High Performance for Entrepreneurs

How to be Confident

When I was in high school, I was always the quiet, why, and not very confident kid. I was often the kid that sat by himself in the back row because nobody wanted to sit next to me.

I would only admire my schoolmates who were more confident and likable, while I would wonder “how can I do that too?”.

Today I’m a completely different person than I was in high school. I’ve pursued all the things I really wanted to pursue in my life (from running my own 6-figure online business to having a hot girlfriend to winning 2 gold medals at my first powerlifting championship).

Now I’m no longer the person that hides in the shadows, and love being in the spotlight and confidently speaking in front of hundreds of people:

In order to get to where I am today, I NEEDED to develop the unshakable confidence that would allow me to take massive action towards my goals and dreams. Today I’m going to show you how I did it, and how you can become more confident in your business and personal life as well.

Let’s dive in!

Without confidence, it’s next to impossible to build an online business

Let’s face it, building an online business is hard.

It requires a TON of putting yourself out there.

From writing articles and releasing them to the world, to creating online programs and charging thousands of dollars for them, to pursuing big media opportunities and even hiring a team – all of these decisions require confidence.

Without confidence, you’ll always get stuck in the thinking phase and progress slower than a snail with your business. Think about it – have you ever met a super successful person that WASN’T confident in their abilities? It’s unlikely, because they probably wouldn’t have taken the action that would allow them to become successful.

With confidence, you’ll be equipped with a jetpack that will allow you to fly over the hurdles and challenges in your way of building your own online business. You’ll be able to escape the endless overthinking loop, confidently take action and even wonder what’s taking others so long to build their own businesses.

But developing confidence isn’t easy, especially since most of the advice on confidence is not all that helpful.

Why conventional advice on confidence building is wrong

If you ever googled “how to become more confident”, you’ve likely ran into one of the article with “25 tips to become more confident”.

Usually they talk about something like this:

Dress better!
Do power poses!
Groom yourself!
Exercise!
Think positively!
…
…
…
Buy a unicorn!

When I read those articles, they always make me roll my eyes because I know they make people FEEL good, but they don’t actually help you become more confident. Which makes sense to me, since these articles aren’t really written to help people, they’re written to attract more views to different blogs and media outlets. It’s sexier to say “do these 25 sexy and easy things” than “do this one hard and boring thing”.

If you’re reading this post about confidence and you’ve read some of these articles, this likely means that those articles didn’t help you a whole lot.

Why is that?

Well, because things like dressing better, grooming yourself or putting on cologne CAN help you feel more confident in the moment… But you’ll likely forget them in a few days and won’t turn them into a habit. Or, they’re things like “exercise more!” which people won’t start magically doing after reading an article about 25 tips on confidence.

They also don’t address the root issue behind why you’re not confident, which we’ll address today.

The real reason why you lack confidence

You don’t lack confidence because you don’t dress well, don’t clean your desk or don’t do power poses. I know plenty of people who are super confident and don’t do any of those things. I also know people who are super confident even though they don’t exercise frequently, volunteer regularly, or have a pet unicorn.

Now here’s the deal – the reason why most people won’t tell you why you’re not confident is that it’s not sexy, it might hurt your feelings, and it can’t be fixed in a few minutes by putting on a nice blazer and a pocket square.

Most people these days will give you “quick solutions”, because they say that “nobody wants to do the hard work”.

Well, I’m not like that. I know you’re reading this blog because you’re a top performer (or you want to become one), and you’re not afraid to put in the work. In fact, you WANT to put in the work, you just need someone to tell you what ACTUALLY works so you know what to do without wasting your time on things that don’t.

Ok, so the real reason for why you’re not confident is…

*drum roll*

You’re not doing the things you said you were going to do.

Yep.

The real reason why you’re not confident about building a business is because you said you were going to write that blog post last week and you didn’t.

The real reason why you’re not confident in putting on 20lbs of muscle and getting a six pack (or a flat stomach and a toned butt for the ladies) is because you said you’d go to the gym regularly and stop snacking, but you didn’t do any of those things.

The real reason why you’re not confident about your speaking skills is because you’ve said to yourself that you’ll go to a public speaking class that you never went to.

I know this might sound harsh, but it’s the truth. And I know you’d rather hear the truth than some feel good motivational tactics.

When I lacked confidence in high school, it was because I never acted on the things I really wanted to pursue. I wished I was more social and that I could make more friends, but I never picked up a book about social skills or even googled how to become more social (until I was a few years in college).

I dreamed of being a world-class athlete but I never actually pursued the sports I wanted to pursue, put in the work or took the initiative to get the right coaches to help me learn a new sport well. Instead I spent hours and hours playing video games at home – no wonder I didn’t have many friends.

Everything changed once I learned how to run my own business, which is when I first experienced what I call Exponential Confidence.

How to develop true confidence with the Exponential Confidence Technique

If we said that you lack confidence because you’re not doing the things you said you were going to do, then how can you become more confident?

It’s simple – you actually do more of the things you said you were going to do, and you’ll become exponentially more confident over time.

Here’s what I mean:

If you look at The Exponential Confidence Graph above, you’ll see that the more you follow through with your goals, the more confident you’ll become.

For example, if you say you’ll write and publish a blog post this week, you’ll become slightly more confident in your ability to create regular blog posts. If you do this for 4 weeks in a row, you’ll really feel like you can do this. And if you create weekly blog posts for a YEAR, it will be really hard for you to NOT be confident in your ability to create regular blog posts.

The same applies to anything in life – from going to the gym, to improving your social skills, to getting better at sports, public speaking, dating… You name it.

The more you consistently do what you said you were going to do, the more confident you’ll become over time. That’s why successful entrepreneurs are confident in their abilities – because they’ve put in so much work it would be hard for them NOT to be confident. That’s why top athletes are confident in their abilities – because they’ve spent their whole lives training to become the best in the world in their sports.

I call this phenomenon Exponential Confidence.

Exponential Confidence means intentionally following through with your goals for a longer period of time in order to become exponentially more confident.

The key here is to acknowledge that while you WILL get a confidence boost after the first few weeks of following through with your goals, the unshakable confidence that you’re seeking will develop over time as a result of this process, rather than magically happen overnight. And that’s exactly why most of the “confidence hacks” don’t work, as the initial boost you get from them quickly drops off

Now here’s the interesting thing about the Exponential Confidence concept.

If you consistently fail to follow through with your goals, then your confidence will get gradually lower and lower over time.

This is what I see in most people who get “stuck” with running their online businesses. They set big goals for themselves, they don’t follow through with them, then get discouraged. They get ideas in their head, stop themselves from pursuing them, and get even more discouraged. Within a few months, they go from feeling excited about their business to feeling like they can’t really do this, and often “move on to something else” or say that “life came in-between”.

The same thing happens with going to the gym. If you’ve ever said yourself that you’ll go to the gym regularly but then didn’t go as many times as you wanted to, you became less and less confident about your ability to go to the gym regularly, and you eventually stopped going, just like every year beforehand.

Eventually, we lose all of our confidence and move on to new pursuits in our life.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Even if your confidence levels are pretty low right now, you CAN build them back up relatively quickly with every consistent action you take towards your goals and ideas. In other words, every time you successfully do what you said you were going to do (to yourself or to others), your confidence will grow.

I see this happen all the time to myself, my clients and my friends.

The Exponential Confidence Case Study: How Diana Started Kicking Ass

One such example is my close friend Diana Tower, who has been absolutely kicking ass lately in her business. She’s close to finishing her second Ultimate Guide this year, she’s written some amazing posts recently (like this one about her experience at the Forefront event), and she’s recording a new, exciting podcast behind the scenes that’s unlike anything that the industry has ever seen.

As she started putting herself out there more and more, people actually started reaching out to her to hire her as a consultant or a coach, which is something that didn’t happen to her before. Now Diana is the most confident in her business that I’ve ever seen her, and she’s also the happiest she’s ever been.

Why is that?

Because she started acting on her ideas.

I know she had this idea of a podcast for a while, but she kept putting it off. As I was supposed to be one of the first guests on her podcast, I annoyed her (like a good friend does) to send me that scheduling link so we could record the episode.

As soon as she sent me the link, she put the wheels into motion. She came up with some awesome podcast questions, scheduled interviews with over 20 people in her network, and has already recorded quite a few of them. As she started working on these podcasts, she also started writing new content that she was excited about, and more and more people started to hear about her over time. And as more and more people heard about her, people started reaching out to work with her.

All because she actually acted on her ideas and followed through with them.

Becoming more confident really is that simple. You don’t need hacks or techniques or to spend hours and hours talking to a coach about confidence. You really need to just do what you said you wanted to do and follow through with it, and the confidence will come.

Now let’s talk about how YOU can apply the Exceptional Confidence Technique to your life and business as well, so you too can become more confident in your skills, abilities and yourself.

From Theory to Action: How to Apply the Exponential Confidence Technique to Your Business (and Life)

You already know how the Exceptional Confidence Technique works, and at this point there’s only one thing left to do: to put it into action.

On a meta level, this is a great opportunity for you to become more confident in yourself as well – you spent 5 or 10 minutes reading this article with the intention to become more confident. Now you have a choice, either you can read it and forget about it (which will make you less confident that you can actually take action on the advice you learn), OR you can take action on it, and take that first step to becoming more confident.

So to put this technique into action, all you need to do is three things:

1. Set yourself a small goal for next week related to your business or personal life that will help you build up your confidence (writing a blog post, going to the gym 3 times this week, or sending out one guest post pitch)
2. Follow through with it
3. EVEN if everything in your life goes wrong (your car breaks down, your girlfriend dumps you or you get stick), STILL follow through with it

The task doesn’t need to be executed perfectly. It’s more important for your confidence to get it done, than to not get it done because you’re trying to make it perfect.

You’ll be amazed at what this does to your confidence, ESPECIALLY if following through with the goal won’t be easy. Because if that’s the case, and you follow through with it anyway, you’ll also develop mental toughness along the way which helps you confidently conquer bigger and bigger challenges in your business and life.

After the first week, the rules are simple.

First and foremost, make sure you always follow through with what you said you were going to do, even if that means just committing to doing LESS. It’s better to commit to doing less, build up your confidence and momentum than to commit to doing too much and lower your confidence while killing your momentum.

Second, you can use your newly found confidence to gradually pursue bigger and better goals and ideas, which will in turn give you even more confidence once you accomplish them. Soon you’ll be taking advantage of the Exponential Confidence principles and you’ll wonder how come you even struggled with confidence in the first place.

And what if you don’t manage to follow through with your goal that you set for yourself? Ask yourself WHY you didn’t follow through with your goal, and if time or energy was the issue, set yourself a smaller goal for next week.

If something else was the issue, address the issue – but make sure things like “my car broke down” don’t take your focus away from your goals. When things aren’t perfect, these are perfect opportunities to train your mental toughness by following through with your goals anyway.

That’s it! You know what to do – write down that one thing you want to work on next week, then make it happen no matter what.

So tell me – what’s the one goal you can take action on next week to build up your confidence?

P.S. You might have noticed some incredible 10/10 art doodles in this post – I drew these myself. I know they’re super random, but I’d love to know what you think of them. Do you love them? Hate them? Should I make more of them?

5 Reasons Why Warren Buffet Became the Greatest Investor of All Time

By Primoz Bozic 10 Comments

Have you ever wondered why Warren Buffet became the greatest investor of all time and the richest man on earth?

Was it because of his natural ability to trade stocks?

Was it a series of lucky breaks?

Was he just way smarter than everyone else?

I’d argue that the answer is none of the above.

I recently watched the documentary about Warren’s life called “Becoming Warren Buffet” on my flight to Chicago (it’s a great documentary and I highly recommend watching it), and it all made sense.

It was definitely not that he was lucky, super smart, or a “natural”. He really just worked harder and smarter than everyone else.

In this post, I’ll share 5 reasons that I believe made Warren Buffet the greatest investor of all time.

#1 – He dedicated his life to one thing

Most of us live our lives in a distracted world where we jump from one thing to another. We spend a few years working in one job, then we switch careers. We take on one hobby, get bored of it, and jump to another one. We learn about one subject, read a few books on it, and then explore other subjects.

Warren Buffet did the opposite of what we do. He dedicated his life to learning about and doing just one thing – making great investments. He didn’t “just” spend 10,000 hours (which usually takes roughly 10 years) to be come an expert. He likely spent more than 100,000 hours learning about and practicing the art of investing, to achieve a true level of mastery.

You can see a similar trend in other people who dedicate their life to one thing without worrying about being good at everything – they just practice more than everyone else. You can see the same pattern in people like Kobe Bryant who wouldn’t leave practice until he made 400 shots each day, Gary Kasparov who spent endless hours each day studying the patterns of old chess games to improve his own game, and world’s best copywriters that wrote hundreds of headlines a day to get better at writing great headlines.

Sticking with just one thing in your life is something that few people do, but the ones that do usually make it further than everyone else.

How to apply this lesson to your life:

If you want to become incredibly good at what you do, according to the studies pointed at on peoplebynetworth.com, the first thing you need to do is pick ONE thing you want to be great at, rather than 5 or 20 different things – and then dedicate your life to it.

To get started on your journey, you can decide to learn about just one thing for the next month. This might mean practicing your copywriting skills for a month, reading books only related to copywriting or connecting just with people who are incredible copywriters.

Then, if you want to get better at it, spend another month on it. And another. And another. It’s only a matter of time until you’ll get amazing at it.

#2 – He started learning about investing early on

While I don’t believe that Warren Buffet necessarily had “lucky breaks”, it’s true that he did have certain advantages over other people that allowed him to get to where he is today. One of those advantages was that his dad had a library full of books about investing.

When he was a young kid, he spent hours and hours reading those books and expanding his knowledge, when most other kids were just busy with playing around. This allowed him to clock in thousands of hours of learning and accumulate knowledge that made him look like a prodigy later on when most of his peers just started to learn about investing.

The same is true for most other “prodigies”. People like Tiger Woods and Mozart who are incredibly good at what they do usually started practicing when they were 3 or 4 years old, getting a head start on most people around them.

How to apply this lesson to your life:

Invent a time machine, go back in time, and start building expertise when you’re just 3 or 4 years old. Just kidding.

While you might not be able to go back in time, you can stop waiting for the “right moment” to get good at something. If there’s something you always wanted to learn about, get started with it today. Take that kickboxing class you are thinking about. Read that book about songwriting that’s on your wishlist. Bake that chocolate shuffle you always wanted to learn how to bake.

The other thing you can do if you have kids is to give them the ability to start learning something – either a sport, an art form or a skill – early on in their life, when they’re just a few years old. This will give them a fighting chance at becoming the best in the world at what they do.

#3 – He reads for 5-6 hours a day

Most of the days of Warren Buffet are pretty boring. He spends 5-6 hours a day secluded in his study, either reading about the stock market or thinking about investments he wants to make or the solutions to his problems. He has been doing that for years on end.

I noticed a similar trend in my mentor Allon who is a high-performance coach that managed world’s best tennis players like Novak Djokovic and Marat Safin. He spends hours and hours each day immersed in books, speeches, podcasts and online courses related to what he does. That’s why he seemingly knows everything there is to know about high performance – he’s been doing that for 20+ years.

Derek Halpern, a leading authority in the online business world is another example of this in action. In his early podcast interviews, he admitted that he reads 2-3 books a week because he heard that Warren Buffet did a similar thing. It’s no accident that he has amassed a wealth of knowledge that he shares in his YouTube videos and blog posts that get viewed thousands of times.

How to apply this lesson to your life:

Pick a subject that you want to learn about and buy and read EVERY book you can find about it. Even if you just read for 1 hour a day (for 30 minutes when you wake up, and 30 minutes before bed) you’ll be able to read a book or so a week. After you read 10 books about a certain subject, you’ll know the subject pretty damn well.

If you want to kick things up a notch, make the time to read more. Instead of spending time on Facebook , read. Instead of browsing the internet while you’re on the toilet or waiting at the doctor’s appointment, read. Instead of watching Netflix in the evening, read. As an added bonus, you can also listen to audiobooks on Audible while you’re committing or buying groceries, which can easily help you work through another book or two a week.

#4 – He stayed in his circle of competence

The school system nowadays encourages us to master every subject – from biology to psychology to art and maths. The society expects us to get good at cleaning, cooking and mowing the lawn. The online business world expects us to practice writing, speaking, podcasting, copywriting, Facebook ads, designing our websites…

Warren Buffet was different than most people in the fact that he was conscious of the things he was competent in and stuck with them. He never bothered learning about cooking or art – he stuck with investing. Even within the investing world he only made investments that he knew would work out, and wouldn’t take big, uncalculated risks. He stuck with the things he was good at.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic, one of the best football players in the world did a similar thing – he knew he was incredibly good at dribbling and attacking, so he practiced that. During the football matches, he would often stay up front and not help the defenders, so he could conserve his energy for when he needed it most – scoring goals. It’s no wonder that he still scores tens of goals each season at the age of 36.

How to apply this lesson to your life:

Don’t spend your time doing things that you’re not good at. Instead hire people that are just as good as you or better than you at designing your website, cleaning your apartment or making dinner. Then use the time you have available to progress further in developing your skill sets.

Instead of trying to get good at every skill of building an online business (writing, podcasting, speaking, etc.) start by spending your time on just ONE skill you’re good at. If you love writing, write. If you love speaking, speak on podcasts, create YouTube videos or speak at events. If you love writing stories, write a lot of stories. If you prefer writing about systems or tactics, write about that.

You don’t need to do everything that people tell you to do. Instead, you can be more like Warren Buffet and do what you’re competent in doing, and take full advantage of it.

#5 – He lives a very simple life

One of the reasons why Warren Buffet is able to get so much reading done is that he lives a very simple lifestyle. He doesn’t have a computer or a smartphone, so he doesn’t spend any of his time on needless distractions like Facebook, email or surfing the web. By living a simple life, he can dedicate most of his time to one thing that matters most in his life – reading about investing and investing.

Cal Newport writes about the importance of living a simple life in his book called Deep Work, where he shares countless examples of people who are able to create incredible amounts of work because they spend minimal time on distractions like email. He himself is a testament of that philosophy by not being on social media. Over the past few years he has published tens of academic papers, written multiple books and hundreds of blog posts, and read hundreds of books – all while having plenty of time for his family.

I’ve had a similar experience as I quit Facebook a month ago. It’s no coincidence that I’ve read 10 books over the past month, written tens of thousands of words and clocked in 40 hours of coaching calls, all while spending 10-15 hours a week in the gym and having plenty of time for my girlfriend, family and friends.

How to apply this lesson to your life:

If you want to become the best in the world at what you do, or even grow your business faster than you’re growing it right now, you’ll want to mercilessly cut out all the distractions that unnecessarily complicate your life. There’s no real other way around it. If you’re serious about doing this, I highly recommend Cal Newport’s Deep Work, it’s a great read.

So why did Warren Buffet REALLY become the greatest investor of all time?

In my mind, it’s simple. He just put in more effort, learning and deliberate practice than anyone else in this world. While most people are checking emails, he’s reading. While they’re browsing the news and spending time on Facebook, he’s working on new investments. He’s not smarter than them or luckier. He’s just more hardworking and more focused.

We can all learn from Warren Buffet and his habits. We can all dedicate our life to one thing, constantly read and improve our skill sets, stick with our strengths and minimize our distractions to live a simpler life. The only thing we don’t have an effect on is starting as early as Warren Buffet – but we can get started today.

Which was your favorite lesson from Warren Buffet and why?

Why I Quit Facebook

By Primoz Bozic 7 Comments

My palms were sweating. I was sick in my stomach. I could feel the tension building up in my body.

Then I did it.

I pressed the mouse button to make one of the scariest decisions I’ve made in a while.

I waited for a moment. Nothing.

The next moment, relief slowly started kicking in. The tension in my body slowly started to release. The stomach started to untangle. It felt like a huge rock was dropping off my shoulders. And slowly, a smile formed on my face.

I had just deleted my Facebook account.

When I announced the day before that I would be doing that, and encouraged my Facebook friends to reach out to me via email in the future, the reactions were mixed.

Some of them said “good for you!”. Some said “I wanted to do the same but never did it”. Some said “Are you sure you want to do this?” And some of them were just sad.

But everyone had one thing in common – they were shocked.

Over the past few years, I’ve built a decent following and reputation on Facebook, and whenever I posted something on my wall or in one of the communities I was a part of, I would always get a big response, which would help me spread the word about my work.

I also used Facebook to connect with and stay in touch with a lot of online entrepreneurs. Nowadays messaging with someone on Facebook is one of the easiest ways to start or continue building a relationship. All it takes is to open and app and shoot a message to someone you want to talk to. Being an entrepreneur I had to use the app to communicate with a lot of people.

And of course, if you’re not on Facebook nowadays, you’re “missing out”. You’re missing out on birthday party invites, interesting events you could attend, posts in Facebook groups that could be valuable for your business, potential publicity opportunities, and so on.

By quitting Facebook, I would throw all of those opportunities away and could potentially hurt my business and my relationships.

But even though all of those things are true, quitting Facebook wasn’t a shock or a radical decision for me. It was more like a logical next step and something that I saw coming.

To fully understand why I made this decision (and why it really isn’t that surprising), we need to go back in time for a few months.

THE CONVERSATION THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

A few months ago I was having a conversation with a client and a friend, Allon.

Allon is a high-performance coach for online entrepreneurs and he has managed three #1 tennis players in the world, including Novak Djokovic.

Allon wanted to find a few online entrepreneurs to work with and help them become high performers and top authorities in the online business world.

As he mentioned that, I thought to myself: “Damn, I wish I could work with Allon!” And then it dawned on me. Why couldn’t I? I told Allon that I’d be happy to become his first mentee if he’s interested in working with me – and he said yes.

That single conversation a few months ago completely changed the trajectory of my life in the future months. It was the beginning of my journey to “stop messing around” and become a professional online entrepreneur.

I was sick and tired of running my business as a hobby and in a half-assed way. I knew I could perform on a really high level, but I struggled with doing it consistently. I had times when I would write tens of thousands or words a week and create a ton of incredible content, but I also had times when I just wasted my time on email, Facebook and other addictions without really creating any meaningful work.

I was hoping that Allon would help me break out of that and perform on a high level consistently by helping me build the right mindsets, habits and character. I was willing to do whatever it takes to get there.

HOW I STARTED MY JOURNEY OF BECOMING A PROFESSIONAL ENTREPRENEUR

The first thing that we did with Allon was start working on creating the so-called “power blocks”, which he talks about in his Ultimate Guide to High Performance. These were uninterrupted windows of highly focused work where I would go to a coffee shop for a few hours before and after my workout and just crank out some writing.

This single habit already made a huge impact on my business, and I was able to write 102,522 words of remarkable content in 28 days of writing shortly after we started working together. I wrote the whole email sequence for the Ultimate Guide System plus a few long and detailed blog posts that you can find on my blog.

The next habit we started working on were the so-called “online blocks”. These were block of time during which I was supposed to take care of all my email, coaching done in my Ultimate Guide System community, browsing and checking Instagram and Facebook.

Out of all the habits that we worked on with Allon, this one was the hardest one to form (or rather break). I’ve tried staying off from social media and mindless browsing with limited success in the past, and this time was no different.

Sure, I was able to drastically decrease the time I spent on browsing, and that helped. But I still found myself regularly checking my phone to see “if there’s anything new”. I would check my email multiple times a day. I would do the same with Facebook notifications and Facebook messages. Then I would go on to check my Instagram account and the different news websites. And sometimes over the weekend, I would go on YouTube and start watching random YouTube videos.

I often spent hours and hours mindlessly browsing the internet when I wasn’t at my coffee shop writing. When I had a 15-minute break, I would always check my phone. I hate to admit it but I was addicted to it. I always had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I should “check what’s new”.

The worst part of it was that I was “one of those people” that constantly stared their phones. When I was hanging out with my girlfriend in the evening, we were often on our phones. When we were hanging out with our friends the same thing happened. And even when I was visiting my family for lunch I sometimes constantly checked the phone. The same thing happened when I was waiting in line at a grocery store, and (this is the worst of all) sometimes even while driving.

It was clear to me that being addicted to the internet was bad for me. Not only did it put me in danger while driving, it also wasn’t good for my business (I could be reading books during that time) and horrible for my relationships. My girlfriend often got mad at me for being on my phone all the time, and she was right.

This went on for a few weeks, until a few other things happened that helped me get rid of my internet addiction.

MY SERENDIPITOUS TRIP TO ISRAEL

Allon and I are both huge sports fans and we often chat about how our teams are doing. One Monday morning he sent me a random message saying “Hey, if you want to be super spontaneous you can visit me in Israel this weekend. Slovenia is playing Israel in a friendly basketball match, and we could go see it together!”

To most people it would seem crazy to go to Israel on a 2-day notice, and they’d never do it. Me? I love taking trips like these. I needed a vacation anyway, and I loved the idea of spending a few days with Allon and sinking in all of his wisdom. So I bought my flight tickets and made it to Israel the next Thursday.

During our trip we made it to the basketball match (where Slovenia unfortunately lost):

But while the basketball match was nice, it wasn’t the highlight of the trip. Hanging out with Allon for a few days was.

Allon is different than most people. As soon as you start talking to him, you notice that he’s clearly an expert at what he does. He seems like he has a great answer to every single question related to high performance. It didn’t matter whether I asked him about money management, deep focused work, overcoming self-doubt or anything else. He always knew how to give me incredibly valuable advice.

Over the few days that I stayed with him we had countless incredible conversations – more than I would usually have in a year. We were constantly talking about how to become better in different areas of our lives while chilling by the pool or taking a long walk on the beach.

Even though I learned an incredible amount over the few days I spent in Israel, the knowledge itself wasn’t the most powerful thing for me. The most valuable thing of all was seeing the lifestyle of a true high performer.

Allon lives a very different life from most people. He doesn’t spend almost any time on Facebook or email. He doesn’t constantly check his phone. Throughout my whole trip, I haven’t even seen him sit behind a computer once.

Instead, he’s actually focusing on living a life. He’s always present when he talks to you. He spends a lot of time reading, learning, meditating, having great conversations, playing with his son and his dog, or talking to his wife. And it seems like he’s genuinely happy while he does that. He’s not constantly worrying or stressing out about emails or rapidly checking social media.

As I watched Allon and his life, I realized that this is the lifestyle that I wanted to have. I want to live a rich, abundant lifestyle where I help a lot of people, but I don’t want to be checking emails for 5 hours a day.

Seeing Allon living this lifestyle AND being extremely successful made me realize that success doesn’t need to come with sacrificing your whole life. Instead, I had the feeling that this lifestyle that Allon created for himself actually fuels his success.

PURSUING THE ROAD TO EXCELLENCE AND MASTERY

As I spent more and more time with Allon, it soon became clear that he reads and learns a TON. He has taken hundreds of online courses. He has read thousands of books. He has been consistently focused on learning and improving himself for the last 20 years.

It started to make sense to me WHY I was getting that feeling that he “knows everything” and seeing him as an incredibly wise expert. It was because over the last 20 years, he did two things consistently. He learned, and he put the advice into action.

Over the years, he has accumulated an enormous bank of knowledge and expertise that now makes it seem like he effortlessly knows a solution to every single problem you might be having.

I realized that that’s one of the things I haven’t been doing as well as I would have wanted to. I knew that I could learn, improve and grow my business very quickly when I learned a lot in the past, but I wasn’t regularly doing that lately. Allon told me that creating a routine where I for example improve my writing every single day would have a HUGE impact on my business in the long run, and I agreed with him.

When I came home from Israel, I made a commitment to myself to figure out how to truly become an expert and achieve mastery. My chosen area of expertise? Writing. My goal is to become one of the top 5 writers in the online business world – a goal that is absolutely achievable, and a goal that won’t just magically “happen”, but will need to be achieved through a lot of deliberate hard work.

In order to figure out HOW to get there, I began rapidly learning about mastery, excellence and expertise. I read books like So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work by Cal Newport, I read the Talent Myth from Matthew Wallace, I listened to a few episodes of the Finding Mastery podcast from Michael Gervais, I listened to a few interviews from people like Derek Halpern, T Harv Eker and so on – all in a matter of weeks.

The more books I read and the more interviews I listened to, the more clarity I had about how to become a true expert.

Here are a few crucial things that I learned:

#1 – There is no such thing as talent

Mozart wasn’t a musical prodigy when he was born. Tiger Woods didn’t become an incredible golfer because of his “talent”. Most of the olympic medal winners don’t become olympic medal winners because of their “gifts”.

All incredibly successful from different walks of life have one thing in common: They worked their asses off to become insanely good at what they did. In most cases, a lot of them had access to great teachers and opportunities to practice their when they were extremely young, getting thousands of hours of practice in when their competitors weren’t even thinking about golfing.

Because they put in so many hours of quality practice so early on in their careers, they were far superior to their competitors who started training at a later age, and seemed like prodigies, when in reality they really just had the unfair advantage of putting in more quality practice.

The emphasis here is on QUALITY practice. Anders Ericsson, one of the top sports psychologists out there called this “deliberate practice”. Cal Newport calls it “deep work”.

Regardless of what we call it, the reality is that if you want to get really freaking good at something, you need to put in the high quality, focused, and often uncomfortable work.

If I for example played tennis for 10 hours a week for 10 years with a friend, would I get better? Absolutely. But if I never actually practiced it and just played, I wouldn’t become a world class tennis player.

If on the other hand I hired an amazing coach for 1on1 lessons and spent 5 hours a week practicing with him, while spending the other 5 hours playing matches or attending tournaments, chances are I would become a world-class tennis player over the course of 10 years as I would put in thousands and thousands of hours of high quality practice.

This was an important realization for me because until I dug into it, I subconsciously believed that some people are just “more gifted or talented” than me, and made me feel helpless. Now I see that’s not true, which made me realize that I can become an expert at anything I want to, IF I’m willing to put in the hard work.

#2 – You can be an expert at anything in 10 years

One of the things that Allon constantly reminds me of is that you can achieve anything you want to in 10 years.

Originally I had trouble believing that, and imagining it for myself. Could I really become a Hollywood actor in 10 years? Could I really run a billion dollar business? Could I really become a professional footballer in that time frame?

As I explored “the talent myth” and realized that the practice is really what turns you into an expert, it all started to make sense.

You’ve probably heard of the “10,000 hour rule” to become an expert. Cal Newport talks about this rule in So Good They Can’t Ignore You, where he makes the point that just 10,000 hours isn’t enough – 5,000 of those 10,000 hours need to be deliberate practice.

He proves that thesis by a study that was done on professional chess players. The chess players that spent 9,000 hours out of the 10,000 hours playing tournament games (and not studying how to get better at chess) became intermediate players. The players that spent 5,000 out of the 10,000 hours studying their game and the games of other people became grandmasters.

Coincidentally, you can only get about 1,000 hours of really highly focused practice in every year (as highly focused practice is tiring and straining), which means that you’ll likely need about 10 years to put in the 10,000 hours and become really great at what you do.

Hearing about this I started to BELIEVE that I could achieve anything I wanted to with 10 years of deliberate practice and constant improvement. It would be hard NOT to become great at what I do if I really put in the years of hard work and daily improvement.

#3 – Removing distractions is the key to consistently progressing towards mastery

As I listened to some of the Finding Mastery interviews with Michael Gervais (he’s the mental toughness coach for Seattle Seahawks and from Felix Baumgartner, the guy who took a balloon to the space and jumped from it), I could see the same pattern repeating over and over again.

The athletes that became the best in the world at what they did were focused on improving themselves every day through deliberate practice, and spending as much time as possible “in the zone” of presence, calm and focus. This focus is what enables them to get in the thousands of hours of high quality practice that helps them become the best in the world at what they do.

This made me realize that just “trying to learn something new every day” wasn’t enough. I needed to find big blocks of focused, uninterrupted time in my schedule where I could learn and improve my skills. If I managed to do that, then failing to improve really wouldn’t be an option any more.

This is where quitting Facebook and social media comes in.

THE COST OF BEING ON FACEBOOK

As I’ve mentioned in the beginning of this article, Facebook has a lot of benefits for an online entrepreneur. But few people really consider the cost and the downsides of being on Facebook.

For me, Facebook (and other social media like Instagram) was not only a considerable time suck. It was also something that my brain was constantly thinking about, and taking my focus away.

I constantly thought to myself “I need to see if there’s something new.” “I need to check if someone messaged me.” “I need to see how people liked my blog post that I just published.”

Even if I logged out of Facebook, set myself set hours to access it, or even blocked my access to it through apps like Freedom, it didn’t help.

I still felt like my brain was wired and addicted to it. It was always in the back of my mind. I need to check Facebook. I need to check Instagram. I need to check my email. I need to check news websites. I had that thought in the back of my mind over and over again, and it took away my focus from the tasks at hand.

On top of that, there was the obvious browsing Facebook (which isn’t really helpful), responding (or feeling guilty for not responding) to messages from random people who would message me, or replying to questions in the Facebook comments that would continue to suck out my time and energy.

Even if I managed not to check Facebook when I was writing, I still checked it every chance that I would get. On the toilet, in the elevator, sometimes even in the car. I often spent a lot of time on it in the evening, rather than spending quality time with my friends, family or my girlfriend, or reading to improve myself.

Being on social media was hurting my business and my lifestyle, and I knew I had to do something about it.

WHY I QUIT FACEBOOK

By the time I quit Facebook last Saturday, the decision was quite easy to make. It was a “gut feeling” decision. I knew it was the right thing to do.

As I’ve spent a lot of my time thinking about what my big vision of what I want to achieve in 10 years is and studying the HOW to get there, I realized that I was SAYING that I wanted to achieve these incredible feats, but what I was DOING wasn’t getting me there as fast as I could.

I realized that if I really wanted to become an expert at what I do, reach all of my goals and live this incredible life that’s similar to Allon’s life, I needed to live a lifestyle that would help me get there. I would have to spend a lot of time each day on deep, focused work to get better at my craft. I would need to spend a lot of time learning, reading, and listening to rapidly gain new knowledge. I would need to spend the rest of the time doing the things I loved and spending quality time with loved ones.

Being on social media didn’t fit into either of those things. It wasn’t deep work. It wasn’t deep learning. And it wasn’t spending quality time.

In that moment when I had that realization, I knew that Facebook needed to go. I was nervous when I made the decision to delete my account, but on the other hand I knew it was the right thing to do.

I pulled the trigger and pressed that DELETE button. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

“BUT WHAT ABOUT ALL THE BENEFITS OF FACEBOOK?”

In the grand scheme of things, quitting Facebook was an easy decision for me. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t worry about “missing out” on all the benefits of it. I definitely had a bitter taste in my mouth as I pressed that button.

There were 3 major concerns I had towards quitting Facebook, and this is how I worked through them:

#1 – “I won’t be able to promote my content through Facebook anymore”

When I share something remarkable on my Facebook account, many of my Facebook friends read, comment or share it. It’s one of the easiest ways to spread my work in a matter of minutes, and can bring hundreds or even thousands of new visitors to my website with the small viral effect that happens.

Not posting my content on Facebook any more will take away from my website traffic, email subscriber growth and sales for sure. And yet, that’s the sacrifice I’m willing to make.

As I’ve built a bigger and bigger following and a reputation on Facebook, it became comfortable to just create content and spread the word about it there. A lot of people in my audience would read whatever I wrote anyway, and a lot of them would share my content with others if they saw that I wrote something new.

I was also a part of a few online communities where I had a lot of authority, and where I could continue to spread the word about this content.

The problem with all of this was that it became too comfortable for me. Yes, sharing my content on Facebook would attract thousands of visitors to my website every month, BUT that number wouldn’t drastically go up. It would consistently stay the same.

I realized that by focusing so much on promoting my content, I was taking away the focus from what REALLY matters – creating high quality content that people will read and feel compelled to share with others because of how good it is.

That would allow me to actually GROW my audience in the long run, and not only keep my existing audience engaged. I took it a step further and decided to create content that’s so good that people who know me (and people who don’t know me) will share it on Facebook and in different online communities even if I never share it there.

This new focus on really creating stellar content that people won’t be able to resist talking about is more in line with my goals and my future, and will be better for me in the long run than spending time promoting content on Facebook.

One concern down, two to go.

#2 – “I will miss out on all the relationships I could build through Facebook”

Facebook makes it easier than ever to connect with new people, or “stay in touch” with old friends and people that you meet through conferences and online.

I’ve been able to connect with quite a few people through Facebook and even chat with a few major online influencers regularly to stay in touch.

For a long time, I thought I would be “missing out” on these relationships if I get off Facebook. And the reality is that that might be true to some extent. Some people are more responsive through Facebook than they are through email. I might fall out of touch with some people that I used to talk to regularly.

On the other hand, it’s important to realize that Facebook is just a medium of communication. The way I see it, if you really want to connect with someone and they want to connect with you, you can usually reach them in another way. You can email them or jump on a Skype call with them.

One of the downsides of Facebook is that while it’s easy to “stay in touch”, I don’t think the relationships that you build through Facebook messages in MOST (but not all) cases are pretty surface level, and not the deep, lasting relationships.

I would argue that spending the same amount of time on Skype as I would spend messaging people on Facebook would actually be a lot better for creating a new relationship or staying in touch as that would add a lot more depth and focus to our conversations.

Looking at it from that angle, not being on Facebook might not be that bad. I’d rather do a few Skype calls with the people I want to stay in touch with every month than to spend the same amount (or even longer) messaging back and forth with them. It’s a bigger bang for your buck for everyone.

I believe staying off Facebook will actually be better for my relationships in the long run, as I won’t build the relationships the lazy way, and rather create deep, lasting relationships by focusing on actually spending quality time with people I care about.

#3 – “I’ll meet out on all the events that are happening around me!”

Facebook Events tool is pretty damn powerful. You can use it to organize meet ups and birthday parties within minutes and invite the cool people from your network to them in just a few clicks.

I acknowledge that by not being on Facebook, I’ll likely miss out on some of these events, as I might have no idea they were even happening.

Still, if I look at it from a similar lens as on building relationships, that’s not necessarily so bad. I know that the people who I’ll have strong relationships with will invite me to those events that they’re hosting anyway (another reason to focus on building strong relationships the old fashioned way).

I also know that if I regularly spend the time staying in touch with people that I care about, they’ll let me know if some cool events are happening out there, even if I don’t find them on Facebook myself. I know that I might still miss out on some of the events, but I’m sure I’ll still make it to the important ones.

These were the major reasons that prevented me from leaving Facebook. There are others of course (like not being able to do research in online Facebook groups etc.), and for every one of them I simply asked myself “how would I do this if Facebook didn’t exist?”. I was always able to find an answer within minutes, and in many cases it ended up leading to a higher quality activity than spending time on Facebook.

WHAT MY LIFE IS LIKE AFTER FACEBOOK

I quit Facebook last Saturday, and today it’s Friday. This means that I’ve been off from Facebook for almost a whole week now. You might be wondering what my life is like without Facebook. Is it really that different?

And for me, I’d have to say YES. It feels like so much has changed to the positive over the past week that it’s crazy.

First of all, I no longer have this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I “should check what’s new”. It’s gone. It’s like not having the feeling that I really need a beer right now. Not having this feeling is incredibly freeing and allows me to focus a lot better on what I’m doing – whether I’m writing or spending time with my girlfriend.

I notice that I now check my phone WAY less than I used to. I only really use my phone to send messages, make phone calls, read books or listen to audiobooks, and record videos in the gym. I don’t have Instagram and Facebook accounts any more, I can’t access email from my phone, and all of the websites I used to mindlessly browse are now blocked (Freedom app is awesome). The same thing is true for my laptop.

I can only really check email on my iMac that I have at home, and it’s incredibly freeing to not even have the option to check it otherwise.

Because of this, I find myself reading and learning a lot more, which feels awesome. I also feel like I’m really getting the most out of life by spending 95% of my days on high quality activities, whether that’s working, learning or spending quality time with people I care about.

Do I miss Facebook? Honestly, I don’t. I like feeling more free and less wired and addicted. I feel so much happier now that I’m not obsessing about all the things that are happening around me or things I’m missing out on, and just focusing on living a happy life where I’m steadily refining my craft and building a business that will impact millions of people all over the world.

Am I on Allon’s level yet? No, but I’m getting there. There are definitely things I still could be doing better like being even more present and concentrating better, letting my mind wander less etc., but that’s not something you change in a week. It’s something that changes through years of deliberate practice.

Quitting Facebook definitely feels like the right decision for me, and I have zero regrets about it. Now the question is… Should you do the same?

SHOULD YOU QUIT FACEBOOK TOO?

My opinion on whether you should quit Facebook / social media is two part:

– I don’t think EVERYONE should quit social media
– I do think that a lot of people would benefit from quitting social media

As mentioned in the beginning of this post, Facebook CAN be a great tool for building an online business. A lot of the business relationships I’ve built in the early days were through Facebook. I got a lot of help through different Facebook based online communities of online business courses when I was starting on with my online business. Being on Facebook definitely helped me jump start my online business and make a name out of myself online.

If you’re just starting out with your online business, Facebook can be a great tool that you can leverage for building an audience and the right relationships, if you actually use it very wisely and strategically to build the right relationships, do customer research and spread the word about what you do.

Having said that, there are two questions remaining:

#1 – Is Facebook the BEST way to achieve those goals? Or are there other alternatives that could be better / more powerful for what you want to accomplish?

#2 – Are you REALLY using Facebook in the best way possible (or are you wasting a ton of time on it)?

If you tend to spend way too much time on Facebook, limiting your time on it daily to a one hour block might be a good idea – or removing it completely (if you notice it distracts you from your important work way too much).

If you really want to dig into this, Cal Newport talks about quitting social media in his book Deep Work, which I highly recommend. He shares a framework that will help you decide for yourself what’s best for you.

What I can say is that quitting worked way better for me than limiting it to an hour a day because I tend to think about it a lot if I do have daily access to it. I’m the type of person that likes to either go “all out” on something or to not do something at all.

For me, this is definitely the right choice.

WHAT TO DO NEXT

What about you? Have you ever quit Facebook? Considered quitting it? Are you considering quitting it right now? Let me know by leaving a comment below!

Also – if you’re reading this and you’re running an online business, you’ll love my free e-book where I talk about the #1 strategy that I used to attract 278,958+ website visitors, 6,150+ email subscribers and made $300k+ in revenue with my online business. You can grab your free copy of it below!

P.S. Have a friend who’s addicted to Facebook and would benefit from reading this article, or a friend that’s successfully quit Facebook themselves? Send this article over to them!

-Primoz