The Power of Thinking Time
The Amplified Impact Podcast
July 7th, 2023
Today, I’ve got a mind-blowing practice to share with you that rocked my world in 2022.
I rediscovered this gem while reviewing my journal and it took me back to the four months I spent practicing “thinking time.”
It’s a concentrated and focused form of meditation that I learned from Keith Cunningham’s book, “The Road Less Stupid.”
Keith, the rich dad from “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” outlines the power of dedicated thinking time.
Picture this…an hour of uninterrupted writing, guided by a single question.
It’s uncomfortable yet transformative, fueling creativity and clarity.
I highly recommend integrating this practice into your routine.
Find that quiet hour each week, let your thoughts flow, and witness the profound impact it has on your life.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“he key here is to find an hour of uninterrupted time maybe once every week, just to sit and think. And if you can do that, I think you’re going to notice a qualitative improvement in the results that you achieve throughout your day out of your weeks and your months. And I can think of fewer higher leverage activities than that.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
Yo, what’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the pod I want to share with you one of the most powerful practices that I adopted in 2022. So a year ago, the reason I’m I’m in the 2022 mindset right now is I found this journal from last year. And I was just reviewing some of the ideas, the places that I’d been, some of the thoughts that I’d had throughout the year. And I recalled this four month period that I spent doing this activity that’s called thinking time. And it was a very profound, powerful exercise. I want to share it with you guys because it’s something I’m probably going to pick up and do again for the next three or four months. And I love cycling through some of these systems instead of just doing them all the time ad nauseam until they become broken and boring. And I like to do different systems for a period of time, and then when it no longer serves me, when I’m no longer getting as much juice for the squeeze, then it’s time to introduce something else or put that on the back burner, kind of let the system reset, so to speak.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:00]:
And I was reminded just by how powerful this was. It’s a form of meditation, but it’s also, just as the name implies, concentrated, focused thinking time. And I got this idea from Keith Cunningham’s book The Road. Less stupid. So Keith Cunningham, for context, is the guy that Robert Kiyosaki was talking about in his book rich dad, Poor dad. So if you’ve ever read that book, the Little Purple book, pretty much everybody in real estate’s read it. And I recommend it for everybody who’s trying to change their mindset about being a person who trades their time for money to being an entrepreneur or an investor who is finding assets to work for them. It’s a fantastic foundational book that will set you down that path.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:45]:
So highly recommend it. Rich dad, poor dad. And in it, he talks about how he had two dads. He had a poor dad who wasn’t really poor, but he was doing well. He was an academic, he was a teacher, I believe, and doing well. But on that traditional American path of work for your money, get on a good career, get the job security, and that’s savior way to retirement. But he also had a best friend whose dad was an entrepreneur, a businessman, and was very, very wealthy. This is his rich dad.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:14]:
And so Robert, in this book, compares the two ideas between what he’s hearing about finances in life and how to navigate career choices. And all this from his poor dad and the same advice that he’s hearing, or different advice, but on the same topics from his rich dad. And the messages are so very different in how they think about things. And one of the reasons I think that generational poverty is so hard to break is because there’s nobody in the family that’s able to give an experience or perspective on the topic of money and wealth building outside of what they have inherited themselves from the people in their family who are also, by definition, generationally poor. And so it’s like that idea that the rich get richer, the poor stay or get poorer. And it’s because the ideas and the frameworks that they both are operating on, one is more advantageous for building wealth, and it’s being passed from generation to generation, and it’s a compounding interest flywheel that just compounds upon itself. And it’s the same on the other side. When the message that you’re sending and you’re teaching people about finances is inherently flawed, then that flywheel is going to compound in the opposite direction, right? So this book, Rich Dad, Poor dad, really lays this out and says, okay, if you’re being taught, like, the rich concepts, here’s what you need to have.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:30]:
If you’re being taught the poor concepts, this is what you need to avoid. Now, he never explicitly says who the rich dad is in his book. Well, it turns out it’s Keith Cunningham. And he wasn’t actually, to my knowledge, had nothing to do with Robert Kiyosaki when he was a kid or anything like that. I think this was all just a narrative that Robert created to help frame the book. Doesn’t make any of the ideas any less powerful or true. Maybe truthy would be a better way of putting it. But Keith Cunningham is a fantastic businessman who’s put out a lot of great content, great thinker, and he wrote a book called The Road Less Stupid.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:03]:
And in The Road Less Stupid, it’s really just laying the foundation for this one principle that he expounds, which is thinking time. And the way it works is he sits down every morning for an hour in a very structured, organized way. He sits in a very particular chair. He sits in a very particular way, explains exactly how he sits so that he can not get distracted. He faces away from the window. He has just a pen in his hand and a notebook, and he just writes constantly. His goal for the whole hour is to not let the pen ever stop moving. And what I find really powerful about this is you end up getting a lot of content at the end of that hour.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:47]:
You get a lot of ideas that are just bubbling up to the surface. And your only goal is to not necessarily critique or edit what’s coming out of you. It’s just to let it come forth. And what you’re using as like the focusing prism point on the things coming out of you is a singular question. A singular question that you write down at the top of the page, and then you just ideate on that one question for an entire hour. And so one of the things that this book is really trying to help you with is figuring out what are the really good questions worth unpacking? And, for instance, this one for me, what would make 2022 an incredible year? This other one, what are my 2021 lessons learned? This was right in January at the turn of the year. So it’s obvious that some of these are more focused on that kind of, like, beginning and end of year. This one, what do I want to accomplish this year and what must be done to maximize my chances of success? Or this one, where am I dabbling and doing just enough to get by? What needs to be done about it? Here’s another one where is my level of engagement and intensity of focus inconsistent with the vision and outcomes I desire? So these are the types of questions that you sit down and you use to focus your mind.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:11]:
And then for 45 minutes to an hour, you just gush. You just write on that one question, whatever comes from your subconscious, and you just put it down. And at the end, you spend 1015 minutes walking through and saying, okay, what were the best ideas that I just threw out here? What needs to be retained? What do I need to continue unpacking? And maybe that becomes the impetus for tomorrow’s thinking time question. But I found this exercise to be just very, very powerful, because it’s difficult to find quiet time for yourself, just to sit and think. And honestly, it’s one of the most uncomfortable things, just forcing yourself to sit with a single question and do nothing but write on it for an entire hour. It’s a really long period of time. So you’re simultaneously building the muscle of discipline, of consistency, of patience. All these things are fantastic.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:02]:
But on top of this, you’re also learning how to write. You’re learning how to think more clearly, how to formulate your thoughts and share them on a piece of paper. There’s so many benefits that came from this activity that I highly recommend that you give this a try. Go pick up the book. The road less stupid. Start integrating thinking time into your practices and don’t overthink it in terms of like, oh, am I doing it right? Am I doing it wrong? The key here is to find an hour of uninterrupted time maybe once every week, just to sit and think. And if you can do that, I think you’re going to notice a qualitative improvement in the results that you achieve throughout your day out of your weeks and your months. And I can think of fewer higher leverage activities than that.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:48]:
So hope that brought you a little bit of value. Guys, thanks for being here. I’ll see you back around these parts tomorrow. Till then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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