This is Optimal Living Daily, episode 277, an excerpt from the book Hustle by Neil Patel, Patrick Vlaskovits, and Jonas Koffler. Get ready to maximize your potential with Optimal Living Daily, the podcast that brings you the best in personal development and productivity every day of the week. Your optimal life awaits. Now here's your host, Justin Malek.
What's going on, Life Optimizer? Welcome to Optimal Living Daily, where I read to you every single day, rain or shine, holiday or no holiday, reading to you from the best blogs and books I can find with author permission. And I'm Justin Malek. Today I'm going to be reading from a book, the full title is Hustle, the power to charge your life with money, meaning, and momentum.
And it's coming out in exactly one week, but I was able to get my hands on the manuscript and will be sharing a section with you totally free, and Hustle is available for preorder. And I saw that Neil has a page up where he offers bonuses if you preorder, so that's really cool. I have it linked in the episode's description and at oldpodcast.com for this episode. And now there are three authors of this book, so I'm not going to read all their bios to you, but just know that these guys know what they're talking about.
I was actually already familiar and a fan of Neil Patel's site. He's a super smart guy, so yeah, I'm excited to read this excerpt to you. So let's get right into it to start optimizing your life. The one habit that rules them all, the 10-minute rule, from the book Hustle, by Neil Patel, Patrick Vlaskovitz, and Jonas Koffler.
Developing a personal opportunity portfolio might strike you as an overwhelming prospect, like taming a wild animal. We want you to know it's not. There's a simple way to work on it and in the process develop a powerful habit for your hustle. The best part is it takes a mere 10 minutes per day.
If life has taught the three of us anything, it is this. Getting started is the single most difficult aspect of doing anything worthwhile. Not finding a good idea, not executing. Think about your life, from mundane tasks like washing dishes after dinner to going for a run to getting up without hitting snooze at 5 a.m.
14 times to writing a book about hustle. It is the thought that is vastly more painful than the actual task. Always has been and always will be. How many times have you groaned at the thought of going to the gym only to find that once you are all of seven minutes into your workout, you not only feel absolutely fantabulous, you question why you even hesitated in the first place.
How absurd, and inescapable, and human. As irrational creatures of habit, many of us tend to put off small breaks in our routine to do things that we need most, like getting to bed early when we know we need rest, opting for a healthy meal when we felt bloated for 14 days in a row, not prioritizing quiet time for reading, forgetting to unplug from our internet devices for even a day, putting off a work task or a home chore that's nipping at our conscience, whatever it may be. To alleviate the inevitable feelings of self-imposed friction, what we call the anti-hustle, we have a simple solution, maybe even brilliant in its simplicity. The 10-minute rule states that instead of contemplating and delaying, simply do something that moves you, sans judgment, for 10 minutes and then evaluate.
Do for 10 minutes, then evaluate. Not evaluate for 10 minutes and never do. Say you want to exercise but also want to talk yourself out of exercising right now. Stop talking, stop deliberating, and instead start walking briskly or better go to the gym and pick any exercise machine.
Just do it. 10 minutes is all we're asking for. Go, get started. Maybe you have a presentation to craft for a meeting tomorrow afternoon but would rather play ping-pong or a game on your phone, or check Facebook or Twitter, or search for hilarious animated GIFs.
Instead, plant yourself and focus on one thing. Jot down the key message of the presentation, work out the points you'll need to cover. Do it in 10 minutes or less. Set the countdown clock on your phone or watch if need be.
It's a simple way of staying productive, present, and focused in the moment and in a place of near-constant momentum. Putting the 10-minute rule into practice saves us time and headaches and allows us to quickly make decisions about how to prioritize and allocate our resources and energy by circumventing our propensity to overthink. Benefits of the 10-minute rule. While we find numerous advantages to employing the 10-minute rule, there are three main benefits.
Number one, rapid productivity. Have something critical and essential or even annoying to do? Tackle it immediately, as in right now. 10 minutes is all you have to get moving.
Make a quick list of a few items, plot them on your calendar or to-do list, and pick any one of them to start. Have a phone call to make? Smile and dial. An email to send?
Craft it and get it out quickly, like Hugh Forrest. A proposal that needs to get out the door and to your clients? Wrap it up. A pitch to practice to win new business?
Talk through it in front of a mirror for 10 minutes. Or maybe just scheduling a brief meeting to close a deal. Cement it on your and your client's calendars now. You have something that must get done today, we all do.
And now is better than later. So just do it. Get moving. Get her done.
Man done now. Start the day with a burst of the 10-minute rule. Track your progress for weeks to see how this helps you. Number two, unfettered presence.
Ever felt distracted or even powerless against the forces of overwhelm and overload? Do you find yourself torn between tracking your American Express expenses, taking a peek at TMZ, and responding to more text messages and social media invites than you can count? Use the 10-minute rule to get undistracted and be present with one task at a time. Own it.
That means sitting or standing upright with good posture, practicing steady nasal breathing, and staying present with the task at hand. If you're working on your smartphone, use only one app. If you're on another device, that same rule applies. Do only one thing at a time.
Breathe it in, focus on it, and finish it, and only it. Then move on. Give yourself 10 minutes to exert real control over your destiny. Number three, friction-free persistence.
It's been said that God is action. Think of your 10-minute session as a spiritual practice. It's the Zen-like daily practice of mindful doing. It's a meditation, a short burst of effective, non-judgmental output.
You are a monk in your temple of doing, whether it's a monastery or a cubicle. You're committed to pursuing opportunity and enjoying small doses of gain every day. The short time required forces you into a focused and disciplined bubble after which you can decide if you want to pursue the question, problem, or pursuit of opportunity for a longer period. We know someone who created a sign for his office that read, Do not disturb, I'm in the temple of doing.
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The book is currently on pre-orders through Amazon or their sites, and if you get it through them directly, there are bonuses, so I'll have the link to that in the episode's description and also at oldpodcast.com for this episode. And now there are three authors of this book, so I'm not going to read all their bios to you, but just know that these guys know what they're talking about. I was actually already familiar and a fan of Neil Patel's site. He's a super smart guy, so yeah, I'm excited to read this excerpt to you.
So let's get right into it to start optimizing your life. The one habit that rules them all, the 10-minute rule, from the book Hustle by Neil Patel, Patrick Vlaskovits, and Jonas Koffler. Developing your personal opportunity portfolio might strike you as an overwhelming prospect, like taming a wild animal. We want you to know it's not.
There's a simple way to work on it and in the process develop a powerful habit for your hustle. The best part is it takes a mere 10 minutes per day. If life has taught the three of us anything, it is this. Getting started is the single most difficult aspect of doing anything worthwhile.
Not finding a good idea, not executing. Think about your life, from mundane tasks like washing dishes after dinner to going for a run to getting up without hitting snooze at 5 a.m. 14 times to writing a book about hustle. It is the thought that is vastly more painful than the actual task.
Always has been and always will be. How many times have you groaned at the thought of going to the gym only to find that once you are all of seven minutes into your workout, you not only feel absolutely fantabulous, you question why you even hesitated in the first place. How absurd and in