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John Jantsch (00:47): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jan. My guest today is Richie Norton. He’s an award-winning author and serial entrepreneur, an executive coach to CEOs he’s featured in Forbes, Bloomberg business week, Inc entrepreneur and Huffington post Pacific business news recognized Richie as one of the top 40 under 40 best and brightest young businessmen in Hawaii. We’re gonna talk about a new book by Richie called anti time management, reclaim your time and revolutionize your results with the power of time tipping. So Richie, welcome to the show.

Richie Norton (01:25): Thanks so much. I’m excited to be here. This is gonna be so much fun.

John Jantsch (01:29): So I do have to warn people that the book starts with a missile attack. Yes. So may maybe you can briefly tell that story and then tell me why that made it into the book.

Richie Norton (01:39): Well, some people may know of this, but if you don’t. Yeah,

John Jantsch (01:43): I recall. I recall

Richie Norton (01:45): It. Yeah, it has a good ending, you know, like spoiler alert, but I actually was in, I live in Hawaii. I was on a business trip in, in Tennessee. And while I was there, I get this text message saying ballistic missile attack in Hawaii. And it followed up with this is not a test. And so therefore it was not a test. This was happening. This is from our government, you know, telling us this and I’m freaking out. It’s easy. It’s easy to tell a story now, like when was happening, I mean, this was, it was real. It was real. I mean, there were people in Hawaii that reportedly were jumping into manhole, you know, so they could like take cover, like it was real. So I call, I have, you know, my, my three boys are at home. My, my wife’s home, I’m calling each one of ’em, nobody answers.

Richie Norton (02:33): And you know, the lines get crossed, you know, when there’s a disaster happening. Anyways, my one of my sons calls back and I think he was 13 at the time. And it was crazy. He said his goodbyes, you know, he is, I love you dad. And he was just weeping. And I re I remember when that happened, I just started thinking like, oh my gosh, my whole world is about to get destroyed. My family, my home, everything I’ve known the whole Hawaiian island chain, uh, like who knows what’s gonna happen here. And it was an interesting experience in addition to what was happening at the time, because I’ve had a number of, of tragedies and I’ll list them without getting too emotional here. But I had a brother-in-law pass away at 21 and his sleep. I had a son pass away as a baby. Uh, he caught pertussis, also known as whooping cough.

Richie Norton (03:23): My wife had a stroke and lost her memory. We’ve had three foster kids that we thought we were gonna adopt come and go. After two years, taking care of them, which was so hard. And I had my, I had a son get hit by a car and he crossing the street and he shouldn’t be here, but he is. But so in this moment, while there’s this missile attack, I had the strangest feeling. In addition to all the emotions, I thought, at least we didn’t live without, you know, at least we didn’t live with regret. We lived without regret. We did all the things we thought we could do. We tried our hardest, we did our best. We’ve experienced tragedy after tragedy and we’ve gotten back up and it was just this weird, surreal moment. And of course, then later we get this text saying that it was a mistake, you know, and life goes back to normal. So here we are

John Jantsch (04:13): Pretty, pretty crazy. So how does that doesn’t really anchor the book, but uses the launching off point. How does that story kinda launch what you’re trying to say in anti time management?

Richie Norton (04:24): You know, at times people will, I’m kind of stuttering cause there’s so many different ideas in my head right now. but when people start thinking about their lives, one of the first things they do is they work towards managing their time better. And the moment they do that, they, whether they realize it or not, cuz fish are the last to realize that there’s this thing called water, right? They don’t even know what’s going on. We don’t even realize that there’s this thing that’s been actually controlling our entire lives until we start looking at it. And we don’t realize that time management was actually designed specifically not to give us freedom, but to control every aspect of our lives at work and eventually into our homes. It’s not about controlling time. It’s about who owns your time, who controls your time and time management was specifically designed that someone else would.

Richie Norton (05:13): So this is important because as soon as we start realizing, oh my gosh, time is limited. Life is short. I know it’s cliche. We immediately create a priority and we instinctively put that priority last on a timeline. It wasn’t an instinct. It was taught to us in kindergarten to do that. Here’s how you set goals. And so I, I truly believe that, you know, goals from experience are tasks, goals, outside experience are growth, and there is a way to work from the goal instead of endlessly toward it. And when you have these experiences in life, you start realizing what really matters. And is there a way to make our work, support it as opposed to working toward it and never having it happen?

John Jantsch (05:57): Yeah. There’s a lot to unpack from what you just said there, but I want to get to give you a chance to say like in two minutes then what is anti time management?

Richie Norton (06:06): Anti time management is like a value centered approach. So stop timing your values and start valuing your time. Right? People will like bake a cake without sugar and expect it to be sweet. I know you can put other things in it, make it sweet. I get it. But just go with the analogy for a second. That’s like trying to live a life saying you have values in one day, you’ll live them and expect it to be a life lived on value. It’s not possible. But when you bake in freedom of time and autonomy and the things you want, even inside of an entrepreneurial business from the start, it actually expands. It creates it. So all these entrepreneurs, I’m gonna start a business to get my time and freedom back only to lose their time and freedom to the business, why they created that world for themselves. They didn’t know any other way. They learned it from corporate.

John Jantsch (06:52): So your solution of course, to, to getting a hold of this is something you call time tipping. Mm-hmm . So because that’s in the title as well. Let’s juxtapose that with anti time management.

Richie Norton (07:04): So anti time management, like the idea of time management, they control you anti time management. You get to control what you’re doing. Time tipping is kind of this framework that kind of goes along with this methodology. So the concept here I’ll make it super specific. If you are a college kid or whatever you are, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re an executive. The first thing you do when you wanna change your life in a lot of ways is you decide how you’re gonna get paid. But it, the instant you decide that you’re gonna move to the city to get paid. You made the decision to have a city life you did. And you decided that everything you do revolves around that world. So someone will get paid in a way they don’t like living. And they’ll do that for a really long time, maybe forever. Whereas someone who wants to live by a lake in Montana could go to Montana, live by a lake and make the same money or more and live the lifestyle they wanted from the start.

Richie Norton (07:59): So in time tipping, we reverse it. What’s the goal of the goal. What’s the job of the goal. What’s the reason I’m getting paid. And we go, we move beyond that. So we start with purpose, create projects around that purpose. And eventually we create a model that allows us to get paid that way. That doesn’t mean we get paid last. We can still get paid first. I’m a huge fan of getting paid first. And just saying, all of a sudden your work is in alignment with autonomy, with availability, with ability with actual productivity, as opposed to lying to ourselves and pretending that it one day will.

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John Jantsch (09:13): So for years, you know, one of, one of the mantras always was, you know, to have this balance work, life balance. And obviously most entrepreneurs know that’s a fallacy, but you take it on pretty head on. I mean, why is balance really the wrong goal? Even,

Richie Norton (09:27): You know, it’s like the word has got, or the term work life balance has gotten messed up with the meaning. Yeah. So, so they’ll say like, I want balance say, no, you don’t wanna sleep for eight hours and play for eight hours on work for eight hours. Maybe one day, you know, like not every day. What you want is these, the essence of that is that you want the availability ability and autonomy to do what you wanna do when you wanna do it balance itself. It’s a weird word because balance itself in physics means motionless. It doesn’t move. Nobody wants a life that is motionless. It doesn’t move. You actually wanna unbalance or imbalance your life in the direction you want it to go. So you’re able to create things and set things in motion, not just do it all yourself. So I, you know, I even work life flexibility is a better term, but even that term misses the point because work life flexibility has become a perk at corporations at the moment. It’s a perk. Get a corporation is not a benefit to the worker anymore. It’s used as another way to control you. So I’m a fan of this concept of time tipping. Cause we need a new language to talk about the things we actually want because it’s not there.

John Jantsch (10:38): So this is slowly changing this sort of industrial age, you know, management, you know, era is changing. I mean my parents and my wife’s parents could never really understand what I do right, right. Because it didn’t fit into what they understood is a job. And you know, increasingly of course I was doing it 30 years ago, increasingly that, you know, my kids are like, no, that’s how I’m, you know, that’s like, that’s normal, right? That’s normal. I’m gonna have freedom. That’s right. I can work from home. I can do anything I want, you know? And so it is changing, but there still are a lot of people that are just very ingrained in that idea of if I’m not busy, if I’m not filling by my day, if I’m not sitting at a desk from nine to five, then I’m not working. I mean, how do we get outta that?

Richie Norton (11:23): It’s true. And I, I think what’s amazing is this is one of the first times I think in history, cuz a lot of the, I, you know, I work with corporations. I work with executives. I work with entrepreneurs. I work with the everyday person. But when you talk about it from like retaining talent, you know, you know, point of view, things start changing because you realize that someone is only in a job for on average in America, 4.6 years, that means you’re turning over at least every five years, more or less. And when that happens, you have a new opportunity. Look, you as an entrepreneur, you can change projects or careers every day. Right? Right. Yeah. But if you’re in one place one time and everybody’s changing every five years and you realize that leaving a job and getting a new one will get you a higher pay raise than staying for the three or 4%.

Richie Norton (12:05): They’re gonna give you every year. Right. Changes the dynamics. So what happens is this is the first generation. I mean generation now, I don’t just mean what age group in generation. Now everyone who’s living. This is the first time that everyone realizes they actually have everyone in quotes. Right. Everyone realizes they have a choice in the matter. Yeah. Yeah. Whether they do something or not is different, but the switching costs are so low to do something new. Whereas in the nineties, even in the two thousands, it was pretty hard. And before that almost impossible today. So they go, wow, it’s so hard to keep these kids on the, on here that work, is it? Or do they just want, do they just know they can do something else and make more money for in, in less time and they’re actually more productive and you wish you could do that too. And you’re jealous. Like what are we talking about here? but what’s cool is our parents, grandparents, they set us up for this. This is the success that they were working towards. So those who don’t wanna take advantage of it, I think it’s an awareness thing. And then those who want take it advantage of it, the opportunities now it’s, it’s never been more readily available.

John Jantsch (13:07): So one of the things that I think trips, a lot of people up is especially, well, people that are bought into what you’re preaching is that there are a lot of things that want to take your time. yes. So, so how do you get better at protecting? You know, you could set up like, here’s my flex, here’s my lifestyle I’m gonna live. And then everybody just like starts piling on.

Richie Norton (13:26): Now that that’s a great question. And it’s, what’s funny about that is like, it’s the same thing with money. When someone realizes you have money that people are like, Hey, I need some money too. Can I have some money? Right. So I like to believe in this concept that I call time flow there’s cash flow and there’s time flow. And you’re right. The people who are the most productive are rewarded with more work. So instead of getting things done, you know, from nine to five and they can get it done in between, you know, nine and 12 or whatever, they don’t get to go home early, early, they just get more work. So then we, everyone starts saying, nevermind, let’s all be average. Let’s all just do the same thing. Let’s spread out day, the exact time, you know . And so here we are.

Richie Norton (14:05): But for people who are trying to like figure out what to do at their time, I straight up, I have to help many people free up their time. They do it on their own, just sharing their principles. And a lot of times they go right back to doing more work. So there’s no judgment of how you fill your time. You’re gonna do it however you want. But there is a way to make one small move that allows one. It makes lots of decisions that you would’ve made disappear. And on the other hand, it creates a number of different opportunities and possibilities. But to answer, it’s like more of a bigger picture question, Aristotle called it a final cause. So like an acorn becomes an Oak tree. So a lot of times we’re planting things that aren’t acorns, but we expect them to become Oak trees.

Richie Norton (14:46): So the moment you realize that, then you can go back and make your work aligned with what you wanna do. Like someone says, I’m not making money. And I say, when’s the last time you asked someone to pay you? Oh no, I’ve been working so hard. Well, if work to you means you’re gonna get paid. Don’t you think you should ask someone to pay you cuz you haven’t worked a day in your life. If you’re defining work as getting paid, now you don’t have to define work as getting paid. But if you do, you should be asking people to pay you that’s aligned work. So when it comes to like how you make your decisions, Aristotle called a final cause. And the idea was an acorn becomes an Oak tree. So academics will use an example of like a table and they’ll say so I need wood.

Richie Norton (15:22): And I need to be able to have a design of how to make it. And I need someone to put it together and voila it’s done well. What’s the goal of the table. If it was to have like an heirloom for your family forever. Cool. If it’s because you have some nice people coming over, some business people, some family, and you wanna have a nice dinner. You there’s Uber eats, man. You can go down the street and go get a taco anywhere. You, you know that there’s a food truck of every flavor everywhere. So when you realize it’s not the dinner, it’s not the table, it’s not the wood. It’s the experience. Well then you can change what you’re doing. The idea is stop focusing on means and focus on ends. Covey didn’t say begin with means in mind, he said begin with the end in mind. And so I think we’ve made goals, habits and strengths. We’ve turned those into means, sorry, we’ve turned. Those means into ends into themselves. So then we lose all of our time and things that don’t lead us anywhere. Even though we think they are, instead of just saying, you know what, if I just did the thing, all this stuff would go away. I’d have more time.

John Jantsch (16:24): Well and how much stuff do we do in the name of being busy? That doesn’t really go anywhere, right? Yeah. So one of the, you have the book broken up into sections. One of the sections is ultimately some practices, you know, for implementing your methodology. So I jotted down a couple that I’d love to hear you explain a little more project stacking for the first

Richie Norton (16:43): One. Oh man, that’s such a good one. it’s such a good one. The concept is how it’s not multitasking. It would be super single tasking. Where one thing you do impacts all of your other companies, whether you like the guy or not. Elon Musk is a master at this thing. You know, his one company will affect all of the others. So you know, space X and you got the solar thing and you got Tesla, they’re using similar technology. They’re using similar resources. One thing impacts the other, you got this boring companies. Now these cars can go underneath. So that’s the idea is you might say, I wanna do all these different things and I’m not saying it to do ’em all at the same time. Maybe you will. Maybe you won’t. But if you can look at your projects and instead of putting them linearly, turn ’em over and stack ’em, it’s almost like this alignment allows you to say, Hey, I wanna make this decision. And this decision makes these different things in my life happen. I can give you more examples, but is that a good, is that, yeah,

John Jantsch (17:44): That’s a great example. And I’ll actually take it. If some people are thinking, oh Teslas, blah, blah, blah. You know, but I mean you write a hundred blog posts over a hundred days. You turn that into a hundred pieces of audio content that turns into a book. I mean that, you know, that’s another way of kind of looking at it on a real simple term, isn’t it?

Richie Norton (18:00): Oh absolutely. You know, every time we share an example, just leave, have a super example. It becomes like, whoa, like, so for me, yeah, I was an entrepreneur. I still am. People ask me questions. So I wrote a book about it. This is an alignment. The book. I mean the other book I’m referring to is the power of starting something stupid. That book turned into coaching consulting, online courses. All these things can happen with the same client that turned into me creating a product based business, where we make over a hundred different products at any given time for entrepreneurs all over the world. And now I’m making yoga pants and I’m making tiny houses in the same breath. And then I’ll be like, wait, what are you talking about? Like, yeah, it’s one decision. And it all came because of the book, the mindset. And now I have an editing company for people and people go like, what are you doing? How you do so many things. So I don’t, my job is to get people their time back. And if there’s a way I can do that in a way that also gives me my time back. Why wouldn’t I?

John Jantsch (18:51): Yeah. And it leads to another practice expert sourcing.

Richie Norton (18:55): This is, so this one’s so important. Expert sourcing is so important because what most people do, you know this, we all do it. We all do it like, oh, I need to delegate or I need to outsource or I need to hire an employee. So what they do is they go and find someone that’s as cheap as possible. But with that choice, it is not about money. They could be the same price. Just depends on what’s going on. But they intentionally go into it saying, I’m gonna teach this person how to do what I do. And they intentionally from the start have set up themselves instead of having zero jobs, they now have at least two or three jobs.

John Jantsch (19:30): that’s why it’s so hard to do. Right. That’s why people don’t

Richie Norton (19:33): It. It’s like I’m gonna hire this person. I’m gonna teach them how to do it. They’re gonna do it wrong. And then I’m gonna do it myself. . But in, in inherently in the word expert, I’m inferring, they know how to do it better than you. Right. There is zero training in expert sourcing. Sure. There’s little things about, I like this. I like it done by then. And here’s how, you know, we work, but this person should be able to teach you how it’s done. And in that sense, everything changes.

John Jantsch (20:03): Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome way to look at it. Let’s wrap up today talking about something you’ve hinted at, but I want you to hit this dead on because I think it’s in a lot of ways. I think it’s the essence of the book change, how you get paid,

Richie Norton (20:15): How you get paid dramatically impacts your life in every way. And I don’t mean how much you get paid. I get that. You need to make a certain amount and I get the more the merrier you and I both know millionaires. Maybe even some billionaires that have no time and they hate their lives. They’ll say they’ll even say money is easy. Time is hard. How you get paid, decides how you live your life. So if I am making a ton of money, but I’ve decided I have to work in a swivel chair, I will stay in that swivel chair spinning around all day long. When I told myself I wanted to work from my cell phone, this is before Facebook. This was before Facebook, when phones folded it was a decision cuz I knew that would force me to have to think, wow, I can’t be in an office.

Richie Norton (21:05): How am I gonna get this done? I can’t necessarily have people all around. How am I gonna get this done? So it allows you to be creative, these positive constraints. We’ve ended up just being on the road for six months at a time with our kids, screaming in the back of the car, doing whatever we want. Not that we had all the money in the world, we’re making money on the road while we’re good, just like we would anywhere else. So the idea is when you can create an environment that allows you to live the way you want, then you can also get paid to support that environment. And it’s a very different way of thinking, but it works like magic.

John Jantsch (21:37): Well, and it’s kinda like the end in mind of thinking too, that you just mentioned too, is if you start there , you know, then all the decisions you make, you know, should support that. And just, as you said, in some cases, they force you to make certain decisions. Don’t

Richie Norton (21:51): They, they do. It’s a forcing function. And so that’s why with small moves, you can reclaim your time. You can be as productive as you already are. I’m not saying get rid of things that you, that are good that you like. I’m just saying, don’t lie to yourself when it’s not working, let’s just work on something that’s in alignment. And here’s how to do it in a way that creates time for you and your family and for others.

John Jantsch (22:13): And, and I guess we could spend a whole nother show talking about how you actually figure out what alignment means, but there you go. That’s for another day, right? the Richie. Thanks so much for stopping by the duct marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where they can connect with you. Obviously the book will be available wherever you buy books.

Richie Norton (22:28): Yeah. Go to Richie norton.com. And if you go to Richie norton.com/time, I have a 90 day action plan that helps walk you through this. So you can find your alignment and make these things happen now, you know, and it’s really powerful. So, but honestly, John, I’m just so grateful to be on your show. Thank you so much. This has been so, so good to me

John Jantsch (22:45): Now. You, you bet great book again. I appreciate it. And hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Richie Norton (22:51): Definitely. I’ll see

John Jantsch (22:53): Ya. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we create a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment dot co .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d. Love to chat with you about the results that you get.