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Episode 865 · Oct 13, 2023

10 Mind Hacks for Creative Problem-Solving in Business

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Creative problem-solving is not a gift reserved for a few people. It is a skill you can train every single day. In this solo episode of The Daily Mastermind, George Wright III shares ten practical mind hacks designed to sharpen your thinking, break you out of routine, and help you operate at your highest level as an entrepreneur or high achiever.

George frames the episode with a personal note: recovering from arm surgery and forced to work with one hand, he found that the constraint itself sparked new systems and efficiency. The lesson is universal. Challenges often carry the seeds of your next creative breakthrough.

Why Routine Is the Enemy of Real Growth

Before diving into the ten hacks, George draws an important distinction: disciplined habits are valuable, but mindless routine is not.

Routine is the enemy of great success.

You need structure, but you also need to constantly question it. Are your daily activities still serving your biggest goals? That question alone is a powerful act of innovation.

How Daily Affirmations and Mindfulness Rewire Your Mind

The first two hacks work on your internal operating system. Start every morning with positive affirmations that reflect who you are becoming, and pair them with a clear visualization of your goals. According to George, this sets the standard you measure every decision against throughout the day.

The second hack, mindfulness and meditation, feels counterintuitive for busy entrepreneurs. But stepping away from the noise, even briefly, reduces stress, sharpens focus, and deepens your awareness of how you think and act. The payoff in productivity more than covers the time invested.

The Five-Second Rule, the 80/20 Principle, and the Power of "Yet"

Three of George's ten hacks target decision-making and mindset directly.

Mel Robbins' five-second rule is simple: when you face a decision or feel yourself stalling, count backwards from five and act. Five, four, three, two, one, go. This breaks the cycle of procrastination and builds a habit of decisive action.

The Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule, is one George returns to repeatedly. Twenty percent of your activities generate eighty percent of your results. If you cannot name that twenty percent right now, that is the problem to solve. Identify it, protect it, and build your day around it.

The fifth hack is a subtle language shift. Replace "I can't" with "I can't yet." That single word signals a growth mindset. It reframes unsolved problems as temporary rather than permanent, and it keeps you oriented toward possibility rather than limitation.

How Journaling and Parkinson's Law Create Mental Clarity

Morning pages or journaling, hack number six, serve two purposes: capturing your ideas so your mind does not have to carry them, and forcing you to articulate what you actually want. George notes that he uses spreadsheets for the same reason. Getting things out of your head and onto paper creates mental space for your best thinking.

Parkinson's Law, hack seven, states that work expands to fill the time available for it.

The amount of time an activity will take will expand to the time you give it.

The solution is to set tight deadlines and use time-boxing. Constrain the time you give a task and your focus sharpens automatically. If you miss the deadline, move on and return. The goal is efficiency, not busyness.

The Eisenhower Box, Gratitude, and the No-Email Rule

The final three hacks address how you organize your priorities and protect your most productive hours.

The Eisenhower Box, which George also associates with Covey's framework, categorizes tasks by urgent versus important. Most entrepreneurs spend too much time on urgent but unimportant tasks. Labeling each activity in these four quadrants gives you permission to deprioritize low-value work and concentrate on the twenty percent that actually moves the needle.

Gratitude is not just a state. It's a practice.

Hack nine is a regular gratitude practice. George is clear that this is not simply a feel-good exercise. Consistent gratitude improves mental well-being, reduces anxiety, and builds the inner peace and contentment that fuels sustained motivation and clearer decision-making.

The final hack: avoid checking email during the first hour, ideally the first few hours, of your workday. When you open your inbox first thing, you hand control of your day to other people's agendas. Instead, dedicate your morning to your highest-priority work, the tasks that align with your goals and produce the greatest results.

Action Steps

  • Start each morning with a short affirmation and visualization session to anchor your goals before the day begins.
  • Apply the Pareto principle: write down the specific twenty percent of activities that drive eighty percent of your results and schedule them first.
  • Use Mel Robbins' five-second rule whenever you feel resistance or indecision; count down and act.
  • Time-box your most demanding tasks using Parkinson's Law: set a tight deadline and hold yourself to it.
  • Block the first one to two hours of your workday as a no-email zone dedicated to high-priority, goal-aligned work.

None of these hacks require radical change. They require consistency. Pick one or two to start, integrate them into your workflow, and build from there. As George puts it, it's never too late to start creating the life you're meant to live. Every day is a new opportunity to think sharper, act bolder, and become the most effective version of yourself.

READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to the Daily Mastermind, everyone. I hope you're having a phenomenal week, and I'm looking forward to talking with you today about some ways that we can really stimulate your creativity, thinking out of the box, finding some innovative solutions that'll help you with challenges in your day-to-day life. You know, if you're listening to this podcast as an entrepreneur, small business owner, CEO, or just a high achiever, I know it's very important for you in your profession, in your career, and in your life to constantly be innovating, constantly be coming up with ways to think out of the box. And so today I want to talk to you about some mind hacks and just, you know, some things that might be repetition, but some things you might not have thought about. I, as a quick update, and just to digress, I'm doing great. I know many of you have asked about the surgery on my arm, everything's going good. I am working with one arm and not two. So it's definitely a creative challenge for me. But I've learned to really, you know, systematize things that I'm doing. It's really helped me to think out of the box. Sometimes challenges in your life can become the thing that creates that creativity that you'll have to come across in order to problem solve or in order to come up with new ideas. And so if your perspective is to look at that from a new lens of learning and creating like I've done with you know the ability you know being right-handed to not be able to use my right arm and right right hand for you know four months that's going to be a challenge but I've started to actually get more productive and more streamlined and those are the types of things I want you to be doing in your life every day. So what I'm going to do today we're going to kind of go rapid fire I'd like to give you 10 mind hacks, basically 10 ways to increase your productivity and creativity overall. And these are ways that are not just designed to increase productivity, but also to challenge your mind, challenge your routine, challenge what it is that you feel you're putting your time and energy to. So I'm going to go through these quickly, but what they're designed to do is to, I want you to think about how you can incorporate one or two or three of these principles into your life, into your business, into your work, into your priorities, because I think it's going to help, and this is very important, listen to me here when I say this, it's not only to increase productivity, but also to get your mind always thinking out of the box, always thinking of new ways to innovate, because routine is the enemy of great success. I really think, and I want to clarify that, because having a consistent, disciplined schedule is very, very, very important, but falling into a routine you don't think about and that you don't question and that you don't try to innovate with that is going to be something that's going to hold you back from the best version of yourself so let's get into these 10 mind hacks and these things okay number one daily positive affirmations and visualization i can't emphasize it enough when you start your day with positive affirmations of what you believe you're becoming and you are in your life and when you visualize your goals that will be the litmus test you do throughout the day so i know you've heard this before, but how many of you are starting your day with positive affirmations and visualization? The second one is also one I've talked about, mindfulness and meditation. A mindfulness practice and most busy entrepreneurs even like myself feel like it tough to step aside and to hold back but you don realize the power of being able to be mindful and present It reduces stress. It enhances your focus. It deepens your understanding of thoughts and actions. And so having that minute to actually create mindfulness will make you more productive. It seems counterintuitive, but I encourage you heavily to take advantage of that. The third one is one you've heard me talk about. Mel Robbins talks about it, the five-second rule. Get in a habit. Create a habit of the five-second rule. When you have a problem or a decision to make, count backwards from five and just take action. Five, four, three, two, one, go. Because this simple technique will help you to overcome procrastination. It'll also help you to foster decisive action. So many of us, even if it's a little bit of indecision, you put off something and you have to go back to it over and over and you waste a ton of time. Adopt the five-second rule. It'll make a big difference for you. The other one I've talked about recently is the Pareto principle. This is the 80-20 rule. I don't care if you rethink about this every single day. You will constantly innovate, I promise you. focus on 20% of the activities that are yielding 80% of the results. And here's the thing, if you haven't identified already very specifically, and you could say it, what the 20% is that create 80% of your results, then you are not driven and focused. And it is a fact, it's a law, it's a universal rule that there are 20% of the activities that will create 80% of the results. And so really incorporate that Pareto principle into your day-to-day planning. the fifth hack the fifth hack and this is just kind of a random one is the power of yet replace when you feel like i can't just replace it with i can't yet i can't yet in other words there are things that you can do these subtle shifts in language that encourage you to grow your mindset it allows you to approach challenges and problems that you maybe feel are in you know solvable and when you approach this growth mindset of I can't yet or I you know and I don't use I can't very often ever but if you ever feel yourself in that position just realize it's just a matter of time before you're going to have the solutions to your problems the the direction that you need and action is going to help you to do that the sixth mind hack for productivity and thinking out of the box is morning pages or journaling and you could do this in the evening as well but what I love about morning journaling is just keeping your thoughts, your focus, your ideas out in front of you. This helps you to also clear your mind of clutter. I have this happen a lot. It's one of the reasons I use spreadsheets is I like to get the stuff off my mind onto paper. And the reason I do that is it gives me more mental clarity. It gives me peace of mind that things are captured so that I could put my mind into other things. And you don't constantly have this entire to-do list dragging around taking up your mental game so that's something you could do with journaling or morning pages the seventh hack is this principle of Parkinson's law Parkinson's law states that you know the the amount of an act the amount of time and activity will take will expand to the time you give it So when you feel like you going to put a bunch of effort into a certain task or a problem or something at work and you give it a lot of time, you'll take up that time. So the goal is to set tight deadlines and time box is another way to actually do this, but set tight deadlines so that it will boost your need to create focus and efficiency. Because the more time you allot to a task, the more time you're gonna take. So shrink the time, force yourself, force yourself to get those things handled in the times and deadlines. And if you don't, move on and come back to it. But Parkinson's law is a real thing. And what you don't wanna do is just always be busy and active and not effective and productive. So use that law. There's another principle called an Eisenhower box. and you've seen this if you've listened to Covey and others, where you can start to block out urgent versus important activities. It's just another way for you to look at what you're doing on a day-to-day basis. And I encourage you, at a minimum, just to do this once or twice. Because so many times we have a list, and we try to prioritize a list. But what we don't understand is that when you use this principle of an Eisenhower box, or urgent versus important, you can categorize things by urgent, important, not urgent, not important. By labeling these things, it allows you to give yourself permission to focus on what's important, not just urgent. And especially to deprioritize. When you label something not urgent and not important, you can deprioritize it. And a lot of entrepreneurs fall into this, this, you know, this category. And I have two. So trust me, I've been there where you just want to accomplish a lot. So you're checking the boxes. You're getting things off your plate. And you need to understand that that's hurting you. It's hurting you not to focus on important tasks, the 20% that create 80% of the results. So use that little technique to help yourself be more productive. And remember, this is about getting your mind moving in a different direction and always thinking, how do I become more effective? How do I become more focused? How do I become more efficient at what I do. Because as you increase in efficiency, Rob Durdick does a great job of this. If you've ever listened to his podcast, Rob Durdick from, well, you guys know who he is. He's got a great podcast because he talks about how his efficiency, even when he thought it was efficient, 10x'd the more he was constantly trying to innovate where he spends his time and how he does things. Grouping and time boxing and getting things done in a more effective way. that's a really really productive thing to do when you start to label it the ninth thing i want you to do with your mindset is i really really encourage you to create a gratitude practice because see gratitude is not just a state it's a practice regularly expressing gratitude for what you have fosters a positive mindset gratitude is going to help you improve your mental well-being being, your fulfillment, your inner peace. It's going to create a sense of contentment and motivation. So it's literally not just a tactic, but a strategy that I want you to apply. It's, you know, I know we all want to feel grateful for what we have. It's that saying, you know you want to want what you have not have what you want That going to create the happiness But understand that a practice of gratitude is also going to help you in all these other ways If you're suffering from anxiety, stress, depression, if you're having a tough time setting priorities and making decisions, when you practice gratitude, it's a mental and physical change that can help you to be more productive. So have a gratitude practice. And then the very last thing is the last number 10 of our mind hacks to increase your productivity and get you thinking out of the box is no email during the first hour of the day. I would say before noon. But listen, you've got to stop having your day run by communication that comes inbound. Avoid checking your emails during the first couple hours of your workday. Because what happens is you start to create, and I know that you have this as a habit. You start to create your workday around things you need to do and around communication requests. And that's not being intentional. If we're trying to create our life, we are trying to create a life that we are driving. We will set our priorities. Then we will backfill them in with requests and responses and follow-ups and things like that. But you've got to dedicate your time in the morning to high-priority tasks, the most important things, the 20% that align with your goals and ensure that you have a productive day to start. So these are the 10 ideas I kind of sketched out for you. They're things I wanted to rapid fire out there because remember, it's never too late to start creating the life you're meant to live. Every day, I believe the reason I created and trademarked the Daily Mastermind is because I believe it's a daily battle. I believe you have to constantly innovate, not only to be successful, but to be happy, to be fulfilled, to be productive, to be the best version of yourself. It's a daily practice. So I want to constantly keep you thinking out of the box. I want to constantly be giving you these ideas. And I'd like to ask you to do me a favor. Would you please share this show? Just hit the share button and share it with one friend you know or post it on your social media. Give us a little bit of a boost. That helps us to grow the show, get the message out there. And once again, I want to highly encourage you, if you are struggling, if you are looking for a way to get some more direction and clarity. Hit me up. I'm surprised every day. Now, I get a lot of people contacting me, but I'm surprised how few, given how many downloads and how much exposure we have, actually ask for help. Stop trying to go it alone. You know, having coaching, mentoring, feedback, mastermind, it's going to help you go to the next level. Reach out. Tell me what you're doing. You can email me directly at george at g3worldwide.com. george at g3worldwide.com. tell me what you're working on tell me what you could use help with what can I do to help you just getting that power of the mastermind working for you in your life is going to make a big difference that's all I have for you today I hope you have an amazing weekend I hope you really spend some time visualizing your best life as you take some time at least a little bit of time away from the office this weekend and working on your other things the other priorities like life and family and finances and things that'll make you happy but I look forward to talking with you again on Monday. Once again, this has been the Daily Mastermind, and my name is George Wright III. Have a great day.

About the host
George Wright III, host of The Daily Mastermind

George Wright III

George Wright III is an entrepreneur, investor, and the host of The Daily Mastermind. Over more than two decades he has founded and scaled several multimillion-dollar companies and built a renowned seminar business that put some of the world's biggest names and brands on stage. With 25+ years across marketing, sales, and executive leadership, he's made a career of turning bold ideas into results — and momentum into lasting growth.

Today his mission is singular: empower driven entrepreneurs everywhere to master their mindset, unlock their potential, and live their ultimate destiny. Through The Daily Mastermind, George shares the Prosperity Principles and strategies that help people create massive change — in their business and in their life.

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