How To Overcome Self-Sabotage & Get 10x More Done

This is going to be a video on how to overcome self sabotage and get 10 times more done every day. No matter what content I make, no matter how many clients I work with, actually getting stuff done and getting out of your own way is always the number one problem and even for me as well. So in this video I'm going to go over seven major things. The information diet, the morning routine, what I call the timer and the work form, having a printed schedule, planning three to five things per day, getting momentum and reprogramming your mind. And this is what's working for me in my agency and mastermind. That is what's working with my 550 plus clients. And for each example, I'm going to do a story, I'm going to go over the different problems I face and a five part plan on how you can implement this yourself. So these are the pillars of success in every business. We have our funnel, we have our messaging, we have our planning, we have our metrics, and we have the personal side. This of course is going to be about the personal side and it's very, very, very big part of it. Because if you don't have the mindset, the habits and all of that kind of stuff to kind of get enough done to implement the funnel, do the messaging, do the planning and do the metrics, tracking like the rest of the stuff is not really going to get there. Right. So let's get into the first point. And the first point for me is always the information diet. So everybody kind of, we know what a real diet is, the food we eat, the drinks we consume and all of that kind of stuff. But I think that more importantly or equally as importantly is the information that we consume. I watched a, it was like a YouTube video. I've never been able to find it since, but the first line was other than Oxygen. Content is the thing that we consume the most. And while most people think about the air quality we breathe, most people don't think about the quality of content we consume. And I think that's extremely true. I think most people don't even get off the ground because their mind is filled with everything except the stuff that actually matters. Like normally this will go into, you know, short form content. Social media, news, politics, sports, YouTube, streaming sites, porn, all of that kind of stuff. And I know for myself the number one weakness that ruins my life is both YouTube and news. I'm not really short form content, yes, I guess if it's on YouTube, but I don't really ever go on Instagram or TikTok I don't really go on social media, but YouTube and news have probably cost me 20 times more money in the grand scheme of things than all of the bad hires or mistakes that I've ever made in business. And I actually purely just block these from my life where I make it so difficult to access all of these things that even if I have a moment where I, like, chimp out and really need to, I really want to do any of these things, I just can't access it. There's VPNs, there's blocking tools, there's stuff on my phone, there's stuff on my computers where it's just so bad for me that I completely got it away from my life. I don't know about news, but you definitely can use YouTube for good. Like I make YouTube videos and there's definitely stuff to be learned on YouTube. But you can use a lot of things for good. Like you could use a baseball bat to play baseball. You could use a baseball bat to beat someone to death, right? You could use a knife to basically prepare dinner and cut food. Or you could stab someone with it. Like everything. There's very few things that are only used for good or only used for bad. And I had a moment of honesty with myself, let's just say, and 95% of my time I ever spent on YouTube is used for bad. Like basically entertainment, numbing of the brain and all that kind of stuff. I think of all the things that I'm going to go over, the information diet was something that made a big difference for me. And another thing too, but I'll go over that in a sec. So here's the plan. If you find that your information diet is bad, if you find you are absolutely, you know, kind of just terrible, you're on your phone all day and it's just like, you go and you see that you have, you know, 10 hours of screen time and you just don't. You can't even like tell anybody what you actually did. Try this plan. So I use a VPN called FocusMe. This is, blocks everything for me. Basically, you set it up and then if you go to X, Y and Z website or X, Y and Z keyword shows up, it just shuts it off. So I do that for all news, YouTube, social media, that kind of stuff. Then I use the child settings on my phone. But I also use something called. This is like an actual, I think it's set, called an RFD tag, where you have this next to your phone and it will like, like Just like in the picture, you know, X, Y and Z is blocked. And to have to unblock it, you have to pull the tag near your phone. You just have the tag or your phone, you know, across the office or across the home. That's a very good way to do it in my view. The next that I really like, and this is very important to me, if you have like some sort of addiction that's really kind of causing you a lot of problems. Like I another thing that I did, that's not really necessarily the information diet, but I was absolutely addicted to coffee. And by addicted to coffee, I mean I would just like buy an absolute like 10 coffees a day, which is not good for you. Sure. And probably something, something information diet here. But it's also just very time consuming. I read this book and completely quit. Cold coffee, cold turkey, like basically the next day he has one for alcohol, smoking, your phone, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And I think especially if you're in some of those reading this where wouldn't call it necessarily an information diet, but you have addictions that like prevent you from focusing. Very good book to do. Next thing that I always do is I'll get to this in a later part, but I have affirmations about how I'm so free of all of this stuff. I'm free from distractions, I'm free from my previous addictions, all that kind of stuff. And over time, it becomes more and more ingrained in your brain and you're just really, really. I am able to focus 10 hours per day without any problems. I'm so happy and grateful that I'm free from YouTube. It's basically had no neg, no positives or advantages, and only disadvantages. I didn't really find it difficult to give up because I didn't actually lose anything. I just freed myself. This kind of stuff in my view, is very powerful, especially when you do it over the course of months and years. And then the first, the final thing I think everyone should do is listen to something positive within the first 60 minutes of waking up. So I like to do a Tony Robbins app. I just like to watch or listen to something of that. I think I'm gonna go over it in a minute in the morning routine. But how you start the day is very indicative of how good or bad the day will be. And I think when we get our information diet right, we basically free up time for to think about the stuff that actually matters, free up mental space. But we also, you know, are just able to Get a lot more done and we're going to be in a better frame of mind. So that leads to the next point which is going to be the morning routine. And the big problem that I think a lot of people have and why they should have a morning routine is because most people just don't get off to the right start. They get off to the wrong start. And when you basically are getting off to the wrong start, that's like you're trying to fly from Los Angeles to New York and then you're just flying towards Hawaii for the first hour of the day, for example. And then you got to go and turn around, if you can even turn the ship around at that point. And a lot of the time, you know, wake up, check your phone, you know, check all of the social media, basically hammer out the exact wrong thing. I talked about earlier with the information diet. Endless phone scrolling, endless distraction, not a good way to start your day with the information diet side of things. And I think a lot of people just wake up and, or get started way too late. You know, they just wake up. 11:00am I remember I was born in Canada and I spent the first, you know, 20 plus years of my life in Canada. And when I started working and started being an entrepreneur, I was very good about waking up at 5, 6, 7am depending on the time period of life. I remember when I moved to Dubai the first time just because of the time zone more than anything else. It's nine hours ahead of Eastern Time and 11 hours ahead and you're always taking calls to, you know, if you don't keep on track of it like you'd be taking calls till 2, 3, 4am So I think what I did that is, you know, batching all my calls to end at 11am so I or 11pm so I could go to bed 11pm, wake up at 7am consistently and get started on the day versus you are like what a lot of people do even in the United States is they stay up until forever and you know, they wake up at 11:30, middle of the business day. And when you do that, in my opinion, you're just getting hammered by messages, emails, all that kind of stuff, problems. And it's not a good way to have a, a nice building positive morning routine when you're waking up too late. Even so I don't think getting up early is even the, you know, let's just say catch all solution because a lot of people don't really get into their work early enough. You know, they might get up at 7am but they don't really start working. You know, they're on their phone, they're doing some other morning routine and I'll go over this one in a minute. They're answering questions to their employees or clients are doing. They just get started way too late. And I think that's a complete shame when you're being disciplined and waking up on time, but you're just not actually getting into the routine fast enough. I think overall like not having a morning routine, like most people get off to the wrong start and then if they don't have a, you know, even the first 60 minutes of their day, kind of, let's just say scripted or there's no consistency day to day. And consistency day to day builds momentum, which I'm going to talk about later. And, and momentum is probably the most powerful force in the universe. So I think it's kind of essential we start the day the same every time. So to implement a good morning routine, I think a key is the same bedtime and wake up time every day. Can't be going to bed at 8pm, waking up at 4am and then 10pm and then 3am and then, you know, we need to have the same general bedtime and wake up time every day. I like to keep the phone off and out of my bedroom or out of reach within the first 60 minutes of the day. First thing I do, and this is something that I learned over time because I used to be one of those people that would just did an insane morning routine. And by the time you do the morning routine you're like, wow, I did so much, I don't want to work. So the first thing I like to do is basically leap out of bed and go to the computer, turn on something good to listen to and do 60 minutes of work right away. Basically whatever your most important task is for me it's usually making these YouTube videos. So I'll literally do that within the first 60 minutes. Rushing to the computer and waking up and then I kind of invert it. So I do that 60 minutes of work so I actually get real progress and like I actually started something and then I go and do the 20, 20, 20 morning routine from the 5am Club. So if you don't ever read that book, I really like it. It's the first 20 minutes we are going to move. So I usually do this on the treadmill and that's where I do some of those affirmations and all that kind of stuff. Next 20 minutes is reflecting. Sometimes I do that on the Treadmill. But sometimes it's, you know, the goals setting, the affirmations, the journaling, that kind of stuff. And then the final 20 minutes is I grow. And I just read a book there. So when you do that, I think it's kind of the perfect morning routine. So you've got your 60 minutes of actually doing work, and then you've got your 60 minutes of just say exercise, mental exercise, and we'll just say spiritual exercise, for lack of a better word. And then we always want to have our affirmations, our goals, our days without doing X, Y and Z, and then our progress tracking. So affirmations. For me, it's like I am every single day, I'm getting closer and closer to becoming a billionaire. And I think that's a very important distinction with your affirmations. If you're going to do this, is your affirmations cannot be made up. It's not I am a billionaire. It's every day I'm becoming closer and closer to becoming a billionaire. Because if you don't do it right, I think you can psyop yourself to actually believing your own stuff. And I know that from experience. So, you know, like step number one here. So for me, YouTube video, and then two, you know, treadmill, and then three kind of goals, and then four, read. And then this is going to be, for me, typically between 6 and 8am and then I have some very big, very good accomplishments. So the time that 9am Eastern time comes around, like, I've gotten so much done already that not only is actual real work, but is good for the body, the mind, and all of that kind of stuff. So it's very, very good and very, very important, in my opinion. So the next thing is the timer and the work form. And this is by far the number one thing that all of my clients who I get this on say that is the best thing. And most people, in my opinion, like, just can't even focus for even an hour without Adderall. And, you know, being dependent and relying on Adderall is not necessarily what you want to be doing either. I would say that's the exact opposite of what you're going to be doing. So for me, I always have a timer and a work form. So what does that mean in practice? That means, like, you're going to Amazon, preferably, and not using your phone, even though I don't have my timer with me right now. So I'm going to do it here. You have a kitchen timer. So, like, kitchen timer, Amazon, you have something like this and then you take it and you literally put one hour on there. I'm just putting my phone here and you put this down. You can put music in, you can do whatever you want. And you work non stop until that timer goes off, right? Then when that timer goes off you have a Google form or any form. But I like Google form because it's easy and free and you say okay, it's December 29th hour. Two, what did I do this hour? Film, YouTube video. And what is your work standard? I am working more and more every day. I get at least eight work forms done per day. And you submit and then when you submit it here, it's going to send an email notification and a text message notification if you want, to the boys, right? To your accountability group, all your friends. And two things happen. One, you know you're actually being held accountable because they're going to see if you're not doing it. And when you get other people's email in your inbox that they're doing it, it's going to remind you and re motivate you to do work. So to implement, you know, you have your Google form, it's free, just you know the date and hour. What did you do? What is your work standard? You can put whatever you want on here. But I like to keep it simple. You link all those responses to a spreadsheet so you have them all and you can track how much work you're actually doing. Set up that group chat with the accountability and then you zap your email over to them, work for the 60 minutes and then record it. And this to me is the number one thing I hear. I've worked with 550 or so clients over the past 12 months. Of the things that I actually tell them to do and they actually do consistently, this is the number one thing that they kind of bring back to me that really, really help them. So it's just one of those things where it doesn't cost you anything, it's free. It's just a very good mental way to break up the day and actually get work done. That I've never found anything as good as this. But I guess some people might think differently. The next thing is having a printed out schedule. You could also just write it out if you want on a notebook. But I think that this is one of the best things that you know, I think for me this is the number one. And I think for me and a lot of people, they kind of just get like technology overwhelm and or they have a Lack of awareness of what they should be doing. It's like, logically or, like, mentally, you know, that there's a thousand things that you should be doing, but it's just all one big blob. It's kind of like the phrase the how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time, right? Or how do you climb Mount Everest one step at a time? And it's kind of like when you take all those things that, you know you need to be doing and you put it out into a printed schedule. And a printed schedule can be pretty simple, like the one that I use. So I'll just, like, print this out, and then it's tracking every 30 minutes, and then I'll just write in what I'm going to do every 30 minutes, and then just cross it off when I do it. And you just go through that line by line, and you break down all of the big tasks into pieces. You schedule the pieces, and then you just work through it and cross it off one at a time. So, like, a good example of this would be like, make a YouTube video. You know, that's a kind of a vague task. So maybe on, you know, 6am Create title plus outline for video. Create thumbnail plus intro script for video. Create Miro board for video. Film, video, film, video. Upload video. Turn video transcript into newsletter. Create messaging module for course. Upload and format messaging module for course. And you get the picture. Like, just make a YouTube video, work on the course, do client work, you know, all of that kind of stuff. Okay? And then we'll go, you know, Logan, call Matas, call Joe, call lunch, exercise, exercise. And then, like, just. You have all of these things in your head, and it's just very difficult, in my view, to get anything done unless it's printed out on a schedule like that. So I like to create a page like that. I like to. I like to print it out, but you can just also just write it in a notebook. And I would either track every 15 minutes or every 30 minutes, depending on how messed your brain is. If your brain is ultra messed, doing it 15 every 15 minutes. 15 minutes is a good way to kind of audit your time. Print it out, break all the big tasks down on your overall to do, list into pieces, schedule them, and then work through it. And you're going to get a lot done when you're doing this as opposed to anything else. This is the number one thing for me that keeps me on track. I rarely do a single day without doing this. The next is something where I Personally always used to schedule way too many things on my to do list, like 30 things. And then I would just kind of not do any of them because it was so many things and it was so overwhelming. And I think that's probably what a lot of people do. Where I think that it kind of all changed for me is when I heard a Kevin o' Leary clip of him talking about Steve Jobs. And basically what he said there, that Steve Jobs is, you know, literally the, the number one person in the world distinguishing the signal and the noise, where, you know, he's like, okay, there's two to three or three to five things that you need to get done over the next 18 hours and 80, 90% of your time needs to get done on these things. And that is the mark of a, you know, successful versus unsuccessful person. So if you do that, you probably spend 80% of the day on these, at least, hopefully a hundred percent. But that's not always realistic. You're probably going to have two to three habits that you have to get done. So like for me, making a YouTube video, writing a thousand words of content, and making a module. And then you'll probably have one to two large tasks. So, you know, make a welcome flow, make a vsl, make a film, these ads, whatever, right? You're gonna time block three to five hours on basically kind of, you know, time to work on this and just do this and repeat it the next day and the next day and the next day until that just becomes kind of what you do. And when you do it like this, you are shielded from overwhelm, but you're still making a tremendous amount of progress in compared to, you know, doing one or two things per day. It's just very, very strong. This here could probably be the most important part of the video. This is not really kind of an action step, but this is kind of the whole point of it all. And that is to build momentum. So everything feels hard at the start and that's why people quit. But it gets easier the more you do it. And it's the law of thermodynamics. I can't remember which one it was, but it's Isaac Newton. An object in motion wants to stay in motion and an object at rest wants to stay at rest. The exact same thing with all of your productivity and your life in general. When you really get going, it's easy, but most people don't kind of get going, for lack of a better word. So, you know, this is why on a daily micro level, the morning routine is so important, because that builds momentum for the day. And this is why all of the other stuff is important, because it will build momentum for the long term. So I always like to have my Habit tracker apps. I like to do the three to five things that make the day successful. And no matter what, before I go to bed, and I won't go to bed until I get all of those things done. Those three to five things, all you really need to do when you do that, we make it as simple as this. You know, you string the days together and it becomes easier and easier and easier over time to where it's just as easy as, like, breathing. You know, if you worked out 365 days straight, the 366th day would be extremely easy. You wouldn't really even need to think about it, versus you are trying to work out for the first time or you're trying to work out for two days in a row. And it's, oh, my God, I have to go back to the gym or I have to go running again. Oh, my God. And it's the same thing here, where if you have it like this and you build that momentum, you pretty much will become unstoppable. It's going. It's kind of like that big boulder or that or not the boulder, but the snowball that, you know, becomes so big rolling down the hill and keeps collecting more and more and more snow until it can't be stopped. When at the start it was like this big, but then it kept rolling and rolling and rolling and became as big as that. I think that's the number one way to think about it. You want to become that big snowball that keeps going down and down the hill, and eventually you can't be stopped. Let's just say the final thing I want to talk about is reprogramming the mind. And most people don't have a mindset that serves them. That's the main problem that they're dealing with. It actually is against them. And I think that a quote I like from Alex Hermosi, he said it a few times on certain content that I've consumed over the. How many years it is now. People need to be reminded more than they need to be taught. And I think that's absolutely right. I had a horrible mindset for two to three years. What years would these be? Probably 2021 to, you know, early 2024 is when I had an absolute terrible mindset about pretty much everything. And when I was going through it, I obviously needed to. Knew I needed to Change it. But unless you consciously make the effort to do so, you're not really going to be able to do that. So what I like to do is I have an affirmations app on my phone. It's called I Am. I like to read through my affirmations between five and 15 minutes per day. I have a goals app on my phone called Accomplish. And I like to look at my top 10 goals over and over and over. Whenever I have downtime, instead of YouTube or instead of scrolling news like I used to do from the information diet section, I'll, you know, work through the affirmations and look at my goals. I have a major definite purpose. Currently, my major definite purpose is to have 55 million liquid in investments by December 35. December 31, 2030. Got a Ways to go, but I think I'm making good progress. I think of that and repeat that to myself as the goal and the benchmark as much as possible. You can't see it here, but right here I have. I'm sorry, no, right here I have a sticky note on my computer that has this goal. So no matter what, I constantly look at it every day. And I think one of the cool things or one of the things that I learned from this coach who I think is kind of a hippie. I worked with him last year and I almost don't agree with almost anything he says other than this. But he said to you need to keep a list of proof and accomplishments. That's like a written list either on your Apple Notes or in like a journal. And you need to read that every day because especially when you are ambitious and hard on yourself and you're trying to do X, Y and Z and trying to achieve very, you know, big hard goals. You also should keep this list and remind yourself, like, how far you've actually come and what, like maybe even year over year so that it doesn't feel like you're not making any progress and you're not such a negative person all the time. Because I'm a, historically a bit of a negative person, to be honest. That's one of the things that really worked well for me. And then the final thing is I think having predetermined thought patterns or thought habits, like a good one, that, you know, I was trying to quit sugar at one point. And then I determined that, you know, one of the thought habits when I saw cookies or something like that was, that is absolutely disgusting. I can't believe I used to eat that. I'm so happy that I no longer do and anytime I see cookies, sugar cakes, like all of that kind of stuff, I literally think that and I think another one that's good is when I was creating my big agency is every time I had a lull, every time I was feeling discouraged. Like, what I would say is like this could be fixed by making better paid ads because that's what's going to acquire customers. And having three to five predetermined thought habits that are going to be the highest impact area on your life is one of the highest ROI things that I think we can do. So those are the seven things that I think are, like the video title suggests, going to help you overcome self sabotage and get 10 times more done. So the recap, the information diet, the morning routine, the timer, the work form, the printed schedule, three to five things to do every day, getting momentum and reprogramming your mind. Because if we don't get the personal side of things done, we are not really going to be able to get anything else in our business. You are always going to be the biggest bottleneck and the biggest roadblock no matter what type of business you're in. So hopefully it was helpful and thank you for watching.