“Chains of Habit Are Too Light to Be Felt Until They Are Too Heavy to Be Broken” – Warren Buffett

Show Notes

Clay Clark and Josh with Living Water Irrigation breaks down why chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE – “On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.” – Exodus 16:5

Gather Objective Google Reviews

Gather Objective Video Reviews

Conduct the Group Interview

Record the Calls

Install Accountability Systems (Call Recording and Recorded Video

NOTABLE QUOTABLE – “Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.” – George Washington Carver

 

Chains Of Habit Knowledge Bomb Thrivetime Show Slides

Business Coach | Ask Clay & Z Anything

Audio Transcription

Grabbed a duct tape and mentally prepare yourself for yet another mind expanding knowledge bomb from America’s number one business coach. Clay Clark.

Yes, yes, yes and yes. Quattro yes. Welcome back to the thrive time show on your radio and podcast download on today’s show. Jason, I’d like for you to make sure you hop on a mic here. We’ve got Josh with living waters, living water, irrigation on the microphone. Not living waters, plural, but living water irrigation on the show. And I wanted to talk to you guys today about one deep idea as Jason adjust the microphone. What I’m doing is I didn’t tell Jason he was gonna be on the show until just now I’m back because I wanted the show to be organic like we’re at a whole foods. So here we go. Warren buffet once said, the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they’re too heavy to be broken. Warren Buffet says the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

So the question I’d have for you, if you’re out there today is what 5% on what 5% of your new schedule could you t what would you be willing to swap out to become a millionaire? What’s the 5% of your schedule that you’d be willing to swap out? You know, like an hour and a half a day? Okay, we go to 24 hours a day and let’s say if it was 10% that’d be 2.4 hours. I’m talking about like an hour and a half an hour a day. What is, what is the hour of, is there an hour in your day that you’d be willing to swap out if it would make you rich? So what I’m gonna do is I’m going to tee up some stupid repetitive tasks that you have to do that take you between about an hour and a half and two and a half hours a day. And if you do them, you’ll become rich.

Assuming you have a real product and real service. And I’d like for Josh to explain to me why you find the time to get the thing done and maybe why you think other people can’t. So here, well, I’m sorry to cut you off there. I’m sorry to cut you off. Let me, let me after. I’ve really cut you off it before you cut me off. Let me, let me tee this up. Every week, every single week you see it up here in the office. Oh, we do a group interview. I interview the candidates personally Wednesday night at 6:00 PM every week. I personally still do it and I’ve only delegated it twice in my life for long periods of time to people that could handle it. But why do you think that most people out there will not and don’t want to do the group interview that, that I do every week. Why do you think Josh, the people don’t want to do that? I think the biggest contributing factor to people’s lack of success is their lack of

The ability to stop making excuses. So I had a really funny conversation just yesterday with a young man who is says he has a of desire to be successful. I heard this from Kevin Hart the other day. Everybody says they want to be successful, but nobody wants to do the work. So I had a young man

I was talking to yesterday and he was saying, Hey, I want to do this and I want to do that and I see what you guys do and all that. And I was like, cool, what time do you get up today? He was like, well, you know, typically about six 30, whenever. I was like, all right, cool. So let’s do this. Let’s get up at four 30 and then you have two hours where you can spend that amount of time working on the things to improve yourself and improve your business. He’s like four 30, four 30 what? And so he had every excuse in the world of why that couldn’t happen as opposed to just, okay, we’ll make the shift, but we see it with a bunch of people up here to click. So I see clients though. I’ll give you one client that piling on that to that.

He said pour 30 it’s so early. You get up at four 30 every day. You do collect. Really? So he said, I’ve got a shadow you, I don’t bottom believe it. She comes up here, I pull my car up at 3:00 AM and he’s looking like death. And he’s like, Dude, how do you do that? I said, well I went to bed at, you know, nine you know, I go to bed at nine, you know, wake up at two. I mean it’s, it’s been five hours. Hey here’s a move. You’re ready for a move. Yeah, sure. So if somebody text me past eight 30 I text them back at 4:00 AM yes. Oh I love that move. Oh Dude. All time. And then I’ll get a phone call about nine 30. Why did you text me at four oh one this morning? Cause I was awake. Cause that’s what time I got up.

This is it. This is an interesting thought though, is that for me to get up at three somebody always says, well, I have to see, I don’t really believe it. So this guy actually came to Tulsa and he saw it and he goes, you do it. That’s so cool. I thought you were just speaking in hyperbole on the show. And I said, okay, these are good, but what about your like health on the health? And I said, well, I don’t know if it’s more healthy to stay up at night, you know, drinking beer and eating pizza or if it’s, or you know, to get up early, I don’t know. But I think you need to sleep about six to eight hours a day out. Let’s say it’s seven you talked to your doctor, this guy, true story. He went as far as to talk to his doctor and the doctor’s like, yeah, you need seven or eight hours of sleep.

So if you go to bed at 10 just wake up at four or five but not six or seven or eight. But again, if you, you can’t create like the creator unless you’re willing to work that sixth day. So if you put in that extra hour a day, five days a week, that’s gonna create that extra day for you to get ahead. Now again, one thing you’d want it to him and talking about, I’m talking about just just be an hour, about an hour, about an hour a week right now is you want to get that group interview done that takes you about 30 minutes and you say, well, clay, I only got definitely leads me like an hour or a half hour to get everything else done. Well, here’s what you gotta do. You gotta get real objective Google reviews from your real clients and real objective video reviews from your real clients. Now that’ll take you about another half hour.

Now, Josh, how do you find time to do that at living water irrigation? But before you answer that question, how much are your sales up this year from 24 months ago? So we’re up a little over it’s 300 to give you an exact number. 311% so do I do I, they’ll give you a a to-do list of every after each business coaching meeting of like hours and hours and hours of homework and he isn’t normally just like four or five hours a week just to take me a, it takes me about 30 minutes to an hour every morning I get to the office before everybody else gets there so I can have uninterrupted time. So I spend about 30 minutes to an hour on our agenda. That sounded weird. Hours. Hour. So you you say at a 40 hour work week? Yes sir. I’m just asking you to trade off about, it sounds like with you about seven or 8% of your work week to get all this stuff done.

Can we talk about that 40 hour work week real quick? Like I’ll play the advocate of the devil of the enemy. Do it. So Kim, have you ever met a successful person that works nine to five sir? No. And I actually think it’s not a biblical idea because in the book of Genesis and in the book of Exodus, it explains that you should work the sixth day a, it talks about that God gave Adam the by the garden so that he should work it. But it talks about the sixth day and on. People don’t want to talk about the sixth day, but if you take the religious aspects out of it, just from a practical level, if you’re a professional athlete and you’re training five days a week and you’re competing against guys who are training seven days a week, you will lose. But if you want to make it religious, exodus 16 five reads on the sixth day, they are to prepare what they bring in and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.

So what we’re going to send, John, you’re telling me I can’t sleep in on Saturday? No, I mean not only if you wanna be successful, you’re telling me I can’t go to the lake every weekend. Right. Brian, you’re telling me that I can’t grill out and have 50 people over whenever I came in to afford the food. There it is. You’ve got to delay gratification. So Jason, we’re talking about this here. You work with great clients that can figure this out. I do. Why do you feel, again going back to Warren Buffet’s quote, where he says, chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. Why do you put some of your clients have been able to have been able to break those chains of the bad habits and some haven’t will. I know for a fact the ones that have been able to break the chains with the ones that felt the immediate pain of the change themselves, like the second that they realize that that habit was the one thing holding them back.

Like take for instance, we have a s do you want me to do the businesses name? Yeah, sure. So Allen with motility, he is growing so much over the past week because he’s, he’s getting reviews, he’s getting video testimonials. And on top of that we’re writing the content, whereas before, is this like a theorial idea and he’s like, I don’t really know how I feel about it. And that became a habit of him just like kind of questioning it. Well, now that he sees his traction going up from it, he’s all in. And I want to say this for everybody listening out there, if you are a member of our business coaching program and you don’t know why you need to do something, I blame myself for that cause I flipped. There’s no poor students. Right. But once, you know, I think Allen’s case, he was kinda trying to understand it.

Yeah. So maybe I could have communicated it more succinctly, but I believe that every, once you know what to do, it is now incumbent upon you to, to do it. Right. but again, we’re talking about the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. So I would just say, if you’re listening out there today and you own a business that’s already doing $500,000 a year and you say, clay, I don’t have a lot of time. I’m going to give you three tasks that I want you to do. The big three you hear in professional basketball, it’s always the big three. Can we get the big three together? Can we team up Lebron with Chris Bosh and Dwayne Wade? Can we do, can we get Rodman with, with Pippin, with Jordan? Can we win a championship? It’s, it’s like it’s guaranteed lot when three of your starting five are all stars.

It’s like the Phil Jackson Trinity. Oh, there it is. This is, this is the big three one. I want everybody out there do the group interview every week. You got to do it. Interview all the candidates at one time at the same time every week. No matter who applies. Say, Hey, we’d love to interview you this Wednesday at 6:00 PM and interview them. Then it never stopped because if you have bad people, nothing gets done. Just took what? Maya Angelou, the bestselling author. Nothing works unless you do or nothing works. Unless they do. Someone has to do the job. So that’s gonna take about a half hour a week to get that system going. Now you got to get those Google reviews and Josh, how many people call you and say, Josh, man, I was reading for those Google reviews and I’m going to move forward with you guys. I’m convinced. So we get a, we close.

I would say the majority of our closes, I don’t have a metric number on that, but the majority of our closes are because of our reputation online, whether it be word of mouth or online. Yeah, we get four to seven leads a day, so I’ll track that. We do get, we get four to seven leads a day from Google. And Are you trying to tell me that you actually have to schedule a time out in your schedule each and every day to ask each and every single day? Why can’t you just mass email out your clients and say, Hey, give me a review. They’re guys because they’re not going to. You’ve got to be in front of. Oh, doing the service at that given time, exceeding their expectations and at that very moment, folks, that very moment ask them, hey, thank you so much for letting us come out and work for you.

Could you please leave me a Google review? There it is. Every minute and the third video reviews. Jason, why is it so powerful when a client collects those video reviews? Well, everybody nowadays, if they’ve, you know, read the case study, they want to raise their net promoter score, they want the net promoters. Well guess what? The video testimonial is a living, breathing apostle for your brand at somebody saying, hey, this person was so great. Here’s my face on camera telling you exactly why you should go with them. It’s a, everybody wants that word of mouth referral and it’s a word of mouth referral that exists on your website or Google forever. Now, once you’ve conducted the group interview, the weekly Group interview, once you’ve gathered objective Google reviews, once you’ve gathered objective video reviews and you’ve again once getting them again, once you’ve co if you don’t do one of these steps, it doesn’t work.

Cause if you, if you conduct the group interview every week but you don’t get Google reviews, it doesn’t work. If you gather objective reviews but you don’t get a video reviews, it all has to work together and you’re saying, well clam willing, I’m willing to get 7% of my week five. Yeah, I’m a million ball. Give me seven. Well then you’d want install call recording. The company I recommend is called Clara t voice and you’d want to listen to those calls in your staff meetings because it turns out most people answer the phone poorly. If the calls are not recorded true and you go, well clay, I’m going to go 9% I’m like, well do you have employees that work onsite or offsite? You say offsite. Okay, put gps on their cars. See how many strip clubs they go to per day or how many job sites.

Just to check in. Apologized for that. All right, keep Italian. Marker it seriously though. I see a lot of construction companies once they put the GPS devices on the bottom of the cars. Oh yeah. I see a lot of pharmaceutical sales companies. Once they put the GPS devices in the bottom of the cars, they start realizing why are our guys aren’t going to the job site, right? So if you want to get that extra level of success, you record those calls and the company you want to use as clarity voice. That’s clarity. Boyce.Com record those calls. Now you say, what’s the next thing you do that gps or you install video cameras and Josh, if you have a crew that’s working onsite and you can install video cameras, why is that so important? You manage a crew of people. Why is it so important to know what living water, irrigation, what’s your employees are actually doing versus what they say they’re doing?

It’s accountability. Trust, but verify. If you can’t minute by minute throughout your day, if you can’t know precisely because it’s the whole story of, Hey, yeah, I’m going to go here and I’m going to get this done. The job takes an hour and four hours later you’re like, wait a second, why are y’all not done? And then you find out that the GPS and do the cameras that they never went to the job. You get a call from the homeowner and the homeowner says, Hey, I thought y’all were going to be here at noon and it’s three o’clock in the afternoon and you have no way to track or know where they’re at. You call and they’re like, yeah, we’re here working. You’re like, no, you’re not. The homeowner just called me.

Can I, can I tell you guys a story there in Josh? That’s a great, a great story. I, I’m really proud of it. Maybe as some of our listeners wouldn’t want to hear Josh, please do, please. Oh, maybe. Oh Man. Let me tell you a scenario. A lot of times, like has your wife ever traveled out of town? Yes, sir.

As she comes back into town. Yes sir. So you might think to yourself, you know, so you’re back in town. You’re right. Has your wife ever been in town when the kids ran it down? Ah, yes. You’re thinking, you know, maybe if we engage in certain activities, we can make it make a whole new town. We can try it. But the point is, if you’re going to schedule time for the horizontal Mambo, you need to make sure it’s your, it’s your duty to please the booty thrive nation. It is. You’ve got to schedule well, time

For the things that matter. I’m being serious. I see guys tell me, they’re like, the reason why my love life is falling apart with my wife. It’s because my business has having successful there. My business is becoming successful, my business is having success, therefore I’m not having sex with my wife. And you’re like, okay. Then you see other guys like, Oh man, my love life was incredible. And you’re going deep. Is that your cart? Did you push that shopping cart here? I live in it for a temporary housing. Oh, but I’m on the verge. And so if you’re out there today, just quit buying into this belief. You can’t do both because you have this habit of making excuses and everybody around you is going to bonafide and justify what you’re doing because most people don’t have success. In fact, I wanted to read a quote from a George Washington carver who, this is the guy who was born a slave, who invented the technology that allowed the newly frayed, newly freed slaves to be able to provide the soil with the ongoing nutrition it needed.

So back in the day, all African Americans who are newly freed only knew how to grow cotton. So it was depleting the soil of the much needed nutrients. And so George Washington carver says, there’s gotta be a way to make this, this crop farming sustainable. So he obsessed on the peanut and the sweet potato. He’s just obsessing about the peanut and the sweet potato. And he comes up with a way to oxidize the soil. You say, clay, why do you know that? Because I’m obsessed with people that are awesome. So read that book. George Washington carver read any book you can about that guy. It’s awesome. But he says, and I’m quoting him, so get mad at Jordan, get mad at GW. You got born a slave. Get mad at him, justify to him just in your prayer life tonight, he’s up there in heaven. Just say, dear Lord, could you relay this message to GW?

I strongly disagree with you. I have a valid, excuse me, this guy was born a slave. 99 piece has 99% of the failures, 99 that’s a high number. Georgia says 99% of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses. So if you’re out there today, I ask you what is the excuse that you’ve been making and I’ll I just going to fire off the most common ones and then I’ll let you guys just go home and wrestle up with that. I hear I’m just not a morning person. I would love to do it. Another one is, well here’s the deal. I was up late last night. I just, I won’t get into Netflix and I just couldn’t stop watching. Third. This is my favorite one. This is the weakest one ever. I have anxiety. Turn off your smart phone. Everyone would have anxiety if you’re interrupted 95 times you Jack Ass.

Turn off your smart phone. Unbelievable. I have anxiety when my phone rings. Turn it off it. Guess what? I have anxiety. Do you know how I deal with it? Work is a great, everybody has anxiety. If you sit there and contemplate the bad things that are happening to you, unbelievable white. My Dad had Lou Gehrig’s disease. Let me tell you what, I had anxiety. Let me tell you how you die quickly. Do Nothing. Atrophy, just so this idea, I anxiety. The other one is I’m a, I’m afraid of making cold calls. I’m afraid. Get out of here. Just pick up the phone. I don’t know what I would say. Get a beer. Pick up a phone. Make the call. People do it at weddings. It’s true. Grab a Bayer. If you need to grab a beer. Are you advocating grabbing a beer to make calls? If that’s what’s standing in front of you, making the call or giving a toast.

At a wedding. Absolutely. Don’t just bail out on the best man’s toast because you’re weak. Come on man. So you say, what are other other excuses? I ran out of time. Print off your calendar, printed off baby. What’s the next excuse? Can’t find good people. Do the group interviewed every week. Clay. I’m just not good at sales. Come to one of our business conferences, learn how to do it. I don’t have the money. Get three jobs. I worked at target, Applebees, and direct TV. I just, I come from a bad family. I don’t go back to Minnesota. Why? Because I have nothing there. I do not care about what they did in Minnesota. I don’t care what they’re doing now, I’m not going back, but I’m from the ghetto homie. Get out of the ghetto, but I’m from the sticks. You know what I’m saying? No, I don’t know what you’re saying.

Get out of there and buy a freaking toothbrush. You’ve got to sometimes leave Atwoods and get serious about your life. I love Atwood’s. It’s where I go. But you got, if you live too much or two of you, if your neighbor is a redneck and he’s got a bus parked on, you know, on the front lawn and that’s your normal, get out of there. Move. Well, clay, I, I come from a family of addiction where my dad was drinking and I was drinking then God, Drake. Hey, hey, but here’s the deal. I just, the reason why I hadn’t affairs, my dad had an affair and his cousin had an affair and I’m just an idiot. Quit making excuses. Well, in my religion, it’s not appropriate to make cold calls. They’d switch religions. Well, I just, clay, I just, I just, I don’t do well and people yell at me, okay, take your head and pull it out of your rectum and break the habits that are bad habits.

You hear that sound? That was your head coming out of your rectum. You have the power to change it is. That’s nice. You can’t, you can do it, but this is your, I would be a mean person to tell it to validate your excuses. All right, so marinade on this George Washington carver quote and then we’re going to call Matt with Oxi fresh. 99% of the failures come from people, not you who have the habit of making excuses. Again, 99% of the failures, not you come from the people who have the habit of making excuses and now that you know we’re not talking about you, go tell the lazy person in your life that they don’t need to live on your couch anymore. Tell your 34 year old son to go get a job till your 23 year old son to quit going to college. Actually declare a major and finish.

Just quit saying you have carpal tunnel. Go work out. Quit saying you have, just stop it. Just whatever excuse it is [inaudible]. There’s an excuse for everything and there’s 99% of the population there to cheer for you and congratulate you and say, look, you have a disorder. I do too because people that aren’t successful want com company, misery wants company. You’ll find them. Just go to local networking events and find a whole bunch of unsuccessful people hanging out together, justifying their dysfunction. But I’m telling you this right now, you have the capacity to change. You have the tenacity to change. And now if any further ado, we want to, we want to end the show with a light and happy. Boom. Here we go. Three, two, one, boom.

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