The Momentum Course - Purposeful Self-Improvement & Productivity

1. Introduction: Lot of successful musical artists agree on the fact that the best way to make good music is to focus on making your music and you would like to listen to me, I guess I look at it the same way with this course. This course is the course I always had ready to backward. I started out my journey of self-improvement and productivity over a year and a half. The course it would've taught me. You don't have to read and listen to everything to hustle goons have to say to you about picking yourself up, working 12 hour days, sleeping flowers tonight, and hit a good gym at 05:00 AM. The course, it would have taught me that self improvement in productivity or not the ankles, they're not even of targets to hit. There's simply the most natural and logical way towards living the life you want and doing what you love. Hi everyone. I'm Joseph Mavericks. For my teenagers throughout the time I was 25, I always had a ton of projects on my to-do list, which I either never started or started and dropped. A few months later, I tried to turn on different things. I built websites as a freelancer. I tried to create a t-shirt business. I got into trading algorithms. I tried selling art, creating an online comic, making videos, making an app. And none of these projects lasted for more than six months. In fact, most of them lasted even less than that. Then I got my first real office job as a marketing graphic designer. I became a great asset to my company because I had a lot of skills I had acquired thanks to all these projects I just mentioned, the most important those skills was coding. I completed a master's in graphic design, but coding is what really opened new doors for me. Give me more responsibilities and more work. I always had a drive to be an entrepreneur, to do my own thing. For me, the stability of a job I liked, good salary and nice colleagues were both too easy and too risky at the same time, of course, I was grateful to be in the position I was in, but I also knew that if I settled in that comfort zone, I wouldn't ever do anything more with my life. I wanted to keep improving, keep learning, to cross items on my bucket list. For the first two years of my job, I kept trying to start projects, but I never actually launched anything. And then in the summer of 2019, something clicked in my brain or switch went off. I headed enough. I decided to make list of all the side hustles I had tried up to that point and to pick one to try for at least six months, nonstop natural job. The list to pick from looked something like this. I wrote down website building, selling t-shirts, trading, painting on skateboards, and blogging. Those are my five options. And I picked blogging because it was the option with the most upsides for me, I could start right away. I didn't need an upfront financial investments. I had always loved writing journal for as long as I can remember. So I have stuff to say and I could code and do all the setup by myself. So I went with blogging and I was going to commit to it for six months. Why six months? I'll get to that later in the course. There's a whole chapter on the six-month rule. But for now, just know that this decision has been one of the biggest in my life and over two years later I'm still at it. It gave me a lot of opportunities, taught me a ton of things, and that's what this course is all about. Everything I learned along the way in one place. Finally, one of the biggest opportunities bugging gave me is the ability to interact with like-minded people who are also entrepreneurs, do their own thing and make their own money. Most importantly, people who are much further along the path of success than I am. I published my first interview piece in August 2019. It was a roundup interview of ten or nine writers with five questions per person. The interviews were centered around their morning routine because at the time I wanted to learn more about this magical time, I was reading about everywhere. Early mornings. That's when most productive people seem to get ahead of it. Gathering all the answers and writing this first piece was hugely motivational for me. And I went on to write three more rounded pieces and more than 75 individual interviews through a project called The people who do the wealth of information, knowledge, and motivation I acquired through my interviews has been absolutely invaluable and all the god of the course, you will find quotes, tips, and tools gathered from those 75 plus interviews I conducted over two years. That's it for the intro. Thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you in the first module of the course whenever you're ready. 2. Self-Improvement & Productivity: Before we jump into the details of the different techniques and processes I've used to become more productive. I want to take a module to talk about what it means to be more productive and to improve yourself. You shouldn't want to improve yourself because something is wrong with you. But because you want to know and understand yourself better, there is a big misconception that self-improvement is all about productivity, crushing targets and being better than everyone else. It's often associated with those productivity gurus who want you to buy their book and come to their conferences that they can tell you how to live your life and beat the competition. I always knew there was a lot of bad content out there. And that's the main reason why I was not interested in it. But once my interest in developing myself started to supersede the assumptions I had on self-development content. I started to look more into it when I started my self-improvement journey, I did it as a necessity for my blog. I knew that this project was going to require more organization time management, productivity, and those were skills I had, but they needed to be honed to get to a higher level. And so he discovered that there is this very big introspection aspects to self-improvement. Mostly in the beginning. Again, you can only improve if you know what direction you want to go, what you want to be like, who are you? What's your story? What's your reason for wanting to improve in the first place? Where are you headed? Essentially, it's not self-improvement just to self improve, There's gotta be a purpose behind it. One of the first books I decided to read when I started my self improvement journey was the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. I had known about the book for a very long time. It's a worldwide bestseller, but I always reluctant to read it. It just looked like a gimmick self-mastery Bible. I would find shallow at best, empty at worst. But eventually, once I started to tell myself I was going to give this thing a go. I read the book and it was amazing. There are a lot of books out there that people will generally find disappointing, but this one is truly worth the read and I highly recommend you read it. The biggest lesson I got from this book is one that I think can be a great starting point from any one self-improvement journey. You create your own environment. This was a huge game changer for me. The day you realize that you can shape your environment by choosing how you react to it stimulations, then you can really change yourself and your life. This goes from the simplest things like getting less angry at irrelevant stuff to the biggest ones, like completely changing your social circles, for instance, for me, going from passively reacting to my environment to shaping it by choosing my reactions, started with worrying and overthinking lists. I discovered that a lot of negative feelings generated throughout my day where 100% self-inflicted. For instance, if somebody at work annoyed me, it was my decision to feel annoyed. If I felt frustrated at something in general, it was my decision to feel frustrated. If it was great outside and it made me feel down, It was my decision as well. And the list goes on. If it's raining outside and it makes you feel depressed, you can choose otherwise, most people will say, I'm feeling down because today's a great day. But the truth is, it can be sunny in your heart and in your mind, you just have to change the way you react to this gradient using the same approach. If somebody makes you feel angry by their actions and what they're saying, you let them influence you in that way. You can decide to change the way you react to their attitude. Once I realized there was a huge game changer for me, I started to pay more attention to how I was reacting to things. It could now see where my energy was being wasted, holding onto feelings that didn't matter. This is the foundation for moving forward in life in general, because from the moment you take the decision to be in charge, whether of your feelings or your actions, then you're able to make progress, which takes me to my final and most important points about self-improvement. Nobody can do the work for you. You can read all the books you want, listen to all the podcasts, watch all the videos. You can consume all the contents on how to live your best life. If you're not willing to get up one day and actually get to work, then it won't work. A lot of people don't read self-help content because they're just not interested in it and that's okay. But the people who consume content without putting into practice the advice it contains are stuck in a vicious circle and the Illusion of Progress that won't take them anywhere until they shift gears. So please don't consume content passively. Make sure you put it into practice, including with this course you're watching right now. Just like you shouldn't pick up self-improvement for no reason, you shouldn't aim for productivity just for the sake of being productive. Again, if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. Productivity is the engine, but it's not everything. You may have an idea of where you're going, but you still need clear instructions of process, a roadmap to get there. Let me tell you what this meant for me. When I started working on my blog, I told myself I had to work on it early in the morning. I had my nine to five job during the day and I will be too tired to do any extra work after getting home at night because I had always been a morning person. So I decided I'd started waking up at 06:00 AM to work on my blog. It was a great idea, but it was missing one big component of plant. I remember mornings where I would literally wake up, make coffee, opened up my laptop to get to work, and then nothing. I didn't actually know where to start. I didn't have a to-do list items to check off something to structure the work. We just sit there in my office chair wondering what the **** I was doing up so early with nothing to do for me. The solution to that was David journaling and I'll get to that later in the course. I also have a full course dedicated to journaling. And so by writing down the tasks for the next day, in the evening, the day before, I finally knew where to go. The level of personal productivity you want to reach will also depend a lot on your existing schedule. If you're married with kids and you have a 95 job, you're going to have to be a lot more productive than average if you wanted to develop an activity. It, if you're a student, you might have a jam-packed schedule to, or you may have a bit of extra time and you're able to take things more easily. Productivity is relative. The first-person in my example, the married one with a nine to five job will get a lot done in a day probably, but it won't necessarily be what he or she really wants to work on their site project. The second person in my example, the students will also get a lot done, but in a completely different manner. There is no kids to feed, no cartoon fix. And maybe with more done on this project that matters to him or her. But in both cases, these people have something in common. They have a side project they're working on or want to work on in the productivity world, this is commonly referred to as a side hustle. Its simplest form, a side hustle is something you annotate next to your regular job to bring in extra cash more and more though, it just means stuff you do that next. Money outside of the normal, conventional ways of paying the bills, aka unary factor. Now, I'm personally not a fan of the term side hustle because it comes from there, hustling community, which is usually all about working 247, putting work first and nothing else and burning out in nine out of ten cases. I'm okay with saying that my blog and the content I create is my side hustle because it's something I do on the site, but that's about as high as it gets. You can aim to be productive with a side project without necessarily focusing on the influx of money in the first place. That's what I did and I still do to a certain extent. You can also aim to be productive and still have a family life. So fully ends. Interestingly enough, a lot of the most famous guys in the hustling community have actually taken a step back lately and acknowledged that maybe it's good to have a break once in awhile after all, you know, guys like Tim Ferriss, Gary Vee, pleased to work all the time. They're starting to serve the mindfulness and self-awareness wave. Are they doing this because it's becoming the trend or because they actually realize their lifestyle is not sustainable and long-term, I'm not sure, But what I do know is this, It's a great reminder to not make the same mistakes when you're starting your own journey. So on that note, we're not going to jump into the third module where we're really getting into the core of the course with the Wheel of Life approach. For this first assignment, I would like you to try to identify treaty. Think why you wanted to take that course. Why were you interested in self improvement in productivity in the first place? And what do you want to learn from it? As we've seen in this course module, those are two very broad notions that mean a lot of different things for a lot of different people. Why do you specifically feel like you want to improve yourself and, or become more productive? So just take a piece of paper and write down your answers, your reasons, or type it on your, on your laptop if you prefer to do that. But remember, as we've said in this module, you shouldn't try to improve yourself because something is wrong with you and you shouldn't try to be more productive just to beat the next guy, just to, just for the sake of more productivity, there should be a reason and a purpose behind the intention. So identify the reasons why you want to take that path and take those steps towards self-improvement and better work. Once you've done that introspection exercise, you'll be ready for the next module of the course. 3. The Wheel of Life: I used to we love life for my personal resolutions and overall planning of the year every December. I'm not sure where I found this approach at first, but I believe it was on the great website of the art of living.com, which is a website full of interesting resources. This is what the Wheel of Life looks like. Normally, the Wheel of Life is used as an assessment tool where you rate yourself in each of the sections of a circle. And at the end of the exercise, you end up with a shape that represents how balanced July is around the different areas. It's great as the first touch-based exercise to get a feel of where you stand. But that's not how I use it generally. I've basically only use a different sections and I made decisions, screed goals and targets in each section, regardless of my score in each section. So I might prioritize one area over the other on a short period of time, maybe a month, but over a yearly timeline, I tried to work with the whole ecosystem of the Wheel of Life because for me, all sections are important. All your alarm turned a good and healthy life. By the way, you'll find a ton of templates online, but my Wheel of Life template is one I made myself. It's obviously based on an existing one, but I changed this section names and structure a little bit to match my needs more and I encourage you to do the same. So as an example, here are some of my resolutions at the beginning of 2021 per category of the Wheel of Life. For the blog, for instance, I had published a course for sale within two months, create one massive guide or comparison article on the productivity app, which ended up being my tick, tick versus tourists article on my website, published one article that week to be able to focus on all the extra work I wanted to do next to just writing content and finish. Jenny got my business before tax season ends. This was for accounting purposes in the Health and Wellness Category. I had run five kilometers in less than 20 minutes, weren't a new a half marathon personal record in the summer. Make good use of my pedal board at the lake, take care of myself with a barber shop manager massage. In the personal development, learning and creativity category, I had learned things, choose which things to learn and study them. State of the world, geography, GIS, straight up subjects I was interested in. Stop YouTube with a self-control app every single day. 15 minutes of YouTube was my delete, average goal, check email list, and do email more because I would spend so much time checking my e-mails, but not actually replying to emails. In the family, friends, and social category, I had visit friends when it becomes possible again, after the pandemic connect to people who lift me up, the world opens up again. Again. This was during the pandemic in the emotional, spiritual, and loved category. I had padding summer vacation, planning another bike through, and doing more camping on the weekends in December with my girlfriend because that's something we both like to do. And then I had developed a consistent meditation practice and keep doing this stuff, carrying, stop criticizing thing, which is something I set it for myself as a little spirituality goal in the physical environment and belongings category, I had owned less stuff and get organized more. And finally, in my nine to five job category, I had take care of the new website, clean everything, all the material we ever had, and they could look awesome, leveraged the budget and be more organized in my overall approach to my nine to five. I do this every year, but I also checked in monthly and after the weekly to see how well I'm doing what I intend to prioritize during the week ahead. As another example, Here's a check-in I had during the year of 2021 on the weekend to set my intentions and my goals for the week. The black category, I had finished draft of an article, proofread to draft, submit an article and work on my course in the health and wellness category I had run on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday in the family, friends and social category, had call lands on Saturday in a physical environment, in belongings category, I had to do my chores on the weekend where I have to clean around the place and the personal development, learning and creativity category. I had play 30 minutes of chess per day. So that's an example of my weekly planning around the areas that we love life. As I said, I looked at it both on a short term weekly timeline and the long-term yearly time link. Again, I highly recommend the Wheel of Life approach, especially for people like me who naturally like structure. I'd easily all over the place with a ton of interesting projects and things to do. But without knowing where to start, the Wheel of Life approach combined with a yearly, monthly and width, the timeline works wonders for me. We're gonna get into it more when we talk about time management later in the course. But for now, let's answer a question you might be asking yourself after seeing all those tasks, those to-dos in those lists, how to not get overwhelmed? Well, obviously when you're trying to catch upon eight different areas at same time, things can be pretty overwhelming. In fact, it's fair to say that making progress over eight different areas with only seven days in a week is nearly impossible and you shouldn't stress yourself because of that. Personally, I work on maximum two areas per week. And one of those two is almost always the same. My blog, because for me that's the career area of my Wheel of Life. I want to be able to work for myself one day, except when ammonification, I always spend a lot of time on this section. It's very high priority for me. Then I choose another one to focus on a secondary target for the week. The thing with setting goals is you shouldn't be too hard on yourself in as much as I do believe in hard work and you only get what you put in. And this might require a lot of sacrifices and all that. I do believe in debt. But if I'm fully honest and transparent, I'm happy if I get 70% of my big overarching goals done over one year and nobody, or very few people hit all their targets All the time every year constantly, probably nobody does. And coming to terms with that, the reality of life is very important. Otherwise you might get stuck because you're afraid of even getting to start because you're going to fail anyway and then you just like a deer in headlights. Or you might start but you always get disappointed in yourself. You feel like you're not making progress. I've betrothed those phases, so I know those feelings. Even if you're watching this video right now, you'll probably make some mistakes as well. And that's completely fine. Id2, and I'm still making mistakes as I go along the way. I think one of the reasons productivity and self-improvement contents remain so popular after all those years. Well, really, everybody's going to sing the same thing over and over again. I think the reason for that is that people still make mistakes and they still need to be constantly remind you that it's okay to fail, that you shouldn't stop at the first obstacle on the road and that it's better to have ten goals and hit F5 then to have 100 and it's 0 or it's not even have goals and then we get to work. So this is how I don't get overwhelmed. I allow myself a big margin for error. And I know that as long as they focus on the process and the progress rather than reaching the angle, I'll be fine, but we'll get back to this further ahead in the course for now. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next module. Whenever you are ready. For this assignment, you will find the Wheel of Life template I created for myself in the resources section of this course. You can download it and print it and basically fill it out. In this chapter, we haven't paid too much attention to the timeline of your goals and your resolutions yet. But it doesn't matter for now. What matters is to identify those targets and categorize them in each of the Wheel of Life section. What I recommend is going with a monthly timeline to start with and thinking of small goals who can implement in each category of the Wheel of Life for you to start working on. This way, you can always have them at the back of your mind during the upcoming month, but also hopefully all along your self-improvement journey as you move forward. Remember that as we saw, it started about chasing five different goal categories within a week or even within a month. Think of all your goals at first to get a bigger picture of them. But when it comes to execution, only focus on 3D four categories maximum and only one gold per category. I hope you'll find this exercise a good starting point for the Wheel of Life practice. And I'll see you in the next module of the course. 4. The One Thing & Eat That Frog: The one thing and eat that frog are both pretty popular productivity books about how to get to work and optimize your workflow mainly through prioritization. Although I do recommend you read the books here, we're gonna be talking about them in terms of very strong concepts to implement in your life. You don't have to have read the book to understand this. The first book, V1 thing was written by Gary Keller. In his book explains the very powerful concept of focusing on one thing and only one. It's super simple, but there's so much to it, especially for someone like me. This was something I need to do a lot in my life. As I've mentioned before, I've always been all over the place with the a 100 different ideas but no direction and unable to pick one thing and to stick with it for longer than a few months. Gary keller explains that at one specific point in his career, he wanted to attract more customers to his business, which at the time always real estate. So he sat down with his team and they brainstorm and different targets they could aim for. That would take them to their overarching goal of attracting more customers. They had a lot of different ideas, but eventually they settled on one and only one. Publishing a book in the hope of CMD become a best seller. So the strategy was that if Gary Keller managed to write a best selling book by focusing only on writing the book on good content. The promotion of the book would give his business for exposure because people would get interested in it for a few months, Keller focused on one thing and again, only one, writing that book and working on making it as great of a book as possible. It did at it being a best seller. And it did end up driving a ton of attention and consequently more customers to his business. And he summarizes his approach to choosing your one thing in one question. What's the one thing you can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary. Interestingly enough, in Gary Keller connects to one thing approach to the Wheel of Life, which we just talked about earlier in scores. For me, the one thing I went to put the most focus on, or at least to start with, was my block. The one thing I could do to move to block forward was pretty straightforward. Writing. I needed content articles for people to discover my work. So that's what I started to do every weekday for almost a year. I woke up at 06:00 AM much before I had to be for the office. And I would write down what article trapped every day, five days a week for a year. I did on every single day, never allowing myself to stay in bed past 06:10 AM. I pulled that my cutoff time and I will turn three of those drafts into proper articles each week and post them on my blog, on my medium profile. Now obviously some of the drafts never saw the light of day online. Some of them were just not good, so I never turn them into an article. But this strategy enabled me to consistently post three articles per week for 52 weeks in a row. And guess what happened to my blog then? Slowly but surely, I started getting more feedback on my content. People reached out to me more than left comments on my articles. They subscribe to my newsletter. I got to interview 75 authors. And by the way, an overwhelming part of them also woke up early to write first thing in the morning and get it out of the way. That's because they knew very well what they're one thing was, in the words of Gary Keller, it they had identified the one thing they could do with such by doing it, Everything else was going to be easier or unnecessary. So if you can take anything from this section, is this, ask yourself, what's your one thing? What's the one thing you can do every day that's going to help you not only get better at your craft, but also it's going to make the project move forward. How do you move the needle? Essentially. The second book we're gonna be talking about is eat that frog. Once you've identified the number one thing to focus on, you have to find the time to do that. One thing I've already mentioned a few times in this course how I ended up making time for extra work by waking up early. In this section, I want to explain in more detail what led me to that solution. At the time, a lot of work with my nine to five, I was tired when getting home and I didn't feel like spending my only free time, my weekends on the laptop, working on my blog. I was already on the computer or week-long, So I basically didn't want to spend my life on the laptop. So I read the book, eat that frog by Brian Tracy, and the essence of the book can be summarized in this one analogy from the author. Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that's probably going to be the worst thing that's going to happen to you all day long. You're frog is your biggest most important task, the one you're most likely to procrastinate on if you don't do something about it. So for me, writing was my frog, it was a very important task that I was increasingly likely to postpone as to the weight on. And that's why I started tackling it first thing in the morning. Again to quote Brian Tracy, the key to reaching high levels of performance and productivity is to develop the lifelong habit of tackling your major tasks. First thing each morning, you must develop the routine of eating your frog before you do anything else. And without taking too much time to think about it. You know, like Gary Keller's book, Brian Tracy is constant, has a wakeup and change your life ring to it, which I'm not a fan of. I don't believe in a one-size-fits-all plan to change your life. I know things are not that simple. That's why I was reluctant to read both of these books at first. But in the end I have to say that they were really game changers. Whether I stepped good or bad, Phelps pumped up or beaten down, full of ideas or uninspired. Get out of bed, go stretch on the terrorist for ten to 15 minutes and I would start typing right away. I would keep an ongoing list of article titles, structures in Chapter ideas to make sure I never had the excuse to have nothing to write about. All I had to do was pull up my spreadsheet and look at the writing and years in there. I would use the weekends to choose what's right about on each day and what drafts I would polish and proofread for publishing on, given these little recap, whatever project you're working on, make sure it's the right one. And once you've done that, ask yourself, what is my one thing and what is my frog above that one thing? Then eat that frog every single morning or at least every morning of the week and used the weekends to plan and relax. I'm a big advocate of early mornings because they were a great with my productivity style. Branch race is also a fan mornings or when he recommends you get your art or task of the day out of the way. In my 75 people who do interview series, an overwhelming part of people wake up early, either a to get to work or simply to take some time for themselves. In fact, 612 AM was the average wake-up time of all the people I asked. Mornings are objectively great to get things done because there are no distractions in the morning. It's usually quiet, calm. There is no one asking for your attention, no urgent phone calls, emails, most people are still sleeping or getting ready for work, so it's really great to work. That being said, I am fully aware and conscious that not everyone is a morning person. I used to believe that if you wanted to get a hold of yourself, you just had to wake up early, get to work and go cease today. In fact, I used to have a friend who would complain about his life a lot and I would tell him that if he woke up earlier, he could start controlling his life more. And I still believe that. But now acknowledge that this will be easier to do for some people than for others. By now, there's been multiple studies on whether or not some people are morning people and some are not early birds on one side and the other. And the consensus is indisputable. Yes, our attitude towards mornings is affected by our genes, our brain, chemicals, nobody's, this means two things. Number one, if you're not a morning person, but you can somehow manage to wake up early, even if it's very hard. I highly encourage you to do so because it feels amazing to get your hardest task of your day is done first thing in the morning. For some people, it's the gym for me, it's writing for some others, It's going for a run, writing annoying emails. The second thing it means is that if you can't manage early mornings, it's totally fine to fight another time studying your day where you can focus 100% on your tests for a lot of night owls. This time is usually late at night. It personally, you doing hi focused work at night is impossible for me. There is still the sight of me that tends to believe evenings or less prone to full focus works somehow. Everyone is on social media in bed texting late at night. For me, it's just a recipe for so many distractions, but that's just me. So if it's your thing, go right ahead as long as you're able to get to work on what matters is to be willing to do the work and to get to it. And that's the last thing I want to mention. Actually, obviously, early mornings are not always easy. Even as a morning person myself, the first 510 or even 30 minutes RB heart, you've got to wake up, get ready, normal. You're not fully awake yet. And I think so many people who tried to become morning people and they tried to wake up early, they find it so hard and they give up so quickly. But my advice to try your morning routine for a little more than a few days and see how it goes overtime. Obviously, it won't be easy right away. For me, my morning routine is very simple. It's getting out of bed, start the water kettle to make coffee, stretch on the terrorist for ten minutes and go back inside, make coffee and get to work. And that's it. I've been doing this for two years and of course at first it wasn't easy. But now we can get into full focus mode within 30 to 40 minutes after waking up. So all I'm saying is I understand not everyone is a morning person, but it's objectively the best time of the day to get things done. So if you want to give it a go, try it for more than a few days, try for a few weeks. Thanks for watching and see you in the next section of the course, maybe tomorrow early in the morning. For this assignment, identify what your one thing is and what your frog is. If you've started this course, I'm assuming you're looking to not only self improved, but also to potentially become more productive to start your own thing on the side, maybe your business side hustle a lot of people that are interested in my type of content. Usually you have a passion project. They want to turn into a business and they are leaving from, if you do, then all you gotta do to get started is to identify the number one business driving activity for you. What's the number one most important thing you can do to either get your business going, keep it performing a top level. So for example, as I said from my blog, my one thing was writing. So that's what I focused on every morning. Once you've identified your number one thing, identify when you can tackle this thing every day in your schedule so that you can make consistent progress for me, it was every morning at 630 for you. It can be whenever you want. But again, as I said in the course, I tend to believe that early mornings or objective with the best time to get things done. 5. The Best Productivity Tools: Denmark, where I live, is a country famous for its design in general. But there is one specific area where they really stand out. Chairs. Their chairs are pieces of art on display in the world's most famous museums and galleries. They look amazing, but the problem is that they fail to fulfill the number one purpose of a chair, to sit down, feel comfortable and relax. I've myself tried multiple ones in the past. They honestly just don't feel that nice. They sure look amazing, but they just don't do what they're supposed to do. This problem has a name. It's called Putting form or design before function. You might be wondering, how is this related to productivity? Well, many times in the past twin trying new productivity tools, I found myself obsessing over the form rather than the function. It's important that a productivity tool feels nice to use and that the visual rendering of whatever the tool enables you to do looks nice. But when I started obsessing over the form rather than the function, I don't question whether it's because the tool Hispanic designed or if it's because the tool wasn't really nice-looking piece of fluff in the first place. I just move on and I tried to find another tool where I'll be able to get down to the function of eta Quaker. If I can't sit in it and feel comfortable within the first few hours of training. It's not worth my time. In this course module, I'm going to bombard you with a ton of tools. Have gathered those tools from many people I've interviewed over the past two years. But obviously don't go and try to implement them all in your life. As with everything when it comes to productivity advice, try things out, find what works for you. But at the end of the day, don't use this one tool just because your favorite productivity guy uses it. Don't put four before function. Go find something else that's going to be fine with that in mind, here are a bunch of productivity tools I've gathered from my research work in general, animals start off with the tools I'm using myself. The first one is tick, tick. It's my favorite productivity tool of all time. I tried so many productivity apps before it tick, tick and I never took to a single one. The number one game-changing feature for me is the arrange tasks option. It enables you to sort and reschedule the overdue tasks by going from a vertical to-do list layout to a horizontal calendar view in a simple drag-and-drop interface. Overall, tick tick has just so many native functionalities that you would normally have to import from third-party tools. For example, the to-do list. If you want your tasks in the calendar, you need to sync it up with your Google Calendar or something else. And that just creates a lot of issues for me. It's tick, tick all the way. I use it to structure mostly my dates by weeks and to keep track of the things that have to do. Next. Tip is Notion. Notion is very powerful all in one workspace for nodes, tasks, wikis. It is extremely brought with probably over a 100 features and I use something like 5% of the app. Again, I like to keep it simple. I basically use Notion to structure any of the content that's not blog posts. So of course releases, video shoots, few scripts. I put it all in there and I organize it in there as well. Third tool is self-control. I use self-control primarily to block YouTube access from my computer. You have to do is download it at YouTube to the blacklist, set a timer duration, I click on Start. You won't have access to YouTube until the timer expires, even if you quit the app, even if you restarted the computer number for his pocket. Pocket is a service that lets you save articles from the Internet to read them later, install the browser add-on and click on its icon every time you want to save something for later. I considered a productivity app because reading is part of the work i o myself, whether for writing or for self-improvement or you read the content I saved during the day, at night on my e-reader in bed next to standard bird. Thunderbird is an e-mail client I've been using for, I think literally a decade now. I usually instead of the Gmail interface because I like to compartmentalize and have one space slash device for one use. So I use my browser to browse. I don't want to do my emails in there. The two main options I use all the time in Thunderbird are automatic tagging and custom filtering, which are basically scripts that gets triggered every time I get incoming email. For instance, if the subject line of the email or the address from the sender contains the word invoice or receipt to the email automatically gets moved to my Accounting folder. That's super convenient. The Google Suite. I use the whole Google Suite of my nine to five job from my blog, I tend to only stick to Google Sheets. The only reason being that I find it easier to use than a locally installed tool like Open Office or Microsoft Office. I use Google Sheets mostly for custom tools. I create my own and $60 spreadsheets. I use Google Sheets to organize my content to keep track of my various projects. I sometimes like to create timelines in a spreadsheet as well. Text edit and Hemingway. Writing apps are obviously very important as a content creator, I use texted it to take notes on the go. The downside of this app is that I tend to get a ton of files later on in my computer and it's not extremely organized. But I love text data because like I often say with simple tools, it does one thing and it doesn't create. I use it to write the first draft of my articles. And it's so simple, I don't have to worry too much about the formatting or anything like that. I just type away. I focused on writing and I'll make it look pretty later. In Hemingway. Hemingway is basically like Grammarly, so it helps you make your writing look and sound more pro. But I like it more than Grammarly because it has less of an invasive and generic correcting style. I personally think that grandma makes your writing good and better, but it just makes it sound so generic. And I find that Hemingway doesn't do that inch. Now for more productivity tools. As a reminder, these are the tools I gathered from over 75 interviews and two years of work. I'm only going to mention the most popular first two is the Pomodoro timer. I'm really not into the Pomodoro approach myself, but a surprisingly high number of people I asked mentioned it. This is not a digital tool per se, but more at time management technique. It was developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980's and it is very simple to put into practice. First you set a timer and you worked for 25 minutes, and you have a break of five minutes. And you repeat the cycle for as many times as you like, usually taking a break around the fifth cycle or something like that. But of course, all the variables are adjustable to your own tastes. Apple notes, apple nodes is a great app to help structure your thoughts more easily than in a normal journal. My writing doodles and other scribbles tend to get all over the page. And it's sometimes hard to keep track of my ideas of Towards, I use a specific notebook that has a table of contents at the beginning to help me cope with that. But nothing beats digital when it comes to organization. Rosanna, Rosanna is a web and mobile application for teamwork management. Some of the people asked did use it for personal productivity, but it's really designed to work with multiple people. If you own a business with multiple employees, Asana can definitely help streamline workflows. If not, you probably find it too broad for your personal use. Trello kanban boards are a very popular way of managing projects. Items of a project are represented by cards and steps of the projects are represented by columns. Card moves from one column to the next as the overall project moves along. The system was developed by Toyota in the 1980's. And Trello is a web app that offers a digital version of Chem on boards. It's very efficient, but it's also a little bit raped. You can only do come on board with these tools. So if you're not a fan of this approach, you probably won't like it. Dropbox. Dropbox is a file hosting servers quite similar to Google Drive. I actually used myself to store video content and I find it more efficient than Google Drive. I find that Google Drive is sometimes very slow to upload big files. And I also find that sharing files and leaving notes and comments on different types of files is easier to do in Dropbox. Then in Google Drive, brain that FM brain dot fm consists of a database of soundtracks to help you focus on getting things done. It's functional music is designed to get you in the flow within ten to 15 minutes. The technology they use is patented and has been tested on brain and behavior. Raindrop. Raindrop is an organ one bookmark manager. So it gets you organize everything that you like and save on the web into folders, sub-folders, tax filters, lists. You can choose between multiple views for clarity, like grid masonry or headlines. And raindrop also comes with an automatic backup system, meaning that even if a page you've saved the sticker down, you'll still have a copy of it in your bookmarks locally. Evernote. Evernote is one of the leading task management apps with some of the most efficient features on the markets. Sink and organize Web Clipper tasks, calendar templates, documents, scanning, surge, home dashboard. They have the whole package. Text expander. Text expander is a tool that lets you insert snippets of text as you type using quick search or abbreviation. But this can save you a lot of time, especially when it comes to emails. How many emails do you get every day that could be answered with the same generic paragraph? Things like meeting requests. Thank you. Notes, follow-ups. With text expander, you can insert preformatted blocks of text by simply pressing the forward slash key followed by your customer trigger. For instance, let's say your customer support thank you message. You would just type the fourth slash key on your keyboard, then support response. And your message automatically gets loaded up in the email and you can just click Send. The nice thing is that text expander works with dozens of other apps for different cases that just emails, for instance, notes and writing, task management, blogging, texting. So that's it for productivity tools you can implement in your life. Again, remember to remain simple. You don't need a ton of tools, but you most likely need a ton of work to reach your goals. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next module. For this assignment, I encourage you to look through the tools you're currently using and through each one to ask yourself, do I really need this? As I said, I just bombarded you with a ton of different tools, but it doesn't mean you have to update your whole toolbox. Maybe you saw something that's nice, but if you really think about it, you don't already have a use for it. Maybe you saw a nice feature of a specific tool and you realize that, Hey, you can actually adapt that functionality to a tool you're already using. So you don't have to change all your tools. Look at the tools you have asked yourself, do I really need this for each one of them? And you probably going to end up removing a bunch and simplifying your workflow. 6. Journaling: Before we jump into this section, I just wanted to give a quick disclaimer that this course section is going to be a condensed version of my course on journalling, which is also available on Skillshare. Since I talked about my journaling through six sections there, I thought it didn't make a lot of sense to have the exact same stuff here. We're only going to spend five to ten minutes on journaling and his course. And if you want to learn more about it, I encourage you to go check out my other course dedicated specifically to journaling. So back to this course in my introduce series called 75 people who do 60% of people asked about journaling and asked almost everybody journal on the regular, either physically or digitally, daily, weekly, monthly, and a specific time or anytime, the practice of journaling was a big component of their answers about productivity, I myself consider journaling to be a keystone habits, and that's the term created by Charleston in his bestseller book, The Power of Habit. The Hague defines a keystone habit as small changes are habits that people introduced into their routine that unintentionally carry over into other aspects of their lives. It's essentially something positive that's going to ripple through your life and create more positive change. As I've said before in this course, productivity techniques work differently for everybody and success during statements who millions of targets depending on people. But I believe there are a few universal habits that greatly increase the chances of success for anyone who's willing to implement them in their routine, no matter the person who charged the goal, the timeframe, the environment. I believe that some habits just work. I also strongly believe that journaling is one of those habits and let me tell you why. So we're not going to be going through the emotional upsides of journaling. Obviously, if you're emotionally overwhelmed or if you feel like you need to list stuff out, it goes without saying that journaling can be of great help with that. And I highly encourage you to write down your thoughts and things going through your mind. But in this section, we're only going to be talking about generally from a productivity slash self-improvement angle because that's what this course is about. I think you're only gotten off for the past ten years myself and I switched to a consistent journaling practice, writing out all the time. I started blogging around two years ago. I find that it really helps with structuring my days, my wheat slight overall lifetime line where I want to be in life, what my goals are, what my resolutions are sometimes journaling. He's also an amazing creative output for me because as an entrepreneur and a content creator, I always need new ideas to afford and to put stuff out. Otherwise, I'm gonna be left behind in my journal. I write whatever crazy ideas I have. I love to take my journal with me anywhere I go. I love to take it with me. When I go for a walk to the park, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, I have to write down immediately my journal because then I'm gonna forget it when I wake up the next day, I went to graphic design school and I had a teacher that always told us to write down and draw every little stupid idea we have. Because a stupid as it might seem on the moment, it might actually turn into something big if you look into it and if you brainstorm around anymore, and also once it's out of your brain and onto the paper, then you're free to forget it and you can make more space for potential better ideas. Now, in terms of process, I have experienced with a lot of different general IT systems. And this chapter of the course is obviously about the one I ended up choosing. No matter what stage you're at in life, it's never too late to become journal, especially when you're on the low side of things. Journaling is the practice that will enable you to encapsulate 90% of the stuff I talked about all the crosses course, things like time management resolutions, productivity, juggling is essentially a blueprint to personal success because it helps you define all the variables in your success equation. What works for you basically, let's get into it. So the first component of my journaling system is the Inspire now daily productivity planner. Us Inspire now Journal every day to write down my top three tasks of the day. How I feel right when I wake up. I also tried my day score, my sleep score, my bedtime might wake up time. And I also write down a summary of each day and something I'm grateful for each day. Then at the end of each week, this journal has a page every seven days. And then locking approach in his journalists based on the Wheel of Life templates. This journal also comes with a ton of templates you can use to track so many things. Things like books to read, movies to watch, please just to go. It has a fitness plan, a dead management plan, a calendar of the year, calendar of each month. It's very exhaustive and I don't use all the pages included in it, honestly, the joel covers six months of the year and you get a discount every time you order a new one for the next six months. So very convenient total overall, I use it daily and weekly for my planning. Highly recommended. Second component of my journaling routine, my dotted notebook. I use his journal to write and draw on the go or at my desk, I log article, ideas, pitches, sketches. This is a journal I tried to take with me everywhere I go. I used to use a blank notebook without dots, but everything was like instructor. It was all over the page and it was always a challenge to get back to an idea I had written two weeks ago, lost in the storm of doodles and scribbles. So with that in mind, mitotic notebook has to have at least these two features, numbered pages and a table of contents. This way, if I have something I know I will want to get back to later, I can write it down in the table of contents and indicate the corresponding page number. And the third component of my journaling system is the one line at a five-year-old memory book. I found out about this cool little item in an interview I did with Amy Chen. Each page of this minimum is notebook represents swan day of the year with five entries for five years. So that in five years from now, when you write about your day on January 10th, for instance, you will be able to see where you were 1234 years ago on that exact same date. That's pretty cool. I think this is an amazing tool for self-development, motivation, and long-term vision in general, because it can help you to commit to your projects more. It helps to think long term. So that's it for the journaling I hope you enjoyed. Again, don't forget to check out my full Journaling course also on Skillshare if you're interested, and I'll see you in the next chapter of this course whenever you are ready for this assignment, I encourage you to try the Inspire now, daily templates I've attached to this course in the resources section, and just try every morning or every night, depending on whether, whether you're an early bird or an idol, try to fill it out and to plan your day in some sort of way by using this layout. Again, as you've seen in the video you just watched, I've tweaked the template to accommodate my own needs and I highly encourage you to do the same. You can print it out and change things yourself. The reason I'm highlighting the Inspire now journals specifically for this assignment is because as much as I said that the dotted notebook is the one that would keep if I had to learn all the other ones. Journaling in general is all about planning. And my dotted notebook is the opposite of planning. It's all over the place. It's doodles, random thoughts. And letting your mind roam free on paper is also important, but that's not where I would start if I wish just starting off with journaling and panning in general. So try to bring more structured through your planning with the Inspire now daily and weekly templates and let me know if it helped you in the comments section of this course. 7. The 6-Month Rule: When you search for the six-month rule on Google, nothing really shows up, which kind of surprised me, but I came across the six-month rule multiple times throughout my blogging journey, mostly by reading articles on productivity and progress and motivation. What is the six-month rule Exactly? Well, I would define it as an approach to starting something new. And that approach involves picking something up and sticking to it for six months. Sticking to it means to consider this thing. You're picking this activity to consider it like a job for six months, but do not expect any money from it or anything else for that matter. So it's like an unpaid job for six months basically, in my case, I picked her blogging and I told myself that for the first six months I would just get to work, published articles right every morning like I told you about earlier in the course, and proofread articles every week. And I made a conscious decision to ignore the metrics around my blogging. I had to not care about the views, the followers, the likes, money, the exposure. I didn't count my hours either. I just had to show up every day and see where this thing would take me over six months. Where did it take me? Consider this. If you start painting every single day for a year, you will become better at painting than 99% of people. Based on the same logic. If you keep it something consistently for a six-month periods, you're most likely mixed some sort of progress on that thing. It's very unlikely that it will take you nowhere unless you really bad at executing. In my case, I honestly couldn't believe how far I had gotten within six months when I actually stopped and took a moment to look at the metrics on my blogging. It was crazy to me. I have already made my first few $100 online and I never even thought I started making money after a year of blogging. I already had hundreds of people following my work. I got some emails from people telling me that they liked my writing was crazy. Already after six months, I could feel some sort of momentum. So I checked in with myself in my journal and I concluded with five bullet points to focus on for the next six months. So that would be a year of blogging already. And actually went back in my notes to prepare this course. And I found exactly my targets back then. Here's what they said. Three more months of focus on writing only to quality articles per week, minimum, one weekly newsletter, one email flow of one to two e-mails from new subscribers, and a continent pipeline in a content calendar. So clearly I now knew that I wanted to keep going and set some goals for myself. But how did I come to this conclusion? How to know whether or not you want to keep going after six months? Well, there's no magic recipe here, but usually it's very easy. It just has to feel right the point of going at it for six months, this to experience what it would feel like if you were to give this thing a series shots. And that's an important concept to understand. Well, six months is obviously not enough to actually develop a side activity into a viable business or into whatever you want to make out of this. It's merely a starting point. It tests to see if you'd be willing to keep going for a lot longer because it will be required if you want this to become something. I would say that the most important thing is to not care about the financial aspect of your project. I think no matter what your starting, unless you're starting a business where you have to sell stuff, you have to do it because you love it, especially in content creation. Of course, eventually you want to start making money and be able to be on bias and that's important to you. But if I didn't love what I do personally, I wouldn't be able to keep going anyway, even for more money than I'm making right now. I think a lot of people say they don't care about the money and they're genuinely doing this because they love it. But in this day and age, a lot of people want to be internet famous without really admitting it. They wanted to be popular online and they want to maybe become YouTube millionaires. But that's honestly another way to happiness and to doing what you love. And I think a great indicator of that is that people who do what they do for the money, their content, their business, their brand, it's not that great. They care about the profit and this, honestly, we'll make it a lot harder on yourself to start anything in life if you start with the money in mind, when I started my blog, I genuinely did not care about the money. It just happened to start coming in faster than I thought, but I really just started with the content in little recap, pick one thing and considered like a job for six months. Don't focus on making money. Don't count your hours. Don't expect this to go anywhere. Basically, just putting the work, wait and see and you'll most likely get a lot further than you would've ever thought in six months. For this assignment, we're nearing the end of the course and it's time to bind it altogether. Have all the learnings coming to one practical actionable pad. If you look back on the chapter on Wheel of Life and the one on eat that frog and the one thing, look at your one thing, your frog and how you're tackling it everyday or every 23 days, but at least regularly. Look at how you can implement an action plan around that one thing over the next six months. And through the lens of the Wheel of Life. Use what you did in the Wheel of Life assignment to help you organize next six months around your activity, as I explained in this course section, why six months? Because six months is a realistic, yet not too long timeline to get things going to build momentum around IT projects and to get an idea of whether or not you see yourself committing to this thing in the longer run, because it will be required if you want to make something out of this. There are two more modules to this course, but this is the last assignment. I hope you found these little exercises helpful and interesting. Don't hesitate to post your earnings, your templates, you results in the project section of this course and enjoy the last two chapters and I'll see you around. 8. The Problem With Goals: I thought it made sense to include in this course a few caveats to productivity, as much as I believe in putting into work, showing up every day. I also know that not everything is perfect in life and you can find downsides to anything. When it comes to productivity. A lot of it goes through setting goals for yourself. And I want to talk about the downside of goals to do. How many people do you know, who are actively working towards their goals? Probably not a lot. Goals are great, but they can also be really discouraging. The very reason most people don't follow their goals is because they don't realistically think they can reach them. Why is that? Well, for starters, goals are far away. They move, they're standing still on the horizon of possibilities. And the only way to get to them is to start walking the distance and getting to work. But there's always bad days with wind, rain, storms, and nobody likes to walk on those days. Yet. If you don't make any progress, it feels like you're wasting time. When you finally do get to your goal, you realize there's a whole new horizon waiting for you with yet another goal standing still shining in the distance. It's like it never stops. It's like this enlisting of gold after goal if you're even motivated enough to move forward. So one of the first key things I want to talk about with goals is results have nothing to do with goats. They have everything to do with a strategy and the system you put in place to get to where you want to be. Here a few examples to show you what I mean. If you're a writer, your goal might be to have a book featured on the New York Times bestseller list or to win the Pulitzer Prize. If you're a runner, your goal might be to finish a marathon and there were certain time or to qualify for specific events. If you're a chef, you go maybe to get your first Michelin star for your restaurant or to have your own cooking show. But realistically, if you keep working at your craft in each of those cases and focus on the long-term progress, you will get results whether you have goals or not. What matters is to put in the work, the rest happens almost automatically. Let's go back to the marathon example. I happen to have trained for and random marathon around two years ago. I was part of a running club and someone told me this story about a woman she knew who wanted to run a marathon to. That person didn't really know where to start. One day, she went out for one kilometer road. It took around ten minutes, which is pretty slow by any standards. They after that she went for two kilometers and the next day, three kilometers, she kept increasing the distance by one kilometer every day, taking breaks only on the weekends. She was extremely consistent with their plan until she got to raise day, which is 42 kilometers. Obviously, her speed increased as well, but she didn't have a target anyway, so it didn't matter to her. A way of training was pretty unusual, but he was her system and it works great for her. Now the question is, would this woman have gotten results running the race without the goal of running a marathon? Yes and no, but most of yets and here's why. So she did have that goal of running a marathon. You could argue she would not have gotten the results without that goal because maybe she needed to envision a target in her mind, the goal was the incentive, that thing that kept her going. She needed a focal point to keep going straight and ****. But you could also argue that she would have definitely gotten the results because we've got a clear targets of running a marathon. She could've decided to simply start running. Maybe she would have used approach. Maybe who progress wouldn't have been as fast, which is still would have gotten results. Her speed would have naturally improved. Her posture would've become better, pace, everything around her running would've become better because she just decided to start burning and to stick to it. And in that sense, goals are great for motivation and direction, but progress and results are the fuel of every accomplishment. The second thing I want to talk about when it comes to goals and why they can be an obstacle rather than the way forward. Is this a goal is not a unit qualifier. We just looked at the marathon example. Let's look at the writing example now. If you're a writer, you go maybe to win the Pulitzer Prize. If you don't know what the Pulitzer Prize, It's a series of annual prizes awarded by Columbia University in New York City for outstanding public service and achievement in American journalism, letters and music. But there's really only one word for music and 20 others for everything around good writing. Basically, it's a really famous award as an author. It's like the Oscars from movies. And do you know how many people win a Pulitzer price every year? Well, I just told me 20 people we want win-win for written work and one person from using, and what is the number one characteristic between the people who won a Pulitzer Price and the wants and we didn't. Well, it's that just like in many competitions, they all mostly wanted to win. You have to submit your work to the academy to enter the contest. So if you submit your work, it means you wanted to, when it's not something you can just randomly weight. But only 21 people out of all the contestants will win the price. If you ever win a Pulitzer Prize and somebody asks you, What made you win over the others? And you answer because I had this goal of winning. You're not answering the question. Everybody else lost and everybody had the same goal, including you. And that's true for any competition. Again, whether you write, play, basketball, swim, the gold can be the qualifier here. What made you successful was your system? Which was apparently better than others, and that's great for you. And a quick note, unwilling here, apart from a great system, there's always a varying amount of luck involved in winning in life in general. But that's a really broad subject for another video. For now, just know that you should never really rely on luck or take look into account in anything you do in life basically. And also the harder you work, the luckier you get. And that's a great quote from Gary Player, One of the greatest school players of all time. Moving on. Third downside of goals. A goal is temporary, but a system is continuous. Let's say you do in the pollutes or phrase. If after winning the Pulitzer Price, you sit back and stop working, you won't make anymore progress and you can be sure you'll never win anything. Again. Achieving a goal is only a momentary change. Once you reach a goal, you've got to ask yourself what comes next. If you don't have a system in place, the work ethic to create something else to look forward to you. We'll go back down the slope of all the progress he made until now in order to continuously make progress to hone your craft and to not find yourself dumbfounded. Once you reach a milestone, you need to create a system. Once that system is in place, you can have fun with it and always put it to use. Otherwise you'll get a slap in the face when you reach your goal and you have nothing else to look forward to or, and that's the last point I wanted to mention. You will have something else to look forward to, but you'll find yourself into vicious circle where you never have enough. What I'm getting at here is if your system is just a series of goals put together on an upward slope, once you reach one, you need to find another one. Keep going up the success ladder. And that can be pretty boring and or depressing. This strategy of going from one goal to the other might work in the beginning. And it can actually be beneficial to create momentum for yourself. But eventually, you'll find yourself coming up against either one of those tools. Number one, you'll get tired of winning all the time. If you crash every single one of your goals, congrats, you have a very good system and your excellent and crushing goals. But is that what life really is all about? O, because you'll come to realize that there's no correlation between your happiness and a number of goals. Question, it never stops. You can always choose more and your happiness won't increase anymore. The second wall is maybe you run out of goals eventually, going back to the fluids price example, if you win this thing, there's basically nothing else for you to win. Or at least it's another writer. There's nothing higher than the Pulitzer Prize. It's a sports equivalent of winning an Olympic medal. Why did you do after that? Now it actually looks like you're done, but you're still not happy and you want more. You can go ahead and maybe when another Olympic medal. But then you're going to face the other wall which we just mentioned, which is you're gonna get tired of winning all the time. So the answer to the two problems we just mentioned is the same. Embrace the system, not the goals. It's about improvement, progress, learning, not about hitting target all the time. Not only that, but it's extremely likely that you will crush all your targets without failing once in awhile. And that's something else to remember. It's completely okay to fail. It's boy to win all the time. And you could even argue that you learn more from losing that from winning. In fact, let us add discourse module by quoting the great Michael Jordan, where this disabled failure. If missed more than 9 thousand shots in my career, I've lost almost 300 games 26 times. I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. You know, Michael Jordan probably had a few goals, but he also failed to **** out of times. I obviously don't know him personally, but I'm pretty sure he was more focused on his system the whole time rather than on the wedding MDP or scoring X amount of dunks or points during his career or a game or whatever, his system was excellent. When he came across an obstacle, he remained focused on showing up and putting into work. He went through 300 last games, yet he never stopped beating his scrapped. Its goals are still cool. Don't cross out all your ********. Goals give you a direction and motivation, something to look forward to. But acknowledged that goals are not the end game. If you don't learn to love what you do, to always be willing to improve without expecting to win, you're probably setting yourself up for constant disappointments. Work on your system, honing your craft, embrace failing, and never stop learning. And see you in the next course module. 9. What All Overachievers Have in Common: Ever since I started blogging, I've interviewed over 75 medium authors on the subject of productivity. As a content creator, it's very motivating to get to chat with like-minded people and entrepreneurs, people who are ahead of me on the path of personal success. For my readers and my viewers, it's equally inspiring to discover stories of people who are just like them and they're to take the leap to start their own thing. In this section, I want to show you what is possible when you get to work. And I take real-life examples to support my case, saying I've learned a ton from those 75 plus interviews would be an understatement. The wealth of knowledge, the amount of tools, tips, and tricks I've learned about has been invaluable. And that's also what I'm sharing with you in this course. To this day, I myself use some of the learnings I got from the interviews daily. One crucial thing is project has taught me is that there's no one size fits all plan. Everyone has their own techniques, their own tools, and their own routines. Yes, I have identified clear patterns and tendencies across all of the data. I've gathered. An overwhelming majority of the people I interviewed are early risers, the journal they read. So I do believe there are some habits that have proven to work in most cases for most people, there are also some rules that are true in 99% of cases and that stemmed from decades of scientific research on work focus and execution in general. But because everyone works differently, you can't say that there's a clear blueprint to success. I can always find patterns and trends, but never a general truth. But there is one thing all these people have in common, something that ties them all together. It is an indisputable truth effects so obvious, I almost can't believe it took me more than 75 interviews to realize it. All along, it had been in plain sight and it does apply to each and every one of the people I interviewed. It applied to me it advice to you as you started your own site household too, and it applies to any entrepreneur or overage either out there. We all just started over people land of you dare to take that first step. In many cases they had no idea of for that commitment was going to take them. I had no idea either, but I also just started and I'm still here two years later. It's kind of odd to realize that just starting, it's the one thing that all overachievers haven't. It sounds too easy, too obvious. But if it was easy and argues, everybody would be working on their dreams and that's nowhere near the case. We all run into the same classic obstacles when we tried to start something new, to step out of the ordinary, to not follow the conventional path. The difference between overachievers and everyone else is that overachievers keep pushing, they don't give up. So let's look at a few of the most common obstacles when starting out and how the people I interviewed and myself managed to overcome that obstacle. Number one, fear, most of us are scared. We don't dare to admit to ourselves, but there must be a reason we keep postponing our own projects. Why do we not there to take the first step to get to work, to follow our gut. When you ask people who have actually started their advice is straight to the point. There's no right time to start. You'll always be scared. Shannon Wilson, a blogger on Medium, said this about fear. Don't wait for the right time to present itself. Just dive straight in and start. If you wait for the ideal set of circumstances to magically materialize, you'll be waiting your whole life because there's no such thing as Tasha, another blogger on Medium, said, the worst thing that you can do for your project is to sit and wait for the perfect moment to start. The perfect moment is now obstacle number two. Having a reason and finding a purpose. Allen truck, UDL illness, a typewriter on medium.com said, at least in my case, whenever I feel like procrastinating, I usually realized that I don't really want to do that thing or that there's some other thing that I'd rather be doing. Jessica Stillman, a blogger, said, reflect on why you want to do that work. I think the key to productivities to find something you really want to do. That's something you feel you should do, or something your parents want you to do, or something that's the right thing to do. So again, the message here is pretty clear. Without a clear reason to keep going, It's easy to stop. Before I started blogging and making content, I was always starting ten projects at a time and not finishing anything. I knew I wanted to do something, but I didn't know exactly what. At least I experimented and try things, but I never had a clear reason to keep going because I didn't know what I was doing this for. It was sort of easy to start but even easier to stop. So I always did stop. Then one day. I also talked about this in the introduction of this course. I literally wrote down a list of everything I was interested in, everything I'd ever considered as a good idea for his household. As you know, I ended up choosing blogging and I told myself I would keep at it for six months and see where it would take me. But what I didn't mention in the introduction is why exactly I was blogging because I wanted to remove as much friction as possible between me and starting. I was already picking things up and dropping them off so quickly, I wanted to make it as easy and fast as possible to start with blogging. I didn't need any upfront financial investment. I already had everything I needed to start, which was basically a laptop. I had been writing personal refer as long as I could remember. And managing a blog is pretty easy. I couldn't do. We start right now. If I could just get to work right away, I had no excuse, and so on stopping and pushing through Zulu rain, a blogger and YouTuber I interviewed, says, if you understand why you're doing something, it's much easier to escape has two parts where you just want to stop and Desi way Peralta, another medium author I interviewed, says, the best thing you can do when you want to start a project is to find a realistic and plausible reason that really drives you to work on it. Whether it's growing in your career or being famous, or getting out of your 95 work. An obstacle number three, not knowing where to start. I just explained how I found my side hustle idea, but I still had to know where to start. When I started blogging, I told myself I would wake up at six AM every day to get to work right away. I had found a project. I was really motivated vote and I was eager to get to work. The problem was that I would get out of bed and made coffee sitting at my desk and then nothing would happen because I didn't have a plan. I didn't know where to start. The motivation was there, but I didn't have any structure. Many mornings when I started I ended up sitting at my desk with my coffee mug staring out the window, wondering what the **** I was doing groups orderly with nothing to do. What I did was identify the one thing I could do every morning that would drive my blog project forward and eventually my business that was writing. From there on every morning I would get out of bed, make coffee, and start writing an article drive. I finally had an execution plan and it works a lot better that way. I'm getting started. Ritchie proudly says, as slowed Sue said, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single-step. Just do something that helps you to make a tiny bit of progress each day. And you'll travel long distances over time. Obstacle number for finding the motivation to keep at it. I knew that she was ICA, a blogger, I interviewed. It, had this to say about motivation. 99% of people quit new projects before six months, maybe more. Make it two months, seven, and you'll find the beginning 20% of the journey accounts for 80% of the total progress. After you get traction. The rest is just a matter of time to get things to pop. This is a very powerful concept. Every day you keep going. 1000 squeaked, not dozens, if not hundreds of thousands of people. By simply showing up every day, you're already placing yourself ahead of a huge percentage of your potential competition. And tomorrow, a lot of these folks will be gone, but you will still be here. This not only gives you an edge, it helps you to create long-term momentum, the more you keep going, the easier it is to keep going. Nicholas coca is a tough ride on medium and someone who was my first inspiration when I started blogging or two years ago, he gave me great advice on how to get started. You responded to my emails when I asked him questions, he was really helpful. Here's a quote from an interview I had with him showing up for five years again and again. And what I'm trying to get better from each state to the next is what worked for me. Starting to work on your thing is the hardest part. Once that's done, all you have to do is keep showing up. It doesn't even matter if you have low days, if you sometimes slag structure or if some of your experiments fail. In the beginning, these setbacks can make or break your motivation. But once you've been doing it for awhile, it won't matter. The engine will keep going. There will be ups and downs, but the overall trend will keep going up. Another quote from one of the many interviews I conducted was, you can't wait for the carrot on a stick of working hard for 30 years for a nice retirement, you need to work hard for a nice life now, not later. That's from gerund Clark. What if guarantees main goals is to avoid the 95 life? Not, it may not be your vision of success, but the message here is the same for everyone who wants to start their own thing. Stop waiting. It's never the right time. There's always going to be an excuse. And none of us are getting any younger. Whatever your project may be, the right time to start. It's now. That's partly what this course is here for to help you get started, whether you're liking structure, processes, ideas, motivation, or all of the above. When I started blogging two years ago, I had no idea how far it would take me. I didn't even know if I would keep going after six months of training, but I kept going and it's one of the best decisions I ever made in my life. The good news is taking a step. It's quite easy to not-so-good news is that you can never know 100% where that first step will take you no matter how structured and organized your butt, that's completely fine because what matters is to keep going through the ups and downs as we just saw, if you'd like certainty, Here's one for you. If you start painting every single day for a year, you'll become better at painting that 99% of the people, if you start cooking every day for a year, you will become a better cook than 99% of people. This applies to any discipline because practice without talent beats talent without practice. On that note, I'll see you in the next module. 10. Recap & Outro: Thanks a lot for watching this course. We're nearing the end now. This is the last section. It means a lot to me you got here, so congrats, and I just wanted to leave you with a two biggest insights from this course. In my opinion. The number one thing is that as I always like to remind people who read or watch my content, productivity techniques work differently for everybody and success translates into millions of targets depending on people. There was some magic recipe to get productive and become your best self. Everyone who jump on the bandwagon. So remember this when you watch or read any type of self-help or motivational content, have a critical outlook on what you're consuming. Ask yourself, how can I make this strategy work for me? Don't apply to the t including with this course. The second big lesson from this course could be summarized in two Easy words. Just start, the powers of self-discipline, commitment, and consistency are untapped potential for most people, you have no idea how far those three elements can take you. And I truly mean that six months, one year, many years, it might not be enough for you to become the best at what you do to make a living from your passion. But when you choose to pick up something and stick to it for at least six months and more after that, it will change your life. You need to consider it like a job and rethink your life around this one activity can be anything. For me. It was blogging and starting to create content because that's what I had been wanting to do for a very long time. Something you love to do as a great foundation for self-improvement and to build up your productivity because you'll naturally feel more motivated about it. It's also easier to push through doing something you love, even when things get tough because you always hit low points, setbacks, periods of time where it's just not working out in those moments. Doing something you love will be a natural reason to keep going. Consistency brings massive change because instead of just living day to day, you start to have a purpose. You get home from work, knowing what you're going to do. You wake up in the morning excited about your project, the weekends doing something meaningful, you start saying no to going out for drinks because your project is about more fun. In the two years since I started my blog, I've put out over 250 articles. 1 million people read my work, and I just started out by posting articles three times a week for 52 weeks in the road. I got in touch with some of my favorite online writers and a ton of inspiring, productive people. I got to interview the author of one of the books that had the most impact on my life. I didn't 68 hours by Laura thunder Come my online following winter by crazy numbers, I put together a 150 plus page guide to where I interviewed 75 productivity and business experts. I started making courses like the one you're watching now, but this all takes time. It builds up over time and consistency is key. If you've ever wanted to try anything for yourself in life, now is the time the world is changing more than ever. So many people who either never start or pick something up and stop a few months after that, I urge you to start working on this project of yours because I believe that story to more fulfillment and happiness in life. Working on what you love, open so many doors and just starting will take you places much further than you could ever imagine. So pick your thing, keep at it, brace for the lows, breathe through the highs and November to enjoy the journey you're on. Thanks so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed if you have any comments, suggestions, ideas, feel free to leave those in the corresponding section of the video probably down below. Feel free to also post your thoughts in the discussion section of this class and don't forget to leave a review and follow my profile as we're planning on launching more of those courses. Thanks again, Have a great day and I'll see you around.