TJ Walker argues clutter, sugary drinks, and sedentary living are choices, not circumstances. Three free habit swaps: declutter your space, drink water instead of soda, walk more by parking farther away or getting off transit early.
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This is the Habit Influencer. This is the show where we talk to you about all the latest information, insights, techniques on how to have positive habits in your life. Habits that will give you more fulfillment, better health, better career, better personal relationships. Clutter is a choice. That's right. Clutter is a choice. If you live in clutter, if your house is filled with clutter, if your office is filled with clutter, it is a choice. It is an active choice you are making. If you decide to not live in clutter, that's a choice too. It is completely up to you. A lot of habits are like that. You have a choice. You have a choice on whether to drink colas and soft drinks and juices with lots and lots and lots of artificial sugar added, or you have a choice to drink water, tap water specifically. Unless you live in a region of the world where the tap water is not safe to drink, you have a choice either way. When you are getting to your office, your place of work, or going to a grocery store or shopping center, you have a choice of do you try to park as close as possible to that front door? You have a choice of do you take the bus or the subway that takes you right there? Or do you park couple minutes away where you have to walk several hundred feet? Do you perhaps get off one subway stop earlier, do you get off one bus stop earlier, five blocks away, and spend five minutes walking to your place of business, your office, that store? It is a choice. It is an active choice you make. And guess what? With those three scenarios I just gave you, it costs you nothing, absolutely nothing, not a penny to make the healthier choice. In fact, in many cases, it costs less to make the better choice to have the stronger habit. It takes a lot of time, energy and money to clutter up your house and clutter up your office. Having a habit of living in a way without clutter will save you time because you're not always looking for stuff lost under all your clutter. You also don't have to buy so many knickknacks and garbage and junk, filling your house and office with stuff, so you save money. The reason I bring this up is so often we like to give ourselves excuses. And I'm guilty of this too. Certainly I was in the past. Oh, it would be so easy to have good habits if I were rich. I'd have a personal chef and a maid and a butler and a personal trainer. Oh, it would be easy to have good habits if you are affluent or wealthier or richer or something. Guess what? There's so many good habits you can have that cost nothing or actually save you money. Clutter is one of them. The next habit. You've heard the argument, I've mentioned it before. Where people who live in poorer communities here in the United States, for example, urban areas, inner city areas where there simply are no good grocery stores that have lots of fresh fruit, fresh produce, everything at their local convenience store where they have to shop for food is packaged, processed, filled with sugar, carbohydrates, preservatives, nothing's natural. There's no fresh fruit, no fresh vegetables because it's not available in that poor neighborhood. You've heard that before. Yes, there is some validity to that, however, when it comes to what you drink all day that you don't get off the hook for that. Coca Cola, Pepsi, Sprite, Mellow, Yellow, Mountain Dew, all of those cost money. Doesn't matter. If you're in the poorest block in your town, you go to a store, you go to a seven eleven, a convenience store, they're going to want money for that sugary beverage that is destroying your health, that is giving you so many calories you don't need far cheaper to drink water. If you're here in the United States other than Flint, Michigan, it's perfectly safe to drink tap water. And guess what tap water cost you? Nothing. For the most part. Cokes, Pepsi, Sprites, co, Kool Aid, orange juice. It all cost money. So if you want to drastically improve your health, reduce the number of calories you consume on a daily basis, reduce the grams of sugar in your body that are messing up your system, possibly leading you down the path to diabetes, you can't use the excuse that you're not affluent enough. Simply stop spending money on Coke and Sprite and soft drink, drink water. And I certainly hope you live in a place where you can get safe drinking water. But if you don't and you got to buy something from a bottle, buy water rather than soft drinks if you have to. You might not save money then, but at least it's a wash. You save a tremendous amount of money on your health care cost, your medical cost. Take two people and they have the exact same diet. And one person is drinking four, five, six Cokes a day, the other one is drinking water. Maybe neither one of them has a great diet, but after a year, after a decade, the person who is drinking the same food as the other but is consuming all these soft drinks day is likely consuming another 500, 600 calories a day. That's likely to be another pound a day. That person, over the course of five years or so, could be 20, 30, could be 40 pounds heavier than the first person. The only difference, drinking those colas, drinking those sugared water. So again, here's another choice. Nothing to do with how much money you have has nothing to do with how much time. Simply make the choice of drinking water. Make that your habit, rather than the bad habit of the sugary water. And the third example, walking a little more. It's an active choice to stand up and walk, even if it's another five minutes a day. It is so much better for you. I've been guilty of it. I know you must have friends or family who will sit around and wait five minutes for a car to back up just so they have that primo parking space two feet away from the front door of the grocery store or the shopping mall. Why are we doing that? You would have gotten to the mall, to the store so much faster if you had just parked in the very first space you saw, even if it's 300ft away. What I like to do now is I'll often consciously park the furthest spot away. A lot of advantages to that. No one's dinging up the side of my car. It's easy to get in and out, easy for family members to get in and out, and you get another couple of minutes of walking either way. So you get more exercise. You're not spending an extra penny, and you typically save time. You're not caught up in a little mini traffic jam as everyone's trying to get that perfect parking space. Those are just three examples. But I want you to start looking at every thing you select in life to do or not do through this prism. Is it actually helping you? Is it helping advance your goals of being healthier, being happier, saving time, saving money in some circumstances? Now, I'm not saying you always have to save time or money, but if you have a choice between a habit that's bad for you, that is costing you more money, and wasting time versus a good habit that is saving you time and saving you money and possibly making you healthier, you need to be aware of that. And at that point, it should be pretty easy to make the right choice. Now, I know we have a lot of people all around the world watching this show. Some of you are here in New York with me. Some of you may be wildly wealthy and affluent and have no material needs. Some of you I know are from some of the poor, poorest cities, countries and regions of the world. And I'm here to tell you. I hope all of you get all of what you want in life, but don't let the fact that you currently are in a place that is less than ideal, a place where you are not affluent, not rich, stop you from fulfilling positive, healthy habits today. Yeah, maybe you can't have your own library and pretend you're Thomas Jefferson and you have this big fancy library behind you with thousands and thousands of books. Guess what? If you have a cell phone, chances are you do or you wouldn't be watching this show. You have access to a million books already that are free from Google. So when you make a choice to look at another silly cat video versus reading an important substantive book about a real skill or a real topic of art, science, literature, you're making a choice. And it's one that isn't dependent on economic status or where you are. It's dependent just on you choosing. I want you to choose the habits. They're going to lift you up, that will build you up, that will make you healthier, happier, wiser, more productive, and ultimately more fulfilled. So don't kid yourself. You do have a choice. That's about all for now. But if you like this and you want to see more, please follow me on any of the links you see below. I'm TJ Walker. See you soon.
