The Mindset Mentor - Ep 82 - How Hard Are You Really Working?

Episode Date: February 26, 2016

Are we really working hard towards our goals every day or are we just showing up? If we want to put our 10,000 hours into something, or at least improve at it, we must show up, work hard and push ourselves out of our comfort zones. In this episode I speak about this and offer a challenge to you at the end. Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Before we dive into today's episode, if you would like a free copy of our motivational ebook called Hack Your Goals, the Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving Success, go to mwfmotivation.com and download it. It's already been downloaded over a thousand times, so go ahead and get your copy now. All right, I'll get you the podcast right now. Welcome to the MWF Motivation Podcast, which I am proud to say has been rated the number one podcast in iTunes new and noteworthy in six different categories, including self-help and business, and is a podcast designed to help you grow into the best version of yourself in 10 to 20 minutes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we'll take a life topic, break it down, discuss it, and leave you with thoughts to impact your life and mind. My name is Rob Dial, and

the podcast starts now. Welcome to the episode. If you have not yet done so, please subscribe to us, however you listen to us. And if you have not yet liked our Facebook yet, I don't know what you're doing because we have daily motivational stuff that goes up every single day. If you go to facebook.com slash MWF motivation. And today what I'm going to be talking about is, I guess you could call it 10,000 hours part two, the 10,000 hour rule part two. And the thing about the 10,000 hour rule is there's a couple books that are written on it.

Another one is the talent code, which I'm going to talk a little bit more about, where it goes a little bit more in depth of why the 10,000 hour rule actually works. And the key to it of what he says is that greatness is not born in people, it's built. Greatness isn't born, it's built. And I literally just got off the phone 14 minutes ago with a billionaire, billionaire with a B. And when I was talking to this guy before and then after the actual recording, we were talking about how busy he is and that he has traveled in three different weeks to three different continents. And as soon as he got off the phone with me, he was immediately going to a school to speak. And it was just interesting for me to listen to

talk about how hard this guy works, even though he's already a billionaire because he believes so much in what he does. He doesn't do it for money because he has other ways he can make way more money than going out and speaking to a school. He does it because he has a why. He does it because he's passionate about something. And so to go a little bit more deeper into the 10,000 hour rule and why hard work pays off and how it works in your brain, in the book, The Talent Code, which once again, if you want to get it, you can go to mwfbook.com and get a free subscription to Audible. But in the book, the author speaks in depth about something called myelin. And myelin is what insulates your neurons in your brain so that the messages between your neurons can

transfer quicker. And it's like a rubber insulation on a copper wire. When you don't have the proper insulation on the actual wire itself, then the electricity will leak out and you will lose efficiency. It's the exact same thing in our brains. The more repetition that you have, the more myelin that you'll build so that therefore you can transfer information from your neurons in your brain to work quicker. They also call this, people seem to think of it as something like muscle memory, which I'll speak about. So the more you do the same thing over and over again, the more you push yourself, the myelin in your brain will start to grow and start to build more, which will then allow your brain to transfer information quickly and more quickly

throughout your brain whenever it needs it. So it allows your brain to get that information much more efficiently. A perfect example of this is playing guitar. When I first started playing guitar, putting my fingers in certain chord shapes and all of these were extremely awkward. They were hard to do. All of these weird shapes to hit a specific chord. But the more you do it, when I did it hundreds of times and thousands of times, and I've probably done each chord a hundred thousand times by now, my fingers got used to it and developed that myelin in my brain, which allowed me to do it, which most people think of as something like, you know, you do it so many times that it's muscle memory. So now I can play those chords that I struggled with when I first started without thinking about it, without even looking at the guitar.

And like I said, with most people, they call it muscle memory, but myelin is what builds up around the neurons so that the circuitry and all of the circuitry to allow my brain to actually not have to think about it. And it makes it much easier to do all of these things as well. And the way you build the myelin in your brain is what he calls deep practice, which is the same thing as deliberate practice, which we spoke about in the last episode. So it's the area where you're pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone just a little bit, just a little bit uncomfortable for you. It's a little bit harder. And one of the things that he says in the book that's really key that I took out of it is he says, struggle isn't an option. It's a biological requirement. So struggle isn't an option. It's a

biological requirement. It's the same exact thing, like I said, as building muscle. You can't lift the exact same weight every single time you go to work out because then your muscle will never grow. Well, you can't keep going and do the exact same thing every time you do this practice. You have to push yourself outside of your comfort zone, quote unquote, lift more in order to build the myelin, in order to build that in your brain. So the muscle grows when you're pushed outside of your comfort zone. One thing he talks about in the book is Michelangelo. And Michelangelo, people look at him and say, wow, he was amazing, so young, he was just so talented. But Michelangelo. And Michelangelo, people look at him and say, wow, he was amazing, so young, he was just so talented. But Michelangelo started as an apprentice under a stonecutter when he was

six years old. The stonecutter actually lived at their house. And he learned how to use a hammer and a chisel before he even learned how to write. So at 24, he created his first masterpiece. But that's 18 years of dedicated, deliberate practice. 18 years, that's way over 10,000 hours. And Michelangelo is actually quoted saying that if people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all. So the question that I have for you, maybe even the challenge that I have for you, and this is a challenge that I have for myself as well. The question is, and the challenge is, have you really been working? How hard are you working? When you say you're working hard, are you really working hard? Are you really trying to push

yourself? Or are you just kind of showing up to work? When people ask you how your day was, or you think about how your day was, and you say, oh man, I was just really busy. Well, the question is, were you really busy or were you just there? So I'll give you an example. My last week on Thursday, I've had a couple crazy weeks because the fact that we just launched our Amazon product, which I will tell you guys about very soon, but we just launched it. So therefore, it's been getting in the way of... I've been putting a whole lot of time into that, taking a little bit of time away from the podcast. Normally, I get all of my recorded episodes done, everything planned, recorded on a Monday, and I get it done for the next week. So therefore, I don't have to think

about it. So I do three episodes on a Monday. Well, we launched our product on Monday, so I wasn't able to do that. So let me take you through last Thursday versus a couple days ago. So last Thursday, my day, I woke up, I did my morning routine, went straight into doing as much stuff as I possibly could for Amazon. It was hours and hours and hours. And it's at that point where I looked at the clock and it was three o'clock, but I thought it was about 11 and I was hours behind what I thought it was. I was so in the zone and so in the flow for so long that I was actually way, way deeper into the day that I even realized. So the time was just flying by. And I had a workout that I had

to go to with my trainer at four. So I finished what I was doing as much as I could, went to my workout at four. As soon as I was done with that at five o'clock, I drove over to Chipotle, got food, drove straight to Starbucks, stayed there for two and a half hours and worked, did more stuff, planned episodes for the podcast. And then what I did was I went to my band rehearsal and I was at my band rehearsal until 11 PM. And then I came home and had people staying at my house. And the craziest part about it was one of the rooms that's right next to my place where I record actually had somebody sleeping in it. So I didn't want to come in and start waking people up or anything like that. So what I did was I took my mic because I did not have

my Friday episode already done because of the fact that I was so busy. I took my mic into my closet, my walk-in closet in my house and recorded and then edited put it up, and finally got to bed at 12.30. So from 6 a.m. until 12.30 a.m., I was completely going nonstop the entire time. One of the busiest days I've had in quite some time, years that I can actually think of. And I remember waking up the next day and I was like, man, yesterday was so productive, but I was doing stuff that I love. Everything that I was doing, I love. It was all my own business. It was all everything that I was working on. And then a couple of days ago, somebody was talking to me and at the end of the day, somebody was like, so how was your day? And I was like, man, I was just so busy. And then I thought about it and I compared that day. I think it was like Tuesday or something,

whatever it was. I compared that Tuesday to the Thursday before. And I thought in my head, well, Thursday, I feel like I got a whole lot more done and I was just going and I was grinding and I was trying to get everything done that I possibly could. And I was so passionate about what I was doing. The time just kind of passed and I didn't even realize it. And I thought about it in my head. I was challenging myself was, man, maybe I didn't work as hard today as I could have possibly worked. And some people say, I don't want to work my life away. I understand. I don't want to work my life away either. But what I do want to do is work really hard right now so that in a couple years from now, I have the freedom to choose when I want to work.

My goal is even less than that. In about six months, a year from now, I want to choose when I want to work and when I don't want to work. And that's what my plan is to do. And so I want to ask you the same thing. When you say that you're busy, when you think that you're busy, are you really busy or are you just showing up and kind of going through the motions and then checking Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all of those things and sending emails and text messages? Or are you really just turning all that stuff off and going straight at one project for as long as you possibly can? That's the question that I have for you. So what do you want for your future? Do you want it to be more successful than the present time right now? And if you do,

what are you doing right now to make sure of that? See, I want to make sure that I have time in the future to do whatever I want to do. And so it actually reminds me of something I posted up on Facebook and Instagram as well. And what it says is, the quote says, and I got a pretty good response from it. It says, the earlier you start, the more time you have to mess up. So if you're waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect moment will never come. You need to go out there because you're going to fail. Success is 99% failure. You're going to fail. So the earlier you start, the more time you have to mess up. So why don't you go out today and start working towards what you need to or put more time into what you have to mess up. So why don't you go out today and start working towards what you need to

or put more time into what you need to mess up as much as you possibly can because if you mess up as much as we possibly can now, that means that success will come to you sooner than if you keep putting it off. So that's the question that I have for you and the challenge that I wanna leave you with. Can you work harder today?

Can you work harder tomorrow than you thought you were supposed to, or than you did any other day this week? That's the challenge that I have for you. Because if you work hard now and you build up that myelin and you build up all of the stuff that you need to your customer base, you build up your sales, well then maybe in a couple of years from now, you don't have to work as hard. And maybe you can have some extra money to spend on your family, or maybe you can actually have so much freedom that you could spend more time with your family. So that's the challenge that I have for you is,

are you working as hard as you think that you are? Because I think that probably 99% of us are not. And I include myself in that when I compared my last Thursday to this Tuesday. So that's what I want to ask you with. And that's what I want to leave you with. And the last thing I want to leave you with is the same way I leave you every single episode, make it your mission today to make somebody else's day better. And I hope that you have an amazing day. And I hope that you have an amazing weekend. Well, that's it for today's podcast.

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