130： Finish What You Start ｜ Jon Acuff
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Summary
If you have problems finishing what you start, this is the episode for you. Today I m joined by New York Times bestselling author, John Acuff. We talk about developing a tolerance for imperfection, why strategic incompetence is a powerful tool, how to overcome what John calls noble obstacles, and how to finally finish what you have started.
Transcript
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If you're anything like me, you are what I refer to as a starter. I've never been at a loss for
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figuring out how to start things, but getting things done is a completely different story.
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Today, I'm joined by New York Times bestselling author, John Acuff. If you have problems finishing
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what you start, this is the episode for you. And I'm not going to lie, I needed this one more than
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most. We talk about developing a tolerance for imperfection, why strategic incompetence is a
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powerful tool, how to overcome what John calls noble obstacles, a new spin on smart goals,
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and how to finally finish what you have started. You're a man of action. You live life to the
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fullest. Embrace your fears and boldly chart your own path. When life knocks you down,
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you get back up one more time. Every time. You are not easily deterred or defeated. Rugged,
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resilient, strong. This is your life. This is who you are. This is who you will become.
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At the end of the day, and after all is said and done, you can call yourself a man.
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Men, what is going on today? My name is Ryan Mickler, and I am the host and the founder of
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this podcast, The Order of Man. Each week, we are bringing you my interviews with the very best
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this planet has to offer. But today, I've got to go on a little bit of a rant here. I've been doing
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this for about two and a half years now, and I've just got to say that I am so sick of the raw,
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raw, motivational guru types out there with their cute little one-liners about being motivated and
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getting stuff done, and don't worry about what other people think, and just do it and be disciplined.
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I get it. I mean, there's a time and a place for that kind of stuff, but I want this to be different.
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So rather than talk about the one-liners that you already know, I want to talk with my guests about
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the how. I'm talking about really digging in deep and getting to the handful of tactics
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tactics that make these guys a success. And that's exactly what we're doing today with this
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podcast and my guest today. But before we get into that, I just want to tell you a little bit
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about our exclusive brotherhood for just a quick minute here. When I began this journey to become
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a better man nine years ago, there was no roadmap for me. There was no track to run on. There was no
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one to show me how to do it, which is probably why it's taken me nine years to get to where I am now
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with a long way to go. But had I had a roadmap and the track and the brothers to help me along
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the journey, I am certain that I could have sped up the process. And of course, the results that
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come with speeding up that process. So let's be real. You can go on this journey of becoming a
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better man by yourself. I did for a long time. I did that. But you don't have to. We've created
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the framework inside of the Iron Council that points you in the right direction. It distills my hard
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thought and hard learned lessons as well as the other men inside of the council and allows
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you to tap directly into the results that we have all experienced. So I want to invite
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you to join us. You can learn more about what we're up to and claim your seat in the brotherhood
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at orderofman.com slash Iron Council. Again, that's orderofman.com slash Iron Council. With
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that said, let me introduce you to my guest today. His name is John Acuff. I've read his last
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four books and I've been trying to get this guy on the show for two years. The time finally
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came with the release of his new book today. That is if you're listening to this today, it's
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being released. It's called Finish. Give yourself the gift of done. The other books that I've
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read are Do Over, Start and Quitter, all of which have been instrumental in helping me launch
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the podcast that you guys are listening to right now. Again, he's a New York Times bestselling
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author. He's worked with companies like Home Depot, Staples. He worked with the Dave Ramsey
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team. He's been featured on CNN, Fox News, other major media outlets. This guy is intelligent.
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He's funny. And he's here to drop some serious knowledge on the art, science, and skill of
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finishing what you start. John, what's going on, man? Thanks for joining me on the show
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today. Yeah, thanks for having me, Ryan. We were talking before we hit record. I've read
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four now of your, how many books have you written? Five, six? Six. Six. Okay. So I've read
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four of the six books. I got to get the other ones as well. Well, one's a gift book. So it was
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just kind of a funny little, I mean, it's definitely six because you should always count
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the stuff you do. But like one of them was definitely just a gift book. So that you haven't
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read that does not hurt my feelings at all. All right. So I get a pass on that one. So
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What was really interesting about the book that you just wrote, Finish, is you talked
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about you addressing the wrong ghost a couple of years ago when you had written the book
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Start. And you almost alluded to the fact that you should have started with this one as
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opposed to that one. Can you walk me through that thought process?
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Yeah. Part of what Finish, this new book, talks about a lot is the myths we have about goals.
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And then it says, well, let's put some research around that. Is it true? And one of the myths
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is that the start is the most important part. So we have motivational statements like, well,
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begun is half done or the hardest part of any journey is the first step. But the reality is that's just
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not true. If a surgeon told you, after I make the first incision, I'm half done, you'd think,
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no, you're not. The first step is not the hardest. The middle is way harder. And so what happened was
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I wrote this book about getting people to start and it went fine and people liked it. And I think
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it helped people. But a lot of readers came up and would say, hey, no offense, but I've never had
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a problem starting. I can start a million things. I've never actually finished. How do you finish?
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And as I started to look at my own life and other people's lives, I realized I have a lot of half
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read books. I have exercise gear in my garage. There's a lot of people right now listening that
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have a treadmill that they now use to hang clothes on to dry in the garage. And so I realized
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starting is super, super easy. It's fun, but it's super easy. I mean, how easy is it for your
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listeners to register a URL and go, I'm going to have this new website? Yeah. But that's all they do
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with it. And so the goal of this book was to address that big question of, okay, I started,
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but how do I actually take something to completion? I've heard, and maybe even seen
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studies where it actually talks about psychology and how the mind almost has the same reward system
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when you start something as when you finish it. Have you looked into that or is that true to your
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knowledge? It's interesting. I mean, it's like the dopamine is less, but it kind of does trick you in
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the sense like Derek Seavers, this author talks about this. If you tell people your goals the wrong way,
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they give you pre-congratulations and you don't do it. So for instance, if you tell a friend,
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you tell your buddy, I'm going to run a marathon. They go, good for you. I could never do that.
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You're so disciplined. What an athlete. And dopamine gets into your system and it's enough
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to make you not do it. So what you're supposed to do is say to a buddy, hey, I need you to hold
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me accountable to running three times a week for the next eight weeks while I train. And they go,
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got it. And so, yeah, the way your brain works does say, okay, right out at the start, you'll get
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some dopamine. We'll give you some of it. I don't know that it's the same exact amount. I mean, it's
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the science is kind of hard on that, but you definitely, I mean, we've all started something
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and been hot about it. Like that's, that's dopamine going, yay, the start, you know?
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And I imagine too, this probably leads to some of the mediocrity that we see when somebody says,
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for example, you're going to run a marathon. They say you're disciplined.
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And you're not really disciplined yet. You haven't proven yourself to be disciplined. Let's
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figure it out if you can, if you can actually stay the course for the next three months or
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whatever it is you're going to take to get ready. We haven't done anything. I mean, all you've said
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is a sentence. You might not have even registered, purchased shoes, talked to a trainer, joined a
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running club, like got a GPS watch. Like you haven't done anything. All you've done is expressed
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the desire. So in moments like that, the idea of saying like, wow, that's amazing what you
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did. You haven't done anything. And that's what's fascinating.
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Well, I think this leads into the conversation that you have about consistent activity and why
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it's so important because you're right. I mean, I have books, I have weightlifting equipment,
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I have hobbies and fly fishing stuff and you name it, I've got it. And I've never really done much
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past the first couple of days. Tell us why consistency is so important and how to even maintain
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some of that. Well, I mean, I think consistency is important, but it actually hurts you when it
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becomes perfection. There are people that go, we tend to judge ourselves on all or nothing,
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like it's going to be perfect or I'm not going to do it at all. And so like people will say,
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well, why do perfectionists have messy cars? Because if it can't be like toothbrush clean,
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they won't even remove old food. And so I think the temptation is to kind of land on perfection
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versus like consistency, which says, okay, it's a little bit at a time. It's not overaggressive.
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The goal is the right size. It's manageable for the day. I can do it. It stretches me.
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And then it becomes, you know, like so many people talk about, you get the power of habit
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behind you versus just relying on willpower. I know this is true in a previous life and I still
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own my financial planning firm, but I can't tell you how often I heard people say,
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I don't really want to start investing right now because I can't invest as much as I would like to.
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And to me, it's like saying, I don't really want to go into the gym until I lose weight.
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Well, yeah, it doesn't, the idea of like, I want to invest so much that I won't even start.
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That doesn't make any sense. I have a friend and she has a violin and she said,
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I don't want to practice the violin because what if I'm bad? And you kind of go, well,
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it's self-fulfilling. Like if you don't practice, you will be bad. The only way to get better is to be
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okay with bad and keep working. So the psychology of it's pretty fascinating.
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And I think the bottom line in the premise of the book is really to overcome this idea of
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perfection. How do you start to develop the tolerance to do that?
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Well, I mean, the first chapter is the day after perfect. For this book, the research process,
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the people we worked with, the day that most people quit was day two. And if you ask somebody,
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when do people quit their goals? They say day 15, day 20, when the going gets tough. And the reality is
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most people quit on day two because that's when the work starts. In our head, we think,
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okay, if I divided a group, if I divided a project into three groupings, it would be
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30 days. It'd be starting would be day one through 10, middle would be 11 through 20,
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finishing would be 21 through 30. It's really like the start is day one, the middle is day two through
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29 and the finish is day 30. And so the minute we feel that motivation dip a little or the emotion
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of it and we go, oh, I'm just not as excited as I was yesterday. I just, I'm not going to do it.
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Like we end up quitting really, really quickly and giving into perfectionism right out of the gate.
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I'm sure we're going to get into the rest of the conversation as to why that is. But at the end of
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the day, is it just some sort of underestimation about what it'll actually take to accomplish the goal
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that you've just set? I mean, I think that's part of it. One of the lessons in the book is
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why you should cut your goals in size. And that's definitely because people oversize their goals,
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but it can also be that you're afraid of success and that you're great at the first 90% of a goal,
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but you, you sink your own ship as it comes into Harbor and you can't, the thought of success
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terrifies you. And so it really, I mean, there's, there's probably a hundred reasons people will mess up,
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but it does involve that or involves you've picked something you hate doing. Like I have so
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many people that will say, I'm going to get in shape and I'll go, how? And they say, I'm going
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to run. And I'll go, do you like running? And they go, no, I hate it. That's how I know it's good for
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me. Like we, as a culture believe for something to be good for us, it has to be miserable. And that's
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just not what the research says. That's interesting. I hear you talk about afraid of success and I hear
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that. And I think other people hear that and like, come on, that's not real. Like why would anybody be
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afraid of success? It's almost counterintuitive. Help me explain that or understand that a little
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bit better. Oh, it's 100% counterintuitive. So for instance, I, one of the ladies in the book
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that I tell her story, she spent six years getting a degree and then failed the last final on purpose.
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So she wouldn't graduate because she was afraid of what's next. Think about a football player.
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You've been in the NFL forever and you're, you're about to be 28 and out of the league. And since six,
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that was your whole thing, the idea of what's next is overwhelming or the idea of it won't be
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perfect. So I'm afraid to see what happens. But a lot of people, and then like factor in money,
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you're a financial advisor. Like you ran into people that were very ashamed of money that had a lot of
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money rules or money lies, they believe. So a friend the other day at a dinner party said,
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I can't believe that CEO makes $20 million a year. How do you think he sleeps at night? And I wanted to
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say probably on Hungarian goose feathers, probably, but in his mind, there was a certain amount of
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money that was good. And then too much was bad. So if you've got, you know, or if you had parents,
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like maybe you had parents that always said the phrase, that must be nice. Like when a neighbor
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went on vacation, they go, must be nice to be able to take vacation all the time, must be nice.
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And you've got this sense of, if I take a vacation, I don't deserve it. I haven't worked hard
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enough. Oh, that that's a fear of success. And a lot of people carry their version of that.
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Interesting. You know, I imagine too, and I've seen this because I spent some time in the military.
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And this is just one example where a soldier might define himself as a soldier. And then when he leaves,
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whether he's retired or voluntary or involuntary, leaves the service, he has a very difficult time
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transitioning to something else because he has defined himself one way for so long. Do you run across
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that? Oh yeah. I mean, I have, I have a friend who works with Navy SEALs and that's the same.
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You know, you talk about having a peak experience and then being done with that peak experience.
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So in that sense, think about it this way. If I know that finishing something means I no longer
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get to do it, I'll drag it out as long as I can. Or if it doesn't even have to be a fear of success,
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it can be a fear of completion. So if I write a book and I work on it, work on it, work on it, work on it,
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as long as I don't finish it, it'll never be criticized. It's just in my computer. It's just
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at my house. The minute I finish it and put it on Amazon, strangers can now judge it. So maybe it's
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not a fear of success. Maybe it's just a fear of visibility. And it's easier to say, okay, I've got
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an amazing book in my head or my computer. But once I share with the world, then the expectation has
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changed. I mean, I know public speakers that will say, I want to surprise people not be known as good.
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So I'm afraid to get a good reputation and do well because then they expect it. And then their
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expectation is high. I'd much rather only do it a couple times a year, really surprise people when
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I get there and then disappear. This is kind of like the phrase over promise, under deliver, right?
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Exactly. But if you pull that, I mean, you pull that phrase out long enough, like you end up in a
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place where you're, it feels like in gym class in college, when you took weightlifting in college,
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they would always say, don't lift a lot of weight at the beginning. Cause at the end of the semester,
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you'll be judged for your grade on how much more you've improved. So like everybody would sandbag at
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the beginning. So like you come up with just this random assortment of hacks and broken rules and
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ways that people live. And every team I talked to at every company has an employee that they go,
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tons of potential, most amazing employee we had couldn't get out of their own way.
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Like just before they would win the big client or the big, whatever they would mess it all up.
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And part of that, I mean, just from a, from an emotional standpoint, maybe you don't believe
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you deserve good things. And so the idea of something good happening feels really wrong to
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you. So like if we were robots, you and I could say in order to be men, do these seven things and
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you'll be fine. Like we know the things it's like, why is anyone in the world out of shape? If we know
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the things, you know, it's how do you get in shape? Eat less, move more done. But like we can't handle
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that. So it applies to goals too. Yeah. It's really funny that you talk about this. I had just
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the other day, a guy tell me that overly giving out your respect to other people devalues the level
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of respect you give to some. So you shouldn't share it so freely because it lessens the quality of the
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value that you give really strange stuff. Yeah. But see, if we were more self-aware,
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we could deal with those rules easier and identify them to each other and say, that's
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a crazy person statement. I mean, one of the stories I tell in the book is my friend, top
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executive, huge, huge executive. He got a job going between LA and New York, bought fancy
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luggage. It was uncomfortable. The strap hurt his arm. And he sees a lady wheeling a bag through
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the airport. And he says to himself, when did I start believing wheels don't count? So his
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rule was, it only counts if it's a heavy luggage and you got to look like a professional.
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And she looked very professional. She just happened to find the easiest way to do something.
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And he realized that's a dumb rule. Like I'm not going to live my life by wheels don't count.
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Like this sucks. And that's what I think some people fall into.
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Yeah. This is the section you talk about in the book, which really resonated with me. And that's
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the secret rules that we create, right? Which I think is synonymous with limiting beliefs or is
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it different? Oh, totally. I think it very, I think like everybody has their own version of that
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concept. Mine was, you know, the cuckoos that are in your nest, so to speak. But yeah,
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I've heard different people call it limiting beliefs, um, secret rules. Yeah. I think
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psychologists have their own phrases for it. I think there's a lot of people that talk about
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that concept. I hate cuckoo birds, by the way, after reading your book. I know, right? They're
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the worst. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. Okay. So you're talking about secret rules and I think the first
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step is to really identify or understand that you're probably telling yourself some lies, but
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how do you begin to do that? Well, I mean, it's not a, like there's some things you read in a book
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and you do it right then, but there's other books you read, like the war of art. Like if you read
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the war of art and Steven Pressfield talks about resistance, then that sticks with you. And a week
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later you're driving your car and you hit a moment where you go, Oh, wait a second. That thing would
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really applies to this part of my life. I think it's the same with secret rules. Um, I think it
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takes time, but I also think it takes friendship. It takes, you know, relationship where sometimes you're
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so close to your own lies, you can't see them. And you need to talk them out with friends and say,
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Hey, here's this thing. I believe is it like the guy who told you the respect thing. If it was from
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a different perspective, if he had said to you, Hey Ryan, here's how I think about respect. Do you
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agree? Like you wouldn't have judged him or shamed him, but you might've gone, dude, I don't know if
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that's true. Like I don't, here's, here's how I see that. That might, you know, you might want to look
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at it this way. Or if, if somebody told me, okay, I've got to have my company this size and we need
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this to happen. I can say to them, well, why does it have to be that size? And if they go, well,
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my grandfather always said big companies are better. I might go, well, is he still alive?
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And they go, no. And I think, so you're trying to meet his standard and he's not even like,
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he'll never know. Like that's a weird rule to plan a budget by. Nobody at your company knows your
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grandfather's ghost is on the board. Weird. Interesting. You know? And so I think a lot of
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it is, I mean, one of the, my favorite secret rules in the book, a woman told me that she lied
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to herself and said that being in shape and fit is immodest, like, and being fat is, is humble.
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And so the joke I do there is like, yeah, cause that's like, no one's ever seen ranch dressing and
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been like, Oh, the humility, humility is ranch. But like, that was a thing. And maybe, you know,
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for all we know, her mom one day saw somebody in a bikini, like in a two piece bathing suit and made
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a snide comment to her. And then that little girl said, okay, that's the rule. Like if I get in
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shape, I'm going to be, you know, immodest. So I have to stay out of shape. That's, that makes no
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sense, but that's why they're, they're secret rules. They're crazy. In a way, it just sounds like
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facing the reality for what it, what it is and giving it a name. I've talked with the guys before I
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spent some time in Iraq and it would have been laughable if we pretended the enemy didn't exist.
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And yet I think we do this every day and we hear terms like ignorance is bliss, which is actually
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kind of funny because that is a secret rule itself. Oh yeah. Yeah. Well that's, I mean,
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but there's people that take that to the extreme of like not getting tested for something. Like if I
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don't get this test, I won't know if I'm sick and you're like, but then you'll be sick. It's not a
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solution. And so I think we do a lot of the, that's why for me, a lot of goal setting books fail
00:20:09.580
because they act like you're a robot and they take, they don't take into account all this emotional
00:20:15.920
like tangle that people, you know, fall into. Well, and you even talk about this because you
00:20:22.480
talk about and highlight the shortcomings of the acronym SMART goals, right? And why, yeah,
00:20:29.180
they're robotic, they're boring. And frankly, they just don't work because you're dealing with human
00:20:33.140
beings, not robots. A lot of people in Western culture, we think it has to be miserable to
00:20:38.200
count. And so what we studied with that particular section was, does fun matter? You know, companies,
00:20:45.260
you'll hear companies go, we're not Google. We don't have a water slide in our office. We do serious
00:20:48.960
work. And so I was curious, does fun matter? And when you study goals, you measure two things,
00:20:53.900
satisfaction and performance. Satisfaction, how you felt, performance, how you did. Now,
00:20:58.420
if I raise one and not the other, I've failed you. If I raise your satisfaction,
00:21:01.620
but your performance drops, you're smiling all the way to last place. If I raise your performance,
00:21:06.540
but your satisfaction drops, you're every rich, miserable person we've ever met. You're every
00:21:11.780
successful, unhappy person. So you have to raise both. So we said to the people that almost 900
00:21:17.560
participants, we want you to be really deliberate about making what you do fun. And people that did
00:21:24.160
were 31% more satisfied, but the biggest number, they were 43% more successful. So it's fun for me.
00:21:31.080
And I worked with a researcher from a local university is I can say to individuals, companies,
00:21:35.780
teams, whatever, fine, fine, fine. I know fun feels silly, but you'll be 43% more successful.
00:21:42.440
And the big principle here is it's not have fun. It's make it fun. And have fun is I only do things
00:21:49.000
that are passionate and lollipops. And like, that's garbage. Make it fun admits some of the stuff you do
00:21:55.000
is going to be boring and dry and dull. You have to figure out a way as a leader to make it more
00:22:02.800
I'm glad you made that distinction because there's a philosophy, I guess, for lack of a better term,
00:22:08.460
that one I actually adhere and subscribe to. And that is that doing challenging things and doing
00:22:13.180
difficult things mentally, physically, emotionally, intellectually is actually a good thing for you.
00:22:18.760
But there are strategies you can use to enjoy even the most difficult circumstances.
00:22:24.300
Oh, yeah. I mean, and there's there's study after study talks about that. You know,
00:22:28.140
misery for misery's sake is dumb, something that stretches you that you find joy in. I mean,
00:22:33.080
like, I love throwing the frisbee in my front yard. It's very different the time I joined an ultimate
00:22:38.100
frisbee league. And the first day I threw up like, but it was still like, ultimate frisbee was still
00:22:44.280
really fun. And I remember driving away covered in mud, exhausted, but still feeling like, wow,
00:22:49.020
I had fun and I really stretched myself. Like, I really went beyond what I thought I could do.
00:22:53.600
And so, yeah, I don't I'm 100 percent into challenges, stretching, pushing yourself beyond
00:23:00.620
what you think your current limitations are. But at the same time, I'm not I don't accept that it has
00:23:06.260
to be like difficult doesn't mean miserable. Difficult can be difficult and like unbelievably fun
00:23:13.620
at the same time. And this goes to one of the questions that really stood out. And that question
00:23:18.100
was, what's my real goal? Because I think a lot of the times we latch ourselves onto this misery and
00:23:23.080
how we're supposed to be miserable. And even guests on the podcast have come on. And I'm sure guys have
00:23:27.100
listened to it and said, oh, I've got to do that because fill in the blank. And yet that's probably
00:23:32.280
doesn't have anything to do with their ultimate objective, what they've identified or failed to
00:23:37.080
identify for themselves. Yeah. I mean, look at the numbers. So statistically speaking,
00:23:41.320
depending on the source you take, 81 to 90 percent of Americans want to write a book.
00:23:46.540
So that means 267 million to 290 million people want to write a book. Only 1 million do every year.
00:23:53.760
So you go, where are those other quarter billion books? And part of it might be they don't really
00:23:59.000
want to write a book. They want to express themselves creatively. And if they recognize that was the real
00:24:04.020
goal, they'd have more freedom to go, I can do art or I could lead a PTA meeting with a creative
00:24:10.100
speech or I could, there's a million ways I can meet that goal. But if they're so narrowly focused
00:24:14.700
on the only thing that counts, that's another phrase. Like you see people, the only thing that
00:24:19.500
counts is for me to write a book and maybe they're not writers and they've got this such a narrow
00:24:25.060
definition that it's really holding them back. Almost in a way, this, this cliche we hear of,
00:24:29.520
you know, grinding, grinding it out. That sounds like a miserable term and a miserable process to me.
00:24:34.340
That's why I joke about smart. I think smart goals have a value, but the words specific,
00:24:38.980
measurable, achievable, realistic, and time bound aren't even distant cousins of fun. Like
00:24:43.280
you would never say that, you know, it was really fun about my vacation. It was time bound. I knew
00:24:47.500
when it was going to end. Like, so I, you know, I'm constantly looking for ways to say, okay, I have
00:24:53.260
to do this difficult thing. How do I make it a game or how do I, you know, the big thing that the book
00:24:58.320
talks about, one of them is that there's two ways people are motivated, fear or reward from a health
00:25:03.340
perspective. Let's take that. You walk into a doctor's office and if you're motivated by reward,
00:25:07.820
the doctor needs to say to you, if you lose weight, you'll be able to go on all the water
00:25:12.020
slides this summer with your son. Or if you lose weight, you'll be able to hike Cinque
00:25:16.060
Terra in Italy with your wife. If you're fear motivated, the doctor needs to say, if you don't
00:25:21.180
lose weight, you won't walk your daughter down the aisle. If you don't lose weight, you're going
00:25:25.260
to develop diabetes. Now your job, part of your job as a leader is to decide, okay, personally,
00:25:32.080
which one am I motivated by? And then if I'm leading people, what are they motivated by? Every leader's
00:25:37.420
had an employee that was motivated by reward and they try fear and it doesn't work. So they say
00:25:43.180
to the employee, if you don't get your act together, you're going to lose your job. It just goes right
00:25:47.680
over the head. Where if they had said, hey, we've got a bonus or we've got this money. I mean, that's
00:25:52.240
what's happening right now with a lot of millennials. 45% of millennials care more about workplace
00:25:56.340
flexibility than they do salary. So when a boomer company tries to say, you can't work from home,
00:26:01.800
but we'll raise your money. They don't even hear that. They'd much rather hear, you can work your own
00:26:05.900
hours. We're results focused and you can be away from your desk four days a week. Like
00:26:10.340
that's their value. And when you get that twisted, good things don't happen.
00:26:16.640
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Now let's get back to my conversation with John. So is one of these better than the other? Is it
00:29:23.480
better to be reward motivated or fear motivated? Or is it just like you talk about in the book with
00:29:28.080
judo that you just use whatever you use to create a system that's going to work most effectively for
00:29:33.940
you? Yeah, I think it's the latter. My big thing is you're going to be motivated for different things
00:29:41.680
in different ways. So for instance, I prepare speeches as a public speaker harder because I
00:29:47.000
don't want to bomb. Like I'm fear motivated in that I love applause. I love people laughing like
00:29:52.120
that's awesome. But my real motivation is I never want to have an hour long speech and be done 10
00:29:57.500
minutes in with no more content. Like that terrifies me. So like I and they call that it's
00:30:02.840
approach or avoidance. So approach is a reward. If I do this thing, I'll approach this good thing.
00:30:07.460
Like avoidance is if I do my work, I'll avoid this bad situation. Now on the flip side, I'm going to
00:30:12.800
read, you know, 156 books this year, probably like three books a week. And part of what I enjoy is
00:30:18.140
posting them on Instagram and interacting with people. Like that's a fun reward, like where people
00:30:22.520
go, Hey, here's another book or way to go. Like, and it doesn't have to be massive. It's not monetary.
00:30:27.580
So part of your job is to say with this particular goal, and here's an example, because people hear fear
00:30:34.100
and they get it twisted. You might be like motivated by just sending out a weekly report
00:30:40.240
to your team. Like maybe you're motivated by not having them go, what's going on with that account?
00:30:45.320
We never hear from Mike. And so you, you'd rather not have difficult conversations in the break room.
00:30:50.260
So you say every Friday, I'm going to send out a report and that's you avoiding a bad situation.
00:30:55.560
Now, is it massive? Of course not. It doesn't have to all be like, I get fired. I get sick if I don't do
00:31:00.640
this. But I think part of the step is saying for this particular goal, is it going to be a reward
00:31:06.940
that gets me across the line? Or is it going to be a fear like avoiding a bad situation? And is the
00:31:13.080
situation close enough that I can be impacted by it? I mean, you can say all you want to a 15 year
00:31:18.860
old, Hey, don't post crazy things online because someday a job is going to pull that up and they're
00:31:24.560
going to ask questions that like that's 15 years away. It's not close enough for me to care.
00:31:29.100
Now you might say, Hey, 25% of college admissions officers search social media before they take
00:31:36.400
your application. That's going to be you. And you go, Oh, well that's a lot closer. Like
00:31:40.720
if I'm 15, college is closer than work. So it's really dependent on the situation.
00:31:45.560
So you're not judging whatever your motivation is or saying I should be motivated by this or I
00:31:49.420
should be motivated by that. You're just using what is to your advantage.
00:31:52.480
Yeah, exactly. Like I would never say to myself, I wish I cared more about rewards for this one thing.
00:31:57.740
Like that just becomes a secret rule again. And if you chase your goal with somebody else's value
00:32:03.100
system, it never works. So if you've got a friend that's like, I'm going to lose weight because I
00:32:07.360
can't wait to fit into these jeans and that's not your thing. Then that will never like the, the,
00:32:12.820
you know, I kind of look at it this way. I, I joke in the book, it took me three years to do six
00:32:17.460
days of P90X. So you could say, well, you're a bad athlete. Or you could say, wow, you must be
00:32:25.040
community driven. Like you must like to work out with a group of people, with a trainer,
00:32:29.780
with loud music in a place you drove to on purpose. That's how I'm wired. So I wouldn't,
00:32:34.860
Ryan, if you said to me, well, since you don't do P90X and I do, you're not a good athlete. I would,
00:32:39.960
I would say, well, that's not true. We're wired differently. And our ability to plug into that
00:32:44.040
is part of what makes goals easier. Yeah. Makes sense. Well, I want to shift gears here because
00:32:48.440
there's a couple of points that I really wanted to address as I knew I was going to be talking with
00:32:51.420
you. And the one term that really stood out in my mind that, that I absolutely love is
00:32:55.520
strategic incompetence. Walk me through what you mean when you talk about strategic incompetence.
00:33:00.800
Yeah, it was interesting. There was a, like, there was a line about it in this book I read called
00:33:04.900
two awesome hours by this guy, Josh Davis. Um, and I've heard other people talk about it. Jim Collins
00:33:10.420
has mentioned it before, but it's basically being willing to admit ahead of time. I'm not going to be
00:33:16.420
good at this thing I do so I could focus on other things. So one of the examples I use is when I had
00:33:22.380
two kids under the age of three, I didn't care about my yard. Like my yard wasn't in good shape.
00:33:27.520
It was barely ever cut. It wasn't, and I had a ton of weeds and you go, well, why? And it's because I
00:33:32.980
knew the kids were difficult in that season. Like it's different now where I have a, you know,
00:33:38.460
11 year old and a 14 year old almost. And, and that's a different, you know, kind of plan. Most of us
00:33:43.640
though, we try to add a new goal to our life without removing something else. Like one of
00:33:48.960
my favorite examples in the book, a woman said, when I'm busy at work, my kids know clothes get
00:33:54.060
clean, but they don't get folded and put away and dinner gets served, but it's simple. It's hot dogs,
00:33:58.800
it's pizza rolls, whatever. The idea is you get to choose strategy or shame. Strategy says ahead of
00:34:04.360
time, I'm not going to worry about these 10 things. Shame says I can do it all. And then when I mess up the
00:34:09.580
10 things, I feel like a failure and I quit. I'd much rather you go, I'm not even going to try to
00:34:15.500
do these five things. Like while I'm training for this marathon, I know like I'm not going to have
00:34:19.620
a ton of time for friends. Like, and I'm not going to feel ashamed about that. I'm not going to be
00:34:23.780
bothered by that. I'm just going to, you know, it's a season. I'm going to push through it. So
00:34:27.540
that's kind of the choice is strategy or shame. And I think along the lines of shame, there's this
00:34:32.660
personal shame where you feel guilty to yourself because you may have made a promise to yourself
00:34:36.580
that you're no longer keeping. But I think there's this other factor, which makes it really
00:34:39.980
hard. And that is societal norms or even expectations to behave or act a certain way.
00:34:46.360
Oh yeah. Well, I mean, I think that like moms definitely have that. They always joke about
00:34:50.720
the phrase mom guilt. I think dads have that, you know, I had a story in the book about a dad who
00:34:56.140
had to take on a weekend job in addition to his other job. So he had to work four hours on a Saturday
00:35:01.580
and he'd come home and his neighbor would be out in his front yard playing football with his own
00:35:06.380
kids. And he'd feel like, Oh, look at that good dad. I'm such a terrible dad. And that wasn't the
00:35:11.120
case at all. It wasn't that he was spending four hours drinking somewhere. He was doing an extra job
00:35:15.220
to pay for his family. And that was, it wasn't going to be forever, but it was definitely for
00:35:20.020
now. And that was okay. But there is that expectation of, I should just be able to do it
00:35:24.780
forever, like, and do all of it. And I just don't think that's true.
00:35:28.800
Well, let's look at the other side of this, because in that scenario, that example of the father,
00:35:32.440
he could be using that as what you termed a noble obstacle, right? I'm going to do this.
00:35:37.580
This is noble. I'm providing for my family. So I don't have to do X, Y, Z.
00:35:41.800
Oh yeah. I mean, you talk about a sneaky kind of secret rule, the idea of like blaming your kids
00:35:48.660
for being busy. So like I would do all these great things, but my kids, I'm just trying to serve them.
00:35:54.520
And so, yeah, a noble obstacle is something, you know, an example I use in the book is my friend whose
00:36:00.120
wife said, Hey, I would really love you to clean the garage. And he was like, why don't we have a
00:36:03.860
yard sale and a garage sale? And cause on the surface, wow, now he's going to make money and
00:36:08.980
he'll do what she asked, but she knows, no, he won't. He won't do any of it because he just added
00:36:12.940
30 steps to what was a simple process of throwing stuff away. And so we do the same, you know, it'd be
00:36:19.360
like saying, okay, I'm going to plan 12 date nights with my wife. And you go, well, what if like,
00:36:26.100
what if you did one? Like, what if you just did one and actually went on it? And you're like,
00:36:30.640
no, no, no, no, no. I mean, people do that. Like people do that with goals, what they do with goals
00:36:35.960
and people tell me this all the time. They go, I got 10 goals. So I'm going to prioritize them.
00:36:40.080
You want to not do anything, try to prioritize goals because you end up with this list and then
00:36:45.400
you're like judging them and just, I'd rather you spend that time and go here are five I care about.
00:36:50.320
We'll do the first one and then I'll move down the list and that'll be great.
00:36:52.840
It's the same thing with like a noble obstacle for writers is I can't write my book until the
00:36:58.360
outline is amazing. And I, when you say that to me, I know you'll never write a book because
00:37:03.360
you're hoping that the outline will be so perfect. The book writes itself and you'll never actually
00:37:08.900
write because you'll be working on the outline. It's a great, I mean, that's, what's great about
00:37:12.300
a noble obstacle is it looks like progress. Like Netflix is not a noble obstacle. Nobody's like,
00:37:18.320
Oh, I watched so much TV and people like, Oh, it's so brave of you.
00:37:21.300
You're like, you're so courageous. You're so courageous and creative. Like they go,
00:37:25.420
wow, you're lazy. But a noble obstacle is really deceptive because on the surface it looks like
00:37:31.320
you're doing something. This is almost like the opposite of paralysis by analysis where it's
00:37:35.760
paralysis because you're doing stuff that doesn't matter. Not just sitting there twiddling your
00:37:40.080
thumbs. That doesn't help or doesn't move it forward. And if you were honest, you would say,
00:37:44.740
yeah, I don't need to do this thing for this other thing to happen. I mean, it's like,
00:37:49.100
you know, there's been great books like start with why about figuring out your why to do
00:37:53.500
something. But what we'll do is we'll say until I know my why I can't do anything. So like I would
00:37:59.940
love to get my money in order, but until I know the heart of my business, I can't focus on my
00:38:04.960
finances. And you go, well, that's not, that's not what that book's about at all. You don't have
00:38:09.400
to have a perfect why to do the right thing. You know, you don't have to have a perfect why to get
00:38:14.040
some of this stuff, but you figuring out your purpose, like you're saying, you know what,
00:38:19.600
I just got to get, you know, I'm not feeling creative enough or I'm not, again, it looks
00:38:24.080
very noble. Like, wow, you're really taking the time to dedicate to this. And really you're just
00:38:28.220
hiding in a fancier way. Yeah. I know this is certain. I've, I mean, we've all fallen prey to
00:38:33.420
this, right? Where we've made up a thousand excuses as to why we can't have anything. And at the end of
00:38:38.200
the day, I mean, my, my mantra, one of the mantras that I try to live by is just start
00:38:42.360
and figure it out along the way. Cause you can, and you can adapt. We're not talking about,
00:38:46.360
uh, you know, solving world hunger or a life and death situation. We're just talking about
00:38:51.420
starting a business or cleaning the garage. Exactly. Something that you can,
00:38:55.880
and it's going to change along the way. That's the other reality. Like you're going, you know,
00:39:00.340
where you end up won't be where you start. So get over it. John, there's so much more that I could
00:39:05.940
talk with you about. And of course I took a lot of notes here, but for the sake of time,
00:39:09.520
um, we're going to wind down here today and I would encourage anybody to just buy the book
00:39:13.880
and read it. It's a quick read. It's an effective read. There's not a lot of fluff in here
00:39:17.780
and it's a very practical guide to helping you complete what you actually started out to
00:39:22.640
complete. So with that, John, let me ask you a couple of questions as we wind down. The first one
00:39:27.340
is what does it mean to be a man? Um, I think it means to be fully there. That's a big part of it
00:39:34.360
is to not be passive and to be fully engaged with your life. Um, in a way where it's not
00:39:40.840
life isn't happening to you. You're happening to life. Yeah. I love it. I love it, man. Well,
00:39:47.320
how do we connect with you? How do we learn more about what you're doing and buy the book?
00:39:51.780
Well, if you go to timetofinish.com, you can see the, I think we've got it where you can get the
00:39:56.760
first chapter free. You can figure stuff out there. Acuff.me has everything I do. Once a week,
00:40:03.040
I share an idea about writing or speaking or business. And so you can sign up for all that
00:40:07.480
or just on Twitter. But yeah, Acuff.me or Time to Finish are kind of the best places.
00:40:12.100
Right on. We'll, uh, we'll link all of that up in the show notes so the guys can check it out.
00:40:15.760
I told you this before, but I want the guys to know too is man, you've been so impactful in my life.
00:40:21.260
Uh, the first book of yours that I read was called Quitter. My wife got me that as I was struggling in
00:40:25.820
the financial planning field. It took a little longer than I had anticipated, but that book and the
00:40:30.540
thoughts inside of that book literally altered the course of my life for the better. So
00:40:34.460
with that and the other books that you've written, man, you've been really impactful in my life and
00:40:38.100
I appreciate you for doing that. Oh, thanks, man. It's been fun and I'm still figuring it out just
00:40:42.320
like you and all your listeners. Right on. Let's get some more things finished, man. Awesome. Thanks,
00:40:46.120
buddy. There it is. Gentlemen, my conversation with the one and only Mr. John Acuff. I hope that you
00:40:53.040
enjoyed this show, but more importantly, more importantly, I hope that this has given you some tools to get
00:40:58.120
more done in your life because that's the objective. We want to get more done. Uh, you can check out the
00:41:02.600
show notes. You can pick up your copy of his newest book. Finish. Give yourself the gift of done at
00:41:07.460
order of man.com slash one three zero and make sure that while you're there, you take a look at our
00:41:13.640
exclusive brotherhood. I mentioned to you earlier, again, you're plugging into a framework that I've
00:41:18.100
spent nearly a decade harnessing and fine tuning and experimenting with. In other words, I've gone through
00:41:24.260
all the crap so you don't have to. So if you're interested in learning what we're about claiming
00:41:28.640
your seat in the brotherhood, you can do that at order of man.com slash iron council guys. I will
00:41:34.100
look forward to talking with you on Friday for our Friday field notes, but until then take action and
00:41:38.620
become the man you are meant to be. Thank you for listening to the order of man podcast. You're ready
00:41:44.740
to take charge of your life and be more of the man you were meant to be. We invite you to join the