Time Management is Dead: How to Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with Richie Norton

by Matt McWilliams | Nov 7, 2022 | Interviews, Podcast

Copy of Podcast – 515 Time Management is Dead

Time management is dead. In this episode I have a very special guest to talk all about how to reclaim your time and dramatically revolutionize your results with the power of time tipping. This episode is all about anti-time management and I can promise you it might be one of the most powerful episodes I’ve ever recorded.

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Links Mentioned in this Episode

Anti-Time Management Book

The Power of Starting Something Stupid Book

Turn Your Passions into Profits Book

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Time Management is Dead: How to Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with Richie Norton

Time management is dead.

In this episode, I have a very special guest on to talk about how to reclaim your time and dramatically revolutionize your results with the power of time tipping.

This episode is all about anti time management, and I can promise you it might be one of the most powerful episodes I’ve ever recorded.

So we’re taking a bit of a break from the norm here.

The last episode was my best affiliate marketing advice for the holidays.

The next episode, we’re talking about eight reasons people fail at affiliate marketing.

We’re not talking about anything even closely related at all, anything at all to affiliate marketing or affiliate management or growing your business, at least directly.

Now, there’s an indirect path here that we’re talking about today.

We’re talking about time management, or rather anti time management.

And I’m joined by a very, very special guest, my dear friend and author of two of the best books I’ve ever read, the Power of Starting Something Stupid and Anti Time Management.

This is a deep conversation into how to create the lifestyle that you want.

No matter how busy you are or think you are, no matter what stage you’re at in your business, this will show you how to create that lifestyle, the lifestyle that you want.

And that might involve a successful business, but it probably includes a lot of other stuff as well.

So with no further ado, let’s jump in with my interview with Richie Norton.

Matt: Richie, my man. Welcome, bud.

Richie: Oh, man, I’m so excited to be here. You’re so good to me. We’re going to have so much fun.

Matt: I’m going to start off with this kind of weird thing for those who are going to be watching this, by the way, for your podcast listeners, we post all of these on my YouTube channel.

You should totally go subscribe. There’s things that you might not pick up that you get on the video.

I’ll just throw that out there. I didn’t plan that. But I interviewed you like, seven years ago. You’ve changed a little bit, man.

I think that maybe what we’re going to be talking about today has played a role in that. Is that a fair assessment?

Richie: Yeah. Let’s do it. I love this.

Matt: Cool, man. So I want to start off just a little bit of your story, right?

I think the back story here is super important.

You’re one of those people. I’ll just say this, man, like, I’ve known you for eight years now. Seven or eight years.

Honestly, though, we’re kind of considered peers.

I’ve always looked up to you quite a bit, and I think part of that is what you call Gavin’s Law.

I remember I wrote about it in, I believe, your first book, The Power of Starting Something Stupid, which our usual friend Mark Sieverkropp bought me on Kindle, and I promptly didn’t read for 18 months because I can’t read on Kindle because of ADHD.

So I bought the hardcover copy, like, two years later and read that.

And it’s based on these two people named Gavin.

So if you can tell us a little bit about them and what Gavin’s laws, because I think that is, like, the central thesis of, I might argue with your life, at least based on our interactions together.

Richie: Yeah.

You know, things happen in our lives that we can’t control, and all we can do is assign meaning to them and hope for the best and try and create things.

My brother in law, he lived on and off with us for about five years, and one day, he just didn’t wake up.

He passed away in his sleep at the age of 21.

And I say that like it’s just something that happened when in reality, it completely, as you were mentioning, turned our lives upside down in a bad way, and in other ways, we assign meaning toit.

Like I talked about, we try to live better because of this.

We grow up in America and in many parts of the world, believing that one day we’ll be wealthy, we’ll retire, and we’ll help other people and will live this life of service or maybe lounging by some pool or ome beach somewhere in the Bahamas or, like me, just in Hawaii right now.

But for him, that wasn’t true.

We have our faith.

Hopefully we’ll see him again, all that kind of stuff.

But at the end of the day in life right now, that was the end.

And to say that life is short is not just some cliche.

It’s true.

And to say that life is long also might not be necessarily a cliche.

It’s also true.

But for him, that was the end.

He would never grow up to do the things that he had hopes and dreams to do.

And my wife’s, only brother, my kids, favorite person in the world.

And a few years later, we had our fourth son, and we named him Gavin, after my brother in law Gavin.

And this little baby brought so much joy into our lives the way that he could.

And he got this cough.

Babies get cough, doctor said he’s fine, said we’re over protective parents, you know, that kind of stuff.

And we’re like, well, we’ve had a few kids already, I don’t know.

And we brought him back a couple of times, but at one point, it got bad where he was having a hard time breathing, and we brought him to the hospital, and they kept us there, which was unusual.

We didn’t know that they would keep us there because they never had before.

They all just kind of shoot us away.

They finally tested for something that no one had considered.

They tested something called pertussis, also known as whooping cough.

And around that time, I guess we didn’t know until later, there was an epidemic or resurgence of whooping cough, especially across California.

We’re in Hawaii, but it kind of spread across the country.

And to be real, it was just too much on his little body.

And I remember a nurse came in and said, you guys need to stay the night, which was an odd thing to say because we obviously stayed the night every night.

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But she was trying to say in a kind way that this is it.

And we had people all over the world, like, watching my wife’s blog and praying for us.

Some guy in Istanbul messaged saying he stood up all night praying for our child.

I remember they took out all these wires and all these tubes that they were, I guess, trying to keep him alive for as long as possible.

And they handed him to me, and I held him for a moment, handed him to my wife.

She’s sitting on a rocking chair.

I’m on my knees and on his heart.

We’re singing him lullabies, and we wait for those last beats.

And it’s the worst experience as a parent to the child, someone that you’re supposed to protect.

And I remember asking my wife about it later.

It’s like, how do we even leave the room off the situation?

And there was another nurse that came in and said, hey, in her own way, nice way, like, Can I rock him for you?

Then we go to the aftermath of all that, and I asked my wife, how do we have the courage to do all this?

And she says she felt like there was another Hernandez Natalie she felt like there was another Natalie inside of her, someone more crazy, someone that she didn’t know existed that helped her pull her through this.

And someone asked a mentor, said, what did you learn from your brother in law and your son passing away?

And we’re at this point in time, we’re super young, like, in our lives, young in our marriage.

Like, we’re just figuring things out and my wife’s like, I don’t know.

Ask me in a year and I’m like, I don’t know.

What am I supposed to learn from this?

And I thought about it, and I came up with what we call Gavin’s Law, which is live to start, start to live.

Because if you think about it, when you live those ideas that are pressing on your mind, you really do start living.

Even when terrible things are happening.

Your life is hard, or you don’t have the money, or you don’t have the education, or you don’t have the time, or you don’t have the experience, or you don’t have the mentor, you don’t have the funnel.

You don’t have whatever.

There’s this noodle of an idea pressing on your mind that you haven’t done something with I call that something stupid.

Not that it’s inherently stupid, but the fact you haven’t done anything with it means you’ve labeled as right place or the right thing.

But if you look at people, even if they do the thing and it fails, they come alive.

They move from the walking dead to, like, the running living.

And so Gavin’s Law has propelled everything I do because I realized life is short.

You can do a ton of things in a short amount of time, but it doesn’t really matter what you’re doing if it’s not on purpose, fit the purpose for purpose.

How can you align your priorities so that there is overlap?

So one thing creates a bunch of positive things.

So, yes, Gavin Law has driven my life into many different situations, and you can see it in the way I show up.

You can see it in my clients and the way that they’ve lived their life.

According to Gavin’s Law, people have read the book, and otherwise, you can see it in experts out there who read this story.

Berna Brown herself wrote a whole blog post about it, said it was changing her and her husband’s life.

This book is in a dozen different languages or whatever, and now my new book is doing something similar.

All that comes from this idea that you don’t have to wait.

You can start now.

Here’s how.

Here’s why.

So Gavin’s lies profoundly a part of my life and helps the world in a tremendous way.

Matt: Well, I think the thing that makes it so powerful is anybody who spends any amount of time with you sees it.

Richie: Oh, that’s nice of you really?

Matt: Yes. It’s not just a cool concept we name this thing it’s not Just Story. It’s a tough story.

I mean, it’s a cool story, like, you know no, no.

Like the time like the time you met your favorite artist and target and got to take a picture with them.

That’s a cool you know what I’m saying?

It’s not just.

Oh, that was a gut wrenching story.

It brought up emotions, you know, and things like that.

It’s something that I noticed in you the very first time that we spoke and then the very first time we met in person and got to hang out down in Nashville for a few days.

And even in like our little text messages I’ll just share with you.

You know, I mean this thing is amazing cause it’s like, you know, I’ll text you and you’re like yeah, I can’t talk right now.

You know, surfing or something like that.

Pick me up in a week.

I’m like, dude, this guy like is like he legit, practices what he preaches, you know?

And that’s one of the things like we interviewed somebody yesterday.

It was really hard scheduling the interview because I had some time off and she was like, man, I really appreciate the fact that you said you had this week off and you didn’t schedule the interview.

I’m like, I know I didn’t because I was off and I expect you to do the same thing if you come to work for us.

So how do we transition from that to talking about time management?

Wow, that’s a boring topic, right?

So I’ll just say the working title of this episode.

We’ll see what it ends up being.

Time management is dead. Right?

When I think of time management, I think it’s like it’s one of the buzzwords not really buzzwords, the buzz phrase, right?

When I think of time management, I think one of those buzz phrases like work life balance.

I’m curious because you talk about this in the book, but I want people to hear this.

Like is worklife balance even possible in the sense of the way that most people is it even desirable?

What are your thoughts on worklife balancing?

It’s a good place to start as far as time management,

Richie: Work life balance is undesirable.

Matt: We just have bad language. Really?

That’s not what everybody tells us.

Richie: Nobody actually wants that.

It’s just they don’t have the language around it.

Think about a ball that is balanced.

In physics, balance means motionless.

That’s what balance means.

If you want to put the ball in the hoop or in the goal, it has to have forward motion in the direction you intended.

So what we actually want is to be unbalanced or rather imbalanced.

We want to push the ball forward in the direction we want it to go.

Nobody wants 8 hours of sleep and 8 hours of play and 8 hours of work.

I mean, what happens when you want to slip in like something else?

Everything’s out of whack.

So the concept of balance is really more about flexibility, which is around if you ask someone what they really want you, what’s the goal?

You got to ask a better question.

Not you, just we have to ask ourselves a better question.

What’s the goal of balance?

Oh, so I can do what I want to do, when I want to do it and where.

That has zero to do with balance, my friend.

So every time you do something fun and you do something you don’t like, that sounds terrible.

So when I wrote The Power of Starting Something Stupid, you like, that the yin and yang thing is already doing its thing, man.

When I started talking to very wealthy people, they would say, money is easy, time is hard.

I heard that from a direct quote from a venture capitalist.

You don’t want balance.

You want three things.

You want autonomy, availability and ability.

That’s what you want, and that’s what comes from flexibility.

So when I wrote the power of starting something stupid, what I learned was something interesting.

People would say they wanted to start this business, whatever it was, and you see this all day long.

I want to do this launch for this reason.

They’re lying to themselves because if you successfully help somebody do the thing they said they want and they get it.

Which happens often.

People say it doesn’t happen often.

Well, actually it does happen a lot.

But sometimes what happens is at the end of the day, you go, oh, that wasn’t what I actually wanted.

What I wanted was more time with my family, more money for these situations.

But in reality, entrepreneurs, they’ll start a business to get their time and money back, only to lose their time and money to the business.

Matt: We have the economy.

Richie: Yeah, come on, man.

But that was because they used the scientific management, time management principles from industry and brought it into their entrepreneurial world.

Instead of creating their own world, they just created.

Instead of saying, I want to leave this company because I have a boss, they said, I’m going to have a boss with many hats.

And they got busier, Sadder.

And you know, you go, that’s great.

I can control my time.

It’s like, yeah, man, I think it’s so weird that you’re so excited about this hustle culture that you have no time for your family.

That’s really weird.

That’s really weird when you could have designed it completely differently.

I call the castle of a moat strategy.

So we’ve been taught for 200 years to create a moat around the company, to protect it, to build it up, to become profitable.

And we do our businesses that way too.

Instead, we just start with the castle, build the dream, and then create a protective, economic and strategic moat to support it.

So everything you do creates more of what you want.

If you intend to start a business to make money, you’ll make money.

If you intend to start a business that creates time, you will create time because you measured for it.

And you can create both time flow and cash flow.

So when people started something stupid out of my last book, they would create all these things and they’d say, but what I really wanted was XYZ.

And then I was like, Why are you two stepping?

Why are you doing ten steps and hoping that the 11th step will turn out the way you want when you could have just started with the 11th step?

Why are you saying you want to create a business to travel the world when you could just travel the world and start a business that supports it?

So you can actually collapse time doing this way, and I can make it super real.

Let me give you a little background.

I wasn’t planning on calling the book anti time management.

I was going to call it Time Tipping because the idea is basically how to tip your time in your favor.

This idea of imbalance in the right direction, this idea of being able to do whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want, by working through the things you want, by prioritizing your attention.

Stop managing time, Start prioritizing your attention.

So what most people do is they try to create a life that is something like this.

I’m going to bake a cake, but I’m going to bake it without sugar, and then I’m going to expect it to be sweet.

People are creating lives and they have values around.

They don’t put their values inside the cake from the beginning.

They let it rise without the values and then say, oh, I wonder why my life wasn’t lived on value.

I wonder why the things that are important to me aren’t happening.

And you want to get super real.

You go, because time is elusive.

So you go, when is the best time to get healthy?

Oh, I can’t wait to start getting healthy in ten years.

I’m going to work for ten years to start getting and then start getting healthier.

That doesn’t work that way.

Help doesn’t work that way.

And it’s the same thing with time.

If you want time in ten years, you figure out a path and a way to create time now.

When you have more time now, you have more time later.

So I started looking at what’s going on in the world.

I realized that when people sacrifice what they love for success, they get neither.

And that is the path that 99% of people are on.

They sacrifice everything for the thing that makes zero sense.

Like, literally, where did that come from?

Why are people doing this?

Why is it so prevalent?

You go, let’s look at history.

You know, there’s this industrial revolution, there’s a second industrial revolution.

People are trying to figure out how to manage these machines, how to manage these people that are coming from all over the world, and they invent something called time management.

Thanks Frederick Taylor. He is the man that invented it.

And he started doing these time motion studies and started watching how people moved when they did it.

And for the first time in history, something happened in mass.

They decided to separate the head from the body.

They decided that all these people who were tradesmen and artists and creating were going to take their knowledge.

Step one, take their knowledge.

Step two, tell them exactly what to do in scale.

And these people are saying that they were automatons wooden men, people being control.

They were puppets.

And this had never happened in the history of the world before in Mass.

Now, there’s a lot of good things that came from the guest revolution, but it’s now the 21st century, my friend.

Anyone knows this who studies the history?

When you look at it, you go, why is time management even in the self help vernacular?

Like, it makes zero sense, because time management was specifically created and designed to measure every drop of blood, sweat of tears of workers.

So it’s not about controlling time.

It’s about who controls your time.

So under time management, they control your time.

Under anti time management, you control your time.

Under Time management, they tell you what to do.

Under anti Time management, you decide what you want to do.

And there can be some ebb and flow between the two.

Once you understand the difference, then you can change your life, change how you’re paid, the way you work, the way you operate.

And you’ll change your life way more than the dollars that you make.

Matt: And I think people hear this and they go, well, I can’t get 100% of the way there quickly, so I’m not even going to try.

And you just said something very powerful.

You don’t have to get to perfection next week.

There’s iterations.

What if you can get 10% of the way there in the next three months?

I mean, that’s a huge improvement for most people.

You said something there.

When people sacrifice blank for success, they get neither.

Can you fill in that blank?

I want to tweet that.

Richie: When people sacrifice what they love for success, they don’t either.

Matt: That was also just another way of having you say that again, because I think that is so powerful, because I hear this so often.

Like, there are sacrifices I’m willing to make for the things I love.

I don’t like having to discipline my children.

This is not in me, right?

I don’t want to do it.

I sacrifice my wants because I love my children, and I want them more than I want to just feel good in the moment.

I want them to grow up to be good people.

That’s a sacrifice.

This is not like you’re not saying, don’t make sacrifices.

I don’t like working out.

I actually hate it.

People are like, you work out, you must know.

I hate every minute of it.

When I’m doing it, every now and again, I’m like, that feels good.

And then I’m like, no, it doesn’t.

I hate I do not get runners high.

I have never had runners high a day in my life.

Every step I hate.

What I like, though, is the fact of how I feel the other 23 hours a day, and I am willing to make that sacrifice.

That’s a sacrifice that I’m willing to make, but like, making a sacrifice for some ethereal concept of success.

Like the old saying, I constantly remind myself of this growing up, just like, I’ll get into the weeds here.

But growing up, I had what psychologists call the spotlight effect, because I had moved 13 times in 14 years.

I was always the new kid at school, so I always thought that the spotlight was on me.

So if I did something stupid, I thought everybody saw it and they were judging me.

And so then that manifested itself later, and I thought I had to keep up with the Joneses, right?

Because everybody was looking at me.

Here’s the truth.

Nobody gives a crap.

Nobody’s watching me.

Nobody.

Half the people I even have decent relationships that don’t know what kind of car I drive.

I could show up in a completely different color and size car tomorrow.

They won’t even notice.

Nobody cares.

Richie: Yes.

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Matt: They wouldn’t even know if we moved.

They asked me for my address every time they come over.

They don’t know where we live.

And I’m like, if you think about that, most people don’t care.

And the people who do know those things are the people who love me for who I am anyway.

They’re around me so much, they finally remember what kind of car I drive.

So if you think about that, like, what am I sacrificing?

That’s right.

To get a better car and a better house.

Go get a better car.

Have a better house.

You live in Hawaii, the most expensive place to live.

That’s great.

But I think it’s very important to get clear on those things.

Like what you’re willing to sacrifice for something that actually means something.

So here’s something you wrote in the book here, which, by the way, I would actually love for you to explain it.

You wrote that good things happen not by managing time, but by prioritizing attention. Okay?

So I think we have to have a little bit of a mindset shift, because I’ve read time management books.

I’ve read ten of them.

I’m a productivity junkie, as Kevin Miller would say.

So what does that mean?

To prioritize attention, not manage time?

What’s the nuance there?

That’s differentiating those two.

Richie: First of all, shout out to Kevin Miller, always on his show.

He’s a three part series also on this.

Matt: Nice. Remind me or text him.

Richie: You do. He is amazing.

If anyone doesn’t know, follow his show, too. Right?

He runs all the zig ziglar stuff, and he has his own amazing impact on the world with his concepts and what he’s doing with his family.

But let me take it from a different angle, because let me set the framework or kind of like a mindset, and then we can get into, like, the how.

Because anyone can do this.

This is like riding a bike.

Like, time tipping is a learnable skill.

This isn’t magic.

It’s just a choice.

And because we’ve been told one way to do it for so long, we rarely consider that there’s another way.

And so when people say they have to sacrifice something to get something else, which you just talked about, I’m not saying that’s not true.

I’m saying, why are you choosing the wrong things to sacrifice?

Especially when that thing that you think you’re doing will get you something else.

Never will.

And when you then consider it from the point of view of, let’s say the marshmallow test.

If you’re familiar with the marshmallow test they did a long time ago, everyone’s like, yeah, it’s so cool.

The kids that are patient that wait for the second marshmallow, they’re going to be so successful in life.

And you go, Hold on.

You want to show what’s really happening here?

The marshmallow is an incentive.

The person doing the test, from my point of view, is a manager at a company, and they are trying to see who is the most obedient if this kid takes the marshmallow now.

But if I can control the child by saying, you’ll get a second marshmallow later, that’s the guy I’m going to hire.

The kid that took the marshmallow in the beginning could have gotten ten marshmallows through negotiation or starting their own things through initiative instead of through incentives.

Incentives have nothing to do with the child, but the purpose of the manager.

So you see, in kindergarten let’s get real.

In kindergarten, the end of the day, kids, you’re going to get this green jelly bean.

Has nothing to do with the jelly bean.

It’s about control, about controlling the children.

And you start hearing about how school was actually from the factories, and you start seeing how it all comes together, and you’re like, Dang, dude, we have 200 years.

We watch our parents, our grandparents and great grandparents, if they were out long enough, do it this way.

It was a 21st century.

You don’t have to do this, when in fact, you probably never had to do it this way.

They didn’t do it before the Industrial Revolution, at least not in mass like they do now.

When I start sharing these principles, people go, I want that. Okay?

The first question they ask is how.

It’s totally the wrong question, because everyone’s brain stops at how.

If you don’t know how, you stop thinking.

So you discover how.

How?

It’s the wrong question.

It’s not a terrible question.

It’s just wrong to ask it first.

Here’s why.

Goals from experience are tasks.

Goals outside experience are growth.

It’s not a goal if you’ve done it already.

You just do it again.

A goal outside of experience is gross, which means inherently, you don’t know how to do it.

That’s the whole purpose.

So inside the book, I had to change the language of productivity around the reality of what you’re trying to achieve, as opposed to the control that your boss and workers and all these wonderful time management books have used to keep you on task, but not on purpose.

Think about it this way.

They say they say, follow the process.

Whose process is that?

Because here’s the thing.

Process, in my opinion, process should always follow purpose.

Purpose doesn’t follow process unless you realize that the process is someone else’s purpose and you’ve been tasked to fulfill it for them.

I know it’s a mind shift.

I’m not saying that time principles don’t work if you work longer, you’re probably going to do more.

But they found out that isn’t true.

They found out that the four day work week is more productive.

And then you go, well, what does productivity mean?

Well, if you do more and less time, it’s productive.

But what if you’re doing the wrong things?

I work with executives and CEOs.

When they say someone’s working late because it’s a symbol, look how hard I’m working, they actually say, what’s wrong with that person?

Why didn’t they get their work done on time?

So we’re creating all these things that aren’t helpful.

But let’s get super real.

You have to ask, what’s the job of the goal?

And then you land in your mind in the promised land of where you want to be.

So in time tipping, instead of endlessly working toward this goal, which, by the way, how often do our plans actually turn out the way we’re planned?

Next to zero.

You work from the goal, not endlessly toward it.

Work from the dream, not endlessly toward it.

So when you read these books, wonderful books, my friends, and they’re obsessed with goals, habits and strengths.

I’m a mentee of Cubby.

He said, begin with the end in mind.

He is the habit grew that everyone has stolen their ideas from.

This is fact, right?

Here we go.

Matt: Yep.

Richie: He never said begin with means in mind.

And goals, habits and strengths have a purpose to lead us somewhere else.

But people make goals, habits and strengths ends unto themselves.

They are ever habiting and never inhabiting.

So when you want to, like, get really good at something and you’re really good at nailing things, the company will say, here’s a strengths test.

“Oh, my gosh. It says, you’re really good at laying bricks.

So excited for you to lay bricks for the rest of your life.”

And when you try to change and develop and become a different person and try to go horizontal or vertical in the company, HR now has a piece of paper that says, “no, you’re good at laying bricks.

You don’t need to do anything else, my friend.”

This is how management has distorted all these wonderful things that we’ve learned over time.

So when I look at time tipping, I go, what do you like and want to do?

Not what you’re good at.

Architects don’t build buildings, they draw them.

General contractors do not pick up hammers if they don’t want to.

They sub the whole thing out.

The idea is to move beyond, completely beyond goals, habits and strengths and begin in the dream.

Because when you do and you choose the aligned goals, habits and strengths that will fulfill the purpose sooner than later.

Matt: That’s powerful.Very powerful.

Goals from experience are tasks, as I write that on you.

Goals outside of experience or growth.

And that’s exactly why I think it’s so much more energizing to set those crazy goals.

I know for me, when I think of I would have defined myself prior to about two years ago as someone who loves to work for the sake of working, especially because I started my first business and was very successful and built a well over a million dollar a month business when I was in my mid 20s.

So I was single.

Reality is, what else did I have to do?

Like, I had no other obligations.

And I mean, like today, for example, as we’re recording this, like, I have a hard stop.

Like I can’t work past 4:25 if I wanted to because our daughter has a game tonight and by gosh, my world stops.

Richie: That’s right.

Matt: That’s a priority.

That might not be a priority for somebody else, that’s totally fine.

But like, asking, are you on task or on purpose.

Like, for me, those massive goals, we have three massive goals this quarter.

I just have to look at, like, what am I doing right now?

Is it fulfilling any of those goals?

And if not, my only two options are delegate or delete.

And I think that lens for me is so powerful because after I read the book, one of the things that it had me doing was I was kind of just always like, I worked every day from roughly nine to five.

That was like my schedule, right?

9 to 5:30 and I would work out in the middle, you know, eat lunch, do stuff like that.

But it was pretty much my schedule since reading the book.

There are days where I’m like, I’m looking at the clock, I’m like, It’s 4:23 I’m like, I’m just done.

I can’t start this thing meaningful.

What am I going to do?

Check Facebook?

Richie: Exactly.

Matt: Get on.

Richie: I’m not inventing these things.

Matt: No.

Richie: I am one of the last quote unquote coaches or experts that actually talks to individuals.

Everyone just wants to scale and do a course.

Nothing wrong with that.

But I think we’ve lost a lot of the humanity in that, in helping people one on one.

And I’ve spent my time for the last ten years since power supply has reached out in 2013.

I’ve spent the last 9 10 years talking to people, oneonone every year, hundreds, one on one.

I’ve read out, talked to thousands of people one on one.

And of course there’s a group thing and there’s a course thing.

But I’ve learned and I’ve seen and I’ve asked people that are retired or approaching retirement what worked and what didn’t they’d say?

I waited for a time when I have more education, more time, more money, more experience, only to find out what I’m here.

And I still needed more time, more education, more experience, more money.

Well, that’s interesting.

You could have lived your whole life and still had that problem, but lived your life instead of waiting.

So, like, make it super real for someone.

Here’s kind of a framework.

You need a North Star, something that directs you where you want to go, and you can decide what that looks like.

The North Star looks like this looks like purpose.

But it’s not just a woo woo idea.

It’s the idea of what is the job, of the goal.

And I do it professionally, personally, people play, and I come up with four things that could be a zillion, but you identify the four things that are the most important.

And so when work comes up, I decide how I’m going to operate, even inside of a job.

This is not for entrepreneurs only, because most people are not entrepreneurs.

So I had to make sure this works for people inside of companies.

And if it’s not working, your company, you have to decide, do I make a shift or a decision?

Do I talk to someone about it, which we can or do I continue to blame others.

So this is all about responsibility.

But then you make decisions on, OK, what are my priorities?

So, as we’ve learned since kindergarten, priorities, sadly, are put last on a timeline.

So we’re rescuing the priority from the end of a timeline and putting it front and center.

Priorities go priority precede proceed.

We’ve been using them right now.

If you go to any of your other books, they will put priority last.

Weird.

Carrot and stick.

This is a carrot cake.

Okay, so you go purpose, priority, project for my family, project, for my profession project for my people project, for my money project.

All of them are always projects.

One of the things people talk most when you read my book is stuttering.

I have so many ideas right now, but I call it Project Stacking.

The idea is to take all these ideas that are separated or in isolation and turn them together so that you have priority overlap where one decision impacts all of them.

But here it is.

Purpose

Priority

Project.

Payments.

You can get paid first, but how you get paid changes not how much.

How you get paid, the way you work.

How you get paid changes your life more than how much, because millionaires strapped to a chair or a thing.

So when you realize this and you go, oh, I want to make all this money, so I’m going to move to New York.

New York is great.

But you’ve decided to have a New York lifestyle.

If you wanted to be in Montana fly fishing.

You don’t lie to yourself that living in New York is going to give you the Montana fly fishing lifestyle.

The goal was to live in Montana, fly fishing, go to Montana and fly fish.

You could probably make the same amount of money you would make in New York or more nowadays, and be living from the dream.

So it’s these kind of ideas that are super important.

In my new book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits, I show you exactly what types of lead magnets actually convert and lead to explosive list growth. Grab your copy here!

I know the podcast, but who’s that guy?

Matt: Say hey.

Richie: Hi.

Giovanni: Hi, Richie.

Matt: That’s Richie Norton. Remember him?

Giovanni: No.

Richie: I don’t know. Did we meet?

Matt: One year old back then maybe two.

Giovanni: Yes, I know.

Richie: I like your hat. I see that. It’s backwards.

What’s on the other side of it?

Matt: We have floor and Comets hockey team.

Richie: Oh, you’re so good.

Matt: I’m going to finish up this interview, then we’re gonna get ready for your sister’s soccer game. Okay?

In your practice, you gotta go get ready.

Richie: What’s your practice about? What sport are you doing?

Giovanni: Soccer practice.

Richie: Oh, man. Will you score one for Uncle Ritchie? This one’s for Uncle Ritchie?

Matt: No, he’s like my brother from another mother.

So everybody listening is loving this, but I think they probably want me to finish the interview, too.

So there’s going to be like thousands of people.

Giovanni: Cool.

Matt: Yeah, kind of Cool.

While you’re famous, I love you a little bit.

So here’s the thing.

I was just thinking about the word you mentioned, priority and priorities.

I don’t know if this is true, but I heard somewhere that the word priority, when it first came out, did not have a plural version.

And if you think about that given moment, we can have one priority.

So there was just something that hit me few years ago.

It was like, if we have one priority for the day, and typically I have three, but if we had one and I actually got that one thing done every single day,

I would accomplish, like, 200 things in a given year that were like big needle movers.

But we don’t look at that like, no, we got to do more.

And then how many do end up getting done?

Probably less than 200.

Richie: Yes.

Matt: The other thing, just real quick to go back to the marshmallow test, and I want to touch on the coaching thing that you mentioned.

You work one on one with so many people, but this saw just occurred as you were talking about the marshmallow test.

Maybe some of the kids really just only wanted one marshmallow.

Maybe their family has a history of diabetes.

They just get one, and they just wanted one.

So if you’re only going to get one, just get it now.

Richie: Yeah.

They actually did later studies, if you look it up, that even though they said these kids are more patient and this or that, it wasn’t.

I mean, you got to look up for the actual words here, but it was no indicator of their future success.

So we’ve been using this story for a long time in an unusual way.

It’s not even true.

Yeah, it’s so weird.

Matt: These are the things we believe in because they were said by somebody who had letters behind their name. Right?

You mentioned coaching, and there’s something you wrote in the book where I think you can choose both meaning and money.

Richie: Yes.

Matt: I’m curious.

These people that you coach, you’ve worked with a lot of people, people that everybody’s heard of.

I mean, some of the biggest entrepreneurs in the world, you know, you write about in the book.

You study people.

I know you’re a people studyer.

So what are some of the traits that you’ve noticed about those people who actually have both?

Because there’s some people that come to mind.

And I’m curious, what are some of those, we’ll say, anti time management, time tipping principles that you’ve seen them use in their lives?

Richie: That’s a great question.

I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that before.

But one of the first things that comes to mind is there are some people that either have both or want both.

But I would say the majority of people that end up reaching out or learning my stuff, they’re wanting change because they don’t have both.

I have an unusual number of doctors, dentists, psychiatrists, psychologists, lawyers, no joke, unusual number of people, professional services that reach out.

And I’m like, I don’t know anything about your profession, but I can help you get what you want out of it.

And then they get the meaning back to get their time back on the money meaning matrix.

So the idea is some people have a lot of money and they have no meaning.

That might be it could be anything.

It’s not this, but it could be I’ll just be I’ll just keep doubling down on New York.

It could be I’m on Wall Street making tons of money, but I’m sad and depressed and I have no meaning.

That’s not always true, but just say that for fun.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have people that work in nonprofits and they have tons of meaning.

They love what they do, but ironically, they spend all their time raising funds.

It’s called Mission Drift, where they are spending more time raising money than helping the people they intended to help.

So you need both, and it’s a choice.

So what people do, my clients, they try to pick, like what you say one thing, they can have a bunch of different even if it’s not a word anymore, the goal of the goal, the purpose, aristotle called the final cause, the thing that’s way out there, the bigger picture, that means you can have many ways of doing it.

So what they’ll do is they look for what’s called a positive constraint.

A positive constraint is one thing that you do in your environment that changes the whole environment.

So, for example, I started working for my cell phone before Facebook was a thing.

So there was no my cellphone closed.

Matt: Kelly, I thought that was in the last five or six years now.

Richie: I’ve been doing this for 20 years.

Matt: Oh, my gosh.

Richie: I had no idea the cell phone closed.

There was no like, I’m going to post something and get people excited about working with me.

I’ve watched this evolve over time, but the reason it was because I wanted more time with my family.

And of course I doubled down or had the idea to do it more after my son passed away.

So we ended up on the road, as you know, six months at a time.

New York to San Diego to Mexico to Canada back to Hawaii.

All over Europe.

All over Asia.

It was all because I decided to work from my phone, not from a laptop.

I have a laptop, you know what I mean?

But it was if I choose to do this, it will force me to ask better questions about how I can get work done, because my priority is to have freedom and flexibility.

What I’m saying now to do sorry for those who think it’s not easy, it’s extremely easy.

It’s a choice, though.

It’s the easiest thing in the world now to post on something and get someone to talk to you in the history of the world that has never existed, ever about that.

But to say it’s hard, it’s a full on lie.

It is so easy.

Now, doing it on purpose and making it work according to your goals, yeah, that can be, quote unquote, hard.

So when you say, like, what do these people have in common?

What they have in common is that they realize that money isn’t everything.

They don’t work for work’s sake.

They figure out what is the sake for which I’m working for and work from that, not toward it.

Because it changes everything.

I’m not going to spend 20 years in corporate to finally retire 40 years in corporate to finally retire my family.

Nope.

I’m going to have time in my family right now and I’m going to choose the way I work.

And in that way, you become a polymath, not just the one you think to be a polymathic living.

You could become 20 different people over 20 years old.

Me, stephen McCabe told me he asked me to trains with him for speed of trust.

And I said, I’m too young.

And he said, no, no, he said he pounded his fist on the table and he said, in a loving way, he said, People say they have 20 years experience, Richie, when in reality they only have one year’s experience repeated 20 times.

And I was like, Holy smokes.

Matt: You wrote about that in your previous book. I will never forget that.

I cannot tell you how many.

I quoted that so many times I forgot it.

Richie: Yeah.

So the good news is, it’s not about experience, it’s about continuous learning.

Matt: Yeah.

Richie: And continuous learning is worthless if you don’t apply it.

It’s not a lesson learned unless it’s a behavior changed.

Matt: That’s powerful.

And I think the concept there of the constraint that you put on yourself.

There’s a question that I wrote in my journal that is it’s something that is not practical at this exact moment.

We’re entering a book launch and I don’t want to take two months off.

If I took two months off, it could inevitably take the book launch and I don’t want that to happen.

So for three months, one of my big priorities is the book launch.

But after that, I wrote the question and it just says, what would have to be possible for me to just completely leave the company for two months and leave it to the other team members? Right.

And people go, well, that’s impossible.

It’s not impossible.

What needs to be true?

Well, this, this and this.

OK, what can I do today?

Richie: That’s it.

Matt: What can I spend an hour on today to make 1% progress?

Because if I make 1% of progress every day, 100 days from now, I can take two months off.

Richie: Yes,

Matt: It’s changing.

That the way instead of saying it’s impossible, you just say, what can I do?

What’s the 1% today?

It’s all you do.

Richie: This is an entirely different level of thinking, and people don’t allow themselves to think in this way.

So when someone says, our brains are like calculators, you go, I can’t do this, or I have to do it this way, and your brain says, you’re right.

But when you say, like, let’s say, how can I have a book launch without it negatively impacting my family, just say that’s in general.

Then your brain goes, what can I do?

Who can help?

Whatever, without all these terrible things that I’m worried are going to happen.

Like the launch failing or my family.

Like being sad that I’m gone all the time.

How can I do this over the next three months?

See, it doesn’t mean you know the answer, but it means you’ve allowed your brain to create space for creativity, for answers, for the interpretation of data and for discernment.

Whereas before, you were shut off.

So anyone listening to this, you can get the book and you can see all the details of how it works.

But the idea is, ask a better question and you’re get a better answer.

A better question is a better life.

Because our lives are led by the questions we ask.

Matt: Yep.

So as we wrap up, first of all, thank you so much.

I have one last question for you.

I can’t think which one I want to ask.

There’s, like, seven.

I want to ask one.

So as you answer this little question, which is, where can people find more about the book?

I’m gonna think which question I want to ask at.

So real quick, tell us where can people get the book?

Obviously, any other 15, that’s the place to go.

Richie: Just fly out to Hawaii, come meet me.
Matt: So that if enough people are just waiting there for you, they’re guaranteed to get a copy.

Richie: I’m not going to promise that, but let me know.

We’ll see what we can make happen.

But, yeah, it’s everywhere, of course.

Amazon, Barnes Noble, everywhere.

But if you go to RichieNorton.com

Time, I have a ton of worksheets.

I have a challenge, I have video, I have audio that help you kind of walk you hand in hand, step by step, to kind of make these things happen again.

The idea isn’t like, what are all these million things I have to do to get something else?

No.

It’s like, what is the something else?

Let’s start there, and then we’ll figure out ways to support it instead of endlessly working toward it.

It’s magic, man.

It’s like, you know how Marie Kondo treats, like, closets and clothes?

Matt: Spark, joy.

Richie: Time tippers.

Treat time the way Marie Kondo treats organizing stuff.

And it is a magical, joyful way of living.

Matt: This is the last question.

There’s a powerful quote in the book.

“Your goal as a time tipper is to set things in motion, not do everything yourself.”

Richie: Yes.

Matt: That’s so important.

And that is a powerful shift.

And I know for me, I see how that applies to me. Right?

I’m an entrepreneur. 17 years.

This company has been eleven years.

We’re growing fast.

We have twelve team members.

We’re going to be doubling in the next 14 months.

I see how I can apply that.

But, like, what does that look like? Practically, for the average person out there, the solopreneur, the person who has, like, one VA single mom who’s working two jobs, somebody doing their business as a side hustle.

What does that look like?

To set things in motion, not do them yourself.

Richie: A bulleted list is like bars in a prison.

Your list of things to do is not the same as a list of things that need to get done.

You can delegate, outsource, and eliminate all the things you don’t want to do, and you can do only the things that you want.

And that way you’ll end up getting everything done.

It’s handled.

A full calendar is an empty life.

Think about that.

An empty calendar is a full life because the things you needed to actually get done are handled.

This is essential.

A better word is this is effectual, which means things are getting done on purpose, with purpose, fit to purpose, not just getting done for no reason or lying to yourself.

They’re getting done for another reason.

So if you think differently about what is the job of the goal and you focus on that, then you will find ways to free up 80% of your time.

Honestly, double down the 20% that’s working and create space for more things or more of the same.

So, so good, bud.

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