Discipline is Just Math

Anybody can be disciplined because discipline is just math. You use willpower on your goals and quit as soon as it gets hard. There's 2 kinds of discipline. There's internal or self-discipline, and then there's external discipline. So right now, if the world's kicking your butt, that's external discipline. And if you're self-disciplined, the world's kissing your butt right now. There's one thing that you absolutely require if you're gonna make a big change, and that's discipline. See, without discipline, nothing happens. University College London followed people building one new habit And the median time before it ran automatically was 66 days. I realized at a young age how to change myself was through discipline. And the military didn't teach me that. It was something I realized I had zero discipline, zero self-discipline. And I realized I have to start developing this.

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments, right? So whatever in life you envision to do, you gotta be disciplined.

So you quit at day 20, Blame yourself, say you suck, when the math says day 20 is nowhere near enough time.

If you don't work out, you don't get a muscle, right? So I always tell people, this is— there's a daily practice like priming. If you don't do that, if you get up and you just have no discipline whatsoever, you get no value of anything. Diets don't work when you don't do them. Exercise doesn't work when you don't do them. People have a love of music. They may do 1 or 2 or 3 albums, and then for some reason they fade away.

That hasn't happened to you.

I think again, again, it goes back to a bit of what Warren was saying as well.

Like, it's the discipline. John D. Rockefeller got his first job on September 26th, 1855. He was 16 years old, and he was an assistant bookkeeper at a produce firm in Cleveland called Hewitt and Tuttle. He was so proud of that day, he celebrated it every year for the rest of his life. He called it Job Day, and he made more of it than his own birthday or his wedding anniversary. A few days after he started, he spent 10 cents on a small red notebook. He called it Ledger A. In it, he wrote down every single transaction of his own life— what he earned, what he spent, what he gave away. He wrote down every item as it happened with his handwriting instead of adding it up at the end of the month. He was earning almost nothing at the time. He was a teenager on a clerk's wage and had no reason to keep books at all. And the amounts were tiny, but he wrote them down anyway. And he never stopped. Decades later, as the richest man in the country, he still had Ledger A. He kept it in a safe deposit box and he'd take it out and turn the Yellow Pages on it. A grown man in his 60s worth more than anyone alive looking at what a 16-year-old wrote down about a few dollars. Rockefeller ran Standard Oil the same way when it was refining most of the oil across America. Rockefeller was famous for wanting the actual figures, down to how many drops of solder sealed the can. When you know your numbers down to that level, you find savings that other founders miss. So Rockefeller's fortune started with a 10-cent notebook by writing down everything he spent money on. Now I know how this sounds. You're thinking this is going to be joyless and that you're not a numbers person and that some people are just wired for this and you aren't. The good news is that discipline really is just math. And if you get the math right, then achieving your goals becomes automatic. So you're about to see 6 famous entrepreneurs and the one number that each of them tracked. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time.

Believe.

Benjamin Franklin, 13 lines and a black dot. So Benjamin Franklin picked his number at age 20 on a boat before he'd done much with his life. It was 1972. He was sailing back from London to Philadelphia. He had 80 days at sea with nothing to do, and he decided he was going to fix his own character on a schedule. So he wrote out 13 virtues: temperance, silence, uh, order, resolution, frugality, industry, and 7 others. He made a little book and gave each virtue a page in the book. He ruled out 7 columns, one for every day of the week, and 13 lines, one for every virtue. Each evening, he went back over his day and put a black dot in the box wherever he'd failed. He'd work one virtue a week. So 13 virtues at one a week is 13 weeks. So he got through the whole list 14 times a year. Be a better person is something that you can't measure, so you can't fail at it and you can't win at it either. Fewer dots on this page than last week is something that anyone can follow. So having a number also makes it easy to follow. One virtue at a time, 7 boxes, a dot takes 2 seconds to put down. He kept that book for years and carried it around with him wherever he went. So pick the same thing tonight. Pick one thing you want to get better at this week. Just one and draw 7 boxes for the next 7 days. Mark it honestly every night, and then next week pick the next thing. You'll wanna pick 5 things because one feels too slow to matter. Franklin picked just one, and that's how he became Benjamin Franklin. Mary Kay Ash, start with the hardest. So Mary Kay Ash spent 25 years in direct sales and watched men she trained get promoted over her. So she quit and she sat down to write a book about what she had learned and what came out was a business plan. She launched Mary Kay Cosmetics in 1963 with $5,000 and her son. The discipline she built that company on takes about 4 minutes a day, and we're gonna talk about it right now. Every night before she stopped work, she wrote down the 6 most important things to do the next day in order with the hardest one first. The next morning, she started at the top. 6 was a deliberately small number for her. Her reasoning was that a long list of things to do makes you feel beaten before you've even started, and a person who feels beaten Doesn't do the first thing on the list. They do the easiest thing. So cap it at 6 things and everything on the list has to earn a place in your calendar. The other important part is that it's written the night before, so you're choosing what matters while you're calm so that tomorrow's version of you who might be tired, you might be getting messaged all day, doesn't have to choose anything. You just show up and you do what's on your list. She believed in it enough that Mary Kay printed space in those 6 lines in the datebooks the consultants she had carried around. Hundreds of thousands of people running the same 4-minute routine and selling Millions worth of products. I'm the same way with my calendar, by the way. If I woke up and had to work out what to do today, I'm probably not gonna be that productive. So the decision has to be already made before the day starts, which is why I put it in my calendar. So tonight, before you close your laptop, write 6, 6 for tomorrow with the hardest one at the top. Then do it again tomorrow night. 6 to 6 nights of that, and it becomes an automatic habit that pushes you towards your goals. Herb Kelleher cut it to 10 minutes. Herb Kelleher was a lawyer, not an airline man. He and a client sketched out Southwest Airlines on a cocktail napkin in a San Antonio bar, drawing a triangle between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Then he spent nearly 4 years fighting the existing airlines in court for the right to fly at all, and he argued much of it himself because he was a lawyer, all the way to the Texas Supreme Court. By the time he won and got planes in the air, the company was nearly out of money. In the spring of 1972, Southwest had $143 in the bank, and he'd already sold one of its 4 planes to make payroll. He had 3 aircraft and a schedule built for 4 of them. Now, anyone else would cut the schedule. Kelleher took a more disciplined approach and picked a number instead. The industry took about 45 minutes to turn a plane around at the gate. So you gotta get everybody off, clean the plane, load it, get everybody back on. He decided his airline would do it in 10, 10 minutes to do all of that. A plane earns money in the air and loses money sitting at the gate. So take 35 minutes out of every stop at the gate and he gets an extra flight out of the same aircraft every single day. His 3 planes could Fly the schedule built for 4, and the plane that he had sold to survive, he didn't need it anymore. So holding 10 minutes cost him things, and he gave them up permanently. So there was no assigned seating, there was no meals, there was no transferring bags to another airline. There was one type of aircraft, so every crew knew every plane. Everyone worked to make it happen, pilots included picking up trash in the cabins. The idea is credited to Bill Franklin, his ground operations head. What Kelleher did was refuse to let it be a one-time emergency measure. He built a whole airline around that 10-minute number and defended it 30 years against every consultant who wanted assigned seating and every executive who wanted a business class. He worked on the crew himself on the day before Thanksgiving, the busiest travel day of the year. He worked the baggage department at Love Field with the ramp crew. So pick your own version of 10. There's one number in what you do that multiplies everything else. How long you take to reply to a lead, how many days from finishing a job to sending the invoice. Pick that number, cut it in half, name what you're dropping to get there, and then check how you're doing every week for a year. Also, if you wanna take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It has the top lessons from today's video, space for your own takeaways, and a simple action plan that you can start today. Click the link in description below to go grab it, and I'll see you there. Andy Grove, put the number on yourself first. So Andy Grove ran Intel through the hardest turn in its history when Japanese manufacturers destroyed the memory chip business Intel had been built on, and the company had to become a microprocessor company or die. In 1982, as his growth stalled, he saved He had to leave the company with a number. He called it the 125% solution. Everyone was asked to work 25% more hours for the same pay to get the company through. Now, that's a pretty brutal thing to ask your team, and asking it puts you in a difficult spot too. So he did something specific alongside it. Intel ran a late list at the door, a sheet that you signed if you arrived after 8 in the morning. One morning, a reporter from the New York Times watched Andy Grove sign it because he was late. The chief executive, in the middle of asking everyone for 25% more time, was signing the sheet because he was late. He put himself on the list too with his name on it where his people could see that he was late. So really he picked 2 numbers. 125% more hours is what he asked for. 8:00 AM is what he held himself to in writing, or if he was late, the whole company would see it. He didn't just give some big speech about commitment. So the next time you set a standard for other people, whether that's staff, a partner, your kids, pick the number first and put yourself on the list before anybody else. Then hold yourself accountable to everyone on the days where you don't follow through. Truett Cathy, give up 1 day in 7. So Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy picked a number that cost him money every week for the rest of his life. In 1946, he and his brother Ben opened a diner called the Dwarf Grill in Hapeville, Georgia, on the 23rd of May. It had 10 stools, 4 tables, which is where the name came from, and they ran it around the clock, 24 hours, because that's what a new diner between a Ford plant and the Atlanta airport had to do just to survive. The 2 of them, they covered it between them on alternating 12-hour work shifts with a $6,400 loan on top of their heads. Truett was 25 and had just come outta the Army. On the first Sunday after they opened, they closed. He said later that he'd seen what 7 days a week do to people and that he and Ben needed the day off. So he had a 24-hour restaurant, a loan that he couldn't afford, 2 people covering every shift between them, and he took out 1 day in 7, which is 14% of the week, at the exact moment that he needed the money. The most that business grew into Chick-fil-A, and the Sunday off rule survived all the way through the company's history. One diner, then hundreds of restaurants, then thousands. Every one of them closed on Sunday for about 80 years now. Now Sunday is one of the biggest days in fast food, but Chick-fil-A still does more sales per restaurant than chains that are open all week. His reason was religious, and it doesn't have to be yours. What matters here is that he decided the number once in the year he could least afford it, and then he never had to have the argument with himself again. There was no weekly negotiation. About whether this Sunday was special or not. Picking the number in advance is what ends the argument with yourself. We're not overthinking anymore. Then it's not about willpower or discipline. It's just about doing your number. So pick one thing you're going to hold when it's expensive and hard. One evening a week with your phone in a drawer. One day in a month with no meetings on it. Put it in the calendar on a repeat schedule and treat every request to break it as already answered.

No.

Dave Ramsey, pick the number, you'll finish. So Dave Ramsey picks the mathematically wrong number on purpose. He went bankrupt in his 20s after building and losing a real estate portfolio, then spent the next 30 years teaching people how to get out of debt. His method is the debt snowball. So it's list every debt from the smallest balance to the largest, pay the minimum on all of them except the smallest, and attack that one. When it's gone, roll everything you are paying on it into the next smallest and then repeat. Now, any finance textbook will tell you that's the wrong order. The correct order is to attack the highest interest rate first, because interest is what the debt actually costs you. Now, Ramsey knows this and he teaches the other way on purpose. His reasoning is that this was never a math problem in the first place. As he puts it, personal finance is 80% behavior and only 20% head knowledge. The optimal plan takes a long time to show you anything, and a person who sees nothing for 7 months Quits. So clearing the smallest debt in 6 weeks gives you a win that you can feel. And a person with a win, they keep going. So he gives up a bit of interest to buy the thing that actually matters, which is that you finish. So that's the limit on everything else in this video. Numbers are how you find the truth. They're not automatically how you get yourself to move. If the optimal plan is one that you've already abandoned 3 times, then it isn't the optimal plan for you. And a worse plan that you complete Beats a better one that you quit next month. So there's no perfect plan. Whatever you write down, there are going to be holes in it because the projection of where you're going to go isn't reality, and reality is only what you ever actually get done. What almost everyone is missing is momentum. That's the most important thing. So when the math and your behavior disagree, pick the number that you'll still be running in 66 days to make your habit automatic. Pick your number tonight. Rockefeller started with a 10-cent notebook, and every cent he spent was. Written in it. Then I showed you 6 more numbers from some pretty successful people. Ben Franklin picked 13 virtues in 7 boxes. Mary Kay Ash picked 6 to-dos written the night before. Herb Kelleher picked 10 minutes to clean the plane when the industry average was 45. Andy Grove picked 8:00 AM, or he signed in late on the list. Uh, Truett Cathy picked 1 day in 7 days off and gave it up for 80 years. And Dave Ramsey picks a smaller balance on purpose so you get a win before you quit. Every one of them chose a number. Instead of relying on willpower. They didn't get more disciplined than you. They just made the decision once in advance instead of every single morning having to think about it. The math is what tells you that you're at 4 attempts and not 500, that you're 20 days in and not 66, because your feelings will tell you that you've been at this forever. The math will tell you the truth. I've come to believe something about discipline, having been on both sides of it. You blame it on discipline and whatever, that's just an excuse. What you actually have is a standards problem, and your standard is whatever you let yourself Off the hook for. You raise a standard by picking something small enough that you can't argue with it, putting it in your calendar, and then doing it, especially on the days that you don't want to. You are what you consistently do, not just what you think about. You can build belief through action. Every time you do the thing, you believe that you can keep going, especially when it's hard. So pick one number tonight, just one. Make it small, put it in your calendar, and then get to work. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be.

Believe.

Now let's learn how you can delete your old self. You can't just plan your way into being a different person. You change who you are one small habit at a time. The thing is, is that we become creatures of our own habits. You can have any habits, any, any patterns of behavior that you wish. It's simply a question of which you decide. In a study published in the Journal of Personality, In a study published in the journal Psychology and Social Psychology, researchers tracked people hour by hour through their days and found 43% of what they did was habit. The same action in the same place almost every day. Habits account for 40 to 50% of our daily behaviors. And this is all the stuff that you're just doing without even thinking. If you want to get your life together, you have to start with small, boring habits to fix the loops that create 95% of our problems. Which means almost half of your day is already on autopilot, Mostly running on autopilot. So here's how you delete your old self and upgrade your autopilot. If you think about it, everything we do, almost everything we do in life is autopilot. Your brain is always developing habits, so it's, it's happening whether you want it to happen or not. And the question is, can you take control of the process? George Foreman did it all in public, and it started in a locker room in Puerto Rico in 1977. Before that night, George Foreman, he was the villain, and he enjoyed being a villain.

The first time around, I was angry and I just didn't care. I mean, People booed me, and it was great because they were booing the right guy. I was a bad fella.

He was the heavyweight who scowled at people, said almost nothing, and scared everyone around him. And that was his whole persona, and it worked. He was terrifying, and he was famous for being terrifying. But then in March 1977, he lost to Jimmy Young in San Juan.

I'd fought Jimmy Young, and I just lost the fight.

Afterwards, in the dressing room, he collapsed from exhaustion and started hallucinating. He described He describes it as a near-death experience.

I went back into the dressing room and I was just cooling off. And I started walking and cooling my body off and I was just overtaken with that I was gonna die. And I experienced a death in that room.

He walked out of that room a born-again Christian and he quit boxing at 28 years old.

When I left that dressing room, I was screaming the name of Jesus. I started screaming words like, hallelujah, I've been born again!

Then he spent 10 years doing something nobody talks about. What do you think the 10 years you spent away from boxing Boxing did for you? from what, I guess from '77 to '87?

When was it?

About '77 to '87.

10 years.

What did it take out of you? What did it take away from you?

You know, it gave me an appreciation more than anything of life. It made me a better man.

He became an ordained minister. He preached.

I became a preacher, full-time evangelist with the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. Gave me something I never had before— peace of mind. Like, I like being who I am.

He opened the George Foreman Youth and Community Center in Houston, Texas, and spent his days with kids who had nothing. A decade of that out of the spotlight, doing small repeated things that had nothing to do with who he used to be. He started deleting his old self.

I dropped everything I was doing to tell the whole world that Jesus Christ is alive. God took me all over the country fighting in Africa, Puerto Rico, uh, Europe, everywhere, and I was just trying to exalt George Foreman. Now I'm going all over trying to tell them about Jesus.

By 1987, the youth center needed money badly. So at 38, an age when every expert said it was ridiculous, he went back to boxing to pay for it, and it started one of the most famous comebacks in sports history.

I decided right then, I know how to get money. I'm going to be heavyweight champion of the world again. That's how I'll get money for my youth center.

And on November 5th, 1994, at 45 years old, he knocked out Michael Moorer and became the oldest heavyweight champion The winner, and once again heavyweight champion of the world, Big George Foreman! But the title wasn't even where the money was. A grill company put his name and his face on a small kitchen appliance, the George Foreman Grill, and it sold more than 100 million units. In 1999, Sultan paid $137 million to buy out the company. out Foreman and 2 of his partners for the exclusive rights to keep his name on that grill forever.

This thing sold over $100 million. Right.

And to give the check some context too, you end up being bought out, I think, for something like $140 million after what you had already made. Is it true? I mean, at one point checks were coming in for upwards of like $4 million monthly?

$5 million.

He'd made about $5 million for fighting Muhammad Ali. He made an estimated $200 million from the grill. Sultan didn't pay the $137 million for an angry boxer. Nobody was ever going to buy a family kitchen product from the terrifying 1974 version of George Foreman. He deleted his old self, and the man America met in 1994 was the one those 10 quiet years had built. And the boxing comeback is what put him in front of everybody again. Now, you're not going to collapse in a locker room room in Puerto Rico. But that night wasn't what changed him either. The 10 years of preaching is the actual story. Everything that made him somebody else, everything that allowed him to delete his old self, happened in small, consistent habit changes in a church and a gym in Houston with nobody watching. Which brings us right back to that 43%. Almost half of what you do is already running on habit— the same thing in the same place. So to delete your old self like George Foreman You need to change the things you already do every single day. Here are the 6 things that actually rebuild who you are. Do them and you'll be a different person. Number 1, decide who you are before you decide what to do. So you've been taught to do the reps, then you get the muscles, then you call yourself an athlete, right? You wait years before you'll let yourself say, I'm an athlete. We need to turn that around. Being leads to doing. So wake up and decide who you are today, and what you actually do after that changes automatically. Exactly. When you tell yourself, I'm an athlete, I'm a great dad today, I'm a leader today, it might feel ridiculous for about a week. Then you notice that you're doing things that you never scheduled because an athlete doesn't skip the workout. A great dad shows up for family dinner. A leader speaks up when it would be easier to stay quiet. A list of to-dos gives you tasks, but no reason. If you've decided that you are a leader today, you already know what to do when a choice shows up, including the hundreds of small choices that were never on any to-do list. Should you send that message? A leader would. Should you have that drink? An athlete wouldn't. You stop arguing with yourself about every little thing, which is exhausting because you've already decided who you are. Watch a salesperson at a Ferrari dealership. They don't scramble to pull up a website and prove how many races that the company has won. They stand there knowing that they are selling a Ferrari and that means something. You are a Ferrari too when you decide that's who you are. There's a line on a t-shirt I own that I go back to constantly. A bird sitting on a tree isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, it's in her wings. Who Who you decide to be today can change the rest of your life. So decide who you are before you worry about deciding what to do. Number 2, go outside before the world gets to you. If you took every habit away from me and let me keep just one, I'd keep this one. It's my Believe Walk. Here's how it goes. You wake up and get outside within the first 15 minutes of your day, then walk for 15 to 20 minutes. Your phone comes with you for one job only, which is audio. No email, no messaging, no scrolling, no reacting to anybody else's demands. Go for your believe walk and just listen to something that makes you believe in yourself more. There are mornings when your own belief just isn't there, and on those mornings you can borrow somebody else's belief. You're going to spend the next 15, 20 minutes listening to something either way. And if you don't choose with intention, you'll probably just pick whatever is convenient or a social media algorithm recommends. And now you've entered doom scrolling mode, which is probably not how you want to start your day. So instead, put on a speech, a set of rules, an interview with someone who's done what you're trying to do. It's why I make these videos every single day on my channel. So there's always something new for you to put on if you want. And when you do that every morning, you come back from your believe walk with a belief that you didn't wake up with. And that's the whole point. Do that for 30 days and it'll change your life. A bonus tip is the second you get out of bed, put a stopwatch on. You need to be outside within 15 minutes. Go to the bathroom, brush your teeth, get changed, drink some water, feed the dogs, get outside. No more drifting or doom scrolling. You have now claimed your day. Number 3, answer these 3 questions. You need something written down because your memory of who you decided to be will not last all week, especially when you get stressed. So sit down tonight and answer 3 questions. Who do you want to become? Why are you here? What are the things you actually want in your life? Spend an hour with it and give yourself permission to let yourself dream for an hour. Don't worry about the stresses, the mortgage, the family drama, the health issues, the responsibilities, your past trauma, and everything else that is creating pressure on you right now. Those are real and you will fix them. But just for an hour, let yourself dream again because you can't delete your old self by living in the problems of your old self. So 3 questions: Who do you want to become? Why are you here? What are the things you actually want in your life? Who you want to become is how you behave when things go wrong. Why you're here is the one people skip because it feels too big. But write down a bad answer. A bad answer is better than no answer. And on what you want, Be specific, even if it's embarrassing. The number in your bank account, the money for selfish reasons, a break from responsibility, more friends, a weight goal, looking good naked, traveling to a specific destination. This list is just for you so you don't have to worry about someone else's judgments or expectations. Just write. That page is what you check yourself against. Not a mood, not a feeling about how the month went. A page that you can hold up next to your calendar. So a week later, if you're spending time on something completely different from what you wrote down, you don't need to argue with yourself. You just pull out the page. You wrote it down. You wrote it. You can see the gap yourself in 15 seconds. Keep it to one page. If it's too long, you will not come back to it. It won't be as valuable. And keep it somewhere that you physically pass, not just in some folder on your laptop. If you have to keep looking for it, you won't, especially on tough days. So keep it visible as a reminder of who you are becoming and why it matters. Bonus tip, read that page every Sunday with a coffee and a fresh perspective. If the page says you're building a business and last week you had 2 hours on it and 14 hours of other people's meetings, the page isn't wrong. You aren't lazy. Your calendar just belongs to something else. And that's what needs to change. The goal is to catch the drift while it's still just one week wide. And one week is easy to fix. If you skip the Sunday read, you'll wake up 6 months later as somebody that you never chose to be. Number 4, expect the moving cost. You are going to stall out around week 3. And this is why. Changing who you are has a moving cost, and it works exactly like if you're moving a house. The big items are easy, right? You know where the couch goes. What kills you is the small boxes of stupid things that you forgot existed. Same thing happens with your identity. Deciding is just the first part. Then you find the bio line that still describes the old you, the link in your profile that points to something that you don't even do anymore, the autoresponder written by a person that you no longer are, the photo from 4 years ago back when you were somebody else, the friends who only ever ask you about the old thing. None of those little things are hard to change, but all of it combined, it just slows you down. And being slowed down is what makes you slow. So go clean out those small leftover things on purpose. Give yourself 1 hour this week and do it in one pass, because spread over a month, you'll get stuck halfway and just live between the 2 versions of you. Rewrite the bio, fix the links, delete the old automated messages, change the photo, unsubscribe from the 20 emails that were meant for the person that you used to be, and expect the people part to take a little bit longer because they're not trying to be difficult. They met a version of you that made sense to them, and that is comfortable and familiar to them. Keep showing up as the new you, and most of them catch up inside a few months. The ones who never come around only liked you the way you were before, and that's worth knowing. And you don't need to announce any of this either. Announcing invites a debate about whether you've really changed or not. Just answer differently when they ask what you're up to and set a new standard for what you will no longer do. Number 5, set a baseline for yourself. So you do the Believe Walk for 9 days. Day 10, you sleep through your alarm, and instead of walking on day 11, you decide that this The streak is broken, so the whole thing is off. And you know, we start properly on Monday, right? Monday becomes the first of the month. The first of the month becomes never. Sleeping in wasn't the real problem. What stopped you for good was deciding that you had blown it. So instead, set a baseline that you'll almost never miss. Not the perfect version, the version that you can do with a fever, on 4 hours sleep, on a day that started with some emergency. If the Believe Walk is 15 minutes, your baseline is walking to the end of the street and back with one song on. If it's the gym, the baseline is walking in and doing one set. If it's writing, the baseline is writing one paragraph. Write the baseline down next to the real version tonight before you actually need it. You can't set a fair baseline at 6:00 AM when you feel terrible, right? That version of you is looking for a reason to skip, and it'll take any reason that you give it. Hit the baseline and you kept the promise. That's the rule. The baseline isn't there to make progress. Some mornings it does nothing at all for your fitness or for your business, and it still counts because what it protects Is the promise you made to yourself. You're building evidence that you're somebody who does what they said they do, and evidence is built by showing up again, especially when it's hard. Number 6, sit down with yourself. I want to give you 2 more exercises, and both of them take 5 minutes. The first one, imagine a park bench. You sit down on it next to yourself from 5 years ago. You get 5 minutes with them and then they're gone. What do you tell them, younger you, to change their life? For me, it would be that I need to believe more in myself. Write your sentence down word for word, then realize that you're not just talking to the younger version of you. Whatever you tell them, younger you, you still need to hear it right now. Future you is also saying that same message to you right now. 80-year-old Evan is telling me to believe more in myself too, right now. The second one, and I got this from Jeff Bezos, is picture yourself at 80 looking back at this exact moment. week. What do you regret? What did you never try? Then make the choice today that the 80-year-old version of you would be proud of. Both of these work because they get you out of the current version of yourself for a minute, and the current version is the one making all of your excuses. So do the park bench exercise tonight. Do the 80-year-old test before any decision that scares you. They cost you nothing, and the answer you get is almost always the one you really needed to hear. It's a thing that deep down you probably already knew, but your fear was preventing you from hearing. Your old self was a rough draft. George Foreman spent 10 quiet years preaching in Houston and running a youth center for kids who had nothing. That's how he deleted his old self, and years later, the whole world trusted him in their kitchen. Nobody heard from him for those years or cheered him on. He built it himself. You can do the same. Tomorrow morning, do your believe walk, 15 minutes outside, and make a decision about who you are. Your purpose comes from your pain, and the old version of you is the one who carried it. You've carried it long enough. Now go be the person who does something with it. Now let's learn how a true workaholic works. Outworking the people around you still works, and it's never been easier to do.

You need to work super hard. And I mean, if you do simple math, say like, okay, if somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100, you'll get twice as done— as much done in the course of a week. If you don't work hard every single day, you will perish.

Gallup found that full-time American employees worked 42.9 hours a week in 2024, down from 44.1 in 2019.

I begin each morning by doing my highest priority work first. I have a very clear priority list, and I start from the highest priority work first. Before I even get to work, my day is already a success.

If it's not in the calendar, it won't get done. It's not really a priority, right? You have to make sure that it's in your plan, it's in your day. That gap is 62 hours a year, and that's a new skill, a finished project, or the side business that you keep saying that you're going to start one day.

You have to prioritize your time really carefully.

The way that I've found to stay focused, be productive, and not get distracted is one, by auditing my So that I know, one, what I'm supposed to be working on, and then two, that at the end of any task, I'm going to reflect back on how long it took me, how much time did I spend on task. So here's how a true workaholic actually works. Jensen Huang runs Nvidia, and he works 7 days a week. The reason goes back to 1996 when the company came one chip away from dying.

You're getting ready to ship the RIVA 128.

Yeah.

And you guys have— You're running out of money.

In 1993, 3 engineers sat in a Denny's in San Jose and started a company with $40,000. Jensen Huang was one of them. Chris Malachowski and Curtis Priem were the other 2. They made graphic chips, and for the first 3 years, they made them badly.

At the time that we started the company in 1993, we were the only consumer 3D graphics company ever created. By the time that we realized we had gone down the wrong road, Microsoft had already rolled out DirectX. It was fundamentally incompatible with our architecture. With Nvidia's architecture, 30 competitors have already shown up, even though we were the first company at the time that we were founded. So the world was a completely different place.

By 1996, the company was nearly dead. Huang laid off about half the company. Everyone left had one chip to bet on and not enough money to build it the normal way.

Our backs were up against the wall. We were running out of time. We're running out of money. And for a lot of employees, running out of hope.

So here's how building a chip normally goes. You design You design it, you pay a factory to make a small batch, physical samples come back, you test them, you find the mistakes, you fix the design, and you pay for another batch.

The plan that companies normally go through, which is, you know, build the chip, write the software, fix the bugs, tape out a new chip, so on and so forth.

Every round costs months and money. Nvidia could afford one production run and nothing after that. So Huang made a bet that should have killed the He spent a big piece of the money he had left on an emulator, tested the entire chip on that machine, and never held a real sample in his hand.

We also made the decision to use this technology called emulation.

Then he ordered the full production run on a chip that nobody on Earth had even touched. If the emulator was wrong about one detail, there was no second batch and there was no company.

You decide to do the entire testing in simulation rather than ever receiving a physical prototype. You commission the production run sight unseen with the rest of the company's money. So you're betting it all right here on the RIVA 128.

Yeah, the chip was the RIVA 128, and by the time it shipped, there was enough cash left to cover one more month of salaries. It sold a million units in 4 months. NVIDIA lived.

Was everybody telling you you were crazy? No, everybody was clear we had no shot. Not doing it would be crazy because otherwise you might as well go home. You're going to be out of business anyways. Well, it worked.

Yeah.

And for years afterward, Huang opened his presentations by telling the room that the company was 30 days from going out of business. He still works like a man who believes that. He has around 60 people reporting directly to him, and he holds no Nvidia's leadership team is 60 plus, 60 people.

Yeah.

And they all report to you?

They, yeah, they all report to me. 60 direct reports? 60 direct reports, yeah. I don't do one-on-ones. I give you feedback right there in front of everybody.

Here's how he describes his week.

I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, and I work 7 days a week.

Now that's a true workaholic, but he isn't just putting in more hours. He said it's about being more efficient. And right about now you might be thinking, okay, that sounds like the fastest way to burn yourself out. And I hear you. I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be how you run your company, but when somebody joins me, I ask them a question. How many hours do you want to be working and how many are you working right now? Then I write a contract to match it. Some of the people on my team work 25 hours a week. Some are at 70. Both work fine because the hours aren't what usually breaks people. The wrong work is what usually breaks people. Work is. Hours on work that matters make you good. Hours on work that doesn't matter will wreck you, whether you're at 25 or 70 hours a week. And Jensen Huang isn't spending his week on boring paperwork. He built a company with no managers between him and the information, so he spends his hours deciding, making important choices. You can set up your week the same way. So here's how a real workaholic spends a day. Split your week into building days Building days and meeting days. So my week splits into building days, maker days, and manager days, which are meeting days. So Wednesday and Fridays, those are my maker days. Wednesday is my creator day and Friday is my CEO day. And on both days, I don't have anything booked. Monday and Thursday, those are my manager days. I stack them with calls. Tuesday is a maker day on paper as well. It's my YouTube day, so nothing gets booked on it either. Here's why I'm strict about it. One 60-minute call dropped in the middle of a building does not cost you 60 minutes. It costs you almost a whole day. You spend the morning knowing that it's coming, so you don't start any deep work. Then you spend the hour on the call doing the thing. Then you spend the afternoon getting your head back. And by the time you're thinking clearly again, it's already 4:00 PM. I mean, you've built nothing. A meeting day and a building day are 2 different jobs. On a meeting day, you're reacting, you're answering, you're trying to make decisions quickly with people. On a building day, you go down into one thing and stay there for 4 hours. Try to do both in the same morning and you'll be wiped out by Friday. with nothing finished. So pick one day this week and close it. Start with whatever you can book off and then grow it to a whole day. Move every call off it, even the good ones. Then take everything you moved and jam it into one other day. So I use 2 meeting days for meetings because of the size of my team and what I'm working on. But start with one. And on that day you might get through 6, 7 conversations in a row and you'll still have the next whole day free to actually go build something. Even half a day is a good start. Then you grow it. Give every day one job. So inside those days, I give each one a single theme. So Monday is my team day and I spend the whole day mentoring and talking to the people on my team. Tuesday is my YouTube day. I'm filming this video on a Tuesday. Wednesday is my creator day, my project day. Thursday mornings I do my group trainings and Thursday afternoons I save for friends and friends of friends and podcasts. Friday is my CEO day. The reason why I have different days for different things is switching. Every time you jump from a sales call to editing a video, to a hiring decision, to support emails, It takes a while to get your head into the new thing every single time. So you feel busy all day and you finish your week with like four and a half things finished. A theme day means you never have to catch up. So on Tuesday, I'm not taking calls. I'm not taking meetings. I'm just locked in on my YouTube. My tools are open. My camera's ready to go. My head is already there, and I'll film a stack of videos one Tuesday that keeps my channel fed for at least a week. I can only do that because I'm not bouncing between things, and the bouncing is what creates most of the chaos and mental fatigue. So look at last week and count how many different kinds. of work you touched on your worst day. If it's more than 3, that's your problem. You're not lazy. The problem is you're just switching too much between different kinds of tasks. Then name your own day. So for me, Monday's people, Tuesday is making YouTube videos, like whatever fits your business, write it somewhere where you will see it. And when somebody asks for a Tuesday sales call, tell them Thursday works better. They will almost never be offended. That's the part that most people worry about and it hardly ever happens. So they book on the Thursday and they start treating your calendar like it's worth something because you treated it that way to begin with. The people who take your protected days almost always are not doing it on purpose. They take it because it's available. So stop making it available. You made it available. And listen, you're going to have real emergencies. So you can decide right now what the rule is going to be for emergencies. For me, I'm training my team so they know if you are calling me on a Tuesday, if you are interrupting me, you're sending me something, I'm in the middle of making videos, so it better be important. And people respect that boundary. And there are almost no emergencies that ever pop up. So the first few weeks, That's going to be a little bit harder. People are used to your old calendar. They might test a new one a handful of times. The more you hold steady, this is my calendar, the more they respect it. Shrink the block and move it off your morning. Every meeting I run is scheduled to end 5 minutes early. So a 25-minute call instead of 30, a 55-minute instead of an hour. That gives me 5 minutes to go to the bathroom, to get some water, to get my head straight before the next thing starts. So you never know when you're gonna have to go pee. And a day with no gaps is also where you can feel frazzled at the end. That's the smaller version. And here's the bigger one. I used to check a whole list of websites every morning and it would take me a while to get through all of them. It felt very productive. It also was the first thing I did every day, which my best hours went to reading other people's work. So I ran an experiment. I condensed it into half an hour at 1 o'clock every day. And in that half hour, I have to get it done. And look at Look at that. I get it done in half an hour instead of 90 minutes in the morning. If you give a task 2 hours, it usually takes 2 hours. So you could start doing this today. You could take the task that is eating your mornings. You can cut the time by 2/3, move it to the afternoon, set a timer. When the timer goes off, you're done, whether you are finished or not. The first 2 days, it'll feel a little bit rushed. By day 3, you'll notice the work was never actually filling that whole block anyway. Your mornings are your best hours, so don't spend them on small stuff. Kill the work before you speed it up. So I have a formula I use for this, and the order is the whole thing. It's eliminate, automate, delegate. That is the order. It's a particular order. Eliminate comes first, and almost nobody starts there. You'll buy software to speed up a task that you should have just deleted. Now you're paying every month to do something that doesn't actually matter, or you'll hand it to a person, which is worse because now somebody's week is filled with work that was never worth doing in the first place. So eliminate first, then automate what's left. A tool can automate whether it's a software, whether it's AI, etc. This isn't only a business framework; it's a framework for anything in life. Anytime you're feeling stressed out or overwhelmed, that feeling is a signal that you need to go eliminate a few things from your life—not to work faster, to have and do less. All progress begins, I think, with telling the truth, and the truth is usually that a third of your calendar is there because it was just there last. Month. So here is the assignment. Open last week's calendar and find the recurring thing that you'd be a little embarrassed to defend, right? The report, the check-in, the updates that people are not replying to. Skip it on purpose. Say nothing. If a week goes by and nobody notices, skip it again. Do that for a month and it's gone for good. One number, 3 drivers, and nothing else. So I have a brain that wants to chase everything, right? Left alone, I'll start 6 projects on a Sunday. So I keep one Google And I have what I call my wildly important number. At the top, there's one number. It's not a feeling, it's not a theme, it's a number. And under it, there are exactly 3 drivers, and each one is also a number, something I can count at the end of the week to see my progress. That's the whole document. 3 is the limit, and it matters. 2, when you're not really running a business, you're running a project. 4 or more, and you just have no priorities at all. You just have a list of to-dos that almost never get done. So to put it in a rhythm that makes it work, every time I'm checking in with my team, that number gets updated before the check-in. So you can see in a glance whether it's moving. But the number itself and the 3 drivers underneath it, they don't get swapped out because some shiny idea showed up on a Tuesday afternoon. The numbers hold for months. So if a driver turns out to be wrong, you change it deliberately, not because you're just in a mood to change things. That saved me more time than any app I've ever bought. The new project isn't the problem. The problem is the old one sitting half finished for 6 weeks while you play with this new idea. So write your number down tonight. Write your 3 drivers underneath it. Then look at tomorrow and find the block that doesn't move your number or any of your 3 drivers. There's always one. That's the block that goes away. Do 3 a day while they do 1 a week. So here's where your extra hours now should go. When I was young and part of an agency, I was the least skilled person on the team. That's not me being humble. I was measurably the worst. So I did homework. Everyone else was putting out a video a week. I made 3 a day every day, including weekends. One in the morning, one at lunch, one at dinner. And my agent was looking at them, giving me feedback. So if we count what that does, in a single week I got 21 reps and a piece of feedback on each video I made. The person next to me got only 1 rep. Over a month, that's 84 corrections against their 4. I didn't catch up to them because I was smarter. I wasn't. I was not naturally more gifted. I caught up because I'd been wrong 84 more times than they had, and every one of those got fixed. So that's what the extra hours are for— more attempts at the thing that you're trying to get better at. And after every attempt, somebody tells you what you did wrong. So find your rep. If it's a salesperson and you're taking calls, if you're making videos, then it's videos. If you write, then it's pages. Count how many you did last week, then do that many in a day and let the quality drop a little while you do it. You'll be embarrassed by attempt number 7 and you'll get better by attempt number 15. And find out how it went as fast as you can. If nobody tells you what you got wrong, then you're not getting better. You're just practicing the wrong things. You're just staying Start your day before the work starts. So every workaholic I admire protects the first stretch of the day and spends it with intention on purpose. So back to Jensen Huang from NVIDIA, he gives his time to his email stack. I give mine to a walk. So I call it the Believe Walk. It's, it's one word hashtag and it's 3 steps. Step 1, wake up and get outside fast. Put a stopwatch on. I'm out the door within 15 minutes. That part matters more than the walking because the alternative is picking up your phone, And the second you do that, you're starting to hand your life, your day to whoever happens to be overwhelming you with email or Instagram. Step two is the walk, right? Fresh air. Move for twenty to thirty minutes. Some mornings I'll throw a rucksack on extra weight, but that's that's an extra point. You don't have to do that. You just have to get outside. And in step three, listen to somebody who's already done what you're trying to do. So I'll put on Steve Jobs or Howard Schultz. You're borrowing their belief until yours show up. So this is not about trying to have some productivity hack. It's about who you are when you sit. I think being leads to doing. So do your believe walk. Get outside, walk, put something in your ears. It helps you believe in yourself more. And if you're tight on time, 10 to 15 minutes is enough. That's the baseline, and it's more than enough to change your life. You have 15 minutes. Make the information come to you. So working hard only pays off if you hear about problems quickly. Hwang has about 60 people reporting straight to him. Like I said, no scheduled one-on-ones, nobody filtering what reaches him. When he gives feedback, he does it in front of the group. So everyone hears the same reasoning at the same time, and he never has to say it 60 times. And every morning he reads a stack of short emails from people all over the company, each one listing the 5 things that matter most to them right now. He gets through about 100 of them. So look at what that design does. A normal CEO waits 2 weeks and sits through 4 meetings to hear the same thing. He reads it first thing in the morning in 5 lines. So he spends his day deciding and not just chasing people all day for updates. You can build that at any size if you have a team. You can cancel your next status meeting and ask for 5 lines instead. If you work alone, you're still losing time just hunting for information. It's spread across all of your different apps. Every extra app you have to open is another place to go looking and lose time. One inbox, one task list, one document where the plan lives. If you have to check 4 apps to find out what you're supposed to do today, you'll spend your best hour just finding it out and get nothing done. A bird sitting on a branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her Trust isn't in the branch, but it's in her wings. So build the system so the information reaches you and then trust yourself to decide. You have more room than you think. So nobody gets more hours in a day than you do, right? The people who beat you work the hours everyone else gave up and they spend them on fewer things. So close one day, name your days, cut a block by 2/3, delete the reports nobody Pick your number. If you can do that, then you must. Where you are next year comes down to what you do with this week. To learn the 7 silent killers of success, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe and I'll see you there. The habits that kill your success are silent, and that's exactly why they win.

When I was at the peak of my career, I felt like I'm unbeatable and I feel like I could do anything. I'm kind of walking on the water. We all experienced that.