STOP WASTING YOUR TIME | The Most Powerful Life Advice Of Successful People 2023

The Greek said that moderation in all things is the key to a happy life. Moderation! Now, sometimes people say, "Well, I don't have time for my family.

I don't have time to exercise. I don't have time for this and time for that. " Whenever you find yourself getting out of sync with regard to balance, and especially when you feel that you don't have the time, is when you most need to stop and think.

So here's the question to ask: What would I do if I only had six months to live? If you find yourself working too hard, or not spending time in your relationship, or not spending time with the people you care about and who care about you, ask yourself: What would I do if I only had six months to live? If what you would do is spend more time with the important people in your life, the time to start spending that time is now.

So, what would you do if you had six months to live? You know, it's an old joke: the doctors say they've never met a businessman on his deathbed who said, "Boy, I wish I'd spent more time at the office. " The fact of the matter is, balance and moderation in all things increase your productivity, increase your efficiency, and remember, the only reason you're working is so that you can enjoy the great things of life, which are your people, your relationships, the things that make you happy, and so on.

Imagine that you are financially independent, that you have past $20 million in the bank, and simultaneously, you only have ten years to live. You're going to enjoy superb health, but you have all the money that you need, and you have to work at something; you cannot be a layabout. Therefore, if you could work at anything, and you had all the money you needed, and you didn't want to waste any time, what career would you choose?

If you could wave a magic wand and have all the talent and skill that you need to be successful in any field, what field would you choose for yourself? Then, what you do is you just start to do some research on that field: working it part-time, working it for free, reading books and courses, talking to people who are in it. I have spoken to literally thousands of people over the years who did that and eventually changed out of their current job—sometimes within their same company, sometimes out of their current job where they weren't very satisfied—into a new job that they loved, and they became a star at that new job.

You can do the same. Everybody can do this. I'm going to give you a law that is my favorite law of time management, and it's called The Law of Three.

This law alone will enable you to be one of the most productive and successful people in your world. The Law of Three is based on my 30 years of study into time management, and what it basically says is that if you make a list of everything that you have to do in a week or a month, you'll come up with 20 or 30; some people write down 40 or 50 tasks or activities. But if you look at this list, you'll find there are only three activities that you engage in in your life that account for 90% of the value that you contribute in your life.

Wherever you are in life, there are only three things that account for 90% of your happiness—only three things. This Law of Three works everywhere, and it works for everyone. It works if you're a doctor, an investment banker, a salesperson, a business owner, or a student—whatever.

There are always three. So, what you do is you make a list of everything you do, and then you ask three questions. Question number one is: If I could only do one thing on this list all day long, which one activity would have the greatest positive impact on my life?

Or you could say, "I could only do one activity all day long; which one activity would help me to double my income faster than anything else? " That answer is usually pretty obvious, so you put a circle around it. Then you ask it again: If I could only do two things all day long, what would be the second most valuable thing that I could do?

You go through your list and you'll come up with number two, and then you ask the question a third time: If I could only do three things all day long, what would be number three? And you circle it. Now, I put every one of my students through this exercise, and they're all astonished because, in a few minutes, they see clearly that these are the three most important things that they do in achieving their goals of health, wealth, and happiness.

So the rule is this: Do fewer things in your daily life, but do more important things, and do them more of the time. Then, get better and improve in each one of those areas in your life. There are three things that you do that are more important than everything else, and these will change over time, but you must be clear about those three things.

If you start working on only those three things, you will double your productivity, performance, and output very quickly. If you can concentrate on the three most important things you do, there are four requirements for you to make these techniques work for you. We call these the four D's.

The first D is desire; it's when you must have a burning desire to be effective at time management. The second D is decision; you must make a decision that you. .

. Are going to become an expert in this subject? You are going to take this course.

You're going to use these materials. You're going to practice them over and over again because what we have found is that in the absence of a decision, nothing ever happens. You need a clear, unequivocal "Do or Die" burn-the-bridges decision that this is a subject that you are going to master.

The third D is discipline. You must discipline yourself to practice and repeat over and over again good time management techniques. In fact, we say that time management is self-discipline in action, and the ability to discipline yourself, more than anything else, is going to determine your success in life.

The fourth D, to become excellent in time management, is determination. You must have the ability to persist; you must have the determination to keep on keeping at it, on and at it long enough until you become very, very good in this field. But I promise you this: the payoff is tremendous because you see, time management is really life management.

Everything that you do to improve the quality of your time management will improve and enhance every part of your life. You can even say it this way: the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your time management. The quality of your life will be determined by the way you use your time—minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day—because your time is your life.

In every single study of high-performing men and women, we find that intense result orientation goes hand in hand with big payoffs in life. You see, it's not how much time you put in, or the activities that you engage in, or how sincere or how intelligent or competent or capable or anything else; it's only what you produce, the results that you get from the time that you put in that counts in determining your rewards—not only your psychic rewards (how good you feel about yourself) but your financial rewards. You're always paid in direct proportion to the quality and the quantity of the results that you produce.

We call this the law of sowing and reaping, the law of cause and effect. The cause of everything that happens to you is your ability to get results, and the easier reward. If you want to increase the quality and quantity of your rewards, you have to think all the time about increasing the quality and quantity of your results.

Now, the second point is this: most people are very unproductive. Most people cannot do a full day's work if their life depended upon it. In fact, every study that I've ever seen suggests that the average person works at only 50% of capacity.

In fact, in most work environments, about 30% of the work time is spent socializing, gossiping, wasting time, talking, chit-chatting, hanging around the water fountain, reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, and so on. What does it mean to you? It means that the average person is working at 50% or less of capacity.

There are tremendous opportunities for you if you'll do some of the things that we talk about to rapidly move ahead of other people. The starting point of getting things done is the quality of neatness. The quality of neatness means that you start with a clean desk and you end with a clean desk; you start with a clean briefcase and you end with a clean briefcase.

You take the time to make sure that your entire working environment looks neat, professional, productive, and effective. Remember this: it's not just what you do, but it's the perception of other people of what you do that counts. I read a story by a self-made millionaire who said that he built five successful companies, and one of their critical rules was that every single person kept a clean desk.

Now, the fourth key in getting things done is the importance of focus—focus, which leads to clarity. We talk about this over and over again. Focus means that you're absolutely clear about what you're trying to accomplish.

Focus means that you're absolutely clear about your key result areas and why you're on the payroll. We say that fuzzy focus leads to fuzzy results; clear focus leads to clear results. This means that you take the time to think.

You take the time to think through: Why am I on the payroll? What have I been hired to accomplish? What are my key result areas?

What are my core functions? What are the 20% of the things that I do that account for 80% of my results? And so on.

So the starting point in getting things done is focus—focus and clarity. I call this, it's like adjusting the camera all the time so you keep your focus very, very clear. Well, the next key principle is concentration.

Concentration is what you do once you've decided on the most important idea to achieve your most important goal. Then you have to concentrate single-mindedly on one thing until it's complete. If Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the richest man in the world and the third richest man, were at a dinner party at Bill Gates' home last year, and there were about a hundred guests standing around at the reception, drinking wine, and so on—these three men, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates' father, are good friends and they were standing and talking.

One of the other guests came up and said, "Excuse me, gentlemen, you are three of the most important people in the world; what would you say is the most important key to success today? " They stopped talking, and they all turned and said, "Focus. " Focus is the most important quality for success today.

We're so surrounded by so many distractions of so many kinds that the. . .

The ability to focus is more important for success than any other quality. Now, I developed a philosophy when I was young and broke, and the philosophy was that if rich, successful people tell you to do something, you should do it. If they tell you that this is a key to their success, then you should at least practice it for a while to see if it applies to you.

What I have learned, and what I learned coaching my clients, my business owners, is I taught them how to focus. I taught them how to select specific goals and activities in each area of their life, and how to focus like a laser beam on one goal at a time. If you can do that, you can conquer the world.

Now, concentration is, in reality, where all the work and time management leads us to. It is the ability to concentrate 100% on one thing, setting priorities—the most important thing—and to stay with that single task until it's finished. Concentration means moving forward in a straight line toward the goals and objectives that you've clearly identified.

It means concentrating without diversion or distraction. Focus and concentration, I believe, in 25 years of research, are the reasons for success and happiness in life. The reasons for a lack of success and unhappiness are a lack of focus and a lack of concentration.

I have found the most important time management or personal productivity principle of all, and it is: make a list of everything you do in the morning before you start work, and then select the one item on that list that's more important than any others in terms of potential consequences. Then, start on that one task and work on it 100% of the time until it's complete. Now, if you can do that, you can double and triple your productivity and become one of the highest-paid and most respected people in your world.

Select your most important task, start on it immediately, and work on it 100% of the time until it's complete. Because here's what I discovered in 30 years of studying and writing books on time management: task completion is the key to success. It is not the tasks that you work on, but only the tasks that you complete.

If you're a student, it's completing your assignments and your reports. If you're a salesperson, it's completing the sales. If you're a business person, it's completing different transactions.

Everything in life is completing tasks. Now, here's a wonderful payoff: when you complete an important task, it gives you an increased sense of self-esteem and personal power. Your self-confidence goes up, you get more energy and more ideas, and you feel happy about yourself.

Whenever you complete a task, your brain gives you a rush of endorphins, and endorphins make you happy, more alert, and more creative. They strengthen your immune system so that you're never sick. So you'll find that what successful people do is they're always starting and completing tasks, and especially they start and complete them on time.

Now, what does this require? It requires our old friend and enemy: self-discipline. Now, what we know about task completion is that not only is it the key to the future, not only is it the key to getting more and greater and better opportunities, but important task completion—doing something that's important to you and carrying it through to finish it 100% at the end—is a source of energy, enthusiasm, and high self-esteem.

Men and women who are working consistently on getting important things done and staying with it to the end are more positive, more optimistic, more self-confident, and full of confidence. They have more belief and self-assurance in themselves, and they get more opportunities to complete more tasks. And here's the flip side: completing low-priority tasks leads to stress.

If you work and get a lot of little things done but they're not moving you toward the accomplishment of things that are really important to you, what happens is you just feel crummy as a result. We find that the average Brit, average German, and average French person works about 600 hours a year; an average executive or business owner works about 2,000 hours a year. So what you do is take your annual income and divide it by 2,000.

So let's say you're earning $100,000 a year; divided by 2,000, that means that you're earning $50 an hour. This is your hourly rate. Over time, you can include all your benefits and pensions and so on, but whatever this is—let's say your hourly income is $50 an hour—means that, by Ricardo's law, the law of comparative advantage as formulated by David Ricardo, you don't do anything that pays less than $50 an hour.

You only do things that pay you $50 an hour or more, or that people would pay you 50 quid an hour or more to do, and everything else you delegate. If there's something that someone else can do for $10 an hour, you hire somebody to do that. For $20 an hour, $30 an hour, you keep hiring people who can do tasks at a lower hourly rate than yourself.

Now, here's the great discovery, and this can be life-changing. I call it the Law of Three. The Law of Three says that no matter how many things you do, how many tasks you do in a week or a month (and it's usually 20 or 30), three of those tasks account for 90% of your value—only three.

You make a list of all of your tasks, and I do this with my business owners, and I have them go through this, and they're astonished—they double their income within 30 days. Because I ask them the three magic questions. Magic question number one: if you could only do one thing.

. . On this list, one task stands out.

All day long, which task would have the greatest positive impact on your career? Which one task? Well, it'll usually pop; it'll jump out at you.

So you put a circle around it. Then you say, if you could only do two things all day long, which would be number two? You put a circle around that.

If you could only do three things all day long, which would be number three? Put a circle around that. Suddenly, it's almost like all these other tasks fade again, like in a camera shot in a movie; they fade, and those three tasks are sitting there like those three magic tabs.

You realize, "Oh my God, those are the big three. " Everything else is secondary. Everything else can be done by someone else, or done later, or not done at all.

Then you focus on the three. So here's the rule for doubling your income and doubling it again—and I'll repeat it: Do fewer things, but do more important things, and do them more often, and get better at them. Repeat: Do fewer things—the big three.

Do more important things, do more of them, spend more of your day working on those three tasks, and then get better at those tasks, so you can get more done faster and at a higher level of quality. If you will practice the law of three, you'll transform your life. If you combine that with "Eat the Frog" and work on your most important task—the one that can contribute the most value—you can do that until it becomes a habit, just automatic.

You get up in the morning, and you just start working on your most important task, and you say, "No, I don't do that. I don't do little tasks; those are not my job. " People say, "What about this?

What about that? " I say, "Excuse me, I'm management; my labor does all this other thing. " So you, the person who's watching this right now, are you management or labor?

Think of yourself as management and do your three tasks. If you can do that until it becomes a habit, you're going to conquer the world. All of us, over the course of our lives, want to develop character, and character has been defined in several ways.

One definition I like is that character is the ability to follow through on a resolution after the enthusiasm with which the resolution was made has passed. So, taking this course, by the way, you'll make a lot of decisions and commitments and resolutions. The true measure of character is whether or not you have the capacity to follow through.

Character, in effect, is self-discipline in action. You can tell how much character you have by how willing you are to discipline yourself to make the sacrifices that are necessary in the short term to have a great life in the long term.