Quarterly Reviews: How To Rethink Everything & Grow Exponentially
Sam Ovens Blog Video
How do you come up with those 10x ideas that get you exponential growth?
How do you break the linear growth trajectory and go exponential?
I can tell you this: It doesn't happen by doing more of what you're doing now.
Exponential growth happens when you rethink everything and take a radical new perspective.
Jeff Bezos said: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points".
How you see things and take a perspective is worth more than raw intelligence.
The best way to see things in a different way is to rise above the day-to-day chaos and look down on it from a higher level.
In today's video I show you exactly how to do that!
Here's what we cover:
1. Why I take a 7-day break every 90-days to review every quarter and rethink everything.
2. Why "hustling" and "grinding" are useless tasks if you're going in the wrong direction.
3. Why Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos took breaks to rethink everything and read books and why you should too.
4. How to question everything: Are the goals you're striving for even the right goals?
5. Why squeezing "high performance" out of myself has been a fruitful task and how I did with a chef, personal trainer, sleep etc.
6. Why you need to plan tomorrow today and track every hour of everyday and how to do it using my "War Map Calendar".
7. Why good and great aren't good enough -- You need to be exceptional and so should your team.
Hey, what's going on, everyone. It's Sam Ovens here. And today I wanted to do a quick video to talk about quarterly reviews and rethinking everything. So totally rethinking everything that you're doing, your entire business, your entire life, just everything. So I haven't made a blog video in like, I think it was like one week or something, because just last week I was in Tulum in Mexico for my honeymoon with my wife Ashley. And what we do is we take a break every 90 days and we take a seven day break every 90 days. So what we do is we align those breaks every quarter. So from the first break would be at like the end of March. So there's a sprint of Q1, January, February, March. And I create goals for that quarter. And then I sprint through that quarter or achieve those goals and then have a rest for like seven days. And that's the Q1 break. And then sprint through the next quarter, then the Q2 break, which is half the year. And right now we're about halfway through 2018 and I just had my Q2 break. And why I think these breaks are really good and why I think you should take them as well is because they perfectly align with the seasons and the business quarters and all of that stuff. So business runs in quarters, you've got Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. Public companies have quarterly earnings reports and things like that. And then at the end of the year, you've got your end of year financials and all of that. So it runs perfectly. And also that's when the seasons and the equinoxes turn and all of that stuff as well. So it's like perfectly aligned to work 90 days, have a quick break, rethink everything, work in 90 days, quick break, rethink everything. And to be honest, this has really helped me a lot and it has helped our business a lot because it's enabled us to really rethink everything that we're doing and think are we on the right path. Because what I notice happens a lot is that we'll be working on something and you're just heads down focused, just focusing on the thing you're working on, just trying to get it done, trying to get it done. You get it done and if you never take your head up, if you never escape the chaos and if you never rise above the chaos and look down upon it, then you never really know if you're actually doing the right thing. And what I mean by that is we can be very busy and very productive, but in doing the wrong thing. And I notice a lot of people make this mistake. They're drinking like eight coffees a day, they're heads down focused, they think they're really productive and they're doing tons of work, 12 hours a day, but they're not going in the right direction. And what's more important than really rapid progress is progress in the right direction. And we can't really see where we wanna go until we rise above the day to day chaos. And the only way to really rise above that and see what's going on is to get out. So it seems kind of counterintuitive, counterproductive, because you'd think the best way to get things done is just to put your head down and just not stop working. And don't get me wrong, that works really well, but you still need to take breaks every now and then to kind of make sure you're going in the right direction. And so these breaks, you're not actually working. On these past seven days last week, I didn't do any work. I didn't check my emails, I didn't talk to my team. I didn't do anything. I didn't even send an email or make a video. I mean, I did a couple of posts on Instagram, but they were just posts relating to what I was doing in Mexico, not really posts about business. And it's really important to completely shut off because if you're still in that mindset of work and trying to talk to your staff and your team and your customers and all of that, then you never get to fully escape it and think about the whole, the big picture. And when you think about the big picture, that's when you come up with some ideas that might totally change everything. And you never get those ideas unless you escape and you kind of take some time off and then you get to see it from a different perspective. And this video is really about taking breaks and rethinking everything. And so I've explained the breaks and why you should take them and all of that. But now let's talk about the rethinking everything part because a lot of what people do, I've noticed, is they will basically just look at what they're doing and think how they can do it better. And that's good, that's better than just doing it the same or doing it worse. But sometimes instead of just doing it better, sometimes you can do something completely different. Sometimes you can just flip the script and do something like obscene, that you never would have even thought of. And it's often those changes that really make the dramatic jumps, like the exponential leaps for businesses. So on this break that I just had recently, I was really reflecting over how the year went so far and I was reading a couple of books too. I really enjoy reading books while I'm on these breaks because as I'm reading the books, I'm learning, but also ideas just pop into my head about how I might read how someone did it in this business and I'm like "Oh, I wonder if that could work for my business like that." And it's really awesome to get different perspectives on things and read these books on these breaks. A lot of famous entrepreneurs did this too. Like, what's his name? Bill Gates, from Microsoft. This is a very popular, famous story that pretty much everyone knows, but he used to take like two weeks off around the Christmas time, end of year time, to just read alone in a cabin somewhere, and just totally rethink Microsoft. And then another one who pretty much modeled off of that was Jeff Bezos. So he heard about Bill Gates doing that, so he decided well, I'm gonna do that. And he did that too. And that's where a lot of the really good ideas came from. And then really once a year, I don't really think that's enough. I think once every quarter is pretty much perfect. You wanna take a break, get out of the chaos and just rethink everything. And what I mean by questioning everything, rethinking everything, it's like are there goals you're trying to achieve? Are they actually the right goals? You've gotta question everything. You can't just assume that the goals are still the right goals. You wanna question those. Are we really trying to achieve this, or could we achieve something much bigger? And you also want to get different perspectives on things from books, and then just play with it. Entertaining. Just don't even think it's gonna be real because quite often, as soon as you try to make things real when you're having a thought experiment, you're like "Oh, that definitely couldn't happen." But you have to just play with some ideas that are pretty radical and that seem impossible, just to think differently and see could we really do it this way instead, or maybe we could do it that way. Now I'm speaking like in abstract terms right now. Some of you might understand it, but to really help you really understand what I'm talking about, I'll just give you some specific, real life examples in my instance, right? So one thing I've always been focused on for me is high performance. So I've been trying to squeeze and extract more performance and more productivity out of myself. And that's been really ... That's been a fruitful exercise so far, because it's amazing how much you can squeeze out of yourself because there's so much waste everywhere. And some examples of how I did that is I hired a chef. Big, big, big time saving. One of the best time savings I've ever done. Probably one of the easiest things to do because you just hire them and then it's done. And then you save a huge amount of time and you're eating healthier, which means your energy is better, which means now you have more time and during that time you're more focused because you're healthier. There's an exponential gain there with very little effort. So hiring a chef was a big one. Hiring a personal trainer. I've got a personal trainer, Rhet, who lives in my apartment with me. I've got a live in trainer. That was good because now I wake up at a specific time, I got to sleep at a specific time and my personal trainer tracks my sleep and tracks my supplements, designs the supplement schedule and everything as well as the diet, and the exercise plan that I do. And by doing that, by waking up at a specific time, going to bed at a specific time, that allows you to really plan and schedule your day because you know when it starts and ends. Most people have an open-ended schedule and it's almost impossible to plan that because you don't even know when you're gonna wake up, so how can you plan tomorrow today? Which is definitely what you wanna do. If you're not planning tomorrow today, then you're ... I don't know what you're doing because that's probably another big ... That'll get you four times more productivity than what you currently have. At the end of every day, you wanna plan tomorrow today. Break it out into one hour or 30 minutes increments and write down exactly what you are going to do for every hour of the day from when you wake up to when you go to sleep. I guarantee you if you just do that, you'll get four time as much productivity out of yourself every day. And while we're on this topic, one tool I use that's amazing for planning everything and you can see it here, is this tool I call my wall map calendar. And it's basically like a Google doc where I basically plan out my quarters, my months, my years, my days, my weeks. Everything. And it's an amazing tool. And it's free. And I made it myself. And I share it with you so that you can use it totally free as well. You don't even need to opt in or give your email address or any of that crap. You can just click it. You know, get it and start using it for free right away. And if you wanna check out the wall map and how it works and you wanna start using it yourself, then I'll put a link beneath this video in the resources and it'll just say resources mentioned in this video. And I'll put a link to this wall map here, so you can go check it out and start using it yourself. This will give you another like four X boost in your productivity. So things we've covered so far. We've got taking breaks every 90 days. That'll help you a lot. Then another one is plan tomorrow today. That's a big one. Before you go to bed tonight, plan tomorrow today. And then another one is use the wall map calendar. If you do those three things alone, you're gonna exponentially improve your productivity. You're gonna extract more out of yourself. And hiring a chef. If you're making more than 10 grand a month and you don't have a chef, then you're irresponsible because that's just stupid. So get one. If you're not making more than 10 grand a month, then you wanna batch your cooking. And what I mean by that is buy all of your groceries on the weekend, preferably from an online store, get them shipped to you and then cook all of your food for the whole week, store it, and then when you need to eat your meals for each mealtime, just go grab it, microwave it, eat it, bam, done. Alright? That will save you a lot of time as well. So if you do those things, you're getting probably four ... I would say you're probably getting at least six to 10 times more out of yourself than what you are right now. So a lot of the time we think we need to hire more people or get more help, but a lot of the time we can actually just get way more out of ourselves because most of our time is wasted. And so I've been through these exercises, like trying to extract more out of myself for a long time. I've had mindset coaches. Right now I work with a forensic psychiatrist who is ... He coaches and he helps some of the best athletes in the world. Like football players and things like that. And I found this guy on a documentary, hunted him down and hired him. And so he was even helping me with forensic psychology. Like, really helping me identify little blocks or little biases or tendencies or heuristics I have that aren't quite accurate and could be tweaked so that I can get even more value out of myself. And so I've been through this a lot. And we've just recently got to a point where I can still get more out of myself, but it's not that big now, because we're getting into just small gains now because we've already pushed it so hard. And then I was thinking on this break, it's kind of dumb for me to try and just get more out of myself. I'm still gonna try to do that, but it would actually be way better if I now turned my focus to my team and helping them to become really high performance. So that was one of the breakthroughs I had, like a perspective shift. So that's what I decided to do while I was in Mexico. And right away we decided to hold a book club. So anyone who is in my company that wants to attend this and wants to evolve and grow and become really good, then every Saturday at my apartment at like 10 AM, I'm gonna hold a book club where we're gonna read a book every two weeks and discuss it, the ideas and all of that. So that's an idea to try and develop my entire team and try to get more out of them instead of just look at just getting more out of myself. And then I also thought, what if we ... Let's shift things. Really, it saves so much time. And then I thought about it, whoa, what about my team? So every day, they're going down to different stores or whatever, and then they're waiting in line and all of that and then they're eating this food like that and it's really unproductive. It's not a very good use of their time. So I thought what if we just ... What if the chef cooked for my team and me? Why don't we use that same discovery there? And so we thought well, let's do that too. And I thought what about going to the gym and personal training. And I thought maybe Rhet, my personal trainer, he could kind of become like a fitness coach for kind of our whole team, help making sure everyone in our team is going to the gym and exercising and watching their sleep and all of that stuff. And then watching their diet and all of that and making sure they're reading and learning and all of that stuff. So that was a good perspective shift. It was like what I did to myself really helped me get way more performance. More than 10 times performance out of myself, so why don't we get ... Imagine 10 times performance out of 50 people. That is a huge amount. And so that was one ... That's just an example of one thing that I didn't think of normally because I was in the chaos of the day to day, but then when I rised above it and went on a break and rethought everything, perspective shift. Boom. And that's just a perfect example. And for a lot of people, if you've got a team, then imagine if you became high performance with them at the same time. You really want an entire team full of Michael Jordans. You just don't want to have a leader that's really high performance and then have other people want to be high performance, but aren't. So that's a perfect example. And another one is me, I would work from home a lot. You probably noticed that all of my videos are of me working at home. And that's because I've had to create a lot of content and everything and that requires pretty much silence and me to just heads down focus on one thing. But I thought, that's not really going to help me build the team as high as they could go. And so I thought, I can't continue really to do this. The team is going well by themselves, but with the general manager and the structure I've got there, but you never wanna be satisfied with good. You don't even wanna be satisfied with great. A lot of the time, people think "Oh, if I'm just meeting the targets, if I'm just doing the job, this is great." And most people, they only fire people if they don't do the job and they fail. But that's low standards. Great. Good isn't good enough. Great isn't good enough. You have to be exceptional. It really made me think who in my company do I admire and look up to? And really you shouldn't have anyone in your company that you don't admire or look up to. And you really need to cultivate a culture and a team that is just excellent. You should admire everyone. Everyone should be genius level. Everyone should be high performance. Everyone should be constantly striving for more. And I realized that I need to be in there to help everyone really cultivate this culture and lift the standards and really push everyone to the moon. And so I decided, well, I'm gonna have to create a little facility at my office where I can record the content there because my reasoning for not going and doing it there is because there's no real quiet place where I can go and record this content. But then I thought, that's stupid, Sam. You can just put some sound deadening stuff somewhere and be able to do it there. And then in between creating the videos and the content and whatnot, you could easily spend some time with the team and help grow them. So that was another thing I thought about. And so before the break in Q1 and Q2, I was really just looking at myself and how I could squeeze more out of me and I was and that was going well, and my team was going great, but then I thought what if we squeezed all of that high performance out of everybody? That would be huge, way more than any amount of performance gain I could possibly squeeze out of myself. And that was a big perspective shift. And this is the power of taking breaks and rethinking everything, because if I didn't take that break and I just stayed heads down focused, bam, bam, bam, working on everything, I would have made progress, but it wouldn't have been exponential progress. But by taking that break, rising above the chaos, rethinking everything, I had a perspective shift, and that will create the exponential jump. And entrepreneurs often forget this. They just stay heads down focused on the thing, but they don't ever step back and see the bigger picture and think how it could be done better, and that's really important because you don't build anything great and you don't change the world by just making heads down progress in a linear way. You need exponential jumps and the exponential jumps are perspective shifts and the perspective shifts only come when you take a break and you step back from the chaos, rise above it, look down on it, and rethink everything. So that's basically my message for this video. If you're burnt out and you're just smashing emails and sales calls and Facebook posts and all of this day to day, then you're probably stuck in the weeds, you know? It's important to do these things, but they're not going to get you really ... They're not gonna create greatness. So you still need to do them, but you need to take a break and you need to rethink everything. And I pretty much guarantee you if you take a break, truly rethink everything, you'll have at least one to three ideas that will totally change everything for you, your life, and your business. So that's pretty much it for this video. And if you want to get my wall map calendar, which I highly recommend, if you wanna see exactly how I use it, how you can use it yourself and how you can download it and start using it today for free, in the resources section beneath this video, click that link, go check it out. This is honestly one of the best tools that ... I use this thing religiously. It is like my Bible, this thing. So you wanna go check it out right now. And if you liked this video, then just click that like button and also subscribe to my YouTube channel. I release a video like this once every week and I also interview a lot of my customers and their stories and how they've been able to transform their lives, quit their jobs and start wildly profitable businesses. So if you wanna see more videos like this, customer interviews and things like that, subscribe to that YouTube channel right now. And also let me know what you thought about this video in the comments section below. I'm gonna be checking the comments myself, replying to them, so just let me know what you think, give me some feedback and tell me what other sorts of videos you'd like to see because if I see a suggestion in there and I think "Oh, this would help a lot of people," I'll get it done. I'll make that video. So leave me something in the comments. So that's it for this video. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one soon.