#3: Why Eliminating 90% of What You’re Doing Will 10x Your Life
Today, Dr. Steve Orma discusses the transformative power of eliminating 90% of the activities you’re doing to significantly increase your happiness and ability to achieve huge things. Drawing from his own life experience, Dr. Orma explains how reducing distractions and focusing intensely on a few core values can 10x your life. He outlines the massive benefits of this approach, including enhancing self-esteem, living more deeply and richly, and maximizing your most precious resource—time. He also provides practical steps to identify and prioritize what truly matters to you.
In this episode you’ll learn:
How to get more of what you love, value, and enjoy, and less or none of what you don't.
How to make achieving your goals and dreams easier and more fun.
How to massively improve your self-confidence and self-respect.
How to live more deeply and richly.
How to get the most out of your life and not waste it.
Remember, you can achieve ANYTHING you want!
Steve Orma
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00:00 Introduction: The Power of Prioritizing
00:26 Welcome to the Insane Goals Podcast
00:44 Eliminating the Unnecessary: A Personal Story
01:19 What We Don't Do: A List of Eliminations
02:09 What We Do: Focusing on Passions
03:38 The Benefits of Eliminating 90% of Your Activities
04:36 Five Reasons to Simplify Your Life
09:29 How to Identify and Focus on Your Top Priorities
12:26 Practical Steps to Eliminate the Unimportant
16:07 Conclusion: Achieving Your Dream Life
16:51 Subscribe and Leave a Review
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Prioritize Your Life
The more time that you put into the things that actually are most important to you, the most enjoyable and fulfilling, and you start to reduce or completely eliminate the things that aren't, you'll want to keep doing it. It's like self perpetuating. You'll want to even do more time on the things that you enjoy and you'll want to remove the things that are sucking away from that. Because you learn as you start doing this how much you don't miss those things that you thought you needed.
Welcome to the Insane Goals Podcast
Welcome to the Insane Goals Podcast. I'm Dr. Steve Orma, clinical psychologist and goal achieving specialist. Each week I discuss how to achieve massive goals, smash conventional thinking, and give you a radically different vision of what's possible for your life right now.
The Insane Power of Elimination
In today's episode, I want to talk about why eliminating 90 percent of the things that you're doing in your life will actually make your life way better, like 10x better than it currently is. And I'm going to start with my own life. [00:01:00] Because what I have found is that the more stuff that my wife and I have eliminated from our life cut out, the happier we become, the more fulfilled we become, the better our life becomes because it's not filled with all kinds of distractions and things that eat up our time and eat up our energy.
What My Wife and I DON’T Do
So I wanted to start with giving you a list of all the things that we don't do in our life. My wife and I, the things that we don't do.
Watch TV, eat three meals a day, go out to eat, travel or go on vacations, socialize, own a lot of stuff, own a car, drink, smoke, do drugs, watch entertainment like movies, theater, concerts, events, shop, spend a lot of money, go to the beach, lay out in the sun. And there's a lot of other things, but I'll just start there. These things that I said are things that most people engage in, or at least a good number of these, not everybody does certain things that are on this list, [00:02:00] but most people are watching TV, they're eating at least three meals a day. They're going on vacations. They're engaging in lots of like entertainment activities, things like this.
What We DO
Now here is a list of the things that we do. We pursue our work passions. So for my wife, she's an illustrator. She spends a lot of her days drawing. Just working on the drawings that she wants to create. For me, it's developing and sharing these ideas. And I'm also writing a novel, which is connected to sharing certain ideas. We eat one meal a day, and we do that together. We live in two incredible cities. We exercise, which consists of two walks a day and some strength training. And we do minimal chores. So our life is filled each day with just a few things. Our work, spending time together as a couple, health, which would be the exercise and the one meal a day, and we spend a minimal amount of time on chores. And we used to do all these things, by the way. We used to watch probably four or [00:03:00] five hours of TV a night on average. We ate three meals a day. We went out to eat a lot.
We went on a few vacations a year. We socialized more. We owned a lot more stuff. We owned two cars. we drank. And we watched lots of entertainment. We went to the movies, theater, concerts. We spent a lot more money and we used to love to just lay out in the sun or go on vacations where we lay out, by a pool and things like that.
Now I'm not saying these are all wrong or bad to do. The principle that I'm talking about here is limiting where you spend your time in your life to the things that are most valuable to you.
The Benefits of Focusing on What Matters
Now why will eliminating 90 percent of the stuff that you're doing in your life, why will that 10x your life? Well, it's pretty simple, right? When you eliminate the things that aren't that important to you, that are way down on your list in terms of priorities and values, those things that are sucking your time and your energy and your money.
And you just put your time into the [00:04:00] three, maybe four top things that are most important to you, that are your highest values, that bring you the most fulfillment and joy. And you just put the majority of your time to doing those things and you minimize the time you're putting into things like chores, things that you know you have to do to maintain your life, but you put a minimal amount of time into that.
When you do that, most of your time and energy is spent on what you value most and your top priorities and not wasted on things that are less or not important at all and not your priorities. What's the reward of doing this? How does this actually 10x your life?
5 Massive Rewards For Eliminating the Unimportant
I'm going to go over five reasons why this makes your life way better and makes it much easier for you to achieve insane goals and create an amazing, insane, satisfying life.
Number one, you get more of what you love, value, and enjoy, and less or none of what you don't. This makes you happier and more fulfilled because it just makes sense logically, [00:05:00] right? When you're doing the things that are your highest value, that you enjoy the most, that bring you the most fulfillment, and you're doing that more of the time. That's where your energy, your focus, how you're actually experiencing each day goes and you eliminate the stuff that is the opposite of effect or doesn't really add much at all to your life, then you're going to be happier. You're going to be more fulfilled in your life.
Number two, it moves the needle over time on what's most important to you. Because you're removing the time, the energy, the money, the investment that you're putting into things that are way less or not important at all, and you're putting that into the things that are most important to you, the insane goals and dreams that you're trying to achieve, the values that you want to enjoy the most in your life. All that time, energy, money, et cetera, is being put into the top things and not like bleeding out of you, by putting them into things that you don't really value very much. So that's going to cause you to progress faster and easier toward what you want because you're [00:06:00] not being dragged down by putting time and energy into other things that are not moving the needle for you.
Number three, you feel really good about yourself for honoring your values and the life you want to live. And that increases your self confidence and your self respect. Self confidence and self respect, which is what self esteem is comes from honoring your values, being the person that you want to be and doing that in action each day.
That's who you are in your daily life. And when you cut out stuff that isn't that important to you or is just not really moving the needle much in your life and you put that time and energy into the things, the few things that are most important to you, then you're honoring your values, you're respecting yourself, you're being true to yourself.
And that increases self esteem and self respect, which are self earned things. We create that. We're not given that. And this is one powerful way to increase your self esteem and your self confidence is to cut the things out of your life that don't really honor your values.
Number [00:07:00] four, you live more deeply and richly. And my wife and I talk about this all the time. You live more deeply because you're always doing and you're pursuing the things that are most important, exciting, and meaningful to you. So you're not just, getting some cheap entertainment for a short period of time by watching a TV show or, getting buzzed from drinking a few beers or something like that.
That might be fun in the very short term, but it doesn't really satisfy at a deep level because it's not a huge value. It's not something that can really fulfill you in your life And you live more richly, even though you're spending less money, like my wife and I have cut down our living expenses by half over the last several years. Like we started doing this six, seven years ago. Our expenses were cut in half, but we live much more richly in terms of our life. It feels like we're living this life of someone who's massively wealthy because we're getting the most out of every dollar we spend and we're being very thoughtful about how we spend that money and how [00:08:00] we spend our time and how we're experiencing life.
So this is both richly in the sense of, what we're getting for actually what we're spending in terms of money, but it's also metaphorical in that, our life is richer, meaning , we're getting a deeper, more satisfying experience from the things that we're doing on a daily basis.
And number five, when you live like this, you feel like you're getting the most out of your life and you're not wasting it. The most precious thing in life is time because it's limited. You can't get more time. You can make more money. You can even, get more energy, although that is limited as well.
But time is something that we are limited to. We have only so much time each day, each week, each year, and ultimately in our life until aging is cured, we have a limited lifespan. And what you want to think about is how do I want to spend that time? Do I want to spend it doing frivolous things or things that just aren't really that satisfying to me or things that are, number 10 on my list.
Instead of putting that time, [00:09:00] energy, investment into the top three things and the top four things that are most important to you that move the needle. When you do that, you feel like you're getting the most out of your life each day. You really feel like you're living your life fully and you're not wasting it.
And then if you do that all the way through your life, you will feel like you had a meaningful life that you got the most out of, that you didn't waste it. And even at the end of each year, when you look back on that year, you'll feel like, wow, I really lived this year. I really got a lot of living out of this one year.
Now if this is something that you want to do, and if you want to achieve insane goals, If you want to have an incredible, amazing life in every single respect, this is critical. This is not optional because to do that, you have to have the time and the energy and the ability to focus on creating and enjoying and building the things that you want.
And to do that, you have to eliminate a lot of the stuff that you're probably doing right now. And you might think, how do you do this?
How to Identify Your Top Priorities
First of all, you [00:10:00] have to know what's most important to you. What are your values and your priorities right now in your life? A lot of people don't know this because they don't think about it.
You know, they kind of know, yeah, you know, this is important. My family is important but they don't really sit down and think about it and think about it all the time and then keep improving on that over time. And I'll have a whole other episode on this. Just like, how do you value deeply in your life?
How do you figure out and identify what are the top things that are most important to me? And I've been doing this for years and by doing it, I've become clearer and clearer about what's important to me and what's not. And then I just started eliminating things. that were not that important, that were not moving the needle, that we're not bringing much fulfillment.
And every time I did that, I didn't miss the thing that I eliminated.
How I Easily Eliminated TV
So for example, seven or eight years ago, my wife and I just stopped watching TV cold turkey. And we didn't even do it, like we didn't plan out doing that. We just went on this adventure, where we, gave up our [00:11:00] apartment and put all our stuff in storage and we went to Europe and we just traveled around Europe for seven and a half months.
And I'll talk about how we did this in another episode. It didn't actually cost us a lot of money. In fact, our expenses went way down when we did this rather than up. But, what happened was that we were doing something that was so exciting and so satisfying that we forgot about watching TV and we were staying in Airbnb’s and we were staying in hotels that all had TVs, big screen TVs, and we didn't even notice the damn TV because we were so enjoying what we were doing in our daily life, it was so exciting. that to watch TV would have been like, it would have been stupid because it would have been taking away the time that we were putting into the thing that was exciting and incredible for us. And it just naturally happened. And we just stopped watching TV and we didn't miss it at all. In fact, our life became way better.
So when you add to your life the things that are most important, that are the most exciting, that are your highest values, that are the insane goals and dreams that you have [00:12:00] that you want to achieve, and you make that a part of your daily life, you honor yourself by doing that automatically you won't be drawn to things like TV or drinking or eating a lot of sweet foods and things like that. Because your life is so fulfilling and what you're doing on a day to day basis you lose interest in that stuff.
Now I'm not saying you shouldn't watch TV or you should eliminate the things that my wife and I did. Okay. How do you actually do this is you have to think about your own life. You have to think about what truly are the things that are most important to you and what you want to identify is the top three things.
Really the top three, maybe three or four, because that is where you should be putting all of your time and energy and zero time into anything that's below that on the list.
So for me, my top most important things in my life are my wife and our relationship. My work, and when I say my work, the thing that I'm most passionate about, where I'm pursuing it and I'm trying to create [00:13:00] things that are meaningful to me. And my health.
So it's my relationship with my wife, my romantic relationship, my work and my health. And if I were to add a fourth, it would be where we live. Because that has a huge impact on your lifestyle and how you experience each day. But really the top three are the work, the relationship and the health. And that is where 90 percent of my time goes each day. It goes into working on this podcast and developing and sharing these ideas. It goes to writing my novel. It goes to having these really long, incredibly satisfying dinners with my wife. And it goes to health, which would be going on a couple of walks a day and doing some strength training. And that's where 90, 95 percent of my time goes every day. And And then sure, maybe 5 percent of that goes to chores, or errands that are required for life, like going grocery shopping, preparing the meal that we have, doing the dishes, doing laundry every few days, things like that.
But that is so minimal compared to most people where a lot of [00:14:00] their time is being put into these things. Now, for you, what you want to do is think about what are those top three and you really need to put this in a hierarchy, first, second, third. You have to make this work for your own life, but it's generally going to be the top three or four things as where you want to identify and then everything below that you want to cut out completely or radically cut down.
And this is hard for people to do because they think no, all of these things are important or I'm getting something from these things. And I'm not saying you're not getting something. I'm saying that why would you put your time and energy into something that's seventh on the list or eighth on the list or not even on the list, instead of your top three or four things? Spending time with your partner or putting the time into work or the thing that you're passionate about, or your health if your health is important to you or spending time with your kids, if you have kids and that's important to you.
You need to identify for yourself. This is a very individualized thing. What are the things most important to me? [00:15:00] Be honest with yourself. And these can change over time. This is going to change and evolve over time, but you want to know right now, over the next year, over the next two years, what are the things most important to me?
Write those down, put them in order. And then what you need to start doing is eliminating the things that are not important, that are not moving the needle or trying to cut them down by becoming more efficient in your life.
And when you do this, those five rewards that I went over are what you're going to get. This is the reward of cutting all that stuff out. And what you'll find too, is the more time that you put into the things that actually are most important to you, the most enjoyable and fulfilling, and you start to reduce or completely eliminate the things that aren't, you'll want to keep doing it. It's like self perpetuating. You'll want to even do more time on the things that you enjoy and you'll want to remove the things that are sucking away from that. Because you learn as you start doing this how much you don't miss those things that you thought you needed and it'll amaze you. [00:16:00] You'll be like, why the hell was I spending all that time watching TV or doing these things that aren't really moving the needle?
Final Thoughts and Encouragement
If you want to achieve insane goals , and create an insane life, one that you love, that's amazing, that's incredible, your dream life then you have to do this. this is an absolute requirement to really cut out the junk, the fat, the stuff that really isn't moving the needle for you and just have your top three, four things each day and minimize or eliminate everything else.
When you do that, achieving your dreams and everything that you want becomes so much easier, so much more fun. You spend way less money to get more out of life, meaning that you can then save more money or have it for the things that are more important to you instead of less or not important to you. And this just makes your overall life way more incredible, way more satisfying, way more fulfilling.
So that's all for today's episode. Be sure to subscribe to the show so you're notified every time a new episode comes out on Tuesdays. And make sure to leave a review [00:17:00] on Apple podcasts to let me know what you think about the show.
Thanks for listening to the Insane Goals podcast. You can find all the resources and links for this episode in the show notes at https://www.drorma.com/podcast. And remember, you can achieve ANYTHING you want in life. No limits, no BS, and no excuses. I’ll see you next time.