Aidan 

Welcome to episode number 98 of The Growth Booth, where today I'm joined by good friend, mentor, entrepreneur, podcasting legend, author, James Schramko. James, great to have you on the call.

James Schramko 

Hey, thanks. And congratulations – 98! That's showing signs of momentum and stick-to-it-iveness.

Aidan 

Yeah, definitely stick-to-it-iveness. We are getting there. We do one episode a week, but still nothing on you. You've done I think over 1000 episodes on your podcast at this point, which is inspirational. By the way, you can find out and check out James's podcasts over at jamesschramko.com. The other thing I wanted to mention, very much in line with what we're talking about today is your book Work Less, Make More. I just took a look on Amazon and the reviews on that: off the charts. I mean, it's pretty hard to get over a four-star rating on Amazon, but yours is about as close to five stars as you can possibly get. It's not based on 50 reviews. It's based on closer to 1000. So congratulations, I love the book. It's called Work Less, Make More. I've got it in physical copy, I've got an audio copy, and I've got it in Kindle copy, so ticking all the all the boxes. They're definitely worth checking out over at Amazon. So congratulations, James.

James Schramko 

Yeah, awesome. It's hard to write a book. I've got a few books sitting there. I think what makes it so hard is that they're so permanent and so long term. To be six years down the track and have the books still going well is testimony to the lady that helped me actually, and which is actually on point with today. Sometimes to get the best out of ourselves, we need to find other people around us to support us. This lady, Kelly Exeter, was pivotal in getting that book to market and helping me extract it from me.

Aidan 

Yeah, and we are talking about personal effectiveness today. I'm a big believer like you in ongoing improvement, getting 1% better each day, all with the objective of being more effective. So this is a topic that I love. I know a lot of our listeners are going to be really entertained and interested, I think, in this topic as well.

So what does personal effectiveness mean to you? Where do we start?

James Schramko 

Well, I'll tell you what it's not: it's not personal efficiency. There's a lot of material on being productive and speed reading and cramming more into our day and all of this stuff, and I really come at it at a different angle. I like one of the Peter Drucker quotes that "It's more important to be doing the right things than to be doing things right." So for me, personal effectiveness, it means that you figured out what is the point, like, what are you trying to achieve in life, and then you build your life around that. If that was the scorecard, you could say, "Yes, I'm living life the way that I want." And that's pretty important in our field, because as you would know, a lot of people set out to become a billionaire, or 100-millionaire, and that's the goal or objective or point; however, there are going to be sacrifices, and there are going to be things you have to do to get to that stage that might not be what someone like me could consider being an amazing life. I might value surfing or spending time with my children, or watching a movie and not feeling guilty about it during the week, and working three-day workweeks instead of a five- or six- or seven-day workweek.

Aidan 

Yeah, I can totally relate to that. And especially in this entrepreneurship field, there really as oftentimes no ceiling to how big you can grow something, and that can be a little bit of a trap, because you end up chasing the wrong thing. Oftentimes I see people completely neglecting other things that in the long run are much more important, like for example, health, personal energy, diet. Where do you see that side of that, those ingredients, if you like, fitting into personal effectiveness?

James Schramko 

Well, back to the point. If you craft a certain lifestyle for yourself, I mean, one of the presumptions is that you live. I actually know that there was a guy in our industry who passed away and he's 10 years younger than me. It might have been completely random, or it could have been that there was a health issue there, but for me, and I think this is probably more important as you get older, when you're young, you feel it and you don't think about stuff, like kids eat bad food and stuff like that. But I'm 52 years old, and I'm more interested in health than I've ever been because I think when I hit that sort of milestone of 50, for a lot of people, that means "Hey, you could be at the halfway point." You might even be, I mean, based on Western society, longevity metrics, you're past the halfway point. But I feel like we might live a little longer, hopefully, in the future, that will be ideal, but I'll probably miss out on the generation where we get singularity.

In terms of health and fitness, having a young child for me has reinvigorated me to be able to have that momentum because she's full of energy and can last all day and do endless activities. I want to be there. But also I just want to move about society feeling strong and feeling good. I want to be able to lift groceries or carry a child or get up staircases and stuff like that. I know there are people my age who are having huge mobility issues, severely overweight, have terrible bloodwork, all that sort of stuff, eating bad processed food, taking all sorts of medications. I am thankfully, and due to a concerted effort, and we can go into what I've done, but I've had a massive turnaround, even in the last six months, where I shed 10% body fat, where I lost for 13 or 14 kilograms, which is a lot of pounds to multiply by two point something where I can bench press and squat and all that more than my own body weights and do pull ups and push-ups and serve like a much younger person. I haven't actually reached those metrics since I was in my 20s.

I do think just in the work that I've done with entrepreneurs, I see a repeated pattern. It's kind of like how goes the leader, how goes the men, how goes the entrepreneur is how the business goes, if you're neglecting some part of your personal fitness and health, it's likely there'll be a shadow of that in the business to the point where you may not even be around to look after that business. That's the extreme, of course, and I'm sure there are endless examples of people who aren't super, super healthy, like billionaires who run big companies, but they have so many compromises, so many shortcomings, like sleeping in the office by themselves or missing their kid's birthdays and stuff. It's really very important, I think, to maintain a core, if you want to live the kind of life that I live, and I want a long healthy life, and I’d rather pay now than pay later with medication or paid later with being immobilized, etc. I'll do what I can just to stay on top of that. I'll take responsibility.

Aidan 

Yeah. I think, to your point there, it's all connected. If you're healthy physically, if you're healthy with a strong mindset, then that is going to flow over into what you can achieve when you're working on things that you want to want to work on. Although it's not about efficiency, I think that when you've identified the area that you want to specialize in, that's where the time management, goal setting, decision making can come into it. But a lot of people maybe are not even thinking about what they actually want. They just want to have a big business that makes a lot of money. I'm talking in the business sense because that's where we operate a lot and a lot of the listeners of this show operate.

I guess going back right to the beginning, it's identifying what does personal effectiveness mean to you. So you get a few examples there. It basically came down to living life on your terms, doing the things that you love. I know you go surfing every day, you spend a lot of time with your young daughter. If someone is thinking about, if someone is listening to this thinking, “Where do I start here?” do you have any thoughts or ideas or maybe from personal experience about where someone can begin to go down this path of becoming more effective on a personal level?

James Schramko 

Yeah, well, what's important is just to say here, that when I was younger and building a family, I just needed to make money, so there's nothing wrong with that. I worked really long hours. Part of the reason I haven't experienced the health that I've had now since the 20s is I did make compromises. I sat at a desk too long, I worked too many hours, I didn't get enough sleep, I cut corners on strength training, and also I didn't start surfing till only 10 years ago. So there was this period of decades of abuse of my person, but you know, I've got osteoarthritis and stuff. I guess the first step might be to just to future pace a little bit and think where would I like to end up a bit further down the track, and what sort of steps would be the first steps to getting there.

I think it would be, if you could build a solid core, which might be just the basics, and when I say the basics, they're so basic that most people overlook at the basics or getting a good sleep foundation, I would actually start there. I would actually say "You know what, work on getting a really good sleep score, if you track it with an aura ring or if you know you're not sleeping well," and that can sometimes have relational to breathing. But if you could do that you make way better decisions and the time that you are awake, you'll be so potent and powerful that all the efficiency will come, the leverage will come. So I think sleep is a huge priority. Most people don't get good sleep in modern society, and that's the first area that I usually start when I'm helping people. I'm checking on their sleep, and then I'll have a look at their routine. And we'll have a look at what sort of our budget do we want to allocate per week for work? And then how do we find the leverage so that we can work less, make more? How can we get more money, extract more money out of that machine without you having to be the grindstone to it?

Aidan 

Yeah, you mentioned something about future pacing. A question that it reminded me of that I asked myself sometimes is, what would my 10-year older self recommend to me to be doing today? I think that's a great way of sort of grounding yourself. In my case, like, you have a couple of young kids, five, and seven, and in 10 years' time, they're going to be young adults, and a lot of the things that the routine and the monotonous today, I'm not going to be able to do it with them. I would probably pay a lot of money or sacrifice a lot to be able to do those things in 10 years' time. When I'm asking myself that question of future pacing, a lot of that, for me comes back to my family, because I know my business can keep growing and is not the reason I live, let's say.

You mentioned sleeping, there's a fantastic book, I think it's called Why We Sleep, and if you've got any doubt about how important sleep is then read that book and you will want to go to bed earlier. I can promise you that.

The other two sort of pillars, I think of personal health, at least in my mind, exercise, which study after study after study have shown it to be the number one preventative medication if you like, and it's a pretty cheap one that all it requires is 20, 30, 40 minutes, a few times a week kind of a thing. And then what I've done a lot lately is drink less alcohol. So I love a good cocktail. I love a glass of wine. I love a nice cold beer on a hot day, but I notice a huge impact the day after just how sharp I am, how switched on I am if I've had a few drinks prior to going to bed. I think the big reason there is the effect that it has on your sleep. So it comes back to sleep, and there's a whole flow on effects.

So we've got all the health components that we've spoken about. What about some of the actual sort of nuts and bolts of "Okay, I've decided what's important to me"? How can I now focus on these things and really move the needle and get results maybe that I wasn't seeing before? So some of the ideas that I think about, things like making sure you're setting the right goals so that, again, congruent with where you want to get to in the future, decision makings, and sometimes I ask myself the question, "What would James do?" and that's a good a good guide if you're not sure about the best decision to make is to try to put yourself in someone else's shoes and say, "What would that person do in the situation?" and time management. So any thoughts around some of those parts of the personal effectiveness puzzle?

James Schramko 

Yeah, I think what you're suggesting there is building a team around you to help you. That has made the biggest difference for me. There was a series of events, but I observed a friend of mine go through a transformation. He told me that this friend of his helped him. And so I met this friend, we went surfing, and this guy said, "Hey, you could be ripped by the time we got to the Maldives," and that was six months ago. And I said, "Well, what would I have to do?" and he told me, but then he followed me up. He showed me all the steps, he's holding me accountable and checking in with me, and guiding me because he's an expert in those things. So I had a number of people help me. This guy helped with setting up the biometrics and the metabolic tracking and so forth, and then I had my local guy. 

Three months into it, I started going to the gym for strength training. And in just three months, we converted 2.1 kilograms of fat into 2.1 kilograms of muscle, just from two days a week. I also have a friend who helps me with nutrition and food, helping me get guidance in terms of what to eat, what not to eat. And it sounds crazy, but you know, it can get to half a decade old, and discover new ways of doing things and new things that have a profound and everlasting impact. That changed the game. I would surround yourself with the people who will overcome your willpower deficiency, because I've noticed that the high achievers that I work with are really accountable and responsible for their outcomes. They're the first people to put their hand up and say, "Help me, please." They will pay for help, they will look for an expert who's already conquered the thing they want to conquer, and they will shortcut their path there, rather than try and do it a free, cheap, easy, long way. So I would assemble a team around the things that you need support with, to make it almost impossible to fail.

Aidan 

Yeah, I think that's definitely one of the biggest shortcuts that there is, is to get a coach and then build a team. One thing that I think we've done quite well in, in our business and my business over the years, is find good people and hold on to them, and then remove myself, for example, from the different day to day operations. When you are hustling building a business, initially, a lot of what we're talking about here might not resonate as much because you are in that hustle mode, you need to make money, so on and so forth, but it's good to start thinking about a lot of this. And still, if you are in it, that hustle mode to start making money, sometimes it's good to take a step back, look at the 10,000 foot sort of view and say, "Oh, if I had someone helping me here, then the path could be so much faster." And I think that's another trap when you are sort of in that hustle mode is sometimes you miss those opportunities. 

So then related to online business. Where do you think someone would start looking to or for what position do you think someone would start looking to build a team? Is it different for everyone in your experience? What how do you sort of start down that process?

James Schramko 

Well, I love that question, and especially in relation to what you were just talking about. There is a trend right now for people to have solopreneurships. There's a trend for one-person empires. Twitter Bros and young people especially are saying "Hey, I can build a really leveraged business all by myself, no employees, etc." You and I know that is that has limitations. It means you're going to be doing…

Aidan 

Why would you want to do absolutely everything?

James Schramko 

The hidden part to that is the first step that I like to do is review everything that's being done. And knowing the 80/20 principle and extrapolating that into 64/4, I know that only a few of the activities that we actually do are that useful. Trying to strip away and remove and delete unnecessary things is a huge power move. If you are going to be a solopreneur or a one-man hustler or one-lady hustler or one-day hustler, whatever the terms are these days, then don't do anything you don't need to do. So get that list down to the smallest possible list first, and then from what's left, and this is why it's different for each people, figure out what you really love doing what you're particularly good at. What are you the best in the world at? What do people come to you for? Try and do the core activities, and then see if you can get someone to do the other things. And this will vary.

I'll give you two specific examples. For most people like me, I have a coaching community, so I speak to my clients, that's what I do. That's my role. I really only have two main roles in my business. One is to create some content, and two is to coach the people who buy. That's the main thing. Of course, I'm the overarching strategic director and I do a little bit of leadership here and there with my small team of six, but this team of six does everything else: they'll do bookkeeping, customer service, they'll curate all the content, distribute it, write all the emails and send the emails and make sure my website is up and running. Those things I just described are what most people are still doing when they're a one-person business. They're still editing their podcasts, they're still managing their website, they're still sending out the emails, they're still doing all their accounting and stuff. That's where it can be easy to find leverage in those roles. 

The exception is if you are like a high-level creative film director, you might not hire someone to do the filmmaking. You might actually want to be behind the camera. But if you are that person or a high-level website designer or something, then only do that and make sure someone else is packing your case, booking your travel, organizing the gigs, doing the marketing, getting the sales, managing the follow ups. You just get behind the camera and only do that. So I guess it's pick the jobs you want, and then get someone else to do it. I like what Dean Jackson coined, “It's who, not how.” That's such a important mantra for a small operator, as soon as you can possibly find a Who instead of figure out How, you'll find leverage.

Aidan 

I love this idea of basically doing an audit of everything you're doing in a day, or everything you're doing related to building your online business. That's something that we're focusing on, and this is something I picked up from you a few years ago. In fact, you can do an audit for of your own operations very easily, you can open up a spreadsheet, Google Sheet, create a couple of columns in the first column, you might write down each different tasks that you've done. In the second column, you might write down how long did you spend doing that task, and then in the third column, you can, put a checkmark in there, if it's something that you know, other people could potentially do, or if it's something that you must do yourself or can only do.

Now, I think there are not that many tasks that only we can do, we could outsource absolutely pretty much everything if we wanted and get help with everything, but there might be some that you are particularly interested in. And when you do this, you come up with a list of what you're doing on a day-to-day basis. You can then decide, "Okay, this task here, I'm going to do that one more timend I'm not going to do that again." And what would I have to do that you can make a simple standard operating procedure, you can record a video of yourself doing it using something like Loom, and then you can pass it off to someone else. I think that's a great way to free up time and make sure that you're focusing in on the things that are most important to you. Remember, this is all relating back to personal effectiveness. So if your idea of personal effectiveness is that you're focused on one thing, then you want to eliminate everything else so that you can focus on that. If your idea of personal effectiveness is making sure that you've got two hours free every single day in addition to running your business so that you can focus on self-improvement, health improvement, then you can build that add into your into your plan. I really, I love that idea of an audit of what you're doing currently. Really great idea.

James Schramko 

Well, the beauty of doing that apart from seeing what you can delete off that list altogether is you'll get a value for the time and you work out which activities are worth more than others. That gives you an easy hiring metric you can then hire for things that cost less now. Two things come up at this point, usually when we have this conversation, one is, "But I don't know how to hire or where to hire." They're pretty solvable these days. So it's not a skill most people have, leadership, but there's plenty of playbooks and SOPs you can find on hiring and training a team. It's definitely worth doing over the long haul. The second one is, "But I can't afford to hire someone yet," and if that's the case, then go and work on your offer or your sales pricing so that you can afford it because that's the first place I would start. Lift your income so that you can then proportion that money back into and this is what we're doing. I actually gave a presentation on this and someone even wrote a book after hearing this from me. You're buying time, you're literally buying other people's time, so you just need to know what that hourly rate is worth. The more commoditized roles can be bought, quite cheap. And in the future and even possibly now, some of those roles could be replaced with software.

Aidan 

Speaking about virtual assistants and a way that you can start doing that, we've actually got an episode at The Growth Booth number 67. You can check that out about how to some of the ideas that I've got around hiring talent and starting to outsource.

The last thing that I wanted to dive into here with James was related, specifically, to mindset. Do you think there are important elements of mindset when it comes to personal effectiveness? For example, one that comes to mind for me is about resilience, how you handle setbacks, and how you handle failures. When you've got very clear in your mind what's important to you, it becomes so much easier to handle that because if you have a setback, if you have a failure, then the objective is so important that you just keep charging forward, whereas if you're chasing some kind of fuzzy objective, then the first setback might be enough to throw you completely off the path. But in terms of mindset, anything that that you can think of there that you would like to share with people that you've picked up along your own journey or having coached lots of other people?

James Schramko 

Yeah, in fact, another coach who talks a lot about mindset of, I really like his material, his name's Jaemin Frazer. He believes the root of the problem for a lot of people is just insecurity. That is basically we're too worried about what other people think, and that drives a lot of behavior. If you can be more secure in yourself, if the only opinion that you're worried about was your own opinion of yourself, it frees you up to actually function more effectively. I think that's a profound and important mindset technique. That way you can think about when you use words like failure.

Now, you're not really losing when something doesn't work out, you're either getting a win because it worked or you're getting feedback, if it doesn't work that you can use to improve the process, but you're doing it because you want to do it and because it's part of your mission, not because you're trying to please your ex-girlfriend's dad or your father who abandoned you when you were a kid or get attention from your peer group that you went to school with. You now do it for your own reasons, and that's what being secure is about. 

I think that's actually freed me up from worrying about competing with other people in the market or feeling any kind of jealousy if someone's getting a success, and I'm able to celebrate my vastly more successful clients that I coach. I love their wins and success. I'm there assisting them. Usually, it's through a process of total honesty and transparency, giving people a safe space where they can talk without being judged, because I'm not judging them. Because then they are no longer doing things for my approval, they're doing things to improve their opinion of themselves. I like that.

Aidan 

I think one thing that that made me think of when you're sharing that there was about this abundance mindset, and the way that that ties in with this idea of competition. On social media these days, you always see the absolute best highlight reels of everyone. No one puts, I don't see it very often, people putting like the average video or photo on Facebook. It's always, "This was the best photo from my holiday, and I'm going to publish it on social media." And that's fantastic. But people do the same thing with business. So sometimes I think it is a slippery slope to go down, when you start comparing yourself to other people. I've just ignored the noise, doubled down on what I'm doing, and realized that there is a huge amount of abundance, there's plenty to go around. Someone else can be successful and I can also be successful.

In fact, I was recently at a live event in Orlando, and I was meeting people there who I'm in direct competition with with some of the different software that we've got. We had some of the best conversations, I had some of the best conversations with those people, because I don't really look at them like competitors, even though you could say the software is similar and does similar things that that you do. I don't really look at them as competitors. I'm always thinking about my software, or whatever project I'm working on, and how I can keep pushing forward and improving that because when you start using another company as a benchmark, you end up lacking innovation and lacking a way forward.

I think we see this with, you know, giant economies as well, where a lot of people are thinking that maybe one day China is going to overtake and become the number one economy in the world and innovation and so forth, but most of what they're doing is copying a formula that worked very well for a lot of the Western world but has got its limitation, where the leaders of the Western world like Switzerland, certain areas of the United States where we're seeing enormous innovation, they're really paving their own path, and they're not looking behind them to see what's coming, they're looking to see what they can do what's in front of them. 

Gone off on a bit of a tangent there, but in any case, I think this idea of not letting competition dictate.

James Schramko 

I think it's the same topic when people post a picture of them on a jet plane, that just means that's not their normal life, that's something exceptional. It's them saying "I'm insecure. So I need you to make comments so that I can increase my own value based on what you say about me.” It's very, very dangerous, right? When I take my daughter down to the beach here and don't post a picture of it, that's the definition of security. I don't need anyone else to say “Good job, James. You’re killing it," because I already know, right? And so I don't have to share it. I might be the least famous person on Instagram, but it doesn't mean I'm the least happy. 

That's the point about the innovation. As soon as you buy into someone else's game, you've given up on yours if you get too invested in in their game. It's funny about the China thing, because I see companies like TikTok. They probably pushed the short video format pretty hard and cause the other companies to react, and now they're going full on into e-commerce and they've killed their creative fun and want people to create longer content. They're changing gears, and the other companies now have to pay attention to that. When it comes to innovation, even the very biggest companies, the most well-funded with all the superduper geniuses employed by them are still, you could say they'd be uncertain about where they'll be in a year or two from now. You only have to look at X, formerly Twitter, to see how vastly different a company could be within a year.

Aidan 

Also on this idea of competition and watching what your competitors are doing, I've recently been going back through Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. And I've read it a few times, but one of the examples he gives us how Microsoft and Google, I think they were so busy watching what each other was doing and trying to create competing products for the other company that Apple came along, focused on what they were doing and just charged forward, and all kinds of different ways through innovation. There was just a great example in my mind about one company being secure in its identity, working on what it's good at, working on its core competencies and making incredible products where you had Google out there trying to be a word processor, Microsoft out there trying to create a search engine. It causes so much fuzziness in what they're doing. 

I saw a really good movie recently on the flight, which is also related to this, which you might find interesting. It's the BlackBerry, it's the story of BlackBerry, and how the BlackBerry phone sort of was at the pinnacle of success and how everything could change. I think they sort of rested on their laurels to some degree there, and they were here one minute, they were gone the next when the iPhone came out.

James Schramko 

Scarily too much like my old boss. When the iPhone came out, and when the networks couldn't support the platform, it disappeared. It's funny talking about Google and Microsoft, they both really tried hard on the social media front. Maybe Google Wave, Google Buzz, Google Plus, they just couldn't crack it. Microsoft also, I think they ended up just buying LinkedIn from memory. They don't do social media, right? Facebook, Instagram, all these others just killed them.

Aidan 

Yeah, yeah, I think there's a lot to be said, especially if you're a small guy and not a mega corporation. If you're someone like us, and if you can just focus on doubling down on what you want to do, focus on what is important to you, once you've got that clear in your mind, and then you can bring out a lot of tools to help you improve on that. 

A few podcasts that we've done in the past that you might find useful: Episode number 93, I shared seven life changing business apps. These are tools that can help you move forward, and perhaps be more effective and in what you're doing at a given point in time. Regarding goal setting and goal getting, we've got an episode on that number 85, over at thegrowthbooth.com, and there are others in there as well that you can explore.

I know that you've got dozens of episodes on these types of topics as well, James, over at jamesschramko.com. We'll include a link to that in the show notes here. James, thanks for coming on here today. I look forward to having you back again, hopefully in the near future where we can dive into one of these other topics. I'm always good to chat with you. I always get a few nuggets of wisdom, which I can try to incorporate into my own life, as well, so thanks very much, man.

James Schramko 

Thank you so much Aidan, and congratulations on all those podcasts, such a valuable resource. It's amazing what you're doing there. Also, you're so humble, you look absolutely mega successful, and then sharing it on a platform like this is very generous.

Aidan 

Just learning from the best, mate. So thanks. Thanks for everything.

This is a wrap of episode number 98 of The Growth Booth. In the next episode, we're going to be talking about automation, but not in the way that you're thinking of it, and then we've got episode number 100. So make sure you tune into that, make sure you watch it. You can catch it on YouTube or over at thegrowthbooth.com or Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever it is that you'd like to tune into the show. So let's wrap, thanks for listening. I'll see you on the next episode of The Growth Booth.