In this motivational self‑help video, the presenter introduces a practical "life vs. death" exercise designed to reprogram daily habits that drain energy and joy (the "death" activities) and amplify those that energize and fulfill (the "life" activities). Viewers are guided to write two lists on a sheet of paper—one for life‑giving actions (e.g., walks, cooking, hobbies) and one for death‑inducing tasks (e.g., administrative work, difficult meetings, chores). After mapping these lists, the speaker advises analyzing a typical weekly schedule to see how much time is spent on each category, then systematically delete, delegate, minimize, or delay death tasks, especially by leveraging peak energy hours for high‑value work. Real‑world client anecdotes illustrate the impact: a film‑company CEO named David, despite record profits, was burned out because his schedule was saturated with death tasks; after restructuring his schedule and protecting his morning energy, he regained enthusiasm and business growth. Another successful coach faced a similar dilemma, recognizing that scaling her business would increase death tasks and trigger a biological resistance. The video also discusses financial trade‑offs, suggesting that paying for services (e.g., housekeeping, meal prep) can buy back time for life‑enhancing activities, ultimately leading to greater fulfillment and productivity. The presenter concludes by urging viewers to repeat the exercise, continuously prune death tasks, and stack life‑giving activities for sustained happiness.
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In today's video, I'm going to break down the simple and easy process to basically reprogram your life from things that bring you death, things that are sapping your life and sapping your energy and your joy to bring more things into your life that bring you the juice of life, like make you happy and fulfilled and excited and warmed up to life. And a lot of my leaders, when I work with them, I find that their life is stacked with a lot of obligations that are just sapping the joy, like literally sucking the marrow out of their bones for their vitality. And as we reprogram and re-pattern their life, literally in 30 days, they can be on the edge of burnout and 30 days later be more fulfilled, more inspired, more alive in their work and their career and their family life or whatever than they've been in years. So, I'm going to guide you through in today's video the simple but easy exercise that will help you get clarity on what brings you life, versus what brings you death. So, let's dive in. So, life or death exercise. This is a simple process that also broke down in my book, "The Genius Within," and I take all my VIP clients that do a Zone of Genius day. And basically, what we do is you take one sheet of paper, you write down all the things that bring you life, like the simplest things even, like cooking dinner if that brings you life. Now, if it brings you death, then you put it on the death list. But everything that brings you life from walks in the park, smelling the roses, having ice cream, getting a massage, going to play basketball, and you list out all the things that bring you life. Then, you start recognizing, then you look at your weekly schedule, a normal week, and look at how much of your week is filled with life-giving activities. And chances are not nearly enough. And then, on the other half or on the backside of the paper, you write out death. You write all the activities that bring you death, whether it's cleaning toilets or dealing with difficult people or doing an administrative task or meetings, whatever it is. And you just lay out as clearly as possible all the things that bring you death. And then, the goal with the death list is different from the life list, but you want to start with the death list. And you get as detailed and thorough as possible, and it should take no more than probably 30 minutes for your first version of your death list to write out. Plus, you can usually do your life list in about that same time, 30 minutes to an hour for both. And what you end up doing is you take your death list and you start figuring out how can I delete, eliminate, minimize, or delay, you know, kind of put off in the future this death list in a safe and effective way, right? So Um, certain things like taxes are in a lot of people's death list. You can't fully put them off forever, right? So, but you can delegate them to your bookkeeper and to your accountant, and you can get a lot of the heavy stuff off your plate. But then other things like, uh, doing laundry, you actually could delegate. Like, a lot of things on our death list are things that we don't think about deleting, delegating, etc. Um, if you don't like cooking dinner, you can get meal meal prep delivered where it's just you pop in an organic meal and cook it in 5 minutes in a pan or skillet, right? So, there's a lot of ways you can actually reduce things in deathless. And I'll tell one of my clients, David, the CEO of a film company. As we were working together, I won't reveal his whole identity, but as we were working together, this back a couple years ago, in our first day, first Zone of Genius day, we sat down and we did his life and death list. As we broke it down in 2 hours, I had a real clear idea. I was like, David, he didn't say this to me, but I asked, I was like, let me ask, are you really burned out with your business? Are you looking for a way out? And he's like, yeah, how'd you figure that out? Because he had just had a record year of profits. He had made more money than he'd ever made. And he felt great in terms of the progress of the business. I was like, well, I just looked at your life and death list and your weekly schedule, and you have almost nothing in your weekly schedule that gives you life. And your, your death list is stacked. Like, every day is filled with things that you hate doing. You're a visionary entrepreneur and you're stuck in all these administrative meetings day after day, using your peak energy, your peak hours. I was like, and let me guess, I bet you're also battling a little bit of depression. He's like, yeah, I just started antidepressants last month. Okay. All right. So then we started unpacking his death list, basically figuring out meetings he could work himself out of, things he could delete, protecting his peak energy hours, like his morning hours before noon, started doing all these things to proactively basically give him the space, spaciousness back so his visionary side could come Soaring back. And guess what? A month later, as we deleted and he had actually taken action on it and follow-up calls and all that and changed things with his business partners and then revamped to bring the things that he— that brings him life, the things that he really has a genius in and then fulfilled in with his business. Guess what? A month later, he was on fire. He was happy and fulfilled again in his business. The first time in like 2 months— I'm sorry, 2 years. He was really striving again. And over the next 6 months, he really got on track in such a beautiful way. So I can't emphasize this enough that you want to do a life or death list, and it's a simple, easy process. Okay? And then you got to get creative sometimes. And you also might have to be a little more flexible with the money side of saying, all right, If I don't like to spend money on certain things like house cleaner or doing the, you know, lawn care or whatever, well, if it's buying back time so that you can spend time with your wife or your, you know, husband or daughter or kids or just doing things that you enjoy, like outdoors, whatever it is on the weekends, then why are you doing lawn care and like spending 4 hours on a Saturday doing stuff that you hate that you could have paid $80 or $150 even for someone else to take care of it. And then you go and do something that you love with the people that you love that's going to juice you and put life back into you. Do that, all right? And you'll make more money because you'll be more energized and more positive. So I can't emphasize this enough. This is a big, big thing that a lot of people are almost unconscious of. And some of the smartest, most accomplished CEOs that I work with, when we do this, their life is almost always stacked with stuff they dislike And that also becomes a handcuff to growing in your career or your business. Because if you— if it means like, oh, to grow my business means I'm going to do more things that bring me death, then your body's going to say, heck no, I don't want to touch anything more. I don't want to do any more because it means I'm going to suffer more. Like, I have another client right now that I'm signing up tomorrow, and she is She's very— been very successful, sold her first two businesses. Her third business as a coach, very high profit margins, got it to right at seven figures, just under. But basically it meant she didn't really have an employee and struck out a few times on hiring people. And she realized energetically as I was doing the interview with her to see if it makes sense to work together, and she was like, Mike, you know what? Uh, one of the big ahas for her was like, It basically, if, if she kept growing the business, it would have meant more death. So her body was literally saying, no, don't go forward. No, if I, if you make the business any bigger, you're going to suffer more. And so her body was saying no, naturally. All right, so you got to work with your biology. And if you have in your career growing the business means more life, then you're probably going to say yes and you're going to expand. All right. So anyway, I hope you guys like this. Feel free to comment, ask questions, and use this video. Come back to it again. This will be one of the most powerful exercises that you can do. And once you have the list for your death list, delete, eliminate, delegate, whatever you need to do. And then for the life list, just step by step, stack and add more things into it and you'll find there's often very attainable ways that you can add more life and delete some of the death. Much love.
