Where Does Your Arc of Activity Land?

​Welcome back to the real value podcast, the podcast about business, life, success; about finding value in anything and everything and about creating absolutely as much of it as you can with the time we have! Good morning my dear friends and thank you so much for swinging by this week to hang out with me again and grow just a little bit together. Welcome back to our growing community of 1%ers, those that are committed to getting just a little bit better each and every day. Some of you have reached out and asked me what it means to get just a little bit better each and every day. You have said, “Blaine, I understand the concept of getting better, everyone does! But I’m a busy person! What am I supposed to be doing every single day to say that I am getting a little bit better?” This is a great question and a special thanks goes out to Todd for asking this one specifically. Several of you have asked this question, or variations on this theme, so I’ll tell you what I have said to everybody who has asked and to Todd who wrote to me just yesterday. The beauty of being a 1%er is that you don’t have to necessarily be constantly measuring yourself against some audacious goal that is off in the distance. Maybe one that’s so far off in the distance that you cant even see it, which means you’re likely not as motivated or inspired as you could be because all you see is the distance between where you are currently and where the goal is. Focusing on that chasm of imperfection and unaccomplished distance can, in fact, be demotivating. Hopefully most of you know me by now and know that I am all about having goals, things you’d like to achieve, having them written down, you know, SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable or Achievable, Realistic or Relevant, and Time-bound, by a specific date. Those are the standard rules for setting goals. Just remember the SMART acronym and you’ll be all set. However, the problem I have with setting goals and then focusing only on the goal is simply this, hitting a goal is temporary achievement. Although having good goals can alter your behavior and put you on a better path than a goalless one, hitting the goal is temporary when the real benefit was the system you had to put in place to achieve that goal. 

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​I use weight loss all the time as an example because its one that so many people struggle with, myself included, and its one that so many people set goals to achieve and fail. We all have people all around us that will announce their weight loss goals publicly, likely hoping for some public accountability from their social network. They post some pics of a couple of their workouts this week, some of their meals, and a couple weeks later no more workout pics or meals because bowling league was on Wednesday and a couple beers and a huge platter of nachos grande threw them off the goal and into a spiral of self shaming. Some hop back on the diet train again the next day and keep going while others never get back on and, thus, never hit their initial goal. The take away from that example is that the goal isnt the thing, the system that gets you to the goal is the thing. I did a whole podcast on goal setting and then tracking and measuring activity, not necessarily results. Results are deceptive because todays results are always a lagging indicator of your current activity. Just as an appraisal is often a lagging indicator of the current market since it’s always backward looking and our comps are always from the past, your outcomes in any area are almost always a lagging indicator of your habits and activities. Goals are important but goals are not the differentiator between those who have and those who don’t or those who achieve and those who don’t, despite lots of talk to the contrary. No, my friends, lots of people hit their goals and are still poor, fat, unhealthy, and unhappy. And there are lots of people who have no goals who are rich, lean, happy and healthy. The difference between those groups is not their goals, its their daily habits and the ‘arc of activities’ that lead to the end results. Goals help us look into the future and see a future we’d like to experience and, thus, give us some direction. But the goal alone means nothing. There’s a thing in the world of logic and biases called ‘survivorship bias’ or survivor bias. Survivor bias is an error in logic whereby we tend to count the hits, so to speak, and forget or discount the misses. In essence, we mistakenly place more emphasis on those who succeeded at something and we tend to exclude from the statistics those who failed. We count the Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos’ of the world and totally forget about the Ned Nerdlemans of the world who the same goal as Steve Jobs but failed to make the same decisions, have the same luck, maybe got bought out early on, or simply failed to execute. We tend to remember the Michael Phelps of the world and all his gold medals and forget about the Ryan Lochtes of the world who had the same exact goal as Michael Phelps and did the same training but lost.
 
The goal is not the differentiator, the system and daily habits are. Successful and unsuccessful people often share the same goals. One becomes successful and one doesn’t. The difference is in their individual arc of activity which is the trajectory of ones life based on the tiny little activities one does daily toward some future goal. Remember, I said goals can give us direction but its the systems we have to put into place to reach a particular goal that matters more than the goal, in my opinion. If you want to know where you will end up 1 year, 5 years, 10 years into the future, just trace your arc of activity today into the future. Are you investing and saving more than you earn? If not, your arc of spending activity will dictate where you’ll end up in a few years. Are you eating healthy and working out more than you’re drinking beer and laying around? If not, your arc of activity will dictate how big your belly and your stamina will be in a few years. Plot that arc out to 5 or 10 years and you can get a pretty good idea of where it ends up. Goals are important since they give us direction and can help create some motives, which leads to motivation and inspiration, but we tend not to rise to levels of our goals but, instead, fall to the level of our systems. The system for reaching a specific goal, or the lack of one, will dictate where we end up. What and where we are today are the results of the compounding effects of time and daily habits. I realized at my 10 year high school reunion how much time is an equalizer. When we’re in high school we tend to think we know who will be successful and who wont. Who will end up rich and who will be not so rich. Then the 10 or 20 year reunion comes around and the compounding effects of daily habits become very clear. The arc of activity screams loudly as the most handsome and beautiful in high school have lost a bit of glow. A paunch in the belly has accumulated, theres a little less hair for most of the men, some of the women, many with big dreams and goals gave up long ago after the kids came, careers didn’t pan out, personalities that worked well in the rather sterile and cloistered world of high school find they don’t have what it takes in the real world. Then there are those who you never even glanced at in high school who, after 10 or 20 years walk into the reunion and everybody is like, “who the hell is that?  Oh, that’s Ned Nerdelman! I barely looked at that guy in high school! What?! He owns a tech company and won an Ironman race?! Holy hell, where’d he come from?”  Time is an equalizer my friends and it magnifies the sometimes razor thin gap between success and failure. Over a short time period the gap is not noticeable. Over a longer period of time, all of those individual days add up and the arc of activity expands to reveal whatever the daily habits and activities of that individual lead to.
 
So, as a long answer to Todd, and everybody else who has asked what it truly means to be a 1%er and to get just a little bit better every day, it simply means that you are doing something to better yourself, your community, your business, your family, and/or the world in some way. It might simply be that you’ve added 10 minutes of reflection time or meditation to your mornings or evenings. Maybe you’ve decide to spend 30 fewer minutes on social media each day or week. Maybe you’ve decide to start walking around the block a few times each week because you’ve been sedentary for too long. Maybe you have decided to start going mobile and strive in the direction of being paperless. You don’t have to jump in head first. You can simply start by buying a laser measuring device or a tablet and playing around with getting there eventually. Remember, it’s the arc of activity, not necessarily the goal. The goal gives you some direction but it’s the little things you do daily that will dictate where you eventually end up. Maybe you’ve decided to finally look into virtual assistants or using spark or data master to help speed up your appraisal process. I didn’t say you jumped in full bore and started doing these things, I said maybe you started looking into them. That’s what tiny incremental improvements mean. On any given day, I have a whole host of things that I am looking into, things I am in the process of researching, things I am halfway into a implementing, projects I am 3/4 of the way through, things I am wrapping up, and things that I know I should be doing but haven't gotten around to creating a small daily habit in that direction. Regardless, I look at my arc of activities and see where those will end up down the line to help guide me in starting certain things and ending others. We don’t have to be perfect at it my friends, we simply have to be at it! Even though I always say we must be doing something each day to get a tiny bit better to be considered a 1%er, I think this is where the questions come up. We all fail on any given day to accomplish certain things. I have a bullet journal and daily planner that gets filled with things and on any given day I am pushing 8-20 things I wrote down into the next day or week. I could easily feel like a failure if I simply looked at what I accomplished and what I didn’t. But, instead, I look at the arc of activity and I mentally chart where I’ll be in a week or a month if I don’t eventually check off all of these things and add new ones. I also have days where I truly and utterly fail at some things. My diet goes off the rails, I get bogged down in some kind of activity that completely throws off my plans for the day or week, I don’t get to the gym for a few days and feel fat and disgusting, I forget to call somebody back or update an order. You know those days!
 
Do I turn in my 1%er coin? No! Because I know that my daily habits and activities will get me back on track the next day or two days later and my arc of activity will have only a minor blip in the overall trajectory. Over a longer period of time, that blip will not even be noticed unless, of course, I don’t correct my actions and change my daily habits and activities. It’s time my friends. Time is an equalizer and a magnifier. It’s good and bad at the same time because change happens slowly and the changes are often unnoticeable on any given day. We see ourselves in the mirror every day so we tend not to notice the receding hairline or our face getting a little fatter from our daily eating habits. To us, we look and feel normal because it looks and feels basically like yesterday. Our bodies and minds are constantly updating our internal software toward homeostasis and balance so each day the software updates to recognize a new normal. When we try to make changes to the norm, we tend not to see the results we’re hoping for because change occurs slowly over time. That’s not to say you wont feel like shit almost immediately after giving up caffeine or changing your diet, but the big changes we hope for with any change in the system occurs over a longer arc of time. This is where the value of the arc of activity plays a big role. Often times we make some kind of change and then a month later see or feel only moderate results. We may reevaluate the results and say, ‘eh, not worth it!’ And go back to our old ways. It’s our daily activities over a longer period of time that real change becomes noticeable.
 
In the last episode I introduced you to the 1000 true fans concept and how I pair it with the future banking concept to make my future brighter than my past, or even my current state. Well this 1%er mindset that we’ve been talking about today is the key to making the whole idea a reality. Your daily arc of activity will determine how fast or slow you make deposits in the future bank account and how quickly or slowly you build your fan base. As I mentioned in the last episode, I have been working on this concept in various ways since 2008 or 09. I have been solidly implementing some of my plans for years now with little to show for it in the first couple years. For whatever reason, possibly inconsistency, possibly wrong message, possibly needed time to hone my message, maybe needed time to become a better speaker, maybe just needed to keep doing it. Whatever it was, when I look at the arc of activity relative to results, I can see how it all worked out. Like any chart or graph with an X axis and a Y axis where the X axis is the horizontal line at the bottom and represents time and the Y Axis is the vertical line on the left and represents results. Whenever you start a new activity, say, speaking to agents, lenders, and attorneys, you could plot that on the chart as the origin or the beginning of the activity. As you move from left to right over time, initially you cant see any arc because its just more or less a straight line of activity over time with little to no results. As you move further to the right over a longer period of time though, at some point you can see the arc starting to form and move upward in the direction of some positive results. The time frame may be days, weeks, or even years. For me and my prospecting activities, specifically marketing and engaging with realtors, lenders, attorneys and estate planners, it was years. I mean, I had immediate successes with orders coming in but nothing that I could call consistent. One offs here and there and then maybe months in between hearing from them again. But I kept at it for years and over those years the line of the arc started to move upward and I know why. The arc started to move upward because of the universal law of trust was kicking in. It takes time to build trust in a market. People need to know you’re going to be around for a while and not leave them high and dry. Especially when you are dealing with people who are also trying to build their own solid business of referrals. Those people take great care in who they refer to their clients because they're trying to do the same thing; build trust and longevity in the minds of their clients. They aren’t going to refer you if they don’t think A. You’ll take the absolute best care of them and B. Aren’t going to be around long enough to solve problems if they arise.
 
Over time, the line on the X axis starts to rise in an upward arc indicating that results are coming faster with the same amount of activity. This is where people tend to use the term ‘overnight success’ when they see some successes occurring. What they didn’t see was the years of activity with little to no results. That’s because the arc of activity takes time to return results but it always does, whether we like the results or not! If you eat pizza everyday, that arc of activity has consequences. You may not see any results for a long time because it’s a standard activity for you. But the results will eventually make themselves know based on the arc of activity. Cancer lives in the body and remains undetected for 80% of its life cycle. It’s only the last 20% that we hear about or feel affected by. Your dietary and lifestyle arc of activity play a major role in if and when that 20% ever reveals itself. And, although a terrible analogy, I apologize my friends, but like cancer, success and failure often have the same arc on a graph in that results may lie dormant for a long time during a period of activity. All you see is basically a straight line moving from left to right on a graph over time and then all of the sudden there is a dip upward on the graph and results start to happen. The same will be true for building your fan base and making deposits to your future or virtual bank account. Lots of activity for some period of time with little to no results. At least not enough to move the needle on the meter or make a blip on the chart. Rest assured, activity has consequences and the type of activity you choose determines the type of consequences you realize. It takes time to build up what you might call a fan base and it takes a lot of commitment and a lot of activity with little to no measurable or consistent results. But when you know the activity is the right activity, just as you know that adding a salad to each meal or a walk after dinner each night is the right thing to do for your health, then you keep at it knowing full well that your arc of activity will yield positive results at some point. Remember, most people rise to level of their goals, at least not over a long period of time. There may be a flurry of excitement and energy with a new goal at the beginning, but over time and especially when results are not being recognized initially, the excitement tends to die and along with it does the goal. Instead of rising to the level of our goals, most of us tend to fall to the level of our daily and weekly systems and activities.
 
Just remember the concept of compounding my friends. One small thing done today may not seem significant in the day, week, or month but has a compounding effect over time. What are the ways you might automate some small tasks or processes in your life and business that free up an extra 10 minutes here and there? 10 minutes doesn’t sound like much but I know a good many of you who blow ten times that scrolling social media each day. I can get a full hardcore workout in in my garage gym in 20 minutes so saving 10 minutes here and there for me means more time to better myself in that area of my life. Losing 10 minutes here and there means losing that opportunity over time. When you automate things you also free up brain space. When you free up brain space, you are more free to recognize and take advantage of new or other opportunities that in the past you were just too busy for. When you free up brain space you also free up space that was occupied by anxiety and stress and those things are magnified by time as well. Over time, stress and anxiety are the cause of more deaths than smoking, car accidents, and airplane crashes combined. It doesn’t matter if its positive or negative, your arc of activity over time will determine your results and your successes, failures, health, lack of health, relationships, and the lack of relationships. Reading one new book each month or listening to this podcast wont make you a millionaire this year, but over time your commitment to learning and growth may. And when it comes to relationships and building stronger ones and a bigger fan base, human beings are mirrors that reflect back to us what we are giving them. People tend to respond in kind to what they are receiving. Maybe not everybody and maybe not right away, but over time and with consistency it is a universal law that must be honored my friends.
 
Take a look at your daily, weekly, and monthly activities and just take a guess at where the arc will land in some of those areas. You don’t even have to do any work or graphing for this one. Just create the image in your head of that little line of activity moving from left to right. Over time and with whatever activity you choose to examine, where does the arc aim? What’s its trajectory? Is it toward health and wellness? Is it toward stronger relationships? Is it toward success and accomplishment? Is it toward stability and freedom? Or is it toward sickness and disease? Is it toward failure and unhappiness? Is it toward stress and anxiety? The great thing is that you get to choose the path and the activity. Ultimately, you get to choose the arc over time and where it ultimately ends up. Of course, we cant account for the unexpected, which entails potential tragedy as much as it does winning the lottery. But we don’t operate daily as if we’ll be hit but a piece of falling satellite just as we don’t operate as if we’ll hit the lottery this week. We operate as if tomorrow will be more or less like today, except for that tiny and possibly imperceptible thing we chose to do today that will add to our future success and compound over time. We don’t always know when and where the arc will start to break to the upward direction on the chart, but we know that it will…it must!!
 
Thank you my friends for investing your most valuable time with me again this week my friends and that is, of course, your time. I guarantee that spending that time listening to podcasts like this one, reading books, watching videos, and growing a little bit each day will have a compound effect on your mindset, your life, your business, and your relationships over time. Thank you for making the Real Value Podcast one of those good choices, along with the salad you had for lunch yesterday and the walk you’ll take around the block after dinner tonight. I look forward to meeting up with you all again next week, same time, same place, and same plan as we all work on making our arc of activities curve upward and toward positive results. Until then my friends, I’m out!