How to Do More in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months

okay so if you're anything like me you probably think a lot about how to get more stuff done and the typical approach to this is to set annual goals and to track your progress throughout the year but for a lot of us this doesn't really work we can lose motivation we can forget about our goals we can get sidetracked by other things and the worst part about this is that you're not achieving the things you want or building the life that you want because your system isn't really working for you but what if there was a system that helped you achieve your annual goals in just 12 weeks and do more than most people do in 12 whole months that is where this book comes in the 12we year by Brian morren and lennington and this is what we're talking about in this episode of book club the ongoing Series where for the last 4 years I have been distilling And discussing highlights and learnings from some of my favorite books and really in this video I wanted to talk about three key Concepts that I personally taken away from the book the book has 21 chapters it's fairly in depth I would recommend reading the book cuz it actually is a genuinely good book but in this video I'm just going to focus on three key ideas that if you apply to your life will hopefully help you get more done in 12 weeks than other people do in 12 months key idea number one is the execution Gap now really their whole stick in this book which I broadly agree with is if you look at the thing that differentiates High performers from low performers or people who are successful versus people who are not successful how however really people Define their own terms of success obviously it doesn't have to be in terms of money but however you define success the thing that separates people who are successful from the people who are not successful is not knowledge and it's not strategy and it's not information it is simply execution there is a major execution gap between High performers and less High performers and there's a nice quote from Thomas Ed in the very first chapter which is if we did the things that we are capable of we would literally Astound ourselves and then they're going on to talk about how 65% of Americans are overweight or obese do you think that there is some secret to losing weight and getting fit the diet and fitness industry is a $60 billion industry as of 2013 when this book is written each year new books are published on diet and exercise when I searched diet books on the internet my search came back with 45,9 results almost 46,000 books some with familiar titles like the Atkins diet or South Beach Diet some with less familiar titles like run fat pitch run yet Americans continue to be overweight and out of shape most people know how to get back in shape eat better exercise more they just don't do it it's not a knowledge problem it's an execution problem our experience has shown that most people have the capacity to double or triple their income just by consistently applying what they already know despite this people continue to chase new ideas thinking that the next idea is the one that will magically make it all better and like the whole first chapter kind of J basically elaborates on this point in great detail that the single biggest barrier between you and the life that you are capable of living and the success that you're capable of achieving however you choose to Define that is simply a lack of consistent execution there are still basic fundamentals like this a lack of consistent execution that also like really deeply connects with me you know I'm supposedly a productivity expert some might say the world's most followed productivity expert according to my publisher but even still I just found myself thinking as I was reading this damn I am also holding myself back simply because of a lack of consistent execution there is a journaling prompt that came to my mind as I was reading this book which is is where am I allowing a lack of consistent execution to hold me back and honestly I would encourage you to pause the video now and just like think about that where am I allowing a lack of consistent execution to hold me back you know to use a personal example one of the reasons why my health is not in the place that I would like it to be is simply a lack of consistent execution it's not that I don't have the knowledge of what it takes to go to the gym and eat protein and eat relatively well consistently it's just that I don't do the thing similarly last year our business did like 5 million in annual revenue and had I in fact considered L executed the things that I know I should have done it probably would have been closer to 8 or 9 million so there's literally $4 million difference between me inconsistently executing and me consistently executing and so the whole point of this book as they lay out in chapter one is to close this execution Gap and the concept of the 12we year which is sort of what it says on the 10 which we're going to talk about next but the whole concept of the 12we year is designed to help us close this execution Gap so if you've identified that in your life for example there's some sort of execution Gap that's stopping you from living the life that you actually want to live then hopefully you can watch the rest of this video and then maybe you can consider picking up a copy of the book as well now once you've solved this execution problem and you've freed up more time and energy in your life and you might want to spend some more time learning and a great way to do that is using brilliant who are very kindly sponsoring this video brilliant is an interactive platform where you can learn maths programming and Ai and they've got thousands of lessons and their focus is on learning by doing rather than just consuming I've been using brilliant for the last 5 years now and they've been supporting the channel during that time as well they've got a really good first principles approach to learning which helps you build understanding from the ground up and it's all crafted by an award-winning team of teachers researchers and professionals from MIT Caltech Microsoft Google and many more cool places brilliant helps build your critical thinking skills through problem solving and not memorizing things so while you're building real knowledge on specific topics you also become just better at thinking generally and I personally think that learning every day is one of the most important things you can do for your own life and also for your own development and also for your mental health and all of this fun stuff their new courses on programming are particularly good and they can help you get familiar with python for example and start building programs on day one with a built-in drag and drop editor if you're ke to give this a go and try everything brilliant has to offer then you can try it out completely free for a full 30 days head over to brilliant. org Al abdal or click the link in the video description and that will also give you 20% off the annual premium subscription so thank you so much brilliant for sponsoring this video key idea number two replace annualization with periodization now I want to start this with a clip from Ed melet which I saw last year that I thought had some profound wisdom to it my day is 6:00 a. m.

to noon and I'm not crazy you're crazy for thinking it takes 24 hours just like some dude in a cave did 300 years ago my second day starts at noon and goes till 6:00 p. m. that's day two and then the next day is 6:00 p.

m. to midnight what I've done now is I have changed a manipulated time I now get 21 days a week stack it up over a month I'm going to kick your butt stack it up over a year you're toast stack it up over 5 years my entire life is different than it would have been otherwise now this was a clip that that went viral on Tik Tok uh and and so the comments are kind of funny you know so in other words he splits his day into morning afternoon and night me me chatting with the nurse while she puts the straight jacket on me now obviously this clip taken out of context like Ed Miler is great Tom bil is great the podcast is absolutely sick like it's a great conversation but this clip taken out of context like I can see why people would quibble about this thing but there is actually profound wisdom in this one of the comments here is I cut my pizza into 48 slices equals more pizza it's like yes but also no like there actually is wisdom in what Ed is doing here which is basically what he's doing is periodization so let's segue that into what these guys actually talk about in the book and the whole reason why it's called the 12we here is because the way that we generally think about setting and achieving goals is based on annualized thinking level zero is you don't set goals at all and you don't even think about your life and you don't do any kind of New Year stuff cuz you're just like operating an autopilot I suspect if you are a viewer of this channel you are a little bit more hopefully uh intentional about how you're spending your time hopefully you might have seen some of my my previous videos around goal setting around the importance of goal setting and maybe you've decided to actually set some of your own goals that's you know level zero is the people that don't set any goals at all level one is the people who set annualized goals that these are my goals for 2024 this is what I need to do to achieve them etc etc this is how most businesses operate as well they set we set annual goals like our goals for 2024 are a b c d and e and then often businesses will break them down into quarterly goals but as individuals we tend not to think about quarters quarters are a very kind of business speaky type thing where mostly yeah we don't think about like how can I achieve my annual goal and break it down into quarters but even that that is all based on annualized thinking and basically what the guys in the book are talking about is that when you think in an annualized time frame it means means you're wasting a lot of time so when it comes to the end of the year this is usually when a lot of progress is made there's the idea of Parkinson's law which is that work expands to fill the time that we allocate to it if you set a goal for the New Year in January or February or whatever you still have this sense of like oh you know the end of the year is so far away and then by the time the end of the year starts to roll around you see this in the workplace you see this in most people's personal lives there's a real push of like oh crap we need to hit our targets by the end of the year and often businesses you know a lot of businesses will do like 40% of their annual Revenue in the final 2 months of the year yeah Black Friday Christmas probably makes a difference but there is a certain sense of urgency that happens when you get closer and closer to a deadline deadlines as much as I don't particularly like them are generally annoyingly motivating back when I was working on my book I had weekly deadlines from my editor and I was just making no progress in the book and every Tuesday we'd have a meeting at like 5:00 p. m.