SUMMARY

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTE

FULL TRANSCRIPT

[The following is the full transcript of this episode of The Brendon Show. Please note that this episode, like all TBS episodes, features Brendon speaking extemporaneously–he is unscripted and unedited. Filmed in one take, The Brendon Show has become one of the most viewed unscripted, direct-to-camera self-help series in the history of Youtube. It has also been the #1 Podcast in all of iTunes and is regularly in the top podcasts in Self-Help and Health categories around the globe. Subscribe to the free motivational podcast on iTunes or Stitcher.)

In this episode, I want talk to you about the patience and the things that are necessary and required for you to actually bring a long-term goal into fruition. Because I know how hard it is sometimes. You might be up late at night, at your kitchen table with one light bulb on, working on your dream at night.

You work late in the night and then you get up and do your regular day job. While you’re creating and working on your dreams, you’re hoping that that sustains you throughout the weeks. But a lot of people quit on their dreams after a week of struggle, or after two or three, or four months. They start saying, “It’s just a hobby. No one really cares about this.”

And they can’t weather the storm of the difficult times. They can’t weather the storm of doubts they have during the days they don’t feel like creating, or working on their goals or dreams. Eventually after a year or two, they give up (even though they never even put their project out there.) They don’t even know if it works. They’ve been working on it but they didn’t believe in it and themselves enough, so they quit.

I don’t want that to be the case for you.

So, I’d like to share in this special episode what’s happening in real time in my life, right now. Many of you guys have been with us for awhile. If you’ve been watching me on social media, especially on Instagram, this last week I launched something that was a huge dream of mine and I want to share that with you and tell you three things you could do to sustain your own journey.

If you didn’t see it, this is the big hot news right now.

This week, I launched The High Performance Planner! I’m super pumped about this. I spent three years trying to build the world’s best 2-in-1 day planner and productivity journal!

I had the benefit of conducting the world’s largest study of high performers that’s ever been done. I had all this insight about what they do in their morning routines, the questions they asked themselves in the morning, how they prioritize their day, how they reviewed their day, and what score cards they used to stay on track during the days, weeks, and months in the year.

I had all that information and it didn’t land in my last book as much as I really wanted it to. So, I wanted to create a tool for people that would allow you to do what I do.

Every morning, I use a High Performance Planner, and have for three years. This has been my project on the kitchen table. I’ve literally been working on it every night to perfect it. It’s got these different sections.

The High Performance Planner has your morning mindset. It’s got your day agenda. It’s got your evening review, and then a habit score card that’s been directly co-related with long-term success.

Meaning, we know that if you measure yourself and improve in these six habits in this planner, that you will improve your productivity and your long-term success in high performance.

We can measure it. Every single week, I have you review your learnings and review your whole life. We have this whole life assessment that you start at the very beginning. You give yourself scores on that and then you score off your habits. That happens every week. Every month we have more assessments in here and it’s awesome. If you haven’t seen it, just go to highperformanceplanner.com. It’s launching this week as pre-order! If you don’t get it right now, I can’t guarantee you’ll get it by Christmas because it WILL sell out.

We debuted it on Amazon on Thursday and it was an immediate top 20 bestseller. As I’m filming this today, it’s number nine out of all best-selling books on Amazon. It had a big four or five days.

This thing was a three year effort. How many people will work diligently on something for three years? Not many, and that’s why I want to share some insights that I learned along the way.

#1. Work on your dream every single day.
The first lesson today is about having patience for your dream. You have to work on it every single day for at least 30 minutes, or don’t fool yourself that it’s going to happen. We all hope that one day we’ll get a bunch of free weekends, or a month off or three months off and that’s when we’ll finally start working towards our thing. You have to do it everyday.

Whether that means you research everyday, you read everyday, you study everyday, you take a course everyday or you actually create everything on that project everyday.

Authors write everyday. Not all of them, but a lot of the greats wrote everyday. It’s just forcing ourselves to really be in the game. Now not everyone writes everyday and not everyone needs to create everyday.

Some people can have a marvelous 18 days and write the greatest book of all time but that rarely happens. It rarely happens and those folks tend to be like masters or savants or geniuses. Regular folks, myself included, have to work everyday toward those dreams.

Everyday I honed in on this, and if you didn’t know something about me, I do everything in this business. I’m shooting this video right now, but I picked the materials for this thing. I chose the fonts, I designed all the pages, I wrote the back, the cover, and the front cover.

The inside stuff is like the projects of my dreams and that’s what keeps me creatively fired up and engaged. It took effort everyday for three years. I was either picking materials, changing the setup, testing it out, working on it, printing out the pages, and doing the weekly, monthly, and yearly reviews. I was working on figuring out what assessments went in it, what trainings went in it.

I decided ultimately to pull out all the fancy quotes, get rid of all the empty pages, and make this a work horse of a planner.

The High Performance Planner is something that achievers will use. It’s not like a gratitude journal where you just write a cute quote and go, “I guess I’ll write it was great today.”

Nothing wrong with that, but I think you’ve had enough of those. I wanted to create a strategic thinking person’s planner, something that you could do every single day to be on your A-game. Something you do every single day that would force you to approach the day more strategically, that would force you at the end of the day, to really look back at the day and discover the gems. This is to help you discover the things that you not just appreciate during your day, but things that you learn about yourself, about other people, and about your mission. This gets you to score yourself everyday, in the daily habits that we know scientifically lead to long-term success.

It was a ton of work to decide what goes in and what doesn’t. And there were plenty of days I thought, “Ah, this doesn’t work or I don’t like this format or design.” But I just kept tweaking and tweaking. Then I’d learn more about the morning routines or the habits of the successful mindsets of people and I made sure I was getting that in.

Then I created the sheets. I printed them out and sent them to my best clients and some major influencers, celebrities and huge entrepreneurs all around the world. I said, “Do this for a week or two. Tell me what you thought about the process.” So, I created Beta groups and people would fill it out. They’d do it for a couple of weeks and then send it back. I’d make them take a professional academic validated assessment to see if their productivity did actually improve.

Thank God it did. And so, that all led to this. It took three years. If you saw on social media, we launched a full year planner pack. So if you’re wondering why it took so long, there are eight different skews here. We’ve got a full year pack cause each of these planners is 60 days of strategic thinking in your life, day by day. I didn’t want it to get too thick to slide into your laptop bag really comfortably.

I also made it large enough that you could actually write about your life. I know those little dime size journals are really cute but I wanted you to work for your life cause I’ve worked with high performance. I’ve noticed the ones who’ve really crushed it really think about life. It’s hard.

You’re gonna fill out some of the questions in here and be like, “Brendon, those questions are hard. I don’t know the answer right off the bat.” I’m like, “Great, because listen, if it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you. So, I really wanted to go for it. That’s why there’s so many different colors and stuff like that. It just took a long time.

Every single day, here’s what we learn about high performers in general: those who achieve the longest term of success, in whatever their field is, tend to spend about 60% of their week on needle-moving activities.

These are activities that we can see or measure that were the major activities that led to their wealth, their growth or their success. Now the good news is that means they don’t have to spend every single hour of every single day on these. I mean, that other 40% is sometimes administration. Sometimes that’s email, text, talking to people, management, delegation, and all the stuff of life. But 60% of the time of their week, they were dialed in on the major needle-moving activities. So when I ask you for 30 minutes of your day, that’s bare minimum. The highest performing, the most successful in any field in the world, spend 60% of the week on the needle-moving activities that make them successful.

Now I know that might be different for you because maybe during the day you’re working on needle-moving projects at work and then at night, you’re working on that separate hobby, that separate dream. That’s where your 30 minutes happens. Or, maybe you get up 30 minutes early and you work on that dream. If you want long-term success on whatever project or dream that you’re after, you need about 60% of your week dedicated towards it.

#2. Get your visualization game down.
I know this sounds so so silly, but common sense is not always common practice and that’s why so many potentially great people fail to ever achieve their potential.

Listen, you have to get your visualization game down. Visualization means when I wake up, when I have a dream, I wake up in the morning, and before I get out of bed, I close my eyes. I see it happening a little bit. I lay in bed and I let my mind and my body stir up a little bit of excitement or sometimes even anxiety about seeing the actual thing that I want, happen.

That was me at one point in my life, seeing myself on stages, speaking and training people. One part of my life was seeing my book come out and seeing it on the New York Times bestseller list, or seeing it on the Amazon bestseller list. It was sometimes seeing myself coaching major celebrities or sitting side by side with an Oprah Winfrey or Tony Robbins or Larry King, all of which I’ve been able to do. It was because I visualized what I really want to be. Here’s the thing, it’s not just visualization. That’s the first part.

It’s also affect. We talk about high performance and in psychology about this thing called affect, which is basically feelings and emotions. I want you to allow yourself to not just casually see it. You have to put yourself there and feel it, sense it, see it, feel it and drink it in. You really take in the ambience, the circumstance and visualize and feel what you are seeing. That’s so key. I mean, as silly as this is, I literally would lay there and I’m like, okay, if I fill out the ideal thing in the morning, what questions would I ask? I just start literally seeing myself at my desk, in the morning, filling out the high performance planner.

I would think about other people world-wide filling it out the same time as me and knowing that I’ve got this tribe of people on this path, of trying to be their best with me, and imagining people coming at me and goes, “Oh my gosh, Brendon, you completely changed my morning. “You completely changed my weekly routine. “You completely changed my life. “I’d never tracked my habits before. “I’d never assessed my balance every single week “between family, friends, work, finances, adventure, “learning, etc.” Every tool that we put in here, I could see someone come up saying,” Brendon, I really appreciate that part.”

And I literally just thought about it, because I wanted it to feel like I was excited for the project, otherwise look how easy it is to diminish anything in our lives. It’s just a book, it’s just a planner, it’s just a video, it’s just a cosmetic line, it’s just a beauty thing, it’s just a that. We all diminish our dreams. We make excuses and we make our dreams like eh, we throw it away because we’re scared to feel it. You know what I’m saying? It’s easy to just throw it away, eh, it’s no big deal, avoid it, no problem and we mess up.

I want you to feel it. Stop detaching from your dreams. Stop avoiding that anxious, scary feeling.

We all diminish our dreams. We make excuses and throw away our dreams because we’re scared to feel them. It’s easy to throw it away, so we avoid the problem and we mess up. I want you to feel it. Stop detaching from your dreams. Stop avoiding that anxious and scary feeling of thinking about how hard it’s going to be. Most people avoid thinking about it because it causes too many nerves.

Dance in those nerves a little bit. Let them come up for you because that’s FUEL. It’s like Les Brown taught us, you have to be hungry. You’re never going to be hungry if you don’t visualize and see it, feel it, and want it.

 

#3Perfect your dream in MOTION.
Number three is: realize whatever dream you’re gonna have, you have to perfect it in motion. You can’t be a perfectionist. I could have gone another two years working on this. I’ve validated this with 12 other academic teams. I could’ve gone out and built four apps for it. I could’ve kept this dream in progress for a long time. A real perfectionist realizes the root definition of perfectionism is to perfect. And you cannot perfect something until you have released something. You have to set a deadline for your dream and follow it.

The reality is I don’t have a choice. I set a deadline. And last Thursday when I announced it, we were not ready, my team wasn’t ready, the world wasn’t ready. I didn’t have any time because I had pneumonia and I was knocked down off my feet. But it didn’t matter because we were launching. It kicked my butt, but I’m glad it did because as you release something, you start getting feedback.

And I started getting feedback. Let me give you an example. This is the yellow High Performance Planner. This is the one I thought would fly off the shelves. Talking with friends, had given me some idea. If it wasn’t that one, I thought it’d maybe be the cool orange. There’s green, there’s blue, there’s yellow, there’s red. This is the full year planner pack. So if you do look up on this on Amazon by the way, you can type in full year planner pack get this beast mailed to you and this will last you all of 2019. It’s super awesome.

Anyway, I learned, like this, not the most popular at all, least popular. So why is that important? Sometimes, putting things out there is the only way you actually get closer to perfecting your dreams, right. I put it out there, I launched it. It’s available for pre-order right now in the United States, Australia, Canada and the UK. So, if you’re in any of those countries, you need to order it now, especially if you want it by Christmas, because this thing is selling out like crazy.

But I also learned that this one is gonna be one of the big ones. It’s basically these two, it’s the black and the red. Notice when you take off the wrap, this is what it looks like, because I wanted to be under-stated. I’m a simple guy, strip it all down. What’s magic is what’s inside. On the out, it feels beautiful, like a moleskin journal. But I wanted it to be very simple, so everyone’s like, “Hey, what’s that thing?”. I just want you to learn to play your A game so no one knows what your secret weapon is. It will turn out, your greatest secret weapon and your productivity of all of your whole life, will be this planner. I promise it.

Well, I learned this one’s a blockbuster. This one debuted in the top 20 on Amazon. I have no idea where it is when you guys are watching this video but for five days, it held that spot in the top 20, so I’m stoked about that. If it held it for one day, it’s a planner. Like, I had no idea it would crush it like that. So, thank you all for supporting me but I hope you hear the message here.

You have to work on your dreams everyday, and you have to visualize it, see it and feel it. That’s what helps you work through all those times when you want to quit or you don’t think it’s important enough.

Because it would be easy for me to say, “I have four multi-million dollar businesses. I have millions of fans that I’ve got to talk to. My YouTube videos have been viewed like, 17 million times and it’s just me teaching. I’m not even funny, right, I’m not an entertaining person.” So, it’s pretty amazing that my teaching and my training has gone that far but I share all this with you on the road and on the fly, because this has come out and it’s been a labor of love.

And I want to see you have your labor of love come into fruition. I want to see you have your dreams come true. I wanna see you create things but release things and then perfect it like I learned now. It’s like, oh God, this one’s gonna be the big one. Great, we’ll do a re-design, we’ll re-launch with different colors, schemes and everything else. Oh wait, this country orders this many and this country orders that many and these people from this state order that many. This ad works, this one doesn’t. This promotion, this email, great. You’re always gonna be learning. Don’t give up on your dreams just cause the first time you launched it, it didn’t go as big as you want.

I’ve had books that came out, that weren’t New York Times Bestsellers right off the bat. It came out, didn’t do that well. So I had to learn and work and massage the marketing and do different videos and test it and shoot it in different ways. I had to explain it in different ways and then bam, it is in New York Times. It doesn’t have to crush it. Sometimes you release a dream and you don’t believe in it because it only gets a hundred likes at first or a thousand people comment on it over a period of years and a hundred of them were your mom.

It can feel so disheartening but if it’s still in your dreams, if it’s still in your heart, if you still lay in bed and you dream about it, you think about it and you really generally feel it then that dream was sown in your heart for a reason. That dream was given to you to protect. That dream was given to you to create. That dream was given to you to fulfill, so my friends, believe in yourself. Believe in your dreams, put your dreams out there, do the hard work, because you deserve to see them out in the real world.

You won’t see your dreams in the world if you don’t start working at them every single day.

Patience comes from saying, okay, I’m going to work diligently everyday. I’m going to allow myself to feel. I’m not going to avoid those feelings, I’m going to let them come in. I will test it and put it out there. I will make it better but I will not give up on my dream because I own that dream. It’s your responsibility to make your dreams come true, my friends. I know you can do it. Remember, you’re stronger than you think and the future holds good things for you.