The Signal, Not The Noise

I've increased my net worth by over 20x in the past three years, and I think the switch was largely due to what I'm going to talk about in this email.

This is a combination of several important principles and tools coming together at the same time in my life. I think that a lot of progress is not made on learning or becoming aware of a single thing, but on learning and becoming aware of several things that combine to make a result that is far greater than the individual pieces.

In my case, this was a combination of three things:

Let's break down each of these, and then hopefully you'll see how they work together.

This is essentially a spreadsheet where you have all of your objectives per year and per quarter, so you get all of your high-level planning done. It also has a tab for each month in that year. In each tab, you have the opportunity to schedule three to five things that you want to do each day, but no more.

There's so much time in the day, and a lot of people feel so busy. Realistically, there are only a few small tasks that you can do that actually make your business better and push things forward.

The War Map represents a very useful tool for both high-level planning that you need to do and turning it into daily actions. Both high-level planning and micro-daily planning are important, and very few people are good at both.

Unfortunately, you can't have one without the other.

You could have the best high-level planning in the world, but if you don't actually get anything done, your plans don't come to fruition.

On the other side, you could be busy all day getting stuff done, but if you don't have a high-level plan that all of your actions are a part of, you're just doing a bunch of random tasks that don't actually move the needle.

The second thing is a concept from self-help author Brian Tracy that he talks about in a lot of his books, and it's called the Rule of Three.

Brian Tracy's Rule of Three states that out of all the tasks you do in a week or month, only three key activities account for 90% of your value and results. Everything else you do makes up the remaining 10% or less.

I always recommend everybody do this exercise on Saturday or Sunday.

If you do this over and over and over, and spend more and more of your time doing your Rule of Three tasks, you are going to become a very, very wealthy person

I've put the clip above. It's under 60 seconds. The clip I've linked is a short-form clip, but you can see the longer interview if you search for it.

The first part of the clip is an unrelated story, but the last half is when Kevin O'Leary talks about it. I couldn't find a clip of just the lesson from Steve Jobs on its own, so you'll have to suffer through the first 15 to 20 seconds.

If you don't want to watch the video, here's a paraphrased version of the lesson from the video (it’s not perfect as the original clip is edited/shortened).

“I worked with Steve Jobs in the early ’90s. He was not an easy guy. He was demanding, impatient, and completely uninterested in excuses.

But he understood something most people never figure out.

Every day, you have three things that absolutely must get done in the next 18 hours. Not next week. Not next month. Not some vague five-year vision.

Three things.

That is the signal.

Every meeting, email, phone call, distraction, and excuse that prevents you from completing those three things is noise.

Jobs was obsessed with the signal. That was why he could seem so harsh. He did not want to waste time discussing things that did not move the company forward.

His rule was simple: spend 90% of your time on the signal and no more than 10% on the noise.

Know your three priorities. Protect them ruthlessly. Get them done every day.

Do that consistently, and you will be wildly successful.”

When I started putting all of these together, identifying my rule-of-three tasks (the things that I absolutely must get done today to help me toward my goals), and mapping those out on Sam Oven's war map, I saw my personal income, my net worth, my productivity, and my overall level of achievement truly explode.

Talk later,

Matt

PS. My Top Recommendations

It is my goal to create a list of things that you can do that will actually make a difference. I will be adding to this list over time with the links to the original content.