Anyway, getting back to the story. So, um, I was training people in memory for several years and then, um, I had this vision and this dream that I wanted to be part of building a high growth tech company. And then it was in the end of 2012 there was one guy who had been in one of my seminars. He had raised some money and wanting to build an online tutoring company. And he, he approached me and asked if I’d help him build it. And I, it looked like a fantastic opportunity and I jumped at the chance. And the weight thing was shortly after doing this, I, I, I was going to the gym and it’s a street gym and I live in London, is a street gym in east London and I just, it’s, I like it. What I used to like it when I went for a period of time because it was just no bells and whistles.

No, you know, it was just heavy iron and that was as and massive guys. I’m not a massive guy by any stretch of the imagination, but it was just, you go in, you pay five plants, pay five pounds, and then you lift weights. And so while I was in the, and just doing some dead lifts, I remember it, I had this tiny blood blister on my index finger on my left hand and it was kind of getting in the way of dead lifting. So I just just like bit it to get rid of it and then carried on dead lifting and then thought nothing else of it. And then about a week later my hand swelled up and went into hospital and because it was pretty painful and they gave me some antibiotics and said, look, come back in 24 hours. If this isn’t better and I’m 24 hours later.

It was nowhere near about. Uh, and they, they brought me straight in and um, long story short with this aspect, they ended up putting me on general. I’m doing surgery and taking out a whole bit of gunky flesh and turned out loud, contracted Nrsa. So it’s like a hospital superbug but possibly caught it from the gym, possibly caught it from my own mouth. Who knows? Um, Bob, there is a silver lining to this story and the silver lining is twofold. First pieces. I mean like I was in hospital for several weeks because they, they couldn’t figure out how to get rid of this bug because there was a super bug. I’m Rsa and they tried all sorts of cocktails of antibiotics to get rid of it. So I’m just like, you know, I’m fit youngish, healthy guy and didn’t know if I was going to recover from this infection.

But the silver lining is one I didn’t die. And two, before I went into hospital, I picked up a copy of a book by a guy called Steve Blank and whether or not you know him or have him, he’s the guy who God fathered the lean startup movement. So he, he was the, the teacher mentor to a guy called Eric Reese. You’ve probably heard of. He wrote the book, the start, the lean startup. Um, but Steve Blank was his mentor and this book and it’s like, you know, it’s a textbook. And um, I just thought while I was in hospital, didn’t have that many visitors and I also had, um, a separate ward because I had this super bug. I wasn’t, I was with the NHS and it wasn’t, you know, any special treatment. But because I had a, this, this bug, they wanted to contain me. So I had my own little separate room off, a kind of off the main ward and, and I was in there for a few weeks and I had nothing else to do other than read this book again and again and go through it.

And it was so good. If you haven’t read it and you’re into company building, then I whole heartedly recommend that you do. If customer development is a path that is relevant for what you’re doing. And I also started to using memory techniques that I have trained myself and trained other people and started to build out frameworks in my head to put the contents of the book into my head. Because I think there’s a lot of power in having frameworks at your fingertips. So, you know, silver linings Hay. And, um, but anyway, when I came out to the hospital, I, I still have to, to obviously tell the guy who I’d co founded this company with, that this was the holy grail of the path that we should be following. And I was slightly frustrated and disappointed because what else he, he hadn’t spent the last several weeks. I’m consuming this literature and getting really like jazzed up on it and he just didn’t want to listen.

And his actual, his response was, listen, I feel like I’m fighting you and your books. And I just thought, how can you be so stupid? Like these guys who wrote this book, Steve Blank and bobbed, or sorry, I took to credit both authors. Um, these guys have built 14 tech companies between them and how many have we built between us? Right? I’m a huge, huge believer in not reinventing every wheel, especially when you don’t need to, unlike standing on the shoulders of giants and going from that cause he can go further faster. So it was very frustrating to me and ultimately the, the relationship didn’t work out and we parted ways and the business didn’t work. And, um, I actually ended up speaking to Steve Blank about the business. Um, but again, another story. Um, but anyway, so I was out in the market and this is, um, 2014 and, um, I, I strongly believe in the model, if you will.

It’s a mental model of a strategy of preeminence and that is just lead by giving value first. And that’s what I hope that some of the stuff that I’m teaching you or that you’ll either learn that you’ve experienced from listening to me or that you will go on and listen to, will, I will bring you lots of value. And I really believe in bringing value to people upfront. Before any ask. And I’ve done this with, um, so a couple of friends of mine started a, started a tech company, um, data, data management and analytics business. And I had, I’d been through a lot of sales training over the years and I sat down with, um, one of my good friends who was one of the cofounders and just opened up all of the training that I’d had the, the pleasure of experiencing to help him structure his initial sales sales plan.

And, and that was, that was kind of it. But then, so come come to 2014. And um, he approached me with, uh, you know, questions to help them with some, some other aspects of his business, uh, helping him with some of the sales ops infrastructure. I’m just what tools they needed. And we ended up working together. I ended up working for, uh, my, my two friends and went on this journey over four years from 2014 to 2018 of building a high growth, high tech VC backed business. And it was awesome. It was a truly wild ride and it’s exactly what I wanted to do. And I had the opportunity to bring to that organization the frameworks that I had spent time putting into my head that were essential for company growth and essential for having a view on where we were as an organization in our journey from idea three to fixing business model, which is as far as I’m concerned, is invaluable.

And, um, after four years options vesting, I wanted a new adventure and that was marriage fatherhood’s and I wanted to spend teaching and writing and coaching and consulting, which is home, how I am spending my time now and building my own projects and products. And one of those is, so who, last year 2018, um, a friend of mine, she approached me and asked me if I would, I would help her. We’ll show her how to put a set of mental models in her head. So I kind of applying memory techniques to mental models and I’m sure if you’re listening to this then you almost certainly familiar with font, the phone, them street blog and Shane Parrish. And there’s one massive article in there that has like a, it’s being, you know, refined in edited over time, but, uh, there were like 113 mental models and now there’s like 109, but whatever the, it’s, it’s a, um, a collection of models that Shane and his team have looked at and, and looked at from both the way the world works.

Um, but also from reverse engineering, how Charlie Manga and Warren Buffet in particular, Charlie mango, but how the two of them go about thinking about the world at large and could deconstructing that and grouping tools, mind tools, mental models and distinctions into a number nine, also different main bodies. And so that’s one project that I have worked on after, um, after some time. And it’s been really, really satisfying. And what, like if you want to know more about that and not, it’s not, um, how to say, I guess it’s, I looked at looked at it with a view to say, not just how can I teach someone memory stuff and then then go away and apply it. But what if I could actually remove or reduce the barrier to entry and do a lot of the heavy lifting for people who want to consume and use memory techniques but have it applied so it’s not something that you want to know more about. Then, um, listen to the outro of this episode. So listen, that’s kind of been a whistle stop tour, a bit of a welcome and me saying hi and do stay tuned for more. That’s it to the outro.

Hey, thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I really hope you’ve enjoyed the show and if you’ve taken any benefit from this, then please go ahead and subscribe to make sure that you catch the next one. Now I’ve got something else that I think you’re really gonna love a short wanted to go. I asked myself a question, would it be possible to design a program that takes information and structures it in a way that it just goes into your head and what better information to do that with than a set of mental models on human nature and judgment. And that’s exactly what I’ve done. I took 24 models and on cognitive biases and created a done for you memory palace. And I’ve had hundreds of people go through this free program. And if that’s something that you want as well, getting 24 fundamental cognitive biases, uh, the mental models on human nature and judgment delivered to your long term memory, then just go over to story, this.com forward slash mental models, or that’s all one word, no hyphens or anything like that. And that’s exactly what you’ll get. There’ll be an invitation for you there to jump in or be of one hour. You can watch through it and, um, go over there now and enjoy it. So once again, that is a story, this.com forward slash mental models, all one word. And that is in. So once again, thanks for tuning in. I’m Richard Bowdler and this is mental models radio. Catch you in the next one.

Bye for now.

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So that’s the loop. And why learning is so important? Let me just quote Alvin Toffler:

“It’s safe to say that the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write. But those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”

Without attention we have nothing. No capacity to learn and no capacity to remember.

That’s why attention is so important.

At a high level you can break down attention into two areas:
– your internal attention
– your external attention

I’m going to give you a smattering of tools that can help with each area.

So tools that I use and the thousands of other people swear by for helping with internal attention. Number one is meditation and meditation can be either generic, whether it’s a transcendental meditation or something specific like focusing on a mantra and repeating that over and over,
OR writing out your mission statement, a mission statement for what you’re doing, what you believe in, what you stand for, and focusing on reiterating that. It doesn’t just need to be spoken. You can view a sport, an exercise regime that you have, as a meditation for you.

Whether that’s yoga, stretching, going for a run, doing sprints, doing weights, swimming. Whatever kind of exercise that you do, that puts you into a different mental state as a form of meditation. And it helps to pay attention to that.

What I want to talk about in more detail is tools that you can use to help your external environment to support your attention. Because if you’re like me, like many other people, you work online, behind a desk at a computer, they’re are a number of distractions, at every single turn.
And we really want to look at how can you minimize those distractions. I’m going to point you to a couple of tools that can really help. So the one thing that I want to start with is a concept called “The ONE Thing”. It is exactly what it says on the tin.

It really helps if you can just focus on one single thing and that’s it in a nutshell. A book that has been written by a very successful entrepreneur. A guy called Gary Keller who’s co-founder and chairman of Keller Williams Realty, which is one of the largest real estate companies in the world. He now consults and focuses on teaching his concept of the one thing.
What he found was the effectiveness of his teams went through a process where initially, each of his teams would have multiple things to focus on week by week.

Then he saw that not that much was getting done or his teams weren’t as effective as he wanted them to be. So he experimented with reducing the number of things that he wanted them to focus on and stripped it down and thought, “well, what if I just give people three things to focus on?”

And then “what if I just give people two things to focus on?” until eventually he experimented with,

“what if I just give each team or each head of division one thing to focus on?”

…and then just to operate around that one thing. The performance and productivity of all of the individuals that reported to him as well as his company went through the roof. His consulting practice is now focused on that. As another point of interest on that → Peter Thiel, who is a cofounder of PayPal and the Thiel Foundation, a very successful tech entrepreneur. He notoriously, rigorously, when he has managed people, he manages around one specific metric or one specific thing. The only conversations that he allows each individual report to have with him, the conversation has to be about that one thing. And if it’s not, then it’s not relevant at that time.

And it’s a discipline. It’s a management practice and a discipline both for you managing yourself… your own focus and effectiveness. And if you manage other people, to do the same. So I’m going to share

The ONE Thing

That was the name of the book.

There’s another, another couple of tools that I really like to use and I’d suggest you check out if you’re not already familiar with. One is using a process called Kanban. It’s a Japanese management process and it is so simple. I always find that the simplest tools are the best. In summary, you have three columns, possibly four.

And you can use a tool like Trello because it’s free or you could use a spreadsheet if you want, but Trello’s very easy to use. On the left you have a list of things. It’s your to do list and then the next list over at you have things that are in progress. Then what I like to do is to have an additional column. So rather than just having to do in progress and done, I like to have an additional column.

The thought is; in between “in progress” and “done”. So to do in progress and then won’t the one thing now and then done. So there’s a column that has the one thing now and that is the one thing that you will be focusing on right now. So at any one time, there was only ever one “card”. If you’re familiar with Trello, they use cards or there’s only ever one item in that column that is the one thing that you are focusing on right now.

And you focus on that, and only that, until it is done. And then you moved out over. Now I know there are, there are nuances to this. Another piece of literature I recommend is called

“The productivity Ninja” by a guy called Graham Allcott.

I’ll link to that as well. And that is yes, it’s great to have one thing to focus on, but obviously throughout the day, your attention, your energy, can wane wax and wane. So it’s useful to have a set of items, a set of tasks that you can do that do not require your deep focus and concentration that you can just pick off. Let’s say you’ve had a kind of called heavy lunch or you feel particularly tired at some point in the afternoon. You want a list of things that you can just kind of knock off quite easily.

But for the one thing, you want that to be a meaty piece of work that requires a deep focus and concentration. So that’s Kanban, and Trello (which I’m sure you’re familiar with) and Productivity Ninja.

Those are a few tools for you to look at. This is a short episode. There’s way more that I could go into here and I’m going to be talking further in further episodes about things like the one metric that matters, accountability and how to structure Accountabilities to help with your productivity. But some of those will be in future episodes.

There is loads more on this topic that is really powerful stuff to get into that I want to cover in another episode… such as looking at design of your systems to help you focus and attend to what it is that you need to.

But before I go, I just want to finish with this quote, which is from a lady who lived in the early 19 hundreds. A lady called Muriel Lester who was a peace campaigner and activist and became good friends with Gandhi. Here’s the quote:

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance… that applies to the freedom that you have in your mind. You need to be vigilant to things that will take up your attention and take up your time. I think that’s a great quote to finish with. And finally, if you’d like some more detail on all of this, go over and put together a free training on metacognition, learning and learning how to learn and improving decision making. Going to storythis.com

And there is an excellent free training session for you there. Must’ve lost the, with more of this juicy goodness and some actionable takeaways.

I’ve really enjoyed having you tune in here. I hope you’ve found this useful. Stay tuned, subscribe below if you haven’t already, and I will catch you on another episode.

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