The Future Of Less Work
00:08:38 · Anthony Trucks
[00:08:38] S1: I got you there too. So what I've noticed when it comes to like interacting with people and teaching them is when you have to be a person that does it yourself first to lead. That's always been your first piece. When it comes down, I think, to the idea of how do you find out what to do, right? There's ample examples out in the world of individuals who are living lives in a capacity that we might enjoy. So someone could probably look at their life and go, I'm doing this job, I'm in this life, but I like how that life looks, or that experience of life looks, or that role or job title looks. And I go, okay, great. You don't actually achieve or attain or sustain above your current identity, I don't believe. Meaning you have to operate a certain tick to have certain things. And so what I think we first have to do is be okay with the ego being attacked a little bit. Meaning being okay admitting I'm not perfect there. That's usually the first step for most folks, because they'll go, Oh, I'm not perfect. But the moment something shows up and there's a chink in the armor, this big ego wall pops up and goes, But I'm okay. No, it's because of... And they place blame outside, it's external. As opposed to going, ah, you're right, I might need to work on this. The first piece is there's a way to actually have people give you feedback received. But second thing is you can oftentimes take a look and if you're honest with yourself, ask if my hero or my person I admire, like if they followed me around for a day, what would they say? If they actually watched my day to day actions, my process, so I say I want what they want. If that person stepped into my day to day, would they go, Hey, good job. You're on the path. Just keep working. Or would they go, Oh, okay, I noticed some things here. Like I'm used to doing this and you're doing this, and you say you want this, but these are incongruent pieces. Like a simple example is I have kids, three of them. I have a son who is, he's right now has this little dance of difficulty. But I noticed that what he says he wants, he doesn't function the way to get this thing. And so I go, Hey, you say you want to play division one football, but we're not doing division one football things right now. Those two are misaligned, right?
00:10:31 · Anthony Trucks
So if you can actually let yourself open and go, Okay, I see the separation, it'll inform you of things you can improve upon. Now, just because you see it doesn't mean it becomes real. Just because you know what's out there doesn't get done. The next piece is to go, what if I can deconstruct this down to a simple small thing I do every day? And it may not be calendared, maybe it does. But there's oftentimes a thing that we have to do that is not a single one time push. It's not like all of a sudden it happens a day, it's done, right? It's the compounding of days. It's the fifteen minutes a day, the five minutes a day. So what people have to do is first go, who do I want to be? Right? Okay, noticed that thing. What is it that I can see that somebody has that I may want? Okay, pay attention to it. Maybe I open the ego wall and go, oh, I can improve here. Now I've get informed of some things. Once I have these things on my plate of they can be worked on, I don't have to do all of them, by the way. I might say there's five new things. You might choose one or two, and that's completely okay also, we're making progress. But then I go, What must I do fifteen minutes a day consistently? And I say, don't go big, go small in the biggest way possible. Make it the most disgustingly consistent thing you can do. And what happens is, I'll look like this, we all been to a coffee shop before. You ever gone to the coffee shop and you have work to get done, your laptop's there, but your phone's in your hand. You had an hour to be there. And about five minutes in, you notice you're still scrolling on your phone. And you go, Ugh, I gotta put the phone down. So put the phone down. And you start trying to focus on the computer doing the work you're supposed to do. The first five minutes is anguish. It's like you're thinking about the phone, the alerts, and everything. And then within like ten, fifteen minutes, all of a sudden you're you're melted into the work. And you pop up an hour later, it's like, Oh my gosh, everything's done. Like that moment there's a blend in, that's how... When that happens in an hour, same thing happens over a period of weeks in a position of your career or your business.
00:12:21 · Nirit Cohen, Anthony Trucks
[00:12:21] S0: Yeah. And I think the part that is interesting to focus on and and what you're discussing is actually transformations. Because, again, you know, the the the health one is an example that a lot of people resonate with. Right? We we know we need to do something. It's not about the knowledge. It's about getting us to do it. These days, at work, it's about changing aspects of how we do work or even the kind of work we do. And sometimes that goes against our routine. [00:12:53] S1: Oh, very much It's [00:12:54] S0: hard to look at someone who's doing this because everything is changing around us. So I'm not sure we all know what it's going to be like or feel like to work in about two years. But most of us do have people around us who seem to be doing better, right, in terms of adopting tools or maybe being more entrepreneurial. And I think you're suggesting take those small enough steps to say, okay, what is that one thing that I can adopt from them actually Yeah, do this
00:13:26 · Anthony Trucks
[00:13:26] S1: that's a simple way of putting it for sure. And that's really as simple as it is, but as difficult as it is. Because it sounds good to go, oh, just fifteen minutes. That's fifteen minutes. And that's on top of your already hectic day. Maybe you have a husband or a wife and kids and the boss and a project in some, there's a lot that still goes on. But the reality is, if you want to have more, you have to become more, which is an expansion. There's this idea of capacity I sometimes use in the same aspect we're talking about. Because yeah, new things to do, and life doesn't all of a sudden slow down because you have a new idea. So the idea is how do I expand my capacity? And conceptually, it's like, I say I have a plug in my house, I have an outlet, there's two plugs. Let's say I'm working on four things. I have my marriage, I have my health, I have a project at work, and maybe I get the kids, I don't want to be close to them. If I only have two outlets, I can only power two at a time. So I'm doing my career stuff, maybe I'm working on my health, but then my wife and kids are getting none of me. All right, focus on my wife, but I have to, you know, take work off the plug, and I got to work on my health in my marriage, right? You have these different dances, but something's unpowered. The idea is if you can actually create an expanded capacity through what we're talking about, which is it's a stretch. It's not easy. I have a metaphor for that too. But if you think about a power plug having an extension cord that plugs into a power block, well, now you all of a sudden have six extra outlets from that one, it's expanded. I can plug the five in, four in, and still have two more.
00:14:48 · Nirit Cohen, Anthony Trucks
[00:14:48] S0: But where do I to get be expanded. Where do I get that power back? Right? [00:14:51] S1: Exactly. So [00:14:52] S0: I'm getting up in the morning, going to work, coming home, doing the stuff I have to do, and there goes another cycle. Right? That's where people say, have no time to learn something new or to have a deadline. I don't have time to, you know, bring in new tools here or think about, you know, other things I could be doing. [00:15:10] S1: Yeah. There's this guy named Gay Hendricks, and he says, If you fight for your limitation, you get to keep it. So in a moment that we identify as I don't have time, or it's too much, or it's too hard, I have now told myself that I can't add more. Therefore, if I can't add more, I can't have more. So you either have to give up the dream, or you have to give up the idea that that's a truth, that you don't have time, because we all have time. But the hard part is like, how do I expand that? And I will say it's like this, you ever lifted weights or worked out before? [00:15:37] S0: No, yeah.
00:15:38 · Anthony Trucks
[00:15:38] S1: Yeah. You ever started and like you found like you could, there's like a weight you couldn't pick up, and you just, it was so heavy. And eventually, you just started to lower weights, you slowly built up. And eventually that weight you couldn't pick up was a warm up weight. Like you're so much stronger now. It's the same concept, but more of a psychological play. Because the weight of the day or the weight of the stuff, is, it bogs you down and it gets heavy. But our brains are phenomenal with efficiency and effectiveness. Like it finds ways to make it easy. Why when you lift weights, the body goes, oh, at a cellular level, it goes, let's make the sarcomeres of your muscles bigger so you can handle more weight so we get stronger. The body kind of operates very similarly at a psychological level. So I have to stay in the weight room of my mind of work. And then over time, the things that I'm adding on, they are stressful and they are difficult and they're heavy, but eventually brain gets good at operating with that. It becomes a new normal. And now you feel emotionally the same as you did before you added that thing, which gives you a space to go, all right, let me add some more. And we normalize and normalize and normalize. It's a way that, here's the best example. At some point I was a college student and I was a football player, full time in division one. My wife, now my wife, a fiance at the time, she was a full time student. We're bogged down. I got football in school, her school, and then we had a baby, and he's now 21 years old. And we're 20 years old at the time. And so the dance of it is like, I had to figure it out. I was subject to a situation of, if I want to be a good dad, I don't have the ability to go, I'm trying to be a good dad, son, sorry. It's like, no, I got to add this in somehow. And the first few weeks is crazy. First month is like, what's going on? But after the first year, normal. It was just as easy as it was before. It was almost easier. Was like, oh, this is just normal what I do. Same concept is applied for all of us across life. The problem is we get to these moments and go, I don't have time. So yeah, if I own that reality, then that's going to be my reality.