7 Actionable Ways to Achieve More in Life

hey friends welcome back to the channel so this is one of my favorite books it's called someday is today and it's filled with incredibly actionable helpful practical advice for achieving more of the things we want in life it's written by an incredible guy called Matthew dicks who has survived three near-death experiences including a ridiculously bad car crash and also being held at gunpoint at the age of 22 and these experiences forced him to reconsider what he was doing with his life and what he achieved and he went from being someone who was completely broke living in his car and working at McDonald's to becoming a best-selling author world champion Storyteller and award-winning journalist I was sure that I was going to die that day and I will tell you that I did not feel fear or sadness or anger the only feeling I was consumed with was regret I was 22 years old and I had failed to do anything with my life that I had wanted to do that was a quote from a podcast that I did with Matthew a few months ago incredible episode but in this episode of book club which is the ongoing series will be distill and discuss highlights and summaries from some of my favorite books I'm going to talk through seven actionable tips that I took from his latest book Sunday is today these are seven tips that will help you achieve more of what you want in life let's get into it tip number one the parking lot practice so when I first started writing my book feel good productivity uh I felt like I had to do it in the right environment I felt like I had to go into a coffee shop and have my little latte next to me and my headphones on and I wanted the environment to be perfect otherwise you know for some reason I felt this writer's block and I felt like I couldn't do the thing but Matthew's approach to this is completely different and his approach is actually change the way that I approach my creative work and I think you can get a lot of value from this as well and one of my favorite quotes from the book is that product ity is not pretty now we've all seen those examples of like you know the students that are like doing the notes in like the most elaborate colorful method possible we've seen those sketch notes we've seen all these people with their like incredibly pretty desks and everything and it just looks like such a productive Vibe and it looks very pretty but the point that Matthew is making is that true productivity does not have to look pretty and the example that he talks about in the book is where he was early for a dentist appointment and so instead of just sort of waiting in the car or like scrolling Tik Tok or whatever the thing was instead of doing that he decided to just sit on the side of the road in the parking lot lot get out his laptop and continue writing some more of the novel that he was working on during World War I there were men in trenches wearing gas masks artillery exploding over their heads and they were scribbling in little books in journals hoping that if they survive this battle and the many battles that were to come someday they might publish something so thank goodness that the writers of the 1910s did not require Starbucks smooth jazz and 2hour quiet blocks of time for them to get their work done his point is that there's never going to be a perfect place or a perfect setting to get things done especially when your life is chaotic especially when you have kids I don't have kids but he does and so he would know and if you're always waiting for the right time or the right environment to be able to do a thing that propels your creative life forward or to do a thing that you really want to do you're going to be waiting for a very very very long time it's the same with eating healthily it's the same with going to the gym it's the same with building a business the timing is never going to be right the time is now the time is never and the people who can take action on the things that they want to do despite the imperfect environment are the ones who ultimately succeed and timately move forward with what they want in life tip number two the minut mindset so the point here is that when we plan out our day we tend to think in blocks of hours but thinking in hours can actually cause us to waste quite a lot of time now in the book he talks about this and this is one of my favorite stories in any book that I've ever read he talks about how he was meeting up with a person who wanted to write a book and he was meeting up with her for breakfast she met me at the McDonald's and she was late and so when she sat down I said tell me what you're planned what you're doing and she started describing this book and then eventually I said as I always say to writers I say so how much have you written and so often almost always the answer is oh well I haven't started writing anything yet and I then I said to her I said well you were 7 minutes late today and she said I'm sorry you know she I'm so sorry I'm like no no no my point was not that you were 7 minutes late and I was upset my point was I used the 7 minutes that you were late to write some sentences you know I turned my computer I said this is what I wrote in the 7 minutes that you were late and I just absolutely love this approach like after Matthew's near-death experiences he says that he realized the profound value of time and he didn't want to come to the end of his life with regret for failing to achieve the things that he actually wanted to do and so what he tries to do now is he tries to get the most out of every single minute rather than every single hour I I tell all of the creative people of the world 10 minutes is precious to you it doesn't mean in 10 minutes I can write a chapter in 10 minutes I can reread the last three paragraphs I wrote earlier today and see if they're okay and clean them up a little bit or I can write five good new sentences and this is actually how I was able to grow this YouTube Channel while I was working for 2 years full-time as a doctor this book hadn't come out yet but at that time I had a similar attitude in that in between patients or in my lunch break or in a random break here and there when I had a few minutes of time I would get out my phone or I would go on notion on the Windows computers at work and I would just make a few more notes on a video that I was working on and so what that meant is that in these little blocks of time here and there throughout the day where other people around me were scrolling Tik Tok on their phones or whatever in those moments I was writing more bullet points for a video or fleshing out some title ideas or figuring out a thumbnail and in this context me and Matthew are absolutely not saying that there is no time for a break and that you should never ever recharge and relax in fact my whole the whole final three chapters of my book Feelgood productivity are all about the power of rest and relaxation to make things sustainable over time but the way to think about this is that what do you find yourself doing in those pockets of time do you wait until it hits like 5:00 to be able to do something because you have to start on the hour what if you just had 3 minutes or 5 or seven or 9 minutes left could you do something intentional and effective and enjoyable with that time rather than wasting that time on scrolling whatever thing that you tend to default to oh and by the way one of the productiv tools that I use every single day that really helps me make the most of my time is what I call the year at a glance spreadsheet it's basically a Google sheet that has the entire year laid out and it's a way of visualizing the calendar that you just don't really get within calendar apps and there's going to be a link in the video description where you can download this completely for free if you want a better way for planning your year as well all right tip number three is the lily pad method now in the book Matthew writes that the only real failure for any Creator is to stop making stuff now by making stuff it could be writing it could be YouTube videos it could be studying for your exam it could be learning to code it could be starting that business or working on your sales scripts so you know this all of this stuff is what I would call Creative in some ways but sometimes doing this stuff can feel really overwhelming especially with everything else going on in our lives and especially if you have a big project that you're working on like trying to study for a massive exam or like trying to write a novel or trying to start a business and get it off the ground there's often a lot of little steps involved in that thing but if you look at the whole thing it can seem like a mountain that feels very daunting to climb now normally the conventional path towards working towards our goals is to do things in sequence in order one at a time but the lily method is kind of Matthew's approach to this which is to recognize that you don't actually need to start at the beginning and you don't need to finish at the end you can in fact jump around I think sometimes people see a goal or a dream as a linear process Like A to B to C and I think that's always a mistake too so I was working with someone yesterday who said I want to write a memoir and I said we'll start writing a memoir and she said I don't know where to start and I said do you have some good moments that you know you want to include she said oh yeah I said well write those she said don't you have to start a book at the beginning I said no you write something just write chapter 15 if that's what you can write today so seeing your dream as stepping stones but you get to touch whichever one you want at any point cuz you're going to have to touch all of them eventually that's really helpful so if you figure out what is the goal that you're trying to go for and then you break it down into these tasks but instead of seeing these tasks as things that that have to happen in sequence if you can think of them as almost like lily pads where you can sort of Leap Frog around these different lily pads depending on your mood and depending on how you're feeling then in those moments where you feel overwhelmed by a particular task or you feel like you don't have the motivation or the discipline or whatever you want to call it you can then just Leap Frog to another lily pad and you can make progress in that direction I also did an interview with writer Mo Gat who's written a bunch of books he's amazing he's like an World expert in happiness happiness research stuff like that but I asked him about his writing habit and how he managed to write so many books and what he said was that he always works on like five or six different books in parallel and so every day he spends a few hours writing I wake up sometimes in the morning and I write for 3 4 5 hours but every morning he asks himself which is the project that I feel most pulled right now to be working on and he just works on that one I loved the Journey of writing it I loved the Journey of exploration I loved the analysis the research I love the conversation I had with a friend to say does this make sense to you I love all of that and it's you know what it's it's hours of my life that are filled with a joy he's not forcing himself to stick to one particular project or one particular task in a way he Leap Frogs around depending on how his energy is going on a particular day and so the question to ask yourself to take something away from this point is when it comes to the goals that I'm pursuing how might I be able to start in the Middle with some of them rather than necessarily starting at the beginning and in moments where I feel overwhelmed with a particular task is there a way I can leap frog that particular task and do something else that takes me towards my goals okay tip number four is the Horizon habit now you've probably heard of smart goals which is goals that are specific measurable attainable or assignable realistic or relevant and te for time bound but the problem with setting these sorts of goals is that often we can set them towards things that are actually outside of our control like if you want to start a YouTube channel but you set a specific goal of hitting a million subscribers which is specific and measurable and time bound and all that kind of stuff it's a goal that's kind of out of your control and so it can be very demotivating trying to get there and so the way Matthew thinks about this is setting Horizon goals instead and I really like this way of thinking about it because the way I think about goals is that goals are ultimately just a destination they don't actually help us get there they're just the destination and so Horizon goals are just a way of taking the pressure off of the idea of goal setting and explicitly allowing us to set a General vague directional goal that's like over there on the horizon but it's not really that specific I like to identify that IDE of I'm going to be a Storyteller but that I'm going to be a Storyteller also allows cuz it's on the horizon to be maybe I'll teach storytelling someday maybe I'll be a consultant about storytelling maybe maybe an advertising company will allow me to inject storytelling into their car commercials which is what I've done right all of those things are sort of on the storytelling Horizon but it affords me the opportunity to be flexible in terms of what ultimately is going to happen so if your goal is to be a musician you might think about all the other ways you can incorporate that dream into your career you could become a band member but you could also try songwriting or DJing or radio presenting you could learn how to produce music and become a technician or a background singer who picks up an event management job or a teacher or an online Creator sharing insights into the music world all of these jobs are crucially on the music Horizon but this flexibility gives you both freedom and also resilience which brings us to the next point in the book which is tip number five the piano precedent and there's a great quote from the book which is that 5-year plans are inviting the universe to drop a piano on you basically if you try and meticulously plan out your life then it's inevitable that something is going to happen that will completely ruin your plans now that's not to say that planning is not important because making a plan is generally quite helpful and we've talked about setting a horizon goal as your destination so you can start working towards it and generally you know when I find people come to me for Life advice and I ask them well what do you actually want they don't really have a vision of where they actually want to go and it's like that quote from Louis Carol's Alice in Wonderland if you don't know where you're going then any road will get you there but I just wanted to ask you which way I ought to go well that depends on where you want to get to oh it really doesn't matter as long as I then it really doesn't matter which way you go and there's a graph that I really like I think I think it's from Darren Brown's book happy which is basically all about stoicism which is where you've got your plans on one axis and then you've got Fate on the other axis and the path that your life takes is sort of somewhere in between these two things you're very unlikely to always be going in the same direction as your plans but equally having some sort of plan will allow you to not just be completely buffeted by The Winds of fate and you'll be able to sort of chart your ship in those in those Waters of Fate tip number six the 100-year old plan now in Matthew Dix's thingy I think it's one of the early chapters in his book which I really liked which is that when you're at a Crossroads in life try to imagine your 100-year-old self and think to yourself what advice would my 100-year-old self give to me right now now the example that he uses is where he's sitting at his desk and he's writing and he's got deadlines and he's got work and he's got stuff to do but then his son comes up to him and asks him to play tag now one option in that path is to continue with work because you got to be disciplined and you can't be distracted and you've got to focus but then thinks what would his 100-year-old self want him to do and his 100-year-old self is always going to say look man go play with the kid because there's going to come a day where the kid no longer wants to play with you and you want to take advantage of the moments when the kid is actually Keen to play tag with you now similarly Alex homo's approach to this he calls it the Solomon project is when he does journaling but he imagines the journaling session as a conversation between him and his 86-year-old self a practice that I started doing which is I have a coaching session with myself weird I have a conversation with my future self who's 85 and I ask him for advice on what I should do now and he knows that the 86-year-old has context on where where he is at right now and what his goals are and what he needs and he knows that the advice that the 86y old gives him is going to be well the right advice and again there's so much value in this kind of thinking right because the more shortterm we think of our life trajectory and the more short-term our decision- making the more we tend to make decisions based on what's urgent rather than what's actually important honestly this is still something I really struggle with far too often when it's a choice between friends and work I'll think oh but works really fun and I've got this deadline I've got you know I've I've got all this stuff and so I'll choose work when actually I know that my older self would have wanted me to choose friends or family or relationships or health in that moment and tip number seven is the purposeful approach now often when we talk about productivity and this is fundamentally a productivity book it's easy to default to thinking that productivity means work or hustling or business or money you know that kind of stuff but sometimes we need to take a step back and really think about why we want to get things done efficiently so when people say productivity sort of grinds you down I think of productivity is it's the thing that you want to be doing that you should be doing more of so let's Max imiz our life the things we have to do in order to sustain life in order to get to the things we want to do so we don't have to think of productivity in terms of work so the way I think of it is that I want to be making the most of my time not for its own sake or not because I want to maximize economic output but actually by making the most of my time it frees me up to be able to spend my time doing the things that truly matter to me and this is why Matthew is a big fan of what he calls soft goals which are things that aren't necessarily productive if you look at like the standard definitions of productivity but that are intentional and that are meaningful to us anyway so the action point here is figure out what are the soft goals that you want to aim for in life what are the things that like someone else looking at it might not think it's particularly productive but for you it's very intentional it's very satisfying and it brings you the sense of meaning and fulfillment I was talking to a client the other day and I said well what's your horizon goal and she said I want to see the 50 greatest movies of all time there's a list in the world I have the list and I want to sit on my couch and watch the 50 greatest movies she said but that doesn't feel super productive and I said that sounds incredibly productive to me because it's your dream let's make sure we maximize your work time your chore time let's take away all of those little black holes of your life that you're wasting and make sure that we use all that so you can get your ass on the couch more often with your husband watching black and white movies and so now if you can be really productive in the areas of your life like your work or like your studies or whatever the thing might be you free yourself up you unlock a lot more time and energy to be able to give to the things that truly matter to you now as you might know I am completely obsessed with reading productivity books which is why I ended up actually writing one link down below but if you're interested in my top insights from most of the productivity books I read check out this video over here which summarizes 107 productivity books that I've read into a nine-step framework that you can use to level up your productivity and do more of the things that matter to you so thank you so much for watching and I'll see you hopefully in the next video bye-bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 531,942

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal, how to change your life, change your life by reading, how to change your life in 30 days, change your life mathew dicks, mathew dicks, someday is today, how to achieve more in your life, how to achieve more in life, achieve more, achievement, reach your full potential, someday is today mathew dicks, how to achieve more mathew dicks, someday is today book, someday is today book mathew dicks, achieve more mathew dicks, mathew dicks book, book summary

Id: yxF9TGhWPMc

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023