 Some people wonder how I can get so much done. Today is the launch of my third book, Authentic Selling. And in this video, I wanna talk about my process in terms of all the things I can get done in a week and some tips that you might be able to use to become more productive and joyfully productive as well. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm George Cao and I'll just describe what's on my plate. I run a 40-person group coaching program by myself. I don't have any assistance. I don't have a virtual assistant. I haven't had one since the beginning of the year. Decided this year to try to do everything in my business myself, everything, including the bookkeeping. I don't have a bookkeeper name, whatever task in my business, I do it. The only thing I don't do is graphic design, which I only do once in a while and I outsource that to Fiverr. But everything I do in my business, I don't have a tech guy, I am the tech guy, assistant. I do all the admin, everything. So I have a 40-person filled group coaching program. I have 18 one-to-one clients at the moment. Most of them see me just once a month. I prefer to keep it that way. And I have, let's see, I write one book every six months. I blog twice a week. Usually about 800 to 1,000 words. Blog posts every week twice. And along with two of these videos a week, as you probably know by now, 15 to 30 minute videos. I also run, let's see, what else do I do? I'm kind of jotting this down. Of course, I create a new online course every month. A whole new course every month. The three-part course each month, new one. I send out a weekly newsletter, email on Bravia email, and I work 35 hours a week on my business. So that's all that takes about 35 hours a week. Of course, I clear my email inbox every day. Every day my email is to zero. If you look at my email inbox, it's zero. My desktop on my computer is completely clear. On my screen, on my physical desktop is clear as well. So I think I get a lot more done than most people do. And I'll tell you why. I have very low drama in my life. And some of you might actually think that my life is extremely boring. Actually, some of you would probably be extremely bored with my life. I have no friends. I have no local friends. I mean, I've, some of you are my friends now. I feel like, you know, but I purposely have no local friends. So I don't get invited to any local gatherings. I don't go out with anybody for dinner. Except when my clients occasionally come to town and they're willing to come meet me here at my house and we eat locally. I'm very happy to take you out to dinner if you ever come to meet me here. So please feel free to ask me and come visit me. Any of you, audience members, clients can come visit me and I'll take you out to dinner or lunch as we can find a time to schedule for. So that's the only time I go out to dinner. No, I'm sorry. I go out to dinner with my wife all the time. But in terms of local, I don't have no local friends. And I purposely keep it that way because I don't wanna be invited to the birthday parties. I don't wanna be invited to any kind of social gathering. I keep my life very, very simple and boring, to be honest. But I find a great deal of joy and fulfillment and fun and adventure in doing my business. And I think that's what makes the difference is I have such a passion for my business. And that's my question for you. Do you have a passion for your business? Are you willing to sink your need for adventure and joy and fulfillment and fun and creativity and newness, novelty and friendship and everything? Are you willing to sink that into your business? Now, the other thing that makes my life low drama, to be honest, is I have no kids. I have no young children. I have no kids. And I'm not taking care of anybody elderly. And I may be in the future with my parents getting older. But I don't have anyone to take care of except my wife. She works four days a week outside the house. And I have a dog and two cats and they're really easy to take care of. I go on the dog walk twice a day and that's kind of adventurous, kind of fun. Get it go outside. And yes, I might see a few people at the dog park and say hello to, but that's about it. So my life is extremely boring. That's why I get so much done. And you might not want that, right? Because some of you have a lot higher requirements than me for social interaction. I get no social interaction except through these videos, through with my, of course, I'm talking to clients, multiple times a week. I have a group call. I have a group that I talk to every week on Zoom. I teach a course every week. So that's how I get my social interaction. That's it. So you might, I don't think, I don't know, some of you don't want my life, and that's okay. And that's really okay. And that's, I think that's part of the point I'm trying to make here is it's a trade-off. And I have learned, I have designed a life that feels very fulfilling to me, but it works for me and it might not work for you. So please don't compare yourself to me. That's a really important point too. So how come George can do up? You might not want that, right? And so my question for you is what, how much time are you investing? And that's, okay, so let's talk about what do I do then? Okay, so 35 hours a week. So let me kind of back up a little bit. There's two elements going on here, okay? One element is the time I actually schedule to work and what do I do during those times? And the second element is the energetics of my life. So that's what I've been talking about right now is the energetics of my life. If your life is exciting, you've got, you go to social events all the time, your energy is drained. And so by the time, or you have young kids to take care of, that's every kid you're taking care of is a full-time job. I mean, you know that better than anybody, but studies are now showing, studies are showing, I read a study recently, literally every kid you've taken care of is equivalent energy-wise to a full-time job. So if you are taking care of a kid and you're trying to, you have a job, like a physical, you know, like you have to go to work, you basically have two full-time jobs, right? I'm sorry, I'm getting cold here, so I'm doing my space heater thing here. And do you go out, do you have friends locally? That's like another, it's a part-time job to have local friends, right? Because you feel guilty if you don't say yes to certain interactions and you feel guilty if you don't invite them to certain interactions. So the energetics of my life are completely invested in my business, besides, you know, my wife and my tiny little family, that's super low maintenance. So that's one part of it, and that's how I'm able to sink so much energy and passion into my business. You gotta be realistic, right, about your trade-offs, because if you have any of those energy requirements, of course it's gonna be harder to have energy for your business, of course, right? And my time, let's talk about my time. So what do I spend in the 35 hours? I actually have an entire course called Draw for Productivity where I go into the details of my calendar, I show you my calendar, everything. So I feel like that's gonna be probably too boring for this video. So I'm gonna make this video more interesting by just telling you what, if you want to get things done, you've got to schedule, in my opinion, you've got to schedule it in, number one, and number two, you've got to show up for the things that you've scheduled. This is going to rub some of you the wrong way because some of you are like, no, George, the whole point of having a business is freedom, the freedom to do whatever I want whenever I want to. And I agree with you to some extent. I get to set, I'm my own boss. I get to set the times I work and I get to do whatever I want to do during the times I set. The question that I have for you is what kind of output do you want to have? If you want a certain amount of output doing certain kinds of things, then are you putting in the time to create that output? If I want to write two books a year, I've got to put out the output that allows two books a year. And my secret of writing a book, it's not so much a secret, you probably know this if you've gotten any of my books, is I basically blog twice a week and then twice a year, I turn those blog posts into a book. It's very simple. It's very simple. It's blog to book, that's it. And so I basically am able to kind of do two things at once, right? And in terms of my online courses, I create a whole new course a month. So that's multiple hours, about a dozen hours of preparation for each course. So I got to schedule that in. And I've got a group coaching program that I have a call every month or a call every week rather, plus I answer questions in my private Facebook group. So that's time that I need to structure and schedule that in. I write my blog post twice a week, so I have to structure time to do that. Otherwise they won't get done. Things don't get done just because you feel like doing it. Have you noticed that? When it's a creative project, you feel good after you do it, not before you do it, okay? Before you do it, you have some fantasy about doing it. That might feel good. But then the doing it doesn't feel good, but the afterward feels great. It feels amazing. Just like working out. Well, actually, just like exercising, right? You don't feel like exercising. You exercise because you know it's good for you and you feel great after you exercise. So it's the practice of doing something you don't feel like doing. Are you willing to do that? That's my question for you. Are you willing to do what you don't feel like doing? Knowing you'll feel great after you do it. That is essentially the question of life, the question of success, right? None of us feels like going to work. I don't feel like doing this video, but once I'm in the video, once I'm doing the writing and I see the blank page is miraculously ignoring my fear, ignoring my inner critic and my judgments of myself. I ignore those things and I just start typing. And I'm like, no, I'm not gonna listen to you. I'm not gonna listen. It's a continual practice of ignoring the fear and ignoring the self-criticism. And if you practice that, you'll get good at that. And that's what you need to practice to be creative, right? And so as I ignore, ignore, ignore and type, type, type, type, type. Oh my God, there are words on the screen. Okay, let me edit these words a little bit. And I have a timeline because I have a client at nine o'clock so I better post this before nine. You structure your time so that you do it by a certain time. You give yourself deadlines, right? You are your own boss. So you give yourself the deadline. Like I give myself my own deadlines. I can't give you a deadline because then you'll resent me, right? You have to give yourself a deadline and you can't resent yourself. You've got to learn to respect your own deadlines and to love yourself for giving yourself deadlines because you know that without a deadline, very little gets done in life, right? That's why taxes are a certain, if there was no deadline for taxes, nobody would pay taxes, right? And we would have no roads, we had no police, we have no military to protect our country. I know most of, I'm not happy with how much of our taxes go to military spending. That's a problem. But you know what I mean? Whatever services, civil services that you appreciate, right? And if there was no deadline to life, the human life itself, if you knew that, ah, you would just live for, well, actually I do believe we live forever consciously, but thank God the soul has been smart enough to give us little deadlines of each life, right? This life, I live 80 years and I have to get something done in 80. So that's the ultimate deadline, dead, we die, 80 years, right? And then we get to live another life of 80, 100, whatever, you know, the next one. It's like little segments like that. Our soul has given us little deadlines of 80 years in the drop of the eternity of the soul. And just like today, I have a deadline of today, I gotta get something done. I have a deadline of getting this video done so I can finish my blog post that gets accompanied to this video. You see what I mean? Everything is deadline, life is deadline driven. You have to make peace with deadlines. You have to make peace with that. I know you are a free spirit. Oh, I wanna be a free spirit. Free spirit can be applied at a wiser level. I'm a free spirit too, but I have a free spirit in the macro sense of things, but I'm not a free spirit today. I give myself the prison. I am my own prisoner and I'm my own warden. I give myself the prison of today and my deadlines and my calendar so that I can get things done and enjoy the free spiritedness of the overall pattern of my life and my business. I get to make a lot of choices myself. I'm a free spirit. Does that make sense? And I get to choose where I go on vacations, when I go on vacations, how long my vacations are. I'm a free spirit in the macro sense, but I am disciplined in the micro sense. And I think that's true with the human soul as well, the human life. Again, I'm sharing my personal beliefs. You might believe something totally different. I believe that we live eternally, our consciousness is eternal. We are free spirit in that way. We have free will. So yeah, I'm a free spirit, but then our soul is smart enough to give us the prison of this life, prison, the deadline, the schedule, the calendar of this life so that we can get things done while we're here, grow the soul, grow the spirit while we're here. And then we get to, so I think of all this stuff in micro, macro. Okay, so let me kind of wrap this up by saying, I mean, really, whatever you want to get done, write a book, create a course, have a product or a service that you push out there that you promote, it's all based on your own output, which means it's all based on your own spending of your time wisely to do these things. That's it. And I'm just saying that when it comes time to do the thing that you scheduled to do, you are not going to feel like doing it. I don't feel like doing it. So why do I still do it? Because I know I feel great afterwards. And I know I feel great in the big picture. Just know, oh my God, look at this. I've already created 10 courses this year. I feel amazing knowing I've done that. But every time I prepare for the course, oh, I'm confused. I don't know what I'm supposed to teach. I don't know what people, I don't know how to parse down all the knowledge I have into something that's really doable for me. It doesn't feel good in that sense of, I would rather sit on the couch and eat potato chips. That feels great. And watch Netflix feels amazing, right? Sitting down doing the work doesn't feel good in the first 10 minutes. That's what you've got to learn the discipline of. The 10 minutes of not feeling good so they can feel great as I'm in the process now. Oh, I'm in the flow now. I see this coming together. The creativity process feels terrible in the first 10 minutes. I'm fearful, I don't feel like doing it. I'd rather go play video games. I'd rather go play with my dog, whatever. And then I feel great. Oh, I'm so glad I had the self-discipline of feeling bad for 10 minutes. So then I can feel good now and then I can feel great later after I've accomplished it. Okay, so the last thing I'll talk about is the, so I've talked about the energetics of my life and how it's a trade-off between how much drama is in my life and how much of human interaction and how much energy I'm able to give into my business. I think that is a real trade-off, okay? Can't have your life too exciting if you really wanna have a lot of business done, right? Put your excitement into your business. That's something you have to learn to channel your excitement into your business, okay? So second one is scheduling time. The third one is disciplining yourself. You're not suffering the whole day. No, I don't suffer the whole day. I just suffer the first 10 minutes of every task. You know, I don't really suffer. I don't really suffer anymore because I've practiced in putting joy into everything. And that's a spiritual practice. So even the, oh, I don't feel like doing this. I put joy into, ooh, this is opportunity for spiritual growth. Ah, I don't have to be suffering. Disciplining myself does not suffer anymore. It's joyful. It's a joyful diligence now, right? So that's self-discipline, turning that into joy, practice doing that. And then the fourth is staying accountable to the output. I stay accountable because you know I'm showing up Tuesdays and Fridays at 12 noon. So I've given an expectation to my audience and my network that that's when I show up. So I have accountability from you. And I hope you'll ask me, George, what happened? Tuesday, you're not here at noon, okay? Ask me, okay? Keep me accountable. But I also keep myself accountable with a tool called FocusMate. Some of you are getting me anger, anger signs. I'm not sure why. So tell me why you're angry. Okay. You know, I use focusmate.com all the time, several FocusMate sessions per day. Even on, well, I organize my own co-working sessions on Saturdays, but I do co-working using FocusMate during the weekdays. So that keeps me accountable. And I think that's, and the last thing is I don't judge my work. That's actually a really big one. I'll just end with this. I don't, I've talked about this about ignoring the fear, ignoring the self-criticism, ignoring the, what if I'm confused? What if I don't know what I'm doing? Ignoring all that and just doing it and just creating the output. So that's really important. And I think to some of you, that's like, oh, it's, George makes it sound so easy. No, it's not easy. It's a practice. It's a practice of ignoring my negativity. Because I have that within myself, just as all of us have that seed of negativity within ourselves that could be flamed into the fans of stopping us from, of limitation, right? The seeds of negativity, if you pay attention to it, get flamed into, I can't do this anymore. I'm stopping myself. So I don't judge my work. I don't judge my work. I let you judge my work. You can give me the anger signs. Some of you are giving me anger signs and whatever. Sad, sad, sad symbols. Okay, I let you judge my work. I don't judge my work. Because I now know being knowledgeable about marketing. And I hope I'll impart that knowledge to you now. In marketing, you don't get to judge your work. The audience judges your work. So when I wrote this book, I had many moments in the book writing process where like, this is not a good enough book, but it's not good enough. I said, I don't care. I have a schedule. I have a schedule. I'm creating, I'm gonna put this book out no matter if it's terrible. You know, by September 18, gotta schedule. Don't judge your work because you are not a reliable judge of your own work. You're not. You will find that when you think your work is great, your audience doesn't think it's great. When you think your work is whatever, oftentimes your audience thinks that was amazing. I have become agnostic. I don't know if it's gonna be amazing or not. I really don't. I'm always wrong. I'm always wrong. So I just basically put it out there. Have a schedule. Have a rhythm. Don't judge your work. Put it out. See what the audience says. Observe what the audience says. Oh, the audience likes that kind of thing. Well, let me try doing more of that. Okay, again, not judging. Just say, I'm gonna try doing more of it. I'm gonna put it out there on a schedule. And then what happens is it's, you know, I was thinking the other day, it's almost like I'm looking at my own life outside of myself. I'm like, how am I just getting stuff done? It's very Taoist. It's very like, I don't, I have no drama. I just put stuff out there. And, you know, even this book launch, some people exhaust themselves with book launches. I exhausted myself a little bit with my first book launch because I thought it was a big deal. And now I realized third book in, book launches are no big deal because no matter how much you push and prod and get people to review and blah, blah, blah, blah, all you can do is just do the tasks, do the tasks in a very calm way with no expectation of whether people buy the book or not and how many people buy it. Right now it happens to be number one in new release in sales and selling techniques and on Amazon, number whatever, 40, here's a secret. I sold 30 copies and I was number one on Amazon in sales, in the sales category on Amazon as a number one new release in Amazon. People don't tell you that Amazon bestseller status is so easy. You get 20 of your friends to buy the book on the same day and you're number one on Amazon. And people say, number one Amazon bestseller, I know, it's a ridiculous game, right? But what I'm saying is you just let go of the outcome. You let go of the results, but you stick to a schedule and if you stick to a schedule, you will find yourself having a Taoist business where you're like, oh my God, I'm getting so much done. I'm putting out courses, I'm writing books, I have clients, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, just because I create output. That's all, that's it. So I hope this is helpful and I'm just thanking those who are able to join me for this. Carissa and Sarah, Miriam, Daphne, Franziska, Brian, Alejandra, Captain Nick, thank you all so much, Daniel, Yule. I'm not able to see all the comments right now. Let's see here, Megan, Karine, thank you all so much for joining me here. And Daniel wrote, I admit it's come to my awareness that I am a content hoarder challenged with sharing content, established medium to share such content. Yes, Daniel, it's a great point, great point. At the end of the day, it is as simple as where is your time going? That's it, right? I mean, that's not it. I talked about the energetics of life. That's important. Where is your energy going? Is it going to the drama of your personal life or is it going to the drama within your business, right? And then where's your time going? Is it going here or is it going there? Is it going into consuming content? Consuming this content means you're not creating it. I consume content when I'm walking my dog and when I'm sitting down with my wife in the evening when we're eating dinner, we watch a show on Netflix or on DVD or whatever. That's my content consumption time. I don't consume content anytime else during the day. I only consume content when I'm not creating, you know? And so that's a really important distinction to realize, oh my God, if I'm consuming, I'm not creating what the heck is going on here, right? Very important. It's pleasurable to consume content. It's not pleasurable to create content in the first 10 minutes, but after you're willing to stick it out for 10 minutes of pain and practice bringing joy to that pain, just like working out, exercising. I don't feel like doing push-ups. The first push-up is not fun. The second push-up is a little bit less not fun. Third push-up's like, hey, I'm doing this now. I'm doing this now. Yeah, I'm enjoying it. You've got to be willing to do the first 10 minutes of pain. That's it. Fear, inner criticism, not good enough. What if I don't know what I'm talking about? What if someone criticizes me? That's pain. That's painful. First 10 minutes, practice, right? So, and let's see here. Yeah, Negan says, discipline equals freedom. I'm a disciple to myself. Yeah, you're a disciple to your higher self. That's it, right? Alejandro's channeling my excitement to my business. Yeah, I have a lot of drama in my business, a lot of adventure, right? A lot of fun, a lot of social interaction, right? Thanks to all of you, right? Okay, that's it. So thank you all for joining me for this. And if you have any questions, you want me to make videos on anything, write on anything, just comment below. I'm always, you know, when you write my next book on something, comment below. So thank you. If you haven't yet gotten the chance to get my book, Authentic Selling. And if you're interested in the topic, I'd be grateful if you buy the book, supports the book, helps it, stay on number one Amazon bestseller list or whatever. It's kind of ridiculous, but the book itself should be useful to you. And if you wanna get more clients, that should be useful. So blessings to you and I will see you in the next video. Be well.