- All right, so life`is a bit weird. It's a never-ending tapestry
of hundreds of small decisions that we make each day, and these small decisions add up to create our experience of life. The problem is that because
there's so many of them, we can get caught up
in anxiety and stress, trying to optimise each one and worry about choosing
the best option each time. Now, one solution to this
problem of decision fatigue is to use mental models
or rules or principles to help simplify our decision-making. And so in this video, I'm gonna go over 10 of the rules that I try to live by each day to make my life more organised and to help filter through the noise. All right, rule number
one is the three Cs, and that's Consume, Create, and Connect. Now these are broadly
the three main things that I use tech for. And so every day when I see in the news and like on The Verge and
other kinds of YouTube channels that, oh, there's this
fancy new tech product, I think about the three
Cs and think about, is this product gonna add value to my life either in terms of consumption, like, will it make it
easier or more pleasurable to consume the things I wanna consume? This is why buying a Kindle is great because it makes reading
books much easier. Secondly, could this new
thing make it easier for me to create stuff, which is why, I don't know, buying a new laptop that
has a nicer keyboard, like a nicer keyboard, a mechanical keyboard
is always a nicer way to create things, or certainly is it gonna help me connect to people a little bit better? So like, should I really upgrade from the iPhone 10 to the iPhone 12? Will it really help me
connect with my friends a little bit better. And then if we have a
take on the three CS, I decide cool. I probably want this
piece of tech in my life. But if we don't, I think, okay, this piece of tech is probably
gonna be a waste of time and I'm not gonna buy it. Rule number two is that I
always want to invest in things that take me from zero to
one, rather than 1 to 1.1. And what I mean here is
that like zero to one, like if you go from not having
a phone to having a phone, that's a zero to one difference. Whereas if you go from the
iPhone 8 to the iPhone 10, that's not zero to one. That's like 1 to 1.05. It's like a very incremental upgrade versus a completely novel upgrade. This is usually why
people ask me, you know, what piece of tech would
you buy for like under $500 or things like that? I usually recommend
getting an actual camera because the difference between
not having an actual camera to having an actual camera
is a big difference, because it means you
suddenly start to take more and more photos and
those photos are really nice and high quality. And I'm really glad I bought a camera when I was at university, because now I have these
incredibly high quality photos of my friends, of my
experience in med school. That just doesn't compare
to what you can get from a smartphone, even though phone cameras
are pretty good these days. And so I'm always on the
lookout for these zero to one kind of improvements. Going from not having a
Kindle to having a Kindle. Going from not having a
laptop to having a laptop, rather than thinking about, oh, I need to always have
the best thing each time and make incremental upgrades. All right, rule number
three is hell yeah or no, which is a great time management tip by my friend, Derek Sivers
and the title of this book, "Hell Yeah or No," it's
very good, would recommend. Link in the video description, and I'll cut to Derek talking about this. - We tend to say yes to too many things. And because of this,
we're spread too thin. We're so busy doing average things that we don't have time for
the occasional great thing. So instead I propose raising
the bar as high as you can, so that if you're feeling anything less than, oh, hell yeah,
that would be amazing, then just say, no. By doing this, you will miss
out on many good things, but that's okay because your
time will be quite empty. So then by saying no to
the merely good things, you'll have the time and the energy and the space in your life
to throw yourself in entirely when that occasional great thing comes up. - Now this is the lesson that I need to remind myself of every day, and I still do a terrible
job of following it because my calendar is
just full of obligations that I said yes to, because it was like, oh, this thing seems,
seems reasonable, why not? Someone's asking me for this. I'll just say yes to it. Whereas I'm trying really hard to switch more to a
unless I have a hell yeah response to this thing,
it's gonna be a no. And I'll say to the person,
look, I'm really sorry. Life's really busy right now. I can't commit to this. But I really, really suck at this, but I'm trying to get better at it. All right, next, we have rule number four and we'll cut to Casey
Neistat talking about this. - Last week I talked
about that Voltaire quote, "Perfection is the enemy of good." And what that means is, you can never let your
desire for perfection prevent you from finishing
something that's good. Because to finish
something even imperfectly, is to learn from it and
then you can move on and get closer to perfection. - Honestly, this thing about perfection is like the biggest issue that's holding so many people back, holds me back as well in lots of ways, Especially when I teach my course the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, we've taught like a
thousand plus students now to start and grow their YouTube channels. And like 80% of them plus have suffered from this perfection thing where it's like, oh, I have to get the perfect camera set up. I have to get the lights out. I have to get a perfect microphone, otherwise I'm not gonna upload a video. And the thing I always try
and tell them is that, no. You can't let perfect
be the enemy of good, just upload the goddamn video. Because if you upload the video and just do more and more and more of it, you'll learn from that. And eventually you'll be able
to move towards perfection and like good enough or whatever, whereas if you have that
requirement from the get-go that this thing has to be perfect, it has to be, I don't know,
a viral video or whatever you're just never, ever
gonna make anything. And this is advice I often
need to tell to myself. When it comes to writing my book, in my mind I'm thinking,
oh, this needs to be a "New York Times" bestseller. And therefore every word I
write, it has to be perfection. And that just stops me from
doing any writing at all. And so when I stopped thinking
about that and instead think, you know what? I'm just gonna get
something messy on the page and I'll worry about it later. And that's the time when
I actually make progress in writing. All right, rule number five is one that I still follow to this day, which is that I am not allowed to watch TV unless it's with other people. And this is one very, very simple rule/mental model/principle that I've had in my life
since my university days. And it has sort of freed
up so much of my time to do other things that
I've gotten value out of. And I sometimes think, you know, I've missed out on a few TV shows because I don't do the
thing of watching TV in my spare time by myself. Then I think, well, I'm
really glad I missed out on those TV shows because I
was able to do better things, things that I enjoyed more of, things that I personally
found more meaningful. Now, for you, if you find a lot of meaning and joy and fulfilment from
watching TV by yourself, that's totally cool. You do you. For me personally, I
realised that I don't get a lot of meaning joy, fulfilment out of watching TV by myself. I get a lot of joy out of
watching TV with other people. It becomes a social activity. But watching a TV show by
myself, just a bit dead. I'd rather, I don't know,
hang out with friends or play something on the piano, or learn something on the
guitar, or read a book, or play on the PlayStation. I'm cool with playing
PlayStation these days. But just that one rule, I
still have it as a rule, not allowed to watch TV by myself, and it just frees up
so much time in my life to do other things. Rule number six is the go first rule. And this rule states that
everyone in the world is friendly, but you have to go first. And I think about this
whenever I'm in a new situation where I'm surrounded by strangers,
I need to talk to people, and I always think that
anxiety within me of like, oh, I don't know, a fear of rejection, a fear of being weird. The fear of like, oh, I don't
wanna be the first person to say hello, because what if they think I'm weird and stuff? And I was reminding myself, no, the go first rule is that
everyone is friendly, but you always have to go first. In 100% of situations where
I've taken that first step in saying hello to someone, or like trying to start some banter, or like asking someone out, in 100% of cases, I've been
glad that I've done the thing. It hasn't always worked out well, but I've always been glad
that I've done the thing. And so now I try and live
by this go first principle. All right, rule number seven
is the pareto principle. And now let's hear from Tim Ferris. - I apply the 80/20
principle to everything. And the 80/20 principle in brief means that 20% of your actions,
or inputs, or products, or services will create
80% of what you want, whatever that happens to be. So if I have 10 products
and those 10 products are taking up all of my time,
working a hundred-hour weeks. So let's say a hundred
products weeks products that are creating a hundred-hour weeks. Chances are, if I did an analysis, I'd find out that 20 of those products are producing 90% of my profits. Which means, hypothetically, I could cut out 80% of my
products, just get rid of them. Pull the trigger, get rid of them. Make 90% of what I'm making now and work 20 hours a week instead
of a hundred hours a week. I do that for everything. - Again, this is something
I think about a lot as well. Like what are the 20% of things that are leading to 80% of the outcomes? And I applied this rule the other day, I read Marie Kondo's "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" and decided to minimilify my wardrobe and realised, of course, that
I actually only really wear 20% of the stuff in my wardrobe. And so I just donated the other 80%. I had like 24 keyboards in the house and I realised I use two of them. So I donated the other 22
keyboards to a charity shop. So just doing this sort of 80/20 analysis in everything in life. Rule number eight is
the write-off principle. Now this is a rule that I
came up with for myself. And it's basically a way of
helping me feel less guilty about like taking time off, because now I've got a
rule and it's like, okay, this is gonna be a write-off day, I'm gonna write the day off, and then I can relax and
like play Ratchet and Clank on the PlayStation, or just vegetate or order
some like crappy takeaway. I can do all of that stuff guilt-free. And on the few occasions that I do this, I do this like maybe two
or three days a month. I always feel that like,
yes, I've got that reset now. And I also often feel that,
okay, this day was fun, but I actually wouldn't
wanna do this every day. I wouldn't want every
day to be a video games and eating crappy food day, because I get a lot of
value in joy and fulfilment out of like the work
and doing YouTube videos and running the business
and all this sort of stuff. And so having those few days in the month where I just completely
vegetate and turn off, helps me be more productive
in the rest of the time. But you know, it also adds to
my kind of fulfilment and joy and meaning that I get out of life. Rule number nine is
journey before destination. It's something I always talk about. It's a quote from Brandon
Sanderson's amazing series, "The Stormlight Archive." And one of the ideals
of the night's radiant is life before death,
strength before weakness, a journey before destination. And I really always think about
journey before destination, like basically... With basically everything in life, it just is about the journey. It's not about the destination. Like setting a goal, the
goal of, I don't know, writing a book, the goal of
hitting a bestseller list, the goal of starting a YouTube channel, the goal of hitting subscriber count, the goal of getting six pack abs. It's not actually about the destination. Like the goal is kind of irrelevant. If you hit the goal, it's
like, great, I hit the goal. You celebrate for five
seconds and then you move on, moving on to the next thing. Whereas it's actually
all about the journey because the journey is where
we spend 100% of our time. And so my whole thing
is that every single day I'll try my best to enjoy the journey rather than being fixated
on the destination. I think having a destination is important because without a destination, without like a goal to point to words, it's hard to like set off on a journey when you don't know where you're going. But once you know where you're going, at that point you can
forget about the goal, forget about the destination,
and just focus on the journey. It's the climb. Remember to have fun. Remember to enjoy yourself. Remember to enjoy every
day on its own merit, because the journey is all that we have. Wow, I really sound like
one of those fortune cookie type things, but yeah, genuinely life-changing principle, a journey before destination. All right, rule number
10 is a line from a book by Marie Forleo. - Hey mom, how do you know how to do so many different things that you've never done before, but nobody's shown you how to do it? And she put down her screwdriver, she cocked her head to the
side, and she looked at me and she said, "Ray, what
are you talking about? It's no big deal. Nothing in life is that complicated. if you roll up your sleeves,
you get in there and you do it. Everything is figureoutable." And I was like, whoa! That phrase was cool. And it washed over me and
it planted a seed in my soul that I swear to you has been
the most powerful driving force in my life ever since. Nothing in life is that complicated. Everything is figureoutable. That's just like a really
nice way of living life. And I often get questions on Instagram from people being like,
"Oh, how do you play the guitar and piano and how are you so cool? How do you do all this kind of stuff? How are you so handsome? How are you so charismatic?" Et cetera, et cetera. And I should just have a snippet being like, nothing in
life is that complicated. Everything is figureoutable. Anytime I see someone doing something that looks really cool, I think, whoa! How could he possibly do that? And then sometimes I
ask them, they're like, "Oh yeah, it's easy. I just did a, B, C, D, E." I'm like, oh, okay. That actually doesn't seem too bad. Any field that we don't
have experience in, fields like a black box,
like learning how to code. what the hell is learning how to code?. It feels like a black box until you actually spend five
minutes opening the black box and you realise, oh, it's
actually not too bad. I can learn HTML, CSS,
et cetera, et cetera. And now I've got a roadmap
to learning how to code, and it wasn't as complicated
as I thought it was. I've actually figured it out. Okay, so those were 10
mental models I live by. There are actually 13 in total and the other three are
in the extended edition of this video, which
is available on Nebula. If you haven't heard, Nebula
is a streaming platform that's built by me and a bunch
of my other creative friends And own Nebula, we post ad
free versions of all our videos and extended editions of
videos and bonus content that wouldn't necessarily work on YouTube. And we can post off on Nebula
without really worrying about the YouTube algorithm. And so in the extended
version of this video, which is available in Nebula, this little thing gets taken out and it's replaced with
another three mental models. And I've got a tonne of other
exclusive content on Nebula, like my workflow series, where I deep dive into how I
use some of my favourite apps like Notion and Room, and my deep dive snippet series, which has like bite-sized wisdom from all the interviews that I've done over the last two years. If you wannA get access to Nebula, the easiest way is to sign
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kinda tips, techniques, and mental models that we can
apply to our lives from that to anything we're doing, whether we're students or not. So thank you so much for watching. Do hit the subscribe button
if you aren't already, and I'll see you in the
next video, bye-bye.
