Productivi-Tree: The Human Side of Productivity

Nearly all productivity advice assumes you get to keep what you build. Scherrie L. Prince spends her working Life proving that assumption wrong.
She is a trial attorney, a JD MBA, managing partner of Prince & Associates PLLC, and host of the Play Big Faster Podcast, now past 252 episodes. She got here the hard way: a probate fight after her mother died, a business built on a handshake that fell apart, and a mortgage brokerage wiped out in 2008. Those three losses sent her to law school and into asset protection.
In this episode, she gives Santi the framework she uses with entrepreneurs. Four questions to answer before you even think about an LLC or a corporation. Why your estate plan and your business plan cannot live in separate drawers. What "own nothing, control everything" really means, and why nobody is fully judgment-proof. Then the productivity half: how she runs a law firm, a coaching practice, and a twice-weekly podcast, all based on one rule she got from a commercial real estate broker: plan your fun first.
She also tells the story of the AI mistake that made it into her court filings and what she changed afterward. If you have been growing something without protecting it, this conversation is the audit you have been putting off.

Key takeaways
Answer four questions before you pick a structure: do you have a will-centered or trust-centered estate plan, is the business product, service, or hybrid, is it physical, virtual, or e-commerce, and do you need anonymity or are you public-facing? Structure comes after, not before.
An exit is not a failure. It can be a sale, a retirement, a handover to the next generation, or a reorganisation. Deciding which one you want changes what you build today.
A trust does not stop anyone suing you. It organises what you own and builds a moat around it. Nobody is 100 percent judgment proof, and any adviser who claims otherwise is selling something.
Insurance is not only about dying. Disability and incapacity are the more likely events. If the business stops when you stop, you are the bottleneck.
Plan your fun first. Family events, holidays and the things that light you up go on the calendar before the work does, and the work fills in around them.
Every major activity gets a system. Separate CRMs where privacy demands it, Dropbox as the common file layer, Zapier for the gaps, Asana for tasks, and SOPs that get updated by voice into an AI tool.
AI is a tool, not a solution. Her firm had an SOP and training and still filed fictitious legal precedent while she was out. The control is human review, not a ban.
Service businesses can scale, but only with scope clarity. Group coaching, masterminds and one-to-many delivery are how you duplicate yourself without a clone.

Chapters
00:00 The one document you are missing
00:47 Who is Scherrie L. Prince
01:49 Two failed businesses and a probate fight
03:15 Begin with the end in mind, even at day one
04:58 What playing big actually costs
06:15 The four questions to answer before you pick a structure
09:24 Estate plan and business plan, explained simply
10:32 Why founders avoid planning for disability and death
11:26 Own nothing, control everything 12:56 Plan your fun first
14:35 Court dates you cannot move
15:49 The system behind 252 podcast episodes
17:44 Mindset or structure, what separates the founders who scale
19:36 The calendar advice she would give her younger self
21:09 The AI mistake that reached her court filings
23:59 Using AI to do more instead of to work less
25:31 Can a service business detach income from time
27:24 The guest who impressed her most
29:12 Quickfire round
31:28 What Santi took away

Guest links
Scherrie L. Prince on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scherriespeaks/
Website: https://scherrieprince.com/
Prince & Associates PLLC: https://princelawassociates.com/
Play Big Faster Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/play-big-faster-podcast/id1635345946
Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
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You build a strong case. You bring the data. You explain your reasoning. And the other person still says they need to think about it.

Patrick van der Burght has spent 25 years explaining why that happens. He is a founding member of the Cialdini Institute, one of the top ranked Cialdini Certified Trainers in the world, and a business partner of Dr. Robert Cialdini. His clients include Google, Apple, Canva and Cisco.

🤫 How Productive are you Really? Take the Free Productivity Test - https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
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In this episode he walks through the research on how people actually decide. Around 95% of decisions come from System 1, the fast intuitive part of the brain that runs on shortcuts. Yet when you sit down to write a pitch, an email or a proposal, you are consciously thinking, which means you are in System 2. So you produce logic and justification for a part of the brain that handles a fraction of the decisions. The result is not a no. It is an indecision, and Patrick argues those indecisions are where most of your lost yeses live.

He then walks through all seven universal principles of persuasion, with workplace examples for each: Reciprocity, Liking, Unity, Social Proof, Authority, Consistency and Scarcity. Santi pushes back on scarcity fatigue, brings a real case from a Swiss retailer that deleted 350,000 unverified reviews, and asks what happens to authority when people start trusting AI more than experts.

The through line is ethics. Manipulation removes choice. Persuasion surfaces the reasons a yes was already there. One holds when the boss leaves the room. The other does not.

- Around 95% of decisions are made by System 1, the fast, automatic, shortcut driven part of the brain. Attention spans have dropped from 20 minutes in the 1980s to about 7 seconds, which pushes that number higher every year.
- Most professional communication addresses System 2, the slow logical part, which handles roughly 5% of decisions. That mismatch creates uncertainty, and uncertain people postpone rather than refuse.
- Manipulation removes choice. Persuasion gives options and lets the yes surface on its own. When the decision comes from inside the other person, the behaviour holds without supervision.
- A gift with a condition attached is a reward, not a gift, and it does not trigger reciprocity. The downloadable ebook behind an email form is a lead magnet, not a favour.
- In a study on email negotiation, sharing personal information before talking business dropped deadlocked negotiations from 30% to 6%. The effect came from the number of similarities uncovered, not the volume of information shared.
- Do not introduce your own credentials. Have someone else do it, before you speak, so every sentence lands with the weight it deserves.
- The most persuasive average review score is 4.2 to 4.7. A perfect 5.0 reads as filtered or bought.
- The word "because" raised compliance in the photocopier queue study from roughly 64% to 93%, even when the reason that followed it carried no information.
- AI understands persuasion science but has no situational awareness. It does not know your relationship history, so it picks the wrong principle for the moment and invents supporting detail.

💬 Guest Links:
Patrick van der Burght LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-van-der-burght/
Ethical Persuasion Unlocked podcast - https://ethicalpersuasion.com.au/podcast/
Patrick on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@ethicalpersuasion
Patrick on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ethical_persuasion/

Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
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Career strategist Sonal Bahl, who has screened 250,000 resumes as a former HR Director at GE and PwC, breaks down why high performers get passed over for promotions and shares the Candy, Vitamin, Painkiller framework for career positioning that actually gets you seen.

Key topics

Career transition from corporate to entrepreneurship
Common patterns in high performers who are stuck
Candy, Vitamin, Pain Killer positioning model
The importance of visibility in career advancement
Strategic approaches to job search and personal branding

💬 Guest Links:
Sonal Bahl, Website: https://www.superchargeyourself.com/
Sonal Bahl, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonalbahl/
Sonal Bahl, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/SuperChargeYourself

🤫 How Productive are you Really? Take the Free Productivity Test - https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
🎁 More Free Productivity Tools and Templates - https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/free-productivity-resources
📩 Join my Productivity Newsletter - https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Newsletter

Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
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Sameer Ranjan holds a US patent for an AI platform that measures the nine soft skills your resume never shows. He gives the resume about eighteen months before it becomes obsolete for most white collar roles.

He started as a mining engineer, graduated top of his class, worked a thousand feet underground with five hundred people under him, then walked away from the field entirely. Today he is CTO and co-founder of Catenate Corp and founder of Cognitive Sprints AI Labs.

In this conversation we get into why companies hire for job skills and lose people over soft skills, why an AI interview cannot do the one thing an interview exists to do, and why hiring managers get measurably worse at reading people after 1pm.

What we cover:

Why nobody has ever survived twenty years at a company for being a great coder
The three failure points in how companies select people today
Sympathy versus empathy, and why the difference kills AI interviewing
How MayaMaya builds a digital twin from behavioural data over time
Personality drift as an early warning system for burnout
Where the privacy line sits, and who owns the data
How to audit your own soft skills this week without any platform
Which soft skills map to healthcare, IT and sales
Why the resume has eighteen months left, and what replaces it
What organisations get wrong about measuring productivity

Chapters:

0:00 Hired on day one for skills, kept for years for personality
0:47 Who Sameer Ranjan is
1:58 From mining engineer to AI founder
3:58 What boardrooms decide vs what actually happens
7:37 People, process, technology: why hiring broke
10:18 Where companies get hiring wrong
12:58 Inside MayaMaya
14:57 Why adults are as confused as students
17:28 Can hiring managers actually read people?
18:52 Tracking personality over time and catching burnout
21:05 The privacy line
22:42 Beyond employee surveys
25:49 How to audit your own soft skills
28:21 Which soft skills fit which industry
32:41 Will resumes disappear?
35:25 What organizations get wrong about productivity
39:21 Quickfire round
41:15 Cognitive Sprints, MiraMira and money as a personality

Guest links:
Sameer Ranjan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sameerranjan009/
MayaMaya: https://mayamaya.us/
Catenate Corp: https://catenate.io/
Cognitive Sprints AI Labs: https://www.cognitive-sprints.in/ailabs

Resources from Santiago:
Free Productivity Assessment: https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
Free productivity tools and templates: https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/free-productivity-resources
Productivity newsletter: https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Newsletter
Website: https://santiagotacoronte.com/
Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

AI has made information cheap, but wisdom is more expensive than ever. Andrew Winton, CMO at Digital Advisory and creator of BOOM Marketing, explains why executives confuse the two, what governed advisory looks like next to a consulting deck, and why senior leaders are building portfolios instead of climbing one ladder.

Guest Links
Andrew Winton - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/globalmarketingleader
Digital Advisory: https://www.digitaladvisory.com
BOOM Marketing (Qosmos): https://boom.qosmos.ai

Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment
More Productivity resources at https://santiagotacoronte.com/productivity-tips/
Become a Guest: info@santiagotacoronte.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.