Six months ago, you told yourself this is going to be the year. You set the goals, you made the promises, and chances are you probably fell behind. It's happened to the best of us.
I've been there, wondering how the heck am I going to catch up on everything I said I would do. But, here's the good news. It only [music] takes six months to change everything.
Some of the most successful people alive made their biggest leaps in a single six-month stretch. They just had a plan that made turning their life around feel inevitable. All you need is what I call the four-week edit to set yourself up for the next six months.
Because you don't need to burn your whole life down, you just need to edit. I've shared this with thousands of founders I work with, and some [music] finally hit goals they've been struggling with for years, and I really believe you can, too. So, watch till the end because the version of you six months from now will thank you for [music] it.
So, let's start with week one, where the focus will be to envision. Where are you actually going? You can't change your life if you don't know what you're changing it into.
If you skip this, you'll literally spend the next six months busy, but you'll end up in the exact same spot you're at because you don't know where you're going. So, there's only two things you can do to set your vision, and the first one is to visualize your 10. 0 self.
Most people, they set goals like this. Let's get healthier. Let's make more money.
But, if you can't describe the vision you have for your life with the same specificity as you could your current situation, then that's not a vision. That's just a wish. The 10.
0 version of you is looking at all the best moments where you've shown up put together in one day. That is your 10. 0 self.
You and I [music] got to figure out what that is so that you can aim at it because you'll never hit a target you can't see. So, here's how we do that. Number one, we have to get specific in four key areas.
No vague words allowed. The first one is the body. Then we've got your bank, >> [music] >> the money side.
Then we have our calendar, our time. Where are we spending it? How are we investing [music] it?
And then finally, we've got people. Now, here's the trick. We have to write it like it's already true.
I like to go to the end and say like it's December 31st and it's already happened. How would I write it down? I'm not just going to write like be healthier.
I'm going to say I weigh, I completed a marathon, I completed a 5K, whatever it is. On the bank side, the money side, you say I made and I like profit, I invested, calendar, I spent. I work out.
And then the people, now we're talking about I am surrounded and you also put I don't spend time with those people. This is how we set the vision. The trick is to do it in present tense [music] or past tense.
What we never want to do is put it as future tense. Now step three is we grab all of this and we turn it into a vision board, visual representation of the life you're creating. And I'm going to give you the prompt that's going to make you generate the vision board based on what we've written down.
I want to visualize what my life is going to look like in 6 months from me for any gaps that might need to be there for context, then create a hyperrealistic image that puts me inside that life so that I can see myself living it every day. And the model's so good that you can actually feed it an image of yourself, you can actually make it real real. What I want you to do is save it as your desktop wallpaper on your laptop and anytime you open up your phone, you start working on your computer, ask yourself, how am I doing on that?
I'm looking at this stuff three times a day meaningfully, like pausing and being there with it because I want to align all my actions to doing that work. Those 10 minutes will literally give you more clarity than you've probably had in the [music] last 10 years. Now most people will just stop right here and just run with it, which would be awesome, but that's not what we're going to do.
Knowing what you want is only half the job. Now we have to reverse engineer. Most people just do the work and they're like, I hope it gets me where I got to go.
Hope is not a plan. And what we're going to do is we're going to flip it. We now have the end goal in sight.
Now we got to work backwards from that to build a plan that actually makes sense. You can have all the hope in the world, but if you have the wrong strategy, ain't going to get you anywhere. This is what I call identity-based goals.
So, identity-based goals is pretty much have, be, and do. Have is all the stuff we just talked about, the things that we said we want. Vision, things around the money we want, the relationships, the body, the bank, right?
Where do we put money? This is the things that you want to have. These are your [music] goals.
So, we got to ask ourselves, who do I need to be to have those things? And these are the things, these are the I am statements, right? You want to write down an athlete, if you want to work on your body.
I remember that was a big thing I wrote down and then I started doing CrossFit. And the first workout I did, they were like, "Hey athletes, what's up? " And I was like, "Oh crap, I guess I became an athlete.
I'm valuable. I am productive. " The big one for some of you is, "I am an extrovert.
" You can be an introvert in moments, but you can also show up as an extrovert. Write it down. This is our identity.
This is who I believe that I am, even if today I don't have any proof of it, I need to be there. But now we got to go to the habits, the things that the person that's being, that has those goals, what do they do? I'll tell you, things like, "I don't drink.
I eat healthy. " Our lives today are a reflection of decisions we made 6 months ago. That's why for me, the identity is a byproduct of our habits.
You can have the vision to have a six-pack, but if you keep eating in the kitchen, you will never have abs. Two years ago, I realized that I was an Iron Man, I didn't look the part. I didn't look like I worked out.
I didn't look fit. So, I woke up one day and decided, "I'm going to have visible abs. " And I went on the journey, and it was hard.
Even when I was doing it, I worried that it was never going to happen, but I stayed at it. Two years later, continue to maintain the same body weight because my identity shifted. Things that were habits are no longer habits once you adopt them as identity.
So, now we have a vision of what we want to achieve and now we have a plan on how to get there. But, now we got to go to week two where we learn to delete. Here's my question for you.
What's quietly holding you back from this stuff? Cuz you can't build a new life on top of the old one. We need to make room for you to be able to install these new things and you have to cut before you build.
And there's two things quietly eating away at your time and it's found in your calendar and in your circle. So, the first thing we have to do is we have to avoid the dragon. And these are the things that are pulling you off track that are just so easy to reach.
The app that's one tap away, the one glass of wine every night just to take the edge off. All these temptations around you that you can just remove to make them a little harder to reach for. You won't beat those with willpower.
Willpower runs out. So, instead of continuing with that, we got to add some friction. We have to make it hard to do the wrong things.
It is easier to avoid the dragon than to slay it. So, here's how you can do it for yourself. First thing, we have to log your time for the week.
See, most people don't know where their time goes. So, what I like to do is be very precise and log every 15 minutes. Have a timer that goes off and write down, what did you do?
What did you work on? And we got to audit our time. And we got to do that for a week.
Now, we have a log of everything we did. Step two is to go back through each one and circle in red all the things that are pulling you back away from your goal and your vision. And then circle in green all the things that were pushing you and supporting your vision.
If you said yes to joining a call with a bunch of other peers that are like you, that was supportive. If you answered a phone call from a friend that you met in high school that continues to complain all the time and you know they're going to complain, you answer the phone just so you can listen to them complain, that pulls you away. Just be honest with you.
Does it support or does it subtract? Now, what we do is we take the list of everything that was pulling you away and we put it in a bucket and we build a plan. First off, we should cut it.
Make it hard to access. If we can't, then we want to add some friction. I don't know if you've ever seen these like bricks that are like an NFC tag where you tap your phone and essentially if you tap it, it means you can't go to Instagram or any social media app that you set up until you come back and tap it again.
It creates friction to make it hard for you to make decision. And look, I get it's easy to say but it's harder to do in practice. The best way to stay compliant is once you made these decisions, tell your friends, tell your wife, tell everybody, "These are my decisions.
If you see me doing it, question me on it. " Once you free up your time, the worst thing you do is go and waste it again. So, that's why I built the perfect week template that's made just for busy CEOs that are juggling their team, their family, their travel.
So, if you're a CEO that struggles with this, just find me on Instagram and DM me the word YouTube week and I'll send it right over. But, your time is only half the battle. The bigger problem is who you're doing it with.
Now, we got to delete some other stuff that are taking our time and those are the people. You want to run a friend inventory. You are the byproduct of who you spend the most time with and they quietly set your ceiling.
The ceiling could be so much higher if you surrounded yourself with people that are more positive. We allow ourselves to be around folks that take our energy. They suck our time.
I call them energy vampires. And then there's people in your life that you know, when you're around them, they energize you. They drive you.
They push you. They support you. Those people are amplifiers.
When I was 17, I made a bunch of bad decisions and I ended up in rehab for 11 months. Through that process, I learned a lot about myself but one of the most powerful things they asked us to do at the end was build a transition plan. The decision of who we were going to not see and remove out of our life and who we needed to add and even if we didn't know who those people were, what kind of people they were.
And if I didn't do that, I'm telling you today, I wouldn't be here. This for me was life or death. That decision saved me at 17, and honestly, it's what scales founders at 40.
If your enemy put sugar in your water, that won't hurt as much as your friend accidentally putting poison in it. I call it a friend inventory, and here's how we run it. So, we got the traits, we got vampires, and amplifiers.
What I'm going to ask you to do is first, we have to write down the traits of people that are aligned with your goals. The habits, the vibe of that person. First one I'm going to write down is positive.
I'm going to write down driven. Financially successful. I'm going to write down kind.
I love me a kind, driven person. [music] The second step is we want to list everyone you've spent a lot of time with over the last 60 days and make a list of them, cuz we're going to categorize them into one or two lists. On the left side, we have our vampires.
These are energy suckers. These are the people that are always asking you for stuff, or even worse, when you share your wins with them, they make you feel bad about it. On the other side, we have the amplifiers.
These are the people that pump you up. These are the ones that teach you things every time you talk to them. They're always introducing new ideas to you.
I always want to be in somebody's amplifier side. And that's what I'm doing here for you right now. All the amplifiers will have the traits typically that you need to become, and you put those people on this side, because if you spend the most time with them, then you'll become like them.
Then everybody else becomes a vampire. And this is a tough one, because a lot of the people on this list are probably going to be family members. They're going to be friends you've known for 20 plus years.
But I'm telling you, the decision to create some space and love them from a distance will change your life. And what we got to do is we got to adjust our time to spend less time with the vampires and more time with the amplifiers. And if you don't have anybody in this list, let's go find them.
And the pro tip, do the same thing with your social media feed. My rule is this, if I saw the person in the mall, would I pretend not to see them? They're vampires.
[laughter] Just do yourself a favor and unfollow them, unfriend them. You don't have to have them in your life because you sat next to them in grade seven. So, now that you've made all this room in your time, here comes the fun part.
We got to fill it back up, but this time with the stuff that actually will change your life. Week number three, install. Now that you have a vision and you have a clear junk drawer because you cleaned it all out and only the good stuff is in there, now we got to build the new life.
We got to start putting stuff in it that are going to support the dreams. The first thing we have to do is we have to set our thermostat. Every person has a thermostat for things they feel they are allowed to have in their life.
And essentially, if it goes up or down, you put on too much weight or your bank account has too much money, you will react. It's kind of crazy because some people are like, "Oh, I'm all into visualization and positive mental attitude. " I'm like, if I stuck you in a commercial-grade freezer, I don't care how much positive attitude you're going to have, you're going to feel cold.
So, it's all about your environment. Just look at Lewis Hamilton, the F1 driver, seven-time world champion, one of the greatest ever, one of my favorite drivers. And he drove for Mercedes.
2025, he switches to Ferrari, and suddenly, he can't even win. He can't get a single podium. He called it his nightmare.
Same driver, same talent, different environment. Now, he's turned it around since, but that's how much your environment matters. It can make an amazing talent great, or it can hold them back.
And your space, your environment, shapes you way more than you think. Last week we talked about making the bad stuff hard to reach. This week we flip it and we make the good stuff easy.
So, what we got to do is we got to design your space that does the work for you. Number one, we got to make the good stuff easy stuff, and we got to put it right in the path. So, for example, if you make a commitment, you want to go to the gym the next morning, grab all your stuff, put it right next to your bed so that when you wake up, you literally step into your gym clothes, step into your shoes, and you go to the gym.
If you need to drink more water, you can preset your water jug the day before and have it on your desk, and you can make a commitment. You can set an alarm that goes off to remind you. You want to do something today that makes the decision of tomorrow super easy.
And next, we have to upgrade our inputs. This goes back to the feed. I love to use my social media to feed my mind.
I'm building an AI venture studio to a billion dollars. So, all of my feed is AI people talking about building billion-dollar companies. Anybody who's always complaining about things they can't control, guess what?
I either mute them, unfollow them, and they just don't end up into my world. And number three is we have to surround ourselves with people who've already achieved the things we want. That is the ultimate hack.
I don't care how rich you are, you get in a bigger room and you're the low person on the totem pole, you will naturally want to rise to the rest of the room. So, that's why you want to install good spaces, inputs, and people into your life. And here's a pro tip.
If you're ever trying to get connected to somebody, instead of asking them for the thing, ask past them. Be like, "Hey, do you know anybody who could help me with X, Y, Z? " If they're open to it, they might say, "Well, I could.
What do you need? " But if they're not, they'll just say, "Well, no, but I know this person can help. " And that works really well.
Nine times out of 10, they'll actually reply saying, "I can help. What do you need? " If you get this right, doing the right thing stops becoming hard.
It doesn't need discipline, it doesn't need willpower, it just becomes automatic. But the perfect space, that environment without the right daily non-negotiables, will never work. So, we got to lock those in.
Lock in your non-negotiables. One of the components of the coaching work I do with people is these five daily non-negotiables. And what I asked myself when I started that program is, "What are the things I could ask my clients to do every day that if they just did, whether they talked to me, showed up, studied, do the things that I was teaching them, would guarantee their success?
" You remember those daily habits that we circled back in week one? Now, we need to make sure you stick with them for the long term. Because the one thing about habits, it's either we're doing them and our life is spiraling up, or there's a day where we skip it and we slowly spiral down.
That's why I have a rule, I never skip the gym more than two days in a row. For years, I've never gone two days. One day of travel, no problem.
Two days in a row, no, no, no. And that's the difference between people who can change and people who don't. If you can't build non-negotiables, then you don't have the foundation to push off of.
But, how do you turn them from a habit to what I call a non-negotiable? Here's how we make them stick. First off, we have to pick the non-negotiables.
These are one or two habits for each of the like mind, body, or business that we talked about in the do part of the identity-based goals. Two, we have to make sure we start with embarrassingly simple, small, easy wins. I'm talking about writing one page of your book or one short workout or one call to somebody you don't know.
So small that you're just going to do it cuz it seems so simple. So, you're trying to build momentum. Number three is we're going to habit stack.
We're going to attach each one of those non-negotiables to something you already do. So, for example, if you know you got to take your vitamins and you brush your teeth every day, you put the vitamins next to your toothbrush, so you tie the brushing of your teeth to taking your vitamins. I have a Kindle that's next to my hot tub, so every time I go in the hot tub, I read my Kindle.
I make it really easy to do the right thing by making them non-negotiables. I'm installing those things into my life to make them super easy. And number four, one of my favorite things to do is create rewards and stakes for each one of them.
As I mentioned, when I did Project Visible Apps, I had stakes on the line. If I didn't hit my goal, which is kind of crazy at the time, 90 days to lose 32 lbs, if I didn't hit it, I made a commitment to everybody that I would enter in a fitness competition as is. I'm talking no tan, [music] no shaving my chest, just straight up on stage in a mankini.
Like, did not want to do that. Luckily, my desire to not show up on the internet having those photos exist was more than the pain it took to get visible abs. But, it's got to be something that costs you big time.
And then the reward was a new supercar. I'll tell you, I did more to avoid the thing I didn't want than the thing I wanted. And I do this all the time.
Even last year in my media company, me, Sam, and Todd, Todd runs it, says I'm a creative director, and myself, we had a goal, get to 8. 8 million followers across all platforms on social media. If we don't, we put our Porsches on the line.
We literally put our cars. And I will tell you, right up till the last day, it was a question mark if we were going to keep our cars. But it kept everybody aligned.
The upside is I bought them some really cool Rolexes, but the downside was losing their car. And I'll tell you, for the three of us, we didn't want to lose our Porsche. So now everything is ready.
We got the vision, we got the space, we got the habits, but this is exactly where most people completely fall off. So let's make sure that's not you. Week four, we track.
How do you make sure that it actually sticks? You built the whole machine now, but this week is how you keep it running for 6 months. Setting it up is relatively easy.
I said it was 3 weeks, but you could probably do it in like 45 minutes. Sticking to it, that's where most people fall off. Most of the time it's because we don't track our progress.
And if we don't track it, we don't keep score, we don't create momentum, it doesn't feel good. So we have to keep score. Most people don't quit because they fail.
They quit because they can't see they're winning. They don't stop to look back at how much elevation they made as they've climbed that mountain or how much money they made in their business. They just see the massive gap between where they're at and where they want to be.
So we have to keep score so that we can measure it because we can't manage what we don't measure. What gets measured gets managed. Seeing the proof stack up is what keeps you going and what motivates you.
Those little tiny wins, those little daily habits that might feel super small. I'm telling you, if you do them for three, four, five, six days in a row, you'll feel so good about yourself. Do you know that most people have never gone to the gym for 8 days in a row?
They're like, I got to take a rest day. From what? You're not even sore.
Now you're building momentum. Now you're feeling good. Now you're identity building.
So here's how we keep score. We have to track. The first thing we have to do is we need a north star [snorts] metric.
This is the one number that proves you're moving. This could be weight, this could be revenue, this could be the pages read, this could be the workouts done. But essentially, you log it, you measure it, you have it tracked.
Not 20, [music] that one one. It's like the leading indicator of everything else. If you're making progress, everything falls into place.
Then, we need a daily scorecard. This is where we can have other data points that we measure that are aligned, that are precursors, that are activities that make this easier. And we want to put it into a spreadsheet, and we want to do it the same time every day, no exceptions.
I like to put it in my calendar. At the end of my day, I log in, it's the last thing I do, and I update my scorecard for the activity that I was doing for that day that's aligned with my goals. And then lastly, we have to do a weekly check it.
This is where you review and you see if you're making progress, cuz if you're not, this is your opportunity to make feedback. Every Friday, the last thing I do on Friday is to review my week to then adjust my next week based on my calendar, based on my time, based on my energy. What do I need to install that's aligned with tracking?
Then I choose the one or two moves for the following week, not 15, and I install them into my week. That process will make it so inevitable. Now, here's a pro tip, cuz I've done this several times in my life.
You share this progress publicly. I'm talking 75 Hard, post the photo. Iron Man training, post the photo.
Project Visible Abs, post the videos. Make it so that you can't hide. Make it this is non-negotiable, this is what we're doing, this is the strategy, and I'm going to make it public.
Cuz guess what? Sunlight sanitizes all things. Sanitizes bad habits, it sanitizes willpower.
It will make sure that you got what you need to win this time. If you do this for 6 months and you stack those wins, you will wake up to a completely different life. So, that's the plan.
Edit. We have to envision, we have to delete, we have to install, and now we have to track. 4 weeks to set you up for the next 6 months.
But here's the twist that nobody sees coming. The loop. This isn't a one-time thing.
It's something that you set up over the next 4 weeks that you live for the next 6 months, and then you run it again. You start from envision. Now, we need to delete.
You go to install, and then you find the new track, and you do it over and over and over. But, this time you want to dream even bigger. You want to ask yourself what more you can do.
Who do you need to become? A life well-lived is well-examined. And this allows you to examine it so you can get better.
Don't wait till New Year's Eve because the calendar was never the point. You just start. 6 months is 6 months.
Let's start today and change your life. So, here's my ask. Leave a comment and let me know what's the first thing you're going to delete this week.
Write it below in the comments. And remember, if you want my perfect week template, just find me on Instagram and DM me the word YouTube week and I'll send it right over. And if what you want is building a business from absolute scratch, go find my new second channel, Dan Martell Daily, subscribe to it, and watch me post every day so that I can help you build the business of your dreams.
Or click this video and I'll see you on the other side.
