This Daily Routine Changed My Life (4 Habits & The Future Of Productivity)

the clever man may work smarter not harder they say but the creative man doesn't work at all to me it's a shame that the average American has equated overwork with a status symbol or worse they use it as a way to escape their responsibilities because if you were serious about your work you would optimize for creativity not productivity you would go on walks you would train you would exercise you would eat well you would do all of the things that lead to a quality mind that leads to quality work you would get enough sleep you would socialize you would push your limits in calculated ways you would understand that 4 hours of focused work when done correctly leads to much more results than 12 hours of scattered work the problem here is with a concept that I've talked about before called conceptual survival it's the fact that animals try to reproduce the information that's in their genes right they try to reproduce physically humans on the other hand they also do that but we also try to reproduce the information in our Consciousness in other words we try to survive and reproduce on the conceptual level we try to reproduce our identity our mental body and now understand that this is just a concept a metaphor for understanding what is happening in your mind because we write books to become immortal in a sense because we're impregnating other people with the idea does that we distribute and hope to catch fire and live on in someone else's mind we argue with others when they disagree with our political beliefs and you feel that threat response when someone tells you something the political season just passed and it's probably going to ramp up again soon and you're probably not going to be in control of your emotions because you're not aware of how your identity is trying to reproduce and Survive by feeling threatened by the people that are challenging your beliefs so you feel as if you have to mentally attack them to win that game so what does this have to do with work or productivity at all well when overwork or working too much becomes your identity often through unconscious repetition toward a goal you were assigned by Society then you constantly feel anxious when you think that you aren't being productive enough that anxiety is your mental body trying to survive by getting you to work more but most people get productivity wrong they may not explicitly say this but their actions show it they think productivity is about quantity not quality they think that all hours of the day are equal and they are the same person in the last four hours of the day as they are in the first four they think productivity is about working on all things not the one thing that brings all of the results they fail to separate tasks from levers they fail to realize that person a can work 12 hours a day and make $50,000 a year while person B can work 1 hour a day and make 5 million the difference is skill leverage and understanding not how hard long or organized you work and the excuses that pop up here are of course your mind again trying to protect and reproduce its identity from the ideas that you've been conditioned to belief and so it spits out excuses of like oh well the person making 5 million working 1 hour a day can do all of it because of this this and this and this and they definitely started out there they started out making 5 million doing 1 hour of work a day yeah they started out doing that they didn't start out as a baby who then learned how to speak English or whatever language they speak and then evolved to where they are now they didn't go through a conditioning process that led to where they are because the life they live and the results they have can be replicated maybe not exactly but there is a sequence of actions you can take and that depends on the variation in selection ability of your mind your ability to discover ideas within an unknown area and then your ability to navigate between there in trial and error eliminate ideas until you can select the right one that leads to the best results but you don't have a goal that you assign yourself so you're kind of navigating off in this direction when you should be heading in this direction so things are all up but the secret and the thing we can start with is how to design a creative lifestyle so here's what we'll talk about in this video why the quality of your ideas matter more than ever as AI fear increases the four modules of a creative life and a template to plan your week the routines of famous creatives and how Charles Darwin changed the world with minimal work my personal routine why I do it and how to create your own and with that said this video is for those who want leverage this is not for those who are set on some more traditional style of work I'm not here to convince you to go my route I'm just stating who this video is for and who will benefit the most from it if your mind isn't open to this kind of stuff then you're probably not going to benefit from it the quality of your work depends on the quality of your ideas therefore the future of productivity is creativity and as the economy continues to bias creators and Founders who leverage Ai and Technology the way we work is changing anyone can type chat GPT into their browser and have it spit out a book newsletter marketing asset piece of art code for a to-do app or legal document and yet there aren't a million bestseller quality books or production level software work has become easier but the fact that most people lack agency remains if people weren't already motivated to build their own thing in the past 10 years they're still not going to be and they may be taken advantage of by those who are there is a major lesson here where I'm going to be going over my thoughts on this whole AGI and AI thing if you're not on Twitter or you're just not aware of how open AI released a benchmark test for uh their new model 03 some people are screaming AGI is here some people are screaming that jobs are going to be replaced within 5 years and so it's a pretty uncertain time for a lot of people but with that AGI is not ai ai is what we have right now people are still afraid of that but what they don't realize is that while AI makes things significantly easier and yes you can go and write a book that doesn't mean that people know how to at all still and that doesn't mean they'll go do it and that doesn't mean they'll publish the book they still don't do the gurus and entrepreneurs of the world have been screaming at you to just start for the past 8 billion years and you still haven't and it doesn't matter how easy it is to do now well it's still not easy I'm just saying there's not much to worry about if you're just a person who acts on their own interest if you're just floating along through life then yes there is a lot to worry about but that hasn't changed there always has been the reason I bring this up is because productivity is through the roof AI can do anything right kind of sort of but if productivity is through the roof and it's going to continue going through the roof then the thing that matters more than ever is creativity because productivity is nothing without creativity let's take a writer as an example I don't think the current versions of AI and for the foreseeable future until we reach actual AGI like actual human level capability ities and intelligence of being able to choose its own own goals discover new goals and act within any domain of life or medium of Life physical or mental I don't think the current version can replace writers or designers or whatever it may be because I'm not talking about the tool by which someone creates I mean the essence behind what that thing is what the writing is what the designing is it's the human desire to create sifting through 100 ideas to find one constructing a creative narrative ative toward a goal capturing the attention of a group of people deeply relating with them through conscious experience documenting High signal information for future Generations now I'm not against AI in the slightest we actually have some really incredible features going into cortex next month at some point but the thing is if you aren't a writer or don't learn from a writer your AI outputs are probably going to disappoint you good luck building anything if one you don't know what you want to build and two you're still too lazy to learn even if AI makes it easier even though it's been easy for the last 10 years people are saying oh you can access any knowledge at at the tip of your fingertips you have a PhD uh in your pocket you've already had that you're just not going after the information if you can't type it into Google you're not going to type it into chat GPT no matter like what the difference in the level of information is there if you wanted to find it in the past you would have found it and now that it's one button click away it's not that different and it's only attracting more lazy people who aren't going to take it that far it really seems like this AI stuff the marketing strategy at least and how people position it is just the get-rich quick scheme of literally everything oh you can do it all with AI now but we all know where those things lead the thing here is that AI maybe not AGI but AI what we have now lacks executive function it is a tool that needs a master it is a system that achieves a goal that it is assigned it is a specialist that needs a generalist and when so many people have been turned into tools by their parents schooling and repetitive task oriented jobs it's no wonder why people are so afraid of being replaced it's because they are going to be replaced unless they start acting like a human agency conscious experience risk mistakes Discovery perception struggle now as an example as to how you can use this I like to think of James Patterson who uses a ghost writer for his books if you don't know who James Patterson is he's a pretty famous author the author James still likes to create the plot he's the Storyteller he likes to craft the narrative he still creates the tone and the style and makes sure the final output is up to his mind's quality and on top of that James Patterson has a big picture awareness of the sales the distribution the community everything that's going on in that space that actually made the book of success because it's not as simple as oh I'm going to write this book as James Patterson put it on Amazon and just just let it sit there a ghost writer or AI in this context removes the amount of time and labor it requires to produce said writing and the auxiliary task to get that in front of someone else the master still has to be a generalist they still have to be an entrepreneur they still need the vision story and value but how do you make those things impactful cuz can't you just ask chat GPT for the ideas the vision the story the value you can but unless you want to be at the whim of how AI writes by default and the baked in bias you will still be doing what most other people are doing you will still lack agency you will still get lumped in with the homogeneous output of the bias model and as markets go you will be a commodity you won't be able to sustain any kind of meaningful result because you don't know what leads to the meaningful result you don't need you don't know the inputs of the AI that leads to the outputs everyone's saying that prompt engineering is the greatest next thing to learn but in order to be a prompt engineer you're still learning the exact same thing that allows you to write the prompts in the first place if you want to be able to write good writing prompts then you need to understand writing you don't have to understand and actually do the writing but you need to understand the big picture everything that goes into that skill and again can you ask AI for that yes but then you're at the whim again of the bias of the AI it's not unique so what's the answer here what is the answer to all of this it's something called idea flow Robert Green reads 100 books before he writes one Founders have a thousand ideas before one changes everything creators post a thousand times before one makes them an overnight success more ideas lead to more exponential events nothing happens then everything happens you don't find these ideas by asking chat GPT to give you a list of 100 ideas because guess what you're still missing the overarching vision and Story You're missing experience you're missing meaning you're missing purpose the point I'm trying to make here is take two people who know nothing about whatever we're trying to accomplish let's say I'm trying to accomplish something and I'm worried that other people are going to take my place let's take two other people that have absolutely no idea what I know and have them type in be like hey find 100 ideas to do something what are you going to do you don't know cuz it's in my head so you type those ideas in and you're going to get relatively similar responses the thing with this there's a distinction between problems that can be solved outright like physics or an explanation or something that's hard I created this cup this cup is a cup for something like that's so personal and evolving like an idea that strikes you at the right point in your Human Experience is very difficult to find because you're navigating this vast unknown landscape and then even then that idea 10 minutes from now could be useless if AI is so good that it could teach you exactly how to write why would you go and buy something like my course one because it's my process that I've created through experience well couldn't I just find that and figure it out through AI sure maybe but is that going to teach you how to master writing or do you still actually have to do the thing and then after that is that the end of your education or does it continue going on because knowledge creation is infinite is that just one stopping point why are you looking at AI as this thing that's just going to solve all problems in your life when problems never cease to exist even when AGI is here and the curve goes exponential problems are infinite they still go on progress knowledge problems are all infinite just because you don't know what they're going to be doesn't mean that they aren't going to be there again agency and being able to give yourself permission to solve problems and not rely on anyone else ever in never ever ever ever to give you a problem to solve or a goal to achieve because you will be replaced Schools jobs Etc everything reject it back to the point of idea flow you're missing a forward moving lifestyle designed to achieve your vision from which you can extract and connect ideas to create value you're missing the context people don't follow you because you have information they follow you because you have lore because you have perspective when AGI has all perspectives it effectively has no perspective unless it's the one you give it or assign it based on the situation it's in but by then as we'll talk about in the next video it's no different from you the ability to compute or transform or variation selection attention all of these different things there is no difference between the capability of that of an AGI and that of a human and even then you still have it in your pocket you aren't going to be replaced by AGI you're going to be augmented by AGI okay let's talk about how to actually create this lifestyle that leads to more idea flow honestly the most important thing in your life for being creative and therefore having the quality ideas to be more productive in a more efficient and leveraged way we'll start with this previous quote of mine fill your brain in the afternoons with books learning and socialization empty your brain before bed with journaling planning and meditation use your brain in the morning with creation output and focus the thing here is that people tend to give me a crazy look when I say that I work only 4 hours a day if you've watched my previous videos on this you already know what we're going to talk about here because on the surface I look like I get a lot done I mean I post videos every week newsletters every week content three posts a day on all platforms I'm managing and building a software company I've written a book I'm writing two more books not at the same time I built 10 plus products it's it's a lot but my question is what's so crazy about that because I mean you don't know how I started I started on social media by writing posts and replying to people in between video game matches I would play Team fight tactics or League of Legends and reply in between messages that's how how I worked and if I were to add up those hours for what got me started and growing it was probably around an hour a day maybe now we'll go over my daily routine towards the end of this video the last section but I want to make a point that I write for the first two hours of a day and then I do administrative tasks we we know that if you've watched previous videos of mine the the thing here is that there is a lie somewhere in there I've never really considered reading Walking napping or training as a part of my work I read to hunt for ideas I walk to make sense of those ideas I nap because I like to and I train because I enjoy energy and health the quality and quantity of my work would not be possible if I did not do those things I'm not optimizing for more I'm optimizing for the right amount that brings the results I need to actualize my goals I can do less work with more impact than most working 12 hours a day with those simple habits again creativity is the fuel for productivity so if those are taken into account for how long I work then I've been lying to you all along technically I work all day 24 hours a day because even my sleep fuels my work my work is the most enjoyable thing in my life it is my mission it is my entire day with that said you're drastically overestimating the amount of work you need to do to just start be rational for a second you know that people also have responsibilities like you you know that people don't start with 12 hours they start with 1 hour in the morning you just love to make excuses about how your situation is special the question now is how do I make the most of that 1 hour of focused work and it's by designing a creative lifestyle and titrating the time spent on those activities up as you're able to transition to doing it full-time you need four habits think of these like modules in your day you don't have to do them in order you just have to do them the four habits or modules that you're going to be implementing throughout your day however you pleas these are clear consume connect and create you clear your mind you consume to learn something new you create to piece that together and you connect everything so that you notice those novel connections which breed new ideas after we talk about these I'll actually walk you through a little daily planner that you can use to schedule these things and it has tasks within it so we'll go over that but the first habit is clear your mind and my favorite way to do this personally is to align it with my work so generating ideas for my work you can do this by writing 5 to 10 ideas if you don't know what to write you can practice using this also as a journaling experience where I like to reflect on my past or my past week and think of uh either negative things that happened or experiences I don't want to experience again and I'll turn those into 5 to 10 ideas if I don't hit 5 to 10 ideas then sometimes I'll just brainstorm more on top of that of whatever comes to mind think of it like a brain dump the second habit is to cons consume plain and simple you can't create if you don't consume I'm not talking about consuming endless content on social media like a Mindless zombie I'm talking about learning hunting for ideas for your work like your ancestors did in the physical you do in the mental and digital read along book read a long article scroll a curated social timeline for 5 minutes study that course you bought but forgot about listen to a podcast or lecture but don't forget an absolutely crucial step have somewhere to capture those ideas to irrelevant project you're creating habit number three is create the core human desires are to create expand and transcend anything else is either a distraction or a lesser purpose that pulls you toward those desires to create is to account for a crucial function of the mind that most people miss out on everyone consumes information they gain mental fat some people write down information or clear their mind so they cut down mental weight but few people synthesize that information into something that helps and impacts others they have the strength metaphorically and mentally to save someone from a car crash creating something is how you build mental muscle in other words those people are missing out on how they contribute to the world they're missing out on a very crucial key to purpose and meaning so you need a project to build a project is a structure for your mind to become a magnet for ideas now the fourth habit is to connect because when you have a meaningful project to build not one assigned to you by parents teachers or Society at large you see life in a completely different way when I write a book it's completely different from a social post for obvious reasons but my mind expands to match the frame of that book I notice more in my everyday experience the information I consume and the conversations I have because I have an anchor for those ideas my mind can zip through complex reasoning and make sense of ideas I couldn't before because I can articulate novel lines of thought that AI can't because I would have to train it on that same frame to come anywhere close unfortunately most people don't optimize for pattern recognition and by doing so they rarely become curious or obsessed they haven't invested energy into a project that encourages their mind to take a new shape so the solution to this is this template or planner that I have for you so here we're inside of Cortex you can get this with the link in the description you're going to have to sign up for cortex first and then when you click on the document you'll see a duplicate button up here where you can duplicate it to your workspace so then you can start filling it out now once it's actually in here it's probably smart to duplicate it again because you can use this as a weekly template now I'd encourage you to read through the instructions and you can look at the example of how I've filled it out before but in a nutshell it's pretty simple right you have days inside of what we call Elements if you want to access elements or create a new one you just type slash you can go to elements if you'd like or you can type new and then new element create one here so on and so forth these are just little organizational blocks but you can open this and you can see okay brain dump clear your mind turn thoughts reflection and experience into five to 10 ideas so you brain dump those at any time in your day right this is modular experiment with doing these things at different times of the day sometimes it helps to do them at night so you write down 5 to 10 ideas so that you have something to wake up to and work on the next thing is learning so you can connect sources that you're consuming you can add PDFs to your library inside of Cortex soon what we're working on is being able to save any link or file cortex is actually going to see a pretty big update with that so it's going to be less about note taking and only having documents but you can put images files anything YouTube videos whatever it may be but here what I can do let's say I'm reading a book by David Deutch which I kind of am or if this is who I'm learning about this week and I can save it here I can open this and I even have a PDF here that I could start reading inside of Cortex but that's what you're consuming you can also just add specific documents like if I wanted to create a new document about uh notes on creativity then I can create that here and I can fill this out if I'd like right here pretty quick now the next thing is just projects so what are you working on for me I'm working on a newsletter relating to artificial intelligence so that's up here in my favorites I can open that I have my specific newsletter outline for it I have these things saved again I was reading that by David Deutsch so on and so forth so you can see in the example up here that I am writing a book a newsletter and social post for that week and these are all also up here so this just helps me keep track and really and open them fast in order to see them so I can start working on them inside of Cortex so if you don't know what to do in cortex or you signed up before and you're like well okay I can create a note I can create a document you're missing out on the deeper power of Cortex to work on all of your writing in one place and once we have ai in man it's going to be an absolute Game Changer but the next thing is tasks so you can add and structure your priority task here if you'd like so things like just when you're going to work on things if you're going to go on a walk when you're going to eat you can structure your day and then you repeat this process each day of the week inside of these elements and then if you wanted to you could organize these in like planning December 2024 and then I drag that template inside of here and I would name this uh week to December planning or something like that and then every week I just duplicate these and I can organize by each folder now the last thing I want to mention is that whenever you have ideas you need somewhere to capture them right and so you can do that in capture on your phone or inside of Cortex itself but the cool thing about our capture is that you can capture to a specific document so if I type at week to December then I can cop I mean I can write ideas specifically for this thing you should see how I have this set up for my book right I save ideas to each chapter every single day that come to mind as I'm consuming things if you write newsletters or social posts and you're not capturing ideas to where you're going to write those things you're missing out on quite a bit and we're also testing voice transcription right now so there is a lot coming to help with this mobile desktop offline mode all dropping in January we're going to start seeing a very big uptick so if you haven't opt on the cortex train yet I would encourage you to at least try it out especially throughout January and it's free the AI stuff is going to be paid of course because it's very expensive but the base features of the app it's all free you get it's free so again if you want that template or you want to sign up the link is in the description for both cortex and the template itself the ultimate goal is to have a life so beautifully designed that work rest and play cease to exist the entirety of your life is channeled into One Singular yet evolving Vision now I want to preface this with the fact that there is no right way to work I probably said should have said that at the beginning of this video but here we are clearly Alex horoi who recently went on vacation I'm proud of him look at his Instagram post good he does very well working 12 hours a day and having this hustle and grind mindset but that's his identity that's what brings him fulfillment for a lot of people that's not theirs so horoi is very successful but so were some of the world's most famous creatives who barely worked at all the point is to experiment to collect various perspectives experience them and discard the pieces that don't work for your unique set of goals interests and values it's called lifestyle design for a reason you don't simply copy someone else design and expect it to make you rich how can you call yourself a creative if you don't apply the creative process to the main thing that influences everything else so before we start I'm going to display a graphic but I recently picked up this book after seeing the graphic online and I'm like okay where did this come from what's the source it's this book daily rituals by Mason Curry and it's pretty good I've been listening to it on audiobook on my walks and taking some notes but it's one of those books that's just like a good source of inspiration to experiment with different things but this graphic absolutely blows my mind it's really cool to see how different creative structure their days in terms of their sleep their work their day job if they have one their food and Leisure and exercise and Etc but I want to focus on Darwin's Charles Darwin's daily routine because I find it fascinating and I actually pull a lot from that even though I didn't realize that until I saw what Darwin's routine was so in the morning he starts his day with a short walk at 7:00 a. m. followed by breakfast he would start his first and most productive work session from 8:00 a.

m. to 9:30 a. m.

following that work Darwin would take a break to read letters and spend time with family then returning for another work session from 10:30 a. m. until noon by this point he considered himself to have done a good day's work now Darwin would take his second walk of the day around his famous sandwalk which is a quarter mile gravel path that Darwin created specifically for thinking and reflection after lunch and reading the newspaper Darwin would rest and listen to his wife read aloud at 400 p.

m. he took his third walk of the day usually around the sandwalk again sometimes with company my point with sharing this with you is that Charles Darwin of all people worked surprisingly little for the amount that he accomplished in his lifetime he accomplished more than most of the productivity obsessed people today what's the difference ideas I didn't want to do this but I think the idea guy meme is actually becoming a thing and I'm helping create so I apologize for that but I think it's the right way to go and as you could have guessed I love that Charles Darwin's routine emphasizes the importance of walking because those times of deep thinking were an integral part of his work focused work sessions paired with regular walks allowed him to achieve a balance of intense intellectual work in periods of rest and contemplation Darwin wrote 19 books and developed his theory of evolution with this routine imagine if this guy had AI so we went over Darwin's routine and I will just share my routine because maybe that holds some value maybe it provides some inspiration I like to slice my days into three parts low entropy so little room for uncertainty or chaos clear mind deep focus High intention mid entropy so allowing myself to interact with people in my phone and then High entropy so Controlled Chaos that results in a plethora of ideas I can utilize the next morning I wake up naturally around 5:00 a. m.

and then in the warmer months I'll go on a walk in the colder months when it's winter Ark season I will get straight into work when I do go on a walk first thing in the morning the thing that I'm focused on it's a it's a walk for intention I'm not listening to something I'm not bringing my phone I'm simply thinking what am I going to write about when I get back like I'm I'm already writing in my head I'm getting my mind warmed up to the writing process of flowing through ideas so I have the gunk out before I start writing when I get back from my walk my first 90-minute work block is focused on my highest priority highest lever moving task usually this is something new right this is a book a product or a business it's something that can be built once and then sold multiple times it's not something that I'm going to it's going to be a part of my day forever it's not something that I'm consistently doing it's something that I'm doing in kind of like a Sprint but I'm doing it first thing in the day so that I ensure that it's making progress because since it's not a consistent part of my day I know that knowing me that's easy for me to fall off of doing so after this work block I will go and just eat fruit right I I'm not eating too heavy of a breakfast right now this all all my diet stuff changes quite frequently but I'm just trying fruit right now until noon so it's like kind of like modified intermittent fasting with just fruit to boost metabolism a bit more and I've been really enjoying it I've been wired like when it's time to work after that I sit down for another 45 to 90 minute work block and this is when I do high priority tasks that grow and maintain my work for me this either involves writing one section of a newsletter so 20 to 45 minutes writing as many content ideas as possible which is 10 to 30 minutes and crossposting to various platforms which is 15ish minutes and this is highly dependent on how well my mind is turning out ideas on Tuesdays I replace this block with recording a video like this one and this is also a process that I teach inside of toour writer how I write post threads newsletters Etc and the other thing here in in the context of like cortex right when we're not launching anything we're not building anything yes that takes up more of my time when we're in a maintenance mode my role at cortex is the same as it is in my personal brand because it's a it's a product so I'm the one that generates traffic for and markets it and idea generates and strategizes all of these things that's my main value source for cortex so after that work block and then more fruit as like a kind of lunch then like Darwin I also feel like I've accomplished quite a bit and I don't need to worry about work the rest of the day so at this time I'll go on a second walk usually shirtless if it's not too cold because I want midday sun which helps with sleep and light health and it's extremely important and on the walk I consume some form of like an audio book or a YouTube video or a lecture if sometimes I'm going down this rabbit hole and I just want to keep learning about one specific topic sometimes I don't know what to watch at all and I just scroll until I find something interesting I pick it and I watch it and I usually get something out of it this walk specifically is when I like can get my best ideas because I can spend the most time focusing on a problem because I don't have to focus on work anymore so this is the walk that sets myself up for the next morning of work because I'm capturing like crazy inside of Cortex capture connected to my projects cuz the thing with that is you can write those in Apple notes you can write them in notion you can write them wherever they're not connected to your projects they're not organized these little sentence long independent ideas you can't organize them in other apps and then after this walk or even sometimes on this walk this is when I do more administrative tasks like answering emails messaging Partners or friends and things like that then I go to the gym and that marks like a a crucial distinction in my day from I'm working to I'm done with work if I want to be and so the question that arises here is like well what do you do for the rest of the day and it's like well but a lot of things I read I nap I walk more I go run errands with my girlfriend I'll go get dinner with my friend I'll have meetings so sometimes I do work and sometimes I kind of just Pace back and forth right sometimes I'm laying on the couch and I have an idea so I come to my computer and I write it down then I get caught in writing for 30 minutes and I go back to the couch and I go on a walk and I kind of just Leisure around it's called Leisure for a reason and if I have nothing to do and I'm bored then I'll probably just work more but it's not a requirement that's the point is it's not a requirement for me and it's not the default thing I do at that time and then at around 5:00 p. m.