Breakthrough. David Nurse

I hear goals like “make a billion dollars,” “shoot the most three‐pointers in the league this season,” or “play a sold‐out stadium tour,” I want to know what's driving them. The more obvious and desirable the goals (“David, who wouldn't want that?”), the more I worry about the breakthrough potential. If you want to create something the world has never seen, you need to think differently and do differently.

      Learn more about your mission; get a sense of your breakthrough purpose. Your goals should be serving your breakthrough—useful and actionable guides to the results you alone can reach. Your breakthroughs will be as unique as you are; starting off with goals is like slipping on blinders that keep you narrowly focused on something mediocre that many could achieve, or it leaves you with a target too broad and ineffectual to really innovate on.

NAVIGATE THE HOW

      Every breakthrough—big or small, personal or professional—centers on answering a “how” question.

      Once an elite performer recognizes that the key to breakthrough results is answering the right “how,” you scramble to find your “how.” Unfortunately, that's a really lousy instinct.

      You deserve incredible, innovative, and unique solutions to questions like:

       How can we outperform our highest aspirations?

       How do we make our relationships more loving?

       How do we keep production, motivation, and drive high?

       How do we prioritize everything we need to accomplish in a day?

       How do we distinguish ourselves from our competition in a disruptive 24/7 environment?

       How do we heal from the hardest blows in life?

       How do we pivot every challenge into something actionable and collaborative?

       How do we constantly and consistently come up with creative, life‐altering ideas and follow through on them?

      But if you want answers to these, you need to create the conditions in which breakthroughs not only can happen, but can come to life. You don't get that by chasing “how”—you get that by finding answers to the who, what, where, and why of the breakthrough formula. System + Process = Results. Follow the system in the formula through your daily process, and you'll get better “how” results than you can even imagine.

SEIZE THE FORMULA

      Confidence + Cooperation + Service + Purpose

That's it. That's the breakthrough formula. But these four ingredients in the formula aren’t what you think they are, nor what the world says they are. You’ll see, you will have a paradigm shift, but trust me: this shift will be exactly what you have been searching for. If you are confident, cooperative, acting in service, and have a sense of purpose, you are already in the process of breaking through. You are living in the space where breakthroughs occur naturally and easily. If you're not already experiencing a constant string of breakthroughs each and every day, you act on the formula by tackling these big four questions:

       Breakthrough Confidence: Who are you?

       Breakthrough Cooperation: What relationships matter?

       Breakthrough Service: Where are you helping?

       Breakthrough Purpose: Why are you playing?

      Everyone has breakthrough ideas; a rare few act on them; a very rare few build lives where their breakthrough ideas can immediately come to life. This formula is the system you need to drive actual results from your amazing ideas. Don't scramble to answer these questions now (we're going to build out the details together throughout the entirety of the book); just commit to the formula and get pumped about being one of the very rare.

EMBRACE THE CLOCK

      Developing your breakthroughs through who, what, where, and why sounds great, but when? When are you going to have time for all that?!

      Once you stop fighting the clock, there's actually no better tool to support your breakthrough.

      The breakthrough formula is a four‐quadrant schedule that overlays your day so you can have, perform, and achieve at breakthrough levels, all at the same time. It doesn't require you to change anything about your schedule. You become a perpetual breakthrough machine!

      It doesn't require you to reschedule anything. The tools and perspective pivots you'll practice each quarter can be done while you commute, take meetings, spend time with your friends and family, and accomplish everything you need to get done. All it requires up front is a commitment to shifting your overarching focus four times over the course of each day.

      If you change absolutely nothing about your daily life besides reframing it into these quarters, the process will organically create breakthroughs. It couldn't be simpler: take the rough number of waking hours in your day, and divide by four. If you get eight hours of sleep each night, your breakthrough day is sixteen hours long. Each of your quarters will be four hours long. Say you wake up at six and start Q1; your Q2 will start at ten, Q3 at two, Q4 at six. Rotate through this schedule, complete the assigned tools each quarter, and engage your subconscious mind with that quarter's question while you do everything you would normally do, and you'll have an amazing day—regardless of what's on your calendar. You'll create an environment where your “how” can reveal itself, and it will be something that you can actually follow through on, something that you will enjoy and be stimulated by. The search for your answers becomes powerful and exciting, not stressed and miserable.

       ***

      SENSE is a great warm‐up for your breakthrough—if you use it.

This blueprint is exactly as effective as you make it. Reading the book will teach you how to think differently, but until you put the system into action, it won't have any impact on your breakthrough results.

      Don't wait until you understand every word perfectly—practice is essential to getting even proficient. Don't even wait until you're finished the book. Start here; start now. There's no “someday” on the calendar. You're warmed up—so get out there and play. Today should be your breakthrough day!

WARM‐UP TOOL: SNAP

      No matter how committed you are to your breakthrough when you start your day, old patterns die hard. Breakthroughs aren't easy, or everyone would be having them. Whenever you find yourself veering back down the well‐beaten path to mediocrity, SNAP back!

      Equipment Required: Your Hand

      Space Required: Anywhere

      Time Required: <2 Minutes

      Instructions:

      1 When you feel disconnected from your breakthrough mission, physically snap your fingers as a cue to pivot back, and:Stop: Whatever you're doing—solving problems, feeling listless, losing motivation, or trying to brute force your breakthrough—physically and mentally throw on the brakes.Notice: Take note of what threw you out of the Breakthrough Blueprint. What is the roadblock? How frequently are you running into this problem, and what causes it?Assess: What do you need to get over this and back into the process? Take a breather, choose your second, and …Pivot: Turn back to the breakthrough formula with new strength and determination, and get back into your quarter—breakthrough confidence, cooperation, service, and purpose.

      2 Keep your hands on