Transcript & Summary: How to Do More in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months

[00:00] okay so if you're anything like me you probably think a lot about how to get more stuff done and the typical approach to this is to set annual goals and to track your progress throughout the year but for a lot of us this doesn't really work we can lose motivation we can forget about our goals we can get sidetracked by other things and the worst part about this is that you're not achieving the things you want or building the life that you want because your system isn't really working for you but what if there was a system that [00:21] helped you achieve your annual goals in just 12 weeks and do more than most people do in 12 whole months that is where this book comes in the 12we year by Brian morren and lennington and this is what we're talking about in this episode of book club the ongoing Series where for the last 4 years I have been distilling And discussing highlights and learnings from some of my favorite books and really in this video I wanted to talk about three key Concepts that I personally taken away from the book the [00:43] book has 21 chapters it's fairly in depth I would recommend reading the book cuz it actually is a genuinely good book but in this video I'm just going to focus on three key ideas that if you apply to your life will hopefully help you get more done in 12 weeks than other people do in 12 months key idea number one is the execution Gap now really their whole stick in this book which I broadly agree with is if you look at the thing that differentiates High performers from low performers or people who are successful versus people who are [01:09] not successful how however really people Define their own terms of success obviously it doesn't have to be in terms of money but however you define success the thing that separates people who are successful from the people who are not successful is not knowledge and it's not strategy and it's not information it is simply execution there is a major execution gap between High performers and less High performers and there's a nice quote from Thomas Ed in the very first chapter which is if we did the [01:32] things that we are capable of we would literally Astound ourselves and then they're going on to talk about how 65% of Americans are overweight or obese do you think that there is some secret to losing weight and getting fit the diet and fitness industry is a $60 billion industry as of 2013 when this book is written each year new books are published on diet and exercise when I searched diet books on the internet my search came back with 45,9 results almost 46,000 books some with familiar titles like the Atkins [01:55] diet or South Beach Diet some with less familiar titles like run fat pitch run yet Americans continue to be overweight and out of shape most people know how to get back in shape eat better exercise more they just don't do it it's not a knowledge problem it's an execution problem our experience has shown that most people have the capacity to double or triple their income just by consistently applying what they already know despite this people continue to chase new ideas thinking that the next idea is the one that will magically make [02:21] it all better and like the whole first chapter kind of J basically elaborates on this point in great detail that the single biggest barrier between you and the life that you are capable of living and the success that you're capable of achieving however you choose to Define that is simply a lack of consistent execution there are still basic fundamentals like this a lack of consistent execution that also like really deeply connects with me you know I'm supposedly a productivity expert some might say the world's most followed [02:45] productivity expert according to my publisher but even still I just found myself thinking as I was reading this damn I am also holding myself back simply because of a lack of consistent execution there is a journaling prompt that came to my mind as I was reading this book which is is where am I allowing a lack of consistent execution to hold me back and honestly I would encourage you to pause the video now and just like think about that where am I allowing a lack of consistent execution to hold me back you know to use a [03:11] personal example one of the reasons why my health is not in the place that I would like it to be is simply a lack of consistent execution it's not that I don't have the knowledge of what it takes to go to the gym and eat protein and eat relatively well consistently it's just that I don't do the thing similarly last year our business did like 5 million in annual revenue and had I in fact considered L executed the things that I know I should have done it probably would have been closer to 8 or 9 million so there's literally $4 [03:34] million difference between me inconsistently executing and me consistently executing and so the whole point of this book as they lay out in chapter one is to close this execution Gap and the concept of the 12we year which is sort of what it says on the 10 which we're going to talk about next but the whole concept of the 12we year is designed to help us close this execution Gap so if you've identified that in your life for example there's some sort of execution Gap that's stopping you from living the life that you actually want [03:58] to live then hopefully you can watch the rest of this video and then maybe you can consider picking up a copy of the book as well now once you've solved this execution problem and you've freed up more time and energy in your life and you might want to spend some more time learning and a great way to do that is using brilliant who are very kindly sponsoring this video brilliant is an interactive platform where you can learn maths programming and Ai and they've got thousands of lessons and their focus is [04:17] on learning by doing rather than just consuming I've been using brilliant for the last 5 years now and they've been supporting the channel during that time as well they've got a really good first principles approach to learning which helps you build understanding from the ground up and it's all crafted by an award-winning team of teachers researchers and professionals from MIT Caltech Microsoft Google and many more cool places brilliant helps build your critical thinking skills through problem solving and not memorizing things so [04:38] while you're building real knowledge on specific topics you also become just better at thinking generally and I personally think that learning every day is one of the most important things you can do for your own life and also for your own development and also for your mental health and all of this fun stuff their new courses on programming are particularly good and they can help you get familiar with python for example and start building programs on day one with a built-in drag and drop editor if [04:58] you're ke to give this a go and try everything brilliant has to offer then you can try it out completely free for a full 30 days head over to brilliant.org Al abdal or click the link in the video description and that will also give you 20% off the annual premium subscription so thank you so much brilliant for sponsoring this video key idea number two replace annualization with periodization now I want to start this with a clip from Ed melet which I saw last year that I thought had some profound wisdom to it my day is 6:00 [05:24] a.m. to noon and I'm not crazy you're crazy for thinking it takes 24 hours just like some dude in a cave did 300 years ago my second day starts at noon and goes till 6:00 p.m. that's day two and then the next day is 6:00 p.m. to midnight what I've done now is I have changed a manipulated time I now get 21 days a week stack it up over a month I'm going to kick your butt stack it up over a year you're toast stack it up over 5 years my entire life is different than it would have been otherwise now this [05:47] was a clip that that went viral on Tik Tok uh and and so the comments are kind of funny you know so in other words he splits his day into morning afternoon and night me me chatting with the nurse while she puts the straight jacket on me now obviously this clip taken out of context like Ed Miler is great Tom bil is great the podcast is absolutely sick like it's a great conversation but this clip taken out of context like I can see why people would quibble about this thing but there is actually profound [06:08] wisdom in this one of the comments here is I cut my pizza into 48 slices equals more pizza it's like yes but also no like there actually is wisdom in what Ed is doing here which is basically what he's doing is periodization so let's segue that into what these guys actually talk about in the book and the whole reason why it's called the 12we here is because the way that we generally think about setting and achieving goals is based on annualized thinking level zero is you don't set goals at all and you don't [06:35] even think about your life and you don't do any kind of New Year stuff cuz you're just like operating an autopilot I suspect if you are a viewer of this channel you are a little bit more hopefully uh intentional about how you're spending your time hopefully you might have seen some of my my previous videos around goal setting around the importance of goal setting and maybe you've decided to actually set some of your own goals that's you know level zero is the people that don't set any goals at all level one is the people who [06:57] set annualized goals that these are my goals for 2024 this is what I need to do to achieve them etc etc this is how most businesses operate as well they set we set annual goals like our goals for 2024 are a b c d and e and then often businesses will break them down into quarterly goals but as individuals we tend not to think about quarters quarters are a very kind of business speaky type thing where mostly yeah we don't think about like how can I achieve my annual goal and break it down into quarters but even that that is all based [07:23] on annualized thinking and basically what the guys in the book are talking about is that when you think in an annualized time frame it means means you're wasting a lot of time so when it comes to the end of the year this is usually when a lot of progress is made there's the idea of Parkinson's law which is that work expands to fill the time that we allocate to it if you set a goal for the New Year in January or February or whatever you still have this sense of like oh you know the end of the year is so far away and then by the time [07:47] the end of the year starts to roll around you see this in the workplace you see this in most people's personal lives there's a real push of like oh crap we need to hit our targets by the end of the year and often businesses you know a lot of businesses will do like 40% of their annual Revenue in the final 2 months of the year yeah Black Friday Christmas probably makes a difference but there is a certain sense of urgency that happens when you get closer and closer to a deadline deadlines as much as I don't particularly like them are [08:11] generally annoyingly motivating back when I was working on my book I had weekly deadlines from my editor and I was just making no progress in the book and every Tuesday we'd have a meeting at like 5:00 p.m. and so on Tuesdays you can bet your ass that like that morning I was like crap I need to need to have the meeting and I don't want to show up to the meeting empty-handed and so I would write lots of words on a Tuesday this is the deadline effect as we get closer to a deadline our performance increases there's more of a sense of [08:36] urgency it's not that we're working any harder I wasn't working any harder on a Tuesday than I was on a Monday or the weekend or a Friday or whatever the thing might be I was just I just had more of this sense of urgency and I was spending my time doing sensible things rather than wasting my time playing PlayStation or scrolling social media or doing random stuff that had nothing to do with the primary goal that I was working towards now according to the book the concept of periodization was first starting to be a thing in in the [09:00] Olympics in the 1970s where Eastern European athletes were using that skill and they were using it to great effect basically the idea is that if you're an athlete trying to improve a skill instead of trying to improve all aspects of the skill all in one go you're instead periodizing your training so you have four to 6 weeks working on skill a then you stop and then the next four to six weeks working on skill B and then you're sort of stacking this up and doing things one at a time in series rather than trying to [09:26] do multiple things in parallel I've talked about this concept in a bunch of videos before around how trying to make a little bit of progress across lots of things all at the same time is generally a lot less effective than just focusing on one thing and then finishing it and focusing on another thing and finishing it and the whole idea of this whole like 12we year is that it periodized the year into four periods of 12 weeks or quarters in other words but they're calling it 12 weeks because it's just [09:49] like sounds cooler than like quarterly planning basically the whole book is about quarterly planning it's about like thinking of your year instead of it being 52 weeks instead thinking of a year as being 12 weeks and the idea there is that it means that you set goals that are more focused on things that you can actually get done in the next 12 weeks when you only have 12 weeks every week counts whereas when you have 52 weeks is you can sort of screw around for a lot of the time and it means you're taking advantage of the [10:12] deadline effect which means that as the 12 weeks starts to come to an end you get more of that sense of urgency and you're actually going to work a little bit harder or in a more focused fashion to achieve the goals that you set out to achieve in that 12we period now a criticism to this might be well like bro is doing what Ed milet is suggesting and just breaking down arbit arily breaking down time into different chunks but that actually does work if you arbitrarily break down a year into four 12we [10:35] segments with like I don't know a week of break in the 13th week or if you arbitrarily break down a day into 3 days like whatever terminology you want to use you're really taking advantage of that psychological phenomenon of the fact that as things come to an end we tend to push a little bit harder at them this is not an advocation of hustle culture this is simply a case of using our time in a way that's actually more effective and more aligned with the goals that we say we want to achieve and key idea number three is your emotion [10:59] connection to the outcome okay so the first idea here is that often like if you do decide to set goals for a 12E period usually that involves doing new actions and new actions can be uncomfortable which is why we tend not to do them and there's a quote here in our experience the number one thing that you'll have to sacrifice to be great to achieve what you're capable of and to execute your plans is your comfort we always have to sacrifice comfort you know for me to get jacked I have to sacrifice the comfort of playing on the [11:26] PS5 and instead go to the gym and lift some weights it's is going to be uncomfortable for me to grow my income or grow my business or like be more intentional about my relationships I might have to have uncomfortable conversations I might have to initially experience an uncomfortable amount of work over time I would get better at dealing with that discomfort and it would then go into my comfort zone but I have to face that discomfort in the first place and this is a big thing that holds a lot of us back because we do not [11:51] want to face that discomfort we're so addicted to comfort the whole book about this called The Comfort crisis but we're so addicted to our comfort that we allow the love of comfort to hold us back from living our best life which leads us to another journaling prompt I love collecting journaling prompts it's like one of my favorite things because I think these questions can be incredibly powerful if we just ask them to ourselves even every now and then the question that came to my mind was this where am I allowing my fear of [12:14] discomfort to hold me back from building a life that I love again I'd recommend pausing the video and having a think about these two prompts and I can guarantee if you just think about this for a minute you will get more value from this video than you've gotten from most YouTube videos that you probably tend to watch because you know you can watch videos all day right like and just feed your brain with the information but as we know from studies around active recall and stuff like the actual change [12:34] will happen in your life when it's driven from within and so that's why I think these questions are incredibly powerful yeah I could tell you that uh you're probably allowing your love of comfort to sacrifice your income potential or your health whatever but like it wouldn't be nearly as powerful as you asking that question for yourself and really recognizing oh crap in this specific area of my life I'm allowing my love of comfort to hold me back that's useful to know that is like the initial spark that leads to the change that may [12:58] happen further down the line so anyway I talked for a bit longer than that but like please pause the video and have a think about these two little prompts so how do we actually get over this love of comfort and fear of discomfort that we have and actually take actions that are going to help us get more done in 12 weeks than others do in 12 months oh Chapter 3 of the book talks about how the one key skill that you need to have to make that happen is a compelling vision for the future now I want to play a clip from the Diary of a [13:24] CEO podcast where my friend Dr K who is a psychiatrist was being interviewed this is what you have to say if you look at the statistics on suicide it's very interesting so the number one thing that correlates with male suicide is not depression and this is super scary there's one study I saw recently that suggests that 50% of men who kill themselves have no history or evidence of mental illness and this I I believe this statistic in in my clinical practice because I know what depression looks like I know what bipolar disorder [13:52] looks like and half the men that I've worked with at least are not actually mentally ill see mental illness means a mythology of the mind which means that the mind is malfunctioning most of the suicidal men that I work with they're not ma their mind isn't malfunctioning they genuinely have a life that is no longer worth living they're looking at things and objectively realizing that there's no way out of this situation so they turn to Suicide now obviously this video is not going into the whole mental [14:17] health stuff what I took away when I heard that I was like oh that's interesting and it sort of Vibes with what these what the authors of the 12 week talk about in the book which is that if you don't have a vision of the future which is significant L better than your current state there is no reason for you to act in a way that pulls you towards that future if you can create this compelling vision and you just have lots of reasons to act that pulls you in a direction that helps you overcome this fear of discomfort or the [14:42] love of comfort you're unlikely to bother doing that unless you genuinely thought there was something worthwhile on the other end you know part of the whole concept of feel good productivity is that it's not really about the destination it's about the journey but even so there is no Journey without without a compelling destination I most people don't enjoy just like leaving the house and sort of wandering aimlessly it's like if you just do that all the time the wandering aimlessly doesn't doesn't feel that fun whereas if you [15:07] have a destination in mind you're like okay I'm going in that direction now wandering in that direction yes you can enjoy the journey along the way but you kind of need to have a specific destination in mind but you kind of need to have at least a sense of direction at least a sense of what is this compelling vision of the future that's going to pull me in that direction and get me to actually do things and get off my bum and get off the PlayStation and actually go to the gym for example or actually [15:28] work on my business or actually be a bit more intentional about my relationships whatever the thing might be so these are some of the things they encourage us to think about think about what you truly want to achieve what Legacy do you want to create what do you want for yourself and for your family what do you want spiritually what level of security do you seek what level of income and fulfillment do you want from your career what interests do you wish you could pursue what do you really want to do [15:49] with the time you've been allotted if you're going to perform at a high level take new ground and be great then you better have a vision that is compelling in order to achieve a level of performance that is greater than your current performance you will need a vision of the future that is bigger than the present you must find a vision with which you are emotionally connected without a compelling Vision you'll discover that there is no reason to go through the pain of change this is good here we go vision is the starting point [16:14] of all high performance you create things twice first mentally then physically the biggest barrier to high performance is not the physical manifestation but in fact the mental creation you will never outpace your mental models vision is the first place where you engage your thinking about what is possible for you I like yeah again having been in this productivity space for a very long time like almost every everyone around everyone who written books about this stuff even mine chapter 9 alignment talks about this idea of creating a [16:44] compelling vision for yourself because it's just so incredibly powerful in helping you actually take action towards what the thing is and I find that when I'm giving talks and when I'm speaking to people and it often turns into like pseudo life coaching e type productivity coaching sessions people often struggle with with with stuff and and my first question is usually okay what's the goal and why is that the goal like what are we actually working towards here and usually I kind of talk people through [17:08] various prompts that help them figure out some sort of personal Vision cuz you start with a A Life vision and then you figure out what does your work Vision look like to facilitate the Life vision that you want and once you have that sense of like okay this is the direction I'm currently headed in that doesn't mean you can never change your mind on that thing it's just a rough first draft but even having that rough first draft usually gives people enormous Clarity and this sense of like like oh cool now [17:30] I get it now I'm willing to put in the effort to put in that kind of facing of discomfort in order to get to this thing this this destination that actually feels really compelling and crucially this is where the emotions come in your vision that you create for your life like the goals that you're working towards kind of need to be emotionally resonant within you there can't be shoulds like a should is like I really should work on my health but a should is not at all emotionally resonant a sh is like based on fear and based on like [17:57] avoidance of negativity and based on on like Duty and these things tend not to motivate us as much as a vision that we genuinely you know I would love to do this thing I'd love to have a business that allows me to quit my job I would love to be in amazing shape so that I can play with my kids when I'm 85 I would love to be better at the guitar so I can play Anything by ear ah that feels so emotionally resonant and therefore when I figure out what do I then need to do every day every week every 12 weeks [18:22] as in the book the 12we year to make progress towards that Vision now I'm way more likely to actually overcome the discomfort of practic in guitar and choosing to practice guitar or choosing to go to the gym or choosing to work on my business instead of scrolling Tik Tok or playing on the PlayStation now if you're interested in creating a personal vision and in 12we planning and all this sort of stuff I actually host regular free Zoom workshops uh about this there'll be linked down below depending [18:44] on when you're watching this the next one is on April 20th 2024 but I'm hosting these basically every 3 months they're completely free for anyone to attend you can check out the link this is all part of the free version of productivity lab which is a new community that I'm building of ambitious entrepreneurs creators and professionals just like you uh to help us all double up productivity while enjoying the journey and making friends along the way but yeah quarterly planning sessions Vision planning sessions a bunch of [19:05] these are going to be completely free check out the link below if you want to attend and if you don't want to do this thing live and you'd rather figure out your own vision and your goals on your own which is also totally fine you should check out this playlist over here this is three videos which is part of my series about why you might feel lost in life and basically if you just follow the advice in this series of videos that will help you create a compelling vision translate it into goals and then when [19:25] you read the 12we ear and start implementing it into 12we plans all of that stuff will make a lot more sense so thank you so much for watching and see you in the next video bye-bye