Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, get my jacket tonight. Wow. I've never heard it. I made it up. That's why. Wow. But you wouldn't care, would you? No. Because you don't master your own choices. Great. See how I did that? Very great. Wasn't sure I was going to get that. All right. It's your friend and mine. You can't say it very well, but I can. It's Epictetus. Epictetus, wow. The unrestricted person who remains in control of their choices, no matter the circumstances, is free. But anyone who can be pressured...

coerced or manipulated into acting against their will is not truly free. Hit me with a wow. Wow. Wow, indeed. Now, I think about mastering your own choices in the modern world is quite a hard thing because I think what people don't realize is they're making lots and lots of choices that they probably don't want to. I don't mean your preferences in the bedroom. Excuse me. Yeah. How many do you know how many decisions we make a day? You or me? We collectively. 120,000.

so I spotted an interesting thing that I didn't like. I will walk from the car park to my office and I'll walk past different coffee shops and stuff like that in Bournemouth. And when I'm walking past, I'm seeing people sat there on the phone, but they might be with a friend. They might be with like their mother, grandmother, their phones in the hand. Other mothers are available and yeah, the mothers are available, but

When you spot those things, you've got to be like, it's very easy to spot biases in others. We're all very good at that. I can spot biases in others all day, but can you spot it in yourself? And then I started noticing there's all these little times with like you reaching for the phone, the phone is there all the time and you see it in sales teams all over now. I saw it in Tesco and I thought, this is mad. That person's supposed to be working. Just like stopping working just to like look at the phone and you're like, someone else does it. And suddenly it's like that yellow car thing. As soon as you start thinking about yellow cars, see yellow cars everywhere. So.

What I thought I would do is a couple of things to try and take the choice away. So I made a choice that took the choices to go from my phone away. The first thing I got was the Opal app. Yeah. So the Opal app is basically like no matter what, there's a restriction on my phone around certain apps at certain times. And even if I wanted to, there's no password I can put in. There's nothing I can put in to get into them. Once it's on, I can't get into those apps. I'm locked out and that stops you going for it. But what you start to spot is you'd still would try.

So you still like, you know, eight o'clock at night, I'm like, I'll just check LinkedIn. I can't. It's off. And then, and then the other thing that I did was actually downgraded my phone. So I've never done that before. It came to a point where it like, you can upgrade your phone. Now there's this upgrade available. I was like, I'm actually going to get a worse phone. I'm actually going to go back to like five years ago and get a worse phone. And it's bad. doesn't screenshot anything. The apps don't work, but it encourages me not to use it. The screen actually doesn't look very good to look at. Yeah.

And you're not as encouraged to look at it all the time. So there was a choice that was being made for me that could distract me. And he's probably distracting people from getting on the phone right now. They should probably be working rather than listening to this podcast. Yeah. But you can put things in place that let you master your own choices and become the master of those choices rather than the choices being made for you. What do think about this energy? I think it's too much beautifully said. No, think that salespeople, we live in a world of procrastination where salespeople will look at two screens all day. They're dialing on one, they're emailing on another, and they're also flicking through LinkedIn. Lunchtime comes, they're scrolling through TikTok, they're on the train home, they're looking at Instagram, and then they get into bed, they're watching YouTube, Netflix. Like, we know it happens. One thing that I've been thinking about recently are, like you said there, are rules, okay? Rules are so, powerful because...

And I don't know about you because actually you live in a different part of the country, but I don't go around punching people in the face. I do. But you know why I don't? there's a rule. Because I'm weak and I'd get punched back. There are rules that you don't do that. Okay. So what I've done is I've set new rules in my life. So one of the rules that I've been doing this year is I only eat fruit until a certain time. Jesse Itzler. Jesse Itzler. So I'm taking bits that I like, but setting rules, like I've got a notification on my phone.

that six o'clock it goes off and it says, switch off your phone before you get home. But I'm making my life easier by having these rules. So then that becomes a rule. And then the rule certainly over time starts to become a habit. You shouldn't just try and like master it because free will, know that like habits are hard to build. And actually we have a choice. We probably will go for the easy option. So that's where being a stoic comes into it. So like make your life easier, whether it's a case of putting reminders on your phone or putting blocks in your calendar for cold calling and only like, well, when it's 12 till two, I cold call. That's a role. That's what I do. That was the first cold call today. So I think that's so, so important, making your life easier, having little systems and processes in place to get you to be where you want to be. And one of the most beautiful quotes I've been thinking about this year is doing the obvious thing.

for an extraordinary amount of time without thinking that you're smarter than you are. So as a salesperson, where do you want to be? What do you want to achieve? What input needs to happen? Just do that. The obvious thing over and over again. And eventually you'll get the results. Wow. And what about eventually you'll die? Eventually. How's that fit in? I've been Jack Frimston. I've been Zack Thompson. Remember you'll die. He didn't invent death.