[00:00:00] Jay: When someone says they're really busy, my internal question is usually, what are they hiding from? Because busy is like, man, I got a lot done today. Did any of it matter would be the next question. Checking a lot of boxes is not how you find extraordinary success.
[00:00:18] Michael: Hi, I'm Michael Hyatt
[00:00:19] Megan: and I'm Megan Hyatt Miller,
[00:00:20] Michael: and you're listening to the double wind show.
[00:00:22] Megan: And we're super excited today because we have our good friend, Jay Papazan, by the way, I totally butcher his name in the interview, but we now know Papazan. is the right pronunciation. I think he's Greek. He's a Memphian. We'll get to all that in this conversation. But Jay, if you don't know, is the author of the book, The One Thing.
[00:00:44] And I mean, probably no audience more than ours is more likely to have read that book.
[00:00:48] Michael: We should say also the co author. Gary Keller.
[00:00:51] Megan: Yes. With Gary Keller of Keller Williams fame. Jay has sold with Gary, I don't even know, millions maybe of books. The most recent
[00:00:59] Michael: [00:01:00] number I could find on the one thing was three and a half million copies?
[00:01:03] Megan: Yeah.
[00:01:04] Michael: That's a lot of books.
[00:01:04] Megan: It's a lot of books. Almost no authors. That's like point zero zero. Achieve that. And yeah, I think the reason is because this framework in the one thing is so helpful, which really helps you prioritize and focus on what truly matters to achieve extraordinary results. And he has these great frameworks in the book that are very practical and, you know, Philosophically meaningful as well, but just really practical.
[00:01:29] We get into that. We talk about right out of the gate, one of my favorite, which is called the bunker, which I think you guys are going to love, like basically, as I say, in, in our conversation, the Venn diagrams between the Papazans and the Hyatt's are like almost completely overlapping. He is our people.
[00:01:45] And I think you're going to love hearing this conversation that will help you focus at just the right time of the year.
[00:01:52] Michael: So much wisdom. Okay. Here's Jay.
[00:01:59] Megan: Well, Jay, [00:02:00] welcome to the show. We're so excited to have you.
[00:02:02] Jay: Oh, I'm so excited to be here. This has been on my calendar for so long. I actually accidentally prepared for it a month ago because I was so excited.
[00:02:10] Megan: I love that. Okay, so I got to see you in Austin this fall when I was there for a mastermind that I'm a part of and you came.
[00:02:18] You are so And everybody was so excited that you were there. Um, we don't always get to have a special guest in person, but since you live in Austin, you were there in person. And it was, it was so great. You actually presented twice. And I have to tell you, I took so many notes from your presentation. And I ended up coming home so fired up about the one thing, which I had read years before, but I hadn't read recently that I took the, the question, the one thing question, which is what's the one thing I could do such that by doing it.
[00:02:50] Everything else will be easier or unnecessary. And I had that made into two posters that I then had professionally framed. And I have one in [00:03:00] my office where I see it every single day. And I have one in the meeting room that our team meets in at least once a week. And so you are immortalized in a poster.
[00:03:10] You are ever present in our office. And now I get to be with you this morning.
[00:03:14] Jay: I love that. You have to send me a picture so I can share it on Instagram or something. That's great. I love that. So I have a question because when we were talking about focus and bunkers, your aha was that maybe you needed to get your plants out of your workspace because that was your distraction.
[00:03:28] Was that, am I remembering that correctly?
[00:03:30] Megan: No, you can't tell all my secrets, J.
[00:03:33] Jay: Okay, you're caring for the plants. You're caring for the plants. And that's like, it
[00:03:38] Megan: can derail me. In fact, it's funny. I told Joel, my husband this morning, he was talking about, he feels like he does better work. Like we'll talk about what this bunker concept is in a minute.
[00:03:48] Cause I think our audience will love that. But he said he does better work at the office. And I said, well. If I was at home in your office, which is wall to wall books, he's an author outside of his work with us on the content side. I said, I feel [00:04:00] like that would be like, if I tried to work in the laundry room and I had baskets of laundry around me, like I just wouldn't be able to get anything done because until I got the laundry done and even then, you know, I'd have to put it away.
[00:04:09] So the answer to your question is no, I still have the plants in my office, but I have changed that. I've given somebody else the job. Of the watering and I have also given myself time before work starts to like, you know, on a weekly basis, go around and take care of everything and trim off the dead leaves and whatever.
[00:04:29] And so I feel like now it's become my bunker and it is not a distraction anymore.
[00:04:35] Jay: Yay. So maybe that's a great place. I'll take them.
[00:04:38] Megan: Yeah. I think we should start with now that everybody wants to know what the bunker is. Tell us what the bunker is and why we need one.
[00:04:44] Jay: We all understand this. Like, our world is not lined up to help us focus.
[00:04:49] Megan: No. That's true.
[00:04:49] Jay: Right? So, we have distractions, the biggest ones being our phone. So, we usually talk about this for your work, one thing. Is there a place that you can go where your focus would be more or [00:05:00] less protected? And we refer to that as a bunker, right? It's a safe place for your focus. And I've talked to people from every walk of life.
[00:05:09] And it's strange how many of them, their work office is not their bunker.
[00:05:13] Megan: Yeah.
[00:05:14] Jay: Especially if they work in an open office setting, right. Or they have a cubicle. And I'll say, where is the place that when you go there, you tend to be able to really get a lot of work done without interruption, maybe even get into that state of flow, right, where you're in the zone.
[00:05:32] And I've heard on airplanes, we had one lady that had found like a secret kind of spot in the basement of her building. It actually worked for me years ago. It was like a couch. But nobody knew where to find her, right? I had one lady that would bring in a rolling bag and she would stop in a conference room that was empty and get her laptop out and work for 45 minutes or so before she went to her office because her office is where the distractions were.
[00:05:59] People are going to say, [00:06:00] can you help me, can you help me? So it's a very relative answer, but people should ask an answer. Where is that place I can go to where historically I've been able to get a lot of work done and we'll call that your bunker.
[00:06:12] Michael: You know, you said airplanes and I have sometimes threatened to build a fuselage in my office.
[00:06:20] We're literally sitting in an airplane seat. But the thing I've noticed that used to be fantastic. But the problem is I need the Internet. I need it for research. Almost all the apps that I use require the Internet. And so what I found lately. is that the internet is so unreliable that I spend the entire flight trying to get on or waiting for it to load.
[00:06:41] I mean, it's just, it's just crazy. I just had that experience coming back from Denver a couple of days ago, but yeah, I love this concept. So I just did this. Megan doesn't even know this. You probably can't see my phone, but I've been looking for a dumb phone solution. And so I looked at the light phone, you know, because it's got no distractions, but I already actually bought one of those several years ago and it [00:07:00] just didn't work for me.
[00:07:00] So I wasn't much of a temptation. So what I did now is I turned the accessibility settings to the color filter that's called grayscale. Yeah. So I don't have the color, which we know creates a dopamine Hit and is also makes it more enticing. So now it's just grayscale. And then I found a little app called screen time control.
[00:07:21] And I know that iOS has that built in, but not like this. This makes applications disappear on a schedule so that you literally can't find them. You can't search for them. They're not your app library. They just disappear. And that's pretty cool too. So I'm trying to get in my bunker.
[00:07:38] Jay: We talk about the four steps, right?
[00:07:40] In that process, you find your bunker, you store provisions, right? Everything you need to do your work should be there. And it sounds like for you, Michael, also wifi, like I need to have wifi to be productive. And then you sweep for mines. We're continuing the military thing, but like your, your phone is one of them.
[00:07:59] So I would [00:08:00] catalog that in, how can I sweep for mines? And there's programs like freedom, there's the stuff you can do, like the colors, anything that creates a barrier between you and the distraction. Yeah. Like you can undo it. You can turn the settings off, but now you consciously have to do it. Friction.
[00:08:16] The store provisions is important. Research says that if someone interrupts you, that classic got a minute, it can take you 30 minutes to an hour to fully get back on track.
[00:08:27] Megan: Yeah. So
[00:08:27] Jay: it's never a minute, even if it was just a 30 second interaction.
[00:08:31] Megan: Yep.
[00:08:31] Jay: Your flow has been interrupted from whatever deep work you've been doing.
[00:08:35] Megan: Yeah.
[00:08:35] Jay: So just avoid it. And where Gary and I write, we have everything we could conceivably need. Like from Advil, water, power bars, you name it. Except for like a bathroom. Like that would be the ultimate, right, to have the bathroom there. Because we just don't want to, we call it getting sniped. We leave our bunker.
[00:08:55] I mean, these are your teammates. They're your team. And they're like, I need [00:09:00] help. What are you gonna do?
[00:09:01] Megan: Yeah. But
[00:09:02] Jay: if you avoid that, they will wait for you to come out. And say, gosh, I've been waiting for you to come out. And then you can dive into it. So the bunker strategy is one that really helps a lot of people who haven't yet gotten the strong muscle of focus, right?
[00:09:18] We all have our muscle, our focus muscle depends on how long we've been using it and how much distraction we have to deal with every day.
[00:09:25] Megan: Yeah.
[00:09:26] Jay: Right. It allows you to turn the volume down on the distractions and maybe get a little bit more work done.
[00:09:30] Michael: I got to ask you advice on something. So I kind of have a bunker.
[00:09:34] We call it a carriage house, but it's really just a cottage out back. And so I've got an office and I've got my supplies. It's in the upstairs part of that structure. And I've got almost everything I need. But the one thing I do like to do is take a break like every hour. And I, I know that that's good, but typically I walk back in the house where everything's happening and then I get distracted and so then it takes me a while to get back in the zone.
[00:09:59] So [00:10:00] what do you think about breaks and how do you do that in the context of a bunker?
[00:10:04] Jay: So it depends on the nature of the work, right? Like if you're writing or doing deep work, like the longer you can stay in there, the better. But there's advocates for the Pomodoro method, which I'm sure you're aware of, like 20 minutes on, five minutes off, 20 minutes on allows you to clinch that like a rep on a, on the bench press.
[00:10:23] Like you can really get a strong rep in, then you relax. So I think if you're doing it consciously, I would just experiment. Like, I think that's a, a gray area for me. Cause I do it too. I have to move physically. So our office layout, you can walk a loop and my chief of staff, Carly, she literally puts it on the calendar every day.
[00:10:44] We do a 15 minute walk, usually outside the building just to get out and walk. And that gives us some thinking time during the day, but I'll get up when I'm just stuck. I usually hit a finish line of some kind. And I get up and I will walk around the building. And I [00:11:00] also do this because I'm a leader. I'm an introverted CEO.
[00:11:04] And I got some advice from a past CEO that I worked under and Mark Willis. And he said, Jay, when I look at your natural behavior, you're very task oriented, you want to go do the work and you're not naturally going to check in on your people. So his challenge to me was every day. To find a different route to my
[00:11:24] Megan: office.
[00:11:24] Jay: And that would allow me, you know, the old management by walking around, I'm trying to remember what is that in search of excellence, maybe, but that idea of happenstance, I get to bump in to my peers in the building. I get to bump into my people and just, how are you doing? And it's been pretty magical. So I get up and I do a loop around the building and I'm actually very consciously looking to connect with people.
[00:11:50] Michael: I'm the same way. And I find on those kinds of things, if I don't reframe that relational time as a task. Like that, that, that changed everything. Like just [00:12:00] reframe it as a task. Yeah. You know, just something to check off. I mean, I'd much rather be in my bunker all by myself, but it's important when you're a leader.
[00:12:07] Megan: It is important. Yeah, definitely.
[00:12:09] Jay: It's non negotiable, honestly, no one succeeds alone and they don't fail alone either. That's right. So you just have to make sure that. You're connecting with your people. It gives you so many opportunities to serve as a leader when people just need to nudge a little coaching.
[00:12:23] Megan: Yeah.
[00:12:23] Jay: And when we talk about time blocking, which I know we'll get to making appointments with yourself to do things, I literally have appointments with myself to get up and walk around and see people. And people will say like, I have date nights. We've been on over 750 date nights since our kids were young.
[00:12:39] Megan: Amazing. And
[00:12:40] Jay: people were like, But that's not romantic. Shouldn't it be spontaneous? And the answer I've learned, Gary says it to my coauthor, Gary Keller. He's like, if it's important enough, it belongs on my calendar. And I think that's romantic.
[00:12:53] Megan: Yes. And
[00:12:54] Jay: so, because I want it to happen without fail. I don't want it to happen by accident.
[00:12:59] So [00:13:00] I'm with you. It is like a task. I'm going to schedule it. And I am really good at following it through when I have a task and I put it on my calendar.
[00:13:07] Megan: I love that. And I think that's freeing because I think sometimes we think the most important things in our life, we should just have spontaneous motivation to do, and we've all tried that.
[00:13:17] It doesn't usually work well. You know, you just forget. Cause whatever's most urgent usually is the thing that takes over in my experience. Jay, I would love for you to talk about the domino effect, because I think this is such a powerful concept and I think it's a powerful concept. at this time of year when our natural goal motivation and that big surge that comes at the beginning of the year around January 1st tends to wane a little bit.
[00:13:41] So talk about that concept and how we can use it.
[00:13:46] Jay: Sure. It kind of was the natural evolution of the, kind of one of the big ideas in the one thing book and it's think big, but act small, which is very counter intuitive, right? Most people want to think big and act big. [00:14:00]
[00:14:00] Megan: Yes. Oh,
[00:14:00] Jay: we're going to be number one in our, in our area, in our marketplace, and we're going to do all the things to get there versus really focused effort that has a bigger impact.
[00:14:12] We use the dominoes as a metaphor for someone's one thing. What is your one thing at any given moment? And can I find the thing that has the biggest impact? The most leveraged outcome, like what is the thing that would have the biggest impact on my goals? The 80, 20 rule, whatever you want. And when you write a book called the one thing, the first thing we got was a lot of skepticism.
[00:14:32] Like, what do you mean one thing? Nobody's got one thing and they're kind of right, but they're. not right. At any given moment, you should have one thing, right? You can only focus on one thing at a time. It doesn't mean you won't have multiple things to address over the course of your day, week, month, and year.
[00:14:48] But the idea of the dominoes is if you line them up right, I think y'all call it a double win. If you line it up right, you knock over the one domino and more fall down.
[00:14:59] Megan: Yep.
[00:14:59] Jay: And [00:15:00] so we started playing with this and the world record. was set in the Netherlands, I think around 2009, and they set up almost, uh, 4.
[00:15:10] 9 million dominoes.
[00:15:12] Megan: I mean, it's hard to even conceive of that, like, to even think about how, how much space does that take up? Like, that's an incredible amount of dominoes. And where do you buy
[00:15:18] Jay: that many dominoes? And where do you
[00:15:19] Megan: buy that many? And how do you get them inside? Like, there's so many questions I have.
[00:15:23] Jay: Well, it's like a whole sport out there, evidently. But they, they had to put it like in a gymnasium sized space.
[00:15:29] Megan: Okay.
[00:15:29] Jay: It had to be humidity controlled, and then they have to create breaks. So that if someone like me, I'm like going out at midnight to get Starbucks or whatever, I would come in and back up and knock them all down by accident.
[00:15:42] So they have breaks throughout it so that you can't unintentionally force them to set up the whole thing again.
[00:15:48] Megan: Wow.
[00:15:49] Jay: And so I think it was like one domino, like a flick of the finger released like 93, 000 joules of energy. And so that was the biggest example we could [00:16:00] find of someone who'd physically lined up one things And then we had a full time paid researcher and she found an article in the American Journal of Physics from the 80s by a guy named Loren Whitehead.
[00:16:12] Where he built physical dominoes that were 50 percent larger than each other. So a two inch dominoes where you start. I'm sorry if someone's listening around the world on the metric system, I don't know how to do the conversion, but the two inch domino will knock over a three inch domino will knock over a four and a half inch domino.
[00:16:28] And that's where my math breaks down without a spreadsheet. Cause I'm an English French major, but he built 10 of them. And by the first domino and to the 10th, he described it. He went from a gentle tick to a loud slam. Wow. And the last domino was about six feet, seven. So like a door, a door. Yeah. Yes. And so it's just kind of amazing to think of that much momentum building so quickly.
[00:16:54] So I went to a spreadsheet and graphed it out and it's one of the most like [00:17:00] Instagrammed or shared pages in the book is that little hockey stick graph. Where a two inch domino, 18 dominoes in, would knock over a domino as tall as the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
[00:17:10] Megan: Amazing.
[00:17:10] Jay: 23 dominoes in would knock over one as tall as the Eiffel Tower.
[00:17:14] And you go on out, and I think it's 33, you're 3, 000 feet above Everest, and 57, it would be from the Earth to the Moon. Wow. And so, compounding, you know this, our brains just can't grasp compounding. We think in a straight line. So, this idea that when you get really good at your one thing, You don't just get many results.
[00:17:37] Your impact gets larger and larger over time. I mean, I think about you, Michael, like how many people you've coached over the years, and I'm fairly small set of things, right around focus and goal achievement. Like how much more powerful you are in a one hour session than you were when you began
[00:17:56] Megan: because of all
[00:17:56] Jay: of the accumulated stories and experience and people don't think about that, [00:18:00] how much you grow along the journey.
[00:18:03] And how much more impact you can have. And so that for us became the central metaphor every day. We should be looking up and saying, where's that two inch domino around the goal that I want to achieve because it's doable, it's achievable every single day, it's kind of like that. Make your bed book, right?
[00:18:22] Every single day you can do that thing well and say, you know what? I only did knocked over that two inch domino. But I believe in the power of momentum and it will get bigger. And all of the evidence I found. in my life has lined up. Extraordinary happens this way. It starts small and it grows so much faster than we can imagine.
[00:18:41] Michael: This may be a confession. And if, and if so, you can absolve me, hopefully. But, uh, I believe everything you said intellectually, but at an emotional level, I think I operate from an assumption of scarcity. Like I've got to do it all now, you know? So what that means [00:19:00] is I take on too much because I feel like this has got to get done.
[00:19:05] And I caught myself doing it last week, and my assistant Jim challenged me on it, and I just blew him off. But over the weekend, I came back to the conclusion. I told him this morning in our meeting, I think you were right. I think I'm taking on too much, and I just need to see the power of incremental change over time.
[00:19:23] And in our goal achievement system, and see if this resonates with you or what the parallels are, but we encourage people to set their goals in the discomfort zone. So ratcheting them up. And in our SMARTER framework, the R stands for risky, not realistic, but the next steps in the achievement of that goal should be squarely in your comfort zone.
[00:19:45] They should be easy. It's a phone call. It's a email or a text message or a bit of research, but the steps are easy, but the goal will be enormous. But I think it's the same concept.
[00:19:56] Jay: Yeah. I mean, I go back all the way, was it, um, who did the [00:20:00] BHAG? I turned to think of that old book way back.
[00:20:02] Michael: think that was Jim Collins too.
[00:20:03] Yeah.
[00:20:04] Jay: I like the idea of a big goal where you could honestly say, I feel like I've got like a 50 50 chance if I'm honest with myself. So it feels like it's at the edge of our abilities, but it's not so big that we shut down and don't do anything at all. Yes. And so I agree with everything you just said, but I want to go back to what you were saying earlier, your confession, which you conveniently moved on from.
[00:20:28] Because I think. Well, I can only imagine 90 percent of the people listening feel exactly the same way. So I just want to address that. One, I think it's real. Everything in our world tells us that to think big, we have to go big. And it's really hard to see the evidence of our progress until farther down the line.
[00:20:49] We've done studies and the number one, one thing that people who read our book pursue is almost always health.
[00:20:56] Megan: Yeah.
[00:20:57] Jay: And that makes me really happy. But if you [00:21:00] go into a health regime, a new workout, a new diet, how long does it take before someone says, You know, Megan, did you lose weight?
[00:21:08] Megan: Mm hmm. Right.
[00:21:09] Months. Long time. Ten
[00:21:10] Jay: weeks.
[00:21:11] Megan: Yeah.
[00:21:11] Jay: Right. You get to a place where you are kind of in, in, in no person's land. You're not sure that it's working at all. And then you start to get the positive feedback. Mm
[00:21:20] Megan: hmm.
[00:21:21] Jay: And I think anything that's extraordinary, you have to have the faith to get through that zone. And doers, I like to say we serve primarily, there's two groups of people in life, doers who don't have space to dream and dreamers who don't have space to do.
[00:21:37] I believe probably both of our businesses have a lot of doers who don't make space to dream.
[00:21:41] Megan: Yeah.
[00:21:43] Jay: And if you're a doer, you've probably been rewarded with your initiative and your ability to close loops fast your entire life. You've been lauded for it. We've been rewarded and it's probably a protection mechanism.
[00:21:57] I have so much going on. That's why people [00:22:00] multitask. I've just got to knock that out and I think it is a natural urge that we've been trained to do right because it's made a successful. How do we just govern it just a little bit so that it doesn't become dysfunctional? Because like I know I had a leader that worked for me, a CEO I hired and I would be giving him some to do's.
[00:22:21] And I'd be like, what are you doing? And he's like, I'm doing that email. And I was like, but we're still talking. And he was so conditioned to just knock things off of his list. He'd be right there in the meeting, knocking out the task. But I was like, but now I'm only getting a fraction of your attention.
[00:22:37] And the beauty of us being together is we get to tackle big problems. The tasks are for later, but I just see this so common.
[00:22:44] Megan: Yeah.
[00:22:45] Jay: And so I'm not going to say don't do that stuff all the time. Be that way when you're in your bunker doing your number one activity. If the number one thing that leads to your success, Megan or Michael, like for me, My number one activity [00:23:00] is writing.
[00:23:01] If I am writing down new ideas that can be turned into content, books, and coaching, I'm making my number one contribution to my businesses and my partners, if I can just be focused during those couple of hours a day, I'm okay. I'll, I'll give myself a little grace. I'll go be distracted. and multitask a little bit here and there else.
[00:23:22] But my number one thing when my kids were small was reading in bedtime, right? I was the working dad, bath and bedtime. Man, I didn't bring my phone upstairs. I don't want a distraction at these milestone moments. When it really matters. Does that make sense? Does that make you feel better when you, about your confession?
[00:23:41] I don't
[00:23:41] Megan: know if you know, but we just went to therapy. That was therapy.
[00:23:46] Michael: So true. Go ahead and invoice me for that.
[00:23:48] Megan: Yeah.
[00:23:49] Michael: Okay. No, it, it, it totally makes sense. You know, I think there's some deep things that I'm looking at. Megan and I both, and a lot of our company, we've been studying addiction and dopamine and [00:24:00] the impact on us.
[00:24:01] And there's an environmental. There's a biological component, there's a biochemical component,
[00:24:06] Megan: genetic component, genetic
[00:24:07] Michael: component, all this stuff. But I think that for most of us, we're sleepwalking through life and we never just stop long enough to say, what's driving this behavior? Yes. I keep thinking I'm at a level where I'm self aware and then I realize, no, I'm still asleep in that area.
[00:24:23] And so I'm just kind of waking up.
[00:24:33] Megan: Jay, one of the questions that I feel like our listeners are probably having right now For maybe 10 percent of the people, maybe they know what their one thing is. They know what their most important contribution is. But for the 90 percent who don't, how do you determine what your one thing is, maybe at home and professionally?
[00:24:55] Because there's, sometimes I think it feels like there are so many priorities. It's like why we [00:25:00] multitask, you know, we have the sense of scarcity. It's like there's so many things that are important. How do I pick just one?
[00:25:05] Jay: You alluded to it earlier. We talk about the focusing question. And honestly, if the book was prioritized perfectly, that would be the first thing you read.
[00:25:14] But it's so simple. Nobody would believe you.
[00:25:15] Megan: Yeah. So
[00:25:16] Jay: it's kind of in the middle of the book, if I'm honest.
[00:25:18] Megan: Yeah.
[00:25:19] Jay: We had to earn people's trust to say like this simple tool can do the work. We wrote the book for about four and a half years before it was published. We did a lot of research cause it was our first non real estate book, Gary and I.
[00:25:30] And we wanted to get it right. And we didn't want it to just be our ideas. And I remember having a lot of anxiety. If I ask the question, what's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or necessary. Will I know the answer? And I was afraid most people would not now having taught tens of thousands of people through keynotes and trainings.
[00:25:51] I can tell you 99 percent of the people that we work with do know the answer. And most of them, when they ask it, they feel a little [00:26:00] guilty for having neglected it.
[00:26:02] Megan: Okay. Wow.
[00:26:03] Jay: So it's the opposite. Now, the people who don't know the answer. are the people who are asking questions that truly haven't been asked very many times.
[00:26:13] There's not a book out there on it. There's not a course out there on it. There's not a simple solution for the how or what the journey might look like. I mean, It's almost trite, but like, you know, like the whole Elon Musk thinking about how do we get to Mars? Like, it's a very big question and it will require time to find that answer.
[00:26:32] But for the most part, day to day, the stuff that matters, what's the one thing I could do for my health? What's the one thing I could do for my marriage? What's the one thing I could do for my job? Most of us know the answer. But we haven't cut a path in order to do it regularly and consistently.
[00:26:47] Michael: Do you think that that's because, you're, you're familiar with Steven Pressfield, the world of art.
[00:26:51] Yes, I
[00:26:51] Jay: love him. Like he speaks to my soul. Me too.
[00:26:54] Michael: I just wonder if that when we know what that one thing is, for me, it's very same as you, creating content, [00:27:00] writing, but there's a lot of resistance around that one thing. Like I don't, I don't get resistance around, you know, And, you know, things that I, are really not my one thing.
[00:27:09] In fact, I often do that kind of downhill work and drift into that kind of work because I'm somehow at a subconscious level afraid of doing the one thing because it's hard and it's hard to get started.
[00:27:22] Megan: I think because it's vulnerable too. I mean, I, I know for me, I think writing is, is my one thing also.
[00:27:29] And especially the work that I've been doing lately, it's vulnerable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like it's so important that that is its own threat, you know, I don't really know where it starts or where it ends, I'm not really sure what people are going to think about it, if it's true, I'm not really sure what that means, you know, like there's just like these big kind of existential almost questions that are attached to it, and so I think that That's a lot to engage with.
[00:27:56] And maybe that's not true for everybody's one thing. Maybe this is just like [00:28:00] the, the particular therapy here. Maybe we're back to therapy, but, uh, well, which I'm actually going to this afternoon, fortunately. So that, that works out, but you know, I do think there's a vulnerability of like doing things that are less important and maybe more concrete, or you can check them off, like, you know, catching up on your email or sending that, that, that.
[00:28:18] contract to somebody or whatever, they, they just, they don't require our heart and our soul in the same way that the really important things do.
[00:28:27] Jay: I agree with that. And that's like, if it creates some anxiety and fear is because it matters,
[00:28:32] Megan: right? Yes.
[00:28:33] Jay: We don't want to fail at the things that matter most to us.
[00:28:36] And so there's a natural tendency to be hesitant or anxious. And you, you know, this, it often falls away as soon as you sit down and start talking. going. It's just what we would tell our kids. Yeah. Just go ahead and take the first step. And
[00:28:49] Megan: yeah,
[00:28:50] Jay: it almost always, and we can build habits that make it easier and easier to do the thing.
[00:28:58] And that's the [00:29:00] regularity of when we sit down, going through the stages of finding the comfort level to start opening ourselves up to writing in your language. There's a process. I remember reading on writing by Stephen King because we're just a bunch of writers here. And he talked about when he would start writing, it was like he was looking through a tiny pinhole into another world.
[00:29:22] But the longer he sat there, it would open up and surround him. And the more frequently he did that, the faster it would open up.
[00:29:30] Megan: Interesting. And that metaphor
[00:29:31] Jay: has shown for me. So If it's your one thing, it is for all of us. How regular do we have the courage to be in our schedules? Are we willing to say no to the other things?
[00:29:43] Megan: Yep.
[00:29:43] Jay: So that we can carve out 30 minutes, an hour, two hours a day, maybe four or five days a week to do our one thing. I will tell you, I've, except under deadline, I've never written seven days a week. Like, I take days off, but I know people who do. The [00:30:00] other half of it, so there's the, it matters and therefore there's this natural hesitancy, like we don't want to fail.
[00:30:05] I think that's just human and we can condition ourselves to move through that faster. The other side is what we call busyness. And I think that our culture rewards busy people who move fast and get things done. Like we were talking about. And I kind of, it's like one of my opening quotes on the podcast this week with Sean Blanc, who y'all, I believe know Sean Blanc, when someone says they're really busy, my internal question is usually, what are they hiding from?
[00:30:33] Because busy is like, man, I got a lot done today. Did any of it matter would be the next question. Checking a lot of boxes is not how you find extraordinary success. Or meaning it's how you look extraordinarily successful. And so to go back to how we started, Steven Pressfield refers to that as the shadow work, right?
[00:30:55] It's the rock star that's really good at going out on the weekends and boozing it up [00:31:00] and living the rock style life, but they're not writing the music and playing it, right? The writer who, studied Raymond Carver or whoever and thinks they need a cigarette and a bottle of scotch, they've got all of the props, the shadow work, but they're not doing the work.
[00:31:15] So I think there's two kind of traps there. So that's where we come back to start where you can, if it's five minutes a day, 10 minutes a day, whatever that small domino that you can commit to and start trusting yourself. I kept my promise today. I did my writing and you start to trust that you will one, do it.
[00:31:34] And that, over time, can become part of your identity. There's been periods of my time where the identity that I had of being a writer felt so true and valid. And there have been times where I'm doing all of the shadow work. I'm promoting the books. I'm out on, on a plane going to a keynote, which is not writing a book, so it does help sell them.
[00:31:53] And I felt inauthentic talking about it. And so everybody goes through phases, but I kind of think of it in those two [00:32:00] ways. There is the emotional fear because it matters. And then there's this natural tendency to avoid that by doing busyness, which is often rewarded.
[00:32:08] Michael: You know, back when I started blogging in 2004, writing was a real chore and it would take me a couple hours.
[00:32:16] So I just committed that I was going to blog once a week. And then as I developed proficiency at it, I found that I, in about that same time, I could knock out about three posts. And then I got to the place where I was doing it daily. Now, at the time, I was a CEO of a public company. So this was no, it's not like I didn't have anything else going on, but I, but I could literally knock out a blog post in about an hour early in the morning.
[00:32:39] And it made me notice things during the day that I could write about the next day. And so you do develop proficiency in this, but like a lot of things, weightlifting or whatever. It's often unseen. But the question I was going to ask you, and you kind of touched on it a little bit, but I want to come back to it.
[00:32:54] I think there's value in rituals, you know, the things that will get us into that head [00:33:00] space for high performance. Yes. You want to comment on that?
[00:33:04] Megan: Yeah. Cause it's kind of like the biggest challenge with writing or anything that you feel like is important. Maybe it's a presentation you've got to put together, you know, conversation that's really significant that you need to have and you need to think through.
[00:33:15] It's like, The hardest part of that is the first 10 to 15 minutes of your butt is in a chair long enough to get to the place where you start doing whatever the thing is. Cause it's like, you know, you have like the crazy monkey mind for that first 10 to 15 minutes. Like your brain, it's like panic mode.
[00:33:31] Like all the things I could do or want to do, that would be easier or more fun or whatever. It would just take a
[00:33:36] Michael: minute. It
[00:33:37] Megan: would just take a minute. You know, I could go snip the dead leaves off my plants right now. That would make sense. My husband
[00:33:43] Jay: would love it if I did the laundry right now. My husband would my marriage, it's more important than the work.
[00:33:47] Yeah.
[00:33:48] Megan: Oh, yeah. We can get really good at justifying. Yeah.
[00:33:51] Jay: It's real. I think there's a lot of research. There's also a lot of superstition. Like, I'm not going to be like a batter and, like, touch my shoulder four times before I [00:34:00] sit down at the keyboard. If that works for you, it works for you. My philosophy is if it matters to me, I want my ritual to be on these days at this time, I go to this place and I work and I want to make the, the ritual as simple as possible.
[00:34:17] That is a ritual. A ritual is anything that you do ritually. And I think a lot of people like that word more than habit, which can feel hard and overused, but what is my pregame? Like for Gary and I, because we're also CEOs, we have to, I call it A lot of times we tell people write as early as you can. Hmm.
[00:34:38] I still got family. I've still got one living under the roof. I work out in the morning. I'm probably not gonna get up at 5:00 AM to write for an hour before I go to work. I, I get to write at work, but when I come in, I usually take the first hour or two to meet with my key people and make sure that they have something they need me urgently for.
[00:34:56] They're not waiting till noon or two o'clock to get an answer [00:35:00] right. I get out of the way. It also frees up my brain so that I go into my workspace without all of these unanswered questions. And so whatever your rituals are, I just would say, find what's effective for you and get past the efficiency trap.
[00:35:18] I think we can get all tied up and catching a half a percentage point better here. That happens over time, but like what's effective for you and just try to be ritualistic about it. I know I am, but I use time and place and the place for me as a laptop. If I'm honest, I can write anywhere now.
[00:35:37] Megan: I have
[00:35:37] Jay: my laptop and a little quiet and focus.
[00:35:40] I can kind of go to that place really quickly. There's additive work and there's subtractive work. Two and a half years ago, I started writing. I gave myself a weekly deadline for a weekly newsletter. This year I added a weekly deadline for a podcast. And I remember thinking all of this on top of, I had a 90 day deadline to finish a book.
[00:35:59] I had all [00:36:00] these other more important creative works. But some activities are like a flywheel and some are like a siphon. Some tend to be additive to the whole. And like, I found that doing things like this podcast, writing like a newsletter or in your case a blog, I started before I started the newsletter, I had 50 content ideas, like almost a full year.
[00:36:23] I just wanted to start because I was so afraid of running out. I think every week that I write one of them, I add three.
[00:36:29] Megan: Yeah.
[00:36:30] Jay: Like it's one of those things that that process is a snowball in itself. So, like, I just wanted, like, to validate what you said, and that's an opportunity for everybody. What are those kind of flywheel activities that are a part of your core work that tend to make everything go faster and easier?
[00:36:47] Megan: I love that concept.
[00:36:48] Michael: I've done a deep dive on AI, uh, this year, and there's a lot of controversy with AI and writing. But the, apropos to our discussion, the thing that I found it the most useful is not actually doing the [00:37:00] writing for me, though I've trained it on all my content and everything else, but it gets me started.
[00:37:05] You know, and so it's like when I sit down at that blank screen. I can just get some ideas. I may not use any of the ideas that AI serves up, but boy, does this stimulate my thinking. And now all of a sudden, I've kind of found the wonder and the delight in writing because I can get over that transom faster and get into it.
[00:37:21] Jay: I love that. Have you heard of the Hemingway method?
[00:37:24] Michael: Mm hmm.
[00:37:25] Jay: Like, he would end every writing session by writing the first line of the next chapter. Oh, that's like you found your Hemingway. Technique or whatever, like you can come in quickly, play around with the AI and that kind of, it's like the bobsled team pushing you into the shoot.
[00:37:41] Now you're off to the races. .
[00:37:43] Megan: I love that.
[00:37:43] Michael: I do that actually in my newsletter. I have a weekly newsletter too, and I put at the very end of it, what's next? So I'm gonna, I'm gonna preview what I'm gonna be writing about next, which forces me to kind of think through it a little bit. Yeah. So that at least I've got an outline in my head.
[00:37:58] Before I commit to it. [00:38:00] So I'm doing that Hemingway method there. Yeah.
[00:38:02] Megan: Jay, one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about in the last, well, really in the last year since probably this time last year, but for sure in the last six weeks, maybe a little longer is the value of slow. Now, You haven't known me that long, but if you had known me as like a five year old, I mean, I sort of came out running and haven't stopped since, you know,
[00:38:25] Michael: firstborn,
[00:38:26] Megan: you know, like sure.
[00:38:28] There's so much pathology there, you know, as I said, I have therapy this afternoon, so we're going to work on that, but speed is kind of my middle name and. What I'm kind of thinking about experimenting with is the value of slow. So trying to produce less, it's like, I think so often people who are geared towards speed and efficiency and productivity, it's like, it's all about output, how much, how can we put out more stuff, whatever that stuff is.
[00:38:56] And you know, your context as quickly as possible so we can do more [00:39:00] stuff so we can put out more, you know, like it just becomes its own, an end in of itself. Yeah. And I'm curious what, if you've thought about that at all, if you've thought about just in general doing less, um, the value of not trying to optimize for efficiency, that there's something, I think what I'm, I'm realizing is there's some kinds of quality and output that are not enhanced by speed that actually slow, And, you know, it's kind of like if you're cooking that braising something for hours, like certain cuts of meat, you know, yeah, you could cook that meat.
[00:39:34] So it's not going to kill you in 10 minutes. But if you cook it for four hours, like I'm going to do tonight with some beef ragu, that's going to be way better, you know? So I'm curious how you think about that in this whole conversation that has a lot to do with productivity.
[00:39:49] Jay: So you're kind of our avatar, by the way, like we serve entrepreneurs and that need for speed.
[00:39:55] I mean, you literally just told us the story to go back to the theme, like your identity, since you've been [00:40:00] born, right. It's been around this, right. Well, this is a part of your identity. So that's a big one for you to jump into. I think it should always be situational. Like when do we need to be fast? When do we need to be slow?
[00:40:13] If you're going to do something extraordinary, it's not going to be because you did millions of things. It's going to be because you did that thing and the handful of things that matter around it extraordinarily well. So there's the, the speed and then the scale.
[00:40:29] Megan: Yeah. So I
[00:40:29] Jay: think first is, can I just start saying no to everything that's not about this thing that's most important to me?
[00:40:36] And we're going to disappoint people to succeed. Like y'all are leaders. Y'all disappoint people every single day with almost every decision. There's someone who's not on board That's so true as a living father and husband and leader. We want to make sure that we're disappointing the right people.
[00:40:52] Michael: Yes I literally
[00:40:54] Jay: just journaled about this this morning.
[00:40:55] Megan: Yep.
[00:40:56] Jay: There we go. Are we disappointing the right people? The last people I want to [00:41:00] disappoint are my my wife and kids and If I make decisions too fast, the likelihood that I will disappoint them goes way up. So one of the areas that I focus on slow is making commitments.
[00:41:16] Megan: Ah, I like that.
[00:41:18] Jay: And I've got lots of systems in my life.
[00:41:20] So you know how you can type TY on your cell phone and it'll, what will it write if you type TY? Thank you.
[00:41:27] Megan: Mm-hmm .
[00:41:28] Jay: I've started creating little scripts, so I get lots of opportunities to be on podcasts and do things in social media, dms and text messages. And if I type no social. As one word doesn't exist.
[00:41:43] Otherwise, it will fill out a whole script that says, wow, that's really exciting. Something like that. I'm really trying hard to avoid making commitments on social media and then DMS. If it's not inconvenient, would you please email me at this address? So that I can sit down [00:42:00] with my Chief of Staff Carly and I can give you a firm yes or no, something along those lines.
[00:42:06] Like I don't even look at it anymore. I probably should update it. But what I'm trying to do is slow down my decision to commit to all the things that are exciting and flattering so that I can sit down with Carly and we're looking at them all side by side. So I can look at it and go, well, I've got two speaking opportunities.
[00:42:23] One's in Singapore and one is in Omaha. Which one sounds more appealing? Cause I would have to choose. And depending on who you are, one of them might sound more appealing, right? I want to go see Warren Buffett's house, or I want to go to Singapore and watch F1. Whatever that is for you. Awesome. But what you also need to be aware of is that also the week of your kid's 8th birthday.
[00:42:45] And maybe you should say no to both. And so, slowing down my commitments has been one of the best things I've slowed down. Because as a leader, we have to be decisive. But when should we be slow to decide? [00:43:00] So I just move all of those decisions to the beginning of the week. I triage with my chief of staff.
[00:43:07] We look at everything and we try to just make the best possible decision. But now I know what I'm saying yes to and what I'm saying no to. So I don't accidentally disappoint the wrong people, but we can go further into slow, but that's my first blink. Like all of us as leaders, as entrepreneurs, can we be a little slower to commit?
[00:43:28] And can we be a little slower to allow our people to commit? Right. If I say I've got this new project, one of my top people is going to raise their hands and I want to run that. I will often circle back and say, Michael, I love that you want to take this on. When are you going to do it? And they haven't looked at their commitments, right?
[00:43:47] Maybe you can work with someone else to let them lead this opportunity while you coach them. But your plate is full. What are we saying no to? So helping ourselves kind of manage those commitments and helping our [00:44:00] people might be two great places to slow things down.
[00:44:03] Megan: Like
[00:44:03] Jay: I love getting stuff off my plate.
[00:44:05] So I just want that person to run with it, but I also don't want the legacy of having burnt them out. When they walk into my office and say, I just can't do this anymore. I don't have a life, my health, my marriage. Like I don't, I never want to be that boss.
[00:44:25] Michael: This really inspires me because I, I do have systems around email requests, you know, because first of all, I don't review my inbox. That's my assistant doing that. So that puts some distance. But I remember Viktor Frankl talks about this idea of between the stimulus. And the response, there's the opportunity for freedom if you pause.
[00:44:45] And Stephen Covey amplified that, talked about it further, but I've never thought about text messages. And I think my kryptonite. where I get caught and make commitments I don't want to make is in text messages, because it's so immediate and I feel like I have [00:45:00] to respond. And also at church during coffee hour, if somebody comes up and asks me something, it's really hard for me to say, put that in an email.
[00:45:09] Well, it wasn't until now. Now you give me the courage to do it, but to say, Hey, that sounds really fascinating. Could you just send me an email and let me kind of your whole script, you know, let me consider this with. with my executive assistant or my chief of staff or whatever, and make sure that if I'm going to give you a yes, I can give you a firm yes.
[00:45:26] Jay: What I want to make sure is that if I say yes, that I'm really saying yes. So do you mind just giving me a little grace? Drop it in my email. I promised it like most of the time, if you give them a promise of when you will circle back, can I get back to you next Tuesday is my default answer. It gets me out of the weekend.
[00:45:43] It gets to me past Monday. And most people just want to define time. Most people would say, sure. If you say, when do you need it? When are they going to say,
[00:45:52] Megan: yeah, yesterday,
[00:45:53] Jay: ASAP.
[00:45:53] Megan: Yeah.
[00:45:54] Jay: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Buy yourself some time and it'll also, you'll have fewer regrets. You won't have said no [00:46:00] to the wrong people.
[00:46:01] And you won't have said yes and given half efforts. I want to go back to the speed. That was the slow. My son, this is a fun story. He finished his freshman year in college last year. He's in his sophomore year. In the summer, he and eight of his friends decided they wanted to drive from Austin, Texas to Banff national park.
[00:46:20] Oh, wow. That's a long way. And there's a couple of Eagle scouts. So I wasn't terribly frightened and most of them don't drink and they're not of age to drink. So I was like, okay, this will be a grand adventure. I'm so happy he's doing it. It's, um, about 1, 750 miles from Austin to Banff.
[00:46:37] Michael: Straight north.
[00:46:38] Within
[00:46:39] Jay: a day and a half, they got their first speeding ticket. And they just made a commitment to drive the speed limit the rest of the way. The cop let them off, but that would have been devastating to them. I did the math, and I just said, and I'll ask you, If you're driving 1, 750 miles, in this case from Austin to Banff National Park, and [00:47:00] instead of driving 80 miles an hour, for me, nine miles over the speed limit, I won't get a ticket, or I won't have to go to court for it.
[00:47:07] Megan: This is getting way too close for comfort.
[00:47:10] Jay: If I drove 70 instead, how much time do you save driving 10 miles an hour faster over that vast difference? How much time do you think you save? Very little. You know, that's where I'm going. It's only three hours. Wow. But the difference is you and everybody in the car is kind of white knuckling it through the mountains because you're just pushing it the whole time.
[00:47:32] And that's an ADHD technique, right? I want to listen to this podcast on one and a half. I'm going to make everything fast because it will force me to give it all of my attention. But now, all of my attention is on the yellow stripes on the road, which is not a bad thing for a young driver, but so is everybody else's.
[00:47:50] Megan: Yeah.
[00:47:50] Jay: And they stopped and did the Cadillac Ranch, and they stopped and they saw the arches, and like, it allowed them to enjoy the ride. And so, three [00:48:00] hours over 1, 750 miles, and the benefits were huge. So I just think we're conditioned to think that everything faster is better. And I just think that there are definitely times where it doesn't mean you have to go slow.
[00:48:16] Like there's a time for slow that's decision making and maybe a handful of other things. Like I want to sous vide that steak before I throw it on the grill. I like cooking, slow cooking. Yeah, baby. Smoke it. When is the appropriate time for slow? And when is the appropriate time for fast? And if I'm choosing fast.
[00:48:33] Is that just for me to gamify it so that I can stay focused? And will it take all the fun out of it?
[00:48:40] Megan: I've been talking with our team and the question that I've started to ask, I used to ask as a CEO, well, how quickly do you think we can get that done? I mean, that was like my default question. How quickly can you get that to me?
[00:48:53] You know? And so presumably now they're going to tell me an answer. That's actually faster than they would have liked to, and it's going to be [00:49:00] right on the edge of their comfort zone and or impossible, but they know what I want to hear is going to be something fast, you know, that's probably days and not weeks, preferably, and they could start it today, not next week or next month.
[00:49:12] And I've started to ask, how much time do you think you need in order to do that excellently?
[00:49:18] Jay: Oh, great question. I love that. Why did
[00:49:21] Michael: you share that with me?
[00:49:22] Megan: Well, because I, I haven't asked you for anything yet. That's coming later today. But, you know, seriously, because what I care about, now, I'm not lax on our targets for things, and you know, all the, the performance stuff matters.
[00:49:38] to a point. But I think that my value became speed, not the quality of the output. It was like the, there, there was an addictive or a compulsive component that I was unaware of around getting everything done in the shortest amount of time, getting there as fast as possible. To your point, if I'm driving somewhere that's 20 or 30 minutes away, [00:50:00] it's negligible.
[00:50:01] It's just that I don't want to be the slow car. I want to be in the left lane. I don't want to be the person getting passed. How lame is that? You know, well, as it turns out, the person who's getting passed probably has a way more regulated nervous system than the person on the left, you know, and what I really want in this phase of our business and in my life is to do things.
[00:50:22] with meaning and excellence that ultimately make a contribution that's worthwhile. I don't think that those necessarily mean they have to be slow, although some of them do, but I do think they have to be thoughtful. And I, what I don't want to do is unconsciously just drive for speed with no thought, just like somehow that's better.
[00:50:42] Like, like, you know, basically people that aren't losers just go fast. I mean, not honestly, it's like what I've thought without thinking about it and I don't, that's not the person I want to be. Everything in life that matters happens pretty slow. You know,
[00:50:55] Michael: I have to tell a quick story on Megan.
[00:50:57] Megan: Oh yeah.
[00:50:57] This is, this will be embarrassing.
[00:50:58] Michael: So this was [00:51:00] back, this was back when I know what
[00:51:01] Megan: he's going to tell.
[00:51:02] Michael: This is back when I was the CEO of Thomas Nelson. Actually it was before that, before I became the CEO and I was meeting, should I say who?
[00:51:07] Megan: Sure.
[00:51:08] Michael: So I was meeting with John Maxwell and this was before the 17 irrefutable loss of leadership came out.
[00:51:12] It was a market meeting. And I was, I think at that time, I was an associate publisher, but I was in charge of the marketing. So my phone kept ringing, and I kept ignoring it. And finally, John says to me, because it was vibrating, he says to me, Do you need to take that? And I said, Well, I kind of do. It's my daughter.
[00:51:31] And he said, Okay, take it. So I take it. Megan's on the other end of the phone. She's crying because she just got a speeding ticket. Okay.
[00:51:37] Megan: I'm probably what, 16? 17. 17. I remember exactly.
[00:51:40] Michael: And it was in, I think it was in your red truck. So she was speeding. So I came back in and John said, everything okay? And I said, yeah.
[00:51:46] I said, my, my daughter just got a speeding ticket. So John says, I want you to call her back and tell her something. I said, okay. He says, tell her that I'm proud of her because only people with important things to do speed. [00:52:00] So kind of the anti example of what you're talking about.
[00:52:04] Megan: We love John, but I, I think, you know, I've, I've kind of learned that that impulse.
[00:52:10] For me, like, and this is just my own self awareness for me, that really has to do with anxiety, fear of like missing out, fear of getting left behind, fear of, you know, just some kind of scarcity or the identity around people who are slow are just losers. I mean, I think that is just, I mean, seriously, like, I think that's just kind of a pervasive belief in our culture that we're unconscious of.
[00:52:33] And certainly it has been for me, This is why I
[00:52:36] Michael: drive frustrated, because I'm frustrated half the time in the car because somebody that's driving too slow is in the left lane. It's like, yeah,
[00:52:43] Megan: don't you know, you're got to be faster than me if you're going to be in the left lane, keep up people, you know, and it's like, you just kind of want to say like exhibit a the Italians, you know, like they're, the Italians are pretty happy.
[00:52:55] They cook slow, they eat slow, like they just do everything slow and you know, it's working out for them. [00:53:00]
[00:53:00] Jay: I lived in Italy for a while. I've driven there. They don't drive. That's true. That's a good point.
[00:53:04] Megan: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:53:04] Jay: Yeah. Stop signs and traffic lights feel very optional to me when I was driving.
[00:53:08] Megan: Maybe that's my perfect scenario, actually, now that I think about it.
[00:53:12] Oh my gosh. Well, we could just keep talking forever because this is so fun. And the Venn diagrams between the Hyatts and the Papazans are basically like a 99 percent overlap. So we are kindred spirits, but we're not going to let you leave before we ask you our three Most important questions, which are kind of rapid fire, except they're not that rapid to my earlier
[00:53:33] Michael: answer.
[00:53:34] Megan: That's right. I mean, the first one is J. What is your biggest obstacle personally in getting the double win, which we define as winning at work and succeeding at life?
[00:53:46] Jay: So specifically to me, and I've felt it a lot this past year is I. And unique in some of our, like, I am a W2 employee and an entrepreneur.
[00:53:58] And my [00:54:00] partner happens to be my boss in the W2 executive role. And so the tension for me often is how do I ethically navigate doing my job here and having it align with the business opportunities I run for the founder of this company. And it's not a giant leap, but it's one of those things that I have to really slow down.
[00:54:22] We call it lining up our dominoes, right? The double win. But like for me If I can, I want like the podcast to lead to the 20 percent or newsletter to lead to maybe the breakout session that I'm going to do at our annual conference called family reunion. And I struggle sometimes to get those two align.
[00:54:43] Because integrity is just outside of my top three values to me. It's, it's definitely way, way, way up there. And I teach my people, like, I don't care if you have a side gig, but do it on your own time. If you're doing it on our time, it's kind of like stealing [00:55:00] from the till like that, I feel strongly about that.
[00:55:02] So I struggle to sometimes align those different hats I wear, but without the success I've had in the W2. I wouldn't have all of the other business and opportunity. So I try to honor it, but it's been a struggle for me. And there's probably people listening. It's like, Oh, I've got the side gig. How do I line up writing the great American novel with being a great mom?
[00:55:20] And. earning a wage to pay the rent. And those are the things that you just have to get creative and try and try again until you figure it out.
[00:55:29] Michael: By the way, for those of you that are living outside the U. S., when Jay's talking about W 2, he means being an employee. Oh, thank you. Okay, the second question is, how do you personally know when you're sort of in that double win zone where you're winning at work and succeeding at life?
[00:55:42] Jay: Oh gosh, I've got a few areas in my life where I've just We've nailed it, you know, for our health goals, my wife and I started working out with a trainer three times a week, like 14 years ago.
[00:55:54] Megan: Wow.
[00:55:54] Jay: And that was a health goal. And we've probably gotten more marriage counseling from our [00:56:00] poor trainers. And it's like a date three times a week.
[00:56:05] Like there's so many things that lined up around that one activity. And, and so it's like a great combination of there's no dissonance. Right. There is resonance would be the thing. I feel a sense of resonance and when I'm doing it and there's often, even if it's really, really hard, there's a sense of deep fulfillment because somewhere, even if it's on the conscious level, I'd like, this is really working for me right now.
[00:56:31] And the older I get, the more I want of those kinds of activities to fill my days. Because they're just so rewarding when you figure it out, but they're not always easy to figure out in my mind.
[00:56:43] Megan: Yeah, I love that. That's a, that's a
[00:56:44] Jay: great answer.
[00:56:45] Megan: That is a great answer. Very different. Very different than one we've ever had before.
[00:56:49] Yeah. So I love that. Okay, lastly, what is one ritual or routine that you rely on to do what you do that maybe you haven't talked about? [00:57:00]
[00:57:01] Jay: So when our kids, um, were gosh, two and 18 months or whatever, like they were eight, they're 16 months apart. So that math doesn't work. Our oldest was two years old. My wife came to me and said, we need to get on the same page because I was writing books and my, my business and my opportunities were growing.
[00:57:21] She had decided to stay home and she had two and diapers at home. And we weren't as connected. So the ritual for us and y'all teach it and do it, we've done an annual goal setting retreat every year since. And I cannot tell you how important it's been for our marriage and our businesses for us to take just a day or two every year, get out of our lives.
[00:57:46] Like you were talking about the laundry room. Can't do this at home. Even in COVID we got out. Right. We just found a way to get out. So we're not mowing the yard or walking the dog. All the things we'll rationalize. Our most important thing right [00:58:00] now is where are we going ultimately? Like, where are we ultimately going together based on that?
[00:58:06] Where do we want to be in five years? And based on that, where do we want to be a year from now? And we've just refined it and refined it and refined it. And so I think. This is coming back to if you've been fortunate enough to pick a great partner for life. And I did. Wendy's amazing. She's also an entrepreneur.
[00:58:26] We have so much alignment where it matters and so much compliment that has kept us together and kept us stronger because the driver in the, in most marriages, I compare it to driving like a Porsche down a mountain road, being an entrepreneur, being a leader is fun. You want to downshift. You want to pass those slow cars.
[00:58:44] You want to go through the curves. But a lot of times there's the drag along spouse. They might be the stay at home partner. They might be the traditional employee partner. And if you're not actively bringing them on the journey, that [00:59:00] fun ride down the mountainside, they're in the back seat with a blindfold.
[00:59:02] They're just getting sick. And I just realized that I had not been communicating so much to my wife and vice versa, and finding this window where we had a safe space to communicate. As allowed us to shift like last year, my wife did almost all the support for me three years ago, she had 70 million in sales volume, walk off of her team in one year because of a big thing that happened.
[00:59:30] And I spent a lot of time trying to support her, but we have to communicate. So we know it's like, you know what, I'm going to put this thing on the back burner so I can be here for my partner and communicating clearly. My wife is hyper social. Compared to my introvertedness. And every year her birthday falls within a couple of days of our mid year event.
[00:59:53] That's always right here in Austin. So being her, she wants to throw a big party at her house. And I am [01:00:00] facing about 15 to 16 hours of stage time over three days where I'm assaulted by 12, 000 people I don't know who know me, which is fulfilling, but hard for me. And I remember the year where this became a topic for our goal setting retreat, like the police showed up because the music was so loud, like at 11 o'clock.
[01:00:22] But we talked about it and it's like, I get it. You want to see all of your friends that come for this event. They're all in Austin. But I also have to prepare to be on stage and even after all these years, I get nervous. So the next year, she said, I'm throwing a party at the house and I'm, I'm starting the internal dialogue like are, you know, all the things.
[01:00:41] And she goes, and I booked you a hotel across the street from the convention. You can get room service and watch a movie and wake up and walk across the street.
[01:00:48] Megan: Oh, I love that.
[01:00:50] Jay: You have a great wife. That's perfect.
[01:00:51] Megan: Wow.
[01:00:52] Jay: Oh my gosh. Yes.
[01:00:53] Megan: Wendy. We won the lottery. We won the lottery. Oh. And we,
[01:00:57] Jay: we try to do that for each other.
[01:00:59] Yeah. We have to [01:01:00] communicate where we are and what we need, or we can't help each other out. Like, I want to believe everyone on my team has telepathy. But I actually have to tell them who they need to be in order to be successful. I can't just expect it. And the same goes for your marriage and your partnerships.
[01:01:16] Michael: Jay, thank you so much. This has been rich. And this is why I love doing this podcast because we get to sit at the feet of people like you and just soak it in. It really challenges. You know, a lot of beliefs and there's so many things that even I've taught, but to hear them from you and to hear it in a slightly different way, filtered through your experience, it's like I'm hearing it for the first time.
[01:01:38] So thank you for that.
[01:01:40] Jay: Thank you for having me. It's been a real pleasure. And I've had fun. If you, like, I love talking to you. Talking about this stuff.
[01:01:46] Megan: Well, one of these days we need to all get together and our spouses need to be there. We got, we got to hang out with Wendy. We don't even know Wendy. And she's awesome.
[01:01:53] So we, we need to get to know her. But next time we're in Austin or you're in Nashville, let's meet up and have [01:02:00] dinner. Let's
[01:02:00] Jay: make it happen.
[01:02:01] Megan: Okay.
[01:02:02] Jay: Thanks Jay.
[01:02:02] Megan: Thanks Jay.
[01:02:13] Michael: I have so many takeaways from this episode and it's really resonated with me at a deep level. And, um, I think I need to go back to therapy because mean, who doesn't? I mean, seriously. Well, I've just, I've just realized that there are just a lot of things that happen below the surface that drive my behavior that I wasn't aware of.
[01:02:36] And I'm definitely not fully aware of him yet, but I'm beginning to see that he has a wonderful balance of kind of the deep philosophical cultural analysis on the one hand,
[01:02:47] Megan: Yeah.
[01:02:47] Michael: But very practical strategies for dealing with it.
[01:02:50] Megan: I also like that he has these kind of visuals, like the domino effect. I was thinking to myself, I mean, first of all, I literally had these posters made.
[01:02:59] I had a [01:03:00] graphic designer take that one thing, quote, and create posters that color coordinate with the rooms that they're in. But I was thinking, I wonder if I could find somebody on Etsy who could make that 50 percent bigger domino. exercise that he talked about that kind of like a little 3d model kind of in like a glass shadow box.
[01:03:17] Cause I thought I need to be reminded of that because it's so easy to think that the small things don't add up to the big things, but they actually do. And that whole idea that you're going to have this period, I think he used weight loss as an example, but I think it applies to literally everything, you know, of eight to 12 weeks, we're going to be doing this stuff.
[01:03:38] But there's not going to be any visible benefit or visible change. I mean, I think that is life in a nutshell.
[01:03:46] Michael: Well, as you know, mom and I hired a personal trainer, new personal trainer back sometime this last summer, but this is our 24th week of working out. So we've worked out three times a week unless I'm traveling, which has been maybe two or three times, [01:04:00] but we've worked out three times a week for an hour each day.
[01:04:03] And it's become this amazing social thing too. But I will say this for. Months I didn't see any change.
[01:04:10] Megan: Yeah,
[01:04:10] Michael: you know, I'm just I'm just doing it faithfully knowing that it's good for my health overall But last week I really started to notice some changes, huh? And you know, I mean more definition Yeah more of that kind of stuff.
[01:04:22] So yeah, it is a slow boil
[01:04:25] Megan: I think it's so much about developing a tolerance for slow and I really think it's a tolerance, you know, because it's like kind of a frustration tolerance. You don't get that big dopamine hit of, you know, like the first time you work out, you try to like do something crazy and you feel incredible until you can't move out and get out of bed the next day or the day after that.
[01:04:45] You know, it's like when we take these little steps. If we have the maturity and the tolerance, then we end up in somewhere, somewhere awesome.
[01:04:54] Michael: For me, it really comes down to a scarcity mindset around
[01:04:58] Megan: time.
[01:04:58] Michael: Yeah. Cause [01:05:00] that's fixed. And I'm at the age where it feels like I'm running out of runway, but that's a scarcity thing.
[01:05:08] Cause literally if I just lived to my dad's age, you know, I'd have another 21, 22 years and maybe longer with medical technology and all that. So I don't know why I feel this, cause scarcity. I mean, it doesn't even feel like my dad feels that.
[01:05:21] Megan: Although he did, he did tell me one time, I said, Pap isn't, we call him Pappy.
[01:05:26] I said, Pap, how are you doing? And he said, well, let's just put it this way. I'm not buying any more green bananas. Well, that was like 15 years ago. So, you know, whether he did or he didn't, it's, he's just rolling along. I know. I love the idea of the bunker.
[01:05:39] Michael: I was going to say that too. Yeah.
[01:05:40] Megan: I think that's a big idea.
[01:05:41] Well, I think especially in a virtual space where you can work anywhere, you can be interrupted anywhere, avoiding being interrupted or distracted, especially by digital tools is really challenging. Um, I think if you work at home, there are great things about working at home. And there are also things [01:06:00] that are not great about working at home.
[01:06:02] At least for me personally, I find it very difficult to work at home because I just see, oh, I could go get that meat out of the freezer, which I forgot to do this morning. If I was at home, you better believe right now I'd be walking out to my garage freezer and pulling that out, you know, or, oh, I could just put a load of laundry in, or, oh, I could fill in the blank, you know, make myself something great for lunch or, or, or, or.
[01:06:21] And. I think if we're going to focus and we're going to do the work that really matters our most important work, we have to put some kind of guardrails around it, knowing that our impulse, our brain just wants the like cheap and easy dopamine hit, whatever that is for you, you know, in the same way that if we want to eat healthy, we're going to have to plan for that.
[01:06:41] Like it's not, no one's ever like, man, I just ate this incredible salad, like twice a day for two weeks, unless you actually plan for it. That's not going to happen. No. And I think the same is true for, um, being able to focus. And I think sometimes we just try to white knuckle it and there's, that rarely works.
[01:06:59] White [01:07:00] knuckling and brute force is like the most crude strategy you can use.
[01:07:04] Michael: You know, I'm, I'm really intrigued by the bunker idea too, because what I've gotten into the habit of doing, cause I really like being around Gail, my wife, is that, um, I will work in the den. And this time of year, it's also tempting because I love fires and we always have a fire in the fireplace.
[01:07:22] And if I go out to my office, I don't have that. In fact, I, I said to Gail last week, I said, if we had to do the carriage house where my office is over again, I would build a fireplace in my office.
[01:07:32] Megan: Yeah.
[01:07:32] Michael: But here's what happens. It actually drives her crazy and the family crazy when I'm working in the den.
[01:07:38] And it kind of makes me crazy because my focus is divided.
[01:07:42] Megan: Right.
[01:07:43] Michael: So I'm going to redouble. My effort to get back into my office space but have a hard boundary of quitting at five. That's the other problem with working in the den. Yeah, it's kind of like it. There's no natural barrier. Yeah, you know, where if I just will leave the office at five and leave my laptop in the office,
[01:07:59] Megan: it
[01:07:59] Michael: makes [01:08:00] everything else.
[01:08:00] So much easier.
[01:08:01] Megan: I'm thinking about that and I'm like, maybe you could put a wood stove out there.
[01:08:05] Michael: Yeah.
[01:08:05] Megan: Well, this was such a fun episode just as a reminder, guys, get the one thing book. If you know, if you're one of the two people left who hasn't read it, you know, if you're like me and you read it years ago, or you've heard people talk about it or whatever, get that book.
[01:08:19] And then also check out the podcast because I think Jay's podcast is a great tool there as well. And. He's just like somebody wants speaking into your life.
[01:08:29] Michael: Well, he's one of the wise ones. He
[01:08:30] Megan: is wise.
[01:08:31] Michael: And I think wisdom is something I, I value more and more the older I get. Yeah, me too. Well guys, thanks for listening.
[01:08:36] And if you could do us a favor and write a, or at least rate the podcast, write a review. It doesn't have to be long. Just a few sentences would be awesome. That helps the podcast gain more visibility with potential listeners. We're committed to spreading this message of the double win and we need your help to do it.
[01:08:52] So we'll see you next time. [01:09:00] Thanks.