Micro Class: Top 10 Tips on How to Take Consistent, Impeccable Action to Achieve Your Goals

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey guys, this is Brian with another optimal living 101. This one's on the top 10 tips on how to take consistent, impeccable action to achieve your goals. It's the start of 2013. I hope that you've set some inspiring goals for the year. Maybe you've got some New Year's resolutions tied into some action steps you're going to go out and rock to achieve another extraordinary year to create another extraordinary year. And I'm excited to share these top 10 tips on how to help you rock it. Last month, as part of our Optimal Living 101 series, we taught a class on how to set goals that will actually make you happy. This month we're doing a class on action and how to take consistent, impeccable action to achieve your goals. And and I've got a top 50 list of big ideas. I will link to that below. But here's the top 10 that will be the cornerstone of the class that I'm teaching. I'll link to that as well. So, number one, we want to build your willpower muscles. I'm going to repeat this again and again and again, but willpower, whether or not we have self mastery, the ability to do what we need to do when we need to do it, is the greatest predictor of of our health, happiness, quality, of our relationships, our wealth. It's amazing. Willpower out predicts IQ for academic success by a factor of two. Give me someone's iq, tell me about their willpower and I will be able to predict their academic performance and everything else. Way better knowing their willpower than their IQ. It's extraordinary. So I did a separate video on 10 ways you can build your willpower. I will link to that as well, but very quickly. The first way you build your willpower is meditation. Meditation? Yeah, because meditation helps us train our attention, which is the number one key here. It doesn't matter what systems you have, GTD or otherwise. If you can't put your attention where you want, when you want, none of this stuff matters. Meditation doesn't need to be wacky. Just spend a minute or two or five or 10 or 15 a day training your mind. Number two, breathe deeply. I'm going to go quickly. Taking a deep breath is the best way to build our willpower. Exercise, we talk about that all the time. Eat low glucose is a great way to destroy your willpower. Build your willpower with small stuff, even just sitting up more consistently. Sitting up straight Consistently throughout the day will actually build your willpower. Muscles that will affect other aspects of your life. It's amazing. Reduce the variability of your behavior. If you want to work out consistently work out at the same time every day. You want to create more consistently. Create before you check your email. Consistently reduce the variability of your behavior. Be nice to yourself. Self loathing doesn't build willpower. Pre commit, know what you're going to do before we can talk about that for a weekend. Tidy up. Very interestingly, having a clean environment at your home and office builds your willpower. Take tidy up. Bright lines. Bright lines. We need to know where we want to play. Have bright lines to know when we're off again. I've got a video with all that in detail. Number two, you need to stop doing something perhaps that's really bringing you down. What do you do in your life right now that just doesn't serve you? It might be drinking too much, smoking too much, watching too much tv, yelling at your friends, your colleagues, your spouse, your kids, whatever. What's the number one thing you need to stop doing now? Again, we can talk about all this fancy stuff, but if you have something in your life that's destroying you, you've got to solve that first. So what's the number one thing that you can stop doing? Get on that. As we do that and we remove the things that are destroying our health, let's think about what we can start building in. What's the number one thing you can start doing that if you did it consistently, would have the most positive impact in your life. Start doing that now. Number four is tied to those two, which is rock your fundamentals. We need to identify the things we do when we're on. Mine include exercise, nutrition and attention training, which includes meditation, optimism and gratitude. Exercise, nutrition, attention training. It's hard for me to have a bad day or a bad month or a bad year when I'm consistently showing up on these fundamentals. I say all the time, you want to see how tall a building is going to be. Look at how deeply they're digging the foundation. Now you can set up this fantasy of having a skyscraper with marble floors on the top floor. But if your foundation isn't solid, it doesn't matter. It's going to topple the first time you hit a challenge. You need to have strong fundamentals. Number five, you need to make 100% commitment to your goals. If you're kind of sort of committed, well, it doesn't matter. You're going to give up the first challenge you hit. So make 100% commitment, then recommit and recommit and recommit and recommit. Number six, Quit being a perfectionist. We talk about this all the time too, but perfectionism is a great way to thwart your activity level and procrastinate and all that stuff. You need to embrace the fact that mistakes will happen. They're just like Ms. Takes. You're not going to go through your whole life like you're filming a movie and do it in one take. You're going to have miss takes. Oops. Take it again. Not a big deal. Become an optimalist versus a perfectionist. We have a video on that as well. You need to make failure. Okay. It goes with Alan Watts used to say things go with other things, failure goes with success. It's just how it works. You can't separate the two. You want to have a growth mindset and you want to experiment with life. That's just some ideas we'll talk more about in the class on how to quit being a perfectionist. Number seven. Make yourself proud. In any given moment you have a choice. Step forward into growth, back into safety. The plus one minus one that we talk about a lot. Well, one great way to take a step forward is to make yourself proud. Ask yourself when you don't feel like doing something. You're feeling overwhelmed, stressed, anxious, it's, etc. Ask yourself, how can I make myself proud right now? Then do that. Powerful, powerful idea. Number eight. Now we're getting into the details of getting things done. But again, notice it comes after this stuff. If you go straight to a system and I Basically use a GTD ISH methodology with OmniFocus that I love. But if you go straight here without dealing with this stuff, well, I'm not so sure that's going to be the best approach. But once we get to this idea, getting things done, here's five quick ideas we'll talk a lot about more in the weeks ahead and in the class. 1. Capture everything. Quit letting things slip. That's huge. Get a trusted system. You can put stuff in. Things that take less than two minutes. You need to one touch them. Emails, bills, etc. One touch single handle things that take less than two minutes. Get your inbox to zero shoot for once every 24 hours. It's an amazingly cool practice that I talked about in a separate video. The only reason you're not doing that is because you're afraid of making a decision or you're just a little bit.

Lazy on pulling the Trigger.

It's a great habit to discipline yourself to get your inbox to zero once every 24 hours. Now, if you don't do that, it's probably because your standards are kind of low in that domain of your life. Raise your standards in that and everything else you're doing in your life and your life will change. Number five, constrain email time. If you allow email to come in and trickle into your consciousness throughout the day, you're going to have a hard time getting things done. Constrain it. See if you can get all your email done in a half an hour or an hour or two hours. Block out that time and knock it out. Don't be sitting there like a little rat pushing a pellet to see if you got more emails. I am guilty of that more often than I'd like to admit. Number nine, Know Stephen Covey's four quadrants. Four quadrants. Covey says we can map out things, whether they're urgent were important and we're going to talk a lot about his quadrant two, Quadrant four. I'll do a separate video just on this. We want to spend time in things that are not urgent but are important, like meditation, exercise, good relationships, etc. We want to spend less time in the fourth quadrant, which is it's not urgent, it's not important. Time wasting activities, checking email again, going to ESPN or whatever it is you do to zone out and you want to find a way to move, notice when you're in quadrant four doing time wasting activities, move to quadrant two. I've got a really fun game we'll talk about in future videos and in the class. And then of course, you want to put first things first. Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of things that matter least, Goethe tells us. And finally, number 10, as you figure out how to take consistent, impeccable action to achieve your goals, remember, remember to prioritize your happiness. Happiness precedes success, not the other way around. So take care of yourself. Have fun. This whole process is supposed to be enjoyable. Don't stress yourself out as you do this or whatever else you're passionate about. Have fun. Prioritize your happiness. There you go. Really quick look at 10 ways to take consistent, impeccable action to achieve your goals. Hope you enjoyed it. Hope you got something meaningful out of that. If you if you're feeling it, join us for the action class. Join us for the monthly work that we do, where every week I have a different session, a Q and A, or I bring a philosopher's notes to life. Having a lot of fun with it. Some extraordinary people are involved and I'd love to play with you if you're feeling it. So there you go. Top 10 tips on how to take consistent, impeccable action to achieve your goals. Have an awesome day and here's to an extraordinary 2013 and beyond. See ya.

Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course, it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up. Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101, business 101, meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern Science plus Common Sense plus Virtue plus Mastery plus fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson.

Me join.