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Gmail - The Daily Routine That Changed My Life
Gmail - The Daily Routine That Changed My Life
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A routine contains the rules for how you live your life.
The longer you play, the better you get, and you often forget the rules and win
anyway.
Now is the time to stop playing the game society told you to play and start playing your
own.
A powerful routine, no matter how long, prevents overwhelm as you progress toward
your goals.
Most people are progressing toward the goals that were given to them.
They are progressing the dreams of someone else rather than their own.
Without a routine that you created, your life will slowly fall – faster and faster –
down a chaotic hole into a life of responsibilities, work, people, and a personality that
you despise.
The mind craves order, and routines allow you to focus your attention to make action
seamless.
This is why working a job “sucks,” but not enough to make you quit and pursue
something that sucks more until it sucks less.
Life is suffering, and we have the ability to choose our suffering every day.
Your goals are the axis of your suffering, and most people are pursuing goals that
aren’t their own. Their suffering doesn’t bring fulfillment.
You don't need motivation or discipline when you are the person who would take
certain actions.
The information we are exposed to as children and throughout our lives programs
our minds to run on certain systems.
A system, in brief, is the process of reaching a goal (this can get extremely
complex).
So, our identity is a web of conscious and unconscious goals that determine the
skills we acquire, the interests we learn, and the choices we make in alignment with
those goals.
You are already acting toward layers of unconscious goals every second of the day.
They’ve been conditioned to the point of not requiring conscious thought. You wake
up, walk, brush your teeth (maybe), and put on your clothes so that you aren’t seen
as an outcast. These are all skills that you have developed as a human with the goal
of fitting in and surviving in society.
This goes deep. The social matrix of goals creates humans that all operate in a
similar fashion. With a slightly different goal of society, we could all be walking
around naked and communicating with each other by tapping people on the head
with a stick. Biological goals clearly influence this.
When we do not have clarity on how to achieve a goal, our mind becomes
disordered. We become overwhelmed, anxious, and narrow-minded.
Our mind declines into chaos.
This is known as entropy. Entropy is Universal. It doesn’t only apply to things like
buildings that fall apart with time unless maintained. The structure of your mind, or
identity, is an invisible building.
You reverse entropy by making a goal conscious, creating a path to achieve it, and
focusing your attention on priority actions that bring results as feedback.
The priority actions include daily education and practice that expose you to the
information that creates an identity.
We will talk about how to master new skills quickly in a future letter, but for now,
understand this:
Because if you don’t have one, society does, and they’ve been planning your life for
decades.
If you don’t set your own goals, acquire the skill necessary to take on the challenge,
and forge your own path – your destiny will be manhandled by society and you won’t
even realize it.
Nobody wants to wake up 40 years later wondering where the time went.
By adopting a daily habit for each pillar of your life, success becomes inevitable.
My question to you:
If you aren’t building your mind, body, business, and relationships every single day –
what are you doing?
Genuine question.
Do you realize that human psychology has been mapped over the course of
evolution to show that humans have an innate drive to grow, expand, transcend, and
create?
"Doing what you want" is often the ego ending the train of thought that would lead to
you improving yourself – because that’s what your nature wants.
You can truly do what you want when you peel back the layers of what you think you
want.
I’m not going to give you a super scientific approach to habit formation.
I’m going to give you the only real way to make behavior change seamless with time:
A person who has money problems and the goals of society will see a new job
opportunity as important.
A person who has money problems and self-generated goals will see a promising
business opportunity as important.
One will store information in their mind that is conducive to their goals and solves
their problems.
The first step to changing your life is to become brutally aware of the problems that
make you want to change your life.
If you’re reading this, then you obviously have problems, everybody does.
Let your mind run wild to create an anti-vision for your future.
What is the worst-case scenario if you continue with the same mental, physical,
financial, and relational actions you are taking?
Next, we will bridge the gap between where you are now with where you want to be
with self-education and skill acquisition.
Schools are necessary in many cases, but they teach you a microscopic fraction of
reality.
They train you into a compartment of reality – like chemistry, physiology, or literature
– and lack regard for the holistic interconnectedness that breeds true intelligence.
Without self-education, you go through life with the same narrow identity and
perspective as everyone else.
It gives you the knowledge to act with clarity toward your goals.
If you were to only immerse your mind in information that taught you how to build a
profitable business, you would.
It took you 18+ years to shape your actions with education from your parents,
friends, and schools - it’s going to take a few years to shape your actions with
information that you curate.
The difference between where you are and where you want to be is skill.
This is a fact.
You don’t have the results you want because you aren’t the person with the skill that
would get those results.
The only thing that can stop you is getting distracted to the point of falling off the
path.
Learning to walk and speak are arguably the most complex skills you’ve ever
learned. They are more complex than building a billion-dollar company.
The thing is, you didn’t have a mind chained by limits that you were taught by people
who didn’t break through their own.
When you build in the real world and hit a wall, a problem is created.
You may or may not become aware of the problem depending on your skill and
experience (this is what prevents most people's progress, they blame their lack of
progress on anything but their own ability).
The problem sits in your subconscious mind to filter the information you get from
your self-education.
As you repeat this process of education and building, for 1-5 years, you will be
awestruck by how far you come.
I will provide the reasons and whys behind each of these parts of my routine.
This is an important point:
The more reasons or whys you can stack behind your actions, the easier it becomes
and the more beneficial it is to a great future.
You discover these reasons or whys by having a goal to apply your self-education to.
If I want to commit to a gym habit, self-education around habit formation and the
gym will give me the reasoning necessary to do so – if and only if I am building in
reality.
Please note that this routine may not be feasible for you now.
Please also note that this was the process of years of experimentation to find what I
deemed enjoyable and conducive to my desired future.
I encourage you to take bits and pieces to experiment with in your own life until you
can create a routine that fits you.
First thing in the morning, around 6am, I get outside no matter the weather or how I
feel.
I aim for 15-20,000 steps a day because of the stacked benefits it brings to my life.
Walking is one of those activities that requires minimal effort but brings maximum
results.
Walking clears my mind, wakes me up, gets me away from distractions, acts as a
creativity block in my day, keeps me lean, keeps me healthy, keeps me (slightly) tan,
and reverses most of the damage done by sitting under life-sucking blue light.
For the past few days, I have been doing 30 minutes of meditation followed by 30
minutes of reading (Psycho Cybernetics right now).
I have a list of recurring tasks and levers that I execute every morning.
I stack all of my priority tasks in this work block so I can complete them before most
people wake up.
This allows me to gradually introduce entropy into my day as work becomes less
structured.
I do this to reap the benefits of the general 150 minutes of zone 2 cardio a week (I
consider my excessive walking to fill in the rest).
I’ve personally noticed that running improves my focus, stress tolerance, body
composition (less water, more vascularity), and allows me to sleep at night knowing
I “did the hard thing.” I hate running.
On all other days I walk, listen to educational material, and collect ideas in my phone
(using Kortex) to channel into my creations and products.
After my run, I shower, eat breakfast, and sit back down to work.
I’ll help with administrative work, client work, and introduce myself to people-
oriented things.
This is when open loops and distractions start to take over, but not so much that
they can’t be mitigated by another walk.
I want Kortex to succeed more than I don’t want to take calls, therefore I want to take
calls.
Most days, I work 4-5 hours. (Even with my excessive workload, I am still close to
The 4 Hour Workday philosophy I have which I talk about in my book.).
These calls include client calls, internal company calls, design calls, and product
calls spread out throughout the week.
If I don’t have to be at my desk, I will take these calls on yet another walk.
6) Go to the gym.
I know that I won’t be able to operate at my best after the gym, so I treat this as a
work cutoff time.
I train every day, so not rest days unless my body needs it (please don’t reply with
your latest and greatest training ideology).
Of course, with Kortex, the book launch, and everything else on my plate, I may have
work spillover during this phase of my life.
I’ve had many contacts in the past, but it has always subtracted from my life rather
than adding to it.
After the gym, I get lunch with my good friend and decompress.
Things are getting boring now so I will spare you, but this part of my day is crucial for
psychological recovery.
Most nights I’ll go out to dinner with a close friend or spend the night in watching
shows and catching up with my girlfriend.
Dan
Koe Enterprises
1817 E Southern Avenue Suite #462
Tempe
Arizona 85282
United States