HL January 15,13

The main idea of this information is that good intentions are meaningless without taking action. It emphasizes the importance of self-discipline and using a calendar to plan and prioritize tasks. It suggests writing down everything and following through on commitments made to oneself and others. The key message is to forget intentions and focus on exercising self-discipline to achieve success. Hey, good day, everybody. Hey, listen, to hell with your good intentions. Instead, action, all right? You had every intention of getting up early so you could do the things you really need to do to be successful and happy. Instead, what do you do? You hit the snooze button three times. You didn't do what needed to be done. You intended to make your prospecting calls as soon as you arrived at your office, knowing that this is the one activity, the most important activity you can take to build your pipeline. Instead, you open up your email box. You're overwhelmed by the demands of their family, your friends, your co-workers, your clients, and strangers. You never did the prospecting. You had every intention of making the difficult call to a happy client, right? To an unhappy client, right? Unhappy recruit to help resolve their issues and complaints. But there was easier work to be done, and you pushed it off for another day. Your unhappy client remains unhappy. Your unhappy recruit remains unhappy. You never intended to spend hours of your day bouncing around from one site to the next on the internet, but there's an endless supply of novelties, like pictures of grammatically challenged cats, and the time just seemed to slip away. It seems like time is always just slipping away, doesn't it? Know this. Your good intentions are meaningless. Actions, not intentions. Look, the road to hell is paid with good intentions. You know why you never hear anyone say, the road to hell is paid with good actions? Because good actions are how you beat a path out of hell. Look, it's nice that you intended to get up in the morning, but it doesn't produce the outcome you needed. A lot of salespeople, a lot of recruiters, have every intention of making their prospecting calls, but few, very few, have the self-discipline to take the action and produce the outcomes. Look, it's your actions that produce your outcomes, not your intentions. Look, like a bat out of hell, the cornerstone of success, folks, is self-discipline. It's what allows you to keep the promises you make to yourself. It's what allows you to keep the promises you make to your family, to your friends, to your teammates. It's what allows you to postpone your gratification, doing the less pleasant work now for a greater reward later. Your self-discipline is your ability to take the actions that need to be taken now without allowing yourself to be lulled to sleep by the lie that there will be more time later. Look, you are exactly where you are because you have great self-discipline or poor self-discipline. If things aren't going well, if your income and your business aren't growing, then you have poor self-discipline. It's simple as that. You can make all the excuses you wanna make, but in the end, you lack self-discipline and work ethic and persistence. If things are going great, if you're growing, you're attracting new people, you have self-discipline. The self-discipline, the prospect to create that situation, the self-discipline to improve so you can train people better, the self-discipline to do all the things that's required of somebody wanting to build a great business. Look, forget your intentions and exercise your self-discipline. The tool to help you with this is your calendar, folks. You've gotta keep a calendar. Let me just tell you what I used to do, all right? This is what I've always did when I was building my business. I used to use a Franklin Planner. We didn't have these smart cell phones that have all this stuff, but today I'd be using the phone. I use my phone for that same thing today. One of the things that I did, all right, just so you can do this on your phone or if you rather, you're old school, you wanna use a Franklin Planner and write it down, that's fine too. It doesn't really matter. The fact is you've gotta do it. You've gotta exercise self-discipline when it comes to your time and your calendar. So what I would do, folks, is every night, and I mean every night, I would never go to bed without having every hour of the next day completely planned out. Everything I was gonna do was planned out, was written down, and so that when I got up in the morning, number one, it helps you sleep. If you have everything written down, you don't have to worry about remembering anything. If I had to do anything, I always wrote it down. If I'm sitting down with a client and they ask a question, I don't know the answer to that, I wrote it down to look that up the next morning, right, to find out the information for them and then to call them back. I wrote it down. I didn't go, I'll remember that to do that. No, you cannot trust your memory because life's too hectic, too busy. You have family, you have children, you have a spouse, you have work, you have so many things going on in your life. If you don't write every single thing down, you're gonna miss something, and when you miss that thing, it's gonna cost you money, it's gonna cost you credibility with the people that you promised to get that information or to do something for, okay? So you need to get in the habit of writing every single thing down. No exceptions to this, none. Write it down, all right, promise you, you might remember some things, you're gonna forget something, and that forgetting something's gonna cost you. It's gonna cost you business, it's gonna cost you recruit, it's gonna cost you referrals, it's gonna cost you something, all right? So write down everything. I wrote down everything I was gonna do. So if I told a client, I'll get the answer and I'll call you tomorrow at two o'clock, I wrote in at two o'clock, called Mr. and Mrs. Smith in regards to this question, and I'd write in their phone number so that two o'clock came, I looked, what am I doing at two? Oh yeah, I've gotta call Mr. and Mrs. Smith with the answer to this question. I'd call them right at two o'clock and they'd go, holy cow, you said you were gonna call me at two? And you called right at two. That's exactly what you need to do, right? This is how you become a person of your word. You write everything down. You never forget anything because it's always written down. All you have to do is refer to that, you know, to your calendar and now you can do everything you say you're gonna do, right? So if you're gonna, I don't care what you're gonna do. If you have to do paperwork, man, you write that down. I gotta do, you know, administration stuff from eight a.m. to 9.30. Write it down, everything you've gotta do. If you gotta make a phone call to the home office to get something fixed, write it down when you're gonna do it. Whatever it happens to be, write it down. You notice I'm being repetitive here. Write it down, write it down, write it down, write it down. Don't ever, ever trust your memory, okay? Unless you're a frickin' genius and you don't forget a thing, you gotta write it down and make sure that you follow through on everything you say you're gonna do. So forget your intentions and exercise your self-discipline. The tool to help you is your calendar. You need to keep a calendar and you need to follow that religiously until you're completely financially independent. You have no debt. Then if you don't wanna follow a calendar, don't follow a calendar. Do whatever the heck you want, but on your way, you've gotta become fanaticable about your time and what you're gonna do with that time. Write everything, even write in time with family. Like if you say you're gonna pick up your kids from school at, you know, 2.30 and you're gonna take them to the park like Jan and I used to do, write it in. 2.30, pick up Jack and Janae, go to the park, go have something to eat. You know, that's from 2.30 to say five o'clock. We're doing all this stuff. I write it down. So if somebody says to me, hey, Hector, can I meet you at 2.30? I go, no, I've got an appointment. Yes, I've got an appointment with my family. They don't need to know it's with my family. I've got an appointment. I'm busy, but I'm free at five or whatever, okay? You should write everything down, everything. Don't ever, ever, ever, ever trust your memory. Look, if you want change, one single belief that will revolutionize your results is change your belief that your calendar is a place where you keep the commitments you make to other people, which as you do that, it raises your esteem in their eyes. People will begin to trust you when they know you say you're gonna do something and you actually do it without hesitation every single time because you've written it down. Believe instead that your calendar is a place where you keep the commitments you make to yourself, right? That's the same thing. You wouldn't dream of missing an appointment with someone else once it was placed in your calendar. Treat yourself with that same respect, a calendar, and treat your family with that same respect. A calendar isn't a place to keep your intentions. It's a place to keep the actions you're committed to taking. So if you have a prospecting, I'm gonna prospect from 10 a.m. to 12 or from 12 to two or whatever time, that's your commitment and you keep that commitment, right? Somebody says, ah, I got something. Can you meet me or can you talk to me or can I meet with you at 12? No, I've got a commitment from 12 to two. What is it? Well, they don't need to know what it is. It's prospecting and you gotta keep that commitment and those commitments you make to other people as well. Look, don't intend to do your prospecting work. Put it on the calendar and take action. Don't intend to call your unhappy client or recruit. Put it on the calendar and make the call and when you put it in the calendar, put their phone number right next to their name so you don't have to look it up. Treat the alarm clock with the same awe and reverence as you do the little notification chime you get when you have a new email message. Turn up the alarm, open the calendar, and turn the browser off. To hell with your good intentions. It's your actions that produce the outcomes you need. Some questions for you. Do you ever intend to do something but then you don't because you forget? Well, I guarantee you, if you start writing everything down, you're never gonna forget. You can never use that excuse because all you have to do is every hour look at what you're doing, okay? Do you ever intend to not do something but then do that thing you wish to avoid? What outcomes do intentions produce? None. Intentions never, ever produce an outcome. It's only action. It's only works that produce the outcome. It's never intentions. That's why people have all these great intentions but they never get around to doing anything. That doesn't work. So how do you exercise your will and your inner strength to do what you know will produce the outcomes you need even when there's more pleasant distractions available because you write it down and you commit to doing those things every day? If you do that, folks, this is probably one of the most important calls that any of you will ever hear because if you get this down, if you actually write every single thing down you're gonna do before you go to bed at night and then you act on that every day, you can't believe how your life's gonna change. You're not gonna believe how much productive you're gonna get. You're not gonna believe how people are gonna start trusting you and following you because they know you're a person of your word. You're not gonna believe how much more you're gonna get done how much more personal development, how much more prospecting, how much more everything you need to do to be successful. You're gonna have that happen. Folks, that's what I did. I wrote everything down and I watched myself. I managed myself hour by hour, right? You could do this in a phone, right? Or you could have it chime every hour on the hour and then you look back and you say, okay, what did I get done in that last hour? That's what I used to do. Okay, Hector, what'd you do in the last hour? Every now and then I let an hour slip by where I wasted that hour, right? But then I would catch myself and then the next hour I'd get busy and I'd make the calls, I'd do what I needed, I'd prospect or do whatever I needed to do to start going in the right direction again. I wouldn't let an hour turn into two or three or four in a day or a day, right? I wouldn't let it get away. And so by doing that, I was so productive, folks. I got so much done, right? Because I managed my time like a professional. You notice that really, really busy doctors, they have a schedule, right? And they know how they call you. If you have an appointment, they'll have somebody call you. Now they even have robo-calls, right? They call you, but they call you and say, Hector, Mr. Lamarck, you have an appointment at 9 a.m. tomorrow, do you intend on being there? Yes, I'll be there. Great, because you know why? Because if you're not gonna be there, then they'll fill it up with another person. That's what they do, that's what busy people do. And really, pros, if you're gonna be a pro, and pros are the only ones that make big money, by the way, right? If you're gonna be a pro, right, then you're gonna learn how to manage your time like a pro. And you're gonna manage every hour of every waking moment. And if you do that, right, and you're productive like that, I promise you, you will change your life. You will become so different than all your peers, and you'll start getting the results that you only dreamed of getting. All right, guys, we'll talk to you next week.