Nov 9, 2022
Richie Norton is the author of
“Anti-Time
Management,” and a
Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coach. He is the CEO of Prouduct, an
INC. 5000 company. In this episode, Richie
opens up about tragedies that changed the way he lives, works, and
spends time with his family. Richie describes work-life flexibility in three
parts: Ability, Availability, and Autonomy. His message: Don’t
defer your dreams.
https://bit.ly/TLP-332
Key Takeaways
[2:15] Richie Norton walks his
dog on the beach every day. He travels the world and works from his
phone.
[2:29] The name of his company,
Prouduct, means products you’re proud of. At any given time, they
make over 100 products. Besides being an entrepreneur, Richie
coaches and consults. He is happily married and has seven children
including three fosters. His youngest passed away but would have
just turned 13.
[3:50] Years ago, Richie was in
Nashville working with the Zig Ziglar team on a project. He got a
text from the State of Hawaii that a missile was about to hit his
house on Oahu. Then a text that said it was not a test. He called
home and finally, his son answered the phone crying, “I love you,
Dad.” He thought these were his last moments. It was all a mistake.
It shook Richie into thinking about other events.
[5:02] Richie’s brother-in-law,
Gavin, his wife’s only brother, had been living with their family.
He passed away in his sleep at age 21. Life is short. They started
living their lives differently and thinking about time differently.
Richie’s fourth son, Gavin, named after his uncle, was born. He had
a cough. Doctors said he was fine, but it turned out he had
pertussis. In the hospital, he slipped away in his mother’s
arms.
[6:25] In thinking of these two
tragedies, Richie came up with Gavin’s Law: “Live to Start, Start
to Live.”
Take the ideas that press on
your mind, and start living them. Too many people push ideas aside
claiming they don’t have the education, time, or money to make them
happen.
[7:11] Richie worked with
Stephen M.R. Covey while in his twenties, training executives.
Richie thought he was too young for the job but it wasn’t about his
experience, it was about continuous improvement and
learning.
[8:05] Richie speaks of some
life events. His foster children returned to their biological
mother. His wife had a stroke and lost her memory. The business
deal that took him to Hawaii fell through. His son got hit crossing
the road and was badly injured. He is OK now. His wife got her
memory back. Richie was shouldering a lot when he changed his
life’s trajectory by putting meaning behind these
events.
[9:52] With meaning, Richie was
able to keep his faith and continue moving forward. His meaning was
in asking himself, “How can I live better, not bitter?” When you
get stuck on what happened, ask yourself how to assign positive
meaning. Approach your work from the dream, not toward the
dream.
[10:57] Covey would say, begin
with the end in mind. He didn’t say, to begin with, the means in
mind. You can change goals, habits, and strengths, which are all
just means to an end. The approach of working from the dream and
not endlessly toward it is powerful. You can collapse time. It’s a
different way of thinking, living, and working. It’s anti-time
management.
[12:54] Richie learned that
grief is a tunnel, not a cave. Things happen that impact us and the
way we see where we’re going and what we have to look forward to.
Richie’s purpose is his family. He wants to create the ability to
have availability. Purpose is having character, creating
relationships of trust, and being available for his family, and
those for whom he needs to be available when they need him
most.
[15:48] Richie describes
work-life flexibility in three parts: ability, availability, and
agility or autonomy. When you look at the world through autonomy,
availability, and ability, you can see how free you are to make the
choices that you do, including the consequences.
[18:28] You have to value your
time, not time your values. You can’t sacrifice what you love for
success. When you sacrifice what you love for success, you get
neither. Infuse your work with your values or you will get a hollow
life with hollow hopes. You can have money and meaning. You’ve got
to bake it in from the start.
[21:17] The second industrial
revolution in the late 1800s came from the concept of time-motion
studies. It is now known as Taylorism or time management. It was
designed to control and master every aspect of workers. It takes
and squeezes everything out of the worker for as long as possible
to the point of breaking. Time management is about who controls how
you use your time.
[22:32] Anti-Time Management
gives you control over your time. In Time Management, others tell
you what to do. In Anti-Time Management, you decide. There is a
balance between the two approaches. A full calendar is an empty
life. An empty calendar means you’re a leader; it’s been
handled.
[25:18] The recent pandemic was
the first time in history that everyone was experiencing the same
thing at the same time. Technology advanced. Companies and talent
started learning what was possible. People started seeing the world
in a new way. People started distrusting companies and news outlets
more than ever before. Of course, the corporations want everyone to
come back in!
[26:38] Can productivity
increase working from home? It depends on the situation.
[26:47] The leadership quality of the future that will
be the most important leadership quality is discernment. When you
have these gaps in data and interpretation, we need leaders and
talent who can use discernment to fill them in to decide the
direction we’re going to go.
[27:50] Never have the switching
costs of moving from one company to another been lower. People
change jobs every 4.6 years. The company that supports talent in
working for their role in the home is going to be the
winner.
[29:02] As soon as flexibility
becomes a corporate benefit to the employee, it’s not a benefit to
the employee anymore, it’s a longer leash.
[29:56] Discernment comes in
asking better questions for better answers. Problems are
multi-dimensional. With discernment, you can make decisions that no
one else saw. Ask open-ended questions. You can develop
discernment. Richie has great mentors and surrounds himself with
good people that think differently. It helps to listen to great
podcasts like The
Leadership Podcast.
[33:23] If a chick doesn’t break
out of its egg, it dies. Fear, negative pride, and procrastination
are like an eggshell that we must break through to be our authentic
selves. If you had no fear, pride, or procrastination, what would
you be capable of? How would you feel? What would you do? You would
be you. We go around trying to avoid past traumas through our
decisions.
[36:10] Richie sees that people
have fear at work. In corporations, there is 99% work signaling and
1% working. Jan cites Joel Peterson, former Chairman of JetBlue:
“24 hours is more than enough time per day.” Richie talks about
having a purpose or reason bigger than your fear. At the end of the
day, you get what you want, tragedies aside. You’ve got to be
willing to do the work.
[40:17] Richie does not like the
retirement mentality. It has destroyed generations of people. He
wants people to talk about it, as he does in
Anti-Time
Management. The
retirement mentality is to put off what you want to do until you
retire. You can do what you want now and find a way to responsibly
support yourself your whole life.
[42:06] Richie talks about the
marshmallow test. The original study indicated that a child willing
to wait 15 minutes for a larger reward rather than accepting a
smaller reward now, would do better in life. But later studies
showed that was not true. Richie compares the patient child to the
obedient employee, willing to wait for rewards. Waiting is great
for some things, but not for everything.
[44:36] Your lifestyle is
changed by how you get paid. The way you operate, the way you work,
and the way you do things in order to earn, dictate your life. If
you can work in a way where more gets done in less time, it will
expand your ability to live, create, and be hyper-productive.
Consider your purpose, priority, projects, and payments: If your
payments can align with your purpose, you’re set.
[45:59] Closing quote: Remember,
“Time is the coin of your
life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how
it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for
you.” — Carl Sandburg
Quotable Quotes
- “I don’t think people work for work’s sake; I
think we work for something else, and so I love to help people
create that something else and find work to support
it.”
- “I held him for a second and handed him to my
wife; she was in a rocking chair and I had my hand on his heart and
we sang lullabies. He slipped away. There’s nothing like having a
human being die in your arms. There’s just nothing like
that.”
- “I came up with what I call Gavin’s Law, which
is ‘Live to start, start to live.’”
- “People say they have 20 years’ experience when
in reality they only have one year’s experience, repeated 20 times.
… Let’s go to work.” — Stephen M.R. Covey, per Richie
Norton
- “A lot of times [people] get stuck on what
happened. … Ask, … ‘How can I assign positive meaning to this?’
Because … if you can, then you can figure out your approach. When
you approach something from the dream and not endlessly toward it,
you work entirely differently.”
- “Goals, habits, and strengths have become
means, that have become ends unto themselves. They’re just means to
an end. You can change the goals, habits, and
strengths.”
- “The way time tippers in
Anti-Time
Management treat time
is the way Marie Kondo treats clothes and closet space. We look at
it with, ‘What brings us joy? What doesn’t? What served us? What
hasn’t?’”
- “You have to value your time, not time your
values.”
- “I believe that the leadership quality of the
future that will be the most important leadership quality is
discernment. … When you have these gaps, we need leaders and talent
who can use discernment to fill them in to decide the direction
we’re going to go.”
- “There are more opportunities than ever. …
People are saying to me, ‘How do we get the talent back?’ … Just
hold on. … Never in the history of the world have the switching
costs of working in one job or another been lower.”
- “If you want to be … the leader that brings in
other leaders, … now we have an opportunity to show love, to be
egoless, to look for talent where we are supporting them in the
role that they’re working for … the role in the home; those are the
companies that are going to win.”
- “Any fear that happens, if you don’t have a
bigger purpose or a bigger reason, why would you do something about
it? People are scared of losing their jobs and they
stay.”
- “Change the way you get paid — change your
life.”
Resources Mentioned