How Barbara Corcoran turned $1,000 into a $5 Billion Empire.

Spend more time implementing wisdom, not collecting it.

The Productivity Show: Asian Efficiency

Episode - The most overrated productivity hacks

• To become more productive, implement one new tactic each week - no big, dramatic changes are necessary.

• 3 top resources: a) 4 Disciplines of Execution, b) You can use your library card to gain access to online courses on LinkedIn. c) Simply Scan for scanning documents at home with ease.

• Create positive associations around stressful things. Example: When you feel stressed at work, instead of reaching for junk food, go for a walk.

• For habit formation, building a streak is critical. Example: Simply driving to the gym for 2 weeks in a row, even if you don’t work out will program a new habit. This will increase your chances of actually working out exponentially.

• Zero base calendar or Hyper Scheduling: This approach of scheduling is akin to zero based budgeting where you are allocating where each dollar you make goes. You schedule every minute of your day including leisure time. My personal opinion is that this approach is overrated as it will create too much friction with reality. It will cause frustration and discouragement. Who wants to be micro-managed by their calendar anyway? I don’t. I am however all about allocating blocks of time for specific tasks (batching).

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Tim Ferris Show Podcast

Episode - Barbara Corcoran - How she turned 1,000 into a $5 Billion Empire.

• Barbara is dyslexic and came from humble beginnings (a household of 10 kids). But, she invested early in developing skills she naturally gravitated to. These skills were entertaining people with her imagination and storytelling. This investment made Barbara incredibly savvy at PR and creating a buzz around a product. Lesson: lean into your natural tendencies and work at them till they turn into your superpower.

• Never take a victim mentality. Barbara “The difference between rich and poor people is that poor people spend too much time feeling sorry for themselves.”

• Recovering from failures is critical to building a good life.

• Opportunities come to people with enthusiasm. People who are happy and have a positive outlook.

• Use your difficulty. Barbara was often the only woman in a male-dominated industry. She used it to her advantage by dressing the part and grabbing attention she could turn into meaningful conversation/leads and business opportunities.

• The best question in sales is to ask - ‘When do you need it by?’. It reinforces the customer’s need and creates urgency.

• The best close is the ‘reverse close’. Take the pressure off the customer by telling them ‘Promise me you won’t buy anything today'. Think about it and then make a decision tomorrow.’ This can relieve the buyer from the stress of making a decision and put them at ease. It also earns you (the seller) a lot of trust because you are looking out for the buyer’s best interest.

• After-sale care: The most important follow-up is the follow-up. Do it frequently and consistently.

• Exercise and pulling weeds is the best therapy in the world.

• You regret the things you don’t confront, particularly when they are a moral fight.

• If you have the means, be willing to overpay for things you really like. Money can help bypass a lot of unwanted stress and delays.

• Hire happy people.

• Check out Barbara in your pocket on Patreon where you can interact with Barbara and get her feedback.

• What Barbara will put on a billboard for millions of people to see - ‘You are a lot more capable than you think you are.” Don’t write yourself off too early.

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Beyond the To-Do List

Episode: Terri Sjodin on improving your presentation skills and public speaking

• 3 mistakes to avoid during a business presentation: 1. Don’t wing it, 2. Concluding/ending without making an ask, 3. Being informative over being persuasive

• To remedy these mistakes, prepare an outline of your discussion with the top 3 points based on your audience. Balance information with persuasive arguments. Always end with an ask.

• Making an ask is all about delivery. After a sales presentation, ending with ‘ok, do you have any questions’ vs. ‘How would you like to proceed from here?’ will have a materially different net result. This can be the difference between a sale or no sale. Making an ask is about showing the path forward. if the audience is engaged and interested then show them the next logical steps. Example: ‘You seem interested in our services, so the next step will be an agreement which will include the terms we discussed,’ etc.

• Using the above-mentioned framework will lead to further questions which is what you want. You want further dialog. This will help you understand what the audience really needs.

• The most common and consistent feedback about sales presentations is that they are boring. If you are a sales professional, pay attention. The remedy is to use stories to make your presentations more engaging and entertaining.

• Effective communication is THE great leveler. It negates where you came from, your socio-economic background, and to some degree how much you know about the subject matter.

• If you are a business professional, I recommend reading Terri Sjodin’s book.

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Deep dive with Ali Abdaal

Episode: The emotions expert: Why avoiding feelings is dangerous

• The body keeps the score of your emotional trauma. Cultivate a practice where you are always aware of your body and its sensations to some degree. For example, awareness that you are clinching your jaw, grinding your teeth, making a fist, etc. We experience the world through our bodies but don’t take the time to process or reset all this incoming information.

• Emotional abuse occurs when somebody holds you responsible for their emotional state or somebody tells you what you are feeling is not valid.

• Putting your chin up is a somatic coping mechanism to avoid the feelings. Putting the chin down consciously will take your attention inwards and help process the feelings deeply.

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Huberman Lab Podcast

Episode: How to enhance focus and improve productivity

• Focus is a habit. It can be cultivated by using techniques like productivity meditation (Cal Newport’s book Deep Work has much more on this topic)

• Astrologers need telescopes. Thinkers need whiteboards.  Your brain processes information written vertically in a different/better way which can help work through complex ideas.

• The best way to learn is by using ‘Active Recall.’  Study a topic, underline the key ideas, and then walk away (take a break from it). While away, try to reconstruct the ideas in your head. Check how far you got and fill the gaps. The brain learns by making educated failures/mistakes followed by calibrated corrections.

• Practice makes perfect. But, what you practice and how you practice matters. Focus on attacking the pieces you find difficult to learn. Study them intensely (highly focused). Done this way, even small practice sessions can lead to exponential growth over time. One way to know you are doing it right will be by the sheer frustration generated by the process. Learning intensely is meant to be difficult and frustration is natural. Keep going.

• Failure or being bad at something provides the exact conditions for the brain to create plasticity (an environment that facilitates change/growth).

• Deep work is not flow state. Do not look for a ‘flow state’ while doing deep, concentrated work. You may reach the flow state as a by-product but to rely on it or aim for it will be unproductive.

• Your brain has to pay a price for switching from one task to another - cognitive disorder. For instance, if you are working on a complex problem but switch to checking email, or texting in between, your brain has to activate different pathways for that switch. This can hamper your overall brain power and how much cognitive output you can apply to a specific task. Instead, if you focus on one task, your brain will find the ‘groove’ and you will get more done (and of better quality). Try the Pomodoro technique.

• Pseudo-Productivity: Modern definitions of productivity come from agriculture and industry where the focus is on measuring and finding optimal ratios. This output-based thinking cannot be applied to modern work life (or personal). Pseudo-productivity can also be described as being busy or passing time doing things that seem productive i.e. checking email.

• Giving your time a job ie. blocking time for specific tasks works better than making a To-do list. A list helps document what needs to be done but doesn’t define when it will be done. There is no internal accountability or external mechanism to produce the work. Time blocking solves this problem as long as you do the assigned task in the time slot allotted for it.

• Have a long-term mindset around productivity. Think in decades. What do you want to produce in your 20s, 30s, and 40s? Audit if you are happy with the quality of work you are producing.

• List all the distractions you would deploy for your biggest rival or competitor. Make sure you are not falling victim to those distractions. In some terms, your most focused and productive version always competes with your distracted version.

• A large part of the attention deficiet crisis is caused by the bad selection of a working environment. Just like an athlete has parameters around eating, exercise, technique, not smoking, etc., anyone focused on learning and being productive must also pay attention to all contributing factors. Choosing or creating an environment conducive to learning or managing distractions is critical. Both physical and cognitive excellence demand that you pay attention to the details.

• “It’s easy to be exceptional these days because so many people are distracted.”- David Goggins.

• Cal Newport’s top 3 recommendations:

  1. ‘Pull’ work on your plate intentionally rather than allowing others to ‘push’ work on your plate.

  2. Plan on three levels: Quarterly - Weekly - Daily. Quarterly vision feeds the weekly time blocking and the weekly plan determines what your day looks like.

  3. Have a shutdown ritual. Make sure the urgent things are taken care of and you have a plan for the next day. Write down things that are on your mind - mind dump. Then, have a demonstrative step that declares that you are done for the day. Cal Newport says this out load - ‘ Scheduled shutdown complete’

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The Greg McKeown Podcast

Episode: What’s essential: The power of systems with Rob Dyrdek

• Systems are more important than effort.

• Everything is created twice, once mentally/emotionally/spiritually and the second time, physically.

• Rythym of Existence: This is a documented operating system of your life. It’s built to drive all aspects of life to automation and then optimization.

• Aim for systems that help you excel in all the key areas of life i.e. health, wealth, relationships, etc.

• Focus on dynamic equilibrium. Constantly calibrate/adjust while living a balanced life - not a life where you're sacrificing your time with your loved ones over making money/work.

• Create 4 key categories of your life (The Core Four). Examples: health, wealth, skill acquisition, and relationships. Rank order how you are performing in each category from 1-10. Doing this will provide you with quantitative data over time. This will help you discover unknown triggers for your behavior. For example: You drank too much on Saturday and your sleep pattern for the rest of the week was impacted because each day was a 6.

• What gets measured gets managed.

• Mega trade-offs: What’s the first thing you trade-off when work gets busy or there are demands on your time/schedule? The common answers are health (no exercise), diet (more junk food), and relationships (no time for loved ones). These are bad trade-offs. So, you need a system that prevents you from trading your time from other key categories. If you allot 30% of your time to work activities, then the focus is to optimize that 30% to get as much done as possible and not borrow time from other categories. One word - balance.

• If you think creating such a system sounds cumbersome, consider that you already have a highly complex system. The difference is now you are implementing a system, deliberately and intentionally.

• This year alone, Rob created 250 episodes for his TV show which was viewed over 55 billion minutes on cable TV. He accomplished that with only 4% of his total allocated work time. That’s the value of an intentional system.

Hope you found these summaries valuable.

Which segment or tactic are you going to implement this week? Comment below.

Much Love,

PM