Make A Habit Of Being Happy In The Morning | TJ WALKER | THE HABIT INFLUENCER™️
A livestream episode of TJ Walker's Habit Influencer in which Walker argues that making yourself happy first thing in the morning improves motivation and habit execution. He shares simple morning practices (e.g., a quick joke, gratitude journaling), rules for phone use, discusses creativity as a daily habit, and reviews a large longevity study linking healthy lifestyles to roughly 7–10 extra disease‑free years. The episode mixes practical tips, audience Q&A, book recommendations, and references to research and news items.
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Years, live for 10 more years, get 10 more years of life. Would you be willing to do that? I'm going to show you what that is today on this show. Hi, I'm TJ Walker. 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. That's what we're all about about here today. I've got an exciting show for you. A number of topics in the news, other insights based on research, plus you I'll be taking your questions, your comments. Any topic at all as it relates to personal development and habits is fair game. We can agree, we can disagree, we can have a conversation. This is a community for people who want to better themselves, improve their habits. So I'm very, very happy you've joined me here today. Topic A Making yourself happy first thing in the morning should be your number one priority. Now, this is going to sound strange to some people because it seems like it's being selfish. You are not being selfish if you focus first and foremost on trying to make yourself happy first thing in the morning. If you try to put yourself in a good mood, you're not being selfish. You are doing the right thing for your family, for work colleagues, friends and for yourself. Why is that? Think of it this way. Imagine your spouse comes to you in the morning, tells you that you are fat, ugly, lazy, useless, messy, a slob, and then says, and take the garbage out. How motivated are you going to be to do that specific action right now? Now, how about another scenario? Your spouse comes to you, says good morning, asks how you've slept, perhaps gives you your favorite cup of coffee the way you like it, and then says, oh, I hope you have a fantastic day. By the way, whenever you finish your coffee, would you mind taking the garbage out? Which scenario is more likely for you to want to take the garbage outside or do any other household task? I didn't mean to pick one that seems sex specific. If you believe in sexually designated tasks around the house, which one, which scenario is more likely to to make you want to do that positive house cleaning habit right then of taking out the garbage. In this case, chances are it's the second scenario because you're feeling good, you're feeling upbeat, you're already in a good mood, you're hearing great things from your spouse or your partner, you've already been given something, you have a nice cup of coffee. It's simply Easier to do things when you are in a good mood. Now, habit researchers for a long time have known this, and I definitely agree with it, that if you are in a good frame of mind, if you are happy, it's much easier to tackle the tasks at hand. For you to do easy tasks, but also hard tasks and to have focused. So what does this mean for you at a practical level? I'll just break down for you what I do myself in my own day. Very early in the morning I go to my cell phone or my iPad and I go to a joke app and I read one joke and I give myself a little chuckle. It doesn't take an hour or 10 minutes or five. It takes 20 seconds, sometimes 10. 10 seconds. But I start my day off with a chuckle. This is also why it's a great idea to start off your day. And this sounds like a cheesy thing I know to some of you it did to me for many years. Journaling gratitude about something what is it you are grateful for? The simple act of writing down something you are grateful for puts you in a good mood. It's focusing on the positive in life. And when you are in a good mood, when you are positive, it's a lot easier to do other daily habits that are going to help you. Whether that's making calls to clients in the business world, whether it is doing the sit ups you've assigned yourself, doing your 20 jumping jacks in the morning. As we talked about earlier this week, whatever it is that you're trying to do on a habit basis, your normal routines in life, it's going to be easier to do it, easier to be motivated to do it. Even though I don't really like that word motivated. If you're in a good mood, if you are happy about things, and this is where it can sound a little frou frou to some people, because it kind of sounds like the Stuart Smiley, the old Al Franken routine, the caricature of what self help is about, of, you know, I'm great and wonderful and doggone it, people like me. When he's staring at the mirror, you don't have to say it like that, but I do want you to think about something positive that puts you in a good mood. For me, just reading a joke, getting a little chuckle is a way to do it. It takes very little time. You know, when you're on an airplane, the attendants tell you if we run out of oxygen, put oxygen, the mass that falls down on your own mouth before trying to worry about your kid or anyone else around you. You have to take care of yourself first before you can take care of anyone else. I believe the same is true when it comes to positive habits in your life. And if you want to increase the odds that your positive habits can start off quickly, easily put yourself in a good mood. But don't use this as an excuse. I don't want to hear you say, well, T.J. i'm in a good mood if I get to watch a two hour comedy movie in the morning. Well, your day will be over. Your productive hours will be over. If you start watching a two hour comedy now, you might want to play a game. If it's a really, really quick solitaire game and you can do the whole thing in one minute, but don't start a video game and next thing you know you're in Fortnite and you've spent three hours and you forgot to show up to work or school that day. I'm not talking about something that long, that's completely self indulgent, that takes you anywhere and everywhere. I'm talking about something brief, something short, something that doesn't take a lot of time, but it puts you in a good mood. When you are in a good mood, it's easier to exercise. It's easier to really sit down and start writing that nonfiction book or that fiction book. It's easier to tackle that big task, whether it's home improvement, whether it is starting a new software program. It's easier, just easier when you are in a good mood. This is also why, by the way, I really recommend you try to minimize your news consumption in the beginning of the day because too much news is likely to put you in a funk. Now, I'm not suggesting never watch news, don't vote, tune out. No, I consume news. I vote. But I try to put specific restrictions on how much time I consume news in the morning. So not to be overwhelmed with negativity. And one rule I have some of you have heard me talk about this before. I watch zero cable TV news. I cut it out of my diet about two and a half, three years ago after a certain election here in the United States. I just decided no more cable TV news at all. And it's been one of the best things in the world for my mood. So think about what you can do to make your mood better in the morning. It's going to make life better for everyone else. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much for joining me. We've got a great show for you today. I want to say hello to all my special friends around the globe joining us. I see that Oscar Lopez has joined us on TikTok. Michael, Stezy and Michael, I'll get to your question in just a moment. Valid Moby has joined us on Instagram and several others on the Instagram platform. And we also have asulkimshed on our Facebook. So we will be taking your questions and comments. Typically in the show, I'll do segment a for about seven to 10 minutes, as I just did. We'll take a little time for questions and interaction, having some fun. Then I'll go to a segment B and I'll do a deep dive on another subject as well. But now you listen to me, it's your turn. So, Michael, what are your thoughts on phone addiction? Michael writes me this question on TikTok. I think it is a massive, massive, growing problem. And when you see the research that people are checking their phone 140 times a day, I'll tell you exactly what I do in my own household to try to overcome this. Because I can be as guilty as the next person. Something I did this morning and I typically do for at least an hour, hour and a half every day. I go for a walk. I leave my cell phone at home. People say, well, you know, tj, what if there's a wreck? What if there's an emergency? You might need it. If you bring a cell phone with you while you're walking or exercising or doing anything, you basically destroy a huge percentage of the value of that exercise at that time alone. Because your brain knows, oh, the whole world is accessible at any moment. Oh, I need to be on call or, oh, I might need something. And you Google something and next thing you know, three emails have come in. You destroy your ability to communicate or to let your brain relax. So, Michael, I think it is a huge, huge problem. I also do not let my cell phone in a bedroom. I leave my cell phone out and I try to make sure I don't touch or look at the cell phone an entire hour before I'm going to sleep. One of my resolutions, and I haven't gotten there yet, one of my resolutions is to only check email twice a day. I'm not there yet, but I'm checking it a lot less than I used to. There's so many surveys and research articles out there about how workers across the globe are spending six hours a day checking email. And it's rewarding workers who are good at getting back to their boss quickly, but it's not rewarding workers who are deep Thinkers who are profound creators who solve long term problems. And that's the problem with these cell phones. It's also frankly just frying people's brains if you have to be looking every two seconds. I'm sure you've had this experience, Michael, as I have, where you're trying to have a conversation with a friend and they're swiping on some date site or something and they're ignoring you or half listening and it's incredibly annoying. One thing I do now when I have parties at my home, I turn the Internet off and I tell people, if you want to use your cell phone, go out to the driveway occasionally. It irritates people. Our parties are a lot better because we actually have human beings talking to fellow human beings at parties at my house. Now it also works for me because the area I'm in in Long Island, New York is kind of a dead zone for cell phones. So people can't really get Internet or email without access to my WI fi. So I either turn the WI fi off or I'll change the password and not give it to people. So that's something that I think you should do. Michael, do you feel like this is a problem in your own life or do you have problems? Do you see? Do you feel like family members are having problems with cell phones? Feel free to share that with us on Michael again joining us on TikTok, saying I want to say hello. Valid says hello on Instagram. Thanks so much for joining us. And Sokhar Ani Rasapour has joined us on Instagram. Thanks so much. We are open if you have questions about any aspect of habits or personal development. Would be very happy to hear from you. And Peggy's back. Peggy, good to hear from you as well. Meant to ask you, Peggy, yesterday you put a frowny face, which I never realized. I looked at it. It said like, you're angry. I hope I didn't say anything to anger you, but I guess it wasn't too much or you wouldn't be back today. But if I said anything confusing, let me know what that was about. Peggy, I would love to hear from you. Peggy said she left that by accident. Okay. You may be hearing Marceau's voice in the background. That is my producer. He's in another location today. But Peggy says that she did that. He says that she did that by accident. So that that does happen. By the way, if you are watching this, let us know. You don't have to leave any questions if you don't want to, but if you're watching this on YouTube, just say where you are and so we can keep track of where this program is going and where people are watching it the most. This is a bit of an experiment. I am with my colleague Marceau, streaming this on about a dozen different platforms all at the same time. Conventional wisdom says, oh, just do it on YouTube or just do it on Facebook. And my philosophy is I care about you, I care about these ideas, but I don't really care about any one platform. Platforms can come and go. I'm old enough to remember there was this thing before Facebook and it was before MySpace. Now we're really going back into the 1990s and it was called, and now I forgot the name, but it was the precursor, the Globe. I think it was called the Globe or the World. And it was run by a couple of 23 year olds and it was the next big thing and it was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And they went out of business. Friendster, not much better. So platforms come and go. I'm interested in the ideas that relate to personal development, how to build better habits and forming a relationship with you regardless of what platform you are on. Let's take a look at the, the YouTube platform. We have people streaming in there. If that's your preferred platform, you can check in there as well. Okay, it's time. And we've got a lot of top news stories today, especially the one I teased at the beginning, which is, can you change a habit and get 10 more years in your life? Interesting news story out of the BBC. But first, creative geniuses. This is topic B. Creative geniuses are made through their habits. They are not born. We live in a culture where people are constantly told, well, you know, Beethoven was great by the time he was three. Tiger woods was great by the time he was three. If you're not fantastic world class by the time you're three, well, you're just out of luck. You weren't born with it. No, creative geniuses are made by their habits. Even someone like Beethoven, if you look at the number of hours his father spent tutoring him on music and composition from the time he was born, I mean, by the time he was six, he had basically a PhD level in terms of sheer number of hours that he was receiving from his father. So there is a huge school of thought out there that says even Beethoven wasn't born naturally gifted. And if you look at some of his early compositions, very ordinary. Nothing inspirational at all. Granted, he was doing it when he was age 5. These are learned skills and the number one trait geniuses have for the most part is they simply have developed a habit of creating every single day. Now it may be creating the perfect stroke through water the way Michael Phelps became a genius in Olympic athletics. But whether you're a writer, a painter, it's about doing every single day. Picasso went down in history as one of the greatest artists of all time. But a lot of his art wasn't considered that great. He made 40,000 pieces of art in his adult life. He averaged two pieces of art a day. If you think of yourself as an average artist, okay, you might be. I'm willing to bet you don't make two average pieces of artwork per day. If you want to be seen as a genius, don't sit back and say, oh, I wasn't born a genius. It's my parents fault that I didn't start off with a 300 IQ. You will be perceived as a genius if you develop the habits of people who are wildly successful in your field and then you practice those habits every single day. Great writers typically write every day, many of them seven days a week. Many of them give themselves quota. For some it's they're going to write for a solid four hours a day. Others it's one great page, finished page a day. Other authors give themselves a word quota, 2,000 words, 500 words, 5,000 words every single day. You don't have to write that much if you write every day to have enough to publish a book. I mean if you write just 150 words a day, you'll have enough to publish a book every year for the rest of your life. You might not aspire to be a writer, that's okay. But if you publish a book every single day, or if you publish a book and write every day, publish a book every year, one of them might be a best seller, one of them might have an impact. Isaac Asimov, the famed science fiction writer wrote more than 500 books in his lifetime. Many of them sold almost nothing. Many of them were forgettable, many of them were not critically well reviewed. But out of those 500, he had a few dozen that were best sellers that did stand the test of time, that are still read today and valued by people. And he took an extreme, extreme version of being a workaholic with Wright. He basically was up at 5am and working till about 11pm seven days a week. Now to me that's too much for most people. That would drive them mad. Isaac Asimov famously never took vacations, didn't travel. Here was a guy who wrote about space travel and innovation. He's afraid to fly. He stayed in New York and he just wrote all day long, every single day. And he wrote 500 books. You don't have to write 500 books to be considered a genius in your genre. If you had and if I had the habits of Isaac Asimov Just 2%, we would be authors of dozens and dozens of books. So please keep that in mind. If you aspire to a lofty reputation, if you aspire to have a huge impact in your field, the other people who are successful in your field, not born geniuses, they simply acquired the habits necessary to rise to the top end to produce more. They did it. So can you. Special hello to our friends joining us on YouTube today. Also our friends on Facebook and also very special hello to my friends on TikTok. Celtic Pure has joined us. Madam has joined us. Seven Sisters has joined us. By the way, Sisters and Celtic, if you have questions on any aspect of personal development, communication skills, habit acquisition, let me know. I am here for you and this show is for you. Sabrina writes and Sabrina says hi, tj. Hello, tj, Sabrina, thank you for joining us. And by the way, forgive me if I seem like I'm ignoring you because I'm staring off into space. The reason for that is every single app is a little bit different. Instagram doesn't easily let me use the app that allows me to broadcast on 12 different platforms at a time. So I have you just on my cell phone on a tripod looking at me while I'm in my studio talking to my main broadcast camera. And that is also why my friends at TikTok kind of see this weird angle of me. Everyone else sees me. It looks like I'm in a nice living room. This is my living room. But this is a video clip of my video room. And if you were watching those of you on YouTube and Facebook and Periscope, if you are watching me the same way my friends are on TikTok and Instagram, you would see I'm in a room and there's a TV screen behind me that has a video clip of my living room. So it's a little bit different view for each person out there. And Marceau, do we have any other friends joining us on other platforms? I might not be aware of talking to my friend and producer, Marceau? Not yet. Just the usual YouTube and Facebook and all that. Great. This next story really caught my eye. On the one hand, it's completely what you would expect. It's not shocking, shocking, but it's still just dramatic the impact habits have on our lives, positive or negative. This was reported on the BBC and I've linked to it in the show notes. This story talks about how simple habits can take 10 years off your life. According to a recent study, now it's seven years for men, seven, ten years for women. Because of simple lifestyle habit changes, you can have as many as 10 more years of life free of cancer, heart problems and type 2 diabetes by living a healthy lifestyle. This is a study in the bmg and this is again, you can see the footnotes, you can see all the specifics of this in the show notes that I've attached. You can see that on, on YouTube, Facebook, most of the platforms. We haven't yet posted that on Instagram or TikTok. But if you want to head over to the Facebook page or YouTube, you can see those notes as well. This is research done in the United States on 111,000 people. So this is a huge, broad based study. It's not one of these college surveys that was done on seven freshmen in one semester. They tracked people for 20 years. Now, here's what they found. That if you exercise regularly, drink in moderation, only have a healthy weight and a good diet and you don't smoke. So if you have that I cheated a little bit. I said change one habit. It's a habit of having a healthy lifestyle versus a not healthy lifestyle. You may have experienced some family members who said this before or friends who said, you know what? I'm going to enjoy my life when my time comes, My time comes. You can't control it. Well, that's just not true. You can control a lot of it now. You can have the healthiest lifestyle in the world and get run over by a bus. You can lose a genetic lottery and just have a heart attack. Even though you're a perfect weight and you exercise all day long, famously. For those of you old enough to remember, Yul Gibbons died much, much, much younger than Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who had a famous lifestyle of drugs and heroin and rock and roll and drinking excessively. And he's still alive. So it's not a 100% guarantee. Nothing in life is a guarantee other than at some point you will in fact die. But on average, when you look at 111,000 people, if you simply exercise regularly, maintain a proper body weight, drink in moderation, eat good real food and don't smoke, you're going to get another 10 years of life. If you're a woman, and seven years of life as a Man. Now, if you're a young person, if you're below 30, a lot of times people think, you know what, I'm 30, I'm going to live forever. And you know what, If I don't, if I get to 70 and I don't make it to 80, who cares? 70 is so far off, that's probably going to be too much. Guess what? Your perspective changes once you hit 70. Because when you're 70, unless you're in pain, you don't want to die. You want those extra 10 years. Now, the lead author of this was of Harvard Medical School, the public health department division there in Boston, Dr. Frank Hugh. He said a lot of positive messages here for the public. They gain not just more years of life, but good years. Some people say, well, you know, I don't want to live till 90 and have the last 10 years horrible health, miserable, in pain, in a hospital, but I'd rather just die at 80, so let me drink, smoke, do whatever I want. That's not the choice. According to this survey, you can actually have 10 good years without cancer, without diabetes, without stroke. At the age of 50, the study participants were asked if they met at least four of the following five never smoking, a healthy balanced diet, 30 minutes of moderate or vigorous activity every day, a body mass index, the BMI between 18.5 and 24.9. No more alcohol than a small glass of wine a day for women and a pint of beer for men. And if they did that, you get all this magic extra years. 10 years for women, 7 years for men. Women who said they met 4 out of 5 lived an average of another 34 years of cancer, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. They lived absent of those. They did not get those diseases. These were people who started at age 50. For the healthy men, it meant another 31 years of disease free life, which was seven years more than the unhealthy men. So we know that we live longer if we have healthy lifestyle. This is yet more evidence. Unfortunately, evidence alone doesn't create changed behavior, doesn't necessarily create new habits. That's what this show is about is how do you go from intellectual knowledge, facts to turning them into daily habits. So that's what I share here every day. We talk about these, we collaborate with these. I've got some more tips in the news today, more up to date information, some of it a little bit not exactly what you would expect, but I'll share that with you today. But first want to say hello to some more friends who've joined us on Instagram. I see Abu Zavi 1389 has joined us as well as NY Steam Filter has joined us. And if the NY stands for New York. Great to hear from someone else in New York today. Thanks for joining us. It's a beautiful sunny day in New York. A bit on the cool side, 25 degrees Fahrenheit. I still went out and did an hour walk today, but I had to wear my ski mask because it was too cold to go for a walk with that temperature. And hello to our friends on Facebook and YouTube as well. I want to talk a little more detail and this is a controversial subject about the bmi, the body mass index. There is a story out on the I want to be as sensitive as I can because there is a school of thought that says if you talk about anyone's body by name then you're fat shaming and you are doing something awful illegitimate. And I don't really want to get into that debate and I certainly don't want to make anyone feel bad. So I'm going to try to talk about this next story that's in the news in as sensitive a way as possible. The person who is a part of this controversy whose body is not being discussed is Jillian Michaels. She is a well known physical fitness expert, personal trainer. Many of you in the United States have seen her on shows like the Biggest Loser where they help people who are wildly obese lose often more than £100. Well, Jillian Michaels was on Buzzfeed AM2DM, it's a talk radio show and she was asked to comment on a particular celebrity. I'm not even going to mention the celebrity's name because I don't want to get caught up in the controversy that I'm talking about somebody's body and a woman's body and making fun of somebody. I'm not making fun of anyone but Jillian Michaels, who is perfectly fit and has not an ounce of fat on her. I don't think she minds us saying that. Was asked about this particular celebrity who by all accounts is obese. The celebrity in question is a well known rapper who's recently won a number of awards, has a lot of sing a lot of songs, top of the charts and has gotten a lot of attention for not looking like the typical beautiful thin singer movie star. So Jillian Michaels said this. Why are we celebrating her body? Why does it matter? Why aren't we celebrating her music? It isn't going to be awesome if she gets diabetes. Well, that hit a trigger for a number of people and Jillian Michaels has been criticized very, very harshly on Twitter. Other social media people are attacking her, saying she's essentially awful for fat, shaming this woman. I want to know what you think about this, because it certainly is a bad thing to just say, oh, aren't you awful because you're overweight? I don't agree that that's an appropriate thing to say. You should condemn someone if they're just being a bully and trying to mock someone for their size. But there is something to this idea that if we just constantly tell people every size is of equal value and everyone is beautiful of any size, and if you're 200 pounds overweight, we should be celebrating the fact that you're in the media. There is a school of thought that says, wait a minute, we're kind of glamorizing an eating disorder. We're glamorizing something that leads to disease, that leads to early death. Folks, we're not talking about 5, 10 pounds overweight here. And this particular individual, again, I haven't mentioned her name, certainly would appear she's 50, 60, maybe 100 pounds overweight. So for Jillian Michaels to then assume that this person has a good chance of getting diabetes, that's not crazy talk. When you are that far overweight, it's more common that you have diabetes than not have diabetes. And diabetes is a gateway to so many other health care problems, not the least of which is having to have various appendages amputated. Your mobility goes down, your chance of stroke. So many other problems, as we discussed in the last story, occur. Greater chance of heart attack, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, if you are excessively overweight and certainly if you are obese. So she continues to ask, why are we celebrating her body? Let's focus on her music. To me, that's much different than just saying, oh, we shouldn't give her the award because she's fat. She didn't say that. Now, Jillian Michaels is no stranger to controversy. She has weighed in on the past, saying that she essentially thinks that there is a newfound political correctness that glamorizes obesity. There is this sense among some that for so many years, people put a premium on being pencil thin, especially among women, that the pendulum needs to go back the other way. And if a woman or a man is really overweight, but especially a woman is 100, 200 pounds overweight, we need to say that's the new image of beauty. Gillian Michaels is saying, this is not true. It's political correctness to say that. And really what we're doing is we are enabling people's pathway into early grades. I would like to hear from you because I do think reasonable people can have differing opinions on this subject. Has Jillian Michaels said anything insensitive? Maybe. But is she a monster for pointing out that diabetes is a really, really big problem in this world and it is especially affecting people who are really overweight? I don't think that makes her a monster. I could be wrong. I'd love to hear from you. I am Ann Attu has joined us on TikTok. Thanks for being with us today. Emoji XP has joined us on TikTok. I would love to hear from any of you on TikTok. What is your opinion? Is it, is it fair for a physical fitness expert like Jillian Michaels to show concerns about someone who's in the spotlight but who is and is a role model for young people, especially young women, but suffers from obesity? We wouldn't say. To someone who admits to being an alcoholic and says, yes, I drink five bottles of whiskey every night, we wouldn't say, well, we hope that person learns how to not drink five bottles of whiskey every night. That's going to put the person in an early grave. Not quite the same thing with food and being overweight, but in many cases you could certainly make the case that obesity is killing a lot more people in the world today than alcohol is or certainly drugs and hard drug. I mean, the number of people who die from heroin a year is basically insignificant to the number of people who die of obesity in one big city typically. What are your thoughts on this? I'd love to hear from you. Amar Hosin has joined us on Instagram. Thank you so much for being and thanks for the wave. I appreciate that. And NY Steam Filter. If you are here in New York, let me know what city you're in. I'm here in Dix Hills, by the way, in Long island if you are around here. Lots more in the news today, plus your questions, your comments, your thoughts as well. This issue isn't going away. Now if any of you have seen Hassan Manhaj, the comedian who has a show on Netflix now, he did the last show of his series in December of last year on the issue of obesity, specifically how US Corporations are exporting obesity around the world. It was a fascinating take. If you have Netflix, I would highly recommend that you check out Hasan. I think it's called the Patriotism Patriotic Report. But it's Hasan Minhaj. If you type his name in, you'll definitely see that he dealt with this issue. That, hey, we're not trying to make fun of anyone. We're not fat shaming anyone. But it's a simple fact that the entire world is becoming obese and people are dying faster. And he looked at places like Mexico where once NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, went through in 1993. All of America's processed foods and garbage and Coca Cola's went to Mexico. And Mexico is now the number one consumer of Coca Cola in the world. And it's a situation where basically 75% of Mexicans are either obese or close to being obese and are technically overweight. It is a huge, huge public health problem that doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. Other top stories in the news that I wanted to address with you today. This is a story about mindset, and it identifies seven key mindset shifts that will help you become less anxious in 2020. I want to go over a few of these with you and see if any of these applied, because some of these did apply to me as well. You can see the author in the link and in the website that curated this and put it together. Everyone has their own opinions on what makes people anxious, what keeps people up at night. And it gave some very specific suggestions. Some of them I can relate to. One of the things on the list, you try to force people to agree with you. Politically, I am guilty as charged. I've been a political junkie my whole life and going back to the 1970s, following local politicians in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I grew up, volunteering on campaigns, listening to political talk. My first experience with media outside of my family's tv, was a little crystal radio set. That's something you don't even need electricity for. You can get a radio signal. And my crystal radio set only had the ability to get one station. And on that station, WBT Radio in Charlotte, North Carolina, they had talk shows on at night that often dealt with politics. So this is going back to the early 70s, when I started listening to politics and forming strong opinions. And yes, it does create anxiety. When you have a friend, a family member, someone you're close to, and you see them embracing someone politically who you think is an absolute, unmitigated monster. You think that this person is antithetical to every democratic view you could possibly have. And yet your friend, family member, embracing this person, it can make you anxious. It's made a lot of people, not just in the United States, but England. You have your Brexit. There's political unrest all over the world. This is a constant source of anxiety and at some point you got to get over it. That's one area where I think I've made some progress in the last year when my friends send me inflammatory political stories intended to annoy me. I've got a fantastic technique for not letting those stories give me anxiety. It's called delete. I simply don't read emails from friends where I already know where they stand on every issue. They already know where I stand and not a lot of learning is taking place. It's just about who can get under the skin of the other. So that's one tip I would recommend that you take a look at this story again. It's in the show notes link. Something else it suggests that creates anxiety with people. You focus more on your kids response to stress than you should than your own stresses. You cannot take care of your kid's stress if you're not focused on your stress. We touched on that earlier in the show as well. And sometimes in the sheer act of trying to help your kid with stress, you get so stressed out you create more stress for your kid and it becomes this never ending cycle that just gets worse and worse for everyone involved. TJ I'm TJ Walker. I'd like to thank you for joining me today. We're going to be here at every day 1 to 3pm Eastern time. Now at some point could we possibly change times because many of you just prefer not. It's possible there's no one perfect time to do a live show. I've picked this time in part because it just does work out with the rest of my schedule here in New York. But I do realize that if you're in Australia, this is not the most convenient time because it's in the middle of the night in certain parts of China as well. So I'll remain open. If you have other thoughts on the best time for a live show on personal development and habit acquisition, then let me know because I do know on some social media platforms like Udemy, I have followers and students from more than 190 countries. So this is an international audience and every day we hear from people from India, from Pakistan, from various countries in Africa. So we're very happy to have you no matter where you are in the world. And I see we've got more folks joining us on Instagram. Thanks for being with us. Barry oh has joined us on TikTok. Thanks for being with us. Tammy has joined us as well. By the way, if you have any questions or suggestions for topics related to personal development, I do leave some time in every show for you so you can introduce topics, you can put out questions, and that way we can have more of a community and we can in fact interact. Other stories in the news. This one caught my eye. It was a reflection from a blog survey and it's called To Build a New Habit, look to the past. I've linked to this in the Show Notes as well. And if you're on Instagram or TikTok and you don't see the show notes, just head on over to my Facebook page page. You can see the show notes there. Type in my name and you'll see this show live going on there as well. But the gist of this article is that if you really want to know how to create habits, you should look at what created habits for you in the past. Really spend a moment and reflect on what has worked for you in the past. Now I'm going to share something, and it's kind of embarrassing, frankly, but I'll be candid with you. We're here. We're all in this together. A lot of personal development experts and habit experts talk about flossing and you need to floss. And I do floss all my teeth every day. And a standard rule of thumb in so many books about habit acquisition is start by flossing just one tooth each day. If you never floss, flossing one tooth is better than nothing. And it starts the whole process of flossing. Well, this was more than this was about 20 years ago, and I was in a rough patch. I'd had some TV shows and websites go bust. I didn't go bankrupt simply because I had no assets worth protecting, but essentially bankruptcy 20 years ago. And when that happens, your health care takes a back seat. I had not been to a dentist in a while, and I was brushing my tooth one day and one of my back molars breaks off. I had a cavity and I'd let it go too long and it was, frankly, it felt weird. There was some pain. It felt awful, it felt. Felt embarrassing. I felt like a homeless person. And at that moment, the emotional pain was such that I never went a day without flossing again. Now, after that, I had a fair amount of cosmetic dentistry done. It became even more important for me to floss every single day. But that pain. Pain can be a huge motivator. Pleasure can be a huge motivator. Tony Robbins famously talks about this a lot. The two strongest motivators, pain and pleasure. Sometimes when someone has a kid, the pleasure of seeing their kid's face smiling at them is so intensely pleasurable that that causes them to get rid of all sorts of other bad habits or to work harder and be serious about their profession for the first time. So I want you to really reflect upon in the past what has helped create habits for you, good or bad. Because we're all different. We're all different human beings. And what worked in the past might work in the future. So it's called habit reflection. It doesn't really need a fancy name, but that's all it is. You're reflecting on your habits. So a survey was done and what they found was simply. And it was done by. This was reported in the website Fast Company. I should have pointed that out. The fast and simple method helped participants to practice their habits 0.7 more times per week on average than others. That's a 100, 140% improvement over the second most effective technique. So the sheer act of reflecting what caused you to start certain habits makes you more effective at following these habits. Plus, according to the study, those who used the habit reflection technique reported more satisfaction with their progress toward their habit forming goals than any other group in the study. So again, what is a habit reflection exactly? It's what it sounds like. You take some time to reflect on how you previously incorporated a positive habit into your life. Now it's best when you write it down. Write down anything you learn from the past situation about how to successfully form new habits for you or any tactics that work. I know for me, the two tactics that work the most that I talk about a lot here. Creating a selfie speak audio where I tell myself exactly the habit I want. The second most powerful thing is looking at a checklist. I pull up my cell phone, which I can't pick up and show you right now because I'm using that for a live feed for Instagram folks. And I just make a note every single day that boom, I did that one, I checked it off. To me, that's what works. But everyone is a little bit different. The more you understand exactly how your habits work and how they've worked in the past, the better it's going to be. The easier it's going to be for you to make those as well. Now, Marceau, do we have a message? I've seen a couple of things pop up, but I didn't actually. Oh, there it is. Krishna. Now, Krishna writes in how to set long Term Goals when there is no one around to Mentor. I think anyone who's serious about having a more fulfilled life Having a happier life needs to have long term goals because all of your habits are simply ways of helping you get to a particular place. If you have no goals and all you do is show up each day at a boring job doing boring work that's unfulfilling and you eat junk food all the time and as soon as you get off work, you spend all your time watching trivial entertainment and hanging out with friends, drinking and smoking pot. Then your long term goal is to end up exactly as you are now, 20 years later, only at much worse health. That's going to be your long term goal. So you've got to figure out what is important to you. My long term goal is I want to reach the largest possible audience in the world, hundreds of millions, ideally with my message to help people through building better habits. And I want to reach them through this online show, best selling books every year, turning this into a podcast, more stage appearances, speeches all over. Those are my goals. Shouldn't be your goals. But the second part of your question is where do you find the. You said no mentors are nearby. Your mentors don't have to be nearby. Let me tell you about one of my mentors, Gary Vaynerchuk. He is probably the most well known person in the world when it comes to really mastering social media, communicating, building large audiences and communicating positive messages, empowering people using the power of YouTube and Instagram and TikTok and LinkedIn. And he is a mentor of mine. Guess what? I've never met him, but he is an intellectual mentor of mine. Because I've bought and read all of his books. I consume a lot of his content, if not daily, at least weekly. And I used to watch his daily podcast every single day. So his ideas have had tremendous influence on me. I mean, that's part of what's so exciting about living in the world in 2020. If this were a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago, most of us, well, we certainly wouldn't have any TV or any Internet or radio, obviously. And even people who weren't poor quite often only had one book in their entire household if it's 100 or 230, 300 years ago. So we just didn't have any option of getting mentorship through ideas media. In the past it was either your father or your mother. Those would be your mentors for most people throughout history or the town or the village leader. But now it's a big, big world, so you don't have to rely just on people who are physically there. Also there's all kinds of online mentorship programs where you can be a part of groups, some of them free, some of them you may spend $100,000 on. And these can be formal and informal as well. So it's a very wide open world. One of the things that is so interesting and exciting to me, and I'm a part of it, is so many of the greatest experts in the world now share their expertise online courses. If you want to be a comedian, and I don't, but if you want to be a comedian, you can take a course from Steve Martin, one of the most successful famous stand up comedians and comedic actors in the history of the world. By the way, I forgot to say goodbye to our friends on Instagram. They do get cut off automatically after an hour. We are going to be, well, we started before the top of the hour so that's why we lost our friends on Instagram. But we've connected with them again. So I'm always happy for you to find an in person mentor and you can talk face to face with someone. Those can be great. But I don't want you to limit yourself to just people in your town or your village. Marcel, if we could switch Back to the YouTube comment a minute. I just wanted to address our colleague Krishna. I don't know where you're based, but whether it's a small town in India or whether you're here in New York City, I don't mean to presume, at your fingertips are the greatest minds and the most successful people in the world. They might not be able to have lunch with you every day, but they're sharing their expertise and most of them are sharing an awful lot of it for free. I'll mention the Gary Vaynerchuk model again. He gives everything away for free. He does sell it in the form of his books and then corporations hire him to do the same thing he does for himself for them. So that's how he monetizes it. I give away for free all of my advice on public speaking and media training and how to build new habits, how to improve yourself from a personal development standpoint. But I also for people who want a leaner, more structured way and a faster way of getting a particular skill. Many of them buy my courses on personal development on how to create new habits. By the way, our sponsor for the show today is my complete course on personal productivity. You can see a link to that in the show notes. You don't have to buy anything. This show is free. And other than that little mention right there, it's basically advertising free too. So there are a lot of different models. And you can learn from mentors all over the world because people are sharing it because they can make money from someone else. It doesn't have to be you, because every day, the more I give out to people like you and everyone else here in online community, a teeny tiny percentage of people call me and then they want me to come to a workshop at their convention, their conference, their company, their event, and everybody wins. We are going to take a brief break here. We'll be back for hour two, so please don't go away. And my Instagram friends, sorry we got cut off there. Instagram just does that automatically after an hour. TikTok, glad you're here with me. YouTube, Facebook, we have a lot more to come, so we'll be back in just a couple of minutes. See you then. Welcome back to hour two of the TJ Walker show, Habit influencer. This is the show where you learn how to influence the most important audience of all. Yourself. You can influence your own habits. I'm not the habit influencer for you. I'm just here to help you. You influence yourself. You have to take charge of your own life. You cannot rely on some expert from afar. You have to take personal responsibility. Special hello to our friends on TikTok. This just came in before the break. Asplicit says how to become successful rapper without a studio. Well, Ace, if you are a rapper, good luck with your career. And I would say of all the people in the world you could ask about how to be a successful rapper. I'm probably the least qualified person to answer that, but that's never stopped me before. I do think I can give you some general principles for success because they cross pollinate throughout every single industry. What is it the rappers are doing who are already successful? How did they rise to fame? If you look at people of my generation, and I'm only a little bit younger than the Robert Plants and the Led Zeppelin's of the World is, they were just out singing. They cut a demo. They somehow talked someone into letting them cut a demo. They got in front of the right record executive. That was the old way of doing it. Now you have people like Justin Bieber and I realize he's not a rapper where he just starts singing songs on YouTube. Building a fan base. Now my understanding is initially he would only sing other people's songs and just doing a new song every day. Building a fan base. Building a fan base. And then at some point started mixing in his Own songs with covers of other people. So people who wanted to hear him perform a song they already knew and loved then would maybe stick around and listen to what he created on his own. And at that point, when your audience is bigger and bigger and bigger, you have all sorts of power. Traditional media companies want you, Traditional music labels want you. You don't even need them. If you have a big enough fan base, you simply make your own music and sell it directly to fans. I mean, there's so many shopping carts. There's so many ways of monetizing your creations. The hard part is building a fan base in the first place. So let me ask you, ace, are you currently making music and just putting it out there online? You mentioned you don't have a studio. A whole lot of really successful people did not have studios. They just are performing in their bedroom with a guitar. And I realize, forgive my ignorance. I realize a guitar is probably not the first choice of a rapper, but whatever it is, you need a keyboard. Do it simply and start making your music. Something beats nothing. People do have the ability to discern and make judgments. They may think, okay, this person doesn't have the fanciest studio production. They might not have the most expensive synthesizer, but that person's voice is really distinctive and great. I'd like to hear more. What is it you have that is special? You look at most great singers, whether they are rappers, country stars, R and B, folk. Most great singers have something that's distinctive about them. Now, I'm not quite as old enough to be a big Frank Sinatra fan, but one of the things people liked about Frank Sinatra is that his voice was distinctive. It didn't matter if he's singing Happy Birthday. He was able to make the song his own. He was able to put his own imprint on it. He made it distinctive, and that is what will make for a successful career. I remind my daughter of this all the time. We can be at some restaurant and hear a musician playing, and their voice might be beautiful, but they're playing somebody else's song. And they're playing for 10 tips. And they may play all night and make $30. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not saying everything in life has to be about money, but I remind my daughter this is why it's essential to think of yourself as a creator. If you sing other people's songs, you'll never be able to make a living off of your singing. If you create your own songs and sing your own songs and people want to hear it, then there's unlimited wealth potential. If all you're doing is singing someone else's song, then you're just a cover act. You could perhaps be a studio musician, but you'll never really reach the pinnacle of success in a field like music. So that's my other big challenge to you, is create. You don't need a studio to write great lyrics. So many of the greatest musicians in the world started off by writing great songs for other people. And then they built a track record, they built relationships in the music industry. And this is about as far away from a rap reference as you can get. But Barry Manilow famously wrote scores and scores, if not thousands of songs for other people, and he wrote a lot of those before he ever got to record his own music. So there is nothing preventing you from creating great rap lyrics today. So start writing and most important, start performing a cappella. I don't know if you called it that, but you can sing without fancy studio production. The main thing is start creating. Sing for free if you have to. I believe it was Jay Z. Certainly there are a lot of famous musicians in their early days, just started selling their own music out of the back of their car. Build a fan base. Any way you can convince your uncle, who's getting married next month to let you sing at their wedding and give away. I don't know if people even use CDs anymore. Download, do something to get your music in the hands of people. You want a successful career, you need fans who are going to show up that if they hear there's a chance you are appearing in a tent down the street or in Madison Square Garden or at 02 in London, they're going to pay for the ticket no matter what the cost is. You need fans like that. If you have that studio time will be paid for. All the instruments you need will be paid for. Good luck to your career. Marceau, did you have anything you want to add to that about rap? You might know more about rap than I do, but that's the best 10 minutes I can give you about rap, considering I really know very little about rap. Okay, and let me just scroll down, like, just put your videos and stuff like that everywhere you can possibly get them. Yeah, just record it on your phone. I'm sure you probably have an iPhone. Yeah. Marceau, if you can't. If you can't hear Marceau, he's saying, yeah, if you didn't hear Marcel in the background, he's saying, create, create, create. Share, share, share. One thing that I don't think rappers are doing right now, but you might want to is borrow from what successful people do in other genres. You look at the people in the gaming industry, you know, the PewDiePie, they're just playing games all day doing live streaming. And he's making, you know, was making $25 million a year. See what they're doing. There's nothing preventing you from doing what I'm doing right now. A live stream. What if you did a live stream every, every single day and you try to live stream your creative process of how you're writing, how you're creating doesn't have to be just singing. You could do behind the scenes of an aspiring rapper. Make it your own series and go live every day. And borrow from me, I'm doing this on 12 different platforms to and some of them, I may only have a few viewers and others, there's hundreds aggregated, it's thousands, but it can add up. So look at what successful people have already done, but also look at what successful people do in similar industries. And sometimes when you synthesize them together, it's even more powerful. So I hope you found that a little bit, little bit helpful and espoused. Says, I appreciate you taking up my question. That's what we're here for. I'm happy to take your questions. Prince Marco says, how do you start a successful YouTube channel in technology? I want you to step back a minute and just really ask yourself, what is your real goal? Do you have a passion for technology? Do you want to be the next Steve Jobs? Do you want to be the next Elon Musk? What is your ultimate goal? And then what is it you want to share with the world? There are a lot of great YouTube channels about technology and you've got to figure out what your niche is, what's underserved. Why would someone need your channel? When I started this channel, for example, I didn't say I specifically want a successful YouTube channel, although I am on YouTube and I do want it to be successful. I stepped back and said, I'm really interested in helping people build personal habits to help them have more fulfilled lives. How can I reach people? If you go on Amazon, there's tens and tens of thousands of books. I may at some time write a book, but we don't instantly need another book about habits. There's plenty of on demand videos on YouTube about habits. What I thought is there was nothing out there that could be a live experience where someone like you could ask me a question and I answer in real time and try to give Tailored, personalized advice and we create a community, a live community. So that's why I created this channel. As I saw a specific need, I saw something that I thought played to my own strengths. Because I like talking, I like hosting shows. I come from a background of hosting daily, two, three, even four hour talk radio shows. So for a lot of people, it would seem too hard to host a daily show for two hours. For me, it's kind of fun. So I looked at what's the need in the marketplace, what's my passion, what's my area of expertise, how does my skill set overlap with all of these things? And that's how I came up with what I was trying to do for my YouTube channel and my channels across all platforms. I would ask you to not duplicate me, but at least try to do something a little bit similar. In thinking about what are you really trying to do? I mean, everyone who starts a YouTube channel wants to be successful. I can tell you right now, if you don't have a passion for technology and you're doing a technology YouTube channel just because you think, well, this is a hot subject and I'll probably make a bunch of money, I can get a bunch of affiliate deals. I'm going to go ahead and make a prediction right now. You're not going to be successful if you don't have the passion to constantly be looking for the latest camera or whatever the technology is you are an expert on and constantly learning and a passion for sharing. You won't get over the hump when you're starting a YouTube channel. Even if everything goes really well. 99.99999% of people in the world make no money the first year. So if you're doing a daily show, that's 300 and some videos you're going to make without making a penny or very little, not enough to cover your cost. If you're doing a weekly show and editing it together and producing it, that's still more than 50 shows and you're not going to make a penny. So if you don't have an intrinsic interest in technology and a real passion for it, you just quit. I see it all the time. People come to me all the time and say, dj, it looks like you're making a ton of money on online course platforms and on you. To me, I want to do it and I always am happy to share with them. And I have courses on how to make online courses and how to be an online instructor. Most of them never do it. They all could. Most of them don't, because there isn't a passion there. They think, okay, there's money there, looks easy. But if you don't have the passion, you can't get over the hump. Let me ask you, why do you want to do a YouTube channel on technology? What aspect of technology? And is this something you would do where you potentially wouldn't make any money for the next five years? If the answer is yes, then you may be on the right track. Now you're writing to me on TikTok. Why not do 15 second technology tips? Because it's frankly easier to grow faster on TikTok these days than YouTube. But you could do both. So share with me, let me scroll up, make sure I'm not missing it. And nice to see we've had a whole lot of people. Gary in Yi Yi has written to us. You say people would block me. I'm not quite sure what that means. We're not blocking anyone here unless they're obscene or something. And no one has been obscene to me. The worst comment I've gotten lately on social media is, okay, Boomer, I'm tough. I can handle that. Back when I was a political talk show host, when I was a political talk show, I would get death threats. And on YouTube, especially, where people have anonymity, people would write comments, oh, tj, you're bold and ugly and you have beady eyes. Okay, may all be true. What's your point? People can be really, really nasty on certain platforms like YouTube. People I've noticed so far on TikTok Instagram, very friendly, very positive. Technology tends not to bring out the nasty side of people. People not saying there aren't nasty people in technology, but they tend not to be as nasty as those debating politics. By the way, if you're watching us today from YouTube, Facebook, any other platform, post your comments or your questions and I will address them. I'm just, I'm now scrolling on my iPad on the comments because we've had a number of people joining us on TikTok. Someone on TikTok, that's the name, has joined us. Prince Marco says, and how I know what people are interested in. And so here's the hard part, Prince. If you're doing a technology YouTube channel and you're going into a blank slate of what are people interested in? I think that's a problem. What you need to do is figure out what are you interested in and then look for the intersection of what are you interested in and what is everyone else interested in? Think of it as a Venn diagram. Here's what you know, here's what you're interested in, here's what you like, here's what you're good at, you're good at, and here's what people value. And look at what is in that intersection. Because if it turns out there's some poll that says the number one thing people are Interested in is iPhone 14 specs, and you decide you're going to do a whole channel on iPhone 14, you're going to run out of things to say pretty quickly. There's probably people out there who have better insights on that iPhone, whenever that comes out, if it ever comes out. And it may become completely irrelevant six months after the phone comes out, because then a 15 or a 16 comes out. So the starting point, I believe, is you have to do an inventory. This is the very same thing people go through when they're trying to figure out their purpose in life. People come to me all the time and say, tj, how do I find a purpose in life? I have an entire course on how to find your purpose in life. If you go to Udemy and type in purpose with my name, you'll see that course. And it is a not terrifically complicated process, but there is a process where you have to think about, what are all the things I really like doing, what are the things I'm good at doing? What are the things that people value? Now, I like playing tennis, but I'm not by any stretch of the imagination good enough to play tennis, to ever have anyone value that to pay. So I know my purpose in life can never be to be a professional tennis player or a professional tennis instructor. So you've got to look at that. Sometimes you can like something and be really good at it. You may really love World cup soccer, and you may be an expert on the top four teams every four years. You may really know a lot about it, you may love it, and you may have a real passion for it, be good at talking about it. But there's so much information about World cup soccer and there's so many news sources and there's so many really famous soccer players and commentators talking about it that you may find there's simply no interest from people who want to know about your take on it because they have so many other choices. So that would be a good example of you good at something. You have an interest in something. There's just no marketplace for what you have. So let me step back. Why do you want to do a YouTube channel on technology? And the second part of this question is if you could make any YouTube channel successful on any topic, and I can guarantee you, you know, two years from now, you'll have 10 million subscribers and you'll be making $10 million of advertising revenue every month. What would it be? I want to know from you. Go ahead and post that. And Prince, I am looking at it right now. Glad to see Wilmer has joined us, Bisuket has joined us, Sherry Berry has joined us. And I want to teach people in knowledge. You got to be a little more specific than that, Marco. I mean, everything is knowledge. I am a specialist in computer and it. Monkey Fish has joined us as well. And Asplicit is back with us. Thanks, Ace. And Ace, I'm not done with you, so I do want to hear a little more from you. So, Marco, it is a huge, huge field. There are so many operating systems. I have a neighbor who is now making six figures a year as a side business, just doing courses on Linux, online courses on one platform. So if you can be the number one expert in the world on something and have a YouTube channel and then maybe sell an online course, those two can be quite complementary. I don't make a lot of money from my YouTube channel, a little in advertising, but I do have world leaders and major corporations find videos of mine and then call me up and hire me and pay me a fairly substantial day rate to come give workshops and seminars either to people one on one or small groups. So that's how I make money on YouTube. I mean, you can have a YouTube channel and have a million views a month and half a million subscribers and make almost no money. You could also have a YouTube channel that specializes in just the absolute narrowest, newest, tiniest niche of artificial intelligence. And you have 100 views a month, but it generates a million dollars a month in revenue for you because big corporations are hiring you to do highly complicated artificial intelligence programming. So the more you can specialize initially, the better. One great habit is always to start easy, start small. Mark Zuckerberg did not say, I'm just going to launch Facebook to the world, see what comes, put it on the web, see what? That's not what he did. He started Facebook, and it was only for undergraduates at one college at Harvard. Just a few thousand people, very tiny group, but he dominated that. Then he expanded it not to the whole world. He expanded it just to Ivy League colleges. There are seven Ivy League colleges in the United States. They're among the oldest, most prestigious. He didn't then say, all right, whole world Come get me. He expanded a little more. He expanded it to, I believe, about 30 selective, prestigious schools. Schools like my alma mater, Duke University. It still wasn't open to every college student. It wasn't open to the public. But it grew and grew and grew in concentric circles until eventually it took over the world. Most experts would contend that was a pretty smart strategy. I would recommend exactly the same for you and that start in as narrow a way as possible. Build a fan base, then expand. See where it goes. So Marco writes, I want to teach people in Linux, Windows and Mac os, all operating systems. But Linux is highly specific. And I don't know enough about the YouTube technology channels to know what's out there. But that would be your first bet. Look at every single channel on that topic and figure out what are they doing well and where can you do it better, how can you improve it? That's what you. You want to find some opening to give people a reason to come to you. Part of successful, successful people do is it's not about higher iq, but they try to be smart and not just do things guaranteed for failure. If you're trying to create something that is exactly like something else exists, very unlikely you'll succeed. If you create a cola product that tastes exactly like Coca Cola, but it sells for 10 cents less, I'm willing to bet you're going to be very unsuccessful. You're not going to sell anything. The world doesn't need another cola that tastes exactly like Coca Cola. People want a cola that tastes like Coca Cola, they will buy Coca Cola. So you've got to figure out what's different about what you do and what is really going to stand out. But my biggest piece of advice, Start with something. Start with something today. Make some video about Linux while you love Lennox. Why? You hate Lennox. Something. Post the video today on YouTube. Post the video today right there on TikTok. Don't wait. Oh, I'm getting an error message. You know, what happened is I had a phone call come in and it may have, and I thought I put my phones on do not disturb, but it's. It's. What's that, Marceau? TikTok. It says the host is away. Since I'm the host, I'm not quite sure why it says the host is back. Okay. Oh, you put that. Okay, so just made a mistake there. That's a part of learning. You're going to make mistakes. What's that, Marceau? Okay, great. So I guarantee you it's better to make mistakes on a YouTube channel. Than to make no mistakes. But not post. Start posting and then you'll figure out what you like doing. You'll also figure out what your audience likes because you mentioned that you want to talk about all sorts of operating systems. It may be that you talk about you do videos on five different operating systems a bunch of times and all the views go towards one operating system. That may help you reorient your whole process towards going deeper into that one specific niche. I'm glad you brought up YouTube, because that does lead me to the next story I wanted to share with you and it is in. I think I just dropped my notes here. Excuse me for a second. It does lead me to the next story that I plan to go over with you. It's in the show notes and it says break free from conceptual reality. Eckhart Tolle. Now many of you may have heard of him if you follow the self help movement, personal development movement. He's famous for his whole concept, the power of now. Living in the moment, trying not to obsess over the past and the future, but actually enjoying the present. He is a thinker who is absolutely loved by Oprah Winfrey. She made him incredibly famous. He sold tens and tens of millions of books. I don't want to seem critical of him, but I want you to click on the video when you have a chance. It's in the show notes. You can see it on Facebook, YouTube and others. When you watch him speak, he speaks in a way that is so incredibly slow and low energy and almost awkward. And yet he's wildly successful. He has millions of fans all over the world. The reason I like him and like to point out to him when it comes to his YouTube channel is he's a perfect example that you don't have to look and sound like an anchorman or a Hollywood starlet to be successful on YouTube or social media. There are people who are wildly successful in every size, every shape, every color, every race, every degree of hair or lack of, every accent, every voice. It's all there. If you have content and ideas that are interesting to someone in the world, some people, it could be far less than 1%. And you can still have a huge, huge audience on YouTube, social media, and sometimes in the mainstream media. So I want you to look at him just in the sense not to mock or ridicule him, but if you showed a video of him to a bunch of communication majors in a college somewhere who had never heard of him, and so what do you think of this guy? Will this guy be a Successful media personality. I think they would universally say this guy is the worst. Low energy, not interesting, fl, flat, frozen, boring, monotone, looks kind of like an elf. And yet tens of millions of books, huge, huge following all over the world. Widely influential Oprah Winfrey has said herself, if she had her choice, she'd love to do a daily show with him and just talk to him about living in the present every single day. But she also said she doesn't get to decide. Her audience decides. And that would be too much for her audience because Oprah is a billionaire in part because she listens to her audience. Now, I don't think she just panders and that she secretly has a wish to talk about physics all the time, but it's integrated. The audience needs and her needs, they're balanced. And that's one reason why she's gone on to be so wildly successful, own her own media company and become a billionaire. What if you don't want to be a billionaire? What if you just want more money? What if you want to raise. Interesting story in today's New York Times, and it's entitled I'll share my salary if you share yours. This is in today's New York Times. I've posted a link to it in the show notes. Take a look at it. And this is a story geared primarily towards women, about women. The author's thesis, and I have no reason to dispute it, is that women are much less likely to talk about money. There has historically been more of a taboo against women talking about money, making money, comparing. And the author talks to a number of women who have become quite aggressive. And I'm not saying that in a negative way. I'm saying that in a positive way at talking about money, getting other women to talk about money, because knowledge is power. Because if you know there are other people in your own organization, exact same credentials as yours, same number of years experience, same education, and they're getting 50% more than you. Well, now you have valuable information leverage when you're going into your next negotiation for a salary increase. So I do urge you that in this world of creativity, because we do live in an ideas economy, you have to stand up for yourself. And I'm not against people who are trying to create stronger institutions and equal pay for all sorts of things. Yes, all of that is important. But ultimately all you have is the ability to sell your own ideas, your own time, your own services, so the more you can arm yourself so that you're confident, if you know other people do a similar service and are getting X, why should you receive 10, 20, 30% less than now to really take it to the next level? And what I do, frankly is you look at what other people are doing and then you figure out how can you do something significantly better, more powerful, more thorough, more innovative. So you can charge not the same X number of dollars everyone else does, but two, three, four, five times as much what other people. To me, that's really what's really empowering. And not that money is the, the be all and end all of what's meaningful in life. But if you value yourself as an expert, as someone who wants to be a real leader in an industry, you want to be the best. And if you are the best, you should be paid accordingly. The best heart surgeons are paid very nicely. The best artists are paid very nicely. The best public speaking training experts, media training experts, and self help guru experts are paid very nicely. Don't you deserve to be paid better? Better than you're currently being paid and certainly as well as others doing similar things. So if you're not quite happy with how you're getting paid and you work in any kind of traditional organization, or if you're a freelancer, check out this story. I've linked to it right there and I think you will in fact find it helpful. Something I like to do in this show every day is share with you what I am reading. I am a big believer in reading. I love people watching videos. I like to watch videos, podcasts. I hope you're learning now. But to me a foundational habit for someone who aspires to a better life, a more fulfilled life is reading, daily reading. So I do like to share with you things from my own list. But before I do, I want to make sure I've recognized everyone. Christine has joined us. Oscar Lopez is back. Thanks for joining us on TikTok. We also have oh my good friend Fortune Tribes on Instagram has joined us. Really appreciate you participating on a daily basis on all the posts there. By the way, any social media platform you are on right now watching this, chances are I have dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of videos there. I'm not asking you to watch all of them, but if you get any value out of this today so far and you can't watch tomorrow live, go back and look at some of the videos because most of them are done in a way where they're not timestamped, they're not out of date. We deal with evergreen issues here so you can see a lot of the videos I've been posting for the last three weeks. Excuse me, the last three months on Instagram and Fortune. You've already been doing that. So I want to thank you. And I see that slr6226 has joined us on Instagram. Thanks for joining us. Plus Remco and Java. If you have any questions, all of you are waving. I want to wave back to you. Thanks so much. And if you're just coming in, this is a show about personal development and building habits. If you have any questions about habits you're trying to build, positive habits you're trying to boost into your life, or how to get rid of negative habits, let me know. So we also have balloon lamps joining us on TikTok. Plus Trevor Rehnquist joined us. Trevor, thanks so much for being here with us today. I want to share a few things off of my own personal bookshelf. I always like to look at a classic, but also a newer book that I think is worthy of your attention. The first book is by an extremely well known author in the personal development space, Brian Tracy. If you have paid attention at all personal Development in the last 30 years, you've surely come across one of his books or audio programs. Prolific author. He's written at this point close to 100 books. This is one of his more famous ones. Eat that frog 21 great ways to stop Procrastinating and get more done in Less ways I want to share with you just an excerpt. The Truth About Frogs. It has been said that if the first thing you do each week morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that this is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long. Now he's somewhat bizarrely, he's not giving the credit of that quote to Mark Twain, who is typically given most credit for that guy. I love Brian Tracy. That's not meant as a slam on him and his whole point is start with the hardest task first in a day. You get that over and the rest of your day will flow and you'll be wildly productive. What I like about Brian Tracy and why I think that he is still relevant today. He is someone, I would say it's fair to say in sort of the more advancing aspects of his career. Career. He is I think about 75 now, but still active every day. New videos every day. He's been doing this a long time. What I love about him is he really breaks things down in simplest, easiest, most understandable chunks that anyone can understand. He really writes with Great simplicity. He speaks with simplicity. He is someone who by his own admission basically had no education, bounced around, had all sorts of odd jobs and was really just kind of a guy stumbling through life, but learned about self development, started reading, immensely, writing and thinking. And he's a perfect testament to how you can be successful if you really narrow your focus and apply what you've learned every single day and create. He's someone who got no family credentials, no wealth, no education. He may have graduated from high school, but not much education beyond that. And yet one of the most prolific and successful and wealthiest authors in the world today, speaks on stages all over the world. It's not that you'll hear any one idea from him that you think, wow, that is the most bizarrely interesting, unique idea I've ever heard. But what he's able to do is to take information and simplify it in such a way that it's actionable. So if you are interested in sort of the history of personal development, this book is now about 20 years old, but still very helpful on topics of procrastination. Now there's another book that is a little bit newer that I also want to share with you. This is the Checklist Manifesto, the Checklist Manifest and I typically give you a link to where you can buy these books on Amazon. It's not an affiliate link. I'm not trying to make any money off of you yet. I might at one point. I don't think I got the links in today, but all you have to do is type, copy the title and go to Amazon or whatever book selling place you you like to frequent. So this is a book by Atul Gawande. He's also the best selling author of Better and Complications. It's all about how checklist they're not sexy, they're not glamorous, but they're highly effective and they save lives. So I just want to share with you an excerpt. He goes, he's from the medical world and he goes into so many details about hospitals that had infections. I mean every hospital has deaths. But by following simple instructions on hand washing and procedures before and after surgeries, infections went way down. Deaths went way down from just simple checklists that doctors and nurses and people in the operating room follow. So he concludes his analysis of one of these turnarounds. He said the results were so dramatic. This is after a hospital used the checklist he created for them. The results were so dramatic that they weren't sure whether to believe them. The 10 day line infection rate went from 11% to zero. So they followed patients for 15 more months. Only two line infections occurred during that entire period. They calculated that in the one hospital the checklist had prevented 43 infections and eight deaths and saved $2 million. That's just from following checklists. This is something I really take to heart. I put all of my habits in a checklist format in the phone, in my phone, in the notes section and I go off and literally do a check or I put a letter Y for all of my daily habit goals. It's not sexy, it's not exciting, it's not fun. It gets results. In this case, when it comes to pilots, major jetliners, jet airliners, and doctors in hospitals, operating rooms all over the world, it saves a tremendous number of lives. So at first blush, this book doesn't seem that exciting to me. It's a cornerstone of good habits and leading a productive life. We all get arrogant sometimes. Well, we know this. I don't even do that. And there are times when if you miss a certain item, it doesn't matter. Most of us, when we were taught how to drive, went through this checklist of your hands are on 10 or 2, adjust mirror, adjust side mirror, foot on brake. You go through all these checklists, but after you've been driving for a year or two, you do it all automatically. You don't automatically. You don't actually write down a checklist to see if you do it. Most of the time when you're driving, it's okay. But you know what? 1.2 million people a year die in automobile wrecks around the world. So maybe it's not a good idea that people don't use checklists. Certainly making left hand turns, speeding, tailgating, those are all things that could be avoided by following best practices and using checklists when right people don't do. And as I say, the statistics don't lie. 1.2 million people a year die around the world in auto related deaths. So this is a book that again, it's not the most dynamic read. You're not going to be riveted staying out reading it all in one night, possibly because it's so exciting, but it is extraordinarily powerful, helpful and I think if you, if you want to be really well rounded and the arts related to personal development, it's a great part of your education. Part of what I like to do in every one of these shows is also take questions from my online students. If you're new to the show and you don't know me, I host this show every day, one to three o'clock right here on platforms. Basically every major social media platform that lets people stream live. I'm on. This show is relatively new. We did a few rehearsals. We were sort of in the dress rehearsal stage in December and then we launched officially just this week on Monday. So this show is new, but I have been teaching people personal development skills for more than 35 years and many of those years were exclusively public speaking skills, media training skills. Now I teach people broader skills related to personal development, building habits and all aspects of personal development. So I do let my students write to me with questions and I tell them if they tune in, they can see me answer them right here, which I'll do, but I don't want to forget our friends as well on Instagram. I see Solara has joined us, Kickin has joined us. And Kickin says, I have a YouTube channel. How do I grow my subscribers? I wish you and thanks for coming. We did talk about that at length in the last segment and I would urge you once this short will go on demand later on, probably on Periscope since you're out there on Instagram and you can watch that section. I'll try to cover a little bit again, but we just did a lengthy segment on that Kickin has oh, you said please tell you about that. So we will come to that shortly. But I do have to get to a couple questions from my online students who were nice enough to write in. These are from my students on the UDEMY platform and this I may have chopped off his name. This student writes in he mentioned that having roadmaps dot points is much better than having scripts full scripts written out for a speech to roughly remember what to say without memorizing every word. I feel that my biggest challenge is finding out and arranging words that make sense. Does it harm to start with scripts in the beginning until words come out naturally over time with practices or having written scripts? Will written scripts slow down my learning? Now I feel very strongly about this. I believe you should not write out your full script. The second a speaker starts writing out a full script, then everything is geared towards text. The way human beings communicate through text is very different than how human beings communicate by speaking. There's an artificiality that comes about from text. Now I have some text here, but other than brief quotes and excerpts, I'm not having my head down reading to you the whole time. If you start to read or if you start to memorize text, what happens is it destroys your voice. You become flat, you become monotone. You lose the conversational quality. Your speed becomes consistent. It's boring. And people will start reading their phones and checking Instagram and Facebook and TikTok. So that's the problem with a script. It's far easier for you, the speaker, but it's also far easier for the audience if you just speak in a conversational way and the student wrote that feels like the words aren't quite right. Don't worry about the words. Focus on the idea. Focus on giving ideas of value to your audience, sharing with them, helping them. And if you get a word or two wrong, in my experience, no one will notice and they will feel that you care about them and they will respect you. On the other hand, you can have the most beautifully written speech written out. You get every word just right. If the audience feels like you're not focused on them, you're not looking at them, you don't care about them, they're going to tune out, they're going to pick up a drink, check email, and ignore you. So don't worry about getting it perfect. Use a couple notes and then just speak to people. Focus on the idea, not the exact words. Thanks for writing in with that question. Here's another question Fiwa writes in. Fiwa is one of my students in my facilitation class online. How to be a facilitator dear TJ please kindly give an example of the two minute introduction and the 30 second introduction of a first speaker. I ask in order to get the idea of the wording and to use it in the homework videos and what I wrote back and I'll tell a few of you right here. Don't worry about the wording. Words don't matter. When you're giving an introduction to someone, the most important thing is you're letting the audience know. Why should you care about this person? Why was this person invited here today? So if I were introducing myself to an audience, you're here for a personal development convention and TJ Walker is about to speak. I wouldn't, for example, start off with, well, TJ Walker lives in the New York City area and he had attended college at Duke University and his first book about politics was boring. Nobody cares about any of that. If I were giving an introduction to someone to introduce me, I would have them say something like, imagine if you could change any habit with the push of a button and make it that simple. Our next speaker, TJ Walker, has innovated a way of changing yourself any habits you want, creating selfie speak programs. He's a personal development expert who has taught thousands of people all over the globe for years how to speak more effectively to large audiences and small audiences. Now he teaches individuals how to speak to themselves to change their own habits. Ladies and gentlemen, here's TJ Walker. That's how I would have someone introduce me. That was probably the 32nd version. It's not about how long it is or how short it is. It's about, can you just focus on information that is truly interesting and unique and whets the appetite of the audience. So thank you to my students and by the way, any of my online students, regardless of what platform you are. This is kind of the teacher's office hours, this show too. So you can always email me in advance or post your questions right here. Now, I do want to get to Kickin, who's asked about a YouTube channel. How do you grow subscribers? The number one way of growing subscribers create new content that's interesting that people love and want to share. Now, I realize that doesn't sound particularly helpful because it raises the question, how do I know what content people really want and want to share? So my question to you is, are you creating content? Now, how often are you creating content? You look at so many of the most wildly successful YouTube creators, they could be 17 years old, and you dig in their background long enough and what you find quite often is they were doing, sampling and experimenting with three other genres. Maybe they're doing comedy now, but before they were doing drama and cooking skits and stand up comedy instead of comedy shorts. So many people who are really successful on Udemy were not successful with their first channel, second channel, or third channel, or their first or second or third format. They experimented, they tried, they learned, they put a lot out there and they listened to their audience. If you only do one video a year or one video a month or one video every two weeks, chances are you're not going to succeed on YouTube because you're just not putting enough content out. You don't have to put out a new show every single day as I do, but you need to put out at least one week's worth. Excuse me, one show per week to build a relationship with an audience. Think of your favorite shows of all time. If you're old enough to have ever watched regular broadcast television, whether it was Seinfeld or Friends or shows like that, they're on once a week. You build a relationship with them and oh, we lost our friends on. We lost our friends again on Instagram. At some point we'll figure out how to do that a little bit better. We'll see if I can get. I'm going to see if I can just. In our last remaining minute here, we'll see if we can get our friends back on Instagram. And it may. We may have lost them for the day. So apologies to our friends on Instagram for that technical glitch. But that's in a nutshell. What I think is most important if you want to be a success on YouTube is you need a habit. You need a habit of creating content on a daily basis. Now, you might not be posting a video every single day, but you're thinking about ideas, you're researching what all the other channels in your niche that are successful, what are they doing? You're maybe honing your skills when it comes to editing special effects graphics. It's extraordinarily competitive these days on YouTube, so every single thing you can learn can only be to your advantage. So I want to thank all of you for spending time with me today. All my friends on Instagram, colleagues on TikTok, those of you on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, Periscope, anywhere you're watching from. I value your time. I appreciate your time. May all of your habits in life be good habits that support your aspirations. I'm TJ Walker. See you tomorrow, Sa.
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