Why Hustle Is a Form of Laziness

Hustle feels responsible. It looks disciplined. It sounds ambitious.

But what if it’s actually decision avoidance?

In this foundational episode of Big Ideas Made Simple, Jess challenges the cultural obsession with busyness and explains why fast thinkers don’t struggle with clarity — they struggle with containment.

If you generate ideas easily but rarely commit to just one, this episode will hit close to home.

You’ll learn:

1. Why hustle is often motion without commitment
2. The difference between clarity and containment
3. How optionality becomes a hidden addiction
4. The real reason smart people optimize instead of decide
5. The MADE framework for turning ideas into traction

Jess introduces the MADE strategy:

1. Map – Contain the idea instead of expanding it
2. Anchor – Choose a season, not forever
3. Design – Test reality instead of planning in private
4. Execute – Take visible action before you feel ready

You don’t need more effort. You need better decisions — and the courage to close doors.

Reflection Question

What is the one idea you keep refining instead of committing to?

Map it. Anchor it. Ship it.

Resources Mentioned

1. The One Thing by Gary Keller & Jay Papasan
2. Children’s Heart Foundation
3. Team Thomas the Titan

Connect

More tools and frameworks: bigideasmadesimple.com

Welcome to the Big Ideas MADE Simple podcast.

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If this is your first time here, I'm Jess.

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And I created this show for people who think fast.

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This is for my friends who can play chess, know, see five moves ahead.

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Or the ones who generate ideas without ever even trying.

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the ones who open a Google Doc to outline something and end up mapping the next three

years of their life instead.

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This show wasn't created to be a motivation show or a productivity show.

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And I don't want to help you cram more into your calendar.

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What I truly want to do is help you decide better and then actually move on those

decisions without

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burning your brain out in the process.

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So today's idea is simple.

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And yet it's one that usually makes people fairly uncomfortable before it makes them feel

relief.

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And the idea is this.

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Hustle is actually a form of laziness.

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Now, before you roll your eyes at me, let me tell you exactly what I mean.

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You see,

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When most people hear hustle, they think effort, grit, drive, commitment.

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And I am not attacking effort.

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Effort is great.

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Effort is fine.

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Discipline is fine.

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But what I'm talking about is something completely different.

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Because hustle, the way I view it, is truly decision avoidance.

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So for me, it's

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motion without commitment or fear without good posture.

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So, Hustle is what we do when we don't actually have a clear idea of what matters most to

us.

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So, instead of choosing that path, we stay busy instead.

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And my fast-thinking friends are very, very good at this strategy.

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If you're somebody who is wired similarly to me, you probably don't struggle with clarity

the way that people think you do.

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You honestly struggle more with containment.

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You're the type of person who can see many viable futures all at once.

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Because you don't just have one good idea, you have six that could potentially work if

executed in the next 24 hours.

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And because all of those features can work, choosing just one often feels premature.

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You feel like you might be closing the doors on something too early, or you might be

wasting potential that could make something that much bigger or that much faster for you

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down the line.

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And so instead of making that decision, which

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does feel like a big heavy decision, you optimize.

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You are essentially the person who does research or refining.

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You reorganize things.

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You prepare.

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And for many, that might look responsible or it sounds intelligent.

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And often it even feels productive.

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But if you're honest with yourself,

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you're not struggling with clarity.

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You're struggling with containment of all of those ideas.

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Because fast brains ask, is this possible?

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They struggle with asking, is this necessary?

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That difference in questioning is where hustle tends to kind of sneak on in.

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And I'm going to be honest, I learned this incredibly early on, even when I didn't have

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I want to take you back.

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I want to take you back to my childhood um where I was truly the quietest kid in the room.

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I was the bookworm, the wallflower, the teacher's pet.

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And my intelligence was the thing I could trust the most.

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Part of that was because I was honestly not that athletic.

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uh I have a connective tissue disorder that makes that pretty clear.

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Although it does create fun party tricks like twisting my feet entirely backwards to the

shock and amazement of everybody in attendance.

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But at the same time, that is the spot where my sports resume ended pretty early on.

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so I leaned into the thing that I had control over, which was having the knowledge, having

the ability to be right, be prepared.

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always having the answer, honestly.

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I vividly remember fourth grade, my family moved from St.

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Louis, Missouri to Birmingham, Alabama.

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my parents originally started me in a private school because that was my background, but

quickly realized that the academic rigor and the small social setting left me feeling very

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isolated.

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And so I switched schools mid-year to the local public school.

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in that switch, a lot shifted.

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By the second quarter, I had learned everything that the public school was teaching in the

first quarter of the private school.

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you can say the academic rigor was a little bit different for me.

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And so I chose to sit in the back of the room and read.

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I remember one day my teacher

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who hadn't gotten to know me well enough yet because I was that quiet kid, called on me

assuming that I wasn't paying attention to the lesson and asked me to name the primary

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Native American tribes of Alabama, without looking up from my book, I rattled off Choctaw,

Chippewa, Cherokee, and Creek.

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and then kept reading the page that I was on.

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And I tell that story because it wasn't me rebelling, it wasn't me being disrespectful, it

was truly boredom disguised as productivity.

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I was doing the work of looking responsible while not actually stretching my brain or

connecting with material.

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I've noticed as I look reflectively on things that that pattern scales really well into

adulthood.

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We build businesses that look impressive or systems that look complex.

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We build plans that sound responsible, but sometimes we're honestly just sitting in the

back of the room reading while answering the occasional question to prove we're still

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smart.

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Hustle is what we do when we won't choose.

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And that makes me think of one of my favorite books on focus and productivity, which is

The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.

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because the core question of it is truly a powerful one.

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And so the one thing asks us, what is the one thing that I can do such by doing it,

everything else becomes easier or unnecessary.

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Another way to think about that is what is the one domino that I can focus on to start the

chain reaction of the rest of the dominoes.

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So that question is a priority question.

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It's a leverage question.

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It forces you to admit

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that not all effort matters equally.

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And honestly, most fast thinkers would say that they totally understand this

intellectually.

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The problem isn't that they don't know their one thing, it's that they don't stay with it.

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ah So I love looking at this in such a way that direction becomes the parent, where

execution is the child.

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The direction is the thing telling you what matters, but execution determines whether it

ever even becomes reality.

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And there is a gap between those two things in our world.

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I'll say this, you don't need another strategy.

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You certainly don't need another book or another idea, another podcast.

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You need a translation layer.

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that turns this is important into this is what I'm going to do right now.

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Because knowing what matters and acting on what matters are two completely different set

of skills.

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Let's face it, optionality is the drug where anchoring is the detox from it.

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In an effort to get people to that point, I created a translation filter called the MADE

Strategy.

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So I want to share this with you in hopes that it helps with this process.

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And I'll use something very neutral as an example.

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Since this is the first episode of this podcast, let's use starting a podcast as the

example.

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Not because I believe every single person in the world needs a podcast.

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but because it's a very simple visual.

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So you could swap in a book or a section of your business or your offer, a uh career

pivot, whatever it is that helps you.

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And let's say most fast thinkers honestly would say, I want to start a podcast and

immediately jump to the vision, the scale of this idea.

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So they would sit there and strategize and consider what should I call it?

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or what's the brand identity gonna look like?

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What's the growth strategy?

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Who are the guests?

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How do I monetize it?

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What platform should I use?

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What technology should I buy?

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How should I look on camera, right?

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All of those questions are not momentum.

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They're avoidance with really good Wi-Fi.

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And so the first letter in the made strategy is M, which is

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stands for map.

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And mapping, for me, isn't about expanding the idea.

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It's honestly about containing it.

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So instead of letting your mind wander and considering questions about how big it could

be, I'll challenge you to kind of step back and say, what is this actually for?

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can you explain in one sentence?

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what it is without sounding like a consultant.

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Can you name the problem that it solves on the worst Tuesday of your life?

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Not like some big aspirational identity shift, but like a really bad Tuesday for you.

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You know, the entrepreneur at 2 a.m.

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with 50 tabs open who feels so behind in their own vision that they can't get anything

else done.

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that kind of bad Tuesday.

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And what is

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the smallest proof that you need that this podcast matters?

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Not a season or a logo, right?

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It's probably like three conversations.

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Because honesty creates momentum faster than brilliance.

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this is where hustle can lose its first option to hide.

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And then when you have the ability to map, you can move into anchoring.

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the A in made is a space where you don't have to choose forever.

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You choose for a season.

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Maybe it's a seven day strategy or 30 days, 60 days, 90 days.

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I don't know what it is for you, but for this window, this idea or concept gets your

attention.

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And you create a rule that you can capture other ideas somewhere else, but you make a

commitment to yourself and to those that you serve that you're not going to act on all

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those ideas.

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I mean, I have a digital notebook graveyard of brilliant half-built things.

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that existed because I didn't want to close doors on ideas.

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Optionality felt intelligent, but I'll be honest, it really probably keeps you stuck.

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And that's where your feeling of hustle will probably bring up panic.

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when you have the ability to map and then choose an anchor for a season, that lets you be

strategic and move into the D of made, which is design.

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So design, I'm gonna be honest, it's where smart people tend to hide because planning

feels incredibly responsible.

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It's fear dressed up professionally, right?

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I mean, I remember thinking about launching my coaching and consulting business and

wanting to have everything perfect.

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So I spent months.

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trying to build a logo for a landing page that didn't even have an offer yet.

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That was not excellence.

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That was me avoiding the possibility of being wrong about the actual idea.

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A plan asks how to avoid being wrong.

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uh

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on the other hand, asks what breaks first?

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If not a single human can respond to what you're building, you're probably still hiding.

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So in our example of a podcast, that might mean recording one episode on your phone and

sending it to five or 10 people and asking one simple question, like, did this help you

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think differently?

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That's contact with reality, friends.

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This is where hustle

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puts on that blazer and calls itself a real strategy.

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And when you can design with intention, it allows you to move into the fourth letter E.

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It allows you to execute.

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And execution isn't about feeling ready.

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It is about being visible.

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So confidence is a trailing indicator.

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It's a lag measure.

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It shows up after you act.

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cannot think your way into clarity.

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You have to act your way into clarity.

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One visible step, make it less than an hour, something that can succeed or fail in public.

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Intelligence becomes impact only when it's exposed.

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And so that's where Hustle honestly finally goes to die.

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And here's why that matters so much.

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There was a moment for me personally where my son's heart journey took a massive left

turn.

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For those of you that are listening that don't know me personally.

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My son Thomas was born with a congenital heart defect called Tetralogy of Fallot what that

means is just he had multiple various heart defects all rolled into one, which caused us

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to spend the majority of his first year of life in the hospital having five heart

surgeries.

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Now, I mean, he's an amazing, incredible kiddo who is scheduled to go to kindergarten here

soon.

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So life has picked up and allowed us to live fully, but I will never forget when I got a

massive slap in the face.

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And that was the day that I had gone into the office for less than two hours to get

something done because I believed that I was the only person in a massive organization

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that could handle something.

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And instead of doing what I needed to do, I was told to turn around and go to the...

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emergency room at our local children's hospital because Thomas's heart rate had jumped to

300.

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He had a fever and he went from being a little bit tired and not feeling great to

literally vibrating and almost comatose.

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And I'm, I mean, it sends chills down my spine and, and it just, it makes me tear up every

time I think about it because when I was walking in to meet my husband,

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and Thomas at the ER, I was met with a paddle cart.

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You know, the kind that they use on TV shows where they're like clear the room.

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And that was the reality I was walking into.

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I had believed that all the work that I was doing was the most important thing, but it

wasn't.

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It was my kid.

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And so my choices

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in designing what mattered had to shift in that moment.

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it allowed me to recognize that time isn't something you manage.

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It's something you protect.

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And so through that and everything else, where thankfully he didn't have to have the

paddle cart, we were able to strategize, meet with cardiology, get him another solution,

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it became this massive catalyst for me

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believing that time management wasn't the issue.

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It was this filtering mechanism of defining what matters and aligning our actions with it.

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And so honestly today, part of my mission is bringing awareness and funding to pediatric

heart research through the Children's Heart Foundation and our personal family team,

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Thomas the Titan.

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But.

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Beside all that, here's the larger truth.

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None of us can fund our purpose if we are fighting our process.

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Because hustle fills time.

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The made framework creates traction.

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Hustle is the thing that protects your intelligence, but made tests your impact.

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So I'm gonna challenge you

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If this episode clarified something for you, your next step is so simple.

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Start small, map out an idea, identify what your worst Tuesday looks like, choose a

season, or take one visible step.

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You don't need more time.

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You need the courage to close doors.

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And I hope that the MAID framework is the catalyst for you to be able to do that.

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thank you so much for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.