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Always remember that tools make your job easier and make your life longer.
Any tool that saves me a few minutes a day (without adding frustration) is very valuable. If you value your time at even $1,000 an hour ($60 a minute), then a tool that saves you minutes is worth much money. And sometimes, like the wrench that allows you to remove your car’s oil filter, you cannot even do the job without the tool.
The Tool on the Wall
When I worked as a research chemist at Southern Research Institute, I was surrounded by brilliant people. My work associates had Ph. D.s in Chemistry and Physics. And they were not just smart; they were innovators: in that environment, without new ideas, you starve.
My mother was a Tupperware Lady at the time, and she gave me the following tool (it was a prize Tupperware ladies gave at their parties).
I had that tool on my desk, and one day, someone with a doctorate in physics walked by, picked it up, and asked, “What is this?”
I looked at him and was surprised and pleased that someone so smart was perplexed by something every Tupperware lady carried in her purse.
So, to aggravate my very smart workmates, I taped the tool to the wall over my desk and posted a note adjacent to it that read, “What do you do with this?”
It stayed there for a couple of weeks, aggravated all who came into my lab, and no one figured it out.
It’s an orange peeler; if you have one, you can peel an orange very neatly and quickly.
I promise you that (once you get over the frustration and figure them out) the tools I gave you during this course will be much more satisfying than even an orange peeler or an oil filter wrench–they will allow you to do the impossible.
Thomas Jefferson said, “Always grab things by the smooth handle.”
Always grab things by the smooth handle.
–Thomas Jefferson
Critical Tool Rule
Some can fall so in love with their tools that they waste more time learning or using them than they save.
For example, I think “Slack” is like that. I do not want people to be able to interrupt me at will. Even if you learn to use it, it only opens you up to constant interruptions: it takes your time to learn it, and then it steals more time when you use it.
Another example is the leaf blower. I did “yard work” as a kid, was a janitor in high school, and used a rake and broom. The guy who loves the leaf blower so much that he uses it for an hour and aggravates all his neighbors when he could have used a broom to sweep his sidewalk without noise in about five minutes–that is the person who loves the tool more than his time.
Side Note: In my opinion, if someone uses a leaf blower when a broom would do, it should be legal to give them one punch to the nose (not two, and you cannot use a tool other than your fist).
I do not love any tool on my computer.
I do not love my computer (and it is a Mac).
I hated my PC. If you are still tolerating the abuse of a PC (unless you are an accountant, where you need a PC to run the best software), I pray for you like I pray for the woman still tolerating her husband’s abuse.
I do not even love my 5-Notes System, but I LOVE what it can do to improve the lives of your patients and put money in your bank.
Conclusion: Deciding when a tool is worth using is a puzzle.
Hence, there is a need for my “tool rule.”
Tool Rule: Learning to use the tool and using it must take much less time than the time it saves.
If it takes you days to learn to use a tool that only saves you 3 minutes when you do something once a year, that’s not a good investment. But, if you learn to use a tool and it does many hours of work for you every day (doing work, changing lives, and collecting money) while you are drinking your coffee, going for a walk, seeing patients, and making love to your spouse (and not even looking at the tool)–that is worth learning to use.
The following tools will allow you to do things others cannot. These tools take less time to learn to use than the time they save you and (more importantly) allow you to do things you could not do at all without them.
These tools are more like slaves (ethical, of course, when a slave is a machine, not a person) that turn out hours of work for you, at almost no monetary cost, while you do other things; but that happens only after you learn to use the tools, and then routinely practice using them in the manner of our 5-Notes System.
Learning to use the tool and using it must take much less time than the time it saves.
For example, in a month’s time, if you look at the hours that people watch my videos in a day, one person may watch a video for 5 minutes, another may watch three videos for a total of 10 minutes, and if you add it all up, people are watching my videos for significantly more than 24 hours a day in cities where my feet are not standing and will never stand.
The 5-Notes System makes the impossible happen.
Or, you can keep talking to one person at a time in your office when they can get there if they even know who you are and where you are, taking money only when someone can physically put cash or card in your hand, and delivering better health to the people who need you only when they can stand in the same room with you.
Back to my example, even if I could live without sleep, I could not talk for more hours than there are in a day. But multiple people can watch multiple videos, and together, they can watch more than 24 hours of my talking worldwide in only one day.
Just like the oil filter wrench and the orange peeler, it may take some time to figure out the following tools, but once you do, you have superpowers that allow you to help the people who need you.
Here are two of my favorite tools:
- Rev.com I think it’s the best for getting real transcriptions of your videos.
- GPT-4 is not so good for research, but nothing beats it for summarizing what you already read or wrote. Version 3 is not so good.
To learn more about the tools that will grow your practice and bring to you the people you want to care for, see my 5-Notes System here<–