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

Okay, Go live to this. All right. And we are going back to TJ in 1, 2, 3. And you're back. Welcome back to the Habit Influencer. I'm TJ Walker, your host. This is hour two of the live program. We are coming to you live around the world on about 20 different live streaming platforms, including Facebook, Periscope, YouTube, and you name it. We are trying to be there. All that and you. Your calls, your comments, your videos, your emails, your texts sent in. You can communicate with us any way you choose. If you want to introduce new concepts for us to discuss, questions about habits or other aspects of personal development and communication, we are here for you. A lot of big news to talk about in hour two, plus some deep dive segments. Every single show, at least once, sometimes twice in an hour, I'll do a deep dive in a particular subject. Coming up later this hour, doing a deep dive on these cell phones. Is it time to get off? Are you sick and tired of not being able to have a real conversation with a real human being looking them in the eyes anymore? Because they aren't doing this the whole time, ignoring you? We'll be talking specifically about tips for weaning yourself off of cell phone addiction and other tips for digital hygiene. All that and more. But first, our big topic for this hour. Topic C. Are you building your creative muscles every single day? There's a huge myth out there that you're either born creative or not. You're either Beethoven making compositions at age 3 or you're someone who's just destined to work in a backroom office, punching holes in things, doing boring stuff. Well, guess what? That's not how it is. Creativity is something anybody can get better at. Creativity is a habit. It's not something like being born with blue eyes or brown eyes. It is a habit. The more you do it, the stronger it gets, the more you cultivate it. If you tell yourself you're not very creative, well, that's the first habit you need to break right there. You've got to stop telling yourself that you are not creative. Your brain listens to what you tell it, whether you're thinking that or actually saying it out loud. If you keep telling yourself you're creative, you're not creative, you will be less creative. Now we're all guilty of this from time to time. In the past, I've said to others and myself, oh, I'm not good at names. I don't remember names. Well. Well, every time you tell yourself you are not good at remembering names, you are programming your brain to not remember names. Stop it. If you want to be more creative, you need to tell yourself that you are more creative. Now I happen to be fortunate enough, lucky enough, however you want to ascribe it, to be able to make a living, have a nice life, see the world, travel the globe, work with interesting people all over the world by creating. I create books, I create 140 online courses, I create shows like this. Every single day I create 15 second videos that go out on places like TikTok and oh, I forgot our TikTok friends. I told you Marceau, we'll have to edit this part out for the produced segment. Marceau, I told you I was going to connect. We lost our live connection with our TikTok friends and I just realized I was leaving all of them out of the conversation. So I'm going to just take one minute and connect with our TikTok friends again. Yeah. So welcome back to our TikTok friends. So a part of my creative output is every single day I create a 15 second video that goes out on TikTok and Instagram and Snapchat and LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter. Every single day. Through the help of my team here in Marceau, I create a new 7 to 10 minute video that goes out on websites all over the world. Every day I create a two hour live show to share with you. Every single day I create five hundred to a thousand words that I write on some personal development topic. Whether it is habits or communication skills, I'm creating every single day. Am I in danger of putting da Vinci out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Loop? No, it's not that kind of creation. But I am creating and it's a lot of fun and it's interesting and it pays rather nicely too. All things being equal, I find every human being loves to be creative, would love to be more creative and is looking for more ways of being creative. It's only when we tell ourselves it's not possible that we shut that down. So I want to share with you. Some of this will be mundane, some of this may seem trite, some of this is going to sound silly, but it works for me. It helps create the creative lifestyle that I want and have and enjoy. I'm going to share with you at least 39 things I do every single day to spur creativity, to generate more creativity. Pick and choose as you like. You can do all of these, some of these, none of these. But it's just something I hope gets you thinking about increasing your own creativity. For starters, I Write a journal every single day. Now, my journaling is different from others. I typically just write two, three sentences on whatever the biggest thing that happened. This is stuff entirely personal. This is not something I'm going to share with anyone. This is personal stuff. That's what it's all about and that's what I want to share with you is just the idea of writing stuff down just for you. Tim Ferriss is a big believer of this. The Artist Way came out in about 1980. It really popularized the idea that artists should be creating words just for themselves in daily journals. They call them daily papers in the artist's way. Just writing and writing, whatever you think of. Some recommend doing it for 10, 15 minutes. I do it shorter. But I write a lot of other things to generate creativity every single day. This next item some of you have heard me talk about. I write a poem every single day. Are they good poems? No. Am I going to replace Dr. Seuss anytime soon? No. I write a simple haiku, five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables on whatever it is I'm thinking every single day. And it just forces me to use a slightly different piece of my brain. And that gets me just thinking a little more creatively, using words in a different way, counting beats in a little different way. And I find that that helps me a lot. One thing I have on my to do list every single day is to simply think about how to build better daily habits than anyone else in the world. Now there are a lot of wildly respected experts, authors, psychologists, in the field of habits. I don't think I'm being insecure if I say I'm not the single biggest expert in the world on habits right now. But I force myself every single day to think about new habits so that I can ultimately reach that goal of being the number one habits expert in the world. So it's something I have on my checklist that I think about and check off every single day. This next one I think you will like. I read one joke per day and there's a gazillion different apps and, and they're free. This takes about 5 seconds, sometimes 10 seconds. But I go to the app and I read a joke and I get a little chuckle. Am I trying to be a stand up comedian? No, I'm trying to be more creative. And part of any joke is surprise. Looking at things from a different perspective, sending someone down this way and now they're this way. So I read a joke every day, single day. This next one I have written down. Reflect for 10 seconds on the fact that I am creative and I have a bunch of other things. I say loving, talented, wonderful. I have a whole bunch of lists of positive things. And it's simply a to do item where I say, reflect for 10 seconds on this. And then I check it off so I'm actually reflecting. And I realize this can sound egocentric, it can sound weird, but it's all for the purpose of building my creative muscle. This habit of thinking of myself as more creative and actively creating more. It's a simple thing. Again, that's another one that takes 10 seconds. This next one. Visualization. A lot of personal development experts talk about visualization. I tell myself, visualize all of your long term goals being 100% achieved. And I list a bunch of them and some of them are specifically creative. I talk specifically about my goal of creating the world's largest and most influential live daily show, this thing we're on here. I talk specifically about creating a book that reaches a very wide audience starting in 2021, a new book every year. These are creative goals of mine. And I look at this every single day. I remind myself of my goals every single day. This next one may strike some of you as odd, but I actually have, as a to do note, play a game every day. On Sundays, I play tennis. It's fun. It uses the brain in a different way. It keeps me physically active. That makes you more mentally alert to be more creative. But on a day when I'm not playing tennis, I just go to my phone and I use a particular app called wordscapes. It's a simple free app and you have to rearrange letters to make words. Here's the one I did today. A child can do it, but it's a different way of thinking. You have to think of words. Spelling it typically is something that takes two minutes. It's faster to me than a crossword puzzle. It's certainly a lot faster than playing World of Warcraft or whatever the video games are. But it's something fun. It's having to think about letters and words and meaning in slightly different ways. And I find that it just helps me feel more creative. I have to create words out of the raw material of letters. And at some point all creation is the same. You're trying to make combinations with things that no one saw them working together before previously. That's really all creativity is combining things that were not previously combined in ways that are either useful, interesting or artistic. That's all creativity is. So the more you do it, the better you get. I also write one joke a day. Now. Sometimes this is one of the slower things. I like to watch stand up comedy and if I'm watching Netflix at night, it's typically for one hour of stand up comedy. I like the fact that it's shorter and I like the faster payoff with jokes. Quite often that motivates me to write my own jokes. I'm not performing stand up comedy anywhere. I don't know if I ever will, but I'm pretty sure I won't go to my deathbed saying I hated the fact that I spent 30 seconds a day writing a joke. By trying to create humor, it makes it easier for me to see humor everywhere. It makes me appreciate good humor, makes me appreciate more comedians and their output and respect their craft. And it's obviously a creative endeavor making people laugh. I also write one Question of the Day. Those of you who are regulars on my Facebook page or Twitter or LinkedIn, you're seeing these I post a question of the Day. It's a question I want to answer myself, that I want to think about myself. But I also think that you might want to reflect on it too. So I have to create this question of the day. That's something I write down every single day. Something else that I think helps create more creativity is optimism. I have as a to do item, what is it you are optimistic about right now? If you're not optimistic about the future, it's very hard to be creative. You can't start a new play, a new company, a new software program if you're not optimistic it's going to be successful. So building that habit of being optimistic about something for the future is an important, crucial skill when it comes to building your creativity. The next item on my list that I think helps with my creativity, I limit myself severely to reading the news just 30 minutes in the morning. In the past, I got into a bad habit of sometimes reading news for two hours, sometimes three hours. Saturday or Sunday morning I could spend four hours reading news. And for what? I'm not a news commentator anymore. I'm not in the news business anymore. I'm not gaining more by doing four hours of news consumption. I limit it to 30 minutes. Now I have more time to read creative books, occasional novels, to consume other arts works of art. So it stimulates that creativity. Another item every single day I have on my to do list that I'm going to read a book, an actual book, for one hour before bed every single night when I'm reading books. It stimulates creativity in a way that simply watching a movie, even a great movie, doesn't do. The most creative people in the world, I find, doesn't matter what field they're in, they read the most. Yes, there are exceptions. Gary Vaynerchuk famously doesn't read books. Certain artists don't read books, certain musicians don't read books. But they are consuming 20 hours of music a day, so they're learning in other ways. I also listen to my own selfie speak program, the audio recording I make for myself, essentially a podcast for me, telling myself what habits I want. In this audio program. I tell myself I'm creative in all the things I'm talking about here in my checklist. I tell myself that in the audio program. So I'm reinforcing very, very specific ways that I'm going to be creative. Every day I learn one new word. Every day takes five seconds. I just go to a free app and it helps think of new ways of learning. And it's sending a message to my brain that I must keep learning. You cannot create new stuff if you're not learning new stuff. I read one aphorism per day, one insightful quote, and I do that by going to about three different quote sites, apps. There's no particular one I recommend. I draw one piece of artwork every day, often faces, typically on an iPad on a phone. I'm not a very good artist. I'm ashamed to show you most of my artwork, but I'm not ashamed of the fact that I spend 60 seconds a day drawing. It's exercising a different creative muscle that has gotten pretty weak and flabby since I was a kid in grade school. I've not done a lot of artwork, but I have been drawing daily for the last year. And it's fun. It is something I sometimes do with my daughter or I'll show a picture drawn of her and she laughs at it and says how awful it is. But it's a fun, fun time. Something else I do to stimulate creativity that I find a wildly high percentage of great creative people do. I meditate every day. By meditating, clearing your brain only ten minutes a day. Getting rid of all other thoughts creates the space for future creative ideas to pop out later that day. Every single day I try to write. One tip. Thought of the day. It's a little longer than an aphorism. It's a suggestion I have on how to live better, how to have stronger habits, but it's forcing me to write and think about how other people perceive this. This is something I put out on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and all the other places that you may have seen me. And I also write an aphorism. I write my own quote, my own philosophical thought of the day. I put that out every single day. Are they all brilliant winners that are going to stand the test of time and people will be quoting me 100 years from now? No, but it's still working my creative muscle. And out of the 365aphorisms I write this year, I think there are going to be a dozen or so that I might be proud of in a couple of years or maybe five or 10 years. And some of those are continued to pass around. Now, the single most important creative muscle I use every single day is when I first get up. I write 500 to 1000 words every single day. Now I like to dictate right into my phone. You might like to type. There's no one perfect way. But that forces me. That's one concentrated, concentrated time of creativity. And I'm doing this. It's dark out, typically before anyone else in the house is awake. There's no calls, there's no texting. It's just I can concentrate 500 words and sometimes it only takes 10 minutes. I might spend 50 minutes. I don't worry about the time. It's often 5:45 in the morning. But I'm going to get those 500 words that I'm going to create. Something else I do in part in preparation for this show is I read, I say a minimum of 15 minutes. It's likely to be a half an hour or more. All the other blogs on creativity and habit acquisition, so I'm constantly doing research. Those are all the things I do just in the morning. I have a number of other habits I do every single day in the evening to also spur creativity. I give myself a minimum of reading one book per day. Sometimes it's a digital book. I also listen to an audio book every day. Sometimes it's a complete paper book, but I find the more creative I am is a function of how many other ideas I absorb. The fastest way to absorb ideas for me, reading. You might like listening to audio, but I like reading. Although I do listen typically to one audiobook summary every single day. Something else that stimulates my creativity, having a clean desk. I completely clean my desk every single day at the end of the day by not having distractions around, it allows me to focus on new ideas and not be worried. Everything else. So these are some of the things I do. Another one is I try to watch A video every day, just a two minute video to learn some new skill. It could be how do you communicate more effectively on TikTok? It could be something eminently practical. How long do you spend boiling squid or cooking octopus? It could be something cooking related. But I try to learn one new skill every day in a video format. I also try to look at one piece of art each day. It could be from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it could be from anywhere. And I'm just doing this very quickly on the Internet, typically on my iPad. I also take one photo a day. Now I don't consider myself a great photojournalist or photograph photo artist, but I find if I force myself to take one photo a day once a week, there'll be one that I kind of like that I think is interesting. And again it's just, it's another creative outlet. Creativity begets creativity. The more you create, the more you create. I make one short 15 second video every day for TikTok and all the other social media platforms that take in short media videos. These are the things that I do that and the final one I listening to one abridged book every single day, the audio version of it. So I believe that adds up to actually more than 39 tips. This is what I do every single day to boost my creative habit. You don't have to do all of them or any of them, but you've got to do something otherwise your creative muscle will rot. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. I'd like to know how you improve your own creative muscles. You've heard from me, there's no one perfect way dancers. If you're Twyla Tharp, you improve your dancing by dancing every single day. Dancing is not one area that I spend a lot of time. Every now and then I'll get my wife and daughter together, we'll put up a YouTube video of learning some new dance. But six months can go by and I haven't done that. So I want to know what specific habits do you employ ideally on a daily basis to make yourself more creative? Post your questions, post your comments. And Marceau, I do realize I then I accidentally chopped off our good friends on TikTok again. So I'm going to try to get them back. They are on a different. They are not able to get us from our main feed. So I'm going to put them back here so we don't, so we don't leave them out. And we'll give just a second for them to hop back on. So let's check in with social media. We have a lot of good friends joining us today from TikTok, from Facebook, from YouTube, Instagram and a lot of other new websites, at least new to me, live social media streaming sites. So wherever you are, please just give us a quick thumbs up. Let us know where you're from. If you are a first time viewer and listener, let us know what city and country you're in. We have a very cosmopolitan audience here. We are not giving habits that are specific to any one culture or country. I may occasionally say something you think, well, that doesn't work in our culture or TJ's culturally insensitive. Just realize I'm not telling you how to live your life. I do often share with you things I'm doing in my life and you can decide whether it works for you or not. You're going to have to filter everything to the prism of your own culture, your own ethics, your own standards and beliefs. Let's check in and see who we have here on the live chat. Fortune gives us a thumbs up. Good to see you Rasin. Hamas is with us. Rasma Success and Law of Attraction is with us today. Believe you've been here before. Thanks and good to hear from you. At some point we'll do a little deeper dive into Law of Attraction. Since that's in your name, I'm going to take a wild stab that you are a big fan of Law of Attraction. So I would love to hear you. I won't say defend, no one's on trial here, but give yourself perspective on the Law of Attraction. That will be something we definitely talk about on this show from time to time. We have 1761 Dorothy with us, u5219 Jean Terrie Nan is with us. And by the way, Marcel, what platform is this from? I'm not recognizing Up Live. Up Live. So we have lots and lots of new friends joining us on Up Live Today and confession. I don't think I've ever been to Up Live so I really appreciate you spending a minute or two with us if this is your first time here. My name is TJ Walker and this is a show specifically devoted to habits. How to build good habits, how to take everything you hear from all these sources of personal development, self help, weed out the stuff that's just fluff, figure out what's most important. Then how do you really hammer it down to the habits? What are the specific tips, tricks, tactics, hacks to turn good ideas and aspirations into actual habits? That's what this show is about so on the and forgive me, I messed up the name already. Not ustream, not Live stream. What's Up Live. Okay, Up Live, our friends joining us on Up Live, including Jean, Terry, Nam, Function 22 and up live ABCX has joined us again. And good to see you back from yesterday. ABC SAI's with us as well as Alex Ramirez. And we have Vapu Kalish has joined us on TikTok. So happy to see our TikTok friends back. Forgive me, we cut you off earlier because of some broadcast technical issues. We're hoping to get that all streamlined so you can see us through the main feed. So you can't see me looking at you now. I'm looking what seems to be off in the distance. I'm looking in the main camera and we hope to get you back on that feed very soon. Checking in on Facebook, Mohammad has joined us and he says I'm optimistic about my new teaching profession. Well, Muhammad, congratulations. If you have a new job, we'd love to know more about it. What exactly is it you're teaching if you care to share that with the community? William J. O'Reilly has joined us. William, good to hear from you. I believe this is the William who I think came to one of my in person workshops or seminars, oh, a dozen or more years ago when I maintained a full time training studio in Manhattan. So if that is the same William, great to hear from you again. Hope you're doing well. And I do see your social media posts from time to time as well. And this is we also have Sai joining us who's one of our absolute top fans and community. I don't really like the word fan because it says fanatic and it makes it sound almost demeaning. One of our top community members. What I'm trying to do is create community here of people who really care about habits, sharing with other people, connecting with other people and improving their life and the lives of everyone else. That's what we're here for. In a moment, I'm going to switch to our topic D of the day on cell phones. But before we do, quick question to Marceau. Are we okay technically? I know we've had a couple of rough bumps. I'm seeing a frozen screen. Have we lost our connection? Marceau and maybe Marceau can't hear me. Marceau, can you hear okay, so have we lost a connection? Because I'm seeing darkness whereas I normally see a live feed. It's refreshing to show me. Okay, so let's switch over. We may have Lost one feed. But we have our good friends at TikTok. So happy to see Anderson saying hello. Hello from San Francisco. One of my favorite cities. Been there, oh, probably a dozen times. I was just there two years ago with my wife, and for the first time, all the times I'd been there, I'd never been over the Golden Gate Bridge. And we got one of those electric bikes, and forgive me if that sounds physically lazy, but the hills are so sharp on the other side. Took one of the electric bikes all the way across the Golden Gate Bridge to the little beautiful towns over there. Not Carmel, Sausalito. Beautiful little town there. So lovely, lovely area where you are in San Francisco. So Anderson's with us. Sandra has joined us. We have Baya Fine has joined us as well. We're here again talking about personal development, specifically habits. And I think we have our live feedback for all of our other friends as well. Want to hop right into. Want to hop into our final big topic of the day? Topic D. Put your cell phone away. I have some bad news for you. You're not that important. The world will not come to an end if you are not staring at your phone every two seconds, checking every single text that comes in, every single email, every notification from Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter. And believe me, I love it that you've got your phone in your hand now and you're on TikTok watching this show. I don't want to sound like a hypocrite, but we as human beings have to make some harsh priorities. And I do believe as much as I love technology, as much as I love cell phones, it should not come at the expense of actual human relationships. And we're at the point now where the cell phone has become a barrier between human beings. This was the topic of discussion on today's TikTok video, the 15 second video where I didn't have time to elaborate, but I'm telling you, put your phone away. Stop checking your phone so often. Depending on what source you believe, the average American checks his or her cell phone 160 times a day. That's too many times. Yes, I check my cell phone and my cell phones on right now because I'm broadcasting to our friends at TikTok. But there comes a point when it's too much of a good thing. If you're trying to have a family dinner and nobody's talking to each other, that's a problem. If you're going to a family reunion and people have traveled two hours to get together for a big Family dinner, all the kids and all the adults are on their cell phones ignoring. People are kind of sort of saying, hey, how are you doing? Good to see you. What's the point of getting together? What's the point of even meeting? Why not just have everyone stay on a little pod in their room, or a pod like in the Matrix movie, and just stay in a little pod all day long and never actually talk to a human being face to face? Now, I mentioned this today on TikTok, and one of the responses was, okay, Boomer, yes, you can deride this as just an old timer saying, you kids get off my lawn. But I ask you, whether you're 14 years old, 20 years old, 23 years old, if you ever want to get married, for example, do you want someone proposing to you through a text? If your parents die, do you want to just hear about it through a text on your cell phone? The most important human communication, I believe, needs to be face to face. And if it's not face to face, you need to see the person. And I do understand and respect the value of things like facetime video and Skype video for communication. You can't be there. It is the next best thing. I love it when I'm traveling in a foreign country to be able to talk to my daughter and my wife on FaceTime video where we actually see ourselves. But there has to be a time when you put the cell phone away, and this idea of, I can't possibly be without a phone for a second or my head will burst into flame is a big problem. Is a big, big problem. Now, something I talk about a lot on this show is the need for digital detox. I have certain segments of every day where I am not anywhere near a cell phone. I highly recommend it to you. I. I guarantee you, unless you're an emergency room surgeon and people are going to die if they can't get you in five minutes, nothing bad is going to happen to you by being away from your cell phone for a couple hundred thousand years. Until one or two decades ago, every single human being got along perfectly fine without cell phones. Nothing bad happened. There were some things that were different. People actually got a lot more sleep. Tolstoy didn't have any cell phones. He had 12 kids, and he wrote War and Peace and a dozen other books, in part because he didn't spend all of his time texting and checking Instagram every two seconds. And I love Instagram and I'm glad you watch my videos there. But he didn't spend every two Seconds on social media, refreshing Yahoo News, and looking at 10,000 Twitter updates every second of the day. He actually used what little free time he had as a father of 12 to write books. So I'm asking, and I'm guilty of this too, sometimes, really ask yourself, when's the last time I picked up this phone? Do I really need this phone? Or am I hoping for just that quick dopamine fix of that? 1 out of 50 times when there's an interesting email from a fun friend or a great new client or someone who wants to hire me and take me to exotic locations, because that's one out of 50, sometimes one out of 500 emails and the rest spam, garbage, nonsense, ordinary business stuff that if you waited 24 hours, it wouldn't matter. So why are you checking the email every 10 minutes? Or sometimes every 10 seconds? You hear about the smartest, richest, wealthiest people in the world who live in Silicon Valley, who are the creators of all these Internet companies being so vigilant, not letting their kids have phones at any age. Maybe when they're 30, but they don't give their kids phones, they don't give their kids iPads. Steve Jobs famously did not want his kid to have any of these things because they believed they were addictive. They formed habits that took over your brain. And if you want to be creative, if you want to have purpose in life, if you want to be successful, you have to take control of your own brain. As much as I appreciate you listening to me and watching me today, it doesn't matter. It doesn't help you at all. If you don't. Then carve out some time for yourself. Put your phone away at some point today, turn off all the screens and just think. Every day at 4 o' clock, I go for a walk. Typically one hour to 75 minutes long. No cell phone. I don't mean I put the cell phone on vibrate and walk. No, because then I'd be tempted to pick it up, make a note to myself, and oh, I would see an email or a text, destroy my ability to digitally detox. I don't mean I take my phone and I turn it off in case there's an emergency and I could call for help. I mean, I literally leave my phone at home. Emerson went for walks, Thoreau went for walks, Walt Whitman took for walks every single day. Didn't seem to hurt their careers that they didn't have cell phones. So walking is a great way of really being able to think clearly. Get away, free your mind and get away from the cell phone. And I'm not trying to get rid of cell phones. I would be very upset if you came and took my cell phone and just gave me a phone that I had in 1980. But there has to be limits. It's too much of a good thing. So my challenge to you, can you go for an even an hour without looking at your cell phone? Are you even capable of enjoying a movie or a TV show or a Netflix at your home without checking a phone the whole time? Can you just relax and look at one thing at a time? Can you have a family dinner or a friendly conversation or a date if you're single and not be thinking about, oh, I can't talk to this person anymore, there's gotta be something better on my phone. If that's the situation, you have a problem. We all have a problem. The phone is taking over control. It has become our number one habit. And as liberating and as powerful as it is to have the world's greatest supercomputer in our fingertips and access to every piece of information and every bit of knowledge and every bit of art ever created, it's all wonderful. As wonderful as it is to have your own printing press, your own TV studio, your own radio studio at your fingertips. And it's all of those things. And it's a tremendous wealth generator. It's also something that will completely take over every inch of your brain and your psyche and your soul until there's nothing left left. You must become the master of your cell phone. You cannot let the cell phone become your master. If you do that, you have consigned yourself to a lifetime of slavery. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. That's my sort of meditation on cell phones. I want to share with you some insights from others recently looking at cell phones. And feel free to share with me how you think the proper use of cell phones should be. Certainly, I think any fair minded, rational person would say checking your cell phone 160 times a day is just futile. There's no good that could possibly happen from that. If you have some relationship that's dependent on you getting back to that person within five seconds versus an hour, chances are you've got a very flawed, dangerous relationship. How do you use cell phone? How do you like to use it with friends, family, colleagues? If you're in a meeting and you're trying to give a speech or presentation, people are on their cell phone. Does that strike you as a polite habit, a helpful habit, a useful habit? I'll tell you what I do when I'm giving a speech, I never chastise anyone. I'm never rude to anyone. But when I see someone is pulling up their cell phone, I'll do several things. I may walk right over to them. They're used to speakers staying in one spot behind a lectern. I'll just walk right over to the person. Typically, they'll put it away. Or I may reference them by name if I see someone. If I see Jim in this corner is on his cell phone, I may walk to the other corner of the room and say, you know, I was talking to Jim about this issue earlier, before we started, and he was telling me, I'll reference some snippet of a conversation, and when Jim hears his name, he'll put his phone down. I may occasionally give the person extra eye contact or walk right up to them and smile. In some cases, I've gone up and I've just not looked mean, not looked angry, not looked annoyed. I'll just stop a little bit of a smile on my face and look. And typically, what happens is the person next to the person with a cell phone will do one of these. Let's hit them with the elbow, and it brings them back. Because I do think it's profoundly rude to get on your cell phone when someone is speaking to you. If it's that important, get up, go out of the room and make a phone call, or do something, but don't ruin the environment for everyone else. That's what I believe. There's a school of thought that says, oh, T.J. okay, Boomer, you're just an old fuddy duddy, and everyone today is completely competent at multitasking. And everyone can listen to you process that and be typing text the entire time. Okay, but have you seen the statistics of how many people die every single day doing that on the highway? All the statistical evidence shows that human beings are horrible at multitasking. You can focus on your phone or you can focus on a conversation with a real human being. You can't really do both at the same time. You can't do it. Well, right now, I want to focus on my friends on TikTok. I see that El Banglas has joined us. Okay, so, sorry. I got carried away there and didn't see you. So let me scroll back up here and see who I missed, how far I've gone up here. So lots of comments about cell phones. All right. Anderson says, I'm a big fan of your work. Well, thank you. I do appreciate that. Appreciate the kind Words I spend over eight hours a day on my iPhone. How can I get this time to go down? Well, Anderson, I'm going to hope and assume it's two hours a day watching this show and there's six more you do. The biggest recommendation I have is you have to specifically carve out time when it's just away from you and it's not around and it's not on and you're not tempted. If it's right next to you, you're going to use it. Biggest recommendation I have, go for a walk and leave it at home. It will feel painful at first. You can do it. If you're going to go to the movies, leave it in the car. Something I do now I didn't used to do. When I go to a dinner party with friends, it's Friday night, Saturday night. I don't have clients calling me in an emergency. No one gets booked for a speech at 11 o' clock at night on Saturday night. So I do not take my phone into a party so I can actually talk to human beings. So I would recommend you have specific times of the day where you know it's going to be off for a walk. Turn the phone off one hour before you go to bed. So many people, they're just looking at things in emails and texts right before they go to bed and then they don't get a good night's sleep. It's horrible for your sleep patterns. So that will help and I'm going to give you, if we don't run out of time, a few more tips from other experts on how to reduce your cell phone usage. Anderson says, one day I spent over 12 hours on my phone, so that is a big problem. I'm glad you're monitoring it. That's the first step. Most people don't do that. And Renee says thanks for the advice. Refreshing to disconnect every day for a little while or a lot. Something else I do after my walk, I typically will have what I like to call hot tub therapy. I turn the hot tub on full blast, the bubbles full blast. I don't let a cell phone in the hot tub room. I don't have a cell phone at the dinner table. I don't have a cell phone in the bedroom ever. Nothing bad has ever happened in my life. By keeping the cell phone out, we'll play it live. That was Marceau writing. Okay. I found more opportunities from the online world versus the offline world. Renee, so you're right, it is tempting. You can talk to people, you can get sucked into Facebook as your only social outlet and just talk to people on a cell phone all the time. But at some point, it's not as satisfying as real human contact for most people. I'm not telling you you shouldn't spend some time connecting with friends on Facebook. I do. It's a great way of connecting. I have nieces and nephews and sisters in North Carolina. I don't get there very often, so it's nice to see their pictures and connect. At some point, you got to really put the phone down, talk to real human beings, read a real book, think, write on a computer screen or a piece of paper. You can't do that while consuming stuff on phones. And Jorgens has joined us. Thanks. Anderson says, I'm addicted to my phone. I spend 12 hours. Here's a great suggestion that I don't use. T. Blanglish says, I go fishing and hunting many days. I found that sounds like a great way to get away. Personally, I get bored too quickly to fish and I've really never done hunting. But I'm from the south and a lot of people I know absolutely love. My next door neighbor here in New York, loves to go deer hunting in upstate, sometimes brings us back venison. And he definitely does not take his cell phone with him. So that's, that's a great way of doing it. On my way back, I feel much better even while you're there. So while you are hunting and fishing, you feel better because you don't have that cell phone. You're not worried about someone needing you. Andrew says, do you have kids? T.J. yes, I do. And a lot of times people fool themselves. They'll say, well, I'd like to go for a walk without my phone, but it would be irresponsible. It would be dangerous because I have a kid. And what if kids school called me? Timeout. Your parents didn't have phones and you're alive. Your grandparents didn't have phones and your parents were alive. This idea that if you're not on and available 24 hours a day, every second of the day, that somehow you're a bad parent, that's complete nonsense. And it's completely overlooking the fact that you are destroying your mental health by never getting away. I think you do need to have some responsibility to your kids to be healthy yourself, to set a good role model, to set a good example. If you're telling your kid through example that, hey kid, you should never ever be away from this at all times, I think you're harming your kid's health. So you weren't making that argument. But I do hear that from time to time, so please keep that in mind. You can be a great parent and not have your cell phone on every second of the day. Prince, Marco says my uncle died. I miss him so much. What should I do? Well, Prince, first of all, my condolences to you and I wish you the best in this time of mourning. I extend my sympathy. I think that you should mourn the loss of a loved one. And if you feel it is putting you in depression, you may want to seek out professional counseling. I'm definitely not an expert grief or bereavement, I can tell you that. So I can't give you better advice than that other than fill your life with doing things that create purpose. You know, sometimes when someone passes, it makes you realize how short life is and all the things you wanted to do if someone you care about passed and you realize, wow, I was hoping that person would read my first novel or read my first business plan. Be a regular on my YouTube channel and you haven't started it yet. Then use that as motivation to get going with your life and accomplish the things. Create the things you want. To me, the best way to create meaning in life is to create something that helps other people. I get a lot of meaning out of doing a show like this because I get a lot of feedback from people who say it help them in their lives. That gives me meaning, that gives me purpose, that gives me a certain joy. And that's why I spend so much time in this show. I almost called it a course. In a sense, it is a course. And this is a supplement to my online course. All my students are invited here. To me, so much of personal development is often missing something. It. It talks about creativity as just one of 10 or 20 or 30 nice things. To me, it's a higher level thing. It's a true, true primary pillar of what you need to focus on to lead a happy, fulfilled life. Because if you are creating something, you're helping other people, or you're entertaining them, or you're giving them joy, or you're giving them something useful. When you're creating something, typically you're having to learn a lot, you're having to read, you're having to maintain your health. If you are actually creating at full capacity, it typically, not always, but typically creates alignment in so many other aspects of your life. I can't wait to hop out of bed in the morning because I get to prepare for this show and make new choruses and do other things. It's fun because I can't wait to hop out of bed in the morning. I don't have to stay up till two in the morning drinking, watching stupid shows to forget about my misery, my horrible, boring life. Because I don't have a miserable, horrible, boring life because I get to create and do fun things. So that's what I think. Part of the answer. Marco. But again, I extend sympathies to you and hope you get through this time. Want to check in with some of our friends? We have Matt Food Insider with us on YouTube today. So Matt, thanks so much for joining us. Talk about an area for creativity. Now, when I was a kid, we had Julia Child on pbs. Jacques Pepin, I guess the great French chef. But that was about it as far as chefs on tv. And when I grew up, I was thinking, oh, I want to be a media personality, talk show host. Had I known way back in 1975, all the opportunities to talk about food and be a TV star, be a video star, be a Martha Stewart at Emeril, I might have really taken cooking lessons very seriously. It's a fantastic subject matter because human beings love food. It's essential to life, for nutrition, for nutrients, but for joy too. So I don't know if you are based on the name of your handle on YouTube, if you're also producing videos relating to food. If so, we'd love to watch it, love to see it. So please feel free to post right there. Wow. Times like this I do have regrets. My regret is we didn't make this a three hour show. I'm having a blast. But we are at the end of our time and I know that we all have to practice a little digital detox. I'm going to in an hour. Turn my phone off. You may want to. Right now we're at the top of the hour. That's it for today's edition of the habit influencer. I'm TJ Walker. See you back here tomorrow, 1:00pm Eastern. All right, my friends, Sa.