Force Your Mind to Act | The Brutal Truth About Discipline and Success

Good morning, Believe Nation! It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe that you have something special that when you unleash it, it will be able to change the world. So to help you on your journey, today's message is Write It All Down. Over to you, Joe Rogan.

Write down everything you want to do. I don't mean crazy, like I'm gonna be the Prince of Brunei, I'm gonna have a base on the moon. Shut up. This is what I want you to do, right? Write down what you would like to fix about your life, and then just— if you're 30 pounds overweight, you want to lose 30 pounds, do it the right way. Go start eating vegetables, monitor your calories, write down what you eat, exercise every day, force yourself to do it. Say you're the general. The brain is the general, the troops are the body. The troops don't want to listen, but you go, fuck You listen and you get up and you do it, and then you get to write it down. And if you don't write it down, you don't eat, you don't fuck, you don't jerk off, you don't shower. Write that shit down so you do it. It's like brushing your teeth. It's not something, "I don't want to brush my teeth today." What do you want, your teeth to rot out of your head, you fucking dunce? Just do it. Just do it. Make yourself do it. And if you do that, if you write shit down and do that, you can change who the fuck you are.

I'm a big believer in writing things down. I have my goals down, my big goal that I want to accomplish, but also my weekly goals and my daily goals. I wake up, I know what I have to do today because it's written down in my Google Calendar note. And I think this is a key difference that can really help a lot of entrepreneurs, is understanding planning versus doing. I think too many entrepreneurs are constantly in planning mode, and it's fun to be in planning mode, right? You're planning, you're thinking, you're dreaming, you're imagining. It's gonna— here's how I'm gonna start, and then we're gonna hire this person, and you keep building this great idea. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and it's exciting. You fire off the the happiness feelings of this great idea that you're exploding out. But nothing happens until you do, right? And sometimes the planning and the seeing it through to the end is so exciting and so fulfilling that then you don't even want to do it because you already got the happiness from doing that. You don't actually want to do any of the work. Where most entrepreneurs, I think, are up here with planning and like down here in execution, you gotta flip it. Planning is really important. You don't want to just go out and do and hope something happens, right? That's not the path to having success. So planning is important, but doing is way more important. Like, you gotta spend way more time on the execution versus the planning. And so this is why writing things down really helps. So when you're in planning mode, and whether it's once a week or once a month or once a quarter or some kind of mixture, whenever you feel your plans aren't going according to, according to plan, you create a new plan and say, okay, Monday I'm going to wake up and here's what I'm going to work on. And when I look at my Google Calendar note and I wake up and I see Monday and here are my tasks. I know what my goal is, like, here's my big goal, and then I know how I'm going to accomplish that. And then I know what I need to do today. So the planning mode is super small on the Monday. I'm just reviewing what I need to get done. And then I spend the entire day doing, executing, making tons of progress. How am I able to make 3 videos a day for my YouTube channel? Yes, I have a team. Yes, they help me tremendously. And yes, we have a plan in place, right, of how to structure the day and how to film and what goes up in content review and a whole system and architecture. And we constantly work to improve that plan. But it's most of the time we're spending time doing like I am executing. Christina, my editor, is executing. The people on my team are executing. We're doing the work. And so you need to get out of the planning mode and more into the execution mode. And if you don't write things down, then you stay in planning mode too much. At least I find if I woke up and I didn't know what I was gonna do today, I didn't have a plan, then I'd wake up and make a plan, right? I make a plan and then let's start from the top again. And then, and I would spend a good chunk of time planning and not enough time actually doing. And if I did that every day, then I'd be losing so much time to planning that I would never get as much done as I could get done. So planning is important, and you need to spend time planning, and you figure out what is your execution game plan, right? Good. And then most of your time, 90% of your time, are spent actually doing the work. And then you come back at some point, like, did this work work? Did it lead to results? Is this the best use of my time? You can come back to planning mode every now and then and make some adjustments, and then go out and test it again. But this is where you need to spend most of your time. The work, the doing, the execution, the hard stuff versus the planning, the thinking, the dreaming only. You need both pieces, but you gotta play more here than over here. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious what your habits are of writing things down. Do you write down your big goals, your little goals? Do you have daily to-do lists? What do you do to write things down that helps your business move forward, or is there a new habit that you're going to start after watching this video? Let me know, leave it down in the comments below. Really looking forward to hearing your thoughts. I also want to give a quick shout out to Alex Smith from Odd Angry Shot. Alex, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. It means a lot to me, man, and I hope you enjoy the read. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, and I'll see you guys again tomorrow morning for another shot of Nespresso.

My infrastructure on what I wanted to see myself, I wrote, I wrote, I write everything down and I see everything. So I got books and books and books from years that now I go back and pull out and I'm like, wow, you said this in '09. No, and now you're living it, you know. So, so you wrote the vision and you like, yeah, yeah, okay. And you see it, right? And you see it. And that's one thing I share with guys. I'm like, listen, write down your vision, write it, you know. Let your subconscious mind be the leader of you, you know what I'm saying? Trust it, because what you think of your subconscious mind, also what you're going to live, you see. And that's, that's when God says, write the vision. He said, make it plain. He didn't say write a 5,000-word essay. He just said write it, make it plain so you can see it, so you can visually see where you want to go in your next steps. And so for me, I did that a lot and I still do it. Yeah.

If you write your goals down, it makes all the difference. Harvard did a study in 1973. They took the graduating class and asked how many of them had goals. 100% of them had goals. Well, they asked how many had written down their goals upon graduation. Only 5% of the class had. In 1993, 20 years later, they followed up with the class. They found that the 5% that had written down their goals 20 years prior upon graduating were worth more financially than the other 95% of the class put together. So I have always written my goals down about what I wanted to achieve, and I really attribute a lot to that. And then aim high. It's really true.

So the most important thing you can do is plan your day preferably the night before. Sit down with a piece of paper and write down everything that you have to do the coming day. It should be the last thing you do at the end of the day. Now, if for any reason you don't do this, then the first thing you do in the morning, before you check your email, your phone calls, newspapers, first thing you do in the morning is make a list of everything that you have to do that day. Once you have a list, you have a track to run on. Writing down a list clarifies your thinking. Writing down a list forces you to think at a higher level. If you start working from a list, you increase your productivity and output by 25% the first day. All successful people work from lists, and all successful people, with regard to their projects, work from checklists. A checklist is a list of everything organized in sequence, and you go down the checklist.