The Work Ethic System – Sharran Srivatsaa

In today’s fast-paced world, staying motivated can be a struggle. So, how can you achieve your goals if you can’t stay motivated?

In this episode, Sharran shares the blueprint for outlasting motivation by building a work ethic system designed to win. Learn how to create sustainable habits that allow you to work harder without burning out.

From daily discipline to leveraging systems, Sharran unveils his five key strategies for transforming effort into long-term success. Whether you’re a high performer or someone striving for consistency, this episode is a treasure trove of practical tips that put you in the driver’s seat of your time and results.

Take the first step towards building your unshakeable work ethic—listen now!

“Motivation is fleeting, but discipline is dependable.”

– Sharran Srivatsaa

Timestamps:

02:13 – How to build a system that outlasts motivation

03:55 – Why is hard work more important today?

04:59 – 3 Things you can do to accomplish hard work

08:20 – Mental fortitude vs. willpower: Which wins?

09:30 – 3 Tactics to cultivate mental fortitude

13:07 – How to take systems to crush willpower

17:10 – How to build goals into your daily routine

19:25 – Embracing the grind instead of just reading about it

20:37 – The DBQ (Do Better Question) for continuous improvement

Resources:

– The 5am Club

– Join the 10K Wisdom Private Partner Podcast, now available to you for free

– Join Sharran’s VIP Community

– The Real Brokerage

– Top Agent Power Pack

– The Job of a CEO

– ARC Multifamily Real Estate Investing

– Sharran’s Partnership Program

– Grab Sharran’s 4-Week MBA for Free

Connect with Sharran:

– Facebook

– Instagram

– Twitter

– LinkedIn

– YouTube

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Hey, this is Sharran Srivatsaa; welcome back to the business school podcast. And in this episode, I’m going to talk to you about the work ethic system. No, it’s not what you think. I’m going to talk to you about how to outlast motivation, meaning how to stay disciplined and build systems, tactical things that you can do that you can actually use in your day-to-day life.

[00:00:16] To outlast motivation and why work ethic wins, and how to create yours without burning out. And most importantly, how to turn daily effort into a system that drives long-lasting results for this one big reason. Instead of working hard, if you can build a system, working hard becomes easier. That is the main idea.

[00:00:37] Instead of just working hard all the time, instead of grinding, if you could just build a system tactically, Then working hard becomes easier. I break down all of this step by step on the Work Ethic system, all starting right now.

[00:00:54] One thing is for certain, just because it’s tried and true, doesn’t mean it’s working [00:01:00] right now. So the big question is this, where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact how-to. How to grow your business, how to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth.

[00:01:16] That is the question. And this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharran Srivatsaa and welcome to business school.

[00:01:28] So whether you like it or not, you’re really successful. I say that again, whether you like it or not, you are really successful because you do Things really well now, it may not be directly aligned with your goals. It may not meet your aspirations, but there are things that you and I do that are really good.

[00:01:44] We probably manage our time well, or we probably have good relationships, or we probably go to the gym on time, or we probably have a six pack, or we probably have made some good money, or we probably have rental real estate, or we probably have grown a business, or we probably have a big social media brand, or we probably are.

[00:01:57] You know what you’re loving and caring for yourself and your family [00:02:00] and put on the table. You are successful. And if you look behind the scenes, you will realize something really interesting, which is that success behind the scenes is driven by some kind of system, some kind of system. So I’ll give you an example.

[00:02:14] I wake up at 4:45 am every single morning. I’ve done that for almost every single day of the year for 10-plus years. Now, there is no way I would have ever been able to do that because I’m a night owl, but I created this online community called the community called the 5 am club. It’s a five-minute call at 5 am Pacific time, 8 am Eastern time, every single morning.

[00:02:33] And we’d be doing it seven days a week, 365 days a year for the last 10-plus years. The reason I wake up every single day, and that is a little success in my life, is because I have a system for it. And today, I want to talk to you about how to build a work ethic system. It’s almost contradictory, but the work ethic system where how to stay disciplined and build systems that outlast motivation.

[00:02:56] That was what I wrote down, how to stay disciplined and build [00:03:00] systems that outlast motivation. I’ve got five kind of big ideas for you, but here’s why this is really important in today’s world. In today’s world, we have this instant gratification economy from DoorDash to on-demand social media to what is it, the same day or next day Amazon Prime.

[00:03:16] Building true success demands a lot more than our fast shortcuts. And most people think that hard work relies on willpower alone. They’re like, man, Sharran has the grit. He likes to work hard. But the truth is, if you. Actually have a system working hard becomes easy. Think about that. If you have a system working hard becomes easy.

[00:03:35] I have a system for waking up every morning. In fact, even to today, after I missed the call one time, I said two alarms. So now I know that I have two alarms on two different phones and I’ve never missed a call since then, because when you build a system, working hard becomes. Easier. And so I want to give you five kind of big ideas.

[00:03:54] Big idea number one is this. Hard work today is more important now than ever. Especially because [00:04:00] everyone is in this instant gratification world. If you’ve not heard this quote, 85 percent of employees at Gallup said are disengaged at work. Why? 85 percent of employees are disengaged at work because they have access to all the tools that keep them distracted.

[00:04:15] And they don’t choose to grind. Now, grind is this hustle porn culture is a very different thing, but there’s a great quote which says, you can’t cheat the grind. It knows how much you’ve invested. Really powerful, right? You can’t cheat the grind. It knows how much you’ve invested. And we’ve seen story after story We’ve heard about Jeff Bezos crediting amazon success now. There’s no overnight success, but the painstakingly hard work behind the scenes.

[00:04:41] You can’t cheat the grind. It knows how much you’ve invested So what does all of this really mean? I got like three tactical pieces of advice When it comes to why hard work is more important now than ever and what you can do about it And by the way, these are not me telling you what to do. These are My truths it’s got a lot of these have worked for me.

[00:04:58] So maybe I’m just sharing them with you. The first one [00:05:00] is to track consistently record daily progress. Recording daily progress is really powerful for to visualize improvement So I remember if I’m ever tracking my weight I track my weight on an app or on a clipboard and I track it every single day and so tracking daily progress is really important.

[00:05:20] I’ll tell you what I’m tracking right now. I’ve been doing that for the last few years is I track my HRV, which is a heart rate variability. I track it on a app, on a little device called the Wootband and the Wootband connects with my app. And I wake up every morning and I want to see where my HRV is and whether I’m in a good state or a bad state, whether I can push myself that day or not.

[00:05:37] Tracking consistently and visualizing progress gives you insane improvement. That’s number one. Number two, probably the best thing I can give you is to work hard. You just have to limit distractions. Working hard is all about just limiting distractions. If you have more time, you just limit distractions.

[00:05:54] If you could just limit distractions, things get super easy. Now, how do you limit distractions? The way you limit distractions is [00:06:00] by having a not to do list. Most of us have a, Oh, I’m just gonna put it on my to do list. I’m gonna put it on my to do list. I’m gonna put it on my to do list. I’m gonna put it on my to do list.

[00:06:07] And so, you wake up in the morning and you have 10 things on your to do list. You finish 9 out of the 10 things on your to do list, but you added 17 things. So now, You insert being 90 percent done. Now you have 18 and more things on your to do list. And if you ever go one day with being distracted, that list will mushroom so big.

[00:06:27] Every time I write goals or try to create a to do list for myself or the quarter or the year. I have a very tight not to do list. What am I not going to do this year? What am I not going to focus on this year? What I’m not going to think about this year? What, what am I not going to prioritize this year?

[00:06:40] And what you’re doing is you’re giving yourself permission to put the other things aside so that you can create space for you to do the things that truly matter. And last but not least, you know, I think this is way easier said than done, but setting priorities is important. You’re like, yeah, yeah, sure.

[00:06:55] Of course. But I want to tell you how to do that. I’ve realized that for me, most [00:07:00] people, I have friends, entrepreneurs who don’t sleep really well because they don’t know what they’re going to do the next day. They’re like, man, I’m going to wake up tomorrow and deal with the onslaught of email, onslaught of Slack, onslaught of text messages, onslaught of everything.

[00:07:10] Like, by the way, when I wake up in the morning, I have to give myself like a good 15, 20 minutes just to like solve all the fireworks, put away all the fires, right? Setting the priorities are very important. So every night before I go to bed, I stretch. And while I’m stretching, I just think about, Hey, tomorrow, if I could only do three things, what would they be?

[00:07:29] And the reason I do three things is because I try to do one big thing, two medium things, three small things in any given day. But if I just said, I want to do three things tomorrow. If I get those three things down, I look back at my day. I’m like, that was a good day. When you do that seven days a week, many, most people only work five days a week.

[00:07:45] You automatically, when I work seven, just because I work every day. And that’s how my world is, is I do 21 key projects a week. When you stack 21 key projects a week, right? And you do, 10 weeks. That’s 210 key [00:08:00] products. Like you’re making insane progress. We keep ourselves busy, but we don’t make insane progress.

[00:08:04] So my suggestion would be the night before you write yourself a, Hey, if I only had to do three things today, or I’m not going home until I do these three things today, it gets very helpful. So that is number one, which is hard work is more important now than ever. But even the hard work, if you have a system, it gets a lot easier.

[00:08:19] Here’s number two, which is, I really think that mental fortitude beats willpower. Right? And mental fortitude is just like how strong you are mentally and the mental thinking patterns that you have beats willpower. Willpower is just when you have energy, when you are motivated, when you have good news.

[00:08:35] When you have good news, you have willpower. When you’re well rested, you have willpower. When you don’t eat junk, you have willpower. When you have exercise, you have willpower. When you sleep well, you have willpower. But I’ll tell you there’s rarely a day when I sleep well and have rested and I’ve done the sauna and I’ve gotten good rest and I’ve eaten like it’s rare.

[00:08:51] So, cool. My willpower varies, but I want my mental fortitude to be there. I don’t know if you know the stat, but over 45 percent of habits are just unconscious behaviors. It was like a [00:09:00] multi-generational Duke University study that was ran that says 45 percent of our habits are just unconscious behaviors because motivation is fleeting and discipline is dependable.

[00:09:11] Think about that. Motivation is fleeting, but discipline. Discipline is dependable. You always want to give projects to the disciplined person because you know that discipline is dependable. So, what are, what’s like the tactical stuff around this? I’ll give you kind of three tactical piece of advice when it comes to mental fortitude.

[00:09:30] The first one is this idea of using micro-challenges. I’m a big fan of doing small things. So I’ll give you an example. When I check my email, I only handle 10 messages at a time. Otherwise, you can check email for 14 hours, right? And most of us have two or three different email accounts and you’re testing with email.

[00:09:47] You’re getting email marketing or you’ve saved email. No, my micro-challenges. When I open my email software, I only check 10 messages. When I say 10, I might reply to two, I’m a archive three, [00:10:00] and I’m a forward four. Okay. I have five, right? That’s ten. As soon as I’m done with ten, I’m done. That’s my email session.

[00:10:05] I’m done. So that micro challenge, if I have five, six kinds of email sessions a day, I do ten at a time so I could jam through those. If I have ten minutes at the end of the day, my goal when I look at my email is not like, let me just check email. My goal is, what can I do with ten? I just want to clean out ten of my messages so I make progress, right?

[00:10:21] That’s really, really good. The second is to really develop mental fortitude, you gotta have some kind of way to pick yourself back up at any point in time. I’ll tell you how I work. I have a little Spotify playlist, and it’s got like 3 or 4 songs in it, and I’ve created the fact that every time I’m getting ready to work, like when I’m right before, 5 to 10 minutes before I know I’m gonna do great work, I just turn on that soundtrack.

[00:10:44] That soundtrack always gets me in a place where it’s like, OK, Sharran’s ready to work. It’s no different than athletes putting on the same soundtrack every time because it gets them in the zone. I’m just getting ready to work. So it would help if you had some kind of like get ready to work routine because no matter how [00:11:00] you feel, you can pull this feeling, this motivation together.

[00:11:05] My friend Leila Hormozi always says, F your mood, follow the plan, right? It’s really, like, cool. She’s got t-shirts made on this. It’s just F your mood, follow the plan. And I’m not saying the F word, but like F your mood, follow the plan. It’s good because when you have that, it’s just a mantra that regrounds you into what you’re doing.

[00:11:22] So some people say, Hey, you know what? I just listen to a soundtrack. Some people like I have a friend before he starts working, he does 10 pushups. So every time he’s ready to start working, he does 10 pushups or 10 air squats. When you do that, when you work your big muscle groups, you know that that is the ritual to kick yourself into doing things.

[00:11:38] So my point is before you do anything important, do the same thing. That way, when you’re tired or not feeling like it, you can do that thing. And this synthetically motivate yourself to do the thing, which is really cool. And last but not least, I do a lot of planned breaks. Like recovery is really important, but.

[00:11:55] Because us as humans just need recovery. And I’ll tell you what I do for recovery. I just walk, [00:12:00] right? So I have good endurance. I can do like six to eight zoom calls in a row, right? If I did those, I need like a 30 minute break because I’m just kind of mushed and useless otherwise. And when I have that, I literally turn out.

[00:12:11] Alarm on my phone or a timer I put in my pocket. I put an airplane mode. I just walk. I walk around the block. I walk around the neighborhood. I just walk, uh, whatever I’m thinking. I just process, but I don’t talk on the phone. I don’t do any of that. I just walk. And that’s my planned recovery. And then when I come back, I can do four more straight hours of zoom calls or whatever I have to do.

[00:12:27] But if you need to know what’s good for you, sometimes people need to eat. Sometimes people need a snack. Cause a lot of people need sunshine. Some people need water. There’s people like ping pong or foosball or whatever you need to recover as well. So those are three. Okay. Kind of tactics for you. Number one, use micro challenges, just like checking 10, 10 emails at a time.

[00:12:43] Number two, having some kind of mantra or ritual so that you can, whenever you do that, you know that you can kick into high gear. And third, just know that you have some recovery because otherwise you’ll just get burned out and you’ll come home and be like, man, I worked eight straight hours. No one really cares about me.

[00:12:57] And you’ll start to be a pity party for yourself. So kind of, [00:13:00] that’s number two, which is mental fortitude, beatable power. Here’s number three, which is a really; what’s even further, is the other side of the coin, which is how you take systems. We just don’t want to depend on willpower. Willpower is the enemy.

[00:13:15] You don’t want it. Willpower is fleeting. Willpower is based on motivation. You don’t want to inspire and have to motivate anything. Systems just need to work. Okay, now what systems can you have to trump willpower? Did you know that close to 92 percent of people fail to reach their goals because they rely on willpower alone?

[00:13:30] There’s also a great James Clearcoat, he says, you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, right? And the nice part is I don’t want to fall to anything, I actually want to rise to the level of my systems, because if I can have great systems, cool things start to happen to me.

[00:13:43] And here’s some kind of tactical advice for you as far as that goes. I’ve really started to adopt this idea of time blocking, and I’ll tell you exactly what I mean by that. I have made a commitment to following my calendar. Whatever’s on my calendar, I do. And for whatever time it is, I do it. Just like I keep the [00:14:00] appointments that are on my calendar, I realized the other day that, you know, kind of many years ago, that if I had an appointment on my calendar with you, I would show up to the appointment 100 percent of the time.

[00:14:10] That’s a responsibility, right? But if I had an appointment or if I, if there was a blank space, I don’t do that. Have an appointment with myself. So I do whatever is on my kind of priority list at that time. So what I’ve decided to do is I block the calendar with and I pulled the tasks in necessary, meaning I either have an appointment with you or I have an appointment with myself. Those are the only two appointments I have I either have an appointment with you or I have an appointment with myself and my appointment With myself is to actually do something or the rest very simple. So I may have an appointment with myself to write an email and then I might have an appointment with myself to take a walk. But, my entire calendar has to be filled with appointments.

[00:14:49] An appointment to you? Or an appointment with myself. So what I do every single morning or the night before, this is how I generally do it, is I plan my next day. So I look at my calendar the [00:15:00] next day, I want to make sure that my full working day, I generally work my scheduled structured time is 6 am to 6 pm.

[00:15:06] Structured time. So, everyone works in and out of their time, but my 6 am to 6 pm, I want it perfectly scheduled. There’s no white space, I want it perfectly scheduled. And it’s either, I have a booked slot, I have an appointment with someone else, Or I have an appointment with myself and that makes it really easy because I know what I’m going to do next.

[00:15:23] And if I ever feel tired, whatever, I’ll start to learn that, Oh my gosh, I went four hours without a break. Now I have, and I’m doing appointment with myself. So I feel significantly better about it overall. Right? So that’s super, super important. So that’s kind of number one. Number two is you want to build habit stacks.

[00:15:39] So the best part about building habit stacks and I’ll talk about how I like to do that is that whenever you want to do something, you attach it to another habit. So for example, if you want to start flossing, right? And you know that every night you brush your teeth. Well, all you have to do is tell yourself you’re just going to floss before you brush your [00:16:00] teeth.

[00:16:00] Or, I’ll tell you what I do. I like to post on Instagram stories every day. Now, I forget to post on stories, so what I do is every time I put my car in park, like if I park my car somewhere, park my car in a parking lot, park my car at home, every time I park my car, before I get out, I post stories. Every time, before I get out, I post stories.

[00:16:19] So it’s a really, really powerful tool. Positive, powerful thing because it allows me to know that every time I park my car, I just post two stories. So I stack my habits along with those, right? So that’s super, super helpful. And a big part for me is to track a bunch of small wins. A lot of times people think that they need to have these big win days.

[00:16:38] I don’t. My days are built entirely on if I did the days work right. Did I design my calendar right? And did I show up for myself in all my meetings? Did I show up in all my meetings? Did I show up for myself? Cool. If I did that, then I have the confidence that I can create anything, right? And so the easiest way to kind of think about this is just keep your promises to yourselves.

[00:16:58] And if you can use your [00:17:00] calendar, which is the only time based kind of artifact that we have, it’s super helpful because that way you have a system for always following the promises that you make to yourself. Awesome. All right. I have two more. Number four. It’s super important that I’ve noticed to build goals into my daily routine.

[00:17:16] I’m a high D driver. If I don’t know why I’m doing what I’m doing, I lose interest very quickly. And so I don’t do things for fun. So, and when you may think that’s really boring, but like I don’t golf and or I don’t like shoot guns or I don’t like watch, I don’t need to serve or I don’t need to paddleboard.

[00:17:34] I don’t need to walk in the woods or I don’t need to go out with my friends or I don’t need to play poker. Like I’m not wired like that. To me, I just need to have a purpose for what I’m doing. I get a lot of joy with my family. I love being around them, but most importantly, I like to build goals into what I’m doing into my daily routine because it always feels like I’m making progress.

[00:17:51] You may have heard the stat, which says, you know, people who write down, uh, Their goals are 42 percent more likely to achieve them. So, which means that if you write and rewrite your goals [00:18:00] from memory, every single morning in the present tense, like you’ve already achieved it, that’s a really good thing, right?

[00:18:05] And so it makes you live into the identity that you should have, but a goal without a plan, you and I both know is just a wish and we got to do better with that. So what I like to do is two things. One, when I put something on my calendar, I asked myself, huh, does this make a difference to my goals? Very simple question.

[00:18:22] Does this make a difference to my goals? If it doesn’t, I have obligatory energy to it, and I do whatever I can to either shorten the meeting, to defer the meeting, to get out of it, to pay for it, to have someone else do it, to beg for forgiveness, whatever. I realize that I am not good at doing things that are not connected to my goals.

[00:18:39] And sometimes I’ll say yes to doing things that are not connected to my goals, and then I’m like, man, I should not have done this. So, whenever I look at something in my calendar, I ask myself, Does this make a difference to my goals right to asking that question number two is every single week I do something called a review preview.

[00:18:53] I’ve talked often about that on my podcast The review is I look back one week on my calendar I look through every single appointment that I’ve [00:19:00] done and I ask myself. Is there any follow up? To this, did I make a follow-up commitment to this? Is there any promise that I made? And then I look ahead on my calendar two weeks, and then I look at everything that is booked.

[00:19:10] And then I ask myself, do I need to prep for this? So sometimes there’s travel or whatever. So one week back, two weeks forward, uh, review preview. And that allows me to ensure that everything that I do, I build goals into my daily routine. Last but not least, here’s number five. I think there’s a super interesting part about embracing the grind and just not to read about it, right?

[00:19:30] A lot of people love this idea about reading about people that grind. Like, I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you ask somebody, uh, let’s say you’ve not seen a friend for six months. And you see them six months later, and they’ve lost a lot of weight. What do you say? You say, hey Jimmy, you look amazing.

[00:19:46] And then we can’t help ourselves, but we ask, what have you been doing? And what does Jimmy say? Oh, you know, I eat, I eat right and exercise. You knew Jimmy was gonna say that. There’s never been anything else, I mean, apart from getting a shot of a Zempik, but like, [00:20:00] apart from that, you know this. You know that every single person that you’ve asked that has lost weight has told you the same exact thing, which is they’ve eat right and exercise.

[00:20:09] You know it, but you still hear it, but you won’t do it. The problem is, you can’t learn to swim by reading about swimming. Right. You just can’t do that. I tried to do that before, by the way. Only, uh, I think this is quoted only 8 percent of people succeed at their resolutions because they stuck in get stuck in planning mode.

[00:20:25] And so you want to embrace the grind to do kind of the work, right? So the question is, how can you move something forward every day, right? And I wanna give you this one thing, one idea that I came up with, which is called the D-B-Q-D-B-Q. I call it the do better question. Every single night before I go to bed, I ask myself the do better question, the DBQ, what can I do tomorrow to make it better than today?

[00:20:51] That’s it. If you ask yourself this question every single night, the DBQ, what can I do tomorrow to make it better than today? It, you will get, you will make every [00:21:00] day better than yesterday. Can you imagine that? What, the DBQ, what do, better question, what can I do tomorrow to make it better than today? I will tell you, there’s one question that has made me a better father, a better husband, a better friend, a better entrepreneur, a better everything.

[00:21:17] A citizen of the world, it is asking the DBQ, what is, what can, what is one thing I can do tomorrow to make it better than today? What is one thing that I can do tomorrow to make it better? So I talked about kind of five really bigger ideas, right? So number one, hard work is more important now than ever because you can’t cheat the grind.

[00:21:35] It knows how much you’ve invested. Number two, mental fortitude beats willpower. We know that motivation is fleeting, but discipline is dependable. Number three, we talked about systems trumping willpower and the great quote of how you don’t need, you don’t rise to the level of your goals, but you fall to the level of your systems.

[00:21:51] Number four, building goals into kind of like their daily routine, where a goal without a plan is just a wish. And people who write down their goals are 42 percent more likely to [00:22:00] achieve them. And number five, which is how do you embrace the grind? You can’t learn to swim by just reading about swimming and you want the DBQ, which is the do better question.

[00:22:08] What is one thing I can do tomorrow to make it better than today? All right. So this was the main idea of like, how. to stay disciplined and build systems that outlast motivation. Outlasting motivation is your key to building some really, really cool stuff. This is a different kind of format that I used today, so I’m, I’m very curious if this was interesting to you, if it kept your attention, if you thought it was helpful, if that was tactical.

[00:22:28] I know it’s, you’re probably walking, talking, working out, taking dogs, dogs out, etc. Maybe listening in the car. You’re not, don’t have a chance to like write and give me a review and all of that, but I’m curious. If you’d like this episode, could you just screenshot this and post on social media and tag me saying that you liked it?

[00:22:43] Because then I can make more like this for you. So please do me a favor. If you like this. Just screenshot this episode, tag me so I can name more like this for you. And until then, we’ll catch you on the next one.[00:23:00]

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