Tools of the Trade

This is a special chapter, and comes with a few caveats.

Having spent years dedicated to self-improvement, I can say without any doubt that I failed way more often than I succeeded.

It’s hard, there’s no point sugar coating it. Trying to better yourself, day after day, year after year, it’s not a walk in the park.

This chapter is a summary of all the best ways I’ve found to fail less. Some of it may be useful to you, some of it may not. If you already have a great deal of experience in improving yourself, you may want to just skip this chapter entirely.

But if you’ve ever found yourself struggling to keep up with the goals you’ve set for yourself, it’s okay. It’s not easy. But it’s probably not as hard as you’re making it.

Easy is Steady, and Steady is Hard

Once you’re committed to improving yourself, the next challenge begins. You’ll be faced with the same question countless others have had to face on the road to confidence.

How do we keep ourselves moving forward?

Knowing who you want to be and what you want to do is hard enough. But staying on track relentlessly, often for years on end, is even more challenging.

Being consistent is something we all struggle with. But a lot of the time we make this more complicated than it needs to be.

If you think that all you need to do is be more disciplined and hard on yourself, I want you to go ahead and throw that idea straight in the trash where it belongs.

Forcing yourself forward will only make you resent what you’re doing, and long before you make it to the point of success and happiness, you’ll start hating it, and fall back into the loop of wishing you were someone else again.

You can achieve results with force, but it won’t feel like you succeeded.

The secret to genuine consistency, that can last a lifetime and never gets in the way of the love and passion you have for what you’re doing, is making the process as easy as possible.^{Note 1}

I’m a committed gym goer, you’ll find me there most days after work and even on weekends. I’ve been doing it for so long that it’s not something I need to motivate myself to do. It’s as much a part of my life as getting dressed in the morning. It’s actually harder for me not to go to the gym, and I often find myself feeling bad about taking holidays when I know I won’t get to exercise while I’m away.

But this is not how my relationship with exercise started.

I was very unfit in my early teen years. I sucked at sports and hated exercising. I remember my dad talking me into going for a run with him around the block, and I almost threw up before we’d made it through a single lap.

Since I was in a school where being cool meant being good at sports, I was pretty unhappy about the whole situation in general. So, around the age of 15, I started exercising.

The first workout routine of my life was as simple as it gets. All I did was 20 pushups a day.

There were a few reasons I decided that this was the best workout for me. The first and most important one is that I was a lazy kid and I could do this in my bedroom in less than a minute. But I was also woefully unaware of how exercising actually worked, so I genuinely thought if I did 20 pushups a day, I’d look like a superhero in no time.

When this inevitably failed, I decided to try something new. I upgraded my routine to include a short run to the local park to do pullups on the monkey bars. This turned into longer and longer runs, with more and more bodyweight exercises involved. As the years passed, I kept redefining what I thought the perfect workout was. I tried new things, dropped old ones, sometimes working out for hours at a time, sometimes only minutes. I kept trying to find the simplest way to get in great shape.

By the time I was in my mid twenties I’d discovered the gym, and I’ve been using it ever since.

I used to think I’d wasted all those years trying to exercise in the easiest and simplest way possible. How much fitter I’d be, if only I’d worked out properly like I do now.

But looking back, I can see the real benefit of all those years of easy exercise. They were so easy that no matter what was happening in my life, I never stopped working out. I’d been consistently exercising for over a decade by the time I joined a gym, and by that point it had become a rock solid habit.

I now use this lesson for other things in my life that I’m starting for the first time. I know that if I can make it as easy as possible at the start, I won’t quit, and over time I can make it harder and get much better at it.

If you’re trying to start something new in your own life, the best thing you can do for yourself is to make it easy to keep going.

If you want to get into fitness, then train somewhere that’s easy to get to, in a way that you enjoy doing, and that doesn’t take up all of your time.

If you want to be an artist or writer, set aside some time each day where you know you’ll feel the most energised and relaxed, and practise in an environment you find calming and enjoy being in. The goal isn’t to produce something amazing every single time you practise, the goal is to sit down consistently, and the amazing results will come, so make the process easy and stress-free.

Whatever it is that you’re trying to work on, look for ways you can make the experience more enjoyable. Listen to music while you work, exercise with friends, collaborate with colleagues you trust and admire, drink your favourite teas and eat your favourite snacks while you go.

Making things as easy for yourself as they can be is the only guaranteed way you can be consistent over a long period of time. Consistency is the hardest thing to achieve, but making things easy is the best way to do it.

Go with the Flow

Even though you should be making the actual act of sitting down and getting started as easy as possible, the task itself needs to be easy and enjoyable if you want to keep coming back for more. Which means it needs to be at that sweet spot between too easy, and too challenging, that has come to be known as being in the zone, or being in Flow, the state of mind we talked about in the last chapter.

Most of us don’t understand how much our lives are shaped by our decision to seek out or avoid challenges.

Every experience we have is defined by where it falls on this spectrum.

At one end, where there is absolutely no challenge for us at all, we have boredom. At the other, where the challenges are far too difficult, we have stress.

And in the middle, where our skills perfectly match the challenge, we have something even better than happiness.

We have effortless concentration. We have flow, the meditative state you can put yourself in while doing literally anything.

It’s the feeling of flow that frees us, that gives us energy and makes us feel alive.

Most of us bounce between things that are too easy, like watching tv, and things that are too hard, like stressful days at work. We spend all our time either bored or stressed out, and then wonder why we don’t have any energy.

But we all have things we enjoy doing. Things that make us feel alive. Maybe it’s something physical, like playing a sport or working out. Maybe it’s something mental, like creating art or gaming. Or maybe it’s something social, like partying or dating.

Whatever it is, I can guarantee you that it has this one defining feature. It challenges you just enough to make the act itself its own reward.

When this happens, our minds aren’t clogged up trying to fill the void that boredom has left, or trying to deal with the overload of stress. We are free and clear to focus solely on what we’re doing.

Living a good life is about spending as much time feeling this way as we possibly can, and as little time feeling bored or stressed.

The problem is that people dislike being stressed so much that they try to stay as far away from challenges as possible. They decide that boredom is better than risking stress. What they don’t realise is that all this does is make more and more things in life too challenging for them to handle. The more they feel challenged, the more they try to hide in boredom, and the less skills they develop to deal with these challenges.

This is what happens to people who stay in their comfort zones.

By trying to hide from stress, they end up more stressed than they were before. Most people suffering from anxiety have fallen into this trap. They live a life where everything is either too easy or too hard. And nothing feels good anymore.

For a very long time, the solution to this sort of problem was sold as ‘you have to face your fears. Do the things that make you anxious until they don’t make you feel that way anymore.’ But this idea completely misses the fact that these experiences are on a spectrum. The way to escape one extreme is not to jump directly to the other.

The answer is balance. It’s to find the equilibrium, and spend your time in the middle of the spectrum. If you find yourself stuck in the extremes of boredom or stress, your goal should be to get halfway between them.

And it’s easier than you think.

Just slowly increase the challenge until it’s difficult enough to take all of your attention to overcome it. No more, no less.

Start feeling stressed about it? Scale back the challenge, make it a little easier to complete. Start getting bored and finding it hard to concentrate? Up the challenge until it demands all of your attention again.

Let’s use learning an instrument as an example. You start with an easy song, something that matches your skill level. Learning it will be challenging and rewarding, but once you’ve done it you need to move on to a harder song, otherwise you’ll lose interest and stop. Pick a song that’s too difficult, and you’ll feel stressed and frustrated trying to learn it and you’ll also lose interest and stop.

This applies to literally everything. To the job you’re doing, your relationships, your hobby, your home cooked meals, your sex life, everything.

It’s happening whether you realise it or not, so if you notice you’re spending too much time bored or anxious, it’s time to introduce some balance into your life.

Avoiding challenges just makes things more challenging. But the right amount of challenge is how you’ll finally get that feeling you were looking for all along.

Taking Back Time

“The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?”

– Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

When Mat Fraser won Silver at the 2015 CrossFit Games for the second year in a row, making him the second fittest man on earth once again, he felt like a complete failure.

He had cut corners, skipped important parts of his training, and wasted time he could have dedicated to training.

He decided to make a brutal life change. From then on, with everything he did he would ask himself “will this help me win the CrossFit Games?” And if the answer was no, then he didn’t do it.^{Note 2}

Mat would go on to dominate the male division for 5 years straight, and become a fitness legend in the process. And he did it by taking extreme ownership over his time.

Becoming who you want to be takes time. Staying who you are takes time. Reading this sentence just took some time. Everything takes time, and if you’re not careful, you’ll run out of time before you’ve finished doing what needs to be done.

This section is all about having more time, and what to do with it once you’ve got it.

The first thing we have to get straight in our heads is that time is finite. There are 24 hours in a day. Wanting more isn’t going to get you more. You can’t buy, bargain, or bully your way into having a few more hours to work with. You’ve got 24, just like everyone else, and that’s it.

So having more time is all about sacrificing.

We split our time between different activities throughout the day, some we enjoy doing, and some we don’t. If we want more time to improve ourselves, we’re going to have to sacrifice something already taking up time in our lives.

But let’s take a few things off the table.

Getting a full night’s sleep is the first one. The fastest way to ensure that you fail at your goals is to exhaust yourself with lack of sleep. Don’t trade your sleeping time for anything. But pay attention to what a full night’s sleep means for you. For some people, 6 hours is enough. They are lucky, and have more time to use in their waking lives. For most of us, it’s around the 8 or 9 hour mark. If you think you need more than that, then I hate to break it to you but it’s probably the quality of your sleep that’s the real problem. Don’t keep throwing away hours tossing and turning in bed. Focus on improving how you sleep. Set a bedtime routine and stick to it. Stretch, meditate, or do some light reading. Make sure the room is quiet and dark. And if you have serious issues with insomnia go speak to a professional, it will be one of the best things you ever do for yourself. Don’t suffer needlessly.

The second one is your ‘day job’ or working hours. If you’re already working in your dream job then this won’t apply to you, but many of us have to pursue our goals alongside a job we struggle through day after day. It can be tempting to throw something like this to the side to make room for your passions, but there are a few important reasons why this is a bad idea. The first is that you’ll be putting your entire livelihood into the hands of your passion project. Successfully achieving your goals will suddenly become a matter of survival. Do you think all that extra stress and pressure will make it easier to succeed? How long do you think you can keep pushing yourself with so much at stake before you’re forced to give up? Remember, easy is steady, steady is consistent, and consistency is the most important thing. Don’t go all in and risk losing everything just because you don’t want to wait any longer.

The other reason to hold onto your job is that, whether you believe it or not, it’s giving you some valuable and unique experiences that are going to come in handy later. No matter what the job is, you’re likely learning how to work with people, meet deadlines, show up consistently, and deal with boredom. All highly valuable things to master.

The third thing you should never give up is spending time with the people you love. No matter how big your dreams are, or how important they are to you, they won’t mean anything if you don’t have anyone in your life to share your successes with. Never feel bad for spending your time with the people who matter.

That leaves us with a handful of hours left to play with. It might not seem like much, but it’s enough. A few highly productive hours a day will lead to enormous results in the long term.

If you watch a lot of tv or play video games, you’ve got the perfect starting point. Sacrifice most of that time to work on yourself. There’s nothing wrong with doing either of those things, they’re designed to make you feel good, but you’ll get the same benefit from 20 minutes of tv or gaming as you would from 2 hours. So use the other 100 minutes to work on the things that matter.

The next place to look for time is in your phone’s settings. Go to the apps section and see how much time you are spending on each app. Your top three might surprise you with just how many hours you’re putting into social media. Again, decide that you’re going to sacrifice the majority of that time for productive work.

Another good thing to consider is ‘dead’ time. The classic example of this is commutes. When you have to give up large pockets of time just waiting to be somewhere you need to be, it’s easy to consider that time completely lost. Anything you can do to make it productive is a win. Read on the train. Listen to podcasts in the car. Take back every second of it you can, bring any dead time in your day back to life, and make it work for you.

All of these are just suggestions. We’re all different, and probably have our own unique ways of wasting the time that we have. Take a moment to think about all of the things you do on an average day. Decide what parts of it you’re willing to trade in order to become the person you want to be. It’s a choice, a simple question of where your priorities lie.

But having the time to work is just the first step. Turning that time into a productive explosion of mental effort that gives you incredible results and also feels damn good in the process is an entirely different thing.

We are Sprinters Where it Counts

The human body is designed for long periods of walking. We are nomadic, and migrated out of East Africa on a slow march that took us to every corner of the world. We walked through Europe, crossed into the Americas, and island hopped all the way down to Australia. Our tall slim builds, and broad flat feet were the perfect tools needed for a species that literally walked around the Earth. There have never been better walkers in all of history than us.

But we suck at sprinting.

Basically any animal above our knee height with four legs can out sprint us. Try running from a bear, or chasing a deer. Hell, try running from a small dog, or chasing a rabbit.

Sprinting has never been one of our strengths. At least, not when we are talking about our bodies.

Our minds however, are a very different story.

It takes an enormous amount of energy to run our brains. It’s the main reason we don’t have powerful bodies capable of outsprinting predators. We traded the resources needed for that and put it into growing a kickass brain. And it worked. Our bodies were a bit flimsy compared to our other ape relatives, we couldn’t sprint, climb, swim, or jump as well as most of the other animals in our environment, but we could out-think them all.

Thinking was our territory. Here we were the fastest and strongest. Here we had the most stamina and resilience. If our bodies reflected our minds, we would all be Hercules.

So when we’re working with our minds, we need to act like the superhumans we are. Don’t try to walk to your goals - sprint, climb, swim, and jump there.

Intense bursts of effort followed by rest and reflection is what the brain’s designed for. And it’s the fastest way to make progress in anything that requires mental effort.

How fast these bursts should be depends on how much focus you need to achieve results.

Take writing for example. After a few hours of consistent work, the quality of your writing will start to suffer. Slowly at first, and then rapidly losing all of its sense and style as your brain reaches its limit. Everything you’re writing at this point will take you twice as long to fix, or be deleted entirely. You’re basically throwing your time away.

Other tasks that are a bit easier to focus on, like reading, organising, or designing, can be done in much longer bursts, but they’ll still suffer from the same decline in quality as you tire yourself out. You’ll need to stop, rest, and reflect if you want to be able to come back to it full of energy again and achieve the best results possible.

This is a common problem in our current work culture. We’ve been told to concentrate for 8 hours straight on work that is mentally challenging and requires focus in order to do it well. This isn’t possible, and it’s doing employers harm. They’re unknowingly asking for staff to work while mentally exhausted. They’re prioritising how much work is being done, over how good that work actually is.

The 8 hour day was designed when people were doing physical work, usually as part of a production line in industrial warehouses. The work was hard, but it was consistent physical effort, much more like a day spent walking. It was something we could do well for long periods of time.

Now we’re expected to work at the same consistent pace, but with our minds, not our bodies, as if the two were interchangeable and could be used in the exact same way. It’s like asking someone to sprint all day instead of walk.

Naturally, we fail. People spend large chunks of their work day wasting time. Browsing social media, talking to colleagues, taking smoke breaks, anything to give their brains a little bit of relief.

We dose ourselves with caffeine to keep ourselves going when we start struggling to stay focused. We keep producing work even though we know it’s not good, and probably has too many mistakes. We exhaust ourselves, and often get to the end of the day feeling utterly defeated.

This, I think we can all agree, is a terrible way to get things done.

When you’re working with your brain, act like a sprinter. Sit down and charge out some seriously focused work. As soon as you feel yourself slipping into exhaustion, stop. Take a break, a real one. Go do something completely different and easy for your brain. Take as long as you need to feel refreshed. And before you start working again, think about what you were doing in that first sprint, what was working well and what wasn’t. Decide if you can make any changes so this next sprint is even more efficient. Then hit the ground running.

You might only do one mental sprint a day. You might do several. Only you will know how much your brain can handle whatever task you’ve given it.

You may feel like you’re wasting time resting. You may feel guilty, or frightened that you are falling behind everyone else who’s pushing themselves through ridiculously long work days. But remember, the true waste of time is working while exhausted. You’re doing bad work that’s going to take you even longer to fix, and you’re not even giving yourself the chance to make it better because you’re not giving yourself the time to reflect on it.

Overworking is sold to us as the path to success, when really it’s the path to ruin.

Working hard in short bursts is the definition of working smart, especially when you pair it with reflection before each burst. The time you’ll save by not having to correct all your own mistakes will blow you away. You’ll have a new benchmark for quality when it comes to your work, and you’ll stop settling for anything less than your best.

This can also help you overcome one of the greatest time wasters in history. The infamous and undisputed destroyer of good things… Overthinking.

How to Overthink

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”

– Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

How happy does your house make you?

It’s pretty easy to answer that question, the moment you think about the place you live you immediately know how much you like it or how much you don’t. But if I asked you when does your house make you happy, it’s a little harder to define.

The truth is you only feel good or bad about where you live when you’re thinking about it.

Despite the fact that you spend huge amounts of time at home, you rarely think about the home itself. Instead your attention is on all the things you’re doing while you’re there, and that’s what’s going to be shaping how you’re feeling.

So the question “how happy does your house make you” is actually asking how happy it makes you when you’re thinking about it. And this applies to literally everything in your life, like your car, hobbies, and even your loved ones.

The danger here is that it causes a focusing illusion.^{Note 3} If you like your house, you’ll exaggerate how much happiness it actually gives you day to day. The opposite is also true if you don’t like it. Even though you’re rarely thinking about it and therefore, rarely feeling good or bad about it, as soon as you do think about it you’ll feel like it dominates your mood all the time.

On a larger scale, you can imagine that every Australian would be feeling good all the time thanks to the sunny weather and outdoor lifestyle that always comes to mind whenever we think about our quality of life. But this is only the case if you’re new to the country and enjoying the climate because it’s an improvement over what you’re used to. Once you’re accustomed to the sun and the surf, it stops being something you think much about, and therefore plays very little role in how much happiness it actually brings you. It can offer regular opportunities for things that do make you happy, like swimming in the ocean or going on hikes, but believing that the weather actually makes you a happier person is another example of the focusing illusion. It’s only true when you think about it. And you spend the vast majority of your time not thinking about it.^{Note 4}

The danger here is that we can end up not really knowing whether we’re happy or not. If most of our time is spent thinking about things that make us unhappy, like our work or bad relationships, but from time to time we can stop and think about how nice the climate is where we live, or how big our house is, we can very easily convince ourselves that we’re happier than we actually are, and that nothing in our life needs to change.

The most powerful example of this is the way paraplegics will report increasingly happier moods the further away from their accident they get, as they become more and more familiar with their new way of life.^{Note 5} As long as there’s no recurring pain, or they haven’t developed severe depression, their mood becomes less and less dependent on their disability and becomes all about what their attention is on day to day, just like the rest of us. Thinking about the accident or their condition will still make them feel bad, but the longer it’s been since the incident, the less they tend to be thinking about it.

What this means is that no matter what happens to us in life, whether it’s good or bad, we can either adapt to it by thinking about it less, or we can become absorbed by it, by thinking about it way too much.

I’m the type of person who overthinks every thought that finds its way to the front of my brain.

I overthink conversations I’ve had, food I’ve eaten, shows I’ve watched, books I’ve read, decisions I’ve made, and whatever weird ideas my subconscious throws at me throughout the day.

And it’s gotten in the way of lots of things.

I overthought my career, and ended up with a mismatch of qualifications and experiences, none of which I really wanted to pursue.

I overthought my relationships, and spent the majority of my twenties alone, unable to commit or decide on what I was looking for.

I overthought who I was, and spent too much time trying to copy other people, instead of focusing on what I really wanted.

Being an overthinker has done a lot of damage in my life, there’s no doubt. But it would be unfair to say it hasn’t done me a lot of good as well.

This book (like all books for that matter), is the result of sitting down, alone with my thoughts, and overthinking.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to recognise which ideas are okay to obsess over, and which ones aren’t worth a second thought.

Overthinking is not a problem you need to fix. It’s a powerful tool, you just need to learn how to use it properly.

The ability to overthink is only as valuable as the quality of your thoughts. Which means that the way to ‘fix’ your overthinking problem, is to start thinking about better things.

And what are these better things you ask? Well good news, you were born with a built-in detection device that’s designed to tell you exactly what’s good for you and what isn’t. It’s called your emotions, and for some weird reason we all seem to really hate listening to them.

Is something making you feel really shitty about yourself? Why not obsessively overthink about it for days… brilliant idea.

That feeling is a warning that what you’re thinking about isn’t good for you. The alarm’s going off and instead of evacuating the building you’re just sitting there staring at it.

Pretty simple really, if you’re thinking about something that’s making you feel terrible about yourself, your life, or other people, then listen to your damn emotions and realise they are trying to tell you to stop.

It’s hard not to overthink our problems. Especially when they’re attached to things that are important to us. To truly get something you want in life you have to make sacrifices for it. And as soon as you start sacrificing for it, you start doubting it. The anxiety and stress that comes with that is easy to obsess over.

But overthinking any of these things will not improve your situation one bit.

The best way to stop yourself obsessing over the wrong things, is to bring your attention to the right things. Follow your emotions away from the warning signs, and towards the welcoming signs.

Obsess over something that makes you feel curious, and interested. Overthink the things that blow your mind, and fill you with awe. Look for the feelings that trigger your passions, not your pains, and you will be free to overthink until your heart’s content.

Microdosing Happiness

I don’t think people really know what they mean when they say they want to be happy.

Are we talking about feeling peaceful and calm all the time? Or how about joyous and energetic? Do you mean you never want to feel negative emotions ever again? Or are you just looking to feel content with who you are?

I think the last one comes closest, but that’s not really happiness is it? At least not the full picture that happiness brings to mind.

One of the goals of this book is to convince you that confidence is what you really want, and when you think about being “happy”, you’re really mistaking it with the feeling of being confident. Because as it turns out, recognising what emotion we’re actually feeling is something we’re all pretty terrible at.

In a worrying study about how bad we actually are at correctly labelling how we feel, it was shown that people who have gone through a frightening experience, like walking over a rickety old suspension bridge, are more likely to find someone attractive when they reach the other side, because they confuse the heightened arousal with sexual attraction.^{Note 6} This is why it’s common for people who’ve gone through a highly emotional experience together to end up dating, like colleagues who worked on a high-stakes project, or friends who experience a dangerous situation. They mistake their emotional reaction with feelings of love.

So trying to pinpoint exactly what happiness feels like is definitely not going to be easy.

The truth is, we use happiness as a broad term to describe anything that makes us feel good. We can’t really define what happiness is, and the most concrete thing we know about it is that it’s fleeting.

It’s almost like happiness is a drug, or a few different drugs, that make us feel amazing and then fades away, forcing us to go out and find another hit.

If only we knew what these drugs were, and how to find them… if only we had some sort of magical search engine that could give us all the answers…

Okay, you get the point, jump on Google and type in ‘happiness drug’. And boom, there it all is. Turns out happiness is mostly just 4 drugs (or hormones) that we all produce naturally. Dopamine, Serotonin, Oxytocin, and Endorphins. They all do slightly different things, but I’ll let Google tell you all about that.

What we’re going to talk about here is what to do with that information.

So happiness is a group of drugs, drugs we know about and understand how to get. So why the hell are we all still struggling to be happy?

Well, it turns out we all prefer to pay other people to spoon feed us these drugs instead of just making them ourselves. And the ones we’re buying are poor quality and cut with all sorts of nasty crap we don’t really want.

Happiness drugs are supposed to reward us for doing things that are going to improve our lives.

Dopamine will make us happy for completing tasks, getting shit done, and doing anything related to self improvement.

Serotonin will make us happy for being in the right environments, spending time outside, sleeping well, and staying active.

Oxytocin will make us happy for spending time with the people we love, and cute animals like dogs.

Endorphins will make us happy when we push ourselves hard at something, mainly exercise, but really anything that takes us out of our comfort zone.

This is how we’re supposed to take these drugs. This is what being high on happiness is supposed to look like.

Being happy is supposed to be a reward for improving ourselves.

And how are we taking these drugs instead?

Like the true addicts we are, paying for cheap hits like eating a cheeseburger, playing video games, watching porn, and dosing up on everything from caffeine to cocaine.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy every single one of those things, everyone does, that’s the whole point of them. But they all come with serious side effects. They’re cut with things that will make it harder to feel happy consistently, like saturated fats and a false sense of accomplishment. And if they’re the only source of happiness in your life, it will not be a very happy one.

Happy people know how to dose themselves with happiness drugs at the right times, in the right quantities, and in the right way. An average day in a happy person’s life is built around their happiness drugs, seamlessly moving from one high to the next.

Waking up and working out, so they can ride that dopamine and endorphin high all the way to work. Boosting it with a few easy wins by finishing off some tasks in the morning. Taking a walk outside on their lunch break to get a nice serotonin hit. Challenging themselves in the afternoon with an interesting task to keep their endorphin levels up. Going home and hugging their family, friends, or pet and feeling that sweet hit of oxytocin. Spending some quality time with them and keeping that oxytocin coming. Eating well and getting a good night’s sleep so their serotonin levels are high in the morning.

Repeat.

So simple. Too simple really.

What this fails to mention is all of the things outside our control that will hit us throughout a typical day, making it much harder to get these highs.

Things go wrong. People treat us badly. Temptations get the best of us.

Just knowing how to make yourself feel better with happiness drugs is not enough. You have to be willing to go out there and fight for them, day after day.

Remember, they’re a reward. They must be earned if you want to do them right.

Average Days

Who you are is built on your average days.

You are not your extremely productive and awesome days. You are not your terrible and wasteful days.

Who you are can be found in your average day.

The trick to becoming the person you want to be is to make an average day in your life look like a day in the life of the person you’re trying to become.

Then all you have to do is live that day more often than any other.

The beauty of this approach is that it doesn’t require perfection, not by a long shot. You can still have plenty of days where you fall off track, do new things, and let life get in the way. As long as you keep coming back to this average day, the one you’ve designed to move you forward.

It must be efficient, productive, and most of all, easily repeatable.

Using everything we’ve gone over in this chapter, you can put together an average day that feels easy, but gets you results.

Here is a list of everything the day should include:

1. Planned use of happiness drugs. You should know exactly when and where your happiness drugs are coming from.
2. Choosing your own incentives. You should be rewarding yourself for doing things you know are good for you.
3. Deliberate overthinking. You should know exactly what you want to obsess over for the day, and stick to it.
4. Scheduled bursts of work. You should be sprinting, then resting and reflecting before the next sprint.
5. Eliminated time wasting. You should have cut any pointless activities from your day and given that time back to any of the above.
6. Everything done in the easiest way possible. You shouldn’t be making things harder for yourself than they need to be.

If you can design a day for yourself that is built around these things, and then live that day at least 4 times a week, you can change your life.

I’m going to share what my average day looks like while writing this book. It’s far from my ideal average day, mostly due to the fact that I still have a full time job I need to fit in. But I hope it gives you some ideas about how to design your own average day in a way that gives you everything you need to pursue your own dreams.

I wake up in the morning around seven and the first thing I do is spend an hour meditating and doing some light exercise, usually yoga. After that I write for an hour. This is the most productive moment of my whole day, and the majority of this book was written during that one hour every morning.

Then it’s time to actually work, and I try to get any hard tasks for the day done while I still have momentum.

At lunchtime I walk my dog to the local park near my house. It has a nice little forest area and getting out in nature is the best midday break ever. Regardless of whether you have a pet or not I highly recommend fitting this into your average day.

When we get back I eat lunch, which is always my first meal of the day. Then I try to fit in another full hour of writing. I usually have a lot less energy at this point, so it’s more reading than writing, and I tend to use this time to do research so that I know what to write about during my morning hour the next day.

When my work hours are over, the first thing I do is go straight to the gym. After my workout I jump in the sauna and finish up with a cold shower or ice bath.

I go home, cook and eat dinner at home with my wife and dog, and spend the evening relaxing on the couch with them, usually in front of some new binge-worthy show.

The last thing I do for myself every night is some more yoga to help my body recover for the next day.

It’s a simple day, easily repeatable, and it’s how I finished this book in about six months.

I didn’t do crazy hours of writing, staying up through the night, pumping out page after page in a mad rush to the finish line.

I wrote it literally, one hour at a time.