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

All over the globe on about 20 different live platforms. Very happy to see our friends from Instagram, from Facebook and so many other platforms. Happy to see our friends on TikTok joining us today. And sorry, you're still getting sort of a side view of me. We can't quite figure out our way around the rules and regulations for TikTok to allow us to do a shared feed. So that's why you're seeing me kind of stare off into space. But we're very happy to have you regardless of what platform you're on. And remember, as always, this is a forum for you. If you have questions, you have comments about anything to do with habits, personal development, you can post them and it doesn't matter what platform you're on. I see you if you're there on on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, we are monitoring all the channels. A lot of top stories today in topic A. I'll be discussing do you really need a car? Some surprising, surprising data on simply, simply owning a car does to your health and your body. We'll be looking at some new research out that try to clinically examine the effects of various diets and to really discern which ones are most helpful to people in losing weight and more important, keeping it off. It's easy to lose weight. You can eat 5mms a day and lose weight if that's all you eat, but it's impossible to sustain that. So we'll be looking at that later on in today's program. Also, the Fame Trap Fascinating, fascinating article by Tim Ferriss of the Four Hour Workweek fame. He is just brutally candid about what's happened to his life since he achieved meteoric fame after the debut of his book the Four Hour Workweek some 13 years ago. And he's not lamenting at all. There's certainly a lot of positives in his life because of his fame, but he goes into incredible detail about all the negatives. It is enough to make you think twice. If you have a daily habit of working hard to become fame famous because you think that's the secret to happiness in life, it's certainly not the secret to happiness. It can be a gateway to good things in your life, but also many bad things as well. All that and more, plus your questions, your comments. What I like to do most programs is before we even get to me and my agenda, I like to get to your agenda. Now you get to post your questions here. I respond to those also for my online students all over the globe. If you have questions for me, this show kind of doubles as the instructor office hours for all of my online courses. I have more than 140 online habit building courses, personal development and communication skills courses. This question coming in today is from Hetul Kumar and she is in my Train the Trainer course. If any of you have an interest in actually being a trainer, this is a great course to really teach you not just the basics of speaking in front of people when you train, but how to run a business for training. Because it is, I think, one of the most enjoyable careers you could possibly choose. So here is the question. Hi tj, I would really like to have a pre training conference call, but at my company it's not quite possible as people who enroll in the training are not available most of the time due to work commitments. So do you think that this can be done as a questionnaire when they fill the enrollment form for the training? Or should I only have the call with people who are available? Even if the number is less than the number of attendees, Please suggest. Thanks Heddle A little background information for those of you listening and you're not a student of my Train the Trainer course. A part of what I recommend for any trainer and what I do in my own training is a couple of weeks before the day long training session, or the two day training session or the half day training session. I ask anyone who's going to be in the training to be a part of a conference call, just 10 or 15 minutes to go over the goals, the agenda of the training. What I find is by doing this there is basically a 100% increase in the value out of the training, at least with what I do. Typically I'm teaching people better habits on communication, public speaking skills, media training. So when I can talk to them a couple weeks in advance, I can motivate them to read a couple of my books on either media training or public speaking. And I'm not selling them anything at this point, but I'm simply trying to motivate them to think about these issues and to prepare. Now any one training topic could be a little bit different, but what I do is about teaching people a specific skill, quite often with their body. When you're speaking, you're using your mouth, your face, your hands, your body. So it is a physical skill, not just an intellectual skill. So in my training it's really important that people prepare, practice what they do in advance on video. Those of you who are regulars here know that I regularly preach the value of practicing any speech, any presentation, any talk, any sales pitch, Any interview, any media opportunity, on video, just on your own cell phone. It dramatically improves your ability to go into any speaking situation with tremendous confidence. So the pre training conference call allows me to walk people through that to answer their questions. So a couple of, I want to tease apart a couple of concerns HEDL has in here. You're saying it's not possible for people to be in a pre training call because most of the time they have work commitments. Well, I understand what you're saying and I'm not in any way denigrating your comments there, but I can tell you this, there's always time for anything that's important. When someone tells you they don't have, they can't spare five or ten minutes to talk about a training they're going to do a week from now or two weeks from now and they're potentially spending a full day in the training or a half day. What they're really telling you is I don't care about this skill and hey, that's reality. I occasionally have that. Typically now that I'm at a certain level in my career and people are paying a relatively large amount of money for a day of training with me, it tends to get their attention and it tends to motivate them to want to do what I ask. It is much more difficult. As I gather Hedl, if you are working internally and they're not necessarily writing a big check for your training that day, it's much harder. I understand that and I feel for you. So I would try to beg people in a polite way for five or 10 minutes of time and if they say I couldn't possibly spare 10 minutes, ask for five minutes to go over what you want them to accomplish, to find out what they want and to try to get them to do some tiny bit of homework, even if it's just reading a page or two to help prep their mind, I find that that's really, really crucial. Now you're asking me can the same thing be done with a questionnaire? It's better than nothing, but not much. In my experience, if you try to communicate goals of a training in a questionnaire format, no one will do it. Now in my case, I want people to actually do some homework. The homework is not answering a questionnaire and your topic may be different. The homework is actually recording themselves. Speak. If I don't speak to them in a pre training conference call, then only about 10% of people will do the homework. If I do speak to them on a pre training conference call and they can hear Me explain why it's so important. It goes up to 100%. So that's why if you're a trainer, I beg you, try to have a pre training conference call. The other thing you'll find I find this occasionally. Sometimes what people say they want and what they really want are very different. Sometimes they want the training to go into a different direction and you could be able to help them. But if you didn't have the pre training conference call, how would you know? You can tailor your expertise more closely to what they're after. But if you just show up and are talking to people for the very first time when the training is supposed to start, it is too late to do that. Now here's the other trick. I do everything. I try to communicate in a pre training conference call. When training someone on personal development skills and habits, I record myself in a video and I put that on a webpage and I send that to people in advance too. So you could ask, well, T.J. if you're saying it in a video, why do you actually need to have a live conference call? Because if I send people a video telling them everything I want them to do, they're not going to do it again. It goes back down to 5% completion rate of the homework, preparing them for a personal development habits workshop. If they speak to me and they can ask questions and I can ask them questions, then it typically goes up to 100%. But I would let me take that back. If it's 5% for the questionnaire just sending text, it goes up to maybe 15% if they watch the video. So I do think it is helpful to have a video of yourself introducing yourself, explaining what's going to happen in the training. Even if it's your own company and you see these people two cubicles down, it still helps for them to hear you really explain what skills are you going to learn in this training? What are you going to get out of this? How is this going to benefit you? And then let them know if they want the most benefit. If they want the greatest impact, they need to do some bit of homework first. You. That's what I find is the most helpful way, really the best habit when it comes to preparing for any professional training you do. For those of you in the training field, I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. This is the Habit Influencer. This is the program where we work with you as a community to figure out how to build stronger habits, how to get better, better and better habits. Let's check in with some of our friends on TikTok, I see that Al Kendrick has joined us, Bozeman has joined us. User 17:16 Lucy Rod Music has joined us as well. Zusen has joined us, Bozeman has. Well and again, for all of our friends joining us on TikTok and any other platform, please feel free to ask us questions, to throw out comments, give your suggestions. You can also say when you think I'm full of baloney, I'll share that with you. This is not one of these guru sites where if you question the master, people are going to be sending you nasty comments and I'm going to be shutting you down. No, it's okay to question me. Because you know what? Here's one absolute guarantee I give you. At some point, maybe not today, but in the next year, I will give some bad information or certainly something that doesn't work for you. You need to call me on it. One habit I do believe is important for anyone who wants to be successful and fulfilled in life. Question everything and everyone. I don't mean be cynical or assume the word, but question it. Hold it up to the light, Test it. That is a great habit. Even though I might not enjoy it at the time. I do appreciate you questioning everything I say too. Let's switch to our friends over in the live chat. I see a number of our friends on on Instagram, on Up Live. Fortune has joined us. Good to see you fortune, as always. 888 joining us from up Live. Mohammed has just signed just joined us and it says just sent Yala. I'm not quite sure what that means, but it sounds nice. I do appreciate that Vimal has joined us. Sai has joined us and has a question about interview skills. Yes, Sai is one of my students in my interview skills class, so I hope that's going well and you can then tailor whatever insights I've given you to make it most applicable to your colleagues, your clients, your trainees. And that's really what should be done anytime. Tailoring information to the audience in a way that's most applicable to them. Maryland. Khan has joined us as well, and several others. So very happy to hear from so many of you all over the world. Hope you had a great weekend. Now I realize some of us are on different time frames. Some of us take Fridays and Saturdays off, some of us and Sunday is the beginning of the work week here in the United States. We take Saturdays and Sundays off. So just getting kicked back into the it was a fantastic weekend. Super bowl was a big cultural event here in the United States, even if you're not a football fan. For those of you in the rest of the world, when we call football, it's not we call what you call football soccer football. What we have as football is a bunch of guys with giant pads sort of standing around in huddles and then every so often there's bursts of violence. That's not exactly the way Marceau would describe it, or a true football fan would, but that's essentially what football is. I'll be talking a little more about football in just a moment, but don't worry if you're not a football fan. And spoiler alert, I'm not a football fan. There's going to be some insights for the rest of us too, that are applicable. And let's see, Marceau. I don't know if we had any other sites we wanted to check in on. Okay, so you're almost ready to. We're going to go to Facebook. We're going to check in with some of our friends on Facebook today. Almost always. Nice to hear. By the way, if you want to get the absolute latest on new courses, I have coming out freebies, free passes to special things, information about upcoming public appearances. The easiest way not to miss out on that is to join my Facebook page. Just go to facebook.com and type in TJ Walker personal development and you'll come to my main business page by signing up to that. That's the easiest way to get sort of advanced tips, freebies and passes to things. Joan Apandu has written in and says hello. Good to hear from you. We also have Pat Wakisa, Erica has joined in, Asel has joined us as well. And so happy to hear from our friends in Africa, Asia, Europe, South America. And believe it or not, I haven't heard from this person recently, but I do have online students from Antarctica. So we pretty much really do cover seven continents with the reach of this show and the online courses that are associated with it. Lots going on. Okay, let's hop right into one of the top stories of the day that I see. And this leads us to topic A. Do you really need a car? Now, to many people in the world, especially the United States, outside of New York and Boston and Washington, it sounds like crazy talk to even suggest not having a car. So much of the way our society is constructed, it's virtually impossible not to get around, not to have a car. You are stranded and you are basically out of luck. You can't eat, you can't work, you can't do anything. But in so much of the world. It's not like that. We live in a world that is increasingly urban, and yet when people get cars, it changes behavior. Now, I personally am one of these weirdo Americans in that I've never liked driving. Even when I was 16 years old, when most Americans, especially American boys back in my era of the 70s, literally, the day you turn 16, you got a driver's license. I did, but even then I didn't love driving. My family, we are a one car family. That's crazy. Everyone else near where I live, everyone has two, three, four cars. We only have one car in part because my wife doesn't like to drive, I don't like to drive, my daughter's too young to drive. We only have one car. It works for us. How many cars do you have? Have you ever had a time in your life when you didn't have a car? Now, for many years when I lived in midtown Manhattan in New York City, I didn't own a car at all. And I walked everywhere. And if I went a couple of weeks without going to the gym, it didn't matter because I still walked, Walked six, seven, eight miles a day. There was no other way of getting around easily. In a lot of urban areas, including New York City, it is faster quite often to walk than it is to take mass transit or a taxi cab. So there are huge advantages. There's been a new study out on what happens to your body once you do own a car. And this is a study that was published in bmj, an organization. This is reprinted in the Minnesota Post. I've linked. I've sent a link to the show Notes if you want to look at more data on that. But they looked at people in Beijing, of all places. This is the habit influencer. We can go to the T. Okay, so. All right. Excuse us, friends. On Tick Tock, I'm gonna have to sign off a moment. Joining us. Hi, I'm TJ Walker. Forgive us for minor technical problems. This is just the, really the first day of month two of this program and we're still working out some of the kinks. So I appreciate your patience and thanks so much for joining me. By the way, what we're doing here is a little different from what you've seen on Internet video before. We've all seen Internet video. I have had videos on YouTube for. Well, it's really since it started about 14 years ago. But this is different. It's live video now. You've seen live video before. You've seen people doing Facebook Live and YouTube Live. This is still a little bit different from that. We are simulcasting. We are broadcasting on almost 20 different live platforms all at the same time, which on the plus side of things helps us get a much larger audience and we can reach people wherever they happen to be. Some of you like to be on TikTok and I see that Fortesp has joined us and Vulcan Chan has joined us. Nink has joined us on TikTok. We want to be accessible to you, so that's why we're doing this on phones and other broadcast feeds. The downside is it is more complicated with audio feeds and things can sometimes get messed up. So appreciate you bearing with us. So our big topic for topic A in this segment is the health impact of having a car. Now, again, if you live in the United States or rural parts of Canada or rural parts of almost anywhere in the world, it can seem implausible not to have a car. But when it comes to living in urban areas, this is where it gets interesting. A new major study coming out of Beijing shows the dramatic health changes to a human being just for getting a car. Now, I was sharing some of them, but for the people 50 years old and older, you know, the really old people like me, as soon as they got a car, weight gain, the last thing most people want. And it's defined here in this study as considerable weight gain. So that's the big problem. So please keep this in mind. Now, there were 937 people in the sampling. 180 won the permit to buy an automobile. And almost all of them, as soon as they won the permission permit, went ahead and bought the permit to get a car and then did in fact buy a car. So here's what they found. The individuals walked and cycled an average of 24 minutes per day. For people under 50, no significant weight gain was associated with owning a car. But for those over the age of 50, here's the interesting thing. An average of 23 pounds was gained. 23 pounds. I mean, that's the difference between for a lot of people being perfectly healthy weight or within a healthy range to going not just overweight, but even clinically obese just for purchasing a car. Now, weight gain, of course, is sometimes associated with aging, but not 23 pounds. Absolutely dramatic. Now, China's obesity rate is around 14%. That's basically nothing compared to the United States, where we are at a 40% obesity rate. But if more and more people have cars, it looks like they might be catching up. I did notice when I was in China last year that there were obese people there. Definitely fewer than the United States. But you could see people lined up at the Kentucky fried chicken, the McDonald's, all the American style fast food places with lots of grease, fat, lots of salt, lots of sugar, lots of processed foods, processed carbohydrates. I was pointing out yet another KFC I was looking at to my tour guide in Beijing last year. She said, oh yes, that's kfc, very popular here. It stands for Keep fat Coming. That's what they, they call it in China. So keep that in mind. Do you really want a car if you don't have a car? It sounds preposterous. It sounds like, of course I want a car. Everybody wants a car. Be careful what you wish for, be careful what you ask for, because it's human nature to say, well, I've got the car, let me just hop in and do it. And in many areas where I happen to live, there's literally no store I can walk to and there's not really a park I can walk to. So I am somewhat car dependent. I don't feel great about that. But I still spend at least an hour a day going for a lengthy walk in the neighborhood. I'm not getting anywhere. I'm just getting out and walking and not using a car to get around. I'm going out specifically for the exercise. If you have a car, you've got to sometimes work even harder to exercise. It's so easy to just say, let me, let me go that quarter of a mile to go get milk when you could be a lovely 10 minute walk to go to a local convenience store and get milk. Plus there's also all the frustration of being in traffic and maybe you have to walk 10 minutes to a subway or a train station. Take public transit. Once you get to a station at your final destination, another 10 minutes and oh, we lost TikTok. Let me add, let me add them back. I know what I did with. Excuse me, we're having all kinds of technical difficulties today, but I forgot to plug in my power source source for my phone. Therefore we lost our TikTok audience. Those of you where you can see me looking right at you, that's a regular professional broadcast quality camera. But our TikTok friends are special in many ways, so they're joining us through our, through my cell phone. So be careful about the automobile use because it can just suck you in. And before you know it, I've seen friends and family and neighbors drive their car just down their driveway to take their kids to the street because they're too lazy to walk down their driveway and they want to take their kids to where the bus meets them. I mean that's genuinely absurd and it's basically asking for a heart attack and to become obese. But it's that allure of hey, I have a car, I might as well use it. The car is there to help you, you're not there to help the car. Let's check in with some of our friends on social media. We've got, Robert has joined us and Robert says, can I ask you what has helped you the most as you've changed careers in, in terms of selecting the projects that for your best potential? So I have a different career path from most people. On the one hand I've been in sort of the same career for 35 years. I've been in the communications field. On the other hand, I have frequently shifted focus. I've sometimes gone from being a campaign political consultant to being a full time talk show host. Sometimes it's because of macro events going on in the world where you think, okay, this is the perfect time to host a talk show based on my own orientation. A lot of those times it hasn't worked. What has helped me the most for the last 20 years is making smaller bets, trying something, sampling, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't destroy everything, it doesn't bring down, you're not betting the farm. You make lots and lots of small bets. Because 25 years ago I would do things like stop working, stop working at a regular consulting firm and just host a TV show or a radio show full time and make no money for a year and a half. That gets very old quickly. Everyone can glamorize the struggling entrepreneur making sacrifices when they're 20, 21, 22. But if you're in your 30s and you're living on your friends couches for too long, it gets old. So I stopped doing that. I didn't stop my dreams, I didn't give up my dreams. But I learned how to make smaller bets and smaller gambles. And that leads me to. One of the lessons I wanted to get get to today is you've got to take risks on a daily basis. A daily basis. I took a risk this morning and I failed massively. I produced a video, a short 15 second video which I do every day for the TikTok platform. Our friends on TikTok for Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram. If I didn't mention that sometimes it really works. Sometimes it doesn't. And I'm going to ask my colleague, Marceau, can you go ahead and play that 15 seconds? The reason I want to play this is not to be self indulgent and to show off. It's because this is the worst video I've done since I've ever been on TikTok. This is the worst performing 15 second video I have ever done and I want to show it to you and maybe you can tell me why you think it's so awful. I thought it was a brilliant idea. I thought it was topical, I thought it was relevant, I thought it was a good message for you, a good message for so many of my students. And it was a disaster. Marceau, if we can run the clip. People over 30 often like to feel sorry for themselves for being too old to go on camera. Nonsense. Look at the Super Bowl. JLo, 50 years old. Terry Bradshaw, more than 70 years old. Jimmie Johnson, three years shy of 80 years old. There you go again. None of my daily 15 second videos are slick or produced. There's no special effects, there's no graphics. It's typically just one tip. Well, this particular video had fewer than hundred views on TikTok. And those of you, my friends on TikTok, check it out. You can tell me what you don't like about it. I won't be offended. And typically I get at least a thousand views, sometimes 5, 10, sometimes 80,000 views on any habit tip that I give or communications tip that I give on TikTok. This one practically went back to my old videos and so started removing views. It was that much of a loser, that much of a failure. And now I do occasionally reference topics of interest to older people and baby boomers. So it's not just that that video didn't resonate with the TikTok audience, because that's known as a young audience. I actually have people of all sorts of ages on TikTok, but just something about it didn't work and nobody wanted to see it. Nobody wanted to heart it and like it and share it. So it died a non viral death online. So what do you really take away from that? For me, the biggest takeaway is this is why I need to try a new video every single day. Because if this had been my first video, TikTok and I did maybe just another one or two in the next month, and maybe they were almost like this, I would have concluded, Ah, TikTok, big waste of time. They don't want people who aren't 14 years old that Would have been the wrong lesson. So for me, the big lesson here is nobody knows anything. Quote Jack Warner, famous Hollywood studio mogul. He was talking about what makes a Hollywood movie successful. Nobody really knows anything. My gut told me that this video would be big because it's playing into the super bowl. And here in the United States, that's a big interest. And I'm referencing celebrities, JLo and people like that. And I knew that this was a time that really resonates with so many of you and plus so many of my online students. This idea that, oh, maybe I don't look good enough to do video. Maybe I shouldn't do my own YouTube channel. Maybe I shouldn't do my own TikTok channel because I'm not young enough, pretty enough, this or that. So I thought I had a great topic wrong. I failed. But that's okay. To me, the biggest lesson is, didn't cost me. It only cost me 15 seconds to make the video, because I make videos typically in one take. And these short ones are, by definition, 15 seconds to go on TikTok and a number of other social media platforms. Here's the thing. I know that any one day I make a video, I could fail. Any two or three days could be slow. But if I do a video every single day for a month, then I know I'm going to reach a lot of people. Not five or ten or a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand or even a hundred thousand. Even in my first month on TikTok, and that was only four months ago, I'm reaching 150,000 views. Now, I say that not to impress anyone, because there are kids who are really funny. Entertainers will go on TikTok and Instagram and other platforms, and within two weeks, they have a million views and 10 million subscribers. So it's not that it's so impressive, my numbers. But I say this to help motivate you, to make you realize it's a lot more impressive than calling people one at a time. It's a lot more impressive than. Than going to a Rotary club and spending half your day and talking to just 20 people in your community. Why not speak to the 150,000? And here's the thing. I know if I just consistently do this 15 seconds a day, I will communicate with a million people, or at least it will generate a million views over the course of a year on one platform, TikTok. And typically I'm posting this video on, you know, the short ones, six, eight, sometimes ten platforms a day. So to me, that the far bigger lesson is, a, I don't know everything. B, you got a lot of try. You got to try a lot of stuff. C, we're all going to fail. I'm no different. D, that's okay, because if you sample enough, if you experience enough, something will work. And sometimes you can figure out what it is and do more of it. Sometimes you think you're on the right path and you know what? It just doesn't work. You don't know why, but it doesn't work. But here's the thing I do know. Even today's video that I did, that by my standards received a 98% lower audience than normal. No comments or very few comments, many fewer likes. I still reached 100 or so people I would not have reached otherwise. That's still better than not doing a single video. Now, one question I have come to me all the time from friends, family, people I meet down the street at a barbecue. Tj, what's the easiest way to be active in social media? I can't be hiring producers like you are and doing seven to 10 minute videos and music and graphics and all that. Here's what I tell them. Just pick up your phone, speak on video for 15 seconds, tell people some bit of insight, information you have that can help them. That is your number one habit. If you want to be more of a social media success, make that video. 15 seconds. Try to do it in just one take, then come up with a little title, one hashtag or two hashtags, copy that and then quickly post it on eight or nine or ten social media platforms. Now, is that the best way of doing it? No, but it's the fastest, easiest way and it's a lot better than what most small businesses, consultants, authors, experts do, which is nothing. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks so much for joining me today. We've got a lot of fun planned for you on this Monday. We are live today. It is February 3, 20, 2020. We are in our very first day of the second month of this show. This show just began the first full Monday of January. So we're just in our second month having a fantastic time. Really appreciate so many of you joining us today and every day. We're happy to have our regulars participate, folks like Sy and Peggy and Fortune, Tribes and Muhammad and so many of you from all over the world. JM with us as well. But we're also really happy to have first timers. If this is your first time joining the show, please just say hello and just say first timer you don't have to ask a question or a comment, but just let us know that you're here for the first time. We'd love to hear from you and give you a special shout out. Let's check in with our friends on YouTube. Good to see so many friends on YouTube as well as on Instagram and and Up Live. So Marceau, which site do we want to go to first? So Remco is joining us on TikTok. Shoot8 has joined us as well. Up Live. Ramjan Ali is with us. Bo is with us on Instagram. Saydan Hum Appour has joined us on Instagram. I'm gonna take a wild guess that you're one of our friends from Iran. I'm really happy to have such a warm feelings with people in Iran. I've spoken to many business people and professional speakers in Iran through Skype video. I realize our countries are not really getting along that way these days, but I think people of goodwill who are trying to improve their own personal skills, their own development skills and others can always find a way of stressing common ground and getting ready for the day when our political leaders can get along well too. So thanks so much for joining us there. B. Souza has joined us on Up Live. 88879 has joined us too. And Marceau, did we have any friends joining us on YouTube today? YouTube, perhaps the longest standing social media platform where I've been posting videos regularly since about six months after the platform started. Let's take a look. Clinton likes likes my idea of KFC standing for Keep fat Coming. And Clinton also says sorry for the technical difficulties with TikTok. Hey, that's okay. And I do see that we continue to have a very active community on TikTok joining us courtesy of my cell phone. So even though you're not getting the direct feed, I am listening to you watching you. If you have any questions for me, comments that relate to personal development and habit acquisition, please let me know. I also see that Clinton says Zach Productions, I'm out. Okay, not quite sure what that means. Extramotional gives us it looks like four. I don't know if they're smiley faces or what they are, but I appreciate emotion. Whether it's strong positive emotion or negative emotion, the worst possible response you can get if you are hosting a show is apathy, is sleep, is negative emotion. I well remember my worst talk show appearance ever other than when a host pulled a gun on me was many years ago, more than a quarter of a century ago when I was hosting a talk Radio show in South Florida. Not a single call for four hours. Finally a call comes in and my own producer, the board op was like this sound asleep. He couldn't answer the phone. So I had to go the entire 4 plus hours shift without a single phone call. So I do appreciate the emotion, any emotion whatsoever. I'm TJ Walker, this is the Habit Influencer. We're going to be with you all second hour. I'm going to be talking to you about a fascinating article by Tim Ferriss of the four hour Work Week fame on the pitfalls. Some of the real downsides of fame. It's in some ways sad, in some ways odd, in some ways not surprising. But for many people who had such a tremendous work ethic, whose habits are so intense that they propel themselves to massive success once they get there, they find it's just a whole new different set of problems. And in some situations the problems are massively worse than their original problems. So that's, that's quite an interesting, interesting story we will be covering. We're going to take just a very quick 30 second break and I'll be with you in a moment. We got a final segment before the 2 o' clock hour. Stay tuned. Sa. Communication. Hi, I'm TJ Walker. We are back. You are watching the Habit Influencer. This is the program where we talk about your habits. How you personally can influence your own habits to live the kind of life you want to be fulfilling as a human being on your terms, not my terms, not your parents terms, not society's terms, but your terms. So what is the best diet? Now we talk about on this show seven major spheres of habits you have in your life and it includes things like your health, your finances, your creativity, lifelong learning. There's seven main spheres that I outlined for everyone in the program last week and I'll be coming back to from time to time. But health is foundational and the biggest impact for most of us on our health, what we put in our mouth. You can run marathons every day. If you eat enough garbage, it's not going to matter. On the other hand, you can be somewhat sedentary. If you eat incredibly healthy food at the right amounts in terms of portion size and calories, you still might be extraordinarily healthy. Well, a new study was done, this is published by GQ of Australia which is, they're not the scientists who did this, but it's a new study that just came out and it purports to really slow down scientifically rate how good various Diets are, and it's not just about which ones can help you lose weight, because frankly all diets can help you lose weight, often quickly, almost irrelevant to what has an actual impact. So here's what they found. And some of these results may surprise you at least, and they looked at everything from some of Gwyneth Paltrow's gimmicks to Quito and others, but they looked at the scientific studies analyzing eating strategies of real world eaters. It wasn't all just done in a laboratory situation. So, so here's what they found and the results actually did surprise me. According to the science of looking at all of these studies, intermittent fasting is the most maintainable diet. 54% of people were still fasting twice a week after a whole year, losing an average of 5kg, which I guess is about 12lbs for those of us in the US who can't seem to figure out metric anything. It also showed lower blood pressure. Intermittent fasting refers to going extended hours with food and then limiting your eating window to a certain time frame. For most people, this looks like the 168 method where people fast every day for 14 to 16 hours and then eat for just eight to 10 hours. So that could be something like you, you don't eat breakfast till 9am and then you might eat an early dinner at 5pm or 6pm but you, you have a long window there where you're not eating. It's, it's not meant to imply you're going for weeks without food or days without food. It's time within that. I tried this about a year and a half ago and I have to tell you, it just didn't work for me. I tried to start my breakfast later. I'm naturally an early dinner eater, so it wasn't hard to not eat past say 6:30pm but try as I might, if I had dinner at 6:30pm By 6:30am My stomach was just screaming saying, feed me, feed me, feed me. I was in pain, I couldn't read, I couldn't do anything productive, I couldn't exercise. So for me it didn't work. I want to know, have you tried intermittent fasting? According to this research, it a is effective. It didn't surprise me that it was effective. What surprised me is according to this research, 54% of people were still doing it a year later. That frankly shows shocks me because this to me strikes me as something people would give up quickly. It's also very difficult to keep up with all the contradictory health information you get because you Hear information about how healthy intermittent fasting is for losing weight, maintaining proper weight, and yet so many other people saying you've got to have breakfast as soon as you get up. You got to have breakfast as soon as you get up. Well, you're eating breakfast when you get up at 7am Are you really going to have dinner at 3:30 in the afternoon? It's hard to really see how that's going to work. Now here's the interesting thing. For those who follow the Paleo diet, you might want to reconsider. A study published in the American Journal of clinical nutrition followed 250 people for a year with minimal professional support, allowing them to opt into a food plan out of choices, including the Mediterranean diet, intermittent fasting or Paleo diet that included a bit of dairy and legumes and grains. So here's what happened. The Paleo plan had the lowest adherence with just a third of people sticking to it, as well as the lowest weight loss at just 2kg. There was also no improvement in blood pressure or blood sugar levels. Now, a very nice gentleman posted on my Facebook page just yesterday, I was giving some healthy eating tips and habits that he lost 50 pounds in only four months and was so happy and it was great. I didn't want to seem harsh, I like to be encouraging to people. But my first thought was, wow, if you gained 50 or if you lost 50 pounds in four months, it's going to be really easy to gain 60 pounds in three months. Whatever is quick to take off is typically even quicker to add on, plus more. So here's my question. If you've been on the Paleo diet, have you been on for more than a year now? I understand people feel very, very passionately about particular diets and it has become a new religion for many people where if you don't agree with all of their tenets of their diet, you are a heretic and they don't like you. And I want to, I don't want to start flame wars here and great intensities of passions about particular diets, but I am interested if you have trouble tried the Paleo diet. I'm not interested in knowing whether you lost weight. If you tried the diet and you stuck with it for more than a week, you will lose weight. You'll lose weight on any diet. The real key with any of these diets, did you keep it off a year later? Were you able to stick to the plan? So what I look for with every single new habit, every positive habit that I try to incorporate into my life Is, is it sustainable? Is it easy? Ideally, is it fun and is it sustainable? Preferably all three of those things. But if it's not sustainable, in my view, it is a waste of time and you shouldn't even start. I'm TJ Walker. We can talk about this more in hour two of the program. We'll be back at three minutes past the hour. See you then. Thanks. And my friends on TikTok, I'm going to sign off, but I will sign back on at three past the hour. Foreign. Welcome back to hour two of the Habit Influencer. I'm your host, TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. We are live, it is Monday, February 3, 2020, and we have open line, so to speak. You can call, you can text, you can post a comment on any social media forum where you're seeing this. And we will, I will put a spotlight on it. You can also, I realize it's asking a little more, but you can also make a short little video, post it on our YouTube page and we will play that video right here for everyone. So thanks so much for joining me. I want to go this hour in depth into something that is kind of the downside of, you know, you can have great habits your whole life professionally, reach huge audience, a level of financial success, career success, attention, but then find you're famous. And there's a lot of downsides. Tim Ferriss, the well known author and podcaster really kind of revealed all the downsides to fame, even, even things like potential kidnappings he was involved with because of his fame. And I want to share that with you because I don't want to throw cold water on your goals and ambitions. And hey, I've got goals and ambitions to be more well known than I am today. But there is a downside. And the one thing he stresses, the one thing basically any Hollywood celebrity from Jim Carrey to Bill Murray stresses is that just being famous isn't going to make you happier, necessarily. Necessarily. It's certainly not going to solve your problems in life. It will intensify certain problems, good and bad situations in life, but it doesn't solve all the problems. Before we hop into that, let's check in with our friends on social media. Happy to see Fouchen is back with us on TikTok. Thanks. We've, we've kind of gone on and off a few times today, but we're mostly here every day 1 to 3pm Eastern. So appreciate you joining us. And I think we had a few friends joining us on Facebook, Instagram up Live and YouTube as well. Oh, it says I'm not live. I'm just getting a message saying that I'm not live on TikTok. So ah, well I'm getting message that we are. It's not me. Anna has changed joined us. So Anna, thanks so much for joining us on TikTok. If you have any questions related to habits, personal development or communication, more than happy to have you a part of the show and we'll be reading your comments. And Marceau, if we have any questions, comments, hellos from our friends on Facebook, Instagram, other social media, happy to recognize them. Before I really dive in to our next big topic of the day, which is what happens when your habits are so strong that you achieve a level of fame? Then what? What new habits do you need to build to protect yourself? Because there can be a whole different set of problems in your life once you have a certain level of fame. Now many people may be saying, well, if only I had that problem of being rich and famous. It does seem glamorous. Tim Ferriss is going to share with us some of the things that don't get talked about as often, including death threats. Let's check in. Duane Marlow has joined us on Facebook today. Duane, always good to hear from you. And Dwayne is a great student and a great trainer and speaker in his own right. So thanks so much and ah, I know what happened on TikTok that time. My battery went dead and I have no idea why it wouldn't be. Excuse us one second. We're having a day just full of technical problems. I have my phone plugged in and it's not getting power. We're gonna have to take a 30 second technical timeout. I've got to put a few plugs in. I'll be right back in a moment. Welcome back to the program. You may be thinking, wow, I bet TJ's annoyed today. All sorts of technical problems. They've had to hop on, hop off, audio problems. He was speaking for a minute and it was just his mouth moving. Then he had to stop to plug in for the phone because the power went out. Here's the thing. I like to look at all of these as learning opportunities. In part, it strengthens you as a communicator. It strengthens you as someone who can deal with situations on the fly. Think on your feet, not get flustered by things. Because here's the one thing I know with absolute certainty. My whole career, career, my financial destiny is not going to be decided by one show today. Now I want to make every show the best possible show I can. I want you to never leave this show without thinking. You know, I really learned something from this. I really got some benefit from this. As long as I've done that, I'm going to feel good about the show. Plus going to feel good that, okay, we got a baseline. We don't want our shows to dip below this. So that is the real, I think, silver lining. Anytime you have a show that doesn't work, a podcast that doesn't work, a program that didn't work, you learn from it and you try to figure out how can you make it better and better and better. Let's check in with we had a couple of other friends joining us on Facebook. So Muhammad writes, I've lost 30kg in one and a half years. Muhammad, how did you do it? Did you use a specific diet? Did you simply try to eat smaller portions and exercise more and increase the percentage of vegetables and unprocessed foods? That's what I do recommend primarily as the most effective long term habit. But how did you lose 30 so many of our American friends, you hear the word kilogram. We don't know if that's an ounce or what it is, but that is a substantial amount of weight. That would be something like £70 if my conversion is correct. So congratulations if you lost some 70 pounds and are at your proper and health body weight. So way to go. I would love to know post if you feel like sharing what diet you used and how others can possibly learn from that. Also, if you had other diets in the past where you lost weight but then it all came back, share that as well because that's happened to me before. It's only when I decided no more gimmicks, I'm not going to do the Tim Ferriss. And even though I like Tim Ferriss and I'm referencing him right now, I'm not going to do the Tim Ferriss don't eat anything white diet. I'm not going to do a keto, I'm done with Atkins. All of these things ultimately for me felt like gimmicks. And it's too hard to sustain any diet long term if it's gimmicky. The thing that works for me is when I changed my habits so that I didn't snack. You know, I don't, I'm not a construction worker. I'm not working in a coal mine. I don't really burn that many calories a day, so I don't need to snack between meals. Number one. Number two, cutting back on portion size. I don't need to fill my plate with giant, giant helpings of food. Number three, only one plate of food. Again, I'm not NFL lineman. I'm not a professional soccer player. I do not need two, three, four plates of food. So just following those things is what helps me lose weight to get to my proper body weight. But I want to hear from you. So feel free to share with us that while you're thinking of that, I want to say hello to Nadine, who's joined us. Nadim is joined us on TikTok. Thanks for joining us today. We're going to dive right into sort of the underbelly of fame. Many of you, myself included, we spend so much time building habits to become more and more successful. We all want success. I understand that. But for a select few who break through, the success is such that you have a plan, platform, and you're seen by millions, sometimes tens of millions of people. You have a certain level of fame and there are downsides. Tim Ferriss, many of you know, famous lifestyle designer, a term that he coined, talks about the downsides of fame. When his book first hit in 2007, he was pretty obscure. He'd had a few successes, but no one knew him. He could walk down the street, no big deal. He was 29 years old. And then his book took off. Here's the thing that was shocking and again, I have to admire him for mentioning this. He told a friend of his when he was about 28 years old, if I'm not famous by 30, I might as well put a bullet in my head. Tim Ferriss really, really, really wanted to be famous. And he went about it in a strategic way. And he built habits to increase his platform and increase the odds that he would in fact become famous. Now, he said he never seriously thought about killing himself when he wasn't famous, although apparently he was very depressed in college and had times in his life when he was suicidal. But here's what happened once he became famous. He still remembers just a couple of years after that or a few years after that, he received a video from a friend of his who he'd met through the success of his work. And the friend then sent him a video where he says, I'm killing myself, and he blew his brains out, killed himself. Things like that don't happen to you and me. Typically he talks about another person, sort of a regular, a regular follower who started speaking to him and almost stalking him. And I don't know what could be Worse than seeing someone, you know, turn on camera and shoot themselves and kill themselves, and it's a message just for you. Other people were stalking him. Now, since he came out with his first book, he's had five books, 1,000 blog posts, 500 million downloads in his podcast. So he's still fairly humble. He's saying, look, I'm not really famous. I'm not Brad Pitt, I'm not Angelina Jolie. I don't get mobbed if I'm walking down the street. But he defines himself as a micro public figure with a monthly audience in the millions or tens of millions. And he's giving this advice to people because he realizes because of playing platforms like TikTok, people can go from completely obscure to having millions of followers overnight. Typically doesn't happen when you're talking about personal development issues, but it could. It could. There are some rewards. And he does point out a lot of opportunities have come to him. He's been able to invest in a lot of great companies that have made him a lot of money. Interestingly, he didn't point out, hey, one of the upsides of being famous is I'm really rich. Now, he doesn't say that. It's sort of implied. But he talks about all the great people he's met, the great early companies that he's been able to invest in, organizations and causes he's been able to help, places he's been. And he even does mention that sometimes he gets nice seats at busy restaurants because of his name. But then he points out, with fame, there's a downside. Things can get very, very tricky. He remembers one of his college roommates had a very famous father who was a producer in Hollywood. And here was his advice. You want everyone to know your name and no one to know your face. That certainly is the axiom many people have shared over the years. He quotes Bill Murray, an actor favor to many. He says, I always wanted to say to people who want to be rich and famous, try being rich first. See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24 hour job. The only good thing about fame is that I've gotten out of a couple speeding tickets. I've gotten into a restaurant when I didn't have a suit and tie on. That's really about it. This is from Bill Murray, the famed comedian, leading man and character actor who sprung out of Saturday night lives some 40 plus years ago. Other things. Here's where it gets really dark. Death threats. He goes into explicit detail. Now I'm no stranger to death threats. Fortunately all of you are very nice and friendly and now that I talk about personal development and habits, it's just not a topic that generates a lot of death threats as much. But there was a time in my life when I was a political commentator on the Internet and going on CNN and MSNBC and Fox and Cork TV and all these places and yes, and hosting talk radio shows and yes, that was a part of life getting death threats. Not exactly a lot of fun. A special hello to it's not the Anna and be joining us on TikTok and I will follow you on TikTok as well as OK Larry and Shauna Bitz appreciate you joining us. And we're just having a conversation about good habits and unfortunately some of the downsides of a lifetime of good habits, which can be fame. And these are some insights shared to us by the well known author Prince, personal development guru of sorts, and podcast host Tim Ferriss. And it's amazing the strength of the negativity from some people he points out to he takes more of a statistical look at it. He says, imagine you're in junior high school. You're in a classroom with 30 people. How many of them are murderers or crazy or bizarre or dangerous? Chances are nobody if it's just you and 29 students in your high school or junior high school. But now think of it. In a city, if you're in a big city like New York City, every single day, a certain percentage of people are murderers, A certain percentage of people are violent, a certain percentage of people are monsters. So he now points out that he his monthly audience is bigger than the entire city of New York City. So it only makes sense that a part of his audience is made up of murderers. Violent, crazy people, deranged. I never really thought of it that way, but it is an excellent way to think about it. It's just a sheer function of numbers. If your podcast, your blog, your live stream, show your, your TikTok audience, your Instagram audience gets to a certain size, it's just statistically likely that you are going to attract crazy people. Here's what Ferris says. The averages will dictate that you get a certain number of crazies, con artists, extortionists, possible or actual murderers, and so on. In fairness, we should also point out there's a certain number of geniuses, a certain number of good Samaritans, and so on. Sure, your subject matter and content matters, but it doesn't matter. As much as you'd like to think, the bigger the population, the more opportunities and problems you will have. A small self contained town in Idaho might not have a Pulitzer Prize winner among its Rangers residents, but it probably doesn't need a SWAT team either. Great way of looking at it. Now here are some of the downsides he talks about that are a direct result of his habits of success. It was his tenacity at marketing his book, at creating his vision, this whole four hour work theme that he turned into a huge empire created stalkers. He talks about one where he lived in San Francisco. A fan on the east coast thought I was sending him secret personalized messages embedded in my Facebook post. Kind of sounds like a problem the Beatles had. He believed I was talking asking him to move into my house and work for me. He told his co work so clearly a crazy person. But the person started stalking him at his house. He finally had to move out of his house, which seems seems a shame. Now the next thing I don't like to talk about this either, but death threats. It's a very real thing. Tim Ferriss says as a result of his work habits, quote, I get regular death threats and this is common for public figures. I would estimate I get at least one per month via some channels. Sometimes they're related to extortion, but they're most often from people who are mentally unstable. What are they angry about? Once again, therein lies the rub. It is rarely in response to anything I've said or done. This is the scariest thing. And it's also why the Tribe Village City metaphor is so apt. The people sending death threats are normally suffering from psychotic episodes and there is nothing you can do to prevent them. Totally bizarre. He talks about people who've stalked him claiming that he's humiliated people he never ever met. Now unfortunately, and I'm not going to drive to the same conclusions, he he talks about the time a fan from Austin, Texas drove 11 hours to see him with guns and because of that he now has a gun. I'm not advocating we're not going to get into the whole gun debate here on this program, but I'm just sharing with you what Tim Ferriss has said. He also points out that he's had harassment of family members. He says there are at least two categories of people who want to find you fundamentally nice people, although they could be over enthusiastic and fundamentally malevolent people. I hate to put it that way, but I'VE learned that there are people in the world who derive great pleasure from hurt, hurting or threatening others. If either group can't easily get to you, whether to find you or harm you, they will often go after your family or loved ones. So he recommends never writing about talking about any loved ones. Now I cannot relate to this because I'm not single he talks about dating woes as you might imagine, dating can be a quagmire of liabilities and bear traps. It could be someone hoping to write a clickbait article about their date with you and without disclosing such. Or it could be much worse. If you're a female, this is where things can once again become physically dangerous. If you're a male, this is where things can become legally dangerous. There are many predators for both sides and it can make you lose your fear faith in humanity. He also talks about extortion attempts. He regularly has people write to him and say pay me X now or I will ddos your site doxing his site, basically destroying his website. Now he said he was confident in his infrastructure, the security for his website, but there have been times when he's ignored extortion attempts and they escalated it to bomb threats. Just horrific. He also interviews some other female bloggers and well known personalities. He's changed their names, but he says whatever he's getting, it could be 10 times worse for a woman in terms of daily death threats and threats of sexual attacks just for being famous, talking about things of how to help people. Quite often kidnapping is one of the categories. He suggests that anytime he travels anywhere, he doesn't let people know where he is, he travels under it. And assuming I thought this was something only the Beatles did or really famous movie stars. But he's saying he has to use a different name. If he has a car service picking him up, he uses a different name. He talks about once in South America, he was picked up by someone who asked him by his name, are you there? And he realized he had not booked the car service in his own name. He said, I'll be back in a moment. He went and made a quick phone call. Sure enough, it was not the company he'd hired to pick him up. Whether it was someone who was about to kidnap him, extort him, or just an overzealous fan, don't know. So many, many, many problems, invasions of privacy, people always wanting things again. For you and me and those of us who are not wildly famous, it can still seem like okay, these are small little things too to have to pay if you're also famous and rich and you can go anywhere in the world. And people like Tim ferriss, you get $100,000 just for showing up to talk for an hour. It still seems to many people that it's a bargain worth taking. But question it. Ask yourself, is this how you want to live your life? That the thing that struck me the most there was the comment from Bill Murray about this is really a 24 hour a day job. If you are famous, everyone wants something, everyone wants to talk to you, everyone wants to take a selfie with you. And folks, I'm not famous so I don't have to worry about that. But ask yourself, is this what you are working toward? The habits of success is it to prepare propel you to this? Now there are ways you can mitigate that. You can lessen the impact of fame. You see it from Hollywood stars all the time. They just take a few years off, go live in Idaho, no one cares about you anymore. So you can become unfamous relatively easily. But you also get addicted. You're in that habit of creating and being in the spotlight and doing things and getting praise. Can you just cut it off? It can be a hard thing. I'm TJ Walker. We're going to talk more and more about habits to help you lead a fulfilling life. For most of us it's not a huge problem of waking up one morning and having tens of millions of people loving our stuff and stalking us. That's a relatively small outlier situation. But we look at every situation right here on the program. What's your biggest concern right now? I want to hear from you. This is a program where I come prepared every day to deliver some insights, some meditations on some aspect of habit of gaining new habits. But I also want to hear from you. So our friends on TikTok, if you have any questions, comments, topics you'd like us to discuss, just go ahead and type it right into the comment bar. We have some friends joining us on Facebook and a whole bunch of people just did a whole bunch of hearts and smiley faces. Glad you're here. Muhammad said eating smaller portions. Muhammad had told us just a few minutes ago that he's lost. Was it 60 or 50 kilos? No, 40 kilos. Tremendous amount of weight in the last year and you did it by eating smaller portion. Regular physical exercise, originally Asian food but majority plant based diet. So that's fantastic. Muhammad Ending Parwat has joined us on Facebook as well. And Mohammed, for a lot of people here in the United States, it's Confusing to hear that you could lose weight eating Asian food. Because here in the United States, if you go to the typical Chinese restaurant, you have things like General Chow's chicken and it's chicken and then it's completely covered with flour and processed carbohydrates. It's then fried. It then has a tremendous amount of sugar and grease and oil put on it. So if you eat even a small portion of it, you're likely to gain weight and have way in excess in terms of the calories you need per day. But if you go to China, where I was last year, they don't have General Joe's chicken in China. In China, you don't have all the gloppy sugar in oil. It's much leaner, lighter. There's a lot more emphasis on fresh vegetables. So remember, if Mohammed says, well, I lost weight by eating Asian food, you can't just go and get spicy orange beef with a portion size as big as your head at a New York City Chinese restaurant or one in Miami or in Los Angeles and expect to lose weight. You've got to look at what you are actually eating. And the Chinese people I know and I know a few thin because they eat lots and lots of vegetables, steamed tiny bits of oil. When they eat meat, it is small, tiny slices that you can eat with a chopstick. And if you add up all the meat they eat in a typical meal, it would be substantially less than the size of a deck of cards, which is often the size that nutritionists recommend to people as true serving size of meat. A serving size of meat is not a 12 ounce steak, a 16 ounce steak, a 32 ounce steak. Those are serving sizes. If your goal is to become obese and have diabetes and have your leg amputated, sorry if that sounds harsh. We will talk about health. Diet. Diet tips and tips on how to have a healthy, healthier life on this show regularly because it is of the seven main spheres of habits. If you don't have your health down, it's really hard to do any other habits on a regular basis. It's hard to be creative. It's hard to have your career on track. It's hard to be a lifelong learner if your health is in poor shape. Let's check in with some of our friends on Instagram as well as Uplive. Oh, and Ruz, sorry about that. You're pointing out no audio on YouTube. We had a little problem half an hour ago or so. We're still working out a few tech problems. I think we've solved that. Hope you can hear now. Ian writes. Just found your channel through one of your media training videos. Very informative. I wanted to know if you had any tips regarding artist personality. Media training, is it a similar process? Well, when it comes to artist personality, if you mean someone who is an artist and therefore a personality, how to be media trained, yeah, I have a lot of tips if it's. If you're asking how do I train someone on how to have a personality that's a little bit different. The main thing with artists, musicians, novelist, or for that matter, politicians or CEOs from a media training standpoint is from my point of view, it's all the same. Everyone wants to come across comfortable, confident, relaxed. If you are talking about your latest painting that is going to be in the Modern Museum of Art and you're on a major TV show, you want to come across as relaxed, confident, friendly, engaging. You don't want to sound like you've memorized something from a script. So that's the first skill. You want to look and sound comfortable, confident, relaxed. Now everyone's look can be different. If you are a mutual fund manager and it's a conservative fun, you may want to have a traditional suit and tie or business suit. But if you're an avant garde artist, you may want to have something really, really colorful or a black turtleneck. I guess you could look like Jean Paul Sartre that way. So you need to think about is what you're wearing sending the right message? If you are a fashion designer, you probably want really interesting, colorful examples of your clothing to capture people's attention. So think about that. Next, you need to think about your message. What is your message? What are you trying to convey to this audience? Is it to come to your showing? Is it to check out your artwork in the gallery? What is your actual. Is it to buy your music download? What is your message? What is it you want people to do after hearing your message? Then if you're being interviewed, there's a whole skill set on how to answer questions in a media interview. And the messages can be different. The answers can be different regardless of whether you're an artist or a business person. But the process is exactly the same. And then finally, if it's any kind of traditional media outlet where they quote you, a newspaper, an online publication, an art journal, you have to figure out how to package your sound bites. These are the four habits you really have to learn if you want to be successful as an artist or anyone else when talking to the media. How to look your best how to shape a three part 30 second message, how to answer questions, and how to package your messages with sound bites. If you want more on that, I do have an online course. I haven't done any pitching all day, so let me just do one quick pitch. I do have the Complete Media Training course. It's an online course. You can get it for less than 15 bucks. All you have to do is go to udemy.com letter u d e m-y.com and type in TJ Walker Complete Media Training and you will see the course. This is the most highly rated course in the world to my knowledge. It's the longest course on media training, the most thorough, and it certainly covers everything you need to know as an artist or as a business person, and has a complete money back guarantee. That's not the Course Spotlight of the Day. The Course Spotlight of the Day is for my newest course on PowerPoint. Now maybe if you're an artist, it's not as relevant to you to know how to make a PowerPoint. Although you never know. You might be trying to get a grant from some national government entity in your country and you might have to deliver a PowerPoint presentation. This course will teach you how to make slides in a way that you're interesting, that you're memorable, and how to deliver that. So that course is on sale right now. I have a very special link for you. It's normally 200 bucks for you today and tomorrow it's $9.99 US so you can check that out in the course show links the past two my latest course, the complete PowerPoint presentation, slide design and Delivery course. So you'll want to check that out. And let's check in with some of our other friends on Instagram and Uplive. Himmel has joined us. Wow has joined us. Yes. Mulhan has joined us as well. Someone named look, someone who appears to have. It looks like perhaps a Thai language. I can't. I can't tell what type of Alphabet that is. Wower has joined us. Sidesee Siju has joined us. Tuxi has joined us. So happy that so many of you from Uplive have joined us today. This is one of our newest affiliate platforms. We've been on your platform for just three or four days starting with last week. So happy to have such a nice warm response from so many of you. Let's check in with our friends on Facebook. Luke Westwood writes in himself a prominent media presentation trainer joining us. Luke says I don't drive and so glad I Don't. I think he's referencing the story I did in the first hour of the program showing that individuals who've never had a car. If you're over 50 and you get access to a car for the first time, you gain on average 23 pounds. At least. That was the research with people in Beijing, China. So, Luke, I'm glad you don't have a car. It sounds to me like you're healthy. You know, I've had significant periods of my life when I didn't have a car. And I have to tell you, I like not having a car. To me, that's a luxury. I only have one car now, and my wife and my daughter and I, we all share the same car. To me, that's a luxury. It would be work. It would be an extra headache to have two cars and three cars. But that's just me. Mohammed writes, if you skew it more, it's kind of Indian, Pakistani, and beef was once in a blue moon. Mohammed's talking about his specific diet for how he lost so much weight. That's a dramatic weight loss. But what strikes me as consistent with everything I know about weight loss is what Muhammad said, smaller portions, more exercise. Now, exercise itself doesn't do much. If you've ever been to a marathon, and I've been to many to watch the New York City Marathon, if you're standing by the finish line at hours four and a half, five, six, seven, you will see massively obese people. And here are people who, they've just run 26 miles, they've done a lot of running, and they're still obese. You cannot run off excessive calorie consumption. But sure, if you go from one weight where you're overweight and you're not exercising at all, and you're consistently eating too much and now you are eating a lot less, healthier food, smaller portions, and you're exercising more, putting the two together, yes, that can catapult you to a little more success in reaching your ideal weight. So I congratulate you for that. But I know for my own body, I typically walk 12,500 steps a day, and I can still gain weight if I have second helpings, if I have a snack, I can walk that much and lift weights and run on the treadmill and do a lot of other exercises, and I can still gain weight walking six and a half miles a day. For me, there is kind of a threshold, and this happened to me yesterday. I played tennis in the morning, went for a walk in the afternoon, little time on the treadmill. And then I was running around the house a great deal because we had an anti Super Bowl super bowl party for a few friends and it was just so much running around activities throughout the day. I ate a lot of food. I thought when I got on the stage scale today I was going to see the number go up and I actually lost a pound. And it's not because I scrimped. I had a ton of guacamole. I had something I rarely eat Doritos, which is a very unhealthy thing, but I figured once a year for a Super bowl party, I would try it. Beef, pork, vegetables, second helpings of all sorts of food, cheeses, other snacks, plus cake for dessert and perhaps a glass or two of wine. So it was a very high calorie day for me, but I walked 20,000 steps and I lost a pound. I say that not to brag but to simply point out, yeah, at a certain level you can burn calories and you can eat more than usual. And I was able to eat a lot more than usual, but because I walked 10 miles miles, it didn't result in weight gain for me. So it's not as simple as just, oh, let me go on the treadmill for 20 minutes and do this, and now I can go eat 3K. It doesn't work like that. Doesn't work like that at all. I'm T.J. walker. I want to thank you for joining me today. As always, we're here to discuss good habits, how to build good habits, how to develop stronger habits, how to bring out the best in other people, how to decrease negative habits. I come to you every single day right here on this program, this format, typically with three or four major topics I have prepared and then beyond that, what I like to do is toss the floor open to you to see what you think. So if you have any questions, topics, please bring it up. And I see user 1754 has joined us as well. And we have a lot of friends joining us on up live on YouTube, Facebook and other forums too. Here's a headline I thought was rather provocative and got my attention. This is from the Herald Dispatch. Is Secondhand Screen Time the new Second Hand Smoking? Well, that's certainly a provocative headline. It says the Environmental Protection Agency first warned us of secondhand smoke in 1991, some 30 years after scientists determined that smoking cigarettes causes cancer. Today, a growing body of research points toward a new indirect health hazard. Just as frequently, being around other people while they smoke can cause cancer, heart disease, lung disease, and other ailments. What I call second hand screen time could be endangering children. This got my attention because I do have a child and I do worry about is she around too much screen time. Now we have a policy in our household. No cell phones, no screens allowed at the dinner table, and as little TV and screen time as possible. And certainly things like after dinner, that's a time for reading books, doing homework, music practice, things like that. But still, even in our household, screen time can catch up. And I would be a liar if I told you that my daughter doesn't see me on my cell phone or on my iPad from time to time. Is it as bad as secondhand smoke though? I am curious about that. To me, my initial reaction is that seems like a bit of a stretch. But here's the author's thesis. By not limiting their own phone use, parents and other caregivers may be unwittingly setting kids up to be addicted to screens. It's an addiction. A decade ago, the unwillingness or perhaps the inability of the college students in my writing class classes to stay off their phones for 50 minutes at a stretch catalyze my interest in screen use. And my students have only grown more unwilling to put down their phones, a trend that has also gotten worse outside of my classroom. So the writer of this article for the Herald Dispatch is a teacher curious about my students phone use, I began researching screen addiction and conducting my own surveys. Roughly 20% of my students have used the word addiction when describing their phone habits, and many more have expressed misgivings about their phone use to me. There's still a fundamental divide though between an activity that is basically 100% inherently negative, especially putting a small child around some cigarette smoke. There's no way of spinning that that is damaging to their lung. It's damaging for anyone. But certainly if it's daily exposure, Even if it's 10 minutes a day, smoke is damaging lungs hurting health. If you are on your cell phone but you're getting classical music to teach your child classical music, or you're watching a video that teaches appreciation for ancient Roman art, I don't know that I buy into the theory that that is just as negative as smoke because it's on a screen. To me, there's still a huge issue of what is it you are consuming on that screen. We don't say that people who go to libraries are addicted in harming themselves. Even though it's possible to go to a big library and just read silly comics. I don't know if most Libraries have comics, but you get my point. There's something silly or trivial in a library. You could, in theory go to libraries all day long and just read boring classified ads in newspapers that the library subscribes to. But no one really worries about someone who goes to the library every day because there's so many good things to read in the library. When it comes to our cell phones, when it comes to our iPads, our computers, there's a tremendous amount of great content there to enrich your brain, to enrich your life, to enrich the lives of your children. So that's why I think that those who want to act like, well, if you let your child look at a screen for five minutes a day, you're basically guilty of child abuse. At some point, the research may prove that. I still think we are a way off from concluding that. And the idea that just because your child sees you on a cell phone or an iPad, that that's going to create a lot of problems still strikes me a bit of a stretch. Now your child comes to you and says, mom, Dad, I really want to talk to you about something serious. And you're like, okay, yeah, go ahead, I'm listening. And you're staring at a screen. Yeah, that's a problem. When you don't give actual human beings attention and you're staring at a screen, that's a problem. That's rude, that's obnoxious. Whether it's an addiction or just being obnoxious, it is obnoxious. But that could exist before screens were devoted or ever created. Think of all the sitcoms from the 70s and the 80s or the 50s. When you see a husband and wife and the wife is trying to talk to the husband about something seriously, and he's like, yes, dear, his head is buried in the newspaper. Well, he wasn't giving the spouse proper attention. But was the newspaper the equivalent of secondhand smoke? I don't think so. What do you think? Is screen time the new second hand smoke or is that anti technology hysteria? I do worry about screen time. One of the guests at my party last night said, tj, I know you don't really encourage people to use cell phones at your parties, but I just need to check one thing important for a trade I'm doing. Can I please have your WI Fi password? Okay, I did give it to them. I don't want to seem dogmatic, but I do stress to people when they come to my home to socialize. I put my cell phones down, I put the iPads in another room And I actually talk to human beings. Went to a small social gathering Saturday night. And I do what I always do. I needed my phone to get to the party and to get home. The gps, which for better or for worse says something about my ability to remember directions. But I did something I'm very happy about. I placed my cell phone in my car and then locked the car door before going into our host home. I did that because I didn't want to be rude because it is in fact easy to be at a party and maybe your host has to get up and check on kids or go to the kitchen or go to the bathroom. You're sitting there by yourself. It's human nature to just pick up a phone. Oh, let me just check for one second. Then your mind is elsewhere. Your friends, others come back in and you have to make this huge brain transition back to a party. I don't want to make those transitions. I want to be in a social space when I'm socializing and not be doing all these switching costs and all this multitasking. That is my advice is a good habit for you too. Just don't take your phone to a party. And if you absolutely, positively have to, and I don't really believe you do, turn it off. Don't just turn the ringer off or notifications off or on silent. Literally turn the whole phone off. But it's far better. Don't take it into the party with you. Much better for your mental state, frankly. Going to be better for your social life too. Let's check in with our friends on Facebook. By the way, apologize. A few little sniffles. I don't normally do this. I often advise people if you're feeling sick or something, don't ever apologize to your audience. Don't tell them about no one cares about you. What's a little bit different here is not that I assume all of you love me, but I know that some of you do. Watch every day and you can see you can tell a little bit difference in my voice. I'm struggling over a couple of words. I have just a touch of a cold. I think I'll be fine by tomorrow. But that's why I am drinking more water. Should be drinking more water. It's easier to get dehydrated and drinking tea, green tea. Even though I love sugar and cream, I don't put any sugar or cream anymore. It's much healthier. Just the tea. Hint of cinnamon and nutmeg. And to me that makes it more interesting. Helps mask the fact that I Don't get to put a lot of sugar and cream in anymore. Let's check in with our friends on Facebook. Do you keep courses with certifications on Udemy platform? So, Sai, I'm glad you brought up sports certifications, because that's a question. I get a lot from online students all over the globe and I'm on 60, maybe 100 online training platforms. And sometimes people's first instinct is, can I get a certificate saying I'm now a great public speaker or professional speaker? And I typically respond the same way, which is, sure, but why do you care? You really think anyone else cares? Here's where certifications I think do really matter. If you want to operate on another human being, yes, it is very nice to have this certification of whatever country you're in. You are a medical doctor and you went to a respected, esteemed, regulated medical school. If you want to be a lawyer in most countries, you have to pass a bar. Same with medicine. You have to pass tests before you can be a doctor or a surgeon. If you want to be a lawyer, you have to have gone to some official law school and to have passed a bar exam. In my experience, in almost every other field, nobody cares about your credentials. They care about what you can do for them. I think the only time I've had anyone even ask me for a college diploma in the last 35 years was five years ago. I was doing a project with the United nations and they just had a sort of a standard form for any communications consultant. They must show a diploma. Thankfully, I had one out in the garage. I don't keep it on my wall anywhere. I don't need a reminder to myself or anyone else that I graduated from college, but. But fortunately I had the diploma. That's literally the only time anyone ever cared about my certification. And this was one that I had to spend a lot of money for as an expensive, fancy college, at least for the time. Expensive? No one's ever asked. So, Si, my bigger emphasis to you should be spend every second building your skill skills, building your knowledge base, building the intellectual content that you can give to people. That's the only certification that matters. I mean, just this morning I had inquiries for training from people in Geneva, people in Dubai and people in Botswana. Potential clients wanting me to train their people on personal development skills, meeting training skills, public speaking skills. So I sent them videos of me talking about how I'm going to help them. That's my proposal. A video where I just talk about them and their skills. Oh, and by the way, I'M going to give you this book to help you. I'm going to give you this online course to help you. So that is my number one recommendation for you is focus every single conversation you can, especially if it's your own training business, on how you're going to help other people. Certificates are about me, me, me, me. Look how great I am. Nobody really cares about you that much. If you convince them you're going to help them, they're going to want you and that is what's going to make you credible. Not a piece of paper. Now, I'm not an anti intellectual. I'm not anti the academy, I'm not anti college. But there are some fields, like medicine and law, where you really do need that stamp of approval, that certification from outside agencies or you're not not only are you not credible, it's illegal for you to help people in those fields. But there are other I can tell you in the communications field, in my experience, someone who is the most certified in the world when it comes to communications and has a PhD in communications, those people are typically the absolute worst communicators and couldn't even begin to help you slightly figure out how to give an interesting speech or how to speak to the news media and get the quotes you want. So Sai, thank you so much for your question. Happy to talk to you in detail about that and any other topic on our next program. We're coming to the conclusion of this program today. Thanks so much for spending your time with me. I'm here with you every single day, Monday through Friday, 1 to 3pm this is the Habit Influencer. This is the program where we get together on TikTok, Facebook, every other live platform and have a community discussion on how to build stronger habits to give you the fulfilling life of your dreams. I'm TJ Walker. See you tomorrow. And folks on TikTok, thanks so much. We had some chopping on. This is a Chickadee production.