Hakeem Olajuwon is one of the best defensive NBA players in basketball history.
He did 3,830 blocks throughout his career – the most in NBA history to this day.
That would probably mean his defensive efforts directly prevented somewhere north of 7,000 points against his team(s).
It’s safe to say he was pretty fricken good at rejecting the other team’s agenda.
The reason I mention him today is that when it comes to you achieving your goals, you need to constantly reject other people’s agendas.
When I coach individuals, they say they want to achieve X.
I ask them to show me their calendar for the week.
They either barely use it, or they use it but it’s filled with OPS (aka Other People’s Shit).
How can you expect to get closer to your goals each week if you’re barely allocating any time to achieving them?
Sure, we all have ‘other’ commitments like family, day job potentially, partner, friends etc.
But there’s a bunch of stuff in their that doesn’t add any value to your life.
You HAVE to be ruthless about what I call Calendar Defense.
Every single day of your life you will have people suggesting to do things, whether it be work or personal.
Some of these things will add significant value to your day and life.
Many of them won’t.
A common trend I see in successful people I know is that they are extremely serious about their time and how they spend it.
James Altucher’s book on ‘The Power of No’ is a great example of this.
These days I only say yes to things I think will actually add a bunch of value, and politely decline anything that doesn’t fit that description.
If you don’t respect your time, no one else will.
When I was in corporate I would intentionally dodge meetings where I didn’t think I was needed.
I would often email the meeting organiser prior to check what I was required for and if that I could not attend an email through my input.
It was very effective and as a result I got less meeting invites (haha).
But they ones I was invited to were super useful and productive.
People knew that I would just attend a meeting because I had been invited.
You should be like that in your own life.
It’s amazing how much time you can free up by not automatically saying yes to everything.
In terms of action items on your end – I would review the last 2 weeks of your calendar.
Mark the events/meetings that you could have done without going to.
You’ll likely notice you could have freed up at least 8 hours last week.
That’s an entire extra work day.
Try it out and see how you go.
Ray
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