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You may have thought that we started late, but it is ironic that the first speaker
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would be the author of the book, "Procrastinate on Purpose".
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(Laughter)
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How is it, that we have more tips and tricks, tools and technology,
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calendars and checklists than ever before,
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and yet, we still always seem to be behind?
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How is it that we work longer hours,
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we're moving faster than we've ever moved in history,
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and yet we never seem to be caught up?
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How is it that we know more about time management today,
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and yet stress is at an all-time high?
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The reason why is because everything you know
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about time management is wrong.
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I first started to realize this a couple of years ago.
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It was early on a Saturday morning, I was at my business partner's house,
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and I was picking him up for a very important
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international leader planning retreat,
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and he has a 2-year-old baby girl name Haven,
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and she is the sweetest little thing you can imagine.
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She has curly brown hair, and these sweet, soft, brown eyes,
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and we live in Nashville, so she has a little southern accent that's developing
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and as I'm picking up Dustin, and we're about to leave,
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Haven come sprinting down the hallway
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and she leaps, and she latches on to Dustin's leg,
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and she says: "Daddy where you going?"
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And he looks down at her and he says:
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"Oh, I'm sorry baby Haven, Daddy actually has to go to work today."
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And she looks up at him, and her eyes well up with tears,
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and she says:
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"No Daddy, please, no work today. No work Daddy."
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And in that moment, I realized two things:
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The first is that I myself am not ready to have kids just yet.
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(Laughter)
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The second is that even though everything that you've ever heard
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about time management is all logical, tips and tricks, tools and technology,
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calendars and check lists, its apps, it's all logic.
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What I realized in that moment, from a 2-year-old,
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is that today, time management is no longer just logical,
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today, time management is emotional,
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and how our feelings of guilt, and fear, and worry, and anxiety, and frustration,
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those things dictate how we choose to spend our time,
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as much as anything that's in our calendar, on our to-do list.
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In fact, there is no such thing as time management.
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You can't manage time, time continues on whether we like it or not.
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So there is no such thing as time management.
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Really, there is only self-management.
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That was the first big realization I had.
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In order for you to understand the second,
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I want to take you on a quick history of time management theory,
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and that really began in the late fifties, and sixties,
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and it came during the industrial revolution,
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and an early time management thought was all about --
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it was one-dimensional, and it was all based on efficiency,
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and the idea with efficiency, was that if we could develop tools and technology
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to help us do things faster, then theoretically,
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that would give us more time.
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Well, there's nothing wrong with efficiency, all things being equal,
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efficiency is better, and yet there is an unfortunate limitation
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to efficiency as a strategy for time management,
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and it's evidenced very well by the fact that we all carry around
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miniature computers in our pockets,
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and yet, somehow, we're still never caught up.
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Well, in the late eighties, era 2 time management thinking emerged.
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I feel like it was pretty much single-handedly ushered in
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by the late, great Dr. Stephen Covey.
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And Dr. Covey introduced what we're referring to as 2-dimensional thinking.
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He gave us something called the Time Management Matrix,
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where the x-axis was urgency, and the y-axis was importance,
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and the beauty about this was that it gave us a system for scoring our tasks,
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and then based on how they scored in these two areas, we could prioritize tasks,
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one in front of the other.
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Prioritizing is all about focusing first on what matters most,
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and for the last 20 years,
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this has been the pervasive mode of thinking
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as it relates to time management theory.
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It's not that there's anything wrong with prioritizing, in fact,
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prioritizing is as valuable a skill today
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as it ever has been in history.
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Even though we throw that word around,
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like it's the end-all and be-all, to time management theory, right?
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We say: "Get your priorities in order.",
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or "You don't have the right priorities."
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Well, unfortunately, maybe that's not really the case,
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because there is a massive limitation to prioritizing that nobody ever talks about
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and that is this: there's nothing about prioritizing that creates more time.
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All prioritizing does, is take item number 7 on your to do list,
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and it bumps it up to number 1, which is valuable in and of itself,
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but it doesn't do anything inherently to create more time,
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and it does nothing to help you accomplish the other items on your to-do list.
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If you think about efficiency, it is kind of like running on a hamster wheel,
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and if you think a prioritizing, it's really about borrowing time.
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Borrowing time from one activity to spend on another, it's kind of like juggling,
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and that really describes the way that we even talk about time.
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I'm juggling a lot, or I'm trying to balance a lot.
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And in that paradigm there's only two strategies:
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one is to do things faster, or to do more things,
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and that is what the world kind of feels like, right?
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How does it feel to know that really all we are is a bunch of juggling hamsters,
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sprinting towards an inevitable crash landing?
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(Laughter)
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You cannot solve today's time management problems,
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with yesterday's time management thinking.
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What we've noticed, is the emergence of a new type of thinker,
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somebody that we refer to, as a multiplier,
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and multipliers use what we call, 3-dimensional thinking.
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While most people only make decisions based on urgency, and importance,
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multipliers are making a third calculation which is based on significance,
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and if urgency is how soon does something matter,
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and importance is how much does it matter,
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then significance is how long is it going to matter.
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It's a completely different paradigm, it's adding on to what is there,
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it's in with the old, but it's also in with the new.
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Because most of us, if you think about the modern day to-do list,
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which is one of the key strategies or tools that we have,
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we ask ourselves, when we assemble our to-do list, we say:
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"What's the most important thing I can do today?"
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But that is not how multipliers think; multipliers, instead ask the question:
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"What can I do today, that would make tomorrow better?"
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"What can I do right now, that would make the future better?"
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They're making the significance calculation.
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When I say: "Multiply your time," that might sound a little bit superfluous.
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It might sound like an over exaggeration, but it really is not.
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Now, it is true that we all have the same at a time inside of 1 day,
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24 hours, 1,440 minutes, 86,400 seconds.
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There's nothing any of us can do to create more time in 1 day,
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but that's exactly the problem, that type of thinking is the problem.
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We have to break out of that paradigm, and instead, think about tomorrow,
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and that brings us to the premise for how you multiply time.
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The way that you multiply time, is simple:
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you multiply your time, by giving yourself the emotional permission
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to spend time on things today, that give you more time tomorrow.
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That's the significance calculation.
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You multiply time, by giving yourself the emotional permission
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to spend time on things today, that create more time tomorrow.
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The significance calculation changes everything.
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The Focus Funnel is our attempt, to create a visual depiction
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that codifies the thought process, that multipliers go through in their head,
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unconsciously, when they are evaluating how to spend their time.
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It's why some people create extraordinary, explosive, exponential results,
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and other people seem to kind of just create linear traction,
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and it works like this, if your tasks all come into the top of the funnel,
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the first question a multiplayer asks is: "Can I eliminate this?
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Is it even worth doing?"
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It's another example of how everything you know about time management is wrong,
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or at least that it has changed, because most of us use to-do lists,
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and multipliers realize that next generation time management
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has much more to do with what you don't do, than what you do do.
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Multipliers realize that perfection is achieved
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not only when nothing more can be added, but when nothing more can be taken away.
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It is the permission to ignore.
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Because anything that we say no to today,
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creates more time for us tomorrow.
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The challenge emotionally is that we struggle with guilt,
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and we struggle with wanting to say no,
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but really feeling like we have to say yes,
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and so we go through life trying to never say no.
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In an interview with a multiplier
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they said something that changed my life,
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"It's futile to go through life, trying to never say no.
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What you have to realize, is that you are always saying no to something."
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Because anytime you say yes to one thing,
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you're simultaneously saying no to an infinite number of others.
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If you can't eliminate the task, the next question is: "Can I automate the task?"
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Anything that I create a process for today, saves me time tomorrow.
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It's like setting up online bill pay.
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I never have two hours in my day to set up online bill pay,
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I just don't have time, and if I had two hours in my day
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I would never use it to set up online bill pay.
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But a multiplier realizes that if I save 30 minutes a month
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from paying my bills, by setting up online bill pay,
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then it makes sense to invest those 2 hours,
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because then after just 4-months time,
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I will have broken even on that investment,
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and every month thereafter, I will get something we call ROTI,
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Return On Time Invested.
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Automation is to your time
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exactly what compounding interest is to your money.
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Just like compounding interest takes money and it makes money into more money,
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automation takes time, and it makes it into more time.
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The way that wealthy people think about money
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is exactly the same way that Multipliers think about time,
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and they give themselves the permission to invest,
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invest the time and energy to automate the process.
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If it can't be automated, then the question is:
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"Can it be delegated? Can I teach someone else how to do this?"
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I'm reminded of a time, when I was 7 years old, and I'll never forget,
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I was in the car with my Mom, and I hit her with this question, I said:
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"Mom, do I have a Dad?"
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And as you might imagine, that was a pretty difficult question
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for a single mother, to navigate with her 7-year-old.
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It was the first time that my mom told me her life story.
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She was pregnant at 17, divorced a couple of years later.
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Pregnant again at 22, and then she was divorced
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from my biological father 6 months after I was born.
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So there she was, 22 years old, single mom, no high school education,
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and she explained to me:
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"Rory, I decided at that point that I would never have a man in my life,
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because I haven't had good luck with men, and we may not have a lot,
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and we may not have a dad, but we're going to have love."
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We went back and forth, and I said:
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"You know Mom, I love our family, I really do, I love our family,
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but I think it would be really cool to have a Dad."
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And so she said:
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"Well, I'll tell you what honey, if you want a Dad,
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then why don't you go out, and find yourself a good Dad."
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What kind of crap is that?
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(Laughter)
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It just so happened that that was my first day at a new Shaolin Kung Fu center.
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I had been studying martial arts since I was 5.
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So they put me in this all-adult school, to be a little more advanced.
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Another gentleman who walked in, it was his first day, also.
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This guy was much older than me.
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He had long hair, and tattoos all up and down his arm,
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and a leather jacket, and he came in on a motorcycle,
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and this guy was about the scariest dude you can imagine, if you're 7 years old,
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and he gets paired up as my sparring partner.
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(Laughter)
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His name was Kevin. He turned out to be pretty nice.
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We advanced through the belt levels together,
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and so Kevin started bringing me home from class, every once in a while.
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Soon Kevin came over on the weekends, and we would practice our forms.
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Then we caught a movie, and then before long,
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Mom came with us to the movies.
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So it was the 3 of us going to movies together,
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and I'll never forget the first time the 2 of them went to a movie
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without me.
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(Laughter)
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As it turns out,
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Kevin and I tested for our black belts together on the same day
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when I was 10 years old.
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They got married 2 weeks later.
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A couple of years after that Kevin adopted me,
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and I change my last name, from Rory MacLachlan, to Rory Vaden,
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and they have been married for 20 years, ever since.
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(Applause)
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And the point of that story is that you can delegate anything.