5 habits that cause 87% of your problems

when Michelangelo was asked how he carved the statue of David he famously said it's simple I just remove everything that's not David the heart of this deeply profound concept is something called addition through subtraction now often on our quest to unlock our inner greatness We Begin by looking in all the wrong places we look to introduce these fancy new habits like cold plunges and red light therapies or gratitude journals but in my experience the thing that's most often holding us back are not the things we aren't doing but rather the things we are doing that

we just need to stop for example just imagine you're a car great habits are like the accelerator whereas bad habits are the emergency Brak now you could just press harder on the accelerator and sure you're going to go faster but do you smell that yeah that's the smell of burnout no bueno so before pressing the pedal all the way down to the metal let's just take a moment and make sure that we've disengaged the emergency breath all right so let's get to it by unpacking these five habits that stop most people from achieving their greatness

the Journey Begins by rewriting one of the most Insidious and habitual of thought patterns it is the scarcity mindset most of us live our lives haunted by the Spectre of scarcity fearing that there's just simply not enough of whatever it is that we seek whether that be money love attention security and this scarcity mindset it creates this perverse Paradox where the more we worry about not having enough the less open we become to the opportunities around us after all as the famous poet Ry once said that which you seek is seeking you so here's how

this usually plays Out imagine two brothers we got Tom we got Jerry yeah like the cartoon why not so they both inherit a large fertile piece of land from their father Jerry he looks at the land and he sees a farm capable of sustaining his family and Community for Generations he believes in his vision for what the farm could be so Jerry he's constantly reinvesting back into the land he's working towards the vision he sees so clearly in his dreams and Truth is it's really hard to stop a person like that from a eventually realizing

their goals whereas Tom on the other hand you know he sees something else he worries that the land it's not vast enough the soil it's not fertile enough the work it's too hard the profits too small and Tom with his fear-based scarcity mindset he invests only the bare minimum in maintaining that land his crops are ultimately meager which he takes as proof that you know what I was right the land is no good so he invests even less next year and less the year after that so on so forth and downward spiral he goes if

you fast forward just a few years is it really any surprise that Jerry's Farm has flourished whereas Tom has been floundering no why is that well because our beliefs Drive our thoughts which become our actions and ultimately our results it's remarkable how often the world contorts itself to fit the vision of reality we hold in our Mind's Eye if we actually show up and act in alignment with our beliefs on a long enough time frame there's practically nothing you can't do truth is any belief held with sufficient conviction will eventually be made true so be

careful what you choose to believe because in a very real way it will become your reality okay so scarcity bad abundance good but how do we counter that pesky voice of fear that we all have in the back of our heads one word gratitude now gratitude is a concept that's really been bastardized over the past decade many of us myself included we've systematized gratitude to death in pursuit of ever increasing productivity we've turned it into a to-do list to be checked off on the morning routine in the process we become detached from the heart of

gratitude not only that but if you're like me you spend most of your time focused on that gap between where you are and where you're tring trying to go and the problem is that Gap it never really gets any smaller because we're constantly moving the goal poost on ourselves so here's a paradigm shift that's really helped me feel more gratitude simply take time to turn around and reflect on the gap between where you are and where you began because that Gap is only ever increasing and in that ever expanding Chasm there's a lifetime of gratitude

to be found all right so here's the second bad habit keeping you from the life of your dreams it's prioritizing urgency over impact so this deceptive habit is like quicksand sucking us deeper and deeper into a Vortex of now which often comes at the cost of our long-term goals and happiness see we live in this increasingly noisy World filled with loud tasks vying for our attention and unfortunately the loudest tasks of all they tend to be the ones which are the most urgent but not necessarily the most important and as a result these important tasks

they get pushed to the back burner because they don't require immediate attention things like long-term strategic planning developing meaningful relationships investing in personal growth or even your health all of that just gets pushed aside in the name of answering those emails a little more quickly in this world we confuse being busy with being effective and being effective isn't about how much you get done it's about what you get done so here's how I typically see this playing Out imagine two friends we have Lisa and Emma who are carving out careers in a high stakes world

of corporate finance Lisa is what we call a firefighter she thrives on the adrenaline of urgent tasks and last minute deadlines she's always the first to respond to emails she takes pride in her ability to multitask and she feels more productive when her day is packed with back to back to back to back meetings she ends each day exhausted but feeling good about the fact that she got a lot done Lisa is a classic example of somebody who prioritizes urgency over impact Emma on the other hand she takes a different approach she is incredibly selective

about the meeting she attends and she's diligent about setting boundaries on her time she carves Out hours each day to do the important deep work that only she can do and she guards s this time ruthlessly not letting anything like emails or text messages distract her Emma recognizes that the things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least so fast forward a few years and Lisa has become the go-to person for last minute tasks her willingness to jump in on every urgent task it's one her praise but she's perpetually

stressed and she's feeling as though she's running on a hamster wheel because the Urgent task they never really stop and despite her hard work she hasn't really progressed in her career as much as she'd hoped while Emma by comparison has steadily risen through the ranks because her strategic projects though they don't get the immediate Buzz of Lisa's urgent tasks they deliver long- lasting impact not only is she growing professionally and personally at a quicker rate but she's doing so with far less stress listen when you're trapped in a cycle of urgency it's easy to confuse

being busy with being affected but remember not everything that demands your attention deserves it after all there is no greater waste than to do with Excellence that which shouldn't be done at all now if you need help Discerning which tasks are important versus just urgent check out this video that's going to pop up here on the screen it's called this productivity system changed my life and I'm going to break down a couple strategies for optimizing your work like the ice framework or the Eisenhower Matrix go check that out next but before you do the third

habit keeping you from the life of your dreams it's a sneaky one it's subtle and often mistaken as a virtue it's collecting but not connecting too many dots or in layman's term it's the Relentless pursuit of knowledge without application dots in this framework is simply information here's how I see it playing out all the time picture two scientists you have Richard you got Sarah Richard loves to learn he spends countless hours pouring over research papers attending seminars and taking online classes he's always looking to acquire new information and amass more knowledge but the problem is

he never really does anything with it he is simply a DOT collector whereas Sarah on the other hand she follows a different approach so while she values learning she equally values applications she splits her time equally between acquiring new information AKA collecting dots and applying buying that information AKA connecting dots you fast forward a few years and the difference between Richard and Sarah is Stark despite Richard's vast knowledge his impact on his field is minimal his desk is filled with stacks of papers and books symbols of the knowledge that he's acquired but not necessarily applied

whereas Sarah while she's made significant strides in her field her balance of learning and doing has resulted in numerous research papers and patents by connecting the dots that she's been collecting over the years she's considered the foremost authority in her field so here's the important takeaway yes the acquisition of knowledge is valuable but it's the application of knowledge that creates real world impact so how do we become more like Sarah well the key is you got to strike a balance and make time not only to learn new things but also to make time for reflection

and application of that knowledge this means setting aside specific doing time each day to connect dots now if you're like me and you tend to be more of a DOT collector than a connector I recommend you check out this next video where I break down how to incorporate more doing time into your schedule it's going pop up here somewhere all right so here's the fourth bad habit that's keeping you from the life of your dreams it's scattershot Focus all right moment of truth raise your hand if you think you are an above average multitasker okay

so obviously I can't see you through the computer so I have no idea if you actually raised your hand or not and hopefully it was more of like a mental hand raise than a physical thing anyhow but lucky for us the University of Utah posed this question to 310 undergraduates and what they discovered is actually quite remarkable 70% of the students believe they weren't above above average multitasker which is pretty funny on its own that 70% of people think they're above average but it gets even funnier when you look at two key results of this

study first the people who multitask the most are typically the worst at it whereas the people who are best at multitasking are actually the ones least likely to work on multiple tasks simultaneously huh additionally another study found that people who are interrupted during the execution of a task require 50% more time to accomplish that task and they make 50% more errors so here's the truth I really hope you take from this the quality of your results is dictated by the quality of your focus multitasking is by definition a dilution of focus and therefore a dilution

of results just remember to do two things at once is to do both poorly so stop falling for this multitasking myth and start developing laser-like Focus for only one task at a time we progress towards our goals most quickly when we commit to doing less but better which I know it's like way easier said than done because there's a literal War for your attention being waged every single day if you want to learn the system that I've used for developing hyperfocus which enabled me to turn my ADHD into a superpower then there's another video going

to pop up here on the screen I highly recommend you check that one out all right so let's get to the last bad habit keeping you from living the life of your dreams it's abusing Parkinson's law now Parkinson's law is a very simple concept that states work expands to fill the time alotted and you have personally experienced this law if you have ever procrastinated on a project that you had months to complete and then found yourself staring down the barrel of a fast approaching deadline wondering how am I going to get this all done well

maybe you had to pull an all nighter and maybe you didn't do your absolute best work but chances are good you probably found a way to get it done right now knowing that humans are a uniquely quirky species that loves procrastination we can use Parkinson's law to our advantage by simply shortening our deadlines so let's use an example to show one way I see this playing out all the time in the workplace imagine we have two entrepreneurs we got Rick we got Linda so Linda she meets with her team every mon morning to review last

week's projects and to lay out upcoming tasks and to does this team has the expectation that they will complete their tasks by end of week whereas Rick's team by comparison they meet every single morning for a quick debrief on the previous day's projects this team has the expectation that they will complete their tasks by end of day now here's the thing I've been both Rick and Linda at different phases of my entrepreneurial journey and what I came to realize is that the total output of a team skyrockets by simply shortening the expectation of how long

certain tasks should take when you give somebody a week to complete a project it takes exactly a week but if you only give them a day it takes exactly a day over the course of a month a quarter a year the team with the shorter deadlines ends up moving so much faster and iterating so much more quickly that it's pretty much Game Over Now The counterargument to this is that the shorter deadlines will lead to lower quality right but the truth is that most dreams die of inaction rather than wrong action and it's the same

in business momentum that takes you generally in the right direction is better than sitting around trying to plan things to Perfection after all you can only turn a boat that's actually moving right now more often from what I've observed the biggest reason people set long deadlines is they have a fear of failure the longer the deadline the less frequently they have to face potential failure so I'll just leave you with this one final idea that I call the magical success coin see success and failure are two sides of the same coin in the beginning that

coin is weighted so it always lands on failure like 99 99% of the time which means you're practically never winning and honestly this is why most people give up but this is a magical coin with each flip the odds shift 0.001% towards success so if you just keep flipping the coin on a long enough time frame your odds of success become a virtual certainty now in this game you get to flip the coin as much as you want the only question is how fast are you going to flip it or put it another way how

fast are you willing to fail your way forward my hope is that you remove these five bad habits from your life you release the eer you break and you gun it in the direction of your dreams now if you really want to accelerate your progress check out the next video that's going to pop up here on the screen it's going to show you five cheat codes so you can stop playing life on hard mode I'll see you over there [Music]