Habits

Hi, it’s Bog.

If you’ve read Atomic Habits or watched any of the self-improvement YouTube videos, then you probably know how powerful and life-changing habits can be. Especially ones like these:

• Meditation

• Journaling

• Learning something new every day

• Exercise

• Visualisation

• Having a wind down routine

• Waking up at the same time

• Reading

• Not eating for the first half of the day

• Gratitude

• Etc…

I’ll call them the “good” habits.

And for the past 3 years I’ve been doing a lot of these “good” habits every single day.

But around 2.5 months ago, a weird thing happened.

I was about to start working on a YouTube video that was quite long, so I knew it would take a lot of time to edit.

I assumed it would take me at least 1.5 weeks before I could hit “publish” because (1) it was a much longer recording than usual, and (2) because more than half of my day was already filled with all the “good” habits I was doing, so there was little space to work on the video.

But as I sat there looking at the raw recording, a thought popped into my head:

‘What if I just ignored all the “good” habits for a few days and laser focused on getting that video done? Could I do it in 3 days?’.

I decided to give it a go.

And this felt like I unlocked a superpower.

Not only did I do it in 3 days but I suddenly felt strangely motivated to keep working even though I was doing way more work than before, and I no longer felt held back by the “good” habits stealing time away from me.

And I didn’t stop there.

I did this for the next video, and the next... And two and a half months later, this is what happened to my channel:

The views went up by over 242% (from 2.1M to 5.1M compared to the previous 2.5 months).

And seeing this now makes me feel (a) pleasantly surprised and (b) completely stupid because it took me so long to realize that if I stop doing the “self improvement habits” and focus on improving the stuff that matters, the stuff that matters gets better (duh).

A few days back I watched a video from Andrew Kirby, and he helped put everything into simple words:

“What is the #1 biggest problem that I have in my life? What's the one problem that, if solved, would catapult me forward in life? Focus on fixing that one problem and ignore everything else.”

Now I’m not saying that meditation or exercise are bad. Quite the opposite. These habits are among the best things you can possibly do for your physical and mental health. Nor am I saying that views on social media are what matter.

What I am saying is that if you have a bigger problem in your life, a problem that, if solved, could immediately get rid of 80% of the stress in your life, then journaling or meditating for 10 minutes a day is not going to solve it. Solving the problem will solve it.

When these self-improvement habits get in the way or become a way of avoiding a more important problem you’re facing, they can become the problem.

Thanks for reading 👋!

❤️ My Favorite Things

⚙️ My favorite tool: Manim

Manim is a Python library that lets you create animations with code. I started messing around with it around 9 months ago (without knowing anything about coding), and it’s been a super fun experience. It still feels so cool to create an animation using code every time I find a fitting place for it in a video. The animations look so unique as well. P.S. I also made a course about it for people just like me who know nothing about coding but want to learn to create animations with it. So far the people who’ve taken it seem to be liking it a lot (it has 4.7/5 stars out of 32 reviews on Udemy) which I’m very happy about.

📩 Cool Gmail trick:

I can’t believe I just discovered that it’s possible to sort your gmail inbox so that it shows unread emails at the top (though it’s kind of buggy sometimes). Not only that, there’s the split view option to see the emails on the left and read the one you clicked on the right.

✍️ Quote of the Month:

Don't spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It's not your problem.

From The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant

🎬 Free Resource To Make It Unreasonable That You Don’t Succeed With Your YouTube Channel

https://store.thaomaoh.com/b/youtube-game

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