DGS 28: Genius & Speed Learning with Jameson Brandon

Today, I am hanging out with Jameson Brandon and talking about the subject of genius and speed learning. We talk about how to really tap in and connect with your genius and purpose, and how to remove stuff from your life that is preventing that from happening. This all affects growth and how your business is growing. We talk about energy management, time management, and building a team that is motivated and passionate.

Every business, especially, property management businesses want to grow faster. Jameson and I talk about unlocking your inner genius to grow your business faster. Most business owners want to be moving faster, but they run into roadblocks. People commonly think the roadblocks are due to lack of tools or resources, but they are usually rooted in a much deeper belief. In this episode, we explore what it means to be a genius, and how to bring out the genius in all of us.

You’ll Learn…

[04:00] What it takes to be a genius. We all have genius inside us.
[07:11] How people need to find what drives them and gives them joy.
[09:41] How identifying with something creates a dynamic that makes it stronger.
[10:12] Producer is a dreamer and thinker. The performer is a doer. In school, we are forced to become performers.
[12:44] How what gets measured is the thing where the focus is.
[16:47] Shifting our thinking towards passion and what we desire through an increase in awareness and asking deeper questions.
[19:12] Why we deserve to remove the little things that take away our power.
[21:25] Asking the tough questions and removing what we don’t want to do.
[24:31] Inspiring others to find their true principles and getting clear on why.
[26:06] How energy management and feeling good is even better than time management.
[27:21] Finding out what your employees love doing and hire them for that.
[29:06] Going through the refinement process of letting go and finding what you love.
[30:04] Knowing your purpose and focus enables you to learn much quicker. Stand on the shoulders of giants and learn from others.
[31:10] Tell your mind to serve up more of what you are focusing on. Thin down your focus.
[32:17] Having each team member focus on one thing.
[33:48] Finding a company or software that fills the challenges you are facing.
[34:49] Focusing on a few core things that you should focus on.
[38:29] The endless to-do list of stuff to learn.
[39:31] Put people in place to manage things. Have a process for how things are done, and even how much you learn.
[44:15] Speed learning hacks. Find in love with the topic. Break it down into micro pieces and study until they become a habit. Create micro goals or measurements, so you know that you are moving forward.
[46:32] Laws of frequency and recently. And reviewing.
[50:44] Getting very good at living in the future to become the future thing.

Tweetables

Resources

How great leaders inspire action Simon Sinek Ted Talk

Optimizing Man

@jbrandon0 Jameson on Twitter

Jameson on Facebook

Jameson YouTube

Jameson LinkedIn

Transcript

Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to The DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and expand your rent roll, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrow Hacker.

At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to grow property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, expand the market, and help the best property managers win. If you enjoy this episode, do me a favor, open up iTunes, find The DoorGrow Show, subscribe, and then give us a real review. Thank you for helping us with that vision.

I’m your host, property management growth hacker, Jason Hull, the founder of OpenPotion, GatherKudos, Thunder Local, and of course, DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show.

This is episode number 28. In this episode, I’m hanging out again with Jameson Brandon. We’re talking on the subject of genius and speed learning, how to really tap in and connect with your genius, how it connects to purpose, how to remove stuff from your life that is preventing that from happening. This all affects growth, it all affects growth and how your business is growing. We talk about energy management, time management, we talk about building a team that has passion, that you don’t have to motivate, we talked about how we all start to suck. There’s so many great take aways from this. I hope you really enjoy it. Let’s get into the show.

We are live. This is Jason Hull, I’m here with Jameson Brandon. Jameson, welcome back.

Jameson: Thanks man, good to be back on the show.

Jason: Cool, we’re going to be talking today about what you first mentioned over to me, you said, “We’re going to talk about genius and speed learning.” I was like, “Okay, both of those sound really cool to me. Really interesting.” We’re going to be talking about unlocking your inner genius to grow your business faster. If there’s one thing that pretty much every business owner wants, especially my audience which are property management entrepreneurs, it’s to grow their business and to grow it faster. What really makes somebody a genius?

Jameson: I think first and foremost, let’s just say that predominantly, I think most business owners, whatever space you’re in, you want to be moving faster right now. It just seems like that’s the hot topic. The only thing is that we run into a ton of road blocks and at first they’re misdiagnosed because the awareness isn’t there. It’s almost like we’re asking the wrong questions because we just don’t know what we don’t know.

We think it’s issues like tools, and resources, and funding, and money, those are all the common things, but it’s not. Usually it’s rooted to a much deeper belief and a neuronetwork that has gone on unchecked over a period of time.

The thing about being a genius is I think everybody is. Albert Einstein said, “Everybody is a genius but the issue is that if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it’s gonna spend its whole life thinking it was stupid.”

The problem is not only with learning in itself but this title of being a genius, we have designated it in society and we’ve come up with this set of rules for what it takes to be a genius. When you hear the word, when you think about it, you think back to people like Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Benjamin Franklin, Edison, you think of people like that. You think of modern day people like Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates, and people like that. We’ve got these preconceived notions that these people are somehow special, they’re born with different DNA, with more chromosomes, with different muscular structure, something like that and we immediately just remove yourself out of the equation, out of possibly being a genius in some sort of way.

What I define as genius, let’s just take a side step, is we all have this magical ability. We’ve all experienced this, this is when you’re in the state, you want to call it flow—I think it’s a little bit beyond flow—where things effortlessly happen. Obviously, productivity has gone up. I’ve talked about flow state before, that’s a natural occurrence that happens as your productivity goes up, time distortion happens, things are happening in a compound interest effect on your ability to get things done.

I think the genius state is taking that flow state that you happen to have and get access to in patches and it takes that and makes it like an everyday thing. When you look at people like Steve Jobs, when you look at people like Warren Buffett, everyday it’s like the best day of their life, everyday they’re able to tackle these difficult decisions and face these tough things and it’s like, how do they do it?

Again, that just all gives us proof and evidence towards like oh they are special, they’re different, we can never be that.

Jason: Right.

Jameson: I don’t think it’s that at all. I just think that they figured out a few key things and then they focus on those. I’ll share those really quick. I think early on they found what makes them tick. They figured out that thing that they just fallen in love with.

You look at Warren Buffet, he started out six or seven doing newspapers, that’s like a couple of cents a piece. Then from there, he grew on into starting to read all the yearly end reports for publicly traded companies. He waited his dad’s library and read every single book inside of there. He found what he loved and he just kept going after it.

My brother was the same way, my brother loved numbers. Warren Buffett fell in love with the game of business early on. My brother fell in love with numbers early on. I don’t think it happens for everybody, it happens at different points when you find that oh, that’s my thing. I think this is conversation probably for another time but I think school and a lot of the path that we take mutes and hides the us finding our kind of thing early on. That’s what people don’t find it till their 40s, 50s, 60s, and maybe not even at all.

Jason: Let’s touch on that just briefly. What you’re saying is people need to find their why, what drives them, what innately they’re hard wired to be interested in and find joy in and do that’s just them.

Jameson: Yeah.

Jason: Part of the challenges that’s been interrupted or disrupted or damaged or prevented by the situation in which they’ve been brought up, school, upbringing, and that’s probably the majority of society and probably the majority of people listening. Let’s talk about how that gets interupted, how that gets prevented, and then maybe we could figure out how can we take people out of that, how can these people listening get out of that situation.

Jameson: Yeah, I don’t even know where we would start with that. I’ll start throwing a few things out. Public school system gets you to operate in a certain way, they base it off of performance, they base it off of numbers, how you do on your SATs, how you do on testing. That is their benchmark for how they gauge performance.

An interesting book that I cracked open recently, I can’t remember the title of it. Basically, goes back to the beginning and the inception of Ritalin. Ritalin was the very first medication that was given to what they deemed as ADD and ADHD. What was interesting is at the height of that, it encompassed 11% of the population in United States. It’s like everybody is getting it, everybody had the issue, and they started tackling the adult market.

That was actually created back in the 40s. A guy had created it for his wife so that she could focus more playing tennis. He noticed that she played tennis better and she obviously had these cognitive upticks and that’s when they rebranded it and they even named it after her. Her name was Rita, and then they created Ritalin.

Then Ritalin took the school system by storm and they were starting to throw kickbacks to the schools for the prescription amount that they were writing and the amount of madness that started to occur based off of this whole phenomenon of ADD and ADHD. You look at it now, it’s like a full blown disease. All it does when you have a disease is it enables you to act a certain way, because you’ve categorized yourself, you’ve become this thing, you’ve identified with it. For example, the identifier I’m homeless. You’re identifying with being homeless. How hard is it going to be for you to get a job? How hard is it gonna be for you to get a house? That’s all based on how deeply you identify with it.

Jason: Right.

Jameson: How hard is it going to be for you to get over cancer? It depends how deeply you identify with it. The same thing here, you have this dynamic that’s basically trying to push and force everybody to be a performer.

To bring in the second point that I was heading towards, is that I believe the easiest way to break people down there is all these personality tests. There’s a simple way I’ve heard it broken down which is called producer and performer.

Producer is the dreamer and the thinker. Performer is the doer. Now here’s the issue, all of us are forced to become a performer in school because we’re rewarded based on what? Performance; our grades, our academia, our performance. That doesn’t stop there, we get our first job. What are we graded off of, what are we judged off of to get a bonus, to get a promotion? Our performance.

Regardless if you’re a producer or performer, you’re probably quite good at being a performer. That’s true for everybody in the United States anyways and every other country that follows our system. That’s where the big divide happens. You’re talking about where do we go and pinpoint and find thins breakdown of what has occured. It occured from the very get go, passed elementary school when art class is no longer taken that serious.

If you haven’t fully committed into the path of maybe being a musician and being in band or being on the acting in theatre classes or being fully engaged in sports–junior high and high school, all they’re really there to do is support what you’ve already chosen to be, but not everybody has chosen at that point.

All the other things that are affecting you environmentally, at home, your parent pressure, your school pressures. I know for me I wasn’t decided on what I wanted to do in high school, in junior high, because it was also true through elementary up until junior high, I was labeled as special ed, I was labeled as ADHD, super hyper active and back then it’s just the 90s so they put in the special needs ads.

There’s kids in wheelchairs drooling on themselves, those kids had issues. They had problems, I didn’t. I was just bored with the teacher, I just didn’t want to focus on the topic of history because I just didn’t see the point. How was that even serving me even to this day? It’s really not. It’s not even like fun fact in little percentages that I can drop a conversation, make me seem smart. It’s almost utterly worthless.

I think that the vibe starts right in the beginning, as soon as you get into the public school system, because it’s rewarding the performer and it’s muting out the creative side of most of us.

Jason: Part of the challenge is from the beginning, we start getting measured by something. Whatever we’re measured on, that’s what the focus is, that’s what the teachers are pushing, and we’re trying to crow all these people, students, to measure up to these standards, these tests, these standardized tests, these results that really only are probably geared towards one particular type of person.

Jameson: Yeah. Remember, it’s all working off of a bell curve. The grading system and stuff based on the class, they’re gonna take the person who’s the best in getting the highest score and the worst and try and create bell curve off of that. Again, that whole system that we’re working off of doesn’t really reward the creative type.

Even in corporate America, you look at today, we’re just now starting to crack the veneer on performers being in a CEO title and allowing a producer to be there. I think one of the people that really pioneered that to the people was Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and the whole thing that happened with the computer revolution. That really showed the world wow, you don’t have to be thins analytical performer, you could be like a dreamer and still have a successful company.

Now, you have a lot more of the corporation starting to open up towards that idea but is still predominantly not widely accepted at all. But the reality is that you need equal part thinker and equal part doer. You need the creative type just as much you need to action oriented guy who’s in the trenches getting shit done.

Jason: I think another issue in school, in our upbringing, is that school is very repetitive versus experiential. It’s a lot of regurgitation. It’s like memorization versus experiential learning. My son Hudson for example, he’s very kinesthetic. He’s definitely more like an entrepreneur personality type. Some people probably try to categorize him as ADHD.

Part of the challenge is that he shows up at school and he’s already complaining to me about art class for example. I said, “What do you do?” He’s like, “I hate going to school Wednesdays.” I’m like, “Why? Why don’t you like Wednesdays?” Because I ask him each morning like, “What are you excited about today?” He’s not excited about Wednesdays. I say, “Why not Wednesdays?” “Because we do art.” I was like, “What? Why don’t you like art?”

What I came to find out is that basically, the art teacher comes and says, “Hey everybody, we’re going to make this picture and I’m going to tell you exactly how to make this particular picture. We’re going to do it this way.” There’s zero creativity involved.

Jameson: Yeah.

Jason: I was like what?!

Jameson: They’ve even taken the fun out of art class. If you were to invite 5, 10 kids and say, “Hey, who wants to draw on the board?” When you’re a kid, everyone is gonna run up and draw on the board. That’s how we used to do it. The teacher will just open up the chalkboard and we can all start drawing pictures.

By the time you’re in junior high, high school, an adult, how many people are gonna come up and draw a picture? We all feel so stupid and judged, inner about how people are gonna think of our picture that we don’t even try.

I think that coming back to the topic of genius and speed learning, so much of it is de-learning the bad habits of the public school system sadly, and how we were raised from our parents, and how we’re just told to go and get a good job and put in your 40 years and then retire. All the shit has to be removed before I can even step into this space and offer in my own genius.

Jason: How do we start to disconnect from that? How do we start to shift our thinking out of like all of my performance is based on just getting these numbers versus shifting towards maybe passion, what we desired, what our genius is.

Jameson: I think that’s a lot of increasing awareness. You need to start asking deeper questions. Let’s look at somebody right now listening to this that’s running a business. They’re dealing with multiple employees they’re already managing, they’re dealing with different vendors, they’re wearing a lot of different hats. You need to immediately ask the question, while you’re doing this, do I like doing this? Yes or no? Yes, keep doing it. No, find somebody immediately in the next five days to take that task over.

I’ll tell you for me, personally, that’s been a huge shift for me. This year, I’ve already bought on three different staff. Before in the past, I had upwards of 30 staff but it was all just developers. I never had an assistant, I never had a social media person. We’ve had people running our ads in the past, but I still heavily micro managed them and they were expensive, they were like $5000, $10,000 a month. These are top Facebook ad guys that you see all through your Facebook newsfeed all day long.

This year, at the end of last year, really came to the conclusion because I ran an event all by myself and it was so hard and so stressed. I just said you know what? I’m done with this. I’m gonna really refine down what’s my genius. What is the thing that gets me excited and that I could do all day long, whether I was making money or not, whether I was tired, whether I was happy, or sad. What are the things that I could do no matter what? And it is really wouldn’t feel like work.

You ask that enough times, you really start to refine it down into real tangible stuff. The first few times, I think you stuck at it. That’s true of anything. The first few times, you’re still not really allowing yourself to feel out the question and actually give a real answer. When you ask that more and more, you start to come up with clear answers.

The reason why is because there is a quick little audit and I don’t think I have time to share it, maybe we’ll go through it in different time. But there’s different reasons why we don’t want to do things. For example, I didn’t bring on an assistant for the longest time because of really silly things. I didn’t think that I deserved it, I didn’t think that it was appropriate at the time, I wasn’t even sure if it was possible, all of these are the reasons why actually I didn’t do it. But as soon as I did it, it was magical how much stress that actually relieved off of me.

I’ll tell you, the number one reason why I didn’t is because I didn’t think I actually deserved a assistant. Like, “Who am I to have an assistant?” We’ve predominantly heard of people that have assistants are important, high level business executives and here’s me, just running the solo little show. Even if I’m doing a couple of million dollars a year, I really didn’t really feel that I needed an assistant, like I deserved it.

But again, I came to this conclusion, I asked these questions enough times to where I was just like I’m not dealing with any of this mundane stuff anymore. A lot of the email stress has been removed off of me, a lot of the day to day stuff, everything that we’re dealing with that I dealt with to get moved into the loft that I’m in, just gave it to them. All the little stuff I would normally go and handle myself, going and getting groceries, going and getting my food, all handled for me.

Jason: Right.

Jameson:When you start to remove those little things that disempower you—without you even realizing that they’re just empowering you—when you’ve removed enough of that, then all that’s left is for you to go and do what you love doing. At first, again, I think it’s like a bump and grind process and it’s little by little.

Right now, I brought on the assistant, next is social media, then we’re gonna bring on a vlogger and have them do like a lot of the video work for us. Once I’ve removed those things, I’ve got a developer ready, that has taken away like 90% of my day. I’ll probably go though a couple of days to where I’ll just sit around like what am I gonna do today?

I might even be bored almost, which I don’t think you should ever be bored. But I’ll go a few days to where I’ll just be like, “What am I supposed to do now?” Because you’re so shaken by the fact that everything that you used put all this time and energy into, you might not like it but you put a ton of time into it is all of a sudden gone. I think that’s the simplest way. Instead of trying to go back and heal childhood traumas, and getting hypnosis, and take psychedelics and go on this huge spiritual quest to try and cure something, just stop that. Start where you’re at and start to just really ask these tough questions which is like, “What don’t I like doing?” Remove the affordabilities and just start doing it.

Jason: I think every entrepreneur gets to the point where they realize they can’t do it all themselves. They need a team and it’s really challenging to give up, because in the beginning they do everything.

Jameson: Yeah.

Jason: They are billing, they are sales, they are marketing, they are everything. To give up each of these pieces seems really scary to them, but if they’re willing to grow, they have to be willing to let go of this control. By doing that, I found that that’s a challenge.

Right now, I’m in process of letting go of sales which is something that I’m good at but I don’t want to be focused on just doing sales. I want to spend more time focusing on content creation and developing new ideas but I’ve always had an assistant, I love having an assistant. When I don’t have an assistant, I’m always like, “I need one.”

Having a team, having people to support you is a big deal. I realized what happened for me, I was doing website design. I had this website design company, it was OpenPotion, I was doing all these websites for people I didn’t like. I was getting paid too little and they were some of the worst clients. They were micromanaging me, they’re telling where to click, basically what to do.

I would just wake up in the morning and be like, I said to my wife, “Babe, I’m not working today.” She’d see me just sitting on Netflix like I’m not working today. She’s like, “Are you taking like a you day or something?” She’d be stressing out, thinking like we need to get money in, but I was just fed up.

I was waking up dreading dealing with these things so I would just avoid it. Then, I came across Simon Sinek’s video—this TED Talk that went viral. It wasn’t even like a normal TED Talk, it was like TEDX. The video quality wasn’t even that great, but he did this talk about the golden circle and these three ideas of why, what, and how. I was really curious and it shifted my thinking. I was like what’s my why? Everything should come from my why, from my purpose.

My why is to inspire others to love true principles. I love to figure out what true principles are, those are things that work. I love to learn those thing, it’s just fun for me to leard. I love sharing that with other people, I would do that for free for fun. That’s what I do when I’m selling, that’s sales for me. It’s just getting on phone calls and finding out their issues and helping them figure out what works. That’s what my content creation is, that’s the stuff that I love doing.

I realized when I got clear on my whys, okay, here’s what I don’t like doing. This does not fulfill me, I hate making contracts, I hate spending an hour or two drafting up some sort of proposal or contract. I don’t want to do that anymore. I gave that to somebody else to draft up and work on. There were a lot of things I realized I didn’t want to do or didn’t enjoy doing. There are a lot of the things I like doing, I like doing graphic design, I like building websites, I like doing this kind of stuff. But it got to the point there was other stuff I liked more. I then needed to start giving those things up so that I could focus on the stuff that I really like doing even more.

That cycle keeps going in business, it gets to the point where you just keep building your team, you keep building them up and giving them the stuff off of your plate. One thing that shifted my focus was time management. Everybody gets so caught up on time management because they’re trying to do all this stuff on their own. I realized that what’s better than time management is just energy management, just what makes me feel good, what gives me energy, like what you’re talking about, and what doesn’t.

If I just focus my time and my energy and effort on the things that make me feel alive, that give me energy, that fulfill me, that’s exciting. By doing this with you here, this is fun. This is fun for me. I enjoy doing this.

Jameson: Yep.

Jason: Me going in, drafting up a proposal, not fun. Me doing support tickets, not fun. Here’s what’s weird though because I think the challenge that people think that we mistakenly think though is that I don’t like doing it so everybody else must not like it either.

Jameson: Yeah.

Jason: I have people on my team that they don’t want to be on phone calls, they would rather do support tickets. That’s what they enjoy doing, they like that. They’re introverted, they like that introverted interaction with people. I got people on my team that they just love doing graphic design, that’s my main thing when I hire somebody. I just say, “Just tell me what you really, really love doing. If you can just do it all day, what do you love doing?” If it’s not what I’m hiring them for, they don’t get the job.

Jameson: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a big difference. Again, I don’t think any of these geniuses had special traits or DNA prints. It’s just that they figured out themselves much early on. Again, there’s a million different ways to skin a cat. It’s like people like you and me, we went through the process of being a jack of all trades, which again, you forced yourself to get good at something really quick. Whereas it’s the exact opposite almost of school. In school, you learn about the same stuff over and over for months and almost years.

Even now to this day, I can’t recall half the stuff I learned, actually, probably 70%, 80% of the stuff I learned in school. But I can tell you everything I’ve learned last year, yet I studied that stuff in the last year, less time, and it took less of my focus. I wasn’t sitting down studying it for eight hours a day. It’s funny how it almost flipped flopped. It’s the same thing with you, we’ve gone through and we’ve become an expert at a lot of different things, we are great at a lot of different things because we felt that we had to.

Somebody like Donald Trump, somebody like Warren Buffett just said, “I don’t have to do that. I’ll just find somebody who’s already good at that.” Whereas you and I, maybe we’re trying to save a dollar, or trying to hyperfocus on staying small and keep the revenue tight. These people just said, “Nope, I’m going to go and get them right away.” That propelled them to get to that place of power much quicker and do the refinement that you and I are going through right now as individuals.

I think a lot of people on this call, they’re still going through that refinement process of letting go of the rings, and letting go of like the ego control of all the pieces. But I can tell you that what you’ve been finding out over the last couple of years is that the more you start to test […] this and how much do I love this in comparison to this thing over here.

The more you keep questioning and filtering, you will ultimately get to the play where you are doing one or two things a day and that is your absolute highest priority and that’s the thing that you’re actually best at. Everything else is being handled by somebody else. At the point, business will grow so quick, that’s the overnight success. It took you 10, 20 years and now you’re a millionaire, now you’re a billionaire, whatever it is. That’s part of the success, I think.

Jason: I think another factor is that when we know our purpose and when we know our focus, what then happens is we’re able to learn a lot quicker because we’re focusing just on that, that one thing, we’re focused just on that. When we’re focused on that one thing, there’s always a lot of information, resources and stuff, available for that specific thing.

We’re able to stand on the shoulders of giants and take what they have, learn from them and even take it further. I think anybody that’s been labeled as a genius probably stood on the shoulders of several other innovators and thinkers and producers from the past.

Jameson: Yeah.

Jason: And would openly admit that, I’m sure.

Jameson: Yeah, a lot of them it’s like they have a very microfocus. Even the guys who have 15, 20, 80 businesses, you look at somebody like Richard Branson. His focus—even though there’s hundreds of companies—is still slick. There’s easy test of this. Everybody’s watched The Secret, they tell you that the minute you start focusing on a red BMW, you see it everywhere. All you’re really telling your mind is to serve up more things related to this narrow. Whether it’s a red BMW or just being the visionary of your company, you will be served up with more support, everything, in and around that when you slim down your focus. Anything out of that is still trying to multitask and I think that’s the issue. That’s the issue with the growth problems, that’s the issue with the revenue problems is you’re still trying to focus on too much and you need to thin down that focus even more.

Jason: Yeah, that makes sense. Every single thing you add to your plate is dividing your focus. If you have one thing and you add one more thing, you’ve divided your focus and attention in half. Every time you add that, it dilutes it even more. We feel just like we’re just spinning our wheels. I find internally for my team, it’s best to have each team member have one primary focus.

Jameson: Yeah.

Jason: They have one thing they focus on. I wanted to hand off the podcast production and I was thinking well, there’s all these moving pieces to doing the podcast. There’s the graphic design to create the images, there’s the show notes, and the transcription stuff, and there’s audio editing. There’s just all these different pieces and it was taking me on average about four hours an episode. It was just crazy because you have to go through the episode multiple times, like slowly to edit it and clean up stuff, once to create the show notes. It was just taking a massive amount of time. I enjoyed doing some of it but it was just eating up so much of my time and I’d rather be making money.

Jameson: Yeah.

Jason: One option was hey I’ll hand this off to my team but our focus is not podcast production and putting all of this stuff together and putting it out. We tested that and it was diluting everybody’s focus on the team towards something else.

Jameson: Yeah.

Jason: It didn’t make sense. I ended up hiring a podcast production company because that made a lot more sense. That’s all that company focuses on, that’s their whole vision. They’ve got different team members that handle transcription, that handle this, handle that. Sometimes it’s not even just hiring the right person. Usually I recommend to clients find a company that specializes in this or find a software that facilitates whatever challenge that you’re dealing with because that’s always going to be cheaper than trying to fill a bunch of roles to take that on.

Jameson: Yeah. I think again, you just got to start chipping away at that little by little because when you’re trying to come at it the top down which is what we’re really talking about and you’re starting to slowly let go of the reins, you’re also always conscious. For some reason, it’s like you don’t want to spend the money, you want to bring on another asset, you think you can afford it, it’s always gonna be like that. But the minute you commit to it, the affordability all of a sudden is there.

The minute you say, “Okay, enough is enough. I’m bringing out an assistant.” Poof, everything works out. The minute you say I’m going to bring on the podcast team no matter how much money they are, poof, it all works and handles itself. It’s really just us getting in the way of that natural flow and again, that’s what we’re talking about with this genius state and really getting to that high level of just focusing on a few core things that you should be focused on that nobody else can deal with in the organization.

Again, you see that everywhere. You see that with Warren Buffett, you see that with Bill Gates, and their role over the years continue to be refined. In the beginning, they might have been doing a lot of the grunt work but very quickly they refined to being just this little tiny piece that they are today. Which again is very appealing, because that’s cognitive advise that we all operate off of which is called outcome bias. We see the finished product and forget what it took to get there. We’re so starstruck by the finished product that it actually derails us and it basically makes us feel bad about what we’ve got going on because we’re comparing ourselves to them.

Jason: Right.

Jameson: Comparing it to the finalized version that’s had 40, 50 years of experience. I mean, come on.

Jason: Yeah, absolutely. Comparison, when it comes to genius, it can be a tool to be leveraged positively or negatively. We can look at somebody else and go, “Oh man, they’re so far ahead of me. I’ll never be there.” Or we can also compare and look at others and look at our self a year before or two years earlier or in the past go look how far I’ve come.

Jameson: Yeah.

Jason: Really, the person we should be comparing our self with is our self yesterday.

Jameson: Yeah. If you’re comparing yourself to anybody outside of an origin of you, you’re losing and you’re just wasting energy. One thing I was gonna mention earlier, you said that any new task that you bring on, any new thought that you bring on that’s outside of your designated genius, think of it like an energetic loop.

You wouldn’t just go into your house and just plug in 30 things into the wall and turn them all on, would you? That’s actually what you’re doing when you’re comparing yourself, when you’re not closing out these loops, when you’re not handing off these jobs and tasks that people that are designated to do them and try not hold on too much of the reins. What you’re doing is you’re just spinning out your energy and draining your life force, really, and then you burn out, big surprise.

Jason: Yeah, it’s incredibly draining. Smart people hit these crisis, this is where they’re bouncing around from crisis to crisis because they’re not staying in their area of genius and keeping their focus on what their area of genius is.

Jameson: To summarize what we’ve really talked about, I believe everybody is genius in their own way. We all have our genius state, the thing that we’re great at. We all experienced that to where we picked up something extremely quick, we’re so excited about it, we delved into every information we could about that topic and we learned it extremely quickly. These things are not designated for a select few, these things are accessible to everybody. There’s a deep structure to everything, meaning that you can reverse engineer what was on the character trait itself and you can start to apply those key pieces to your life and have a positive result.

Jason: Yeah, love it. I think one of the big temptations is when we have a need to know some new knowledge or we have a need to do something or we hear about something we should be doing, like somebody pushing like, “Hey, you should be doing social media marketing, you should be doing this.” The temptation is, “Oh, I need to go learn that now.”

I think one thing that entrepreneurs tend to have is this endless to do list of stuff to learn, “Yeah, I need to learn more about that, oh I need to learn more about this.” They end up in these of loops of just learning where they’re starting programs, and buying into programs, and getting different coaches for different things but they’re never really wrapping any of those things up. It’s this endless cycle of trying. Again, it goes back to just trying to do it yourself and falling prey to this temptation that I need to learn it. As opposed to just finding somebody else that already knows that, does that, and loves that.

Jameson: Yeah, I totally agree. You got to go back to the basics here. It’s just like one thing at a time. Get your foundation set up. We’ve got Facebook nailed down now, let’s move to Twitter, Twitter gets nailed down because it’s not our channel, Instagram, we got that down, YouTube, it’s like you move pretty quick through these things but you’re making sure that you’ve got standard operating procedures. You’ve got people in place to manage this piece before you’re moving onto the next thing.

You should have a process with how you learn, with how you take on the new topics, is it gonna be you that’s going through the training, is it gonna be somebody else, are you doing it collectively? How much access you have, how much are you over seeing this thing as it starts to flourish and as it starts to take off? Those things should be baked into your process.

Jason: Yeah, I think one of the challenges that we run into, because a lot of entrepreneurs we start out as solopreneurs. We start as these individuals and we’re doing everything in the business and then we have to start letting go of the stuff, but then there’s the E-Myth Revisited book and this sort of concept. There’s this mindset that we need to learn it and know everything about it ourselves, then we can teach somebody else to do it and document that process. I think that’s this mistake or this challenge to getting stuff done.

I would guarantee that some of these high level entrepreneurs and CEOs, there are a ton of things they don’t know how to do throughout the business and organization, there’s a lot of stuff they’re not good at.

Jameson: And they are completely okay with that.

Jason: Exactly, they don’t waste any time digging into that or trying to figure out any of that stuff. They find people that are experts at that. I think one of the challenge is in this E-Myth philosophy that a lot of people subscribed to for a number of years, is they’re like, “Okay, I need to learn this myself, document all of it and then hire the lowest cost staff possible to just be dummies and follow directions.”

Jameson: Yeah.

Jason: I’ve tried that, that doesn’t work very well. The quality is poor. I feel like it’s much better if I hire bad asses and hire people that are experts and that are in their area of genius even though they cost more and allow them to really do their thing and take ownership of that particular area and the end result is just far better.

Jameson: Yeah, you get what you pay for. Again, the only thing that’s slugging down that whole process is us, is the individual. Tomorrow, we could bring on every single asset we need at the highest possible price. Most people, that would completely break them though because they couldn’t jump that quick out of a comfort zone. That’s why you see so many people they have to go through and hire on somebody cheap and they end up not doing a good job and they hire somebody that’s more money.

You and I have already figured out that, it’s worth it to pay a premium because not only does that make me itchy that I’m paying much money and that gets me to go out and produce and that gets me to go out and make more money and bring in more topline revenue and profits. Also, I know that they’re gonna do the job. I don’t have to question them, I don’t have to micromanage. It’s like, “What is that doing for me?” Again, removing another element off my shoulders and allowing me to take another step deeper into my zone of power which makes me more money.

Jason: Yeah, I think that’s a great question to ask ourselves in the business is where am I currently a bottle neck, slowing things down?

Jameson: Yeah, we’re getting in the way in a big way.

Jason: Anyone could look, entrepreneurs love to have to do lists. They have these endless to do list that some people called to die list. You can look at this to do list, everything on that to do list represents you as a bottleneck in the business because it’s stuff that is waiting on being done, instead of being done.

Jameson: Yep.

Jason: I think a fantastic thing to do is actually do a time study, analyze you time for the week, just every 15 minutes write down on a spreadsheet or paper what you’re actually doing. Then look at your time and see is at least half my time spent on production or on what I really feel like you should be focused on? Rather than management and to do’s and tasks.

Jameson: Yep, absolutely. If you don’t mind, I want to jump into the speed learning piece.

Jason: Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say. I want to hear about the speed learning. How do we speed learn?

Jameson: Let’s talk about it really quick, I’m going to give you guys a simple hack on how to do this. First and foremost, let’s remember back to anytime you’ve learned something really quick. What is the first thing that you noticed? You loved the topic.

Jason: Yeah.

Jameson: You have to fall in love with the topic, regardless of how you truly feel. Find a way, find a thing, find an entry into loving that topic. That’s going to go very, very far with the information bypassing the critical factor. Then the next thing we need to is we need to break this thing down into micro pieces and we need to study the pieces in little tiny chunks until they become a habit.

Based off the tiny chunks, we also need to make micronized goals so that we get those little up ticks to dopamine and serotonin and all of the feel good stuff based off of, “Hey, we just accomplished this thing.” We need to create a microset of comments or goals or some sort of measurement so that we know that we’re moving forward in this almost merry timeline of start to finish.

Jason: Let me recaps. One, we love the topic. We got to find a way that this topic that we feel like we need to learn, we got to find a way to make it relevant to us, a way that we call fall in love with it and be excited about it. If I learn this, it’s going to open up these doors and windows to me.

Number two, you need to break this into little pieces. When you figure out what are these little pieces, how do we break this down so that I can actually eat this. You can’t eat the whole elephant in one sitting. You can’t eat the whale in one sitting. What are the tiny bite size pieces and then what’s the very next one that I can take. Then by breaking it up into these pieces, we need to be able to measure these accomplishments, we need to know what these goals and these targets are so that we can see we’re actually moving forward. Because as entrepreneurs, when we don’t see progress, that is such a huge killer of momentum.

Jameson: Yeah, it is. It almost dies instantly. That’s where the next thing comes in which is frequency. There’s two laws, it’s frequency and recency. What that means is first and foremost, when we touch something and then go away and then touch it again and then go away, that’s redundancy. Like school, we don’t need […] of these. It can actually happen very, very quickly, like in a matter of days.

We’ve tested this now, we’re creating basically this concept that I want to roll out on the big scale and hopefully help change and shift the education platform itself but we’ve been doing it on a small scale with these highly personalized events. One of the things that we noticed is that how we cycle people through as we keep touching the same thing over and over again. Once that tiny chunk has become habitualized through the frequency, we start to stack on top of that. You can take somebody from not knowing anything in a complex sport or skill set and they can become extremely very quickly.

But there’s one more piece I want to mention, which is that we need to overview, period. We need to go back and look over what we just did. For example, if I’m learning how to race a car, if I go and take a lap, when I come back and I’ve completed the lap and I get out of the car, we need to review what just happened. We need to do this is because you need to get good at separating fact from opinion. The thing we all are very good at is beating ourselves and adding in our own emotional feelings about what we just did, “Oh I just suck, that was horrible, I did bad.” No, no, no, what are the facts? The facts are maybe you were wrong at entry, in this corner, you’re too tight on that corner, not enough speed here, not enough break there. Those are the facts. All we do is we review back through your lap. We look at the facts, all the opinion, all the emotional stuff, we just leave that alone. What this does is it gets you to very analytically review yourself which hones in the core skills.

Jason: Yeah, this is why athletes watch tape. They watch themselves because when you’re in the moment and you’re doing stuff, you may think you’re amazing or you may think you’re terrible. The reality is you don’t have an objective perspective because you’re in it, you’re doing it. When we look back and see what’s actually occurred, when we look at measurable numbers, when we look at actual data, when we look at where things really are, we then have real perspective.

Jameson: Yeah, absolutely.

Jason: I think you pointed out an important thing like this mindset of beating ourselves up or this idea because again we’re comparing ourselves to the experts teaching on us where we’re learning or people we’ve seen in the marketplace that are doing it better.

You mentioned this earlier, we all start at the level of suck. Everyone needs to understand that that’s perfectly okay. Nobody makes fun of a baby for crawling before walking. They don’t say, “Look at that little baby, it can’t even walk.” What’s wrong with you?

Jameson: Right.

Jason: We have to remember we’re that baby in everything new that we’re starting out. As a property manager, if you’re just starting to figure out maintenance coordination, or you’re just starting to figure out sales and how to close the deal and get people on, you’re always gonna start at suck. I think sometimes we’re just afraid of sucking.

Jameson: Yeah. I will say this, you don’t need to suck for very long. That’s your choice. You have access right now to all the resources, information, people that you need. It’s up to you how long you stay in that level of not being good or being really, really bad. Just like the baby, the baby starts off being […] but it’s not judging itself, so very quickly, baby is walking.

Jason: Yeah.

Jameson: It usually doesn’t take that much time to get off of the ground, same thing here. That’s like the core framework that will help facilitate speed learning aid or a new topic.

There’s a couple of other pieces worth mentioning. One is that you need to get very good at living the future, meaning a future reality of you being amazing at this thing or you having this new skill set and living in that world very vividly. When you can do that, it starts folding time and you get this quantum leap effect into the future to become that thing, to have that skill set.

Jason: Would you say that’s like just imagining yourself in that state of being really successful, being really good, being good at sales, just imagining this?

Jameson: I want to set some context here. I don’t think you need to go and meditate with the monks for this. I think you need to go on your special little room, get your blacked out eye mask on and get your meditative trance music. This is something as simple as when you’ve had a great moment, you’ve closed the sale, anchored it in. This is how the future is gonna be, this is like everyday occurrence. Almost like, duh, of course I call that sale, that’s all examples of how on the fly you can just start to build in this deep neuronetwork into this future you want for yourself.

At every opportunity that you can do it, you should be doing it. We don’t need to fall back our tree and go meditate about this for days and years. I actually found that could do, because it doesn’t actually […] there. It’s much more powerful when I involve my five senses into the mix and I’m in the real world with eyes open, I just had this experience and I anchor that in to the overall vision that I want.

Jason: Yes, I think that’s really powerful. I know I failed to do this, is I’m so focused sometimes though on the future and what I want and need to do next and moving on to what’s next because I’m in momentum but I don’t take time to celebrate the wins. I don’t acknowledge or celebrate the accomplishments that I’ve created or that I’ve had, it’s that act. It’s that act of will to pause yourself and to celebrate those wins, to reflect on the good that you’ve created and what you’ve accomplished that really allows you and really anchors that into your subconscious and in your mind allows you to keep moving forward.

Jameson: I think both of those pieces go hand in hand. You talked about how do you manifest, how do you live your dreams. I think in simple terms, it could be broken down into being very clear about what you want your future to be, living in that and being very grateful for every piece that moves you further along the board.

Most people, they take for granted all the good things that happen, they missed maybe the synchronicity or coincidence that happens on the daily basis that’s magically moving them forward along their path. They take those things for granted, they stop being thankful for those thing which again I think that’s another way of us creating a bottleneck.

Take the time to be grateful for all those things as they’re happening to further give you that momentum, give you that drive. When we’re only focusing in on one thing, how easy is that? It’s much easier to be grateful because you have more awareness. It all fuels itself, this whole concept of what we’ve been talking about.

Jason: For speed learning, love the topic, break it into pieces, have some goals and milestones you can actually track. When you hit those, celebrate it, anchor it in, feel the positive vibes about that, allow yourself to do that. Then frequency and recency, so make sure you’re doing it and building it in over and over, repetition, and then stacking the next things on it.

Jameson: Yep.

Jason: You’re doing that. Make sure you review and analyze, you’re actually looking at the data, looking at the facts, looking at your performance.

Jameson: Yes.

Jason: Any other hacks when it comes to speed learning? What are some of your cool little things that you know about speed learning that you like to do?

Jameson: It’s not necessarily applicable to everything but pre-shot routine. In sports, it’s the easiest to correlate, give you a story and give you a metaphor. Michael Jordan talks about this, before he walked on the court played a game, he put in his a hundred times, Tiger Woods would visualize the shot before he stepped up to the pin with his club and actually swung to the shot.

The same thing we do with drivers that we work with and anything involved in sports. We have them before they even take the lap, as they’re sitting in the car, at the start line, visualize the perfect lap. Everything goes right, everything goes your way, picture it, feel it, hear the sounds, add the color to it and then stop, come back, open your eyes and just go do it. It’s this process, I learned this a long time ago. I can’t remember from where but it’s like, you go through, you mentally visualize, you distract yourself and come back to the real world and then you just go do it.

You do that enough times, that three step cycle, and not only the amount of confidence that builds in yourself is amazing, that deep trust, trust that I can do this, but it also propels the skill set that much further. You hit this tipping point to where you never really have to question that again. Tiger Woods could be in a completely poor mindset walking up to the next toll. He could have just screwed up that last hole walking towards the next one. When he was in his prime, by the time he walked up to the next hole and got into position and went through his pre-shot routine, he’s completely forgotten about what happened at the last one.

There was very few times you saw a guy like Tiger Wood crack that process and not do it that way, which is why he performed so well. Michael Jordan is the same thing. You never really saw him choke, you never really saw him hang onto the last mistake for too long.

You watch football players at the Super Bowl, I love telling this story because it just happens every almost every Super Bowl. You got the kicker, he misses the most ridiculous easy kick for a two point conversion, whatever he’s going for. It’s close, he should’ve made it, he misses. But then in the same game later on, twice as long at a more clutch moment, it’s only because he’s forgotten and he’s dropped the mistake, he’s just kept that from memory and he just kept moving but also he has a pre-shot routine. He has a process he follows before he does every single kick. If he didn’t, he would be so inconsistent it’s not even funny. Think of how you can apply that to your business, think of how you can apply that to how you’re handling people and situations.

Jason: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting, this ritual. People do a ritual when they do a free throw shot in basketball. You see people do a ritual when they get up to the plate in baseball. You’ll see Tony Robbins, you’ll see before he goes out on stage, if you watched the Netflix documentary that he’s got up on there. You’ll see him do this weird ritual each time before he goes out on stage, these movements, these actions, he has anchored this thing. That’s an interesting idea to add in a ritual into the action that you’re taking.

Jameson: We started doing this, I did door to door sales in Detroit, Michigan for like two years. We did it then, I just really didn’t know what we were doing. We had a full pre-shot routine. But now just picture this, before every sales call, you picture that you’re talking to your bestfriend, you picture that you’re talking to somebody that you’ve known for years and you feel completely comfortable with. You picture that it goes exactly your way, they sign up. It’s a mutual benefit for both people to move forward on the deal and you guys move forward.

Just imagine before you hire every person that you’re gonna hire the perfect person for the job and that after the training, they’re gonna perform the way you wanted them to. That’s how you apply that to those situation, to the everyday business situations. If you just picture it going perfectly, why shouldn’t it go perfect? You know what I mean?

Jason: Yeah, I love it. Well cool, Jameson, it’s been awesome having you on. Lots of cool little ideas that you shared with us, appreciate it. As before, how can people get in touch with you or what do you want people to know listening to this?

Jameson: I would say follow me on social media because that’s where I predominantly post. If you want to keep chasing content and hearing around the conversation of genius and speed learning and those sort of things, […] to more of your potential, then social media is a great place to follow me on. Also, optimizingman.com would be another place that regularly publishing content now in and around the topic of peak potential. I’d say those would be the best places to get a hold of me and to follow what I’m doing, get involved in more training.

Jason: Awesome. Jameson, thanks so much for coming out here on the DoorGrow Show.

Jameson: Thanks for having me.

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