Clamp Time Principle #1

In this article, I’m going to walk you through the process of defining and scaling your vision—a crucial step for anyone looking to achieve real, lasting success.

Understanding how to define and scale your vision is essential because it’s not just about having a dream or a “why.” It’s about taking that initial spark and turning it into something actionable and powerful.

By following this process, you’ll not only avoid common pitfalls that derail many people, but you’ll also unlock the potential to reach heights you never thought possible.

Now, let’s dive in.

Main Point #1: Defining Your Vision

Defining your vision is the foundation of everything.

Without a clear, well-defined vision, you’re likely to face obstacles that seem insurmountable, and progress will be slow or non-existent.

Imagine someone who wants to start a business because they love baking cupcakes.

They might have a passion, but without a defined vision—like understanding their target market, the economics of running a business, or how to scale—they’re setting themselves up for failure.

On the other hand, someone who has taken the time to define exactly what they want, who their customers are, and how they plan to grow, is on a path to success.

The difference is night and day, and the transformation begins with clarity.

Main Point #2: The Role of Goals

Goals are the driving force behind achieving any vision. They take a broad idea and make it manageable, actionable, and achievable.

Consider someone who has a dream but doesn’t write down their goals. Their vision remains a vague, unattainable idea.

Now think about someone who writes their goals every day, breaking them down into micro-goals that push them forward daily.

This person isn’t just dreaming—they’re actively working toward something concrete.

The act of writing goals transforms a dreamer into a doer, and it’s this simple practice that can make all the difference.

Main Point #3: Rolling Focus

Focus is a finite resource.

Trying to do too much at once often leads to burnout and failure.

Rolling focus is a strategy that allows you to concentrate on a few things at a time, achieving excellence in those areas before moving on to the next.

Imagine a person trying to juggle multiple major projects at once. They’re stretched thin, progress is slow, and satisfaction is low.

Now, picture someone who prioritizes their time effectively, focusing on just two or three things at a time. Over a few months, they make significant progress in one area before shifting focus to another. This method ensures they excel in all areas without spreading themselves too thin.

The transformation here is one of sustained progress versus constant overwhelm.

Main Point #4: Aligning Incentives

When incentives align, success follows naturally.

Misaligned incentives, however, can cause friction and prevent you from achieving your vision.

Think about a business owner who wants to grow their company but also wants to spend weekends with their family. If their business demands weekend work, there’s a conflict.

Without finding a way to align these incentives, something will eventually give.

Now, consider a scenario where incentives are aligned—a business owner whose personal and professional goals support each other.

Progress is smoother, and success is more likely.

This alignment removes roadblocks and paves the way for achieving your vision.

Main Point #5: Scaling Your Vision

Once you’ve defined your vision, the next step is to scale it as far as it can go.

This means thinking big, pushing boundaries, and stepping out of your comfort zone.

Take Arnold Schwarzenegger as an example.

He didn’t just want to be a bodybuilder; he wanted to be the best in the world.

To achieve this, he couldn’t stay comfortable—he had to move to new places, learn from masters, and constantly challenge himself.

When you scale your vision, you unlock new possibilities. Even if you don’t reach the ultimate goal, you’ll still achieve far more than if you had kept your vision small.

The transformation here is from limited thinking to limitless potential.

Your Journey Forward

As you embark on this journey of defining and scaling your vision, remember that the key is in the details. Narrow your focus, set clear goals, align your incentives, and never be afraid to think big.

My hope for you is that by applying these principles, you’ll transform your dreams into a powerful vision and achieve the success you’ve always wanted. I wish you well on your journey forward.

Clamp time has three key principles.

  1. Define and scale your vision
  2. Identify and close gaps
  3. Perform under pressure.

In this video I’m going to teach you how to define and scale your vision. Having a “why” is helpful but it is not enough. Sure, everyone needs a why. Something that captured your attention that motivated you and ignited the fire within. For me it was seeing the heart beating for the first time. That spark is the most basic initial step of purpose. Beyond the why, there must also be a how. This step is the how, a logical system – a way of taking that why, clearly defining It, prioritizing it, and elevating it beyond its original intention or objective.

There are reasons you must scale and define your vision.

The primary reason you must clearly define the vision is that later you will observe and identify obstacles you must overcome aligning with that vision. Not every gap needs to be closed. I can’t sing, but my vision has nothing to do with singing. So, I don’t need to take voice lessons, learn how to harmonize, develop stage presence.

Those are not important to prioritize.

Further, If you think about failure to launch, failure to get started or not making progress, its usually because someone’s vision is too broad and not scaled appropriately.

You try to start a business because you love making cupcakes, but you haven’t taken time to define who your market is, what town has opportunities, the economics of the business and you haven’t thought about how you can move to greater levels where your fixed costs don’t affect your bottom line to the same extent they do when you are starting out. Your business fails because of your lack of a defined and scaled vision.

Let me give you an example to illustrate this concept. A simple undefined vision might be the desire to start and manage an investment fund. A defined and scaled vision is to start an impact focused hedge fund which controls 1 billion dollars in assets and invests in environmentally sustainable companies listed on the Russell 2000 index. Notice how this vision is both narrow in focus but broad in scope.

Another example is moving beyond being a doctor who treats cancer patients and deciding to be a medical oncologist at a major academic medical center with a research emphasis generating innovative science capable of winning a Nobel prize. Again notice the new vision is narrow in focus, but broad in scope.

Why don’t people do this? Why do people keep their goals broad and limited? Rather than narrow and unlimited. There are three main reasons.

  • Because it takes work. Dreaming is easy. It takes no effort at all. You can do it while your sleeping. Defining and scaling your vision is a step that takes mental effort. Not a lot of effort, but still some
  • The second is more subtle. Defining and scaling your vision makes you uncomfortable. You are forced to accept the realization that you don’t know how to accomplish the ultimate vision. Good, that’s exactly where you need to be. Don’t allow yourself to be frozen with fear of failure because even in temporarily falling short, you learn, gain experience, form relationships, and find another pathway through. There are no dead ends in Clamp Time, only solutions.
  • The third reason is people don’t know how to define their vision. They focus on things that are extraneous rather than essential to the vision. They get distracted by other visions and by other dreams. They have too many dreams. That in of itself is a non defined vision

These prevent people from making actionable progress. But I’m going to provide the exact framework I use for defining and scaling my visions which is easy to apply and will help you make real progress towards your goals.

You now have a big challenge. You must narrow your vision (i.e. define it precisely) while simultaneously scaling it as large as it can be. Here is how. Step by step. Its two parts first is defining the vision. Second is scaling it.

Defining your vision.

There are 3 strategies for this.

  1. Goals
    Goals are in fact the driving force of achievement. They help focus a broad vision to something manageable. Without goals, there is no realized vision. Dreaming about something makes little difference if you take no action to achieve it.
    The problem people have is they don’t have their goals clearly written down. Clamp time requires them to be front and center at all times. Write them down. I have a ritual where I write my goals every single morning. Sometimes big goals, sometimes more short term, but they are always in my mind.
    This serves two purposes. First your subconscious will get to work on them even when you aren’t thinking about them.
    Second it will organize your thoughts and make you consider which goals are vital for your overall vision and which are not essential.
    The second important point about goals is you have to acknowledge the micro goals. These are like the to do list. The mundane achievements you make every day. These are things like researching a topic or applying for a license. They are important to notice as well. They will make you feel like you have accomplished something as well. So write those down too. Check them off.
  2. The second way to narrow your vision is to roll your focus.
    People ask me this question all the time. “How do you find the time to succeed?”
    “Finding” time is a major barrier to success and depending on your life circumstances (if you are single parent or caregiver for a family member for example) there may be significant limitations. How can you do it all? The truth is I don’t find any additional time. The difference that separates myself and other successful individuals is that we prioritize our time more effectively than others do.
    Highly successful people understand that it is very hard to achieve greatness if you focus on more than 2-3 things at a time.
    There is however, a strategy that allows you to invest time in other interests and responsibilities while not sacrificing your vision. It’s what I call rolling focus. In business, “rolling” means that the time period of interest is constantly changing. For example, a rolling 4 quarter report means the last 4 quarters of data, not just the 4 quarters associated with a particular year. In the same way, having a personal rolling focus means changing your extraneous focus on a periodic basis in certain time frames. Let me give you an example.
    I know I can’t focus on more than 3 things at a time and still achieve excellence. My surgical practice always takes on one of those areas. For me that’s nonnegotiable. Physical fitness also occupies one of my areas as a nonnegotiable focus point to help me remain resilient (more on this later). This leaves me one more area and only one area I have time in my life to master. Whenever I try to increase this to 2-3 more areas, I find myself falling short in all of them and unhappy with the progress I’m making.
    The problem is I have varied interests. So, I roll my interests over time periods like a business might. For 3 months I might focus on real estate, reading books, making connections, learning from experts and spending time reviewing properties. After 3 months, if I’m satisfied with what I’ve achieved, I’ll move on to some other subject I have interest in. Perhaps fitness, or history. Perhaps learning about success and performance. So, during those next three months, I’ll read several books on performance, research stories of those who have achieved or envision working on this book. In the following three months I might read about finance and learn about derivatives trading or how to value business by studying experts in the field.
    There is an added bonus as well. Sometimes key discoveries and progress come when combining disciplines. In addition to making your day-to-day life more interesting and fulfilling, being well rounded might prove to give you the edge you need to make substantial progress. As long as you realize it can only be one thing at a time pursued on a rolling basis, you can continue to achieve at optimal levels and do it all. Incidentally, rolling focus also allows you to make massive gains in one area if that’s what you choose. This is how you take your vision from fanciful thinking to an appropriately focused and narrowly defined vision. Let’s say you want to focus on fitness and develop defined muscles, low body fat percentage, and improved cardiovascular health.
    You realize that there are three elements to this. You will have to improve your diet, perform regular resistance training and finally engage in a program of cardiovascular exercise. If you choose to focus all aspects of the goal simultaneously you will likely be overwhelmed and not make progress. But if you take two months and hone the diet, then another two months and focus on lifting and getting a routine together for training, and finally in the last two months focusing on making sure you obtain your regular cardiovascular exercise, you will likely succeed in all 3 and make massive gains in the one area of focus, fitness. So rolling focus doesn’t have to be completely separate fields. It can be applied to various aspects of the same subject to comprehensively improve.
    So rolling focus is the second way to define your vision specifically.
  3. The third technique is alignment of incentives
    When incentives align it’s a powerful multiplier effect propelling you towards success. In medicine, treatments applying two different forms of targeted therapy to eradicate a disease is often superior to one. Think of multiple types of chemotherapy attacking different mechanisms of cancer, or different antibiotics for a tough bug like tuberculosis. Aligning incentives provides the same effect.
    Here’s an example. If you want to be the best heart surgeon in the world and you operate on the most patients, do research to perfect your skills, gain a positive reputation, have healthy personal relationships, a healthy body and are rolling your focus on other interests to become more well rounded, then all of your incentives are aligned. You will almost certainly be successful in that goal. There is nothing holding you back. No tire out of alignment, creating friction and developing as yet unseen conflicts.
    Contrarily, If you pick a goal with conflicting incentives. For example if you want to both run a restaurant where you would have to work weekends and holidays but also want to spend time with your partner who works a 9 to 5 and is only available on weekends then the incentives are out of alignment and it will be hard to be successful at both. A compromise must be found to bring these facts into alignment or at some point, something will give.
    Great businesses align incentives to help them succeed. One frequent technique is to offer an employee bonus based on some performance metric. If the employee performs, they make more money, are happier and the business succeeds. All the incentives align. Another example are customer loyalty programs where customers receive points for purchases. For every purchase the company does well, the customer is happy because they gain incentives and the organization breeds loyalty and repeat customers. Don’t believe it? How many people preferentially use their Starbucks ap daily because of the loyalty points they receive?
    Businesses align incentives to achieve maximum profit. Individuals align incentives to take their dream to an appropriately defined powerful vision. When you pursue a direction, think about all the great things that come from it, write them down. Are they fitting with one another. Or is something out of whack. I always try to pick directions where my incentives are aligned.
    Take this course for example. If I make a great course, I help a lot of people succeed which is my goal. The course is successful, more people buy it and tell others about it, which allows me to help more people. I gain a positive reputation. Everything is in alignment. Therefore, my vision becomes more defined.
    The final piece of the puzzle is once you have a defined vision, you must scale it as big as it goes. You can use the 3 techniques to define it, but to scale it you have to think big. Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger. He didn’t just want to be a body builder, he wanted to be the best in the world. So his strategies had to change as his vision was bigger. He couldn’t just stay in his local gym, he had to work with masters, push himself, move to the United states. When you dream big, you immediately think I cant do it, it makes you uncomfortable, it pushes you to think in new directions.
    So once you take your narrowly defined vision, think about how grand and bold you can make it, push yourself to see how far you can go. I want to open a recording studio. What if you want your recording studio to have the best performers in the world. What if you want to eclipse sony, what if you want the most sales in the world. The beauty is even if you don’t ultimately get there, you will be far better off than if you never thought big.

So to summarize, use the 3 techniques of

Writing goals
Rolling focus
Aligning incentives
To narrow your vision.

Then multiply it as large as possible to increase the scope. Once you have done that you are ready to move to step 2.