In this blog post I’m going to share with you one of the most powerful “people assessment” tools out there. You may have heard of Myers Briggs, or some other personality assessment tool, but I’m going to give you something even simpler. It’s so powerful and you can use it in many ways…
- If you’re thinking about starting a business or becoming a real estate investor, but you’re not sure if you’re going to succeed at those ventures or not, I’ll give you a simple, straightforward and BRUTALLY HONEST way to figure out if you’ll succeed.
- And, this same strategy will hold true for entrepreneurs or investors (or even folks who are happy in their careers) who want to reach another level.
- And, this same method words if you are trying to hire someone and you want to know if they’ll work hard for you, or if you are thinking about partnering with someone and you want to know how they’ll contribute to the partnership relationship.
This prediction tool works nearly 100% of the time with 100% accuracy (unless you tell the person how you’re measuring them).
Ready for this? Here it is…
Find out how they spend their time.
How do they spend their working hours? What about time with family? What about their “downtime” or leisure time? You can learn a lot about a person by finding out this one single piece of information.
That’s because time is really the only commodity that gets spent no matter how we use it. (With money, you can always make more… but your time asset ticks down second by second every day, at the same rate as everyone else’s time asset).
So it comes down to this one principle: Show me how you spend your time and I’ll tell you what’s important to you.
- Working all the time? You’re a hard worker… but may be at the expense of other important pieces in life.
- Binge watching TV? Maybe an occasional guilty pleasure is one thing (see my next point) but if you watch 5 hours of TV a day like the average American, you probably don’t place as high of an importance on your long-term career or business goals.
- I’m not saying cut TV out of your life (although it won’t hurt if you do!) but I am saying that you should cut back if you’re watching as much as the average American and consider instead spending more time on learning and growing and building your relationships.
- Listen to educational podcasts while on the go? You love to maximize the time you have and you aspire to grow.
Of course these are just examples and generalizations, and I wouldn’t judge someone’s potential based on a single datapoint either. But I’m using these to illustrate how powerful this is… and it’s pretty accurate (even if we try it on ourselves and don’t like what we see).
If you want to increase your potential for success in business, investing, and life, start by analyzing how you spend your time. Record in 15 minute increments for a week or two and then analyze. Almost everyone who does this is shocked at how they used their time and almost instantly makes changes.
So the next time you want to assess your own potential or someone else’s, just ask them to give you a run-down of how they spend their time in a typical week. You’ll learn a lot.
