IMAGINE WHAT YOUR LIFE WOULD LOOK LIKE IF YOU WERE ABLE TO CONSISTENTLY PRIORITIZE AND FOCUS:

You would wake up every morning and take an hour to relax, maybe having a coffee and reading or visiting with your family. You would know what you needed to do that day and you would have plenty of time to do it.

You would sit at the computer and start working. By lunch you would have finished your most important task, the one thing that will move your business forward more than anything else.

In the afternoon you have time to work out, go for a walk, or just hang out with friends.

You would feel closer to your goal at the end of the day. You would feel a sense of progress.

You would know you accomplished the most important things over the weekend.

You can see upward progress at the end of a month, quarter or year.

Jobs quickly replied “no,” then paused. He took a deep breath and said “Nike makes some of the best products in the world. Products that you lust after. But you also make a lot of crap.”

Get rid of the bad stuff and focus on the good stuff.

There was a pause. He expected a laugh.

It never arrived.

In a later interview, Jobs said that he was as proud of what Apple didn’t do as it was of what it did.

What do all these high performers have in common? An extraordinary ability to focus and prioritize.

The power of focus has been written about by authors. The struggle continues.

Why? What are you doing wrong?

The answer is nothing.

No one can expect you to change your life if you don’t have a system.

You already knew that.

It wasn’t an accident that you found this page. You are a high-performer, the type of person who thinks differently and works on improving themselves, not because someone is telling them to, but because you believe it is important.

You need the right system.

You know that you need to study, model and use the components of other’s successes.

You have never been given a system that does this.

The most successful people have the same things. They follow the same principles. These principles allow them to remain focused and successful.

Their principles are the key to achieving audacious goals.

Many of them don’t consciously realize it, but there are key principles that have allowed them to accomplish goals with what appear like effortless ease while you’re struggling and slogging through your day.

These core principles are the answer to why two people can be both smart and hard working, but one can go much further and faster than the other, without sacrificing their health, relationships, or having a prestigious background.

You will have a plan to finally start achieving more, working less, and having time for yourself if you internalize the principles and use them in your everyday life.

Steve Pressfield has called it The Resistance. Most productivity books and systems don’t mention the concept of emotional work.

Sending a cold email to someone you respect or publishing your thoughts for thousands of people to see is the emotionally difficult work of The Resistance. These are hard emotionally and logistically.

Ben Horowitz, one of the most successful entrepreneurs, had this to say.

The ability to manage my own psychology was the most difficult skill I learned as CEO. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring, and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check. I was not tough going into it. I was not aggressive.

I have spoken to hundreds of CEOs, all with the same experience. I have never read anything on the topic, and very few people talk about it. The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is not to talk about it.

The difficult emotional work of fighting The Resistance and managing your own psychology is often the work that is created equal.