Develop an Insane WORK ETHIC | Adam Erhart

Key Takeaways

before I ever started my first business I worked for seven years for a number of very successful billionaires and the lessons that they taught me about work ethic I'll never forget I just finished wrapping up a strategic consultation or a presentation or maybe even a coaching session with a group of highly accomplished entrepreneurs young entrepreneurs who are really looking to take their businesses to the next level in this next year and one of the topics that obviously came up was all about work ethic and essentially the debate between this illusive work-life balance and kind of the glamorization or the glorification of hustle and grinding and putting in these long hours and so obviously the question came up about well what's my stance on this and sort of where do I fall especially being that I'm a family man and I've got three young boys and I've got a wife who I love and I've got activities that I enjoy like rock climbing and mountain biking and snowboarding and playing guitar and all of these things that on the outside look like they could take up a ton of time and yet my answer is still that I put in an obnoxiously large amount of time and energy and resources into the business and into myself and into my growth and into the goals that I want to accomplish and so that's what I want to share with you here some of the lessons and some of the discussions that we had so that you can approach this and really build up this ironclad bulletproof unstoppable work ethic that'll make you untouchable to your competition and help you accomplish pretty much any goal that you really want to go after before I ever started my first business I worked for seven years for a number of very successful billionaires and the lessons that they taught me about work ethic I'll never forget one of the first lessons that I ever learned and probably one of the most valuable ones and certainly one that stayed with me and that I'm pretty much never able to forget and it drives me absolutely bananas when I see it in other people is a sense of entitlement essentially having a sense of entitlement or this feeling that somebody owes you something or the world owes you something will absolutely kill your chances of success and it will destroy your work at because what we've seen and what they've seen and certainly what I've seen in my life in my business is that success is absolutely positively attainable you can be ridiculously successful but it's going to be way harder than you thought and it's going to take way more time than you thought which is why I get a little bit frustrated and maybe even a little irritated when I hear people talking about putting in I don't know six to eight hours in a day and putting in like four or five days a week or trying to build this lifestyle business or making a few posts and not seeing results or basically putting in what would be considered kind of like bare minimum effort even if you are working as an employee for someone else and then when it comes to your own business I mean there's just there's no excuse especially if what you're looking for is significant maximum impact and positive results so if you want to improve your work ethic and you obviously do or we wouldn't be having this conversation right now well the very first step is to eliminate any sense of entitlement that you may feel that you may have been raised with that you may have developed from well-meaning friends or teachers or people giving you commendation and accolades and saying hey you're really good at what you do why aren't you growing faster why isn't your business doing better or anything like that because the reality is is that the market never lies and if you put out a good product you will be rewarded it just may take longer than you initially thought doesn't mean you should give up it just means you may even want to work harder which is kind of my next point here and kind of alluded to it in the previous statement which is that you need to know and understand and also appreciate that reaching a true high level of success reaching your goals especially if they're lofty goals well it's going to take longer and it's going to be harder than you thought and that is a really really good thing because I don't want to get to cliched here but the reality is is that it's not really the goal that you achieve but the person that you become in pursuit of that goal that really matters plus if you become a better version of yourself if you become more capable more skilled more talented more able to deliver on results and things like that well you're not only going to be able to achieve this initial goal that you've set but it's also going to make you weaponized to essentially achieve any further goals they you have in the future with that much more ease and that much greater expediency one of the obstacles that does come up though when you're putting in the hours and you're putting in the work and you're really trying to develop that work ethic is the really human feelings of having doubts and fears these lead to procrastination they lead to feelings of laziness so how do you combat that how do you get over it well at the end and closer towards the end of this conversation I'm going to share with you some actionable and practical tips but one of the big ones that you need right off the bat is is really to know your why right like you need to know why you're doing this why are you putting in the hours why are you making the sacrifices and if it's for something superficial like a new car or a bigger house or a better vacation I promise you those are gonna be very fleeting and you may even experience what I experienced around a decade ago when I first hit this high level of success and I was able to achieve the goals that I set and these were my life goals my ambitions I thought if I could achieve this if I could have this car if I could have this house if I couldn't earn this salary then I'll be happy and a scary thing happened and that I achieved all that and I still wasn't really that happy and I didn't know what else to do and I realized that my why really wasn't that solid I mean it was all just really superficial and it didn't enable me to become the person that I knew I was going to be able to become so really drill down and get real with yourself and figure out are you doing this for yourself are you doing it for your family you're doing it to build a legacy just make sure that you're building your goals and your work on a solid foundation and not on some superficial dream for even a new car or a new house or anything like that alright let's talk about the next lesson that I learned which is that you have unlimited willpower this old concept is is really a myth that you have a depleting source of willpower that we just call a decision fatigue where if you make too many decisions in the morning you're gonna run out of it and then you're not gonna have any willpower and so you're just gonna binge on ice cream and watch a Netflix all night and what we've shown and what the studies have shown is that this isn't actually that true and you have willpower just like you have happiness and it's all about switching your mindset around and focusing on again your Y and your goals and what you're trying to accomplish so that you can tap into that sense of willpower and you can just keep delivering on it and keep getting bigger and stronger willpower is kinda like a muscle and it does need to be developed which means you are going to need to put in the reps you're going to need to make commitments to yourself and then you're going to need to keep them to prove to yourself that you have a really solid work ethic and there's a fantastic thing about self-confidence confidence in general and that confidence is going to arrive from the promises that you keep to yourself not to others not to your mom not to your dad not to your friends not to your partner but to yourself so this is why we're gonna cover in just a minute two different ways to go about this but it's really important that whatever you say you're going to do you actually do it so if you're going to clock in 15 minutes or 60 minutes or even four hours on a specific task it's incredibly important that you actually stick with it which is gonna lead me perfectly to my next point and this is gonna be very specific to you and to what type of personality you are and how you best accomplish things but essentially there's gonna be two different ways that you're gonna want to go about developing your work ethic number one is with baby steps this is gonna be small micro changes mini habit shifts that again maybe we're gonna be adding like 15 minutes to your work day maybe we're going to be having clear and focused and distraction free time and we're gonna just slowly step it up maybe five minutes a day over the week or maybe an extra hour a day over the month or whatever it is but it's gonna come through baby steps and for the vast majority of people this is a far more effective and far more sustainable way to do things but there's another group of people and maybe this is you but if it is just make sure that it actually is because otherwise you're gonna want to favor the baby step approach but if you feel like perhaps a more extreme approach is gonna be better for you then that's the path you can take and it really is that full-on extreme approach this is good if you've got a really solid why you've got a strong goal you've got a short time frame to accomplish it and this is where you want to just dive all in burn the boats eliminate all distractions and really focus in on becoming the true masterful sort of work dedicated person that you know you're capable of becoming regardless however of if you choose the baby steps or if you choose the all in extreme approach you still are going to need a few more tips that I'm going to share with you now that I learned from the billionaires that I've worked with and that I've definitely incorporated into my life over the last better part of a decade to build a number of successful businesses and a life that I'm really proud of and really happy with the first thing is that you're going to need to be real with yourself about what your current obligations are what kind of time you have available and you're going to want to design and develop a routine and a schedule that works for you not for me not for your friends or for your family but for you because where you're at right now and with your specific personality traits and with the type of things that you enjoy and what you dislike and all of that you're going to want to be real with yourself and make sure that you're setting yourself up for success right from the start the reason that I could share with you my routine right now but it's gonna seem maybe insane certainly extreme and the way that I got to where I'm at right now including the ridiculous hour that I wake up and all the the food that I eat and how structured that is and that with the workouts and everything is completely dialed in didn't just happen overnight this was a process that took years and years and it took studying the great talk modeling after the billionaires that I worked with it took mentoring and coaching and it also took a large dose of self-awareness to figure out what I was willing to do what I was unwilling to do what I was willing to compromise on what I was willing to sacrifice and things that I was unwilling to sacrifice so really make sure that you find the best routine and best schedule for you obviously you're going to need to include work times in your schedule and it's important here that we don't just talk about quantity of work like those massive monstrous long work days but more specifically the quality of the work that you're doing within that quantity for example if you're putting in twelve or fourteen or a 16-hour day but you're only working for four or six hours of it and the rest of the time is spent exhausted or just answering emails or scrolling through social media well you're kind of just wasting your time and you'd be much better off by putting in two or three focused chunks of three or four hours at a time and you'll accomplish significantly more and if you just kind of waste away in an unscheduled and unproductive day there's a great quote by Jim Rohn that I absolutely love and I think is relevant here which is while you're at work work while you're at play play don't confuse the two don't be on the beach thinking about work and don't be at work thinking about the beach I know for me at least I still struggle even when I'm away that to not think about work but it is important that while you're at work you're really focused you're really dialed in and you're focused on getting things done productively efficiently and working to the best of your ability ultimately when it comes to developing an ironclad work ethic to really reaching those world-class levels of productivity of success and of accomplishment you ultimately just have to do it I don't know how else to really say it other than you've got to flip that switch in your mind you have to realize that you only have one life to live you've got to maximize your potential you've got to seize the moment you've got a crush everything that you possibly can and extract the maximum value out of this life and deliver the max amount of value to the marketplace and to other people because that is where success comes from so if you want to create more content then you're gonna have to carve out some time and you're just gonna have to create more content if you want to get in better shape you're gonna have to carve out the time and you're gonna have to make an effort to get to the gym plan your meals and do what you need to do there and if you want to build a thriving business you're going to need to spend a ton of time on servicing your clients on mastering the fundamentals of business on learning from mentors and coaches and on building the best business that you possibly can and that is going to take an awesome awesome amount of work and that is a good thing because it's through this work that you're going to become the best version of yourself all right the next thing you're gonna want to do is check out the video I have linked up right here on ten signs you are going to be successful so make sure to check that out now and I'll see you in the next episode what if there was a way to predict your success before it happened so you can plan for it stack the odds in your favor and really make sure that you're on the right track well there is which is why in this video I'm going to share with you