You’re not gonna like this. You’re really not gonna like this.
I’m not going to talk about meditation, reading, affirmations, visualizing your success or any of that stuff.
Instead, I’m going to share with you my simple morning routine. I don’t know what’s the best part of it, but I know it works for me.
The one thing I can guarantee you is that there’s one component in there which has been proven to maximize your chances of success for thousands of years.
Here goes:
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Last June I bought a Garmin Vivosmart HR activity tracker, primarily for two reasons:
While I happily would’ve shelled out 125 € for just those two features alone, there are a few other perks to wearing one of these around the clock. One of them is sleep tracking.
What I’m about to say as a result of it is not going to be popular and it’s definitely not politically correct. At the very least though, it’s food for thought.
For the past five months, I’ve been sleeping less and I think it’s the right choice. Let’s put that into context.
They say there is no such thing as overnight success. Well, I’m an overnight success when it comes to habits.
I can drop and pick up habits, literally overnight. It’s not spectacular. No huge changes. No crazy, outrageous declaration. I just do it. Nobody notices.
And suddenly, I have a new thing I’m practicing, every single day.
On the outside it’s super lame – big whoop, so now a guy flosses every day – but when you know that habits are how you win the game of life, this actually isn’t quite so lame at all.
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On 29th of September 2016, I moved to Munich. Two days later, my mattress still lying on the floor in the middle of my room, I went to one of the many college libraries at 11 AM and opened my laptop. I worked on Four Minute Books all day until 6 PM, before going home and assembling my bed.
(yup, left it like this)
Moving to one of, if not the most expensive city in Germany was an all-in move for me. No more half-assing. No more part-time freelance, part-time writing. It’s all-in or nothing on two fronts:
What’s surprised me is the ease with which I’ve catapulted my work ethic into high gear. Today, I’d like to give credit to the man, who’s largely responsible for it: Gary Vaynerchuk. Welcome to the GaryVee Matrix.
I’ve learned all of these from Gary Vaynerchuk. Thank you for teaching a 25-year-old what most 65-year-olds still don’t know.
1. Self-Awareness.
“You have to accept yourself and go all in on who you are.” — Gary Vee
You might not like who you are, but if you don’t know it, you’ll live your life in denial and can never really win, because you’ll keep spinning your wheels.
For example, you can keep saying you’ll write a novel someday, but if you’re a people person, total extrovert and can’t sit still for 15 minutes, you might be a lot better off just organizing public readings for other writers, because that’s where you’ll shine.
If you don’t know, round up your closest family members, friends and loved ones, and let them tell you who you are.
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Coming up with ways to make your brain sharp is a way to exercise your mental faculties in and of itself. But it’s not the only thing I do.
Here are 7 more ways I send my brain to the gym:
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What you see up there is not a CGI rendering from a movie. It’s a real animal. An inhabitant of the Australian desert called the thorny dragon.
Let’s call him Trey. Trey does a few very uncommon things:
Pretty cool, huh? So how come you’ve never heard of Trey? I mean, he’s not the national animal of any country, there are few clips of him on Youtube and he hasn’t been on the cover of Forbes.
However, Trey, much like his fellow thorny dragons, has a lifespan of 15 to 20 years, which is an eternity in animal land. A few more evolutionary cycles and they’ll close in on the masters of longevity: turtles.
When we look for success, we usually turn to the commonalities of those, who’ve made it to the top. But what if we’re wrong?
Maybe, the only commonality of making it to the top is to not share many commonalities with others.
Read MoreOn Monday, I picked up the official lecture notes for my “Fundamentals of German Law” class. It’s 180 pages long. The exam is in exactly four weeks, and I don’t know the first thing about law.
In a slight rush of feelings — mostly panic mixed with determination — I sat down and went through the first half the same day. Before this day is over, I’ll have done the rest. But not before writing this.
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“Geez, these all look the same! How am I supposed to sort these?”
Every time I fold my laundry, I spend more time trying to tell apart my socks from one another than actually folding. They’re barely distinguishable.
Not too long ago, during a particularly tedious case of color-matching, a thought struck me:
“I wonder if my creative projects should be the same?”
Read MoreYou don’t lose interest. You lose discipline. Without discipline, you’ll never overcome this problem.
When you start something new, it’s fun, easy, you make lots of progress and can brag about it to your friends.
But when that’s what you draw your motivation from, you’re bound to quit the second it gets hard. It’s what happens after…
…that separates professionals from amateurs.
They show up every day.
This is how you overcome what Seth Godin calls The Dip. It’s the phase where you have to put in more and more effort, without getting anywhere. The tunnel you have to make it through to go from average to world-class.
Don’t confuse interest with discipline. You either love something, or you don’t. Nobody likes everything about their field. There will always be fun days and days that are shit.
Just pick something and turn pro.
I’ll see you on the other side.
