During last week’s #MMPT, I revealed a list of characteristics I felt all elite level performers exhibited based on my research and experience. This topic evolved out of a meditation I had just a week prior. I noticed how impatient people get with their lives and business. Life has a way of reminding us that success at anything can take years or decades to accomplish. Being patient is one characteristic of being elite, but not the only one. Elite level producers also have clarity, they are aware, committed, consistent, they have skill and are innovative. I realized I needed to discuss all 7. So let’s discuss CLARITY.
CLARITY means that you are clear, you know exactly what you want, when and how to get it. Napoleon Hill refers to it as “definiteness of purpose” in his epic book Think and Grow Rich. Instead of Clarity, people use other well know words and phrases such as “Goals,” your “Vision,” your “Why,” your “Purpose,” your “GPS” or in Take Flight, I’ll refer to it as your “Flight Plan.” Others refer to this as “problems that need to be solved”, or “desired outcomes.” I think the word “Clarity” is an overall description for all of these words or metaphors. It describes the need to know what you want, how you want to feel and how you are going to obtain it and by what date. If you are not clear on THAT one thing, you most definitely will not get it. Most people, the 97%, naturally default to “paying the bills” or maintaining survival mode. That’s the one thing everyone understands - the need to survive. It’s built into your brain as the natural default.
To push past this default requires thought. An Elite Level Producer, or “ELP," is the Top 3%. ELPs all have one thing in common, they put a lot of time into thought. They know what they want to accomplish in their life. The road may take different paths than originally planned but they know the general direction and work towards it every day. Napoleon Hill goes on to describe in Think and Grow Rich the "master key” as "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.” To conceive, you must think. All of the masters of thought leadership agree on one thing… ”your thoughts create things.” Your thoughts evolve over time as your experience grows and your knowledge improves. With this self-improvement, your final destination becomes more clear (Clarity).
The ELP knows this and makes thinking a priority.
Tom Bilyeu, of Impact Theory, says that 80% of his ideas come from his daily “Thinkitation” sessions.
Keith Cunningham, the author of my new favorite book The Road Less Stupid has daily, non-negotiable thinking sessions. He schedules them into his calendar every day and has created a ritual for them.
Vishan Lakhiani, owner of Mindvalley and author of The Code of the Extraordinary Mind built a huge educational business around teaching mindfulness practices.
I’ve read that nearly 90%+ of all corporate CEOs have a daily meditation, visualization or thinking ritual and the percentage is similar for top athletes, musicians and creatives.
Thinking creates Clarity. I have Clarity as characteristic #1 for an ELP for a reason. If you are not clear on what you want to create, you will not do what it takes to be elite. You just won’t.
This reminds me of the Harvard study on goal setting. It surveyed the graduating class of MBAs in 1979. At graduation, they asked the graduates the question “Have you set written goals and created a plan for their attainment?” 84% had no goals set at all, 13% had written goals but no concrete plan, 3% had written goals and a concrete plan to attain them. The results? 10 years later, the 13% that had goals but no plan were earning twice as much as the 84% that had no goals. The 3% (ELPs) who had both written goals and concrete plans, earned 10 times as much as the remaining 97%. The 3% had clarity. They knew what they wanted and how they were going to get it.
A huge part of CLARITY is documentation and planning. When you have thoughts, ideas, goals and feelings, they need to be written down and reviewed daily. This process allows you to program your mind to see and receive those ideas needed to meet your goals. Thought gives you the needed intuition to succeed. Clarity helps you trust your intuition because you have no doubt about your path.
In 2009, I was very early in my self-development journey. But I was really clear on one thing. I needed to create financial stability in my life. I knew that I needed to do whatever it would take to get out of the hole that I had dug for myself. I started by creating a goal for myself and I documented it by creating an Org Chart that displayed my team that would help me achieve $40,000,000 in production and $650,000 in personal GCI. I put that Org Chart in my vision binder, reviewed it regularly, and then I did what I do best… I hustled like crazy during the day to do what I needed to do to claw back. In the mornings, at night, and on the weekends, I was in self-development mode. I asked myself one question daily. How can I get better? Creating that financial stability took 5 years of heavy lifting. That was my “first flight.” That flight landed in 2013 when I hit the goal I had written on that org chart.
I teach in “Take Flight” that your life and career are made up of “flights.” A “flight” is a period of time that it will take to reach a very specific, shorter term goal that will help you reach your life goals. I am on my 4th flight and the first 3 lasted from 9 months to 5 years. I knew that if I wanted to reach my life goals, I’d need to hit these major milestones. Just like a flight, you program your goal or the problem you need to solve into your “flight plan”, you create a plan, a date for completion and execute on it until completed. If you stack these flights on top of each other over the course of your career and life, you’ll hit all of your life goals. Being an ELP, in theory, is simple. You just need to model those that are ELPs and understand the importance of the "7 Characteristics.” As Jim Rohn said, “Success Leaves Clues.” There is no need to reinvent the process.
So, let me give you some tips on creating Clarity. I’ll start from the beginning:
- To start, schedule an initial meeting with yourself at a location that is inspires you. Create a calendar invite, dress appropriately and commit to it. Make it non-negotiable. Put your phone and laptop away. Using just a pen and note pad, ask yourself a simple question: What do I want? Let your mind wander and start writing things down. Go back and organize your thoughts. As Warren Buffet said, “Write down your Top 25 things that you want to accomplish in your life, drop the bottom 20 and focus on the Top 5.”
- Identify the shorter term “desired outcomes” that need to be completed before you can reach your life goals. Create a plan and set a time frame. This is your “flight.”
- Write down your goals and review them every day. This is straight out of Napoleon Hill’s and Earl Nightingale’s playbook that have been with us for a century.
- Develop a daily “thinking” session such as meditation, “Thinkitation” or that “thinking session” as defined by Keith Cunningham in The Road Less Stupid.
- Build a self-development plan that is going to help you learn the topics necessary to reach your goals and desired outcomes.
- Repeat. Review.
Gary Vaynerchuk, the wildly popular thought leader and entrepreneur, refers to this process as reverse engineering. He tells the story of how he knew on the first date that he wanted to marry his wife Lizzie. His mind is so programmed as an ELP that even on that first date, he was “reverse engineering” what he would need to do over the coming months and years to get her to say “yes” to marriage.
I could not do a MMPT on Clarity without mentioning one of my favorite books on high performance. High Performance Habits by Brendan Burchard is a must read for those that want to go to the next level with their lives and businesses. He actually has Clarity as one of his 6 habits of high performance. He does a beautiful job explaining how Clarity is about the future, while describing high performers… “they didn’t just know who they were; indeed, they never really focused on their present personalities or preferences. Instead, they thought about who they wanted to be and how to become that. They didn’t just know their strengths today; they knew the broader skills they would have to master in the coming months and years to serve with excellence at the next level. They didn’t just have clear plans to achieve their goals this quarter; they had lists of projects that would lead them to a bigger dream. They didn’t just think about what they wanted personally this month; they obsessed with the same focus on how to help others in their overall lives and careers."
Brendan goes on to say “…this future focus went well beyond what they wanted to become and how they would achieve what they and others wanted. They could also describe with great clarity how they wanted to feel in upcoming endeavors and they knew specifically what conditions could destroy their enthusiasm, sense of satisfaction, and growth.”
For me, I chase that FEELING that Brendan describes. My financial goals are secondary. I live my life so that in the future I will not regret that I didn’t play big for myself and for others.
I could discuss this topic of Clarity for hours. In fact, it was difficult for me to distill the message to this content. What I can tell you is that, at some point, you have to listen with extreme attention to those ELPs that have blazed the trail for all of us.
If you don’t know where you are going, you will never get there.
That little statement sums up CLARITY. All elite level producers have it.
