The Real Cost of Distraction

What's your experience being working with those leaders trying to get them understand that they might be even asking the wrong question. Yeah. I think the first thing for me, it's always making the case to them, you

know, making the case in the sense of what is the cost of distraction? How much time is being wasted? How much energy is being wasted? What is, how much money is being wasted?

If you're paying somebody eight hours to work a day and they're distracted for five hours, why don't you just pay them for the hours they actually focused? Yeah. You know, and think about the, you know, I

I remember working with this fashion design company in LA once, and the lead designer was telling me, you know, I'm sketching something, the fall collection, and then someone comes up to me and goes,

where do they move the photocopy paper to? So she turns around to answer that question, and then comes back, and she's lost her flow. Think what the cost of that is.

And this happening every day, because there's no system set up, no one's taught how to focus, there's no way to communicate if you're in a state of focus. And once I think leaders understand the cost of focus,

how much energy is being lost, how much information is being lost, knowledge, communication, then there's an impetus to do it.

Because if you just say you need to teach your companies to focus, they go like, well, yeah. Well, you need to do that. Where do you even start?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we start with my book, but you know. Yeah.

Well, I got a Ted talk, highly for a keynote, a book. Exactly, and it's not complicated. We do things because once we realize something, what's the difference between knowing something

and realizing something? For me, a lot of people know things. Very few people realize something, and realization causes a complete shift

in behavioral patterns. When most people know that we all die, they see their dad die, they see their mom die, their cousin, their friend, and they go,

oh my god, and they're sad, and then they just carry on like normal, right? Whereas for me, when my guru died, when I was in the monastery,

it brought a deep realization that life is finite. It's not short, it's finite. There's a clear definitive end. And that made me get to a place of extreme clarity

as to what is my purpose in life? Have my purpose articulate my priorities in life. And now I need to learn how to focus and focus really well so that I can focus on my priorities that

have been defined by my purpose, where the byproduct of doing that is I live a more rewarding life, a more fulfilling life. not a happy life, but a happier life,

and be able to channel that finite time and energy towards things and people that truly matter in my life. So I think when leaders and companies realize, not just know, realize that distraction

is hugely costly to productivity, efficiency, energy, time, bottom line financially, then they will start to implement it first, be a role model to everyone down the chain,

and then start implementing. You can't tell your team to focus, and then you don't even focus yourself. Most leaders are guilty of this, and there's this really terrible narrative with entrepreneurs where they like to say, I'm an entrepreneur, so I have ADD, and I can be all over the

place. That's part of a trait of being an entrepreneur. I remember sitting in a car driving for two hours with a man that built his company up to $2 billion.

In the hour and a half we spoke in the car, he gave me his undivided attention and it showed me, look here's a person that took his family's business from nine figures to two billion and he can focus for 90 minutes straight. So there's no reason you have to say that you're an entrepreneur and you can't focus.