This Is How Elon Musk Makes a Decision in Under 5 Minutes

Elon Musk makes bigger decisions in 5 minutes than you make in a month.

Tesla this year will do over $100 billion in revenue, so that's $2 billion a week. If I make slightly better decisions, I can affect the outcome by $1 billion. First principles analysis, I think, is something that can be applied to really any walk of life, anything really. It's really just saying, let's boil something down to the most fundamental principles, the things that we are most confident are true at a foundational level.

Every one of those decisions goes through the same short, list of questions. His biographer Walter Isaacson reported that Elon made about 100 command decisions in a single day walking the factory floor.

First, make your requirements less dumb. Your requirements are definitely dumb. It does not matter who gave them to you. It's particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them enough. Try very hard to delete the part or process. This is actually very important. If you're not occasionally adding things back in, you're not deleting enough.

Elon will be wrong on some of them, but he'll still be further ahead than the person who waited.

Whatever requirement or constraint you have, it must come with a name, not a department, 'cause you can't ask the department, you have to ask a person. And that person who's putting forward the requirement or constraint must agree that they must take responsibility for that requirement. So you should always like assume that you're to some degree wrong and you want to be less wrong. This is, I think, very important. It's a little tougher on the ego, but it's great for getting to the truth of things.

In 2018, SpaceX had spent years and a lot of money building Starship, out of carbon fiber. There was tooling for it, there were engineers whose whole job was carbon fiber, and Elon Musk threw the material out and told them to build the rocket out of stainless steel instead.

Until October last year, we were pursuing a completely different design. So it was really— I switched the design to steel, I think, yeah, approximately maybe October last year.

Now this was a decision based on math. He said it like this: the carbon fiber is $135 a kilogram, 35% scrap, So you're starting to approach almost $200 a kilogram. The steel is $3 a kilogram. So the material he'd been building with cost about 45 times what the material he switched to cost. And the steel was better in the place it mattered most, because carbon fiber starts falling apart above 150°C, and the stainless alloy he picked holds up past 800°C.

It also has a high melting temperature. So for a reusable ship, you're coming in like a meteor. You want something that does not melt at a low temperature. You want something that melts at a high temperature. And this is where steel is extremely good as well.

And it wasn't just a material swap. Carbon fiber had to be laid up in an autoclave by specialists, and steel gets welded. So the change threw out the tooling, the suppliers, and a chunk of what the team had learned how to do. And it made the rockets buildable outdoors in a Texas field instead of inside a clean room, which is why the thing got built as fast as it did.

Very easy to weld stainless steel, the evidence being that we welded it outdoors without a factory. With carbon fiber, this is impossible. With aluminum lithium, also impossible. But steel is very easy to weld and it is resilient to the elements.

The team fought him on it and he said so. It took me quite a bit of effort to convince the team to go in this direction. Then he told the reporter, honestly, I'm in love with steel. So here's Elon betting his biggest program on a material change, and the reason why came down to 2 things: it's cheaper by 45 times and it survives the heat. The rocket standing in Texas right now is stainless steel Because one person ran the numbers on what the thing is actually made of and then acted on the answer immediately. Now you can say, well, he's Elon Musk, he has billions of dollars and he can afford to be wrong and you can't. If you made a bad call on your business, that could be your house. Except being wrong is something Elon accounts for. He's making 100 decisions a day and he says, at least 20% are going to be wrong and we're going to alter them later. But if we don't make decisions, we die. He's saying a fifth of his calls come out wrong and the company still moves faster because he made a decision instead of procrastinating on them. And he does get them wrong on a big scale too. In December 2022, he decided to shut down Twitter's Sacramento data center. His own manager said moving those servers would take 6 to 9 months. He gave them 90 days, then flew there on Christmas Eve and started pulling servers off the racks himself with a borrowed pocket knife. Months later, he admitted. In retrospect, the whole Sacramento shutdown was a mistake. He was wrong. It was in public. It was a big mistake. And he still makes more progress in a month than the person who overanalyzes everything. He wrote the reason into the operating rules at both companies. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. Urgency here means a bias about time. So a decision that could be made today is a decision that gets made today. And the difficult answer to when is always now. Now, so how does he make so many decisions so quickly? Elon has a fixed set of questions that he runs every decision through, and we're going to talk about each of those six right now. 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. Question number one: What's actually physically true here? So for years, the whole car industry agreed that battery packs cost about six hundred dollars per. Kilowatt-hour and always would. Every plan in the industry was built on that number, and it's why electric cars were always written off as just too expensive and will never work. Musk didn't argue with the $600. He just asked a different question: what do we know is actually physically true about this situation? So he broke a car battery pack down into the stuff it's physically made of— cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, the polymers in the separator, a steel can— and he looked up what those materials cost that day on the London Metal Exchange, and he added them up. The total was $80 per kilowatt hour. The $600 price was coming from how the battery pack was being made, and how a thing is made is something that you can change. That one calculation is why Tesla built its own cells instead of buying them, and it's why the price came down for the people who bought those cars. There's an awesome line he gives his engineers: the only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation. So physics is the short list of things that nobody gets to argue with. Everything else— pricing, timelines, industry standards, the way it's always been done— they're So what's on the other list? And the other list is something that you can change and influence. It reminds you of the Steve Jobs quote around everything around you has been created by somebody who's no smarter than you and you can change it and you can influence it. So you're carrying your own version of a $600 number, a price that you accepted, a timeline that somebody quoted you, a rule about how your industry works. You got it from other people in your industry and you never analyzed it yourself. So take one industry assumption this week, write down what the thing is actually made of or actually takes to make happen in hours and in dollars, and then add it up yourself. And then do the same Another one next month. All progress begins with telling the truth, and the first truth is usually a number somebody else gave you that you never checked. Question number 2, whose name is on this requirement? So step 1 of the process Musk runs at both companies is to question every requirement. And to do that, he says every requirement has to arrive with a person's name on it rather than a department or compliance or the customer. A human being is responsible that you can go and talk to about it. So here's what Elon has said. Your Requirements are definitely dumb. It does not matter who gave them to you. And he says the dangerous ones come from smart people because when a smart person hands you a requirement, nobody argues with it. So it just gets approved and it sits in the business for years, whether it's right or not. A requirement from somebody junior usually gets challenged. A requirement from the smartest person in the building gets written into the spec and inherited by people who never met that person. And 6 years later, a team is designing around a decision that never made sense in the first place. You have these in your business and life too. The report nobody reads, the approval step for a thing that never once has been rejected, the 12-page onboarding doc. Each of these exist because somebody asked for it at some point, but you can't name who or when or for what reasons. So take your 3 most annoying recurring tasks and write a person's name next to each one. Whoever actually wants this? If you can't fill in a name, you found something to delete and you should run the same test on 3 more next month. Half the work sitting on your calendar is somebody's old preference that nobody has questioned since. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write 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, and I'll see you there. Question number 3, what can I delete right now? Step 3 is to delete the part or the process. So Musk's problem with deleting is that people are too careful about it. So he puts a number on it that tells you when you've cut enough. He says, if you're not adding things back in at least 10% of the time, you're clearly not You're supposed to cut so hard that roughly 1 in 10 of your cuts turns out to be a mistake that you have to reverse. If you never have to put anything back, then you weren't actually cutting enough in the first place. He said, possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist. Making a useless process 30% faster is worse than useless because now the useless process is efficient. Everybody gets to say they made progress, but nothing actually happened. Once you've cut, then you can speed up the process, then you can automate it last. He's got a line for people who just skip right to speed. If you're digging your grave, don't dig faster. Automating a step you should have deleted just means the wrong thing now happens itself at scale faster without anybody watching it. So you don't work to improve your onboarding, your content systems, your sales process until you try to delete pieces of it first. Homework, pick one process this week and cut something out of it instead of trying to improve it. Remove a step and run it without that step. Then do it again next week on the same process and keep going until you have to put something back. That moment when you put one thing back is a signal that you finally cut deep. Question number 4, what does it cost versus what it's made of? Musk uses a ratio he calls the idiot index. You take what a finished part costs and you divide it by the raw materials in its cost. So his rule is that when that number comes out high, the money is going into how the thing gets made and who handles it on the way, and not into the thing itself. So a rocket part that costs $10,000 with $200 of aluminum has an idiot index of 50. That part has a process problem or a supplier problem, and you can go And you can go and fix both of those. The useful part is what a high number tells you to go and look at. The price is coming from the machining, the certification, the shipping, the supplier's margin, and the 3 people who have to touch it along the way. And every one of those is something that a person decided and a person can undo and change. It takes about 30 seconds and it works on things that aren't rockets too. What do you pay for a lead? What does the ad that produced it actually cost you? What does an hour of your service cost a client? What does the labor in it cost you? What's your software bill against the thing that a replace would take in hours? Run that math on your 3 biggest expenses this week and put it into your calendar to run again every quarter. The gap between those 2 numbers is where a lot of your profit margin is hiding, and you've probably barely looked at that calculation. Question number 5: Am I still adding anything in this meeting? So I love this one. Elon Musk sent a company-wide email to Tesla staff calling excessive meetings the blight of big companies, and he gave his staff a permission almost Almost nobody gets typically at work. He tells them to walk out of a meeting or drop off a call the moment it's obvious they're not adding or getting value. Then he gives a reason. It is not rude to leave. It is rude to make someone stay and waste their time. The rude part is keeping a person in a room where they can't contribute, and you staying in meetings just to be polite isn't making progress. So he runs the same rule upwards in the organization too. His managers are required to do the actual work, and he's specific about why. He says, All technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20% of their time coding. A manager who can't do the work can tell a real constraint from a bad excuse, so the meeting fills up with people reporting instead of doing. He asks for the same thing on jargon and on the chain of commands. So drop the buzzwords because what they do is really just hide meaning. Talk to whoever can solve the problem instead of routing it back up and down through 4 different layers of management. Basically, the goal is to get to the shortest path to the answer possible, no matter who you have to talk to. So look at your calendar for the next week and find the meetings that you add nothing to. You already know which one of those are. Get out of it and check for a new one every Friday because they grow back like new arms. An hour a week is 50 hours a year, which is a working week and a half you're getting back for one uncomfortable cancellation message you have to send. Question number 6: Have I decided or am I still deciding? So here's the last one, and it turns the other 5 into even more speed. On a good day, Musk makes about 100 command decisions walking the Tesla floor. He knew roughly 20% of them were going to be wrong, so he trades some decisions that need to be changed in exchange for a company that's never waiting on him. He puts one condition on it, though. He says it's okay to be wrong. Just don't be confident and wrong. Being wrong fast is cheap when you set up front that you might be wrong, because then everyone around you is paying attention, and if it fails, You can actually correct it pretty quickly. But being wrong after you sold the room on certainty is what becomes really expensive because people just assume that it's going to work. You've probably got the opposite problem though, and are likely carrying a decision that you've held onto for weeks. And while it sits there on your calendar, people on your team can't move. What that costs you is another week of your business being stalled because everyone is waiting on you to finally make a decision. So give the next one 5 minutes, run it through the questions. What's physically true? Whose name is on it? What can I delete? What's the idiot ratio? And am I adding value here? Then decide, apply it immediately, and move forward. You know when the best time to start is? Now. How about right now? The rocket is made of steel because somebody decided. So the paper airplane on my logo on this YouTube channel, it's a paper airplane because it's breaking the sound barrier. And I think that's impossible. And that's what entrepreneurs do. We do the impossible every single day. Elon's Starship is impossible too, and it's standing in a field in Texas made out of the same steel that your kitchen sink is made out of because one person And then that person asked what the thing was physically made of, got an answer he didn't expect, and acted on it that week instead of later that year. And the thing that made all this possible was small. Somebody looked up the price of steel, wrote it next to the price of carbon fiber, and saw a number 40 times too big. That took a willingness to question how things are done and check a price the whole industry said was standard. So none of the 6 questions require you to have a ton of money. They don't require a factory or a team or somebody's permission. They're fast, and the only reason you're not running them is that nobody gave you the list of questions before. But now you've got that list. If you have the ability, then you have the responsibility. If you can, then you must. That's what my mom always told me. So pick the decision you've been carrying the longest, give it 5 minutes today, and get it off your desk. Then do the same thing tomorrow with the next one, because the best skill is in becoming the person that people stop And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be.

Believe.

Now let's learn how highly productive people structure their week. 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 year as the other company.

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 gonna 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 time 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 gonna reflect back on how long it took me, how much time did I spend on tasks, 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 about 6 months of cash left.

And 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. So 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 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 the employees, running out of hope.

So here's how building a chip normally goes. 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 the 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 company. 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 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 another chip that was 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'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 scheduled one-on-ones with any of them.

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 Now that's a true workaholic.

But he isn't just putting in more hours. He set his whole company up so that those hours count. 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 hours on work that matters make you good. Hours on work that doesn't matter will wreck you whether you're 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 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 day 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 and 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 4 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 Or 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 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 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 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 three, 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, et cetera. 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 Sheet and I have what I call my wildly important number. At the top, there's It'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 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. 1 in the morning, 1 at lunch, 1 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, 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 busy. 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 2 is the walk, right? Fresh air. Move for 20 to 30 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 And then step 3, 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 down. 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. Make the information come to you. So working hard only pays off if you hear about problems quickly. Huang 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. What's the most important thing? 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 reads. 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. 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've 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 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, and your weight, your bank balance, and your marriage are 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 St. Louis.

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

Afterwards, in the dressing room, he collapsed from exhaustion and started hallucinating. 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 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— from what, I guess from '77 to '87?

When was that?

'77 to '87? 10 years.

What did it take out 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 made a difference. 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 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 in history.

The winner, and once again heavyweight champion of the world, Big George Foreman!

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 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 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 gonna 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. before 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 gonna collapse in a locker 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 did, 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. 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 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 gonna spend the next 15, 20 minutes listening to something either way, and if you don't choose with intention, Mm-hmm. 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 do you want to do? 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 right. 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. 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 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 quit. So go clean out those small leftover things on Give yourself 1 hour this week and do it in 1 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, 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 the streak is broken. So the whole thing is off and you restart properly on Monday. 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 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 Text 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 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 doing it. 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 want to be. I'm going to do it. are today. 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. To learn how to outwork people without burning yourself out, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. 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