These Daily HABITS Will CHANGE YOUR LIFE Forever | Nir Eyal EP 454

0:28I am so grateful for you. community. All you have to do is go to lewishouse.com slash giveaway. And that's where you'll get all the details about how you can be a winner. And again, we're choosing winners every single day for 10 straight days. 10 days of greatness is my way of saying thank you for a decade of greatness. So what are you waiting for? Head to lewishouse.com slash giveaway and enter the giveaway right now. Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

1:07What should we be thinking about on how to set our goals and dreams for our life? Yeah, so goals are tricky. I would say that, you know, there's nothing inherently wrong with the smart goals technique, etc. There is definitely a lot wrong with, let me sit here and make a vision board and a mood board about like my five-year plan. My best piece of advice is let's just start with tomorrow as opposed to, Ooh, what do I want to do in five years? And my vision board and my mood board and all that stuff. Again, it's about living according to your values and nobody can tell you what your values are. How would the person you want to become spend their time by blocking out that time to say, you know what?

1:43Yes, I have a dream that someday I'll write a novel. I have a dream that I'll get my PhD. I'll get a dream, a dream that I'll have a successful business. Okay, but how much time are you going to invest in that? And knowing that constraint of the same 24 hours with everything else that you want to do and that you dream of forces you to prioritize. Consistency over intensity, that is essential to getting to that long-term goal is to work on it day or over day after day after day. Relentless forward momentum, this is how we accomplish these big goals, not just dreaming about them. The only metric of success from now on for you should be one thing.

2:18Did I do what I said I would do without distraction? It's not about finishing anything. Because when you say to yourself in your calendar, I am going to sit at my desk and work on my book for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, whatever it is you say you want to do. I don't care how long you work on it. Whatever you said you're going to do. And this is called making an implementation intention, which is just a fancy way psychologists call planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. That technique has been shown to be more effective. Here's the kicker. The people who do that actually finish more.

2:52They actually get more done than the people who use the to-do list technique. It's kind of like saying, okay, I'm not going to go run for an hour today, but I'm going to put my shoes on and I'm going to go outside and I'm going to start the run for two minutes. And I'm just going to do that every day. So I respect the, you know, just get started technique. Very nice. But it's the don't stop technique. Don't say, oh, I'm going to run a 730 or whatever. Say I am going to walk for 30 minutes and I'm not going to do anything else that might take me away from working on this thing for 30 minutes in my life.

3:24That's all I'm going to do. I am going to check email and do nothing but flush through my email inbox for 15 minutes without doing anything else. I am going to read a book and nothing else for 20 minutes. that is all you need to do to measure yourself don't worry about will i finish the book will i get to inbox zero will i ever be in good physical fitness don't worry about the end goals worry about did you put in the time to work on the task you wanted to work on without distraction that's your only metric of success and what happens to our self-confidence or the belief in ourself when we constantly let ourselves down with this process of not doing what we say we want to do So if you run your life on a to-do list and you don't finish what you said you're going to do, which barely anybody with a to-do list actually, you know, who runs a life with a to-do list actually does, you're reinforcing a negative self-image of another day went by and here I go.

4:17I didn't do what I said I was going to do. Look, I still got all these things that I didn't get to. What a loser. As opposed to when you measure yourself based on this only metric of did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction, you are a winner with every time box. Yeah, it doesn't matter the results you get. It's just that I was my word today. And what I said I was going to do, I did it. And that builds a better self-image and self-confidence. Bingo. So being indistractable, first and foremost, is about personal integrity. It's about being as honest with yourself as you are with other people, right?

4:52We all know that we wouldn't want to be a liar. Being called a liar is one of the worst insults anybody could say to you, right? You wouldn't want to lie to your friends, to your family, to your co-workers. and yet we lie to ourselves every day. And that takes a huge psychic toll on our self-image and we don't even realize it until it's too late. And that's when people start concocting all these ridiculous ideas. Oh, I have a short attention span or I'm bad with time management or hey, you know what? I probably need some kind of diagnosis. For the vast majority of people, there's nothing wrong with them, right?

5:22They just reinforce this crappy self-image of someone who's incapable when they are perfectly capable if they had the right techniques.

5:37Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple podcast right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel on Apple podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

6:27Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.