Your Problem Isn’t Motivation

Count money, man.

Count money, man.

That gritch is fine.

I told him.

I'm a beast.

What's up gang?

Welcome back to another episode of The Grindcast.

Get ready.

It's a new day.

And your biggest problem isn't motivation.

It's distraction.

Most likely.

A lot of times this is what I see.

And so most people aren't lacking ambition as much or talent or even motivation a lot of times.

It's that they're lacking controlled attention and focus over long periods of time.

So your mind is your most powerful tool.

But an undirected mind.

Waste tons and tons of energy in time doing things that aren't getting them any closer to the goal at all.

So distraction doesn't always look like laziness.

Sometimes people think that they're not distracted because they're not lazy.

They're going to work.

They're showing up when they're supposed to show up.

They're doing what they're supposed to do.

But it's in between those times in the day where a lot of people lose their focus and they start to get left behind.

And so some thoughts on this would be like examples of checking your phone all the time.

Consuming, you know, too much social media content at wrong times.

Responding to everybody else's priorities going on or constantly looking to see what other people are doing.

You know, just all these things that don't have nothing to do with you staying locked in and focused on your goal.

Because now that we got all this technology at our fingertips, marketing and television and movies and sports,

the whole world is competing for our attention every minute of the day.

People are trying to get your attention.

People are trying to get our attention all day long.

This is where it takes the discipline to not get distracted with those things so you can stay focused on your mission.

Every notification, interruption, these unnecessary conversations, you know, that eat up 10, 15, 20 minutes in the middle of the day.

Meaningless commitment, you know, to things start to pull your energy away from your main objective.

You know, these, I said I was going to go here, I was going to go this, I was going to go do that.

Is that getting you any closer to the goal that you have or is it just another excuse that it's really just a distraction?

Every time you break concentration, you lose more than a few minutes in the interruption.

You lose more than a few minutes in the day.

You start to lose momentum, I feel like.

You know, like when you put a day together where you start to build and build and build and you're locked in and you're focused

and all those things, it's when you stop and start doing these other things that break your attention and focus,

all of a sudden all that momentum that you were building stopped, you got to try to recreate that momentum.

Imagine how many things you can get accomplished if you continue to keep that momentum all day.

And so I think momentum is built through sustained, uninterrupted effort, you know, consistently.

Just, oh, just putting that energy in, blinders on, not looking to the left to the right, I'm just locked in.

That's where the momentum is built.

And the person that can maintain that level of concentration while everybody else's distracted has to me an enormous competitive advantage.

You know, when you put together, all right, one day this person's distracted more than this person's distracted.

This person's focused completely for the day.

And you start to stack those days on top of one another.

All of a sudden you start to see the gap that happens between people over the course of three months, six months, 12 months.

And so what I found out a lot of times is people don't necessarily need more opportunities.

You just need to extract more from the opportunity that's already in front of you.

You know, I give this example a lot of times in our business that how can one person have the same situation, same resources, same contract, same, same everything, but get a completely different result, even if they have similar skill set.

A lot of times it's that distraction button.

It's the lack of focus.

Focus isn't something that you wait to feel.

This is where it goes back into the, you know, I don't feel like it.

Well, if you only do the things that you feel like doing over time, you're not going to get the chance to do the things that you really would like to do with your life.

Because to get to do the things that you really like to do with your life, which is a reward for getting results, you got a lot of times.

You got to do a bunch of stuff that you don't feel like doing.

And so staying focus isn't something that you wait to feel because that might not happen.

It's something that you decide.

This is what I'm just going to do.

I'm going to lock in.

And so we got to train ourselves to return.

You know, every time you feel yourself getting distracted, just keep, uh, return back to the main objective.

Anytime that your mind starts to wander to the left to the right, um, let me do this.

Let me do that and stay locked in.

I just left a message to somebody.

Somebody was trying to pull my energy.

Not on purpose.

I love this person.

And they were hitting me about something.

You know, I got mats, old mats, grappling mats, wrestling mats in storage.

And I got new mats coming in.

And they were asking me, hey, what do you want to do?

We got wall mats.

I was getting ready to do this.

And then it's minute to minute.

So I said, look, I said, I got no time until probably after 6.30 p.m.

To think about this.

I appreciate you thinking of me.

But I got to get back to you maybe after 6.30 p.m. today because I'm minute to minute to minute to minute to minute to minute to minute all day.

And so basically if it's not on my schedule, unless this is a 9-1-1 emergency from like my wife,

from my mother who never called me in the middle of the day for random things unless they really need it.

Unless it's coming from that, there's not going to be any deviation from what the schedule already says today.

And so the question isn't how motivated am I all the time.

It's really about asking what currently has my attention all day and does it deserve that much attention that I'm giving it.

And so, you know, if you look at stacking days, let me give you an example of the difference of someone who's distracted for three days out of a week.

Where if you look at seven days in a week and you're trying to build a business and you look at seven days and you're like, well, four days I give myself an A.

I stayed locked in. I was focused three days.

I know throughout the day I was getting distracted.

I was, okay.

So let's give you a plus four.

Every time you were locked in, let's give you a minus three.

Every time you lost four or a minus one every day that you were locked in and a minus one every day that you lack focus.

So if I was plus four and then minus three at the end of a week on plus one.

And let's say we did that just to keep it simple for the course of a month, four days locked in three days, lack focus.

Got distracted.

Plus one plus one plus one plus one at the end of the month on plus four, right?

And then you'd run up against somebody that has similar talent in you.

Same talent as you and they go plus seven plus seven plus seven plus seven.

The score is now 28 to four or even two days, right?

So I go five minus two.

That's three, three times four. That's 12.

Somebody else stays locked in seven days a week. That's 28.

28 to 12.

And that gap may not show as much because it's inches.

It's like 28 inches, 12 inches.

You may not see it as much month number one.

But you know where you do see it?

Month number six.

Month number 12.

You start to see those inches turn into yards and miles and big gaps between people that there never should be that much of a gap because the talent level was similar.

And so the closing thought I want, I want to remind you of is if you can't control your attention, you can't fully control your future.

We got to take responsibility.

All right, so we're going to give a few shots of express so, you know, over the next few weeks.

And so this one isn't as long of a message, but maybe it's something you could catch during your drive.

And as always, you know if this helped you, you know, it can help anybody else.

Do us a favor and share it with other people that we can impact.

But just a reminder, your biggest problem isn't typically motivation.

It's usually distraction.

All right, so we appreciate you guys staying locked in with us today on the groundcast.

As always, we appreciate that.

And we'll see you next week on the groundcast.

Get ready. It's a new day.