Hey, everyone. This is Stefan from Projectlifemastery.com. Today, I'm excited to
be interviewing a good friend of mine by the name of Matt Gallant. Now, Matt is a
very successful Internet marketer and Internet entrepreneur. He's sold over
$10 million worth of products and services online and has built over 39
profitable websites in various markets and sectors online. Matt is most known
amongst his friends as "The Mad Marketing Scientist" because he's always
testing and he's always optimizing things in his business. I'm excited to
have this chance to be able to interview Matt. I've got him right now on Skype, and
we're going to jump in to the topic of productivity because Matt recently put
together a brand new blog called Mattgallant.tv. He's got a free PDF, a free
resource on how to "3X your productivity" and how to work the 20-hour
workweek. Matt will really dive deep into productivity, how to optimize yourself, your
life, your business, and so we're going to talk a lot about productivity in this
interview, but a little bit about how to build an online business and really
scale up your online business. Matt, I'm so excited to have this chance to be able to
talk to you. Thank you for taking the time today. Thanks, man. It's great to have you. It's been amazing to
see you flourish with what you're doing, and I'm excited to talk to your audience
because I think you're attracting some really powerful people. Awesome, man.
Before we get into some of the tips and strategies that you have for increasing
your productivity, do you mind telling people a little bit about yourself and
your story about how you got into business and online marketing? Sure, so
I started ... I was going to university studying kinesiology and I saw a poster
on the wall that said, "Make $10,000 this summer," and that was pretty appealing, so I applied,
and it was an application for College Pro Painters. College Pro Painters is a
franchise system and, actually, that company that owns College Pro Painters has
has several different franchises. It's a very successful company. I got the gig, and
then they proceeded to train me into so many different aspects from cold calling
to phone to selling
to how to do a painting estimate when I never painted in my life, how to hire people,
on and on and on. It was really a crash course in business. I hated the painting
business, but it was awesome, so I did that for a couple of years, then I became a personal
trainer and did that for a while. Along the way, I became ... There was a light
bulb in my head that went off one night that marketing is the key. It was just like
that classic eureka moment that you see in the cartoons,
and I became obsessed with marketing ever since that point because I just realized, if you're good at marketing, you could
generate revenue, you could make sales. In terms of starting a business, it's
absolutely, in my opinion, the number one skill that anybody can learn.
That started my journey to copywriting. I hired John Carlton, I hired Gary Halbert to mentor me, Dan
Kennedy...
on and on and on. Then about 12 years ago, I started becoming successful
online. The skin care product and then I created a publishing company in the guitar
space, a supplement company and too many other niches and things to go into, but
had changed. What I do changed. How I think changed. It changes, but it's fun, man.
I just love all aspects of business. To me, it's just a blast.
That's awesome. It's really impressive what you've built online, the online
empire that you've built, but you're most known I guess because you're a master at data
optimizing, testing things. Why has that attracted you the most,
that side of business? People make the mistake of thinking of optimization as
an analytical process. To me, it's a creative process. I'm a creative guy.
I'm about 50-50, 50 right brained, 50 left brained, and I love the creative side
of it. That's what excites me. In other words, I'm going to create two different
ideas,
throw them in the octagon, throw them in the arena and see which one prevails.
I love experiments more than anything else in my life. That's why
it attracted me since day one. I remember John Reese talking about split testing,
and that was another light bulb moment. I'm like, "Yeah, it makes sense. I can just keep testing,
optimizing and improving the results." It's been probably the thing I've
done the most. It's probably been my number one habit for being successful
online because a lot of project that I did wouldn't have worked had I just
stopped early or a lot of projects made me ten times more money because I optimized.
That obviously keeps fueling the passion for it. That's awesome. I think the core essence is the
mindset of improvement. You're always finding ways to improve things, whether
it's an ad, a sales page, a product, something in your life, whether it's a
routine, a habit. Is that what you would say it really comes down to?
It's just an obsession just to improve things and make it better and better, whereas, a lot
of people, they're just content with just putting up one ad or putting up one
product or a version of a website? A 100%. It's a 100% an obsession with constant
improvement. I mean, I'm sure you're familiar with the word "kaizen," which is
a Japanese word for "gradual improvements." That's what my whole life is about
on every level whether it's financial, business, physical, emotional,
spiritual. I know there is no ceiling. I love the fact that I can continue
to grow. Growth for me, it is a massive payoff. There's nothing that
jacks me up more than growing, more than improving. There's probably some massive
dopamine released in my brain and it just fuels the passion for it.
Cool. Let's jump into productivity. What are some of the top tips that you have to
increase your productivity? First of all, productivity is one of those things
that never stops. There's no ceiling on that. You can always be more productive.
If I look at how much I've improved and how much I've changed since I started
business today,
it's several thousand percent. I know that, maybe 10 years from now, I'll improve
even more. It's never ending. I'm going to cover some big, broad principles
and then we can dive into some deeper stuff if you want. The first one is to
prioritize. There's a lot of things to prioritize. One is, are you in the
right market? Are you in the right industry?
Let's use you as an example. I remember, just a few weeks ago, you were here and
you were selling e-books you weren't that excited about, and then I
look at you now where you're doing something that's aligned with
your essence, it's aligned with who you are and we look at the difference in
success. That's a great example of are you prioritizing the right industry.
You got to obviously choose things you're excited about or things you're passionate about.
That's the first priority.
Second, and this leads into effectiveness, and prioritization also
involves "are you prioritizing the right projects, are you prioritizing the right
tasks, are you prioritizing the right money moves," which we can get into.
Then there's effectiveness, and I want to differentiate effectiveness and efficiency. It's far more important
to be effective than it is to be efficient. Effective means you're in the right
industry, you're working on the right projects, you're working on the right
money moves, like you're doing the right things, and then being efficient means
you're really good at those things, you're really fast. Efficiency is one of
the biggest things you got to always be aware of because it's easy to waste your
time. Then
efficiency is critical, too, learning to be fast. It is funny
a mutual friends of ours was commenting that he was seeing you work on the
computer, and he said the same thing when he sees me work, and he just comments
how he can barely follow what I'm doing, right? That's just because I'm very
efficient. I know all the shortcuts.
That's important, too. That helps us
obviously get more out of every minute. Then you get into some higher level
things like team-building. That becomes critical because, at the end of the day,
there's only one you, there's only one me.
Our ability to replicate ourselves and replicate our money moves, replicate our
tasks is really where the ceiling comes into play.
Imagine if you had 25 staff that are doing
what you're doing today, you'd probably be making 25 times more money.
That's where team-building comes in. Then the biggest leverage point
in productivity is what I call focus ferocity. You have to have a lot of
other things in play, but, once you know what your money move is, then you're doing the
right thing. That's the most important thing. You're doing the right thing. Then, it
Then, it becomes about intensity. I'll give you simple example that's very
black and white, which is writing. I started writing a blog, for my blog in January. I
was writing about 500 words an hour. I wasn't that efficient. I mean, now
I'm about 1200 words. If I look at that, that's more than double, and I could probably get it up to
1500, 2000 words an hour by continuing to try to push myself, continuing to get
more efficient, continuing to build that skill, but where else could I triple my
time like that? You know what I mean? This is where the 20-hour workweek comes in
because, if you can be 3 times more effective doing the right things, you're
going to be more productive than most people are in 40, 50 hours in doing the wrong things, adding normal intensity. All the people that I'm friends with that are worth
8 figure, 9 figure, they're all intense people. They're intense
with their conversations. They can be polite. They can be pleasant. It doesn't mean
they're not pleasant or polite, but they have an intensity about them that you
won't find in
a lot of other people. Then last but not least is you have to recover
because when you're really pushing your brain and you're
practicing focus ferocity, you're going to get tired. I'm not just talking about
being tired after an hour. There's a cumulative tiredness, too, just like if you
train really hard for a competition, like you have the tiredness after three
months of doing that that's very different than just when working out.
For example, I really pushed myself for three months straight, the first three
months, and then last week and this week, I'm recovering and relaxing a lot more
and getting ready for the next big wave. It's very different than ... I'm not taking
I'm not taking vacations or, because I don't like what I do, I take vacations and breaks and
recover to prepare me for another wave of intensity. Just like we do with
training, you've got to balance intensity with recovery. That's the big picture.
Obviously, there's a lot of little things that come into all of those.
Yeah, for sure. Let's talk a little bit about the prioritization. I find that
valuable. You're running multiple businesses. You've got a lot of
different projects going on. How do you prioritize your time? Do you try to
simplify things as much as possible to your primary skillsets, because I mean
you're extremely skilled at copywriting, ad copy, creating systems? One
thing I found with myself is that, at a certain point, I just kind of gave up
trying to be a master at everything. I'd much rather focus on just being, going
really, really deep on a few core skillsets and get really, really
skilled at that and try to simplify things, to just prioritize my time doing that
and then have other people try to do everything else for me. Is that kind of
the same way that you operate your businesses? How do you prioritize your
time? Let's talk about, and I want to talk about this because I think most people
who are listening are probably in this level, and that's, let's say you're a 1- or 2-
or 3-person team, because it changes, my answer is going to change quite bit,
and we can get into that, but let's go back to the beginning.
Maybe I got a tech guy and a Webmaster or even have a business partner. It really
becomes about focusing on one project at a time and getting it done.
You got to drive it to completion. Just like maybe when you film a product,
you can get laser beam, right? There's nothing else going on. You're going to block off a
couple of days,
bang that out. That's key.
You have to drive on one project until it's out there because,
until it's out there, it's just grabbing rim. It's not making you money. It's
costing you money. It's costing you mental energy. That's a big concept
that I want to highlight is you have to protect your mental energy. You only have so much RAM.
I'm very, very protective about my RAM. There's so many things that I do in
my life to protect my RAM, and we can get into that. Picking the right
project is first part of prioritization. Then, absolutely, when I
was a 2-, 3-person team, I had 4 things that I did. These were my 4
money moves. Money moves is the things that, if you only did that, your
business would continue to make more money.
Everything else you shouldn't touch. You should outsource. Hire. Get
your customer support. Hire a manager. Hire. Do whatever it takes to get all
that stuff off your plate. That's a great example of protecting my RAM
because all that stuff drains me. I don't want to be drained. I want to
be fresh. I want to be powerful. My money moves back in the day was work on
AdWords maybe about an hour a day because we were spending
well into the six figures a month on AdWords, so there was a lot of leverage there. Number
2, create emails because, if our list was, at our peak, 1.5 million leads, so, that, there's a
lot of leverage in creating emails, then writing copy and split testing. Those
were the four things that I did for, to grow and launch the businesses.
Those are four great money moves that anybody can focus on. It depends
on who you are. In your case, maybe being with the video is your money move
is you're building your audience, you're getting more people, you're getting
leads so your money moves will change and that's important to my money moves
moves change probably every 6 months. This is also where the team comes in.
I don't write as much copy as I used to.
Now, here's a productivity strategy, so 10/90/10, so, as you build things out, so as you build things out
I'll be involved in the first 10%, then whoever is going to execute is
going to run with it for 80% of it, and then I'm going to come in at the last
10 of 80. In the last 10%, I'm going to come in and really rip it
apart and optimize and improve it. I'm not the one doing
the bulk of it. Sometimes, I still do, and that's an important thing, and I'll give
you a great example that's right here right now. In one of my
businesses, we're going to complete redo the funnel. We're doing a
completely new strategy. I feel that it's so
critical that I'm going to do it myself. It depends which business is ... I'm
talking about. I'll give you another specific example in the publishing business. I don't write
copy anymore because it's not as critical. Like whether I write the copy or
not on a launch, it's going to be maybe a 10%-20% difference in revenue because we have
the formula down so much and I've got a guy that I've trained very well. With this
new funnel, it can be a $10 million
funnel if I do it correctly, so I'm not going to outsource that. That's
an example of prioritizing. I'm prioritizing that on top of my list and I'm going to do
it myself. There's no black-and-white answers on prioritization, but
I'm going to take that and I'm going to focus on that, and that's going to be
my main thing until it's done, and then I'll do something else after. Yeah,
Yeah, that's the quick and dirty of prioritization. I think the same way. I mean,
it's not even whether you can do it, because you can be more than
capable of doing all these things, but it's more so the mental energy that that
task can take up in your head and consume your mental thought process. I remember
Mark Zuckerberg and people like that. They wear the exact same clothes every
single day just to prevent decision fatigue because, the more decisions you
have to make, the more things you have to occupy your mind with. It drains you.
I found for myself and my business just these little things that I could easily do
myself, but I just have accepted that I'm just going to have someone else do them for me
because I want to make sure that my mind is as sharp and focused as possible.
That's really cool. I want to ask you about planning and scheduling. Do you
typically have a method of planning out your month, your week, your day? How
do you go about that? Yeah. I mean, I try a lot of different things. I'm
always kind of experimenting to see what works. What I find works is a
combination of rigid and flexible. I try like scheduling my entire
week pretty much every hour. That mentally for me was just
constricting and, mentally, for me, it was draining, so, now, it's about 50-50, so 50
percent of my time is schedule because I have meetings with the teams and I also
have some time for my money moves, but then the other 50% is open for meeting
with people, talking with people on Skype because I think networking
is a great money move and just having some time to just do
whatever I feel like in the moment. It's about 50-50. One of the things that I've
done that's evolved is I have ... I used to schedule meeting like any day of the
week. Now, I have 2 days a week where I have all my meetings. That allows me to
just get into that mode, that zone, meet with people. Then, on the other days,
it's more about creating, it's more about writing or filming or whatever it
is that I'm working on as far as a project. That was a good, that was a powerful upgrade
for me that I just did maybe six months ago.
Yeah, and it's tough to restrict yourself when you're doing
something in your business that requires creativity and flow because, if
I only set an hour for myself to record a video, then that's going to ...
that's not going to allow me to really take advantage of that flow state because,
sometimes, you might be doing something, you might be on fire and you might be in
that flow and you just want to prolong that as much as possible because what you're
doing is so high leverage and so important.
Do you tend to, each day, maybe like plan the day before or the day in
the morning and maybe just, okay, here's the highest priority things I'm going to do? Do you
try to focus on the most important thing first thing in the morning? How
do you go about that? Yeah, I mean, right now, because blogging is a new thing and writing is a
relatively new thing or writing this type of content is a new thing. That's the
first thing that I do every day. I write for between an hour or 2 hours. That's
a lot of mental energy. I'm getting in the habit of that. This month, I'm going to give you
another example, what I'm going to do this month, now that's become more or less a
habit because I've been doing it for about three months, so then the next thing I'm going to do is
YouTube. I'm going to launch a YouTube channel, and that's going to be one of
the first things that I do every morning and I want to make sure I get into the habit, in the groove
of that.
This is a great conversation. That's batching versus doing it daily. Now, batching is
more efficient. Batching means, okay, I'm going to take an entire day and film, but one of the
things that I learned from Elliott Hulse, who's one of my partners in some projects, is that
when you're just starting, don't batch. Get in the daily habit.
That's what he did to build himself up, and that's what I'm going to do because
I think it's like learning a language, one of the key things with learning a
new language is you have to practice daily because that neural net that you're
building really shrinks even with one day of rest. For that reason, I'm going to
be using a habit-building strategy versus a batching strategy. Now, once it's a habit,
I'll probably start batching at that point, but I really want to build the
skill of being on camera, so, for that reason, I'm going to be doing it early in
the morning and, mostly likely, daily. Awesome. Another thing I want to ask is do you
use any apps or software, anything like that, to help to be productive? I have BusyCal on the Mac.
I use Google Calendar, so nothing fancy.
but, in my teams, we use different tools like Redbooth, which is a good
project management, but I don't go in there. That's an example of protecting my
RAM. I don't manage projects. I don't want to manage people. I have partners
and project managers and operation managers, so for me to even go in there
and take a look
is a massive mental drain, so I don't go in there. I know what I'm
responsible for and I take care of it. I don't want to be going in there and
wasting my RAM, wasting that mental energy, so we do use tools as a team, and
we like Redbooth, but I don't go there. Yeah. I found that that's a
key thing is really knowing what the distractions are because the distractions are
what can kill you, right? Even for me, like, if I'm in the
middle of something and I go on Facebook or I go into email or whatever, I just
know that that's going to take me down a dark path and, before you know it, like
you think you're going to Facebook or email just to check something for five
minutes, but it ends up ... You end up doing all these different thing and
it just totally sidetracks you from what you're focused on at that time. Do
you do anything like that to help eliminate distractions? Yeah, this is a great segue
to focus. Focus, people look at focus only from one side of it.
Focus is two sides. The first side is eliminating distractions. If you
think about it, let's say you had zero distractions, external or internal, it's
really easy to focus at that point because focusing is just really about
putting your concentration on that one thing or whatever you're doing. If
you're fighting distractions, whether again it's external or internal,
they're both real, then it becomes much more of a battle, so the first thing that
I like to teach people when it comes to focus is just eliminating distractions.
One of the biggest ones is, obviously, what you just mentioned, social media. Put your
phone on airplane mode. There's a great software called RescueTime, which
I like using. In RescueTime, they have a feature called Focustime. I hit that,
and, basically, it just shuts down all the websites that are distracting. I can't
easily hit them. There's even more hardcore software that just disconnects your
Internet for 60-90 minutes. That's what I do at first. If I'm going to
write, I just eliminate all the distractions. Let's make it
hard for me to go there because, again, I don't want to be fighting human
nature. I'm as addicted to social media and Facebook as anyone else is, so I do make
sure that I shut down all those easy outs. The other big thing that I do is
headphones, headphones with music,
even though it's ... as much as, for some reason, having the headphones seem to
help me go more internal, especially if I'm writing. Even the choice of music is
a big deal. I don't want any music with any lyrics. Lyrics and words are
distracting in my opinion, so I usually listen to soundtracks, movie soundtracks
because they're emotional, but they don't distract me. They don't distract my
brain. It will give me that emotional feeling. Choosing the right music I
think is a big deal if you're going to listen to music. Those are some of the things
that I do for focus,
just for eliminating distractions. Yeah. What about your environment? I've been to your
place there in Panama City, beautiful penthouse. In your office, you've got a
big whiteboard. Are there certain things like that,
having a whiteboard or anything in your environment, that helps you focus? One of the things that I'm always
battling with, and my dream is to have a zen environment, which it's not, right? It's totally messy, but I'm trying to get there. Even my
whiteboard right now is pretty much clean. It is a proven fact that messiness is a mental disruptor. It steals some of that mental energy, so I'm working on ... I'm buying little things like this
thing, which is to put my headphones on. It just helps my environment become more zen. Same thing with papers or whiteboards, so, no, I think
the cleaner, the less stuff you could have, the better, but my nature is to be creative and to clutter, so it's a constant
battle. Totally, it's the whole mad scientist thing, right? Sometimes, the scientist gets in the
lab, everything is a mess, but that's- Yeah. What about people? I know a lot of people
are watching this. There are people that have a job. They got their 9 to 5 they
and they want to start an online business so that they can eventually make
enough money to quit their job. I work with a lot of these people, and, a
lot of them, they have that challenge of just time.
What kind of advice would you have for someone like that where
they've got a job that's sucking up most of their time, they only have a few
hours in the evening or maybe they can do it in the morning, in the weekend? As
both of you and I know, in order to get out of that, you're going to have to make a sacrifice
and really work really hard to get out of that, but any advice that you have for someone
that's in that situation? Sure, and some of my business partners were people in
in that situation and then, after it took off, they quit. The key thing is you
have to go to beast mode. You have to go to a place where it's an
obsession to be successful,
it's an obsession to make this work, whatever it is that you're working
on. If you're working 40 hours a week ... and I'll give you an example of how, like, where I was with
this. My early 20's, I was working 40 hours a week for the gym, not for
myself, then, I would do 30 to 40 hours of personal training on top of that, so I'd
start two hours before my shift and then work another 4-5 hours after my shift,
plus Saturdays and, on top of that, I was learning marketing, so, after I would get home
at 9:00-10:00, I would be watching Ted Nicholas, Gary Halbert, Dan Kennedy,
and doing those exercises so I could build my copywriting skills. That's what it took. I had no
TV. That was the biggest thing. Now, I have a TV. It is a big distraction. There's a lot
of shows I enjoy watching, but, during those 5-6 years, there was ... I didn't have that.
That mental energy I had I just put it into learning. If you're not
successful yet enough to have it be your full time thing, most likely, you have to
spend probably an hour a day of learning, and one of the big things is balancing
your learning with action, and I call that the action-learning equation.
A lot of people make the mistake of spending 90% or 100% of their
time learning. They're reading books, they're watching YouTube videos, they're buying
courses.
They're going to seminars, but there's no action. The big thing to realize is
that you're learning will be 3X or 5X if you take action
every time you learn something. That's really been one of my keys to success is
I'll go to an event or I'll watch a YouTube video or I'll buy a book, read the book, I'm going to
take whatever, at least 1 or 2 or 3 nuggets and I'm going to apply it right away,
and then it becomes my reality. Now, I own that information. It's not a stuff
that's floating around in my head and taking space. It's really important to take a
lot of action and to be learning. You can't just be action, action, action if you
don't know really what you're doing, but, at the same time, you can't be just
learning, learning, learning. You've got to balance that. That's a really big deal.
Yeah. I was a dating coach for several years. A lot of guys, they get caught up just
learning all the theory, but the theory is useless if you can't go out there and
talk to a girl or interact with someone, right? I'd always tell people you're
going to learn so much more, probably ten times more, just going out there, trying
to talk to someone, socialize than you ever will from reading about it in a book.
Right? It is that balance of you've got to get out there and get some
results or some sort of feedback and then analyze that and improve it and
learn how you could do things better. That's awesome. Now, because I'm the
morning ritual guy, and I've got a course on morning rituals. I'm a big fan of them.
What kind of morning ritual do you have? Yeah, that's always evolving, too.
I'll tell you what I'm doing right now. I wake up, hit the bathroom, then I have
an ÅŒURA Ring, this thing. This is a sleep tracker. I've been waiting for this
thing for a long time. I didn't want to wear a wrist thing. I didn't want to be hit
with Bluetooths. I can shut down the Bluetooth with the ring. Anyway, it's awesome.
I wake up, look at data. I'll usually do
a HRV reading. I'll strap the H7 heart strap and then use Nature Beat or a Ben
Greenfield's app
and look at what my HRV is so I know if I can train hard...
Then the latest thing I've been doing is I bought the Wim Hof course,
and I'm doing the Wim Hof breathing method, which is like some really intense breathing, re-oxygenate
the body big time. I'm doing that with the Elanra Air Ionizer. It's
an Australian air ionizer. You're breathing in super, super negatively
charged ions, so that's going to detox your lungs and your body. I'm doing the breathing
technique with that. It's powerful. Then, usually, I'll have a Bulletproof coffee.
That's usually my morning ritual and then always a pound of water. I
usually have half a liter of water. That's the first thing I do that just wakes me up. I'll have some
Kangen Water, which you're a big fan, too. Man, that wakes me up, by the way and just a pound of water and boom my
brain is alive. I know you're a health advocate. You're a founder of
BiOptimizers. How much do you feel health plays a role in productivity? It
really determines your ceiling. It determines your limit. You've
seen Tony Robbins on stage, right? Could somebody that's not super healthy and
super vital physically be able to do what he does? They'd collapse
halfway through day one, right? I mean, the level of energy he's out putting is just world
class. He treats himself like a world-class athlete, the technology he uses,
the recovery technology he does. Everything he does is to optimize
his health, his performance and his energy and it shows. That's what's
possible. People don't realize it, but thinking is a physical energy. I mean, it requires a
lot. If you're really thinking hard, especially if you're doing
something new, it requires tremendous mental energy. I mean, whether it's being in front of
the camera and you're really turning it on
or you're really thinking hard and writing or you're networking, all these
things require mental energy. If you don't have the physicality to have
that energy, you're going to struggle. The same thing with endurance, and
we can talk about the muscle side of focus. Focus is a muscle. At
first, if you've never focused, and most people have the attention span of
less than a goldfish. A goldfish is 9 seconds.
Humans are down to 8 seconds. That's the statistic not my opinion. At first,
it's tough because our brain, especially with all the notifications
in social media, we're just used to literally splitting or changing our
attention every two seconds.
We're flipping and clicking and liking and going and looking at that and going
back. That's how our brains are functioning. Focusing is the complete
opposite. Let's say, okay, I'm going to do one thing for forty five minutes.
For 45 minutes, it's probably tough at first, so my suggestion
is, just like meditation, I mean, meditation, don't try to do 30 minutes or 20 minutes.
Start with 5 minutes. Start with 10 minutes. It's the same thing with focusing. Have that focus ferocity.
Maybe you could only keep it up
for 15 minutes at first, so then you need a 5-minute break and then you come back
and you do another 15 minutes and then you need another 5 minutes break. The ability, now, I
can focus for 90 minutes to 2 hours. I wasn't able to do that even last year.
I see the progress, and I think a lot of that, I mean, I take a lot of
different supplements for mental energy, for brain power, and I think they're
paying off in that regard because I just see the gains that I'm making within.
It's always a combination of continuing to strengthening that muscle. I'll give you an
example how important that is for me. I'd spent recently about 15 grand
optimizing my sleep. I bought a custom-made $9,000 mattress.
I could go on and on, right? That's how important to me the recovery is because
I know it's the key to having more energy, and I know it's going to pay, like, for me,
that's a financial investment, I'm going to get that money back in the next
6 months or 9 months or 12 months. Yeah. I remember actually Kobe Bryant, he went to Nike to
make a shoe. He wanted like a little millimeter taken off the shoe just to
make it a little bit lighter. He was so obsessed. It seems crazy, but it
just improve his explosiveness. It's just like a tiny amount, but I guess that's
how you have to look at optimizing things. You're not necessarily going for
this big, big change or big result, but it's just a little, the little changes
here and there that add up to be the big things. Right?
Absolutely. Einstein said that compound interest is the 8th wonder
of the world. People think of that
financially, but compound interest is in every area of our life, and it's working
whether you're aware of it or you're not aware of it because there's negative
compound interest, too. If you take a look at your health habit, let's
say you eat good, you train, you take time to recover, that is one of
those things that compounds. You'll get healthier and healthier. If I look
at somebody who's doing a little bit of health
habits and I look at their compounding health over 20, 30, 40, 50 years and then you have
somebody who's got bad health habits and you see what the compounding effect of
that is, I mean it's night and day, right? You just see that divide. It's almost
like a boat that is 2 degrees to the left and another boat is 2 degrees to the right. After a
few days, they're going to be quite far apart. That's how I look at everything.
Whether it's our work habits, our health habits, our productivity habits,
they're all compounded. One of my favorite books is The Compound Effect
because it really hammers this home.
Over time, over 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, you're getting the rewards of the right
things, the rewards of the right habits, and it's the difference
between success and failure.
Yep, so let's talk a little bit about rest. Obviously, it's not sustainable
long-term just to be as productive as possible in the sense of
like working early in the morning to late at night
because, eventually, you need to rest. Have you seen a lot of benefit in just, I don't know,
maybe in your evenings? Like you watch TV or you just do something maybe on
the weekends to have fun or go out just to recharge in that way? Like you have
certain things you do every day or every week?
Absolutely. It's as critical. It's another thing that determines
the ceiling. Like you have to match the output, the intensity with recovery.
You have to balance that. When I was talking about working 80 hours a week
each day, I was in my early 20's. I mean, if you have to do
that to get out of your job, that's great, but here's some numbers for you. The
maximum level of productivity, like let's just say somebody wanted to be the most
productive he possibly can, it's between 53, 56 hours a week. After that,
people that work 70, 75 hours, have about the same level as the guys working
53, 54 hours, so there's no gains past that point. That's important.
In essence that's a critical thing to realize. This is going to answer
your question is, to maintain focus ferocity, I need to put the
recovery because, otherwise, my energy is going to go like this.
It's going to dwindle. It's going to dwindle. It's going to dwindle. It's going to dwindle. I'm going to be a
100%, but my output is going to be dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping
because I'm out of mental energy, I'm out of physical energy. The first thing
is micro recovery. See, you have to figure out what the optimal thing is for you.
Maybe a lot of people like Pomodoro, which is 25 minutes on and 5
minutes off.
That's a good place to start. I did 45, 15 for a long time, so 45 minutes on and
15 minutes walking around, going rebounding, playing the guitar. Just
change the channel. Get out of the office. Just take a quick walk. Play with your dog.
Play with your daughter. Just change the channel. Then when you
recovered, you're recharged, then you go back at it. 45, 15, 45, 15 and then a 30
minute lunch, a little lunch, snack, break is a great strategy. What I tend to do these
days, and, again, it's just a product of time, is more 90 minutes on, maybe 20,
25 minutes off, so I like just getting ... because I get in the flow state like you mentioned,
which I think is a big part of productivity, and I don't want to get out.
Right? I don't want to get out until I start sensing the drop. The drop usually
happens after 90 minutes. That's on in the day-to-day.
Like, throughout the day, I need to take ... make sure I take those micro breaks. That's critical.
Then, absolutely, in the evenings, I'll usually learn a little bit in the evenings for maybe an hour, 90
minutes, and then I'm done, so ... and then I spend time with my wife. That's a big
part of my recharge, spending time with her, watching a show, talking, walking,
we’re going to see a movie, go to a restaurant. To me, that's critical because
I don't want to get lost in work and lose focus of the bigger picture. Work is
not my life. It's just a part of it. Then I don't work Saturdays and Sundays
95% of the time. Sometimes, when there's a critical project and I got to get
it done, then I'll work on a Saturday. Sunday is sacred not from a religious
standpoint, but from a recovery standpoint. Then there's the bigger
recovery, which means, about every 3 months, I feel I need 10 days off.
That means I'll start like on a Friday and then I'll take all the next week and
the next weekend off,
preferably on a trip, and I don't work, I don't answer
the computer, I'm not in meeting. That's a deeper recharge. Eben Pagan called
it, he says, "You get altitude." You get out of the trenches and you're flying above
your business at 30,000 feet and you're able to see things that you just can't
see when you're just in a day-to-day grind. I actually come up with my best
ideas, my best visions, my best game plans, the next level of upgrades during
those 10 days. Even though I'm not trying, they tend to happen.
That's my big recovery program. I'm fanatical about sleep, like I just mentioned. I
take sleep not as the length of sleep, the quality of sleep. You got to sleep deep,
and this is where the ÅŒURA Ring comes in. It gets me out of the...
and tells me if I'm in deep sleep, how long I'm in deep sleep, if I'm waking up.
It gives me a definitive rating on the quality of it, so it's awesome. Do you, guys, in your business,
plan out the projects you're working on? For example, you've got one big
project you're working on for this month and then you'll also plan, okay, after that project is done,
that's when I'm going to take my 10-day trip? You plan out certain things like that
several months in advance?
Yeah, we plan. First, we have the ultimate vision for the business, what's
the ultimate, which is different from a goal. That's the ultimate. Then
we have a very broad 3-year vision, very broad. Then we have a very concrete
1-year plan, and then we break it down into quarters, 90 days. We'll meet
for a couple of days. There's a great book called Traction, which I recommend for
everyone. It's really changed how we operate. Everything I'm telling
We'll meet for a couple of days and then really plan the next 90
days, what's the game plan, what are we going to do, and prioritize, and then
everybody gets assigned rocks or projects for that 90 days, and you
agree to it
and then, boom, that's it. There's no more projects coming in. There's nothing else that's going to take your
attention. For the next 90 days, you know what you're going to do, and that's it. That's your
game plan. That's how we do it. Cool. By the way, actually, I found out about
the book, Traction, from Wade, who is your business partner. Wade and we’re
working out. He shows up at the gym one day and he's like, "Dude, this book is
changing our business," and he's super excited about it. I was actually reading it on
the airplane the other day, so a really, really good book. I want to ask ... go a little bit more advanced.
For people, you mentioned before you recommend, people that are
starting out, focus on one project. Obviously, once you start having more success ...
and, the position that you're in, you're able to focus on multiple businesses, multiple
projects. What kind of advice do you have to be able to run and operate multiple
businesses? Yeah. It's a very different way of operating.
There's another great book called Rocket Fuel. It's something I discovered before I
I read it, but then I read it and it was just a good validation. The basic
breakdown is there's two types of people,
visionaries and integrators. The visionaries are people that have the ideas,
come up with the vision, come up with the game plan, and then the integrators get it done.
My reality is... I have more ideas than... like I would probably
need to match my level of output in terms of ideas I would
probably need about 15 solid integrators. Every business that I have had is
I've partnered with a good integrator. They're running the day-to-day
because, again, first of all, I hate doing that. I don't want to do it.
It's completely
misaligned with my nature, so they're running the day-to-day and then I come in
and I do what I do best which is to create ideas on how to grow
the business, and there's a lot of ways that I do that. Usually, like one hour to two hours of my
output will create dozens and dozens or, sometimes, even a hundred hours of work
for the team to implement. That's one of the reasons I'm able to have and
be part of multiple businesses is I ... It takes a lot of time to execute
the visions, the ideas, but the key is you got to get the right people. That's
life or death when it comes to this. I'm blessed that I have good
partners. Now, even within a business, one of the things that we're starting to do
within our publishing business is Intrapreneurs. It's the same idea, but it's not
another business. It's kind of a business within the business. I found this
guy, a young guy, and I just saw myself in him, just level 10 drive, just beast mode.
I met him at an event, and I did an interview and it just was a good
click, so we're bringing him on, and we're starting kind of another niche, another
market, and he's going to run that. Obviously, he gets access to all of
our resources, the Webmasters, the traffic team, we help him, we groom him. We
even bring him a copywriter. He's the integrator, so then I get a
chance to just be the visionary in that, so does the main president of that
business. That's a new way that I'm playing with growing. It's bringing
more intrepreneurs into my businesses and kind of giving them an arena
that they can run, that they can have fun and do their thing.
You partner with a lot of people, right? That's one way that you're able
to leverage yourself in some way. Did you have any maybe additional tips for this team
building and maybe attracting the right people to partner with or even to hire the right
people?
Yeah, those are two great things. Let's start with partnering. Partnering with
people is a big decision. It essentially is maybe not as heavy as a
marriage, but it's close. In the beginning, if you look at how you
would choose a girl when you were in high school,
your criteria is very different today because you've had a lot of
learning experiences. Every partnership that you try, it will teach
you what you want, what you don't want, but what it really comes down to in
business is knowing yourself. To they own self be true. That's where a
personality test ... Do as many tests as you can,
Briggs & Myers, Coldbeat, Disk, Caliper. Do an IQ test. You want to know where you're
you're strong. You want to know where you're weak. You want to know what your nature is and
what your nature isn't because it's a guaranteed recipe for disaster if you're
going to try to do things that you don't enjoy doing. It's a guaranteed recipe for
disaster if you try to do things that you hate doing.
If you know these things, then, in business, which is awesome, you can find
people that that's their strengths, and that's the kind of partner you want to
find. Again, one of the big things is are you a visionary or are you an
integrator? if you're a visionary you have to have an integrator because if you
two are visionaries, you're going to struggle. You're going to be like on the
whiteboard for weeks and you're going to have a 50-page Google Doc with
the biggest vision in the world, but nothing's going to get done. Right?
If you have two integrators in the same room, there's nothing that's going to get
done either because they don't know what to do.
They're not the guys coming up with the ideas. They're not
game planners. They don't have
vision. That's one of the biggest things is are you a visionary or are you an
integrator, and find your complement. Obviously, you got to get along with.
Personally, I tend not to partner with friends and family. I think it's a
mistake, but I always become friends with my partners. It's a big difference. Right?
Sometimes, it happens. I mean, Wade like you mentioned, a good
friend of mine, we were friends before we became partners and that case it worked,
but I don't become partners because he's a friend.That's never happened. What
I call functional capability is the key thing. That
means are they capable of doing what it is that they're meant to be doing? If
I partner up with someone and they're the ones that are going to handle
operations, they're the operations guy,
if they're not an operations person, if they don't have the skillset, then it's a
mistake. Again, that goes back to "they own self be true," and that goes both ways. You
need to know what their strengths and their weaknesses are, so it's a good idea
to do
That's on the partner side. On the employee
side, I keep making the process
deeper and deeper because hiring a superstar is such a big thing and it's
not easy. You're talking of maybe 2% of the population is what I
I would call the superstar. 98% of the people out there, you want to try to
filter them out. I have a lot of techniques. Let's use Upwork as an
example. For those of you that don't know Upwork.com, there's hundreds of thousands of
providers who can go on and hire. The first thing that I do is I use their
search engine and I eliminate anybody that's not 4 stars and up and they're automatically
out. Then I look at their work history and if there's any ... I look for red flags.
I'm looking for red flags. Then I'll do what I call Doofus tests. I do a lot of Doofus tests. What I'm trying
to do is I want them to show me that they're either a Doofus or not a
Doofus. This is filtering. What I want to do is I'll send them an
invitation. I really look at how they respond. I might ask a couple of
questions again with Doofus test. If they're not a good communicator
or if there's anything off in their communication, okay, they're gone. That's step 2.
I'm starting to filter. Then step 3 is I do more Doofus tests. I'll set up some Doofus test.
I'll give you an example we did recently for copywriting. We wanted to hire a
copywriter. We had 4 simple questions. It was great. This was
a new evolution in our hiring process, so we created a Google form and there was 4 Doofus
test questions they had to answer. It eliminated 95% of the applicants.
It didn't mean that we had to talk to them. That's the third step. Then comes the
interview. The best book out there on interviewing is called Topgrading by
Brad Smart. That's the book to use. If you do nothing else, just get Topgrading
and follow the Topgrading process. It's gold. There's one
question, and we call it the torque, where you ask them if ... for a reference, and then you
ask them, "Well, if I call your reference or when I call your reference, what do you
think they're going to say about you?" That question is just gold
because they know you're going to call them, they believe you're going to
call them and so they're a lot less apt to lie. That's why it's a torque
because you're really torquing them on that. It's very powerful. That's step 4.
Then either with that I'll have my operations manager do the first phase
because maybe there's 10 people left, she'll interview all 10, so, now, we're left
with three. I'll do an interview with the last three and then we'll do them ...
We'll give them another Doofus test like something real, okay, like build this web
page, write this letter. With the copywriting example, we had two guys at the end and one guy
was a complete disaster. Even after he passed all the other tests, what he gave
us was just
awful. We were left with one guy, one winner. That's the process.
It is involved. At this point, I have people in my businesses that do the
first 90% and then I'll come in at the end because it's too
time-consuming. It's about 20 hours of work to just do that. Hiring
superstars is going to make or break you when you start scaling. You have to go
that deep. You can't cut corners. Every time we've hired out of
convenience, it's bitten us in the ass hard.
Yeah, and how about managing your team? Do you, guys, do weekly meetings? Or what do you, guys,
do in that front? Yeah. Yeah. We follow the Traction process. We always did weekly meetings.
Traction has made the meetings better. We meet weekly, and then the
business will be divided into teams. There'll be a big group meeting where
where everybody in marketing will meet and everybody in operations will meet and
the includes the business leaders but then if we have a Facebook
team or a cold traffic team we'll meet on top of that as well especially
like going back to my money move. That's my main thing, then I'm going to be involved,
I'm going to be driving on that. Yeah, there's big meetings
where everybody's involved and then there's smaller meetings, if you have,
again, depending on the size of your business, but if you have different little
divisions, smaller teams, then, yeah, meeting. One of the books I just read, I just
finished reading it a couple of days ago is Scrum, The Art of Doing Twice the Work in
Half the Time. I'm thinking of implementing that process, which is just
a 5-to-15-minute daily Scrum meeting where ... "What did you do?
What are you going to do, and what was done" basically is the meetings, very quick,
because I find that, especially if it's a new mission like I was talking about creating a new
marketing funnel, I got to be on it daily. I want to be coordinating with
all the key people daily.
Otherwise, things get off track and it takes you months to figure out they're off
track. That's happened recently, and I feel that we need to upgrade that process.
I think Scrum is going to solve that. Awesome. All right, now, this has been amazing.
We've been talking for a while. We've gone into so many different topics,
and I could probably go on with you for several more hours. I guess
just to wrap up, do you any final tips or advice or wisdom? You've been in business for
over a decade now.
Any top, most important lessons that you've learned that you could share with our
audience? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I think optimization in business
is one of the most important habits to build. If it's something we are
feeling mental resistance, which a lot of people do for some reason,
fight back because it's a lot of fun. It doesn't take some massive leverage point.
Literally, in about 30 minutes a week max, you can be constantly growing your business.
What we do is maybe 30 minutes, we come up with some different ideas and the
Webmaster sets it up and we're done, and then you just look at the
data. It might take a month to get enough data to end the tests. Maybe you're coming up
with one new idea a week for different parts of your marketing funnel, and
that's it. That habit will probably double or triple your revenue over time with the
same amount of traffic. I'm not talking about getting more traffic. It's the same amount of
traffic, but double or triple your net profit. It's probably one of the biggest habits.
Second is put your standards as high as possible when it comes to the
people you accept in your life as partners and as team mates because, I'm
telling you, man,
the difference between B grade and A grade is it's far. It's like
when Michael Jordan was making $100 million a year in his prime and the average
player was making a million. That's the kind of difference I'm talking about in
terms of the results. Over time, the gap between a superstar and a B grade ...
and a B grader will make you feel good,
will sound good in the meetings, but, when it comes down to performing, when it
comes down to pressure, when it comes down to surprising you, that's one of
the main things that I look for. A superstar will always surprise you. If you're not
being surprised, like, wow, that's amazing, wow, you went the extra mile,
those are the hallmarks of a superstar. If you're not experiencing that with
your people, they're probably not superstars. I think if you do nothing, but raise
your standards, you're going to attract great people. Again, keep in
mind, always be trying to become more productive. It's a never-ending journey.
You'll look at a guy like Mark Cuban. He's managing or he's invested
in over a hundred companies or whatever number it is. His output, like, if
you look at ... If he spends 15 minutes on each business every 2 weeks,
the value of that time is amazing. Right? That's part of our journey as
as business growers and as investors is continuing to make our time more and
more valuable. It's not a PDF, man. It's an 84-page book
that is a PDF that I'm giving away for free. It's called Triple Your
Productivity, 3X Your Productivity. Yeah, Stefan will give you the link. Make
sure you click that. It goes into everything that we talked about in far much greater
detail, including how to really master your schedule and so many other things.
We would have to talk for another 5-6 hours to cover half of
what's in there.
Yeah. I've been through a part of it. It's really amazing. Again, I'll put a link below this video
for you, guys, to head on over and check it out. I also want to encourage you guys to head
on over to Matt's blog, Mattgallant.tv. If you're going over there, make sure sure
to read his story, because I read your story maybe two weeks ago and it was
really fascinating. I learned a lot about you. You're just a really good writer.
You're very skilled. That's one of your top skillsets
Man, I want to thank you again so much for taking the time today.
I think this will really help and benefit a lot of people, so thank you.
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks to you, and thanks to everybody who listened through. Yeah, then just come over to the
blog. It's all kinds of fun stuff, all kinds of things to improve the quality
of your life. Come on over and enjoy the show.
Thank you. Hey, this is Stefan, and thank you so much for watching this video.
If you enjoyed this, then please hit the "like" button below. Leave a comment to let us
know what you think and make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for
more great videos like this. Now, if you want to take your life to the next level,
then I want to offer you a free gift. It's called My Life Mastery Toolkit, and
it literally has the best of the best of what I have to offer in terms of
videos, articles and resources for taking your life to the next level and living an
extraordinary life. To get access to this, all you have to do is click the link
that'll appear right here on this video or, if you're on a mobile device, then click
the link in the description below and then head on over that page, enter your
email address, and I'll send you immediate access to the Life Mastery
Toolkit. I want to thank you again for watching this video. Until the next one,
I'll talk to you soon.
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