Lessons - How To Focus Like Einstein

Welcome to the lessons episodes of Success Story. These lessons episodes will be shorter clips from past guests, accomplished value community members, and myself. In each short episode we'll feature concise and insightful actionable conversations and tactics providing you with real-world strategies and tips to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. If you're seeking a no-nonsense approach to growth and progress, you've come to the right spot. Settle in, take notes, and enjoy. Hey Scott here. Today I'm going to teach you how to focus like Einstein so you can win big. Be honest, who here is guilty of starting more projects than they finished? It's not a sign of laziness. In fact, it shows your tenacity and lust for life for building things, which is super admirable. You're excited about trying something new and you go for it. Perhaps you've identified a bunch of weak spots in your company's culture and you started six different initiatives to tackle every single one of them, where you made a little bit of progress on each, but at some point they all just failed out. And maybe you have a list of personal development goals or new years resolutions that you've been chipping away. You're going to gym, you started a morning routine, you dove into a bunch of books. Now a few weeks into the year and your new habits are nowhere to be found. What is going on? The issue is that, well yes, it's good to have many aspirations. You can't spread yourself thin and expect big results, just as Einstein. What is the Einstein principle? Albert Einstein remains one of the most infamous minds in known history. The intelligence he possessed and wielded has become the stuff of legends. And of course, we all love the trivia about his childhood. You know Einstein flunked his high school science classes. Einstein could barely speak until he was four years old. These are just some of the famous snippets about Einstein, but there's one thing that often goes overlooked is ability to focus on a few poor tasks and really commit to them. Cal Newport gave a name to Einstein's work ethic and a blog post from 2007. The Einstein principle accomplished more by doing less. The idea is that if you focus on a few projects, rather than say 15 and devote more energy to them, you can achieve better results. In essence, focus your efforts for greater success. Pop quiz. Where was Einstein from the years 1912 to 1950? You guessed physics lab, you'd be right. Einstein was living in a small apartment in the Swiss Alps, working on his general relativity theory. During this time, you focused solely on this project and nothing else. He remained so dedicated to it that even when World War I broke out across Europe and everyone was scrambling for safety, Einstein stayed put. He worked feverishly throughout the war years until he finally completed his task and achieved one of the greatest breakthroughs of all time. And as somebody growing up who was a Frankenstein fan, I will also draw a comparison between the two stories because I personally was overwhelmed as a kid with Dr. Frankenstein's momentous task of creating life from death, but it wasn't a task that overwhelmed me. It was the thought of being so hyper-fixated on one task for days, months, and years at a time. And he did that. That's how Dr. Frankenstein achieved his results as well if you actually know the story. Because we're not used to that level of dedication, are we? In the 21st century, there's no end to the distractions that we have to deal with every single damn day. We can start a drop shipping company in about an hour on our laptops, and we can open a new tab and sign up for Skillshare to start learning a new coding language or a brand new skill. Within the very same day, we can apply for a new job, sign up for a gym, order something off Amazon. But just because we have everything at our fingertips, it doesn't mean we have to do everything or that we should, and sometimes our aspirations to do greater things are keeping us stuck. So I'm going to hazard a guess. The majority of people listening to this are people that have dove into self-help content at some time in their life. I have. Could have been money, self-help, could have been fitness, could have been mental, psychological, whatever it is. If you've ever watched my podcast, you'll see all the different people that come on that are trying to help people live their best life. Self-help content, I believe, is excellent when approached properly, but here's the problem. We don't approach it in a productive way. How often have you gotten to the end of a self-help book or listened to a self-help podcast with a very inspirational person, and you feel like it inspired you to change your life, and then all of a sudden, like 24 hours, you've basically forgotten everything. This is actually due to cognitive distortion. We conflate thinking about potential action with taking that action. A similar problem that really arises if you work towards too many goals at once. You see your to-do list and you think, wow, I've got plans to achieve so many great things. I'm really making progress here. But is it really progress? If at the end of the year, you've doubled your to-do list and completed a total of zero tasks. And no, it isn't. A 12-month vacation would have been more productive. The Einstein principle has to come to your rescue. I know you're feeling attacked because I am too. This is something we all struggle with, and the Einstein principle can help. The theory that applies to this was, if you ruthlessly cut down your to-do list and focus on just one or two projects, you can achieve more in the long run. This is because you're narrowing your energy and resources to one task. So you can devote more of your time and effort to it. It's like what I've spoken about on previous podcasts, and I think even last week, when I put together this video podcast thing about multitasking and energy sapping and attention residue. If you focus on one task, you can get infinitely more done. If you focus on more than one task, you will not operate at 100% efficiency. If you focus on the one task, if you're mitigating the risk of any sort of overwhelm and distraction. Staring down a to-do list of 12 projects is daunting, but staring at a to-do list of one, or maybe even two, much less intimidating. And finally, we stand a better chance of completing the tasks that there are fewer in number and specific in scope. We say that one more time, you have a better chance of completing the tasks if there are fewer in number and specific in scope. Otherwise, you're just going to be around like a chicken with your head cut off. No end goal in sight. If you think Einstein would have come up with his groundbreaking theory of general relativity, if he'd been trying to solve world hunger at the same time or attempting to discover a new particle, I'm guessing not. He's a genius, but even he had his limits. Of course, it's not always realistic to focus on one major project at a time. Einstein's relationships and personal life suffered greatly while he was in the depth of his discovery. His marriage faltered, his hair turned white, and you know, don't even get me started on the story of Dr. Frankenstein, he forgot to eat or drink or sleep for two years while he robbed graves and stitched body parts together. His family and friends literally had to stage an intervention, so I would never suggest to voting 100% of your time and energy to work on a project without mixing in some hobbies nor would I suggest sacrificing your health or relationships to reach a goal. But if you want to achieve something great, the Einstein principle can't help. Identify one or two major projects and focus on them like laser laser focus, blinders on laser focus. You're going to be shocked that we can accomplish this at the short period of time. And how much better your life becomes when it's focused on one central goal. Now, how do you actually apply the principle in real life? Great, we understand the theory of Scott. How do we apply it? Cal Newport hit the nail on the head with his instructions for this principle. In essence, he recommends that you write three separate to-do lists. Personal, extracurricular, professional. The professional column is for anything work or study related. For example, write a business plan, develop a new product line or take an online course. The extracurricular column is for activities that don't necessarily relate to your current job or career, but they're important nonetheless. This might include reading books, taking part in community activities, joining clubs, organizations, whatever hobbies or past times you have. And finally, the personal column is for those things that you need to do to look after yourself, exercising, getting enough sleep, eating well, starting a new morning routine. Once these lists are complete, no less than two items per list, here's the main part of the process. For each list, what are the two goals that absolutely must get done? They will be tasks that other people are relying on you for or that you're mental and physical health depend on. You absolutely ruthlessly get rid of all non-essentials. This will be anything that you can reasonably afford to put on hold with out consequences. Prioritizing your remaining tasks is key. Now that you know what you have to get done and what can wait, make a plan for the remaining tasks to get done in the next one to two weeks. Suddenly, your to-do list is much more manageable. You aren't going on a wild goose chase trying to do everything at once, you have a clear plan of attacking. You know, exactly what needs to be done in what order and by when. I genuinely believe it focuses in the ability to most people lack in the 21st century. And I don't mean working on a task solidly for more than two hours. I mean, real deep, hyper focus on one area of your life and pursuing it with unwavering commitment. The Einstein principle is the perfect anecdote to the chaos distraction and overwhelm that plague us on a daily basis. Find out for yourself. You might just be surprised when you can achieve an assured amount of time when you put your laser-like focus into action. If this is valuable for you, please leave a comment below if you're watching this on YouTube, like and subscribe, do all the YouTube things. And if you're listening to this via podcast, share this with somebody who would find this useful, always give me some feedback on the top so you can hear as well. Have a great one.