This Hustle-bro Advice is Garbage
The Amplified Impact Podcast
November 2nd, 2023
Let’s talk hustle culture.
Hard work is crucial, but let’s not confuse “massive action” with spinning our wheels.
The key is consistent, tiny actions. Here are three:
- Three to Three: Forget the endless to-do list. Focus on your “three to three.” Three crucial tasks a day; quality over quantity.
- Track Net Worth: Daily tracking keeps you in the money game. It’s simpler than it sounds and brings results.
- Don’t List: Identify your time-sucking distractions and avoid them until your “three to three” is done.
Small habits, big impact.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” – Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
So I like to hate on hustle bro culture on this podcast a lot. And it’s actually not that I disagree with the idea that you need to hustle and work hard in your business if you’re an entrepreneur. Like if you want to get ahead in life. Hustle is a key component of that for sure. Hard work, no doubt. The reason I rail against hustle culture though, or like I like to hate on the hustle bros is because it’s very, very easy to mistake take action for traction. It’s easy to feel, to be busy, but not necessarily be effective. And I think hustle culture makes a mistake of thinking that just doing a lot of work is the same as doing the right high leverage work.
Anthony Vicino:
And I fell into that trap personally for a long time where I was just burning the midnight oil, I was grinding around the clock. I was doing a lot of things. I had a lot of balls in motion, but none of it was moving the most important balls forward. It was just a lot of busy work. I’m not a fan of that. And so that’s one of the reasons why I like to kind of take the piss out of hustle culture. But there is one piece of hustle culture advice which in particular kind of annoys me when I hear it, is the idea that you need to take massive action. And I do agree that massive action is good.
Anthony Vicino:
But the problem with this is that massive action is really just the result of a bunch of tiny actions done concurrently, done over a long enough period of time, and done with consistency. So focusing on the massive action for most people just kind of leads to a feeling of overwhelm and in most cases inaction because you’re like, man, I have this big goal. I want to write this book. I want to be a New York Times bestselling author. But that’s such a big goal. And then you’re like, okay, what’s the massive action? I need to sit down and write 10,000 words today. And it’s like, damn, that’s a lot. I don’t know if I have the time, the energy, the desire.
Anthony Vicino:
I don’t know if I could do this. We know what the big massive action is that we’re trying to take, but then it’s so overwhelming, it’s so big, and so we attack it maybe through motivation for a period of time. We can attack it with intensity. And because we don’t have the discipline on the back end, we can’t maintain consistency. And in my book, consistency always beats intensity. And that took me a really long time to figure out. And I think this is what hustle culture gets wrong a lot is that they make themselves feel really good by attacking things with intensity for a short period of time, but then they do not maintain the actions necessary to achieve the grandiose results that they want. But they fool themselves into feeling good because they had that intense action, that intense spurt.
Anthony Vicino:
And by the time the motivation is starting to wane, they move that motivation needle towards something else. They tack that with intensity. And so they can kind of keep confusing and lying to themselves that what they’re doing is being productive because they’re constantly living in the state of intense, intermittent action, and yet they’re not where they want to be in life. And then they look up someday they’re like me, and they’re like, what the hell? Why am I not where I want to be? I’m working intensely. I’m doing a lot of stuff. I don’t get it. And the problem is you’re doing maybe the wrong things. Let’s rewind for a second.
Anthony Vicino:
Massive action, sure. Important, but more important is to focus on the tiny actions today in the moment, the things that you know you can do. Because I can’t remember who said this, but this is a great quote, that nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little. Let me repeat that. Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little. So if you’ve ever thought to yourself, well, I just only have five minutes, I only have ten minutes, it’s not worth it. I’m not going to be able to get in the deep work. I’m not going to be able to make meaningful progress at this thing.
Anthony Vicino:
And so I’m just not going to do anything. I’m just going to keep scrolling instagram. I have been there. I live in this world where I fool myself into thinking, well, I can’t do a lot on that. So I’ll just put it off until a time when I can. The truth is that time never really ends up coming. And more importantly is that those little 1% or zero 1% periods of time where we are able to move a ball somewhat forward can be very productive on a long enough time frame. So here are three things, three tiny actions I think you can use daily to just get ahead in life.
Anthony Vicino:
All right? Number one is you’re three to three. You need to stop overestimating what you can get done in a day, okay? This only sets you up for failure. It’s something that I’ve personally lived multiple times. I just get so ambitious about what I can do. I fill up my to do list with a billion things, and then at the end of the day, I maybe only ticked off two out of the 15 things that I wanted to do. And that’s a bad ratio. And now I feel bad about myself because it feels like I could have done more. However, if instead you just design your three to free, these are your three most important activities that you could get done today, that would be a win.
Anthony Vicino:
Then at that end of the day. If you only did two of those three things well, then you were 66% successful. You will feel very different about that result than in the other example where you only did two out of 15 things. It’s a very simple psychological trick, but I found it to be very, very helpful. Now, the key to the three to three is to identify those three tasks that if you were to do them, you could look back and say, that was a great day. That was a win for the day, and then do those things. And the interesting thing in that framework is to remember you get to define what winning looks like. You get to define winning based off the quality of your work, not on the quantity.
Anthony Vicino:
So you are the one that’s holding yourself to the standard of doing 15 different things, but you could change that framework by just writing down three. Now, I talk about this a lot in the Hyper Focus masterclass. If you guys want to learn more about that, go to beyond theapex.com Hyperfocus, that is beyond theapex.com Hyperfocus, can learn all about this framework, go into way more depth. All right. Number two tiny little habit will make a massive impact on your life is that if you want to play the money game better, you need to keep an eye on the score. And to do that, you need to be tracking your net worth every single day. Do not overcomplicate this. Don’t get too fancy with it.
Anthony Vicino:
For years, I literally just used a simple journal where I would sit down and I walk through everything I spent the day before, everything I earned the day before, and I would just keep a tally. Because at the end of the day, that which gets measured gets managed. And if you want to win the money game, which I’m not saying you need to win the money game, but so many of your problems in life can be solved with money. And why not then win the money game? Because it’s not that complicated. Just takes some intention. So track your net worth every single day, and you will start to see that number climb and grow. I can almost guarantee it. Number three tiny little habit is what I call the don’t list.
Anthony Vicino:
This is productivity is interesting. It’s not about getting more done. Sometimes it’s not even about what you do get done. It’s about what you don’t get done. And I think every single one of us has our own little time suck activity, some little distraction that we indulge ourselves in throughout the course of the day. That doesn’t seem like a lot in the moment, but then when you kind of add it up, you look back and you’re like, wow, I spent a lot more time playing Slappy Bird than I thought I did. For me, my personal thing is chess. But for you, it could be social media.
Anthony Vicino:
It could be reddit, it could be all sorts of things. I don’t know what your thing is, but you probably do just like me mentioning what is that thing? What are those things that if you were to not do them throughout your day, your productivity would be like through the roof. You know what those are? So, on your to do list for the day, your little three x five card, where you’ve list out your three to three, your three activities that you are going to do, next to that, write out your to don’t list. Those are the three things you need to avoid doing. And then don’t do those things until you’ve completed your three to three. And then after you’ve done that, you’ve already won the day. So go fuck off. If you want to go do your don’t list, I don’t care.
Anthony Vicino:
You do you, but you do this on a long enough time frame, these tiny little activities compound, they deliver some pretty impressive, massive results. Or at least they’ve worked really well in my life. Hopefully they will for you as well. And that will do it for me, everybody, I appreciate you. We’ll catch you around these parts tomorrow. Until then, stay hyper focused, everybody.
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