What is the ONE Thing You Need to STOP Doing in 2024?

Ever wrestled with the feeling that your life could be vastly improved by simply letting go of something? I'm Brian Glass, and in this week's episode, I share my recent eye-opening experiences, which will challenge you to consider what you might subtract from your own life for the better. From the awe-inspiring ruins of Chichen Itza in Cancun to the chaos of a canceled flight, I weave tales of introspection and serendipity, revealing how these moments brought me clarity and strengthened my belief in the kindness of strangers. It's a narrative that blends personal anecdotes with a universal truth: sometimes, we grow the most when we dare to shed the unnecessary.

This session is more than just storytelling; it's an actionable guidebook for strategic simplification. Drawing inspiration from the insights of Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan, I explore the transformative power of saying no to the good so we can say "hell yes" to the great. I'll give you a peek into our Great Legal Marketing mastermind groups, where we've embraced the art of decluttering, from inboxes flooded with emails to a refined focus on the cases that truly resonate with our mission. By the end of this episode, I want you to feel equipped and emboldened to execute your own strategic elimination, paving the way for not only a refined practice but an enriched life. So, join me on this journey of discovering the courage it takes to focus on what truly matters and the peace it brings.

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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.

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Transcript

Speaker 0: 0:00

So, guys, welcome back in to Life Beyond the Brief. I'm your host, brian Glass, and on Fridays I dive into Sometimes it's a rant, sometimes it's things that are going on in my life, and sometimes it's just treating this microphone as my therapist and you as the audience, and today's going to be a little bit of all of that. Based around the prompt. What is the one thing that, if you eliminated it from your life in 2024, would cause the rest of your life to dramatically improve? And I'm going to get to the backstory on that in just a minute. But if you are getting value out of this podcast and I hate to be the podcaster who asks this at the beginning of every episode, but it is helpful to subscriber numbers and to the number of downloads that we're getting If you can go and subscribe wherever you're listening, whether it's Apple or Spotify, if you subscribe and this automatically shows up in your feed, then you don't have to remember geez, it's Friday and Brian probably has another cool solo episode out. That would be a wonderful favor, and I will ultimately stop asking you in every single episode to do that. So here's where we are in my life, at the end of what has been an absolute whirlwind January. Coming into the new year, my plan was to slow down and I did a four job of committing or rather over committing to things in January in 2023. And so I'm recording this now, on the 25th, and I thought I'd kick off this episode with just a quick rundown of what's been going on with me in 2024.

Speaker 0: 1:32

So, fresh off of the new year, spent a couple of days in the office and then hightailed it out of very cold northern Virginia and down to Cancun for a quick three day trip with my accountability group. So down there, from the fourth to the seventh, we went and checked out Chichen Itza, which like interesting place. I get overwhelmed in these places like Chichen Itza, like Rome, like Greece, where the things have been standing for 1300 years and it's less apparent in Chichen Itza than it is in Greece or in Rome because it's in the middle of nowhere. It's not really like in the middle of the jungle, but it's two hours from Cancun and these stone Mayan or Aztec Mayan, I think Structures have been standing now since 800 BC and not eight sorry 800 AD and the Spanish came along and they didn't topple it, but it's a little bit more prominent, like in Greece and in Rome, where you have these things that are in the middle of the city, that have existed for two millennia, that nobody ruined, either because they were too heavy or because they were too difficult, or maybe because somebody along the way recognized that those things were important and left in there.

Speaker 0: 2:43

And the thing is that the people that designed him and the people that built them have long been forgotten. Nobody remembers the names of the people that built these incredible structures, especially for the time, like when you're at Chichiniza. There's buildings that the sun only comes into the room at a certain time of day, during the equinox. The amount of math and astronomy that went into planning for that is just unbelievable. And on the one hand, maybe they didn't have anything else to do. Weren't consumed by social media? Weren't following politics? Weren't commuting an hour and a half each way to work? Maybe they had more time on their hands, maybe not, but for what we now consider primitive structures, to have built these things is incredible. And here's the thing it's like nobody remembers the names of the people that built them. And whatever it is that you are doing in your life that you are afraid of accomplishing because afraid of trying, because somebody might see you fail and care Like the world doesn't care. The world doesn't care, or remember who these people are that achieved great things. Why would it care that you had failed at something? So I think that gives you a whole lot of air cover and permission to just go out and build something either for yourself or for your family or for your business.

Speaker 0: 4:00

So day one Chichiniza swam in a sun really cool stuff and did masterminding with the boys down there. Day two Deepsea fishing trip. I learned deep sea fishing not for Brian. We took an eight hour trip. It was windy, we were in probably 15 foot seas in a 40 foot boat. That's not a great recipe for not getting sick, and so I spent the last five hours of the trip hanging over the side of the boat, did catch a whole bunch of stuff. My buddy caught a prize size barracuda, whatever that means. I caught. We caught about five tuna and some red snapper, brought it back to the house, grilled it and then ran all over Cancun trying to figure out a way to ship all of these fish back to the States.

Speaker 0: 4:42

I did not ship my fish back to the States because I woke up on the day that I was supposed to fly out and my flight had been canceled. I was supposed to be on one of those Boeing Max 9s with a door had blown off, ironically sitting in an exit row. Flight canceled and good news hey, we've rescheduled it. Bad news it's rescheduled for four days from now and if you want to do anything about it you've got to go to the Cancun airport. So waited in line at the United Desk for about four and a half hours watching flights appear on Google Flight Tracker disappear. All the seats are gone. Thought briefly about rebooking my flight, but eventually got up to the front of the line.

Speaker 0: 5:22

And the travel hack here is if you're just nice, if you're just pleasant, when everybody else around you is losing their minds, you usually get pretty good treatment. The woman who was at the desk wonderful, a United representative got me on a flight. Not only got me on a flight, but got me again back in an exit row on the flight. Got me out so that I could be back in my bed in Northern Virginia at 10 o'clock on Sunday night just enough time to wake up Monday morning and drive down to our two-day Ben Glass Law annual event in Lake Anna. So did that, came back from that, spent two days with our Hero Mastermind group, put in a day or two of actual work, spent two days with our Icon Mastermind group and then straight into the Great Legal Marketing two-day annual event which took us through yesterday. Today I've done a little bit of work in the morning, headed out this afternoon to Great Wolf Lodge with the family, spent a couple of days at an indoor water park before I take off Sunday afternoon to go up to Vermont to the Abundance Winter Adventure and Mastermind, to go skiing for a couple of days and learn.

Speaker 0: 6:27

And what I'm most looking forward to, I have to tell you, is my time on the plane, where I have no internet and I can't do any work and I can just sit quietly and process all of the things that I've been through in the last 28 days 29 days at that point Just been on this whirlwind without a time to think, because I did such a poor job of planning my January, and so I spent this morning at a coffee shop sketching out what do I want the next month to look like and what do I need to do in order to accomplish it. And the thing that keeps coming back to me is this Derek Sivers quote, which is you ought to view all opportunities through the lens of hell yes or no. And the thing that most people forget Derek Sivers, by the way, a founder of CD Baby, ultimately sold it for, I think, eight figures. But he's got this concept where if something doesn't light you up and you say hell yes to the opportunity, then you should just say no, because there are tons and tons of opportunities that come to you in your life and the more that you say yes to that are lukewarm for you, the fewer opportunities that you have for when the hell yes opportunity comes along. The thing about that is the caveat to them is that you can only apply that when you're oversubscribed or over committed, and most people aren't oversubscribed or scattered or over committed. They just use that as an excuse to play small. This thing is a B plus opportunity for me. It's not an A plus opportunity, so I'm going to say no. It's like cousin Eddie holding out for position in management and not taking any other employment.

Speaker 0: 7:56

But I feel like my life has pivoted to the point where I need to be saying no to many more things and only accepting the hell yes opportunities in my life. It goes back and forth. And that's the other thing you need to know is that this comes and it goes in cycles. There will be times in your life where you are busy as hell and you can only accept the things that really light you up, that excite you, because otherwise you're going to be oversubscribed. And then you will come down off of that cycle and you will come back into a period of time where you just take a bunch of stuff and you just test and test until you find the thing that lights you up and makes you busy again.

Speaker 0: 8:33

And I say all of that to lead you back to the prompt at the beginning of the episode, which is what is the thing that, if you eliminated it from your life, would dramatically change your enjoyment of your life? Because for many of us, especially as you get busier and busier, it's really not. What else could I do? What else could I do to make more money? What else could I do to have a better life? It's really what kind of things do I need to eliminate? It's a Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan concept of 10X is easier than 2X. It's really not about doing more stuff. It's about eliminating the 80% of the things in your life that aren't B+ or above level for you, and so I asked that question of the members in both our Great Lube Marketing hero and icon mastermind groups, as they were in the office in January, and I got many different answers, but a lot of them rhyme. So the ones that we heard most often were it's the 10,000 emails that I get a day if I didn't have to deal with those, or it's all of the little admin things that only come along once a year, but there's so many of them that they pile up and pile up.

Speaker 0: 9:32

For some people it's actually the practicing of law, and I feel like I'm that way now too. I don't want to be knee deep in any case. I just want to run strategy and attract attention and attract cases, but I don't want to be in a deposition, I don't want to be answering in our interrogatories, and for many of the firms who are in the room, we're in the same space and there's nothing wrong with wanting to do all of that and wanting to do all of that for your entire career. There's also nothing wrong with standing up as a lawyer and saying been there, done that, I don't get enjoyment and so that's where I am.

Speaker 0: 10:04

Other things that we heard in that room where I'm tired of managing people or managing lawyers or I'm tired of certain classes of cases, right, and the guy who said that was tired of doing auto accident cases, and so for us that came along in our law firm a couple of years ago when we decided we were tired of doing medical malpractice cases. Like there are many things that you can do but you don't have to and in many cases you shouldn't do the things that are opportunities for you but don't light you up. And for us it was medical malpractice cases that weren't like they're interesting but the risk profile just didn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to run one or two medical malpractices cases a year in an otherwise regular quote, regular personal injury firm because you end up investing so much time and effort and money like six figures in every single case in expert fees and cases that go to trial and if one of those goes south screws up your entire portfolio. So, applying that, what's the thing that you would eliminate to our practice years ago was all of these opportunities that pop up to try medical malpractice cases to bring on. We had an of council social security disability lawyer.

Speaker 0: 11:19

We thought for a while about we could open a workers compensation practice, because we're good at running businesses, we are good at bringing in other lawyers and propping up businesses and letting people operate in their area of genius and just applying tweaks. But for us, doing those things took away and distracted from the thing that we were very good at, which for me is directing an auto accident practice and for my dad is directing a long-term disability practice. So we did the same thing almost at our annual event as we were approaching our marketing. We've got really good data on where our cases and where our money comes from, and we know that in our auto accident practice, 65% or so of our cases come from referrals from other people and 80% of our money comes from referral from human beings from doctors, former lawyer, former clients, lawyers, other people in the community. And then you look around and you go what is all this other stuff that we're doing that generates only 20% of the money? So we spend so much time as a lawyer gazing down at the SEO and the pay per click and the local service, ads and social media and YouTube and all of this stuff that you could be doing, but when you look, that only accounts for 20% of your money. How much of our time is spent on making sure that, and our money and our advertising dollars is spent on making sure that those things are dialed in when they're only producing 20% of our dollars?

Speaker 0: 12:41

So one of the experiments that we started this year is to shut off all of our Google pay per click and reinvest and redeploy that money into a personal referral campaign, driven by our print newsletters, driven by budgeting some money to go out and have lunch and coffee with referral sources. Driven by spending more time and effort actually making contact with people who might refer us cases. Does it mean we're going to miss out on a couple of digital cases? Do we're going to miss out on new sources of income? Yes, of course it does, but I think for us it's being better dialed into the places where our money is actually coming from.

Speaker 0: 13:20

And so the question for you is what is the thing that's really a distraction in your life, and do you have the fortitude to just say no and to just stop doing it? Because it's scary. It's scary to turn off your pay-per-click spend. It's scary to maybe start saying no to a certain class of cases. But if you're like my friend who's practicing auto accident law and you decide I don't want to do those cases anymore and you can find somebody to give those cases to, all of a sudden like your highest hourly rate comes from building those initial phone calls and sending them to somebody else. Because if you refer a six-figure case out, let's call it a $100,000 case. Refer a $100,000 case to fees $33,000 in Virginia where we can do fee sharing.

Speaker 0: 14:03

What's coming back to me is $11,000 for making a connection, having marketing that attracts that kind of a client and marshaling them to a lawyer who is a better lawyer fit for their case.

Speaker 0: 14:14

And in many cases it's the kind of cases that you don't like that you're still taking, that end up either being client communication complaints, where they end up being legal malpractice complaints, where they end up being legal ethics complaints, because those cases that don't ultimately light you up are the ones that get ignored, they're the ones that get put on the back burner, they're the ones where we don't call the clients and they're the ones that end up with aggravated clients and so just having the balls to say I'm not going to do those cases anymore.

Speaker 0: 14:42

Let's develop a good system to get there somewhere else. So here's my challenge to you Find the thing Maybe it's a client, maybe it's a class of clients, maybe it's a type of marketing, maybe it's a staff member that if you eliminate it or him or her or they from your life, will dramatically improve. And my challenge to you is, before the end of February, figure out a way to terminate that relationship or terminate that class of clients, or terminate that practice area and see if you don't feel better by the time the second quarter starts. All right, be good to each other out there, see you.