The Cheat Code to Win Every Week

A four-step system that makes success inevitable before Monday.

Sep 05, 2025

Winning requires a system.

The key is not to grind harder, but to design your week in advance so the win is inevitable.

Unfortunately, most people lose their week before it even begins.

They go into Monday with good intentions, then spend the next five days reacting to problems, chasing random priorities, and measuring success by how many tasks got crossed off. That is not winning. That is survival.

Here are four steps that make it possible.

Step 1: Stop Running on Instinct, Start Running on Insight

Meaning: You cannot win if your business is managed by instinct instead of structured reporting.

In my early days as an entrepreneur, I believed I was sharp enough to trust my instincts. I was wrong. Instinct helped me survive in the short term, but it kept me blind to the bigger patterns. Once I built real dashboards, the difference was night and day.

Let me tell you what changed. Before my first board meeting, our chairman gave me a piece of advice: “Don’t create slides for us. Bring the exact dashboards you use to run your business.”

The problem was that I did not have any dashboards. I had no reporting system. I was running on instinct, and I did not even know it. That realization forced me to build the tools I needed.

Pro Tip: Build a reporting system you review every week. What you measure improves. But what you measure and report, improves exponentially.

Step 2: Fill the Calendar, Then Earn the Slots

You should never wait for opportunities to appear. Instead, you must create the calendar slots and then fight to fill them.

Most people let meetings and calls trickle onto their calendar. They hope it adds up to the right number of appointments needed to hit their goals. That approach is reactive and weak. Meh.

When I was in banking, my goal was to have 5 new client appointments a week. My sales coach told me to flip this process. He said: “Block five client calls on your calendar first. Then make your job filling those slots.”

This is where it gets interesting. Once the blocks were in place, everything else adjusted around them. I was no longer chasing numbers. I was protecting the commitments I had made to myself. It is far easier to move a scheduled slot than to create one from scratch.

And most importantly, it was very clear to me whether I hit my goal for the week or not.

Pro Tip: Decide the essential activities for your week and block them in advance. Fill the slots instead of chasing them.

Step 3: Pre-Decide, Don’t Post-Justify

You cannot build integrity by logging after the fact. Instead, you must pre-log your commitments before you act.

When I started working with a health coach, he asked me to log every meal. Naturally, I only logged the healthy ones, of course. The bad choices stayed off the record. Can you blame me?

Here is the thing: he told me to stop logging meals after the fact and start logging them in advance. Meaning, he wanted me to log all that I was going to eat tomorrow, the night before. That simple shift forced me to stay in integrity with myself. I was no longer hiding from my decisions. I was just executing on the rules that I had already pre-set for myself. I was just keeping my promises to myself.

This principle applies beyond food. Pre-logging is about setting intentions that guide behavior instead of rationalizing behavior after the fact.

Pro-Tip: Pre-log your commitments. Meals, workouts, calls, writing sessions… whatever matters most. The integrity is in the pre-decision.

Step 4: Write the Ending Before the Week Begins

You should not leave your week to chance. Instead, you must write your end-of-week report before the week begins.

End of week reports are required at Acquisition.com. Every leader on my team sends me an end-of-week report. As you may imagine, most people write their reports on Friday, looking backward at whatever happened. That is a sub-optimal approach because it leaves priorities to chance.

I do it differently, most of the time (trying to be honest here).

For most weeks, I write my end-of-week report at the start of the week. By doing that, I already know what winning looks like before Monday begins. My priorities are clear, my non-negotiables are defined, and my schedule is built to match and deliver on the things that I wrote that I “have done” in my end of week report.

Pretty nifty prioritization hack, if you ask me.

Pro-Tip: On Sunday night or Monday morning, draft your end-of-week report. Then run your week to make it true.

The Pattern Behind The System

Notice the pattern.

Dashboards instead of instinct.
Calendar slots instead of chasing.
Pre-logged commitments instead of retroactive excuses.
Pre-written reports instead of reactive summaries.

Each shift is about deciding first and executing later. That is the cheat code to winning the week.

So, please:

Stop outsourcing discipline.

Stop hoping accountability partners will save you.

Winning comes from designing the win before the week even begins.

Install this system, and you will never leave your week up to chance again.