How to completely TRANSFORM your life in 3 months (Part 2)

IN THIS ISSUE 

15 min read

Continuing on the topic of last week…

Life can be tough. I’ve seen it firsthand, and experienced it too.

Just under 4 years ago, I was $50000 in debt from college, living in a broken down shared apartment, and just a complete mess.

Here’s how to tackle the 3 most important aspects of your life: your health, your wealth, and your relationships, to reinvent yourself in a short period of time.

RELATIONSHIPS

So first off, we're going to optimize your environment. The quickest way to change your life is by changing your environment. In particular, there are two types of environments you probably need to tweak: your physical environment and your social environment.

Let's start by overhauling our physical environment. Now, I don't know about you, but I've always found a lot of truth in the phrase that a messy desk equals a messy mind.

I've noticed over the years that the chaos of my surroundings has a strong implication for the chaos I feel within.

So, this might sound like a stupid simple first step, but it's truly effective: to transform your life, start by cleaning your room. Seriously, I'm not joking.

To this day, whenever I'm feeling stressed, anxious, or bordering on overwhelmed, I just take a bit of time and I clean my office or my living space.

Not only is this a simple way to reset my zen, but it's a really easy way to get a little bit of momentum, which I can use to snowball into the next activity.

But listen, cleaning is only going to get you so far. Because if you're anything like I was, the bigger problem is that your environment is almost like designed to intentionally mess up your life.

You've got the big-screen television in your bedroom connected to the PS5 or Netflix. Your fridge is full of junk food and beer. Your gym is on the other side of town, and the workout equipment that you do have at home is currently being used to hang up laundry.

If you want to move your life in the right direction, you have to start making the easy choice harder than it is to make the hard choice.

For instance, you could make it so hard to grab a beer that you just say screw it and drink water instead. You can make it so hard to watch Netflix that you decide just to read a book instead. You can make it so hard to spend money on Amazon that you decide just to save the money.

The thing is, most of us have optimized our environment so that the easy choices are even easier. And the problem with that is, as Jerzy Gregorek pointed out,

So again, our goal in optimizing our environment is to design it so that making the hard decisions—the ones that are going to move you towards your greatest selves—are easier to make than the easy decisions, which are usually just chasing cheap dopamine.

Now, there are three spaces in particular worth optimizing in your home: you've got your bedroom, the kitchen, and the workspace. Go through each of these rooms and ask, "What is its primary purpose?"

If it's the bedroom, that's sleeping; the kitchen, eating; the workspace, working. Then optimize for that ideal outcome by removing everything that doesn't contribute towards that primary purpose.

Get the television out of the bedroom, get the junk food out of the kitchen, and get anything not contributing to the work out of your workspace. Boom, you've now made it that much more likely that you're going to actually use those spaces for what they're designed for.

But this is the easy part. Now it's time for the hard bit. Listen, nobody said transforming your life is going to be easy, and this next part is probably going to be the hardest of all. It's time to optimize your social environment.

Now, you might have heart that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. It's cliche, but there's a lot of truth here.

If you hang out with unhealthy people who drink too much and have money problems, then you're probably going to become an unhealthy person who drinks too much and has money problems.

The quickest way to turn your life around is to surround yourself with people who are where you want to be, doing the things that you want to do.

Upgrading your network is the quickest and simplest cheat code for success that I found. But the reason most people won't do it is because it's really hard. After all, we're talking about your friends, and in many cases, your family—people that you love.

Now, a very harsh reality that I had to come to terms with a few years back is that just because somebody loves you doesn't mean they have your best interest in mind. And even if they do have your best interest in mind, they still might not be helping you on your journey of self improvement.

Now, I'm not saying you need to go and cut these people out of your life entirely, though in some cases, it could be what needs to happen.

It can be as simple as going from getting together with your friends three nights a week, to maybe only going out with them once every other week.

You can then use your newly freed-up time to hang out with people who pull you in the direction of your best self.

If you want to achieve greatness, you need to stop surrounding yourself with people who tolerate your mediocrity. This is hands down the quickest way I found to put your life on the fast track.

Alright, so now that we've optimized your external environment, it's time to change your internal environment, or your health.

HEALTH

Confucius said it best:

It's so easy to take for granted the miracle that is your body. It is a marvel of evolutionary engineering that most of us don't really spend much time thinking about when things are going well.

But as soon as something goes wrong, and we're sick or we snap a tendon playing football, suddenly our broken body is all we care about. Now we're willing to do whatever it takes to get back to normal.

But here's the sad truth: if your life is currently terrible, there is a very high probability your body is also terrible. Your idea of what it means to feel normal right now is probably skewed. At least it was for me.

See, I just took for granted that I should be sore and achy every morning when I wake up,

that I needed that cup of coffee to jump-start the system and clear the brain fog, that, of course,

I'm a little sluggish in the afternoon after eating lunch, and that it's only natural for my energy levels to dip in the evening.

The truth is my body was in a constant state of distress, but since I was so used to the distress, I never questioned it and therefore never thought to try and fix it.

Okay, so if you want to transform your health, then there are three principles you've got to mastered.

The 1st principle is your nutrition. So, I never really thought this was much of a problem because I've been an athlete my entire life.

But the most profound effects of nutrition, they're usually completely invisible. This was proven to me a couple of years back when my personal trainer had me cut two things out of my diet: sugar, and alcohol.

Within two weeks, I felt absolutely amazing. My mind was clear, focused, and razor-sharp for the first time, and maybe ever. It was like stepping out of a perpetual brain fog. It was insane.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that getting your nutrition fixed easy, but it is 100% worth it. Here are three easy ways to get started.

• stop drinking alcohol, period

  • it's poison; you don't need it, cut it out.

• reduce your sugar intake

  • cut out the blatantly overprocessed and overly sugary treats

• cut out inflammatory foods

  • some foods known to cause inflammation are red meats, dairy, refined grains, sweetened drinks, and fried food (it’s personal, do your own research)

The 2nd health principle is sleep. If you're feeling tired, overwhelmed, easily stressed, distracted, then there's a good chance you need to get your sleep sorted out because here's the truth.

Most of us are chronically sleep-deprived, which is a huge problem because there's tons of research showing that sleep deprivation is linked to many health problems, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, obesity, and depression. This is really serious, so do not take it lightly.

So, here are the three strategies to get a better night’s sleep.

1. One, go to bed at the same time every single night.

2. Number two, make sure your bedroom is cool because humans sleep better in the cold; it's just how we are designed.

3. And third, make sure your bedroom is dark. If it’s not dark enough, consider wearing a sleeping mask.

Let's get to our 3rd principle, which is exercise.

Have you ever noticed how energized and amazing you feel after a good workout? There's a lot going on inside your body after a hard workout, things that generate better mental clarity, more energy, and feelings of happiness.

Prioritize exercising for at least 30 minutes every single day. Now, there are literally thousands of workout plans out there, but there's really no need to overcomplicate this.

Every single day you do those things every day for 6 months, and your life is going to look dramatically better, I guarantee it.

WEALTH

There are many ways to approach this. In fact, I’ll link a resource that I’ve written for skills you need to develop. And another to improve at it.

The basic idea of building large wealth, is to go from trading time for money, to trading money for time, which in turn makes you money while you sleep.

How can we do this? We build what we called a business.

There’s many resources online, and hundreds and hundreds of ideas, so I’m not going to list them here.

But outside of the act of actual wealth building, one key principle to keep in mind is you need to figure out how to transform motivation into momentum.

Take this momentum, and sustain it through discipline long enough to start seeing results.

Another thing you need to note is that you’re probably not going to make it big the first time.

Growth isn’t linear, and there are many times when it’s going to feel like you’re stuck or at a standstill.

But even still, as Naval said, life is simply an iterated game. You swing the bat 10000 times, you might just hit a home run.

THOUGHTS ON TODAY’S ISSUE?