In business, it’s so important and valuable to test our ideas. Armed with the information from those efforts, we can build a path that gets us to successful outcomes in the straightest possible line--that includes in our lives as well as our businesses.
There are few entrepreneurs I know who are better testers that Matt Gallant—a serial entrepreneur who has scientifically tested more than 12,000 marketing ideas. From his research, he’s built five companies—including skincare, guitar lessons, and health and fitness products that have generated tens of millions of dollars.
Here are four of his top action steps that he recommends to entrepreneurs of all stripes—ideas that have been borne out by his own research efforts.
1. Know and embrace your “superpower.” The foundation of massive productivity is to offload everything that drains your energy and productivity. That requires you to first know what exactly what you do best—insights that Gallant says can be best learned by taking as many of the well-known personality tests as possible (think Kolbe, DISC, etc.). “There's a lot of power in knowing if you’re a quick starter, for example, or if you’ve got no follow through or whatever the results might be,” says Gallant. “Once you know that, you can start making adjustments to focus only on your strengths and surround yourself with people who can fill in your gaps.”
As entrepreneurs, many of us are so-called visionaries—we have big ideas and grand plans to change our companies or even change the world. But we often lack the focus and follow through to implement those visions and make them real. As a result, we need integrators—detail-oriented people who can build the framework to make our visions happen. “The biggest multiplier to my success and ability to maximize my personal productivity has been to build teams of people who have integrator and implementer personality types,” says Gallant.
2. Engage in focused ferocity. Most of us would agree with Gallant that people tend to be too lackadaisical when they’re working. By having the same focused intensity at work that you have at, say, the gym, you can achieve amazing things in much less time—and end your day feeling energized. The key is to aim that focus at your deepest work—the tasks that really move the needle for your success. “You have to organize and structure your life where you're just doing the things that you're great at, that you love to do—and then you sprint. You just go full tilt and then recover. Take a break, relax, get out of focused ferocity, have a drink. Then boom, turn it back on.”
Such intensity is a learned skill for most of us—it’s not innate. The best approach, says Gallant, is to start with the smallest amount of time you can handle going at 100%. Often, that’s about 20 or 30 minutes, with 5 minutes of rest. Over time, you can begin extending that focused ferocity to 45 minutes of intensity, followed by 15 minutes of rest.
Pro tip: Gamify your efforts. “If you track your focused performance time and then aim to beat it the next time, it becomes fun,” says Gallant.
3. Become a sleep master. Our capacity as entrepreneurs, short-term and long term, will be limited by our health. There's nothing more powerful than increasing our energy.
There are a million ways to increase health and energy, of course, including diet and exercise. But Gallant has found one area—sleep—to yield tremendous benefits. After sleep testing revealed how poorly he was sleeping each night, he took action.
- Get a spring-coiled mattress—ideally made of memory foam, which helps prevent blood flow constriction better than traditional mattresses and helps you spread you weight more evenly.
- Sleep in a cold room. Hot sleeping conditions cause tossing and turning. Gallant is a big fan of ChiliPads
- Maximize darkness. Black-out curtains will help keep out bothersome light, and Gallant even recommends covering up LED lights in your bedroom at night. “Even if you wear an eye mask, which I did for a long time, your skin has photoreceptive cells. And if the light hits that, it's going to disrupt your melatonin and mess up your deep sleep,” he says.
4. Surround yourself with great people. We can get so caught up in being hyper-productive and successful that we miss a key piece of the satisfaction puzzle: hanging out with great people. Deep relationships are foundational to our happiness—and our happiness, of course, helps drive great success. One of the best ways I’ve found to develop meaningful friendships that cross the bridge between the personal and the professional is through mastermind groups and CEO groups—formal groups with other entrepreneurs who are very much like me in terms of mindset and values, and who want to form strong relationships so we can all learn from each other.
That said, it’s also important to find that balance in life by keeping up friendships with people from outside the entrepreneurial circles.
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