Episode 6

This podcast is about living an extraordinary life and maximizing your potential. It emphasizes the importance of self-reflection, simplifying life, and setting goals. It suggests doing things in increments, doing tasks right the first time, focusing on one thing at a time, and avoiding overanalyzing decisions. It also encourages promoting yourself instead of others, understanding people and their strengths, and surrounding yourself with positive influences. Welcome to another episode of Rob the Graveyard. My name is Terry Bryan and we are now at episode 6 and at this point in the podcast it is worth reminding you that this podcast is targeted to those or at those who want to live an extraordinary life. Sometimes I may say things I hate you the wrong way but it's not intended to make you feel bad or to get under your skin. Hopefully I inspire you to make a difference in your life and the life of others. That's what it's all about. It's about maximizing your potential, doing what you can do, living your best life. Nelson Mandela sums this up in one of his inspirational quotes better than anything else I've heard so far. He said that there's no passion to be found in playing small and setting for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living. Now that sums up the spirit of what it means to Rob the Graveyard better than anything else I've heard or seen. Because we are facing a tough life. Life is tough. I don't care whether you live in Africa or you live in America. America is peaches and cream probably compared to a lot of other places but here we live in different circumstances so our feelings are going to be different and we will have similar challenges as people in other parts of the world. Life is complicated and you know what it's full of contradictions. For example sometimes you need to go fast, sometimes you need to go slow. Those are contradictory things but there's a time and a moment for all of those things. That's why life is so complicated because it's all about the moment, right? The moment that leads to the future and the best way you can handle life and be successful is to simplify things. If you can simplify life down to the smallest details that make it easier for you and simpler for you then it will ultimately be better for you. So the key thing here is making things simpler and to do that the best way you can start by figuring out who you are, what you want and why you want it. We talked a little bit about that earlier in one of the other episodes so we're not going to get into that here right now but the key thing is that if you figure out who you are and what you want and why you want it that's the great step. That's the first thing you need to do to figure out where you should go next. What should I do next? If I want these things, what do I need to do together? See and that comes from self-reflection. I talked a little bit about that in the previous episode. Self-reflection is important. That's why meditation is good and we're going to talk about that in a later episode as well but rather than listening to a lot of music and watching nonsense on TV sometimes, spend more time. More time should be spent on you and self-reflection. There is time for that. There's time to be watching TV and having fun and relaxing but most of your time should be spent improving yourself and moving towards your goal. That's what it's all about. So if you want to go back in the previous episode and listen to what I talked about self-assessment and seeing the light and becoming enlightened, that's important because when I talk about seeing the light in my previous episode, I was talking about two things right. One is seeing the light at the end of the tunnel when things are looking bleak and the other part I was talking about is being enlightened. Enlightened by becoming educated and learning more and that's the part that right now at this stage you want to be doing. You want to be learning more and improving yourself so you can move towards living your best life. You've got to figure out what works best for you because when you become enlightened you're not only becoming enlightened about the things you're trying to get accomplished, you are becoming enlightened about yourself as well. You are learning about you. Learning about what things work best for you. What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? What things work best for you? Once you figure that out, it makes your life even easier because you know where to spend your time. I need to improve in this area. I need to be better in this area. I'm already great or good over here so I don't need to spend as much time doing that anymore. I need to spend more time in the areas where I'm weak. Right? That is what it means to do a self-assessment and become enlightened about oneself and move and do the things that you need to do to make yourself better. Because every day you live and just imagine if you can improve yourself just a little bit more every day. Just think about who you would be in five years. You will not be the same person and that's why I said robbing the graveyard is a journey. It is not an event. You can't do everything in one day. It's not a one-time thing. It's a process. But you have to start and you have to do it every day. And that leaves me something that I want to talk about next. You see there are simple concepts. I just talked about simplifying life. Right? I just said what we should do, what will be good to do, will be to simplify life to make it easier for you. As complicated as life is, we want to make it simpler. Right? We want to make it easier. I want the ways you can do that. Well, there's several ways you can do that and really there's simple concepts you can employ and you can utilize. One of the first things I think about when I think about simplifying things is something called incrementalism. Doing things in increments. Right? Sometimes you can't eat the whole cake. Right? You want to eat the whole cake but it's just too much for you. What do they say about eating an elephant? How do you devour an elephant? One bite at a time. You don't have to do it all at one time. One bite at a time. Incrementally. Improve yourself. Improve your life. Achieve your goals. Incrementally. You will still get there. Do as much as you can do and you can take big chunks out of it and that's good for you. Satisfactory for you and it works for you. Do the most and the best you can. But do it incrementally if necessary. Sometimes people can't accomplish everything they want to do and they get frustrated. If they can't do everything they want to do at once, they get frustrated. But doing things, achieving goals, completing tasks in increments has a special place and that will ultimately get you to where you're going. Because guess what? Tomorrow is going to come anyway. Next year is going to come anyway. 10 years from now it's going to come anyway. So guess what? You want to be better in a year or have made more progress in a year than you have right now. So if you do a little bit today and a little bit tomorrow and gradually move. I'm not talking about procrastination now. I'm not talking about putting off things just because you want to procrastinate. I'm talking about doing what you can do today and then coming back again tomorrow with consistency. That's the key word. You want to be consistent and you want to stay focused. So doing things in increments will get you there. You will devour that bad boy, that big elephant, one bite at a time. Now you may take one bite now, complete that, digest and eat it and then take another bite an hour from now or five minutes from now. Just make sure you do it in increments. Now here's another thing you want to do and this is something I learned from my father many, many years ago. I didn't quite understand it then but I understand it now. Do it right the first time. Whatever you are doing, give it your best shot and do it right the first time. Because guess what? If you don't do it right the first time, chances are, if it's of any importance, you're going to have to do it over. And guess what? You have spent more time and you have spent more energy unnecessarily and you would have wasted another portion of your life and if you continue doing that and taking that approach to things, you will waste a whole lot of your life, your life in small increments, in bite- sized chunks, just by the fact that you are not doing things right the first time and you have to repeat and do over several things. So if you have a job to do, don't half-butt do it. Do it right the first time. Get it over with so you can move on to something else so you don't have to backtrack and waste time to do that again. That's a simple concept to help you to get to where you're getting to, where you want to get to faster and better. Because it's a good mindset to employ when you're making your decisions and when you're moving towards your goals in life. Another thing you might want to consider, another simple concept, is focusing on one thing at a time. You see, you can't be in the church and the chapel until my grandma is all the same, right? You want to make sure that when you are doing one task, you're dealing with that task completely and thoroughly. In other words, you don't want to be, for example, out with your kids playing on a Sunday afternoon and thinking about work. Or you don't want to be at work when you should be working and thinking about your kids or your family. Everything has its time and you don't want to be doing one task on the job or your goals and thinking about something else at the same time. Complete your task one at a time. Focus on one thing at a time. Do it right the first time and then move quickly on to the next task, right? If you are trying to be great at something, complete that. Master it. Don't be a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Master your task. Master that job you're trying to complete and then once you get that, then you would have gotten that to the point where you're in second nature to you and now you can have that in cruise control and you can work on something else, right? That is what you want to do. Another simple concept, okay? Then there's one that gets our goat every time. It's called the paralysis of analysis. See, sometimes through laziness, sometimes mostly through procrastination, we try to analyze the dickens of everything before we get around to doing anything. You know, Nike says just do it and basically that's what we need to do. A lot of times, it comes down also to fear of failure. People don't want to make the wrong decision. Well, guess what? You can spend an hour in a corner at a four crossroads trying to figure out should I go straight, should I go left, should I go right, or should I turn back? And somebody else comes up, they don't know where to go either just like you, they just go straight, it's the wrong way. They come back down the road and they went left, it's the wrong way. They come back down the road and then they go right, oh, that's the correct way. But there were two wrong ways to come back and went the right way and you still sitting down in the corner trying to figure out which way you should go. That is not wasting a lot of your time, okay? So don't get bogged down in the paralysis of analysis. Sometimes we have tasks in front of goals, in front of things we want to accomplish and we spend too much time overanalyzing, trying to get things perfect. None of us ain't perfect. I certainly ain't perfect. None of us are. I haven't met the guy or lady yet who is perfect, who hasn't made bad decisions or wrong decisions and outright terrible decisions but that does not prevent you from being successful. You end up like Thomas Edison, finding thousands of ways that did not work. So guess what? You are smarter than the next guy now because guess what? While he has yet to try those things to figure out that they don't work, you have already passed that. So you are smarter by far because why? You failed so many times or so-called failed so many times. You found many ways that didn't work. So guess what? You have so much more experience and now you're better for it. So don't overanalyze things. Just do it. Move on to your task. Collect all the information. See, people often say, well, I don't make decisions quickly. I like to take my time, right? I like to spend overnight. Nonsense. What you want to do in making a proper and astute and informed decision is you want to get all the information. You want to follow everything that there is to know that is relevant and pertinent to you making the correct and right decision. Once you have all the information, you use that information to make your decision quickly and move on. Now, if you don't have all the information, then you seek all the information you need. But if you have all the information, you don't labor on it forever. You have the information, you analyze it quickly, move on. Don't get stuck on the paralysis of analysis. Don't be there forever laboring back and forth in your mind. Well, what if this happens? What if that happens? What if I'm not right? All that kinds of nonsense. Procrastination and fear of failure are the two primary reasons for people getting paralyzed when it comes to making decisions. Just make a decision to move on. So what if you're wrong? Now, there's something else I want to talk about. And this is a simple concept that many of us who are so-called business people end up doing. And it's simply that we do not promote ourselves. Promote yourself. And what I mean by that is this. There are many people out here who I see walking around with other people's jerseys or other people's likeness on their jerseys. Pictures on the wall in their rooms. On their cars. People have stickers of Air Jordan on their car. All these type of things, right? Well, you know what? That's okay for average or ordinary people. And if you fancy yourself as an average or ordinary person, well, that's okay for you too. But if you are a grim robber, right? If you want to do, like Nelson Mandela said, and not play small and settle for less than you are capable of settling, then that's not for you, right? Promote yourself, okay? You don't need to be walking around here with LeBron James jersey on with a picture of him on your chest or Kobe Bryant or may he rest in peace or Michael Jordan or any other or any superstars, any sports personalities or any singers or actors that you like. I'm not saying anything wrong to like these people and to admire what they do. Most of my great people. But promote you. Why are you promoting them? They already make enough money. Promote yourself or those associated with you or any business that you are part of. But I'm not around here with a Dallas Cowboy sticker on my car because I'm a Dallas Cowboy fan. I'm not a Dallas Cowboy fan anyway, but for those who are Dallas Cowboy fans, I know Dallas Cowboy fans are passionate and that's great. But always, the Dallas Cowboys are paying you or giving you a royalty, right? Or giving you dividends for promoting them. You ought not to be promoting them. Not if you are a grim robber. Not if you want to maximize your life. Promote you. Why are you around here promoting Dallas Cowboys or Los Angeles Rams or whoever you support, right? Or Pittsburgh Steelers, all these fancy teams, New York Giants, New Jersey Jets, whatever they are. They are great. Support your team. Cheer them on. Back them. All that stuff. I support some teams as well, right? Mostly players, not teams. But the bottom line is this. You ain't gonna see me around here with no sports team or no sports personality or no entertainer on my shirt or stuck on my car or in my house. I'm not doing that because they don't pay me for that and they don't pay you. Unless they do, you ought not to be doing that. Put on, if you want to wear some of these shirts on your shirt, put on your own picture on your shirt. Maybe put on one of your kids. Maybe do a business like that. That's what you do. Promote you. Stop promoting other people because that's not benefiting you. That's not taking you any closer to your goal. Now another concept I want to talk about is very, very important and this is causing me a lot of consternation. I bet you a lot of rough times deal with this and it is understanding people. If you want to do well in life because you can't do anything by yourself, not to be successful in any major way, you're going to need people, okay? You're going to need people, period. One way to get the most and the best out of people that can benefit both them and you is to understand them. See one of the things you're going to recognize about people is that just like you, people are good at certain things and not so good at other things or don't quite buy the other things and sometimes great at certain things. What you want to figure out is what are they good at? The people that you are working with, the people that are working for you, the people that you are doing business with or that you are in business with, people you deal with on a regular, on an everyday basis, right? You want to make sure you understand them and also make sure they understand you but it's more important for you to understand them because you don't want to set a task or give a task to someone who is not capable of doing that task because they're going to spend a whole lot of time working on that task and never getting it done and then you're going to end up frustrated and they're going to end up frustrated and everybody's going to be upset. Why? Because they're upset because they can't get it done, they're upset because they support you, they're upset because they're frustrated with the whole situation and you're upset because you just wasted some time, you didn't get your job done, you didn't get what you want to get or want to accomplish, get done, accomplish. All those types of things happen when you delegate the wrong responsibility to a person. Figure out what that person is good at, what they're capable of doing, not what they like to do because oftentimes they may like to do things that they can't do or they may not like to do things that they're great at. So you have to delegate responsibility and assign tasks to people who are capable of getting them done efficiently. Understand people, understand what makes people tick, understand that people like recognition, understand that it's good for you to talk good about people and praise them when they do a good job. Don't like them when they do a bad job and tell them they did a good job. You let them go, look, you need some improvement here or whatnot. You don't beat them down but you give honest reference and praise when necessary. But recognition, people like to be around and do things for those who make them feel good. Think about yourself, do you want to be around somebody who makes you feel bad on the table or makes you feel like you're nothing? No. You want to be around people who make you feel good, who tell you good things, who help your self-esteem. That's just human nature, right? So you have to learn how to do that. Then you talk to people and deal with people, you tell them the truth, you give them the honest opinion but you make them feel good, you make them feel worthwhile and worthy, that they are of importance to you and they have a special role in your life, if they do. Because if they don't, then you don't need them around you. So that's another part of understanding. Sometimes you do not need certain people around you. If they don't bring something beneficial to the table, to the relationship, then you don't need them. And you definitely don't want them. And if you want them, you still may not need them. So you want to make sure you understand who you harbor around you because you don't want around you people who are going to help bring you down. You struggle to deal with enough problems in life, you know, as it is. So you want to make sure that you keep the right people around you. You know they say that the top five people that you hire around, you're going to end up in their income bracket anyway, right? So you want them in a high income bracket, hire around people who will help pull you up. That's another example, okay? So understanding people is very important. Another simple concept that can help you right now is to know who your friends are. See, everybody calls themselves your friend is not your friend, right? Know who your friends are. A person may be an acquaintance and that's fine, but a friend is someone who's going to be there for you in the good times, the bad times, especially when you need it most. And those people who run away from you in the hard times, when you can't find them, when things are tough, then they're not your friend. Just so you know. But I don't think I need to get into that. Most people know who their friends are. No, don't equate someone that you want to be your friend, someone who you know to be your friend. Friendship is earned, okay? On both sides. So that's important. Remember that. Now, the final thing I want to talk about today is something called compartmentalization, right? Some people call it compartmentalism. Either way, it's very important, especially for a business person like you, especially for a person like you who want to make strides in life, who want to have big accomplishments. You're going to have some rough times, some hard challenges, some difficult moments. There will be times in your life when something tragic, hopefully not, but something tragic may happen, something very challenging, something very embarrassing. It may be personal, it may be business, what have you, okay? What you have to learn to do, what we need to be capable of doing, is to compartmentalize the different aspects of life. So if you're going through a rough time with your family, your wife, your husband, your kids, something really bad happens or happens, then what you want to be able to do is to put that in a box. Okay, this is what I'm doing with this, but then you compartmentalize it. You say, okay, this is what I'm dealing with here. You deal with that when the time is there for that. Don't let it overwhelm your entire life. When you move on to do your work or to do your business, you focus on that. It goes back to what we spoke about earlier when we talked about focus and we talked about doing one thing at a time, okay? You have an issue, let's say something happened to somebody in your family or something bad happened at home and it's really overwhelming, but life still has to go on. You deal with that there, but when you leave and go and do your work or go do your business, you compartmentalize. You work on that then and then you get back to the problem later. If you cannot separate those things and be able to compartmentalize them and work on each thing separately, each situation separately, then you will not get anything done because a bad personal problem can overwhelm you to the point where it affects your work or a bad situation at work can overwhelm you to the point where you come home and it affects your home and your family life. You don't want to do that. So learn how to compartmentalize, separate things in life and if you can do that, it will go a long way in helping you to accomplish your major goals. So these are some simple concepts, everyday things that can help you move forward faster and help to reduce your drag and eliminate wasted time and that will help you to get to your ultimate goal and achieve your major purpose in life even faster. So we're going to wrap it up here for Episode 6 and remember to rob the graveyard is to maximize your potential. Use your God-given talent to achieve your ultimate purpose in life and not take your talent with you to the grave. We will talk again for Episode 7.