Chapter 7, the system. The 100-day challenge. What you don't measure doesn't get done. Whatever you want to improve, you must have a system to measure progress.
As I said in my previous chapters, I had a student of personal development and high performance for a long time. I have attended seminars, I have been to workshops and invested $100,000 in my personal growth. But one thing I noticed that was lacking in every one of those seminars was a simple tool to measure growth and a system to keep the person engaged and hold them accountable in order to create lasting change. I always felt like I had all the strategies, but I didn't have a simple path with to create progress.
Instead of taking action, I was constantly looking for new information or a new hack because I thought that was what the answer was. At some point I realized it was counterproductive. I was spending more time learning than executing. I didn't have a shortage of strategies.
I didn't have a shortage of knowledge. I just didn't have a system where I could measure on a daily basis whatever I was making progress on. And every time I learned any strategy, I just complicated my action. Had an overwhelming feeling I was a big deal to information, but I lacked the focus to execute.
A little bit later, I felt like I was going backwards because there's no worse feeling than knowing what to do and not doing it. I had to figure out why I was spending my wheels by going nowhere. I started reading my journals from the past few years and I realized that I must have been full of binders, books and notes that I never followed through on. Even though I had heard many times that perfection is a lower standard, I still fell into a trap of thinking that I had to have the perfect framework in order to succeed and then I would execute.
The answer was painfully simple. I didn't grow because I didn't take action. Then I started to learn more about behavioral shifts. I looked at what it takes for high performance to get on the highest level.
I started athletes, CEOs and game changers who broke the status quo. I noticed a pattern. Every high performing gave themselves a challenge for a short period of time. It could be 30, 60 or 90 days.
Then I started to study psychology behind some of the smartest people who graduated from school. The research showed that many who graduated from high honors or were considered to be successful in school never lived out to their full potential afterwards because they lacked the ability to execute. In contrast, many successful entrepreneurs were not good in school and many of them even dropped out. But they were masters at taking action.
They were focused on progress, not caught up in the perfection trap. The key was to create a simple system to track my habits that developed discipline and rewarded consistency. I broke it down in two simple steps. One, you need short-term goals that are achievable and create habits that will support your outcome.
Two, you need a simple plan of action to measure your progress daily. You have to see where you're improving and where you're focusing to be. I took out my journal. I wrote down all the habits that served me and all the habits that didn't serve me.
For 90 days, I kept track of all my behavior. At the end of 90 days, I realized that I'm constantly creating negative habits that didn't support my vision of growth. And because I wasn't aware of these habits, I kept on constantly doing them. Every time I learned something new, their knowledge took me one step forward and my actions always pulled me back two steps.
Let me give you some examples. I wanted to be in the best shape of my life. But even though I had a workout routine, I was eating like shit. I didn't make progress.
I wanted to grow my business, but I was refusing to let go of control and trust my team to execute my vision. I wanted to have a girl relationship with my family, but every time I was home, I was constantly on my phone or checking emails because I was working on my business. Like I said in my previous chapters, there are seven habits of high performance. I called them the seven habits of a king.
So I asked myself, how do I create a discipline to enhance this habit on a daily basis because knowing them was not enough? At the beginning, I thought I needed motivation to work on those seven habits every day. Their problem motivation is that it's easy to stay motivated for one day, one month, or even several months. My motivation doesn't last.
Six-siglass suggested that you need to motivate yourself every day, just like you need to have a bath every day. But what could create that motivation that would make me work on those habits on a daily basis? Then I saw my son playing video games one day. At that time, he wasn't really good at it.
But he kept on playing and playing. And every day, he started the game again, even though he knew he wasn't very good at it. When I asked him why he played the game, even though he was losing, he said, I'm just trying to beat my previous score. That's when I hit me.
I needed to create a game to track and measure my daily score based on the behaviors that I wanted to improve. There were some coaching programs out there that were tracking basic behaviors and using gamification to improve habits, but they were focusing just doing the work externally, not building up the internal and emotional intelligence to create self-discipline. Through meditation and consistent small actions, you can rewire and reprogram your brain to create new habits that will help you do the external work, which makes it a lot easier than relying on motivation. In the chapter, I will teach you the process I use and I teach my clients to use every day to rewire your subconscious mind and expedite your results.
I will also share with you the neuroscience and the research that backs up this process. First, establish as a given that you can't fix what you don't track and you can't track what you don't measure. This system measures your adherence to the seven kings habits every day and tracks it over the course of 100 days. That's the first step right here.
That's the first step right there. Your brain can handle 100-day period much better to handle the concept of this day forward for the rest of your life. That's why many diets include cheat days. You can hold off as slice of cake until the weekend much easier than you can swear off for your entire life.
When you can point to a specific win that you have, your brain will release serotonin. Serotonin is related to the willpower of the leg gratification. Already, you're creating a virtual cycle that you are a person who could delay gratification and do the work required first. That creates a narrative which leads me to the second point.
The 100-day challenge creates a narrative in your brain that you're improving 1% of the time for 100 days. When your brain is engaged in a strong narrative, the brain releases oxytocin. That's the power of a story. When you're keeping score, your brain releases endorphins from the excitement of plane and dopamine from the winning feeling.
Endorphins lowers stress levels and anxiety levels. And your brain associates a good behavior with feeling over for you. Your brain is getting pumped up. This is exactly what my son was going through when he was playing video games.
Even though he scored that time was low, the fact that he was trying to get his previous score given the drive to improve his skills. As I'm writing this book, he's actually one of the top 1000 players in the country out of 250 million players worldwide. As you can see, discipline works better than relying on motivation. By measuring and tracking behavior, you will learn the importance of consistency.
Because discipline is created when you're consistently pushing yourself to do what you said you were going to do. Here's how the 100-day challenge works. It was a journal to do this every day where you could download my free app so you could do this on your phone. The next level app is available for free on Google Play and the Apple Store.
Just go to the next level app.com and download the app. The first step is to create at least two to three sound outcomes for the four main areas in your life. Body, being, business, and bonds. Don't make it more than three.
And don't just pick one. Create two or three measurable outcomes that will accomplish in each area in the next 100 days. Next, create a reward and a consequence trigger. If you accomplish 90% of your outcome because we allow for 10% error, what will be your reward?
This is where you delay gratification comes in. I'm sure that right now you want to buy something or go somewhere and you have the money to do it. By now you're giving yourself the reason to reward yourself. It doesn't have to be extravagant, but you have to keep it from yourself for those 100 days and for the trigger of reward to work.
Try to avoid putting monetary value in your outcome. Reward yourself with an experience, like a concert or a night out. Don't just buy something to see on the shelf. Make it about you.
It should be something you experience and then it's over. Most of the time people remember and experience better than an object. You have to include a motion where you want and you have to delay gratification. Some examples are going to a place that you wouldn't usually go.
Or doing something that may be in your bucket list. If you're going to buy something, buy something that usually wouldn't buy for yourself, make sure you emotionally attach to your reward. Third step is to create a consequence if you don't achieve 90% of your outcome. My experience has been that most people will accomplish an outcome because they don't want to suffer the consequence rather than waiting for the reward.
The consequences have to create some pain in order for you to create leverage. Some examples are dressing up in a clown suit and singing in public and sharing in social media. Or a t-shirt of a sports team that you don't like or attend one of their games. Cheer for them and putting on social media so your friends can see it.
It can be skydiving or budget jumping, but only if you don't like to do that. The same thing that can be a punishment for one person can be a treat for others. So don't bullshit yourself in doing something that you really want to do. Make it something that will push you to the work.
Public shame is usually a good trigger for everyone because we will do anything not to be embarrassed. How to client one time who agreed on selling Girl Scout cookies in his neighborhood, dress only his underwear if he didn't accomplish the goal. If that happened, he might have gotten arrested. But the fear pushed him to complete his challenge.
As you can see, it has to be something painful enough for you to avoid it. Now you have leverage. You have pleasure and you have pain. Here's the thing I play the game.
Every day you go to score seven points based on the seven habits. Here's how the scoring works. One point for working on your body. To get one point for working on your body, you have to focus on exercising and diet.
Half a point for eating something healthy and half a point for exercising a minimum of 15 minutes. That is 1.5. One point for working on your being. To get one point of working on your being, you focus on practicing, business plan to keep moving the needle forward and you get half a point for teaching your team how to become better what they do or learning how to run your business better.
One point for working on your bonds to get one point for working on your bonds. You focus on show and tell. You show love and appreciation and verbally express love and appreciation for the relationships that are closest to you or the people in your life that you want to get closer to. You get half a point for showing someone you love them.
This has to be through actions and you get another half a point for telling someone you love and appreciate them. This can be verbal or written expression. One point for practicing a daily morning ritual. This is where you reset and rewire your subconscious mind to start your day with power daily.
In the next chapter, we'll show you my morning ritual and I encourage you to create your own morning ritual from it. The research shows that every successful high performer invests time himself during the first hours before he begins the day. This is the key habit to create one point for tracking your kind of ability. This will you document the progress based on the outcomes you set up for yourself and the 100 day challenge in the app.
You will have a progress meter where you have to indicate how far you from the outcome and document your progress. If you're using a journal, I suggest you put down a percentage of how far along you are in a specific outcome. One point for documenting your king's code. This where you write down where you have learned from the day.
How did you adapt to challenges? How did you execute your plan? How do you adjust your plan of action? Later in this book, I will show you the formula to expand your king's code to interpret the feedback that I was trying to give you daily.
If you're using a journal, you can keep track of your points on a daily basis and add a map at the end of the week to see how you score and where you need to improve. If you're using the app, you have more feedback because it will show you where you need to improve and keep track of your points for you. There's also a place in the app where you can input your goals, documenting your progress and keep track of your actions. They keep your attention to what you're not doing and what you need to do and how to break the patterns of procrastination, fear and inaction.
If you're focusing on 1% improvement on a daily basis, the idea is that after 100 days, you will do more than you could have done in one year because the system tracks and measures your daily progress. The system is not simple, but it's not easy. Habits are the hardest things for us to change, but now you have a tool, a framework and a plan that will help you break those bad habits and create new habits that will bring you the results you want in your life. But unless you're willing to use these tools and commit to showing up on a daily basis, nothing will change in your life.
Use the leverage of pain and pleasure to create discipline and become consistent on a daily basis. The app will also give you a daily message that I send to my community. These are ways for you to stay committed and continue to show up. I will also give you access to some of the training that I gave my clients.
And this training will take you deeper to help you understand that you have the power to discover your own code to the edge. This system has worked for thousands of entrepreneurs just like you. It's a system that will help you improve your life dramatically. Don't miss the simplicity of this system until you try it for 100 days.
The reason that most people don't have what they want in their life is because they're overcomplicated. They think that there has to be a secret, but achieving success is so complicated that only selective you could do it. The secret is that there is no secret, consistency, discipline, and measuring your progress on a daily basis is no secret. Those principles have been available since day one, but most people are waiting for the magic pill that doesn't exist.
My intention for you is to play this game, like my son played his game and just focus on getting a little bit better every day and increasing your score to become a better player. Take it one day at a time and you will discover that it's not rocket science. You have it in you to create a discipline, consistency. If you focus on your daily habits and use the leverage of risk and reward to get you there, take it one day at a time, 1% a day, and your goal is to get feedback.
So you can recognize your patterns and see what you need to improve on to get what you want in life, focus on progress, not perfection. Your job is to get more consistent, become more disciplined and build the work ethic that will take you to the next level. In the next chapter, I'm going to show you the process that I take myself every day to eliminate the subconscious sabotage or procrastination, fear, and anxiety. There's a daily ritual I practice for almost a decade.
I've told this to all my clients and this is the number one tool they use to accomplish more 100 days than the average person does in one year. I want you to keep an open mind. And even if you've never practiced a daily ritual or meditation before, if you trust in this process and do it for 100 days, you'll get massive results. To download the next level, go to the next level app.com and get started.