TJ Walker separates real success from luck and fame. True success in health, relationships, work, and accomplishment comes from boring daily habits: sleep, diet, practice, learning. Walker limits himself to 30 minutes of news each morning with an alarm, avoiding cable news entirely to protect time for deeper work.
Chapters
Can success be boiled down to anything as mundane as strong daily habits? That's topic C. I believe the answer is yes, with some caveats. Certainly there are some people who are just born lucky. Money falls into their lap, they're born rich, things are given to them and they may have awful habits. They may be alcoholics, drug addicts, and they are still successful as far as becoming even wealthier or fame or notoriety, or they become world renowned rock stars. So there are plenty of people who are successful, at least outwardly to the rest of the world. And they have out outwardly horrible habits, horrible food habits, health habits, diet habits, drug habits, and they still are successful. Certainly the world of rock and roll Hollywood is filled with people like that. But if we take that out of the equation. I do think that if you define success as someone who is living a fulfilled life, someone who has huge sections of their life living in a healthy, disease free and an ideal weight, someone who has meaningful relationships, someone has a meaningful career, someone who feels like they are accomplishing a lot with their life, that most of the time someone like that, you analyze what got them there and you can isolate it, that it is simply a function of, of mundane habits. Do they go to bed at the same time, get a good night's sleep? Do they eat properly? Do they try to learn more about their craft? Yes. Now it's possible to have great habits and a bus run over you. I understand that it's possible to have great habits and be the victim of discrimination and bias. I certainly recognize that and I don't mean to be glib about that. But I do think if you analyze the vast, vast majority of people who are successful by their own terms and by objective standards, you can isolate their success based on what they do on a daily basis. It's not just that they were born genetically gifted. It's not just that they are consistently lucky. It's not just that a muse speaks to them in a different way and they have insights that are so much more brilliant than others and they work less than others. It's typically about habits. Now with some it is purely work ethic of they spend more hours at the office. Now that's not the kind of success I really view as success. There are people who are lawyers and they bill 3,000 hours a year and they bring in a lot of money to their law firm and they have a big house and a big car. But if you're billing 3,000 hours a year, you pretty much never see anyone in your family or any of your friends. Or do anything fun. That's the nose to the grindstone. That's not my definition of success, but it might be yours. In which case the habit is spend more hours working. Not what I would recommend, but in any aspect of life, the greatest writers in the world, the greatest software engineers, it's quite often it is about their habits, their approach, what they do on a daily basis. People who are really successful typically have different habits than people who are very unsuccessful. They eat differently, they sleep differently, they consume different things, they read different things, they spend their free time differently. So that's part of the premise of this entire show. Because if habits didn't really matter, then why don't we all just drink whiskey all day long and eat potato chips and ice cream all day long and just hope that random luck hits us and we become successful regardless of our habits? Obviously there has to be some causal relationship between habits, ultimate success, or why are we here? But I do think, well, many people understand this implicitly. They don't really connect the dots. If you're 20 years old and you want to be really successful when you're 30, or if you're my age and you want to be successful 10 years later, you have to really ask yourself, what are the daily habits of the people who are more successful than I am, who are already doing what I want to be doing, what is it they are doing? And when I look at people I respect, who I feel maybe are a notch or two ahead of me, I figure out what they're doing and it's not a great mystery. They spend time every single day writing about their craft. They spend every single day speaking to people about their craft. Now it might be through live streams like this, it might be a TV show, it might be a radio show, a podcast, it might be simply going to network meetings every single night and talking to people. But they are constantly speaking to people. They are constantly learning, they are constantly trying to improve themselves. Now one thing that it took me a long time to get this, but I heard so many people who are successful in the personal development space 20 years ago, 25 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, say to me and other audiences, don't even look at the news, don't read news, don't read news. I always thought that was very kind of small minded, sort of anti intellectual, being a bad citizen. And I didn't like that. Plus I happened to love news. And for many years of my life I was a news commentator doing political analysis commentary. Those of you in the US saw the debates last night, doing analysis of debates on places like cnn. So that was a part of my life and what I was about and I was fascinated by it. But what I have found is that for the most part, those personal development experts were true. Now, I do think you should be up on the news and you should know the big things going on in the world in your society. Otherwise climate change can destroy you and you've never heard of it. But the whole concept of if you're not a full time journalist, spending a small amount of your time consuming news I think is a valid concept. One of the things that has dramatically freed up my time and I have it is a habit. Every day it's on my checklist, it is in my selfie speak audio that I listen to every day. One of the things I listen to is I tell myself, TJ, you are not going to read more than 30 minutes of news this morning and you're not going to watch any cable TV news ever. I made that pledge to myself about a year ago when I looked at what do the people do who I admire, where do I want to be 10 years from now? And I found that pretty much none of them watch cable TV news. And most of them tried to really severely limit how much time they spend reading news because you're not reading news now. You can read books about art, history, literature, science. You can learn about the latest news of what's going on in your field, whether it's psychology, whether it's philanthropy. You can really go deep and learn. Can't do that if you're spending every moment looking at Yahoo News and other true Kim Kardashian updates on what she's wearing. You can't learn. There's only so many minutes of the day. There's only so much mind space. So I made that decision about a year ago and I have to tell you, it's one of the best decisions I've ever, ever made. What I have found is even though there's dozens of websites I like to go to for news, if I know I'm only going to read news for 30 minutes, somehow magically I read all the articles I need to read in 30 minutes. Now I just set an alarm. I just say, siri set alarm for 10 minutes or for 30 minutes. And when the alarm is vibrating on my phone, then I know it is time to finish up and go to the next part of my day, which could include reading a book, listening to an audiobook for something that's not related to news. So yes, I do believe that success in the vast majority of cases can be examined and we can really look underneath the hood and find it all stems from following solid, basic habits on a daily basis. Once you know that, then success can be yours. It's just a matter of adopting those habits and giving it time.
