Noise Is the Problem

This is the Daily Boost Podcast with Scott Smith. Hey, hang on. I'm just drinking a cup of coffee there. I know. I know. I should have had the sip of coffee before I hit go, right?

But why do that? So noise is a problem in your life, isn't it? It's just a yes. Is it the problem in your life? I'll explain it. We'll talk about it today, and you'll see, and we'll build on what we talked about yesterday as well in this Daily Boost podcast today.

Good to have you here. Thanks for stopping by today. It's me, Scott, heading to Death Valley. It's kind of cool. I was so excited to go. I actually am excited to go to support my buddy Croy as he runs across the desert and almost kills himself.

We're hoping he won't, but if he does, we'll bring him home. That's all. He's not going to die. We'll catch him way before that happens, okay? But I was so excited because Death Valley is kind of a death zone.

I mean, it's kind of off the grid, really off the grid. There's like no cell signals out there or anything and not a lot of Wi-Fi. It's really, you're kind of on your own. And I was thinking, I'm going to be sitting in a car helping Croy and I'm going to have nothing to scroll on my phone.

It can't be on the internet. Oh no, what am I going to do? And then I realized that my iPhone has satellite text messaging and it's free. I thought, okay, well, good.

I can now, darn it, I can actually get texts. I was so excited about being off the grid. I'll turn my phone off now, I guess. And I thought, well, I can't even get on my computer.

And then I realized one of the guys that's going with us is bringing a Starlink along. He's going to be in the car that I'm in. So I'm going to have an internet connection with me.

I'm having a problem with this right now. But I can handle it. I'll let you know how this turns out next week, okay? So noise in your life. Everybody thinks they have, these days, a motivational problem.

And I know that because you'll see all kinds of ads on the internet these days. You don't have a motivational problem. You have a discipline or an execution problem. Probably that too, yes.

But all of us have a motivation problem. We do. But we shouldn't. And the reason we shouldn't is because it's built into us. The secret trait that's inside of you, science has proven this, you were born with motivation.

It's just there. That's why a baby gets born and says, let me latch on, as they say. Oh, they're just hungry. Hunger is not motivation? Come on, man. So just get over it.

Everybody's born with motivation. Yes, you need execution of discipline. That's cool. That's how things get done. But almost, man, for the most part, people don't have this motivational problem.

For the most part, what we have in this society we live in today is a noise problem. Way too many inputs. Way too many options. Way too many opinions.

Way too many, as they say, open tabs. That's such a 1990s reference, isn't it? I wrote that down. I thought, what did I write that down for? Maybe I had a lot of tabs on my computer.

Crazy stuff. But with AI and everything else these days, and then with people like me giving you opinions and giving you my opinion and kind of ranting about a few things, a point of view, if you will, I hope you just take what's here and maybe you can sort some things out. But we have way too many things going on. We can't get away from it.

It's like me going to Death Valley trying to escape it. You just can't do it anymore. I missed the day of rabbit ears on three channels. Yeah, I was there.

Don't remember too much of it. I've often said more is on the other side of less. Have you heard me say that before? If you haven't heard that word before, that sentence before, that phrase before, listen.

More is on the other side of less. Every single big move that you have ever started to make started with an elimination, not an addition. Now, that's a new concept to a lot of people.

They want more. They think they add more into their life. That's not true. You have to eliminate something. It's subtractive, something you hear me talk about all the time.

Got to do less to get more. And speed does not come from pushing harder. Some people think, rookies think, I just go faster. I'll outwork everybody. That never wins.

Not in the long haul. I've seen many people do that for a long while. A lot of people outwork people for a very long time, but at the end of the day, they eventually will wear out. They'll either get smart and get very efficient about how they go fast, or they'll just wear themselves out.

But what happens is speed actually comes from removing what's in the way. Think about this. There's so many things going on. Me preparing for my trip this week,

A massive distraction because there's so many things I had to get ready to go. And all I was really trying to do was get everything out of the way. Because once I did, I could go fast again. But at least four or five days, I was kind of slow.

Amazon was slow. Equipment was wrong. Everything was not working. Frustrating, right? The speed doesn't come from pushing harder. It comes from removing what's in the way.

A race car. I was watching F1 on Apple the other day, I think. It was a Brad Pitt movie. Formula One movie. The race car doesn't go fast on the engine alone.

It's fast because they stripped kind of everything out that doesn't make it go. That's it. They get milliseconds on the track by doing that. Look at everything that you've added this year in your life and thinking of as progress.

Let's think about that for a second. Because I'm taking a trip here. I added a bunch of camera gear. I don't know why I added a bunch of camera gear. Yeah, I do know why.

Because I like playing with camera gear. I hired two really good professional cameramen with really, really expensive equipment. They are there to shoot the pretty stuff. But Scott had to go build this camera rig to take along to play.

My wife said, what are you doing? I said, it's kind of fun to build this rig. I had a good time. It helped that my other camera broke and I had to buy a new one.

I had to. The app. The course, whatever you did this week, the second planner you did. I don't know. How's that working for you? Think about it, really.

We've been, what, seven months into the year now? Think about everything you've gone through. And is it still working? Have you added things in and you're still kind of drifting along?

The hardest thing anyone does is, as you use Benjamin Hardy's term, is raise the floor. But you can't raise the floor while you're kind of carrying the whole garage on your back. You can't do it.

That's why I say it. It's subtractive. Everything is subtractive. Most of you all are listening to all the noise that's going around you, all the opinions.

You're going to AI and you're talking around in circles. Have you figured out yet that it's just going to agree with you and give you compliments and tell you what you want to hear?

Have you figured out yet that after a couple of glasses of wine at two o'clock in the morning, when you think you're talking to your therapist, you're actually talking to a computer, which is just, it's got its own agenda.

It's adding more to your life. Have you figured out that when you get an AI and do that, that it creates a chat thread? There's more words than you would ever write if you wrote a couple of books and you did it without even thinking in the middle of the night, thinking it was going to help you go back to sleep and solve your problems.

Tell you, my coaching business is going good now. You know why it's going good? Because you all spend too much time on chat to EPT. You thought it could answer.

And you figure out, no, I better talk to Scott. He'll have the answer. Any human would have a better answer than chat. Can't just raise the floor, guys, if you keep everything on your back.

Subtraction is scary, by the way. Why is subtraction scary? Think about it for a second. It's scary because it feels like you're losing it. It feels like loss, doesn't it?

Also, when you subtract, you have to do something else. You got to kind of simplify what you're doing. When it comes to getting more, getting rid of the noise in your life, you got to get rid of the complexity in your life. I actually spent a fair amount of my time uncomplicating my life.

Because complication builds up just kind of magically. It just happens. Even the gear I just bought. Suddenly, it's new camera, new lighting, new everything.

And suddenly, it's got complicated. I've got to figure it out now. More to remember. More little things to keep up with. It just happens. It's like little rabbits.

It gets multiplying. You can only scale simplicity. It doesn't mean you're not going to have complicated sections of your life. In fact, I won't go so far as to say, if you run a business, it's the complexity, the sophistication of your business that actually makes you valuable.

It's the moat you build. When you become the GOAT, when you can really do something very, very well and you've got a moat around you of complexity, people can't even enter your field.

So yes, it's got a double-edged sword here for sure. But for the most part, you've got to simplify a system. Usually that means get down to one thing that you do and just get really good at a virtue also, if you will. That will scale.

But you do that by subtracting everything around you. By the way, sidebar here. If you've got friends that don't think this way, you've got to subtract them too.

Don't have to get rid of them out of your life, but you've got to let them stop influencing you because they're going to do things. If they want to party all weekend long and you're like, man, but I need to write my book or work on something else, those friends need to hang out with each other and not with you.

So the first rule that you have to follow here if you're going to do this and get this noise out of your life is the delete first rule. Before you add anything in your life, ask what you're willing to remove to make room.

If the answer is nothing, you probably don't want it badly enough. And this is something people don't want to hear. And I ask this all the time to my clients. Great.

We're going to do this. Going to take some extra hours in the week. What are you going to get rid of? What do you mean? I can't get rid of anything. Yeah, you do.

You got to get rid of stuff. You don't have time. You just don't have time. I cannot tell you how many 90 or 100 hour weeks I have seen people put on their calendar saying, I can do it.

Yeah, you do it for a week or two. Not for long. Quiet is the answer, guys. It's sitting there right in front of you the whole time. If you want to get rid of the noise in your life, subtract.

That's how you do it. All right. Tomorrow, the loving cage. You're going to love that.