Great Things In This World

We squander our time with the death of a thousand cuts
We squander our time with the death of a thousand cuts

[Chorus]
A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things in this world
To do great things in this world
You need free time and a free mind to do great things in this world
You need free time and a free mind to do great things in this world

You should be too busy to do coffee while still keeping an uncluttered calendar
People who know me know that I'm famous for simultaneously doing two things
One is having a very clean calendar
I have almost no meetings on it while at the same time I am busy all the time, I'm always doing something
And it's usually what we call “work-related”
It is whatever the highest impact thing is that needs to be done at that time and that I'm most interested and inspired about
But the only way to do that is to constantly, ruthlessly decline meetings
People what to do coffee and build relationships, that's fine early in your career when you're still exploring
But later in your career when you're exploiting and there are more things coming at you than you have time for, you have to ruthlessly cut meetings out of your life
If someone wants to do a meeting, see if you can do it with a phone call instead
If they wanna do a phone call, see if they can do it with an email instead
If they wanna do it in email, see if they can do a text message instead
If they're text messaging, you should probably be ignoring most text messages unless they're true emergencies
One has to be utterly ruthless about dodging meetings
When you do do meetings, do walking meetings, do standing meetings
Keep them short, keep them actionable and small
Any meeting with eight people in it sitting around a conference table, nothing is getting done in that meeting
You're literally just dying one hour at a time
You're literally just dying one hour at a time

[Chorus]
A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things in this world
To do great things in this world
You need free time and a free mind to do great things in this world
You need free time and a free mind to do great things in this world

When you have something important or something valuable, other busy, interesting people will meet with you
Your calling card has to be, "Hey, here's what I've done. Here's what I can show you. And I'll be respectful of your time if this is useful to you."
And I find that there are very busy, important people who will take your meeting
But you have to come with the proper calling card
All the people who tweet and who email famous or rich people saying, "Hey, if I could just get one meeting with you" and they're vague about it, they're not gonna get anywhere in life
You have to build up the credibility
You have to do the work
You have to have proof of work
If you have proof of work, and you truly have something interesting, then you shouldn't hesitate to put it together and send it to somebody but even then, when you're asking for a meeting, you wanna be super actionable about it
Even if you yourself haven't made it yet, if you think you're gonna make it by going out and networking and doing a whole bunch of meetings, you're probably incorrect
Yes, networking can be important early in your career, and yes you can get serendipitous with meetings, but the odds are pretty low
Just meeting people and hoping to get that lucky break, you're relying on type one luck, which is blind luck, and type two luck, which is hustle luck
But what you're not getting is type three or type four luck which are the better kind where you spend time developing a reputation working on something, developing a unique point of view, being able to spot opportunities that others can't

[Chorus]
A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things in this world
To do great things in this world
You need free time and a free mind to do great things in this world
You need free time and a free mind to do great things in this world

[Chorus]
A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things in this world
To do great things in this world
You need free time and a free mind to do great things in this world
You need free time and a free mind to do great things in this world

If you wanna be able to do great things, whether you're a musician, entrepreneur, or you're an investor, you need free time and you need a free mind
If you wanna be able to do great things
You need free time and you need a free mind