If you repeated this day for 100 days, would your life be better or worse?
Hey! It’s Bog.
If you repeated this day for 100 days, would your life be better or worse?
I came across this idea in Sahil Bloom’s newsletter and it struck me.
I realized that if I repeated my day 100 times I would make progress YouTube-wise but not health-wise.
It made me rethink where I’m headed and how my life will look in 100 days if I don’t change anything.
I urge you to zoom out and look at your day from a birds-eye view.
Examine your habits.
Every little one.
And then ask yourself if they are contributing to slow growth over time or a steep, unexpected decline.
Here’s an interesting statistic:
79% of millionaires didn’t receive an inheritance.
Which means they’re self-made.
We all know those people who can touch something and anything they do seems to work out for them.
But how?
What habits do they have that make it seem that they put little to no effort in but have consistently good results every time?
Today I want to go over 9 millionaire habits that kill procrastination and help you do more things in less time.
I’ve tried implementing all of them at different points in my life and they had a massive positive impact.
1. Make things non-negotiable
If you let yourself mentally negotiate out of difficult tasks then you’ll lose as soon as a harder day rolls around.
And once you lose it’s a lot harder to get back into the game compared to if you win.
Make things non-negotiable.
If I write down something into my to-do list I have to get it done. No matter if it’s Christmas, my birthday, or a random Tuesday afternoon.
I often think about what would I have to do to make it unreasonable not to achieve my goal.
I concluded that if I make at least 1 video per week for the next 2 years and try to improve each one by at least 1% then it’s unreasonable for me not to start earning a semi-decent amount of passive income from my library of content.
2. Make it crystal clear where you’re going
“It doesn’t matter how hard you row, it matters which boat you’re in”. - Warren Buffet
Working slowly on the right thing > working hard on the wrong thing.
If you don’t have a goal then how would you know which things are important to work on?
You might be going sideways without even realizing it.
To work on the highest-value tasks you first need to know what those tasks are.
One of the best ways that have helped me realize what my goals are is to simply sit down and journal.
I wrote down answers to the following questions:
What’s the thing I wish I had started one year ago?
What would my ideal day look like?
What would my day look like in 2 years if I follow my current path?
What would my day look like if I follow an alternative (scary) path?
Keep in mind that pursuing a 10x larger goal is not necessarily 10x harder. It’s just a different path.
3. Make yourself accountable
If you failed to do something then it’s your fault.
No, it’s not the circumstances or other people, it’s you.
You failed.
Ask yourself why.
Take out a piece of paper and write down why did you fail today.
Journal. Think about it.
Don’t run away or hide from failure.
It doesn’t serve you to do that.
(This is very hard for me but I try my best to keep myself accountable).
There’s no upside to just quitting after you fail once and going back to your old habits.
Failing is a part of the process.
You lose only when you stop playing the game not when you lose a match or just one round.
The goal is not to beat yourself up over a failure and quit because of it.
Once you fail - pick yourself up.
Analyze why you failed & hold yourself accountable for it.
Because you are accountable for it.
Don’t expect to win immediately.
Imagine if your kid wants to learn basketball. What advice would you give him for his first training session?
It probably wouldn’t be “If you can’t sign an NBA contract in 3 days you’re a loser and you should quit.”
It would be the opposite.
“Don’t expect to sign an NBA contract in 3 days, only those who take their time, have patience, and apply consistent effort and rigorous persistence can do it”.
Imagine you’re that kid.
Instead of giving up after one failure, continue playing the game, that’s how you win, by staying in the game.
4. Use the environment
If you always had chocolate on the table chances are you’d eat it a lot more often than you normally do.
If you always had apples or bananas on the table and chocolate tucked away chances are you’d eat a lot more of them.
What if you made it a rule that when you want chocolate you’re allowed to go to the store and get it but you’re not allowed to bring any back home?
Now you’d probably only eat chocolate when you want it really bad.
This is one of my main takeaways from the book Atomic Habits (I highly recommend reading it).
Your environment plays a huge role in your productivity.
Reduce friction for “hard” tasks that move the needle forward.
And increase friction for bad habits.
For example, I made it a rule that if I want to use Instagram I can always download it from the App Store, use it and once I’m done I log out and delete the app.
This adds just that tiny bit of friction that’s enough for me to only use the app when I want to do it.
Other times my brain can entertain itself through less toxic sources of dopamine.
Try it. It’s hard the first few days but later it’s bliss for your mind.
5. Reduce decision fatigue
You have limited daily willpower.
Each decision, no matter how small eats away the willpower.
For example, you’re a lot more likely to order takeout in the evening rather than in the morning.
It’s harder to think about what to make at home when you have low mental energy.
So you choose the path of least resistance.
Reducing the number of decisions can keep your willpower tank full throughout the day.
Think of eliminating clothes so you don’t have to choose what to wear.
Meal-prepping so you don’t have to think about what you eat.
Having a set morning routine so you don’t doom scroll for the first hour.
And planning today the day before so you know why you should get out of bed in the first place.
(I found that the more specific my plan is for the next day the more productive I am).
6. Complete the most important task first thing in the morning
If you have limited daily willpower that resets each night that means you have most of it for the first task.
So make your first task the highest value task.
If you complete it - you already won.
The rest is just a bonus.
My highest leverage tasks are either scripting, recording, or editing a video.
I’ve identified these tasks to be the highest leverage tasks for my YouTube channel.
I can do anything else in the world, write newsletters, create courses, digital products, etc. but if I don’t do at least one of those three tasks each day I know that my YouTube channel will not grow.
That’s why I do them first thing in the morning.
I allocate my full tank of willpower toward them.
If there’s nothing left in the tank later, that’s okay because I already did the most important thing.
7. Have a simple to-do list with a maximum of three tasks
Otherwise, you’re not prioritizing well.
Do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality.
It’s more important to do 1 high-value task well than do 10 low-value tasks well.
In essence, productivity is just having the highest leverage on your time.
But make sure you’re doing high-leverage activities in the first place.
Otherwise, what’s the point of being productive?
You’re going to be 100% more productive slow working on a meaningful thing that moves the needle instead of “productively” working fast on a thing that doesn’t matter at all.
8. Use Parkinson’s law
Work fills the time that it’s given.
I find that if I give myself the whole day to write a script for a video it usually takes me the whole day to do it.
20% of the script takes up 80% of the time and the majority of the script takes up 20% of the time.
I can’t help it. It happens every time.
But if I arrange a meeting with friends in 3 hours then magically the script just writes itself in a lot less time than it would have taken me otherwise.
I’m sure I would be able to do it in less than 2 hours. Heck, even 1.
Of course, there’s not always an actual deadline that you can rely on.
You can use artificial ones.
For me, a timer works great.
For example, when I set a timer to study and I immediately pause it if my thoughts wander away or I lose focus, then I tend to finish studying much faster.
The timer gives me an artificial deadline.
And the best thing is that our brains can’t tell if a deadline is real or not.
Even real ones aren’t DEADlines.
So if there’s no “real” deadline, just make one up.
9. Offload your brain
Have a place to capture ideas & thoughts.
Have a place to organize tasks, appointments, and your life.
A place other than your brain.
“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” – David Allen.
I use Apple Notes where I put interesting quotes, books I should read next, and video ideas that pop into my head.
And Google Docs for everything else YouTube related.
Have a place to store ideas and clean your head.
Whether it’s Apple Notes, Notion, or just a simple piece of paper.
It’ll give you clarity, and a sharper mind.
I hope this was useful to someone out there.
Thanks for reading 👋.
P.S. For the last 2 months I’ve been working on my YouTube Video Course which has everything I know about making videos from scratch in my bedroom and growing on YouTube. If that sounds interesting I created an 80% discount code only for the first 20 people that enroll: M34WUWW1SF. Hope you like it!
❤️ My Favorite Things
📚 Book - The Psychology Of Money
This month I listened to this short book and it was amazing.
Here are a few quotes and ideas I wrote down:
Control over your time is the best dividend that money can pay.
Focus less on specific individuals and case studies and more on broad patterns. Focusing on the top most successful people can be dangerous because chances are the more extreme their success the more it has been influenced by the extreme ends of the luck factor which we can’t control ourselves. You’ll get closer to actionable takeaways by focusing on broad patterns of success and failure, the more common the pattern, the more applicable it may be to your life.
“Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems”.
“He has more money than me but there’s one thing that I have that he will never have - enough”.
8+8+8+8+8+8+8+8+8 = 72 and 8*8*8*8*8*8*8*8*8 = 134217728. That’s the nature of compounding.
Don’t be rational, be reasonable with your money. We’re all emotional human beings, not computers or spreadsheets. Don’t tell yourself that you’re going to be rational with every money decision because that’s just not possible. It’s okay to just be reasonable. If it’s reasonable enough to put your money here, do it, if it seems unreasonable - don’t.
The illusion of control is more persuasive than the reality of uncertainty. So most people choose to believe in the illusion of control rather than surrendering to the fact that uncertainty is everywhere and you can’t predict most things.
💻 Website - Payhip
I’ve spent a good chunk of my time on this website while creating my YouTube Course.
It’s a place where you can list and sell digital products i.e. courses, wallpapers, templates, etc.
I used to use Gumroad before but Payhip is basically the same and has lower fees (5% on every sale instead of 10%) so that’s why I started experimenting with it.
So far so good.
✍️ Quote of the Month:
“Never let your quest for more distract you from the beauty of enough.” - Sahlil Bloom
⌨️ Keyboard Shortcut - fn + up/down arrow.
It scrolls the page up or down.
I randomly started using it instead of my mouse scroll wheel and for some reason I like it.
🎬 My New Videos
🌐 How to Build a Legit Website With 0 Code
I loved this post, I will definitely study it during the next few days. Love you Bog, thank you for sharing :)
great man.