How to Transform Your Life With an Unstoppable Mindset | International Best-Selling Author TK Kader

So I want to talk a little bit more about the mindset. You talk about the 3 steps to transfer your— transform your life and adopt that unstoppable mindset. Number one, I think you mentioned going into Mondays with an unstoppable plan. Number 2, getting clarity, adapt and build a life plan and execute on your plans with a 45-day challenge. Um, curious, how does an unstoppable plan on Monday look like for you?

Yeah. Uh, it's a great question. So for 10 years now, uh, I started doing this when I was, when I was running ToutApp. Um, like weekends were really hard for me. Uh, and the best way I could describe it was like, like, you know, you know that, you know, you leave the office on Friday and you go home and you're like, all right, cool. Like, we're just going to take it easy a little bit. And that transition from just riding really hard through the week, cause you're going at startup speed to slowing down for the weekend was super tough for me. I couldn't just turn my brain off. You couldn't just leave all the problems aside. And the best way I could describe it was, it was kind of like, like, like you're a Ferrari and, you know, Ferrari is good at 2 things, just standing still and looking hot or going really fast.

Right.

But weekends felt a little bit like you're being forced to drive the Ferrari in a 20 miles per hour school zone. It's like awkward. And it's like, you know, it's making weird noises. It can't quite go. It's stopping. It's abrupt. It's just terrible. Right. It's not designed for that. And that's what I think, founders deal with. And Sundays were the worst for me because like now I'm like finally calmed down a little bit, but now I'm like getting anxiety about Monday morning and all the things I need to do and things I haven't done. And maybe I could have moved ahead. And so I started doing this thing where every Sunday I would spend 30 minutes asking and answering 2 simple questions. Uh, the first one is, where am I? And the second is, what do I do next? And I actually have a Google Doc that goes back nearly 8 years. I just kept writing in it every, every Sunday. Where am I? What do I do next? And I just answered those questions. And what that helped me do was instead of trying to solve everything and fix everything, it just helped me acknowledge what I have going on in the head, going on in my head, and then making a plan of just 3 big things I want to get done in the coming week. And I did that every Sunday and every Monday I would go in and be like, these are 3 things I just need to crush this week. Let's look at the calendar, make sure it's all in sync. Um, it also helped me kind of acknowledge how far I've come, like what I've accomplished. By the time Sunday night happens, you've already forgotten all the wins you've had last Wednesday, right? You're too worried about next week. So, uh, that's a practice that I started doing. I started teaching other founders to do it and they got a lot of value. So now we've turned it into a little SaaS application that helps you practice it every Sunday. So you can just go to unstoppableSunday.com and sign up and you'll get the instruction and the training and a little notebook too. Do it. And that's how I create a plan. I still do it every Sunday. It helps me feel better. It helps me express gratitude. It helps me make a plan for the week. It helps me organize my calendar the right way. Uh, and so it's a simple practice. You just answer those 2 questions in the right way. Uh, and that's what I've been doing for the last 10 years. That's, that's helped me navigate my mindset going into every week with what I call an unstoppable plan.

I love it. I love other people who do that as well. So I do it every, every day I do my journal, but then on Sundays I have the, uh, I don't know if you've heard of Brendon Burchard. He has something called the High Performance Habits. So he has where you rate different areas in your life from the last week, you know, from 0 to 10, you know, it's not a 10. Okay. What do you need to work on on that area to get to a 10 by next week? So it just kind of recalibrates every week and, you know, you're ready to get in and get back on the battlefield by Monday. Right. So I think that's—

Yeah, totally. I've looked at Brendon's work and there's a lot out there. And one of the things I found was 99% of people out there get turned off by journaling, meditation, yoga, mainly because it just becomes overly complex. It's like, it feels like a commitment. It's like, and so what I wanted to do was like, hey, what are just 2 simple questions that everyone, if they were to answer every Sunday, they'd just be better off. So we actually call it like a Unstoppable Sunday practice and no fancy yoga pants required. You literally just need to answer the 2 questions and boom, you're good to go. So for some, like, you know, a good friend of mine, Uh, he, he owns a sort of a journaling company and, and, you know, they're a direct-to-consumer, uh, multimillion-dollar company and they're profitable. They just sell journals, nothing fancy, super powerful. Uh, but it takes a certain crowd to really be into that. And what we wanted to create was something that's just like for anyone that can do it and super easy and can get hooked into it by answering 2 simple questions. Um, so whatever works for you is what I said. Brendan's stuff is also good.

Simple works. And how should founders gain clarity, adapt, and build a life? So on that side, right? Like you're coming in here, how do you even get started to build a life plan?

Yeah. This connects to what we were talking about before, right? Like if you're working on a SaaS business, um, you know, you might create a strategy to grow. You might create like, all right, we're going to go raise this round and we're going to do this. We're going to do that. Great. Um, what we often skip for founders is Well, what does that mean for me? What are my personal goals 5 years from now? Right? Who do I want to be? Uh, and I think that's super important. And so the 2 things, like the 2 things we teach in the mindset program is, uh, first just going every Sunday with a plan and you can do that, uh, uh, with the app. The second thing is let's just create who you want to be 5 years from now, right? 5-year vision. Sounds simple. Most of us don't do it. But if you were to create that, when you're thinking strategically about your business and you have clarity into who you want to be 5 years from now, you're going to make better decisions. You're going to make better longer-term decisions. You're going to make better strategic decisions. You're going to start to learn to think short, uh, long-term, uh, and not just optimize for the short-term. So that's the second piece. Like, where are you going? What is the longer-term vision? Who do you want to become? Um, and then the third thing we teach people, uh, and you'll appreciate this if you're in, in, in SaaS businesses and startups, Is how to do 45-day sprints. Um, a lot of times, you know, we're navigating our life in terms of, I got to do this and I got to do this, I got to do this and I got to achieve perfect balance. And it's a bunch of bullshit. No one achieves, no one achieves perfect balance and gets real stuff done. The only time we get real stuff done, we really move things forward, is when we say screw everything else. And this is the one thing I'm really going to own over the next, over the next period of time. You know what? Normally when we do that is when someone else tells us it's time to do that. Meaning if there's an emergency, all of a sudden you're not that busy. You're going to focus on an emergency and solve it. If there's a fire to put out, all of a sudden you're not trying to do balance. You're trying to solve that fire. When you had finals week in college, or if you have a doctor friend that had, that had the MCATs or the boards to study for, when you had a lawyer friend who was studying for the bar, all All of a sudden society said, hey, it's okay to forget everything else and just focus on the board and the bar and finals. And socially it was okay. You could tell a friend like, hey, I can't do this because I'm studying for the boards. And everyone's like, oh, I totally get it, man. But if you're a startup founder and you go to a friend and you're like, hey, I really can't do this. Like we're trying to like work on the company. And they're like, what's wrong with you, man? Like, why are you working so hard? Like, why don't you just take— because they don't get it. They don't understand. Most of your friends aren't entrepreneurs. So I was like, why can't we have a thing? And so I started calling it a 45-day challenge and I would tell my friends, hey, I'm doing a 45-day challenge. And they totally understand. They'd be like, oh, that's cool. It's kind of like an Ironman. I'm like, yeah, something like that. Except you get really rich in the end. Like, how's that sound? Um, and so I, I start, I realized that when, when you give it a name, you get excuse from society to go double down on what you need to double down and go get what you need to get done. And so if step 1 is going every week with an unstoppable plan, step 2 is know where you're going, have a 5-year vision. Step 3 is do 45-day challenges. 45-day challenge is to pick out one goal at a time and just knock it out. Just knock it out of the park. Like if your SaaS business has a growth problem, spend 45 days on it. Here's how we're really going to change our growth strategy. If you have a churn problem, spend 45 days across your team. Like we're going to fix churn once and for all. Let's find out our top 25 churn codes. Let's find the 5 features that cause the biggest issues. Let's solve the biggest requests, the top 20% of tickets. We're going to solve them in the next 45 days. days and we're going to improve churn, guaranteed. No one will ever cancel again because of this one reason. Do a 45-day challenge around that. And that's what really gets everything moving a lot faster in your life and your business.

I want to just add to that, just ask you a little bit. I don't know if there's a little bit of research behind the days of what you selected. So 45 days, I've also heard, you know, there's like the 12 weeks. Typically what you see is that 12 weeks is kind of a sweet spot and you see that with like, you know, weight loss challenges or transformational challenges in your body, for example. Or then you also have on business side, you have like OKRs on a quarterly basis, right? Where same kind of concept where you're focusing on maybe 2 or 3 things over the year, maybe 1 or 2 for the quarter, and then you just really hammer on that. Have you seen any, like, does the 45-day make a difference? And sorry about that. No worries.

Yeah.

Have you seen any difference specifically with that 45 days and does it work more effectively or is it just—

Yeah, I've trialed and errored this and there is some, there is some, uh, some research behind this. Uh, if you do 30 days, um, so the way these 45-day challenges work is you pick one big goal and you're going to focus on that. So if you do 30 days, you will actually not think that strategically. You'll think you'll pick a short-term goal because you're like, I only have 30 days. Uh, if I give you 60 days, you're going to procrastinate the first 15 days. Guaranteed. Like you're going to build out your action plan. You're going to move a lot slower. And then when the 45-day mark hits, you're gonna be like, oh my God, like we're less than 45. Like that's close. So 45 days happens to be a little bit, and you can call it 45 days. You can call it 6 weeks depending on how your brain, what feels better in your brain. And people process that differently. But when I give you 45 days, it's just enough time where you're, you're going to feel that fire in your ass to move faster. Um, um, and you're, you're also not going to procrastinate, but it's, it also feels like it's enough time where you can take on something a little bit more strategic, right? Like if I were to say to you like, hey, we're going to reduce churn by 1 point over the next 45 days versus over the next 30 days. 30 days, you're like, oh, that feels a little aggressive. Maybe, maybe it's like a quarter point. Like 45 days, you're like, oh yeah, we can do that. If it's 60 days, you're like, oh, we should do 3 points. I'm like, yeah, sure. 60 days. Like anything can happen in 60 days. It's too far out. 45 days happens to be that lens of focus that really gets you going. You can feel it, right? Like even when I pitch it to you, you can feel how your body's going to respond to 45 days versus 60 days. You're like, 60 days, we've got plenty of time. Let's pick up even bigger goal.

That's true.

Procrastinate 15 days, 30 days. And you're like, hey, that's barely enough time. Like we're already at 29 days. Like by the time we kick this off, 45 days works really well for that.

Nice. I love it. I'm going to have to try to pick something up and test that out myself.

Dude, you should totally do it. It's a game changer.

Awesome. Well, I'll let you know how that goes.