered personal assistant—one that works twenty-four hours a day.

There’s one problem.

Nobody fully understands the power of the mind. It is an incredibly powerful thing—and one we constantly underestimate. But it wasn’t designed to function that way.

In 1956, Dr. George Miller published one of the most influential papers in the history of psychology. He called it “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” and it outlined for the first time a human’s mental “channel capacity”—the amount of information the average person could remember at a given time.¹ It wasn’t so clear-cut as the title, but Miller’s basic premise is still valid—so much so that it’s referred to as Miller’s Law. Humans can only process up to seven simple concepts at a given time. This channel-capacity law actually serves as the underpinning of the modern phone-number system. Seven numbers are the most people can easily remember.

What happens when we flood our brains with information?

Once we start thinking about more than a handful of things at a time, our ability to execute any of those things at a high level becomes compromised. And the problem is compounded by the fact that very few of the things we’re asking our minds to do are simple or one-dimensional, like remembering the digit of a phone number. We’re asking our minds to tackle multiple multidimensional tasks at one time—and our channel capacity at that level falls short. We can’t really carry in our “working memory” any more than three things at one time and have a chance of doing any of them well.

It’s something like being a beginner juggler. If you work at it, you can handle juggling three things at once. But once a fourth item gets thrown in, the system is overloaded and it all gets dropped.

George Miller found all of this to be true in the 1950s—when nobody was carrying around high-powered miniature computers in their pockets, mail came in an envelope with a stamp on it, and “twitter” was just something the birds did.

Today, his findings are more valid than ever. All of us are busier than ever before. It’s way more than just work: We’re making calls, sending texts, going to meetings (real and virtual), and “networking” with professional colleagues. We’re wrestling to balance work and home life in a time when information doesn’t operate on a “normal” 9-to-5 schedule.

The best time management plan in the world—or the best calendar, or the best device, or the best app—doesn’t address the fundamental problem of channel capacity. If technology were the answer, success would be as simple as flipping a switch.

Figuring out how to hack Miller’s Law and find more mental bandwidth isn’t going to help you live a more productive life. Fitting more pieces into the puzzle won’t make you more successful.

In Organize Tomorrow Today, we’re going to show you how to embrace channel capacity instead of fighting against it. You’re going to learn how to make decisions, establish priorities, and light your own motivating fire instead of continuing to chase the counterintuitive concept of multitasking. Most people still seem to believe that being busy is the equivalent of being important, but the highly successful have learned that being busy is a waste of time: being productive is the goal.

WHY SELK AND BARTOW?

Dr. Jason Selk has been training world-class athletes for peak mental performance for almost two decades, including that six-year stint as the St. Louis Cardinals’ mental performance coach. Those Cardinal teams won two Worlds Series titles in that span. He has worked with Olympians and professional athletes in every major sport, including the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball, the PGA and LPGA tours, NASCAR, and the Ultimate Fighting Championships. Jason has written two other groundbreaking mental performance books—10-Minute Toughness and Executive Toughness. His work has appeared in dozens of magazines, from Men’s Health to Shape, and he has appeared on numerous television shows for major networks and cable channels like ESPN, NBC, and CBS.

Tom Bartow essentially rewrote the book on how to train financial advisors. His concepts have been used by tens of thousands of them, first at Edward Jones—where Tom created that company’s top-rated Advanced Training Program—and then at American Funds Group. On the Friday after the September 11 tragedies in 2001, American Funds chairman Dave Short and Tom devised the company’s business plan to move forward in the uncertain markets and rebuild confidence among investors. In 2003, American Funds received $65 billion in cash inflows, a new record for the mutual fund industry. One analyst compared this achievement to winning the World Series and the Super Bowl in the same year.

The seeds for Jason and Tom’s partnership in the world of mental performance training were planted in October 2008, when the stock market lost more than 1,000 points—trading under 8,000 for the first time in years. Many people in the financial markets—and financial advisors, in particular—were extremely nervous. On the day of the 1,200-point market drop, Tom got a number of calls from advisors—most of them in the top 5 percent of their firms in revenue. Even with that success and experience, they had some panic in their voices. They asked him over and over, “What do we do now?”

Before getting into business coaching, Tom was very successful in another kind of coaching—on the basketball floor. At age twenty-five, he took over a team that had twenty-one consecutive losing seasons. In his second year as coach, the team went 20–5. The speech Tom gave those investment advisors came directly from the lessons he had learned during those first two seasons coaching the college team—that it is crucial to learn how to execute during times of adversity.

A few months later, Tom was reading an article in Men’s Health about Jason’s first book, 10-Minute Toughness. The book was born from Jason’s research and clinical experience with world-class athletes. It unlocked the “why” of elite mental performance—the science behind the success patterns that high achievers use. Tom bought it and read it several times, studying the principles in detail. Jason’s research and real-world experience with elite athletes almost perfectly dovetailed with Tom’s work as a high-level business coach. The message in the book—on simple steps to increasing your mental performance in business and life—spoke directly to the challenges Tom’s advisor clients were facing. It was as if they had been working together for twenty years.

The stock market continued to struggle through 2009, and Tom flew around the country giving speeches and seminars for investment advisors, helping them learn how to guide their clients through a historically rough time. He began recommending Jason’s book during his speeches, promoting it as the premier mental playbook for handling adversity. Jason and Tom got together in 2011, and in their first few conversations, they came to realize two fascinating things about the world of high achievement.

First, the greatest athletes and the greatest businesspeople are incredibly similar in their wiring. They think in many of the same ways, and they’re built with the same kind of competitiveness. While Jason and Tom were using different terminology, they found they were really speaking the same language. The best coaches in both sports and business are expert “practical psychologists.” They’re perceptive evaluators, and they know how to figure out what makes a person tick. They understand the best approaches to take to reach different kinds of people.

Second, Jason and Tom saw that many, many people in both the sports and business arenas were being held back because they believed in a common misconception. The greatest athletes and businesspeople are different from average achievers—and some of the differences are innate. Some people are just faster, taller, stronger, or smarter than the rest of us. But most of the difference between the highest achievers and the average achievers is in how they think and how they prepare.

You can learn it, and you can grow it. That’s the message Jason and Tom have shared in a series of training seminars around the country since late 2011. At their Organize Tomorrow Today workshops, they have been giving executives and salespeople a set of real-world techniques developed from the worlds of peak mental performance in sports and business to think better, prepare better, and achieve more.

That isn’t just marketing copy.

Jason and Tom have coached not only professional athletes and financial advisors, but also executives of both large and small corporations, attorneys, physicians, insurance professionals, and others. No matter the industry, clients testify that the Organize Tomorrow Today program does two important things: it significantly reduces stress, and it creates more success.

That success isn’t abstract or hard to define. It’s measured in real-world financial results every quarter and every year. As word started to get out about the results Jason and Tom were helping people achieve, many different kinds of organizations tried to figure out how they were able to coach those teams to those kinds of gains. They couldn’t, so they hired Jason and Tom, who have now used the principles behind Organize Tomorrow Today to train thousands more executives, managers, and salespeople.

Charlie Munger is well known for opening the minds of people in businesses of all shapes and sizes. One of Munger’s most famous concepts is one he calls the “Lollapalooza Effect”—which is what occurs when strong forces work together to produce an exponential result much more substantial than what each force could produce individually.²

Jason and Tom believe that’s what they’ve found with their Organize Tomorrow Today program—a way to exponentially improve the way you function in business and in life.

As a team, they’ve distilled their more than forty years of experience coaching athletes, executives, and salespeople at the very top of their disciplines. They’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. Their Organize Tomorrow Today program condenses those success patterns into a streamlined set of core habit-building principles anyone can use. They are the same principles that their athletic clients have used to win World Series titles and Olympic gold medals, and that their professional clients have used to shatter revenue and sales records and create millions of dollars in new business.

The strategies are real, and you can incorporate them into your routine right away.

HOW?

One of Tom’s mentors during his basketball coaching career (and on into his next life as a business coach) was the legendary UCLA coach John Wooden—who won ten national titles in a twelve-year stretch, in part by emphasizing the fundamentals of the game.

At the beginning of every season, Coach Wooden would begin the team’s first practice the same way. No matter how much experience his players had, he started with the basics. He explained very specifically how to put on socks in a way that would prevent blisters, and how to get the laces on each shoe to sit flat to provide the most security and support.

As all great coaches know, skill mastery depends on learning through repetition, one step at a time. In basketball, you must learn to hold the ball correctly before you can even consider shooting it. The approach in Organize Tomorrow Today follows the same building-block principles; it shows you how to identify the fundamentals, then slowly (and certainly) move to mastery.

This book is made up of eight simple, concrete, easy-to-understand concepts:

• Organize Tomorrow Today

• Choose Wisely

• Maximize Your Time

• Win Your Fight-Thrus

• Evaluate Correctly

• Learn How to Talk to Yourself

• Learn How to Talk with Others

• Become Abnormal

They work together as a performance improvement plan for both work and life—but you don’t even have to master them all to get a benefit. In fact, Jason and Tom don’t want you to tackle them all.

Channel capacity is the key. One of the biggest mistakes people make in business and in life is that that they try to change too many things too quickly. You see it on New Year’s Day, when so many people resolve to change everything they eat and go to the gym five times a week. After a burst of early enthusiasm for the new goal, reality sets in, and it gets harder and harder to cope with all the wrenching changes. At that point, it only takes a few days of “failure” to get discouraged and pitch the whole plan.

Instead, as you read the book, think about which of the eight concepts address some of the issues you’re having in your professional or personal life. Pick the one that resonates the most. Start with that, and commit to following the step-by-step guidelines in that chapter. The key to high-level success is to pick one thing to change—yes, just one—and master it. The title of this book, Organize Tomorrow Today, comes from the concept that has been the most popular starting point among the attendees at Jason and Tom’s seminars (which is also why it’s the first one we cover).

If all you take from this book is a single, concrete change from one of the eight concepts, it’s enough for you to make a true breakthrough to the next level of success—however you define it.

Jason and Tom are realists. The “law” of human channel capacity pretty much dictates that, at most, you’re going to be able to successfully incorporate three of these ideas. So think of the material below as a sort of menu of improvement strategies. We’ll show you eight dishes. All of them have been prepared by master chefs, and all of them will give you the nutrition you need. Sample them all, begin by choosing the three that resonate the most with you and then from there choose your favorite to be the main entrée, then attack. Over time, you can build on them, one concept at a time.

The rules are simple and straightforward, but this isn’t some kind of “get-rich-quick” plan. You’ll have to put in the work and change some habits to see improvement. It isn’t any different from building your body in the gym, or improving a sports skill through practice. Follow steps in the chapters and hold yourself accountable for the results, and we guarantee that you can find the kind of performance gains that athletes, executives, and salespeople spend tens of thousands of dollars to achieve.

In Organize Tomorrow Today, you’re getting your success pattern blueprint—a complete plan that builds on the little victories and establishes the long-term productive habits that will let you take control of your time and your life. That said, at the beginning and end of every seminar Jason and Tom teach, they offer one simple “warning” to the class, and they’ll share it here, too: They are firm believers in increasing knowledge through training and through learning “best practices.” But knowing something doesn’t change your life. Doing something does. Getting through this book (or a class) is one thing, but there’s a huge difference between acquiring information and understanding it. And there’s an even wider gap between understanding it and implementing it, or actually doing it. This is why there is such an emphasis in Organize Tomorrow Today to avoid trying to master all eight concepts at once. Doing so is a recipe for inaction and failure. Success comes in one dedicated and focused step at a time.

The most successful people we see are the ones who take this information and use it in real life. Every day.

Follow the template, and you’re getting a playbook for speeding up the process of getting from information acquisition to skill implementation.

Jason and Tom call it the Owner’s Manual for Doers.

Let’s get started.