genas Khan conquered more land in 25 years than the Roman Empire did in 400 but his real weapon wasn't his army it was his ability to think strategically adapt rapidly and make the most of limited resources now what if you could apply the same manal models to your business and life well today I'm going to give you the five mental models that I normally keep exclusively for my high level clients at selfmastery. pl of Doubt around whether they can achieve their goals and gain insane levels of clarity to conquer their goals like genas conquered the Eastern world so to start let's get into the first mental model and this one is how you're going to get massively outsized returns for any level of effort that you put in but to explain it I need to take you back to ancient Greece where King hyro hero I'm not sure how you actually pronounce that of Syracuse summoned a mathematician to the Palace you see the king had a problem an enormous ship the pride of his Navy had been constructed but could not be launched into the sea hundreds of workers had tried to move it but the vessel was too heavy it was stuck firmly on the shore the mathematician listened thoughtfully and then made a ball claim give me the tools I need and I shall move the ship single-handedly the king amused but skeptical allowed him to try so over the next few days he designed a system of pulley ropes and levers when the contraption was ready he invited the king in his court to witness his Damon rtion with a single hand on the Rope the mathematician Archimedes began to pull to everyone's amazement the massive ship slowly glided forward and into the water as if moved by invisible hands the king stunned exclaimed how did you accomplish such a fate with so little effort ared smiled and said give me a place to stand a lever long enough and a fulcrum in which to place it and I shall move the world that is the power of Leverage and when used correctly you get far more out than when you put in a need to make insane rates of progress when everyone else would struggle but how can you use this as a mental model well in short you want to look for things and move the needle more in your business the things you do and get massive outside returns by doing them in terms of either progress made or time saved for example Building Systems in your business is massively High leverage because you build a system once it's a oneof thing other than the iteration or Improvement every few months and you get to use it every damn day and it will save you a ton of time and also ensure you've a consistently high quality of work now another way to gain Leverage is to prioritize the most important tasks in your business so look important tasks are important for a reason they make progress now every business is going to have typically fre to five important tasks that actually run the business that actually matter but there can also be other important tasks in regards to improving certain bottlenecks that will massively amplify The Leverage of those 3 to 5 million tasks and so you want to identify your three to five most important tasks and prioritize them daily and also identify what bottle lacks are holding your business back and prioritize fixing those bottlenecks now as a generality to use leverage as a mental model you want to ask yourself two questions one what systems tools or even people can I leverage to multiply my impact two what tasks can I do today to create the most progress toward my goals number two and this mental model is going to help you to destroy procrastination and actually take action on the things you know you need to take action on and for it to make sense imagine you're standing on the bank of a river perhaps it's the one you used to go to as a child or the one near where you live now well in the river the water flows steadily never pausing and you have a choice you can weigh into the river and use its current to propel you forward or you can stand on the shore watching as it flows past in the end the river doesn't stop for you the river does not care about you it will move regardless of your action or in action but if you decide to get on a damn boat and even paddle with small Strokes you can steer yourself toward where you want to go and really the key to this mental model is realizing that the flow of time is inevitable so do it anyway again how can you use this let me get tactical here well when I say do it anyway what I mean is do the damn work that you know you need to do solve the problems that are staring you in the face chase the goal that is calling you from so deep inside of you the that you cannot ignore it because guess what if there's a task you know you need to do if there's work you're avoiding that you know is important but it's hard you don't really want to do it you'd rather do something else but it's important and you know it well guess what time is going to pass anyway you know this goes for both the macro when you're chasing goals and the micro you know right now it's 10:00 a. m.
in one hours time it's going to be 11:00 a. m. no matter what I do and so I could have I could have skipped recording this like I know recording a video is easy I'm not out mining coal or doing something actually hard right it's easy but it can be draining you have to talk you have to think and you know it takes effort and there's there's other things I would rather do and you likely have a task in front of you right now that is the same but if I had have skipped recording this it would would have been 11:00 a.
m. anyway and the work would still be standing there in front of me and I'd be thinking sake I still have to do this when I could have just done the damn work and it still would have been a. m.
