Stop Taking Advice And Start Asking Questions That Transform | James Clear

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

0:12I think questions are crucial. You know, it's kind of funny because I spent a lot of time writing about these ideas and trying to share what I learned, you know, with habits and improvement, decision making, productivity and all that. And I think it's easy for that stuff to kind of come across as like advice. But I'm not really trying to give people advice. I'm just trying to like lay out a toolkit and say, hey, here are all the strategies. Here's all the tools. Let's lay them on the table. and then you can choose which one's the best fit for you. Like, I don't really have much interest in telling people what to do.

0:39I'm more just trying to like share all the strategies. But the other problem with advice is that it's kind of brittle in the sense that it's very dependent on context. You know, like people, someone can give you actually very good advice. They can give you like an idea that genuinely worked for them. But if your context is different, if the timing or the situation is different or you have different resources, different strengths, it still might not be a good fit for you. questions however are the opposite questions whereas advice is brittle and context dependent questions are flexible and adaptable and they shift they can naturally transform based on the context so for example one question you could ask yourself like somebody could give you really good advice so to speak on what workout program to follow or you could just have a question and you ask yourself what would a healthy person do and if you keep walking around life asking yourself what would a healthy person do?

1:33You start to notice all sorts of things based on your current situation that maybe you could do. And, uh, it's much more flexible and adaptable than just trying to follow one strict workout program, which may not work if you have a knee injury, or if you don't have enough time that day or for any number of reasons. Right. Um, so I do really like questions and you're right that I had to ask myself better questions to get better answers. I had to ask myself better questions to kind of get myself in a better mindset. And there are a few questions that I really like that I keep coming back to. And I think maybe, you know, maybe anybody listening to this will find it useful as well.

2:11So the first question is, what am I optimizing for? And, you know, people optimize for different things. Sometimes we optimize for money. Sometimes we optimize for free time or family time. Sometimes you optimize for creative output or having like the ability to choose the creative projects you work on. It can be any number of things, but you need to decide what it is for you. And I think a lot of the time we sort of fall into this rut where we're just kind of optimizing for what we think we're supposed to be doing or what other people are encouraging us to do. And we're not actually optimizing or working on what we actually want to optimize for.

2:46So the other challenge with that question is that shifts over time. You know, like what I'm optimizing for today is different than what I wanted 10 years ago or five years ago. So you need to keep revisiting that question and asking yourself, what am I optimizing for? Now, the second question that I like is, can my current habits carry me to my desired future? So once you know what you're optimizing for, are you on a trajectory that can get you there? Or do your habits need to change? because if you're on the wrong trajectory, if you know you want to optimize for one thing, but your habits are leading you somewhere else, obviously something needs to change.

3:25The other way to kind of frame this, if you want to like flip it around and frame it maybe from a, that's like maybe a little bit more of a positive angle. If you want to frame it from more of a negative angle, what you could ask yourself is, how am I contributing to the situation that I say I don't want? Or how am I contributing to the conditions that I say I don't want? and if you look at your current habits you'll almost always notice that there are a few things that you're doing that are influencing the situation you know like most of life is not it's not entirely under your control but it's also not entirely out of your control right you know it's the majority of life is like kind of like a tennis match you know you don't control what the other player does you don't control their shots or their strategy but you do influence it with your shots and your strategy.

4:12And so it's true that luck and randomness and misfortune, it's true that all that stuff is going to happen to you and you can't control everything, every card that's dealt to you in life. But it's also true that you influence the situation. And so the only reasonable approach is to focus on the elements that are within your control and to try to influence it, to try to shape the conditions to the best way possible. And I think questions like, are my current habits carrying me to my desired future? Or how am I contributing to the conditions I say I don't want? Those questions are, are kind of helping shape that or helping reveal different steps that you could take.

4:50By the way, that how am I contributing the conditions question? I think that's from Jerry Colonna, a great like business coach and entrepreneur. So, so those are a couple that I like. The other question that I asked myself, which I mentioned previously, what season in my end right now. You know, that kind of helps encourage you to get in the right mindset and think, Hey, you know, sometimes habits can be good for you, but they just have outlived their usefulness. Like they were, they were good for a previous season. And so, um, that doesn't mean that, you know, the habit was bad. It doesn't mean that you should feel bad about doing it.

5:23It just means that maybe it outlived its usefulness. So those are just a few of the things I like to kind of prime myself with to try to spark thoughts on what should I really be focused on right now.

5:40I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. And if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life, and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you want to make it easier, you want to make it flow, you want to feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and thank you for listening to this episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

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7:13Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.