Shaan walks through his personal framework for achieving laser-like focus — the kind exhibited by Kobe Bryant, Mr. Beast, and Mark Zuckerberg. He covers four tools: raising your “yes threshold” to only hell-yes decisions, switching from a manager schedule to a maker schedule, using Asana’s Pyramid of Clarity to set a mission, one-year goals, and monthly inputs, and finally a friend’s one-slide framework for articulating exactly what you’ll say yes and no to.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host, solo)
Introduction: You Can Do Anything, But Not Everything [00:00:00]
Shaan: You can do anything, but you can’t do everything. And that is what I want to talk about today — ruthless focus, laser-like focus for 2024.
I have not been great at focusing in the past. I have let myself get distracted. I have let myself set a goal at the beginning of the year, and by the end of the year I check in and I’m like, “Where the hell — what did I do all year? Why did I drift?” And it’s not something malicious, it’s not like a total fail, but it’s just this drift that I didn’t like and I wanted to get better at.
I’m going to show you what works for me. How do you get more focused? How do we get the laser-like focus that all the great ones exhibit? Whether it’s in sports and you see Kobe Bryant completely obsessed, in entertainment you see Mr. Beast completely locked in and obsessed, in business you’ll see somebody like Mark Zuckerberg laser focused on one thing trying to make that happen — they don’t let themselves drift the way the rest of us do.
So here’s the little visual. This is you, and this is all the things that you might do. This is some news thing that’s going on, the election, this is Love is Blind season five, this is that investment somebody wants you to do, this is that email you got from that person who wants to do a call and pick your brain, this is that side hustle that’s not really going to go anywhere. That’s all the things. And then the blue thing is the thing you actually want. This is the thing that you would feel proud of at the end of the year if you made this happen.
So what we need is laser-like focus. We do not want the cone to be wide. I’m going to show you how we do that.
Raising Your Yes Threshold [00:02:00]
Shaan: The first thing you want to do — this is a before-and-after of how you can operate. We have all the possible things that we could be saying yes to, and you want to think about your yes threshold.
Before, it might be right here. You might have your yes threshold right there, and what you’re doing is you’re saying yes to anything above that line. If it’s below that line you’re able to say no, but you’re saying yes to everything above that line.
The after? All you have to do — the first thing you have to do — is simply acknowledge, bring your awareness to how low your yes threshold is, and raise it. Raise your standard for yes. So instead of saying yes to things that are pretty good, maybe interesting, might be worth doing, pretty cool — it needs to take your yes to a “hell yes.” That is the easiest thing you could do.
So we’re going to raise the yes threshold. And your yes threshold is even higher. You get two inches of height at least.
That’s the first thing you do. Bring your awareness to: where is my bar today? And take your yeses to only doing hell-yes things. That doesn’t mean you don’t — if your friend comes and says, “We’re going to Costa Rica and it’s going to be amazing,” that might be a hell yes for you, go for it. But make sure you have a premium quality on your focus and what you’re willing to do.
Maker Schedule vs. Manager Schedule [00:04:00]
Shaan: Next thing: time management. You may have seen this — it’s a famous Paul Graham essay that I’ve turned into a cartoon. The Paul Graham essay is basically showing the difference between a maker schedule and a manager schedule.
This is a manager schedule, this is what their calendar looks like. And this is what a maker schedule looks like — this is the artist, somebody who’s a builder. So for a lot of people they have this 9:00 AM, 9:30 AM, 10:00 AM, 10:30 AM, 11:00 AM, 11:00 — “Oh, I’m double booked, oh [bleep]” — and they end up just in a puddle of tears. They are overwhelmed, they’re stressed, they sort of busy themselves to death. “Why didn’t I get everything I wanted to done in life? Why didn’t I achieve my goals and my dreams?” Because you were too busy. Listen to that sentence — that doesn’t even make sense. You didn’t do the things you needed to do because you didn’t have time because you filled it with other crap.
So most people by default — especially people in jobs — will be default opted into a manager’s schedule. What you want to do is switch to a maker schedule.
A maker schedule is basically long uninterrupted blocks of time, usually in the morning. You need at least two and a half hours of uninterrupted time, usually three is ideal. Then a break where you’re going to lunch, exercise, going for a walk, playing with your kids, walking your dog — whatever you do. And then another uninterrupted sprint. For some people, the really great ones, they have another break and then a third night sprint. But you don’t have to do all that.
You need to switch to this maker schedule. And the maker schedule is the one thing you could do with your time where, in the same number of hours, you can get more done. Why? Because when you get into these uninterrupted blocks of time, you get into flow states, and you’re able to actually lock in on knocking out one whole thing without distractions — without checking your email, without being pulled into a call or a meeting about this and that.
Whether you’re an engineer and you want to build a product, you want to code something, or you’re trying to be an entertainer, you need to write chapters of your book, a YouTube video you’re making, or you’re just trying to come up with a new idea — not letting your day get split, I call this the zebra calendar where you’re just stripes all day. That is the next thing you need to do to enable yourself to come up with great ideas.
You are setting up your environment. The first thing we did was we raised the threshold of yes to a hell yes, so we’re just saying no to things — that clears space. The next thing is we do the maker schedule versus the manager schedule, so that you have uninterrupted time blocks where you can be your most creative, productive self.
The Pyramid of Clarity [00:07:30]
Shaan: Okay, next thing. Now we’re going to clarity. This is something I stole from Asana. Asana created this thing called the Pyramid of Clarity, and it goes as follows.
At the top you have your mission. The mission is your big — the reason your organization exists. It’s the reason you’re even doing this. It’s your big why. So let’s say you’re Elon Musk: your mission for SpaceX might be “make humans a multiplanetary species,” or for Tesla it might be “get the world off fossil fuels and onto an electric future.” That’s the big vision for what you’re doing.
Now, little pro tip — because when I first read about this I was like, “Wow, that makes total sense, you’ve got to have this big audacious vision.” But let’s say you’re not building rockets and going to space, or you’re not trying to get the world off fossil fuels. You might just be building an e-commerce business that’s designed to enable your lifestyle to be really great because you wanted money and you didn’t have money. Whatever it is — the key here is honesty. You can write a fancy mission, but if it’s not your honest mission, it’s not going to help. It won’t have any emotional resonance.
So what I try to do is I try to be honest about the mission. For example, with my company, we are building a company that is going to enable us to have an amazing lifestyle. Us — the owners of the business. We only have a couple of people in the business, it’s all owners, and we want to have a lifestyle where we can do what we want, when we want, with whoever we want, and only work on projects that are intellectually fascinating for us, creatively challenging for us. So we write that. That’s what we’re doing. That is the mission of what we’re trying to build — we’re building a vehicle that enables that.
Setting the One-Year Goal: Floor and F*** It Goal [00:09:30]
Shaan: From there you want to go down to the one-year goal. The mission might take 10 years, it might take 20 years. But then you break it down to the one-year goal: where do we need to be at the end of the year for this to be a smash success?
Specifically, I set two goals. I have what I call the “floor goal” and then the “[bleep] yeah” goal. I set a range, because I don’t like static single goals — binary goals — because then you’re like, “Should I just be super ambitious? But then I might be disappointed.” Or, “Should I be conservative? But then I feel like I didn’t push myself.” So I set both.
The floor goal means you would be disappointed if you didn’t reach this level. This would be a solid win. Below that you feel like, “Ah man, really, we didn’t get there.” And the “[bleep] yeah” goal is: we’re high-fiving, we’re toasting — “I can’t believe this is how good it turned out.”
So you want to set that range for yourself and say: we have a minimum, and then we have a target we’re going to shoot for.
Breaking the One-Year Goal Into Inputs [00:11:00]
Shaan: What’s the next level of this? Now you have your overall mission clarified and you have your one-year goal — where we want to be a year from now. That’s what you’re going to work backwards from.
You work backwards and you say: in order to achieve this one-year goal, what do I need in terms of people? What do I need in terms of product? And what do I need in terms of finances? Three categories. You break the one-year goal into outputs to inputs.
For example, for my e-commerce company, we had a one-year goal and we said we’re going to try to double revenue. We did about $17 million last year, we’re going to try to get over $30 million this year. So we said: what do we need in terms of people? Well, I needed to hire a CMO, because today I was doing it and I’m not the best CMO for that business — I’m not full-time on it. So we set some people targets. We need to hire an amazing CMO who’s done this before, we needed to hire a website developer who’s going to do XYZ. You write down what your people gaps are.
Then you have your product gaps. What does the product need to be able to do in order for us to hit our goal? For example, when Elon launched Tesla, he set a product goal: “How do we make a car that is faster than a Porsche and better for the environment than a Prius?” That is a benchmark we are trying to achieve. Is it faster than a Porsche? And is it better for the environment than a Prius? Similarly, you want to set some product goals for yourself to achieve your one-year mission.
And lastly, finances. Do you need capital? By default people think they do — you should question that assumption. Beyond just how much money do we need, it might be your margins or your unit economics. We need to bring the cost down to this in order for this to work, because we want to be profitable and today we’re unprofitable.
So within each of those, you’ve now broken your one-year goal into the different input metrics that, if you did those correctly, would lead to the one-year goal.
Monthly Check-Ins: No More Drift [00:13:30]
Shaan: From there you just break it out by month. You say: in January, what are we going to do? Well, we need to chip away at the people goal, the product goal, and the finance goal. Let’s break those into a digestible chunk. And now all of a sudden it’s like, let’s do 20 interviews and try to find two great candidates for the CMO role — or whatever it may be.
And then you go month by month. Every month you check in on the whole pyramid. You say: as a reminder, our mission is X. By the end of the year we’re trying to do Y. In order to do that we need to hit these three things internally. And then the score will take care of itself.
To get there, we break this out month by month into: what mattered last month? Did we achieve it? And what matters this month? You do that for 12 months straight and you are going to stay on track. There will be no drift.
The One-Slide Clarity Framework (From a Listener) [00:15:30]
Shaan: Last thing I want to share with you. I stole this from my friend Joel Omen — he’s a listener of the show, and I hope he’s okay with me sharing this, I’ll ask him. He shared this simple slide that he made for himself, and I loved it. It was a killer slide — one slide that gave him clarity on what is he trying to do and how is he going to get there.
His goal — his mission — was: “Build a creatively fulfilling cash machine.” I just love that. Creatively fulfilling cash machine. And he said, well, you know, he’d done each of them individually. He’d built successful businesses — cash machines. And he’d done things that were creatively fulfilling but didn’t make any money, like writing a fantasy fiction book. So he’s like, “This time my mission is to do both, because if I did this I would be blissed out walking into work every day. I’d be at my happiest in terms of my professional goals.”
So set a goal for yourself like this. And use this as a bar for resonance. This is not a generic off-the-shelf goal like “be successful” or “make money.” Set it for real. Maybe for some people it’s: “Make six grand a month so I can quit my job, be totally independent, not have to worry about how I’m going to pay the bills — stress-free — and then it’s only up from there.” Write that whole thing out in a way that has some emotional pull for you, a compelling picture.
Say Yes To / Say No To [00:17:00]
Shaan: So you have your mission. Then you have your outputs — the one-year goal. Then the part I liked best: “I say yes to blank, and I say no to blank.”
For example, let’s say for this podcast I have a goal, which is: I want to be one of those people who inspired me when I was coming up. That is very much why I do this podcast. Because growing up, I remember when I was in college somebody gave me a book called The 4-Hour Work Week and it blew my mind. At the time I never thought about half of the concepts in there — just insight after insight, page after page of inspiration and story. I said, “That’s how I want my life to be.” I called it catching the 4-Hour fever. I read that book and for four hours I went into a fever dream and I replanned everything in my life. That was very impactful for me — thank you Tim Ferriss.
There have been other moments like that. Tony Robbins and others where I’ve had people who created content that really shifted my thinking, that made me have more clarity, more insight, more motivation, more firepower to go do what I wanted to do. So my goal with this podcast is to do that.
Well, great. What do I need to say yes to in order for that to happen? I break that big dream down to a one-year goal, and then break that one-year goal down to the things I’m going to have to opt into.
For example, for this podcast you might say: I’m going to have to sit down consistently, week after week, doing my absolute best to create the most compelling content out there — the best wisdom for entrepreneurs. And when I do that, I’m saying yes to doing my best and knowing that the numbers are not going to change every week, that it might look flat for a long time, that I’m going to do that for years and I will not be discouraged. I say yes to doing that input even though the numbers will take a long time to build up.
What’s the second thing I’m saying yes to? Well, this year for example, we wanted to bring on higher-profile guests. We booked Tim Ferriss coming on, we booked Tony Robbins and a bunch of others. So I said yes to doing something I didn’t like to do — guest outreach. I hated begging people to come on my podcast. I don’t know, I don’t like when people ask me, I didn’t want to ask other people. But I said, “I’ve got to say yes to that. I’ve got to say yes to the discomfort and the ego of continuing to follow up with people and try to get them to come on the podcast.”
And what do I say no to? I have to say no to starting a company. I sit on this podcast every week and I come up with ideas for businesses — I’ve got to say no to actually going and doing them. Because if I’m now a CEO of a startup, I’m not going to be able to achieve this goal. So I have to say no to some very compelling, good ideas that would make me millions of dollars. Write that down. What are the other things I have to say no to? I have to say no to avoiding hard conversations. I have to say no to my old habit of blah blah blah.
I thought this was a very, very useful thing, because it had both — it was all about self-awareness. This is a self-awareness game.
What is the goal that motivates me to get out of bed every single day and chase this above all other possible things I could be doing with my time and my talents? Second, what is it about me that I know I’m going to have to consciously force myself to say yes to, and say no to? And here, it’s the things that are not easy for you. You don’t want to write the things you already say yes to that are just trivial for you, that are already in your nature to do. Here you identify what’s against your nature and write that down, so that you’re very clear on what you need to do.
Closing: Focus Is a Superpower [00:18:30]
Shaan: To me, this is how you can do anything. You are limitless. Nobody can tell you that you can’t do that thing. But you can’t do everything. “You can do anything but you can’t do everything” is a very powerful idea, and it gives you that focus.
Focus is a superpower — people say that, but they don’t tell you how you focus. I hope today you learned a little something about how you actually focus.
This is something I’m still a beginner at, frankly. I’m maybe a blue belt in the game of focus. But I do know that it’s important, and because it’s important I’m working at it. I wanted to share with you the things that I’m doing that tend to be working for me, the things that have helped me make some progress.
Maybe there’s some more things out there — I’d love to hear from you. What works for you? Leave it in the comments. But that’s it, that’s the episode.