Strategic Edge

How Entrepreneurs Can Reclaim Focus and Scale Smarter

• Bridget Fitzpatrick

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0:00 | 28:40

On this episode of Strategic Edge, Jay Abraham explains why overwhelm is often a systems and prioritization problem—not a motivation problem. Drawing from decades of advising entrepreneurs and business leaders, Abraham outlines how distraction, poor delegation, reactive decision-making, and weak operational discipline quietly limit growth and profitability.

He argues that entrepreneurs achieve better results when they focus attention on the highest-value activities, eliminate unnecessary complexity, and structure their businesses around strategic execution rather than constant busyness.

Key discussion points include:

  •  Why multitasking reduces productivity and slows strategic progress 
  •  How distractions and reactive workflows drain profitability 
  •  The importance of identifying and removing operational bottlenecks 
  •  Why delegation is essential for long-term business growth 
  •  How intentional time management improves decision-making and execution 
  •  The difference between entrepreneurs who build scalable systems and owners who stay trapped in day-to-day operations

Welcome And The Overwhelm Trap

Jay ABraham

I believe every human being was born to be great. I believe no human being wants to be mediocre.

Announcer

All I can say about Jay is I've known him for 35 years, and for four and a half decades, he has been the go-to guy to optimize your business. Jay is one of the top people on the planet who knows how to maximize a business and its reach to his customer.

Announcer

You're watching Strategic Edge with Jay Abraham exclusively on ASBN.

Jim Fitzpatrick

Hey everyone, Jim Fitzpatrick with the Strategic Edge with Jay Abraham. Mr. Jay Abraham is with us now. Thank you so much, Jay, for joining us on the show once again. We are so excited to have you here, and we're excited about today's topic, which is momentum when you feel overwhelmed. I know this is going to be a very popular show because there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there and business owners, as you know, that feel overwhelmed. And but yet they got to stay motivated. They got to keep their head in the game. So uh, Jay, every entrepreneur that I've ever spoken with has felt overwhelmed at some point, many points uh in their in their career. Um, you describe this not as a motivation problem, but as something

Attention Control Beats Motivation

Jim Fitzpatrick

entirely different. What what is it?

Jay ABraham

Well, I think it's a it's a prioritization, a pragmatism, and a control problem. I think people basically don't understand that today, probably more than ever before, you have to have command and control of your attention. Yeah. And you have to basically become oblivious to distraction. That's the first thing. Second, uh, uh, and I have somewhere a fabulous video on this that I can have you put up and and append to this, but uh, there's a very, very prominent man who does this really fun thesis on the fallacy of multitasking. That really what you're doing when you're multitask is you basically perform a lot of functions pretty crappy. And a lot of people who multitask don't realize this one task that you're doing that is significantly important to your revenue, cash flow, uh competitive position. And this other one, maybe you're doing seven things and you're circling and you're circulating it. This one is totally irrelevant. But if you start basically allocating a little here, a little here, a little here, you end up way, way down months later, finishing the one that was all important that should have been concentrated on before you do anything else. And you end up doing it about three days before you finish the irrelevant one. And he's got a really beautiful graphic that shows it. But the first thing is questioning how you use your time. Right, right. I've heard you describe it as also a systems problem. Yes, right. It is, it absolutely is, and it's not an original thought for me. It's uh it was uh uh uh W. Edwards Deming, the father of optimization process improvement, he said it's very rarely a human problem, it's always a system problem, and it has to do with your employees uh and team members not performing well, but it has to do with you. What is the system you're following? How do you allocate the most precious assets you have? Time, opportunity cost, and attention. Yep. I think if if people go, Oh, I don't have any time, I will always say, Okay, so you're saying that somebody else has more than 24-7. You're saying that that somebody runs a company with 200 million people and uh, you know, or 200,000 people have no, it's how you allocate time, attention, and opportunity cost. And uh this man that I was telling you about, and I talked about him before, the guy with uh theory of constraint, he he basically says, look, there's a bunch of things that affect your business, but there's usually one or two that above everything else, if

Multitasking And Finding The Bottleneck

Jay ABraham

you fix them, improve them, remove them, those are going to free up so much more performance. But if you don't know what they are and you don't prioritize them above everything else, you're just gonna waste time. Also, and you and I know this. I would bet money that 90% of the people watching are addicted indirectly to either you know their their Facebook or their no question.

Jim Fitzpatrick

It's scary to go on and look at your phone where it says uh you know the amount of time that you, you know, that you use the phone that day, you know what I mean, and uh and face uh FaceTime in into the phone. It's just incredible. I mean, it starts out very low, and then by the end of the day, you've you've allocated two or three hours just to just to scrolling or checking things out. It's incredible.

Jay ABraham

Well, but the point is, it first of all, the question I'd ask everybody do you know and can you tell me right now or list the prioritized, most important issues you need to deal with first, second, third, fourth, fifth right now that deal with either the performance of your business, the threats to your business, the opportunities for your business. And most won't even have that clear. They'll have a macro. Number two is can you honestly look back a week, a month, and chronicle for me how you have not used but abused your time? Right. But three, are you a control freak? You know, you might be great at coming in in the morning and making sure the lights are on and the desks are clean and you know, and that everything is great, but is that really the highest and best use of you? It's really interesting. I I think I did this in one of the other sessions. I used to have Brian Tracy do a day for me when we did $30,000 strategy at the summit. And he always did this. He would say, What is your time worth today? Yeah. And then I would say, What do you want your time to be worth tomorrow? Yeah. And nobody ever thought he'd say, Okay, well, let's take a look at what you earned last year for the hours that you invested. And you have to think every hour you are expending is either a it's either a speculation or it's

Pricing Your Time And Your Focus

Jay ABraham

a calculated investment. And an investment needs to have an intended yield. And unless you're really, really not very astute, you don't want the yield to be far less than you could get from allocating it to another investment, right? That's right. That's right. So let's say you say, okay, well, I made $250,000 last year and I worked uh 50 weeks uh uh and I worked 50 hours a week. So what is that 2,500 hours? Yeah. So I well, so my time is worth $100 an hour, right? But I really want to make a million. Okay, so you're saying I want to make four times that I don't really have four times the hours. So am I gonna have to use the hours better? Am I gonna have to stop wasting my time on suboptimal activities that a lesser uh paid person could do to free me up for the more significant and strategic things? Uh, in and the late Stephen Um R. Covey's book, The Seven Habits, he had those quadrants. Do you remember those? Oh, yeah. Yep. I can't remember what they were, but he had most people operate in the wrong quadrant. There's urgent but not important. There's important but not urgent. There's and he said you want to operate in the one which is really going to get you the best outcome. That's right. I have another and I can give all these to you, you can put them up somewhere. I have another interview of a guy that it was he he's a disciple of the 80-20 theorem people, and he's got uh three different quadrants he shows you, and and the most important one is we spend half of our time in what he calls barnacles, wasteful time, uh meetings that don't get anywhere. Yep. Searching that, watching Netflix. Yep. And and his point is that should be used for the highest level strategic activities. Yeah. But we don't mean, I mean, really and truly, nobody has more than 24-7.

Jim Fitzpatrick

That's right. But how you use it, how you use it and how you allocate it, and how much attention you give to that particular item at that uh uh that that time. And it's so true. We as entrepreneurs, and especially entrepreneurs, because they have a tendency to have a little ADD in all of us, I guess, where we are looking for the new shiny object, or we're thinking our minds already thinking about the next business that we might start. And meanwhile, you know, it all of a sudden five minutes goes into five hours, and uh and it can be a complete, you know, I don't want to say waste of time, but to your point, not that it's a good thing. But it's very suboptimal at best.

Jay ABraham

It's suboptimal, but here's something else. And and it's a very interesting uh uh difference between uh a business owner and a true entrepreneur. Uh a business owner, if he or she makes a lot of money, they will normally indulge themselves and their family. They'll buy a Mercedes or they'll buy a bigger house or they'll take the family on a trip, whereas a true entrepreneur reinvests it in people who are better than they are in their skills. And and and and but but so what we're saying is first of all, how do you use your time? How do you use your opportunity? How do you use basically uh your concentration, your attention? How do you, what is your relationship with money? I have a new and I I'll send it to you for you. It's called how money moves in your business. It comes in, does it stay? Does it grow? Does it multiply? Does it leak out? And and the other thing I would say is because there's so many, there's a really wonderful phenomena that has happened today that wasn't available uh before the you know, the internet and and and things like that. There are almost an infinite number of niche specialists in higher performance. And higher performance is a general concept, but you can basically improve dramatically your operational efficiency, your sales impact, your marketing ability, your management ability, your systems approach. And when you have perhaps 20 or 30 different levers in your business that will free up

Shiny Objects And The Money Mindset

Jay ABraham

time and multiply impact and multiply out outcome and thus income, and you're not really even trying to focus on those every day in every way. And I mean, it's just when you look at how you normally, and the you is anybody watching, how you use or abuse the most precious assets you have time, attention, opportunity cost, and investment isn't even necessarily financial investment, it's intellectual investment. How are you? That's a good point.

Jim Fitzpatrick

Anyhow, I don't know if that helps. No, it definitely helps. And I think we all uh I say we all, I'm painting with a broad brush here, but as as business owners, we all fall into that trap of being uh distracted on certain things or just not paying as much attention to other things as we need to. And uh maybe be because of these little machines right here. They they they kind of control the day in many cases. I mean, there's there's days that uh I don't even get out of bed yet, and I'm already reading my emails, uh, which means that the email and my computer, my my phone now controls my day. Major mistake. My wife is my partner in our business, and she will grab the phone out of my hand and say, What are you doing? We've got so much to do today, and you're allowing the you know, the the answers to these emails, which could certainly wait till later, you know, to to uh to just totally uh distract me and and really uh undermind everything that we had set up for that day or that morning.

Jay ABraham

Well, there's a school, I love that, and and and I agree 100%. There's a school of thought that says that the majority of impulsive actions and activities you engage in can be allocated to different uh schedulable times of the day or week. For example, uh looking at your emails, yeah. If there's anything truly uh, I mean, uh you know, cognition critical, you know, immediately important. If somebody sends you an email and you don't respond, do you think maybe they would call?

Announcer

Yeah.

Jay ABraham

So, I mean, if you say, okay, I'm not gonna look at my emails intermittently throughout the day, I'm not gonna look at my text, I'm gonna schedule that for either five o'clock or noon, but I'm not gonna let my my most precious allocation of resources and assets be diverted. Same thing with meetings. Most meetings are purposeless, they don't have an agenda, they don't have actionable, uh, uh actionable um conclusions, they don't monitor, measure, and so they're just a bunch of rhetoric that you're just dissipating. Yeah, yeah.

Jim Fitzpatrick

I can go on and on and on, but no, you're right. Hours and hours and hours

Batch Email And Fix Broken Meetings

Jim Fitzpatrick

are wasted on meetings. To your point, if nobody's held accountable in those meetings and there isn't people that are assigned certain tasks by the time you meet the next week or later in the in the week, and then everybody just goes back and you know gets their cup of coffee and says, Okay, well, I wasn't appointed to do that, so it's not on my plate, and ultimately nothing happens.

Jay ABraham

So, even in this engagement with me, I have abused a little bit the very thing I'm talking about. Uh, they people don't know that, but this is the second recording session we did today. We were trying to do four, but I like tangential conversation, which is a diversionary indulgence, and I've probably wasted enough time talking to you about things that are sort of ADD interesting that we could have done another show.

Jim Fitzpatrick

Sure. That's right. That's right.

Jay ABraham

And I think we we don't hold ourselves always to a higher, I'm gonna call it a standard of performance. Okay, yep. If you if you take a re here's a reality check, and and this is something very fascinating. I I only can paraphrase it, but the actual quote's better is from Peter Drucker. He said, if you're not constantly committed to making your business uh or the way the current way you run your business obsolete and finding higher, better, far more powerful ways to replace that, you can rest assured that your competitors are committed to do it for you and to you. Now I didn't explain it correctly, but you can continue verily along, like Nero, you know, uh, you know, file, you know, uh, you know, file playing a fittle while Rome is burning. But if you look at it, cause and effect, if you only use 30 or 40 percent of your assets correctly, and your competitor uses 60 or 70 percent, who's gonna win?

Jim Fitzpatrick

If they're gonna win, they're gonna win. It's as simple as that.

Jay ABraham

Yeah, asset utilization, Jim, also can compensate for a lack of people.

Jim Fitzpatrick

Yeah, that's true. That's true. So, so true. In fact, we hire people um because we think we need a whole nother person or a whole nother employee to take care of something when in reality there's uh you're not running the people that you currently have efficiently. And uh they start to do the same thing the leader does. Well, maybe I'll spend more time on this, or I'll check out that on online, or I'll spend more time with a water cooler, so to speak. And uh, if the boss isn't gonna manage their day, your employees are the first ones that know that, right?

Jay ABraham

No, you're right. So I was just thinking about the concept of of instant versus deferred gratification. Yeah. I I would argue, and this first time I've said this, so I'm gonna try to conjure it up in a in a in a lucid enough way that doesn't sound like I'm just basically delusional. But if you think about it, most SMBs crave instant gratification. Right now, that manifests a couple of ways. They don't really, they're not very strategic because they just think in terms of of immediate transactional revenue, right? But they're also they wouldn't think of it this way, but you're selfishly indulging

Compete Through Deferred Gratification

Jay ABraham

your diversionary side because it feels good, and because no one holds you accountable, even your your significant other wouldn't, if unless like Bridget probably would you because she's there with you, but most entrepreneurs are not next to their husbands or wives or their partners, yeah. And so, you know, they're pretty much left to their own devices. I would say that most of them indulge instant gratification. Whereas if you are willing to achieve deferred gratification, the results will compound so geometric and exponentially, but you have to really understand that. And that may be too abstract, but I does it make sense.

Jim Fitzpatrick

It makes total sense. There's there's there's no question. There's uh it it and it we are our own worst enemies or our our own greatest assets. It really just depends on what you're doing with you know your mind and your time. And uh, and I will tell you that I'm guilty of that. I've been guilty of that. I work on it every single day. It's not something that I'm never not working on. Some days are better than others, you know, I will admit that. But uh it's got to be something that, you know, you're aware of as a business owner and a leader of a group of individuals that are you hope are all rowing in the same direction and they're taking your lead. But like children in or a family, they're they're watching what the parents uh do, not what they say. So you could, you know, what you could want this for your team and your organization, but if you're not practicing it, that's what that's what the takeaway is going to be.

Jay ABraham

And and and and I think that is beautifully articulate. Here's something else. I think one time, because I people don't know this, I send you all kinds of wild things to look at all the time privately. And I think one time I sent you the list of the 350 top expertises that entrepreneurs uh really uh turn to. And I would argue that most business owners who are not thinking like an entrepreneur and are not uh strategic don't even begin to know all the expertises that have the ability to enhance performance, profitability, positioning, and they don't think about investing. They think people think, I mean, I have uh I have total contempt of contemptuous disdain about the word spending because the very word means I have no idea the return I want to get, I am speculating. Sure. Anyone that does that shouldn't be in business. I mean, I mean, I guess you should go and just you know try, you know, try the dice in Las Vegas. But if you are truly a high-yielding investor, you know what you should demand and command, the yield, the outcome, the the productivity, the profitability for different uh different uh investments in different tangible or intangible. This is interesting. We just did an experiment a couple of days ago, and and I was talking about something that I do that produces a minimum of a three and a usually a 10x uh first year yield and it compounds. And I went, I took the time to look at what most businesses will accept as an ROI. And it's interesting. If you uh buy a piece of equipment, it's normally a three to five before you get back your return. If you do some major remodeling, it's it's uh three to five years. If you do a business acquisition, it's about three to five years. And yet some of these expertises are three to five months, and yet people don't really understand the yield you get on those so outsizes everything else. Yeah, that's a good point. I'm talking about just people that have different expertises that can make the performance of your people, your business, your your everything multiplied.

Jim Fitzpatrick

That's right. Boy, there's no there's no question about it. And uh, and I I will tell you I've I've fallen into that many times, but uh, but it's if we could just get entrepreneurs and business owners, leaders to, to your point, pay attention to how they're spending

High Yield Expertise And Better ROI

Jim Fitzpatrick

each and every, not just hour, but each and every minute of of the day. And and if you say then if it's going to be yielding a return that they're looking for, right? Because uh we've got associates that we work with now. We give them a project and uh, you know, they may say, Well, I I don't have the time in the day, you know, but when you work with them on really compounding what they do, taking a look at their day and working on more of an efficient day, all of a sudden they come up with another two and a half hours of that day. Times that by five days. You've got a whole nother work week that uh, you know, that that you know, they realize, you know what? Actually, I I do have the uh that that kind of time to take on a new project.

Jay ABraham

But um there's a man, a very fascinating expert that I'll introduce to your audience. Uh, he's a very dear friend of mine, and he can give any CEO, but also every one of the team members, five extra hours a week. Five extra hours. You have 20 employees. That's like giving you a hundred hours. That's like giving you two and a half extra people to compete with. But that's one expertise. What I was gonna say is one of the things that somebody said to me in a Really knocked me for a loop. He said, we are all decision scientists. Outcomes are predicated on the decisions we make or don't make, the actions we take or don't take, and the the the drivers, the the the the uh the principles, the the immutable laws that we either acknowledge and capitalize on, or we reject and let whipsaw us. And I mean it gets, I mean, going probably too abstract, but it's pretty fascinating, really.

Jim Fitzpatrick

Yeah, it it really is. And it and is some of it's just being aware, you know, just having the team or the leadership of the team be aware of the enormous amount of uh inefficiencies among the team and the uh as it relates to time. I mean, maybe there's some overlapping there too, or some redundancies with regard to the workflow or what have you. But just if you zero in on the amount of time that a team can be wasting uh each and every day, it's just fascinating. You'll see to your point and and your expert uh that you want to bring in, you know, to be able to pick up five extra hours a week is just incredible. You know, yeah.

Jay ABraham

Yeah, it's it's interesting, and I'll tell you what I believe. I believe that it's not there's no shame in not knowing this, but there is maybe not shame, but there's terrible recrimination for knowing it and not capitalizing on it.

Jim Fitzpatrick

That's right, that's right. That's a very good point. Very good point. And some because most people don't get it.

Jay ABraham

I mean, if you've never had anybody teach that this is available, I mean, in these sessions you do with me, you try very hard to keep me on point. I know I go tangential, but trying to deliver a an epiphany, a realization, a revelation, a a a uh an opening, a whole new slant of understanding. Yeah, but that's only valuable and viable if you do something with it.

Jim Fitzpatrick

That's right. That's exactly right. And you've you've mentioned that before of the the number, the the thousands of people that you have worked with, and not everybody takes, you know, picks up and runs with it. In fact, a very small portion do. Uh those those are the those are the winners in the in the group. But uh it really is unfortunate because to your point, it is a shame if you've been given the knowledge and you've been given the awareness and then not do anything with it.

Jay ABraham

And yet the same people are complaining, oh man, uh you know, business. We're having a tough year. Yeah, computers are everywhere, and nothing I'm doing works. Well, but let me tell you

Delegation Story And Final Takeaways

Jay ABraham

one more story, and this is I've told this before, but this always fascinates me. We did a previous show on mastermind. I used to be an owner of a mastermind group with another person for dentists, and we used to have these really interesting meetings, and at the end, I would have them all pose to me the one remaining um recognizable problem, challenge issue that if they could overcome it, it would have a propelling uh positive impact. And I'll never forget this. We got to this one, and he goes, I know that if I hired a personal assistant, it would free me up to do much higher yielding activities in my practice, including focusing on something. Yeah, I told you the story, and then I said, Okay, but you he said, but I don't know how. And I said, Okay, guys, and I was very hilariously animated and theatrical. I said, Don't tell a soul, because I'm gonna reveal to you the most confidential, advantageous way that you'll never have this problem again. And I said, It's most people don't know about it, but it's a rare and very, very discreet platform called YouTube. If you go on YouTube and you pump put in how to hire an assistant, that's exactly right, you get about a thousand videos, and then the guy has the audacity of saying, Yeah, but I wouldn't know how to train them.

Jim Fitzpatrick

And I went, What the wrong do you? Unbelievable, unbelievable. Yeah. And really what I think that person's trying to do is rationalize why they don't have one and why they really need to do it themselves. You know, my my wife struggles with that, who's my business partner, and and uh she needs a she needs an assistant. And she she continues to rationalize um, you know, why it's just better off if she just does it all. And and you know, when you pick when you hire a personal assistant, you're actually getting two employees because you're getting the personal assistant that's gonna take all of that stuff off of your plate, but then you also pick up a whole nother great associate in that partner or in that that that leader, that executive. You know, that's a great distinction. Yeah, yeah, you got to get in two for the price of one, right?

Jay ABraham

Yeah, and I think one of the things we should underscore here when you and I do these sessions, you have an agenda, I have an understanding, but it tends to spawn some rather original thesis that is worth people really probably watching a couple of times because it's pretty profound. The one thing I will say is I've had a stellar career where I've been exposed to hundreds of world-class expertise that most uh SMBs and and mid-market people would never even know exist. And when you realize how much more power is available, but like the power source and forces you can put into your, you know, for example, when they realize you could have a buy turbo instead of a supercharger, or you could change the gears, or you could, I mean, each one of these gives you that kind of elevated performance and power and and and per. I mean, just it, I just find it fascinating.

Jim Fitzpatrick

Yep, I know you do. And so many other people that follow you and watch you and have benefited from your teachings uh are are grateful to you for bringing this uh awareness to them, as we are here at ASBN. So, Jay Abraham, thank you so much for joining me once again on the show. We very much appreciate it. And I know that so many people are gonna get a lot out of today's session with you. So as you can see, strategic edge with Jay Abraham right here at ASBN.com. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jay.

Announcer

Thanks for watching Strategic Edge with Jay Abraham, exclusively in an ASBN.