Simpleology
Project Ignite Podcast by Derek Gehl Simpleology: Double Your Productivity In 48 Hours Guaranteed - With Mark Joyner
00:00:00 00:00:00
  • Episode  81
  • Mark Joyner

Summary:

Want to learn how to double your productivity in 48 hours guaranteed? Then listen to what serial entrepreneur and best-selling author Mark Joyner has to say. His Simpleology system is used by over 1,000,000 people around the world and the results speak for themselves.

Transcription Episode 81: Simpleology: Double Your Productivity In 48 Hours Guaranteed – With Mark Joyner

Welcome to the Project Ignite podcast, a podcast designed to skip all the hype, skip all the BS, and bring you real, actionable strategies to ignite your success online from real digital entrepreneurs. This is your host, Derek Gehl, and today we’re going to be exploring powerful and practical ways to get more done, be more productive and ultimately more successful in business and just in life in general.

Those two really go hand in hand and the fact is this guys, I know from experience, time is a finite resource. We can’t make more of it, so if I can share something with you or I can introduce you to someone that’s going to show you how to use your time more efficiently, more effectively as an entrepreneur, not only are you going to be more successful, you’re going to be a lot happier.

Today’s guest is someone who’s spent many years developing a methodology and a system to make you more productive in your business. I can tell you for certain that his methodology is based on some serious, substantial personal experience.

He’s one of the earliest pioneers in the world of e-commerce, starting the first online ad tracking company, the second pay-per-click search engine well before Google and he’s authored over a dozen books, four of which are number one bestsellers, been translated in 25 different languages.

He now serves as the founder and CEO of Simpleology which is a really cool web app that doubles your productivity in just 48 hours of use. Without further ado, I’d like to welcome Mark Joyner to the show.

Mark, thank you so much for being here today.

Hey, thanks for having me, Derek. It’s great to be here.

Absolutely. Now, before we get started and I really want to dig into your methodologies on productivity and time management and the whole Simpleology methodology you’ve created, but before we do that, can you expand on my introduction?

You, I think out of the guests I’ve interviewed on the show, you probably have one of the longest histories. I’m thinking back through my guests, up there with names you’d know: Jonathan Mizel and Marlon Sanders and guys that have been around for a while.

You’ve been around for as long as all of them, but give us a Coles Notes version of your path to where you are today with Simpleology. How’d you get started as an entrepreneur and what led you along this path?

Awesome. Great question and by the way, it’s really cool to talk to you about Corey and all those other folks. Back in the early days we were the guys who were doing all that way, way back when, so it’s great to see you still in the game and maybe at some point we can have another discussion about just that.

I think there is a lot of value in that historical context that we can provide for folks now that online marketing is huge.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re not a little niche any more.
Right.
I remember when internet marketing was a niche and now it’s this massive umbrella, right? It’s changed so much, but yeah, we do need to have that conversation. I think there’s some lessons that people could learn from some of our battle scars.

Oh, man, there certainly are and so many lessons. To get back to your question, I started being an entrepreneur when I was very, very young because I didn’t have the opportunity that I saw a lot of folks around me have. I was born into a family that was not well-off at all, which is an understatement, and somehow the switch got flipped in my head that I could pull myself out of that, right?

I don’t know how that happened. I don’t know what kind of good fortune occurred to me, but that switch was flipped.

I thought, “What am I going to do? I’m not going to sit here and allow this situation to control my life. I’m going to make something better of myself.” So I was out there stretching and experiencing different things and at one point I realized that I would never be all that successful with that unless I got some self-discipline.

I went into the military, certainly got a good, stiff dose of discipline there and while I was in the military, I was also starting out with online business. As far back as 1990 I was running little businesses on the bulletin board systems which I think you have enough history to remember that, right?

Wow! Yeah, that’s going back, yeah.

That’s way, way back and this was, the internet was just barely getting started, but that was the more active thing. There were more of us on the bulletin board systems interacting in the way that social media allows us to interact now, right?

Then, I started a bunch of businesses. Some did very, very well. I was very fortunate to experience that timing until I got to a point where, it was just all too much and I had to sell those businesses off or shut them down, just do whatever I could to walk away from that.

I started consulting for people in the background and the thing that really struck me was that when they were writing to me, because of the history that guys like you and Corey and I had, they were asking me for marketing advice.

What I realized was, that they didn’t need marketing advice at all. The problem was not that they’d had bad ideas or a lack of ideas. They had great ideas actually, but they weren’t implementing them.

They were just a complete wreck in terms of how they were running themselves throughout the day. I had to ask myself, what was I doing on those days when I was just really on and what was I doing on those days when I was off?

I started to develop systems for solving that problem and did that individually for folks and then finally I got to a point where I said, “Look, I got to turn this into a system that people can just use because I can’t help people on a one-to-one basis on the scale that I would like to.” That was how the whole thing started out.

You said something interesting there. As you started working with and consulting with these entrepreneurs and you saw the mistakes that they were making and it didn’t have anything to do with strategy, it had to do with how they were running themselves.

Can we dig into what those primary mistakes were and then we’ll shift into how you’ve corrected that with the methodologies?

Yeah, right on. First off, let me say that strategic errors do occur, but I think they are of lesser importance than self-management because I meet people with great ideas, with great vision all the time, that amount to nothing.

What are those mistakes? I would say primarily, the mistake is their lack of focus. If you could boil it down to one single concept, that’s one lens through which it’s very, very useful to look at it.

If you can allow yourself to see one thing that you want to accomplish and allow yourself to move toward that and just navigate through the world where whatever little setbacks, distractions or whatever happens to you, you keep going back to that one thing, you will be way more successful than pretty much anyone else out there. I can say that almost unequivocally.

Now, you can be focused on the wrong thing, but accomplishing that one thing does something to you.

There is something that happens when you achieve even the smallest goal and it programs the mind. We go through all of this talk about, “Hey, you can use self-hypnosis, affirmations, all these things to program the unconscious.” I think it’s an extremely important concept, but nothing compares to actual real-world experience in changing your identity and changing your belief patterns.

Simpleology review

What we like to do is, we like to set people up on a pathway of getting that constant feedback of success after success after success until they become just this unassailable, almost invincible person who understands, “Look, little setbacks don’t matter to me actually. I know what I can do. I know what I’m capable of and I know what it’s going to take to be successful and that’s, to remain focused, to remain on my path.”

That’s really interesting, so it’s creating a habit through actual achievement and letting them feel that. There is an actual chemical reaction that’s happening there, so one of things that I’ve read and I’m sure you’ve come across this in your research and studies and experiences, even just creating a list and being able to check stuff off as accomplish it, releases dopamine into the brain. What’s your take on that?

Here’s one of the challenges I see with this is, people get into a habit of, yeah, they create things that they can easily accomplish, but they’re not the right thing. They still get that reward, that dopamine kick of satisfaction, but they’re not actually accomplishing what they want.

Right. It’s a super good observation and that dopamine reward I think, is one of the interesting mechanisms we can observe here and the way most people use their to-do list sets up an anti-reward.

What happens is, we put take out the trash and solve world peace on the same list and we’re looking at that big, long list and when we don’t accomplish those incorrectly sized or inappropriate things that are on the list, we start to self-shame. Now, I’m not sure what the neurotransmitter mechanism is for that. Is there an anti-dopamine? I’m not sure about that.

It’s called Vodka.
Whatever it is, that’s what we feel. You know that sense, right, when you look at that list at the end of the day and we didn’t accomplish it? We shame ourselves and then we start to doubt ourselves and then we have less confidence and then we crawl into this little hole and we start to get into escapism, I think.
Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s dig into the Simpleology methodology then because I want to really understand how you’ve approached this to make people more effective so there’s so many different productivity systems out there. Let’s call it that, but what is Simpleology or how is Simpleology different? Give us a brief Simpleology review.

Awesome. The primary thing with answering the question what is Simpleology is that there are three tools that we get people to master. Now, we have a Simpleology training system that forces people to master these things in a very, very scientifically designed incremental approach.

While there are many, many refinements and tools inside the Simpleology app itself that we can teach people, we know that if we dump them off inside of it and allow them to use it at will, they’re going to get minimal benefit.

Behind this is a philosophy that we call HIME: High Impact Minimal Effort. What that means is, that among the universe of possible actions you can take, you are going to tend to make better decisions if you filter those possibilities through this lens of HIME.

We actually allow people to score this stuff with Simpleology. You give it an impact score and an E score and then you multiply those numbers together and the one that has the higher Simpleology score tends to be the right thing to do.

On that note, Simpleology applies the HIME philosophy not only to how we help people make their own day-to-day decisions, but to how we structure the training of the Simpleology program as well and what we identified was, that there were 3 primary tools that will give people the most benefit.

This is why we can say the very bold claim of, “Within the first 48 hours you will double your productivity.” In fact, I would challenge people to use Simpleology faithfully and not experience that, right?

Right.

Those three Simpleology tools allow people to unload the stuff that’s in their mind.

That’s the first thing. Simpleology has a tool called the dream catcher and it’s based on this notion that the human brain is a bit like a personal computer. You have RAM, if you will in your mind and we can observe this scientifically. We know that there is a working memory upper limit in the brain and when we have too many things on our mind, you have to shut those things down, otherwise your mental performance is going to slow down.

It’s like having too many windows open on your computer. When you have too many windows open, what happens to the computer? It starts to get sluggish and then it shuts down.

That’s what happens with our brain. Simpleology trains people when thoughts, ideas and to-dos come to mind, they drop them in this tool called the dream catcher and it sends a single to this brain, “Hey, I can unload this from conscious memory because I know I’m going to process that later on.”

That’s the first part of Simpleology and it’s one of the things that makes this unique because most productivity platforms out there exist in this vacuum and they don’t actually interact with how you are managing your brain on a day-to-day basis, on a moment-to-moment basis.

We’ve got all these tools such as Basecamps and stuff like that and it relies on us to go in there and know what to put in and to organize it accordingly. Let’s walk through a Simpleology scenario here.

Let’s pretend I am a new Simpleology client and I’m selling widgets. I’ve got a widget website, selling widgets online and I sign up for Simpleology. I need to start. I’ve got all these big visions, goals and dreams of things that I want to achieve and so the very first place I’m going to start in Simpleology is where?

Great question. What we like to tell people is, that there are only 2 things you will ever have to remember about Simpleology. You can forget everything you and I talk about today. We can geek out about the science. I love that kind of discussion. It’s great, but folks are not going to remember most of it, right?
Yeah, exactly.

If I can get them to remember these 2 things about Simpleology, I know we’re going to be good to go and those 2 things are really simple. All you have to do is, log into Simpleology and click on this button very prominently labelled “do today’s training” and what that is going to do is, it’s going to take you through an experiential training course that ingrains habits in you through the process of actually using the software.

This training is not like a video that you watch and then that’s it. It guides you through the use of these 3 foundational habits that we were talking about. Now, in terms of a guy who has a particular goal, what we’re going to do is, we’re going to have him identify that stuff.

Then, on a daily basis guide him to make sure that he’s taking actions toward that and that he’s not veering off and that he’s choosing the actions that are going to have the most impact, that are easiest for him to perform on a day-to-day basis and get him to consistently do that on a habitual level.

How does this compare then, against multiple different goal setting systems?

If I look at, let’s take Verne Harnish, Gazelles and he works a lot of high performance stuff. He wrote the book, The Rockefeller Habit. What he teaches entrepreneurs is, you need to start with your BHAG: Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal. You’re out there 5 to 10 years, big vision. What do you want to achieve?

Think big and then we’re going to roll that back and we’re going to say, “If I want to hit that in the next 365 days, what are the top 5 things?” He typically says, “Five goals, max. Anything beyond that and it’s too much, so let’s start with 5 goals. What is the 5 things you need to do? Now, we’re going to break that down or we’re going to work on our quarterly goals. Then, we’re going to reverse engineer that and ultimately filter that down to, ‘What is it that we need to be doing today?'”

With the Simpleology methodology that you’re using, are you starting with this end goal and breaking it down systematically?

That is a really, really interesting discussion. There are a lot of similarities in all of these different goal setting and time management and productivity platforms and there are also some very significant differences.

Now, one difference in Simpleology that I think is worthy of note, is that there is a certain amount of flexibility built into the system. We allow you to do that kind of thing. In fact, there is a tool inside there where you can use the method that I used in the US Army for long-term planning called the backward planning method which I think is very, very effective.

We have a tool where people can do that if they choose, but what I’ve noticed is, that when you’re going towards something, the further out that goal is, the more variance you’re going to have on the pathway.

Sometimes long-term plans will prevent you from responding to the inspiration that can give you and alarmingly easy, quick path towards something.

What we like to do is, use a hybrid approach where can allow people to have that sense of planning. You also on a day-to-day basis think about it laterally as well and to take impromptu actions based on the opportunities of the moment, based on the inspiration of the moment, but to constantly guide them toward making a better decision, whatever that is.

Interesting. What Simpleology is doing is, it’s not necessarily helping someone map out a defined roadmap for the next year or 5 years and then breaking it down from there. Rather, it’s more of a, if I understand it correctly, it’s more of an in the moment, “As I look at my day I need to make sure that I am focusing on what’s going to have the most impact,” which is I think, the HIME philosophy or system that you were talking about there.

Is that correct? Is that what you’re focusing on?

Yes and so in terms of the most impact, it’s impact and ease. That’s the real interesting thing because sometimes the thing that’s really impactful is very, very hard and we don’t end up doing it.

If you look at HIME from a mathematical perspective, it’s impact x ease. When you find the higher score of those 2, the variances, then what you’re going to get is better decision making because a lot of people work on what’s the opposite.

They work on something very difficult and not really very impactful and because they have committed themselves to doing that, they have these blinders on that don’t allow them to evaluate that.

Now, the other thing is that, that is talking about the moment-to-moment management of the mind. Simultaneously Simpleology does have tools that allow people to do more complex, long-term planning. We have a Kanban-based project management platform built into it that’s totally integrated in a way that you can also take those tasks that the long-term planning is guiding you with and then bounce those against your day-to-day management which is a huge chunk I think, missing from pretty much every other productivity platform out there.

We also have tools to help people manage systems as well. In the latest version of Simpleology that we just released while this podcast is being recorded, it has a really cool platform to allow people to create, manage and view systems for managing anything, be it your home, your business or what have you.

One of the things I just want to bring back just for the listeners there which I find is really unique and I think that really, that formula you’ve created is, impact x ease. Ease, I was just thinking about that while you were talking.

I’ve never seen a system that focuses on ease, but the more I think about it, the more that makes sense because so many of the methodologies are, start with the hardest thing first, get it done, the whole Eat the Frog, Brian Tracy type thing. You’re right. In many cases that’s not the right approach. You can have more impact by accomplishing something faster, so very, very interesting.

What I’m trying to do here Mark, is, I’m trying to pull out the real differentiators between what you’re doing and what I see all over the place which is the standard goal setting system, the getting things done.

There are so many different systems out there and what I’m hearing from you is, you’ve got a blend. You’ve got a few very different things in there as well, but if you had to summarize it, what is the key difference between Simpleology when you created this? What was missing in these other ones?

That’s a really great discussion. There’s just so many things I could say about Simpleology, but it would boil down to one thing. One tag line that we played with in the past is, simplicity is freedom. I really, really love that tag line because it’s totally, totally true and it goes back to what you’re saying about this Eat the Frog mentality.

I absolutely love Brian Tracy, would never want to say anything disparaging about the guy and I think that what he’s saying about Eat the Frog and Angela Duckworth’s very, very wonderful work on the concept of grit and how it’s such a great differentiator.

All of that’s super important, but the problem is, if we rely on that exclusively, if we tell people, “Look, man, just toughen up,” how are people going to respond to that?

Some people are going to develop that muscle. They are going to toughen up and they’re going to perform better. It’s totally true, but everybody has a breaking point. There is an upper limit of the capacity of stress that we can handle and if we don’t manage that properly, we actually get sick.

What is simpleology

We actually get physically sick from there being too much intellectual stress. That intellectual stress has gotten to a point where it’s totally unmanageable for pretty much everyone that’s connected to the internet. This other discussion that we have in Simpleology on the blog, we like to talk about some of these side concepts all the time, that we have this thing called the complexity gap.

We have this limited capacity of working memory in the human brain. Maybe you can change that capacity through exercises. It’s totally true. You can do that, but there is this upper limit of about 7 bits of information in working memory, but there’s a gap that’s occurring where the amount of information in the world is not only increasing exponentially.

The rate at which the information is increasing is also increasing exponentially which is a freaky thing. Just a few years ago we were putting about 5 megabytes of data into the data stream a day.

I imagine we have gone way past that now and we’re going to get to a point, well, we’re actually at the point now where you can never know everything that there is to know. You have to just accept at some point, “Look, I can’t keep up with all of this because I’m asking myself to keep up with something that is unkeepupable.”

That’s one key difference, is that we decidedly force people to reject too much information.

A lot of people tell you, “No, just absorb more.” No, you need to know what information is relevant to you and you need to make your decisions based on that and you need to remain focused on that and you need to remain focused on that in a way that allows you to stay sane and happy and healthy.

Then, that is key and I don’t know if you’ve been down the road, but I have been down that road of creating illness out of stress just purely by trying to absorb too much stuff and having to stop and say, “Some of this stuff just has to go if I’m going to ever be productive or create anything meaningful.”

Well, it’s interesting. We were talking about the historical perspective of your experience and Corey’s and mine that it’s actually totally apropos because we were some of the first people in the world to have to really deal with that.

On top of being pioneers in an emerging landscape if you will, we also were putting ourselves out there as experts. We had to deal with the tremendous stress that comes from interacting with people on this social landscape because this is something that we don’t talk about a lot.

That landscape I think, also can make people very, very sick because people are very unhealthy in they way they interact with each other. There is this way that we feel it’s okay to talk to somebody because it’s the internet, we can be very insulting to people, we can be disparaging of people, we can be thoughtless in the way we show up and interact with folks and that also causes illness, I believe. I think that you could create a very strong case for that.

Definitely. Well, it creates a different level of stress and stress, yeah, that will come as illness. Absolutely.
You asked if I’d gone through that. I totally have and I’ve gone through various layers of it, having to peel it back and more and more I started to understand that clarity and focus and simplicity in my life are not just a good idea, they are essential human survival traits at our current point in evolution.

I think as entrepreneurs and for a lot of people that are listening that are just in the early stages of this journey, I think there needs to be a level of self-awareness where you got to check in with yourself. I think different people operate at entirely different levels.

Certain people have the ability, the capacity to handle multiple, different things and I know successful entrepreneurs that are seven, eight figure entrepreneurs and they’re focused on one thing and they do one thing really well and that’s it. That’s their business and they know the minute that they start to focus on two things, three things, the results suffer.

On the flip side, in the media what we see is, the Elon Musks of the world, the guy who’s disrupting eight different industries at once. We go, “Ah.” We all want to be that, but I don’t think that’s a reality A, for most people and B, you don’t see behind the scenes there as well of what support he has et cetera, et cetera.

I think this just comes from experience that you’ve had, that I’ve had is, you got to check in with yourself as you’re going through this process which requires this level of self-awareness. Ask yourself, “Am I over my capacity right now?”

Yeah, I think you’ve really nailed it and I think actually, even though those guys are outliers if you look a little bit more deeply you can find that they are actually perfect examples of the same thing we’re talking about.

What I would say is, that the Elon Musks, the Richard Bransons, the multipreneurs, those guys who can get to that point, able to accomplish the seemingly miraculous and then manage such amazing complexity, I would bet that those guys actually have very, very simplified day-to-day guiding principles.

What they’re doing is, is they are using systems and productivity management on a larger scale because they’re not individually managing those businesses. They’re probably only managing about seven or so people.

Interesting that our upper capacity of individual management, that number is similar to the working capacity of the human brain. Those are two numbers that have come up. You tend to be able to manage no more than seven people. You tend to be able to manage no more than seven bits of information in conscious memory, interesting.

Now, those guys then, tier all that out. You get a guy who is going to manager or be in charge of a business and he’s only going to manage as much complexity as he can manage. What they do is, they keep tiering that down.

Once you build up a system and you’ve got one thing compartmentalized and individually managed, now, you can add another layer of complexity. You can build on top of that, but if you don’t have those systems in place, what’s going to happen is you’re going to have larger and larger systems of chaos and of course, entropy is going to set in without that systems management.

Well, Branson, he’s claimed, “My success is driven by surrounding myself with great people.” As far as simplicity and life goes, you look at Steve Jobs, you look at Zuckerberg, just look at how they dress. It’s the same thing every day and more and more people are realizing that, “Oh, these guys that are operating at that level, why do they dress the same every day?” They’re maximizing their capacity by minimizing the crap that doesn’t really matter.

Simpleology Mark Joyner

Absolutely, yeah and it’s funny. Zuckerberg made that same comment. Well, I think he was even quoting Einstein. Einstein allegedly had only one suit. He just had seven copies of the same suit and wore a different one every day because, why? He didn’t want to offload that brainpower onto that decision and it’s very interesting, that he said that.

That was later scientifically verified. There is now this observable phenomenon that cognitive scientists are calling decision fatigue. That’s another thing that Simpleology helps you combat.

Well, it’s interesting, talking about the science behind this and decision fatigue, we don’t understand a lot about the brain. It’s still in its infancy as far as understanding goes, but decision fatigue, another interesting thing I was reading up on was willpower.

Willpower, it’s effectively a limited resource. You tell people, “Oh, you need more willpower.” “Well, shit. I used it up already.” That’s why when I get to the end of the day and I have a craving after a long, hard day and those chips are sitting in the cupboard and people are, “Why can’t I stop myself?” “Well, that’s because you ran out of willpower at about 3pm.”

That’s 100% right and these different types of fatigue are one of the most interesting observations we’ve been able to make that hey, nobody’s showing you how to manage all of that.

Simpleology is based on not only managing complexity, but managing the capacity of the brain to handle these various things. Rather than trying to strengthen those muscles which I think is a noble endeavor, I think it’s definitely worthy of people’s time, I’m always trying to make myself stronger, to push myself more, but I recognize that.

Let me put it like this. Imagine that you’re working out on your body. Most people understand the basic fundamentals of exercise, but we also know that if we don’t get enough recovery in, if we don’t get enough sleep, our body is not going to repair itself.

You need to work in the sweet spot that’s akin to what, I can never this Russian cognitive scientist’s name correctly. He wrote a book called Flow. Have you read that?

No.

Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi, I think something like that. I’m sure I just butchered his name, but he has this idea that if you were to put this on a Cartesian grid, you have time on the lower end and then you have difficulty on the Y axis. Then, there is a sweet spot which is represented by a diagonal line down the middle.

If you’re overstimulated, you’re going to break down. If you’re understimulated, you’re going to get bored, but we found that if you find the sweet spot where you have just enough stimulation, just enough challenge, it’s a joy to be in that state.

He calls that the flow state, but then what happens is, miraculously your capacity for more challenge naturally increases on its own. You just have to figure out how to guide yourself into that flow state.

That’s one of the really wonderful side effects of using Simpleology on a day-to-day basis gives you is, that it keeps you in that flow state. By definition, when you just log in and follow the system as it is, it’s going to keep you focused on those things that are a joy to do, but that are also giving you that dopamine feedback loop of completion.

Interesting and so going off on a little bit of tangent here because I’m always looking for ways to increase brain capacity, effectively. It’s such a limiter, our ability to strategize, to solve complex problems, stuff like that, in business which we’re constantly facing and to remember so much that’s coming at us.

There’s this whole other stream of people that are now going down that, let’s call it the Bulletproof Exec route, all the brain hacks, all the supplements, stuff like that. I look at those and I wonder if that’s like … Are you familiar with in cardiovascular training, cycling, stuff like that, the VO2 max? Have you ever heard of it?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

VO2 max is your body’s ability to deliver oxygen effectively and we’re all born at a certain level and when you look at guys that are winning the Tour de France, those guys have obscenely high VO2 max’s. It’s trainable, but it’s not very trainable. If you’re born with a low VO2 max, you’re never going to win the Tour because even though you maybe can increase it by 10% or so, you’re never going to get it to the level that Tour de France winners have.

When I look at everybody looking for the magic pill, going down the supplement route and look, I take the coconut oils and all that crap. I do it because I think there’s validity to it, so I’m not bashing it.

I do it, but I think people put too much focus on that, hoping for a magical boost in productivity when in reality the shift needs to become with how they’re effectively managing their time and using a system like what you’ve created with Simpleology to make sure they’re focusing on the right stuff.

I think that’s where the low hanging fruit is, but I think everybody’s distracted over here by those damn marketers selling this other stuff. What’s your thought on that?

Oh, dude, you’ve totally nailed it and by the way, I’m a total biohacker. My first website way, way back in the day was more or less about biohacking before that term even existed.

I’ve been a huge fan of that stuff and I attribute a lot of my success to some of those practices and just my awareness of those things, but it’s like this. Another thing I do to improve myself and to strengthen myself on that spectrum of things is, MMA. I do mixed martial arts to challenge myself, to find out where my weaknesses are in my body and in my mind and to face those things head-on.

The reason this is interesting here is, one of the disciplines that are so big in MMA is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and what a lot of folks don’t know about BJJ is, that it is a modification of an older system which was jiu jitsu.

The Brazilian guys, the Gracie family, they took the Japanese Jiu Jitsu and they modified it in a way to make it more effective and to make it easier to learn. In a sense, Simpleology is like that BJJ modification of that system.

It’s like saying, “Look, you can do all those other things. You can make yourself stronger, but notice how if you use the right tools in the right way and manage yourself correctly, a small dude can actually beat up a bigger dude who doesn’t have those skills.” We saw this in the original UFC.

If you go back, and I’m geeking out here, to the history of fighting science which I find so fascinating, it’s such an apt metaphor, when you look at the early Ultimate Fighting Championships, in 1 through 5 we learned this. We saw this relatively small guy, Royce Gracie, just decimate bigger dudes.

Now, we got to point out that we have weight classes now because everybody knows all of these things and if everybody has the same skills, yeah, how big you are and how strong you are matters. Back then, we didn’t notice that and what we can observe in the real world is that hardly anybody has these skills in the world.

We have over 1 million users on Simpleology, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 7 billion people on the planet. What we’re finding is, that people who use these tools have huge advantages over people who may be intellectually more capable, may have more physical energy or what have you because they are managing themselves in a BJJ style.

That’s totally in line with another athlete metaphor, if you will. I was looking at VO2 max’s and power and stuff like that because I’m a cyclist. You’re into the jiu jitsu, mixed martial arts. Cycling is my outlet. That’s where I push myself, so I was looking into this.

It’s very similar where people assume that sheer power and VO2 max, if you know what someone, their power is, so their watts to weight ratio is, in theory you should be able to predict who’s going to win a race. If you know all of the basically, power output that these guys can sustain indefinitely, so it makes sense.

What they found is, although you could know that, that isn’t going to determine a race because the race is going to be determined by the efficiencies of the riders and the skills behind those riders. It’s the same thing that you’re talking about.

It’s the same thing that Simpleology is. You can have maybe some less skills, some less knowledge in a marketplace, but if you’re operating better, more efficiently, focusing on the right things, you’re going to be able to compete with bigger, more sophisticated, more experienced people. It is truly a competitive advantage and it’s interesting.

You’re right, 1 million people really is a drop in a bucket at this point. We’re starting to run out of time here, but just before we run out of time, two questions for you, what kind of people today, what kind of businesses are using the Simpleology method and getting incredible results? If people want to check it out, where do they go?

Awesome. Well, the people who use Simpleology run the gamut. We’ve got small business entrepreneurs. We’ve got Fortune 500s that have their teams on it. We have people in the US government using it, hospitals, work-at-home moms. We even have some schools that have adopted it.

We had to create versions of our Simpleology training or make our training more child-friendly for a lot of these because we had some funny, risque jokes and some of that stuff before. We try to make the Simpleology system fun for people to use. I think software should be a joy to use, so we put a little bit of that in there, but anyway, we’ve modified that. We have elementary school kids even, their teachers will tell them, “Hey, did you do your Simpleology today?” which is really cool.

Simpleology works for almost anyone, but because of the entrepreneurial background that you and I have, there are of course, a lot of entrepreneurs that use it. I think also, there is an entrepreneurial revolution happening in the world right now as well.

People are fed up with the way there is the edifice of government and business institutions that are not necessarily always working in the best interests of people. People are rejecting that and saying, “Well, how about some self-reliance? How about creating a business for myself?” which makes what you’re doing so wonderful. That’s where I think probably the majority of our guys are.

Then, if people want to go check Simpleology out, they can go to simpleology.com and set up an account there.

Absolutely and just for the listeners here, to highlight a point, as Mark said, more and more people are waking up to this opportunity to create incredible businesses. It’s easier. I believe it’s easier than it’s ever been for people to do that, but I’m watching so many people that are in these jobs right now and are trying to make that transition and they’ve got great ideas, but their execution is terrible.

It really comes down to, when you shift from being let’s call it an employee in a structured environment where somebody’s laying out your goals and your plans and giving you a path, there’s a big shift to becoming an entrepreneur and how you need to operate and how you need to manage yourself.

If you try and go at this without a system to follow, I truly believe because I’ve seen it happen time and time again, that your likelihood of success is going to plummet massively because you won’t have structure.

You won’t have that plan that somebody put in place for you, so you need to learn how to do that. What’s the best way to do that? Honestly, I believe it’s to take a system like Simpleology and make sure you use it, but get the discipline to use it because again, these systems only work if you apply them.

That’s another one of my beefs. I see people that, they sign up for these things, they use them for a week and then they stop using them and so if you’re going to do it, do it and hold yourself accountable to it. Anyway, that’s my lecture.

I truly believe in what you’re doing, Mark. It’s absolutely awesome and I hope some of our listeners head over there right after they listen to this and sign up. Thank you so much for your time today, Mark.

Thanks. It was a pleasure.

Awesome and guys, before we wrap things up, if you guys want to find out more, you want the links, as always they’re going to be in the show notes on projectignite.com/podcast.

Guys, now it’s time to take the productivity tips, tools, strategies that you’ve learned from Mark today and apply that final essential ingredient and that ingredient is action. Go forth, take action. Go test out Simpleology. I do believe they have a free trial. Mark, you have a trial there, don’t you?

We do indeed.

Brilliant! Go, take the trial. Start using it. See if it will double your productivity as Mark claims it does. What have you got to lose? Go forth, take action.This is your host, Derek Gehl signing off.

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