How the 95-5 Rule Can Transform Your Success

This Rule Made Me So Rich I Questioned The Meaning of Life – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1t4QsF1yxc

Transcript:
(00:00) 20 years ago, I came across a rule. A rule that completely changed my life and work forever. It’s called the 955 rule. I first learned this rule rubbing shoulders with some of the most successful billionaires that you probably know. And I’ve personally used this rule to go from burning out, working 100 hours a week, and ruining all my relationships to building my dream life.
(00:22) Beautiful family, having access to resources like the plane and the cars, and mentoring hundreds of kids in my local community. So, with that being said, this is the 955 rule. The 955 rule means 95% of your results come from only 5% of your efforts. Think of it like your life is like a boat on the ocean and you’re going along and you accidentally hit a rock and now all of a sudden you got water that’s filling up the boat.
(00:46) Most people would run to the bucket and just start trying to bail it out. People that win in life, the 5% spend the time trying to figure out where the freaking hole is and try to plug it. years ago, I hired a marketer to come into a business that was doing about 3 million a year and they were super talented and had all the right things to say and everybody was super excited about them hitting the ground running.
(01:06) And then 6 months later, we had to fire them. Why? Because instead to stop and doing the deep analysis and figuring out what was actually wrong, they just started getting busy doing things. They didn’t have the discipline to do the audit to figure out where the problems were and then the discipline to focus on what to say no to so that they could actually move the needle.
(01:27) The 955 rule is like the 8020 rule, the Prao principle, but on steroids. It essentially eliminates the illusion of productivity by saying, what’s the one thing that if you knock out of the park, like a massive domino will just knock all the things down and get things moving. If you’re truly growing, 95% of your calendar is going to look completely different in a year.
(01:49) That’s how you know you’re making progress. If you’re still doing this year the same stuff you did last year, probably missing the mark, which brings us to the question, how do you find your 5%. You need to have a direction. How can I focus on the right 5% if I don’t know where I’m going? Like, if I don’t know what the target looks like, how am I supposed to hit the target? And people ask me, well, how do you prioritize? How do you figure out the 5%? How do you really focus? Well, if I know where I’m going, then I can ask myself, does this
(02:16) decision get me closer to that target? Without clarity of vision, it can feel overwhelming. It can feel hard. A lot of people get depressed because they don’t have clarity. A confused mind can’t move forward. If I don’t know what I’m trying to do, how am I supposed to make the right decision? Bill Gates knew early his vision, I want a personal computer in every home.
(02:37) Zuckerberg, he literally said from the beginning, I want to build a metaverse. Elon Musk, the whole world, if you follow him for like five seconds, knows his number one priority in life is colonizing Mars. And that’s why he started every one of his companies. Think about that. Most people don’t realize Starlink, Boring Company, the AI, Optimus, the robots, Tesla, self-driving cars, the whole infrastructure for colonizing Mars is every one of his businesses.
(03:03) Isn’t that crazy? That’s the 5%. Even Doge was him going, “If I don’t help save our economy, all the businesses I’ve created within that economy could be at risk. I’ll go spend 90 days helping solve that problem so then I can go and get back to building electric cars.” So, think about it this way.
(03:21) The clarity of your vision, what you see, determines the quality of your decisions. If you’re clear, your decisions are awesome. So, here’s what you want to do. Number one, dream big. People ask me all the time, if you can go back and talk to that 20-year-old version of yourself, what would you whisper in their ear? Dream bigger.
(03:36) See, most people don’t give themselves permission to dream, so then their target is so nearsighted, it doesn’t feel like it’s big enough to make big decisions to move your life forward. You actually have to go way out there, dream bigger, and then aim for it. Then what you do, once you have that, sit down and write 12 goals for the year.
(03:54) Write down 12 projects, outcomes, things you want to do with your life that if you accomplish, even if you accomplish seven or eight of them, you know you’re making progress. Now, here’s the kicker. The next step is actually to circle the one that if you got done, every other goal would feel obsolete or not needed or be a lot easier to attack.
(04:13) Then I want you to write a list of projects that you got to get done to make that one goal accomplish and aggressively ignore the rest. That is how you execute the 955 rule. Which brings us to the question, how do you make sure you’re doing the 5%. So today I woke up and my calendar is full of only the things that I not only love doing, but they give me the most leverage on my time, which I’ll share with you in a second.
(04:37) My dad had this like really original quote he used to say, which was if you love the work you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. So that’s why I designed the drip matrix for myself and to teach my friends. So the way it works is you evaluate all the things you could do through an X and Y axis. On one side, it’s the things that light you up, that give you energy, that pump you up, that you look forward to do, right? It might be creating with friends, it might be research, it might be writing.
(05:01) Whatever lights you up gives you energy. And the second makes you the most money. It has to make you money. Why? Because money is a resource. Money is energy. Money is a battery of storing value you could use in other things. Here’s what’s cool is your 5% is in the very top right corner of the drip matrix in the production quadrant.
(05:22) It’s in the quadrant of the quadrant that you focus on. And for what it’s worth, this may need to change as your life changes. Before I had kids, my life look completely different. I used to be all about staying up late and getting a bunch of creative work done. Now my days are early. Why? I have human alarm clocks. I have little kids.
(05:37) I have to change and shift things. There was times when certain meetings were green and I love doing them. And then I realized I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t even need to be here. There’s no net new value of me being here. And guess what? I’m not empowering my team to step up when I stay in those things that used to be green, now they’re yellow, sometimes red.
(06:00) So, I have to learn to let go and really self-evaluate where am I focusing my time. As an example, one of my friend owns a dental clinic and he called me the other day because he was like, “Hey man, I need to restructure my life. I got to understand this drip matrix.” And I asked him what was going on and he explained to me the biggest challenge, his bottleneck was he doesn’t have enough staff. That’s your 5%.
(06:18) Building a system for attracting, hiring, training, retaining top staff is going to produce the biggest outcomes in your life. Everything else is just things that have to get done, but it’s not going to move the needle. Focus there. And the way I keep the main thing the main thing is I put that in my calendar first in the morning.
(06:39) The first 90 minutes of every day is working on the project that’s going to push everything else forward. Keeping it there till it’s solved. Not getting bored with it. Not getting distracted. Being disciplined. Stay with the problem. See, I had this bad habit a long time ago that I used to get bored with problems.
(06:54) I moved on from them too quick and they were never solved. The more I understood the 955 rule, I realized that 5% I got to stay with it. I got to do less. I shouldn’t start another company. I should invest in another company. I shouldn’t distract myself. Stay with it. Which brings us to the last question you’re probably asking yourself.
(07:09) What do I do with the other 95% of my time? The best analogy I could give you is to think of yourself like a chef, right? In a kitchen, the chef should only be doing the thing that actually makes the meal world class. He’s not sitting there and doing all the prep. He’s not cutting all the vegetables. He’s not pre-cooking some of the proteins.
(07:27) He literally sits there, the top chef in a kitchen, and things are brought to him. He’s done his work. It’s called mi a plus. He sits there and he does the work and the plates go out the kitchen. Perfect. You want to figure out how to get your life to the same place where you stay in that flow. You stay in that zone and have people support you around you, even part-time, even friends, so you can keep creating and pushing your life forward.
(07:50) So that’s what you do. The other 95% think of the 3Ds. Number one is defer. Some stuff that you want to do is just not a now thing. Understanding the right time for the right action is just as important as understanding what to do because if you do something too soon, it’s not valuable.
(08:07) So postpone intentionally, not passively. You’re allowed to defer things to next quarter, next year. Just make the decision. The second thing is delete it. I can’t tell you how often I go through, I call it a pruning process where I just like look at stuff that I’m currently doing and go, I’m just going to remove that.
(08:20) I’m going to remove that. I’m going to remove that. I did that for my morning routine. I used to be one of those guys that got up and had a very structured morning routine and I was like, I wonder what would happen if I actually just woke up and started to work. Turned out really good move. Now, do I recommend people start there? No.
(08:34) Because they hadn’t built the discipline of execution. They didn’t even understand what that 5% is. They didn’t build the muscle of actually just getting up and working. So, if you don’t have a process to get ready for work and you’re new to this, it’ll hurt you. But deleting things, pruning things is a powerful strategy.
(08:50) The third is delegate. And this is why I always tell people to start with a part-time assistant because most people are not good at this. Most people when they ask somebody else to do something, it ends up not getting done the way they want it and the person ends up getting involved and it doesn’t save them any more time because they don’t know how to learn to let go.
(09:08) The way we do this is we got to hand off with clarity. Define what the definition of done looks like and practice delegating because it is an art. One of my core philosophies to really get more time back to focus on my 5% is to train don’t tell. See, if I’m telling everybody what to do, then I get stuck in this tell, check, next, doom loop of always having people relying on me to get work done.
(09:31) Instead, I train them on how to think this way. That’s why I create this content is because it’s for you and it’s all the people on all my teams. When you learn to let go, you got to be sure to train them on how you did it. A checklist is not enough. Some people are like, I have an SOP. not enough. Role play with them.
(09:47) Teach them the mental models. Think about the first principles. How do you think about this? What are the frameworks you use? If you’re mad that people are in a meeting and they’re not contributing to the meeting, have you ever taught them how to? And if you don’t know how to train people, the good news is there’s this really powerful expensive tool that you might have heard of called Chat GPD.
(10:04) It’s free. Use it. Now, I know choosing one thing is scary. What if you’re wrong? Here’s my promise. Picking something and doing as much effort and focus on it and learning and getting feedback is always the winning move versus doing too many things and playing a game of whack-a-ole in the dark. It’s like fighting an invisible monster.
(10:26) At least this way you can eliminate things knowing they didn’t work versus not knowing what’s broken. Now, if you want to go deeper on delegating, click this video and I’ll see you on the other