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 e my shorts 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 5 to 10 minutes every morning in a journal that's all you need to do like Ben Franklin would set goals reflect on personal virtues and evaluated 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 were 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 Leck term or whatever they're called in the Muji point5

pens I love those things and just take 5 minutes put it in your calendar every single morning to write anything you want in a journal I like to do a 1 two three strategy so one is just a brain dumb 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 like this is like so easy takes me 4 minutes and it's like just again change my [Music] 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 is 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 to Peter AA Rabbit Hole so if you don't know him he's just this like doctor that does really good research on longevity and health span which is basically like how good your life is not how long you

live but how good the life is that you're living um and basically he says exercise has a more significant impact on health span 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 of death 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 aa's website but really if you're hitting 300 minutes of exercise like that's amazing if

you can hit 300 minutes of exercise a week like 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 but so Warren Buffett actually Quinn tuples and that means just five times my reading reading about 500 to a thousand Pages a day and here's a quote from Charlie Monger 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 active 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 in 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 AC of reading is so beneficial try and hit 30 minutes a day I aim for 2 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 4 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 mindblowing 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 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 learned 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 kind of fit their goals there was very little if any memorization just true understanding and if you look at this Bloom's taxonomy of kind of the learning thing it starts with remember understanding applying analyzing evaluate I really only think for school right 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 cuz no one takes the time they all think they need to get to that memorization stage so they can score well on the tests 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 5-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 um 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 TOS right that's what you want to work towards that's where this knowledge was started from this is what the people like th maybe 500 a

th000 100 years ago were using to build this knowledge and when you can understand these foundational like textbooks right you're just like you're on you're on another level it's like not you're just like top percentile new human another level like changing 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 um but pick one of those and say okay I'm going to read six Easy Pieces by Richard fan 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 gamechanging I 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 6 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 Agee 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 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 and ambitious as

you grow older and your taste in projects evolves exciting and important will converge at 7 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 exciting this always preserve exciting this 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 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 cuz 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 thing 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 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 see 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 like I've picked up programming like I love it I love trying new things working on new things making mistakes like 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 like I wanted to be a doctor right when I was 14 like I was into engineering and science when I was 21 I was trying to build the next way to like monitor your health through these electrical systems and stuff like that but then I realized as 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 resonant 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 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 cuz I'm so excited is that hey I'm so busy with my normal life here are some counter points for you right so Mary cury 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 Noel prize H 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 cuz you're so excited about it this could be the thing seriously think hard about this this could 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 [Music] it okay tip

number seven is we need to quantify our inputs number before six was like really exciting really passionate we did get 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 12we 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 the 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 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 and 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 re well

really just measure it if you measure it you can fix it so the eighth habit that 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 way a certain amount of followers a certain School admission a certain grade right but focusing

on only the output is kind of a bad way to do it it's almost like a store fire way to fail the equation for this output right is highly complicated right so it's everything we're inputting multiplied by the way people are feeling the fluctuations in the market the strange happen stances of the world the weather like random chance like 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 like for example for YouTube and like making content and stuff like that my number one goal is to make cool stuff and like share it with people so it helps their lives like like that's it it's like really General really like cliche but it's 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 like more productive or successful and whatever you want to do that's 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 like that's it the quick small caveat here is that I do spend maybe 5% of my time checking on the outputs here right because we might need to course correct we might need to move in a different direction if kind of we're doing all the inputs right but the outputs are changing right and the only reason we do this is because maybe our inputs are affecting the outputs right for example

like if I'm trying to put on weight right which I've actually been trying to do up so if I've been trying to put put on weight recently right and I think I'm doing all the inputs correctly right calorie counting exercising like all this kind of stuff but I'm not actually gaining weight after like 6 months to a year of like 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

out like I'm just not tracking calories properly like that's it and it says in the bad 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 in 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 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 6 months to a year and it's change my life I'll spend you can see in my schedule right I'll spend maybe like 2 3 4 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 cuz 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 5 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 3 hours and a half 4 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 cuz 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 um but that is it thank you so

much for watching and I will see you on the next one