Insights From the Habits of Michael Hyatt - How to Live Your Life by Design and Be More Productive, Happy, and Fulfilled Than You Thought Possible

Mo Bunnell breaks down the incredible insights of Michael Hyatt and shares how to use them to transform your business development efforts. Find out how to live your life by design by creating a compelling vision of where you want your business to be while eliminating, delegating, or automating tasks along the way.

• One of Michael Hyatt’s greatest strengths is being able to distill complicated things down into simple, easy-to-follow models. Michael said there are three ways you can live your life: drift, driven, and by design.
• There are many reasons why you might end up drifting, but the cumulative effect of drifting has a major impact on your life. You often find yourself unhappy and unsure if you’ve been doing the right thing most of the time. You don’t know if you’ve made progress because you haven't defined where you want to go.
• When it comes to business development, drifting is when you don’t have a plan for how you want to improve your book of business, your relationships, the techniques, or the platform you are using.
• Being driven is when you succeed in one area of your life at the detriment of others. That can take the shape of being hyper competitive and can end up harming yourself, your relationships, and your business with a focus on short-term gains over long-term gains.
• When you are living your life by design, you are following your established vision of what you want your future to look like. Living by design is probably when you are the happiest and most productive.
• There are two major intervals of Mo’s life where living by design transformed everything. He wrote down a brief description of what he wanted things to look like ten years in the future.
• There are four major aspects your vision should include based on the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument that covers the four ways that we think as humans. Your vision requires a theme, specific numbers, your day-to-day life, and what the people around say about your life at that point.
• Mo wrote down his goals and carried his written vision down with him for the first couple of years. The fact of writing it down and keeping it with him allowed him to reach his ten year goal in only eight years.
• The most recent ten year plan includes a spreadsheet and annual benchmarks. After creating the ten year vision Mo broke it down into smaller versions of that for each year on the way. Creating themes for each year makes it easier to implement new ideas at the right time and know exactly what you need to do to get where you want to go.
• Our brains are trained to think in weeks so make weekly the cadence of your progress. The happiest people, and the most productive, are the ones that celebrate incremental progress.
• The Rule of 72 is a shortcut for calculating compound growth rates and an easy way to predict how many years it takes for something to double. If you can get only 1% better every single week, after 72 weeks you will be twice as good as you are now.
• Most experts that have to bring in business, if they have time to invest they will probably spend that time getting better at their craft. But if they spent that time getting better at business development, that’s something the client will notice immediately and will have a bigger impact on their business. Focus on your business development habits and your craft will improve as a result.
• In order to free up time, you need to either automate, eliminate, or delegate most of the activities in your business. This is important because every minute you spend on business development is far more valuable than the average hour spent on delivery.
• Look back on your numbers for the last year and calculate your Grow Big Index; then, use that as your litmus test for what you should be doing now.
• What are some tasks that you can completely eliminate? Use your Grow Big Index to figure out if it’s valuable enough to be worth your time. If not, say no nicely and move on to the next task.
• Work with your team in a way that makes the most of your time while still being helpful to other people.
• Most people think of automation in terms of technology, but it extends beyond software. Think of the questions you get most and create well thought-out templates that address those questions. Extremely valuable and well thought-out templates allow you to give someone hours of value with only a few minutes of time.
• Write down what you do for business development and break it down into separate pieces like lead generation, creating demand, and staying top of mind. Then, consider which parts of that process can be automated. Business development is the project that never ends. It fuels your team’s and organization’s growth and it’s exciting to always improve it.
• The people that Mo has seen improve the most all have the same thing in common. The ones that stick to business development week in and week out, making incremental progress while improving themselves, are the ones who find success.

Mentioned in this Episode:

bdhabits.com

Vision Driven Leader by Michael Hyatt

Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt