6 Small Habits Made My Life Better Instantly

If you're trying to make some big improvements in your life, it really doesn't matter what you do every once in a while. What really has made the difference for me is small things done consistently for a long period of time. These are six incredibly simple habits that take less than 60 seconds to do and have actually made my life better in a lot of different ways and hopefully can do the same for you. We'll start off with implementation intention. Hear me out. This habit takes like 20 seconds to set up. Scientists at NYU found this simple trick called implementation intention that if you use it you are three times more likely to stick with your goals. But like 90% of people never do this which explains all the unused gym memberships out there. So here's how it works. Instead of saying I'm gonna do that tomorrow, say I'm gonna do that after X. After I brush my teeth, after I put my shoes on, after I get out of work, after I get on the phone call, that's when I'm gonna do this thing. That sounds simple but honestly this has helped me so so much. It's creating a habit that as soon as I get into bed at night I'm gonna read for 10 minutes or one page or whatever before I ever think about being on my phone or anything else. Instead of I'm gonna drink more water or I'm gonna stop buying soda, it's after I make my coffee in the morning I'm gonna pack a water or lunch or whatever to bring with me for work. It's making a habit happen after an activity that's gonna happen anyways. You're gonna be way more likely to start whatever habit you want to do. If you put it that way as opposed to just vaguely I'm gonna do it sometime. Trust me tomorrow never comes. And then of course we have the friction audit. This one honestly only takes about three minutes a week. Basically I look at what is making my habits the things that I want to do more difficult than they should be and then I just make some tiny little tweaks. And again this one is backed by research. Like if you can just remove a little bit of friction like 20% you're gonna be three times more likely to stick with your habits. But most people just try to push themselves harder. They think that they just need more motivation when really what's gonna make you stick with something for a long time like motivation works for a little bit but for a long time you just need to make things easier on yourself. You need to like almost trick yourself and use your laziness to your advantage. So what this looks like for me is like I try to take some multivitamins every day. It's actually like beef organs but whatever. And I used to always struggle to remember to take these and now I put them next to my coffee where I'm gonna be reminded and see them every single day guaranteed. I bring up a glass of water every night before bed. If I know I'm going to the gym the next day I will lay my workout clothes out on the dresser. That's what I'm gonna put on first thing in the morning. I don't even have to think about it. I'll leave my phone outside my room so that I don't have to have that temptation of having it next to my bed. It's just not even there. These all sound like tiny things but when you set up your surroundings for success you don't really need motivation anymore. You don't need to be like oh that guy is so disciplined. It's like I just kind of tricked myself. When it was easy I just made it harder for me to do the wrong thing and easier to do the right thing and then just naturally your brain goes with what's easy. Kind of like cheating. Now next up we have the stress split. This one's more of like a two-second mindset shift. Since I've started practicing this it's made me a lot less stressed and a lot more happy. Whenever a situation comes up that is stressful, annoying, bad, my default is generally to get annoyed and I've realized that added a lot of stress to my life. So I've been asking how can I see this differently and this helps me be able to choose and take control over my emotions and my mindset and stuff like that. Instead of letting others or the situation dictate how I feel inside of my own body and gets me stressed out and then I can't even like be productive or enjoy my life because of actions of somebody else. So like for instance if somebody you know doesn't show up to a meeting or somebody cancels that's supposed to come over it's like cool I got extra time like that's all right now I actually have some free time in the day or I make a mistake or like one of my many businesses failed. It's like you know it's okay I learned something I can move on I realized that's not it now that's okay. Like literally everything from getting a flat tire to getting cut off and flipped off in traffic like you can yell back and be angry or you can be like oh man that poor person like what a bad day that they must be having to cut me off and like yell at me when I'm just driving normal like I feel so bad for that person. Or you can be like you stupid jerk like whatever. I used to be that way and I have purposefully chosen over the past couple years to try to respond positively to negative situations and I don't have really many negative situations anymore because they're all just kind of like nothing's really good or bad it's just like I can choose what I want it to be and most things are good now which is pretty fun. It's honestly a lot easier. Next up we have the minimum win. I feel like I'm getting every angle possible out of this couch. This habit has helped me stay with my routines for years and it's made me way more productive and actually a lot more money which I'll explain in a second. Here's the idea instead of trying to be perfect create a smaller version of your habit or your goal or like a benchmark that you can aim for. So I use this a few different ways. One of them is like I would love to go to the gym five days a week. That would be awesome. I have two kids. I run multiple different businesses. I also travel a lot and that doesn't always happen. However I have found that if I work out three days a week for a minimum of like half hour 45 minutes I feel good. So that is my benchmark. It can be three days in a row. It can be every other day. It can be whatever it is. While I can do more that is my minimum that I'm gonna stick with and I have sticked with for the past 10 years. It's something that's sustainable without trying to be perfect. It's not an hour five days a week. It's not two hours seven days a week. It's like something very achievable an hour and a half a week right. But I do the same thing with reading. I read one page a day or I use short form and I read like one book summary of a book that I'm thinking about reading or I have read before but I want to you know get the highlights of or I listen to that in the car. I'm actually a really big fan of short form recently. You can get a free trial. I'll leave a link down below. I'm a really big fan and like the stuff that I've learned there has helped me grow my businesses. It's actually one of the reasons why I started another business is because of the stuff that I've learned in books or in summaries of books. It totally changed my life. Couldn't be a better investment. I'll leave a link. But again everything doesn't have to be perfect. If you want to meditate start with committing to one minute a day. You can do an hour if you want to but as long as you got one day you can keep the streak alive. I feel like people do this with their diets. We're like oh I cheated. I missed a day. I missed a day of workout. I missed whatever. I'll get back to it next week and then they just push it off push it off and then that's why everybody leaves the gym. But if you have this minimum standard of like you know what I didn't make it to the gym but as long as I do you know 20 push-ups I can still count this as a success. Well at least you're doing something. You're keeping the streak going. You're keeping in your routines and that allows you longevity even if it's not perfect. It's not ideal. You're still reading. You're still growing. You're still eating healthy. You're still working. Whatever it is at least you're doing something. For my businesses it was always I'm just going to take one action for my business. Maybe it's writing down an idea that I had. Maybe it's you know creating something. Maybe it's talking to my team. Whatever it is I'm just doing one thing to get me closer and closer and closer to whatever my desired outcome is. I feel like that's a huge hack. Then of course we have the seven day rule. Before I go to bed on Sunday so Saturday or Sunday I take about two minutes and I make a plan. What are the generally one to three things that if I get these done my week will be a success. Again that can be setting up like okay I'm going to the gym three times this week and then I'm doing something every day for my business or you know I'm creating this one thing for my business. Maybe it's my top three work tasks. Maybe it's even like what I will do when I feel like procrastinating. I will actually physically write it down not only because goals that are written down are like 42 percent more likely to happen and people who pre-commit to stuff stick to their goals I think 72 percent more often but also like I feel way less mental stress when I wake up every single morning and I know exactly what I'm going to be doing. I also do this when it comes to money so maybe for you it's saving or investing but I will pick something that I'm able to commit to and then make sure that I do that every single day. Like right now it's investing ten dollars a day maybe it's saving five dollars a day maybe it's investing a hundred dollars a day like whatever it is for you but picking something that you know you can do for a long time and then kind of setting that up on autopilot. Like if you have something that you are pre-committed to it's so much easier to like not impulse buy or to you know make investing something that you look forward to. Like I know that I'm continually making progress and I like to see that progress. I use a app called Blossom and I can like see all my investments on there and it's actually a really cool app it's totally free and it's going really viral right now. I'll leave a link to that if you want to check it out and like I can follow other people and see exactly what they're investing in in real time and people can follow me and see what I'm investing in in real time and it like gives me this motivation it makes it a game of trying to get you know better returns and grow my future and focus on that instead of focusing on like buying things and I think that's a really positive thing. Then of course we have skill stacking. If there was one thing that I saw zero progress in for like three years and then it completely changed my life instantly it would be this. Another title that I had for this one is literally like how to get lucky because this one is studying a skill every single day for a long period of time. Whatever method that is for you whether it's watching videos like this, listening to podcasts, reading books. For me I take a lot of courses and go to seminars and get coaching and all that type of stuff. I also just work at different skills like making videos, storytelling, marketing, that type of thing. For the first three to five years of doing this I saw zero progress. I was listening to a book a day sometimes while I was working in the car, while I'm cleaning offices, I'm listening to books, I'm learning things for years. Every night I'm working this full-time job. During the days I'm working part-time jobs and other things and I'm just learning as much as I can. I'm not really seeing a lot of tangible progress and then finally after all these businesses failed but I had all this information, all this knowledge that I learned from failing things, from learning things, from reading things, from listening to stuff. Finally things started to click and I got totally lucky you know maybe with this channel and the other businesses that I've done. A lot of people think that lucky but they didn't see that the guy who did nothing but learn for three to five years before getting lucky. Almost everybody that I've met that has great relationships, great health, great businesses, whatever it is. Most of them have a ton of work that went in, a ton of problems and struggles that they went through, a lot of work that nobody saw in order to get to this result that looks really cool. So stacking skills for a long period of time even if it's the shortest amount that is the thing that can instantly all kind of kick in at once and that's one of the reasons why I now teach because not only is now the best way for me to learn is to have to master something extremely well to teach it and I learn you know public speaking and stuff that way too but I think empowering yourself and believing that you can do something and studying it even if you fail at that thing makes you a better person for trying. That's why I run my five-hour YouTuber cohort. I don't know if it'll be open when I'm talking about this but I'll leave a link below to the wait list but literally I've had people in there who've gone from depressed and not knowing what they're doing with their lives to leaving their jobs and being happier and have better family lives and more money and everything and it's not really because of the course or anything it's kind of like that but it's believing that you can do something, dedicating your life into it, putting in everything you have towards a goal and that's something that most people never do. They never fully commit to see if they can take that shot. They think about it, they dabble with it but they never fully commit and therefore they never have success and they never have extreme failure. They just live somewhere in the middle. So I kind of got off topic but I love this stuff. So if you enjoyed this video you can subscribe if you want to see more of my couch. It's pretty good. Actually the sellers of the house left it for us so it's free but it's also a bunch of dog scratches on it. I'm gonna go.