Episode Details

How to Get Anything You Want 10X Faster

If you set out to build a new house in five years, it will take you five years.

If you have a hard deadline and have to build that same house in six months or your family will be out in the cold all winter, it will take you six months.

Any task takes the time allotted.

Here’s an example. I was recently in the office the day before a long business trip. I had way too much to do and not enough time to do it. I sat down in the at my desk in the morning with the same number of hours in the day as I have any other day but with far more on my plate than I could accomplish. By the time I left the office at the end of the day, everything was complete.

Why? Why did I get…. three times more done on this particular day then on any other day?

Because I had to.

When you have to do something, you do it. The reason most people don’t exercise enough is because they dont have to. The excuse is  “I don’t have time” but if you get a phone call from the school and you have to pick up your sick daughter and take her to the doctor immediately, you do it. It takes two hours out of your day but by tomorrow that missing two hours has dissolved into your day and you never miss it. You had to take your sick child to the doctor-- it was a priority. And if you had to catch up at work because you missed two hours, you would… if you had to.

So here’s the question.

Do you want to succeed? Do you want to get to the next level? Do you want to live your ideal life filled with purpose, wealth, happiness and fulfillment? Do you want to lose 10 lbs? Do you want to have a better relationship with your spouse?

Do you want to? Or do you have to?

Then what are you doing today to make that happen? Is there a deadline set? If not, it will always be a dream. If you do have a deadline, then you will achieve it. If you have already identified your goals and your ideal life, then set a deadline for when you want to achieve it. When you do you will be halfway there because the things that you need to get there will simply show up.

Things like motivation and willpower and opportunities and solutions.

The things that you fear will no longer be insurmountable obstacles but instead they’ll just be challenges that you will simply have to overcome in order to meet the deadline for your dream.

So when is it? When is your deadline for arriving?

I am, on a small scale, in fact, using this tactic right now. Normally it takes me 45 minutes to write the first draft of a blog post. However, I’ve been interrupted several times and am just about out of time to complete this. Instead of pushing my writing off until tomorrow, I gave myself a deadline. Fifteen minutes. I said out loud, “I will complete this blog post draft in fifteen minutes.” It’s an absurd goal because it always takes much longer to write my first draft.

Guess what? Fifteen minutes later… draft complete.

Thirty minutes of my life saved. Thirty minutes! How do you think Oprah Winfrey, and Richard Branson get so much done in the same 24 hours that you and I have?

They get it done. Because they have to.
What do you have to accomplish today to move toward achieving your goals? What do you have to do today to move toward living your ideal life?

You can think about this or you can take action. As my good friend Dr Rob Gilbert of the success hotline likes to say, thought determines what you want. Action determines what you get…. ACTION determines what you get.

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