Do The Work

Realize that your health is your wealth

What do we have on this earth? Time. In that time we do what we want and need to do. So the best way to increase your wealth - whether you define wealth as money, relationships, time spent creating, or something else doesn’t really matter - is to increase your “alive” time here. To feel and be more alive, you need to be healthy. And being healthy in turn also extends your life.

Create a keystone habit and manage your time well

Your days are composed of the actions you take. The majority of those actions are habitual. When you change those habits, your days will change, and thus your life will change. So one of the best ways to improve yourself and your life is to consciously form or remove habits. A good way to start is with a keystone habit. A keystone habit is a habit that serves as the basis for all other habits. Usually, this is a practice that you do early in the day, so all the other habits can lean on it. A practice like meditation, journaling, taking a cold shower, etc.

Design a personal challenge

Improving yourself can be very difficult, especially when we are stuck in our ways. A method of getting unstuck is to create a personal challenge, or “self-rule”. With that personal challenge, you say you will do something and then just do it for the time of the challenge. An example: write 500 words a day for 100 days. It always has to be formulated with constraints, so that you won’t have excuses available to get out of the challenge halfway. What this personal challenge does, when you designed it well, is it gives you a volume of work in the right direction, thereby improving the skill or habit that you set out to improve in your challenge.

Show, don’t tell

It’s human nature to rarely like being told what to do. We rather learn from example. So try to focus your time on living life in a way that you want others to live it instead of telling them how to live (yes I’m aware of the irony in me telling you to do so here, haha! I do try to practice what I preach as much as possible). I always learned most from other people when I watched how they lived, vs what they said. So it is too with parenting our kids, the lives on which we probably have the most impact.

Play the long game

If you take action over time your actions can compound into massive change. But this only happens if you play the long game, i.e., don’t change the game all the time. So when you realize life is a game, and this game is something we would like to keep playing as long as possible, you can make choices that span decades vs years. One of the most important gameplay strategies then is to make sure you play to keep playing instead of thinking you need to win on some arbitrary facet of it. Also, don’t forget that you’re actually playing, i.e., enjoy it!

Direction over speed

When you embody what you want to see in the world and you think in decades about your life vs years, the most important thing is to take the right actions based on the right decisions. Rarely are the right decisions made in haste. So choose Direction, where you want to go and how you want to get there, over Speed. Remember the story of the hare and the tortoise? Fast is slow, slow is fast.