--:-- Host: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have an extra special episode for you. This is the recording of a keynote I did about two months ago titled, "How to Become a Finisher: The Secret to Making Better Decisions and Creating Inevitable Outcomes."
--:-- Host: You've heard me talk on this show quite a bit about frameworks, mental models, and mindsets that have allowed me to hit high levels of success over and over again, whether it's as an executive or in my own endeavors as an entrepreneur. It's these frameworks that create guardrails for decisions that lead to consistent, positive outcomes.
--:-- Host: We're never going to be 100% with our decisions. However, by using frameworks and mental models, we can be more consistent in our positive outcomes. That's what we're trying to do. That's how we compound success. That's how we hit our goals, and that's how we become finishers.
--:-- Host: I hope you enjoyed this keynote. Guys, I created a resource. It's a free guide, about 40 pages, very detailed, called "How to Make Better Decisions Using AI." If you go to ai.ryanhanley.com, there will also be a link in the description or the show notes wherever you're listening or watching. You can get that resource for free. Just enter your name and email, and you will get that guide.
--:-- Host: Using AI to make decisions is the future of leadership. It doesn't mean there isn't intuition. It doesn't mean our experience and expertise don't play a role. It means AI has features and use cases that allow us to create more consistent outcomes and be a true value add and enhancer to our business. This guide breaks it down for you.
--:-- Host: I hope you enjoy this episode of the show. I was proud of this keynote. It is the first time that I've gone fully outside of insurance with a keynote topic, and I was very happy with the outcome. I hope you enjoy it as well. Love your feedback. You can go over to YouTube, leave a comment, or just DM me. I'd love to hear what you think about this topic and the keynote in general.
--:-- Host: With that, let's get on to my keynote, "How to Become a Finisher."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone. In 2017, I had the distinct honor with my team and colleagues at Agency Nation and Trusted Choice—and one of them is in the room right now, one of my favorite humans in the entire world, Sidney Rowe—we put on Elevate 2017 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Was anyone there? Who was there? Jeff was there, right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What many people don't know about that conference is that on the second day, there was a closing fireside chat. I was going to interview a man by the name of Michael Preen. I had been the emcee for the entire conference. This was the first time I was going to come out on stage and actually interact with the crowd in any kind of capacity. When I stood behind the curtain, I almost passed out. I had to be caught by one of our other team members that was behind stage with me. I had to sit down. I was seeing stars, and I was in a really rough place.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I pounded a bottle of water real quick, stood up, looked at Michael Preen and said, "I might not make it." We walked out. I sat down, looked at him and mouthed the words, "You have to take this." Thankfully, he had the capacity and ability. He understood what was going on. He stood up and he finished. The audience didn't know the difference. I just sat there, tried to have a smile on my face and listened to him like that's the way it was supposed to go.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But the truth was, I had allowed my mental and physical health to deteriorate to the point that I couldn't finish a two-day conference where all I was doing was emceeing. Not that emceeing is easy, but you're out for two or three minutes and you're back behind the curtain. There was no reason for me to feel the way that I had felt.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: At that time, I weighed 217 pounds. I drank. I ate terrible food. I didn't sleep well. I didn't nourish myself mentally. I didn't read. I wasn't going to see a counselor. I wasn't doing anything. I was barely getting by physically, but I had convinced myself, "I'm an athlete because I played sports in college. I'm fine. I'm in good shape. I'm okay. I'm getting by." But my body shut down.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It wasn't in that moment. I was flying home from that event. As much as it was an amazing experience that to this day I think back on very fondly, it was a profound and life-changing experience. I was disappointed in myself. I didn't go home with a big huge smile like some victor who had just conquered a mountain. I felt like I had let myself down. In 2017, I was 37 years old. At 37, I should be able to get through two days. I vowed that would never happen again. I would never allow myself to be so unprepared for a situation that I couldn't operate at my absolute best, regardless of the circumstances. I began a journey that I continue on today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I started reading Jordan Peterson. I started listening to different podcasts. I came across a quote by Marcus Aurelius. I know all men are into the Roman Empire, so some of you will have heard this before, right? Can't be a dude and not be into the Roman Empire. That's what the internet tells me. But in 2017, I came across this quote. There was something about it that just grabbed me. It's wedged in my brain. I come back to this quote all the time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: "We are responsible for what we put in our brains, for what we put in our body. We're responsible for these things. If we want our best out of us, we have to put the best in." I was not doing that. How could I say I was being the best version of myself for my wife? How could I say I was being the best version of myself for my kids? How could I say I was being the best version of myself for the team—my 19 team members at the time—for my audience, for our customers? If I wasn't reading and feeding myself good stuff, if I wasn't putting good fuel in my body, if I wasn't exercising and taking care of myself, if I wasn't surrounding myself with people who are positive... "Your soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts." It becomes who you are. I didn't like who I was. I went on a journey.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Twelve months later, we put on what I believe—no offense to Sue—the single greatest insurance conference in the history of the world of all time: Elevate 2018. We had 817 people. We had 315 people in 2017. We did 817 people a year later. Again, I had an amazing team. But in large part, this was due to a massive energy shift. Not only was I able to produce more work and work longer hours, but I also was more positive with my team, more accepting of the challenges they were facing, able to answer and take questions in a positive way without overreacting. Because I had changed what I put in my body and was slowly redying my soul to what I wanted it to be.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: During that time, I developed a mental framework that I use to this day to make big decisions and to get projects done. The title of this talk is "How to Become a Finisher." What I'm going to ultimately share with you is what I call the Finish Formula. It is a very simple formula. We don't use it for every decision we make during our day, but for the big decisions, the big things—those projects that are paramount, that are crucial to our success, that mean something to us. They don't have to be business related. This formula is something I come back to over and over and over again.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But first, we have to address why we make bad decisions in the first place.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What is the color that enrages bulls? When bulls get all pissed off, what's the color that they see? Red, right? Do you know that bulls are colorblind? They don't see red. We all said red. Red's in all the shows. They don't see this color. It's a belief that most people have that is intrinsically false.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: How much of our brain do we use? It's not a trick question. How much of our brain do we use? Ten percent. We are told—and have been told for 90 years—that we use 10% of our brain. And if only we can figure out how to tap into the rest, we're all geniuses. It's just not true. We actually use, in every 24 hours, essentially 100% of our brain. The reason we think we only use 10% of our brain is because of a random misquotation of the original study in a news article in which the author changed it from "capability" to "utilization." The author was saying, "Though we use 100% of our brain, we tend to only operate at about 10% of our capability." The author of the news article changed it from that to "we only actually use 10% of our brain." That single misquotation has created 90 years of misinformation. Yet we base entire beliefs on the fact that somehow if we eat this mushroom or do this breathing exercise, we're going to tap into more of our brain.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There's more of these. We'll fly through a couple of them just because they're fun.
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--:-- Ryan Hanley: There's the 10% one.
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--:-- Ryan Hanley: You cannot see the Great Wall of China from space. Can't do it. We've been told that for how long? Ever. Can't see it. The Chinese actually sent an astronaut up because they didn't believe us. He goes, "Yeah, I can't see it." All the pictures we have of it are from cameras or video cameras that have amplification characteristics.
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--:-- Ryan Hanley: One more. I am sorry to tell you, and as a major baseball fan who's been to Cooperstown probably three dozen times, Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball. There's an entire town in upstate New York that I live about an hour and a half from, based on the fact that Abner Doubleday invented baseball. He did not. Abner Doubleday was at West Point during the time. In 1839, when baseball was invented by Abner in Cooperstown, he was actually running drills at West Point. There's not a single article, the travel schedule for West Point, all his journals, all his writings—he was never there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The whole Abner Doubleday story was invented by a guy by the name of Abner Graves, who was a lunatic. Two convicted murderers ended his life in an insane asylum. He wrote one letter, which was complete fiction, that Abner Doubleday invented baseball. No one gave two craps about it until 1910, when Robert Spaulding, who had ultimately founded the Spaulding Athletic Company, wanted a national pastime and needed someone to build around. He took this one singular letter and invented the Abner Doubleday myth. Now we all go to Doubleday Field in Cooperstown.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My point in sharing this with you is that we operate on a day-to-day basis through beliefs, through information that we don't ever confirm. We let our emotions guide us. We want to believe that Abner Doubleday invented baseball. I want to believe it. I played on Doubleday Field three times. I have about a .600 average, a home run, and a couple doubles. I'm doing all right there. But it's not true.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My pitch to you today is that we have to remove belief. We have to remove emotions and feelings from our decision-making process. Instead, replace that with a series of frameworks that we work our major decisions through—not moment to moment, but our major decisions through—in order to more often be successful and consistently successful in our decision-making over a longer period of time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There are some reasons why we hold these biases. Anchoring. How many of you have ever negotiated on something? If you're buying, offer low. If you're selling, anchor high. Whoever gets the first offer in, we then negotiate from that number. Anchoring. Whatever your first thought is, it is very, very difficult for you to move too far from that original thought.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Status quo bias. This is what our entire industry is based on. We don't like to change.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Survivorship bias. We will take one individual case in which something was successful, and despite all the exceptions in that particular case, we will play that out as an absolute and something that should be duplicated.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Base rate neglect is a terrible series of words in order, but essentially it means there is an entire database of information that we choose to neglect in exchange for one data point that we actually agree with.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Cognitive dissonance. We can't hold two competing ideas at the same time. Just look at our entire political system.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Ultimately, the most insidious of all these is hindsight bias. Annie Duke, a professional poker player with more than $5 million in winnings in her career, wrote an awesome book called *Thinking in Bets*. "Assuming that decision making is good or bad based on a small set of outcomes—seemingly one—is a pretty reasonable strategy for learning chess." What she means by that is a linear game. As soon as you put uncertainty into the equation—business, life, relationships, in this case poker—as soon as uncertainty is added, we cannot take one singular outcome and decide whether it was a good decision or not.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Think about your first marriage. Good decision? However, it doesn't mean you shouldn't get married again. It just means maybe we should re-evaluate the way we pick the other human we decide to spend our life with. Because if you use the same structure for making the decision on the second person as you did the first one, you will probably have a third. Understand hindsight bias.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What is a better way? Frameworks, filters, and ultimately we're going to get to finishing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Charlie Munger, great decision maker, one of the best investors of all time, used frameworks and mental models to make all of his decisions. Why? So many people were able to criticize him while he sat around and did nothing, yet consistently made some of the best bets on stocks and on companies of any investor in the history of the world. Because he did not make emotional or belief-based bets. Charlie Munger had a series of models that were his, and he applied them to situations. If the situation came out "no," the answer was no, no matter how he felt about the CEO, no matter how he felt about the industry.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: A good example of this is crypto. Berkshire Hathaway has not invested in any form of crypto—certainly not up until the time Charlie died in November. It wasn't because they weren't interested in it. It wasn't because they didn't think there wasn't potential. But the models that they use, that had made them consistently successful for over 60 years in investing, it didn't fit. So they were able to emotionally remove themselves from the idea of chasing easy profits and continue on. I think they have like $187 billion in cash as of their last report, so they're doing all right. It's good enough for Charlie Munger, it should be good enough for us schmucks.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Other frameworks. These are some common ones. We'll fly through these. 80/20 rule. We all know this one, none of us practice it, although we all love to talk about it when we're having drinks after conferences. Your top 20% of your customers make 80% of your revenue, and this applies to almost every aspect of your life.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Occam's Razor. If we're given two solutions, the simplest solution will more often than not produce better results. More often than not. We're never going to get every decision right, no matter how many frameworks we use. But the idea here is what I want you to take away: if we remove emotion, belief, and ideas that we haven't verified from our decision-making process, we can set ourselves up to make more better decisions that will consistently produce positive outcomes over the long term.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: At any given moment, in any situation that has uncertainty, we can potentially win. Think of all those people pulling the slot machine handle. They have one data point. "One time I won once, and therefore pulling a handle is going to make me money, and I'm going to keep doing it." Removing the entertainment value from the thing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Opportunity costs. Do you weigh both the positive and negative ramifications of saying yes, and the positive and negative ramifications of saying no to this decision, and weigh them out in a math equation? Or do you just go, "You know, my favorite insurance nerd likes this new CRM, so I think I'm going to drop everything we're doing and buy that one." Because it feels good. It feels like we're doing something. Did you do an opportunity cost analysis? Is it more or less complex to switch CRMs? No. You're like, "He's cool, she's awesome, they're both on that CRM, that means I'm a dork, I need to get on that one." That's what we do. Then we chase the shiny object. Then our staff hates us, we spend more money, and we never actually use it. Because we're using emotions, beliefs, and unverified ideas to make a decision, instead of just applying a framework to it. If the framework says yes, and you want to do it, great. Because now you worked through something that removed all the emotion and belief from it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Before 2017, before Elevate, before that moment, I operated most of my life with just a general sense of dissatisfaction. I probably couldn't have put my finger on it at the time. I thought I was doing good stuff. I had good friends. I enjoyed being a dad. But I never felt like I was 100% me. I never felt like I was everything that I could possibly be. I wasn't that I wasn't proud of myself, but I knew I could be more. I couldn't figure out what was going on inside of me that didn't allow me to get there. Maybe I didn't want it enough. Maybe it's because my dad's an alcoholic. We all have stuff. You have your stuff. I have my stuff.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: For 37 years of my life, I used my stuff to be 80% of what I could be. This was the easiest list to make out of all these slides. A general sense of discontent. You just never feel 100% happy. I'm just dissatisfied. Even on my wins, I'd be like, "Yeah, but..." You ever get a good win and then throw a "yeah but" in there? You're like, "Why did I do that? I just had a win. Where'd that 'yeah but' come from?" Just fast to get frustrated. "Why didn't that go my way? What's wrong with me? When's it my turn?" I had to take a really hard look at myself. I don't like these things. I don't want this. This is terrible.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Then I had a friend who introduced the idea of silent suffocation. This friend is also a mentor. He said to me something that has changed my life. Use this, don't use it, but it's what's worked for me. He said, "Go find a counselor. Man, woman, doesn't matter. Mine's a woman. Meet with that person every other week for the rest of your life and just consider it a life expense. Whether you're doing great, whether the world's on fire, whether you're happy, sad, or anywhere in the middle, just show up at the thing and talk."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: After a few months, I was really struggling with this. What I found myself explaining was this idea: "I feel like I get my head above water for a minute, and then all of a sudden I'm back under. I don't know how to stay above water. I don't know how to swim on top of the water. I keep coming down in it. Then I work my way back up, and then all of a sudden I'm back underwater again. I hate it because I'm constantly working. I don't want that. I want to get ahead. I don't want to be on the yacht. I don't want to be doing one of those dives off the yacht that you see all the rich people do from the second story. That looks amazing, and I want to do that someday. But I can't do that when I'm trying to get air, because I can barely keep my head above water."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: She said to me, "You're making decisions with your emotions, feelings, and beliefs. And they're lying to you. Because we are not our emotions. We're not. Our emotions are data points trying to keep us alive in this exact minute. That's it. That's all they are. They're chemical reactions happening in your brain. They're trying to keep you alive right this second. They don't care about five minutes from now. They don't care about a year from now. Yet we operate like this. They're a guiding path. They are not your friends. They're data points. It's important to understand what they're saying to you. But we can't make decisions on our emotions."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When I learned this lesson through a lot of work—although you're getting all of that for free today, so you're very lucky; she charges me $65 for this—when I started to let that sink into me and really grab onto it, I started to listen to those emotions and what they were actually telling me and how misaligned they were from what I actually wanted.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: "You worked out yesterday. You need to work out today. No one's going to know if you show up to work a little late. Send that email tomorrow. You can just, on the plane ride, fix that thing before your talk or your presentation. Because there's a Netflix series that your buddy told you was awesome, and it would be really cool to talk to him about that series." Yet none of those things are getting me where I want to be. When I'm alone, I know exactly who I want to be, and then I let myself get talked out of it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: How we get there is by applying frameworks, filters, and mental models that will consistently help us make better decisions over the long term. When done, as we see on the quote here from Naval Ravikant, those good decisions start to compound over time. Each good decision compounds on the next one, and the next one, and the next one. All of a sudden we wake up and a year later we've lost 27 pounds. I'm as mentally clear as I've ever been in my life. I can operate for days. We pulled off the greatest insurance conference in the history of the world. Ever. It's the best one ever. Everyone will like it, and there never will be another. I'm very biased because I put it on with a bunch of my friends. But I have the microphone, so I can say whatever the fuck I want.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The truth is, the difference was night and day. Not just in my energy, not just in my physical appearance, but in my attitude. I was happy. I was doing something that I was finally able to love. I loved it supposedly in 2017, although I felt dissatisfied, discontent, like I was underachieving. Doing the same exact thing a year later, everything about it was amazing. I was allowing myself to experience all the feelings. Because for that year, I didn't live my life on my emotions or my feelings or my beliefs or unverified information. I set a series of frameworks with the help of my counselor, and I just went off the frameworks.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You know what the framework said? "Go to the fucking gym. I know you don't want to. I know you don't like the gym. But you know what? You want your brain to work better? You want to be happier? You want to stop being depressed? Use your body. Can't get around it." Doesn't mean you need to be an athlete. Doesn't need to be Adonis. You don't have to be in swimsuit magazines. Just move your body even when you don't want to.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We all talk about cold calling. No one likes to cold call. Cold calling is the worst. What do you do? Just make the calls. Same thing goes for everything in our life. Apply the filters, frameworks, and models that get you to the result that you want, and be relentless in your commitment to those models. What will happen is over time the results compound and compound and compound, and we find ourselves in a place we never thought we could get to. 100% of who we are. I get chills just saying that. I don't know that I'm there right now. But I've felt it for moments. It feels very fucking good.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: 100%. You are operating at your current max capacity. You are satisfied in who you are. You are achieving results. You are able to work through obstacles. People enjoy being around you. You've got a big-ass smile on your face, and you are awesome at sex. 100% of who you are. Who doesn't want to be awesome at sex? Sorry, I like sex jokes.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The mistake that I was making was actually quite small. I worked with my counselor in putting this all together. The mistake I had been making unbeknownst to me was I valued these three pieces of information the most. I wanted to be prepared. I wanted to know this stuff, have the right connections, be in the right place. I wanted to be able to work at a pace, meaning have the ability, have the energy. I knew I was willing to put in the hours.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When you think about how prepared you are, the pace you can work at, and the number of hours you're willing to put in, you get your max growth capacity. Every single one of you can do that equation, and most likely does that equation with most things. Somehow, we still don't get exactly where we want to be. Even if we do, we don't go as far as we're capable of. The reason is we forget the denominator. That is what I had been doing for the first 37 years of my life.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If we do not consider the distractions, then the growth doesn't mean anything. Every distraction cuts into that max growth. Every single distraction. Wake up hungover with foggy brain because you can't not have that drink the night before? Growth potential comes down a little bit. Have to watch Netflix every night for some reason? That comes down. Refuse to time block. Take every meeting. Don't outsource. Refuse to use virtual assistants. Still feel like even though you're the owner or the top level producer, you need to do the $5 an hour work because that's who you are? You are limiting your upside. You are not 100% of yourself. We all forget to remove the distractions.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Distractions for me were I felt I needed to have a beer or two every night. Just for whatever reason. Wind down. I got ADD. My brain's going on high level. I need to have a beer or two every night. That's 360 calories that my body does not need. Alcohol also slows your metabolism. So not only are you putting extra calories in your body that it doesn't need, your metabolism—what actually burns all the stuff that was already in there—slows down. Also, regardless of what you think about alcohol's impact on your ability to fall asleep, you sleep like shit when you've had alcohol in your system. I have tracked it multiple times using multiple different devices. You are not special or unique. If you have a drink, you sleep worse and you have less energy when you wake up in the morning. It's just the way it is. I'm not saying you shouldn't drink. I love drinking, guys, just so you know. We just need to make decisions on actual information.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But that was a distraction for me. Instead of doing an extra hour's worth of work, or reading, or spending time with my children—God forbid—or just going to bed earlier, I felt the need to sit up on the couch by myself. That was a distraction. I had to cut that out of my life. If being the best version of myself was a priority for Elevate 2018, I had to cut that out of my life. I didn't stop drinking altogether. I made a rule: I get one night a week. That was my rule. I get one night a week. That's fine. That's reasonable.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I stopped watching bullshit TV. I watched a few sporting events. Otherwise, during the time when I normally would have distracted myself with the television, I read. I read books. I read a lot of books. That's what I chose to do. I started attacking every aspect of my life and saying, "What are the necessary distractions that I need to move?" We're never going to get rid of all of them. I wanted to hang out with my children. Compared to my goal of being the best version of myself for Elevate 2018, spending three hours on the floor with my kids probably could be considered a distraction. But I wanted to do that. I was willing to take slightly less growth in that area for that distraction.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My point is not that you live some sort of caveman or—what do they call it now? Monk mode. Isn't that what all the kids are saying? Who's under 35 here? You understand that language? Monk mode. Am I saying that right? Brohim over there knows. He confirms.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm not advocating for a particular lifestyle, because frankly you know what you want more than I do. What I want to give you is a tool that you can use to pass the decisions that you make in your life through, if a certain goal is important to you. But if you're not using some sort of framework to get to your goal, then it's all just bullshit. That's what your goal is—bullshit. It's pandering and it's posturing. It's your ego going, "I'm going to write $250,000 in new business next month." Then you don't do any of the shit that you need to do to actually get there. You still futz around in the morning for an hour. You stand at the coffee thing and ask Tina about her day and Tommy about his kids. Instead of getting to fucking work.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Or whatever your goal is. It works amazing. "I want to be a better spouse." Okay, let's work through this. Are you prepared? Do you understand who—I'm a guy, so I'll talk—do you understand who your wife is? What's important to her? What she really values? The life she wants to live? Do you understand how she wants to evolve as a human? When's the last time you talked to her? Do you have the ability, the attention span, the willingness to be present in the moment with her so that she feels like you're actually listening to her?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And then are you willing to put in the time? Take her out to dinner. Or, God forbid, you go grocery shopping or something together that's just like regular. Spend a little time, if that's your goal, and then remove the distractions. Guess what you don't get to do? Death scroll when she's talking to you. You don't get to go golfing four times that week. You don't get to check out when you get home and go into the garage and don't talk to anybody. If that's your goal, right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Are you prepared? Do you have the ability? Are you willing to put in the time? And can you remove the distractions? That is how you get shit done. But it's a framework. There's no emotion in there. Your decisions are your decisions. I'm not telling you how you need to feel or what you should believe. If a goal is important to you, this simple formula will get you there if you're willing to stick to it. And this could be a short-term goal, long-term growth, etc.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Here's the other part about frameworks. You can reevaluate them at any time. Beliefs are different. Beliefs are tough. You believe something, but it doesn't really change. I believe this. If you make a decision based on a belief and you have to change it, that means your belief was wrong, that means you're wrong, right? No one likes that. I don't want to feel wrong. But if you're using a framework, you could be a month into a project and just reevaluate what's going on. "Hey, you know what, doing pretty good, but there's this one distraction I haven't moved yet." Or, "Hey, our goal has changed slightly and we need to do a little more preparation in this area so that we can get more done on the top end. Maybe we need to hire somebody, or I need to go get a particular training."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: With a framework, we can constantly reapply the formula to what we're doing and adjust course as needed to get to where we want to be. But if we're basing it on emotions, emotions are crazy, right? I thought emotions were bad when we're young. As we get older, our freaking emotions are all over the board constantly. I cried at a commercial the other day. I don't even know why. Right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Status, health, mindset, technology, relationships. These are just distractions. And not all of them are bad. At different times, some will be good and some will be bad. Some will be fine. Sometimes you do just need to wind down. And desk rolling, how to teach 10-year-olds how to hit baseball, works for me. So as long as I'm not doing it all the time and it's not impacting my thing, I will say, hey, I'm okay with a little bit of distraction here. I just need to turn my brain off. I'm all right with that. But it's a decision. It's not just happening to me. I didn't just open my phone and two hours later wake up an expert hitting coach but didn't get any work done that day.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want you to bear with me through this next section here. I'm going to ask you to participate. The best part is I see at least a dozen of you death scrolling right now. I'm going to ask you to participate in this process with me. I want you to close your eyes. Okay, close your eyes. Just relax. Just let your brain go. Just relax into your chair. I have my eyes open, nothing's going to happen to you. Okay, just let yourself relax.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want you to picture a milestone. Not a life-changing goal, just a milestone. A really solid, something you'd be real proud of. A nice milestone in your life 10 years from now. 10 years from now. Now, pull it back to one year. What do you have to get done in one year to hit that milestone? Just picture that in your head, right? So you have a 10-year thing you want to do, something you're really proud of. Where do you need to be in one year to be on pace? Just have a vision in your head.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Now I want you to imagine yourself in that moment one year from now. You've done the thing, you're on pace. Who are you as a person? Think about it. Are you happy? Do you have a good relationship? Do your team enjoy working with you? Do you feel satisfied in hitting this goal? Is it a goal that's meaningful to you or is it a goal that's meaningful to somebody else? Feel who you are in that moment. You're thriving. You've hit it. You're doing exactly what you set out to do. So few people do that but you did it. You did it. Hold that feeling. It feels good. Right? You're killing the game. You're doing what you said you would do. You're someone who can be counted on. People know that you finish projects. They look up to you, they respect you, and you feel good about yourself.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Now on a scale of one to ten, I want you to pick a number on how confident you are you're going to be. Not just hit that mark a year from now, but be that person. Just pick a number in your head. First number that comes to your head. No right or wrong answer. Keeping your eyes closed. If you're an eight to a ten, I want you to raise your hand. Keep your eyes closed, eight to ten. Five to seven. Five or under. Thank you. Okay guys, open your eyes.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: 30% of the room is an 8 or a 10. It's amazing. And actually, I know some of the people who raised their hand and I know that they are very process driven individuals. So I think that says something. About 30% of the room. The other 70% of the room is a 7 or less. There is a way to guarantee that you get there. There's a way to make it a 10. But you have to commit to it. And it's a simple formula. A finished formula. It's having that goal in your head.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The key for me when I do this visualization, because I was unwilling to commit to this. I don't like this stuff. At my heart, I'm like a wild creative. I would have been one of those, like if this were the 70s, I definitely would have been naked in the woods painting people's bodies. High, like that definitely would have been me. But that's not as acceptable today. Certainly not in Texas. So I wanted to fight this. I don't like structure. I've been fired from every job that's tried to put me into a structure. But I was also so unhappy with where I was and who I was becoming, and I just saw this path.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I originally wanted to give credit to my counselor for saying this, but then when I Googled it, it's actually an Oprah quote. What you focus on is who you become. There's nothing more to it. Right? You want to be a good dad? Focus on it. You want to be a good spouse? Focus on it. You want to be a good leader? Focus on it. But focus isn't enough. You need to have a framework that you're working through. Because it's very, very easy to get off track, and it's very easy for our focus to get taken away. Again, we make light of the technology decisions, chasing shiny object syndrome, ha ha ha, but it's because we don't have a framework behind the decision. It is easy to change our focus, but how do we stay on that point? To get that done we need to have something that we pass it through, and this formula for this particular need—getting a project finished—is the best formula that I have come across.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I've used it for more than... over 2004? I guess it's almost 8 years now. Started my own independent insurance agency seven days before the zombie apocalypse happened, was able to be acquired in two years, exited in 2023. I've had a 15-year speaking career, most of which before 2017 was an absolute friggin' mess, of which was all just random. My life was random. Before I started adopting this process, my results were random. They were lucky. I just happened into things. And it wasn't until I started applying this very simple formula: Are you prepared to do the thing? Do you have the skills, knowledge, experience, connections, network, etc. that you need? Do you have the abilities? Can you apply yourself in a manner that allows you to be successful? Are you willing to put in the time? And can you remove the distractions from your life that will allow you to hit as close to that goal as you possibly can?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Right, this shit's not easy. But easy is fucking ordinary. You guys wouldn't be here if you were ordinary. You have to know that about yourself. I've been doing this for a very long time. It takes a lot to come to this. I know that. You made a sacrifice and a commitment to be here. You have people at home, you have a business at home, you have things that need to get done. Even if you live nearby and you're taking days out of your life to connect with like-minded individuals, to learn from people and to grow. That means you're not ordinary. Ordinary people don't do that. If you haven't given yourself credit for that, you sure... Clap it up right now. Give yourself credit for spending time in this place. It's meaningful, right? This isn't some event that you have to go to because it's mandatory. You paid real money to come here and get better. That means you're not ordinary.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But not being ordinary is not enough. We have to be intentional, and that is what I am asking you to be. Not just extraordinary, but intentional. Intentional with your actions. Intentional with the path that you take. And there are simple ways to move distractions. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because you can just Google this shit. But like prioritization, right? Use the Eisenhower Matrix. Use something. Google "how do I prioritize better." There are like 15 frameworks. Pick one. Try them.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Structured time. I actually really like the Pomodoro Technique. Basically where you take 20 or 25 minutes out of every 30 and leave the last five or 10 minutes of that block to basically address distractions. What it tells your brain is, "Hey, you give me 25 minutes of work, and I'm going to give you five minutes to do whatever the hell you want." That's a good trade. You may know that right now you're not the best at removing distractions, so allow the distractions to happen and just break up your time in a way where you are giving yourself permission to be distracted for a period of time if you earn it by doing 25 minutes of hard work. That's cool. Right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There's others. Right? Stop eating sugar. Sugar's the devil. It would be a schedule one drug if it wasn't for corrupt politicians and doctors. It's essentially cocaine that we are allowed to put in our bodies. So stay away from sugar, even though it's amazing. I mean, cocaine's good too. But set boundaries as much as you can. That wasn't a recommendation. I've just heard that on the street. So we're... Go to sleep. Change your physical space, right? If your physical space is tough or you're distracted, you got to change it. I can't work on the kitchen table. So my office is in the basement. Close the doors, tell the kids off, and I can actually get shit done, right? So change your physical space. Maybe get a coworking space if you work from home. Or if you actually have an office space and you really struggle to get deep work done there and you're not the boss, maybe talk about, "Hey, can I have one day where I don't go home, but maybe I have another place I can go that allows me to get that deep work done?" Change your physical space. That's another way.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Daily debriefs. Before I move on, daily debriefs. This is something that I actually picked up during my rogue wrist days. In that five minutes at the end of the day, even three minutes at the end of the day, just to go, "How did today go?" Like, how many of you ask yourself, "How did today go?" at the end of the day? Good, good. I knew you were going to say yes. Come on, man. Just that simple question. "How did today go?" "Pretty good, but geez, I let that one customer monopolize an hour of my time. Probably should have passed that one off." Or whatever. And we just learn. We're fallible. We're going to make mistakes. The point isn't to be perfect. Right? With daily debriefs, the point is it allows you to check in and course correct as needed.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There's nothing that feels better than getting that thing done and having it get done exactly the way we said it would happen. You know those people in your life that when you say you need something done, they just get it done? Think of the amount of respect you have for that person, regardless of what their role is in your life. My dad is one of those people. My dad says he's going to be somewhere, he's there. There are a lot of other things he doesn't do. But I'll tell you what, when I need somebody somewhere, he's there. Always. He has left work without telling anybody. He's changed entire weekends of plans. He's made all kinds of sacrifices. So when my kids, in particular most of the time that's what I need them for, and I need him, he's there. And any of the messed up stuff that I had with him when I was younger, he has earned all of it back by being the kind of guy that shows up. And that's his thing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Now, if we want to be that person, because that feels good—I know it's a point of pride for him, he likes to shove it in my face when we're busting balls—if you want to be that person, then we have to consistently finish the things we say we're going to do. And this formula right here, this framework, mental model, filter, whatever you want to call it, it's incredibly simple, it's incredibly straightforward, it's easy to apply, it makes complete sense, and you can use it over and over again.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I have this just as a sheet of paper that floats around my desk. That's how I keep it. It's not even taped down. And the reason for that is I want to randomly find it. I want to be sorting through papers and find this and go, "Am I still on it? Am I still on it? Where are the distractions?" And come back to it over and over again. The power of frameworks is to make better decisions and ultimately create inevitable outcomes. We want to become finishers. When we finish things, we're more satisfied, we're more content, we're happier, we show more love, we communicate better, we walk tall and proud, we speak with authority, we're more compassionate of other people. Because when we believe in our self, it is way easier to believe in others. And what I'm trying to give you today, and I hope you will use, is this simple formula to get there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Now if you would do me a kindness, I have one more slide. It is my second favorite framework for getting things done. But first, just to help me understand—this is the first time I've ever done this particular keynote—if you take a quick snapshot of this and just leave me some feedback, that's it. And I'll give it to the guys at Soup too so they can have it and use it. And if you do that, you'll also immediately get emailed a copy of the slides for the presentation. So this helps me. This helps me get better at what I do. I'm gonna give you just a second, and then I have... Finished Formula is my favorite framework. What I'm about to show you is my second favorite. Equally as powerful, and it will make immediate sense when you see it. So I'm going to give you five, four, three, two, one. You guys ready?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Okay. Second favorite framework for getting things done. Shit. Oh, I fucked it up. Why is it not working? There it is. I messed that up. It would have been much better if I'd kept it on that one. My fans got me.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So guys, my point in saying this to you is: use this, don't use it, try it out, mess around. Right? We don't know what works for us. This has worked really well for me, and I think that it is simple enough and clean enough for you to apply it to whatever makes sense to you in your life. But what I ask of you is to not let our biases, our beliefs, and our emotions keep us from getting the things done that we want to get done. The things that we came here to figure out, right? You came here to get better. You came here to grow. This is going to help you get there, and so is the Finished Formula. Pick what works for you. I wish you nothing but the best. I love you for being here. Thank you so much.
--:-- Host: Every week, we share the ideas, stories, and insights of elite performers that you can use in your business and life. Be sure to subscribe wherever you're listening or watching and leave a comment on YouTube to keep the conversation going. This is the way. This time next week.
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