8 Habits That (quickly) Changed My Life

One week, that's all it took for these eight habits to completely change my life. And before that week, I was stuck. I was tired, unmotivated, and I felt like I was going nowhere. And I had all these big dreams and goals, but my actions reflected more of a Bart Simpson than a Ben Franklin. Whether you're struggling with like energy, or focus, or just getting stuff done, these eight habits can change your productivity, your energy, and your output. So I'm going to give you the toolkit. Everything you need with these eight habits to have more energy, have more focus, to learn properly, and to have the impact you want to have on the world. So daily writing like clarifies the day, removes like junk from my brain, and generally sets me up for success like nothing else ever does. And you can write whatever you want for like five to ten minutes every morning in a journal. That's all you need to do. Like, Ben Franklin would set goals, reflect on personal virtues, and evaluate his progress every single day in his journal. Stephen King writes 2,000 words a day no matter what, and he says, amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, and the rest of us just get up and go to work. And one piece of evidence, students that had a daily morning gratitude journal, literally just writing two things in the morning that they were grateful for every morning, had higher test scores, life satisfaction, and happiness by just writing these two things of gratitude in a journal. So how can you take action? Buy a lovely journal, the nicest one you can see on Amazon. I like the Lacterm, or whatever they're called, and the Muji .5 pens. I love those things. And just take five minutes. Put it in your calendar every single morning to write anything you want in a journal. I like to do a 1-2-3 strategy. So one is just a brain dump, so I literally just write whatever's on my brain, whatever I'm thinking, whatever I'm anxious about. Two is just two big goals for the day, and three is three things I'm grateful for. This is so easy, it takes me four minutes, and it's just, again, changed my life. So recently, I've picked up trail running, and I realized it's an amazing combination of three things that if I do in the morning, it's like a superpower, right? It's nature, it's sunlight, and it's exercise right away in the morning. Challenging exercise in the morning will, without a doubt, make my day better, no matter what. So researching for this video, I kind of went down a Peter Attia rabbit hole, so if you don't know him, he's just this doctor that does really good research on longevity and healthspan, which is basically how good your life is, not how long you live, but how good the life is that you're living. And basically, he says, exercise has a more significant impact on healthspan, that's quality of life, and lifespan, length of life, than anything else. And finally, he says, the stronger you are, the lower your risk There is no drug that even comes close to the benefits of exercise for your life. But what can you do? Well, this is really hard to advise on. Talk to your doctor, visit Peter Attia's website, but really, if you're hitting 300 minutes of exercise, that's amazing. If you can hit 300 minutes of exercise a week, you're going to feel so much better. If you read for even an hour a day, it quickly puts you in the top 10% of all people, right? No one does this. Most people read about 10 minutes a day, right? So, Warren Buffett actually quintuples, and that means just five times my reading, reading about 500 to 1,000 pages a day. And here's a quote from Charlie Munger. He says, in my whole life, I have known no wise person who didn't read all the time. None. Zero. And the superpower here is twofold. The act of reading builds focus abilities, writing abilities, and just like brain abilities, right? And the secondary benefit is this knowledge you get from reading. So, take action, right? So, I would read a book for at least 30 minutes a day, if you can, and something that interests you. It doesn't need to be fancy. It can be sci-fi. It can be fantasy. It can be anything. Just the act of reading is so beneficial. Try and hit 30 minutes a day. I aim for two hours a day. So, the fourth thing you want to do is only have one 30-minute window of using your phone every single day. If you spend four hours a day on your phone, by the end of that week, that's one full day. So, 24 hours a day that you've dedicated to looking at this screen. Imagine if you suddenly gained 24 hours every single week. What could you do? You could do some crazy stuff. You could read a lot. You could learn programming. You could learn a new language. You could spend more time with your family. You could do anything you want. It's just like mind-blowing. 24 hours a week, or for most people, 5 to 10 years of 24 hours a day, right? 365 days a year on your life by just reducing your phone time from 4 hours a day to 30 minutes a day. So, what do I do? I go on about this in a previous video, and I'll link it somewhere around here, but basically, I put my phone in one spot. I only allow myself to look at that phone for like 15 minutes a day, and then otherwise, I just don't look at it. So, step number five is to learn the foundations much better than everyone else. The best students I know learn the basics better than anyone. They understood that information better than anyone else, and then they were able to transform that in a way that fit their goals. There was very little, if any, memorization, just true understanding, and if you look at this Bloom's taxonomy of the learning thing, it starts with remember, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluate. I really only think for school, you need to understand maybe it's level two and level three, maybe level four, maybe that analyze, but if you can understand and apply at a really high level, you're going to beat 95% of all other students, everyone learning these things because no one takes the time. They all think they need to get to that memorization stage so they can score well on the test, but if you actually take a step back and understand the basics, you'll be able to do things with the information that no one else can do. So, I would really focus a lot on level two and level three. Of course, you need to remember it, right? But level two and level three are so magically transformational, like it's crazy. Like my favorite teachers in the world, the smartest people in the world, are all so good at number two and number three, they could teach it to a five-year-old, right? Because they're just so good at that base of the pyramid. And so, what can you do to build the foundations? Well, first of all, figure out what's interesting to you. If you don't know what's interesting to you, I would start with like the big categories of things. So, what are the big categories of things? Well, I have a huge list, but I think it's like physics, biology, chemistry, history, economics, computer science, philosophy, sociology, ethics, linguistics, like all these big things, right? And what I actually did is I went through all these things and I said, okay, what are some easy beginner books? And then what are some books that you can listen to that are like the foundational tomes, right? That's what you want to work towards. That's where this knowledge was started from. This is what the people like maybe 500, 1,000, 100 years ago were using to build this knowledge. And when you can understand these foundational like textbooks, right? You're on another level. It's like you're just like top percentile, new human, another level, like change it, like you're just there, right? So, what I would do is go through all of those, pick one. I think my favorite place to start would probably be physics. Physics is so cool. But pick one of those and say, okay, I'm going to read Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman, really easy book, really entertaining book. And then I'm going to try to look at The Principia by Newton. See what I can read there. There's going to be words you don't understand there, right? But eventually over time, you'll look up these things, learn these things, and eventually you'll be able to pick up any book, read it, and figure out your way through it. It's just a great way to learn. This foundational knowledge is so like game-changing, I can't emphasize it enough. But we got to go on. We got to keep going. Remember, pick one of those and go to it. Okay, tip number six is work on something excitingly ambitious. Now, I stole this from Paul Graham, and he said basically you need to work on something excitingly ambitious, right? And the other thing is why is everyone so goddamn realistic? It's just no fun. Think big here. You need to work on something that's going to change your life. This is how this week is going to be awesome, right? You just work on something that's going to change your life. The funny thing is that most people are being way too realistic. They're just putting themselves in a box, right? When you want something, the whole universe conspires to help you achieve that thing. And that's from The Alchemist, which is one of my favorite books, but it really is true. The past six months, like, my life has changed like through basically a bunch of stuff, like these big visions, these big goals that I put out there. And like because I've had these, my life has changed. It feels like our odds of dreaming about these big things dwindle, like, as we get older. And why? They shouldn't. Even at a young age, people are being told to be realistic, and I wish they were being told to be realistic a lot less. This is a long quote from Paul Graham, but please, please stick with me. Okay, develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let work mean something other people tell you to do. If you manage to do great work one day, it will probably be a project on your own. It may be within some bigger project, but you'll be driving your part of it. What should your projects be? Whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious. As you grow older and your taste in projects evolves, exciting and important will converge. At seven, it may seem excitingly ambitious to build huge things out of Lego. And then at 14, to teach yourself calculus. Till at 21, you start to explore unanswered questions in physics. But always preserve excitingness. Always preserve excitingness. There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of great work. It will not only drive you. I'm getting, I'm just like getting, this is such a good essay. It will not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, will also show you what to work on. What are you excessively curious about? Curious to a degree that would bore most other people. That's what you're looking for. Once you've found something you're excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally and from a distance its edges look smooth. But once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps. This is just like, I'm like tingling reading this because it's so good. And basically what he's saying here is you need to constantly follow what's inside of you. What's so exciting to you? What's such an ambitious project that is just driving you towards that thing? Let that childlike curiosity pull you towards those things. This is why I quit medicine. This is why I'm doing this and a bunch of other things. Because I know I'm going to do the best work in the world to make the biggest impact on the world when I'm doing things like this. Things that excite me. You need to follow that inner child. You need to follow that passion and you will change the world. And the other thing is once you start to learn, he's saying this thing, once you're far away it looks like everything's close together. But once you start to come up close you realize actually there's a lot of broken things here. There's a lot of gaps this knowledge. I'm seeing the edges here. I'm seeing the places where I can make an impact. Where the frontiers are. Okay, so it's just like I just love it so much. The problem is I can't tell you what that thing is, right? I can't tell you what the thing is. I don't know what the thing is. I'm still trying things out to figure out what the thing is. And that's exactly what you need to do. You need to figure out what that thing is. For example, recently I've picked up programming. I love it. I love trying new things, working on new things, making mistakes. I'm not going to be the best programmer in the world, right? But I love building stuff. Maybe this is my thing. I don't think it is but maybe it is. And again, these ideas, these passions, these thoughts can change, right? So if we use his essay, for example, when I was seven I wanted to be a doctor, right? When I was 14 I was into engineering and science. When I was 21 I was trying to build the next way to monitor your health through these electrical systems and stuff like that. But then I realized I needed to go to medical school. So I went to medical school and in medical school I realized, hey, I actually really like solving challenging problems and putting stuff out in the world and helping people, right? So maybe that's going to be a resident. But now I figured out that, hey, it's not actually being a clinical doctor. It's maybe building stuff that are going to help people around the world in kind of a health way. And it's still changing, right? It can still change. But I'm just trying to follow like my inner curiosity, the thing that I'm excitingly ambitious about. What are you so excited about? What are you, where does your curiosity driving you? Now the argument here, I'm just talking so fast because I'm so excited, is that, hey, I'm so busy with my normal life. Here are some counterpoints for you, right? So Mary Curie won a Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry for her work with radioactivity and chemistry while being a solo mother of two. And oh yeah, she raised her kids so well that one of those kids went on to actually win a Nobel Prize. Abraham Lincoln was born into extreme poverty. However, he still was one of the most revered presidents, made the biggest impacts on American society because he found the thing that drove him. So take action here. How can you take action? Think of something insanely exciting that you want to do. What could you spend the next 48 hours on and just like not sleep and just like, do it, do it, do it, because you're so excited about it. This could be the thing. Seriously think hard about this. This one thing could change your life right now. Think hard about the thing that you're so excited about, that you're so curious about and go do it. Okay. Tip number seven is we need to quantify our inputs. Number before six was like really exciting, really passionate. We did get a little bit more realistic here and get a little bit more like functional. So we built the vision above, right? Like what's so exciting for us, what we want to do, how do we actually track how that works? How are we going to get more done in a week than we've done like in the past year? So simply you need to just add a quantifiable number and have regular times when you check on that quantifiable number. So for me, I just read the 12 week year, right? Basically. And at the end of every week, I'm quantifying kind of my percentage of goals that I had. This has changed my life in a month already, by the way. But if you hit these quantifiable goal numbers, then you'll be able to measure, okay, 60% not so good. What am I doing? What's going wrong? 85% pretty good. That's like a sweet spot. 100% I'm getting too much done. I'm not setting my goals high enough. I need to kind of make things more challenging for me. I'm not saying you need to measure every single thing in your life, but the things that are important, things that are aligning with these vision, it'll help you so much to measure. You probably have something that you would benefit from measuring that you're not measuring. Like for example, for me, like it's measuring kind of the number of hours that I actually do this or the number of weight I lift in the gym, right? Because then I can know, okay, I need to lift this much weight or this much weight, right? Quantifying these things can really help you focus on the inputs, the inputs into the system. And the classic mistakes are like three phrases like, oh, I'll figure it out by then. Oh, I'll definitely have enough. Or, you know, I can eyeball it. If you hear yourself saying all those expressions, like you're wrong. Don't do that. Quantify it with like a written down number, right? And I've failed from this many, many times. If you have any questions about this, you can just ask my family about the famous butternut squash soup disaster of 2016 during Thanksgiving. I'll show you one of my example. When you'll see that I've actually scheduled out all these individual things that I want to do, even my haircut, even exercising, even like when I'm going to go to the gym and stuff like that, when I'm going to do coffee, because it's so important for me to quantify these goals and get them in the calendar and do them. Then at the end of the week, based on the number of things like the goals I set with these hourly goals, I quantify them with a percentage. So what can you do? Really just measure it. If you measure it, you can fix it. So the eighth habit you should build to change your life in one week is pretty much ignore the outputs. So I know I talked about before about stringently checking on the inputs and measuring the inputs and everything like that. So really don't focus on the outputs that much. The outputs shouldn't be your focus. The inputs are what matters. So your goal might be a monetary amount, a certain weight, a certain amount of followers, a certain school admission, a certain grade. But focusing on only the output is kind of a bad way to do it. It's almost like a surefire way to fail. The equation for this output is highly complicated. So it's everything we're inputting multiplied by the way people are feeling, the fluctuations in the market, the strange happenstances of the world, the weather, random chance. There's a lot of stuff going on that we just don't have control over. So you shouldn't really worry about that stuff that much. Focus on your input into the system, not all this random junk that you really can't control. For example, for YouTube and making content and stuff like that, my number one goal is to make cool stuff and share it with people so it helps their lives. That's it. It's really general, really like cliche, but it's what I focus on doing in these videos, just helping you out, making sure you have a better life and making sure you're hopefully a little bit happier and more productive or successful in whatever you want to do. That's all I care about. So what I don't focus anymore on are likes, number of subscribes, revenue I get from things. I really just focus on making cool stuff and sharing it with people. That's it. The quick small caveat here is that I do spend maybe 5% of my time checking on the outputs here because we might need to course correct. We might need to move in a different direction if we're doing all the inputs right, but the outputs are changing. And the only reason we do this is because maybe our inputs are affecting the outputs. For example, if I'm trying to put on weight, which I've actually been trying to do. So if I've been trying to put on weight recently, and I think I'm doing all the inputs correctly, calorie counting, exercising, all this kind of stuff, but I'm not actually gaining weight after six months to a year of doing this, I need to go check on the inputs again, right? Because maybe my calorie counting is wrong, or maybe I have a health thing going on. I actually did do this recently, and I found it like I'm just not tracking calories properly. Like that's it. And it says in the Bhagavad Gita, you are not entitled to the fruits of your labor, only the labor itself. I love that quote. So overall, what can you do instead of being attached to external motivators for what you're doing? How can you affect the input into the system? How can you have the best possible inputs and do it consistently, and your life will be changed? Okay, bonus, extra special bonus tip. You thought it was eight tips? It's nine tips. Bonus tip. Tip number nine, change your life in one week by going to work in coffee shops. Now, it's not as big and dramatic as this other thing, but this is what I've been doing for the past six months to a year, and it's changed my life. I'll spend, you can see in my schedule, right? I'll spend maybe like two, three, four hours in a coffee shop working on the most important thing I need to work on in the morning, put in the headphones, open up the computer. I don't know. It's something about the minimalism of only having this computer, only having the coffee, having the people around me working and talking that makes me just like focus. I think it's because the same reason I like going to public gyms. It's almost like the peer pressure of like working in front of other people. Okay, so that's it. So to change your life in one week, write daily for five minutes. Wake up early and exercise. Read at least 30 minutes a day. Max your phone time at 30 minutes a day. Most of us are spending three hours and a half, four hours on our phone a day. Learn foundational knowledge. Work on something excitingly ambitious. Quantify and care about the inputs. Mostly ignore the outputs. And check out a coffee shop. But that is it. I hope this helps you. These things, like really, they've changed my life. So I just was so excited to share them with you because I finally put into perspective like all the things I think I've been doing recently that have just made me like do more and like happier and more successful than I've ever been in my entire life. But that is it. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you on the next one.