The Most Successful People I Know Have a Psychopathic Sense of Urgency
"Decrease the time between having an idea and getting it done"
It’s possible to do more in 90 days than most people do in 5 years.
Not to brag but I’m living proof. The speed at which I can build something from nothing is unheard of.
It started in my 20s. My older brother was painfully impatient. He always wanted everything right now. As a toddler he’d take his toy plastic car and ride it to the shops.
My parents couldn’t keep the little bastard in the backyard.
When we built a business together in our 20s his weird sense of urgency rubbed off on me. We built a new business from scratch to 8 figures and 100 employees in under a year. The level of execution was borderline insanity.
Until recently, I’d forgotten why. Then I remembered.
Our mindset at the time was if we worked hard for a year or two and built a successful business, we could spend the rest of our lives doing whatever we wanted.
Now I’m older I see the flaws in this worldview… but it’s true to a degree.
What my brother and I built wasn’t perfect, but it did completely rewire my brain. I realized what author Jay Yang recently made popular: you can just do things. And when you do things with a psychopathic sense of urgency, big things happen.
Things you could never dream of. Results that seem like millionaire clickbait.
This mindset I got from my brother is life-changing. Here’s how to implement it in your life so you can reach financial freedom, faster.
The greatest muscle you can build is urgency. Decrease the time between having an idea and getting it done. Everything changes – Codie Sanchez
“Let's also prioritize balance and well-being to avoid burnout. Finding that sweet spot can be key.”
(Anonymous X user)
When I saw this comment on my X post it made me realize what having psychopathic urgency isn’t.
The p0rn fantasies of balance and well-being are the reason most people never get what they want in life. The gurus say “find the sweet spot.”
There is none.
You either chase your one big goal with everything you’ve got, or nothing will happen. Trying to be balanced is what’s wrong with society.
Success in any field comes from IMBALANCE.
You can’t have what you want and also be as cool as Nathan Apodaca riding his skateboard down the road drinking cranberry juice listening to Fleetwood Mac while filming a TikTok.
Getting what you want is harder than that.
Then there’s burnout. The happy-go-lucky-f*cky LinkedIn influencers love to post about burnout as though it’s more dangerous than Chernobyl-levels of radiation.
I agree with them, except burnout only happens when you work on something each day that you hate. And most people on LinkedIn hate their jobs, so it’s easy to see why they experience the feeling of burnout.
But when you exit the Dilbert-style cubicle olympics to nowhere, stop climbing the corporate ladder, and get your life together… burnout isn’t real anymore.
I haven’t experienced burnout since I left my job 4 years ago. I’ve forgotten what it feels like. I can work 12 hours straight in a single day without leaving my office chair and feel nothing (I did this one day last week).
Doesn’t mean you need to work crazy hours like that all the time – the point is that chaos and imbalance lead to better results than chilling like a homie wearing a hoodie and drinking cranberry juice.
The critics will then argue that having a psychopathic sense of urgency so you can succeed at something is a stupid pursuit. “Success won’t make you happy,” scream the Karens from the grocery aisle.
What they’re misunderstanding is humans are purpose driven. When you succeed at something in life if gives you enormous purpose. That purpose makes your life feel like it’s worth something and has value.
The opposite is to have no purpose and end up settling for second best while the regrets quietly pile up in the background until you have breakdown. Now you know why modern life sucks for so many people. They innocently didn’t get this memo.
The other reason the gurus praise work-life balance and having no stress is because they’re afraid of hard work. I was too.
Working hard for a bank that saw me as a rounding error felt like death.
But when you work on a project where you have 100% ownership and control, hard work feels different.
Hard work only feels bad if it’s building someone else’s dream, not yours.
The most important thing in your career:
Speed.
If you answer emails fast, walk fast, talk fast, get sh*t done fast, you will make a lot of money. No sense of urgency, you won't. – Nick Huber
How to adopt a psychopathic sense of urgency, so you feel limitlessness
A few small steps and mindset shifts.
Increase your rate of iteration
Nicolas Cole mind-f*cked me with this idea.
I heard him share it on a podcast and it’s haunted me ever since. Your chances of failure increase astronomically if your rate of iteration is too slow.
I’m building a business with my friend Todd. At one point we were only meeting once a week. We realized that meant we only made changes every 7 days.
So our progress turned into snail speed. Nothing could get done. Problems mounted. Solutions were rare.
I channeled my inner Cole and realized our rate of iteration was too slow. So we started talking more often on Whatsapp and suddenly our progress exploded.
Most people iterate too slowly. They don’t have enough experiments running. A/B testing is non-existent. They follow the same boring plan for far too long, even when it’s not getting them results. Fail.
You must have a psychopathic sense of urgency when it comes to iteration. If you don’t iterate your dreams die.
10,000 iterations, not 10,000 hours.
Embrace the power of only doing one thing
Shiny object syndrome ruins more lives than Andrew Tate does.
People have to-do lists, vision boards, and lists of goals. The problem is when you try and do many things you end up with no successful things.
I see this with creators all the time. They’ll decide to start two or even three newsletters so each can be about a different topic. Because they’re working solo, they quickly find it doesn’t work.
There simply isn’t enough time or energy for you to succeed at many things. That’s why the top 1% are normally successful at only one thing, or in rare cases, successful at one thing at a time.
When you realize how hard it is to be successful at anything, it changes how you think. You realize it’s one thing or nothing.
People try to be successful at multiple goals when they make the mistake of not deciding. Instead of choosing, they try to do them all.
Replace your decision-making framework
It’s easy to fail in life if you have a bad decision framework. Here’s the only one you need…
If you’re trying to make a decision and there’s Option A and Option B, the only wrong decision is not to choose A or B. As long as you decide on something, you will make progress. It’s NOT deciding that’s the kiss of death, and this is how most people live.
They put off decisions. They stay stuck in indecision which feels like being Indiana Jones walking into a pit of quicksand.
Once you get better at making decisions, it’s easier to move forward with a psychopathic sense of urgency.
Turn tomorrow into today
This one is subtle.
The difference between doing something today or tomorrow doesn’t feel that radical to most of us. But the difference of 24 hours changes when you compound how much more progress you get when you move actions to today instead of tomorrow.
The challenge of delaying something until tomorrow is we lie to ourselves. We say tomorrow but it’s easy for that to become the day after, month after, and year after.
Delaying action creeps up on us until the boogie monster shows up at our door to rip our heads off for being lazy. Whenever you catch yourself saying “I’ll do it tomorrow,” interrupt that pattern and do it today.
Reframe: When would now be a good time? – Tony Robbins
“Should I even be doing it at all?”
This is the most common question I ask myself.
It’s easy to get caught in a psychological trap where you spend time on things and can’t even remember why. Regularly rejustifying what you spend time on is extremely helpful. I often find I said yes to an opportunity to please another person, or because at the time it made sense.
When I ask myself “Should I even be doing it at all?” the answer is often no. This saves me a lot of time so I can have a sense of urgency toward the right objectives.
Don’t ever say “someday,” “next year,” or “one day”
These phrases made me a loser.
I had to become a heavy drinker to cope with the daily existence these phrases led to. So I wasted 10 years in banking instead of building my dream. And I thought with my d*ck and hooked up with one-to-many women.
One day doesn’t exist.
Next year doesn’t exist.
Someday doesn’t exist.
Cancer rates are higher than ever. None of us is safe. A human life can be all over in a few months. During the 2020 bat virus I lost contact with a good friend I met at work. I just got busy and forgot to return her calls.
When I finally did get time to call her she didn’t answer. One of her friends then sent me a Youtube video.
It was of her funeral.
In 90 days, she went from being a healthy 30-something year old about to start a family, to looking like death.
She filmed the 90 day transformation on Youtube. On day 1 you couldn’t tell. By day 7 the chemo had messed with her face, skin, and ability to talk. By day 89 she was saying “in the next few days I will be dead.”
The next day it happened (4 years ago).
After she passed her friends set up a Facebook memorial page. Each day they would leave her messages they hoped she would read in the after-life. After a year the messages slowed down. In the second year there were two people still leaving messages. Now, 4 years on, no one leaves messages anymore.
That’s how fast a human life can fade. It’s a dark reminder.
If you’re not doing the thing today, it’s bullsh*t. Read that again.
Final Thought
A lack of urgency is the #1 sign of failure.
It’s a lukewarm, piss-weak way to live that will only end in mental health issues and self-care retreats to a magic fairy mountain.
Truly successful people are unreasonable enough to twist people to their insane timeframes. You see it time and time again. From Steve Jobs to crazy book deadlines set by authors like Tim Ferriss.
Anything is possible with a psychopathic sense of urgency.
Is having a sense of urgency important to you? Let me know in the comments below (I read every comment).
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Tim, both love and take some issue with this article, so well done. Agree with 90% of it, and I appreciate the urgency (pun intended). The 10% I disagree with is the black-and-white approach to how you write about burnout, which I’ve picked up on in other posts. I am coming out of a Hustle Culture situation and have had multiple colleagues die in their 20s and 30s from complication of burnout. One example: Undiagnosed diabetes because the person would never allow himself to hit pause on the sense of urgency and go to the doctor to find out his sleep deprivation, sedentary lifestyle and awful diet had drowned his systems in blood sugar. Millions of people experience burnout without dying. Of the 70+ percent who indicated some level of burnout in 2016, only 745,000 deaths were attributed that year to overwork. It’s true, as you write, that people can grit it out and hate their lives and ruin all their relationships for jobs they hate working on someone else’s dream and not die, and that’s a choice they make. More power to them. What I think we can agree on that isn’t in the article is that there’s a difference between a sense of urgency and being addicted to work in a way that causes permanent damage or in extreme cases, death. You can absolutely work insane hours and get more done in 90 days than other people get done in 5 years and make all the money and buy all the things if that’s your thing and you work in sprints. If you try to keep that up 24/7/365 for years without a break and completely ignoring your physical and mental health, it is true bad things will happen (not social media melodrama writing, actual research-backed facts). There is no one-size-fits-all on either side of an argument for or against urgency and rest/recovery periods because every single human needs something that’s specific to them. So I agree with the importance of urgency and using focused sprints to actually do things, it’s worked incredibly well for me. I also make it my mission to raise awareness about the dangers of burnout and at least inform people if they want to opt into the 24/7/365 psychotic work environment of Hustle Culture that’s their choice, but it’s important to name and accept the risks because they are real. It’s just biology. Bodies and minds aren’t made to work at that pace for extended periods. Last point, burnout doesn’t ALWAYS present as a feeling or mood or hating your job. You can absolutely be in flow states all day long and loving it and still be doing silent damage to physical health. And maybe that shouldn’t be called burnout and should be called something else to avoid confusion and permission people to take productive rest as part of their urgency strategy. You’ve given me a lot to think about here for my own writing as your work always does.
This essay reminded me of my sense of urgency two decades ago when I was obsessed with natural sciences. Then I bought my first iPhone and the sense of urgency faded. I'm getting it back again. Slowly, consciously this time.