Have you heard the concept that less is actually more? I have. Let's talk about it a little bit. Several years ago, I met an attorney who was extremely smart.
Extremely smart. Oh, hi everyone. I'm Michael Kroos. This is The Daily Grateful.
We come here every weekday to talk about gratitude and other stuff, depending on my mood. And my mood today is less is more. That's what this attorney told me. He said, whenever he has his clients talking to the police, less is more.
Whenever his clients are in a courtroom, less is more. And I said, that's interesting. He goes, I run my whole life that way. I run my entire business that way.
And I said, how does that work? I said, I think you have to go all out, don't you? Don't you need to go, you know, break on through to the other side and all this stuff? He goes, no.
But you make what you do count. And you do less of it. And then wonderful things will happen. Now, I've got another friend.
His name is Chris. He is a gentleman who puts on PodFest. That's this big multinational, international summit that happens once a year. And this is a 10-year anniversary.
And when he developed this thing over the years, when he developed this thing, he said the same thing. He limited talks, speakers on the main stage, 20 minutes. I'm going to be facilitating a panel discussion with two other people about podcast production. And we're going to do it all in 20 minutes.
We're going to take 10 minutes to answer questions. But the three of us have got 20 minutes to get information out. You would be surprised how much information we can get out in 20 minutes. It's rather amazing.
I've been working on my part of it. And it's amazing. On Thursday, the 26th, I believe, I will be hosting, as I do just about every year, something called Pekka Kucha. I don't know.
You look that up. It's interesting. That's where speakers have five minutes to talk. They've got five minutes.
And they can have 20 slides. And they do not have control of the slides. The slides are controlled at the back of the room. So they've got five minutes to cover it.
I saw them do this, gosh, six, seven years ago. I was a participant. Well, I was just somebody who was there. And I went to watch.
And I said, oh, my goodness. I want to be part of this. At the very least, I want to be a speaker for five minutes. I just really wanted to do that.
But the following year, I did better than that. I got to be the emcee of Pekka Kucha. And I was amazed at all the speakers that we had who gave out so much information. It has become the most popular thing that we do at Podcast.
Or PodFest, I'm sorry. Is this thing where people can come in and watch people. I think there's 26 people scheduled to speak this year. And they've got five minutes.
And they've got 20 slides. And you would be surprised at how much you learn at the end of that whole thing. It is absolutely amazing. With that being said, I'm reading a book right now that I got in the mail.
It's very, very interesting. It's called The 12-Week Year. And the premise of this book is that traditional annual planning is very flawed. It is.
You sit there in January or maybe in December for next year. And you focus on achieving all kinds of things by the end of the year. And when you do that, when you say, yeah, we've got to the end of the year to get this done. Guess what?
A lot of it doesn't get done. And you're not being efficient. Once again, less is more. You shift your mindset.
I have not finished the book. I haven't finished reading the book yet. But this is what I've gotten so far. They're saying shift your mindset.
Define a year is 12 weeks, not 12 months. Okay, this creates right away a sense of urgency. And it forces, you know, some pretty intense focus. What you have to do at that stage of the game is you have to prioritize ruthlessly.
Identify your rocks. Okay, just look at three to five critical objectives for each week of the 12-week period. Eliminate distractions. Get rid of all the junk.
Plan weekly. Break down, you know, break down everything into a weekly goal, a weekly focus. And then as you do this, you're going to find yourself, you know, and I can't wait to finish this book. I probably shouldn't have done this podcast until I finish the book.
But I'm just so excited about it. I've been bouncing around reading here and there in the book, which I do an awful lot of when it comes to nonfiction books. I will read it in seconds. I rarely will read one from start to finish.
But, you know, as you get used to doing this weekly planning and weekly accomplishment thing to get your year done in 12 weeks, you're just getting into a rhythm and a ritual. And then you have to have some accountability here. You have to have somebody who's watching you to make sure that you're doing this. You have to have a partner or somebody that you trust.
And you have to have them doing that, watching to make sure you accomplish all your goals every week. And if you don't accomplish your goals in a week, you dive into it the next week and just, you know, you keep going. You're going to achieve more in 12 weeks than more people, you know, many people do in a year. If you follow this, it will work.
You're going to learn how to have enhanced focus. You're going to learn how to eliminate distractions. You're going to have really good agility. Okay?
You're going to be able to adapt to the changing circumstances. Because we all know in life and in business, things change on a daily basis. I mean, you know, you can take a left turn immediately and be holy. You know, what the hell happened?
So you have to be ready for those changes. And you have to be ready to do what needs to be done to get around them. Every time that you create a victory, you build more momentum. So you want to work on those victories.
You want to reduce stress. That's something that's very, don't let your mind start scrambling and crawling all over the place. So who should read this book? That's a good question.
Anyone who's looking to achieve ambitious goals faster. Isn't that all of us? Individuals and teams struggling professionals seeking to improve productivity and performance. Yeah, I guess that would do that.
Does that mean housewives or househusbands? You can accomplish a lot if you're running a house. If you have plans for your house, which I have plans for my house, for the whole year. And I'm thinking, that's not a good idea.
Instead of having a whole year's worth of planning for my house, I should break that down into a 12-week program. I want to replace part of the fence. I want to paint the house. I want to paint.
And by the way, I'm getting all kinds of disagreement on the color that I want to do. I want to do a gray, and then I want the trim to be in black. Gray and black. I want to paint my front door black.
Like the Rolling Stones say. Paint it black. My garage door. I want to paint it black.
Anyway, that's what I want to do. And that's my household goals. Landscaping. My son's girlfriend has taken that over from me.
I am so happy because she is so good with plants. I'm pretty good with plants. But she is. She's so creative with plants.
I was able to delegate. Actually, she asked if she could do it. And I said, yes, yes. So anyway, pick this book up.
Read it. Get it at the library. It's kind of pricey. I got it sent to me because I am a former, I am a washed up former member of the national radio media.
So people still send me books. I got this sent to me. It's a pretty expensive book. So pick it up at the library and read it if you're interested in it.
There's all kinds of examples and just a lot of stuff in it. I am enjoying my journey through this book right now. And I am grateful that I have new ideas. And I am grateful for the concept of less is more.
This is how I want to live my life, man. I want to do tiny things and get them done efficiently. That always seems to work. You know, when I got into radio, and I had to talk to all the bigwigs, and they wanted to know the big giant plan.
I gave them little tiny things that I wanted to do. And it worked out really, really well. So think about that. Less is more.
Spend more time for yourself. We'll talk to you tomorrow. We'll talk to you tomorrow.