So let me talk a little bit about this book. I wrote this book, “21 Secrets of Million-Dollar Sellers,” because of Benjamin Franklin. When Benjamin Franklin was 22 years old, he took all the money he had, and he and a partner bought the Pennsylvania Gazette. When they did that, the paper’s circulation wasn’t great, so they began looking for a methodology of expanding their sales, expanding their publication’s presence. So one day he called in all of his little delivery guys, and he said, “Guys, you need to get this in more places. It needs to be in more coffeehouses, more bars, more hotels, so get out there and sell the hell out of this paper.” One of the kids looked up at him and said, “Mr. Franklin, we’re not in sales; we’re in delivery.” And he looked at the kid and said, “Son, everybody is in sales.” So, if you want to pick a subject to write a successful book about, you might as well pick a subject in which everybody is involved. And so that’s how we started this.

Here are the basics. I created 10 narrative questions. I interviewed over 200 million-dollar producers. I chose the best ones — 175 for the study. I picked seven completely different industries. If you were selling Maseratis, if you were selling annuities, if you were selling properties, it didn’t matter to me. I just wanted million-dollar producers. In fact, it was the only filter for the survey. I didn’t care if you were a man or a woman. I didn’t care what your nationality was. And I didn’t care where you were from. The only thing that I cared about was that you were a million-dollar producer, and if you were, you got into the study. Many of the participants in the study were clients of mine, which was great because they trusted me with this information. I, of course, had to sign a number of NDAs, which is why the names in the book are generic rather than accurate. Once I was given access, I asked them all the same questions. It took about 1 1/2 years to conduct the interviews, and another year or so to find the patterns in the data. And in that data, I discovered every single thing that all those people were doing that was the same no matter what they were selling.

This book is made up of the actual behaviors of these top producers, what everybody actually does. The book journey is really odd for those of you who have never written a book. I had a company come up to me after a program that we did and say, “Steve, we want you to write a book.” I had never written a book, so I was a little surprised. They said, “Look, here’s the deal. You write the book. We’ve got editors; we’ve got people to design the book; and we’ve got PR covered. We’ll get the book in every bookstore and will market the hell out of it.” Then came the squeeze: “We’ll do all of that for you, and we’ll only charge you $60,000 to do it.” I looked at the guy and said, “I don’t understand that pitch. You take my $60,000, and then I spend a year writing a book?” And they said, “Yeah, it’s a very successful model.” “Well, I’m totally not interested in that, but maybe this book is a real thing.”

So I sent a note to a literary agent whom I knew. When I sent her the note, I didn’t know she was one of the top literary agents in New York, and I said, “This company came to me …,” and I told her the story. She said, “Don’t do that. Send me your outline for the book in this format.” I said, “I don’t know what that is because I’ve never written a book.” She went right down the line. “Here’s the form, and here is what needs to be in it. Pound it out and send it to me.” So I did this outline, sent it over to her, and she said, “Stop where you are. I will sell this book based on your research.” I said, “What? I don’t understand.” She said, “No! People will pay you to write the book.” I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” She said, “No, no, I’ll do it. You need to hire an editor and write a treatment for the book. It needs to be 37 pages.” That’s the treatment for a book — 37 pages!

So, I do all this stuff. She called me back and said, “It’s a bidding war. There are seven publishers bidding on your book. I’ll call you on Monday. I’ll tell you to take the best one.” I just went, “OK.” She called me Monday and said, “I’m here with Paul; Simon & Schuster really want it. They’re going to pay you a bucket load of money. Say yes to them.” So I said yes and was confronted with a harsh reality: I didn’t know how to write a book. It was unbelievably frustrating.

I’m an ex-surfing, tennis-playing scientist. That’s kind of my background, and I’m irresponsible, horrifically irresponsible. So I signed a contract that is this thick from the publisher, from Simon & Schuster, and my agent said, “You need to send this to your literary attorney. You have a literary attorney, right?” [visual] And I went, “Oh yeah, yeah, I do have that right next to my nuclear energy attorney.” So I had to hire one to review the contract. And I found out that publishers are really serious about stuff like deadlines and having this chapter done by this time. And I found out that I don’t get to name the book what I want. I said, “What? The book is called ‘Repeatable Successful Acts.’ That’s what the study was.” You know what they wanted? They wanted our research, and they wanted it really badly. They wanted all that stuff, and they got to name the book and design the book. I didn’t get to do any of that.

Maybe if you’re Stephen King or Malcolm Gladwell, you get to name your book. Well, I didn’t get to do it. So, the book comes out, and it becomes a best-seller, which is a huge honor. And we have to do interviews, podcasts and book signings. We’d go into places, and people would come up to me and hand me a book. I’d sign it, and they’d be gone. It’s like signing a high school yearbook, right? It’s like, “Have a great summer,” and it’s really weird. We did 80 radio, television and podcast interviews, including on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, in three days. At one point, it started at 7 in the morning and ended at 7 at night, and we did half-hour radio interviews like this. [visual] And you go through all these things to promote the content.

At our company, we salespeople should train like athletes. You guys should be training like you are dead serious about what you’re doing. You should be training like this all the time to get better, and if you think about everybody being in sales, that means everybody should be training like this. Even on “Game of Thrones” they practice sword fighting. They don’t just get out there and sword fight. They practice it; they get better at it.

This book is about patterns. When you are a scientist, you learn early to look for patterns — patterns in every element that you can think of. So this is a pattern. [visual] That’s a compression pattern. You can all see that, right? It’s what’s called the compression pattern. Now tell me what kind of pattern this is not. It’s not random.

What causes a reaction? It has to hit something, another ball or a wall. It’s a reactionary pattern. How about this one? [visual] What is one of the aspects of this pattern? Circular. What is another aspect of the pattern? Rotation. Another aspect is that it’s linear. Pick one ball and follow one ball. [visual] It’s linear also. So there are a lot of patterns that are contained in there. Here’s one of my favorite ones. I want you to look at the cross in the center of this pattern. [visual] What other color do you see? Yeah, there’s no green in there. Your brain thinks that there’s green in there, but there isn’t. Fuchsia is the only color that the brain sees differently. Every human sees fuchsia differently. No other color affects the brain like this. So, what your brain does as I increase the speed is fill in the pattern. It looks like something it doesn’t recognize, and it thinks, What the hell is that? And it throws a green pattern into it that shows you that the brain is tricked by patterns. Let me give you a better example.

Pick a country, any country in Europe — I don’t care what it is — that begins with the letter D. OK, No. 2, take the last letter of the country you chose, and choose an animal that begins with that letter. Pick any animal; it doesn’t matter. Lastly, take the last letter of the animal, and pick any color that begins with the letter.

How many of you have, by any chance, an orange kangaroo? Eighty-seven percent of you will have an orange kangaroo. How many have an amber koala? How many have a green dog? That’s not a real pattern. I made you choose an orange kangaroo. Denmark is the only country you could have chosen. If I only give you seconds, and you go to the last letter “k,” your brain will naturally go to kangaroo. Mostly. If I only give you less than 10 seconds for the color, which I did, it’s a fake pattern. It would get thrown out of our study. The orange kangaroo gets thrown out. That’s not a real pattern. Now, I’ll give you a real pattern.

Name all the body parts that only have three letters. You cannot use slang. List as many as you can. There are 10.

I only get one hour up here. It sounds like a lot to you, but it’s the blink of an eye for me, so I’m going to give you the five that the average person gets: leg, arm, toe, eye, ear. If you do not have those five, you are below average. The next three in order that people get are rib, hip and jaw. The ninth body part is lip. It’s such a good pattern that I can program into my presentation. That’s a real pattern, and it would make our study every single time. So, these answers that were given a narrative form required a ton of time throwing out things that weren’t real patterns within the study. By the way, No. 10 is gum.

This is not about muscle memory. This is what muscle memory patterns look like. [visual] Do something all the time. If you do something all the time, it will look really smooth. Sales is about behaviors, about how you treat people. What are the systems that you have in place to get better at what you do? Many of these we call the “duh factors” or the “Homer Simpson paradox” where someone will read a chapter in the book, and then send me a note and go, “Steve, that’s as obvious as the nose on your face.” And I’ll say, “Absolutely.” There are many of these that are duh factors, but let me explain the duh factor to you. For thousands of years, in fact, over 3,000 years ago, the first pieces of luggage were discovered, and we moved things around in boxes and crates everywhere we went.

It wasn’t until 1974 when someone said, “Can we please put some wheels on these bags? They’re heavy. You can watch old movies with Cary Grant where everybody’s like this. [visual] That was pretty obvious to everybody — kind of a duh factor.

Here’s another one that’s a duh factor. Are you a slapper or a tapper? Ketchup is a viscous liquid, which means it is a liquid that behaves like a solid until you add space or air in order for it to change its form to more of a liquid. That’s one way that people did it. What’s another way? A knife. So in 1968 — it was that long ago — John Carroll invented a valve for Prell shampoo. Do you remember Prell shampoo? Do you remember its ad? They would put a pearl in it, and you would watch how slow the pearl would come down, right? He created a valve that was only applied to shampoo bottles until Heinz said, “Can we buy that valve? We’d like to buy that valve, put it on what is traditionally the top and turn the top into the bottom.” By doing that, gravity created everything that was needed.

But that’s not the end of the journey for the ketchup duh factor. Let me show you what MIT did. MIT created this substance called “liquid gel,” and here’s what it looks like. [visual] It’s flavorless and odorless. It coats the inside of any bottle that has a viscous liquid and allows that viscous liquid to come right out. Now, I’m sure that they are in partnership with dry cleaners in the areas in which you live because that will come out so fast that it will be unexpected, and you will be covered with ketchup until you get used to the new stuff.

Every one of these factors appears obvious to us. My problem with you, and it is my problem with every single person we consult with, is that you are going to go back to your office; you’re going to open your office door; and you are going to be hit with the whirlwind of your life. And this whirlwind will suck away every new idea you have. It will suck away every bit of inspiration, every bit of motivation that you have coming from anything you’ve learned at the MDRT Annual Meeting. You attack it like this: You just run right into it, every single time. And the whirlwind is really powerful.

Here’s the issue about the whirlwind: As you hit the whirlwind, what stops you is that you can’t remember what was important from the meeting. What was really important? What is something I should actually do? And you know what? No one thinks you account for it. Nobody calls you and says, “Hi, Mary, this is Joe Manager. Yeah. You were at the Annual Meeting in San Antonio the other week, right? Great, what are you doing new today? Nothing. You’re doing nothing new. Why, you don’t remember anything from the meeting? You didn’t write anything down? Got it.”

At the end of my program, I want you to write one, two or three things that you think were important from this meeting, not just my time but from the whole meeting, something that you will hold yourself accountable to. When you return home, you’ll see your own writing and you’ll say, “I’m doing that.” You’re making yourself accountable to it. This is an accountability tool that will help you get through the whirlwind. It’s so simple that it’s unbelievably elegantly effective.

Let me get to the very first of the secrets I’m going to cover today. The first secret is “simple.” It is the driving force for the entire book, and in the 32 years we’ve been consulting, it is the driving idea of the consulting company. This book would never exist without this idea. So what do I mean? Simple is a big idea. Are you familiar with William of Ockham or the premise that is called “Occam’s razor?” It’s that the simplest explanation is usually the most correct — not always, but usually the most correct. Occam’s razor happens in the 14^th century, and it keeps going on through every revolution we’ve had from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution to the Technological Revolution to the Digital Revolution. In fact, the most important book in science ever written is probably “Principia Mathematica” by Isaac Newton. By the way, if you were going to play kickball and the teams were made up of scientists, and you had the 100 greatest scientists of all time lined up — Einstein is there, Aristotle is there, Kepler is there, Marie Curie is there — all of these great scientists are there, and you get first choice in the kickball game. You go down the list of all of these scientists, up and down. The only choice is Newton — the law of gravity, the laws of speed and motion, the laws of color and the creation of calculus, all before he was 26 years old. There is no other choice.

His was the greatest mind that ever lived. You may go get Leonardo da Vinci. He’ll draw better for you, but he won’t think better than you thought.

So what’s our big mistake? We confuse these two words. [visual] We think they’re the same thing, but they’re not. “Simple” means a lack of complexity. “Easy” means a lack of effort. Have you have ever tried to put together a gas barbecue grill you bought at Home Depot? Worst mistake ever. The $50 should fly out of your pocket. Hand it to the guy from Home Depot; they’ll deliver to your house; and you’ll have steaks by 6 p.m. Instead, you’re looking at tiny little things and a 9-point font like your disclosures. You know, tiny little fonts. You’re trying to screw these little screws in, and then there’s stuff left over, and you say, “Oh, that’s nice. They brought extra parts.”

Here’s an easy one. [visual] This is an example of “easy.” This is a geometry question. They want the value of x, not its location. This kid probably flunked geometry, but I’d hire this kid in a heartbeat. He’s funny. He’s creative, and he’s riskful. If you go to IKEA, you will rapidly learn that, unless you are Norwegian, it’s unbelievably hard to put anything together that looks big at the store. But when you pick it up, it is in a flat box that’s this big. Then when you get home, you have to open it like this.

I’m talking about a lack of complexity for “simple.” Now, we have a bias for complexity. We like things that are complex, but we won’t admit it to anybody. If someone told you that you could do this in two steps, you’d say, “That doesn’t sound very good. How can you do something difficult in two steps or one step or three steps?” You have a bias for it. We think that if something is complex, it’s going to be better.

Let me give you a great scene explaining what I mean. This scene is from “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” [visual] If you’ve never watched that movie, you should. It’s one of the great Wes Anderson films. Here’s the explanation of the game that they played. [visual] My favorite part of it is when the little fox goes, “Got it” after that. You should be familiar with this because this is how you describe your product to your clients, by the way. I know that because I’m the lowest common denominator in the room. You describe it so poorly that you will require your clients to lie to you.

And here’s the lie; you see it every single time. Here’s how this is going to work. This is how the annuity works. That way you’re going have money when you get old. And you go like this to your client: “Do you understand?” Your client nods, and you go, “No, no, no, that doesn’t look like understanding.” So you go through it again, and you look at your client and ask, “Are we OK? We’re not OK, are we? Why would you lie to me?” Because I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t understand how twig ball was played. The more complex something is, the more powerful your ability to simplify it is. And when you do that, that connection between you and your client is as solid as anything. The greater the element of simplification you can do with your client, the greater the connection to your client, and your client will stay with you longer.

I have had the same financial advisor for 20+ years. He’s done a magnificent job with my family, but he didn’t start that way. He started by coming and doing these meetings in our house that were long and arduous, and my wife would never go bail out. Finally I said, “John, I really like it, but you suck at this. Here, take this.” I created this form for him. It had three pillars to it: green, red and yellow. Green had all the stuff that was going good. We don’t need to spend too much time on it because it’s going good. Red was the stuff we should talk about. Yellow was all the new ideas. I said, “Fill this out and send it to me before you come and I guarantee you my wife and everyone else will enjoy the meeting. Oh, and bring a sleeve of golf balls.” And so we’ve used that for 15 years — a single form that covers everything I’ve got going on. I took something that was very complex and I made it simple for myself. I get it now.

These are infographics. [visual] What’s the purpose of an infographic? To make something that is complex easy to understand. Here is our current health care infographic. [visual] Somebody really smart sat in a room with a bunch of wicked smart people, and do you know what they said? “That looks great. Print 100 million copies. Get it out there.” What does it really look like in something as simple? This is what it really looks like. [visual]

Everything that you would need to know about what you do was in that ad, which never aired by the way. It’s inside there. [visual] How do you want to feel? What if we could take your financial plan and craft it with intent? Would you want to have that? You know, the great epidemic in America is that people don’t have financial plans. When we teach planning, we give everybody a list and say, “Write down everything in your refrigerator right now.” Then they go and write down everything they think is in the refrigerator. I give them another one. I say, “Now write down what you’re going to go shopping for.” And they write down what they need to go shopping for. I say, “If you can do that, you can do a financial plan, seriously.” The great crime is that we have an entire mega group of people with no financial plan, no way to know. And it’s partially our fault, and it’s partially your fault.

You guys think you’re in the financial business. It’s ridiculous. You know what business you’re in? You’re in my tomorrow business. That’s the business you’re in. You’re the only person who can help me protect my tomorrow, and do you think most people know how to do that themselves? Are you kidding me? If Ron Godly were up here — he’s the head of USA Chemical, the largest chlorine producer in the world — and if you ask him a question about chlorine, he can tell you anything about it — its molecular makeup, what it attaches with, how to sell it, how it’s used to clean sausage grinders. But if you ask him about his financial future and his personal life, he doesn’t know. You know why? Because his time is spent in chlorine. That’s his job. Your job is to protect my tomorrow, and you’re one of only two professions that can do it because I have no money and no tomorrow without my health. I have no trouble with that. My money. That’s it. Your job is to protect that and to become the protector of my future and my money. That’s your job.

Things don’t start complex. They start simple, and they become complex. A drug manufacturer makes a certain drug. It advertises it on the USA Network. By the way, if you watch the USA Network, you have to be the worst demographic ever because every commercial is either for a catheter or some other kind of pill. Pills start simple, but they affect proteins and they get complex, so compliance in the pharmaceutical industry makes them tell you every single thing that might go wrong when you take a pill. That’s why every ad starts with a beautiful guy walking through the forest, and everything is good. And at the end, it’s going to cause you to have suicidal tendencies, which, by the way, if you have an antidepressant, the side effect should be the exact opposite of suicidal tendencies. Things don’t start complex. The seed in that hand is a redwood seed. [visual] Things become complex; they don’t start that way.

So, to my shower story — I travel to Minneapolis a lot, and when I work with one particular client, I stay at the same hotel. The first time I stayed there was rough. So, in the morning I get up and take off my glasses. I am going to take a shower, and I see this. [visual] Now, I am at my most vulnerable. I look in and go, “What?” And it’s a small shower stall, so you can’t do this. [visual]

You have to go in and stand in front of it and do this. [visual] There are 24 inches of icy water in those pipes. It’s Minneapolis; there are 24 inches of ice water everywhere. It’s like a carwash blasting with icy cold water. You curl up into the fetal position. You figure it out. You get your shower done. You go down to the front desk and say, “Excuse me, has anyone ever asked you about…,” and before you can finish the sentence, the desk clerk goes, “The shower? All the time.” I said, “Well, if you want to be employee of the month, why don’t we just put a little tent card up there that explains how the shower works?”

This is my favorite shower. [visual] I love that shower. I’m assuming red is hot and blue is cold. Don’t make things too complex. It causes unbelievable levels of confusion.

You go to the store, and it’s got everything you need. Frito-Lay is responsible for 81 percent of the salty snacks in the world. Last year Doritos had $2.7 billion in sales. They’ve been a client of ours for a long time. I always used to think they should be the primary sponsor for the legalization of marijuana in every state. Fritos sales skyrocketed in Colorado. This is the toothpaste aisle at Walmart. [visual] There are 70+ different toothpaste choices. How many of you basically use the same one every time? So most of you, when you need your toothpaste, you’re on the toothpaste hunt here, like Indiana Jones.

A lot of stuff doesn’t make things simpler. The patterns that dictate your life are simple patterns. You all have them. Do you have a significant other? I don’t know where it happened, but somewhere in your life, you made a choice, a secondary choice. You chose your significant other, and then you chose which side of the bed you would sleep on for the rest of your life.

This is a powerful pattern, and if you don’t believe me, if you are traveling by yourself at this meeting, you went to your side of the bed when you got to your hotel room. You can test it. Here’s how you test it. Just go to bed five minutes ahead of your significant other and get in on his or her side of the bed. Your significant other will walk into the room every time and tell you, “Honey, I’m going to … what are you doing?” “Oh, I’m going to try sleeping on this side of the bed tonight.” “The hell you are!”

Complexity will always break down under pressure. Now, what I’m going to show you is both hilarious and sad at the exact same time, and it is Charles Barkley’s golf swing. [visual] He doesn’t swing like this around the driving range; he swings like that because the pressure builds up, and everything breaks down. If you want to see things break down, make them complex.

If I had another job in my life, I would like to be the czar of signage. That means I would control all of the signage in the world. If I had an elevator in a hotel, I would have a sign above the elevator so that I could see it from a distance. If I’m in a public space and there is a men’s and a women’s restroom, that should be above the door, not on the door, around the corner in a cup, where you have to ask every single time, “Where is it?” So, we’re hired to do a simplicity project for a hospital, and we see signs like this that lead our thinking. [visual] It makes me panic, and this is good signage. OK, I get it. Go to Table Mountain National Park. And guess what everybody does before they get to their cars? They do this. [visual]

We get to the hospital and start our signage work. This is the signage that exists in the hospital. [visual] Those are two separate places; they don’t go on the same sign like that. Funny. But imagine seeing these for 10 years every day and not even thinking to say, “Never mind.” So our simplification element became to get rid of that and take some more color elements and use the floor. We use the floor because everyone looks down more than they look up. If you watch horror movies, you know this because when somebody is in a place where there’s a monster, they never look up, right? “Alien” is a great example of that. In Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” the first one, Sigourney Weaver and everybody in there are looking around for the bad guy, and it’s above them the whole time. People look down before they look up.

We used the floor. We created signage by using simply the floor. Most patients who are on a gurney look where? They have to look up. Why would you not paint your ceilings pleasingly? People are looking up there. So, during this idea, we stumbled upon an idea that we’ve been using ever since. It’s called the checklist.

Here is the form called Client Call. [visual] This is Dr. Peter Pronovost. Now, Peter is really smart. At the University of Indiana’s hospital, they had an infection rate exceeding 9 percent for surgical patients. Nine out of every 100 surgical patients got an infection. It was one of the highest infection rates, we thought, anywhere, until we started comparing it to other hospitals. Those infection rates were fairly high too. This isn’t the Civil War. We know how to prevent infection during surgery.

Why are rates so high? Peter says it’s because we don’t do the things we’re supposed to do. So how do we ensure that every single time it gets done? He said, “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we just make a checklist? We’ll call it the ‘Infection Prevention Checklist,’ and every doctor will have to go through it and check these items off before every surgery.” And they went, “That’s it?” “Yes, that’s it.” Pilots use them in airplanes. Everybody uses it everywhere. Here it is, by the way. [visual] Every surgeon checks it off. Now, what’s the infection rate at the University of Indiana’s hospital? It’s less than 1 percent, 0.07 percent. Why? Because of one unbelievably simple tool.

So I’m going to show you a checklist. This is a checklist that we use in our company. [visual] We have a toolbox of analog forms — old school, write-this-down forms. This is the Client Call form. Before anybody in my company makes a call to any client, or if we know someone is coming in at 10 a.m., this form is filled out every single time. We know who it is. We know what I want out of that call, period. We know what I want. We never want more than three things, and we don’t hang that phone up until I get those three things. We take notes on the form. Every single time it makes us prepared for the call, and we know what kind of advantage we have when we do. I cannot tell you the advantage we have gained time and time again using this form.

Idea two is called “thoughtful reduction.” If you want to make something simple, get rid of other parts that you don’t need or hide them. I don’t mean hide them; I mean just get rid of stuff. When there are fewer things out there, things appear more simple. I’ll give you an example. Subtract the obvious and keep them meaningful. Here’s a great example. This is the original remote control for a television set. [visual] There are four buttons. The buttons required a lot of pressure, and when you push the button down, it made a sound. What was that sound? Click, which is why quite often anything that’s got a button on it is called the clicker. I love this because it was like the space command as though you were shifting the orbital path of the Hubble Space Telescope. So this idea was really simple. This is the beginning of the fat butt syndrome in America. You don’t even have to get up to change the channel. It’s perfect.

Now, do you watch a lot of television? Let me ask you another question: Do you have a beautiful, flat-screen television with surround sound? We live in a golden age of television. You can’t possibly watch all of the good television that’s out there even if you did nothing but watch television. I travel every week. I’m on planes. I download a lot of great shows, and I watch them on airplanes. Now your remote looks like this. [visual] It actually has an average of 47 buttons. The average user in every survey only uses seven. There are 40 buttons on your remote that you don’t use. Do you have more than one remote? Do you have to switch from one remote to another to get from Netflix to Apple TV to U-verse?

Your remote will punish you. You will accidentally hit the wrong button, and on your TV will appear something you’ve never seen before. You will say, “No, no, no, no, no!” So what will you do? You will turn the TV off and go, “It’ll fix itself.”

Here’s the third idea: This is a fundamental law of how the brain works and what is simple and what is not. If you want a successful sales meeting, never ever create more than three parts to that meeting. Don’t make four parts; don’t make five. Don’t have a 10-part plan. The absolute ability of that to happen is radically reduced by anything above the number three, anything. That’s the formula you need to know. Less will always be more every single time.

This is the U.S. Patent Office when it was first built. [visual] Between 1838 and 1996 there has been one invention with over 4,400 different patents issued. Yet of those 4,400, only one of those inventions represents 80 percent of the market, so there are 4,399 product inventions that are splitting up 20 percent of the market. It was invented by a guy named James Henry Atkinson, and he was wicked smart. Does anybody know what it is?

It is the original mousetrap. It has three parts: the bait tray, the bar and a spring. It was called the Little Nipper. Only three moving parts — that idea of three is pervasive in all the stuff we do. Here’s the original ad for the iPod from Apple. [visual] This is the absolute, very original. It was on billboards and in magazines and everywhere you looked — on the sides of buses exactly like you’re seeing. So, as you’re driving by, you see this, and you will look and say, “What’s the company?”

What is the product name of the product? This is the very first iPod. You had never seen or heard of one before. You had no idea what the product was. Apple used the formula of three. What’s the formula? Only three colors. What’s the most important color?

It was the single, most important decision Apple ever made. Apple has been a client for 20 years with our company. They refused to pay my invoice. I was just a kid starting my company. I needed that money desperately, and they said, “We’re not paying it.” I said, “Well, it was a really successful project.” “I understand, but we don’t have the money.” I said, “I appreciate your honesty, but we have a signed contract.” “You can sue us.” The company was just me at that point. So I call him back and say, “Hey look,” and the guys go, “Hey, listen, I’ll give you stock instead.” And I said, “Why would I want to stock in your little company? You represent less than 1.2 percent of the total market, and your percentage of the market is shrinking.” Apple was trading at $12.10 a share. I still have that stock to this day. It’s worth $213 a share now, by the way.

Let me tell you one more thing about about three. You’re instantly familiar with it: three blind mice. When someone asks you to describe the 26 letters that make up your native alphabet, what three letters do you use?

Newton’s second law of motion is force equals mass times acceleration. Einstein’s law of relativity is E = mc². Red light, yellow light, green light. It’s not an accident that that happens. Light waves can be reflected, refracted or absorbed — three things like that. It’s not an accident; three is an intention. Great producers not only simplify; great salespeople look at time completely differently than anyone else I’ve ever been associated with.

There are approaching 200 different currencies in the world. Every country has its own, but there’s only one that matters. It’s the only currency that matters in the way you look at anything in our lives. If we look at it properly, the only one is time. Time is the only currency that matters. Nothing else matters. You cannot buy it and cannot get it back. And it exists only in two parts, not in three parts. You often think of time as having a past, present and future that you can impact. It doesn’t. It has a past from which you can learn and a future for which you can impact. There’s nothing you can do now. There’s nothing you can do to help me in this moment, this minute. Now, there is no now; there’s never been a now. And you’ll say, “Wait a minute.”

People say, “Live in the now.” That’s because they are not scientists. They don’t understand how time works. I’ll give you the quickest example I can. What color are my pants? They are basically blue. By the time your eyes have seen that, light has bounced off these and headed back to your brain. It’s gone through the rods and cones in your eyes to the visual cortex of your brain through a series of electrical impulses. The eyes look at it and see color. They see the blue of my pants in the past, about two nanoseconds in the past. Everything you experienced visually travels in about two nanoseconds in the past.

The vast majority of your meeting has been about yesterday. You’ve seen graphs and numbers, all those elements that happened in the past, right? They dictate how you should take a look at the future, but they’re not the future. They are just what has already happened. What am I going to do tomorrow? Your emphasis on planning couldn’t be better placed. Time has movement and motion in it. You know, before we diced time up into days and weeks and months and years and decades and centuries, we never thought about time as moving, as having motion to it. It was just a thing to us in the days before measurement. But now it clips around on us and creates untold pressure on us until we’re like Sisyphus. Now, the Greeks used to love to punish people.

Who brought the test, Greek mythology and the flame knowledge to man? Prometheus did, and he was punished for it because Zeus did not like that. Do you know what his punishment was? He was chained to a rock, and every day an eagle would come down and eat his liver. And every night it grew back, and the eagle did it again for eternity. So the Greeks loved to punish people. Sisyphus was a bad king and treated his people poorly. His punishment was to push a rock up the hill, and every single day, at the top of the hill, the rock rolled back down. He does it again the next day, and every day, for eternity. Just like you guys go to work. This idea of time being a penalty to us, of creating this untold amount of pressure on us, is a real thing.

It puts you under pressure, and that’s because you allow everybody and their brother to control this instead of you. You are responsible for your view of time — no one else, just you. You give it up until you squeeze it on Groundhog Day. That alarm goes off on Monday morning, and then you react. Boom, that squeezing, and when you get time, space, you created space. You know what you like to do with that space? Jam more stuff in, even though the space is filled. People do efficiency studies — and efficiency studies are designed to do one thing and one thing only and that is to increase the amount of time — and when they make you more efficient, they will fill that time with something else every single time until that road is constantly being pushed until you don’t get what time means to you anymore.

There are two ways to view it. You can become a victim or a master of your day, and the people in our study were masters of their day. They controlled it. It was their day to do with as they pleased, almost every single time they looked at any form of planning. So who’s in charge? Well, you’re in charge. If somebody in my company says, “Stephen, I didn’t have enough time to do that project,” I will ask them the same question every time. “What did you do instead?” I’ll ask you the question phrased this way: Would like to learn a musical instrument? Do you have more time to read recreationally? Would like to learn to cook or a foreign language? You have all that time to do any one of those things you choose. Any one of you knows what you’re doing — something else. That’s all. You’re just doing something else. When you can be reading recreationally, you’re doing something else, and guess what? You chose to do something else. So let me give you the structure of time.

This is how you see time when you look at your calendar. [visual] The days go like this. When you were in school and had the timelines about the War of 1812, timelines are linear just like this, your work, your Microsoft Outlook. We measure time and bizarre elements. Take 60 seconds, group them up into a minute and add 60 of those into an hour, and now disregard 60. Now it’s 24 hours. Disregard 24 and throw it into seven, seven days. Now disregard seven and throw it into some weirdly arbitrary thing of 30, 31 and 28.

Now, take it and bend it until it breaks. [visual] That’s what you need to do with your linear element. Pick up a rubber band. Here’s what time is to you. It’s anything twisted. It can be short- or long-term; it’s flexible. It’s just what you choose to do with it now. Take it between your fingers and stretch it out almost as far as it will go. You’ll start to feel tension, and that tension is begging for what? Release. All tension seeks relief. Let it go. You just have to let it go.

One of the women in my study was one of my favorites of all the people in the study, and I loved her for her arrogance. I asked her about sales meetings, and she said she doesn’t go to very many. She only goes if the sales meeting meets her three criteria. I said, “Three’s a good number. What are your three criteria?” She said, “It has to have a time frame, an agenda and someone has to tell me why I’m there. Why is it important that I’m here? If I don’t give it a three, I don’t go.” And I said, “Well, I’m sure you get in trouble for not going.” She said, “I’m a billion-dollar producer for this company. You know what they do? They come in and say, ‘I’ll see you next time.’ I control my day because I’m using that time productively.”

Here’s another time waster — emails that suck the life out of you. You will feel tension about what’s going on in your inbox right now. You’re thinking, I can check that and won’t waste any time. You know how it’s a time waster? Even if I don’t know you, I’ll take your email address, and I’ll send you this note: It will say Steve@creativeventures, but the note will say, “Urgent, please open.” You click it, and I’ve just stolen time from you. You don’t even know who I am. Urgent. Open. This is your email response. [visual] We need a better management plan.

Here is another time waster — meetings. You go to meetings. Meetings are a tremendous time consumer. Let me give it to you by the numbers. There are about 15 million small business meetings a day in America alone. That number is 90 million worldwide. Thirty-nine percent of employees spend time in meetings. Seventy percent of you bring other work to meetings. You’re in a meeting about this because you run other work. That’s why you look at your phone during any kind of a meeting. Fifty percent of leaders say they don’t reach their goals. Let me give you the meeting trap. Five people at a one-hour meeting. I’m sitting in the meeting in a beautiful office building in New York. After the meeting is over, my contact came up to me and said, “Steve, what do you think?” And I said, “Well, let me ask one question. How long was the meeting?” “It was an hour meeting.” I said, “No. How long was the meeting that we just came out of?” He said, “It started at 9:30 a.m. and ended at 10:30 a.m. It was an hour.”

I’ve got the agenda right here. He said, “I don’t understand what you’re asking.” I said, “There were five people at that meeting, and each person took an hour out of their day to be there. That’s a five-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. It’s a five-hour meeting. Now, let me ask you if what you did in that meeting was worth five hours of time.” He said, “No, it was not.”

I’m in another meeting where we’re embarking upon a large, goal-planning strategy for a company, a major soft drink manufacturer. During the meeting, I was listening to people talk, and I said, “Stop the meeting. I need everybody to leave the room.” Everybody left the room. I said, “I want you to send just one person in at a time for the next few minutes.”

I brought the first woman in and asked, “What is the goal of the meeting?” She was unbelievably succinct, unbelievably clear. She described what the meeting was about, and I said, “Thank you. Please send somebody else in.” She sent another guy in, and I said, “What’s the meeting about?” He was succinct and clear. He was professional. He described something completely different from the woman who came in two minutes earlier. I could do that with every single person in the meeting. Each one didn’t know what the meeting was about. They weren’t sure what it was about, even though they all said something different. Be careful with your time. One of the ways you can be careful with your time is if you see time, see it and make it visual.

The next idea is called “one critical thing.” So let’s talk about seeing yourself. The brain is a visual tool. Today is Friday. What did you have for dinner on Wednesday night? Steak. When I asked him a question, he looked up. He looked up for just a minute and then back to me. He was looking for a picture of what he had — not what it tasted like, not what it smelled like. It started visually. Eighty-seven percent of everything we experience is visual. The other senses are collectively using 13 percent. Imagine you’re on the phone with a client. Know this: You’re only tapping into 7.5 percent of how we take in information. What’s the point? You need to be telling a better story and painting a better picture on your phone calls because you’re only appealing to 7.5 percent of other brains’ capacity.

Make things visual. Sketch stuff out. We taught 3,500 financial advisors with Morgan Stanley how to sketch the data for their clients. We gave them a new tool in order to show their clients a picture instead of a word. If you want to control your time, see your time. Now, this is another tool that we use. [visual] We’re big, sticky-note people. We use them for everything. If you end up subscribing to our newsletter, you’ll see occasional pictures of a project that we’re working on. We always start scribbling. Then we go to a sketch. Then we go to sticky notes. They are really good because they’re movable. You can see them and move them anywhere. When you’re meeting with your client, it’s a really good idea to have those elements down, and you can sketch them and say, “Now put these in the order of importance for you.”

Ask them to list all the things that they think are important. Write all those things down on Post-it Notes and say, “Now that’s the easy part. Arrange these in order. What is the most important? What’s the second?” Let’s talk about how we plan for those. It’s a great exercise, and people love to do it. Don’t go overboard.

All items in time have weight. That means they have levels of importance. Everything is not weighed the same. Here’s what I mean. I live in Austin, Texas. Not long ago, there was a mayoral race for my little suburb. There were three women running for mayor in a very contested and nasty race. My wife’s friend was one of the women running.

So my wife asked if I would join her for a town hall meeting. She said, “But don’t ask any questions. Please don’t ask any questions.” But I’m me, and as things were going on and on, I raised my hand. I said, “I have a question. If somebody comes to you with issues, if five people come to you in a day, tell me, what process do you use to make a decision? What tool do you use to weigh the decision you have to make? Which decision is the most important? Can you tell me how you make a decision?” Not one could answer the question. They have no methodology for making a decision.

This is the idea of 10, 3, 1 or what we call the “OCT.” This is called the daily to-do list. [visual] I fold it in half lengthwise so there are two sides to it. This is a form we use every day. In my company, we print it two-sided, so there are four days. We plan Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and never plan on Friday.

The first item on the list is a different color. It says next to it “OCT.” It stands for the “One Critical Thing.” I’m going to know every day what the one critical thing that has to be done is. It’s the only thing that I care about. See all those other lines? [visual] I don’t care about those other lines. I care about the red line, and if you can weigh the most important thing every day and do it, the rest of the stuff you have to get done is gravy. You only need to get the most important thing done every day because there can always only be one most important thing. There can’t be three; there can’t be five. There can be only one, like the “Highlander,” for you film buffs. There can only be one every day. We do that every day. I want to know what the OCT is every day, and every day I want the OCT done.

I have this on my desk every day. [visual] Now, maybe you’ve only got 10 minutes. If you do, you’re The Ritz-Carlton. Every day at The Ritz-Carlton, for 10 minutes every morning, every division gets together and has a meeting. They talk about what’s important to them in that division. If it’s housekeeping, they talk about what room turnover is. If it’s the front desk, they say, “Maybe we’ve got somebody coming in from Saudi Arabia, and this person only wants white linens.” Maybe it’s the food and beverage people. Ten minutes — seven spent on what’s going on, and three spent on the mission of the company. Every day they remind everybody of why they exist. Ten minutes a day every day, 365 days out of the year, every single year. Now, maybe you only have three minutes. You’d be like Zappos’ Tony Hsieh. Zappos spends three minutes with each of the teams — if you’re doing pumps, athletic shoes, luggage, it doesn’t matter — three minutes every morning.

What’s going on? What are we doing? What’s the one critical thing? That you know what’s going on in your day.

That’s a real critical thing to have. Maybe you only have one minute. If you spend one minute at the end of your day, 60 seconds, time it, pull out your iPhone and set the stopwatch. Spend those 60 seconds thinking about what tomorrow’s OCT is. You’ll come up with it every day. Are you telling me you don’t have a minute? One minute, spend 30 seconds thinking and then start writing them down, crossing them out and say, “That’s my one for tomorrow.” Sales professionals in this book do this all the time.

So here’s the deal in my book: I give you 21 of these. Are all 21 going to apply to you? Probably not. They probably should, but they won’t. So what are you looking for? You’re looking for the meaningful ones that fit you. You’re looking for ones where you say, “I should do that.” I believe that simple and mastering your day are two very important ones. So you get to choose what to do in the whirlwind of your life. Write down one to three things that you think are important to use that will make it through the whirlwind. There may be one in there that will change the way you take a look at what you do. There should be.

I will leave you with this: If you want something to happen, you have to do something. It is the only way. So your challenge is to do something.

Stephen J. Harvill is the president and founder of Creative Ventures, a strategic planning and consulting firm based in Dallas, Texas. A scientist by education, Harvill brings a unique perspective to both his research and his presentations. For more than 30 years, he has advised high-profile organizations such as Apple, Pepsi, Samsung, Microsoft and the U.S. Navy on organizational dynamics and strategic thinking.