The Mindset Mentor - How To Think Different

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. And if you love this podcast, you would also probably love to learn how to journal. I just created a free video lesson on how to journal. If you want to get that absolutely free, go to mindsetmentorjournal.com right now. Once again, mindsetmentorjournal.com. You'll get the video lesson. You also get 30 free journaling prompts so that you can start on your path to journaling. Today, we're going to be talking about how to think different, how to think outside of the box. Because if you look at all of the people that

Starting point is 00:00:45 are like your heroes, they're probably a lot different than the average person, right? So if you look at whether it's like a Steve Jobs or whether it's The Rock or whether it's Elon Musk or whoever it might be, they think differently than the average person thinks, right? If you look at like Alan Watts, if you look at Wayne Dyer, like they think so differently than the average person does. And I think what happens is we are raised, and as children, we are completely outside of the box. And in order to, you know, make sure that kids fit in with society, we get domesticated is the easiest way of saying it. Our parents do their best, but basically what they do is they put us inside of a box. Society puts us inside of a box. School puts us inside of a box.

Starting point is 00:01:32 And we aren't really trained of how to get outside of the box and to think differently, but the people who you probably respect most are not normal. They're different. They think outside the box, and that's probably one of the things you appreciate about them, right? So we're going to talk about how to, if you've been raised inside of a box and you feel like you're stuck inside of a box, how to start thinking differently. This will require some of your time, but it will take some time in the front end, but save you a lot of time on the back end. So to start off, let me tell you a story just to kind of have all of this make sense. In the early 1900s, there was a guy that had a burger joint and he was obsessed with numbers and facts and figures.

Starting point is 00:02:15 And so they had, you know, the soda machines, they had the burgers, the fries, all of this. And he optimized every single thing that he could optimize. They can make burgers faster. They can make sure that they pour the perfect version of soda. They can make sure that they make the fries the perfect way. And then they make them as fast as possible. And he optimized every single part of his business. But he realized that there would still sometimes be a line of people. And he realized if he wanted more business and to make

Starting point is 00:02:45 more money, he needed to figure a way to funnel people into his business quicker. And so he kept trying to figure out what could he do? How could he make it? And you can't really, I can't make the burgers any faster. They're basically as fast as they can go. I can't make sure the sodas go any faster. It's only so fast before it's too much, gets too many bubbles and then it doesn't work and it takes longer to do it. Can't make fries any faster. Can't do this faster. So he was like, you know what? I think I'm too stuck in my business. I need to go see what other businesses are doing. See if I can get some ideas to help my business grow from businesses that are completely different than mine. And so what he did was he started going to all these, every day he would visit another company.

Starting point is 00:03:21 So he would visit like a grocery store. And then he would visit, you know, a hair salon and he would visit and he was trying to basically pull ideas from people outside of his industry to see if he could use it in his business. And one day everything completely changed for him. And he walked into a bank and his business partner was like, why are you going to go to a bank? Like, what's a bank going to be able to teach us? They're so old school. When he noticed that on the side of the bank, they were building something. So he walked into the bank and he starts talking to him. And he's like, hey, what's that thing that you're building outside? And they go, oh, well, what we've actually done is decide to build something called a drive-through, which means that the customers,

Starting point is 00:03:58 they can come in if they want to, but they don't even have to get out of their cars and we can still help them. And it was like a light bulb. And he went, oh my God, I've never thought of that. I've always thought about the customer coming into the business and trying to speed everything up that way. What if we also built a drive-through for our burger joint? That way we could have people in line there and we could have people in line inside as well. And what he did was he built the first drive-thru for a fast food company and grew his business to another location because he had so much business coming in. He needed another location, another location, another

Starting point is 00:04:34 location. And eventually they ended up selling for McDonald's and McDonald's took his exact format of how he built a drive-thru. And so when you look at that, you think, huh, that's interesting because the way that he got that idea was by going to other businesses that had nothing to do with his business, by thinking outside of the box. And so I heard this story from Jeff Hoffman. And Jeff Hoffman, in case you don't know, is I interviewed him years ago, years and years ago on this podcast. And he's a billionaire now, but he found it priceline.com. And he does this thing that he calls info sponging. And info sponging is what he will do is every single morning, he will learn something that has nothing to do with his business. He'll either read a different magazine, he'll go into different

Starting point is 00:05:20 websites. So like, you know, he was in the airline industry and he was like, you know what, I'm going to read about scuba diving and see what there is in scuba diving. I'm going to read about boxing, see what there is in boxing. I'm going to read about all of these different things. Then he was reading an article about produce. And what he would do is every time he would learn something, he would give himself an hour every single morning, Monday through Friday, and he would learn something new. And then what he would do is he would take a three by five card and he would write down as much as he could on that three by five card and then just throw it in a box. And then at the end of the month, he would look through that box and see if any of those

Starting point is 00:05:57 things that he learned throughout the week, now that he's had some space from them, at the end of the month, he would see if there's anything they learned throughout the month, if anything could be used in his business. And one day he was reading about produce and he was reading how bananas actually become cheaper as they get closer to going bad, right? So ripe bananas are more expensive than bananas that are about to be overripened. And so what he realized, he wrote that down. Okay, no worries. All right, bananas end up being cheaper as they age. And he threw it inside the box. He came back at the end of the month and he was reading through and he's like, hold on, this banana thing. If bananas are

Starting point is 00:06:40 cheaper when they're about to go bad, I wonder if these airlines, because he was already in the airline industry, I wonder if these airlines have seats that are not sold. And if they're not sold, I wonder if they would sell them for cheaper so they at least make some money off of them versus no money. He wondered if the same thing would happen for flights. And it was. It was the same thing. So he started talking to Delta and he started talking to American Islands and he started talking to Southwest. And he said, hey, listen, I'm in the airline industry.

Starting point is 00:07:11 If I set up a website that I could know when you have open flights and open seats, if I could make them cheaper to at least sell them, would you give them to me at a discounted rate? And they're like, yeah, we would definitely do that. So he started Priceline.com where you could bid on flights and the airline would either accept or reject your offer. So if it's two days before and you're like, I need to hop on this flight, the flight's now $700. And you're like, I'll offer 500. You would offer 500 and within 30 minutes,

Starting point is 00:07:41 you'd hear back yes or no from the airline. And guess what? He sold that company for over a billion dollars, but he sold it for over a billion dollars. And the way the idea came up was because he was reading about bananas, right? Think about that for a second. Sometimes we're in our industry for so long. Like I've been in the self-development industry for so long at this point, 17 years. I could use looking outside of the box. If you've been an insurance agent for the past 25 years, you could probably learn from people outside of the box because we get taught these are the exact systems to success, which a lot of those end up working. But sometimes it requires us thinking differently. It requires us to be

Starting point is 00:08:21 different. So that brings us to what I call the five-hour rule. So the world is changing so fast. How do we keep up? Like artificial intelligence is coming through. Have you tried chat GPT yet? It's amazing. Some people are afraid of all of these things. But with the invention and the growing of AI, if you're not trying to learn what's going on,

Starting point is 00:08:43 if you're not trying to get better, if you're not trying to learn what's going on, if you're not trying to get better, if you're not trying to think outside of the box, there's a chance that you could be left behind in the next three to five years. So what can you do to start thinking outside of the box, to start learning about new technology, to start seeing if you could use this technology to come in and help you create better things?

Starting point is 00:09:02 So the five-hour rule is really simple. Here's what you do. You spend one hour per day learning something new, five days a week. You can do this Monday through Friday if you want to. Hell, you could do it seven hours a week if you want to, and it could be the seven-hour rule for you. But you learn something completely different outside of your industry, outside of what you do, outside of what you normally read about, outside of the normal news stations you follow, the normal magazines you read, the normal websites you go on to, and you just find yourself on a different website. What if you went to Drummer Magazine's website and see what's up with the drums?

Starting point is 00:09:37 You went to Scuba Diving website and you see what's up at scuba.com. And then the next day, you decide to go to, you know, bali.com and see what's going on over in Bali. And you start going to other places and you start learning about new things. Because what happens is sometimes we get so stuck in doing the same things over and over again, it leaves no room for creativity. And when you learn something new, you read something new,

Starting point is 00:10:01 you watch something new, it inspires you to start to be more creative. And really, that creativity in your business, in your industry, in your life could be a thing that completely sets you on another path, right? If Jeff Hoffman can read about bananas and build a multi-billion dollar company and become a billionaire from it because he was reading about produce and how bananas are cheaper, I'm sure you could read something that's completely outside of the box and start to figure something out of the way it could work in whatever it is that you do. Benjamin Franklin is actually famous for doing this. This is actually where Jeff Hoffman got it from. He learned that Benjamin Franklin would do this. He would learn about things that were completely foreign to him to

Starting point is 00:10:43 see if maybe he could try to be better. Right? If you look at people like Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo da Vinci, what he used to do is he used to, he would go through and he was, he was painting and he was sculpting and he was trying to get better. And he thought to himself, huh, you know what? I wonder if I actually, if it'd be possible for me to actually look at some corpses and be able to measure corpses. Now, this might sound weird. You might not want to be doing this. It's probably not able to be done now. But back in his day, what he would do is he would actually measure the difference between like this knuckle to this knuckle and this knuckle to this knuckle, and then your palm to your wrist, and then your wrist to your elbow and your elbow to your arm. And he would measure these out and

Starting point is 00:11:22 actually start to find these perfect measurements of if you measure enough corpses, you're going to see that there's a measurement that shows you this is how the perfect body, the average body is built. And so that's why when you see stuff that he did and you see stuff that Michelangelo did and you see like the statue of David, if you've ever been in Florence and it's like the most perfect thing you've ever seen in your life, hundreds of years later later and you can see the veins in the guy's arm that's going up his forearm. The reason why they were so good at this is because they went outside of the box and started learning things that other artists were not learning. And so if you constantly stay on top of what's going on in the world and you always are committed to being a student and always learning,

Starting point is 00:12:02 you'll always get better. I started doing research on like what people have been outside of the box and started thinking differently and how they became famous. And people that came up were like Oprah, Warren Buffett, Tony Robbins, all have a commitment to learning. They never wrestle in the lords of their success. They're always trying to learn and grow and get better. You know, I was at an event not too long ago. And in order to be at the event, it's, you know, it's, if I'm being honest with you, to actually be at the event, that's the mastermind, it's $100,000 a year. And, you know, everybody has a pretty good idea of everyone's net worth. And there's one guy that sold his company a few years ago for a billion

Starting point is 00:12:40 dollars cash. And he owned, him and his wife owned 100 hundred percent of it. And what's cool about it is he sold his company. But if you go to the event, it was wild because this guy literally, you'd look and be like, well, he's worth a billion dollars. He could just retire. He doesn't have to do anything. What's cool about him though is every time I saw him every day, he was in the very front, very middle, right in front of the stage. And he always had a pen and paper with him and he was taking more notes than anybody else. So this guy has probably a higher net worth than almost every single person in the room combined, but he's sitting there being a student. And then he would walk up to people and he'd be like, what do you do? Oh, cool. Tell me about that. It was like this,

Starting point is 00:13:18 a sponge. Like he, the most successful people that I know are the biggest sponges. And he was asking questions. Oh, how do you do that? Well, tell me about that. And he would write down these notes from anybody that he met. And so when you start to think about this, it's like, yeah, will this require some extra time in the front end of your life? Right? Short term, it will take time away from you. It's going to take an hour a day. But long term, you're talking about massive gains in your life from what could be helping you hit a home run at some point in time with your industry, with your life, with your relationship helping you hit a home run at some point in time with your industry, with your life, with your relationship, all of that. So if you take a step back, you

Starting point is 00:13:50 realize there's 168 hours in the week. And you're telling me that you can't budget five to learning, to growing, to creating new neurosynaptic connections in your brain? Think about that for a second. You can't take five hours out of 168. You can't. That's really not that important for you. So find out what time of day works best for you to do this. Some people love doing it in the morning. Some people like doing it in the afternoon. Some people like doing it evening. For me, I like doing it in the early to late afternoon. I usually work on all my work throughout the day. I do all my creative stuff. And then I'm like, okay, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to learn something new. And here's the thing,

Starting point is 00:14:28 look at your phone and see how much time you spend on social media. If you're an average person, it's like one to three hours a day, sometimes four, five, six hours a day. And you're telling me you don't have time to do one hour a day to learn? Replace your social media with learning. What should you be learning? Well, where do you want to go? When you look into the future, what's exciting to you? What scares you? Is artificial intelligence scary to you? Well, what if you just learn about that for a little while? What if you tried it out? What if you went on a chat GPT and saw what you could use it for? Went onto YouTube and started seeing tutorials on how to use AI. So what do you think? Where do you want to go? And what do

Starting point is 00:15:05 you need to know to get there? That's where I would start. And then from there, just budget an hour of your time to learn and grow and become better every single day. And then right there is how you think outside the box by using something that I call the five-hour rule. Five hours per week, one hour, five days a week. That's all you have to do. So that's all I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories and tag me at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And I'm going to leave it the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.

The Mindset Mentor - How To Think Different

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