How the World's Most Successful People Organize Their Lives

The writer Annie Dillard has a great line. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. I love it because it takes something huge, your whole life, and makes it small enough to actually improve on today. Organizing your life means deciding where your hours go before other people and social media decide for you. Even the CEOs of big companies have a hard time deciding where their hours go. 2 Harvard Business School professors tracked 27 CEOs around the clock for 13 weeks, about 60,000 hours in total. They spent 72% of their working time in meetings, and on average they work 62.5 hours a week. About 20 years ago, I was always in reaction mode. I answered every message as fast as I could. I spent my days responding to other people's emergencies, and I never got the things I wanted done. What changed it for me was giving different days different jobs. Monday is my mentoring day when I spend the whole day with my team. Tuesday is my YouTube day. I don't take calls and I don't take meetings. I'm locked in on filming. That's today. It's Tuesday as I'm filming this. And I give each day of the week a specific job. I live by my calendar now because if I had to decide what to do each day on the spot, I probably wouldn't get much done. So I wanted to make this video because giving different days different jobs is the thing that's helped me the most. It's the bouncing between different kinds of work that leads to chaos and a huge lack of productivity. I have spent years making videos about the world's most successful people, and every one of them built a system for how they spent their days And every time I look at how they structure their days, I take away a little nugget that I can apply to my schedule too. So if you organize your life around what matters most, you will get more done in less time and you get to be there for the people that you love. If you don't organize your time, your inbox, and everyone else's emergencies will organize it for you. There are 10 personal systems that the most successful people use to organize their lives, and we're gonna cover them here today. 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. Number one, they cut out small choices. So the human brain, it's like a muscle. Every choice you make, from what to eat for breakfast to what shoes to wear, uses a little bit of your mental energy. It's called decision fatigue. By the time you get to work, if you've already made 20 tiny choices, your brain is tired before you even start the real work. The most successful people fix this by putting the small stuff on autopilot. They eat the same breakfast, wake up at the exact same time, wear a daily uniform. Steve Jobs is the perfect example of this in action. So the Apple co-founder famously wore the exact same outfit every single day. He wore a black turtleneck, Levi's blue jeans, and New Balance sneakers. The idea started in the 1980s when Jobs visited Japan and saw Sony factory workers wearing uniforms. He actually tried to give all Apple employees a company vest, but everyone hated the idea. Since his team refused to wear a uniform, Jobs decided to create a personal uniform just for himself. So he asked his friend and fashion designer Issey Miyake to make him some black turtlenecks. Miyake made him hundreds of them, and Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson that he had enough to last for the rest of his life. By completely removing the choice of what to wear every morning, Jobs saved his brainpower for the massive choices that actually moved the needle for Apple. You could do the exact same thing in your own life by picking your clothes out the night before or eating the same healthy lunch every day. I do this too in my own life. I have the same hoodie that I wear almost every single day. I have a closet full of 50 different hoodies and they're all basically some version of this apart from 2 spider athletic hoodies that I wear occasionally. But the decision is super easy. I wake up, I go for my Believe Walk, I put on my hoodie and I'm ready to work. Number 2, they plan the night before. Waking up and trying to figure out what to do is a huge waste of your morning energy. If you start your day trying to plan, you're already behind. Highly successful people They fix this by writing down their exact priorities before they go to sleep. Charles M. Schwab, one of the richest men in the world in 1918, is a perfect example of this story. As the head of Bethlehem Steel, he wanted his team to get more done, so he hired a consultant named Ivy Lee who gave him a very simple rule. Lee told Schwab that every night his team needed to write down the 6 most important things they had to do the next day. They had to rank them from most important to least important. The next morning, they could not move on to the second most important thing task until the first one was completely finished. This simple habit of planning the night before works so well that Schwab paid Lee $25,000, which is worth about $400,000 today. By deciding your priorities the night before, you eliminate morning distractions and wake up ready to actually take action. One of the things that I do is after I have dinner, I look at what my tasks are tomorrow. I have a folder on my Gmail for each day. So today is Tuesday, tomorrow's Wednesday, it's my project day. After dinner tonight, I will look at all the projects, ideas that I've got for tomorrow, and then start to prioritize what I'm going to work on so that when I wake up tomorrow morning, I already know what I'm supposed to do for the day. Number 3, they use the 25/5 rule. So having too many goals is what stops you from being successful. If you want to achieve big things, you have to cut out good ideas so you can focus on the great ideas. Warren Buffett has a famous rule for this. According to a popular story, Buffett was talking to his personal airplane pilot, Mike Flint. Buffett told Flint to write down his top 25 career goals. Next, Buffett told Flint to circle his top 5 goals. Flint did it, and he told Buffett that he would focus on those top 5 priorities. When Buffett asked what he would do with the other 20, Flint said they came in a close second and he would work on them in his spare time. Buffett stopped him right there. He told Flint that he had it completely wrong. Buffett said those 20 extra goals were now his avoid-at-all-cost list. He told Flint that he couldn't touch them until his top 5 goals were completely finished. This strategy works because your 6th or 7th most important goals are huge distractions. They are interesting enough to steal your time, but they aren't important enough to change your One of the things I love to do is think about what the biggest constraint is. So I have different tasks for different days, and on each day I'll ask myself, what is the biggest constraint? Like, what is the biggest constraint stopping me from achieving X? And then I focus on that. Number 4, they schedule based on regret. So when you have a massive choice to make, it's easy to get scared of failing. Highly successful people don't make choices based on fear. They make choices based on what they will regret the most when they are old. Jeff Bezos used this exact strategy to start Amazon. So back in 1994, Bezos had a very safe and high-paying job at an investment company called D.E. Shaw. He saw that the internet was growing incredibly fast and he wanted to start an online bookstore. His boss told him it was a huge risk. To make the choice, Bezos used what he called the regret minimization framework. He pictured himself as an 80-year-old man looking back at his entire life, and he asked himself if his older self would regret quitting a safe job to start an internet company and failing. The answer was no. Then he asked if his 80-year-old self would regret never trying at all, and the answer answer was a massive yes. Bezos realized that failing is fine, but living with the regret of never trying is terrible. So he quit his job, drove across the country, and started Amazon in his garage. This is a story that actually got me to become an entrepreneur. I thought I wanted to be an investment banker similar to Jeff Bezos. That was what I wrote in my high school yearbook. And when I got the opportunity to either join the company that I thought I always wanted to work for and travel around the world doing these huge deals, or join an entrepreneurial business, take 30% of the company and make $300 a month, I was really struggling. It was the hardest decision in my life. And I used Jeff Bezos's regret minimization framework. And I realized that if I never tried to be an entrepreneur, even just trying, even if the most likely outcome was just complete failure, I would regret it. I would look back on my life as an 80-year-old looking back on today and realize if I don't at least try, it will haunt me for the rest of my life. And so that gave me the courage to not take the job and go become an entrepreneur. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. Covers the top lessons from this video, gives you space for your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it. I'll see you there. Number 5, they work in focus blocks. So when you check your phone constantly, your brain never gets into a productive rhythm. Highly successful people don't let distractions ruin their day. Instead, they use a strategy called time blocking to protect their deep work. Elon Musk is one of the most famous examples of this. To run huge companies like Tesla and SpaceX at the same time, Musk uses an extreme version of time blocking. So instead of just keeping a long list of to-dos, Musk breaks his entire day into strict 5-minute blocks. He assigns a single block to a very specific task even before the day starts. So whether it's solving an engineering problem or checking emails or eating lunch, every single activity gets an exact time limit. If a meeting stops being useful, he expects his team to just walk out. He once wrote in a company memo that excessive meetings are a huge problem and it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time when they could be working. By blocking his time so tightly, he never has to wake up and wonder what he should be doing next. So at the start of the video, talked about a little bit how I chunk my days. I use Monday as my mentoring day. I spend the whole day mentoring people on my team, 25-minute calls and 5-minute breaks in between. Tuesday is my YouTube day and I'm spending the whole day making YouTube videos and thinking about YouTube strategy. Wednesday is my project day. I use that to think about all the different ideas I had to grow my business. If you think about a list of all the things that you could do, when do you ever get to do them? Wednesday is the day that I get to do them. Because if you don't have free time to focus on actually growing the business with creative ideas, you learn to start to hate your business. You bought yourself a job. So Wednesday is a free-flowing day to focus on whatever project I wanna focus on. Thursday's my public-facing day, and as an introvert, I don't like, I don't like talking to people. I get scared. And so I have one day that is all dedicated just to talking to people. So I'll start my Thursdays with my Movement Makers or Brandlytics training to help entrepreneurs build their business and build content on YouTube to grow their mission. Then I'll be on podcasts for the rest of the day, and from one podcast interview into the next, I carry the momentum forward. It's easier to stay in that pocket of extroversion so I don't have to switch between tasks. Friday's my CEO day, and On CEO Day, I work on being the CEO of my business. What would the CEO of your business look like? And just ask yourself that question. If you were the CEO of your business today, what would you do differently than otherwise? 'Cause we're everything from the janitor to the CEO in our businesses, but we don't spend enough time focused on being the CEO and moving the big projects. So that's what I dedicate my Fridays to. Saturdays are my fun day, family fun day, and whatever we need to do to have fun. Maybe there's a festival, maybe we go for a hike, maybe we go for a trip somewhere. It's like whatever is fun in the moment for me and my family that we wanna take care of on Saturday. And then Sunday is family admin day, and that's where we'll worry about grocery shopping and laundry and house repairs and planning for the rest of the week. Whatever is family admin, but try not to let those bleed into each other. So we're not doing laundry and chores on Saturday. Saturday is fun day. Sunday is family admin day. And having a place for everything that maps my daily schedule to the life that I want to live is really helpful, makes me a lot more productive, and reduces a ton of the stress. Number 6, they practice the 20-mile march. So motivation is useless if you only work hard when you Feel like it, right? The most successful people don't rely on random bursts of energy. Instead, they hit a very specific, consistent target every single day, no matter what happens. Business expert Jim Collins calls this the 20-mile march. He created the concept based on the famous 1911 race to the South Pole between 2 explorers, Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. Amundsen made a strict rule for his team. They had to travel exactly 20 miles every single day. If the weather was perfect and they felt great, They still stopped exactly at 20 miles so they wouldn't burn out. If the weather was terrible, blizzard, they forced themselves to get up and hit their 20 miles anyway. His rival Robert Falcon Scott did the exact opposite. On beautiful days, Scott pushed his team to exhaustion and made them walk as far as possible. And on bad weather days, they stayed in their tents and didn't move at all. The results were completely different. Amundsen reached the South Pole safely and on schedule. Scott's team fell behind, ran out of energy, and tragically died in the freezing cold. Now, I think I personally could do better here. I think of when I do my YouTube videos on Tuesday, like it is today, I have a set number of videos that I need to hit, but I don't always do the same number. Today I'm feeling great and I'm doing more videos than usual, and other days I don't feel as great and I don't hit as many. So even in learning these strategies, like, I always try to take one little nugget away from myself that I can improve. And I think having a consistent action like that and hitting a target every single day for whatever day of the week it is could be really valuable for me too. Number 7, they focus on the 80/20 rule. So being busy isn't the same as being productive. Most people treat every task on their list like it has the exact same value. Highly successful people don't do this. They use the 80/20 rule to find the few things that actually matter. So author Tim Ferriss used this exact rule to save his health and his business. Before he wrote his famous books, Ferriss worked 15 hours a day on his sports nutrition company. He was totally burned out and miserable, so he decided to track where his money came from and where his stress came from. He found out that out of his 120 customers, just 5 of them brought in 95% of his revenue. Now, that's an extreme version of the 80/20 rule. He also found out that a tiny group of his worst customers took up almost all of his time with endless complaints. So Ferriss made a massive choice. He fired his most annoying customers and put the average ones on autopilot, and he only spent his energy on the top 20% of people who actually helped his business grow. By cutting out the small stuff, he doubled his income and cut his work down to just a few hours a week. Now, I often get caught up too in small tasks. I think we love being in the weeds of our business. As an example, I love working on the thumbnails of all my videos and Thumbnails do matter, but I probably should be focused on much bigger things. And so again, making these videos and seeing what people are doing and learning from successful entrepreneurs is a constant reminder to me that I need to do better too. Number 8, they build a strict morning routine. So how you start your morning sets the tone for your whole day. If you don't take control of your morning, other people will take control of your day. Highly successful people build a strict routine to focus their minds before the world wakes up and demands their attention. So friend of the channel, Tony Robbins, is a perfect example of this. He's a famous speaker and coach. He uses very strict morning routine to get his mind and body ready for intense work. He starts every single morning by jumping into a freezing cold plunge pool that is exactly 57 degrees Fahrenheit. He says this sudden temperature change forces his brain to know that when he tells his body to do something, it actually does it immediately. After the cold plunge, he spends exactly 10 minutes doing a routine he calls priming. He does a fast breathing exercise to wake up his nervous system. Then he spends a few minutes feeling deep gratitude for 3 specific things in his life. And then finally, visualizes his top 3 goals as if they were already completed. By taking this time for himself, Robbins builds incredible focus and energy before he looks at his phone in the morning. You don't need a cold plunge to do this. You can build your own morning routine by just waking up 15 minutes earlier to read or to stretch or to plan your day. One of my favorite things to do is what I call a believe walk. So, uh, I wake up and I set a timer on my phone that within 15 minutes I need to get outside. So in, I wake up and within 15 minutes I need to go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, have some water, Take the dogs out, whatever I need to do within 15 minutes, and then I'm outside. And then from being outside, I go for a walk. And on that walk, I listen to something. I listen to Steve Jobs. I listen to Elon Musk. I listen to an entrepreneur that inspires me. I listen to a historic entrepreneur. Today I was listening to Jay Gould in the morning, just his story. It inspires me. And so by doing those three things of like getting outside first thing in the morning, going for a walk to have some light movement, it can be a run. It could be a ruck, but at least just going for a walk and listening to something that helps you believe in yourself. You do that every day. For 30 days. It will change your life. I call it the Believe Walk. That's what I do every single morning. Number 9, they treat sleep as a core strategy. So many people think sleeping is a waste of time. They brag about running on 4 hours of sleep. Highly successful people know that this is a huge mistake. They treat sleep as their most important performance strategy. So tennis legend Roger Federer is a great example of this. When he was winning championships, he didn't just practice hard, he made sleep his top priority. Federer famously slept up to 12 hours every single day. He would get 10 hours of sleep at night. And then take a 2-hour nap during the day before a big match. He understood that his body and his brain could only recover when he was fully resting. Science shows that when you sleep, your brain actually flushes out toxic waste materials and locks in your memory. So if you skip sleep, you ruin your focus and make worse choices. And I put this on the list because this is the thing that I'm probably the worst at from all of these things on this list. I am really desperately trying to improve my sleep. I set enough time for sleep and the monkey mind at night keeps me awake and And it's, it's one of my top priorities to work on, to fix, to improve. And I'm constantly trying to model success and see what people are doing because when I have sleep, I feel great the next day. I'm ready to take on the world. And when I don't have sleep, I still go off and take on the world, but it's a lot more challenging and difficult. So sleep is really super duper important and one of the top priorities in my life right now. And number 10, they track their progress with SMART goals. So setting vague goals is the fastest way to fail. If you just say you want to be rich or you want to get and shape, your brain doesn't know what to do with that. Highly successful people fix this by breaking massive dreams down into SMART goals. So SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The United States moon landing is a great example of this. In 1961, the space program was really struggling, and President JFK, John F. Kennedy, needed to unite the country and make some massive progress. So instead of just saying he wanted to win the space race, he set a specific SMART goal. In a famous speech to Congress, he declared that the United States should commit to landing a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth before the decade is out. So we could break down why that is a perfect SMART goal. It was specific, right? He wanted to put a man on the moon. It was measurable, right? Either the astronaut came back safely or he didn't. It was achievable. It pushed the limits of science, but it was mathematically possible to do. It was relevant, right? It proved American leadership to the entire world. One of the goals. And finally, it was time-bound. It had to happen before the decade was out. NASA used this exact framework to focus over 400,000 workers on one single mission, and in 1969, they achieved the goal. Decide where your hours go. So it's easy to look at successful people and think that they must just have more hours in a day than you do, or some magic secret. They have exactly the same 24 hours. They are just more intentional and focused about where those hours go. So cut out small choices, plan the night before, use the 25/5 rule, schedule based off regret, work in focus blocks, practice the 20-mile march, focus on the 80/20 rule, build a strict morning routine, treat sleep as a core strategy, and track your progress with SMART goals. Those are the systems the most successful people use to organize their lives, and now you know them too. Pick one, put on your calendar this week. How you spend your days is how you spend And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Next, let's learn the simple system you can follow to outperform everyone. You are one boring habit away from being ahead of almost everyone that you know.

You can have any habits, any patterns of behavior that you wish. It's simply a question of which you decide.

Gallup found that only 20% of employees worldwide were actually engaged in their work in 2025, the lowest level they've measured since 2010.

Concerning trend we're seeing across the US and some parts of the global workforce where employees' overall satisfaction with their employer has dropped to record lows.

It's through repetition that you program your subjective mind, and it's your subjective mind that controls your behavior.

Right now you're probably in the 80% that isn't engaged, and which side you end up on changes what you earn this year and what your kids watch you do with the rest of your life.

The secret of this whole thing is stay engaged. Learn from people who've already been there.

In June 1966, a guy with a fresh Harvard MBA took a job counting securities by hand in a bank vault. The room was called the cage. The pay was $9,000 a year. His name was Michael Bloomberg.

Both of them made me an offer. One offered $14,000 a year, the other $9,000 a year. I liked the people at the $9,000 one better. Just who I happened to meet that day.

Counting securities by hand, that was the job. A Harvard MBA in a basement moving paper around at the bottom of the building for 15 straight years while the people around him went home. He went from the cage to general partner. Then in 1981, Salomon Brothers merged and Michael Bloomberg got let go. 15 years and they handed him $10 million severance and showed him the door at 39 years old.

Well, I got fired after 15 years. I'll let him say that. Yeah, people always are afraid I was afraid to say that. I don't know. I can just tell you it should happen to every one of you. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. And I did have my share of the value of the company which we were selling at the time. And that was the nest egg that I used to start my company.

He started his own company almost immediately. It was called Innovative Market Systems. You know it today as Bloomberg LP, and the terminal it makes sits on the desks of nearly every serious trader on Earth. So here's the lesson in that. The job that made him was the one in the vault, the one he'd left off of his resume.

I was at Salomon Brothers for 15, 16 years. It was a phenomenal experience. I looked forward to going in every day. I've always looked forward to going in every day, even the day there I knew I was going to get fired.

Everything he learned, how the money actually moves, he learned in the room nobody wanted, doing the tasks nobody respected, showing up while everyone else was already home. They could take away his title, they could take away his desk, they couldn't take back 15 years of showing up every day. Now you might be thinking, okay, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week for 15 years. I've got a job, I've got kids, I'm running on 5 hours sleep, I'm already exhausted. That's just not available to me. And you're right, that version isn't available to you. And I'm not going to tell you to go, you know, wreck your health just to try to catch up. But let's look at the actual mechanism again, because the hours are the least important part of the story. What you can copy isn't It's that he pointed 15 straight years at the same thing without stopping. And duration is something that you can have starting today, no matter how tired you are, because duration doesn't require a giant chunk of free time. It just requires that you don't quit in month 4. That's the whole game. You are surrounded by talented people who start and stop constantly, start and stop, start and stop. New idea in January, dead by March, different new idea in June. If you keep going in one direction for 3 years while that happens around you, you will pass almost every one of them without having a single dramatic And a bird sitting on a branch isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch, it's in her wings. So it's time to trust yourself more. And let me give you exactly what to do starting today. When you're the worst in the room, win on volume. When you're the least skilled person in the building, you have exactly one weapon and it's volume. It's not about clever positioning, just volume. That was me at an agency years ago, bottom of the list skill-wise. Everybody else was out there making one video a week, so I made 3 a day. Morning, lunch, dinner. Then I applied every note I got to the very next one instead of saying, I'll do another one next month. If you do the math on that, 1 video a week is 52 a year. 3 a day is over 1,000. So in 12 months, I had more reps than somebody with 15 years of 1-a-week experience. I got better for one reason. I got 20 more chances to be wrong and I took every single one of them. So that's the move you make when you're green, right? Talent, taste, connections, they take years to build and you haven't had those years yet. Reps, you can start collecting right now and nobody can stop you from doing it. But this is the part that makes reps feel like work. Anders Ericsson's research on deliberate practice found that elite performers can only hold truly focused practice for about an hour at a time and top out around 4 to 5 hours a day. So if you're new, you'll get 15 to 20 minutes of full concentration before your brain is just done. So stop trying to find a 4-hour block that doesn't exist in your life. Find 20 focused minutes and make it a real rep with a real output that a real person could see and critique. 20 minutes a day, 6 days a week is 100 hours a year of deliberate work on one skill. That is not nothing. Find the one book and stop reading the other 99. So I used to read a lot of books a year, and I'll be honest with you that it got to me. 99 out of every 100 of those books did nothing for my business. They felt productive. I finished one, I feel smart. I'd highlight some passages, I'd tell people what I was reading, and my business would be exactly the same as it was the week before. I was reading because it was easier than picking up the phone and selling. So here's what's actually moved my life. Every so often I'd hit one book that landed directly on the bottleneck that I was stuck on at the moment. And when that happened, I stopped hunting for the next book and just did what that one book said to do. So if we flip that around, don't ask, what should I read this year? Ask, what is the single thing blocking me right now? Try to write that down in one sentence. Then go find the one book, the one YouTube channel, the video, or the person that solved exactly that. Then go through the one thing 3 times and execute it before you allow yourself to go open anything else that's new. And skip the courses that you sign up for. So you can feel busy instead of actually just starting. Formal training is usually a year or 2 behind what's actually working, and it feels like you're making progress because somebody hands you a certificate at the end. But the people who get ahead, they teach themselves. They go find the answers on YouTube, in a book, in a forum from somebody who did it last month, and they run it that same night. Being leads to doing. Decide you are the kind of person who figures things out, and then the figuring out starts happening on its own. Give the new thing 20% of your week and nothing more. Now let me solve the problem that you actually Which is that you actually already have a life. So there are 2 ways that people handle this, and both of them usually fail. The first is do nothing new, right? You keep exactly everything as it is. You tell yourself you'll start when things calm down, and guess what? Things never calm down. So 4 years go by and you're still in the same chair. The second is 0 to 100. You get fired up on a Tuesday, quit the job, burn the savings, give yourself 90 days to make things work, and 90 days is nowhere near enough runway for anything real. So you end up back in a job with less money and just more fear than when you started. Here's Here's a version that works. 80/20 until you're 20/80. So right now, 80% of your working time goes to whatever pays your bills today. Protect that. It's what's buying you your future runway. The other 20% goes to the new thing. So if you work 50 hours a week, great, that's 10 hours a week. If you've got a job and 2 kids and 6 hours is all you got, then use all 6. 6 hours a week is enough to build something real. Put those 6 hours in the calendar as an actual block with time. Time you haven't booked goes to then whoever asks for it first. And then you run that split until the new thing starts producing actual money, Not just attention, not just compliments, money from a stranger more than once. Then you move the ratio, right? The new thing gets 40%, then 60%, and eventually it's carrying 80% of your time because it's carrying your bills. So you never have to take a giant leap. You had a slow, boring handover, and you never once had to put your family at risk. So one more thing about time, and this one is free. The last 3 weeks of December, everybody in your industry takes the foot off the gas, inboxes go quiet, senior people are suddenly answering their own emails. That's the cheapest access to important people you'll get all year. While everyone else is coasting, you send the thoughtful note, you record the video, you get the meeting that would have taken 6 weeks in March. Now, I don't like decisions that make me feel weak. Quitting with no plan makes me feel weak. Waiting forever makes me feel weak. 20% a week protected every week makes me feel strong. And it adds up to whether you feel it or not. Eliminate, automate, delegate in that exact order. So here's where the hours you say you don't have are hiding. Take everything that you did last week and run it through 3 filters in this order. Eliminate first. So look at every recurring task and ask a genuinely uncomfortable question. Do I actually need to do this at all? Not how do I do this faster, but does this even need to exist? Because a big chunk of what fills your week is there because you did it once and then never questioned it again. The report that nobody reads, the meeting that could have been 3 sentences, the 40 minutes a day you spend reorganizing things, Instead of shipping things, right? Kill it and see if anybody notices. Usually nobody does. Automate second and only second. So software, AI can take an enormous amount of repetitive work off your plate right now, and it costs almost nothing, but never automate a process you haven't proven by hand first because all you'll do is make a broken process run faster and have more breaks in more places. Delegate third. This is where you'll resist because you'll tell yourself you can't afford it. The higher somebody, but you can start at 5 to 10 hours a week of help. That's it. Somebody to handle your scheduling, the editing, the inbox, invoicing. What you're really buying back is your best thinking hours. So they land on the one thing that only you can do. Most of what's crushing you right now, you assign to yourself. And so now you get to unassign it. Being the best doesn't matter if you're a secret. So you can be generally the most skilled person in your field and still lose to someone worse than you who happens to be more well-known. That's not Fair, but it isn't going to change. Better known beats best every time, and complaining about it doesn't move you forward at all. So the work is to become known on purpose. Educate your market at scale. Take the questions that you answer one at a time on the phone for free all week and answer them publicly instead. One video, one post, one talk that reaches 500 people is 500 conversations that you didn't have to schedule. And show that you care more than the person next to you. When someone watches you explain something for real, for free, in depth, holding nothing back, they conclude 2 things without you having to say either one. This person knows what they're doing. This person isn't trying to squeeze me. That's the whole sale made before you even meet. The paper airplane on my logo means entrepreneurship because a paper airplane, which breaks the sound barrier in videos, is impossible. And doing the impossible is the entire job description, right? Nobody's going to go and hand you a jet. You get paper and you throw it every single day and it goes further than anyone expected because You kept throwing it. Score the day, not the year. Now, the 2 habits that hold all this together. The first one takes 15 minutes a day. Wake up and get outside within 15 minutes. Go for a 15-minute walk. Don't look at your phone. Listen to something that fills you with belief instead of something that just fills you with other people's panic. And that's it. That's the whole thing. And it's the single most important daily habit that I have because whatever goes into your head first is what you think about for the rest of the day. Then you can build a scorecard. So write down the 5 things that would make today a win. Publish something, talk to a buyer, 20 focused minutes on a skill, the walk, 10 pages of the book. Give yourself a point for each. And at the end of the day, you get a score out of 5, and that score is the only performance review that matters. So keep it on paper, not in an app. An app turns into a project you maintain instead of a habit that you actually go off and keep. And why does it work? Filippa Lalla's research at University College London found it takes an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic. And depending on the behavior, it can take any Anywhere from 18 days to 254 days. So when day 12 feels like it's not sticking, that's not a sign that you're failing. That's just day 12. So many people quit at week 3 while the process was working exactly as designed. Benjamin Franklin did a version of this every single day of his adult life with 2 key questions. So in the morning he asked, what shall I do this day? And at night he said, what good have I done today? That's 300 years old and it's still better than every productivity app on your phone. So don't wait to feel ready before you start scoring. Ready isn't real and it never Do more than you were asked on purpose. And last one, it's the cheapest competitive advantage on this entire list. Do more than what you were asked for, not vaguely, but specifically. So before meeting with someone who matters, spend 30 minutes actually studying them. Watch their talk, read what they wrote when they launched their company, find something that they actually built that isn't in their bio, and bring that up instead of their most famous project. Nobody does this. Nobody. And when you show up having genuinely done a little bit of homework, you're going to be a little bit different. The person across from you feels something they almost never feel in business, which is that somebody paid attention to them. Then in the conversation, talk 30% of the time and let them talk 70%. Ask better questions than they were braced for. Repeat their exact words back to them when you respond, because that's how a person knows for certain that you were listening instead of just waiting for your turn to interrupt them and talk. That's it. That's the whole technique. And it works on clients, on partners, on bosses, on anybody. Almost nobody listens. If you do, they'll remember you. You're closer than you think. You don't need a dramatic year. You need 20 focused minutes, 1 book, 5 points on a scorecard, and the willingness to be doing it in month 4 when it stops being exciting. That's a good start. Now go make it 10 times bigger than you were planning to. Now let's learn how the rich see the world differently. The rich look at the problems in the world and they see a business in it. The thing that annoyed them 3 times this week is already their next business idea. Gallup found that Americans who own a business and employ people have a median net worth of $3 million. There's something that will annoy you this week too, and it will keep annoying you until somebody fixes it. So why don't you build a $3 million company and solve it? So here's how the rich see the world differently. James Dyson is worth about $17 billion, and the whole thing started with something that annoyed him while he was vacuuming his own house. In 1978, In 1928, he was cleaning his carpet with a Hoover Jr., and the machine kept losing suction. The fuller the bag got, the worse it cleaned. Now, everybody who owned a vacuum, they knew that. It was just what vacuums did. You bought new bags, you banged it against an outside step to knock the dust out of the bag, and you just put up with it. Dyson was 31, and he didn't let it go. Why does a vacuum get worse at cleaning the more that it cleans? Not long after, he was standing in a sawmill watching a 30-foot cyclone on the roof pull sawdust out of the air with nothing but spin. No bag, nothing to clog. So he went home, ripped off the bag on, on his Hoover, taped a cardboard cone where it had been, and ran it over the carpet. The suction held. Then it took 5 years. He worked in a shed behind his house and built 5,127 prototypes, changing one thing at a time. He was close to $1 million in debt by the end of it. He'd remortgaged the house and his wife's teaching salary was paying the bills. Then he took it to the people who made the vacuums. Hoover said no. Electrolux said no. Miele said no. They all sold the bags, and a vacuum that never needed bags was the last thing that they wanted. So he launched it himself. The DC01 came out in Britain in 1993, cost more than anything else on the shelf, and within 2 years it was the best-selling vacuum in the whole country. Now you might be thinking, okay, that's a story about an engineer and you're not gonna go invent some vacuum in your shed. And fair enough, the engineering here isn't the thing that we're copying. Everybody in Britain owned the vacuum that lost suction and everybody just accepted it. Dyson didn't let it go, and the answer for his business turned up on the roof of a sawmill that he happened to be standing in. The habit is noticing what annoys you and then going and fixing it. The rich build this habit before they had the money, not after it. Dyson had it while he was a million dollars in debt. So here are the 6 ways to build that same habit, starting with whatever already annoys you. Write down what annoyed you this week. So here's how we start. Open the Notes app on your phone right now and start a list and call it annoyances. Give it 7 days. 7 days. Every time something irritates you this week, put one line in it. The invoice that you had to chase down 3 times, the form that you filled out that asked for your address twice, The 40 minutes you spent on hold, the thing at work that everybody complains about and nobody fixes. One line each, 10 seconds. Don't think about whether this is a business yet or not. And by the end of the week, you will have a page of all of these things that annoy you. Almost all of them are nothing, and that's fine. You're looking for the one that shows up more than once in your week. If you hit the same thing 3 times in one week, you're almost certainly not the only one struggling with that. And that's the worth looking at. into. I think all progress begins with telling the truth. And so this list is you telling the truth about where your week actually goes and the things that frustrate you. Right now you're solving these problems for free over and over again, and then forgetting that you solved them. And the reason why this list idea works is that you already have the information. Dyson didn't go looking for a vacuum problem. He was cleaning his own carpet. You walk past your issues every single day at your job, in your industry, and whatever you're already good at. You know things about your own work that outsiders would pay real money to learn. You just stop noticing them because you just do them every day. So write the list for one week before you decide that you don't have any ideas. Almost nobody has actually checked into those ideas. They just decided that they had no ideas and moved on. And then try to put a dollar figure next to the ones that continue to repeat. So if chasing an invoice is worth 90 minutes and your time is worth $50 an hour, that annoyance cost you $75 this week. Now it's a number, and numbers are the things that you can actually act on. Then at the end of the week, you can go back, look at the repeats, and rewrite every single one in a specific single sentence. Be specific about what the annoying thing actually is. So invoicing is a pain isn't a business. I have to re-enter the same client details into 3 different systems every time I send a bill. That is, that's a real specific problem. The second version here tells you exactly what to build, which is something that takes those client details once. Vague annoyances stay annoyances forever. Specific annoyances are ones that you can turn into something that you build, you can sell or hand to somebody else. Specific annoyances are ones you can turn into a business. Ask who decided it. Almost nothing that you deal with every day is an actual fact. It's a decision that somebody made, usually years ago, usually for a reason that stopped being true. The way your industry bills, the reason a service takes 6 weeks, the form that asks you for your address twice— somebody chose all of that. And often that somebody left the company in 2011. Let's look back at Dyson's vacuum. Every vacuum lost suction as the bag filled, and Everybody treated that as just, that's how vacuums work. It wasn't. It was a design choice, and the companies making them had a reason to keep it because they sold the bags. That's the difference in how the rich look at things. You see the way it is. They see the person who decided it in the first place. So pick one thing in your industry that everybody just accepts and nobody likes. Then ask 2 questions: who decided this, and what actually happens if I do it Slightly differently. Deliver in 3 days when everybody else takes 3 weeks. Publish your prices when the whole industry makes you book a call. Answer the phone. How about that? That one might sound like a joke, but in a lot of industries, answering the phone is the entire advantage because everybody else decided that that's just not how it's done. So this week, write down 3 things that your industry does that makes no sense to you as somebody who works in it. Then pick the one that you could change right now without asking for anybody's permission. And start changing it. Say yes before you feel qualified. Now, when an opportunity shows up, for most people, the automatic answer is just no, and you have a reason ready to justify it. You don't have enough time, not enough money, not the right moment, you don't have enough experience yet. Just try this for 30 days. When an opportunity shows up that scares you a little bit but wouldn't ruin you if it went wrong, say yes first and set a limit on the way in. So the limit is how much money and how many weeks that you'll give it before you stop, not everything. The ones that scare you, specifically those ideas because you might not be good enough at it yet. And those are usually the bigger ideas that you can actually build into something. Ready, feeling ready isn't real. Nobody will hand you a certificate that says you're ready. Dyson launched a vacuum that cost more than anything else on the shelf after every manufacturer in the industry had told him no. He became qualified by doing it, right? Being leads to doing. You don't wait to feel like the kind of person who runs a business and then start acting like one. You start behaving like a business owner before you feel like one, and the feeling arrives much later after you've already Started doing the work. So if we make it practical, pick the thing that you've been circling around for months, give yourself 48 hours and do the smallest real version of it. Not a plan, the actual thing. So send the message, post the offer, put up the one page, call the person you've been meaning to call since March. I call it the 2% difference. Don't worry about getting to 100% of the plan, just do the first 2%. Watch what your head does in those first 48 hours because it'll produce so many different excellent reasons why you should wait. And all of them sound like good reasons, good ideas why you should wait. Write them down as they come because seeing them on paper, one, it takes the power away. And 2, seeing them on paper helps you see when the same excuse is showing up over and over again. Listen for other people's problems. Your own list has a limit, right? You live one life, uh, you only do one job, uh, you only hit so many problems in a given week, but everybody around you is describing their problems all day long. People love to complain, right? Your friend complaining about her manager, the woman at the counter Explaining why the system is down again. Your brother-in-law saying that they still have to do the staff schedule on paper every Sunday night. You hear all of these things just as conversations. The rich hear them as business opportunities. You both hear the exact same thing, but only one of you is writing it down. So this week, in every conversation that you have, listen for one specific sentence. It usually starts with, I hate it when, or the worst part of my job is, or we still have to do it by hand. Those are The ones people hand them to you for free and nobody ever picks up on them because people complain by default. So when you hear one, ask a single follow-up, what are you doing about it now? And that answer is worth more than just a complaint because it tells you what they've already tried. It tells you what they're paying for. It tells you how much that problem is costing them. Then write it down in that same list that you started in the first section next to your own problem. A problem that you heard 3 times from 3 different people is worth more than one that you've had 3 times. Times yourself. So you could take the staff schedule one. You hear it from your brother-in-law, then you hear from somebody at a party who manages a pub, then you hear it from your own cousin. That's 3 people paying somebody to do a job on paper every Sunday night. You haven't built anything yourself yet, and you already know who has the problem, how often it happens, and what it's ruining for them. That's a real market. It didn't cost you anything to find out, just some conversations, listening to people complain. And the best ones come from industries that you know You have no idea what's supposed to be hard in somebody else's job. So you'll ask the obvious questions everybody inside the industry stopped asking years ago. Dyson wasn't a vacuum engineer. He was a man cleaning his own carpet who wanted to know why it was getting worse. So have 5 real conversations at the week and come back with 5 sentences, not your ideas about their problems, the exact words that they used when they were complaining. Watch where money already moves. You don't have to guess what people want. You can see it by looking at what they're already paying for. So you can go to Amazon, and read 1 and 2-star reviews of products in the area that you're interested in. Not the 5-star ones, the angry ones. Somebody who paid full price, was disappointed, then they wrote you several paragraphs explaining exactly what was missing. That's gold. That's the cheapest real market research that there is. It takes you one afternoon and doesn't cost you any dollars to do your market research. Look for the same complaint appearing across different companies. So one angry customer is just one angry customer. The same complaint under 6 different products tells you that it isn't just one bad company. The whole industry. Then go and check whether anybody has actually solved it, because that's the part that you just can't assume. Then look for the things that people already pay for and hate. So find a service where the normal experience is slow, where it's confusing, where people are rude, and people keep paying anyway. That's a market that's already spending money and already unhappy. Somebody already paying for a service they dislike is easier to sell to than somebody who has never paid for anything like it. They're already spending the money every month. You just want them spending it with you instead. I notice the jobs that people keep hiring out over and over and over again. Problems that come back every month tend to get paid for every month. Repeat spending is a signal. Selling something once is good. Getting paid every month, that's a business. Then go and talk to 5 people who actually have the problem before you go and build anything at all. Not your friends and not to pitch people. Just ask them what they currently do about it, what it costs them, what they've already tried before, what they gave up on. You can spend 20 minutes with each. That's under 2 hours of your life in total. Those conversations will help kill your bad ideas fast and help get you to the one that will win. The people who build something that works tend to be the ones who talk to real customers early. So this week, pick one product in your area and read its 1-star reviews for an hour. Write down every complaint that you see more than twice and check whether anybody has fixed it yet. Decide who you are before the proof shows up. So this last one is what makes the other 5 actually happen. Start the list today anyway, but if you never decide that you're the kind of person who builds things, the list just sits there and you do nothing with it. While you privately believe that you're not the kind of person, none of the other 5 will stick. You'll write the list of annoyances and then never open it up again. You'll say yes and then apologize for Yes. So decide first. Being leads to doing. Decide you're somebody who builds things, then start booking the time like it's already true. That might sound like nonsense, but you've already done the negative version, the opposite version of that. You've decided, I'm not a numbers person, I'm not technical, I'm not a salesperson. And then organize years of your life protecting that identity. There's a reason why my logo here, it's a paper airplane. A paper airplane in the videos that breaks the sound barrier. That's impossible. And doing the impossible is exactly what all of this is for. Dyson spent 5 years in a shed on the machine every manufacturer had rejected. And now he's one of the richest people in Britain. If you have the ability, then you have the responsibility. If you can, then you must. You've got something you already know how to do that somebody out there is struggling with tonight. And sitting on it helps nobody. You need one week and a list. Start the list today. Write down the first thing that annoyed you this week, because every business you use today was somebody noticing something and refusing To leave it alone. And now it's your turn to learn the 8 middle-class habits that keep people broke. Check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. The 8 habits keeping you broke were taught to you by people who love you.

Your children are learning about the world through you, and more

through your actions than through your words. You know, from the moment they're born, you're there