Bit by Bit

Welcome to one of the simplest and most powerful lessons of Time Control - the amazing power of just five little minutes. Five minutes a day can absolutely change your destiny!

Five minutes a day sounds likes so little time, yet it can bring you success in endeavors you think impossible. It can improve you're your health; it can spark your relationships; it can exponentially grow your business; and it can launch your career.

Simply put - five minutes a day can materialize your Clarity. It's like pouring gasoline on the spark of your goals.

Impossible, you say?

Remember the lesson of Compounding Success from last month. Improve any area of your life by just half a percent five days a week and you can expect to see exponential growth in that area - at least 300% in one year, 1,000% in two years and 10,000% in four years!

In most cases that half a percent improvement takes less than five minutes a day!

If five minutes a day is so simple, why doesn't everyone reap its powerful rewards? The answer is easy - human behavior. Sometimes the easiest things are the hardest to put into action because of our established habits and self-imposed limitations.

My goal in this module is to shatter your paradigm of what five minutes a day can bring you, help you establish the areas where you want to apply its benefits, and give you the tools to create the discipline to use it at least five days a week.

I want to put the incredible power of five minutes in perspective for you. The paradigm I'm trying to get you to shift is that you cannot do much in just five minutes. But applied over time, five minutes a day can have a drastic impact in what you can accomplish and learn.

When I'm teaching this topic before an extended audience I always ask a series of questions that help lead people to their own conclusions about what five minutes a day can do for them.

I start with a show of hands of those in the audience who would like to speak another language. I then ask for a show of hands of those that now speak a second language and find out what different languages are represented. I'll then pick a few of these people out at random with differing languages and ask them to participate candidly with the following premise:

If I wanted to learn to speak their particular language and had basic direction and instruction (a language primer book, tapes, software, etc.), how much could I learn if I spent only five minutes a day over the next week studying? The answers are always similar. I might learn a few words or phrases for languages with a similar alphabet structure to English (Spanish, French and German for example) or learn a few characters and perhaps a few words for those languages with different alphabets (Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, etc.). The point is I wouldn't progress very far no matter what the language is.

I then pose this question: if I were to continue at this pace, studying just five minutes a day for at least five days a week, how much could I learn over the next year, three years, five, ten or twenty years? The answers vary slightly, but most agree that I would gain a competent if not higher level of proficiency and become more and more comfortable speaking the language through time. I certainly would gain a level high enough to enjoy a foreign trip or improve any foreign business relations.

I posed these questions to language instructors and had similar results. Fluency would be very difficult to master at this pace but competency would definitely not be.

In a similar fashion to how I asked about languages, I develop the same scenario for learning how to play any musical instrument. At five minutes a day over one week, almost everyone that knows how to play an instrument agrees that I would learn just enough to sound quite awful. But something wonderful happens when I ask them to project how I could play if I applied this same tool over the next three to five years or even longer. All agree I could learn to play socially very well. Every musical instructor I've polled agrees - anyone can learn to play for their own enjoyment if they practice a little almost everyday.

What do you think?

If just five minutes a day for five days a week can give you the power to learn a new language or play a musical instrument over time, what else can it change in YOUR life?

Personally, I've applied the power of five minutes to six areas of my life and business. I hope they help you see the power of this great time-accelerating tool and give you ideas of how to apply it to your life.

The most important area I've used this tool is in my family relationships. Everyday (to the best of my human ability - but at least five days a week) I take a few minutes and ask myself what is one small thing I can do or say to my wife and two sons that would grow our relationships even more. Many times the ideas that hit me are very simple - a heartfelt "I love you," a tickle attack, playing my boys' favorite games, or just a pleasant talk. The idea I shoot for is to come up with something small above and beyond normal. This keeps me from taking the most important relationships in my life for granted. Through the years the consistent small bits of love and caring add up to be every bit as important as the large commitments!

Another way my family uses this tool is we keep a simple gratitude journal that takes us just five minutes to complete. Each night my wife, my two boys who are currently five and three years old, and I list at least two things we are grateful for that day. Sometimes the gratitudes are deep and profound and other times they focus on the simple pleasures of life. When we are done, we read over a gratitude listing from the past to remember our constant blessings. This simple act has grown us closer together as a family and has produced volumes of family memories to cherish.

For the last 17 years I've applied this concept of five minutes a day to my studying of human behavior in time. A little everyday, making sure at the very least I studied about time for just five minutes, I've built my concept of Success-Centered Time Management and created my Time Control programs. What could you learn if you studied one area of interest for at least five minutes a day, five days a week, for the next seventeen years? The effort is not difficult at all - being patient in your growth is the true challenge.

I've also applied the power of five minutes to my writing on Time Control. As I write these monthly modules and work on my first book, my bit by bit approach to writing makes these projects much more achievable in my schedule and much less stressful. As you're probably way ahead of me on seeing my pattern, I try to write at least five minutes a day, five days a week. I average about three pages a week at this pace, which has me perfectly on pace for my writing project goals!

Many of us have a great story to tell or wonderful information and knowledge to share with others, but we feel that writing would be too hard and take too much of a commitment in our current lives. Most of us will never get started because of this fear.

I want you to see something very interesting, though. Let's say that you're a slow writer, but you commit to finding five minutes a day for five days a week to work on your writing project. If you manage just a couple of sentences a day and complete just one page over the week, you'll have about 50 pages written in one year. Add a few years together at this incredibly slow pace, and you'll have written an average book length in about five years! If you want to write a book, you have the time! In five years, you'll either be here or you won't. If you want to share something in writing with others, time should never again be a viable excuse.

Some of the greatest action systems to improve to accelerate your time in business are improving your marketing and sales strategies. Using the power of five minutes has helped me grow exponentially in these areas.

Five days a week for only five minutes each day I use a learning system I created called the War Board to grow in both knowledge and application in the vital business area of marketing. Whereas most businesses are fortunate if they have five to ten active marketing systems in place, I have 60 active tools and five more in reserve at the time of this writing. I am constantly adding new tools to test, merging effective tools when possible, and deleting ineffective tools. All of this in only five minutes a day! I can't wait to show you how to use the War Board for your success in any area you'd like to improve a little later in this module!

The final area of my life I want to share with you where I've reaped the tremendous benefits of five minutes a day is in the focusing of my day and the review of my goals. Each morning when I awake, as I'm showering and getting dressed, I power up my day through a series of motivational questions that help me focus on what I'm grateful for, what I'm committed to, what I'm excited about, and what I most want to achieve that day. I then mentally review my most treasured and sought after values to ensure I meet the day's challenges on my terms. This takes all of five minutes and the rewards are unbelievable!

At least five days each week, usually as I'm eating breakfast, I review my short and long-term goals. Guess how long this takes? The powerful blinders this creates to the daily distractions I'll soon face over the next 15 hours keeps me steadily on track to successfully achieve all of my goals. I look forward to teaching you this amazing behavioral-based goal setting method I've created from fusing the best elements of over 20 different goal setting tools I've studied since I was 14 years old. I've achieved every goal I sought after with this method, and I'll share it with you in just two months!

The power of five minutes works for me, but I want to show you it works for others equally well. The best example to share with you is a client who is president of a 750-million-dollar financial management company. His name is Gary Curry, and he's president of ORBA Financial Management Company out of Sacramento, California. The power of five minutes a day is one of the single most important tools he uses to lead his company to success into the 21st Century. It forces him to focus on what is truly important and to take action in these areas at least a little every day. He has been so thrilled with this tool's success in his life that he has chosen to endorse it publicly, as you may have already seen on some of my marketing materials.

The Tool – Bit by Bit

Bit by Bit is what I call it. Why call it Bit by Bit? Do you remember the old joke, "How do you eat an elephant?" with the punch line, "One bite at a time." The same concept applies here. The elephant when it comes to time is the task or goal that seems impossible because of its shear size. Your "one bite at time" weapon is the simple power of consistently applying five minutes a day, five days a week - bit by bit to your eventual success.

Bit by Bit is extremely easy to understand and do:

1) Choose an area of your life you wish to improve or a goal you would like to accomplish. Your Clarity and the plans you developed last month with the Continual Success Improvement Formula are perfect places to start.

2) Now simply apply five concentrated minutes a day at least five days each week to your growth in this area or toward your chosen goal's completion.

That's it! Just make sure the area you choose to improve is in line with your Clarity. Otherwise it's a creative waste of time, which is exactly what you don't need and are looking to eliminate in your life.

Using the Continual Success Improvement Formula in conjunction with Bit by Bit is an awesome combination! Bit by Bit gives you the power to find the half of a percent improvement a day that continual improvement needs for fuel. The testing or "Check / Act" steps of the Continual Success Improvement Formula make sure you maximize your five minute efforts to their fullest potential, accelerating your growth and accomplishments even faster.

How aggressive should you be in adding Bit by Bit to your business and home life?

Use the KISS Principle as your guide - Keep It Short and Simple. Start with just a few areas as you begin to create the habit of applying Bit by Bit at least five days a week. If you overwhelm yourself with too many areas to apply the tool at once, you run a high risk of creating excuses not to act at least five days each week. This could lead to frustration and eventual abandonment of this great time-building tool.

Start simple - a few areas at most in the beginning. As you create the habits to build the discipline you need, you can slowly add more areas to work on if you desire. If at any time you ever feel overwhelmed, pull back and simplify until you're ready to try again.

Always remember - Keep It Short and Simple and you will rarely go wrong.

YOUR FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS:

- Improving your relationship with your spouse or significant other