Episode Details

Most of us have grand plans to succeed

Yet, the moment we start there are a million distractions in our way. Chaos lurches around in our doorway and there seems to be no way out.

At Psychotactics, we had managed to get around most of the chaos but then I was in charge of mentoring my niece. As she moved from Year 6 to Year 7, it seemed like we were hit by an okinami of chaos. What did we do to find our way out? How did we manage to avoid the madness that we had no control over? Find out in this article.

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Part 1: Non-negotiable items Part 2: Part 2: Just say no Part 3: The power of drills

Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer.

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How To Get Things Done In The Midst Of Unending Chaos

"J'ai beaucoup de devoirs aujourd'hui."

That's French for "I have lots of homework today". And it's what my niece Marsha informs me almost daily, when I pick her up from school.

Three years ago, my wife Renuka and I started mentoring my niece, Marsha

While school work is never easy to cope with, there was always time to beef up on spellings, learn about clouds, earth's subduction zones and the wondrous mysteries of solar system.

Then Marsha moved to year seven (what you'd call seventh grade) and we were suddenly swamped with homework. English, social studies, maths, even that little bit of French came rushing at us from out of nowhere. It seems so maddening when every day you're thrown deep into yet another onslaught of homework.

This is the kind of chaos that hits us as we go through our business lives

We have every intention to learn more, do more and yet we find ourselves in this spin cycle that we don't understand. At this point, it's important to pull back and notice that nothing else had changed in our lives.

The Psychotactics newsletter still went out on time; The Three Month Vacation podcast rolled out on schedule. Every post at the membership site at 5000bc, and the Article Writing Course went out just as planned. But in Marsha's world such order didn't exist. The homework seemed to pull us away from what we believed to be important.

Somehow, something had to change.

In this series we look at how to achieve the seemingly impossible

To break free from gravity, we have to have a strategy that enables us to forge forward even under trying conditions. The three things that we're going to look at are seemingly pedestrian, but it's something we've had to use ourselves—for our business and now for Marsha.

They are: – Non-negotiable items – Just say no – Drills

Part 1: Non-negotiable items

I just finished conducting the Article Writing Course

On that course you have 25 participants all headed towards one goal: to be able to write articles that are far superior to what you'd see on the internet. And to do so in under 2 hours. At the end of the course, I ask every one of the participants to relate their experiences as they went through the course. And that's when you hear the stories you've never heard before.

Stories of how one of them almost lost a child—and still finished her homework

Or the story about how one person had been working until 2 am, then sat down to write an article at about 3 am, so that they could meet the deadline for the day. Every one of these stories starts off in an almost identical manner.

In their world, article writing was all about struggle, about frustration and chaos. And then, 12 weeks later, every single one of the participants who've made it to the end point can write an outstanding article, complete in almost every respect.

And do so within that two-hour period. Some of them were taking days, one even took four weeks to write an article and yet at the en