every man has two lives and the second one starts when he realizes he has just one have you ever wondered how some people manage to do so many different things in their life I often get asked by my friends how I manage a challenging day job as a software engineer at Google while pursuing my passions on the side like running a YouTube channel hitting the gym four times a week and traveling every 3 months when people ask me this question they expect me to give some crazy productivity routine that they can then apply to their
life and have similar result in reality I don't really have any productivity routine believe it or not most things that people consider me successful for were actually epic failures when I first tried them the first time I went to the gym I found myself throwing up in the restroom within 30 minutes for a long period of time nobody watched my YouTube videos and I've already covered on this channel how I was rejected hundreds of times when I switched my career to software engineering so the big question is what is the secret to turning your life
around and living a truly meaningful life in this video I'll come cover some basic principles that have worked for me in the past but first a quick warning you will make some serious changes after watching this video your thoughts become your actions your actions become your habits your habits become your character and your character becomes your destiny unfortunately most people start at actions and never manage to turn them into habits we go to gym once or twice we try to eat healthier for a week we start learning a new skill but then life gets in
the way and we fall back to our old habits that's because to turn actions into habits you have to do them over and over again for a long period of time and to do something repeatedly we need to know why we are doing it in the first place and that's where our thoughts come in in the popular Netflix show how to get rich ramit asks people to write down their rich life that's because most people don't have a clear vision of what their rich life looks like now Rich here doesn't necessarily mean money rich life
here just means your dream life knowing where you want to be is definitely helpful and I recommend everyone to do this exercise but there is something that can work even better than this picture this a hungry rat is tied to a spring with its tail and you put a piece of cheese in front of the rat on the opposite end of the room how would the rat react this is exactly what researchers tried to study in late 1990s in an experiment that's now called cheese and rat order test to reach the cheese rat pulled on
the spring and generated some Force this force is a measure of rat's motivation to get to the cheese in the next step of this experiment researchers added a new element to the mix the smell of a cat coming from behind suddenly everything changed rat's force of motivation multiplied because fear was added to the equation what can we learn from this experiment many times we already know where we want to be in next few years but we are not able to take the necessary steps to get there because the fear of failure clouds our judgment what
this experiment teaches us is that we want our fear to be behind us instead of the front that way way our fear can act as a multiplying force for our motivation but how exactly do we achieve this when you write down your rich life you already have your cheese figured out all you need now is to find out your cat's smell so sit down and think about where you will end up if you continue to live your life the way you live right now once you have that figured out we can move on to the
actions what if I tell you that whatever life you see for yourself in 5 years I can make it happen for you but I just have one simple condition you need to eat one frog every day for me I know it sounds gross but bear with me let's for a moment assume that you agreed to do it how would you go about doing it if you have to eat a live frog do it first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day that's right knowing that you
have to eat a slimy frog in the evening is a very unpleasant feeling to live with all day imagine being out for lunch with your friends where everybody's enjoying this amazing pasta all you can think about is whether you will wash down your frog with milk or water later and if for some reason you're not able to eat your frog for the day you will have to eat two frogs tomorrow and if you procrastinate for 30 days you will end up with 30 of them this is the single most important principle that has helped me
achieve most things in my life as I've gone through different phases of my life my priorities have changed drastically in my gym obsessed face I would jump out of bed at 6:00 a.m. and head straight to the wait room now I have YouTube as my priority so I plan my videos and script them first thing in the morning pick the most important task that you need to finish in the day and do it first thing in the morning this is the simplest and the most effective productivity system that you can follow but there is one
more thing that you need to know if you really want it to work for you in the 1970s Canadian psychologist brui Alexander conducted two experiments on rats in the first experiment he offered a rat two bottles of water first one contained plain tap water the second bottle contained water with morphine which is a drug that increases es the release of dopamine and causes addiction dopamine is the same hormone that is released when you constantly scroll reels on Instagram anyway as expected the rat quickly became addicted to the morphine laced water and died in the second
experiment everything else was kept the same but instead of isolating a rat a bunch of rats were put together what they found was astonishing this time rats were much less likely to get addicted to the morphin laed water in fact they would often ignore it altogether in fav of engaging in other social activities what can we learn from this experiment finishing the highest priority task in the Morning Sounds easier than it actually is we all know how we are just one notification away from getting distracted and every time we switch the context it's very hard
to bring your focus back once you start scrolling reels you get the same dopamine hit that a rat would get by drinking morphine laced water that's the reason why social media is so addictive to get out of this never-ending cycle of scrolling you also need some meaningful social social interactions so once you know the future you are working towards make some friends who are pursuing the exact same things as you these friends will help you when you feel down and also hold you accountable when you start slacking another thing that can help you break the
cycle of social media is practicing deliberate distraction set aside an hour in your day where you do nothing but social media for any time outside that window block all social media I will link a few apps in the description that can help you do that now that we have mastered our thoughts and actions let's see how to build habits Atomic Habits by James Clear is the best guide to do this I have already made a full video on this book here I will only cover the most powerful idea from the book and that is the
idea of a habit Loop to form any good or bad habit we have to go through a habit building Loop your phone vibrates that's your queue for notification you crave to see who the notification is from response you pick up the phone reward instant dopamine hit by scrolling hundreds of reels Q craving resp response reward this habit Loop is responsible for building any new habit but can you use the same Loop to build good habits if you want to learn how to play guitar you can place it in the middle of your living room by
making guitar hard to miss you have created a queue for yourself to practice every day this will hopefully make you respond by picking guitar every day for every minute that you spend learning guitar you can reward yourself with one minute on social media by doing this you have attached a reward to practicing guitar which will make sure that you stay on track habit stacking is another way to build new habits in habit stacking you attach a new habit that you want to build with an old habit that you already enjoy doing if you love listening
to podcasts and you want to build the habit of working out you can stack these two Habits by listening to podcasts only when you are at the gym when you go through the process of conscious thinking taking action and building new habits a few times you will observe that you have found a new blueprint to achieve anything you want in life self-discipline hard work and perseverance the qualities that people often associate with highly successful people will start coming naturally to you in a way these qualities will become an integral part of your character at that
point no one can stop you from achieving your rich life which is your destiny any success that I've had in my life big or small can be attributed to these simple principles I wish I knew all these things in my 20s there are seven more things which if I knew in my 20s could have made me much more successful today watch this video to know these seven things my name is sahil and I'll see you in the next one
