0 (2s):
Lights that spark Fire Nation, JLD here. And we're going to have an amazing conversation today about how Thursday is the new Friday to drop these volleyballs. I brought Joe Sanok on the mic. He is the author of Thursday is the New Friday. How a four-day week boost productivity and creativity. He's a mental health counselor, keynote speaker and podcaster. And today foundation. We'll talk about why our understanding of time is wrong. We'll talk about how most entrepreneurs get the weekends and hustle all wrong as well. And what happens in your brain when we actually work less interesting food for thought and so much more. When we get back from thanking our sponsors, according to a survey over two thirds of Americans are planning to travel in the upcoming months.

0 (45s):
This means that airlines restaurants and more have been ramping up their hiring, who do they turn to zip recruiter, ZipRecruiter technology finds qualified candidates for your job, and you can easily invite your top choices to apply. And right now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com/fire. Fire Nation is time to stop trading time for money and start reaching more clients and making a bigger impact. And you can do just that with online courses, try Thinkific for free today at Thinkific.com/EOF. That's Thinkific.com/EOF. Joe say, what's up the Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful.

0 (1m 27s):
That most people disagree with

1 (1m 30s):
Fire Nation what's up. JLD, I'm so excited to be here. You know, I think most people really buy into that hustle mentality and think that the more that they work and the more they hustle and the more they grind that that's going to lead to success. And I would actually argue that our very best work is when our brains are optimized and we've rested first. And then we go in and we kill it.

0 (1m 52s):
I'm all about this. I mean, we actually had a little pre-interview chat about our morning wellness routines that I was talking about how one of my now involves three minutes in my cold plunge tub, which is quite the shock to the system for obvious reasons. But it's key fire. Nation's sleeping well, getting up, getting outdoors for a nice walk. That's why I love having a dog, my little, my little gussy poo here, and then jumping into my sauna and then doing the cold plunge. And then something that I know you do as well, Joe, because you were mentioning this before the interview was meditating and journaling. So what does that exactly look like for you? The meditation and the journaling side of things in the morning?

1 (2m 32s):
Yeah, so I do Sam, Harris's waking up meditation. He has a daily meditation. That's 20 minutes that just for me, it's perfectly aligned. He's such an analytical thinker that has turned really meditative. And so that aligns with me. I'll then journal. Just thoughts to just get them out. And these aren't business thoughts, it's it's life and personal and just any of the junk and baggage in my brain. Then I'll read for a little bit, I'll have a cup of green tea during that time. Then I'll usually move into listening to a playlist. That's a little more active that I've put together. I'll do a three-minute plank. I'll do some pushups and do some crunches and then usually go for a 45 minute walk or so, and then come back and by then my daughters are awake and we're ready to rock it out.

0 (3m 12s):
Wow. I mean, Fire Nation, fill your own cup up first before you then looking to go out and fill up the cup of your audience, whoever it is you're looking to inspire that day. I mean, that's just a great way to look at life and to look at things. And as I mentioned in the introduction, Thursday is the new Friday. We're going to be talking about this a little bit because according to Joe, our understanding of time is flat out wrong. Now, Joe, I gotta be honest. I think I'm in this category where my understanding of time is wrong as well. So I'm in the majority here. Can you please let us know why are we misunderstanding this?

1 (3m 51s):
Yeah, this was actually something I discovered as I was researching the book. So I had already done the book proposal. Here's what I want to talk about. And then I'm like, I'm talking about the four day workweek and why that's better. I should probably understand really macro, where did we even get the concept of time? And actually we have to go back thousands of years to the Babylonians. And the Babylonians believed that there were only seven celestial beings that really mattered. And so like the sun, the moon, the earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and mercury, what they could really see. So they said we should have a seven day week. So in nature months kind of go because of the moon years. Cause we go around the sun, but the seven day week is actually completely random. There's nothing in nature that points to a seven day week.

1 (4m 30s):
In fact, the Egyptians had an eight day week. The Romans had a 10 day week, even as early as the 1940s, the Russians were on a different calendar than we were on. And they had added extra days and we had to realign that kind of globally. And so this idea of we were starting with the seven day week that we made up then fast forward to the 18 hundreds. The average person was working 10 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week. And so that's going on, there's all this, this push we may have heard of Mayday Mayday. The reason that we celebrate well, we don't really even celebrate it anymore. But in Chicago there was this gigantic push against that work schedule. And there were, there were riots and there was bombs and the whole nation went on this like nationwide lockdown because of the people rising up that were rebuilding Chicago.

1 (5m 16s):
After the fire saying we can't work like this anymore. So then in 1926 on Mayday, Henry Ford switches to the 40 hour work week, this is huge, but he did it for selfish reasons. It was so that his workers could buy his own cars and then have time to recreate. If they're working all the time, they don't need a car. So he's like I can sell a bunch of cars to all my employees and then, you know, double my profits. So it's totally selfish. The industrialists view people at that time as part of a machine, they think through people as a machine and the 40 hour workweek is that machine. So we're less than a hundred years into this thing that feels so grounded to us. Like the 40 hour work week is just what you do.

1 (5m 56s):
And we saw a shift really, when you start to look at the research that came out and the way that people are looking at, how people understand Fridays in the eighties and nineties. And I mean, I don't know about you, but I remember TGF with full house goal and all that. And Friday was just like this day of release and my dad would put the blues brothers on and we would dance. And it's Friday, it's the weekend. But Fridays started to disappear from actually being productive days. It's when we host birthday parties or we have that meeting that it's the visioning meeting, cause it's Friday who cares really? We're going to just waste time and have tough games. So Friday is this like half lived work date anyway, and there's all this emerging research around how a four day week just explodes productivity, explodes, creativity.

1 (6m 38s):
And then when you limit the amount of time you give your staff or yourself that you're actually able to do even better work. And so kind of the bottom line is the industrialists to me, they were a huge step in evolution for business going from 16 hour days, 14 hour days, six days a week, like who wouldn't want to change to a 40 hour workweek from that, that worked for that time and for that place. But we're less than a hundred years into this and that experiment no longer works.

0 (7m 5s):
Our understanding of time is just wrong. I mean, when Joe broke that down, I'm just like, man, this just makes all the sense. I mean the Romans had a 10 day week. I mean, think about this. I mean, this is really interesting stuff and it's good when we think outside of the box, it's good when we pop our own assumptions, especially when those assumptions are based in a lot of weird places. And I want to talk about in clinicians, Joe, let's talk about what inclinations make people successful.

1 (7m 36s):
Yeah. So I've studied over 500 business leaders. We have over 500 episodes on our podcasts, nothing close to what you've got jailed, but through that and through just doing tons of research, there's three major internal inclinations that successful people have. And so in the book I have an assessment that you can do to first figure out, is this a naturally occurring inclination or does it need some development? We all have areas where we need to grow. We need to expand that. Maybe don't come naturally. And so those three inclinations are first curiosity. I'm so successful. People are thinking through problems in a curious way. They're not thinking pass-fail, they're not thinking, oh my gosh, I didn't do this. I'm such a loser. Like my, my ad campaign didn't work.

1 (8m 17s):
They see what that gives me data. That's really interesting what I just noticed there. So they have curiosity at the forefront. Second, they have an outsider approach. There's tons of research. And one of the studies that I really was interested in was how the minority influence is greater. We're not talking ethnic minority. We're not, we're talking about a group of thinkers having more influence over a group than statistically they should have. So there was this one study where they brought people into a room and they showed them different colors that were either blue or green and they had different shades. And they would say that's blue, that's green, blue screen. In one part of the study, you always have kind of AB testing one group. It was just all regular people. The second group had one or two people in there that they were in there, particularly to say that green is actually blue and to kind of push back on that.

1 (9m 3s):
And they found that statistically, when there was a minority in there that outsider saying, Hey, we should switch this to think differently. This, this blue, I'm going to say that's green, that they had more influence than statistically they should have. And so we see that successful people actually take that outsider approach and put themselves in situations to expand their outsider approach. And then third, the third internal inclination is the ability to move on it. I mean, we've all heard paralyzed by perfection. The finished is better than perfect. Those sorts of things, but successful leaders really push into that. Even beyond where they move on it before they're ready, they figure out that minimum viable product. And there's a lot of research as to the nuances of that. Beyond what we often talk about

0 (9m 44s):
Three inclinations, Fire Nation, number one, curiosity, you gotta be curious, like, what are you curious about? Are you following your curiosity? Number two, the outsider approach for all the reasons that Joe broke down and then number three, the ability to move on it. I like to say, take action. Perfectionism is your biggest enemy. Taking action is your best friends. Now we have a lot of things. When we talk about Fire Nation, when we get back, we'll be talking about how entrepreneurs get both the weekends and hustle all kinds of wrong. We're gonna be talking about what actually happens inside of our brains when we work less, not more when we work less and again, this is all going to happen.

0 (10m 26s):
When we get back from thanking our sponsors, one of the number one challenges, entrepreneurs face is figuring out how to scale. You don't want to trade your time for money because eventually you run out of time. And when you master your time working one-to-one with clients, what do you do here at entrepreneurs on fire? We've been using Thinkific since 2017 to solve this challenge by delivering knowledge to thousands of entrepreneurs around the world. With online courses, as a result, we've seen a huge lift in revenue without needing to trade time for money, but don't just take our word for it. Sarah Cordiner, CEO of main training was also max out, delivering work for her clients. Her options were that she could hire more people, raise prices or introduce online courses to her business.

0 (11m 8s):
With Thinkific. She has educated over 9,000 students in 131 countries and has increased her profit margin 100% from previous years. All that without trading her precious time is time to take your business to the next level by creating an online course on Thinkific. Visit Thinkific.com/EOF. That's Thinkific.com/EOF. According to Forbes, gyms, nail salons, hotels, and mom and pop stores. And more are set to go on an epic hiring spree in the coming months to meet the pent up demand for the services. And all of these businesses reopening means that millions of jobs will need to be filled. So where do these businesses turn to fill these roles fast ZipRecruiter.

0 (11m 50s):
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0 (12m 31s):
Joe we're back. And I want to talk about entrepreneurs getting both the weekends and hustle wrong break down both of these.

1 (12m 41s):
Yeah. So the university of Illinois looked at something that is called vigilance decrement, vigilance, meaning how well we pay attention to something, how our brain stays focused and detriment, meaning breaking down over time. So there is a naturally occurring phenomenon when you're on a task too long, you have vigilance decrement. It goes down. So they wanted to see how long of a break. Someone actually needs to reset the brain. And so they brought these students in and they were on these computers and it was a 50 minute session or so, and it was a super boring task. They would give them these four numbers. So say it was 3, 2, 1 5, every time 3, 2, 1 5 comes up on the screen. You got to click this button anytime any other number comes up, don't worry about it.

1 (13m 22s):
Just don't do anything. So for almost an hour, these students are sitting there. Well, we saw vigilance decrement in that study over time, people paid attention less. So then what they did is with the second group at a third of the way through, they interrupted the task and they said, you know what? We put you on the wrong computer, or we just need to give you a quick break. They gave them a one minute break, one minute break. They came back and then they did the task again. And then at the two-thirds mark again, gave them a one minute break. What they saw as there was no vigilance decrement when they did that. And so study after study has continued to prove that, you know, when we look at Parkinson's law, that work expands to the time given to it, that when we give ourselves breaks, that when, instead of hustling all week until we just feel dead and then we're recovering on the weekend.

1 (14m 6s):
If we flip that and start with, let's slow down a little bit and then do our best work after that, that's really what, where we see the biggest success. I have this event called slowdown school in the summer where entrepreneurs fly into Northern Michigan. We hang out on the beaches and go hike. And obviously this is outside of COVID. And for two days we genuinely slow down and to see what people do on that third day, when we just sprint towards their goals. I mean, there've been people that in 20 minutes figured out their business name, launched the business, bought the URL and outlined their main core offering. There've been people that in 20 minutes have wrote down all seven chapters of their book, outlined it and something that seven months worth of time, they haven't been able to achieve.

1 (14m 48s):
And so when we flip it and we slow down first, and then we move into actually killing it, that's where we see we're actually using the brain's natural flow in a way that we typically just don't do

0 (14m 59s):
Slow down school, Fire Nation. Who's raising their hand right now, who wants to go to slowdown school? Because for me, that sounds pretty delightful. And I will say it's one of those things too, where when I give myself more space, more breath, just more relaxation. And that's why when Joe and I were talking earlier about meditation, about journaling, about just writing things down on, not always business stuff, just writing things down, getting it out of your head, clearing up all that junk. That's always swirling, swirling around in that brain of ours. And just think about that topic we talked about first, how long do you need Fire Nation to reset your brain? And are you ever, ever giving yourself time to reset to refocus?

0 (15m 41s):
Are you doing that for yourself now? What does specifically happened, Joe? When we work less to our brain?

1 (15m 48s):
Yeah. So when we look at our brain, a lot of what's happening is that fight flight or freeze. And so that's the deepest part of our brain. We might even think of it as kind of the snake part of our brain that first developed that all animals have. And when you're living in that space, your brain doesn't know the difference between, you know, a tiger in the woods, or like I was chased by a wild rhinoceros in Nepal. Like my brain doesn't know the difference between that and looking at the news like we are the first first-generation that has 24 access to news, just bombarding us. Our brains have not evolved to even understand the difference between me being chased by a rhino in the middle of Nepal and looking at news that freaks me out.

1 (16m 29s):
And so the same thing happens when we're just stressed out at work and we're pushing ourselves. And so our best work, our best flow, the best connections within the brain are when different parts of the brain can speak to one another in a way that's different than when we're stressed out. And so there's obviously the myth of multitasking. There's all these other ways in the brain. And we can talk about, I think sprint types would be helpful to talk about different types of sprinting that people get to after they slow down. But the bottom line is that we don't allow ourselves to get out of that, to then allow our brains to rest. And so when the, when the brain continues to be in that spot where it's fight flight or freeze, or even just kind of the next level up before we get to the prefrontal cortex, which is the last part of the brain to develop our pre-fund frontal cortex, doesn't fully develop to where age 26.

1 (17m 15s):
So the decisions we make around what substances we put in our body, the way that we analyze things up to age 26 can really impact it. That's where we make all of our decision-making. We can't really get to that decision making and that understanding and being able to think outside of ourselves, unless we get out of that reptilian brain, that's just deep inside of us. Well, let's talk

0 (17m 35s):
About those sprint types. Break them down for

1 (17m 37s):
Us. Yeah, absolutely. So there's, there's kind of two axes, you know, you think of the X Y axis. So there's one side where there's a particular string sprint type and then kind of up and down there's one and people typically fall more on one side or other. And so on one side we have time blocking people and on the other, we have tasks switching. So what does that mean? So our time black person, we also might think of batching. There's a bunch of research around if you take the time to do one task for a period of time and you give yourself interruptions, like we talked about with the vigilant sacrament, but that you have one task you're doing that. You're focusing on at a time, lots of people are in that category, but a lot of people will feel guilty. They'll hear these business books and say, you got a batch, you got to do this.

1 (18m 18s):
And they'll say that doesn't align with me. That doesn't feel right. And that's what I think is a little different about this book is it's more a menu to say here's what the research supports. There's a lot of core things that we all should be thinking, but then there's also ways that we implement it that are unique to each person. And this is one of those where the tasks, which people, there are people that they can say, okay, I'm going to batch things today, but I need to have variety, variety of something that I really value in my work. And so I want to record a YouTube video, or I'm going to spend 20 minutes brainstorming a YouTube video, and then I'm going to spend 20 minutes brainstorming a blog post. And then I'm going to spend 20 minutes setting up all of my recordings. And then I'm going to go have a healthy green smoothie. And then I'm going to go back to the YouTube video.

1 (18m 59s):
And there's a lot of tasks switching within it. And so being able to discover if you're more on that, on that side, where you have to time block it, or if you need to be more on the side of tasks, which that's really important to determine. And then on the other axis we have, how do we do that? And so we have people that are more on the automated side and people that are more on the intensive side. And so an automated person, what they're going to be is they're going to be the type of person who needs to put something in their calendar on a regular basis. So that could be the first Thursday of the month. You realize that you are a time black person, and that's just going to repeat in your calendar. So like how you do interviews, you definitely in regards to how you do interviews. Cause I know you do them back to back. You just kill it.

1 (19m 39s):
That's an example of time blocking. So you have one task you're doing, you get in that zone and it's scheduled on a specific day of the month. And so that's the automated side. So for other people, they may say I'm a task switch person. I can only do two interviews and then I need to do something else and I'm going to have some variety there. So there's the automated side. But then the other side of that is the intensive side. So there's a lot of people that they need to go on a retreat. They need to take four days away. They need to do it several days in a row. Maybe they get an Airbnb. There's this guy Dr. Jeremy Sharp, who has, he has a testing psychologist podcast. So a few times a year he leaves his town. He drives a couple of states away. He gets an Airbnb. He has all these great specifications that I put in the book of, it has to be walkable to everywhere.

1 (20m 22s):
He eats. It has to have a backyard. It has to have certain things for him. And he goes there and for three or four days, he is intensely working on his business. And so for some people like that, they need that retreat. They need to go to a hotel room. They need to go get an Airbnb by the water. And so when we start to discover our sprint type, we then can really say, okay, I've already slowed down. I've done all those skills from the second part of the book of how we slow down and optimize the brain. Now I'm to kill it. I want to make sure I do it in a way that my brain actually aligns with. Instead of just feeling guilty that I'm not like JLD or Joe salmon,

0 (20m 55s):
No, that guy, self Fire Nation. Where do you thrive? Like ask yourself that question and it may be you having to test a few different things. Like, do I want a block? Do I want to really be creative and be doing a variety of different things throughout my day? I mean, you need to know thyself. And once you see where you thrive, you focus on that. Now, Joe Thursday is the new Friday. This is your book that's coming out. And it's all about how he Ford day, week boost productivity and creativity. Why should fire an issue? Read this book?

1 (21m 28s):
When we really think about how we approach business, the posture that we take, the way that we analyze it more often than not it's reactionary. You know, someone calls us and says, I want to work with you. How much should I pay you? You don't have a set plan. You maybe don't even have an evaluation process of whether you should even work with that person or if that time works for you. And so understanding your hard boundaries of the things that you always will do. So I will never take a consulting client that says they want to work on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday. That's just never, I'm never doing that. But then there's soft boundaries of things that I may do sometimes where I may kind of have some wiggle room. So when we think about Thursday's the new Friday, do we want to define the life we want to live?

1 (22m 8s):
Does it feel like it's in line with the way that we approach it, that slowing down and hearing that before we go kill it? Like, does that resonate with you? And if you're hearing this and saying, oh my gosh, like, this is what I want. I have business books that tell me how to kill it. And I have other books that tell me to just rest, but nothing. That's really integrated those two together into one cohesive process. If that sounds good, Thursday's the new Friday. That's going to really walk you through that blueprint, give you practical case studies and show you how to take those next

0 (22m 35s):
Brother. You have broken down a lot of interesting concepts, a lot of new concepts, a lot of head scratching concepts in a good way. Cause it's good. When we scratch our heads Fire Nation, what is it that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from everything that we talked about here today? Give us a final call to action about how we can obviously learn more with your book. And then we'll say goodbye,

1 (22m 56s):
Doing work in the pacing that you need in your life produces more joy, more happiness, more impact on the world and being able to do that. Being able to genuinely enter into the business world and have it be good for your clients, good for the people you help good for your community, but then most importantly good for you. That's so important. And we all have stories of when we realized life is too short, whether it's the death of a loved one, you know, the breakdown of a marriage that you know, something happening with our kids and it's cliche sometimes to say, but it's so true that doing work that we love is so important. And so I would just encourage any of you to just start to move towards that.

1 (23m 39s):
Thursday's the new Friday we made up time. We can change it. We can shift it, you know, post COVID, we're all evaluating how we do work and what we do. And what's important. And to me, when we grasp onto that, we're going to be unstoppable. So if, if people want to connect with Thursday's the new Friday, they can just go to Thursday is the new friday.com. JLD I know you and I talked about how we're going to be giving away 10 books to your audience for free. And we're coordinating with your team on that. And so you're just going to use the hashtag Thursday's the new Friday when JLD posts that on his social media, and then you'll have access to those 10 free books that we're going to be giving away to your audience,

0 (24m 18s):
Fire Nation. This is important stuff you need to be questioning the things that haven't been questioned for a while. You need to be saying, what are the things that I maybe have just been assuming for? Who knows how long and who knows why that now, you know, maybe I can break down those barriers and see things in a whole new light, because you're the average Fire Nation of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with JS and JLD today. So keep up that heat and you want to head over to EOFire.com type Joe in the search bar and his, this page will pop up with everything that we've been talking about here today. Best show notes in the biz links to everything. And Joe, I want to say thank you brother, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today, for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.

0 (25m 7s):
Hey, Fire Nation today's value bombs are brought to you by Joe Sanok and Fire Nation. Want to make you aware of the idea to store contests by.store domains is live. You have the chance to win cash prizes of up to $30,000 for sharing your online store ideas. Learn more at www.ideato.store that's www.ideto.store. According to a survey over two thirds of Americans are planning to travel in the upcoming months. This means that airlines restaurants and more have been ramping up their hiring, who do they turn to ZipRecruiter?

0 (25m 49s):
ZipRecruiter technology finds qualified candidates for your job, and you can easily invite your top choices to apply. And right now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com/fire. Fire Nation is time to stop trading time for money and start reaching more clients and making a bigger impact. And you can do just that with online courses, try Thinkific for free today at Thinkific.com/EOF. That's Thinkific.com/EOF.