Text extracted via OCR from the original document. May contain errors from the scanning process.
of course, is to do so while maintaining or increasing your income.
The intention of this chapter, and what you will experience if you follow the instructions, is an
increase in personal productivity between 100 and 500%. The principles are the same for both employees
and entrepreneurs, but the purpose of this increased productivity is completely different.
First, the employee. The employee is increasing productivity to increase negotiating leverage for two
simultaneous objectives: pay raises and a remote working arrangement.
Recall that, as indicated in the first chapter of this book, the general process of joining the New Rich is
D-E-A-L, in that order, but that employees intent on remaining employees for now need to implement
the process as D-E-L-A. The reason relates to environment. They need to Liberate themselves from the
office environment before they can work ten hours a week, for example, because the expectation in that
environment is that you will be in constant motion from 9-5. Even if you produce twice the results you
had in the past, if you’re working a quarter of the hours of your colleagues, there is a good chance of
receiving a pink slip. Even if you work 10 hours a week and produce twice the results of people working
40, the collective request will be, “Work 40 hours a week and produce 8 times the results.” This is an
endless game and one you want to avoid. Hence the need for Liberation first.
If you’re an employee, this chapter will increase your value and make it more painful for the company
to fire you than to grant raises and a remote working agreement. That is your goal. Once the latter is
accomplished, you can drop hours without bureaucratic interference and use the resultant free time to
fulfill dreamlines.
The entrepreneur’s goals are less complex, as he or she is generally the direct beneficiary of increased
profit. The goal is to decrease the amount of work you perform while increasing revenue. This will set
the stage for replacing yourself with Automation, which in turn permits Liberation.
For both tracks, some definitions are in order.
Being Effective vs. Being Efficient
Eo ttcctivencss is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given
task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard
to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.
I would consider the best door-to-door salesperson efficient—that is, refined and excellent at selling
door-to-door without wasting time—but utterly ineffective. He or she would sell more using a better
vehicle such as e-mail or direct mail.
This is also true for the person who checks e-mail 30 times per day and develops an elaborate system
of folder rules and sophisticated techniques for ensuring that each of those 30 brain farts moves as
quickly as possible. I was a specialist at such professional wheel-spinning. It is efficient on some
perverse level, but far from effective.
Here are two truisms to keep in mind:
1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.
From this moment forward, remember this: What you do is infinitely more important than how you do
it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.
To find the right things, we’ll need to go to the garden.
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013840