How to be prolific

Good morning. Okay, we're coming live from Celebration, Florida. And today. Oh, look at the sun. Otherwise overcast day. But here we are, I'm at Celebration and we're about to start one of my three day breakthrough blueprints. So I've got some time here to talk and get our, our video done for today. So I'm in my journal back here and I laughed because on page 82 of journal number eight, we're in, you know, November 1997 right now. The question that I asked is how can I set up my life to be prolific now? It was, it's very kind of made me smile because that's really the game.

If you are a creative, if you're an entrepreneur, if you're playing a game that requires you to turn ideas into reality or to be productive, you know that part of it is getting yourself to do the things that need to be done to take something from an idea in your head. For me, that path is going through my journal and then out into the real world, trading. The currency that you have to turn your ideas into reality is units of time. That's what it is. Now I've, what I've been really struck by here is looking through my journals. This is the same, this is the same issue that you're going to have 30 years from now.

As I look at it now, it's like so much of the conversations were really about optimizing and setting up my days to manage the energy and the creative flow and do things that put me in a position where I'm able to be productive, which, the more you would be productive, that's what leads to being prolific. And I thought that was a funny word choice because if you're going to be productive, you might as well want to be prolific. It's the kind of thing that goes into how do you create a daily video for 122 days in a row? This is the kind of thing is realizing that you can't spend more than today's allocation of time today.

And it seems so like, I don't know when I, the more that I say it and think about it, you realize that it's such a simple and profound thought that time moves at what I've been calling the speed of reality. There's no way around it. In 1997, in November, time was moving at a rate of 60 minutes per hour. And here we are in 2026, in October. October, nearly, you know, 30, almost 30 years later, 29 years later, and guess what? Time is still moving at 60 minutes per hour. We can only do one thing. When I'm. When you realize that part of being productive is that there is an output for the time that you've spent.

There's some artifact or some check off your list of things that you want to do that you actually got something done. So for me, what I've recognized now over the whole 30 years is finding the zone approach that works for you because I describe it to people. You know, my perfect zone is to be in bed at 11, to wake up at 7, spend the morning uninterrupted, doing things that are productive, guarding that creative time. That's my most creative period of time. And then the afternoons talking to people or doing things that require involvement with other people, delegation, meetings, zooms, all of that stuff. And then the evenings for, for me, for rejuvenation, for doing things fun or socializing or watching.

I love watching movies and Netflix and stuff like that. So for me that's the perfect thing. I was having dinner last night. One of the gentlemen that's here at the event is a guy. He wakes up at 5am every morning and that's his zone. He's done it for years. But the trade off is he's in bed at 9 o'. Clock. And that, you know, it's so funny. There's no nobility in waking up early. You don't have to wake up early to be a more nobly productive person. You know, I was. Robin Sharma, who wrote the. The 5:00am Club, you know, very notedly is an advocate of waking up at 5am and I had breakfast with him one day and said, you know, I think people would be.

It would be a better aspiration for most people if they joined the Nine Hour Club. And the Nine Hour Club would be having a period of nine hour envelope advocated to sleep and recovery, including the on ramp to getting perfect sleep and the off ramp of getting your day started. If somebody would just allocate that nine hours, they would be better off no matter what time of day those nine hours are. So I look at it that, you know, still going 30 years later, it's still the primary thing that is the decider of how productive or prolific you're going to be. Now the thing that I struggle with the most is deciding what to do in those things.

I am, I have perfect attendance in the zones of. I've really made it over the last year a very concerted effort to hit the gates of the things. I kind of add precision to things. Lights are out at 11, 99% of the time I'm hitting that mark, 8am I am in the car, out the door and 99% of the time we're hitting that exact mark. The mornings are, are cleared for productivity. I'm going to move this over here so we don't get the sun in the way in, you know, and all the way till noon. Clear for takeoff. Now where I do struggle sometimes is deciding what specifically to do in that power block.

From 10am to till noon I, my day is, I'm on lock in terms of we go and I have breakfast and then I shoot the video and all of that is done and then I am in position. I call it in the evil scheming position. I'm in the. I'm either at Concord, on the couch, pen in hand, notebook in hand, ready to focus, turning all the world off. But what I find is that sometimes I approach or arrive at that moment and I'm undecided on specifically what I'm going to work or there may be multiple things that feel like they're converging all at once that need to be, that all carry equal weight.

So being a decider, a dispatcher of my own time is a, that's still a work in progress. I'm better at it. And part of that is no way limiting the things that I actually do and organizing my life so that I only do the things that only I can do. I was joking. Like I, I can technically I can lay out and design things because I learned that skill in 1997 to be self sufficient. I know how to use page maker and you know, all of the, the design tools. But there are many people who can do that. And so I get to the speediest way, way to be prolific is I have a designer who now knows exactly how I want things to be laid out.

I can send them. I, I don't really touch any technology other than my pen and a piece of paper. I can draw a postcard or I can draw a cover of a book or a design. I can just draw what I'm looking for, put the positions of where things were going to go so that Glenn knows what I'm looking for. And it's amazing what he's able to turn out. Now that may take hours to do that, but it takes me minutes to outline or to draw and convey the message of what I'm looking to, to do. So that pursuit of setting up the zones for yourself on how or when you're going to be productive, deciding what you're going to be prolific in what you're going to, what your output is going to be, and then removing all the friction by doing only the things that only you can do.

That's my reflection from page 82 of journal number eight in 1997. Thirty years later, in 2026, and I imagine it'll be the same thing in 2056. We'll be having the same conversation, but I'll have stuck with that and have a prolific life track history.