At the time of filming this episode. I'm currently scaling three SaaS companies. I personally coach over 250 SaaS founders in my Go to market program and also I'm personally trying to beat my current personal record of deadlifting £325.
So I get asked a lot of times, especially when I'm talking to clients over, Hey, are you okay? How do you manage all of this? How do you run all these pieces without going crazy?
The truth is, it took me a while to really hone in on a system that helps me run at this high performance. So in this episode, I'm going to walk you through the 11 key habits that I had to learn the hard way through reading hundreds of books. Attending thousands of hours of coaching programs on personal development.
To actually hone in on what works. And when you implement any one of these 11 habits, hopefully all of them, you will be able to accelerate your life and become that founder, become that leader that builds that successful company. Intro.
everybody? Welcome to Unstoppable. I'm TK and on this channel I hope SaaS founders like you, grow your size businesses faster with an unstoppable strategy.
Now, if you're new to this channel, welcome. I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches and how to grow your SaaS business faster. I drop an episode every single Sunday with actual strategies and tactics from the trenches on how to grow your SaaS business faster.
So if you knew, be sure to hit that subscribe button and that belt icon. You'll get notified every single time I drop an episode with the TC Energy. Now, if you're part of this community, part of my SaaS, go to market coaching programs, my people.
Welcome back. It's really awesome to see you over here. And also, we just had 71,000 subscribers on this channel, so it's really incredible to be serving you in this way.
Thank you for the opportunity and for being here again. Now, personal development, the ability to actually rewire the software that operates your own personal life, your brain, is something I have been obsessed with my entire life. The idea that you can actually just like a company or just like a software program, you can look at how you're operating, what are the things you're doing, a routine basis.
You can tweak that code and you can actually make yourself run at a higher performance has been fascinating to me, and I've been a student of that for nearly my entire adult life. as part of that process, I've actually learned what works and what doesn't work. In fact, I've learned so much about it and I'm so passionate about it.
I even wrote an entire book on how I actually run my life. So in this episode, I'm going to walk you through the 11 key habits that's helping me run at high performance and serve you on this channel in my coaching programs and across my companies at the highest and greatest level. So if you're excited, dig in to habit number one.
Gordon Smash out like button for the YouTube algorithm and let's dig right into it. I'm going to walk this through in sequence. And the way I did this is I kind of went from how my day starts off all the way to the end of a month, and I picked off the habits I think are the most impactful and running at high performance in my life.
step number one habit number one is an early bedtime. This is one of the counterintuitive things. And in fact, a lot of these habits may come off as counterintuitive, which is why they work so well is it's less so about whether you wake up at 4 a.
m. , 5 a. m.
6 a. m. .
It has actually nothing to do with what time you wake up. What matters the most is what time you go to bed. As soon as I started to focus on an early bedtime, for me, it's anywhere between 8:30 p.
m. and 9 p. m.
. As soon as I started to do that, became a lot easier for me to actually wake up at a good time in the morning, but also more importantly, get quality sleep, which gave me more energy and more power throughout the course of the day. So the first thing, the first habit that you really want to rethink is what time you actually go to bed and how do you actually get to bed at an early bedtime.
keep in mind that I wasn't always like this. I actually am a naturally a more of a night owl. I did my best coding late at night at three.
Am I actually love staying up at night. It was quiet, but very soon I realized I just ended up waking up too late in the day and lost a lot of momentum. The flip of that, of going to bed early and having the quiet time in the morning to myself was actually way more impactful to my productivity and my energy.
also just in terms of getting a head start in the day so early, bedtime quickly became my favorite. The second habit that I did, as soon as I started to get the early bedtime is I started to own my mornings. The biggest mistake I made for a good portion of me being a star a founder, is I would wake up, I would look at my phone and I would start reacting to all the emails that were in my notifications.
And that was terrible because within the first 5 seconds I was having other random people that emailed me or messaged me or triggered a bunch of notifications on my phone to set the tone of the most impactful part of my day. So the biggest thing I started to do now at this point, I wake up around six, 630 in the morning, get a lot of sleep and then I wake up with my alarm and then the first thing that I do is I try and avoid the phone as much as possible, or I'll quickly glance at it and then put it away. I will not react to anything that's coming at me and I will set that intention to own the first hour or hour and a half of my morning.
And the best way I do that is I make sure that I get my favorite coffee. I go to my coffee shop, I take care of writing to my subscribers on my newsletter, and then I actually start and head into my workout in my work day. So the biggest thing that really led to me transforming how I start my day is starting at an early bedtime, getting proper sleep, waking up early, and then owning my morning instead of spending my morning reacting to the things that are not as important.
As I started to get into that mode, next habit that I picked up that has been completely transformational in my life is to go to the gym every single day. Now, for some of you that have been watching this channel, when we were at ten subscribers, this is Baby TK Baby. TK at his highest was around £240, whereas right now I'm at around £170 and I'm driving towards nearly 14% body fat, which is really, really incredible for me because it's a huge transformation.
And the biggest way I started to do that is actually go to the gym every single day. One of the biggest things I found was whenever I tried to go to the gym three times a week, I would go on Monday and then Tuesday I would not go and it would take a lot of effort to get up the energy to go on Wednesday. But as soon as it became something I do every single day, it completely changed the trajectory of my life.
In fact, right now, here is a video of me hitting my personal record of deadlifting £325. That's how much strength I'm packing right now and how much strength I'm building as I go to the gym every single day. Special shout out to my trainer, John, who has been instrumental in this process.
Step number four. Once I've owned my morning and I've gotten my workout in and I like to get my workout in in the morning because I had the most energy and get it out of the way. And now I have complete upside on doing everything I need to do for the businesses.
Number four is I meditate. It takes about 20 minutes. I have been trained on a specific type of meditation.
It's called Transcendental Meditation. I learned it at Bridgewater when I used to work there. It's the largest hedge fund in the world and a retail CEO who is the founder of Bridgewater gave every employee a deal where he would pay for half the course and we would pay for half.
And if we completed the six month course, then he would reimburse us. And I did that. I was really grateful for it.
These days, time is a lot easier and cheaper to learn, It's completely effortless. You don't actually have to be good at focusing. They teach you a mantra that helps you actually meditate, that has been completely transformational in unlocking creative energy and also my ability to think at a conceptual level.
So I highly recommend picking up the habit of meditation, specifically transcendental meditation habit number five that I baked in is I actually started to set themes for each day. One of the things I realized is when you're running multiple companies or even when you're doing one company, I did this when I was running Tout app, there would be different aspects to my job. That's the nature of the beast when it comes to being a founder.
You wear multiple hats and the worst killer of productivity is context switching. So in a given Monday, if you're having meetings and you're trying to do metrics and then you're trying to do a sales call and you're trying to do eight other things, and then you're trying to code and answer emails, you won't get a lot done, you'll be very frantic. So one of the things I did early on I learned this the hard way is to set themes to my day.
I knew there are broad themes I needed to tend to in my businesses, and so now I have themes. Right now, Mondays are essentially metrics days for me. I make sure that I look at all my business metrics I meet and do one on ones with my team members to make sure we review those metrics and we have a plan on how we're going to continue to improve those metrics.
Tuesdays are filming Days. For me, Wednesdays are client days for all the clients that are in my go to market program. That's when I coach them and I meet with them.
And Thursdays and Fridays are essentially project days where I work on more strategic things that I need to be heads down on. This allows me to structure my week in a way where I'm not context switching. And I also know that I can have the idea of a perfect week, meaning if I do my metrics and my one on ones and I do my filming and I work with my clients and I work on my projects, I will have a perfect week and I know that there's a purpose for each day and that allows me to control my schedule and be proactive about how I go about my week.
So habit number five is to have themes to your days instead of trying to pack a random number of things in each day where you really have control over your schedule. Habit number six that I got into, which was really, really powerful, was to actually establish work blocks. Paul Graham did an essay talking about the maker schedule versus the man your schedule.
And the reality is when we're founders, early stage companies, we are both the makers or we actually have to make things and do the work. And we're also managers where we have to do one on ones and coach other people and drive actual outcomes through other people. And those two things are very different activities.
And so one of the things that I did early on is establish work blocks even within the thematic days. So I would carve out two hour blocks where it would be marked for just me to do work, and no one else could actually book a meeting. This is more powerful than ever before because right now if you have someone booking time on your calendar, even if it's outside the company, you can configure calendar, which is what I use to say, Hey, these are my work blocks, don't book over them.
And that way any outside meetings or any client meetings are booked around that work block schedule. This ensures that I can go be a manager or a coach. And also at the same time, there's time carved out for my important priorities that I've set for the week.
That's my maker schedule. And so those work blocks are in there and this is super powerful because it ensures that I'm not content switching. Those work blocks are set based on the themes of the days, but also at the same time it keeps open room for outside activities and for others to book time on my calendar without me having to context switch.
Habit number seven is now starting to get into a little bit more of a bigger lens. All of these things help me run my days and my weeks in a really great way, but at the end of the day, if you don't know what your North Star is, if you're not clear about where you're going, each day is not going to be as impactful. Today I work into each day knowing exactly what the theme is for the week, what I need to be focusing on in each day.
But I also know what the bigger picture is. What I'm working towards. This is super important because there are tough days even for me as I'm running companies, whether it's a filming day or a metrics day or a coaching day or project day, there are tough days and you actually have to keep clear in your mind exactly what you're driving towards.
So habit number seven is to have a written down set of 365 day goals. And whenever I do a three hour 65 day goals, I always look at it in terms of one year periods. I do it usually at the end of the year.
But for folks that are coming into this for the first time, I recommend to them not to wait till a New Year's resolution or something like that just to think about the next 365 days and set goals. Whenever I set goals, I get very specific on five key areas in my life. I think about my health, my wealth, my relationships, my self development and giving back.
Those are the five key areas that have been super effective in actually defining goals around and keeps me honest and how I want to move forward in the next version of tech. And that's how I think about it. Every year is a new version of tech, an improved version of tech, and these are the goals that I'm working towards and super important to write them down and revisit them.
So you know what your Northstar is. So when things get tough, you know why you're working so hard, You know what you're driving towards. And every year you can look at your goals and keep iterating on them to make a better version of yourself.
Speaking of goals, my habit number eight is you may get very myopic on the day to day. Sometimes you'll look at, Oh my God, I'm doing the same thing over and over. And sometimes company building is just like that, is doing the same thing every single week and it compounds over time.
Even the years can blur together because you can say, Look, we got to a million. There are 3 million. There are, but where is this going?
So I found it's super important to take a step back and actually establish a vision for yourself. So one of the things I do is I have a Google doc on establishing a five year vision, a five year vision of who I'm going to be five years from now, assuming I accomplish my day to day goals, my weekly goals, my monthly goals and my yearly goals. And this helps me really plant the Northstar on what's really important to me in life to make sure the years just don't go by and all of a sudden I'm old and I don't really know what I did with my time.
It helps me be a lot more intentional about my time now. Those are the first eight habits have nine, ten, 11. I have three more.
But before I go into these, let me pause here for a second. Are you starting to see the power in this? Are we start to see the power in some of these habits?
They are not complicated. They're not unachievable. But when you put this in, I consider this my operating system on how I go into each day and each week and each month and each year.
It really allows me to focus on what's important. The task at hand, knowing that everything else around my life is being taken care of. Now, if you're interested in flushing out your 365 day goals or your five year vision or even thinking about Workbox, I encourage you to grab a copy of my book, How to Punch the Sun Jitters in the Face.
link to it below. There's an online version that's completely free and you can just read it online. There's an Amazon print edition that you can order.
We price it so that it's basically the cost of shipping it to you. We don't make any money on it. And there's also an audible version where I narrated for you with the Tiki Energy so you don't have to go anywhere right now.
A link to it below. And as part of this book, you also get worksheets and templates on how to set up. You have to have 65 day goals and your five year vision and a few other tools that are super powerful as well.
You're not to go anywhere. I'll link to it below. Also, if you're getting value from this video, I know this is a bit of a longer video, it's a little bit more in-depth, but I'm still trying to move it at a right pace so that I keep your attention.
seeing the power of this and you're getting value from this video. Please smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. It just loves it when you do that.
And also, can I just get a yes in the comments below there? I know you're with me. Okay.
Habit number nine, We're moving for this really fast. Habit number nine is every single day. I know that I want to set three priorities.
So one of the things I do is I write down three priorities that I absolutely must accomplish no matter what. What this allows me to do is think about, look, there's going to be a lot of things that come my way. There's going to be surprises as far as to put out.
But there's three things I definitely want to get done no matter what. And I write that down in the beginning of the day. So it's very clear to me on exactly what I need to be doing.
And this becomes easier and easier because as I go into each day, some of them are just written out already because they're part of my theme. So on Tuesdays, number one is I want to get an episode done. Like that's no matter what on Wednesdays, I want to make sure I show up with high energy and really serve my clients at the greatest and highest level when we're doing coaching calls.
And so sometimes the themes dictate the priorities. But I also have a third slot so I can actually get ahead on some of my strategic goals. So super powerful to actually have a habit where every single day like what are my non-negotiable threes?
I'm going to get this done no matter what. And the sooner I get them done, I try to stack them in the beginning of the day. So as soon as they're done, any time I have at the end of the day or the rest of the day is pure upside for me, which is really, really powerful.
Habit number ten. This is something that I've done for nearly 15 years and I'm a big believer in it, is I spent 15 minutes on my weekly planning and I ask and answer two questions. The first question I ask myself is Where am I?
And I write down everything I'm grateful for all the things that have happened that really worked out for me, how my goals went from the prior week, any wins that I had. And then I write out what do I do next? And I ask myself, what do I do next?
And I set three priorities, three goals that brings me closer to my yearly goals for that week. This is super powerful. I do this every single Sunday.
I encourage you to do it the way I do it is I block out 1530 minutes on Sunday. You can do it on Sunday or you can do it on Monday. And I basically work through this process.
It started off as a Google doc and it turned into a 300 page Google doc because I did it for so long and it's been so impactful. We actually created a little web app where I log into it and there's a guided video. It's actually video that where I guide myself in this case, but it's a web app that all the founders that I coach, a good number of them use it, and a lot of users that are part of this community use it.
So if you want to practice your weekly planning where I'm guiding you through it, go to Unstoppable Sunday Become. There's a 45 day free trial so you can get started and give it a shot. And if you love it, then you you can pay for it.
So weekly planning, super powerful. And then number 11, I treat myself to a monthly dinner. This one learned in a book called The Artist's Weight.
a great book and it talks about doing essentially as artist self date. So I take myself out to dinner with the same notebook every single month. It's a little weird for some people, but I love it.
I don't mind sitting alone in a table and people are super friendly to you. Sometimes I do it to the same restaurants that they know. It's my monthly dinner and they take really good care of me.
what it allows me to do is have a constant. Every single month I look at what worked well, what didn't work well, what did I learn? And I set an intention for the next month.
And that allows me to really get centered as I go into each month and get tethered to what are my goals, what's my vision, and what do I want to accomplish this month and express gratitude for the prior month? Super, super powerful. And also I'm a big food person, so it allows me to enjoy really great food meal and my trainer John lets me get away with that one because it's my monthly dinner so I can actually enjoy some really amazing food.
So those are the 11 habits that allows me right now to run to three companies, to coach over 250 founders, to run this YouTube channel and do everything else in my life, including working towards my next personal record for my deadlifts. So let's recap Habit number one. You want to start with an early bedtime.
You want to actually own your morning. So when you start with an early bedtime, you'll wake up earlier. It'll just be easier, you'll be more rested.
You want to own your mornings, Don't just react to the stuff on your phone. Number three, you want to make sure you go to the gym every single day. It's easier to go every single day than three times a week.
It's just something you do. I take Sundays off, so you should take a rest. Day number four You want to make sure you meditate.
I highly recommend that all meditation number five have themes for your week. I have Monday metrics Tuesday filming Wednesday clients, Thursdays and Fridays projects. But yours can be different.
Number six, establish work blocks because you are a maker and a manager. So embrace that and make sure that you have time set aside as a meeting where you're getting your own work done versus managing other people. Make sure you have 3 hours 65 day goals so you know what you're working towards.
Break them down in the key areas. And my book has the templates. The link below makes you establish a five year vision.
You really want to know who you are becoming five years from now. This is hard work. There are tough days.
These are the kind of things that keeps you going because you keep the big picture in mind. Number nine have clear priorities for the day and make sure you check them off. Number ten, pause and reflect every single Sunday.
Do your weekly planning. Where am I? Express gratitude for how far you've come and what do I do next?
Set some priorities for the week. Takes 15 minutes. Super powerful.
You can sign up for the app link below. And number 11 have an artist's self date, have a monthly dinner. Even though it's weird, just get over it.
It's so powerful. Treat yourself, celebrate your wins and plot your next world domination move. It's super, super powerful.
Those are the 11 habits that keep my life running and hopefully it helps you run at high performance as well. If you got value from this video makes you smash like button if you want to practice unstoppable Sunday, which is the weekly planning practice, check out Unstoppable Sunday. Com.
I love the app. I log in to it every single day. Has guided videos on how to plan your week, how to plan your month, and also have your daily, priorities with Pomodoro timers and the Alpha waves playing in the background.
It's really cool. Unstoppable Sunday dot com. I drop an episode like this every single Sunday with actual strategies and tactics from the trenches on how to grow your SaaS business faster.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon. That way you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode. Also, if you have a fellow founder, if you have a friend, if you are part of a Slack group, a WhatsApp group, or other founders that would get value from this, they want to run in high performance.
They want to become unstoppable. Please share this video with them. It'll just mean the world to us.
We put a lot of love into these videos. Also. Lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business.
When you are with us, yours is going to be unstoppable. I'm TK and I'll see you the next episode or inside of Unstoppable Suning. com or I'll guide you through the weekly planning practice.
Super fun. Take everybody. when you actually love this.
Wow. There's a lot we've never done so many of these. You might need to cut this part.
