TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

Sa. Are you worried that your teenager uses too much time, energy, effort? Video games, online video games. We'll be giving you tips today on how to help your teenagers use less online gaming video. That's one topic. Lots more to come. Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday Happy Birthday to Martin Luther King. In the United States, where I'm based, this is a federal holiday honoring the slain civil rights leader. Coming up in the show, I'll be telling you and going through a lot of secrets most people are not aware of when it comes to Martin Luther King Jr. S habits as a public speaker. We'll also be looking at some surprising, surprising things that habits experts tell us that don't actually help us build stronger habits. My own investigation in those matters. We'll be taking, as always, your questions, your comments, your thoughts. You can reach out to me on any form. We're broadcasting to you today live from Facebook, YouTube, Periscope and a gazillion other places. So wherever you're listening to us from or watching us from, we're happy you're here. Special hello to our friends on TikTok. And we don't quite yet have the technology for you to get the same feed that everyone else does, but we are working on it every single day and hope to get that up this week at some point soon. The other thing we'll be going into real detail on today in our Topic B. The second big topic of the day is the role of repetition when it comes to acquiring good habits and bad habits. People talk about it a lot, but they don't really focus on the role of repetition or when it comes to acquiring new habits of any kind, good and bad. So that's some of the stuff we'll be talking about today. But first, let's dive in to the big topic of the day, the relevant topic, Martin Luther King Jr. S birthday. Topic A what are the secrets of Martin Luther King Jr. S public speaking success? Now, many historians say that at least within the United States, the best speech of the entire 20th century was Martin Luther King Jr. S I have a Dream speech. This was delivered in the early 1960s on the Mall in Washington, D.C. in front of a couple hundred thousand people. It's studied in schools. Many students memorized the speech. There are entire fan clubs, books written about it. You can see it's hard to see the speech in its entirety sometimes because it's often taken down from YouTube, but I urge you to search. I can't show you the whole speech here today because of copyright issues. The Martin Luther King Estate is quite litigious when it comes to copyright. And I don't want to ruffle any feathers there or set myself up for litigation. But here's what I do want you to know about Martin Luther King Jr. S public speaking skills. Many people look at that and say, well, wow, he was the greatest in the world. The greatest of the century, maybe the greatest ever. I could never live up to that. Here's what you don't know about Martin Luther King Jr. As a public speaker. He took a public speaking class in college and got the grade of C, completely average. Not A, not 100, not B, not even B minus, but a C in public speaking. And he was already adult. It's not like he got that in kindergarten. He was an adult in college, got the grade of C. To me, what this says is public speaking is not some innate talent. It's not something you're born with. It's not something like being a world class violinist. If you're not great by the time you're 20, it does not look good for your violinist career or basketball. Public speaking is in fact something you can build and improve on at any point in your life. Now, this next fact I'm going to share with you, I think is going to surprise some of you. But the phrase I have a dream was not in the speech script he had that day. That's right. The I have a dream speech did not literally have the words I have a dream. Dream was not in the speech. So where did it come from? Now, I had the privilege of speaking with the author of the speech a number of years ago, Clarence Jones, very delightful gentleman. He wrote a lot of Martin Luther King Jr. S speeches, wrote notes for the speeches too. Here's what he did. He wrote the first seven paragraphs of the speech. And then what happened is Martin Luther King only delivered a few of those. While he was giving just the introductory remarks from the speech, a woman on the stage yelled out, martin, tell him about the dream. Tell him about the dream. What she was referencing was a whole set of phrases, segments of speeches he'd given in other speeches earlier that year. Now imagine you're in front of a couple hundred thousand people, TV cameras everywhere, everyone's staring you at you, and you're on a big stage, you have a script and you decide, oh, I'm going to do something better. He was spontaneous, he was extemporaneous, he was able to react. He looked at the woman, heard her, reacted, and decided to go in a completely different direction in his speech. So when you See him after just the first minute or so, he actually pushed the notes of his speech to the side. That's right. And he just spoke from memory. Now, you may think, well, that's impossible. I could never do that. Let me ask you a question anyone's ever asked you. Where did you meet your spouse? Or where did you grow up? You just talked, right? You didn't have to memorize it. You just talked because you've said it many, many times. This is the key to Martin Luther King Jr. S public speaking. Success with this speech in particular, is he had said it so many times. He already had the grooves in his brain. He practiced, he had rehearsed, essentially, even though he didn't know he was going to use it that day. Martin Luther King Jr. Gave hundreds of speeches, by some counts, more than 300 speeches in the very same year that he delivered the I have a Dream speech. Hundreds. There were days when he would give six, seven, eight speeches a day. So, yes, he's like the Beatles. He's like anyone else. Successful, thousands of hours doing something. The proverbial 10,000 hours. Well, he had certainly spoken and given speeches for more than 10,000 hours by the time he gave his I have a Dream speech, even though he was still a young man in his early 30s at the time of the speech. But by speaking so often, getting so comfortable with it, building a comfort, a physical comfort, his mouth, his tongue, his mind, everything is building such a comfort level with his ideas, with segments, entire phrases, paragraphs from the speech, he was able to switch from what he was going to say to something completely different. Turn on a dime. And he could do it because he spoke so often. I can tell you right now, if you give one speech a year and all of a sudden you get up in front of 200,000 people, you're not going to be able to do that. You're going to be so scared, the adrenaline is going to be pulsating through your body that the only thing you're going to be able to think of is what? What is the next word? How can I get through this speech? Everyone is staring. The whole world is staring at me. That is the normal human reaction. He went beyond that, not because of some superhuman talent. I do think he was a fantastic world leader and certainly the greatest moral leader of the 20th century. But I don't think what he displayed that day was something of a supernatural talent. I think it's something that. And I don't mean to denigrate him in any way. I simply think it is A function of practice, rehearsal and building comfort. When you speak so often, you get better. When you speak the same themes, you get more comfortable with it. When you practice and practice and speak and are immersed in something, that's when you can do the highest level is what he did. Listen to your audience, be spontaneous, be extemporaneous, and really connect intellectually and emotionally with the audience in a way to have true impact. And those are the secrets of Martin Luther King Jr. S public speaking skills. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much for joining me. We'll be able to talk about this in more depth today. We have a lot of other exciting topics for you, plus your comments, your calls. If you want to make a video and post it on the Facebook page, we can use your audio or video and you can be seen directly. We'll send the feed from you to our audience live too. So if you want to post a video, go ahead and do that now and we can post that. Otherwise you can simply type in your questions, your comments right here year and we'll be sharing those with the audience again. Special hello to our friends on TikTok. Today we've got Maurice W. Strohn and it looks like Tick Albright Sensebits is with us and several others. So thanks so much to our TikTok friends for joining us. We have a number of friends over on Instagram as well. Agash has joined us. Frederick Adidas kicking kkk. Good to see you back. Unorthodox is with us. Anika Mara is with us. Oh, nice crowd on Instagram today. PPR has joined us. Lightlover20 has joined us and I'm seeing a few thumbs up and some other icon there I guess is it's a heart. So if you do have questions, comments, please let us know. I always come prepared with topics that I think are critically important for you. But part of the beauty of us doing this live stream show is it's two hours long, it's one to three each day. So it's not quite the strict time constraints of just 15 seconds on TikTok. Although I love TikTok and it's not the one minute restraints on Instagram. We have more flexibility and that allows for true interaction in real conversation. Let's check in with our friends on Facebook. Our good friend Peggy has joined us. Peggy, I hope you had a great weekend and making more progress on your own online courses. James Greger is writing. He says Bonjour from Tahiti. I have not been to Tahiti. I hear it's beautiful and gorgeous. And I'm excited about the prospect of going to Tahiti one day. Although I'm not as excited about the jet lag and the long flight to get there. I do understand it is very worthwhile. So James, thank you so much for being with us here today and also our friends on YouTube for joining us too. Give a shout out to Peggy. She's our top fan. And yes, Peggy Marceau says special thanks to you and a special shout out to Peggy. We do appreciate your. We do appreciate you being a good member of this community and participating and helping us learn too. So Peggy, special thanks to you. And I see that we have more people who've joined us on TikTok. Tim Black on Air has joined us. Tim, thanks for joining us. Always nice to hear from another Tim. That's what my T stands for. And the TJ is Tim. So we're going to go into some other topics as well. This next one is not from the news, but it is based on something that I've been giving a lot of thought to recently, and it is the role of repetition. And I'm going to do a little bit of a monologue here. So if you type in a question or comment and feel like I'm ignoring you, please realize I'm not ignoring you. We will come to you. But I am just going to finish roughly a nine minute monologue that I prepared for you on this topic. Topic B the Role of Repetition in Habit Acquisition Now, I read a lot of books on habits, as you would imagine, given what I do, because I create courses on habits and I write about habits and I do an online show every day about habits. Here's one thing I've noticed. Most experts on habits talk about the importance of repetition, but they only say it once. Let me say it again. The key to developing a habit, good or bad, is repetition. The key to building a habit, good or bad, is repetition. The key to building a habit, good or bad, is repetition. Yes, I am aware. The fact that I just repeated myself is highly annoying, which is why successful authors who write about habits and habits gurus don't do that, because it's annoying to people. But here's the problem. Repetition works. All the psychological research shows that the more you repeat ideas to people, they become true, even ideas that are patently absurd. Now, I'm not going to talk about direct politics on this show. We don't talk about impeachment and Brexit and things like that. And I'm not being partisan today, but a perfect example of this Phenomenon is if you just repeat even a lie about a political opponent, if you say it long enough, it does get remembered and believed. Okay, I'm going to try to decontextualize this next example. But in the United States, there was a recent president, and political opponents of this recent president simply said that he was born in another continent. He wasn't. There was evidence that he wasn't. But in an attempt to delegitimize that particular president, the other party and philosophical leaders of that party and the media just repeated this message again and again and again, and I'm not using any names today, that that president wasn't born in the United States. Over time, what the polls showed was that a majority of the members of that party believe that that president in fact was not born in the United States. So it had a tremendous impact. It worked. Why would you vote for someone if you felt categorically the person was not legally qualified to hold the office? So it did work. Now, I'm not advocating lying and I will not lie to you, but I point that out just as an example of the power of repetition. People who are paid to influence behavior. Notice that there's the old axiom, advertising. It says, and tell someone a seen your ad seven times. It's as if they never saw at all. When people buy airtime on tv, radio, online, print, they typically do so with the idea of hitting the person those eyes again and again and again. That's the power of advertising. When you look at the people who have the greatest influence in the world. And I would put forth names like Amazon, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook. And we love Facebook. We're on Facebook right now. Netflix. The founder and the CEO of Netflix, these people have tremendous influence. Why? Because they are sending us repetitive messages every single day. You like this product from Amazon, you'll probably like this product. And you, you know what? It's often true. You like this movie on Netflix. You'll probably like this Adam Sandler movie. The messages might not be 100% identical, but the message behind the message, the desired habit, is exactly the same. Netflix wants you to spend more time on Netflix. Facebook wants you to spend more time on Facebook. So every kind of notification, message, email, it's all about shaping your behavior, shaping your habits. To do one thing that these corporations want you to do. And folks, I'm not an anti capitalist, I'm not bashing corporations, I'm a corporation. Okay, I don't think we can get rid of corporations, but we have to be aware of Their real power, and it quite often comes from repetition. The influence comes from the ability to repeat messages again and again and again. And the problem with books about habits is how many of us read the book a second time. How often does a habits book repeat the same message on the same page again and again and again? Typically not ever, because it would not read well, wouldn't get good reviews. But that's the real problem we face. If you want to truly have influence over your own behavior, there's got to be a mechanism for repeating the instruction of what the habit is you want. How do you repeat it again and again and again? Coca Cola knows that they can't just tell you Coke is great once. They can't just send you a bottle once, they can't just put up a billboard in your neighborhood once. They have to repeat that message. Coke is the real thing. Coke tastes great. All the other messages again and again and again, every day for weeks, months, years, decades, a lifetime time, until the point where you can't even imagine that if you're going to have a soft drink, it's not a Coke or a Pepsi. They have big marketing budgets too. It's this power of repetition. And what are my challenges as someone who helps people and teaches people and does workshops on habits and online courses on habits is how can I help people figure out a way to repetitively bombard themselves with messages to steer their own habits. And to me, that's the fundamental problem with great self help books. It's the problem with workshops on habits is you read the book. Once you're done, go to the three day workshop, you're done. How do you then counter all the other marketers trying to influence your behavior who are using the power of repetition? Ask any marketer what's better, someone who has the world's greatest commercial and people can only see it once versus a so so commercial, but an unlimited advertising budget to get it in front of the prospect every single day for the next year. I guarantee you every marketer would say, I'll take the average so so commercial. If I can get it in front of people, in their eyeballs, in their ears enough times, I'll essentially brainwash them. Now, they won't use the term brainwash, but that's what's happening. And we are all brainwashed to some degree on various issues. So this is the fundamental challenge I see. So please forgive me if you do occasionally hear me repeat myself. I do it because I have found that just hearing something once, even a good idea, doesn't Create long term change. It doesn't create an actual habit. Now, I've been experimenting a great deal over the last few years. What I have found does work the best for me and a lot of my students is simply stating your message of what you want your habit to be in an audio format. And I just use my cell phone, I record it on a memo, an audio memo, and then I just listen to it every day. Is it repetitive? Yes. But does it have impact? Yes. Now, as an adult, some of you have heard me say this before. My weight has fluctuated up and down for many years, Never to the point where I was officially obese, but frankly, not that far away. But for the last year, my weight has stabilized within a few pounds of my ideal weight in the 175, 179 pound range. Why is that? Well, for the last year, every single day, I listen to repetitive messages on my headphones in my selfie speak program where I tell myself every single day what my ideal weight should be, my goals of being healthy, but more specifically, tiny, specific microhabits. Tj, you do not eat seconds. Tj, you do not snack during the day. You have three meals. Tj if you are hungry, drink a glass of water. TJ And I do use my name because it makes it more powerful. And you should use your name, not my name. I tell myself every day that I'm not going to put sugar in my coffee. And by hearing that message every day, guess what? I don't put sugar in my coffee. And so really, for the first time in my adult life, I haven't gone up and down. It's stable. My weight is where I want it to be. It's stabilized because I believe of the repetitive nature of my message. It's not that my message is any different than what any weight loss book says or any diet book. The difference is I figured out an easy, simple mechanism for bombarding my brain, my ears, especially with these messages regarding the habits that I want to have. So my challenge to you is if you are serious at all about creating positive habits in your own life, you don't have to use my technique, but you'd better come up with some technique to be highly repetitive to bombard yourself every single day. Now, in theory, you could put up little post it notes all over your house. I just think that's annoying. It's also embarrassing when people see what you're trying to work on. Most people don't want that. You could do that. You could read from a script every single day, various affirmations and goals and habits. The problem with that is it's a lot of work and no one's going to do that after a week. You could, I guess, if you were really wealthy, buy a whole lot of billboard ads everywhere in your neighborhood so that anytime you went anywhere, you would see all these billboard ads. But again, impractical, wildly expensive, plus embarrassing. You're not going to do that. You could, if you were really clever, create your own TV ads promoting what habits you want. But again, time consuming, expensive, requires a lot of specialized skills. Editing. I don't even know how to edit, so why should I expect you to? So that is my challenge to all of you. Do you have an easy way of telling yourself in a repetitive way what you want your habits to be? Now, you could just read something, a document you've created on a computer, an iPad or a piece of paper. But that still takes active, active reading. And I just find most people are not going to read the same thing every day. It's too boring. The beauty of an audio recording is I put it on, I can go read the news, I can walk around the house, I can do all sorts of other things. I'm kind of passively listening. As long as I hit that button play, it just plays. And I can only sort of halfway pay attention. It's building the message, driving it home and burning something into my consciousness in a way that I wouldn't be able to do that if I had to force myself to actively read. It would be too hard to do. I would find an excuse not to do so. I want to hear from you. What is your solution to this problem of needing to repeat your messages for them to have impact? I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much for joining me. That's the end of our topic B for today. We've got a lot of other great topics, more news, a lot of insights for you, plus your calls. If you choose to call in in a video format on Facebook, will play your audio or video to share with the audience. You can also just text whether you're on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and we'll share your insights with the audience too. Special hello to our friends on TikTok. It looks like we have a couple of people signing in. Daniel Bell Photography has joined us. Echo Lopez. We have a lot of people. Prince Marco says hi. Prince, glad you're here with us again and sense a bit says hi tj Would you be able to check my recent video if you tell you what if you send it to my producer Right now, Marceau. Or actually just post it on the Facebook page. That would really be the best way. Marceau. We'll take a look at it and we can share it with the audience. As long as that's Facebook. Facebook's fine. Yeah, so Marceau says that's fine. So go to. Right now you're writing to us on the TikTok platform. If you could go to my Facebook page and just go to Facebook and type in TJ Walker personal development and you will find my business page, post the video there. Marcel will take a look at it and then he'll share it with the audience. So happy to have you participate in that way. And I think there's a couple of other comments here. 3 reasons to set goals. Sense a bit asks. I can certainly give you what I think are three reasons to set goals. If you don't have any goals, you're kind of like just a jellyfish floating around aimlessly. Life can be boring. It can seem purposeless. If you don't have goals. Human beings need to either be going towards something or going down. You're either making progress or you are decaying. It's very hard for human beings to just get up and say, no goals, no agenda, nothing I want to do. I'm just going to be completely content. Now after a really busy week or month, maybe you can do that for a day. But it's very hard to go through life that way. And to me, that that's the main reason you want to go is you want to fill your life with purpose. Now, most human beings have other needs. You have financial needs. So if you have a goal to make money or start a business or to get a promotion, that helps financial needs to pay for other things you need to. You have. So to me, you must have goals in life. Everyone can have different goals. Your goals don't have to be I want to be rich and famous. Those may be horrible goals for. For you, but you've got to figure out what you want. Marceau, did I miss any of the comments? Let's see. Cy has written in from ndsi, as always, happy to have you. And say hello to all of our other friends in Hyderabad, which I believe is where Sai is from. What's that, Marcel? I didn't quite hear that. I said that's it for now. Okay, great. Well, it is a national holiday here in the United States, so we very much appreciate those of you who did spend some time with us on every platform. Prince writes in in wintertime, I'm more Tired as in the summertime. I eat healthy, do sports, but I'm wasting time in winter with so much sleep. That is a natural phenomenon and certainly it's happened to me. Springtime rolls around, you realize there's a little more padding here and it's not my sweater. It is, I think, human nature when it's darker and there's less sunlight to spend less time outdoors. To me, the real key is you have to embrace what's good about any. Any particular weather, any particular time of year. I talked a little about this on my 15 second updates you yesterday on TikTok, YouTube or not YouTube, but Facebook and a number of other platforms. That is my belief that emotionally mature, successful people never spend time complaining about the weather. Because you can't change the weather. The only thing you can do is enjoy it and embrace it. Yesterday here in New York, it was cold, it was snow on the ground, it was ice on the street. And it certainly was a day when I could have just stayed in by the fire, relaxed and enjoyed. And I did some of that. But it was also a day where I thought, what a great day. I took my daughter, got a sled, we went to the school a quarter of a mile away where there's a nice hill, and we went sledding with a whole bunch of other neighborhood kids and we had a fantastic time. So to me, the lesson is you have to embrace the weather. If it's cold and snowy out, go get a sled. They make sleds these days for $5. We just use the inexpensive plastic sleds. We had a blast. You know, people like to complain and say, oh, if only I had $10,000, I would fly to Aspen and have a fancy ski winter vacation. Okay, well, Aspen is nice and I've been there and it's lovely, but you don't need that to have fun. Just spend $5 on a plastic sled or find an old tray somewhere will work. An old inner tube can be great just for sliding down the hill. And when you have that adrenaline going and you're outdoors and fresh air and you're properly bundled, the weather's not a problem. All of a sudden, the weather is your friend. But Prince, certainly it's normal to sleep more when it's dark. At some point, I believe you have to establish a habit of a certain amount of exercise you're going to do each day, regardless of the weather, regardless of the season, I give myself a goal. It's something I listen to every day on my selfie speak audio it's something in my checklist on my phone. Did I walk 12,500 step steps today? And if it's wintertime and it's too cold to go out, I do it on a treadmill. And if I'm traveling or something and the hotel doesn't have a treadmill, I may just walk around in the hotel or find a mall and walk around. Doesn't take money. What it does take is a decision on your part to make a daily habit of a certain amount of exercise. You may hate to walk, but you might enjoy swimming. Well, you can swim in the wintertime if you have access to a pool. So, Prince, my big recommendation is decide what your minimum requirements are for yourself to feel good physically and then make it a habit to do those minimum things every single day. Sure, there are days when I get up, maybe I didn't have a great night's sleep, not feeling that much energy. I still start my day every day doing 20 jumping jacks. Is that going to get me to the Olympics? No. Gets the blood pumping though. I still do as many push ups as I can every single day up to 60. Right now I'm at about 47 per day. I limit to how many I can do in 60 seconds. I still lift weights every day. I only lift weights for five minutes, so don't be too impressed. But I do that whether it's rain or shine or hot or cold, because it's only five minutes to me. The secret of being physically active and healthy in the wintertime, but also in the summer is for me and everyone's different. I do these little bite sizes where the amount of time is so short that I can justify. Well, I spend more time than that flossing my teeth. So why not do this exercise for 60 seconds? I now do as many pull ups as possible every day in 60 seconds or less. Now I'm only doing five. But if you haven't done a pull up in a while, you may have a lot of trouble doing even one, which is where I was month ago. So, Prince, that's my big recommendation for you. Figure out some kind of daily exercise routine. It doesn't have to be going across town to a gym or running to the gym 10 blocks away in nice weather. It needs to be something simple. It needs to be something easy. You can do rain or shine, hot or cold, summer or winter. Do that and your energy level might be lower in the winter than the summer, but you'll still feel good about yourself. You'll still feel healthy, you'll still be headed in the right direction. So Prince, thanks so much for the comment. I see a few other friends have joined us and Prince and Sean are saying hello to each other. That's good. And Oscar, Oscar Lopez says hi to my friend. Hi Gronk, glad you could be here. Happy to do shout outs from time to time. So G Rock, hope you can join our G ronc. Hope you can join us here every day on the TJ Walker Habit Influencer program. So thanks so much. And Prince says thanks. You are welcome indeed. I want to look at some of the top news stories that jumped out at me. One I mentioned at the top, top of the hour, and that relates to the issue of video games. Many, many parents are concerned that their kids simply spend way too much time, especially their teenager, on video games. You hear stories about places in Korea and certainly here in the United States, where practically an entire generation of young men get so sucked into this culture of video gaming that this sounds disgusting to say, but I have to mention it. They have buckets next to their desk and console where their computer is because they don't want to take the time to get up and go to the bathroom. And they're doing their business in a bucket right next to their computer because they don't want to lose a second. Truly, truly bizarre. Now, I used to love video games as a kid, but the great thing about growing up when I did in the 1970s as a teenager is it cost money to play video games. And if you weren't that good and I wasn't that good, you would spend a dollar and that might only give you 15 minutes of play. And I typically wasn't going to spend more than a dollar. So it was very easy for me to regulate my impulses of wanting to play. I loved playing Pac man and Galaga in 1981 and 1982, but it was very easy for me to regulate my usage because I didn't have any more money after I put the fourth quarter in. Now, thanks to the Internet, video games are essentially free for people. You could play hour after hour after hour and skip school and skip sleep and skip eating and skip human contact of any kind just playing video games. So I want to share with you some research. This comes courtesy of University of Michigan's Health Guide. They've got five tips for parents of teens who are worried about their kids spending too much time on video games. They did a poll. Nearly nine in 10 parents in a Mott national poll say teens spend too much time playing video games. And there's increasing concern that it's affecting mental health and physical health. If you're inside all day long just doing this, you're not getting a lot of exercise. Typically you're probably eating junk food. So it's a huge, huge problem. Here's tip number one. According to the experts at the University of Michigan set limits, parents may not always have the most accurate perception of their teens gaming tendencies. The poll found among parents of daily gamers, 54% report their teens play three or more hours a day. This is compared to only 13% of teens that do not play every day. Just 13% of these parents believe their teen spends more time gaming than others, while 78% believe their teens gaming is less than or about the same as peers. This is the classic sort of Lake Wobegon effect. In our town, everyone is above average. Well, everyone can't be above average and everyone can't be below average. So this is essentially saying many parents don't even realize how much time their kids are spending playing games online. And folks, I'm not a medical doctor, I'm not a psychiatrist, but I can just tell you if you're spending three hours a day on video games and you're not trying to become a professional game because there are people who make millions of dollars playing video games, if that's your chosen profession, then three hours a day is probably not nearly enough. But if you aspire to any career or life outside of video gaming, to me, three hours sounds like an absurdly high amount of time. And some of you may be saying, well, T.J. you're just an old fuddy daddy. Certainly you spent more than three hours watching movies or TV shows at certain times, right? Well, yeah, I have, and I think entertainment should be a part of everyone's life. But I specifically limit myself to, on average, no more than one hour of video entertainment per day. Now, if I watch a movie, it's maybe two hours. I watched the Matrix with my wife a couple nights ago, so that was a couple of hours. But I didn't watch any video the day before or the day after. So for me, something I'm comfortable with is on average, one hour of video entertainment per day. So if your child is doing three hours of video entertainment, very hard for me to imagine how this child can be doing well in school and doing homework and having any semblance of a social life, talking to real friends in real life. So please keep that in mind. The second big tip from this particular health letter from the University of Michigan. Keep tabs. Although researchers Remain divided over whether violent games provoke real life violence. It's crucial to monitor what a child is playing. A few studies have shown that immediately after playing a violent video game, kids are less likely to show empathy and more likely to show unsafe behavior, such as handling a gun. Now, I do have some concerns about the school of thought that says we're in a more violent society today because kids are watching violent video games all the time. First of all, we're not in a more violent society today. Violent crime in the United States is lower than it's been in 40, 50 years. But here's my big complaint with people who try to make the argument between kids watching violent video games and becoming more violent. And therefore they're advocating banning violent games. The place in the world that has more violent video games than anywhere else. Japan. Those kids watch tremendously violent video games and in the entire country there's like one murder a year. It's absurdly, absurdly low number of people murdered a year in that society compared to not just the United States, which is a very violent country, as you probably know, but compared to Europe, a lot of other countries. So if there really were a causal relationship between playing violent video games and kids becoming violent, I think you would see it in Japan and in fact you don't. I'm not suggesting that watching violent games makes you less violent, although there is a school of thought that says there's a catharsis effect, that if you're seeing all this violence here, you're less likely to want to put it out in real life because it's already getting out of your system. You can shoot someone virtually, you don't need to shoot them in real life. I don't know if I buy that either, but please keep that in mind. If you are a parent, you're going to have to make your own decisions there. If you are concerned about the amount of time your kids are spending playing online video. Tip number three, look for trouble. Overall, parents surveyed say gaming often gets in the way of other aspects of of their teens life such as family activities and interactions, sleep, homework, friendships with non gaming peers and extracurricular activities. People like to be in denial. Your kid can say, I've got no trouble with video games. You might say you have no trouble with video games. But if other areas of your life are falling apart because you've squeezed out the time, then it is a real problem. Tip number four, play together. In some situations, gaming together may offer a chance to bond and potentially open the door to other conversations and interactions. Play with your child. At least they're not isolated in their bedroom and you're isolated in some other room. To me, this seems like a pretty reasonable tip. I understand your 16 year old son might not want to play video games with his mom. I understand that, but certainly try and maybe you can do it in earlier ages. Now my own daughter is only six and she's not really that into video games. But we do occasionally play one game that I enjoy. It's a word game where it's a free app. There's all sorts of clusters of letters and it's your job to make words not quite like a crossword puzzle, but you have to turn the clusters of letters into words. To me, it's a great way to use part of the brain. Think of spelling, think of words, think of doing things creatively. And typically the whole game can be played in two or three minutes. And that is a game that I like to play with my daughter. Fortunately, she's not playing any other violent or non violent video games these days. The fifth suggestion Offer alternatives. Parents polled use different strategies to limit the amount of time their teens spend gaming, including encouraging other activities, setting time limits, and providing incentives to limit gaming. It's human nature. If someone is just telling you, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this, it's easy to tune out, it's easy to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, all you are is negative and negativity does not work. Just making someone feel bad deficient typically doesn't motivate. One of the books I shared with you last week was from by an author, P.F. fogg, tiny habits. This is probably the best selling book at the moment in the world on habits. And he really does a deep dive on the psychological effects of making people feel bad. That's why he believes it's not about morality or anything. But when you shame people, you shame people for being too fat or too this or too that. It doesn't really help them change behavior. Because if you're feeling bad about yourself, you don't feel empowered, you don't feel that you can make proactive changes. You're less likely to initiate positive new habits. So that's essentially the thesis behind this last suggestion, which is come up with an alternative. If all you do is yell at your kid, get off that screen. Stop that. And yet you're at home just playing in front of your computer, working on your computer, or just working all the time at the office, you're not your home office, you're not Giving your child a good reason to do something else. Take your child for a walk, offer to play catch with your kid, do something with your kid. And that way, both of you are getting away from screens. Because let's face it, it's pretty easy for any of us to go through life like this. Now, I have a reason for using my iPad right now because I am sharing some insights with you. But there's a classic New Yorker cartoon or I don't know if it's New Yorker, but some cartoon. It's two parents talking to each other and one of them is talking to the other one, but without looking at that person. And she's on her cell phone and she's saying, yes, I hate the fact that my kid spends too much time on his cell phone. How am I going to get him off? And oh, the kid was right there too. So the kid is being lectured to by the mom of get off your cell phone, Johnny while the mother's doing it, could have been the father too. So that's the real problem. We have to give options. We have to demonstrate options. If you spend all of your free time at home watching tv, why do you expect your kid to not look at screens too? I certainly can't argue that watching TV is better than playing a video game or that video games are worse than watching tv. So please give that some thought. If you have a problem with anyone in your family watching too many video games, let me know. If you have solutions, let me know. We'd love to hear from you. You can post your comments on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, many other places. Marco writes, I think best games are brain training apps like Elevate or Peek. Try it. So Prince, I'd love to hear from you on what you think those games do. Certainly some games motivate you and stimulate parts of your brain better than others. I've seen a lot of research that suggests that, that older people who do crossword puzzles every single day live longer, live healthier, and seem to stave off things like Alzheimer's. So activities that motivate your brain, I think have been proven to be healthy and positive. The brain, the specific brain training games, the research there is inconclusive. I've done some research on it. I have tried some of the brain stimulation games and when I do a Google search reviewing them and I type in the name of a particular game or app plus efficacy, what I find is, and I haven't done this in six months. So please correct me if there's new research out that there's simply no causal link between people doing these games and seeing brain activity improve and memory improve. It might be fun, it might be entertaining, but I don't know that it's really as good for your brain as simply reading a deep, intelligent book that makes complex arguments. But I'm open to persuasion. If you have some games, some brain training games, apps that you think are effective, share them with the audience. Let's check in with our friends over on Instagram. Let's see, Mortez has joined us and LightLove20 has written and says here Net is not very powerful and I can't quite see that comment, Marceau. It's being obscured by an icon. If you can scroll up. Okay, there we go. Light writes here net I'm assuming the Internet isn't very powerful and sometimes I don't I guess see you but I know the subject you speak about is very important. Well, we do have viewers from all over the world and Light, I appreciate you joining us and I do realize that Internet consistency, wi fi power varies greatly. I'm certainly of an era where I remember signing on with dial up and things taking 10 hours to download a two minute clip. So I feel for you. Even though my Internet is pretty good here, the United States, the Internet is not nearly as good as it is in I guess France, South Korea, a number of other places, but it is improving every day. One of the most beautiful facts in the world to me, which gets me excited about my own business, this show and everything else is that in general for the last year, for the last several years, and basically every single day of the year, another 625,000 human beings in the world gain access to the Internet for the first time. So it's only getting better for most people in most places it only gets cheaper, less expensive and it's getting faster. So these are indeed exciting times we live in. Light truly appreciates you making the effort. It must be frustrating to start watching something kind of hear something and it just freeze or buffer or other problems. So do appreciate your efforts there and we have a few more comments here. Prince wrote, so unorthodox writes, depends on what you're playing, why and for how long. Absolutely. Like a lot of things, life is complex. Video games are complex. Certainly to become a world class gamer and be making tens of millions of dollars and winning competitions around the world, you have to have really honed a skill. You have to have given a lot of thought to it. Energy, strategy, nuance. I do not in any what do you mean to put that down. I'm sure it's just as complex, more complex and require more brain power than playing chess. So I understand that the context is important. A lot of games that are just boom, boom, boom, boom, at least they were when I were kids. And I know there's an entire range, an entire spectrum of degree, difficulty and intellectual needed for many video games. Unorthodox also writes, I play a bunch of games in competitions and tournaments and I feel like at least, Yes, I would say Brain Train. I missed. Well, I think I missed part of the comment there. Prince writes, yes, I would say brain training apps are working because I see it's a two parter. Okay, I see brain training does work because I see improvements in the app statistics. Okay, so Prince, that's good. I guess a question I would have though is how meaningful are those apps? And well, I just don't know. So feel free to share with us the particular apps you're using. I will look at it and try it out. I am, I like to be open minded. Here are the two qualities I think are most important for someone who's trying to improve any aspect of their life, their health or their brain power or anything else. One of them is be open to any kind of new solution, even if it seems crazy. That's one thing that's important. But the second thing that's really important is to have an empirical mindset, evidence based mindset. Because there's so many people out there selling complete nonsense, fake remedies and there are people in the world who say, oh, I'm going to play on people's suspicions of the government. And you should be suspicious of the government many times. But people will say, oh, the government doesn't want you to eat this smoked shark cartilage because they're afraid. They don't want the pharmaceutical industry to get upset. But this shark, this smoked shark cartilage will eliminate your cancer. And there are unfortunately unsophisticated people and sometimes sophisticated people who then don't go to the doctor and they're eating smoked shark cartilage, which I'm just making up. I hope that doesn't exist just because they're told, oh, the government doesn't want you to have that, so you need to be skeptical. The first thing I do, anytime someone suggests something is great or something new or something I need to buy and this could be a wine, this could be a vitamin, is I just go to Google and I type in that word and plus evidence, plus reviews, plus research and so many things you find it turns out there's simply no evidence it works. We could do an entire two hour show every single day just on health products that have been proven demonstrably over and over again to have no impact whatsoever. And I don't want to turn that show into that. But here's one for anytime you heard the word toxins and someone talking about we'll pull the toxins out of your feet or this, be aware they're probably just stealing money from your wallet. We have time for we have a whole second hour folks. So if I don't get to you before the break, realize we have plenty of time in the second hour. We've had a couple of other comments coming in. Cy writes, you have a question and about doing being full time trainer and starting up a company. So one of the best things about my life is not just that I can follow my passion and study about habits and personal development, but I can help other people by making courses and writing books on the subject and have a full time training business. So we will talk about those themes from time to time. Say I'll talk a little about that in the second hour. I see Deepak has joined us as well. And we have user 0772 has joined us on TikTok plus Romanica 45 has joined us as well. Lots more topics, news stories and more all coming up in hour two of the Habit Influencer. I'm your host TJ Walker. Thanks so much for joining me in hour one. We're going to take a brief three minute break. We'll see you at three past the hour. See you then. This is a Chicky Beat production. Sa. Sa. Sam. Sa. Saki production. Welcome back to our two of the Habit Influencer. I'm your host TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. This is the program where we talk about habits, how to build stronger positive habits for everyday life, how to reduce the negative habits. This is also my office hours for all of my students and my online courses. So if you are one of my students on Skillshare, Udemy, any other platform, here I am. I'm the teacher. These are the office hours. So if you have questions about any one of my 143 online training courses, you've got me right here. Unlike most online instructors, I'm not hiding from you. You can reach me here every single day and I'm wide open and ready for your questions about any of the coursework whatsoever. So always feel free to post questions about any of the courses or any aspect of personal development. My areas of expertise are specifically in communication skills, personal development and habit acquisition. Let's so Cy had written, Deepak has written has said hello too. Happy to see all of our friends on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and our friends on TikTok. We are still trying to get you set so that you can get the live feed from our main camera rather than looking at me through my cell phone. So I realize it's a little bit annoying. I see that PMC Gregorian has joined us on TikTok plus unknown GUI and it looks like Vape Vape Kalisk has joined us too. So thank you so much and I appreciate if I've mangled anyone's name. I'm not trying to be insensitive there, but always interesting the level of creativity people come up with for their online names and online Personas. And another unknown, Qui has joined us. So thanks. I think you were with us in the first hour. Happy to have you back there as well. And to our whole community, this is a show where I come prepared, ready to give you insights and information about stories, news, insights related to habits, how to build stronger habits. But it's also a program that is a community, so you get to set the agenda too. You get to ask questions, you get to put topics on the forum as well. So always happy to hear from you on that. For many of us, we may have good habits when it comes to a normal day. We're at home. We may keep a perfectly healthy refrigerator. We may be good about not buying junk food. It's the travel that's what is the downfall. For a lot of us, everything is different. It's easy to exercise less and eat more and eat the wrong things when you're traveling. So I wanted to share with you some insights. This comes from Thrive Thrive Global. This is a great organization created by Arianna Huffington and they have some of the best personal development insights coming out on a regular basis. They have a new article out and I'll link to this in the show note or if you if you're interested in the link, let's do it. Even better, just write that you'd like to see the links of this and I will post it wherever, wherever you post, no matter what platform you're on right now. But this is an article entitled these tips will help you eat healthy while you're traveling for work. So one of the tips look up the menu in advance. So many restaurants post their menu. Certainly if it's a big chain, they'll post their menu. So if you can see the number of calories and you can see that every single thing on the menu is fried and filled with cheese and has 400% of the daily recommended allowance for salt and fat and sugar, then in calories. Then you can decide not to go to that restaurant. That can be extremely helpful. Tip number two, Bring your own fruits and veggies. Now this is something I've been telling myself I should do, but I have not been doing this regularly, certainly for airplanes. I mean, most food on airplanes is just awful little biscuits, pretzels, things completely devoid of nutritional value. So much easier to bring. Small bag of fruit, regular fruit. Dried fruit is not quite as healthy as regular fruit, but it's easier for traveling sometimes. Don't worry about the banana getting smushed if it's dried fruit, but that's a great tip. And vegetables too. I've tried doing this but have not made that a regular practice, but need to now this next tip from Thrive is a little more controversy. Try intermittent fasting. Here's a quote from one expert. The best way I found to eat healthy while traveling through airports is to fast until I reach my destination. The hurried pace in airports and the usual lack of healthy options readily available leads me to drink more water and plain coffee or tea. If you're trying this for the first time, take a fistful of almonds with you. It'll help you get through the hunger pangs. Drink. Drink lots of water too. Well, I like the idea of having just a few almonds. And almonds are very healthy for you as long as they're not salted or honeyed and with sugar on them. And as long as you don't eat giant handfuls, they are high in calories. But to eat 3, 4, 5, 6 almonds can really give you some energy, eliminate hunger pangs and not fill your body with lots of extra unwanted fat. Salt calories. You don't need the whole intermittent fasting thing. I've tried that. That's the concept where you have a certain amount of time each day where you're not going to eat. Probably the simplest version of this is 12 hours. So if you eat at 7 in the morning, then you're not going to eat for breakfast. Then you're not going to eat anything, even a snack after 7pm so you have to have your dinners a little earlier or your breakfast a little later. Some people go to a smaller window. They might not have breakfast and have a lunch and a dinner within six or seven hours. So they've got every part of the day. They've got a 17 hour window where they're not eating at all. That's a type of intermittent fasting. My problem with this is I hate it so much. It's insane, insanely hard. If I had enough willpower to fast intermittently for an entire trip, I would be perfect weight and perfect health anyway. I would have so much discipline. So I personally don't find this advice of intermittent fasting very realistic for most people because anything one of my guiding assumptions here on this program with everything I do, if you want a good healthy habit, you've got to make it either easy or fun. Ideally both. To me, fasting of any sort is never easy. It's sure not fun so you can talk about it all day long. I don't think it works for I know it doesn't work for me. It doesn't work for most people. What do you think? Have you tried intermittent fasting? Does it work for you or is it just too hard? If you have tried intermittent fasting, how long have you done it? I mean you can do anything for a week. I've tried it for a week. But if you can't do it beyond a week or beyond a month, why start it in the first place? The third big thing I look for in any habit is is it truly sustainable? If you can't sustain it, why bother starting it? It's not going to help in the long run. So let's check in with some of our friends. We have had a number of more people joining us on TikTok. Vapu is with us. Another unknown is with us. User 0772 is with us. Shelley Lynn has joined us and Mohammed has joined us. Very happy to have our friends on TikTok which by the way is just such a fun platform. I'd never heard of it until a few months ago, maybe six months ago and then started posting videos there every day three months ago and every single day. Thousands and thousands upon views. So it's an interaction and questions and comments and feedback. So very happy to be a part of the TikTok community. This is probably my newest social media YouTube I've been on since I think about six months after the platform started and I think I just celebrated my 12 year anniversary on Facebook. Let's check in with some of our friends on Facebook. Deepak writes I just keep watching on tv spending a lot of time on social media. In short if I am free I just there please help me know how to keep myself away from it and to use my time effectively. Deepak the easiest way to spend less time on TV and video games is to schedule more time doing specific, positive things in your life. Let the good crowd out the bad. So I would ask you to take a look at your calendar and where there are holes, try to program specific things in. It could be you're going to exercise every day from 4 to 5. It could be you're going to read a book every night. One thing that's helped me dramatically in just the last year is I literally put on my schedule 9 to 10pm every day. I'm going to read a book in bed before I go to sleep. Helps me sleep better, helps me learn more. And you know what else it does? It keeps me away from the television. The other thing that I find helpful is to give myself a specific allocation of time. So I have literally written down on my phone, I can't hold it up because we're using it to broadcast to our friends at TikTok. I have on my daily to do list, do not watch more than one hour of video entertainment per day. And every single day I have to go in and hold myself accountable. What did I do yesterday? And if I did an hour or less, I put a W for win and I give myself a little, you know, a power boost and I say win. Sounds cheesy. It works. It's a quick reward. That's courtesy of B.J. fogg, the great author on habits I talked to you about last week. Week. I've only recently started doing the sort of the fist pump of yes, I've done it. So that's part of it. As I actually write down on my to do list every single day, limit myself to no more than one hour of video entertainment per day. The other thing I do is I created in my selfie speak audio program, I tell myself, tj, you watch at most one hour of video entertainment per day on average. And I've said it in an audio recording. I listen to that recording every single day. The repetition. Remember what I was talking about in the last hour. The power of repetition. So when I hear myself tell myself every day that I'm the sort of person who only watches video entertainment for one hour a day, that has an impact when I go to my phone every day and I have to hold myself accountable in my notes section and put, no, I failed that or W for when? Yeah, I wanted that today. That drives it home too. And the fact that I also have an audio recording telling myself I'm going to try to read a whole book every day and I'm definitely going to read hour before bed from 9 to 10 every night. And I have that on my to do list. It crowds out the other options, the other time availability for watching video. Now, I'm a big believer that you need habits for every sphere of your life. Not just physical, not just your body, although that's critically important and not just for simple, mundane things, but you. You have to have things for yourself. As a learner, I believe one of the seven pillars where you should have habits for yourself is learning. Talking about yourself as a lifelong learner. And you can't learn if you're watching video entertainment constantly. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much for joining me today. We have a lot more to come, a lot of interesting, fascinating topics. I've got another monologue coming up for you in just a moment and we have other comments from you. Let's go to TikTok. I see that Minnow agrees repetition is important. Yes, it absolutely is. The whole. Everyone agrees, though. The question is, how do you actually do it? We know how Facebook does it. They send us notifications every two seconds. We know how Amazon does it. How do you do it in a way that's meaningful to you to help you with the habits you want? Wild 6 Outlaw says you don't give excuses. You set examples. I think you're relating to the topic about video usage with your kids. If you are worried about your kids using too much video entertainment and video games, I think you're right. Set an example. If your kids. He's talking about you. You have to scroll up. Oh, okay, I missed something there. Marceau, my trusty aide and colleague and producer, is coming to me over a speakerphone. He's working out of another production facility in another city today. So I'm looking at the other comments. This will be a little easier when we integrate TikTok into our overall system. And it's all coming in the same way. Wild6 says you seem like a humble, authentic person. I hope you're talking about me on that one. If so, thank you very much. I do appreciate that. And you know, I certainly have flaws. One day we'll bring my wife in and she'll maybe spend two hours talking about the habits of mine she doesn't like. But I am trying. And maybe she'll need a whole week, I don't know. But I am trying. And this is a journey for me. And I just want to share that journey with you because I think a lot of you, a lot of us as human beings, we're all on the same journey. We're either saying life is miserable, there's nothing that can be done, or we take a growth mindset, an open ended mindset and we think, you know what, we can get better, we can improve. That's the camp I'm in. And presumably that's the camp you're in. Otherwise you would be here, you would be doing something else with your time. So Wild, thank you so much for that comment. And Wild also says I'm an inspirational speaker. Well, thank you so much. For many years I grappled with this labeled motivational speaker because when you tell someone you're a motivational speaker, that's not a label I typically used. It instantly conjures up these caricatures. There was a Saturday Night Live character, Chris Farley, who did a character, a very comedic character as a motivational speaker. Hilarious. I'd urge you to check it out on YouTube. But it kind of embodies all the things people don't like about inspirational speakers and motivational speakers. I do try to inspire. I do believe that every person who speaks, every PowerPoint presentation, every kind of talk speech, you are trying to inspire your audience to do something. Otherwise why would you speak? So I do take that as a compliment. And by the way, that's the perfect segue. I do have a brand new course on public speaking that relates to PowerPoint. I don't use PowerPoint here, but I do use PowerPoint from time to time and I train people on how to use PowerPoint. I now have on the number one online training platform in the world, the largest, longest, most in depth course on PowerPoint slide creation and delivery. So if you want to improve your business skills on how to use PowerPoint, this is the course for you. We have a brand new course and we also have a discount. We don't have the complete freebie like we did last week. We were able to give it free to some of our students. But Marcel, I would ask you take the coupon we sent from last week if you could pull that from the old show notes and put it on the the pages where people are watching now if they're interested in that course on how to speak More effectively using PowerPoint. The link is still good for a discount. You won't get it for free, but it won't be the normal $200 for the course as well. Today you should get it on sale for about $12. So take a look at that course. But very much appreciate your your inspiring words Wild. Because when you tell me that you find me inspiring, that inspires me to want to do more. So I do appreciate your comments a great deal. We have Another comment from Mrs. Minow. Are you a professional, a doctor? Absolutely not. What I am a professional in is the arts of influence. For the last 35 years, I have been training people on how to influence audiences, how to influence the audience when you speak to the media, how to influence audiences when you're speaking to audiences of investors or clients or customers or colleagues. So I have been in the profession of teaching people how to influence audiences. And a few years ago, it occurred to me the most important audience you'll ever speak to yourself. So now I'm in the business of teaching people how to influence themselves, how to influence their habits. So let me state categorically, don't take medical advice from me. You should listen to a medical doctor. I would argue that for most people in the world, when it comes to habits that are harming their health, harming their life, harming their happiness, it has nothing to do with the need for more medical expertise or more knowledge. The problem is they've got to figure out how to influence themselves. And that's what this all about, related to this very subject, which I'm glad you brought up, by the way. I'm always happy if anyone wants to ask me information about my background. I want to be completely transparent. But it does lead me perfectly to one of the stories that really grabbed my attention over the weekend that I wanted to share with you. And it had lots of medical evidence about the dramatic, dramatic cost of smoking. Now, everyone has heard a doctor and health officials tell you smoking is bad for you. Smoking is bad for you. And guess what? People still smoke. Unfortunately, all the evidence shows that evidence by itself doesn't convince people to change behavior. And this particular story is just a stark, stark reminder. This is from a newspaper called the Times Leader, which is based in the Pennsylvania region of the United States. And they did a major study with one of the universities there. Here's what they found. And this was done under the auspices of Wallet Hub, it's a personal finance site. What they found is that the total cost of smoking was $300 billion a year and rising. And this is a time in the United States when daily cigarette usage is going down. There are 34.2 million tobacco users in the United States, and there's a lot of costs. So here's here's the analysis they provide. Again, if you want this story, just post a request on the site you're watching on now and we'll get that to you out of pocket cost per smoker $149,000 $851. I think they're taking into account lifetime usage of purchasing cigarettes, driving to the store to get cigarettes, matches, lighters, all of those things. And that doesn't even include the health cost. Financial opportunity cost per smoker $1,313,711. How they calculated that exactly, I'm not quite certain, but it certainly sounds like it has a hefty price tag. Health care cost per smoker $181,000 per person. That to me seems almost too low. Certainly if you smoked your whole life, you have lung cancer, and you spent the last five years of your life on a hospital bed, the costs are going to be considerably more than $181,000. Income loss per smoker $248. Excuse me, $248,000. Presumably, there are jobs you won't be qualified for, jobs you won't be hired for, promotions you don't get simply because people know you are a smoker. The cost continue. Other cost per smoker $10,838 total cost over a lifetime of a smoker $1,904,000. Now, in many parts of the world, lifetime income is not $1 million. So this is obviously skewed more towards a US audience and a US study. Total cost per year per $37,000. And yet people know this. People know that smoking is bad for you. They know that it costs a lot of money. They know there are direct cost, indirect costs, and people still smoke. Why is that? That's part of why we're here today and every day on this show. Now, my bias in this show is in favor of helping people create positive habits. I'm not an addiction expert and certainly to our colleague on TikTok who asked about my background as a doctor. No, I'm not an addiction expert or medically trained. So I don't want you to rely solely on me for advice of how to get over a cocaine addiction. I know nothing about that. Alcohol addiction, I know nothing about that. I know of alcoholics, but I don't know how to get of rid rid of that. What I'm here for is to help you try to build as many positive habits in your life and in the long run. Ideally, the good ones push out and minimize the bad ones. But you can have a million great habits in life. If you have a raging heroin addiction, your good habits are probably not going to matter because your one bad habit may actually kill you. Don't spend your time watching this show, spend your time getting to a hospital or working with an addiction expert. But I'm more than happy to take any questions you have about my background, beliefs, philosophies, and I'll be as transparent as I can with you. You are. Oh, and I like this. Wild says you are the most articulate, intelligent Mensa. Okay, thank you so much. I appreciate those kind thoughts. Shop center says hello. Nice to see you again. Good to see you. Repetition is important. Yes. We'll be talking about that more in the final half hour of this program. And people's I think I went out of order there for a second. Okay. You'll end up. Oh yeah. So Mrs. Mimeo is is quoting the character Chris Farley when he played this mock inspirational motivational speaker who one of his taglines was, you'll end up living in a van eating cheese by the river. It's just a classic. So please, if you I don't want you spending three hours a day with video entertainment, but if you want to spend a great, fantastic five minutes of consuming video entertainment after this program, by all means go to YouTube. Type in Chris Farley, motivational speaker, and you'll see him talking about, I used to live down by the river eating cheese. It is a classic comedy setup, one of the best of all times. Outlaw again says he's professional at who he is. I don't know if you're talking about Chris Farley or me. Chris, brilliant comedian, unfortunately did kill himself with his own bad habits. Wilde writes, I don't live in fear. I live in afraid. I'm not quite sure what you mean by that, because when you live in afraid, doors will open. I don't know if you mean that. You're simply cautious and you remain open to danger so you can avoid them properly. Certainly, we all should be afraid of becoming video addicts, sex addicts, food addicts, because we all have something that we do. Like, it might not be the sex addiction, but it might be a Snickers bar addiction. So if your point there is, we do need to have a little bit of fear, be afraid of what could happen to us, I absolutely believe you're correct. People believe in yourself first and then people, yes, you do have to believe in yourself. And I realize that sounds trite from a personal development expert, guru, whatever you want to call it, believe in yourself. But it's one of those things. It's true. If you don't believe in yourself, if you cast doubt on yourself constantly, you'll never create. And to Me. A bedrock core activity of a human being who wants fulfillment in life is creating. Creating on a daily basis. One of the things I enjoy, One of the things I enjoy this morning, I enjoy every day is first thing when I get up after I make myself a cup of coffee or today made a nice fire is I write. I write for 500 words a day and sometimes I may finish this at 5:30 in the morning. If I get up at 5 today I slept in late. I slept till 6:30 and by 7 I had written more than 500 words about habits ideas. Some of them become the fodder for comments and commentaries on this program. So very early in the day I feel like I've already accomplished something. I've created interesting ideas, content that I can use for this show, that I can use in an upcoming book on habits that will serve as the basis for online courses. And it makes me feel good. But I couldn't do that if I didn't legitimately think that I believe in myself. I believe I have good ideas to share with people and to help people. If I didn't have that, I couldn't start. I would just sit back and consume. And to me that is one of the greatest dangers in our modern world is when people don't believe in themselves and they just sit back and say I'm going to consume. I'm going to consume other processed food that people have created for me and packaged for me and I'm going to create or consume other entertainment that people have created and packaged for me. And in this case it can be a drug. And your drug of choice might be Netflix, it might be YouTube, it might be Facebook videos, it could be almost anything, it could be Fortnite. But if all you do is consume other people's creations, that chips away on your self identity. If you think so poorly of yourself that you don't think you can create, to me it creates a downward spiral. Now not everyone has to be a talk show host or have their face in online videos. I'm not saying we all have to be the same, but I do think that you need to create something. It could be a cookbook just for your family. But even that if you don't have confidence in yourself that you have good recipes, that you have ideas worth sharing with people, you'll never even do that. So yes, I absolutely agree with you that it is essential, essential to believe in yourself. Even though it sounds trite. In just a moment we're going to go to segments Our topic C today our third big prepared topic which I want to share with you and it's something I've given a lot of thought to recently. So if I don't cut away to your comments or questions right then it's because I want to do about a nine minute monologue on this particular topic that I've prepared for you. So get ready, sit back, and if you have any criticisms, let me know. You can post it. I will air the criticisms whether I agree with you or not, but I probably won't stop for the next nine minutes as I go through this prepared topic Topic C why do Most Habits Experts give Bad Advice? It may seem odd. There's so many experts about habits. If you go to Amazon and you type in the word habits, tens of thousands of books come up. If you go to Google and type in the word habits and search just for news in the last 24 hours, thousands of links come up. The world is awash with experts on habits, and I'm going to contend to you today that there is a structural flaw with the way habits experts give advice on habits. And the flaw results in bad advice for you. In me and others, we've got to figure out a solution. So here's the problem. If you write a book about how to help people have new habits, something I've seen in almost every book about habits is a sentence or two about how if you want to help people have habits, it's got to be simple, it's got to be easy, and ideally, fun. So they all do say that briefly in one paragraph. It's got to be simple or fun or both. At least one of those. They all do say that, to their credit. Here's the problem though. You can't just write that in a book and sell it as a book because it would only be a paragraph long. And just knowing that doesn't help. But the better the book, the more readers it has, the better the reviews are, typically the more complexity and the best way to get a good book deal. And why distribution is if you are a PhD in psychology or a medical doctor established with an elite university and who have all sorts of smart graduate students, all of them in the top 1% of IQ, helping you and researching you. And here's the thing. When you're in a position like that, if you are a respected professor at an elite university, whether it's Oxford, Yale, Harvard, you are rewarded by how complex and elegant and creative and innovative your ideas are. So when you start to write a book about habits, the next thing you know, there's all Sorts of four quadrant charts and there's all sorts of curved lines and there's all sorts of variables and there's regression analysis and there's all sorts of analysis of basal ganglia. Medical jargon, complexity, complexity, complexity. So there's this huge disconnect. You've got experts on habit saying it's about simplicity and fun. And yet their books, often their courses, their workshops, introduce wild complexity. One of the ideas I saw in a book the other day, and I like the author, I'm not going to mention his name, but he gives it as an example of how he lost weight. He got an exercise bicycle, he got a tv. He hired a mechanical engineer to wire his bicycle to his television so that the TV wouldn't run without electricity being generated by the bicycle. So if he wanted to watch an hour tv, he had to bicycle for an hour. And he didn't like to bicycle for more than an hour. He therefore reduced his addiction to watching tv. He didn't watch TV for more than an hour. I heard this solution. I thought, wow, that's brilliant. It's creative, it's innovative, it's resourceful, it shows tremendous initiative. I was in awe. I just thought it was the most amazing, beautiful thing. That was my first reaction. My second reaction is I can't imagine more than two people in the entire world doing that in any one year. And they're probably both fluent, if not rich, PhD professor types teaching at elite universities who have a lot of grad students around to help them with a project like this, looking for an anecdote to go into a book. In other words, it's completely useless advice for most people because it is so incredibly difficult and time consuming. It would take time to do that, money to do that, resources to do that. You have to have access to mechanical engineers that many people don't have. So to me, that's the perfect type of advice that you see in well reviewed, well respected, well written books about habits. And if you read it, it's interesting. But are you going to do that? I know I'm too lazy to do that. That's the big problem. And that's the big problem with so many articles and books and courses and workshops on habits is they introduce complexity after complexity, regression analysis, variables, charts that go into all sorts of quadrants. It's complex and it takes a tremendous amount of intellect to understand it. The sheer act of writing a book is an intellectual exercise. I understand that, as it should be. The sheer act of reading a book is an intellectual exercise. And I love that. But here's the big problem. Everyone else in the real world who is trying to influence you doesn't play that way. They don't try to get you to work hard. They don't ask you to use your intellect to understand complexity. No, they make it simple for you. Netflix says you just watched this Adam Sandler movie and liked it. Everybody who watched that Adam Sandler movie and liked it likes this Adam Sandler movie. With one click, you can start watching it right now. Not a lot of thought involved, not a lot of work. You don't have to hire a mechanical engineer to watch that next Adam Sandler movie. So we have this huge disconnect in the world. They're the experts who try to help people get better habits in their life. And I do think that they're sincere and I do think they're giving the best advice they can. But these experts stay within the realm of the intellect, the abstract, the complicated. They introduce more and more complex ideas. More work for someone to do. And the people who are really influencing our lives, the Kentucky Fried chickens of the world, and I realize they're called KFC. It's not called fried anymore. The McDonald's of the world, the Coca Colas of the world, the Facebooks of the world, the Instagrams, same parent company, Google, they are all saying, hey, TJ, don't think @ all. Don't work hard, just do this click, just buy this, just drink this Coke. It tastes really good. All of these corporations that are actually paid to influence don't ask us at all to use our brains and our intellectual. They make it simple, easy and non thinking. And that's my big problem with the whole habits industry is it goes deeper and deeper and deeper into more complexity with no evidence that that's how people change. They give lots of evidence, analyzing other things that work and don't work, but they're not actually simplifying things to help you and me change our behavior. That's how I'm trying to be different here. I love reading books on habits. I'll give you the best tidbits of all. But our focus here is on how to make your new habits come about in as easy a way as possible without thinking. Because that's the way to make new habits stick. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much for listening to that little rant on what's wrong with the habits industry. And I do this without any malice. I have yet to really uncover anyone in the habits niche that I thought was a charlatan or a con man. There are a lot of other personal development niches, the motivational inspirational and the health niche. Especially where I do think there are a lot of con men and con women and con people I guess we'll call them these days. I don't find that's one of the things that drew me to the habit. Space is it seems to be a place where people are much more focused on really helping people with less BS involved and that's what's attracted me to this place. But I still want to go deeper and figure out what is actually working and how can we magnify that to use on a regular basis. Let's check in with some of our friends on Instagram. Fortune Tribes has joined us, one of our regulars. Thank you so much. And by the way, Fortune Tribes has a great Instagram page. I would urge you after the show check out his page like so. And excuse me, I don't know if it's a him or her. I believe it's a him. He's got some wonderful images and content on his Instagram page, so please try that out. And Fortune says when, when do you do your exercise? In the morning, before or after writing. And you're awesome. Well, thank you. Fortunately, I appreciate it. I like to break. I don't really love to exercise. I love playing games, I love, love playing tennis. But I can't just wake up at five in the morning and play tennis. No one wants to play with me then. So I like to break up my exercise throughout the day. Fairly early in the morning, typically within the first 15 minutes, I'll do just 20 jumping jacks, fix some coffee, maybe do the writing. And then maybe right after that I'll do as many pull ups as I can for just a minute or less. And that's typically right now, not that many, but it gets things going. If I'm doing a writing project or making a course, I may take just a five minute break and go to my gym. And I realize not everyone has a home gym, but you don't need a whole gym or room, just a couple of weights or a couple of things. So I go to my gym in my house and I'll lift weights on a very inexpensive like universal weight machine machine and a few dumbbells. I only lift weights for five minutes a day, but I do it seven days a week. So I have a number of little things like that. If it's the middle of the afternoon and I just want to stand up and stretch, I'll walk from my office 10ft over or 20ft over to my gym and I'll do push ups with the perfect push up machine because if I just use my hands sometimes that can harm my wrist. So I try to break it up throughout the day. Now what I do like to do, it's a little harder. Wintertime today it's 20, it's 30 degrees Fahrenheit. It was 18 when I woke up. There's still a lot of ice on the ground so I probably won't go for my afternoon walk. What I like to do is finish work in my office no later than 3:59pm and then be out the door going for an hour long walk at 4 4pm so that's just me. You may want to try Fortune, a completely different system. You may want to just get up, do your exercise for a solid 30, 40, 60 minutes first thing in the morning. You may be someone who wants to and needs to go to a gym and be a part of a class. Do that. I'm not a big fan of gyms because I just don't think most people are going to go to a gym regularly for the rest of their life. When I look at people in their 90s who are healthy, trim, active and seem like they have their wits about them, it's typically they're not saying, it's, well, I go to the gym three times a week and I drive across town or it's in my retirement. That's typically not what they say. They typically say, I love gardening, I love walking, I love playing outside with my grandchildren, maybe fishing. They're active, they're walking to places, they're walking out to dinner in their village. So to me it's incredibly important to find things you enjoy. You've got to find activities you enjoy or it has to be such a small amount of time that it doesn't bother you. It makes it easy. So that's what I do. I don't particularly enjoy doing running, for example, but I run every day. But here's how I trick myself into doing it. I run at a very fast pace, 10 miles an hour, but I only do it for 60 seconds. Now let me point out again, I'm not a medical doctor and as one of our friends from TikTok was asking me, are you a doctor? Absolutely not. I'm not telling you to run 10 miles an hour every day. For you it might be bad medical advice, but I do it. It gives me a lot of energy. I feel good, I feel like I've accomplished it. Gets my heart rate up, is it as good as doing it for 20 minutes? No. But it's so easy for me to motivate myself to run for 60 seconds a day because the second I get on the treadmill, it's almost over. It's less time than I take flossing my teeth so I can tell myself, you know, is my whole body, my heart, my legs really less important than my teeth, my gums? No, of course not. So it's easy for me to motivate myself to run for 60 seconds a day on my treadmill. You need to find something that's easy, either easy for you or fun for you, that you will do. I've certainly read from some health experts that all things being equal, you're better off exercising first thing in the morning. You have more energy, you're less likely to come up with an excuse as to why you can't do it. Other complications in life haven't taken over. There are fewer demands on your attention from calls, clients, customers, family, and you sort of start the day off with a big accomplishment. So I do find some credibility to that. But I think what's far more important is you fortune picking some routine that you could stick with. It's a lot better for you to exercise 10 o' clock at night if you don't go to bed till one and you do it every single day than to try to force yourself into doing it. Well, everyone says you got to exercise at point some 7am, so I'll do it at 7am if that's not when you want to exercise, you'll come up with good excuses as to why you shouldn't exercise at 7am so why bother? Why put all that pressure on you? It's so much more important to exercise. I'm guilty of this. A lot of people are. If you fixate on little details, we're missing the big picture. The big picture is find some form of exercise you can do every day. It's a lot more important than what time of day it is. That's what's more important. Now, certainly there's a school of thought that says, well, you need to only you only need to exercise three times a week. Here's my problem with the three times a week or something I used to do, which is weightlifting once a week is if I don't do it every day, I'll forget about it and I'll never do it. So I try to get as many of my habits as possible down to something I can really put on as a daily requirement. I know it's coming every day I hear my selfie speak audio telling myself I'm going to do it every day. I hold myself accountable with my checklist every day. And I know, for example, that I want to who walk 12,500 steps a day. I don't do that first thing that I get up. I try to actively look for ways to take as many steps as possible throughout the day. If later today I'm going to take my daughter and wife bowling, I will try to park further away from the front door. Most people spend their time driving around wasting time trying to get a parking space as close to the mall entrance or the store door entrance as possible. I try to go further away in the parking lot. Maybe not the furthest away, but I try to go further away because now I'm adding to my step count and I'm always looking for ways I may walk around the house more. I may take two trips to take something from my main office to this TV studio. I'm building steps. So that's how I do it. Doesn't mean it's right for you, doesn't mean it's the perfect way. But I think most medical doctors and health experts would say that if you had a choice between walking with the average American does 6,000 steps. I don't know what it is in your country, but most people around the world don't walk enough. Many medical experts recommend 10,000 steps a day, although there's no hard evidence saying that's the magic number. I have arbitrarily picked the number of 12,500 steps a day. For me, about more than six miles just makes me feel good and I can do it and I like it and it gives me a sense of accomplishment. Let's check in with a couple of our other friends. Fortune writes, even I hate the gym. I do only body weight exercises using only body weight. If that works for you, fine. Again, because I'm lazy. If I use very heavy weights, I use a system. Tim Ferriss talks about this in the Four Hour Body. Others have written it. It's a type of exercise with weights where you have a heavy enough weight, where you can only do eight reps. You're doing everything in a super slow motion, like 10 seconds up, 10 seconds down to the point of exhaustion after 8 reps. I do find that that's the most efficient way of lifting weights. And if you really do it where you're totally slow and never jerking anything, it's extraordinarily difficult to injure yourself or tear the muscles. Excessively again, I'm not a doctor. I'm not telling you to do that. But that's why people like it. Where people hurt themselves is, you know, quick actions and falling and trying to use weights that they just can't handle at all without cheating. That's where people get injured the most. So that's the system I like for weights. So Fortune says that he does use weights. And Marceau, if you could scroll either up or down, I'm not sure I got okay. Success and Law of Attraction has joined us. Thank you so much for writing and certainly the Law of Attraction is a concept that excites a lot of people. I'm happy to talk about that from time to time. We're coming up at the end of our show today, but we certainly spend an entire two hour day talking about the Law of Attraction, certainly the Secret, the movie that really popularized it in the last dozen years or so. It was one of the breakthrough successes from a marketing and PR standpoint for anything in the self development world. I certainly remember all of the stars of the Secret talking about the Laws of Attraction on Oprah and Larry King and the book and the movie and I have seen it all. We will spend some time talking about that in the future. Eddie writes, Ann has joined us. Fortune Tribes is big on TikTok says mentions TikTok. Yes, it is a fun, fun place. Really. Today was awesome with your ideas, sir. Thanks so much and I appreciate you being polite calling me sir. I realize that that's just standard in some cultures. To me it makes me feel a little too stiff and formal. So just feel free to call me tj. But I'm not offended by anyone calling me sir. I'm TJ Walker and I want to thank each and every one of you for joining me today. It's been a lot of fun. I've had a good time. I hope you've had a good time. I hope we've all learned a little and been able to share. I see that Gavin has written it. Love your videos. Well, Gavin, thank you so much. I'm assuming you're talking about the videos on TikTok. He's, he's writing to us from the TikTok platform and it is a lot of fun doing TikTok videos because they're only 15 seconds now. You can do one minute ones, but the TikTok algorithm really favors the short 15 seconds. And not to pat myself on the back because I'm often slow. And I remember Twitter came out. I thought why would anyone ever waste their time on that. So with the caveat of I've often been wrong about new media and social media, my first thought with TikTok was it's just for kids, it's 15 seconds seems like a waste of time. But I tried it. I tried it and what I found was that I got more interesting comments, questions, insightful feedback from the TikTok audience than any other social media platform these days. So I'm glad I did it. And that's why I've continued to post at least one video, sometimes two, sometimes three or four, every single day for the last three months. So I appreciate your feedback and Gavin, it's nice being on the TikTok community because the community is so supportive and nice. And I've been on YouTube for more than a dozen years. In the early days when I wasn't just talking about personal development, but also talking about politics. The viciousness, the vitriol, the ugliness of the comments. Overwhelming sometimes and I can understand why some people were afraid to do it. In my entire time on TikTok, with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views, I've had one comment that really, it wasn't even that negative. It was just someone saying, why are you giving a beauty tip implying I'm not very beautiful? And I think the person may have just been trying to be friendly. But other than that, the comments have been overwhelmingly positive, nurturing and supportive. So TikTok, I support you and I appreciate you very much. So I definitely hope to be coming back to you every single day with at least one new 15 second video. Because you know what, it's only 15 seconds. And that's why I would urge to all of you, if you think you're not creative, try TikTok video. You can be creative for 15 seconds. You don't have to do my memes, you don't have to sing, you don't have to be perfect on anything. You can just share your philosophy on something and share a tip. I get sometimes more than 10,000 views a day on my TikTok videos. Nothing entertaining, there's no music. I'm not lip syncing. I'm just giving personal development habits tips. If I can do it, you can too. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much for joining me. Please tune in Tomorrow, same time, 1pm Eastern time, New York time till 3pm if that time doesn't work for you, then please send an email with your question or post on any of my social media places, your questions, comments, Social media and right here tomorrow. Thanks. This is a chicken beef production.