10 Ways to Beat Your Distractions, Increase Productivity, and Enjoy the Process!

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Impact Theory Q&A. Today, I'm going to be talking all about the very important topic of how to avoid distractions. If you want to get anything meaningful done in your life, I promise you the ability to keep yourself on task, to not chase the squirrel or the shiny object, is going to be the key to you actually making use out of your time. And efficiency is my obsession. It's one of my secret weapons, my superpowers, if you will. And today, we're going to be talking about exactly what you need to do to make it one of yours. All right, so first question up is I find myself jumping around the day feeling scatterbrained even with my to-do list and non-negotiables written down. I struggle from project to project, finding myself getting distracted by doing chores around the house, running errands, to then finally feeling overly exhausted before the end of the day. It's not just simple tasks, but being distracted during conversations and just about every aspect in my life. I literally feel like a dog spotting a squirrel. It's the struggle of beating distractions and keeping my thoughts aligned. My boyfriend always says to me "Close down some browsers." So, what are some tips to stay focused on one task at a time and beat the majority of distractions? Please help, in all caps. Okay, so number one, this is not a sexy answer, but I have a feeling this is going to come up a lot. You want to make sure that you're optimizing your cognition. So, you want to make sure that you're getting sleep. When you are tired, it is crazy the way that you become scattered. Things that would have been easy to keep your focus on, um suddenly you're going to have a hard time. Your diet needs to be on point. You cannot imagine how much your diet impacts your brain function. Um another one, getting exercise. One of the things that they'll prescribe for people with ADD, um ADHD, is exercise. Just getting out there, putting in the reps, there are huge rewards. Um, BDNF, which is uh brain-derived neurotrophic factor, something that is like miracle grow for your brain. I forget who says that, it's not me, um but I think that that is a very apt adage. And it's going to be something that helps you. So, this part sort of applies to I'm sure every question that we're going to address today. You want to make sure that you get the basics down, and then the last part, which definitely speaks to this in particular, when you find even something like a conversation, you find that your mind is wandering. Some of this is just training yourself to focus. So, we live in this eternally distracted society where we're constantly seeking those dopamine rewards that you get from checking your phone or whatever. Now, you didn't list that as one of the things that um is is your problem, but meditation is the answer sort of regardless of what the impetus is. Regardless of what it is that you find yourself being pulled towards, whether it's the squirrel as you say or something else, training yourself to be able to extend the period of time where you're focusing on one thing is going to be extraordinarily helpful. And it can be as simple as just coming back to the breath. This does not need to be a grand spiritual thing that you do, uh though I think that there are huge benefits to meditation on that side, but just training your attention, learning to apply your attention to the thing that you want to focus on is a skill. All of this stuff is a process, and once you understand that it is a process, then it becomes something that you can train. And so, sitting in a noisy room, it doesn't even need to be a quiet room. In fact, it might be better practice, certainly as you get more advanced, to do it in a noisy room so that you learn when something pulls your attention that you have control of bringing it back. And in a meditative practice um that's focused around the breath, you would just come back to the breath. In a more mindfulness approach, you would use any sensation that you can to come back to this present moment. It could be the um the noise that you heard of reminding you that you're there in that room. It could be if your feet are starting to tingle because of the way that you're sitting. It's, you know, feeling your back against the couch. Whatever. Using something that is in that moment to remind yourself to be present, to be there, and not to let your thoughts drift. And you'll find that in the beginning, like, man, every 3 seconds my mind is wandering. I'm going to something else. And it may even take you minutes before you even realize that your attention has wandered. And in that moment, you bring yourself back to the breath. You give yourself some grace. You don't panic that you have let your mind wander, and you just keep doing that. And day after day, you will find in the beginning it's every 3 seconds, and then it's every 10 seconds. And then you might be able to stay focused on your breath for 30 seconds. And one thing that I did a lot in the beginning is I would just count my breaths. And I would find in the beginning I couldn't complete a single breath cycle and stay focused on my breath for the four parts of a breath cycle, right? The inhale, the inhale hold, the exhale, the exhale hold. Those four parts. That's my meditation practice, very simple, four-part, what they call box breathing. And it's just box breathing, those four parts make up the four sides of the box. And uh I couldn't make it through a single breath without my mind wandering. And then I would get to the point where I could do 10 breaths. And then now I'd say my record is probably somewhere around 16 or 17 breaths. I don't think I've ever made it to 20. Um but that's a pretty long time when you're breathing slowly. I would say it's you know, maybe 2 minutes, something like that. It's a long time, at least for me, to be able to keep my attention totally uninterrupted on one thing. Um and so that might be helpful for you. And just tracking where it is that you're losing track of the breath, where you're like, was it four or five? I I you know, I don't remember where I was. And just continuing to extend that out. So, this is a great reminder that everything in life is a process. And you can get better at flexing that muscle. So, starting with that, that would be my recommendation if you find yourself constantly being pulled away. All right, question number two. What's the strategy I can use to help resist the distractions that come before I even start working? I feel like I'm letting these distractions in because I have so much self-doubt that it hurts less to pretend I don't have the time to start. Oh my god, that is amazingly self-aware. I love that. This is going to be a lot of fun to answer. Even when I know that's not true, my phone and the internet in general are huge problems for me when it comes to keeping focus on my work. Sincerely, thank you for all you do. Okay. The key here is going to be one, the self-awareness that you've already displayed. I just cannot tell you how far ahead of the game you are that you recognize that you're lying to yourself. That is really the beginning step. So, always being honest with who you are, where you're at, what is true for you, even if you can't say it to the outside world, always being willing to admit it to yourself is so unbelievably powerful. That was something that I I had this really big crisis in my early 20s where I realized I was telling everybody that I wanted to be successful, but the way that I was acting was like I just wanted to feel good about being smart. And I didn't know enough to be successful if I was always trying to be the smartest person in the room. And so, they came into conflict. And I remember I remember the room I was in when that occurred to me that, "Hey, if what you want is to just feel smart, you need to quit this company, get the hell out." No judgment. If that's what you want to do, fine. I don't want to live in this sort of sketched out world anymore of where I talked this big game, all my ambition, all the things I'm going to do, but in reality I spiral out of control the second I feel stupid. And I mean it was devastating. I would lose days to being upset and traumatized and thinking badly about myself when um something would occur that made me feel dumb. So, anyway, I would argue for a bad idea just because they were mine. I needed to feel smart. And I realized, okay, hold on. This is this is a thing. So, no judgment, be honest with yourself. And that opened the world to me. Once I wasn't trying to pretend that I was a certain way and I was just really honest with myself about who I was at that moment. I was changeable and I was willing to believe that. But in being honest with where you're at now, you can put together a plan of action. So, going back to what I was just saying in the first question, everything is a process. So, now you've got the self-awareness. Now you know what you're lying to yourself about. Now we can begin to craft strategies, rule-based strategies for getting out of that. Rules are, I think, underutilized in people's lives. And this is something that I use on a daily basis. And the rules that I have laid out in my life allow me to stay on track. So, for instance, you have a problem in the morning of facing an inadequacy, okay? So, you know something about yourself um that you're you like the out of thinking that you don't have time so that you don't have to face, I set a goal, I gave that goal a deadline, and I missed that deadline. And that means, punchline of punchlines, that I'm not good enough. Which is true if you add the modifier yet. I'm not good enough yet. Now, the thing that's going to let you off the hook and allow us to slot in some rules because you're not fighting against yourself, you're now working for yourself to achieve the things you want to achieve, is to understand you actually can get good. So, it's what I call the only belief that matters. The only belief that matters is that if you put time and attention into getting better at something, you'll actually get better at it. Not because you're special, not because you're brighter than the next person, because that is the physics of the human mind. That's just how the mind works. The truth of being a human is that if you apply energy into practicing something and that practice is well done, you will, as an inevitable consequence of that time and energy, have a deeper skill set. That skill set has utility, it lets you do something in the world that other people cannot do. Okay, so if we know that's true, now we don't need to seek a distraction. Because when we realize, "Oh, we're not good enough yet." All that does, another layer of self-awareness, it lets us know the thing that we need to get better at. And now if I apply my time and energy to that thing, I will actually improve. So okay, cool. Now I need rules to make sure that I clear that space for me to actually get good at that thing. Now the only catch there is it needs to be something that you're actually excited to get good at, right? Like imagine that world where you're truly world-class at that thing, right? The only thing that stands between you and being world-class at anything you care about, maybe not the best in the world, but world-class is time. And so if you like that thing, you're excited by that thing, then you put these rules. And so a simple rule may be, "I don't check my phone under any circumstance for any reason before 10:00 a.m." I don't know what your rule is going to be, it depends on what time you wake up, but for me, I don't take meetings before 10:00 a.m. The way I say it to myself is I don't let anyone control my time before 10:00 a.m. I don't take meetings from um anybody on the team at Impact Theory. I don't even take meetings with Lisa unless there's something really um like high time pressure that needs to be dealt with. So I am in my own cocoon, I have my important things list, and then that's another rule that I go down my important things list in order. I always put the highest priority thing first, and then I just work my way down. Also, another very important rule that anybody who's familiar with me will know and have heard me say a bazillion times, I get out of bed in 10 minutes or less. And this morning, I struggle with that because I struggle with it every day. But because I have a rule, I actually get out of bed. So, that is the key. Get that rule set. Figure out what you need to do. Don't touch your phone. Don't allow distractions. And remember that you're not good enough yet. You can get good. So, get excited about the thing you're pursuing, which should make it a lot easier to avoid the time-wasting uh things that are taking up your time now. And three, speaking of ADHD. I have ADHD, which by the way, welcome to the club. I did as well growing up. Uh and I suppose I still do now. Uh but I manage it. So, I have ADHD, and I work an office job where I sit down for 8 hours a day. I'm a very physical person, and all my jobs I had prior to this, I was always active and moving, which works best with my ADHD. I tend to get bored and fidgety doing the same thing all day and just sitting. I'll put music on or a show in the background, get up for short periods. It becomes really difficult to stay focused. Any suggestions? Okay. So, we already talked in the first question about things you can do to elongate the time you're able to focus on something. So, I would run through all of that. The diet, the exercise, the meditation, all of it. Okay. Now, to push this farther and to give you another way to think about this, sometimes instead of pushing back against the way that we are, we can lean into it. So, finding a way to structure your life such that you have a job that actually lets you do that. So, if you know, "Hey, I need to be moving around. I need to have a high degree of physicality in my job." All of that, find a job that lets you do that. You've already said that all of your past jobs sound like they were more suited to what you're doing now. So, that begs the question, what does the ideal job look like for you? I'm guessing you've taken other jobs in your life because you wanted to move up, right? So, you want to make more money, you want a better title, whatever the case may be. And so, recognizing that where you right now may not be fully suited to where you want to be. So, what are the things that need to change? And I think it is very instructive for people to ask the question, "Who's living my ideal life?" And that doesn't mean who's making the most money, it means what person's life do you want to live? The real day-to-day grind of it. And when you identify what your dream job is, now we need to go about figuring out how we get that job. And so, very quickly, a question about managing our ADHD and figuring out how to stay focused actually becomes a question of, "How do we get good at finding the right job?" And so, if you think about orchestrating your life, and most people live by the law of accident. I want to repeat that. Most people live by the law of accident. Don't let that be you, right? You bump into somebody, they know there's a job offering, or it's closer to where you live, or it's, you know, easier for you with the kids, whatever. And so, you bump into these things, it's like, "Oh, yeah, cool. Oh, I'll make that little thing." And instead of designing your life, you end up just responding to sort of little bumps along the road that end up leading you down a path that was never a conscious choice. You want to sit down and map out, okay, we know that we we need a job that meets certain criteria. And one piece of that criteria is that it allows you to be very physical and get that energy out. Okay? So, take control of your lives. I cannot stress that one enough. Journaling is hugely important. Recognizing where you thrive, where you don't thrive, what are deal breakers. So, it sounds like 8 hours behind the desk is a deal breaker for you. So, map out those things, take very strict control of your life, and remember, that this may be one of the things that that has led me to have a career, a life that has certainly led to a tremendous amount of joy in my life, and looks like from the outside, um, impossible to obtain. I am an unreasonable person, and I set aside all of my lacking elements, all of my That's a weird way to say it, inadequacies. I set aside all the things that I'm not good at, because I know it's all a process. I can get good at anything that I point myself at, right? The only belief that matters if I put time and attention to getting good at this thing, I actually will get good at this thing. So, I just set all of that aside. Okay, cool, yeah, whatever. I'm not yet good enough to have the life that I want, my ideal life. But, I'm going to get good enough. And from that, I plant a very unreasonable belief inside my soul, which is I can have any life I want. And now, I just need to write out exactly what that is. And then, I'm going to march fiendishly down that road, using the rules that we talked about in question two, my ability to stay focused that I cultivated from question one. Okay, this is real This is actually how I live my life. All to Now that I have this glowing ember of determination in my soul to live a life that everybody else thinks is absurd, beyond my reach, which it certainly is every time I begin in a journey. But, I know what I want. I've handcrafted the life that I desire, and I know the realities of who I am, and what needs to be true in order for me to move well through the world, right? As somebody who was diagnosed with ADHD as as I fully get it. And so, I have tailored my life to that. Momentum is everything to me cuz I've got to always be moving. I've got to always feel like I can have tomorrow be wildly different than today. But I take responsibility for the fact that I have to build that. And it's not going to happen by accident. The life I would be leading if I led my life by accident would be radically different. It would not be tailored to the things that I want. So, don't be afraid to want. Don't be afraid to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what you really want. And then don't be afraid to be unreasonable in accepting nothing less. Now, we could get into a whole thing about pursuit. Acquiring your goals is far less important than sincerely pursuing them. But that is beyond the scope of this Q&A. All right, so with that I'm going to move on. Number four. My question is, I'm a small-time YouTuber, just started making videos for a few weeks now. I've seen a lot of videos on how to grow your channel and what you should and should not post. All these things have created so much noise in my mind that I need to do a lot of things and have to put an ample amount of effort to become successful in it. This noise is distracting me from being myself and I just want to know if I should do what other people are doing as well even when I don't want to. How should I overcome this? Okay, so um while this may be slightly outside of the the scope of traditionally what people think of as distraction, I really like this idea of the all the different voices in your head, whether it's your parent, whether it's your friend, whether it's other YouTubers, also creating the sense of distraction of I don't know which path to choose. Now, self-awareness, there is no question that it's one of the most important things that anybody could develop in their lives, becoming aware of translating how you're feeling about something into words that you can articulate. I don't think there's anything more powerful than journaling for developing self-awareness, which again, self-awareness is about translating how you feel into an understanding of why you feel that thing, okay? So, that's going to be the journal process. This happened, made me feel some kind of way, this is why I think it made me feel some kind of way. And then you're going to get better and better and better at that until you're able to identify exactly what it is that's bothering you in real time. Now, that's going to be facing a lot of insecurities, admitting um things about yourself that you may not want to admit, but that's going to open a lot of doors for you cuz at least you now understand your motivations. Okay. So, now with that in mind, we've got all these voices that are raining down on us, but we've spent the time developing self-awareness. So, when somebody tells us, "Hey, you should do this to grow your channel." and we're like, "Oh, that makes me feel some kind of way. Oh, I don't like that because I know the day-to-day grind of doing XYZ thing, I won't enjoy doing that." So, okay, cool. Or, the number of people that have given me advice on how to grow Impact Theory University that I have ignored because I don't like the way that being a hardcore salesman like that makes me feel. Um and just being honest that that means that generate as much revenue from Impact Theory University as I could, but to me, doing things like giving it away to people that can't afford it, yeah, that makes me feel the way that I want to feel. And so, being honest with myself about why I'm feeling the way that I'm feeling and the real-world consequences of that is incredibly important. So, as you get this advice on what you should do to grow your channel, if it doesn't feel right, identify why it doesn't feel right, and then steer towards what does feel right because doing things that make you feel better about yourself, that you love the difficult process of doing will be far more rewarding because here is the God's honest truth. The struggle is guaranteed. The success is not. Nobody can guarantee that your channel is going to grow, not the way that you want it to. But I can guarantee that it's going to be hard. So, if you know that something is going to be hard and the outcome is wildly uncertain, then you want to make sure that what you do, you love the process of. And I intimated earlier that sincere pursuit should be the thing that you emotionally reward yourself for. If you show up every day unafraid to make a mistake, to put out a video on YouTube, to see what works, what doesn't work, to try things, to be courageous in the face of putting something out there and people coming after you saying it's garbage or whatever, all the things that will inevitably happen to you uh if you're on YouTube long enough. Um But rewarding yourself for being courageous enough to do it, for not succumbing to the noise, to refusing to be paralyzed by indecision, for in the face of a tsunami of distracting voices and differing opinions, that you knew in the end, the only thing that matters is action. There's a phrase that I think about often, and that is action cures all. If you have a problem, I promise you, thinking about it isn't the solution. Taking action is. Hey, like you, I would go watch a Brazilian YouTube videos, but I wouldn't watch a Brazilian YouTube videos on how to do something before I tried it. I might watch a couple videos, but I mean literally a couple videos, and then I would immediately get involved in that thing. And you will find that in doing it, in trying to pull it off, you learn infinitely more. You now have context for what you're learning. You now will maybe steer your education in a different direction. I just cannot stress enough. You've got to take action. You've got to take action. And in that all that din, that noise, you're going to begin to realize like wait a second, these people don't even know what they're talking about because I'm actually out there doing it. These people do know what they're talking about, so I'm going to be listening more to them. But action cures all. Like that has to be the mantra that everybody lives by. I cannot tell you the the thing that has propelled me forward is I'm so unafraid of embarrassing myself. I know that when I get started on something I'm going to look stupid. And my willingness to look stupid and not try to pose or look cool, to go out there, get kicked in the face, embarrass myself, recollect myself, and move forward. That's how I keep winning. And irony of ironies is if you recognize that you should never judge yourself through the lens of a moment. You should only judge yourself through the lens of a lifetime. Or more practically, three-year movements, 10-year movements. When you start thinking like that, then it's like I laugh because all the people making fun of me, on a long enough timeline, I will beat them all. And I really believe that. Going back to me being a very unreasonable person, I know that I will win. On a long enough timeline, I can beat anyone at anything because I have the only belief that matters. That if I put time and energy into getting better at something, I will actually get better. Now most people can't do it. Most people cannot get their ego out of the way. Most people can't eliminate the distractions. Most people succumb to the paralysis of indecision. They're so afraid to be embarrassed that they let that noise, right? The the very well-defined sense of distraction from other people's voices, stop them from growing, from learning, from trying, from taking action. Now if you take action and recognize I'll get better. These guys can make fun of me. They're never going to stick with it. They won't be able to deal with the emotion of getting embarrassed, of failing at something, of recognizing that you truly aren't good good yet. Now most people don't have the word yet. That you do, you will use that as a weapon. And I know people hate it when I use war language. But I love it. You will use it as a weapon that you will wield in your quest for success. It works so well. Action cures all. Number five. What tools can I use to help shut off my brain from the millions of ideas when I've chosen one to give all my energy and focus to. I left my job as VP of a major food company after 10 years a year ago to start my own business and I struggle with being my own boss now that I only have myself to hold myself accountable. But this business is my livelihood and my future and my passion project. All right, I love this, man. I can relate to this heavily. All right, I've always said that the thing that sobers up entrepreneurs faster than anything is to have your house on the line. When you've got a wife, kids, just rent to make whatever, even if you're a solo flyer, but you know you've got to eat, all of a sudden you become real sober about either something is working or it is not. And when it is not working, man, you better make a change and make a change ASAP. There is some real clarity to that. Now, I would say that you want and I can predict the the kickback I'm going to get on this, but this is the truth. And because I live it every day, as 50 Cent said, I came in the game humble. Can't nobody tell me now. You want to tie your identity to your success. It's dangerous because oh my god, if you end up failing, you're going to have to backtrack real fast and get your identity back out of that, but we're going to save that for another class. For now, I'm going to tell you, hey, the fact that it's all riding on the line, the fact that you said you were going to do this, and now, baby, it's put up or shut up. Let that ride on you. Now, be very careful. Don't let it create so much pressure that you become paralyzed because that does not serve you. We do and believe that which moves us towards our goals. So, we want the pressure, but not so much that it causes us to crack. Not so much that it slows us down or um you know, puts us in this death spiral, right? You never allow yourself to say the words I'm out of moves. You're never out of moves. You're never out of options, right? There is always something else that you can do. Number one rule of being an entrepreneur, avoid a mortality event. The name of the game is to stay in business long enough to figure it out. It is very okay to not know what you're doing right now. It is very much not okay to stand still. The only wrong move in life ever is standing still. Indecision will kill you. Mistakes will not. Now, we can get into the idea of dent the car, don't total the car cuz of course, yes, you could make a fatal mistake, but those are usually pretty easy to spot. If you ask yourself, "Hey, if this fails, do I go out of business?" If the answer is yes, don't even attempt it. Move on to something where the answer is no. Far better to take incremental steps towards your goal, to stay in the game long enough to figure out exactly what direction you want to be taking those steps in, than to do one sort of big, put it all on the roulette wheel and bet it all on black, okay? That we do not want to do. Stay in the game, tie your identity to that success, be all in. While I don't encourage people to burn the ships to the shore, I actually encourage people keep your day job. You've already burned your ships to the shore, so you need to be honest that behind you is the flaming wreckage of your previous life. Now, probably good to hold a little nugget in your head reminding you that you can always get back to that because you have the skills and skills have utility. But for now, we're going to close the door on that. That that's going to be the break clap break glass in case of emergency sort of notion. For now, we want to make sure that since we left our previous job, it's do or die. So, let's do. Now, personally, I respond well to that. I love that. I love having things right on it. But, I'm very careful not to let that overwhelm me. So, the whole notion of overwhelm is outside the scope of this question, but I think you're in a powerful position. But, you have to embrace the do or die mentality. So, get in there. Get after it. All right. Number six. Working from home offers quite a bit of distractions. One I didn't think I'd face is bored eating during the work day. Where do you think bored eating stems from? How do you curb this habit? All right. Bored eating is all about dopamine. So, what happens is you start doing a task. That task is difficult. It has a high cognitive load, okay? And when you think about the brain is about 3 lb, and yet it consumes about 20% of your calories. So, it is a tiny percentage of your overall body weight, and yet calorically, it is wildly demanding. So, thinking actually is hard. And so, when you get into something and you're thinking about it, and you hit that sort of either it's boring, it's difficult, it's forcing you to face your inadequacies, whatever. It's the antithesis of the dopamine reward that you would get if you just pick up your phone, or God willing, that you can go eat something. And eating is one of specially if you're wired like me, eating is one of the biggest dopamine rewards that you're going to get. It is truly a drug-like effect. If that's you, then you need to put in parameters around your eating. You need to remember that you have a goal, you're working towards something, and this is critically important to understand going back to construct your life, you should be pursuing a goal that matters to you, okay? Your goal should be exciting and honorable, okay? Exciting in that you're amped up about it. Even failing at that thing is fun. And I think that's one of the most important questions anybody could ask themselves. What could I do and love even if I were failing? Now, you're always going to prefer winning at something that you love over losing at something that you love, but there really are things in your life that are interesting enough to you. It doesn't have to be some deep passion, but they're interesting enough to you that as you pursue them, they give you more energy than they take. Now, that doesn't mean that you don't have overhead in your life. We all have it. It's a great um concept uh from Jeff Bezos that no matter how much you love your job, there's always going to be overhead. There's going to be some percentage of your job that you don't like. Um I never need to work again and yet uh I'm running a company where 30% of my time 30 a full 30% of my time is I hate. I don't just dislike, I actively hate doing it. 30% of my time is stuff that's fine. It's important. It needs to be done. Not necessarily thrilling. And then only 40% is stuff that I'm ecstatic about. But I'm so excited by what we're trying to build and I'm so sustained by the 70% that's either fine, important, but needs to be done. Maybe not the most thrilling, but fine. And the 40% that I absolutely love that I'm more than happy to slay the dragons of the 30% of things that I hate and for whatever reason I'm unable to outsource to somebody else. So, I've got this exciting goal. It's honorable. I'm trying to help other people is what I mean by that. So, it doesn't just serve me, it serves others, which is a huge dopamine reward for um a social animal, okay? That's critically important. So, when I have that impulse to stop doing the hard thing and to go get something to eat and I have even found myself getting up out of my seat. I'm literally three steps towards the kitchen. I'm like, "What am I doing?" And I sit myself back down. So, it is crazy how fast you can slip into autopilot that there is some part of your brain that's telling you to pick up your phone and look at it to um check your email, to go get something to eat. I think everybody feels those distractions. Understanding that's your brain crying out for a little dopamine hit, you've probably trained yourself to do that either through frequent eating or through uh just training yourself to look at your phone constantly, which they are designed to take over that mechanism, to shorten people's attention span, to make you crave that next hit. And so we're living in this crazy world of digital distraction where we're trained to have this shorter and shorter attention span, to crave that dopamine more and more. So now you're going to have to do things to unwind that. Rules around eating have been very helpful for me. So I eat two meals a day, that's it, period, end of story. And I know when the day begins exactly what I'm going to be intaking. So my calories are always planned out except for Saturday. Saturday I go pretty hardcore. Sunday I don't even worry about calories, but I limit the options like I don't eat things with sugar on Sunday, but I do on Saturday. Um so having rules that are extraordinarily strict, in fact, here is here's a great name for you guys to remember around strict rules. Bright lines. I don't remember who coined that phrase, I think it's brilliant. So in your life you need bright lines. What are things you allow yourself to do and don't allow yourself to do? And if you know, hey, this is what I'm allowed to eat through the day. That's it, or even these are the times that I'm allowed to eat. I have very strict timelines around when I eat. So I eat my first meal usually around 8:30, 9:00, and I eat my last meal, brace yourselves, I eat my last meal around 1:30 p.m. And so I have a nice 17 to 18-hour window where I'm not eating. And I do that for a whole host of reasons, but I don't violate those rules. And so once you put those rules in place, sticking to them becomes far easier because this is why Jocko Willink says discipline is freedom. When you know I don't go outside of these lines. I don't break these rules. These rules are hard and fast. They are bright lines. Now, there's no, you know, maybe I should, maybe I shouldn't. It's like me and getting out of bed in 10 minutes or less. I never want to. Every single day, literally every day of my life. My brain is kicking up excuses. Why today? I shouldn't have to get out of bed in 10 minutes or less. Even I am startled that after I've been doing this now for more than 20 years. Even 20 years in, I still have to fight every day. But I have bright lines, so there's no excuse. So, literally when I think, "Oh, well, today you don't have to for XYZ reasons." My conscious mind, I've repeated it so many times is, "This is a bright line. There are no excuses. There is no reason. There is no ifs, ands, or buts. You get out of bed in 10 minutes or less. Full stop. Period. End of story." And so, therefore, I get out of bed. But you have to know what you're striving for. You have to know why you're doing all of this. Why you're putting in all these rules. And it has to be something you're actually interested in. You're actually excited about. Otherwise, why? Why are you limiting your life like this? Why are you narrowing things down? Okay? Why not go get the dopamine hit from the fridge? You have to have a reason. Right? You've got to know why you eat a certain way or don't eat a certain way. You've got to know why you're working this hard. You've got to know why you push through the difficult things. Okay? Nietzsche's quote, "The person with the right why can survive almost anyhow." Okay? You have to know what your why is. You've got to know why you're pushing through all this stuff. But once you have that, you'll be able to slap some rules on this and get to the other side. Identity is another key component of that. I'm the type of person that follows the rules I put. And I put rules in place to get me to my goals. It'll be something like that. And when that becomes a core part of your identity, when to feel good about yourself, you must adhere to your rules, and you love feeling good about yourself so much that you would adhere to your rules even when it's boring, painful, difficult, that's when things get really, really interesting. All right, guys. On the other side of distraction is an extraordinary world just waiting for you, a highly constructed world that truly is your dream life. Put that unreasonable belief in yourself that you can do this. You don't have to be good yet. Just believe that you can get good. And trust me, my friends, not only can you get good, you can get extraordinary. And speaking of getting extraordinary, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Everybody, thank you so much for watching. If you haven't already, be sure to smash that subscribe button and hit the bell notification so you never miss a thing. Till next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.