May I Have Your Attention? How to Gain Traction In a World Filled w/ Perpetual Distraction + Why The Average American Spends 11.3 Hrs Per Day Consuming Media (Nielsen) + Why 2 Out of 3 People Don’t Plan Their Day

Audio Transcription

Transcribed with Cockatoo

On today’s show, we interview the bestselling author, the behavior designer, and the beautiful man who’s been asked to speak on the campus of the Stanford School of Business and Design. Today’s guest has successfully sold two technology companies since 2003. Today’s guest is kind of a big deal. His name is Near Eye All, and on today’s show, he’s going to teach us how to become indistractable. Is that even actually a word? Yeah, that’s the word.

He made up the word indistractable. On today’s show, he’s going to teach us how to gain control of our attention so that we can choose and design the life that we want to live.

So this is a great place to talk.

is distraction.

The best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand what distraction is not. So the opposite of distraction, if you ask most people, think about it for a minute. What’s the opposite of distraction? Most people will say it’s focus, right? The opposite of distraction is focus. Not so fast.

The opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. And if you look at the origin of both words, they both come from the same Latin root, trahare, which means to pull. And you’ll notice they both end in the same six letters, A -C -T -I -Y, that spells action. So traction pulls you towards what you want, things that you do with intent.

On today’s show, he explains why email is killing your ability to get things done.

Now I’m going to stay focused.

Here we go.

I’m totally going to concentrate. I’m going to do what I said I’m going to do. Stop procrastinating. Here I go. I’m going to get to work.

But first, let me check email.

Oh.

Right?

Let me just do that one quick thing on my to -do list because it feels good to just, you know, to get the momentum going, right?

Right.

Here’s the thing. By definition, any time you are not doing what you said you would do, that is a distraction.

Near also shares on today’s show why super successful people have a calendar and they actually block out time to implement their plans. while the rest of the world simply does not. In the five years it took me to write this book, I talked with hundreds of people, and there was one very surprising practice that everyone I talked to who didn’t struggle with distraction did, and everyone who struggled with distraction did not do. And that practice was to keep a well -defined schedule.

And it turns out that two -thirds of Americans don’t keep any sort of schedule whatsoever. And even the one -third who do, 99 % of them don’t keep it properly. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show.

But this show does.

Two men, eight kids, co -created by two different women, 13 multi -million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Thriving Time Show.

nation on today’s show our guests come from near sir thanks so much for having me hey real quick let’s start with your website domain it’s the most clever domain of all time can you tell the listeners what your website domain is so they can check you out while they’re listening usual first name and I and when I was growing up or one of the the things that kids made fun of me for was my unusual name they say near like New York far and I said you know what that’s kind of catchy I bet people remember that if I turn that into my domain so that’s my domain it’s near and far

but near spelled like my first name, N -I -R.

Do you have any brothers and sisters?

I do.

I have two older brothers.

Are their names like Bobby and Carl or something like that just to balance it out? Exactly. Okay, so now you, Ari, you taught classes at Stanford, the Stanford Business School. I first heard about you when you wrote the book, Hooked, which is really, some people in Silicon Valley have referred to it as kind of like the Bible of creating some of the technology we see today.

You’ve also sold to technology companies. You’ve been a busy guy, but for the listeners out there that maybe aren’t super familiar with your background, could you share with us kind of where you started and how you became a best -selling author? Sure, so I’m a designer, so I build habit -forming products for good. So I’ve worked with companies like Kahoot, the world’s largest educational software to get kids hooked onto in -classroom learning. I’ve worked with the New York Times to get people hooked to reading the news. So, I that sometimes we want to overuse them and sometimes they become quite distracting.

And so that’s what Indistractable is all about. I tell people the Achilles heel of how to put distracting things in their place, not just our technology. Of course, people think about how distracting Facebook and Twitter and email and the iPhone. and the news all are these days, but all sorts of distractions, right? Anytime we don’t do what we say we’re going to do, why don’t we do those things?

And so what I want to do is to help people get out from under those distractions so that they can control their attention. and choose their life. Now I know some of our listeners out there are believers in the Judeo -Christian faith and some are not, but if it’s okay I’d like to start off at the beginning with Adam and Eve. We’re going old school here. Okay, so here we go, Adam and Eve. With Adam and Eve, my understanding is that Adam knew clearly, do not eat from this tree.

He knew it, do not eat from this tree. But yet, he got distracted.

And as the Bible tells, Satan comes down and tricks Eve, and the next thing you know, they’re distracted, they forgot their purpose. Why do people get distracted? So this is a great place to talk. is distraction. The best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand what distraction is not. So the opposite of distraction, if you ask most people, think about it for a minute, what’s the opposite of distraction?

Most people will say it’s focus, right? The opposite of distraction is focus. Not so fast. The opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. And if you look at the origin of both words, they both come from the same Latin root, trahare, which means to pull.

And you’ll notice they both end in the same six letters, A -C -T -I -Y, that spells action. So traction pulls you towards what you want, things that you do with intent. Now the opposite of traction is dis -any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do, anything that you are not doing with intent. So this is really important for two reasons. Number one, anything can be a distraction, okay? So see if this rings a bell.

So before I started this line of research, I used to sit down at my desk and I would say, okay, now I’m going to stay focused. Totally going to concentrate. I’m going to do what I said I’m going to do. I’m going to stop procrastinating. Here I go.

I’m going to get to work.

But first let me check email.

Oh, right.

Let me just do that one quick thing on my to do list because it feels good to just, you know, to get some momentum going. Right, right. Here’s the thing. By definition, anytime you are not doing what you said you would do, that is a distraction.

And I argue that these simple distractions that we think are just like, you know, let me just do that quick email.

Let me just do that quick thing real quick. Boom, boom. That turns out to be a much more pernicious form of distraction. It’s much worse than let’s say you play candy crush or check Facebook or watch a YouTube video. You know you’re slacking off at work if you’re using those things, right? But when you check email, instead of working on that big project, you are letting distraction trick you.

Kind of like Satan, you said earlier, trick you into prioritizing the urgent at the expense of the important. So anything can become a distraction. And conversely, anything can become traction. So it’s not about exactly what you do. So a lot of, you know, a lot of tech critics that are, you know, all chicken little about, oh, technology is melting your brain, it’s addicting everyone, it’s evil, this and that. That’s rubbish.

The scientific evidence doesn’t show that it does any of this bad stuff. If you use it according to your schedule, not the tech companies. So there’s nothing wrong with playing a video game or enjoying a football game on TV or going on Facebook or YouTube. These tools are wonderful as long as you use them with intent, as long as you plan when to use them. So, okay, now we have two parts of this model. You’ve got traction and distraction.

Now the question, to answer what you asked earlier about why do we get distracted in the first place, we have to understand what prompts us to traction or distraction. Two things. We have external triggers, which are the pings, the dings, the rings, all of these things in our outside environment that leads us towards distraction. We’ll get back in a minute to what you can do about those external triggers. That’s where most people tend to blame. They tend to blame their eye slack or some kind of ping or ding.

That certainly can lead us to distraction. But to my surprise, it is not the leading cause of distraction. The leading cause of distraction is not what is going on outside of us, but rather what is happening from within. That 2 ,500 years ago, believe it or not, Plato talked about this very same problem. That Plato, the philosopher, 2 ,500 years before the iPhone, talked about, boy, isn’t the world such a distracting place these days? So this is not a new problem.

And he asked this very important question of, why is it that despite knowing what to do, we don’t do it? Why do we do things against our better interest? Things that you know you should do, but you don’t do. And think about it. So Plato, he didn’t have Google 2 ,500 years ago. We have no excuse.

It used to be that you could say, I don’t know how to lose weight. I don’t know how to eat right. I don’t know how to be better at my job. I don’t know how to have a better relationship. But in this day and age, Google it. Just Google it, it’s all there.

And frankly, this is common sense. Who doesn’t basically know how to have a better relationship? Be fully present with people.

How to be better at your job.

Do the work, especially the stuff that other people don’t want to do. Lose weight. Come on, seriously. Does anybody really not know how to do these things?

The problem is not that we don’t know.

The problem is that we can’t stop getting distracted from doing the things we ourselves know we should do. Why? And wouldn’t it be a superpower if we could just do what we said we are going to do? So this is really the meat and potatoes here. This is where we have to start. Why don’t we do the things we say we should?

And so the answer to Plato’s 2 ,500 year old question of why don’t we do things against our better interests is that the real reason we get distracted is because of what we call the internal triggers. Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape from. That in fact, everything you do you do for one reason only. Now, most people say, okay, well, why do we do what we do? They think there’s two reasons.

Carrots and sticks, pain and pleasure, right? That everything we do is about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This is what Bentham and Freud called the pleasure principle. Turns out that’s not true. Everything you do, you do for only one reason, and that is the desire to escape discomfort. Everything you do, even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations, is about the desire to escape discomfort.

Think about this for a second physiologically, okay? So if you are cold, the brain says, oh, this is uncomfortable, put on a jacket. If you’re hungry, the brain says, oh, these hunger pangs don’t feel good, you should eat. So everything we do physiologically is about the desire to escape discomfort. The same holds true psychologically.

When you’re lonely, check Facebook.

When you’re uncertain, Google. When you’re bored, Google. Check stock prices, sports scores, the news, Pinterest, Reddit, all these products and services cater to these uncomfortable internal triggers. So that means, the big summary here to answer your question, it took me a while, but here we go. The answer to why we do everything we do is we do it to escape discomfort, which therefore means that time management is pain management.

That any other technique you use, well I don’t care what guru you listen to, what productivity hacks, what productivity books you’ve read, none of that stuff works unless first and foremost we address this internal trigger, this desire to escape discomfort, which is the root cause of all procrastination and distraction. It’s not a character flaw, it’s our inability to cope with discomfort in a helpful rather than harmful manner. There’s a Napoleon Hill quote that I’d like to read to you here that Napoleon Hill, the famous self -help author, Back in the day, he once wrote, he said, the capacity to surmount failure without being discouraged is the chief asset of every person who attains outstanding success in any calling. The capacity to surmount failure without being discouraged is the chief asset of every person who attains outstanding success in any calling. I agree with that, and I would like to know in your new book that you’ve written here, Indistractable, how to control your attention and choose your life, how can our listeners learn how to surmount short -term failure or setback?

Because I know when I sit down to write a book, the one thing I don’t want to do as soon as I sit down is write the book. And so I encourage myself, I say motivational phrases like, Clay, would you like a nice warm glass of shut the hell up? And I say, yes, I do want a glass of shut the hell up. And then I sit down and write, and my wife will come down and she will hear me talking to myself. She’s like, what did you just say? I offered myself a nice warm glass of shut the hell up.

Or I have little things, I have little games I play, like I’m not gonna leave this room until I’ve written this book, or until I’ve written this chapter.

So for the people out there that are struggling to kind of coach themselves through the insurmountable failure that happens sometimes.

Give us the tips that are in the book.

Help us. Yeah, yeah. So look, tips and tactics are cheap.

You know, tactics are what you do.

Strategy is why you do it. Got it. give you a link in the show notes for where you can get lots of more tips and tricks than you can ever use, right? That stuff is easy. You know, this app or this little trick or this life hack. What’s more important is the strategy.

I want to get the picture in your brain so that when the time comes and you say, darn it, why am I not doing what I said I’m going to do? You can look at these four basic strategies because there’s only four steps to becoming indestructible. Step number one is to the internal triggers. To understand where is this source of discomfort, and then use it, to harness it, to lead us towards traction rather than distraction. You see, there’s a myth out there, I think.

that is perpetuated, frankly, by the self -help industry, that we are told if you’re not happy all the time, how many books do we read with happy in the title, that if you’re not happy all the time, if you’re not contented, if you’re not feeling great all the time, something’s wrong with you.

You probably need some kind of pill, right? Something’s dysfunctional. That’s, for the vast majority of people, bunk. That if you think about it, the species is not designed to be perpetually happy. Quite the opposite. We’re designed to be perpetually perturbed.

If there was ever a group of homo sapiens who were happy and satisfied all the time, our ancestors probably killed and ate them, right? That would not be a good trait to have. You want dissatisfaction to drive you forward, to keep you hunting and creating, inventing, striving, improving your lot in life. So what I want people to remember is that feeling bad is not bad. Okay, it’s human, it’s normal. And in fact, it’s the fuel that can drive us forward.

We have to feel discomfort in order to get us to do anything and everything in life. It’s about how do we deal with that discomfort? Do we escape it with booze, news, Facebook, football? Do we try and get our minds out of current reality? Or do we use it as the rocket fuel to propel us towards traction? use that discomfort to move you ahead.

And I tell you exactly the tactics for how to do that.

But that’s step one.

Let me go through the four steps and then we can dive deeper into any one of these that pique your interest. Absolutely. So that’s number one. So it’s master the internal triggers. Step two is about making for traction, making time for traction.

In the five years it took me to write this book, I talked with hundreds of people, and there was one very surprising practice that everyone I talked to who didn’t struggle with distraction did, and everyone who did struggle with distraction did not do. And that practice was to keep a well -defined schedule. that it turns out that two -thirds of Americans don’t keep any sort of schedule whatsoever, and even the one -third who do, 99 % of them don’t keep it properly. I would speak to people who struggle with distraction, and they would tell me about how distracted they were, and how they couldn’t get anything done, it seemed like their kids want this, and their spouse wants that, and you see what happened in the news today, and this happened on Twitter, and my boss, I just can’t get anything done. And then I would say, well, what did you plan to do with your time? And they’d say, well, look, look at my to -do list.

Look at all these things I have to do that I didn’t get done. I said, no, you didn’t hear the question. I asked, what did you plan to do with your time? Show me your calendar. And they’d kind of shapishly take out their phone, and they’d show me their schedule. Let me tell you, it was always blank.

Maybe there was a dentist appointment or a meeting on there. But for the vast majority of the day, it was blank. So here’s the rule. Here’s what I want you to remember. Listen super carefully. You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from.

You can’t call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from.

If there’s lots of white space in your day, I have no sympathy.

Right. Everything’s going to distract you. The news, the stock market, the scores. I have a question. I have a question for you, Mr. Near, because I think somebody out there would get mad at me if I didn’t ask you this. You know, I’m like a slave to our to our to our listeners here.

This is what they want. I know they want me to ask this because I’ve met so many of them in our conferences. For me personally, right now, I’m calling you at 1, it’s 118 Central. We’re on the call. You’re on the call. I’m on the call.

I’m mentally present, you’re mentally present. It’s crazy, this idea that you’re focused, I’m focused, we’re all focused, which means my phone is off, right? So my phone is off right now, and I don’t feel bad about it. I do not feel bad about it. But somebody out there is going, okay. I’m buying into the system.

I’m going to make a calendar. I’m going to be intentional. But they’re partnered with somebody, you know, whether it’s a relationship partner or a business partner who doesn’t respect the one hour they have blocked off to interview Burj, you know, Najarian or to interview Nir Eyal or to interview Wolfgang Puck or whoever we may have on our show.

They don’t respect it. So what would you say? Luckily, my wife does respect it and my employees do respect it. But what tip would you have for somebody who’s made the calendar and the people around them just don’t seem to respect it? It’s a really great place to say that just because you’re indistractable, everyone around you will be indistractable. That’s just not the case.

So half of the book is about what you personally can do. The other half of the book is what do we do in these various environments and people we interact with. So there’s a big old section on how to raise indistractable kids, how to have indistractable relationships, and how to build an indistractable workplace. And so here’s the big takeaway for this section on how to build an indistractable workplace, is that the problem of distraction in the workplace is a symptom of cultural dysfunction. Distraction is a symptom of cultural dysfunction because if you can’t talk about this problem of distraction, I got news for you. You got all kinds of other problems.

Distraction’s not your key problem. The key problem is that you can’t talk about this problem because here’s the thing, nobody likes working with constant distraction. Nobody’s at their best and we all know this. So if you can’t talk about this problem and tackle it, the real problem is that you can’t talk about the problem. And when people sit down together without fear of getting fired. in this section of the book I talk about psychological safety, this well -established research that shows that one of the most cancerous part of the modern American workplace is that so many people work in places where they can’t raise their hand and say, something’s not working out here, we should talk about this.

If you look at every case of corporate malfeasance, whether it’s the Boeing 737 Max disaster all the way back to Enron and Tyco, every single company where we see these massive disasters, The culprit is always the same thing. It’s not the people per se, it’s that the people who knew about the problem were told to shut up, were told to sit down and not talk about this problem. That’s the problem. And when people can’t, so the solution, of course, is to give people the psychological safety to talk about this problem. And it turns out that when people do this, so I profile in the book Boston Consulting Group, who I know from personal experience, I used to work there, they used to have a very hard -charging, 24 -7 workplace culture where people were always expected to be on all the time. And they had, because of the result of this, they had very high employee turnover.

And I was one of those employees that left because it was just too much, you know, too This culture was not sustainable. They gave people the opportunity to talk about this problem in a regular meeting, in a regular session. So that changed everything. So it’s not about adopting somebody else’s rules. I see a lot of companies do this.

Let’s do meeting free Fridays or no email Wednesdays. That never works because that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that people can’t talk about the problem. Once they talk about the problem, they can start implementing these tactics for themselves. You are the inventor of the word indistractable, by the way, and I’d like to ask you about this a little bit here, going back to the beginning of the book. You are a kind of a writing partner or a writing buddy of Mark Manson, the guy who wrote The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Damn.

F, who we just interviewed on the show.

He’s a monster best -selling author. You guys are writing buddies if I understand that. Like, will you guys actually get together in one room and write at the same time? Am I getting that right? It’s actually step four. Let me get back to that.

It has a place in the model. Step number three, which you asked about earlier that I didn’t get to, is about hacking back, hacking back external triggers, because this has to do with the pings, the dings, the rings, all of these things in our outside environment, including, it turns out the number one source of distraction in the modern American workplace is not the phone, it’s not the computer. The number one source of distraction is other people. 80 % of survey respondents, right? You probably saw that one coming. 80 % of survey respondents say the number one source of distraction, particularly for people who work in open floor plan offices, is other people.

And so what do we do about this, right? And so I tell you how to hack back all of these external triggers. I tell you how to hack back your phone, your computer, Slack meetings, real life meetings, and of course, the open floor plan office. And so let me just give you a taste of what to do here. Inside every copy of the book, is what’s called a screen sign. It’s a piece of cardstock, this big red piece of paper that you fold into thirds, and you put it on your computer monitor.

This goes back to your question of, what do I do if I’m indistractable, but other people keep distracting me? Well, if you put this on your computer monitor, and people have started using this all over the world now. I get pictures from people every day using this, and it works like a charm. You put this big honkin’ red sign that says, I’m indistractable at the moment, please come back later. Now, you don’t use this all day, you don’t want to be antisocial, but for that time in your day when you need some time to think, you need some time to focus, you put this on your computer monitors, and if you work in an open floor plan office, people see it and get the message. All right, so that’s it.

very effective way to hack back. And then per your question about Mark, so that’s the fourth step. The fourth step is called prevent distraction with pacts. Now, pacts are pre -commitments. They’re promises you make to yourself or to someone else. So Mark and I, for a good chunk of writing both of our last books, we sat next to each other.

at my home office, he would come over, and we would work together for a set period of time. Now, anyone can do this. If you want to sit down with a work colleague and say, okay, for the next 45 minutes, an hour, an hour and a half, however long you need to do your focused work, we’re going to keep each other accountable. Now, we weren’t looking over each other’s screens, but having that other person right next to you also being focused can be a great way to make this promise, this accountability pact. Now, a lot of people say, yeah, but, you know, comfortable doing that with someone at work or maybe they work from home. Well, ironically enough, the solution to tech distraction can oftentimes be better tech.

And so there’s a wonderful technology that I use all the time. In fact, I love the company so much, I invest in it. And it’s called Focusmate. And Focusmate, what you do is you go onto this website, focusmate . com, you pick a time when you need to do focused work, And you say, okay, nine o ‘clock, I’m going to get started. And this is particularly awesome for people like me who have trouble getting started.

Right. So, you know, I used to say, okay, nine o ‘clock, nine, 15, nine, 20, and I still hadn’t started on that big task I needed to do. Well, with this, I know I have to get started because somebody on the other end is waiting for me. They’re going to give me a bad review if I don’t show up. But when I do show up, I see them on a little video monitor. They see me.

And we say, okay, what are you working on?

What are you working on? Go. And for the next 45 minutes, we work without distraction. So there’s a lot of tools out there for entering these packs. And there’s other types of packs as well. There’s actually two different types of packs that I didn’t discuss that can also help us to stay on track.

I have got just a boatload of follow up questions for you. So I’m going to I’m going to fire them off. We’ll go into like a high octane. bonus round here. And I’m just going to hit you up, because I know you have a lot of these answers, because you’ve done so much research over these past five years while you’ve been crafting this book.

So my first question is, where is your office located?

I’m not looking for the home address.

I’m just saying, where are you in New York?

Where are you guys located? Yeah. OK, so you and Mark are in a room.

How big is this room? Really? It’s 6 foot by 10 foot. And do you listen to music while you’re writing or you write in silence? I typically listen to, I don’t like listening to music with words.

So I have an app called Endel, E -N -D -E -L, that makes this kind of ambient music nonstop in the background. And the only reason I do that is to kind of tune out other potentially distracting noises. I feel like there are some external triggers that I have seen my clients cut out, some of them digital, some of them not. and I would like to go through a laundry list and get your take on these things. So one is turning off push notifications. In your book, Indistractable, How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, what is your take on push notifications that notify you every time a piece of mail gets delivered, every time that your alarm goes off, every time an email comes in, every time a Facebook update happens, every time an Instagram happens, every time a tweet comes in, every time it’s an overwhelming list.

What is your thought about the push notifications? So what sparks joy? My question is, is it serving you or are you serving it? That’s the critical question. It’s not about saying technology is evil or push notifications are evil. Push notifications can be great if they help you do an act of traction rather than distraction.

So when I’m with my daughter, I don’t want push notifications because I have planned to be with my daughter right now. I leave the phone on so that if My wife calls me in an emergency that I can see that it’s for a calling, but I don’t have Facebook notifications on, I don’t have email notifications on, I don’t have all the other stuff on because it’s not serving me in that period of time. A great feature that a lot of people don’t know about but actually comes built in to almost every device these days is called Do Not Disturb While Driving. And with Do Not Disturb While Driving, again, almost every device has it already. If you don’t know how to use it, just Google it, but here’s how it works.

Basically, you turn this on and if someone calls or texts you, they will receive a reply that says, I’m sorry, I can’t talk right now.

I’m driving. Mine says you can customize it. Mine says I’m indistractable. So I can’t talk right now. I’m indistractable. If this is urgent, text me with the word urgent.

Okay. So if it really is, Oh my God, you have to call me right away. The house is on fire. You can type in urgent and then the call or the text message will come through. But when I’m doing something where I don’t want distraction, I’m writing, I’m with my daughter, I’m doing something that requires my focus, I can turn on do not disturb and then everything else is blocked out. So it’s helping me towards doing what I want to do, traction, rather than allowing me to get distracted.

So it’s really about asking yourself, is it serving you or are you serving the external trigger?

Now, this is going to get a little mean, I’m sure, but we’ll see what happens. Most of the listeners who listen to this show own a business or want to at some point. That’s kind of our tribe, our audience there. And Inc. Magazine has research that shows that 85 % of applicants just make stuff up on their resume. You know, the U .

S. Chamber now shows 75 % of employees in the big box stores. They tend to borrow things from the workplace and tend to forget to bring them back, you know, that whole thing. So there are certain people who are not necessarily the best fit. in a workplace. What is your take on the distractible people in your life, the people who are causing the distractions in your life, the people that cause, because for me, I own multiple companies and I have hundreds of employees between all of them.

And so for me, I’ve always found it easier to address the person directly, let them know, you know, hey, let’s stop the whatever, stick within the org chart, stop doing the thing or whatever.

And if there are certain people I find that they’re just they’re not coachable. So I have to move to remove those people from my life sometimes. What would you say to listeners out there that have one guy in their office, and he he just likes to cook tuna fish in the microwave? And it’s the smell washed throughout the building. And he just loves to, you know, always be late. And he loves to fire off a barrage of all caps, you know, those big emails, you know, the ones that are like two page pontifications about the workplace.

Is there a time to, you know, sometimes let somebody go if they’re the cause of the distractions? Yeah.

You know, if there’s someone who’s not a good fit for the company culture, the company mission, that if it’s not somebody who’s offering value to the company, sure, yeah, I think that is somebody that you, you know, there’s nothing, there’s nothing that’s, you know, I think we have laws that allow us to fire at will sometimes because sometimes people aren’t a great fit.

Now, when it comes to distraction, I rarely see that the problem is the employees.

Typically it’s management, and I’ll tell you why.

I’ve been hired to do thousands of workshops and presentations about how to, with my first book about how to build habit forming products, and now with the second book about how to control your attention and choose your life.

So many times I will be giving presentations about distraction and why focus improves company output and improves employee well -being, happiness.

all this good stuff that it can increase in one’s life.

And yet, in these meetings, if anybody is distracted on their phone, guess who it is?

The managers? It’s not. What’s that?

The managers?

No, more than the managers. It’s the big boss. Oh, the big boss. It’s not the Gen Z or the Gen Y or the Gen X or whatever. It’s not the young folks. It’s always the big boss.

I agree with you. The big boss who wants to show everybody how important he or she is because I just got these emails that are super important. I can’t be bothered. And so that permeates an organization. Culture flows downhill.

Everybody sees that and they learn from it. It becomes a secondhand smoke effect where people, they also think to themselves, well, if the big boss is checking his email or her email, does that mean I should be checking my email? Maybe the email they’re sending is to me and I need to get on that right away. And so that tends to be what permeates this terrible workplace culture that is really damaging our work environments.

It tends to be from the big boss, unfortunately. And the good news is, It can also be improved by what the big boss does, right? So if you show others what it means to be indistractable, if you set the example, if you are indistractable yourself, that’s how we show our employees how they can do it themselves. have sat down and we’ve agreed on this diabolical idea that your family is as important as your finances and your fitness is as important as your friendship. So we’ve just figured out that faith, family, finances, fitness, friendship and fun, they all have a place in our life. So let’s talk about faith and family first.

Do you think we should block out time for family or should we just give them what’s left?

This is a pillar in Distracted Blood because when I say time blocks your day, I’m not saying

for productive work -related tasks, quite the opposite.

We need to look at our time in terms of our values, and the goal here should be to turn our values into time. That’s what we want to do here, turn our values into time. When we think about our stuff, and how we protect our stuff, whether it’s alarms on our homes, whether it’s security systems in our cars. We put our money in vaults, in bank accounts so that they’re safe. But when it comes to our time, Sure, come on over, take as much of it as you want. What happened in the news?

Oh sure, interrupt. What did the Kardashians do? Oh yeah, sure, take that time. What does my boss want? What does my kids want? Sure, take as much time as you want.

And that is the only asset that everyone on the face of the earth, no matter how much money you have, everyone, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and everyone else, all get the same amount of time, 24 hours per day. And yet many of us just give it away for free whenever anyone wants it. And so we have to start protecting our time, starting with our values.

And so there’s three life domains.

At the center, the most important, is you. If you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of others. So first, the first thing I want you to do, instead of making a big, lofty plan for a five -year goal, or a vision board, or the regrets of the dying, how about we just start with next week? For next week, how much time do you need for you? whether that’s time for prayer, or meditation, or exercise, or bedtime, right? We tell our kids, you gotta get to bed on time, but we’re hypocrites.

What about our bedtime?

We know that sleep is absolutely essential for proper health and mental well -being. So do you have time on your schedule to do something you know that you want to do for yourself, mainly getting proper sleep? Now, I’m not telling you that your values should be the same as mine, but whatever your values are, you need to make time for those values on your schedule. Now, even for fun things, by the way, if part of your values include, look, I want to go on Facebook. I want to enjoy YouTube a little bit.

No problem. There’s nothing wrong with any of that stuff. But make that time on your schedule in advance so you’re not using it when you’re feeling bad or lonely or bored or indecisive. You’re not using it as an escape. You’re using it intentionally. That becomes something that you planned to do with your time.

Anything else would be a distraction. So you can turn distractions into traction by simply planning for them. So that’s the you domain. The next domain is the family domain or the, I’m sorry, the relationships domain. The relationship domain includes things like family and friends, et cetera, your community. And I think this is a big reason why we are in this loneliness epidemic these days.

You know, psychologists tell us that loneliness is as detrimental to our health as smoking and obesity, and that we are in the middle of this loneliness crisis in this country. And the reason we are going through this loneliness crisis is not because of Facebook or Twitter or social media didn’t do this. In fact, Robert Putnam wrote about this in the 1990s. He wrote a book called Bowling Alone. And in the early 90s, he noticed that there was a collapse in the number of organizations around the country that held time on people’s calendars. What type of organizations?

The Bowling League. The key club, the church group, things that hold time on your calendar to be with other people. Listen, knowing other people and having them know you is a fundamental human need. We need that for our psychological and physiological well -being. But if you don’t plan that time with your friends, with your families, with your loved ones, with your community, it’s not going to happen. So that time needs to be held as well.

And then finally, in the last domain is called the work domain. And so this comes last. Most people put this one first. In fact, I argue it comes last. First, you need to take care of living out your values for yourself. then your relationships, and only then your work.

And so this is where we asked ourselves, how do we split our day between reactive work and reflective work? You see, reactive work is responding to all the pings and dings, the meetings, the phone calls, the emails. If you’re in a call center, that’s all you do, okay? But very few people listening to me right now work in any 100 % reactive job. You need time for reflection. Reflection is where we solve those difficult problems.

We do long -term planning. We think, for God’s sakes, with time for reflection. We have to have that time if we are going to drive our businesses and our lives forward.

But how many of us make time to think? You know, when I do these presentations in front of, I’ll oftentimes ask, how many of you have a job that requires you to think? Everybody’s hand goes up. And then I say, well, how many of you have time in your day to do what your job requires, to have time to think? Almost nobody. I’m telling you, it is a huge competitive advantage if you simply make that time to think without distraction.

That is where we do our best work, but it doesn’t happen unless we make time for it. Your book is filled with so much wisdom. Again, the book is indistractable, How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. But I had a couple of just final little nuanced questions I wanted to get into because Proverbs, from that controversial book known as the Bible, Proverbs 13 .20 reads, walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm. Tim Ferriss, who is not in the Bible, But he’s written some good books. He says, but you are the average of the five people you associate with most.

Do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.

And I could quote Oprah and everybody else who said it in a different way, but they’re point is you do become the average of the people you spend the most time with. Talk about blocking out time for specific friendships in your life, because now that you are a best -selling author, you’ve worked with some of the biggest companies in the world that are calling you every day. Your inbox is getting filled up with opportunity, and you’re getting all these opportunities. I’m sure when you were first starting out, you thought it’d be cool to have an opportunity. But now you’re getting so many opportunities, so many people reaching out.

What is kind of your personal filter to decide who to spend time with and what things to do? Yeah, this is such an important point. But I think the more important question is not, who do you spend time with? Because I think many of us have too many choices in terms of who to spend time with. It’s, do you make that time? I mean, how many times have you heard from a friend, we should grab coffee sometime, right?

Let’s go get a drink. Yeah. When does that happen? It doesn’t happen unless we make those regular occasions to have that time with each other. So one of the things I talk about in the book is this practice I call the kibbutz.

And the kibbutz, we just use that term, kibbutz in Hebrew means gathering.

And it doesn’t have any necessarily religious connotations. Basically, this is a gathering of couples because we have these couple friends that we really enjoy spending time with. And we kept saying this stuff to each other, oh yeah, let’s get together sometime. Yeah, we should totally make that happen. It just didn’t happen. So we said, okay, here’s what we’re gonna do.

Twice a month, Same time, same place, we are going to get together. Why? Because adult friendships are important. So many people stop having friends when they have kids. And it’s destroying us. It’s such a bad idea.

And so what we started doing is we got rid of all the friction that’s involved, right? So every two weeks, we get together, same time, same place. Everybody brings their own food, by the way, that’s a big deal. So nobody has to do any cooking. You bring your own food. People bring kids.

And for that time for each other, what we do, it’s almost like an interaction. TED talk we go around the circle and every week one of these eight people and these four couples one of these eight people have the floor and they talk about something that’s on their mind and we go deep we don’t talk about sports and politics and whether we talk about what’s really going on so one week somebody talked about let’s see recently it was oh somebody had this question around like Is it right to force our kids to do something they don’t want to do, like learning how to play the piano? Is that a good idea? So then we talked about that for the afternoon.

And then another time it was somebody was having trouble at work.

They started this company and they weren’t really happy there, so they bore their soul and kind of got down to business in terms of what was bothering them.

Many of us, we don’t have that in our lives, and that’s a problem. We need those regular instances. And let me tell you, it wouldn’t happen unless we put that time on the books. Now, one additional point I want to make here. Remember how I said earlier, that anything can be a distraction. One of the things that we learned can be a distraction, kids, that when we would get together in this gathering, one of the first times we did this, one of the kids came up and said, mommy, daddy, I hurt myself.

I broke my knee. I need help. And this would throw the entire conversation off track. And so we decided that the kids cannot interrupt. They can listen, but they can’t interrupt unless someone’s bleeding. Because we need that time as adults to have those interactions with our friends.

We want those adult friendships. And just as importantly, we want to model for our kids what an adult friendship looks like. That these people in our life are important to us. These are our friends. They matter to us.

And so we need to invest in them. So you can’t interrupt for any frivolity.

We put juice boxes in a room.

We put some games for the kids to play. And they’re fine. And they know this rule. If nobody’s bleeding, do not interrupt.

And so that’s been a great way to block out those external triggers, even when the distraction can be something like your kids.

I have five kids and people think that I am a crazy person when I tell them that I keep my phone off all weekend they think I’m a unethical horrible person when I tell them I’m downstairs between 3 a . m. and 9 a . m. uninterrupted working on man projects before I go check in on the fam and we have a great family my wife and I’ve been together almost 20 years but I think that really is powerful I think somebody should write that down I mean having that weekly in your case it’s bi -weekly right you get together bi -weekly with some couples at the same time So you don’t have to play the scheduled chess, right? I mean, it’s the same time and the kids can’t interrupt you unless someone’s bleeding.

That is a bet that I dare I dare say near that’s a power move that that right there is a power move for somebody out there. That is a power move. Somebody should write that down in a book. Yeah, now here’s the deal. You’re not looking for book ideas, but I can tell you this because I work with many business owners who say they seek time and financial freedom. And when I help them get earned the financial freedom, which we document with case studies and that kind of thing, they find themselves with the financial freedom now to enjoy their time.

And they find themselves kind of bored near, you know, they found themselves bored, but also isolated. And I think you just gave a tip for how to keep from being isolated. And I’d like to wrap up today’s show by asking you for a tip of for all of our very wealthy listeners who have earned a bunch of money, but now their schedule feels empty and they feel like, gosh, isn’t there more to this world?

I thought, you know, they’ve already achieved a lot of our listeners have achieved their financial goals. How does somebody not feel hollow like the Easter bunny when they have a schedule that is now free of obligation? and it’s open to possibilities. How do they? Maybe you’ve never seen this before. Maybe you have.

I mean, it’s where someone just feels kind of like the hollow Easter bunny that their soul seems to be missing as they don’t have anything to do. Maybe it’s a retired listener who just sold his big company. What advice would you have? First of all, may you be so lucky to have this problem. This is a very, very high class problem. But I think part of the solution for anyone, whether you’re retired or not, is to pick good problems to fix.

That our values should drive how we spend our time. And what is a value? What do values mean? Values are defined as the attributes of the person we want to become. And so this is why we have to turn our values into time. We ask ourselves once a week, I’ll give you a link in the show notes where I have this tool, anybody can use it, it’s free, you don’t have to sign up for anything, you don’t have to give me your email, nothing, this schedule maker tool.

And where I want people through this online tool that anyone can use to decide how they want to spend their time. Because we talk a good game about, you know, how busy we are, but when you actually decide in advance how you want to spend our time, this is how we hold ourselves accountable. So it doesn’t matter your socioeconomic position. Any of us can decide how we want to live out our values by turning our values into time. So whether you’re a retiree and you’re looking for stuff to occupy your time, if you find yourself being hollow or you’re feeling hollow, it’s because you’re not living out your values. You need to ask yourself, how would the person I want to become spend their time?

It’s as simple as that. And by picking a good problem, that is one thing the world has no shortage of.

We have lots of problems. So pick a fight.

Pick a fight for something that you want to fix in the world.

And you don’t have to be retired to do that, whether that’s picking what kind of career you want to pursue, how you want to spend your time. It’s about deciding for yourself what brings meaning.

How would the person you want to become spend their time?

Would it be about fighting for a political issue, fighting for the environment, fighting to improve people’s living conditions, fighting to create a new technology, a new business that brings people value?

Whatever it is, pick that fight and pursue it. that time to win that war. Neer, you are an unbelievable author. I appreciate you spending all the time that you spend and invest in putting out your content, your books. You’re awesome. And you’re also a beautiful man.

Are you living entirely off of kale at this point, or what are you doing? You’re looking good. Unbelievable. But I will have to say that there’s no facet of my life that hasn’t been touched by that I put in indistractable because look you know when you are indistractable there’s so much you can do with your time I used to be obese now I love exercising for the first time in my life I used to never understand people say oh I ran a marathon I got a runner’s high I have no idea what they’re talking about right like I used to hate exercise but now that I am indistractable I do what I say I’m going to do.

I’m in the best shape of my life.

At 42 years old, I’ve never been in better shape.

I’ve been married for almost 20 years. My relationship is stronger than ever.

My relationship with my daughter is better because I’m fully present with her.

And it’s because a lot of the tactics I know you and I both use around when I do something, I’m fully vested. I’m there. I’m present in what I do. And that makes all the difference for becoming indistractable. What time did you wake up today? 7?

Is that kind of your default? 7? In those first four hours of your day, what are you doing? First four hours. So it’s scheduled, everyday. The first four hours, so I wake up at seven, I go upstairs.

One of my responsibilities is to make breakfast for my family. So from seven to 7 .30 I cook.

My daughter comes up at about 7 .30. We eat together until eight. I hit the gym from eight to nine. I shower up, I get ready from nine to 9 .30. And then from 9 .30 to 11 .30, that’s my writing time. So I have a two hour block of writing.

And then at 11 .30 I work from home, so most of the time if I’m not traveling, I’m at home at 11 .30, I cook lunch for my family. At 12 .30, I take calls and meetings. The rest of the day is mostly stuff like this, what I’m doing right now. Well, Nir, a little pro tip for you. If your writing career doesn’t work out, I know you’ve already had best -selling books.

If you’re looking for a fallback position, you need to be on the cover of romance novels. That’s what you need to do. That’s your backup position. Unbelievable. I’m telling you, Thrivers, if you look up near I . L.

right now, look him up. N -I -R -E -Y -A -L. He’s in the best shape of his life at the age of 42. I’m serious. This is a thing. You are an inspiration for the Thrive Nation out there, my friend.

And thank you so much for investing your time with our listeners here today.

and uh you know if you think romance novels should have nerds on their cover then i’m sure i’d make a great model it’s an interesting variety of romance novels now it’s a kind of a fork in the road but it’s a romance novel i appreciate it and now without any further ado three two one boom our show thank you for all you do i hear the ripple effects from you are good ripple effects you know i mean People rave about what they learn from you.

So congratulations. Sean, guess what’s happening? April 9th and 10th, 2026. Uh, we are probably going to have an amazing business conference here at Tulsa, Russia. Yes. We’re joined by Tim Tebow.

Tim Tebow is going to be joining us right here at the Thrive Time Show world headquarters, June 5th and 6th. He’s a very successful football player, obviously a Heisman award winner, but he’s also a very successful entrepreneur. when you work with real clients, Sean, real clients you really work with to help them grow their companies, do you ever hear a business owner tell you that they didn’t have time to get something done? Every day. How often is not having enough time a problem for business owners? All the time.

It’s almost, it’s like maybe 90 % of the issues as people are trying to grow their company. Well, Tim Tebow is going to come join us here at the in -person Thrive Time Show 2 -Day Interactive Business Workshop. And he’s going to teach us time management and his approach to personal self -discipline and getting things done. Also at the workshop, I’ll put up on the website so people can see it here. Also at the 2 -Day Interactive Workshop, Sean, we are going to be teaching accounting, systems creation, marketing, human resources, how to hire, inspire, train, and retain great people, accounting, social media advertising, Search engine optimization. Sean, what’s the area where most clients ask you for help the most?

Is it generating leads? Is it hiring people? What’s the biggest issue that most business owners have by default before they come to one of our workshops? Well, I think it’s management, because time is the most valuable resource for these business owners. And being able to manage their time is the first thing. Once they get that under control, then generally the numbers You know, being able to track their business and be able to make the best decisions based on numbers rather than emotions is a big area.

And we teach all of this stuff at the business conference, particularly you, Clay. You love to hammer on time management.

It’s my favorite part of the conference.

Now, I’m going to pull this up real quick here, because we’re going to go through it. If you’re not excited, I want to get you excited about what we’re going to cover at the workshop here, OK? OK. All right. The two -day interactive workshop. This is my 20th year hosting workshops.

So I’m telling you folks, we’re in rare form here. So one is the idea of establishing your revenue goals. I think most entrepreneurs don’t know their revenue goals. Would you agree? or am I off my rocker? No, that’s totally a very important point we do with every one of our new clients that come on board is we have to establish the revenue goals.

And generally speaking, we have a vague idea, but not an exact idea that can be engineered down into like the daily goals for sales. And so that’s a really big one. Now, next is the break even numbers. What kind of sales do you have to do to even break even? break even. Yeah.

Third is how many hours per week do you want to work? You know, what is your ideal schedule as an entrepreneur? Box number four, how do you stand out in the clutter of commerce? What makes your company unique from all the different businesses in a world of brown cows, herds of brown cows, proverbial brown cows, the analogy of brown cows? How can you be the purple cow that stands out? How can you be the squeaky wheel that gets the oil?

Box number five, branding. How do you improve the perception that people have of you, your business, your brand? Box number six. Marketing, your three -legged marketing stool. What is a turnkey way for you and your company to generate leads so you can succeed? Because if you don’t have any leads, your business will bleed.

If you can’t sell, your business will go to hell. You’ve got to generate leads. Sean, how often do business owners by default tell you they have a hard time generating leads? It’s almost all of the time. It’s really a huge struggle. And many times, they may be creating leads, but just through word of mouth.

So they get to a point where we’ve implemented systems, and then they need to create more. leads, but they’ve never had to do it. So there’s a lot of different scenarios where business owners are like, how do you create leads? Something we hammer on at the conference a lot. Box number seven, create a sales conversion system. Again, box number seven, create a sales conversion system.

Sales scripts, recorded calls, one sheets, pre -written emails, lead trackers, all of the sales tools, the sales print pieces, the one sheets, the big screens that you see inside the business, whether you’re a doctor, you’re a trainer, you’re a lawyer, you’ve got to have sales systems in place. We help you with that. Box number eight, what does it cost you to get another customer? Step number eight, what does it cost you to actually acquire a customer? Step number nine, it’s hard to build organization if you’re not organized.

We’re going to teach you how to create repeatable systems. processes, file organization. Box number 10, we’re going to teach you how to manage people, real people, on the planet Earth. This just in, we’re going to teach you how to manage real people on the planet Earth. Box number 11, how to create a sustainable schedule that works for you and your family. Step number 12, how to create human resources systems for recruiting, hiring, training, and retaining great people.

Box number 13, accounting. This just in, we have to cover accounting. It’s not how much you make, it’s how much you keep.

We’re going to cover all the accounting things you need to know.

And step 14, finally, What is the point of even achieving success? We’re going to go over what is the point of even achieving success, how to design a life that you’re excited about, how to design a life where you carve out enough time for your faith, your family, your finance, your fitness, your friendship, your fun, and where you’re going to spend your focused time. We’re going to go through that, all this and more. Now, the workshop, Sean, it’s April 9th and 10th. It’s a two -day interactive workshop. And tickets, we always do it.

It’s $250 or whatever price that someone can afford. Sean, why do we let people name their price? Why do we have scholarship tickets available? if somebody can’t afford the $250 general admission ticket? Well, we don’t want anybody to miss out on it. You could be at a startup phase, or you could be way along in your business.

But we want to make it accessible for everybody. I think it actually goes back, too, to a story of your dad. And it goes all the way back to how you’ve always done this as a business coach, trying to make sure that your average people out there have access to the things that work.

Now, 7 a .

m. to 5, Sean, why do we go from 7 to 5 both days? I mean, it’s 10 hours a day, 20 hours of training over two days. Why do we do 10 hours a day, Sean, of back -to -back workshops? We do a 30 -minute teaching session. We do a 15 -minute question -and -answer session.

And then we take a break.

30 minutes of teaching, 15 minutes of question -and -answer.

Then we take a break. Why do we do that format, Sean? That format is so that we can keep people engaged and not just sitting there listening, but also getting involved. We really encourage people to ask questions. And that’s really where the juiciness of the conference comes out, is you can put your personal situation and your questions on the board, and Clay will tee up and give you direct advice. Even without being in our coaching program, you can get direct coaching from Clay.

It’s really a very engaging format.

I enjoyed a lot.

Once again, folks, this event is April 9th and 10th, 2026.

Get those tickets at thrivetimeshow .

com. Once again, that’s thrivetimeshow . com. I think it’s did you say it’s $250 or whatever you can afford. That’s right $250 or whatever you can afford Sean How do you spell Eric Trump backwards?

P M U R T C I -R -E.

Ooh, that took a long time.

I’ll have to listen to this. All right, again, that’s Sean Lohman.

I’m Clay Clark, and inviting you to come join us at the in -person Thrive Time Show two -day interactive workshop. This event is April 9th and 10th, 2026. Get those tickets at thrivetimeshow .

com. Once again, that’s thrivetimeshow . com. Right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Tim Tebow, baby. It’s Tebow time in Tulsa, Russia. Clay Clark is here somewhere.

Where’s my buddy Clay?

Clay’s the greatest. I met his goats today. I met his dogs. I met his chickens. I saw his compound. He’s like the greatest guy.

I ran from his goats, his chickens.

his dogs. So this guy’s like the greatest marketer you’ve ever seen, right? His entire life. Clay Clark, his entire life is marketing. Luke Erickson here with the Thrive Time Show. As you can see behind me, we’ve got all kinds of energy going on.

People are starting to show up for the conference, and it is hot in this place. We’ve got grill going over here.

We’ve got people playing the drums. We’ve got a fire breather. And, man, people are so excited as they come in. My name is Kevin Thomas and the name of our company is MultiClean. We are a commercial janitorial service and we serve the entire state of Oklahoma and Kansas and soon to be Arkansas. We have probably grown probably five times.

I think when we first started with you, we had 60 to 65 employees, and now we have a little over 300 employees. Before we got involved with Thrive Time, we didn’t really have any systems or processes in place. I’ve probably been to, oh, in six, seven years, I’ve probably been to 12 to 13 business conferences. And amazingly, each time I go, I learn something new and I’m so excited to bring it back and, and show the team. 4 ,000%. from February to February.

Now, I can better that. Okay, Clay, I don’t think you know this. I don’t think you know this. I’m pinching myself, and if I cry, forgive me. In the last two and a half days, we have bettered our entire month of February. in the last two and a half days.

I heard about it on the podcast, started listening to the podcast, became a fan and then figured out about the workshop.

I own an insurance and financial services agency, and I was hoping to learn from the workshop systems and processes. I’m big on systems and processes and always learning better ways to run a business more efficiently. The atmosphere is second to none. none. It’s a high energy, really cool atmosphere to be around.

Contagious, I would say. Just something every entrepreneur, I think, would appreciate and love. I’d say humorous, high energy, and full of substance, which I think is the key. A lot of business coaches or seminars Maybe you’re high on motivation and making you feel good, but don’t have a lot of substance that you can take back and implement, you know, the following Monday, where his does. Man, there’s a lot of valuable things.

I’m going to say like I came to this is my second workshop. The first workshop I took back really the importance of a group interview. I used to spend hours and hours interviewing people. screening resumes, and that saving my time on that part is valuable.

It was that and then the sales scripting that have been two major things just so far.

Man, I think they’re missing out on expert advice from somebody who’s been there, done that, built companies, has learned a lot of lessons.

That’s what I’m always looking for is somebody that I can learn from that’s ahead of where I am.

And I think if you choose not to come, you’re missing out on a lot of good advice that could help your business. Clay Clark has helped us take our three locations in three different states and create checklists, workflows, task lists, time blocks for every employee. He’s helped us with creating systems and audits for every department, quantitative scorecards for each department and every position so that everybody has a number. It’s been able to give us a lot of time freedom and financial freedom and peace. of mind to know that everything’s running efficiently, and he’s been helpful with a lot of marketing, search engine optimization, helping us really rank high in Google, and pretty much every area of the business. He’s been very, very helpful.

We would describe the experience of working with Clay as very energetic. He’s full of energy. He’s very encouraging, very motivating, but also accountable. So he keeps us accountable, and we love that accountability. It keeps our drive in the right direction, so we’re not chasing things that aren’t worth spending our time on. He’s a great coach.

He helps push us on certain areas, helps coach us in certain areas. We’re all emotional creatures, and we go up and down, and he actually will tell us kind of where we’re at, how we can get from there, and even like emotionally, like when we’re stressed about something, he’ll have a story to relate to and really helps us in every area of our business. It’s been very, very helpful. I think Clay’s ability to have a whole team behind him that helped him with all of his clients, all his coaching clients, is that it allows Clay to do what he’s really good at, and that’s working one -on -one with the client and coaching them. And then he can have his amazing staff come in and help you accomplish all these goals that you’re setting.

And of course he has all these resources, whether it’s videographers or whether it’s web developers, that they can quickly jump on your project, knock things out.

He can quickly give you the right coaching. He’s just got a whole team of people that whatever area you’re lacking in, in your own company, he’s got resources from like video, web design, search engine guys who are just knowledgeable in that. Even though he knows a lot of that stuff, he’s got these capable lieutenants that are ready to just take off and help you get that stuff. More stuff gets done on a weekly basis than you would on like probably most individual or some other company. We’ve worked with several companies before.

It’s just not as many things get done on a weekly basis. It’s been very helpful. Well, the conferences for me, I’m a slow learner, so I have to learn like over and over again, hear things over and over again. I’ve been to like, I think, eight different conferences, and each time you come, I learn a few new components. Some things are repetitive, but a lot of the stuff just resettles, and I get a little bit more depth into each component. So, I mean, I’ve been to eight of them.

They’re all super entertaining. He’s very funny, very encouraging. You get to kind of self -reflect a lot. A lot of the stuff is really polarizing. personal inventory of yourself and you’ll be fine. you’ll think like, hey I’ve really got to work on this, really got to work on that.

So every time you come I still get a lot of value out of it. And as much as every conference is the same, it’s totally different. So I think we’ll hear stories we haven’t heard before. He’ll have entertainment or he’ll have speakers he didn’t have before. And like you said, you just always catch a different part of the material that maybe you didn’t catch before. It’s worded differently.

And it’s really cool because some people that you’ve seen like a year ago at a conference, now they’re being showcased as a success story. And you get to see their website. You get to see how their stats and all their metrics have improved and the revenue improved. So it’s really cool to see people that just a year ago that, of course, we’ve been here two years, that just came, that I met, is now being successful. It’s really encouraging to see other people accomplish that stuff. Clay has helped us optimize our website and helped with really topping the right search engines that we need to make sure that we are very, very competitive with all of our other competitors.

He’s done Basically, he outlines exactly what you need to be accomplishing and he creates tasks that we have to accomplish and his team has to accomplish. I would say over the last two years, we’ve totally ramped our website. We’re topping Google in every one of our markets. I would say just doing really, really good.

I feel very, very confident in all of our future locations and making sure that we’re in front of the ideal and likely buyer.

It’s very encouraging. It’s important to me that to know when I’m working with Clay, you know, I’ve been in business for a while and met with him even when I already had three, three businesses in three different states. And to know that what I share with him is staying private. He’s not sending that out to anybody else. To know that when he’s working with me, he’s only working with one other, no other gyms that are in direct competition with me. It’s very encouraging to have something you can trust.

and rely on that he isn’t going to like somehow… tell your trade secrets or give information away. Just really awesome that he’s a trustworthy guy, really cares about you as a client. For us, it’s been a complete mind freedom, because Clay has helped us create a lot of different documents and one sheets for every department, put quantitative scorecards to each department. And so for us, it’s been very encouraging. It gives us peace. Like as an entrepreneur, it’s stressful.

You go to bed at night, you’re worried, like, did we cover this? Did we cover that? So he helps extract everything out of your brain, everything from your business, put it into document creation, put it into checklists and workflows for every person in each department, and make sure that everything’s getting done every week. every month and funnel that all into KPIs or key performance indicators as you can see on a weekly basis to make sure you’re moving the needle in the right area of your company. It’s very encouraging and gives you a complete mind, freedom, and peace to know that that stuff’s created so you’re easy to duplicate and scale your company. Right, and then we can spend time doing what we’re really good at.

I honestly believe everybody needs a coach. I think we’re all inherently lazy and selfish and carnal. I truly believe that humans are humans. If we’re standing, we’d rather sit. If we’re sitting, we’d rather lay down. And if we’re laying down, we’d rather be asleep.

So to have somebody that challenges you, have real active candor and be honest with you on every aspect of your company is really, really encouraging to me because I want to know, I want to work on what we’re weak at.

I want to see any areas that we’re not doing well in and see his perspective from a third party. Because you can look at your own business and just see the good. It’s good to have somebody who’s done this with hundreds of companies. You know, really look at your company, reflect on your company, and see like little chinks in the armor to make sure you cover that up. so your competition can’t get to you and that you’re successful overall in the big picture. Yes, I would recommend Clay Clark because he is a great friend, great encourager.

To me, he’s been a wonderful friend. He’s also, you can tell he cares. And he also, he has this wealth of knowledge. He’s worked with so many different companies and different businesses. He could take a concept that he’s used before in the past with somebody in a totally different industry and see how it would work perfectly for you in whatever niche market you’re in or whatever type of service you’re providing. And so his brain is just a wealth of knowledge and just to have that type of perspective as a part of your team and your own company is huge and super valuable.

So I would definitely encourage people to use him. But one thing is you gotta be coachable. You gotta be wanting to get feedback. You gotta be wanting to really grow your company. You gotta want to put that extra 10 hours a week to working on your business and not just in your business. And so, yes, I would recommend it to anybody who’s wanting to grow their company and provide great systems, checklists, workflows, great encouragement, and have accountability.

In my career, I’ve sold a little over $800 million in real estate. So honestly, I thought I kind of knew everything about marketing and homes. And then I met Clay, and my perception of what I knew and what I could do definitely changed.

After doing $800 million in sales over a 15 -year career, I really thought I knew what I was doing.

I’ve been managing a large team of salespeople

for the last 10 years here with Shaw Homes. And, I mean, we’ve been a company that’s been in business for 35 years. We’ve become one of the largest builders in the Tulsa area, and that was without Clay. So when I came to know Clay, I really thought, man, there’s not much more I need to know, but I’m willing to listen. The interesting thing is our internet leads from our website. has actually in a four month period of time has gone from somewhere around 10 to 15 leads in a month to 180 internet leads in a month.

Just from the few things that he’s shown us how to implement that I honestly probably never would have come up with on my own. So I got a lot of good things to say about the system that Clay put in place with us. And it’s just been an incredible experience. I am very glad that we met and had the opportunity to work with Clay. So the interaction with the team and with Clay on a weekly basis is honestly very enlightening. One of the things that I love about Clay’s perspective on things is that he doesn’t come from my industry.

He’s not somebody who’s in the home building industry. I’ve listened to all the experts in my field. Our company has paid for me to go to seminars, international builder shows, all kinds of places where I’ve had the opportunity to learn from the experts in my industry. But the thing that I found working with Clay is that he comes from such a broad spectrum of working with so many different types of businesses that he has a perspective that’s difficult for me to gain because I get so entrenched in what I do, I’m not paying attention to what other leading industry experts are doing. And Clay really brings that perspective. me.

It is very valuable time every week when I get that hour with him.

From my perspective, the reason that any business owner who’s thinking about hooking up with Thrive needs to definitely consider it is because the results that we’ve gotten in a very short period of time are honestly monumental. It has really exceeded my wildest expectation of what he might be able to do. I came in skeptical because I’m very pragmatic, and as I’ve gone through the process over just a few months, I’ve realized it’s probably one of the best moves we’ve ever made. I think a lot of people probably feel like they don’t need a business or marketing consultant because they maybe are a little bit prideful and like to think they know everything. I know that’s how I felt coming in. I mean, we’re a big company that’s definitely one of the largest in town.

And so we kind of felt like we knew what we were doing. And I think for a lot of people, they let their ego get in the way of listening to somebody that might have a better or different perspective than theirs. I would just really encourage you, if you’re thinking about working with clay, I mean, the thing is, it’s month to month. Go give it a try and see what happens. I think in the 35 -year history of Shaw Homes, this is probably the best thing that’s happened to us. And I know if you give them a shot, I think you’ll feel the same way.

I know for me, the thing I would have missed out on if I didn’t work with Clay is I would have missed out on literally an 1800 % increase in our internet leads, going from 10 a month to 180 a month. That would have been a huge financial decision to just decide not to give it a shot. I would absolutely recommend Clay Clark to anybody who’s thinking about working with somebody in marketing. I would skip over anybody else you were thinking about, and I would go straight to Clay and his team. I guarantee you’re not going to regret it, because we sure haven’t.

My name is Danielle Sprick, and I am the founder of D. Sprick Realty Group here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After being a stay -at -home mom for 12 years and my three kids started school and they were in school full -time, I was at a crossroads and trying to decide, what do I want to do? My degree and my background is in education, but after being a mom and staying home and all of that, I just didn’t have a passion for it like I once did. My husband suggested real estate. He’s a home builder, so real estate and home building go hand in hand, and we just rolled with it.

I love people. I love working with people. I love the building relationships. But one thing that was really difficult for me was the business side of things, the processes and the advertising and marketing. I knew that I did not have what I needed to be successful. make that what it should be.

So I reached out to Clay at that time and he and his team have been extremely instrumental in helping us build our brand, help market our business, our agents, the homes that we represent. Everything that we do is a direct line from Clay and his team and all that they’ve done for us. We launched our brokerage, our real estate brokerage, eight months ago. And in that time, we’ve gone from myself and one other agent to just this week, we signed on. our 16th agent. We have been blessed with the fact that we right now have just over 10 million in pending transactions.

Three years ago, I never would have even imagined that I would be in this role that I’m in today, building a business, having 16 agents. But I have to give credit where credit’s due. And Clay and his team and the business coaching that they’ve offered us has been huge. It’s been instrumental in what we’re doing. Don’t ever limit your vision. When you dream big, big things happen.

I started a business because I couldn’t work for anyone else. I do things my way. I do what I think is in the best interest of the patient. I don’t answer to insurance companies. I don’t answer to large corporate organizations.

I answer to my patient, and that’s it. My thought when I opened my clinic was I can do this all myself.

I don’t need additional outside help in many ways.

I mean, I went to medical school.

I can figure this out.

But it was a very, very steep learning curve.

Within the first six months of opening my clinic, I had a $63 ,000 embezzlement.

I lost multiple employees. Clay helped us weather the storm of some of the things that are just a lot of people experience, especially in the medical world.

He was instrumental in helping with the specific written business plan. He’s been instrumental in hiring good quality employees, using the processes that he outlines for getting in good talent, which is extremely difficult. He helped me in securing the business loans. He helped me with web development and search engine optimization. We’ve been able to really keep a steady stream of clients coming in. because they found us on the web.

With everything that I encountered, everything that I experienced, I quickly learned it is my every penny to have someone in your team that can walk you through and even avoid some of the pitfalls that are almost invariable in starting your own business. I’m Dr. Chad Edwards and I own Revolution Health and Wellness Clinic. Clay, my honor, my honor to be on your show and thank you for all you do. I hear. The ripple effects from you are good ripple effects.

You know what I mean? People rave about what they learn from you. So congratulations. just listening to what they have to say their hiring process has just really been incredible as far as finding good quality help and the just the accountability of meeting up with them weekly and such good insight the resources they have for specific business questions it’s all been really incredible it’s been a great experience so I’d recommend it to anybody. What I’ve seen from Clay and his group at Thrive is they’ll give you a simple system and it’s the simple systems are the ones that people can wrap their brain around. They’re the ones that people can work with on a day -to -day basis.

Hi there, my name is Stephanie Pipkin. I am 24 years old and I own Black River Falls Cleaning Services. We opened in April of 2019 and it is now mid -June of 2020. So I wanted to talk to about the success and growth I have achieved by implementing the Proven Path with Clay Clark’s team and my business coach Luke from Thrive Time. It has been insane, to say the least.

I started working with them in mid -February of this year, so we’re about four months in of working together and it has been completely transformed my business in pretty much every facet. So I’m going to check my notes here. So in four months, my leads have tripled. I was getting probably like two leads a week. Now I’m getting more in the like 10 to 15 leads a week. I have doubled my number of employees.

I’m now hitting the highest revenue weeks in the history of the company, week to week it seems like. We went from about six appointments today as our highest in February to now 14 to 15 appointments a day. And hiring quality employees has become much simpler and less stressful by using their systems for hiring. I typically only get maybe two complaints a month, if that, and everybody shows up to work. I just have really high quality employees now, especially in something people typically consider a high turnover type of work, you know, cleaning houses, cleaning businesses. I have amazing employees now and I get rid of the ones who are not so amazing and bring on new ones because of, you know, group interviews and interviewing every single week.

It’s just been great and I don’t waste as much time on low -quality candidates anymore. And your coach will hold you accountable, which I love. Again, the tough love is really great. Luke’s like a stern father figure, but he’s also nice, but also stern when he needs to be when I’m being lazy and not doing the things that I know I need to do because I don’t

want to do them. So that’s just great worth every penny. I mean, I pay him a million dollars a month if I can and maybe someday I’ll be able to but I would just say go for it. If it seems like a good fit just go for it. Do what they say, even if you think it’s stupid or ridiculous, just do what they say because it’ll work. You know, people, when they look at my business, you know, people in my town, they think I’m lucky.

They think I’m just, you know, things just happen for me. And, you know, maybe I am lucky, but it has a lot to do with hard work and, you know, perseverance and, you know, working until you cry sometimes. That’s just being an entrepreneur, which if you’re a business owner, you understand that. But it’s having these systems in place of, you know, of course I’m going to be successful. It’s an absolute because I have all this stuff in the background happening. And I have Luke and Clay and everybody on their team working really hard to make sure that I’m a success.

And I can tell that they are just so excited every single week when I’m having all these wins and things like that. They’re so excited for me. So it’s the best thing ever and I would suggest to anybody to work with them. So sorry for the long -winded reply, but I just had so much to say, and I could go on for hours probably about how amazing they are. But thank you to Clay and Luke and the entire team there, everything you guys have done for me, and I am so excited to continue to work with you for years to come. Thanks so much for watching.

My saying is, if it’s important to you, hire a coach. And I think that’s one of the reasons people are not successful is they They eat a cheeseburger instead of hiring a coach. My coach pushes me. They’re younger than me. They push harder. They’re trained.

As my rich dad always said, amateurs don’t have a coach, but professionals do. always have coaches. So I’ve always had coaches for whatever was important. My rich dad was one of those persons. I wanted to learn how to play Monopoly in real life. So he was my coach.

Transcribed with Cockatoo