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6 Tips to Get Your Book Done Efficiently (and Ensure It’s Actually Good)

I’ve culled 6 tips that contributed the most to my ability to efficiently write a book I’m proud of, and I want to share them with you because if you’ve got a book in you, I want to support you in getting your brilliance out into the world!

1. Have an outline.

Writing a general arc of the book ahead of time and making a list of chapters I want to write is key for me. When I start, I start at the beginning and I essentially go through sequentially from one chapter to the next. I certainly change the order of chapters and add and delete chapters as I go, but having something to follow ensures that each day when I sit down to write, I know where I’m going and facing the page is less daunting. It also keeps me on track so I’m not going off talking about things that aren’t relevant to this particular piece of work. My outline for this book had a list of chapters with a sentence or two after each chapter title describing what it was going to be about and sometimes making a note of a story I wanted to tell in the chapter.

2. Have a deadline.

One of the best ways to ensure you get something done is to have a deadline, ideally one that someone else is expecting you to meet and, perhaps even more ideally, some money on the line or something else behaviorally relevant. I knew the team at Hay House was expecting the manuscript on a certain day, and because I respect them and their time, I wanted to turn it in on time (and actually turned it in a week early.) I also value our relationship and didn’t want to sully it by being late. I’m an upholder (if you’ve read about Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies you’ll know what I’m talking about), so not letting others down is a big motivator for me.

3. Get your butt in your chair.

The big secret to writing a book (or doing anything) is just showing up. That’s it. Getting your butt in your chair and writing. Putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and writing. There’s no other magical thing you can do other than show up that will get it done. If you show up enough days in a row, eventually you will have a book. It’s that easy and that hard.

4. Have a ritual.

Every day that I sat down to write, I recorded a quick Instagram story saying I was about to write, lit a candle, said the following prayer: “May I write what needs to be said,” put on the Peaceful Piano station on Spotify, opened my document, and got going. When I’d hit 1,000 words, written for an hour, or needed to stop writing because Penelope woke up or I was cooked, I recorded another quick Instagram story including how many words I’d written, how many more I needed to write to hit my total (70,000 is what my contract was for), and anything else about how writing went that day. Having a ritual kept me grounded and gave me something to do that I didn’t have to think about when I sat down to write. By the time I got to the part where I actually needed to write, I’d already done 5 habitual things and the words just flowed (most of the time).

5. Give yourself permission for it to suck.

You may have heard Anne Lamott talk about the “shitty first draft.” I adore her and this concept. Basically, when I sat down to write I didn’t put pressure on myself that what I wrote had to be brilliant. I didn’t even focus on it needing to be good. I gave myself permission for it to suck. Some days what I wrote sucked and I deleted it. But more days than not, the spaciousness that I gave myself when I checked perfectionism at the door actually opened the creative channel wider and allowed what came through to be even better than what might have if I was trying to make it good. It’s a paradox: the better you try to make it, the worse it is because you’re using sphincter energy to create. And creativity doesn’t come from sphincter energy. Creativity comes from freedom. So if you allow yourself to suck, you probably won’t.

6. Know that this isn’t about you.

An angel I met a few weeks before I started writing this book reminded me that writing this book wasn’t up to me. She reminded me that my job was to show up and that if I did, the book would be written through me. The relaxation I felt when she said this was profound, and I’m quite sure it’s why I got started so soon after and why the whole process was mostly joyful. (I hear so many writers talk about the anguish of the creative process, but I find it to be largely a pleasure.)

Know this: you have wisdom inside of you that needs to be shared. If you think you have a book in you, you do. The world is hungry for your insight, your story, and your particular way of seeing things.

Yes, someone has likely written a book on the same topic that you want to write a book about. But YOU have not. And therefore the canon is missing a book. And it’s yours.

May these steps help you get going, get it done, and complete the canon.

by Kate Northrup 

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5 Simple Things You Should Do Every Sunday Night to Prepare for the Week Ahead

Being productive is all about preparation.

If you know what you need to do ahead of time, you will know exactly where to dive in as soon as you get started. On the flip-side, if you do not take the time to prepare, you will find yourself flustered and uncertain because you now have to think through whatever it is you need to do.

Having a great week does not start on Monday. It starts Sunday night. It begins with what you set in your mind you are going to do, before you actually set out to do it.

Here are a few ways to “get your mind right” for the week ahead:

1. Reflect on what you’ve already finished.

Your to-do list is, and will always be, fluid.

It moves as you move, and it stays put as you stay put. If you don’t get things done, they remain on the list. And if you are always getting things done, then your list will be a growing and expanding reflection of that process (which is the goal).

However, in order to know what is “next,” you need to take a moment to reflect on the status of where things currently are. Look through your to-do list from the week prior and see what you got done or didn’t get done — and then ask yourself why certain things got accomplished and others didn’t.

If something remains on your to-do list for weeks on end, you need to make a decision:

Either remove it entirely (clearly it’s not getting done) or push it all the way to the top and make it a priority to do that item before anything else.

Take the time to reflect, though.

It is immensely valuable over the long term.

2. Organize your to-do items based on category.

This is a tactic I’ve learned from Tony Robbins (although I’m sure many others use it as well).

Go through your to-do list and organize things by category or project, even separating between “Random Life Things” and “Work Things.”

The reason why it’s helpful to organize by category is two-fold:

First, it is far less overwhelming to look at a to-do list that is organized by category.

Looking at a long and random list of everything mixed together, you can feel how exhausting it would be to bounce between so many different types of tasks.

That’s what you want to avoid.

Instead, organize by category so that you can get in one frame of mind and work through everything in that specific category. You are far more efficient when you can remain in one frame of mind for a long period of time, rather than bouncing between different types of tasks.

Organize, and you’ll be more efficient.

3. Do what you can ahead of time.

The best example I have of this is meal preparation.

If you bring your lunch to work, or you pack your bag in the morning, why not do those things the night before?

Anything you can do ahead of time gives you more freedom the next day, and is one less thing you have to think about.

The reason why this is so valuable is that you have more head space to think about what is coming up next, instead of trying to remember all the things you have to do.

Mondays are always jam packed.

Anything you can get done now, you might as well.

4. Prioritize input, not output.

Sundays should be input days — not output days.

The start of every week is always output focused. You show up to the office, or to school, or even to your own desk to crank through work, and you are expected to be in output mode.

Knowing that’s around the bend, it is advantageous of you to spend as much of Sunday as possible in input mode. You want to be feeding your creativity and your soul so that come Monday morning you are ready to go. Think of a windup car. You pull it back, you pull it back, and then you let it rip.

That’s input. And more input leads to better output.

5. Take time to yourself.

And finally, the most important part of Sunday night should be the time you take solely for yourself.

Going back to this idea of input versus output, you need to quiet down and relax in order to sustain yourself throughout the week. One way to do this is to meditate. Another way is to read (a book, not social media), or even to just sit quietly with a cup of tea. Silence does wonders, and in our overly busy society it is a valuable asset we all too often forget. Take time to yourself and sit in silence.

If you can sit in silence even for just fifteen minutes, you will be amazed at how refreshed you feel.

No distractions.

No interruptions.

And then go to sleep feeling ready for the week ahead.

by Nicolas Cole

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The greatest reward in becoming a millionaire is not the amount of money that you earn. It is the kind of person that you have to become to become a millionaire.

Jim Rohn

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This Morning Routine will Save You 20+ Hours Per Week

The traditional 9–5 workday is poorly structured for high productivity. Perhaps when most work was physical labor, but not in the knowledge working world we now live in.

Although this may be obvious based on people’s mediocre performance, addiction to stimulants, lack of engagement, and the fact that most people hate their jobs — now there’s loads of scientific evidence you can’t ignore.

The Myth of the 8 Hour Workday

The most productive countries in the world do not work 8 hours per day. Actually, the most productive countries have the shortest workdays.

People in countries like Luxembourg are working approximately 30 hours per week (approximately 6 hours per day, 5 days per week) and making more money on average than people working longer workweeks.

This is the average person in those countries. But what about the super-productive?

Although Gary Vaynerchuck claims to work 20 hours per day, many “highly successful” people I know work between 3–6 hours per day.

It also depends on what you’re really trying to accomplish in your life. Gary Vaynerchuck wants to own the New York Jets. He’s also fine, apparently, not spending much time with his family.

And that’s completely fine. He’s clear on his priorities.

However, you must also be clear on yours. If you’re like most people, you probably want to make a great income, doing work you love, that also provides lots of flexibility in your schedule.

If that’s your goal, this post is for you.

On average, I myself probably work between 3 and 5 hours per day. On days I have class, my workday is closer to 5 hours. On days I don’t have class, my workday is between 3–4 hours.

Quality Vs. Quantity

“Wherever you are, make sure you’re there.” — Dan Sullivan

If you’re like most people, your workday is a blend of low-velocity work mixed with continual distraction (e.g., social media and email).

Most people’s “working time” is not done at peak performance levels. When most people are working, they do so in a relaxed fashion. Makes sense, they have plenty of time to get it done.

However, when you are results-oriented, rather than “being busy,” you’re 100 percent on when you’re working and 100 percent off when you’re not. Why do anything half-way? If you’re going to work, you’re going to work.

To get the best results in your fitness, research has found that shorter but more intensive exercise is more effective than longer drawn-out exercise.

The concept is simple: Intensive activity followed by high quality rest and recovery.

Most of the growth actually comes during the recovery process. However, the only way to truly recover is by actually pushing yourself to exhaustion during the workout.

The same concept applies to work. The best work happens in short intensive spurts. By short, I’m talking 1–3 hours. But this must be “Deep Work,” with no distractions, just like an intensive workout is non-stop. Interestingly, your best work — which for most people is thinking — will actually happen while you’re away from your work, “recovering.”

In one study, only 16 percent of respondents reported getting creative insight while at work. Ideas generally came while the person was at home, in transportation, or during recreational activity. “The most creative ideas aren’t going to come while sitting in front of your monitor,” says Scott Birnbaum, a vice president of Samsung Semiconductor.

The reason for this is simple. When you’re working directly on a task, your mind is tightly focused on the problem at hand (i.e., direct reflection). Conversely, when you’re not working, your mind loosely wanders (i.e., indirect reflection).

While driving or doing some other form of recreation, the external stimuli in your environment (like the buildings or other landscapes around you) subconsciously prompt memories and other thoughts. Because your mind is wandering both contextually (on different subjects) and temporally between past, present, and future, your brain will make distant and distinct connections related to the problem you’re trying to solve (eureka!).

Creativity, after all, is making connections between different parts of the brain.

Case in point: when you’re working, be at work. When you’re not working, stop working. By taking your mind off work and actually recovering, you’ll get creative breakthroughs related to your work.

Your First Three Hours Will Make or Break You

According to psychologist Ron Friedman, the first three hours of your day are your most precious for maximized productivity.

“Typically, we have a window of about three hours where we’re really, really focused. We’re able to have some strong contributions in terms of planning, in terms of thinking, in terms of speaking well,” Friedman told Harvard Business Review.

This makes sense on several levels. Let’s start with sleep. Research confirms the brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex, is most active and readily creativeimmediately following sleep. Your subconscious mind has been loosely mind-wandering while you slept, making contextual and temporal connections.

So, immediately following sleep, your mind is most readily active to do thoughtful work.

On a different level, the science of willpower and self-control confirm that your willpower — or energy levels — are strongest immediately following sleep.

So, your brain is most attuned first thing in the morning, and so are your energy levels. Consequently, the best time to do your best work is during the first three hours of your day.

I used to exercise first thing in the morning. Not anymore. I’ve found that exercising first thing in the morning actually sucks my energy, leaving me with less than I started.

Lately, I’ve been waking up at 5AM, driving to my school and walking to the library I work in. While walking from my car to the library, I drink a 250 calorie plant-based protein shake (approximately 30 grams of protein).

Donald Layman, professor emeritus of nutrition at the University of Illinois, recommends consuming at least 30 grams of protein for breakfast. Similarly, Tim Ferriss, in his book, The 4-Hour Body, also recommends 30 grams of protein 30 minutes after awaking.

Protein-rich foods keep you full longer than other foods because they take longer to leave the stomach. Also, protein keeps blood-sugar levels steady, which prevent spikes in hunger.

I get to the library and all set-up by around 5:30AM. I spend a few minutes in prayer and meditation, followed by a 5–10 minute session in my journal.

The purpose of this journal session is get clarity and focus for my day. I write down my big picture goals and my objectives for that particular day. I then write down anything that comes to my mind. Often, it relates to people I need to contact, or ideas related to a project I’m working on. I purposefully keep this journal session short and focused.

By 5:45, I’m set to work on whatever project I’m working on, whether that’s writing a book or an article, working on a research paper for my doctoral research, creating an online course, etc.

Starting work this early may seem crazy to you, but I’ve been shocked by how easy it is to work for 2–5 hours straight without distractions. My mind is laser at this time of day. And I don’t rely on any stimulants at all.

Between 9–11AM, my mind is ready for a break, so that’s when I do my workout. Research confirms that you workout better with food in your system. Consequently, my workouts are now a lot more productive and powerful than they were when I was exercising immediately following sleep.

After the workout, which is a great mental break, you should be fine to work a few more hours, if needed.

If your 3–5 hours before your workout were focused, you could probably be done for the day.

Protect Your Mornings

I understand that this schedule will not work for everyone. There are single-parents with kids who simply can’t do something like this.

We all need to work within the constraints of our unique contexts. However, if you work best in the morning, you gotta find a way to make it happen. This may require waking up a few extra hours earlier than you’re used to and taking a nap during the afternoon.

Or, it may require you to simply focus hardcore the moment you get to work. Acommon strategy for this is known as the “90–90–1” rule, where you spend the first 90 minutes of your workday on your #1 priority. I’m certain this isn’t checking your email or social media.

Whatever your situation, protect your mornings!

I’m blown away by how many people schedule things like meetings in the mornings. Nothing could be worse for peak performance and creativity.

Schedule all of your meetings for the afternoon, after lunch.

Don’t check your social media or email until after your 3 hours of deep work. Your morning time should be spent on output, not input.

If you don’t protect your mornings, a million different things will take up your time. Other people will only respect you as much as you respect yourself.

Protecting your mornings means you are literally unreachable during certain hours. Only in case of serious emergency can you be summoned from your focus-cave.

Mind-Body Connection

What you do outside work is just as significant for your work-productivity as what you do while you’re working.

A March 2016 study in the online issue of Neurology found that regular exercise can slow brain aging by as much as 10 years. Loads of other research has found that people who regularly exercise are more productive at work. Your brain is, after all, part of your body. If your body is healthier, it makes sense that your brain would operate better.

If you want to operate at your highest level, you need to take a holistic approach to life. You are a system. When you change a part, you simultaneously change the whole. Improve one area of your life, all other areas improve in a virtuous cycle.

Consequently, the types of foods you eat, and when you eat them, determine your ability to focus at work. Your ability to sleep well (by the way, it’s easy to sleep well when you get up early and work hard) is also essential to peak-performance.

Not only that, but lots of science has found play to be extremely important for productivity and creativity.

Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, has studied the “Play Histories” of over six thousand people and concludes playing can radically improve everything — from personal well-being to relationships to learning to an organization’s potential to innovate. As Greg McKeown explains, “Very successful people see play as essential for creativity.”

In his TED talk, Brown said, “Play leads to brain plasticity, adaptability, and creativity… Nothing fires up the brain like play.” There is a burgeoning body of literature highlighting the extensive cognitive and social benefits of play, including:

Cognitive

Enhanced memory and focus

Improved language learning skills

Creative problem solving

Improved mathematics skills

Increased ability to self-regulate, an essential component of motivation and goal achievement

Social

Cooperation

Team work

Conflict resolution

Leadership skill development

Control of impulses and aggressive behavior

Having a balanced-life is key to peak performance. In the Tao Te Ching, it explains that being too much yin or too much yang leads to extremes and being wasteful with your resources (like time). The goal is to be in the center, balanced.

Listen to Brain Music or Songs on Repeat

In her book, On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, psychologist Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis explains why listening to music on repeat improves focus. When you’re listening to a song on repeat, you tend to dissolve into the song, which blocks out mind wandering (let your mind wander while you’re away from work!).

Wordpress founder, Matt Mullenweg, listens to one single song on repeat to get into flow. So do authors Ryan Holiday and Tim Ferriss, and many others.

Give it a try.

You can use this website to listen to YouTube video’s on repeat.

I generally listen to classical music or electronic music (like video game type music). Here’s a few that have worked for me:

One Moment by Michael Nyman

Make Love by Daft Punk

This song from the Disney movie, Mulan

Tearin’ it up by Gramatik

Terra’s theme from Final Fantasy 3

Club Soda by Ghostland Observatory

Stop crying your heart out by Oasis

Give up by Eligah Bossenbroek (so beautiful)

Heart by Stars

This cover of Ellie Goulding

Fragile by Daft Punk

My Girls by Animal Collective

Rain by Blackmill

The Morning Room by Helios

Dive by Tycho (whole album) — (anything Tycho is good)

Lick It by Kaskade & Skrillex (ICE Mix)

Discipleship by Teen Daze (most of Teen Daze is good) — Also really love Morning House

Modern Driveway by Luke Abbott

Zoinks by Session Victim

by Benjamin P. Hardy 

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5 Daily Habits That Will Cultivate a Positive Mindset

How we approach our work is greatly dependent on our mindset.

If we’re in a good place, it’s effortless. If we’re stressed or unhappy, everything feels exhausting. As important as it is to be good at what you do, your craft, it is equally as important to practice your approach and master yourself.

Here are 5 ways to cultivate a positive mindset:

1. Make Time For Input

If you’re constantly in “output” mode, you will eventually run dry.

Output mode is whenever you are calling upon yourself to create, to work, to “do.”

Input mode is when you are replenishing yourself — your knowledge bank, your inspiration, your emotional state.

Reading is an input.

Watching a good movie is an input. Listening to music is an input.

Meditation is an input.

Sleep, especially, is an input.

You’ll notice that whenever you feel stressed or overwhelmed, “input” activities tend to be the first to go. You feel like you have so much going on that there is no time to rest. Instead, you continue pushing yourself (output, output) until eventually there’s nothing left, and you crash.

Remember, life is a marathon, not a sprint.

Make time for input activities.

It will help keep you in a positive frame of mind, and help sustain you over long periods of time.

Note: Also remember that what you input is just as important. Watching re-runs of Wheel of Fortune is not the same as watching an Oscar-nominated film.

Choose your inputs intentionally.

2. Read, Read, Read

I am a huge advocate for reading.

As I said, reading is an input activity, but more importantly, it is essential for constant growth. Reading is what exposes you to new ideas, teaches you things you would otherwise never have the opportunity to learn.

Reading is a well from which you should be pulling endless amounts of inspiration.

Especially in the morning, reading is a great way to get your brain (which operates like a muscle) stretched and ready to go.

When you read frequently, you are cross-training your brain to stay ready to work. And if you don’t read often, you’ll notice that your thoughts can fall sluggish.

Some people prefer to read books.

Some read blogs.

Some read fiction, some read nonfiction.

I would say: read everything. But at the bare minimum, read something.

3. Surround Yourself With Positive People

You are the sum of the five people with whom you spend the most time.

Look around.

If you’re surrounded by smart people, they will raise your standard and you will become smart too. Conversely, if you’re surrounded by not-so-smart people, then that will become your standard and you will fall into similar patterns.

Part of cultivating a positive mindset is surrounding yourself with people that do the same.

Regardless of whether or not they are successful or good at what they do, remember that their mindsets will begin to rub off on you by default.

So don’t just look for people that are skilled — look for people that embody the qualities you too strive to embody.

4. Practice

Over the years, I’ve come to notice a very interesting pattern (in both myself and others) when it comes to practice.

Confidence is the result of not just doing something well, but knowing you do something well.

When you practice often, you get good. When you get good, you feel confident about your abilities. When you feel confident about your abilities, you take more risks, practice even more, and ultimately become a master of your craft.

Similarly, if you do not practice, you won’t feel good about your skills. If you don’t feel good about your skills, you won’t take as many risks, you’ll get down on yourself, you won’t practice as often, and you’ll make very few strides on your path to greatness.

Part of cultivating a positive mindset is to make sure you are doing all the little things that will help support where it is you want to go and what it is you want to do.

No amount of positive thinking can replace good habits or daily practice.

So put them in place as daily essentials, so you can then focus your efforts elsewhere.

If you can count on yourself to have the right habits in place, you will free yourself to focus and work on more ethereal concepts — such as positive thinking and risk taking.

5. Find A Mentor

And finally, the key to cultivating a positive mindset is to find someone you admire who can teach you how they’ve done it.

There is no faster and more effective way to learn in life than to find a mentor. Even being in the presence of someone who has learned how to master their own mindset, you’ll begin to pick up their approach.

Why this is so crucial, and such a wonderful thing to have, is that a mentor is someone who has already gone through their own journey. They have overcome challenges and found their own secrets and practices enabling them to create their own unique approach.

By studying someone who already operates from that mode, you will learn both what it is that allows them to be so successful, while at the same time going through your own process of discovery — except at a much more rapid rate.

Mentorship can be difficult to find.

Remember to stay both hungry and humble, and true to your own practice, and one day the mentor will reveal him or herself.

by Nicolas Cole

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If It Doesn’t Suck, It’s Not Worth Doing

YOUR SUCCESS MANTRA FOR 2018.

According to psychological research, the anticipation of an event is almost always more emotionally powerful than the event itself.

The dread of asking your boss for a raise is paralyzing and can last months. Yet, once you get yourself to finally do it, it’s over before you know it.

The excitement of attaining some object or objective can become obsessive. Yet, shortly after you obtain your desire, you’re bored and in search of something else.

“We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed. But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them,” says Dr. Thomas Gilovich, Cornell psychologist.

Interestingly, your mind can seduce you so much so that the idea of something becomes more satisfying than the thing itself, so you stop at the idea and never make it real. Ryan Holiday points this alarming fact out in his book, Ego is the Enemy, where he argues that a primary obstacle to success is the idea of success.

It’s so easy to dream.

It’s easy to tell people about your ambitions. It’s easy to create vision boards and write down your goals. It’s easy to stand in front of a mirror and declare affirmations.

And that’s where most people stop.

The very act of dreaming stops you from achieving your dreams.

You’ve played-it out in your mind with such intoxicating detail that you become satisfied enough. You become numbed. And you deceive yourself into believing you’ve actually done something productive.

Consequently, when you attempt the activity itself, you immediately hit a stone wall of resistance. More often than not, you quickly distract yourself from the discomfort with some form of momentary pleasure. Yet, Robert Greene explains in his book, Mastery, that you can learn to love this internal resistance. In his words, “You find a kind of perverse pleasure in moving past the pain this might bring.”

How To Get Out Of Your Rut

In his book, Living with a SEAL, Jesse Itzler tells the story of being inspired by a certain Navy SEAL and consequently inviting him to live at Itzler’s home for a month. Itzler admitted being in a personal rut and wanted to shake himself out of his routine.

Day 1: “SEAL” asked Itzler, “How many pull-ups can you do?” Itzler squeaked out eight shaky pull-ups.

“Take 30 seconds and do it again,” SEAL said. 30 seconds later, Itzler got on the bar and did six, struggling.

“Take 30 seconds and do it one more time,” SEAL said. 30 seconds later, Itzler got on the bar and did three, at which point his arms were exhausted.

“Alright, we’re not leaving here until you do 100 more,” SEAL stated. Itzler was puzzled. “Alright, we’re gonna be here a long-time. Cause there’s no way I could do 100.” However, Itzler ended-up completing the challenge, doing one pull-up at a time. Thus, SEAL convinced Itzler that he could do way more than he thought he could.

The principle SEAL taught is what he calls the 40% rule — which essentially means people feel maxed-out mentally and physically, and thus stop, when they are at only 40% of their actual capacity. Going past this 40% capacity is when it becomes uncomfortable. Thus, SEAL’s mantra, “If it doesn’t suck, we don’t do it.”

The Power Of Objective-Based Pursuits

“The pain is a kind of challenge your mind presents — will you learn how to focus and move past boredom, or like a child will you succumb to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction?” — Robert Greene

Like Itzler who shattered a mental barrier by completing 100 pull-ups, you too can get out of your rut by pursuing tangible objectives.

The concept is: Do something and don’t stop until it’s complete, no matter how long it takes.

Your goal is to learn how to accomplish hard things without continuously distracting yourself. You want to develop what Greene calls “A perverse pleasure” in experiencing internal conflict, and sitting with it.

This concept is embedded in Crossfit. Unlike most people, who check their smartphones between exercise “sets,” at Crossfit, you have a specific objective and you kill yourself until it’s done.

If it doesn’t suck, we don’t do it.

You can apply this principle to anything and everything. You can do a homework assignment and just do it until it’s complete. You can write an article and stick-to-it until it’s published. You can do 100 pull-ups, or run 5 miles, and go until you’re done. Who cares how long it takes?

The Greatest Opportunity In History

In his book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport states the following:

“The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”

Without question, we live in the most distracted time in human history. It is almost impossible to remain focused on a single-task for more than a few minutes at a time.

The law of opposites is in affect. With every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. While most of the world is becoming increasingly distracted, a select few are capitalizing on this fact. There is also a widening chasm between the spiritual and secular — where the two used to be synonymous.

Hence, Economist Tyler Cowan has said, “Average is over.” The middle-class is gone. Either you’re among the select few who are thriving, or you’re like most people who are distracted, overweight, and struggling.

The choice is yours.

When something sucks, do you quit? Or do you push-through and eventually enjoy the satisfaction of growth and success?

Anything worth doing is going to suck at the beginning. Anything worth doing is meant to require pain and sacrifice. Herein lies the problem facing America, which originally was built on the moral of impulse control. What once used to be a country filled with people sacrificing momentary pleasure for a better future, the overpowering message of today is live for the moment.

And that’s exactly what people do. They live for this moment. Consequently, when something sucks, or becomes hard, most people quit. Most people indulge themselves in momentary satisfaction at the expense of a better future.

To make matters worse, the twin “truth” of today’s culture is love yourself for who you are. The self-esteem movement of the late 20th century is an enormous contributor to America’s faltering success.

People are taught to love themselves regardless of their performance. Thus, they justify mediocrity. Yet, Asian’s and other immigrant groups who often are considered to have low self-esteem consistently outperform American’s who have high self-esteem.

Unlike in other parts of the world where hard work is seen as a virtue, the repeated phrase in America is: “Don’t work too hard!” Success these days is to get as much as you can for as little work as possible.

In the book, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld explain thatmost successful people not only control their impulses, but also have animplicit sense of inferiority.

These people may have confidence, yet, they remain unsure of themselves. They have a chip on their shoulder due to being oppressed in some way. So they continuously push themselves, regardless of how successful they become, to prove themselves. They are never satisfied with what they’ve done. They continue to feel inferior.

These very traits are awarded in today’s economy because they are so rare. Again, few people control their impulses, but instead live for the moment. And few people, especially in America, have any sense of inferiority. Rather, most people have bought into the myth that you must first love yourself before you can become successful.

Garbage.

True confidence is earned. It’s earned by succeeding. Not by wishing for success. Meta-analytic research confirms this.

True confidence emerges when you consistently push-through things that suck. The longer you sit with the boredom, pain, and discomfort — and actually create something meaningful, the more confident and successful you will be.

Hence, Ryan Holiday explains in an interview with Lewis Howes: you are rewarded for the work you actually accomplish. Not the promises you make.

Doing the work is hard.

Getting into elite physical condition is brutal.

Building deep and committed relationships is nearly impossible. Most marriages end in divorce.

All of these things “suck,” at least initially, and in-the-moment. However, if it doesn’t suck, it’s not worth doing. And you absolutely can learn to endure the discomfort of the moment to build a life worth having.

If you’re stuck in a rut, like Itzler, challenge yourself to complete specific objectives — no matter how long they take.

Pleasure Vs. Happiness

“A life that doesn’t include hard-won accomplishment and triumph over obstacles may not be a satisfying one. There is something deeply fulfilling — even thrilling — in doing almost anything difficult extremely well. There is a joy and pride that come from pushing yourself to another level or across a new frontier. A life devoted only to the present — to feeling good in the now — is unlikely to deliver real fulfillment. The present moment by itself it too small, too hollow. We all need a future. Something beyond and greater than our own present gratification, at which to aim or feel we’ve contributed.” — The Triple Package

True happiness — joy — is fundamentally different than momentary pleasure. Not to say momentary pleasure is inherently bad. However, it often gets in the way of something more real and lasting.

Anything worth doing brings a satisfaction that distraction never can. Don’t give into the resistance. Push through the difficulty. That’s where a joy that those who stop will never taste.

Said Geologist James Talmage:

“Happiness leaves no bad after-taste, it is followed by no depressing reaction; it brings no regret, entails no remorse. True happiness is lived over and over again in memory, always with a renewal of the original good; a moment of pleasure may leave a barbed sting, [as] an ever-present source of anguish.”

[thirteenthanda]

What is defeat?  Nothing but education; nothing but the first steps to something better.

Wendell Phillips

[thirteenthanda]

Rich Thinking Versus Poor Thinking: Why it Matters

“Thought is the original source of all wealth, all success, all material gain,  all great discoveries and inventions, and of all achievement.” —Claude M. Bristol

***

One of the most controversial chapters in Brian Tracy’s book, Get Smart!, is “Rich Thinking versus Poor Thinking.”

In that chapter, he shares a series of simple ideas you can learn and apply. While I fundamentally disagree with much of the gross over-simplification, there are veins of excellence that we can use to add to our mental toolkit.

(Pause for a second before we continue. Just to be clear, this isn’t an article about going from zero to a million in a lifetime. No clickbait here. No, this article is about giving you tools you can add to your mental toolbox.)

The Role of Mindset

Best-selling author Og Mandino says:

There are no secrets of success. There are simply timeless truths and universal principles that have been discovered and rediscovered throughout human history. All you have to do is to learn and practice them to enjoy all the success that you could desire.

Sounds a lot like what we’re trying to discover.

Fearing Failure

A lot of us do things not to succeed but to avoid failure. This is what Elon Musk calls the fundamental problem with regulators. Tracy writes:

Because of destructive criticism in early childhood and mistakes they have made as adults, they are paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake, of losing their time or money. Even if they are presented with an opportunity, they go into a form of paralysis.

Their fear of failure causes them to create all kinds of reasons not to take action. They don’t have the time. They can’t make the minimum investment. They don’t have the necessary knowledge and skills. Like a deer caught in the headlights, they are paralyzed by the idea of failure, which causes them to never take any action at all.

As it happens, most fortunes in America were started by the sale of personal services. The people had no money, but they had the ability to work hard, to upgrade their skills, and to become more and more valuable. As a result, more and more doors of opportunity opened up for them.

Fearing Disapproval and Criticism

This relates to our fear of criticism and disapproval, which results in approval-seeking behavior. And when we’re seeking approval and acceptance, we’re more likely to think conventionally. And when we think conventionally, we're unlikely to get above-average results.

We don’t want to look different. As a result, we stop learning and growing.

***

“I will study and prepare myself and someday my chance will come.” — Abraham Lincoln

Tracy writes:

To achieve something you’ve never achieved before, you must learn and practice something that you’ve never done before.

If you’re learning something universal you’ll always have an opportunity to practice what you learn.

Putting all of this together becomes tricky.

Often we have the courage to think and act differently, we mentally prepare ourselves for the critical feedback and then we dip our toe in the water only to find it’s not to our liking.

This is where persistence comes in.

Most of us are simply unwilling to sacrifice in order to succeed. We want our cake and we want to eat it too. Most of the people I know that are incredibly successful have suffered some setback that they had to overcome. A lot of people would have given up. Only they persisted. (Of course, there are plenty of people that persist and fail too.) I’m generalizing a bit here but the people who look for the nearest exit when things get tough are usually the ones with the average results.

Something-For-Something

There is only one type of relationship that is sustainable over a long period of time and that's one where everyone wins. Tracy writes:

Rich people are always looking for ways to create value, to develop and produce products and services that enrich and enhance the lives and work of other people.

They are always willing to put in before they take out. They do not believe in easy money or something for nothing. Rich people believe that you have to justly earn and pay for, in terms of toil and treasure, any rewards and riches that you desire.

Poor people lack this fundamental understanding, the direct relationship between what you put in and what you get out. They are always seeking to get something for nothing or for as little as possible. They want success without achievement, riches without labor, money without effort, and fame without talent.

Poor people gamble, buy lottery tickets, come to work at the last possible moment, waste time while they are there, and then leave work at the first possible minute. They line up by the hundreds and thousands to audition for programs like American Idol, thinking that they can become rich and famous without ever having paid the price necessary to develop the level of talent and ability that enables them to rise above their competitors.

One of the great secrets of becoming wealthy is to always do more than you are paid for. If you do, you will always be paid more than you’re getting today. And there is no other way.

Go the extra mile. Be willing to put in far more than you are taking out. There are never any traffic jams on the extra mile.

Fear can often keep us mediocre. We don’t risk being wrong.

Getting rich isn't as simple as changing your mindset. However changing your mindset can go a long way to changing the way you see the world. And when you see the world differently you can behave and respond differently to the stimuli around you. When you do that, you have the potential to outperform.

by Farnam Street

[thirteenthanda]

I know the colour of your eyes (A poem for loving your life while you’re aware of eternity.)

I know this lifetime is only a wooden structure — struts and beams of longing and achieving. I know beyond samsara and economics there are colours I have never seen that would send me into euphoria.

And over there, time is something we laugh at. Like when my son said, Remember when I thought if I swallowed watermelon seeds they’d grow in my stomach? And we laugh.

Ya, time, it never existed to begin with.

I know I’m living on multiple plains, as a violet light ray, as a mechanic in Tibet, and a stellar amoeba cleaning doubt from the atmosphere. I am the Supreme God generating the original and eternal space.

I know that before there was The Word there was (and always will be) Space. It is the canvas of reality and Light is the ink of our story.

I understand how Venus weaves Love into a generous geometry. I worship her, so I know.

I get it.

But I’m holding on to here — to music, and linen, and the white berries that grow by the lake. I love how gravity holds me when I dance. And when I decide to burn down this house and all the agreements in it, I’m going to take rhythm, and the fruit seeds, and the colour of your eyes with me everywhere I go.

by Danielle LaPorte

[thirteenthanda]

The Self-Imposed Daily Challenging Healthy Activity (SIDCHA) series

Most people seem to want improve themselves, personally or professionally.

Reading, watching, and listening to people tell you how you can develop yourself professionally or personally doesn’t change anything beyond give you a bit of information. People don’t succeed because they have more information. They succeed because they act.

Even if you know you should do something, how do you know what?

Marketers are trying to tell you what to do. They promote diets, exercise, how to start businesses, learning business skills, learning to be rich, learning languages, learning programming languages, religions, networking, and so on. It’s bewildering. Each category has innumerable sub-categories. I bet you can name dozens of diet and exercise products, maybe hundreds.

With so many options, why don’t more people find what they’re looking for to improve themselves, their businesses, their families, whatever?

What looks like the problem, but isn’t

The problem isn’t that these options don’t work. Sure, some people are trying to scam you, but many of these things do work.

The problem isn’t even that everyone promoting something tries to find insecurities in you to prey on and use it to sell you their book, dvd set, seminar, equipment, etc. They spend years and fortunes figuring out how to reel you in. Even being reeled in wouldn’t be a problem, at least for the things that worked. If you have an insecurity, each one is trying to improve your life, so feels justified pitching you, creating a bewildering and distracting set of options.

The problem isn’t even the bewilderment of all that choice, despite how when you start with one thing, before it works, hundreds of other people with hundreds of other options pull you toward their things.

The problem

The problem is the insecurity, or desire for something you can’t exactly identify or know how to get. Even if everyone offering you a solution want to help you and can, as long as your insecurity opens you to their marketing, they’ll distract from your goals. They benefit from your insecurity so they don’t want to solve it. They want you insecure.

What if you overcame the insecurity? Then you could pick and choose among options based on what you wanted, not on how much they advertise or how hard they sell.

How?

Ironically, the effective ones have the answer, just shrouded behind their marketing. They market how much better they are than their competition—in other words, their differences—but the answer is what they have in common.

How to find the solution

If you look at what the successful strategies have in common across all the different options, you’ll find what works for them all. What doesn’t work you don’t need. What works turns out to be simple. I find the common elements to all these things are that they are

Self-Imposed: that is, you have to choose to do it. Going to work so you don’t lose your apartment doesn’t count.

Daily: if you don’t do it regularly, you’ll drop them. You don’t have to do it daily, but daily makes it harder to forget.

Challenging: easy things don’t help you. Watching TV, listening to music, and reading don’t qualify.

Healthy: it has to improve your health or well-being. Smoking doesn’t count.

Activity: you have to physically do something. Thinking about things doesn’t count. Writing does. Meditation does.

I simplify this list of commonalities SIDCHA, and here’s a picture of it. Do what’s in the intersection of all those areas and you’ll get the common benefits to all of them.

You can look for commonalities yourself. You may find a different set, but I find this set consistent with my experience with many personal and professional development options and it works. If you find another works for you, you don’t have to use mine.

The Solution: The Self-Imposed Daily Challenging Healthy Activity, or SIDCHA

If you practice a SIDCHA—that is, if you impose on yourself a daily, challenging, healthy activity—of any sort, you’ll get the benefits common to all the things people are marketing at you.

Most importantly, you’ll overcome the insecurity that they use to grab you. Without that insecurity, they can’t magnify it, prey on you, and distract you from enjoying your life doing what you want.

SIDCHAs give you independence, confidence, security, and resilience. They create a platform for everything else you want to do to improve your life, free from distraction, full of direction and focus.

You might say, “But I want to lose weight / make more money / build muscles / make more friends / etc and a SIDCHA doesn’t do that exactly.” You can choose a SIDCHA from any area you want to achieve a specific goal. The point is that as long as you have any SIDCHA, the rest won’t distract you. You can choose more than one SIDCHA if you want to develop in more than one area. I bet that no matter how many areas you feel distracted to try, after a few months of a SIDCHA or two in any area, I bet you’ll find that feeling of distraction replaced by confidence and security.

SIDCHAs don’t have to cost you anything, though you can choose to pay for ones you consider worth paying for if you want. They don’t have to take much time. You don’t need books, DVDs, membership fees, special clothing, places to go, equipment, partners, or anything like that, though you’re free to do SIDCHAs that need them. Personally, I don’t like needy things, so I keep my SIDCHAs simple.

I recommend starting with a simple, quick, free SIDCHA to start you off. If you know me, you know my main one is burpees, which need almost nothing and give huge benefits. Even if you want to do more than one, I predict you’ll find that wanting look more like compulsion from their marketing, which you’ll find yourself liberated from. If you still want to do more after you’ve done one a while, like a few months, you can add or switch to new ones.

Wait, Josh, where’s your pitch?

That’s it.

I’m not trying to sell you anything. I just stumbled on what worked for me after years of trying different things. One of my SIDCHAs is to post on my blog every day and SIDCHAs emerged as something I write about.

If SIDCHAs work for you, please spread the word. I’d love for people to link here and for “SIDCHA” to become a household word. My SIDCHAs have improved my life more than I can say.

You can read all about SIDCHAs, how to implement them, examples, and so on by clicking the table of contents to the left.

I’d love to hear your SIDCHA experiences. Email me.

by Joshua Spodek

[thirteenthanda]

HOW TRAINER KIRSTY GODSO EATS KETOGENIC EVERY DAY—AND WHY SHE’LL NEVER GO BACK

In addition to being a Nike Master Trainer, Kirsty Godso has crafted two workouts—Pyrogirls, which pops up at cool girl hot spot Sky Ting Yoga as Pyro Tings, and an energy-packed HIIT class at Project by Equinox, both in New York City. To fuel her workouts—and yours—she relies on the ketogenic diet, an eating plan made up of 80 percent healthy fats, 15 percent protein, and 5 percent carbs. (Though Godso says she tweaks the ratios a bit in order to get in more protein.) What exactly does that look like? Here, she shares in her own words what a typical day is like in terms of working out and keto-eating.

I don’t like the word “diet.” I talk about food as food and what we eat to fuel our bodies. To me, it’s so much more important to be in communication with your body, paying attention to how what you’re eating makes you feel. For me, that happens to be a high fat, ketogenic style of eating.

The first time I started eating this way was seven years ago. I was 22 and working with a trainer who put me on a 21-day ketogenic eating plan. For the first four days, I felt so tired and grumpy. Cutting out fruit was really hard for me and I also had a pretty bad obsession with gummy candy. Giving that up was hard. But I stuck with it and a week into my newfound eating plan, I felt a huge shift in my body—I felt amazing. “Wow, I am never going back,” I thought. And I haven’t. I’m less strict now—I eat fruit sometimes—but most of the foods I cut out, like rice, I just never added back in because I realized that I not only didn’t need them, but I felt so much better without ’em.

People often ask me, “Don’t you get bored eating this way?” No, I don’t! I’m obsessed with eating these foods because they make my body feel electric.

People laugh at me when I say this, but I was fortunate to be born with celiac disease. When I started eating keto, the fact that I already kept to a grain-free diet meant there was one less thing I had to give up.

Now it’s seven years later and I’m still eating keto. Here’s what I eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner—and dessert—on an average day. FYI: Because I’m a trainer, my workout and eating habits aren’t exactly typical or even recommended for everyone. But this is what works for me. Keep reading for an inside look into my day—and my meals.

Breakfast

I wake up at 5:15 a.m. to start training clients. I love breakfast—it’s such an important meal for me—but I wait until a few hours into my day to have a proper one. The first thing I have in the morning is a protein shake, made with just water and protein. Some people get really crazy with their smoothies, but if you have a high-quality protein powder, all you really need to mix it with is water. That simple shake gives me enough energy to train two clients or teach classes. Then, I have a proper breakfast around 10:30 or 11 a.m.

Whether I’m making it at home or buying it out, breakfast for me is always coffee, three scrambled eggs—sometimes I’ll add in arugula and tomato—and half an avocado. I love avocado. My friends and strangers are always tagging me in avocado memes they see on Instagram. You know what’s funny? I’ve never really had many skin problems, but once I started eating more avocados and healthy fats, I noticed that my skin became smoother and more nourished.

Lunch

After breakfast, I work out solo. People might find it strange that trainers work out in addition to training people and teaching classes, but honestly, I need that as my me-time. It not only helps me destress, but it’s also a time when I test out new moves, sequences, and work on my own personal progression with training. Usually when I’m working out I listen to audiobooks or podcasts because I like to improve my mind while I improve my body—I see it as a two-for-one deal.

The classes I teach are primarily high intensity, but when it comes to training myself, I do a lot of strength training and conditioning with bursts of HIIT. I also tend to my body with more restorative workouts, like Pilates and yoga. When you’re training all day, it can actually feed into imbalances and you can set yourself back. It’s super important to focus on alignment, too.

Then comes lunchtime! Almost every day I have either chicken, ground turkey, or salmon with greens. People often ask me, “Don’t you get bored eating this way?” No, I don’t! I’m obsessed with eating these foods because they make my body feel electric. My job requires me to have energy from very early in the morning right through 8 p.m., so what I fuel myself with is so important—I don’t have time for an afternoon crash.

Dinner

After my workout, my afternoon is typically spent in meetings or taking phone calls. I’m especially busy right now because my boyfriend and I are coming out with a protein powder next year. So many of the women I train are scared of protein—they think it will make them bulk up—but it’s so, so good for you. I’m really proud of the product we’ve made and can’t wait to share it with everyone.

My dinners look very similar to my lunches—a mix of meat or fish and greens. If I feel like my body needs some carbs, I’ll add in some butternut squash zoodles, which you can get at Whole Foods. One thing that happens when you cut out sugar is you notice how naturally sweet foods like butternut squash, carrots, and sweet potatoes are.

What I love about keto is how livable it is. I never have to think too hard about meal prep or what I’m going to eat when I go out with my friends.

I know dessert is a weakness for a lot of people and I’m not a robot—sometimes I like to have a little something, too. I think the key is knowing whether you’re eating something because it’s a habit or because you really, really want it. Some people think they need ice cream every night. They don’t—they’re just in the habit of having it. When I want something that’s a little sweet, I’ll either have a spoonful of almond butter or two shots. No, not that kind of shot! Mine is made with ice, frozen blueberries, melatonin, magnesium, bee pollen, and sometimes a little bit of almond butter. Not only does it help me sleep, but it satisfies that sweet craving.

What I love about keto is how livable it is. I never have to think too hard about meal prep or what I’m going to eat when I go out with my friends. You don’t have to put your life on hold to do it. I also think it shows people how to have a healthier relationship with fat, which is actually really good for you. Eating this way really nourishes your body, which is why I’m so wild about it. I’ll be eating this way forever.

by Emily Laurence 

[thirteenthanda]

18 Fitness Tips from Joe Holder, Trainer to Some of the Biggest Names In Streetwear

Running the streetwear game takes stamina: Virgil Abloh, Heron Preston and Eugene Tong get theirs from Joe Holder, who helped Tong complete the New York marathon this month.

“It’s crazy that I’ve gotten to work with and befriend them,” says Holder, a New York- and plant-based performance specialist and health consultant. “Virgil came to know me through Heron, and Eugene through Dao-Yi [Chow of Public School] and Nike.” (Holder became an official swoosh trainer after he was scouted while teaching a class at S10, the gym that he trains out of, and has appeared in Nike ads and commercials.)

It helps that Holder is not only sincerely interested in streetwear but also in his clients as people rather than pay cheques, keeping tabs on their wellbeing and providing support even if they don’t have time to make it to the gym. “The way I think about performance is different to many in the industry and I believe that resonates with them,” he adds. “Plus, creative capacities go hand in hand with sport so we just happen to mesh.”

Holder did football, basketball and track and field growing up, eventually settling on football at the University of Pennsylvania where he studied sociology, psychology and marketing. But injuries and stress laid him low. “I was depressed,” he admits. After forgetting his dad’s birthday, Holder tore up his mental playbook and created the Ocho System: a holistic philosophy that promotes productivity and physical progress while bridging “the behavioral and cognitive gap” that causes people to fall short of their goals.

Below, Holder explains in his own words how to balance the want to improve with the need to be happy, high achievement with downtime, and going hard with going home.

“Penn face” is a thing: where you maintain a happy exterior while struggling on the inside. After dealing with my own issues, I soon realized that so many of my peers had similar problems. No one told me that I was a good player: I was only told how much better I could be, without anyone letting me know what I was good at for the moment. Granted, athletes don’t deserve to be coddled. But there are moments where positive reinforcement is needed.

Remove the negative emotive response that can be a result of introspection. Review yourself as a stranger and objectively – but not harshly – reflect on the things that you need to improve. Now you have two data sets: one that allows you to be happy and content with your current situation but another that you can create goals from.

I make sure that my own social media accounts exude honesty and show my own difficulties. Hopefully I can then inspire. In terms of my clients, I want them to practice periods of time in their day where they remove themselves from social media. Understand the veneer that is associated with it and don’t take everything literally.

Football beat me up, so strength training for me is now about “structural insurance” and injury prevention. I’m not big into heavy lifting because I experienced enough of that in college, but I incorporate micro-cycles of it into my training. I’m hugely into conditioning though: I think that it’s a way to create kind of a metabolic resistance adaptation without needing to incorporate Olympic lifts where form can get sloppy.

Warm up with five rounds of 40-yard prowler pushes and one minute of jump rope. Next, do five rounds of 10 pull-ups, 10 hex-bar deadlifts and 30 seconds on the battle ropes, followed by five rounds of 10 weighted push-ups, 10 dumbbell lateral lunges and 20 seconds on the assault bike. Then a mobility cooldown.

I’m busier these days so it’s hard to fit in my own training. People have the misconception that I’m working out all the time but I’m not a class instructor, more of a coach, so I don’t work out with my clients and I have to find time when it would be easy to just chalk a skipped session up to fatigue. But I try the best that I can to stay active. A typical week of training for me might be three sessions of lifting or conditioning, two to four runs, one session of yoga and one session of Pilates.

If more men “worked out like women” and vice versa, we’d all meet our goals faster. I think that spatial awareness and mobility are two attributes that can always be improved; yoga and Pilates help me with this.

Gains come from recovery. When I’m really on it, I get a massage and do a recovery session once a week. Life is an added stressor so any way that I can enhance recovery is important. Saunas and ice baths also get me used to being uncomfortable and kind of reckoning with what I have on my mind. Sometimes I’ll sit in a sauna for a couple hours and just meditate and have these creative breakthroughs. It’s special when it happens.

As an athlete, you look to impose stress in a beneficial way to create an adaption with the minimal effective dosage required. Many of these trendy high-intensity fitness classes provide an outlet – which is important – but mask the stressors that people need to address in their life. I won’t say avoid it altogether, but recognise the impact that it’s having on your body, and shift your focus to performance and general optimisation. Recovery, nutrition and lower-intensity sessions are all part of that.

One of my favorite yoga sutras basically states that you’re only selfish in the pursuit of selflessness. You have to take the time to “refill your cup” because others will not do that for you, and also set aside time to do the important, reflective work. That will then allow you to be of better assistance to those that are asking for your time.

I started cutting out meat in college, not really on purpose, but just because I wanted to incorporate more nutrient-dense foods into my diet. I approach food from a perspective of inclusion and not exclusion. Breakfast is a smoothie with plant protein powder, BCAAs, berries, ashwaganda, spirulina and dandelion greens. My mid-morning snack is nuts or fruit. Lunch is a breakfast bowl from Jack’s Wife Freda. In the afternoon, another smoothie. Then dinner is a salad or greens with root veggies and beans.

Most people conceptualize diet in an unhealthy manner that makes it difficult to be successful. You really shouldn’t diet to earn a reward or avoid a punishment. That’s an odd way of thinking about it. The first step is reframing diet from “a diet”. Then I try to get deeper into the underlying reasons behind why someone wants to change their eating habits. From there, you can typically stay on track a bit better.

I have an odd habit of setting my alarm early and waking up to ruminate on any issues that I need to hit that day. I then go back to sleep; when I wake up again, I meditate for about 10 minutes. My day is so at the whim of other people’s schedules that if my morning is not on my own terms then the day will be a wash. Also, a smoothie. Without that, it’s dead.

On my workout playlist is a lot of the “Rap Caviar” from Spotify and classic Lil Wayne tracks. I’m not the type of guy to listen to a podcast or eBook while I’m training. Outside of the gym, my head is probably buried in a book or some random study.

My go-to gym outfit is all-Nike gear, of course. I’m not a big Metcon fan but I typically train in the DSX version. I like to work out in sweatpants and a hoody and then the shirt is probably coming off… Outside of the gym, I’m probably still in workout gear or some kind of streetwear: NikeLab, Off-White, Heron Preston, Public School, Felt-type stuff. I’m minimalist in what I wear — it reduces mental fatigue for me. But I have way too many sneakers. That’s my clothing vice.

I don’t have a problem with fitness being fashionable. What I do fear is the “chic” aspect of it taking away from the underlying fact that we have a public health crisis on our hands and the underserved communities who need access to fitness the most may not be getting it. I’m all for fitness being fashionable but let’s not make it inaccessible.

I remember having dinner with Virgil in Milan and picking his brain.To him, stagnation is the cousin of death. He’s constantly connecting, constantly working. It’s amazing to see, and why I look up to him. Busy people like him just want things to work efficiently. So I would say find times of stillness when you can reflect, but also incorporate increased activity into your daily life when you can. And eat well: it’ll allow you to keep up the frenetic pace.

Embrace the chaos. People will always tell you that you need to relax, but if you can manage the stress of the lifestyle then by all means keep going.

By Jamie Millar 

[thirteenthanda]

Maker vs. Manager: How Your Schedule Can Make or Break You

Consider the daily schedule of famed novelist Haruki Murakami. When he’s working on a novel, he starts his days at 4 am and writes for five or six continuous hours. Once the writing is done, he spends his afternoons running or swimming, and his evenings, reading or listening to music before a 9 pm bedtime. Murakami is known for his strict adherence to this schedule.

In contrast, consider the schedule of entrepreneur, speaker, and writer Gary Vaynerchuk. He describes his day (which begins at 6 am) as being broken into tiny slots, mostly comprising meetings which can be as short as three minutes. He makes calls in between meetings. During the moments between meetings and calls, he posts on just about every social network in existence and records short segments of video or speech. In short, his day, for the most part, involves managing, organizing, and instructing other people, making decisions, planning, and advising.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.”

— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

The numerous articles we have all read about the schedules and routines of successful people like these often miss the point. Getting up at 4 am does not make someone an acclaimed novelist, any more than splitting the day into 15-minute segments makes someone an influential entrepreneur.

What we can learn from reading about the schedules of people we admire is not what time to set our alarms or how many cups of coffee to drink, but that different types of work require different types of schedules. The two wildly different workdays of Murakami and Vaynerchuk illustrate the concept of maker and manager schedules.

Paul Graham of Y Combinator first described this concept in a 2009 essay. From Graham’s distinction between makers and managers, we can learn that doing creative work or overseeing other people does not necessitate certain habits or routines. It requires consideration of the way we structure our time.

What’s the Difference?

A manager’s day is, as a rule, sliced up into tiny slots, each with a specific purpose decided in advance. Many of those slots are used for meetings, calls, or emails. The manager’s schedule may be planned for them by a secretary or assistant.

Managers spend a lot of time “putting out fires” and doing reactive work. An important call or email comes in, so it gets answered. An employee makes a mistake or needs advice, so the manager races to sort it out. To focus on one task for a substantial block of time, managers need to make an effort to prevent other people from distracting them.

Managers don’t necessarily need the capacity for deep focus — they primarily need the ability to make fast, smart decisions. In a three-minute meeting, they have the potential to generate (or destroy) enormous value through their decisions and expertise.

A maker’s schedule is different. It is made up of long blocks of time reserved for focusing on particular tasks, or the entire day might be devoted to one activity. Breaking their day up into slots of a few minutes each would be the equivalent of doing nothing.

A maker could be the stereotypical reclusive novelist, locked away in a cabin in the woods with a typewriter, no internet, and a bottle of whiskey to hand. Or they could be a Red Bull–drinking Silicon Valley software developer working in an open-plan office with their headphones on. Although interdisciplinary knowledge is valuable, makers do not always need a wide circle of competence. They need to do one thing well and can leave the rest to the managers.

Meetings are pricey for makers, restricting the time available for their real work, so they avoid them, batch them together, or schedule them at times of day when their energy levels are low. As Paul Graham writes:

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

It makes sense. The two work styles could not be more different.

A manager’s job is to, well, manage other people and systems. The point is that their job revolves around organizing other people and making decisions. As Andrew Grove writes in High Output Management:

…a big part of a middle manager’s work is to supply information and know-how, and to impart a sense of the preferred method of handling things to the groups under his control and influence. A manager also makes and helps to make decisions. Both kinds of basic managerial tasks can only occur during face-to-face encounters, and therefore only during meetings. Thus, I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible.

A maker’s job is to create some form of tangible value. Makers work alone or under a manager, although they might have people working with them. “Maker” is a very broad category. A maker could be a writer, artist, software developer, carpenter, chef, biohacker, web designer, or anyone else who designs, creates, serves, and thinks.

Making anything significant requires time — lots of it — and having the right kind of schedule can help. Take a look at the quintessential maker schedule of the prolific (to say the least) writer Isaac Asimov, as described in his memoir:

I wake at five in the morning. I get to work as early as I can. I work as long as I can. I do this every day of the week, including holidays. I don't take vacations voluntarily and I try to do my work even when I'm on vacation. (And even when I'm in the hospital.)

In other words, I am still and forever in the candy store [where he worked as a child]. Of course, I'm not waiting on customers; I'm not taking money and making change; I'm not forced to be polite to everyone who comes in (in actual fact, I was never good at that). I am, instead, doing things I very much want to do — but the schedule is there; the schedule that was ground into me; the schedule you would think I would have rebelled against once I had the chance.

The Intersection Between Makers and Managers

It is far from unusual for a person’s job to involve both maker and manager duties. Elon Musk is one example. His oft-analyzed schedule involves a great deal of managing as the head of multiple major companies, but he also spends an estimated 80% of his time on designing and engineering. How does he achieve this? Judging from interviews, Musk is adept at switching between the two schedules, planning his day in five-minute slots during the managerial times and avoiding calls or emails during the maker times.

The important point to note is that people who successfully combine both schedules do so by making a clear distinction, setting boundaries for those around them, and adjusting their environment in accordance. They don’t design for an hour, have meetings for an hour, then return to designing, and so on. In his role as an investor and adviser to startups, Paul Graham sets boundaries between his two types of work:

How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker's schedule? By using the classic device for simulating the manager's schedule within the maker's: office hours. Several times a week I set aside a chunk of time to meet founders we've funded. These chunks of time are at the end of my working day, and I wrote a signup program that ensures [that] all the appointments within a given set of office hours are clustered at the end. Because they come at the end of my day these meetings are never an interruption. (Unless their working day ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably interrupts theirs, but since they made the appointment it must be worth it to them.) During busy periods, office hours sometimes get long enough that they compress the day, but they never interrupt it.

Likewise, during his time working on his own startup, Graham figured out how to partition his day and get both categories of work done without sacrificing his sanity:

When we were working on our own startup, back in the ’90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then, I'd sleep till about 11am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called “business stuff.” I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager's schedule and one on the maker's.

Murakami also combined making and managing during his early days as a novelist. As with many other makers, his creative work began as a side project while he held another job. Murakami ran a jazz club. In a 2008 New Yorker profile, Murakami described having a schedule similar to Graham’s in his days running a startup. He spent his days overseeing the jazz club — doing paperwork, organizing staff, keeping track of the inventory, and so on. When the club closed after midnight, Murakami started writing and continued until he was exhausted. After reaching a tipping pointwith his success as a writer, Murakami made the switch from combining maker and manager schedules to focusing on the former.

In Deep Work, Cal Newport describes the schedule of another person who combines both roles, Wharton professor (and our podcast guest) Adam Grant.

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Though Grant’s productivity depends on many factors, there’s one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. Grant performs this batching at multiple levels. Within the year, he stacks his teaching into the fall semester, during which he can turn all of his attention to teaching well and being available to his students. (This method seems to work, as Grant is currently the highest-rated teacher at Wharton and the winner of multiple teaching awards.)

During the fall semester, Grant is in manager mode and has meetings with students. For someone in a teaching role, a maker schedule would be impossible. Teachers need to be able to help and advise their students. In the spring and summer, Grant switches to a maker schedule to focus on his research. He avoids distractions by being — at least, in his mind — out of his office.

Within a semester dedicated to research, he alternates between periods where his door is open …, and periods where he isolates himself to focus completely and without distraction on a single research task. (He typically divides the writing of a scholarly paper into three discrete tasks: analyzing the data, writing a full draft, and editing the draft into something publishable.) During these periods, which can last up to three or four days, he’ll often put an out-of-office auto-responder on his e-mail so correspondents will know not to expect a response. “It sometimes confuses my colleagues,” he told me. “They say, ‘You’re not out of office, I see you in your office right now!’” But to Grant, it’s important to enforce strict isolation until he completes the task at hand.

“A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.”

— Seth Godin, The Dip

The Value of Defining Your Schedule

We all know the benefits of a solid routine — it helps us to work smarter, look after our health, plan the trajectory of our days, achieve goals, and so on. That has all been discussed a million times and doubtless will be discussed a million more. But how often do we think about how our days are actually broken up, about how we choose (or are forced) to segment them? If you consider yourself a maker, do you succeed in structuring your day around long blocks of focused work, or does it get chopped up into little slices that other people can grab? If you regard yourself as a manager, are you available for the people who need your time? Are those meetings serving a purpose and getting high-leverage work done, or are you just trying to fill up an appointment book? If you do both types of work, how do you draw a line between them and communicate that boundary to others?

Cal Newport writes:

We spend much of our days on autopilot—not giving much thought to what we are doing with our time. This is a problem. It’s difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don’t face, without flinching, your current balance between deep and shallow work, and then adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking, “What makes the most sense right now?”

There are two key reasons that the distinction between maker and manager schedules matters for each of us and the people we work with.

First, defining the type of schedule we need is more important than worrying about task management systems or daily habits. If we try to do maker work on a manager schedule or managerial work on a maker schedule, we will run into problems.

Second, we need to be aware of which schedule the people around us are on so we can be considerate and let them get their best work done.

We shouldn’t think of either type of work as superior, as the two are interdependent. Managers would be useless without makers and vice versa. It’s the clash which can be problematic. Paul Graham notes that some managers damage their employees’ productivity when they fail to recognize the distinction between the types of schedules. Managers who do recognize the distinction will be ahead of the game. As Graham writes:

Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager's schedule, they're in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.

Makers generally avoid meetings and similar time-based commitments that don’t have a direct impact on their immediate work. A 30-minute meeting does not just take up half an hour of an afternoon. It bisects the day, creating serious problems. Let’s say that a computer programmer has a meeting planned at 2 pm. When they start working in the morning, they know they have to stop later and are prevented from achieving full immersion in the current project. As 2 pm rolls around, they have to pause whatever they are doing — even if they are at a crucial stage — and head to the meeting. Once it finishes and they escape back to their real work, they experience attention residue and the switching costs of moving between tasks. It takes them a while — say, 15 to 20 minutes — to reach their prior state of focus. Taking that into account, the meeting has just devoured at least an hour of their time. If it runs over or if people want to chat afterwards, the effect is even greater. And what if they have another meeting planned at 4 pm? That leaves them with perhaps an hour to work, during which they keep an eye on the clock to avoid being late.

Software entrepreneur Ray Ozzie has a specific technique for handling potential interruptions — the four-hour rule. When he’s working on a product, he never starts unless he has at least four uninterrupted hours to focus on it. Fractured blocks of time, he discovered, result in more bugs, which later require fixing.

In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain describes an experiment to figure out the characteristics of superior programmers:

…more than six hundred developers from ninety-two different companies participated. Each designed, coded, and tested a program, working in his normal office space during business hours. Each participant was also assigned a partner from the same company. The partners worked separately, however, without any communication, a feature of the games that turned out to be critical.

When the results came in, they revealed an enormous performance gap. The best outperformed the worst by a 10:1 ratio. The top programmers were also about 2.5 times better than the median. When DeMarco and Lister tried to figure out what accounted for this astonishing range, the factors that you’d think would matter—such as years of experience, salary, even the time spent completing the work—had little correlation to outcome. Programmers with ten years’ experience did no better than those with two years. The half who performed above the median earned less than 10 percent more than the half below—even though they were almost twice as good. The programmers who turned in “zero-defect” work took slightly less, not more, time to complete the exercise than those who made mistakes.

It was a mystery with one intriguing clue: programmers from the same companies performed at more or less the same level, even though they hadn’t worked together. That’s because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said that their workspace was acceptably private, compared to only 19 percent of the worst performers; 76 percent of the worst performers but only 38 percent of the top performers said that people often interrupted them needlessly.

A common argument makers hear from people on a different schedule is that they should “just take a break for this!” — “this” being a meeting, call, coffee break, and so on. But a distinction exists between time spent not doing their immediate work and time spent taking a break.

Pausing to drink some water, stretch, or get fresh air is the type of break that recharges makers and helps them focus better when they get back to work. Pausing to hear about a coworker’s marital problems or the company’s predictions for the next quarter has the opposite effect. A break and time spent not working are very different. One fosters focus, the other snaps it.

Remember Arnold Bennett's words: “You have to live on this 24 hours of time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use … is a matter of the highest urgency.”

by Farnam Street

[thirteenthanda]

What’s the Deal with Ashwagandha?

Dear Jean, I read a lot about adaptogens on goop. What is ashwagandha and what do I use it for?—Ashley L.

Dear Ashley, My women’s health practitioner told me to start taking ashwagandha when my out-of-whack hormones weren’t responding even to drugs. Like many adaptogens, ashwagandha can help with a number of different conditions, because they’re more about supporting the body systems overall, rather than fixing specific symptoms. I was skeptical—until I met the glowing co-proprietresses of Botanic Bazaar in Amagansett, who practically vibrates with health and happiness (yes, beauty convinced me where medical experts did not). On the shelves next to the goop skincare was a Sun Potion section; I snapped up a tub of powdered ashwaganda and a bag of tocos (“Put it in your coffee, it makes anything creamier and it’s full of vitamin E,” they enthused) for good measure.

Ashwagandha tastes terrible, as it turns out, and I am the lone non-smoothie-loving gooper, so I devised a morning cereal that deliciously masks the bitterness: oats, seeds, and nuts, plus ashwagandha, cinnamon, salt, tocos, and berries, bound together with a little kefir. It is delicious hot (I use coconut milk instead of kefir if I’m doing hot) or cold, and checks every nutritional box I can think of, from protein to probiotics.

It took less than a month for the hormones to fall significantly more in line; it was summer, my favorite season, so the much-less-stressed-ness I felt might well have been the warm air, but I did notice it, regardless.

The crazy thing, though, was the fall: I suffer from serious seasonal allergies, which invariably lead to nasty sinus and ear infections. I head them off, though, fairly effectively, by dousing my nasal passages regularly with salt water and some daily Flonase. Fall usually involves at least a full month of Flonase; this fall, for the first time in many years, involved…none.

People always slam supplement-purveyors for selling hope in a jar; I certainly can’t promise that any of my results came directly from the ashwagandha—but I’m pretty sure they didn’t come from the countless unhealthy foods I probably ate during the same time period, and few people fault those purveyors for selling refined white flour, sugar, antibiotics, pesticides…Anyway.

Try it, don’t try it; I’m ordering more.

[thirteenthanda]

These 5 Wellness Tips Actually Changed My Life

These evidence-based nuggets of truth from across wellness domains—including natural beauty, reproductive health, and exercise—have changed my daily practice in real ways, empowering me to take control of my own health. Could they do the same for you? Here's what I learned:

1. Ditch fragrance and parfum.

Do you love smelling like crème brûlée? Or maybe it’s just too hard to part with your beloved strawberry-scented body butter. I get it. I’ve been there. For years, I was a product junkie—I had every potion and lotion on the market. It wasn’t until I took a deeper dive to understand the toxins in our everyday products that I became a more conscious consumer of my products and their aromas.

Go into your bathroom and grab your shampoo, conditioner, and body wash. Do you see the words, "fragrance" or "parfum" listed in the ingredients? Sounds ambiguous, right? Due to copyright and trademark laws, scents are considered proprietary. Therefore, anytime you read fragrance or parfum on an ingredients list, buyer beware of the mishmash of various aromatic chemicals that may potentially be carcinogens, neurotoxins, and reproductive toxins. In fact, fragrance dispersants, like diethyl phthalate, may bioaccumulate in the body and cause allergies, dermatitis, and respiratory issues.

If you’re about ready to toss your entire bathroom cabinet in the trash, hold up. My go-to resources to learn more about hazards and toxic ingredients in cosmetic and personal care products are the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database and the Think Dirty app. And, if you’re a true aroma-lover who can’t go without a signature scent, consider swapping out synthetic fragrances for unadulterated essential oils and hydrosols.

2. Get in tune with your cycle using FAM.

For many years growing up, I attended a progressive all-girls school. As forward-thinking as it was, I look back and shudder at the poor formal reproductive education I received. Far too often other educated women tell me that they honestly don’t know all that much about their cycle and how it connects to overall health. While not all of us are taught the nitty-gritty of charting and our female cycle in a classroom, it’s never too late to think about birth control, fertility, and contraception differently.

What if there were no hormones, no pills, no procedures? The first time I learned about the Fertility Awareness Method (FAM), I remember asking some obvious questions—so, a woman isn’t fertile for only 24 hours of her cycle? What does my body temperature have to do with anything? If you’ve struggled with painful periods, contraception, or just want to learn more about your body in a way that has no side effects and is environmentally friendly, perhaps FAM is for you.

By creating a more mindful connection with our cycle, we are able to more deeply tune into our bodies. For instance, I realized that taking magnesium and vitamin C reduces my PMS symptoms. And I’ve concluded that I experience less cramping during menstruation when I practice barre and yoga consistently (at least three to four times a week). Plus, charting and FAM allow you to engage in safe sexual practices with a lot more knowing and a lot less praying and hoping.

Are you wondering where to even start? The book Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler is a great introduction. And if you’re ready to get right into it, check out the Kindara app. Kindara makes it super easy for you with their Wink tool—it’s pretty much an Amazon echo that syncs your temperature and data to the app for you. No manual input required!

3. Tap into scent to get what you want.

A huge part of my interest in health in wellness lies in the intersection of our brain and behavior. How can we thrive at home, at work, and in our relationships? Initially, I found the wellness world to be an overwhelming to-do list of practices with which I originally had little or no attachment and therefore interest. Every day, you must do some interval training, practice yoga—oh and don’t forget to meditate! Instead of looking at these habits as chores, I started tapping into what I call the "me and not me" of spiritual practices.

I found my love and niche in aromatherapy and all-natural product formulation. From my years of study, it’s become clear that everyone can learn how to cultivate different states of being through the power of scent. Evolutionarily, we’ve moved away from our old friend, olfaction, making it one of the last frontiers sense-wise. Just smelling certain aromas, like essential oils, influences neurotransmitters.

Want to be more productive? Reach for some peppermint or rosemary at work, which have been clinically proven to improve memory and energy level. Can’t sleep at night? Rub some lavenderand roman chamomile essential oils on your pulse points, since they’re both potent nervous system sedatives. A recent study demonstrated that lavender creates an affinity to bind to GABA, the brain’s relaxing neurotransmitter, which supports the popular anecdotal claim that lavender works wonders for relaxation and sleep.

Aromatherapy and aromatic molecules were once regarded as woo-woo and placebo—thought to offer little scientific advancement to the understanding of the brain and their influence on human behavior; however, recent clinical discoveries (namely, that these molecules easily pass through the blood-brain barrier) have shown us that it’s worth hopping on the scent bandwagon as they may hold the key to future brain therapeutics that potentially rewire stress, anxiety, OCD, and trauma circuits.

4. Once a day, get moving with low-impact, isometric workouts.

I’m an advocate of finding a variety of workouts for your body and goals, but I’m also a big believer in low-impact and isometric exercises. As a woman who enjoys getting active once a day, taking it easy on my body is a top goal. Running multiple times a week was too hard on my joints, and I desperately sought a complement to gentle restorative yoga. And with autoimmunity on the rise, it's coming to light that caring for and moving our bodies in the right way can make all the difference in the long-term.

That’s when I found barre. There’s a body of research demonstrating that the ballet-like moves, like plies, lifts, and bends, actually require more lower-body muscle than traditional lower-body exercise moves, like squats. Plus, low-impact workouts, like barre, help target the seldom-used back and side abdominal muscles that contribute to the core strength needed to maintain posture as you age. And while you might be thinking good posture and flexibility aren’t enough to entice you, you’re also increasing the energizing hormone serotonin and decreasing cortisol.

If you’ve tried barre and it’s not your thing, be sure to explore other low-impact but high-cardio exercises like cycling, yoga, and swimming.

5. Buy an old-school alarm clock and limit phone use to 1 hour of screen time.

For Instagram lovers, this can be a tough pill to swallow. I know it was for me. In 2017, people spend more than four hours a day on their mobile phones. Researchers estimate that about 90 percent of that time is on apps. And it’s recently come to light that people are spending more time on Instagram than email. I used to spend so much time refreshing email on my phone that the pang of anxiety from the influx of messages became normal.

I read a study that discovered we use our phones twice as many times as we think we do. Reaching for the phone and scrolling through Instagram was a go-to mindless ritual. But living life on autopilot and engaging in automatic behaviors was making me less analytical, creative, and intuitive. Once I started to realize that I wasn’t relying on my own mind for actively retrieving information or entertaining myself, I knew I had to make some lifestyle changes.

Currently, my bedroom is a technology-free zone. I bought a battery-operated alarm clock and use that instead of my old routine of using my iPhone alarm. Beyond that, I only use apps on my phone (Facebook, Instagram, mail, etc.) for an hour total each day. You might think 60 minutes is an arbitrary number, and it is, but it works for me because of my circadian rhythm’s sensitivity to blue light and desire to be more present in everyday interactions.

If you’re inspired to implement these changes, or try a digital detox, incorporate the crystal shungite, which is believed to block electromagnetic frequencies and radiation, into your living spaces, set micro-goals for yourself, and verbalize them or make a pact with a partner or friend. I suggest setting the night-shift mode on your phone to start at least two hours before you intend to sleep. And if you’re committed to curbing your smartphone addiction, I enjoy using the Onward, Offtime, or Moment apps. While it may seem ironic to use your phone in an effort to use it less, I promise these apps that track your time and behavior can help you make the necessary changes to improve your quality of live and overall mood.

Often, it's making seemingly small lifestyle shifts that changes your day-to-day and has a huge impact on your health and well-being. These are the five that have made a huge impact for me.

by Leigh Winters