Mindset & Lifestyle Upgrade: Escaping the Hustle (and the Slot Machine in Your Pocket)
This one's about stepping out of the daily chaos long enough to see where your energy is actually going — and then building a few rules so you stop bleeding it.
Clear the open loops.
I've got a constant inner monologue. Maybe it's the ADHD, maybe it's just me, but there's always a churn: I've got a flight at two, I need laundry done first, there's this long-term project... So try this: grab paper, set a timer for 60 seconds, and write down everything bouncing around in your head. Don't prioritize, don't censor, don't edit. You'll get 5, 10, 20 items. Every unresolved loop you're carrying makes focus harder. Once they're on paper, you can let them go.
Then do the bigger version. Take 10–15 minutes and list everything nagging at you — the project, the date you keep not planning, the thing in the house. One of the best things I ever did was take a week off and treat it like the first week of retirement: I just knocked out the list. Photos organized, house rewired so Starlink and the 5G hotspot ran through one firewall, every quirky smart device re-synced. It cleared a year's worth of background noise. Do it every quarter.
Write your No Manifesto.
If saying no is hard for you — it's hard for me, I want to say yes to everything — make it a system. Look back over the last six months at what annoyed you or blew past your boundaries, and turn it into rules. Mine:
I don't work on anything that won't close in the next 90 days. (If it won't move for the other person in 90 days either, it wasn't a real priority.)
No meetings on Mondays. (I break this constantly, but keeping it mostly clear sets up the whole week.)
A hard no on flying Sundays — that's how you lose 12 weekends a year with your kids to conferences that start Sunday. I'll show up late instead.
No email between 5:30 and 7:30 a.m., seven days a week (the Freedom app enforces it).
Speaking gigs east of the Mississippi have to pay twice what a West Coast one does. Arbitrary? Sure. But it keeps me from flying cross-country for a two-hour speech.
I will not do laundry. Ever. Service picks it up, or a kid does it for five bucks. It drains me, so it's off the table.
Recognize the slot machine in your pocket.
Three questions. The slot-machine question: how many times today have you pulled the handle — refreshed email, LinkedIn, the news — hoping something pops up to change your life? The odds question: how often does it actually pay out? Almost never. You're spinning the wheel chasing a dopamine hit. The stress test: the last breaking-news alert — did it make you calmer and more focused, or spike your adrenaline and fade in ten minutes? Having run a disaster-recovery company for years, I learned almost everything in the first hour — news or your team's first read on a server failure or a fraud issue — is wrong or missing key facts. Short of the building literally being on fire, give it space.
Case in point: Misty sent me a wonderfully panicked email this morning because I hadn't finished a presentation — "I put a reminder on your calendar, it's not in the folder, do you need help?" plus five other things. If I'd jumped on it stressed, I'd have lost the morning. Instead: "Misty, you need to chill, I've got this — I've never once missed it in seven years." Turned out the real subject was cookies for her daughter's baby shower. Space lets you see things for what they are.
Build templates for anything repeatable.
Misty will tell you I've got a couple hundred templates. Every week or two I ask, "What did I do this week that I'll likely do again?" and make a template out of it — my Level 10 meeting format, my bio and headshot, a 20–30 page assistant playbook (travel, board meetings, frequent-flyer numbers), pre-written ChatGPT prompts, and pre-written "no thank you" emails. The playbook is recursive memory: when I switch assistants, I just hand it to the next one.
The three-point removal system.
For each task, ask: (1) Does it matter? If I ignore this, will it matter in six weeks? (When my wife, sister, and mom are emailing about Thanksgiving, it resolves itself 99% of the time — and let's be honest, my input on the menu was never going to matter.) (2) Should I be doing it? I replaced a deck figuring I was saving money — until my son Warren did the math: 1,000 hours against a $40,000 quote is $40/hour, exactly what the contractor charges. Instant clarity. I should've been chasing speaking gigs in my zone of genius. (3) Can I do it right now? If not, move it to a long-term list so your brain stops searching for it.
Escaping the hustle isn't doing more, faster. It's deciding what gets to touch your life at all.
Disruption with a side of humor —
Kirk Drake
