in your pursuit of a goal that you care about, you are gonna end up getting in a rut. In that moment, most people give up. I'm gonna tell you what you need to do if you wanna be part of the 8% that actually sees their goals through. If you struggle getting up and getting your day started early, even though you want to and know that you should be doing it, this comes down to two things.
One, it's all mechanism all the time. What are you doing with your night routine to make sure that you're getting to bed on time? Because the reality is, if you're tired, you're not gonna wanna get up. The reason so many people lack motivation is because of as Vincent Barti said, fatigue makes cowards of us all.
If you're tired, you just don't have what you need to face the day. Life is hard, being a human is difficult. Life is gonna kick you in the face. The second law of thermodynamics makes abundantly clear that life moves inextricably towards one thing, chaos.
And the only way to tame the chaos and create order in your life is by pouring energy into the system. To pour that energy into the system, you need energy at two levels, at the cellular level and psychological energy. Now it's easy enough to get yourself pumped up psychologically, but to get yourself pumped up at a cellular level, you have to make sure that you are getting to bed on time, getting plenty of sleep, eating right, and getting exercise and meditating. If you're not doing those things and you're not gonna be primed at a cellular level, not to get the psychological energy, we get to the second thing.
You just don't want it badly enough. Most people don't want the thing that they're pursuing in their life for two reasons. Reason number one, you don't realize that desire is a process, you build desire for things. You're not born with some intense and sensational desire.
You do have imperatives that evolution has given us, but you don't have these intense desires other than like hunger, thirst, sexual drive, but you certainly don't have a drive to go to the gym. You don't have a drive to be more successful at work. That's actually only minorly true, certainly for guys, you probably do have a pretty strong imperative to gain access to resources, but it will not direct you towards the thing that you're specifically going to pursue. So you'll have a vague sense of, I wanna do more, I wanna be more, I wanna be admired, I wanna be at the top, but the top of what?
That's where people get themselves into trouble because they lack that clarity. They lack that clarity because they don't realize that you just have to pick something that you already respond positively to naturally. You encountered it, it gave you more energy than it took. You're naturally drawn to that thing, you wanna do it.
Okay, but it's not gonna be like, oh my God, I need to dedicate the rest of my life to this. I'm so excited about this thing. That is not how it works. You're just like, oh, that's cool, I did that thing.
Now, if you go put time and energy into building desire, which is basically the process of explaining to yourself why that thing matters to you. And as you repeat that in an embodied way, meaning you embody the enthusiasm for that thing you wanna feel and you loop around it and you actually going to get better at that and do it in the world and people are like, oh man, that's so cool, I love that you can do that thing and you get that positive feedback and it was already energizing to you and you loop around why it matters, why am I investing in this so much? And you do that over and over in an embodied way, now all of a sudden six months later, a year later, it really is this raging inferno at the center of your soul, something that you care about and want incredibly deeply, but you have to go down that process of gaining mastery, of really pushing yourself around why you're gonna love this thing so much. And then it actually becomes real.
You become what you repeat. So if you're repeating that you're an idiot, that you don't love yourself, that would become true. Now, self-worth is a very complicated topic that is beyond the scope of this conversation, but just know that you do become what you repeat. So be very thoughtful.
Right, those really are the two reasons that people are gonna struggle. So you have to focus on making sure that you're getting yourself energized for the thing that you're pursuing and then you have to make sure that mechanistically, you're doing the things that you need to do. So you're not tired all the time. But most people fail to get enough sleep.
They go to bed with such wild swings that it's like having jet lag. Like everybody goes, oh yeah, if I traveled to the East Coast from the West Coast and I had three hours of jet lag, of course I'm gonna be tired. Well, what do you think happens when your bedtime swings by an hour, two hours, three hours? You're gonna experience that same kind of disruption in your sleep cycle.
Also people do a lot of things to have poor sleep hygiene from breathing through their mouth, taking in blue light, going to bed at different times, watching TV right before they go to bed, checking their text messages, reading emails, working on stressful things. All of this stuff are things that are gonna disrupt your sleep and the biggest one, which we haven't even talked about, how close to your bedtime do you eat food? I have roughly seven hours between my last meal and my bedtime and it's amazing. And I have found that if I even eat within three hours of going to bed, I can feel the difference.
Now three hours is, I would say good. If you got three hours of distance between the last moment you were chewing, so now when you start the meal, the last moment you were chewing and when you go to bed, you're in pretty good shape. I think you will find that you sleep better, the longer that you stretch that period out. There's of course also a lot of individual variability.
I've heard some very interesting information around carbohydrates and if you have, your last meal has a fair amount of carbohydrates that you will sleep better. Now I find for me that that actually is true. If I have carbohydrates, but they're not high sugar, wear glucose monitors, very enlightening. But if I have something that doesn't spike my glucose massively, so think about doing a lot of greens, things like that, leafy greens, that I actually will sleep better, but I need to have a pretty big distance still between my last meal and when I go to bed.
You can have to experiment with the stuff. When it comes to diet, there's so much individual variability, it's absolutely terrifying, so try it, run that. But I find that most people eat within an hour, maybe 90 minutes before they go to bed, that's gonna disrupt your sleep massively. So be very thoughtful about trying that and experimenting.
Once you get all of that down and you hold yourself accountable to doing all of this stuff, then I think you're gonna find getting up is very easy. But if you don't address how badly you want, the thing you're getting out of bed for, and your physiology, it's going to be a struggle forever. And last but not least, I'll throw in a little bonus here. And that is, you have to have standards.
I'm angry with myself if I don't get out of bed in 10 minutes or less. I'm angry at myself if I don't go to bed on time, because I really want the things that I'm pursuing. So be really thoughtful about that. Don't do it because you ought to find a way to get excited about it, then build rules in your life around that.
And so you're doing it because it's what you want for yourself. And so the reason that you're upset with yourself when you don't do it isn't because you're worried about disappointing other people, it's because you really want it and you're not acting in accordance with that. That's it, good after it. If you have a goal to get up early and you find that you don't and you're feeling badly about yourself, you have to be very thoughtful about how you react in that moment.
I'm a big fan of rewarding and punishing yourself, but you have to be very good at how you go about that. So when you do what you're supposed to do, of course you want to pat yourself on the back, you want to give yourself that emotional uplift of recognizing a job well done. And when you don't, you definitely want to face square on, you said you were going to do it and you didn't do it, and that is a black mark on your date. Now the problem is that when you continue to beat yourself up, now you're going to begin to diminish your sense of self.
I advise that you never do anything that diminishes your sense of self. You want to hold yourself accountable. You want to have a standard, you want to live up to it. I think that's incredibly important.
I think so many people fail to get what they want to go in life because they fail to hold themselves accountable. So you want to set a standard. You want to hold yourself accountable to that standard, but you also want to make sure that you only do and believe that which moves you towards your goals. I have a rule in my life that I only do that.
I'm not trying to live in a post-truth world. This isn't me just deciding that I'm going to believe in whatever I want to believe in. In fact, I define truth as the thing that most efficiently moves you towards your goal. I think that you're most closely aligned to what is true when you're able to predict the outcome of your behaviors.
And when you're able to predict the outcome of your behaviors, I think you're on to what is true. So we're not going to sit there and belittle ourselves and tear ourselves apart. We're going to acknowledge that what we did, it breaks our rule, that we had that rule in the first place because it is the set of behaviors that most effectively moves us towards our goal. So we want to get back on track because we actually care about our goal and we want to do the thing that's moving us towards our goal.
We're not going to get back on track because we think we're a bad person or we're worried what the world is going to think. This all needs to be intrinsic motivation. You need to care. You need to have some reason why you want this thing so badly that you've put all these rules around yourself in the first place.
All the rules that I have, the amount of work that I do, how hard core I am, the standard that I hold myself to, rewarding myself, punishing myself, it's all in service of what I want. So make sure that you want something that is legitimately exciting to you. Make sure that you've spent the time to build that desire in yourself and then make sure that you recognize that the most important thing that you can do to bounce back is to bounce back right away, to not beat yourself up anymore than is useful, to bouncing back, to getting back on track. And then when you get back on track and you say, okay, cool, this happens to me all the time.
I have a rule, I get out of 10 minutes or less. And sometimes, my feel hit the floor right as it clicks over into the 11th minute. Now, I never miss it by much, but when I do, one I confess, tell my wife, I'll go on camera, I'll tell people, I didn't make it today, I like to hold myself accountable. And I feel good when I hold myself accountable because I'm willing to stare nakedly at my inadequacies.
I didn't do it today, I said I was going to, and I didn't, but my willingness to own that, to admit it, to not lie to myself, to not lie to other people, to say, hey, I didn't do it today. That act makes me feel good because I know how effective it is, I know how much I've gotten out of my life by being honest, when I don't do the things that I wanted to do, I'm reminding myself why I want to do them, by reminding myself why I have these rules in place, and then living in accordance with that. And when I don't, to give myself that reminder that, hey, you said you were gonna do it, and you did not making excuses, owning everything completely, and reminding myself that my life is an exact reflection of my choices, and that I made my day a little bit worse by not doing what I said I was going to do. But at the same time, if I just sat there and beat myself up, but what a loser I am, then I'm not gonna get done the things that I need to get done in order to make meaningful progress towards my goals.
So I do it just enough to kick myself in the ass, and then I stop, I get back on track, I reward myself for getting back on track, and boom, it's all system scale. The most important thing that you can do to wake up early is to get your night routine on point. My night routine really begins at 2 p.m., this is all true. So what I found was the number one thing that disrupted my sleep was I would wake up in the middle of the night to pee, and then my mind would start worrying around all the problems that I have to solve, and I would be up for two, two and a half hours in the middle of the night, every single night.
And so I was like, okay, what would I need to do in order to make sure that I never wake up to pee? And at first I thought, well, if I just stopped drinking water in the late afternoons or the evening, I should be fine, that didn't work. And then I realized, ah, this is a food problem. If I stopped eating food earlier, then I can kill two birds with one stone.
One, I can elongate my intermittent fasting window, which is already incredibly powerful. But two, I'm also not going to have a bunch of water being extracted from the food as I lead up to bedtime. So what I do is I have my last meal, I start eating at about 1.15, I'm usually done chewing by about two o'clock, then by the time I go to bed at 9 p.m., I've had seven hours without eating. And I also, I don't drink, I have one sort of final sip right before I go to bed at call at 8.58.55.
But from two to then, I don't have any water. So I'm able to sleep through the night perfectly well, I'm able to drink as much water as I need during, as I wake up, it's say 3.30 to 4.30 somewhere in there. So I'm able to get a ton of water in my system before 2 p.m. And so everything works perfectly.
So that's the first thing that I start doing. The next thing I do is going to the food thing, I want to make sure that I have a minimum of three hours of not eating before I go to bed for reasons of digestion. So even if I didn't have the water problem, not eating, not having food in my digestion is hugely important. Now, the reason that I know that this actually makes a difference is if on the weekend I'm having a cheat meal, I can actually drink water.
I don't have to stop drinking water because the carbohydrate intake will cause me to retain water. So I'm not going to have that problem, if I eat close to bedtime and keep drinking throughout the day, it's actually wonderful. I love it. I can pound water right before I go to bed, something about water at night tastes so good.
I don't want to worry about that if I've had a high carbohydrate meal. So what I found though is that even by eating, let's say three hours before I go to bed, I can still tell the difference in my sleep. But three hours is sort of that maximum where it's not truly disruptive. So no matter what, whether you have trouble with peeing at night or not, you want to make sure that starting three hours before you go to bed, you finish all of your food intake.
That's really important. Also three hours before I go to bed, I will avoid blue light. So I wear blue blocking glasses and I make sure that my computer shifts over into night mode so that it actually turns the screen warmer colors. I dim the lights.
I try not to get bright lights in my eyes. All of this stuff makes a really big difference. Also, I don't do any stressful work at least an hour before I go to bed. So even though I'll keep working up until I go to bed at nine, as I get later into the evening, I do things that are far more predictable and less stressful.
So for instance, I have an episode to prepare for today. And so tonight as I start getting ready for bed, that will be one of the last things that I do literally right up until I go to bed. Because it's something that isn't about problem solving, it's not stressful. I'm not gonna be surprised by some problem that exists in the business.
Right as I'm about to go to bed, I realize a huge spike of adrenaline and cortisol because I'm like, God, I just realized we have some problem that needs to be solved. So it's something that's based around learning. It's usually exciting. It puts my brain in a different mode.
And so that is really useful to helping me begin to move my brain out of problem solving mode and get into a mode that's going to allow me to fall asleep. Also, I tend to 30 to 40 minutes before I fall asleep. I'll get into bed. Now, I know a lot of people say, don't take work to bed with you.
I have not found that to be problematic at all. As long as it's a certain type of work, like doing research as my go to for being in bed. So I can really begin to relax and calm down. I will also, if I've had a particularly stressful day in that last hour, I might do some meditation to really make sure that I'm calming myself down.
And then right as I'm about to lay in bed, and this is the one thing that I'm conflicted about recommending to people is I put headphones in and I begin reading a book right as I go to bed. So as I lay down and fall asleep, I put headphones in and I put a book on, I've used fiction in the past. I'm using nonfiction currently, but it's a certain type of book. One, it's a very long book.
So often biographies about a moment in time or a given person, I guess technically a biographies about a person or a moment in time. And the books often are like 20 hours, 30 hours. So you know that you're not gonna get woken up in the middle of the night by the book ending, which has happened to me, unfortunately, with shorter books. And so I will listen to those books.
They're not where I'm trying to learn something. So it's just something that's interesting. And that puts my brain into a certain zone and I tend to fall asleep very quickly. I'm talking like five minutes quickly or less.
I'll wake up in the middle of the night and I'll rewind the book back to a part that makes sense. But because it's such a big topic, it tends to be something where, whether I get exactly to where I was or not, I can still get the gist. It's not like a story where, man, if you miss anything, you're gonna be completely lost. What happened, it's disorienting.
So that has been really, really useful. And then the last thing that I do is I tape my mouth closed because if you breathe through your nose, it can actually dry out your throat, disrupt your sleep. There's a whole book on this called Breathe by James Nestor, if I'm remembering correctly. And it's really been transformative to my sleep because I used to wake up with a dry throat and it would pull me out of sleep and you know, your lips macking, you need like something to drink, it's terrible.
So by taping my mouth, I'm able to sleep through the night much better, it really was a game changer. I highly recommend that you guys try not only that, but all of the things that I just talked about, I think that they will radically improve your sleep hygiene, which will allow you to sleep much better. You will be far more rested and able to get to the holy grail, which is not setting an alarm. So you wake up naturally right at the perfect part of your sleep cycle, having gotten as much sleep as your body needs.
If you find that despite having really good sleep hygiene, that you're still getting tired later in the day, a lot of people wonder if they can take a nap or if they should avoid it. And to be honest, I think that it's completely up to the person. There are some times where I'm so tired that if I don't allow myself to at least completely let go, meaning I lay down, I close my eyes and I give myself permission to sleep, I just, I can't focus, I can't concentrate. And I've found that sometimes, even just letting myself go like that, even though I don't fall asleep for 10 or 15 minutes, can be extremely rejuvenating.
Other times, I find that falling asleep for 10 or 15 minutes is completely rejuvenating. And other times, I have no idea why I feel super groggy and even sleeping for an hour may make me feel worse than just staying awake. That's always super bizarre. Where you lay down, you don't set an alarm, you just give yourself permission to sleep as long as you need.
You wake up, one would think that you got a full sleep cycle, but for whatever reason, man, when I wake up, I'm like, God, I just feel awful. I feel sluggish, I have a little bit of a headache, just the whole rest of the day, I feel off. So to be honest, it's pretty rare that I take a nap. Even times where, because if I get five hours of sleep, that I hate that.
I can get by if it's one day, but I really, really, really don't like doing it. I would much rather get six hours, six hours, as magical seven is unbeatable. So if I've gotten five, I will give myself the chance to lay down and take a nap. But I often find that it's like, man, the whole rest of the day just never feels like I quite get back on.
And if I've gotten five hours of sleep, the only time I will give myself a chance to take a nap is before seven AM. So that I'm still getting that sleep early. The sun typically for most of the year is still down. And so I'm able to sleep while it's still dark.
Because remember, I finally got five hours of sleep, chances are I woke up around two, 30-ish. So I can, by that point, I have gone, worked out. I've started working for a few hours. And then I find that just wave of fatigue really hitting me.
Then I will lay down. But if the sun is up and my day is going, the odds of me taking a nap are virtually zero. Again, there's a lot of self-experimentation that you should do, figure out what works for you, learning those rhythms, figuring out what are the times, like, can you notice a pattern when you end up getting sleep in and are unable to bounce back? For me, it's like if the day is really going and the sun is up and if I've had caffeine or anything like that, the odds of me feeling better after I take a nap are very, very low.
But this really is something that you should experiment with because there are gonna be times where you may have gotten so little sleep that the only way to function is to get that rest is to allow yourself to lay down and take a nap. So I certainly don't have any moral judgments on taking a nap. I think some people do. I don't, like for one, if I'm flying, there's something about flying.
If I'm flying, I'm just like, I cannot keep my eyes open. I'm like, I'll take a nap. I've heard people like, oh my God, I've never taken a nap. That's crazy to me.
You wanna cognitively optimize. You wanna make sure that you are performing at your best and if taking a nap is gonna be the thing that lets you perform at your best, then take the nap. You're far better too. If you let's say you're gonna work for three hours, you're far better, or you have three hours to work, I should say.
You're far better, napping for an hour and a half and being really sharp that last hour and a half, then you are just like struggling through, not being at your best and trying to get something done. Now, everything is on balance. I work so hard. I leave everything out on the field.
I just don't think twice about taking a nap if that's what I need because I know that I'm not doing it out of laziness. That's where a lot of people get conflicted is they know that taking the nap is something that they do as a way to avoid doing the work and that they do that kind of thing a lot and that they probably were feeling tired because they stayed up too late watching something on Netflix or playing video games or hanging out, whatever, or they had a few too many drinks. They've done something dumb that is counter to the goals. If those things are your goals, by all means do them.
I don't pass any moral judgment on watching Netflix, playing video games, get as wrong as you want, if that's your goal. But if it's not your goal and you did those things, something tells me that now you're beating yourself up over being lazy and part of the reason that you don't wanna take the nap is because you feel guilty. If you play all out all the time and you know that you've earned that respect with yourself, then taking a nap is a no brainer if that's gonna be the thing that cognitively optimizes you. Just a reminder, PSA, enjoy your life.
And if taking a nap is gonna let you enjoy it, do it. If it doesn't and it's gonna mess up your rhythm, then don't, just grind it out. Let's talk about money you're leaving on the table. Every time you pay full price for a health product out of pocket, you could be missing out on 30% savings.
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That's quince, Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash impact pod for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash impact pod. If you let me control your life for the next seven days, here is exactly what I would have you do. I'm actually thinking about turning this into a challenge because I think that this would be amazingly impactful for people, and it goes like this.
Our goal is to get up early and really attack the day so that we can get a lot of momentum going so that we can outperform other people. Remember, I am super competitive when it comes to doing the things that I most want in life. Now I do that from a place of joy and abundance. Think everybody can have what they want, but it's actually fun to go hard to compete against other people and really see how far you can push your life.
All right, it goes like this. This is the ultimate life routine. Number one, we're going to go to bed at 9 p.m. like it's a religion, no ifends or butts.
And we're gonna, as you see, as we go through the day when we wake up, we're gonna do a lot of things to make sure that we are ready for bed at 9 p.m. But we go to bed at 9 p.m. like it's a religion. We do not set an alarm clock.
You can have an emergency alarm clock if you've got a meeting or a flight to catch or something like that so that you just don't have it on your mind. Cause I know some people are so paranoid they're gonna oversleep, actually interrupts their sleep. By all means, set an emergency alarm. But the goal would be to have at least nine hours before our emergency alarm would have to go off.
Most people are not going to sleep for nine hours unless they've been chronically sleep deprived. So no alarm, go to bed at nine or eight if you have kids or seven if you have kids, whatever. We're gonna go to bed early enough that we don't need to set an alarm for me, that's nine. You're gonna go to bed at that time.
You're gonna wake up when you wake up. You get out of bed in 10 minutes or less. Your feet are on the floor. Next to your bed is your gym clothes.
You're gonna put your gym clothes on immediately. You don't have to go to the gym. You can work out at home. I don't care.
We can do all body weight workouts or we can go to the gym and go ham. Whatever works for you, but we are going to work out. We are going to get our blood pumping. No one, and I mean no one hates going to the gym more than me.
I don't, whatever the endorphin rush is that other people get, I don't get, but it does allow me to cognitively optimize. If you haven't read the book, Spark, read it. Studies show that if you have a hard problem to solve, you want to tackle that hard problem immediately after working out. They did all these crazy studies where they had kids go in and do like these incredibly hard workouts where your grade was based on your heart rate.
So it was like, you didn't have to run a mile in under six minutes, but you had to get your heart rate up to whatever, 141, 150 and maintain that for, I forget how long, let's call it 15, 20 minutes. And then if they had their hardest class immediately following that. So for me, it would have been like calculus. If I had that immediately following gym class where I got my heart rate up into that ideal zone, I would perform better there because you're cognitively optimizing.
So I'm going to work out, I'm going to get my heart rate up. That is key. I'm also going to be intermittent fasting. So we're going to get to when I clock that change, but I'm not going to eat before I work out.
So I'm going to work out fast. Then I'm going to go and I'm going to meditate. By the way, I work out for about 30 to 45 minutes. By all means work out longer.
I wouldn't work out a lot shorter. I'm going to sit down, I'm going to meditate. I'm going to meditate for about 20 minutes. I'm trying to get myself into a place where I'm completely relaxed.
No stress, no anxiety. It is very possible, no matter what is going on in your life, to get to the point where you have no stress, no anxiety. Now, if you're really going through something and you, the thought of trying to sit down and meditate is just unbelievably torturous. Give yourself seven minutes of doom-scrolling cats.
It will put your brain in a certain place. It's very interesting. It is the art of distraction. There is a reason from an evolutionary standpoint that distraction exists.
Go for it. Seven minutes only. At the end of the seven minutes, then we're going to go into meditation. And you're going to meditate if you did seven minutes of doom-scrolling cats, and you just don't have extra time, fine.
13 minutes of meditation, so be it. But I think you're better off making it 27 minutes, seven minutes of doom-scrolling cats, and then 20 minutes of meditation. The goal of meditation is to just breathe. You're not trying to have any grand epiphanies.
You're just trying to breathe. Your mind is going to wander like crazy, and it's going to happen a lot. To the point where it's going to distress you, and you're going to think you're doing something wrong. You are not.
The whole point is to just come back to the breath. Come back to the breath. Back to the breath. Back to the breath.
Getting yourself in that calm, creative state, no stress, no anxiety, lengthening the period of time where you can focus on the breath. Incredibly powerful. Now, if you haven't done this for an extended period of time yet, the next thing I want you to do is take a cold shower. We're doing all of this to accomplish two goals.
Toughen up, buttercup, and cognitively optimize. So working out as much as it's good for the brain, it's also to show you that you can do hard things because in your life, you need to be doing hard things. The other hard thing you're going to do that's also good for your brain and good for a whole host of other things, including anti-inflammatory, getting all the effects of longevity that come from cold exposure. You're going to get in the cold shower.
Now, the amount of time you need to stay in the cold shower is going to depend on the time of year and where you live because let me tell you, Minnesota in February is very different than LA in August. The cold temperature in LA in August, not that cold. So, and compared to, and I've actually done this, was it in Minnesota, no, Chicago. I did Chicago in the winter.
I can't remember exactly what month. And the water hitting my forehead gave me a headache. I was like, damn, this is a whole nother level of cold. So doing that versus in LA was a world of difference.
But in LA, I would keep myself in the shower. I think my record was like, oh God. It was somewhere between 12 and 17 minutes. I can't remember, but for, what was it, 13 months?
I did this every single shower. Weekend, no weekend, actually that might be a lie. Every shower Monday through Friday, that's correct. I think on the weekends, I allowed myself a warm shower to hold me to that.
I can't remember. But for 13 months, I took so many cold showers, it was horrifying. In fact, I stopped. I promised myself I'd do it for 30 days.
I did it for 13 months. I began to resent my shower. But it is extremely powerful for doing things that are difficult. So we're going to do the cold challenge.
Expose yourself for the cold, as long as you can possibly bear. Extend that period of time. You should be shivering before you get out of the shower. Like uncontrollably shivering.
That is a good way of knowing if you've been in long enough. Now again, in Minnesota, in February, it's going to happen a lot faster than a warm climate later in the year. But get cold exposure. After that, we're going to go to our important things list.
And we're going to work our way down the most important things that we can be doing in order to make meaningful progress towards our goals. Once we finish all of that, I know you're going to have to do a lot of work to pay bills and all that good stuff fair enough. Go to your job, crush it. Then we're going to get into the intermittent fasting zone.
So there are two ways to handle this. Way number one is that you can stop eating really early, and then you're going to eat breakfast. Or you can stop eating a little bit later, call it five, six o'clock at night. But then you can't have your first meal until much later in the next day.
The rule of thumb is 16 hours of fasting is about right. I try to push that to on average about 17, 17 and 1.5 hours when averaged over a full week. But during the week, that tends to mean that I'm not having a meal for about 18 to 19 hours. And then on the weekend, it's closer to 15, 16 hours.
So I track that over a year and 1.5, and that's what it came out to be on average. If you do all of those things, your life will be unrecognizable. And I hope that if you do that for seven days, that you're not going to want to quit, because it really will transform your entire life. Once you get initially started in the pursuit of your goal, of trying to improve yourself and become something more, something better, the key is consistency and follow through.
Consistency and follow through. You become what you repeat. The reason that anybody successful becomes successful is because, to quote Winston Churchill, they can go from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. The problem is the human animal has chosen a tactic of using culture in order to have generational progress.
So a horse will come out doing all the things that a horse can do in 20 minutes, but horse culture doesn't progress because they come hardwired with everything and they have for thousands of years and they make no progress. Whereas humans, a generation 10,000 years ago invented the wheel and we're all still using it now. But in taking that strategy, what ends up happening is that you really do become the thing that you repeat the thing that you do consistently. And if you begin slacking off of that, then you don't end up making that progress.
You certainly can't maintain that progress. You have to be very, very thoughtful about what you repeat because it is going to have a profound impact on your life. Now, the vast majority of people end up just breaking. They end up quitting.
The reason that I've had the kind of success that I've had in my life is simply because I understand that iteration is how we make cultural progress. It's what I call the physics of progress. Most people, when they're running the physics of progress, when they get to the point where they have to evaluate their results, they end up lying to themselves and making it somebody else's fault. Now, the physics of progress are really simple.
It's the scientific method, recontextualized for whatever goal you're trying to achieve. And it goes like this. You come up with a hypothesis. If you have information that can inform that hypothesis, that is much better.
But if you don't, when you're beginning, call it your best guess. You're taking your best guess is how you go from where you are to achieving your goal. There is inevitably going to be an obstacle in your way and your best guess is about what do I need to do to overcome that obstacle, to make meaningful progress towards my goal. Then you're going to turn that hypothesis into something that you can actually do.
Then you're going to turn that. You're going to actually go do that thing. And then you're going to get a result from that thing. It is almost certainly going to fail to some extent, which is fine because failure is the most information rich data stream on planet Earth.
But you have to learn from the failure. To learn from the failure, you have to be willing to admit that you made one. Most people will not admit that they made a mistake. And so they get stuck at that level.
And in that moment, they say, it was the world. It's because I was born in the wrong time. My parents were done. The world doesn't want somebody who looks like me to succeed.
Whatever excuse they use to make it somebody else's fault. Now remember, the most terrifying thing about excuses is that they are valid. I'm not saying that those things aren't real. I'm not saying that the world isn't trying to hold some people back.
I'm just saying, it doesn't matter. You have to overcome it no matter what. So in the moment where you tried this thing and it didn't work, don't spend your time and energy focusing on how something else stopped you. Even though I will grant you, it's true.
The world is trying to stop everybody from doing everything. It just is the reality. Accomplishing something meaningful is freakishly difficult. So don't focus on that it's more difficult for you.
It just doesn't matter. You're just going to have to work harder. You either want to accomplish that thing in your life or you don't. And you're going to give up.
That's the reality. The people that get what they want. The people that absolutely demand that they're going to keep going until they get that thing. So in that moment, when you're very tempted to focus on how other things have stopped you, you're not going to.
What you need to do is be consistent. So in that moment, you're going to say, what could I have done differently to get a better result? And that's when the physics of progress loops. Now you come up with a more informed hypothesis.
You learned your lesson. You figure out what you need to do that's going to be a little bit better than last time. You turn that into a thing that you can do. You do that thing.
It will fail to some extent. You stare nakedly at your inadequacies. You figure out what you need to do to make it a little bit better. And the process begins again.
That is why you have to be consistent. But the reality is that most people break. Most people cannot go from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. They end up breaking.
They end up thinking that either there's something wrong with them or that the world is against them. And because they don't want to deal with the pain and suffering of having to face their own inadequacies or they give up because they just think that the world is against them, they don't make progress. Because you have to be able to fail a lot to learn from those failures. If I'm right that humans, as a species, have chosen culture as the learning mechanism, then you have to run the loop that culture demands, which is to try something.
It fails. You iterate and you get better. That works at the societal level over millennia. And it works at the individual level in an acute thing, where you just have to figure out why didn't that work and keep going.
But the truth is difficulty, boredom, struggle, pain, breaks almost everyone that it touches. And I will remind us all, 92% of people fail to achieve the goal they set for themselves. And the reason is that all of that difficulty just stops people because they don't have the right mindset. They don't realize that they need to fail.
They don't realize that failure does not make them a failure. So you're going to have a ton of failure in your life. You have to contextualize it as the most advantageous thing that could happen to you. So when I fail, it stings, it sucks.
I hate it. I want everything that I do to work the first time. And I want to make maximum progress as fast as humanly possible. But once I realize that just isn't the way that things work, and even people like Elon Musk who I think are abnormally intelligent, they realize, oh, I have to fail a lot.
I have to try things and see what works and what didn't. There is no way around being in the messy middle. There's no way to think or hypothesize your way to what's going to work the best. You have to get in there and try things.
Even somebody that's thinking philosophically has to be able to get in there and battle their ideas and take their ideas out to other people. Even Einstein went out and made sure that his ideas were battle tested not only through experimental physicists, but also just his friends that were other people that were able to beat up his ideas and poke holes in them. And if you're not willing to put your ideas to the test, if you're not willing to try things and see what fails, then you will forever be stuck thinking and not making any progress. You really want to be doing, be a doing machine, somebody that's out there trying, but that means you have to risk embarrassment.
And embarrassment is one of the things that destroys so many goals because people don't want to admit that they were struggling. People don't want to admit that they were having a hard time. And so they either don't tell people about the goal, which is a huge mistake. You want to tell as many people as you can.
It's part of the process of building desire. You want to tell people, I'm going to do this thing and it really matters to me. And I'm going to accomplish it by this date. Now, all eyes are on you, but that's one of the ways you're going to stick to what you're doing.
The whole point is that you have to repeat, repeat, repeat, be resilient, be gritty, stick with it, try, fail, try, fail, over and over and over as you get better at overcoming those obstacles, then you have to be willing to push through all of that difficulty to know why you're doing the things you're doing and to understand that that's just the process. So guys, I'm telling you, if you really want to achieve something absolutely powerful in your life, you've got to be persistent. If you haven't already, be sure to read the book, Grit by Angela Duckworth. It's an amazing expose on how to be gritty if you're not already.
The process that I use for achieving my goals is really simple. First and foremost, you want to make sure that you cognitively optimize. I cannot stress that enough. So much of my life is about doing things to make sure that my brain is working well.
They look like this. Number one, get sleep. Do not use an alarm. Most people set an alarm.
Stop. I built three multi-million dollar companies, one of those being a billion dollar company all without setting an alarm. Do I occasionally set an emergency alarm for something like a foreign flight? Yes, but for the most part, I don't use an alarm.
I'm talking like 99% of my days, I do not set an alarm. I want to make sure that I get all of the sleep that my body needs. Why? Because I'm able to be more efficient.
People mistake grinding around the clock and becoming less efficient because they're tired with actually getting more done. What you want to do is make sure that you have a very high output of achievement per waking hour. So I check in with myself about every three hours to make sure that I'm being productive. If you're not being productive, nothing else matters.
So go to bed early. I go to bed at 9 p.m. I don't use an alarm. I typically sleep six to seven hours.
That's changed. If you've heard of a content where I say five to six hours, right now I'm in a cycle where I'm sleeping closer to my average is probably just under seven hours. So I never know what that's going to be. It tends to be regulated by the amount of stress in my life.
So I'm getting roughly seven hours of sleep. So that means that if I go to bed at 9 p.m. I'm up at 4 a.m. I have to rule in my life that if I'm awake Monday through Friday, I'm either working or working out.
I give myself only 10 minutes to get out of bed. Why? Because I struggle to get out of bed. Just is a thing.
It's always been a thing for me from the time I was a kid, my dad would have to drink me out of bed in the morning to there was a period in my early to mid 20s where I was laying in bed four to five hours a day and just could not bear to get out of bed. It's absolutely ridiculous. Even I am completely scandalized by the reality that to this day despite all of the things that I've accomplished, I have to fight myself just to get out of bed. So that's a reality.
I accept that so I gave myself a rule that I had to be out of bed in 10 minutes or less. Right next to my bed, I keep headphones. So I put my headphones on, I begin researching. Thus second, I wake up.
So I'm researching, technically this gets into a long thing. Right now I'm in a phase where I actually read while I sleep. Long story, I don't think you get things subliminally. That's not that.
But I do find that it helps me stay asleep. I don't necessarily recommend that for everybody, but just by way of being completely transparent in terms of what my routine looks like for achieving my goals. From the second I wake up, I'm researching something that matters to me. I immediately put on my gym clothes.
I head to the gym right away. I work out. I then meditate. I do something I call thinkitating.
The reason that I do these two things, one, meditation is a good way to get your stress and your anxiety down to zero. The reason you want to do this is cognitive optimization. If you are feeling frantic, if you are constantly in fight or flight, your brain is not going to function as well as it could. What is happening when you go into fight or flight is the blood is literally leaving your prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex is the seat of higher level cognition. It's where you future plan. It's where you maintain your discipline. And so when you're in that fight or flight stage, you don't have the blood in the prefrontal cortex in the way that you need to, which is why people end up cheating on their diet.
It's why they end up not sticking with their goals and persevering. So you want to make sure that you're taking the time to meditate to lower your stress, lower your anxiety. And then there's a hidden benefit to meditation, which is why I follow that sort of almost seamlessly into thinkation, which is where I stay in that meditative posture. I keep my meditative breathing going.
I'm staying in that cognitive space because when you are meditating, if you're just coming back to the breath, very simple practice. My meditation practice is dead simple. It's literally what I call just breathe. So as my mind wanders, I remind myself to come back to the breath, to just breathe.
My mind wanders again, back to the breath wanders, back to the breath wanders, back to the breath. It's tragic how rapidly my brain begins to wander, but I just keep bringing it back. Now, when I do that enough, I get into a calm and creative state. When I'm in a calm and creative state, unique areas of my brain begin to talk to each other.
And so I will come up with very interesting solutions to problems that I won't get when I'm not in that state. So this is why people will often say, I need to sleep on that problem because your brain goes through that cycle that's very much like a meditative state as you're falling asleep and then waking up again. You pass through a very similar state. So I will call that calm and creative.
So one time in that calm and creative state, now I begin to get these, I give myself a problem to solve before I sit down and meditate. So I know what I'm working on. It's tied to my important things, which we'll get to in a minute. But I sit there and I know what the problem is gonna be that I'm gonna start working on when I'm in that calm and creative state.
And then I'll allow myself to take notes as interesting ideas come up. I'm gonna journal on that, which I would not do during the meditative part where I'm just coming back to the breath, back to the breath, back to the breath. And I do that for as long as I need to, to get to zero stress, zero anxiety, calm, creative. One time there, maybe five minutes, maybe 45 minutes.
If I'm really stressed out, but one time there, then I move over into think-tation and I begin noodling on those hard problems. Once I finish that, then I'm gonna go into my important things. Now, how do I know when to stop think-tating and move on to important things? I have found that at some point, I begin running out of really fruitful novel ideas.
And once I feel like I'm kind of trying to force it, then I'm like, all right, let's just now move into executing on my important things. So now that I'm in my important things, which is a list that I keep constantly maintained. So I know what the top things are that I should be working on. So I'm not spending that time thinking about what I should be doing.
I just go straight into execution mode. So then I start going down the list, doing them in order. Now, the way to execute on something is very much in order. So first thing, you're gonna do everything on that thing that you can do until you've pushed it as far as you can go.
And now you're waiting on other people, and then you're gonna move on to the next thing. You're gonna do everything that you can on that until you're waiting on other people. And then you're gonna push it off. So on and so forth down your list.
Now, my important things list is predicated on my goals. So the very important thing to understand about the nature of goals is that they make demands. If you wanna win a championship in swimming, then you need to do the things that a swimmer, trying to win a gold medal by a certain date, would need to do. It's gonna dictate how you eat, how you sleep, how you train, how you talk to, how you think, all of that stuff.
And so you have to, one, get good at identifying what your goals demand, and then two, you have to be good at actually sticking to the things your goals demand, which this is where most people fall down because it gets boring and it gets difficult. So you've gotta be able to push through. All right, so I work my way down my important things list. Once I finish doing that, then I, because I'm the CEO of a company, at that point, then I'm gonna begin to engage with my team.
I'm usually working for about four to five hours on the things that I know that I should be doing to have the highest, most efficient impact on the company. And then, because I know a big part of my job is orchestrating people, making sure that they're focused on the things that they should be answering questions and the like, then I go and I engage with the company. And then I take meetings based on what's important and how time aligns, it just is what it is. I take meetings until 6 p.m.
I try to cut off, there's one meeting that I have a week because we're dealing with a company in China that goes until 730, at 730. It's only one day a week that I do that most of the time my last meeting ends at six. And then for the rest of the time, for the next three hours, I go back into my mode of controlling my time, making sure that I'm working on things that I need to do, including making sure that my important things list is up to date and I'm working on all the loose ends for the day to make sure that everybody has what they need to start the next day, all that good stuff, which gives me the ability in the morning to take advantage of my peak cognitive ability. Now, one of the reasons I've ended up structuring my day like that is because I found that in the morning, I'm super sharp, I've got these creative ideas, I'm able to really make progress, create space for myself.
Whereas in the evenings, I'm a little bit slower, I'm not quite as efficient as I am early in the day. And so it remains easy for me to be reactive, but it's much harder for me to be proactive. That's just me, maybe you're the complete opposite, structure your day around you. So in the evenings, I can remain very useful as I respond to people's questions and things like that, as I come over my important things list, all of those things I find much easier to do in the evenings.
And in the last hour before I go to bed, whenever I can, and this unfortunately breaks apart sometimes, but whenever I can, I want that last hour to be work, but to be something I'm really excited about. Now you wanna be very thoughtful about how you structure your life because you should love what you're working on. Now, I know that that can be very difficult as somebody who has a period in my life absolutely hated my job, I completely understand, but you want to push yourself to get to the point where you at least have a part of your job that you absolutely love. So that's how I spend that last hour of my day is only working on when I can, something that I'm really excited about.
And that helps combat fatigue, and it also helps me get ready for bed because you don't want to be dealing with something super stressful as you're getting ready for bed. And another thing that I do just by way of sleep hygiene is that I make sure that I am not getting blue light into my eyes towards the evenings. I think that's very important. So starting three hours before I go to bed, I'm wearing blue blocking glasses.
My computer is set to go into night mode. So at sunrise, the blue light comes back on and at sunset the blue light turns off. I think that kind of thing can be very advantageous as for my diet, which is another key part of cognitively optimizing. I do intermittent fasting seven days a week, 365 days a year, including Christmas Day.
And I do that because it makes me feel better. So it's not even for vanity or to be cool. It's just I feel better when I do that. So I do, I average, I track this for about 18 months every day.
And it averaged 17 hours, including weekends, holidays and all that. So there are course times where that window is more narrow, but the least, man, the least I knowingly go to is 14 hours. So that's the least amount of time that I'll go between my last meal and my first meal the next day, like I said, even on a Christmas day or something like that, I'm gonna have at least a 14 hour window, again, just to protect my stomach and make sure that I feel great. And that will on the weekdays mean that I'll go sometimes 18, 19, sometimes 20 hours without a meal before I eat.
And I eat my last meal at about two p.m. Sometimes a little before, sometimes a little after, but that's roughly there. And then I don't have my next meal until eight, nine, sometimes 10, 11 o'clock. So that is my process.
And I think that there's a lot of things that virtually everybody could use from that to build a very effective process. If you want to really make progress in your life, one of the keys is gonna be to track that process. Now, the way to think about getting better is you wanna get incrementally better. The problem is if you're trying to get incrementally better, you're basically gonna stand still.
So you wanna be asking the famous question that Peter Thiel asked, which is how do I make my 10-year plan happen in the next six months? When you start thinking like that, it really does shift your thinking into having a radically different approach. I think one of the big problems that people have when they're trying to make progress is a set of goal that's quote unquote realistic. And when it's realistic, it's not very exciting.
I teach a whole class on the process of setting goals. And one of the things that I tell people is you have to set goals that are exciting. There's a whole bunch of research on this that shows the people that are most likely to stick with their goals are the people that set a goal that is truly exciting to them. The goals that are gonna be exciting are gonna be big goals.
That's just the way the human mind is wired. I'm telling you right now, there is an evolutionary imperative that has been embedded in your brain and there's no way around it that demands that you do hard things. I think from an evolutionary perspective that makes sense because staying alive was hard. And if we didn't get an intrinsic emotional reward from doing hard things, we would've died out.
So we are all the ancestors of people that got off a little bit on doing hard things. So when you don't do hard things, you don't get that positive feedback loop. You feel a sense of dis-ease. And so many people have that sense of unease and they think that I need to go retire and my life needs to be more relaxed.
I need to be in a beach and where this all sucks. It's not true at all. I'm telling you right now, the thing that you need to do is find meaning and purpose and go after it. Go after it in a big way.
Set yourself a crazy goal that you really believe in, that you really think life would be better if I do this thing, if I achieve this. And even if I fail, man, I would've spent my life well trying to contribute to that. If you build your life around that and go all out, man, trying to make something that you really believe and come true, to bend the world to your will, to close your eyes and imagine a world that is better than this one, open your eyes and then execute to make that world come true. You will love your life.
That's the key to find something that you really believe in and then go all out after it. Now, to track all of this progress, you really do want to be journaling, writing things down, checking things off. How many days did you stick to what you said you were going to do? This can be such an amazing way to gamify your own life is to just have a calendar, digital or physical.
Go through and mark off the date. Did you do what you said you were going to do yes or no? And then tally up for the week, for the month, for the year. What percentage of days did I do what I said I was going to do?
Now, in this moment, you can lie, 100%, you can lie. But if you lie, when you look at that calendar, you're not going to feel the way you want to feel. You're going to feel like a liar. You're going to know that you're a fraud.
The whole idea is to feel a certain way when you look at that calendar, to be like, I did the thing that I said I was going to do. And I feel really awesome about that. So it is truly one of those things. The only person that you're going to cheat if you're lying about this is yourself.
So come up with whatever way you can to track this stuff, whether it's a spreadsheet, whether it's checking things off an calendar. If I'm completely honest about what I do, I check in with myself every three hours. I don't keep a written tally, but I do reward myself emotionally. Whenever I do the thing I said I was going to do.
So the first one for me is did I get out of bed in 10 minutes or less? If I did, I get to feel good about myself. If I didn't, two things happen. One, I don't get to feel good about myself.
I want to give myself that jab in the ribs. If you said you were going to do it and you did not do it, and the number two I will confess to my wife or tear to the community out there that I didn't do that day. I didn't meet my goal. And so by checking in with myself in real time, I'm able to see.
The other is when you're setting goals, it is absolutely critical that all of your goals have a metric associated with them so that you know the exact metric that you want to hit. So you know if you're making progress. So often when people get into the physics of progress, they didn't set a metric by which they're going to judge their goal. So they don't actually know if they're making progress.
You want your goals to be specific. You want your goals to have metrics. The reason that I emphasize that so much is most people avoid metrics. They avoid dates.
They avoid those specifics because then they and others will know if they're actually making progress. If you don't want the specifics, it means you're not actually interested in the actual progress. You're interested in the fiction of feeling better about yourself by saying that you have this really cool goal. And so one of the things that I'm constantly checking with myself is did I live up to the rhetoric, meaning on telling people I want to do this cool thing?
Or did I actually show up and play to win? Did I leave it all out on the field? So do not think that rhetoric is actual achievement. Talking about something is nothing.
Did you actually make progress? And to be honest, even trying, even though I actually do think, and this is complex, but I actually do think you should emotionally reward yourself only for this sincere pursuit. But when you're thinking about tracking progress, you need to be naked and raw about whether you're actually making progress. Now the reason it's so important to do that is if you're not making progress, you need to adjust.
This goes back to the physics of progress. You're staring nakedly at your inadequacies. You're asking, what could I have done differently to get a better result? And if in that moment you don't have a metric to judge yourself against, you don't know how to better inform your next hypothesis.
So the goal of trying something is to learn something. It gives you a better thing to do. I mean, you do that. You make more meaningful progress.
And when you don't make that meaningful progress, you need to understand why. But it really does come down to what gets measured, gets improved, what gets measured, gets improved. If you don't have the measurement, you won't know whether you're making progress. You won't have the emotional steam that you need to force yourself to actually dig in and figure this out.
So gamify and make sure that you have metrics. You do those two things, and you will make massive progress. If you want to know if you're setting the bar too high or too low when it comes to goal setting, I'll just tell you this right now. You're setting the bar too low.
Everybody's setting the bar too low. If you think about the crazy things that people have accomplished, whether it's in, I think it's 64 years or something, we went from the right brothers flying a plane for the first time to landing on the moon, 64 years. That's an impossibly small amount of time to think that somebody would have been alive at the time. Like you could have been 20 at the time the right brothers flown and said, we're going to go to the moon by the time I'm 85 and been right.
But imagine how many people would have told you that you were out of your mind. There is so much literature on this. It's just beyond reproach. The people that set the most aggressive goals are the ones that end up achieving their goals.
Now the reason is, because there is complexity here, the reason is that it gets you excited enough to go out and pursue this thing, to be able to attract other people to your goal. That's a huge thing you're going to learn. If you have a goal that's really exciting, and when people think about getting meaning and purpose in their life, and they think about, oh my god, I could be a part of a team that takes us to the moon, or I could be a part of a team that terraforms Mars, or I could be a part of a team that ends world hunger, or deals with climate change, whatever the thing is, it gets you excited. When it is a gigantic goal, it actually motivates people.
Now, you also, the people that achieve their goals, have a path to getting there. So it can't be a pipe dream. You have to actually know how you're going to march towards that thing. And if it's a business, you need to know how you're going to generate revenue all along the way.
It is incredibly difficult. But you do want to make sure that you're setting a bar that is within the realm of physics. You don't want to be throwing something so far into the trees that it is literally impossible. If you have to invalidate the laws of physics, I will tell you that that's not very interesting.
And then one thing that you want to also think through is is it something that you could achieve in your lifetime? And if it's not something you could achieve in your lifetime, are you OK being somebody that's going to lay a brick towards building that thing? And there's that old adage that you want to plant trees under whose shade you will never sit. So there's very many honorable things that people could do that they're not going to reap the ultimate benefits of, that they understand that there are only going to be one brick in that wall.
Think about all the people that have given their entire professional careers to solving cancer, which remains unsolved, countless, amazing, brilliant minds have given themselves over that completely knowing all they're going to do is lay one brick in what will ultimately be the building that is that solution. But be honest, think about that. But make sure that you have a path to get there. That's the key.
It's got to be exciting. And you've got to see a path. But you want to make sure that you're really going after something that's going to inspire you for the long run. Because remember, the reason that most people quit is because they are broken by how boring and difficult things get.