“A focused fool can accomplish more than a distracted genius”
~ Alex Hormozi

Why do many people work incredibly hard… yet make so little progress?

Most of us are taught that if we just work hard and do more, life will eventually get better.

If you work three jobs at once, you’ll become financially free.
If you collect more degrees, you’ll become secure.
If you read 52 books a year, you’ll become smarter.

So we fill up our calendars, stay busy, and convince ourselves that we make more progress by doing more, working harder.

Yet years pass…

The goals we wrote down last year become this year’s New Year’s resolutions. The habits we promised to change stay the same. And before we know it, another year has passed, but our lives haven’t changed much.

That was me.

I thought the way to reach my destination faster was to drive longer and press harder on the accelerator. Instead, I ran out of fuel halfway through the journey. I was exhausted, my engine was overheating, and the quality of my work suffered. It wasn’t that I needed to drive harder, I needed a better vehicle and a better route.

I recently came across an old story that illustrates this concept really well:


4000 years ago in Ancient Egypt, a pharaoh promised a lifetime of riches to whichever of two brothers, Azur or Chuma, could build a pyramid first.

Azur immediately began carrying stone after stone.

Every day he became stronger,
and every day he worked longer.

As the blocks became heavier,
he trained harder so he could lift more.

Chuma, however, barely touched a single stone.

Instead, he spent weeks hidden away in his workshop, experimenting with ropes, pulleys, and wooden beams. Azur laughed at him for wasting time and not making any progress.

At first, Azur seems so far ahead.

But as his pyramid grew taller, every stone became harder to move. The higher he built, the more effort he puts in for each new block.

So what did he do? WORK HARDER and LONGER.

Then one morning, Chuma finally came out of his workshop with his new invention, a crane.

What once took Azur days now took Chuma hours. Within weeks, he caught up and soon after, he finished the pyramid.

Azur never did…

This story made me think about the people in my life.

My parents are some of the hardest working people I’ve ever known.

They worked late nights.
Took overtime whenever they could.
Stayed in the same company for decades.

Yet despite all those years of hard work, their income and lifestyle barely changed.

At the same time, I’ve watched people in their early twenties spend those same hours building a business and within a few years, completely transform their lives.

And that’s how I learned about LEVERAGE.

Leverage is the ability to get more results from the same amount of effort.

Over the past few months, I’ve become obsessed with understanding how leverage works and how to build more of it into my own life.

To achieve my 10 year goals in 6 months.
My 1 year goals in 12 weeks.

So I started to experiment with my system.

Instead of building a system that helped me do more, I built one that helped me identify the 1-3 things I could do each day that would make everything else easier or unnecessary.

Like a long line of dominoes.

You don’t push every single one.
You only need to find the first domino that causes the rest to fall.

Now, for me, every morning I only need to ask myself one question…

Because 1 high leverage action is worth more than 10 low leverage activities.

This letter breaks down the system I’ve been experimenting with to compress my 1 year plan in 12 weeks. Take the lessons that fit your personality, life and your constraints, then ignore the rest. There’s no “right” path to achieving your goals but only a path that works for you. These are simply some of the actions that have worked for me, and I wanted to share them incase they can help you too.

5 step system to achieve your 1 year plan in 12 weeks

(1) rate each area of your life

Before you shoot your arrow, you need to know what your target is.

The biggest mistake I made for the past 3 years was trying to do everything.

We live in a world where “I don’t know what to do” is an excuse now. We have ChatGPT, Google, and YouTube to get some sort of direction on where to go. But the hardest part is knowing which way to go when there’s so much paths to get on top of the mountain.

So the first step isn’t creating a to do list. It’s getting clear.

Start by rating each area of your life out of 5

(1) Health
(2) Finances & Career
(3) Relationships
(4) Personal Growth
(5) Spiritual/Purpose

This helps you identify where the biggest gap between where you are and where you want to be.

For example, if your finances are 1/5, spending more energy, time and money on your social life or eating out wouldn’t be the most wisest thing to do.

And your lowest scoring area reveals the domino that you need to focus on improving/changing.

To do:

• rate each area of your life out of 5:

  (1) Health: _/5
  (2) Finances & Career: _/5
  (3) Relationships: _/5
  (4) Personal Growth: _/5
  (5) Spiritual/Purpose: _/5
  

(2) break down each area of your life

Now that you’ve rated each area, rank them from your lowest score to your highest.

For example:

(1) Finances & Career: 0/5
(2) Relationships: 2/5
(3) Health: 3/5
(4) Spiritual/Purpose: 5/5
(5) Personal Growth: 5/5

Next, take each area and break it down into three questions:
(1) What’s working well?
(2) What’s not working?
(3) What’s one goal I want to achieve or one action I can take in the next 12 weeks that will make everything easier or unnecessary?

By focusing on one goal/action for each area of my life, I learned to unlearn the habit of being busy.

Instead of spreading my energy across dozens of priorities, I focused on one thing for each area of my life that created the biggest ripple effect.

(3) reverse engineer your 12 week goal

I like to think of goals like a skill tree in a game.

You don’t jump from Level 1 to Level 100 overnight.

You complete one quest at a time, building the skills, experience, and resources needed to unlock the next one.

Your goals work the same way.

Instead of staring at one big outcome, break it down into smaller goals.

12 weeks → weekly → daily

This helped me a lot to get clear on the small, repeatable actions I need to do each day to become less overwhelmed.

You can map this out using Notion, Figma, a spreadsheet, or pen and paper.

For each week, write down:
- the outcome you’re aiming for
- metrics you’ll use to measure progress
- habits or actions to do each week

By focusing more on your inputs (actions/habits), you start seeing the results as feedback. Whether it “failed” or “succeed”, it’s just another data point to adjust your actions.

And why 12 weeks?

You can set your own timeline, but I review every area of my life every 90 days because it gives me enough time to commit to it, see progress, and get enough feedback to adjust for the next 12 weeks.

(4) put it in your calendar

The goal isn’t just to achieve the goal, it’s to make the actions required to achieve it a normal part of your day.

Just like for personal trainers, eating healthy and working out is like breathing. It’s what they normally do, it’s who they are.

Their habits aren’t something they do, they’re part of their identity. So, it’s about building a lifestyle that makes the goals a result of who you are.

That’s why I put my goals in my calendar.

If something matters, I don’t rely on motivation or memory, I make time for it.

Here’s how I do it:

Step 1: Create a calendar for each goal

Step 2: Time block your weekly and daily actions.

Using the plan you created in step 3, schedule the habits, deep work sessions, workouts, or learning blocks into your calendar. So that every morning you wake up, you know what to do and when.

(5) track your time

Let’s be honest…

Most of us don’t follow our calendar.

Life gets in the way. Priorities change. We get distracted. Sometimes we spend hours researching how to change our lives instead of actually changing them.

That’s why I started tracking where I’m spending my time on.

To understand where I was investing my three most valuable resources:

• time

• attention

• energy

And where you consistently invest your time, attention, and energy shows what you actually value.

How do you achieve your 10 year goal in 6 months?
or your 1 year goal in 12 weeks?

Not from working harder.
Not from working longer.

But by finding the one thing that you can do today that makes everything else easier or unnecessary.

Throughout experimenting with this system and consistently using it for the past year, I learned that extraordinary results rarely come from doing extraordinary amounts of work.

They come from doing the high leverage ordinary things with extraordinary consistency.