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THE FOUR THIEVES

“Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do."
-John Carmack

Clearly, our best intentions can easily be undone. Just as there are the Six Lies that will deceive and mislead you, there are Four Thieves that can hold you up and rob you of your productivity. And since there’s no one standing by to protect you, it’s up to you to stop these thieves in their tracks.

THE FOUR THIEVES OF PRODUCTIVITY
1. Inability to Say “No”
2. Fear of Chaos
3. Poor Health Habits
4. Environment Doesn’t Support Your Goals

1. INABILITY TO SAY “NO”
It’s one thing to be distracted when you’re trying to focus, it’s another entirely to be hijacked before you even get to. The way to protect what you’ve said yes to and stay productive is to say no to anyone or anything that could derail you.
Peers will ask for your advice and help. Co-workers will want you on their team. Friends will request your assistance. Strangers will seek you out. Invitations and interruptions will come at you from everywhere imaginable. How you handle all of this determines the time you’re able to devote to your ONE Thing and the results you’re ultimately able to produce.

When you say yes to something, it’s imperative that you understand what you’re saying no to.
“One-half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it.” In the end, the best way to succeed big is to go small. And when you go small, you say no—a lot. A lot more than you might have ever considered before.

Focusing is about saying no. The more things you do, the less successful you are at any one of them. You can’t please everyone, so don’t try. In fact, when you try, the one person you absolutely won’t please is yourself.

Remember, saying yes to your ONE Thing is your top priority. As long as you can keep this in perspective, saying no to anything that keeps you from keeping your time block should become something you can accept.

“You can say no with respect, you can say no promptly, and you can say no with a lead to someone who might say yes. But just saying yes because you can’t bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work.”

Whenever you need to say no, you can just say it and be done with it. There is nothing wrong with this at all. In fact, this should be your first choice every time. But if you feel there are times you need to say no in a helpful way, there are many ways to say it that can still lead people forward toward their goals.

A request must be connected to my ONE Thing for me to consider it. If it’s not, then I either say no to it or use any one of the approaches to deflect it elsewhere.

Learning to say no isn’t a recipe for being a recluse. Just the opposite. It’s a way to gain the greatest freedom and flexibility possible. Your talent and abilities are limited resources. Your time is finite. If you don’t make your life about what you say yes to, then it will almost certainly become what you intended to say no to.

Cosby read some advice that he took to heart: “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” This is advice worth living by. If you can’t say no a lot, you’ll never truly be able to say yes to achieving your ONE Thing. Literally, it’s one or the other and you get to decide.

When you give your ONE Thing your most emphatic “Yes!” and vigorously say “No!” to the rest, extraordinary results become possible.

2. FEAR OF CHAOS  
A not-so-funny thing happens along the way to extraordinary results. Untidiness. Unrest. Disarray. Disorder. When we tirelessly work our time block, clutter automatically takes up residence around us.

Messes are inevitable when you focus on just one thing. While you whittle away on your most important work, the world doesn’t sit and wait. It stays on fast forward and things just rack up and stack up while you bear down on a singular priority. Unfortunately, there’s no pause or stop button. You can’t run life in slow motion. Wishing you could will just make you miserable and disappointed.

One of the greatest thieves of productivity is the unwillingness to allow for chaos or the lack of creativity in dealing with it.

Focusing on ONE Thing has a guaranteed consequence: other things don’t get done. Although that’s exactly the point, it doesn’t automatically make us feel any better about it. There will always be unfinished work and loose ends lying around to snare your focus. Your time block can feel like a submersible, where the deeper you commit to your ONE Thing, the more the pressure mounts for you to come up for air and address everything you’ve put on hold. Eventually it can feel like even the tiniest leak might trigger an all-out implosion. When this happens, when you give in to the pressure of any chaos being left unattended, it can be a total relief. But not when it comes to productivity.
It’s a thief!

The truth is, it’s a package deal. When you strive for greatness, chaos is guaranteed to show up. In fact, other areas of your life may experience chaos in direct proportion to the time you put in on your ONE Thing. It’s important for you to accept this instead of fighting it. Oscar-winning filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola warns us that “anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos.” In other words, get used to it and get over it.

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”
—Albert Einstein

 Don’t sacrifice your time block on the altar of “I just can’t make it work.” My mom used to say, “When you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them, ” but this is one you can’t afford. Figure it out. Find a way. Make it happen.

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”
— William James

When you commit to your ONE Thing each day, extraordinary results ultimately occur. In time, this creates the income or opportunity to manage the chaos. So, don’t let this thief pickpocket your productivity. Move past your fear of chaos, learn to deal with it, and trust that your work on your ONE Thing will come through for you.

3. POOR HEALTH HABITS
Personal energy mismanagement is a silent thief of productivity.
When we keep borrowing against our future by poorly protecting our energy, there is a predictable outcome of either slowly running out of gas or prematurely crashing and burning. You see it all the time. When people don’t understand the power of the ONE Thing, they try to do too much—and because this never works over time, they end up making a horrific deal with themselves. They go for success by sacrificing their health. They stay up late, miss meals or eat poorly, and completely ignore exercise. Personal energy becomes an afterthought; allowing health and home life to suffer becomes acceptable by default. Driven to hit goals, they think of cheating themselves as a good bet, but this gamble can’t pay off. Not only does this approach consistently short-circuit your best work, it’s dangerous to assume that health and hearth will be just waiting for you to come back and enjoy anytime in the future.

High achievement and extraordinary results require big energy. The trick is learning how to get it and keep it.

Knowing what you must do and making the time to do it is how you bring the most amazing mental energy to your life. Calendaring your day this way frees your mind from worrying about what might not get done while inspiring you with what will. It’s only when you make time for extraordinary results that they get a chance to show up.

If your response is that you have too much to do, stop right now, go back to the beginning of this book, and start over. You apparently missed something. When you’ve connected proper sleep with success, you’ll have a good enough reason to get up and you’ll go to sleep at the right time.

THE HIGHLY PRODUCTIVE PERSON’S DAILY ENERGY PLAN
1. Meditate and pray for spiritual energy.
2. Eat right, exercise, and sleep sufficiently for physical energy.
3. Hug, kiss, and laugh with loved ones for emotional energy.
4. Set goals, plan, and calendar for mental energy.
5. Time block your ONE Thing for business energy.

Here’s the productivity secret of this plan: when you spend the early hours energizing yourself, you get pulled through the rest of the day with little additional effort. You’re not focused on having a perfect day all day, but on having an energized start to each day. If you can have a highly productive day until noon, the rest of the day falls easily into place. That’s positive energy creating positive momentum. Structuring the early hours of each day is the simplest way to extraordinary results.

4. ENVIRONMENT DOESN’T SUPPORT YOUR GOALS
Your environment must support your goals.

Your environment is simply who you see and what you experience every day. The people are familiar, the places comfortable. You trust these elements of your environment and quite possibly even take them for granted. But be aware. Anyone and anything at any time can become a thief, diverting your attention away from your most important work and stealing your productivity right from under your nose. For you to achieve extraordinary results, the people surrounding you and your physical surroundings must support your goals. No one lives or works in isolation. Every day, throughout your day, you come in contact with others and are influenced by them. Unquestionably, these individuals impact your attitude, your health—and ultimately, your performance.

The people around you may be more important than you think. It’s a fact that you’re likely to pick up some of the attitudes of others by working with them, socializing with them, or simply being around them. From co-workers to friends to family, if they’re generally not positive or fulfilled on the job or away from it, they’ll probably pass on some of their negativity. Attitude is contagious; it spreads easily. As strong as you think you are, no one is strong enough to avoid the influence of negativity forever. So, surrounding yourself with the right people is the right thing to do. While attitude thieves will rob you of energy, effort, and resolve, supportive people will do what they can to encourage or assist you. Ultimately, being with success-minded people creates what researchers call a “positive spiral of success” where they lift you up and send you on your way.

 Create a productivity-specific environment to support your ONE Thing.

The wrong people in your environment can most certainly dissuade, deter, and distract you from the productivity course you’ve set out on. But the opposite is also true. No one succeeds alone and no one fails alone. Pay attention to the people around you. Seek out those who will support your goals, and show the door to anyone who won’t. The individuals in your life will influence you and impact you—probably more than you give them credit for. Give them their due and make sure that the sway they have on you sends you in the direction you want to go.

If people are the first priority in creating a supportive environment, place isn’t far behind. When your physical environment isn’t in step with your goals, it can also keep you from ever getting started on them in the first place. 

“Surround yourself only with people who are going to lift you higher.” 
—Oprah Winfrey 

When you clear the path to success— that’s when you consistently get there.
Don’t let your environment lead you astray. Your physical surroundings matter and the people around you matter. Having an environment that doesn’t support your goals is all too common, and unfortunately an all-too-common thief of productivity. As actor and comedian Lily Tomlin once said, “The road to success is always under construction.” So don’t allow yourself to be detoured from getting to your ONE Thing. Pave your way with the right people and place.

BIG IDEAS
1. Start saying “no.” Always remember that when you say yes to something, you’re saying no to everything else. It’s the essence of keeping a commitment. Start turning down other requests outright or saying, “No, for now” to distractions so that nothing detracts you from getting to your top priority. Learning to say no can and will liberate you. It’s how you’ll find the time for your ONE Thing.
2. Accept chaos. Recognize that pursuing your ONE Thing moves other things to the back burner. Loose ends can feel like snares, creating tangles in your path. This kind of chaos is unavoidable. Make peace with it. Learn to deal with it. The success you have accomplishing your ONE Thing will continually prove you made the right decision.
3. Manage your energy. Don’t sacrifice your health by trying to take on too much. Your body is an amazing machine, but it doesn’t come with a warranty, you can’t trade it in, and repairs can be costly. It’s important to manage your energy so you can do what you must do, achieve what you want to achieve, and live the life you want to live.
4. Take ownership of your environment. Make sure that the people around you and your physical surroundings support your goals. The right people in your life and the right physical environment on your daily path will support your efforts to get to your ONE Thing. When both are in alignment with your ONE Thing, they will supply the optimism and physical lift you need to make your ONE Thing happen.

Screenwriter Leo Rosten pulled everything together for us when he said, “I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.” Live with Purpose, Live by Priority, and Live for Productivity. Follow these three for the same reason you make the three commitments and avoid the four thieves—because you want to leave your mark. You want your life to matter. 

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