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Today I'm going to talk about the failure in planning and why planning is something that you need to develop. As an entrepreneur, I know for myself when I go back to the Dan Pre kids, when I go Back to the 26, 27, 28 year old version of Dan, building my company Spheric, moving to San Francisco, starting my company Flowtown, literally for There was a 10 year window of where I refused to have a schedule, no calendar. I believe that I worked my butt off in life and the reward was no calendar. I didn't want to be anywhere at any specific time. And that was a belief I had. And I'll tell you, it cost me millions of dollars. And the reason why is because the lack of being willing to plan, to have a vision for my life, to attack it the way I've learned since then, missed it caused so many missed opportunities. Missed opportunities in failing to approach my life from a place like wanting to live this like free, no schedule, no calendar, et cetera. Life caused me millions of dollars of lost opportunities because I, I wasn't able to connect with people. I wasn't able to create structure, I wasn't able to refine and refocus. I mean, when I hear people like Tim Ferriss that says, look at the end of his year, he looks at everything he did in the previous 12 months and then makes a decision of what things supported his life and what things took away, what things felt like, energy, suckers, et cetera. And then iterate and move forward. And that's been the new process for me is I use my calendar to lock everything in. And I do that because then I have the ability to go back and iterate and edit and review the flow. So a few beliefs I want to share with you when it comes to planning and failure, okay? Number one is that every human in the world has the exact same time. Like literally it doesn't matter if you're a billionaire or the guy you know working at Burger King. Like you've got the same 24 hours in a day. So if that's true, then you gotta ask yourself what has, what, what have they figured out that's different? What, what have they figured out? The people that are more successful than you, that are, that are growing, that are achieving crazy, audacious outcomes. The Elon Musk of the world, the Bezos of the worlds, et cetera, the people you admire. Maybe it's somebody in your family, somebody in your community that you look at and they're just like, how do they get so much done? Well, I'll tell you what, when I look at my top coaching clients, the people that succeed the most, they do a lot of things really well. Number one is they realize that it is not a renewable resource. Money's renewable, you can go get more money, people on your team, you can get more people to support you. Other things, technology, hardware, like all of these things are resources you can go get more of. You can't get more time, you cannot get more of your time. So how you decide to execute, how you decide to structure and design your day is going to be key, right? So that is like the big idea is that everybody else in the world has the exact same amount of time as you do. And if they're getting bigger results than you, and there's clients that I coach that you all see that are absolutely crushing it, they have a different way of thinking about their time. So I'm just going to share some of my perspectives because here's the crazy part. I have some incredible friends, very high performing guys, people that run multi like 10 figure businesses, okay, like incredibly successful. And, and then on the flip side, they have people in their lives. Sometimes their partner that is not as structured, is not as planned. And what's funny is that like we run into this all the time is other people are on a different wavelength. But here's what I see constantly about the people where their partner is not on the same wavelength and they're such a structured, you know, plan and, and try to reduce, you know, pain. Like the amount of time that people like go do something and then can't do it because they didn't follow a checklist or missed something because they said to some person they would do it but they didn't put in the calendar and then they missed this great opportunity or because they drag their feet throughout the day and they don't try to attack their day and get things done. Then they don't have the space to spend time with their family. Those are the moments when I see that where people are complaining. I don't have time to work out, I don't have time for my kids, I don't have time to build my business. And you see them half, half hazardly go through life, that's, that's a big missed opportunity. So part of this narrative that I want to share, this belief system that I've built for myself because I went from not wanting a schedule pre kids to realizing I had these human alarm clocks which meant I had to like get up, do stuff, be, be a, try to be a Good dad, try to build a venture backed company, try to be present for my, you know, for my wife and be a good husband. I mean, none of that stuff could have happened if I didn't decide to finally honor my calendar. Now I'm also somebody that wants to get the most out of life and just squeeze as much juice as I can out of each and every day. And I didn't start there. It started with the morning habit. It started with the rhythm, rituals, routines, and communication flows. So things like net time, no extra time. Net time means what do I want to accomplish and I want to do other things and how can I put them together? So just some simple examples. I like to read while I'm in my hot tub. Why? I like to go in the hot tub to loosen my muscles, especially if I had a big workout. And I want to get my 10 pages of reading per day. So I've got a Kindle that's waterproof. Before Kindle was waterproof, I went through probably a Kindle every three months because I would absolutely drop it in the hot tub. That cost me 100 bucks every time I did it. Now the Kindle is waterproof for the last few years. Kind of a beautiful thing, right? Because it can't take a physical book inside or into the hot tub. Right. These things will get wet and ruin themselves. So what else do I do to get the most out of my day? I leverage my morning and I use it in the most productive way. I know that all of my deep work, my creative work, my writing, I'm working on a book. Okay, so writing a ton right now actually hasn't shared a lot about it, but I've been working on a book, writing, creating new growth playbooks, strategic planning for companies, designing things that all has to happen in the morning, putting other things together. So for example, a big part of my value system is to connect with other ambitious, driven, kind hearted entrepreneurs. And the way I do that is I have a cadence. So like on Tuesday I do a founders hike. Every Tuesday I go and I hike this mountain and it started off with like one friend, then went to four friends and now it's like 25 people every Tuesday. And I choose a different person as I go up the mountain to talk with and connect with. Then when I come down the mountain, we turn around and, and that is just this great space to do that same thing with my wife. We do date night every Thursday. But what we discovered last summer, because we had our boat, we bought a new boat. We wanted to kind of Entertain people. So what we did is every second Thursday was with another group of couples. So we would do like Thursday with us, just her and I, and then every other Thursday it would be, I think three other couples. So it would be eight of us on the boat. And that rhythm just continued. We enjoyed it, we loved it, so we kept doing it. So now all of a sudden, every two weeks, I've got to find another couple to spend time with. Well, I'll tell you what, you literally, in a year, think about that. That's 25 different couples that you get to know on a deeper level that you have a space in your calendar to connect with. In regards to fulfilled, I've never felt more fulfilled. I've never made more money. I've never been healthier. I've never had a team of people that I love working with more than this. And the byproduct of that planning and structure, right? That, you know, failing to plan if you, if you, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. You know, and I don't know if it was Ben Franklin who said it or Winston Churchill. There's kind of a debate on the Internet. But regardless, that quote summarizes it all. You know, one of my best friends, wives was really struggling with finding her rhythm and finding her structure. And like, that was one of the things that she heard that really resonated with her, that one quote, plan to fail, fail to plan. But it's so true if you don't take accountability for your calendar and plan and structure. So if you, in regards to that, I want to leave you with this. I look at my vision for my life, my 10 year, three year and quarterly goals, and map that to my weekly goals every Sunday. So every Sunday I take a further outlook, right? And I plan every quarter and plan every year, but every Sunday I look at my week and I look at those things and I see if I'm doing the right things. And every night before I finish off my day, I, I look at the next day and I look at my goals for the quarter and ask myself, does my calendar represent the types of activities that's going to allow me to achieve these crazy, ambitious outcomes? And if it doesn't, I need to sit down and redesign the calendar, redesign the flow, redesign the. And that's another thing is I believe that your calendar should mirror your energetic flow. It's not about productivity because you can't force somebody to be creative. You have to choose and know what goes in your calendar, in what order that makes you or will Allow you to be the most creative. So those are some of the big ideas when it comes to executing, getting results in your business. You can choose to wake up and talk to a lot of people and allow people to distract you and get into slack and get into your inbox and get on got a second meetings and take phone calls and let people distract you all day. And you may push the ball forward a little bit. A little bit. But if you actually take a step back and design your perfect week and build rhythms and routines that serve you to be able to be a great husband, get in shape, show up for your kids, be a great friend, contribute to your community, create massive amounts of wealth, create. I want you to be as wealthy as you want to be. Okay? It's going to require you to honor your calendar. It's going to require you to sit down and plan. Measure twice, cut once. It's going to require you to build a team. It's going to require you to build checklists and to check those checklists. When I go snowboarding, when I go mountain biking, when I go anywhere, I have a checklist. I have a packing checklist. Why? Because the amount of waste and time, not only money, headspace, energy, fighting with people because you forgot something. It makes no sense when it could literally just be that simple. Now does that require discipline? 100%. It's going to require you to be a disciplined person. It's going to require you to slow down and take some of the creativity out of it. And for some of you that'll be really hard because you're the type of person that likes unknown, you like variety, you don't like certainty. And I get it, that is the entrepreneurial gene we love. We can deal with chaos, but I'm telling you, add a little bit of structure or at least create the rails where your creativity can happen within block that time and say in that block I'm going to do X and I'm going to be creative. That is how I'm able to do so much. People don't get it. I work crazy amounts of hours. Like I wake up at 4 in the morning and by 5pm like most days, from 4 to literally, and this isn't a bragging thing, this is just fact. From 4 to 9am I've done more in a 5 hour period than most people will do their whole day, 16 hours. And not only that, it keeps going well. Where do you find the energy? How do you make it happen? Because I've designed the energy flows, I'm able to figure out, okay, if I do this. Like, this morning when I went for my run, I did two calls with my management team for one on ones. So our run, two calls, right? Or like working out at lunch to reset my energy for the afternoon and figuring out what two workouts do I want to do that incorporates other people to keep it exciting and interesting, because there's people I want to get to know that I don't know, and I don't have time. My calendar. So I got to put things together. I hope you start to see what's possible. What's possible is literally getting yourself in shape, making more money in your business, building a great team, being the husband or the wife or the father or the, you know, the friend that you hope you could be feeling absolutely alive. But to do that, it will 100% require you to plan. And if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Churchill or Franklin, I don't know who said it doesn't matter. That is the message of today. Hope this finds you awesome and we'll talk soon. Peace. Later, everybody.
