Force Yourself to Train Your Mind Every Morning — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00Dwayne the Rock Johnson gets up before the sun to have two hours alone and he said, I need the mental time in the beginning and the next thing is my training time.
2. 0:09Those are my two anchors and once I'm able to anchor myself, I'm able to go to work.
3. 0:13We want to make sure that we find our anchor.
4. 0:15You want to protect your anchor.
5. 0:17We always got to protect the thing that allows us to do what we do.
6. 0:20Training your mind every morning means choosing what goes into your head before the world starts asking you for things.
7. 0:27The mind is a muscle.
8. 0:28It's not that I'm so great, just I'm well trained.
9. 0:31I've trained this mind.
10. 0:32So when you wake up in the morning and you consciously look for things to be thankful for, you are more alive and receptive to the goodness that comes in your life.
11. 0:42And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on an average day at 5 a.m., 84.6% of Americans are still asleep.
12. 0:48So if you get up a little bit earlier, you get quiet time to think and act before anyone needs you.
13. 0:53I like things quiet.
14. 0:54I shut the door actually at the office because I don't want to hear anybody talking outside.
15. 0:58The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is I work out.
16. 1:02And I work out in solitude, typically in a darkened room.
17. 1:06Listening to music, I get a chance to really think about things.
18. 1:09It's my most creative time.
19. 1:11Now, I don't wake up every day saying, let's go.
20. 1:13I wake up tired.
21. 1:15I'm nervous about my day.
22. 1:17And I have all these limiting beliefs.
23. 1:18I also don't wake up 5 a.m.
24. 1:20I'm actually trying to get as much sleep as I can because I've struggled with not sleeping enough.
25. 1:25But that's another story.
26. 1:27What I focus on is owning the first part of my day.
27. 1:30So
28. 1:30matter how great a day i have today tomorrow i wake up and it's like i'm starting all over again so every morning i go on what i call a believe walk i get outside within 15 minutes i walk for 15 to 20 minutes and i put something in my ears from an entrepreneur who thinks bigger than i do like steve jobs or howard schultz i wanted to make this video because i believe you can borrow belief from other people and the morning is when you need it most if you started your day
29. 1:54on your phone, you'd be reacting to everybody else's emails and messages before you ever did anything for yourself.
30. 2:01By the time I come back from my Believe Walk every morning, I'm ready to go attack the day.
31. 2:05So if you get your mind right, first thing in the morning, everything else in your day will get easier.
32. 2:11If you don't, the first thing you see every morning will be somebody else's problems in demand for your time.
33. 2:16There are 10 ways to train your mind every morning and I'm going to cover them today in this video.
34. 2:21If you've been here before, drop a hashtag, believe in the comments below so we can feature you here in a future video.
35. 2:25And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time.
36. 2:34Number one, get up before the world does.
37. 2:36So for a lot of people, the first thing they see each morning is a message from somebody else.
38. 2:41UC Irvine researcher Gloria Mark found that people switched between projects about every 10 and a half minutes and an interrupted task took about 23 minutes to get back to.
39. 2:51That's why the hours before anyone can reach you are so valuable.
40. 2:54Successful leaders get up early enough to have quiet time and they use it to think and to plan.
41. 3:00The rock has made it a part
42. 3:01of his everyday.
43. 3:02So Dwayne The Rock Johnson was cut from the Calgary Stampeders football team in 1995, and he went back home with $7 in his pocket.
44. 3:09He later named his production company Seven Bucks after that time in his life.
45. 3:13And every morning he meditates, he thinks through the day ahead, and he trains before he leaves for work.
46. 3:18Johnson said, I often sacrifice two hours of sleep just so I can have the quiet two hours that I need before the whole house wakes up, including the animals.
47. 3:27Forbes named him the highest-paid actor in the world in 2019 and 2020.
48. 3:31He says his tequila brand, Terra Mana, sold more than 300,000 cases in its first nine months.
49. 3:35So he's had a lot of success.
50. 3:37You can too.
51. 3:37Set your alarm 30 minutes earlier this week and spend that time thinking before you look at your phone.
52. 3:42I've already talked about my routine.
53. 3:43I do my Believe Walk every morning.
54. 3:45I try to sleep as much as I can.
55. 3:47I just still happen to wake up early.
56. 3:49But the most important thing as I wake up, as soon as I get up, I go find my phone and set a timer on my phone for 15 minutes.
57. 3:55Like I have to be outside within 15 minutes.
58. 3:58I gotta wake up, go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, drink some water,
59. 4:01Feed the dogs, get outside within 15 minutes and start the walk.
60. 4:05And then I'm outside, I'm moving, I have something in my ear and doing that anchors me every day to have time for myself to think bigger on a higher level and come back encouraged to go and start the day.
61. 4:17Number two, read what your customer said before anything else.
62. 4:21So founders often start the morning on team chats or numbers or the news.
63. 4:25By the time they hear from customers, it's weeks later and filtered through somebody else's report.
64. 4:29Bain and company found that raising customer attention by as little as 5% can raise profits by as much as 95%.
65. 4:36Successful leaders read what customers wrote in their own words at the start of the day.
66. 4:41Apple CEO does it before most of the world is awake.
67. 4:43So Tim Cook joined Apple in 1998 when Steve Jobs asked him to come over from Compaq.
68. 4:48He became Apple CEO in 2011.
69. 4:50And in a 2014 interview with ABC News, he said he gets up at 3.45 AM and reads emails from customers.
70. 4:57In a 2018 interview with Axios, he said he spends the first hour of his day going through user comments
71. 5:02and then he goes to the gym for an hour.
72. 5:04And while Cook has been CEO, Apple has grown from a $348 billion company in 2011 to worth more than $4 trillion.
73. 5:12So before you open anything else tomorrow, read five messages from your actual customers.
74. 5:16Part of my morning routine every day after I get back from our Belief Walk is looking through the comments.
75. 5:20every single day for I don't know how many years.
76. 5:22I look through some of the comments on the videos.
77. 5:25At the very beginning when I had no comments, it meant a ton because every morsel of a comment felt like, hey, I'm doing something, like somebody cares.
78. 5:34Now a lot of the feedback in the comments is great.
79. 5:36You're giving me new ideas to work on for new content.
80. 5:39You're telling me how the doubling is working out.
81. 5:41You're telling me where I might screw up or mess up and it's great.
82. 5:44Like the feedback is really valuable.
83. 5:45It helps me make this channel even better.
84. 5:50Number three, say thank you before you get out of bed.
85. 5:52It's easy to wake up and go straight to what's wrong, like a problem email, a missed number, something went wrong in the company.
86. 5:59That puts you in a defensive mood before the day even starts.
87. 6:02UC Davis psychologist Robert Emmons has studied gratitude in more than a thousand people from ages eight to 80.
88. 6:07Successful people start the day by naming what's going right, and then they go to work.
89. 6:12Oprah Winfrey has been doing this for years.
90. 6:14So Oprah Winfrey was born into poverty in Mississippi in 1954 to a single teenage mother.
91. 6:19In 1986, she became the head of her own company, Harpo Productions, and the Oprah Winfrey show went national that September.
92. 6:26It ran for 25 years.
93. 6:28She wrote, I kept a gratitude journal for a full decade without fail.
94. 6:32And today she starts and ends every day by saying two words.
95. 6:35Thank you.
96. 6:36She told people, gratitude really is my religion.
97. 6:39And in 2003, Forbes named her the first black woman billionaire.
98. 6:43So every morning this week, name three specific things that you're thankful for before your feet touch the floor.
99. 6:48Honestly, for me, I've been on and off with gratitude.
100. 6:51I think I'm generally a grateful person, but I've had a gratitude practice, not of writing down in a journal, but of just trying to think of things that I am, that I am grateful for.
101. 7:01I could do better.
102. 7:02I could be better at this.
103. 7:03So this video is a reminder for myself.
104. 7:05One of the things that I try to do as well is as I walk through any doorframe, I think great things come to me.
105. 7:11And so my office door is right here.
106. 7:14There's a doorframe.
107. 7:15As I walk through, I kind of tap the top of it and say, great things come to me.
108. 7:19If you're living in happiness and optimism and hope and gratitude, you're much more likely to be creative and think of answers to the problems you're facing as opposed to drowning into problems because entrepreneurship is a lot of problems for you and for your clients that you're trying to solve on a daily basis.
109. 7:33And so when you're living in gratitude and hope and optimism, positivity, you're much more likely to actually solve those problems.
110. 7:40Number four, read before you check your phone.
111. 7:43So the first thing on your phone each morning is an alert.
112. 7:45It's a message, it's a feed from somebody else that found you, right?
113. 7:49It's draining your time.
114. 7:51According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans spend about 16 minutes a day reading though in their free time.
115. 7:56Reading something you choose puts your own ideas in your head before anyone else.
116. 8:01Successful leaders read something first before the alerts start popping off and sucking your time.
117. 8:07This is called an information diet and Google CEO starts most days with a newspaper.
118. 8:12So Sundar Pichai joined Google in 2004 and he helped lead products like Chrome before taking over Android in 2013.
119. 8:19He became Google CEO in 2015 and then the CEO of its parent company, Alphabet, in 2019.
120. 8:24He gets up between 6.30 and 7 a.m. every day and he told Recode, I read the Wall Street Journal every day.
121. 8:30I also catch up with the New York Times online later in the day.
122. 8:33He also said, I wish I could exercise in the morning, but I'm not a morning person.
123. 8:38I need my time with my paper and tea to wake up and get going.
124. 8:41So put a book next to your bed tonight and read 10 pages before you touch your phone.
125. 8:46Whether it's reading or watching videos, the most important part is just learning.
126. 8:49Like if you are feeding your brain with things that you aspire to be, people who you want to look like, people who have done amazing things that you want to do, when you're around that, when you have that environment of excellence around you, you're much more likely to follow through.
127. 9:03I told you on my Believe Walk, this is how I do it every morning, where I'm trying to listen to something, somebody, a message of a person who's overcome way more complicated things, way bigger things than I'm struggling with right now,
128. 9:15It, one, makes my problems not feel so overwhelming and huge.
129. 9:19And two, it gives me motivation and a plan to actually go out and solve it.
130. 9:22It's just about being intentional, whether it's a book, whether it's a video, being intentional about how you are starting and ending your day so that you're much more likely to feed your brain with the information it needs to help you actually accomplish the goals that you're after.
131. 9:35Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you.
132. 9:38It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, helps you build a simple action plan.
133. 9:43It's 100% free.
134. 9:44Just click the link in the description below to go grab it and I'll see you there.
135. 9:50Number five, do one hard thing first.
136. 9:52Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert found that people's minds wander 46.9% of their waking hours.
137. 9:59I think for entrepreneurs is even worse.
138. 10:01They also find that a wandering mind usually makes people less happy.
139. 10:04A hard task you keep putting off stays on your mind all day long.
140. 10:08Successful founders do one uncomfortable thing first thing in the morning so the rest of the day feels easier.
141. 10:13The founder of AngelList does this in the shower.
142. 10:16So Naval Ravikant was born in Delhi in 1974, moved to New York when he was 11.
143. 10:21He started the review site ePinions in 1999.
144. 10:24And in 2010, he launched AngelList, which helps startups raise money.
145. 10:27He was also an early investor in Uber.
146. 10:29In 2022, AngelList raised $100 million at a $4 billion valuation.
147. 10:33After hearing Wim Hof on a podcast, he started taking cold showers and he turns the water on full blast and walks straight in.
148. 10:40Naval said, I learned a very important lesson from this.
149. 10:43Most of our suffering comes from avoidance.
150. 10:46Most of the suffering from a cold shower is the tiptoeing your way in.
151. 10:50So pick one task you've been avoiding, make it the first thing that you do tomorrow.
152. 10:54This is one of the things that I think everybody struggles with.
153. 10:56I still struggle with myself.
154. 10:58Not all the things on your to-do list are equally important.
155. 11:01So once I get back home from my Believe Walk, I have different days that I do different things on.
156. 11:05So Monday is my team day.
157. 11:07Tuesday is my YouTube day.
158. 11:08Wednesday is my project day.
159. 11:09Thursday is my public-facing interview day.
160. 11:11Friday is my CEO day.
161. 11:13Saturday is family fun day.
162. 11:15Sunday is family admin day.
163. 11:16But when I show up after my Believe Walk, it's like,
164. 11:19what am I going to do today that can move the needle the most?
165. 11:22And it's so easy to just do the things that are like checklistable because you write eight things on a checklist.
166. 11:28You can do seven of them, but like the one that you missed is often the one that is the most important thing.
167. 11:33And so it's just a mental framework that I go through when I come home after my believe walk is like, okay, what, what is the thing that's going to move the needle the most?
168. 11:40And how can I spend as much time on that?
169. 11:42And especially first thing making progress towards it.
170. 11:46Number six, do your most important work before you open email.
171. 11:50Starting your day on email and calls means that your most important work gets your tired leftovers, right?
172. 11:54In the 2011 study of experienced parole judges, researchers found that favorable rulings fell from 65% to nearly zero during each week and went back up to 65% after a break.
173. 12:06So decisions get worse the longer you go without a break.
174. 12:09So starting on email spends your best decisions on other people's problems.
175. 12:13Successful founders blocked the first hour of the day for their top one priority.
176. 12:17This is called time blocking.
177. 12:18And Gary Keller built Keller Williams Realty with it.
178. 12:20So 1983, Gary Keller and Joe Williams started Keller Williams Realty as a single office in Austin, Texas.
179. 12:26Within two years, it was the biggest single real estate office firm in Austin with 72 agents.
180. 12:31When sales was his top priority, he used a four-hour block every morning to do nothing but make calls and find buyers and sellers.
181. 12:37He told Entrepreneur, my motto is, until my number one priority is done each day, all else is a distraction.
182. 12:44He co-wrote a book about it called The One Thing, and Keller Williams grew into the biggest real estate franchise in the US by sales volume.
183. 12:51So block the first 90 minutes of your workday for your most important task and keep your email closed until it's done.
184. 12:58One of my favorite things to do to protect my time is I don't check texts or messages or emails until three o'clock.
185. 13:04So I did my believe walk, I came back, I met with my team talking about YouTube strategy and thumbnails, and now I'm making videos.
186. 13:11And it is almost three o'clock right now.
187. 13:13as I'm filming this.
188. 13:14So the next thing I'm gonna do is then go for a walk and then I'm gonna respond to text messages and Instagram DMs and Slack messages and emails and everything else.
189. 13:23So I get almost a full day's work done before I check any of that other stuff because my mind will go to solving all these problems and to helping people and to seeing if I speak at that event and all of these other things that pop up, which takes me away from what I'm supposed to be doing today, which is making YouTube videos.
190. 13:39So having a different task for each day and then blocking off most of the day to focus on that.
191. 13:45And then at three o'clock, go for a walk outside, no matter how cold it is and start answering the messages, I find really helpful.
192. 13:52I also find that when I'm walking and I'm outside, again, I'm in Canada, it gets cold.
193. 13:57Put on a hat, put on some wool and get walking.
194. 14:00I find I answer things better.
195. 14:02I'm more creative.
196. 14:03I'm a better problem solver when I'm out walking.
197. 14:06So as much as possible, I don't make these videos while I'm out walking.
198. 14:10But when I'm answering messages, I usually am because the fresh air and the movement lets me be a lot more creative and I think happier.
199. 14:19Number seven, write 10 ideas before breakfast.
200. 14:21So coming up with ideas gets harder when you stop practicing.
201. 14:25When a client leaves or a product stops selling, you need to get ideas fast and you won't have any ready.
202. 14:30In front of the channel, James Altucher calls this your idea muscle and he says it gets weaker after just two weeks without using it.
203. 14:37Successful founders write down ideas, even bad ones, so they always have options.
204. 14:42James Altucher does it every morning.
205. 14:43So James Altucher sold his first company, Reset, in 1998 for about $15 million.
206. 14:48And he said he lost it all within two years.
207. 14:51He started a website called Stockpicker, which traded the stock picks of top investors.
208. 14:56And in 2007, he sold it to thestreet.com for $10 million.
209. 14:59He wrote, I usually read a little and then I take out my waiter's pad and start writing down ideas.
210. 15:04Good ideas and bad ideas, mostly very bad ideas.
211. 15:07Write 10 ideas for your business on a piece of paper at breakfast and don't worry if most of them are bad.
212. 15:12I get ideas all the time.
213. 15:13I'm sure you do too as an entrepreneur.
214. 15:15My fear is I lose these ideas.
215. 15:17Like I'm on a walk, I get so much inspiration and I forget when I get home what I'm supposed to do.
216. 15:21So my fear of practice is I'll just take out my phone and I will email myself and I'll usually put the date on it of what day of the week I'm supposed to assign it.
217. 15:29So example, Tuesday is my YouTube day.
218. 15:31So if I have a YouTube idea, a new video I'm going to make, a thumbnail I want to try, somebody I want to interview, some new technique that I created up.
219. 15:38I don't know if it's any good or not.
220. 15:39I'll email myself and say Tuesday and then whatever the idea is, just in the subject line and email it to myself.
221. 15:45That does two things for me.
222. 15:46The first is I don't have to worry about remembering it because I'm going to forget it.
223. 15:52I usually do.
224. 15:53And so if I have it written down and email it to myself, I have it.
225. 15:56And the second thing is I know I have a day in the week to actually dedicate to trying to solve it.
226. 16:01So if I'm worried about my team and it's team day on Monday and I send myself an email about YouTube, I don't have to stress out about like how to make the YouTube idea work.
227. 16:09I know I have a day dedicated to solving all my YouTube problems on Tuesday.
228. 16:13And so on my Tuesday, I'm making videos and I can also look at all my list of ideas in my Tuesday folder for what I should do next on the channel.
229. 16:23Number eight, write in the journal before you write an email.
230. 16:25So starting your day in your inbox, what does it mean?
231. 16:27It means you're reacting to other people's emergencies before you really have a chance to think for yourself.
232. 16:31You're also missing the opportunity to learn from what you struggled with yesterday.
233. 16:36The mistakes that you made yesterday, learning from them will make sure you don't make mistakes again today.
234. 16:40In a study by the HEC Paris and Harvard Business School, people who spend 15 minutes writing and reflecting on what they learned did 23% better on the final test.
235. 16:49So successful founders write down what happened yesterday, what they learned from it.
236. 16:53Ryan Holiday, friend of the channel, starts every morning this way.
237. 16:56So Ryan Holiday dropped out of college at 19 to learn from Robert Greene, the author of the 48 Laws of Power.
238. 17:01He became the marketing director at American Apparel, and then he started his own agency, Brass Check.
239. 17:07His books like The Obstacle is the Way have sold more than 2 million copies in 30 languages.
240. 17:12And Ryan wrote, each morning, usually after a long walk on my farm, I go upstairs to my office and pull out three small notebooks.
241. 17:19In one, he writes a sentence about the day before.
242. 17:22And in another, two pages about his workout, his work, and what he's grateful for.
243. 17:27So try it.
244. 17:28Spend 15 minutes writing about yesterday before you open your email and see what lesson you've learned.
245. 17:33This is something, again, I think I could do a better job of.
246. 17:35I usually am not thinking too much about what happened yesterday or last week or last month.
247. 17:40I'm focused on what's happening right now.
248. 17:42But my Believe Walk, again, helps me set up for I see what these successful people have done, problems they've solved, and I use it to think about the problems that I'm facing right now or potential problems that might come up.
249. 17:56And so I could still do a better job.
250. 17:58It's why I love making these videos and researching and learning alongside with you guys, because I could do a better job as well of reflecting on mistakes that I've made consistently and how I could do a better job on going to solve them.
251. 18:11Number nine, write your top three priorities every morning.
252. 18:14So without a plan for the day, other people's requests, what do they do?
253. 18:17They fill up your calendar.
254. 18:18The work only you can do gets pushed to later and usually later never happens, right?
255. 18:22It doesn't come.
256. 18:23Or it has the worst energy because you're super drained from the day.
257. 18:26One of America's founding fathers wrote on his daily schedule in his little book,
258. 18:29Successful people decide each morning what has to get done and they check at night whether they did it or not.
259. 18:36Benjamin Franklin built his whole day around this concept.
260. 18:38So Benjamin Franklin, he was taken out of school at 10 years old to work in his father's candle shop.
261. 18:44At 12, he was an apprentice to his brother who was a printer.
262. 18:48He ran away from Boston at 17 and ended up in Philadelphia.
263. 18:51And in 1728, he opened his own printing shop.
264. 18:53His schedule had him up at 5 a.m. and the first hours went to planning the day's business.
265. 18:58In his autobiography, Franklin wrote that every morning began with one question, what good shall I do this day?
266. 19:05He started Poor Richard's Almanac in 1732, sold his printing business at age 42 and went on to help draft the Declaration of Independence.
267. 19:14So write your top three priorities on a card each morning this week, give it a try and don't stop until that work is done.
268. 19:19This is why I'm so grateful to have different tasks assigned to different days.
269. 19:22So I know Tuesday is my YouTube day.
270. 19:24I finish my believe walk.
271. 19:25I come back, I film my videos and I look at my Tuesday folder of the different ideas that I need to get done.
272. 19:30And one habit that has also helped me is the night before.
273. 19:33So last night, Monday night, I look at my Tuesday folder and I prioritize some of the things that have to get done so that I don't walk into Tuesday without a plan.
274. 19:42I know I'm making YouTube videos.
275. 19:43I know I'm going to make some content, but specifically what I've decided on Monday night.
276. 19:47So after dinner, I'll take a quick glance at my folder for the next day.
277. 19:51I'll see what ideas I have and prioritize so that when I wake up, I'm not trying to decide what I need to do next.
278. 19:56I've already decided on the night before and then I can get to work.
279. 20:01And number 10, move your body before you sit down to work.
280. 20:03Going straight from a bed to a chair and a screen starts your day off in a pretty sluggish way.
281. 20:08But moving first wakes your brain up before the day starts taking things away from you.
282. 20:12The Rock and Tim Cook, they both work out early in the morning before their work days begin.
283. 20:16successful founders to try to build movement into their first hour.
284. 20:19And some of them take in information while they do it.
285. 20:21Like I do believe walk, right?
286. 20:23Kevin O'Leary does it every morning at 5 a.m.
287. 20:25So Kevin O'Leary, Shark Tank, started a software company called SoftKey in a Toronto basement in 1986.
288. 20:31It grew by buying its rivals, including the learning company.
289. 20:35And then it took that name.
290. 20:36And in 1999, Mattel bought the learning company for $4.2 billion.
291. 20:40Kevin told CNBC, my morning routine is simple.
292. 20:43I get up at five o'clock in the morning and I ride the bike, an elliptical bike, watching international business news from five to six.
293. 20:49He says he watches Europe because those markets often set the trend for North America.
294. 20:53And he said, I do that every day because that's a routine that I like.
295. 20:57So move your body 20 minutes each morning before you sit down and do the work and try to put something in your ears that help you believe in yourself a little bit more.
296. 21:04I talked about my Believe Walk morning routine.
297. 21:05It's the foundation.
298. 21:07If I, for whatever reason, miss a day, I'm on it maybe 98% of the time.
299. 21:12Usually travel would be the only thing.
300. 21:13If I have an early morning flight, then I may not get my Believe Walk in on the day.
301. 21:17But otherwise, I'm doing it every day.
302. 21:19If I don't, I super miss it.
303. 21:20And what's really helpful is I build a playlist.
304. 21:22It's like, how do you know what to listen to when you're on your walk?
305. 21:24You don't want to have to make decisions on the morning of because you'll get distracted and you load your phone and oh, there's this DM that came in or there's this crisis that happened.
306. 21:32So I have a playlist and I have it, my morning walk playlist.
307. 21:36I have the unlisted on my YouTube channel.
308. 21:38It's called morning walk.
309. 21:39It's all caps.
310. 21:40And I put videos on there that I want to play while I'm doing my walk.
311. 21:44So I have, I don't know, a hundred videos on that playlist.
312. 21:47So I don't have to think about it in the next morning.
313. 21:49I wake up
314. 21:50I, again, set the timer on my phone, 15 minutes, I press play on the YouTube playlist and I'm already doing it.
315. 21:58It's like the easiest possible way to get started.
316. 22:00And so plan what you're going to be listening to for the next morning, the night before, so that you have a much higher degree of following through because in the morning you're tired, it's a new day, you forgot what you were thinking yesterday and you make worse decisions.
317. 22:16Make tomorrow morning yours.
318. 22:17So it's easy to think about these habits only work for people who are born with a lot of discipline or natural morning people.
319. 22:24Sundar Pichai says he's not a morning person.
320. 22:26James Altucher lost $15 million before building his next company.
321. 22:29So get up before the world does.
322. 22:31Read what your customer said before anything else and say thank you before you even get out of bed.
323. 22:37Read before you check your phone.
324. 22:38Do one hard thing first and do your most important work before you open your email.
325. 22:43Write 10 ideas before breakfast.
326. 22:44Write in a journal before you write an email.
327. 22:46Write your top three priorities every morning and move your body before you sit down to work.
328. 22:50You don't have to do all 10 of these tomorrow.
329. 22:53Pick one, do it every morning for the next 30 days and pay attention to how your days start to feel.
330. 22:59Your mind gets stronger the same way that your body does one morning at a time.
331. 23:03And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be.
332. 23:08Now let's learn how to trick your mind to achieve anything you want.
333. 23:11There's a famous line that usually gets credited to Henry Ford that goes, whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.
334. 23:17I love it because belief is something that you can build through actual action.
335. 23:21Your mind decides what you'll try before your body actually does anything.
336. 23:25so tricking your mind means planning ahead so you can take the right action before your doubts can talk you out of it researchers peter goldwitzer and paschal schreiner reviewed 94 studies and found that people who make a simple if then plan reach their goals more often than people who only set the goal so an if then plan looks like this if it's 7am then i put on my running shoes now i opened my youtube channel in november 2008
337. 23:49And I sat on it for six months before I posted anything.
338. 23:52My first video was a profile of Walt Disney, and I wore a suit and a tie, buttoned up shirt.
339. 23:58I had a friend come and film it, and I spent two days trying to memorize the script.
340. 24:02I still couldn't get through it, so most of the video was B-roll with just my voice behind it.
341. 24:05It got three comments in its first year, one from my mom, one from my sister, one from some random stranger.
342. 24:10What helped me was a trick.
343. 24:11I started imagining the camera was a friend of mine, an entrepreneur who was really struggling, and I talked to him.
344. 24:17My energy went up the moment the camera became my friend instead.
345. 24:21So I wanted to make this video because I've never stopped needing these tricks.
346. 24:25I still get scared before I go on big stages 15 years later.
347. 24:29Believing in myself is still my number one problem.
348. 24:32That's the whole reason that this channel exists, to help you believe in yourself too.
349. 24:36And I'm still working on it every day myself.
350. 24:38So if you learn how to work with your own mind, the goals you keep putting off start actually getting done.
351. 24:44That big goal of yours won't happen if your mind talks you out of it every time you try to start.
352. 24:48Now, there are 10 ways to trick your mind.
353. 24:50I'm going to cover them with you today.
354. 24:55Number one, count backwards from five.
355. 24:57So your brain wants to keep you safe and comfortable.
356. 24:59When you need to do something hard, you have a small five-second window before your mind makes up excuses that stop you.
357. 25:07Counting backwards from five interrupts your normal thought patterns.
358. 25:10It distracts your brain from fear and turns on the part of your brain that handles taking action.
359. 25:16You have to count backwards.
360. 25:17If you count forward, you can just keep going to 10 or 20.
361. 25:20Counting down forces you to physically move when you reach...
362. 25:24So friend of the channel, Mel Robbins is the most famous example of this trick.
363. 25:28She actually created it and calls it the five second rule.
364. 25:31Years ago, she was struggling with money and her career.
365. 25:33She couldn't even get out of bed in the morning and kept hitting that snooze button.
366. 25:38One night she saw a rocket launch on television.
367. 25:40She decided she would launch herself out of bed just like that rocket.
368. 25:44The next morning she counted five, four, three, two, one and forced herself to stand up.
369. 25:49This simple trick helped her take control of her daily habits.
370. 25:52She wrote a bestselling book about it
371. 25:53and now she's an awesome motivational speaker.
372. 25:58Two, make a movie in your head.
373. 25:59Your brain has a hard time telling the difference between a real event and something you deeply imagined.
374. 26:04So when you play a success movie in your head, you're actually building new pathways in your brain.
375. 26:09You're practicing the exact steps you need to take without even moving.
376. 26:13If you see yourself winning over and over, your confidence naturally grows.
377. 26:17When the real moment finally happens, you don't panic, you don't freeze, you feel completely calm because you've already lived that exact moment a thousand times in your mind.
378. 26:26Jim Carrey is a great example of this trick.
379. 26:29Before he was a famous movie star, he was broke and he couldn't get good acting jobs.
380. 26:33Every night he drove his old car up a big hill in Los Angeles.
381. 26:36He parked and he played a detailed movie in his head.
382. 26:38He pictured famous directors praising his work.
383. 26:41He visualized himself getting huge movie roles.
384. 26:44He even wrote a famous check to himself for $10 million for acting services and kept it in his wallet.
385. 26:50He dated it Thanksgiving 1995.
386. 26:52And right before that exact date, he booked the movie Dumb and Dumber and got paid
387. 26:56Exactly $10 million.
388. 27:01Number three, treat your goals like a video game.
389. 27:03So video games are built to keep you hooked.
390. 27:05They give you a clear mission, small steps, instant rewards as you make progress.
391. 27:10And every time you level up, your brain releases dopamine.
392. 27:13Dopamine is a chemical that makes you feel happy and motivated.
393. 27:17So when you turn your real life into a game, you can hack the system.
394. 27:20If you don't wanna do a boring task, you could break it into small little quests.
395. 27:24You give yourself experience points for doing the hard work.
396. 27:26And once you get enough points, you buy yourself a real reward.
397. 27:30Jane McGonigal is a famous game designer who uses this exact trick to save her life.
398. 27:34She suffered a severe head injury that left her in constant pain.
399. 27:37She felt deeply depressed and couldn't do normal daily tasks.
400. 27:40But instead of quitting, she decided to treat her recovery like a video game.
401. 27:44She created a secret identity that she called Jane the Concussion Slayer.
402. 27:48She gave herself daily quests like drinking a glass of water or walking outside.
403. 27:52She fought bad guys, which were things that triggered her headaches.
404. 27:55She earned points for every healthy task she finished.
405. 27:58And this simple game helped her heal.
406. 28:00She later turned it into a massive program called Super Better that helps millions of people level up their real lives.
407. 28:08Number four, change your passwords to your goals.
408. 28:10This is cool.
409. 28:11So you log into your computer, your phone, your email dozens of times every single day, right?
410. 28:15When you make your passwords your biggest goal, you create a powerful daily mantra.
411. 28:19Typing the words out physically builds a mental trigger.
412. 28:22You don't just see the goal, you feel it in your hands.
413. 28:25It forces you to stop and think about your top priority before you start working.
414. 28:30working.
415. 28:30It stops you from getting distracted by bad habits because you just reminded yourself about what you actually need to do.
416. 28:35Mauricio Estrella is the best example of this trick.
417. 28:38He was going through a terrible divorce and felt deeply depressed.
418. 28:41His office system forced him to change his work password.
419. 28:45Now, instead of picking some random word, he made his password, forgive her.
420. 28:50He had to type that exact phrase multiple times a day for a whole month.
421. 28:54It didn't happen overnight, but typing it out slowly changed his mindset and helped him heal.
422. 28:58He realized the trick worked so well that he kept doing it for his other goals too.
423. 29:02He changed his next passwords to things like quit smoking forever and save money for a trip.
424. 29:09It completely changed his life and millions of people have read his story online.
425. 29:15Number five, act like your hero.
426. 29:17When you face a massive challenge, your own brain tells you that you aren't strong enough, right?
427. 29:21By pretending to be your hero, you step outside your self-doubt, you borrow your hero's courage and their discipline.
428. 29:28It helps you make decisions based on what a winner would do, not based of how tired or scared you feel in the moment.
429. 29:34You stop listening to your own excuses and start executing like the champion that your hero is.
430. 29:39So David Goggins is another perfect example of how to use this trick.
431. 29:43Growing up, he was terrified.
432. 29:45He was out of shape.
433. 29:46He was struggling.
434. 29:46He didn't like the scared kid that he was.
435. 29:49So to change his life, he realized he couldn't just be the old David anymore.
436. 29:52He had to build a new person.
437. 29:54He created a tough alter ego that he just called Goggins.
438. 29:58Whenever David felt tired and wanted to quit Navy SEAL training, he asked himself what Goggins would do.
439. 30:04Because Goggins wasn't afraid of anything and Goggins embraced the pain.
440. 30:07By acting like this hero, he tricked his brain into pushing past human limits and became a legendary endurance athlete.
441. 30:15Number six, break big jobs into tiny steps.
442. 30:18So when you look at a huge job, your brain panics.
443. 30:20It releases stress chemicals and makes you freeze.
444. 30:22This is exactly why you procrastinate.
445. 30:24By shrinking the task down to something tiny, you remove the fear.
446. 30:28Your brain doesn't feel threatened by writing one sentence or doing one pushup.
447. 30:31And once you start, the momentum takes over.
448. 30:34So you're probably not only gonna do one pushup, you'll keep going, you'll do a few more.
449. 30:38It's just always much harder to start than it is to keep going.
450. 30:41Tim Ferriss, perfect example of this trick.
451. 30:43He's a massive author, entrepreneur.
452. 30:45When he was trying to write his first book, he felt completely stuck.
453. 30:49The idea of writing hundreds of pages completely overwhelmed him.
454. 30:53He kept freezing and couldn't write anything.
455. 30:55So to trick his brain, he completely changed his daily goal.
456. 30:58His new rule was to write just two crappy pages a day.
457. 31:02That's it.
458. 31:02By making a step so small, he removed the pressure.
459. 31:04His brain didn't panic anymore.
460. 31:06He easily wrote his two pages and usually ended up writing for hours.
461. 31:10That exact book became The 4-Hour Workweek and sold over 2.1 million copies worldwide.
462. 31:15And it didn't just stop there.
463. 31:16The book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for four years and was translated into 40 different languages.
464. 31:24Number seven, add the word yet.
465. 31:26When you say you can't do something, your brain completely shuts down.
466. 31:30It stops looking for answers.
467. 31:31By adding the word yet, you keep the door open.
468. 31:33It changes a permanent failure into a temporary problem.
469. 31:36So your brain instantly switches from giving up to looking for a solution.
470. 31:40It forces you to keep learning instead of just walking away.
471. 31:42Carol Dweck is a famous psychologist who proved that this trick works.
472. 31:45She studied high school in Chicago that had a very hard test to graduate.
473. 31:50If students failed the test, the school didn't give them a failing grade.
474. 31:53They gave them a grade that just said, not yet.
475. 31:56The simple change completely rewired how the students thought.
476. 31:59Instead of feeling like they weren't smart enough,
477. 32:02They understood that they were just on a learning journey and they need to get better.
478. 32:06It gave them a clear path to keep working.
479. 32:09Graduation rates skyrocketed.
480. 32:11In 2005, the average graduation rate for Chicago public schools was only 52%, but the school using the not yet grading model graduated 78.6% of its students.
481. 32:21And it didn't just help them finish high school, a massive 87% of those graduating students went straight to college.
482. 32:27Dweck wrote a massive book called Mindset about this exact trick, and it completely changed how successful
483. 32:32Number eight, pair hard work with a treat.
484. 32:37So when you hate tasks, your brain feels pain and wants to avoid it, right?
485. 32:40It's natural.
486. 32:41If you link a hard task with something you love, you change how your brain sees the work.
487. 32:45You trick your brain into wanting to do the hard work because it wants the reward,
488. 32:50Right now, this is a real science called temptation bundling.
489. 32:53You take something that you naturally crave and tie it directly to a habit that you usually avoid.
490. 32:58Katie Milkman is a famous scientist who proved that this trick works.
491. 33:01When she was a student, she struggled to go to the gym.
492. 33:04She felt too tired after a long day, but she also loved listening to exciting audio books like The Hunger Games.
493. 33:10She made a strict rule for herself.
494. 33:12She was only allowed to listen to her favorite audio books while she was actively sweating at the gym.
495. 33:18Suddenly she wanted to go to the gym every single day just so she can hear what happened next in the story.
496. 33:24She stopped avoiding her workouts and actually look forward to them.
497. 33:28You can do the exact same thing by only doing the thing you love while you finish your hardest daily task.
498. 33:33As a personal example, I only get my large one cream coffee from Tim Hortons if I go for my morning run.
499. 33:39No run, no Tim Hortons.
500. 33:40That's painful.
501. 33:44Number nine, talk to yourself like a friend.
502. 33:46Your brain believes the words that you tell it.
503. 33:48So if you call yourself stupid when you make a mistake, your brain records that as a fact, you are stupid.
504. 33:53You wouldn't talk to your best friend that way, so don't talk to yourself that way.
505. 33:56When you treat yourself with kindness, you stop stressing.
506. 33:58You allow your brain to learn from the mistake instead of just feeling ashamed and in guilt.
507. 34:03It keeps you moving forward instead of getting stuck in a negative death spiral loop.
508. 34:07Sarah Blakely is a great example of this trick.
509. 34:09So she's the billionaire founder of Spanx.
510. 34:12Growing up, her father completely changed how she talked to herself about losing.
511. 34:17Every week at the dinner table, he asked her what she failed at.
512. 34:21If she didn't give any failures, he was disappointed.
513. 34:24It taught her to talk to herself like a supportive friend when things went wrong.
514. 34:28So instead of calling herself a failure, she learned to celebrate the effort.
515. 34:32When she started her business, she faced hundreds of harsh rejections.
516. 34:36But because she used kind self-talk, she didn't quit.
517. 34:38She just learned the lesson and she kept building.
518. 34:40And she became a billionaire in the process.
519. 34:44And number 10, design your environment.
520. 34:46So your environment controls your choices.
521. 34:47If you wanna build a good habit, make it the easiest thing to do in your room.
522. 34:51If you wanna break a bad habit, add so many steps to it that you just give up.
523. 34:55Willpower burns out pretty quickly.
524. 34:56A smart environment works for you all day.
525. 34:59If your phone is in another room, you don't need willpower to stop checking it.
526. 35:02Victor Hugo is a famous example of this trick.
527. 35:05He was a massive author in the 1800s.
528. 35:07He promised his publisher a brand new book, but he spent a whole year procrastinating.
529. 35:12He entertained guests and he delayed his work instead of actually writing.
530. 35:16His publisher finally got frustrated and gave him a strict six month deadline.
531. 35:20Victor knew his bad habit was leaving the house, so he told his assistant to take all of his clothes and lock them in a large chest.
532. 35:27He was left with nothing to wear except a large shawl.
533. 35:29Because he didn't have clothes, he couldn't leave the house and get distracted.
534. 35:33He designed his environment so that staying inside and writing was his only option.
535. 35:38He wrote furiously and actually finished the book two weeks early.
536. 35:42That book was a classic story, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
537. 35:48Believe it before you see it.
538. 35:49So it's easy to look at all these successful people and think they were just born with more confidence than you or I.
539. 35:55They had the same doubts that you and I have.
540. 35:58What they learned was how to work with their own mind to overcome these doubts and so can you.
541. 36:04count backwards from five, make a movie in your own head, treat your goals like a video game, change your passwords to your goals, act like your own hero, break big jobs into tiny steps, add the word yet, pair hard work with a treat, talk to yourself like a friend and design your environment.
542. 36:21Those are the ways to trick your mind and now you know them too.
543. 36:24Pick one, use it on the goal that you have been putting off the longest.
544. 36:27The you five years from now is already saying thank you.
545. 36:31Now let's learn how to train your brain like Nelson Mandela did to his in prison.
546. 36:35Nelson Mandela proved your circumstances have nothing to do with your ability to train your brain.
547. 36:40he couldn't choose his meals or his clothes but he could choose what his mind worked on robin island museum records showed a black prisoner was rationed under half the meat a white prisoner got but despite the challenges mandela walked out of prison and negotiated with the government that put him there and every habit that made him capable of it started with him training his brain in that cell
548. 37:03Nelson Mandela was 45 years old when the door of a eight foot by seven foot cell closed behind him on Robben Island.
549. 37:09The state took his house, his work, and his name and handed him a prisoner number instead.
550. 37:14His was prisoner 46664, the 466 man admitted to that island in 1964.
551. 37:21What the state never reached was his own mind and he spent the last 27 years training it on purpose.
552. 37:27He arrived, classified a class D prisoner, the lowest grade there was.
553. 37:31That meant one letter every six months and one visit every six months.
554. 37:36And the letter came to him cut in pieces by censors.
555. 37:39His mother died in 1968 and he was refused permission to go to her funeral.
556. 37:43His eldest son Tembi died in a car crash in July 1969 at age 24.
557. 37:48Mandela wrote to the commanding officer asking to go to the funeral and never got an answer.
558. 37:53They buried Tembi on the 3rd of August without his father there.
559. 37:56Four days a week he was marched to a lime quarry and made to hammer white rock from noon until 4pm and the glare off that lime damaged his eyes for the rest of his life.
560. 38:05mandela decided what those years were going to be used for he said it like this prison and the authorities conspire to rob each man of his dignity no man or institution can rob me of my dignity because i refuse to part with it for any price or pressure he set his wake-up time earlier than the prison zone he turned the quarry into a school he learned the language of the men that held the keys and held him captive he grew food on a courtyard on top of an old garbage dump
561. 38:34He wrote a book at night and buried it in the ground.
562. 38:36By 1988, the same government that had locked him up was sending its justice minister and its intelligence chief to sit across from him.
563. 38:44And over his last five years inside, they met more than 70 times.
564. 38:47He walked out on February 11th, 1990.
565. 38:50And four years later, he was running the country.
566. 38:53The man who came out of that cell wasn't the man who went into it.
567. 38:56And the difference was built inside that prison with no privileges at all.
568. 39:00Now, here's what you're probably thinking.
569. 39:01He had 27 years with nothing else to do.
570. 39:03And you have a job and a family and a phone that won't stop going off.
571. 39:07And that sounds right.
572. 39:08But I think it's actually backwards.
573. 39:09Mandela had less free time than you do.
574. 39:11He didn't choose when the lights went out, when the door opened, when he ate or when he worked.
575. 39:15Hard labor took the middle of his day, four days a week.
576. 39:18He was told when to sleep.
577. 39:19Everything he built, he built in the cracks around a schedule that somebody else had created for him.
578. 39:25You have more control over your day than he had over his.
579. 39:28So the real question is whether you're using the conditions you've already got.
580. 39:32And Mandela is proof that a person can be stripped of nearly everything and still build a mind that ends up negotiating with the people who stripped him.
581. 39:40So here are the six things that Nelson Mandela did in that cell to train his brain and every one of them fit inside a life that's nowhere near as hard as his was.
582. 39:53Take the first 30 minutes before anyone can book it.
583. 39:56So the prison bell on Robben Island rang at 5.30 every morning.
584. 39:59Mandela, he got up at 5 a.m.
585. 40:01He took that half hour back from them before the day officially started, and then he ran on the spot inside of his own cell for up to 45 minutes, 100 fingertip pushups, 200 sit-ups, 50 knee bends, Monday through Thursday, and then he rested for three days and started again the next Monday.
586. 40:17He didn't wake up when they told him to wake up.
587. 40:20He said his own wake up time, 30 minutes before theirs, picked his own workout routine, picked his own four days, and then ran the same schedule for years inside of a room that you could cross in three steps.
588. 40:31The warders decided almost everything about that day for him.
589. 40:34They didn't decide that first half hour.
590. 40:36When they moved into Polesmoor in 1982, the cell changed, but his routine didn't.
591. 40:40He was still exercising in the yard at two in the afternoon, an hour at a time, 18 years after he started.
592. 40:46That routine did two big things for him.
593. 40:49It kept the 45-year-old man physically strong through 18 years on the island in prison.
594. 40:54And it started every day with a promise that he made to himself and kept to himself before anybody had the chance to take anything else away from him.
595. 41:02You've got that same half hour right now.
596. 41:04And who are you giving away to?
597. 41:05The people on your phone.
598. 41:06It's time to take it back.
599. 41:07Set the alarm 30 minutes earlier than the first thing that's on your calendar.
600. 41:10Pick one thing you'll do in it and then do that same thing every weekday this week rather than a different thing each morning so that it starts to become yours.
601. 41:18And you know when the best time to start is?
602. 41:19How about right now?
603. 41:20Go set the alarm before you finish this video.
604. 41:24Turn the hours you can't escape into a classroom.
605. 41:27From noon to 4 p.m., four days a week, this is cool, Mandela and the other political prisoners were marched into a lime quarry and they were forced to break rock.
606. 41:36It was punishment designed to be wasted time.
607. 41:39They taught school in that time instead.
608. 41:41So one prisoner would teach English, another would teach mathematics.
609. 41:44another would teach law, another would teach history, another would teach Afrikaans, the language.
610. 41:49Men who came in with nothing, they walked out with a virtual degree and they called the place the University of Robben Island.
611. 41:56Mandela described it this way, we became our own faculty with our own professors, our own curriculum, our own courses.
612. 42:03The subjects were things that people cared about.
613. 42:05English, Afrikaans, mathematics, geography, art, and law.
614. 42:08Whoever knew a subject taught it.
615. 42:11The prison service blocked Mandela's attempt to get a University of London law degree, but he kept going and finished an LLB by correspondence with the University of South Africa instead, awarded in 1989, the year before he walked out.
616. 42:24Nobody gave them a classroom.
617. 42:26They took the worst four hours of the day, the punishment, the hours they had no way out of, and put learning inside those hours instead.
618. 42:33You have some hours like that too.
619. 42:34It's your commute, the going to the gym, folding the laundry, sitting in a waiting room, walking the dog.
620. 42:39Those hours are already spent and you're not getting them back.
621. 42:43But most of them are going without you learning anything inside them.
622. 42:46So pick one block that you can't get out of this week that's frustrating for you and put one thing that you're learning inside it instead.
623. 42:53A book, a course, a YouTube video.
624. 42:55about the skill that you're trying to learn and build, then do the same thing the next time that block comes around and the time after that again.
625. 43:01Doing it every time that hour comes up is what starts to change you and trains your brain.
626. 43:08Learn the language of the person you think is against you.
627. 43:11So the warders on Robben Island were Afrikaners and they spoke Afrikaans.
628. 43:14Mandela, he set out to learn it and not just a few polite phrases.
629. 43:18He wanted to fully learn it.
630. 43:20Later at Victor Wurster, he made an arrangement with Jack Swart, who was the warder who cooked for him.
631. 43:25Swart would speak English and Mandela would answer in Afrikaans.
632. 43:29So each of them practiced the language that he was worse at.
633. 43:32Mandela read their poets, Langenhoven and Leopold and Breitenbach, and he studied the history an Afrikaner schoolboy grew up on.
634. 43:38When a publisher sent him a box of Afrikaans books in the 1970s, he wrote back to them in Afrikaans.
635. 43:43Other prisoners thought Mandela was getting too close to the enemy, but here's how Mandela put it.
636. 43:48If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head.
637. 43:52If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
638. 43:55When the government finally came to negotiate, Mandela could sit in a room with Africana officials and speak to them in their own words about their own history and understand what they were afraid of losing.
639. 44:05That's the reason the handover happened in meeting rooms instead of on the battlefield with people dying.
640. 44:10Now, there's somebody that you've decided is against you, a competitor, a boss, a customer segment that you just write off.
641. 44:15You've never learned how they talk or what they're scared of, and that could be costing you.
642. 44:19So you can pick a person or that group this week and learn one real thing about how they see it.
643. 44:24Read what they read, then do it again the next week, and then the week after that.
644. 44:28Mandela, he gave this years.
645. 44:30Give it for you one month, and your fight with them gets a lot smaller.
646. 44:36Grow one thing nobody else controls.
647. 44:38So there was this strip of ground against the far wall of the prison courtyard that had been used as a rubbish dump.
648. 44:45Mandela asked for it.
649. 44:46He was refused for years and he kept asking and eventually they let him have it, this garbage pile.
650. 44:52He hauled the rocks off it, worked the soil and started planting things.
651. 44:55By the end of 1975, that strip had produced 2,000 chilies and 1,000 tomatoes.
652. 45:00So two hours every morning in a straw hat and these rough gloves, he gave the vegetables away.
653. 45:05Every Sunday produce from the patch went to the prison kitchen to feed the common law prisoners and warders took some home to their families in their bags.
654. 45:15Here's why.
655. 45:15said it matters.
656. 45:16A garden was one of the few things in prison that one could control.
657. 45:20To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend to it, and then harvest it offered a simple but enduring satisfaction.
658. 45:26The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a taste of freedom.
659. 45:31Now that's a man who had lost his house.
660. 45:33He lost his work.
661. 45:34He lost his family.
662. 45:35He lost his name.
663. 45:36Feeding the warders children out of dirt that he was clearing away by hand.
664. 45:40The garden gave him one place where his effort and the result were actually connected on a day when most of the things he couldn't see any hope in.
665. 45:48He kept it going even after they moved him.
666. 45:50At Polesmoor, he grew onions, tomatoes, and lettuce on the roof.
667. 45:53And these 44 gallon drums cut in half and then filled with soil and manure.
668. 45:56That's 16 years of garden across two different prisons.
669. 45:59And he called it one of the few things that he could control.
670. 46:02Now, your version is one thing in your day that nobody can cancel on you.
671. 46:05It's your writing time, your workout time, your 30 minutes on the thing you're actually building.
672. 46:09Pick what that thing is tonight, protect it like it's a meeting with somebody important and do it every day until it stops becoming a decision and becomes automatically who you are.
673. 46:18When your week gets completely wrecked, that's the one thing that tells you that you are still in control.
674. 46:25Decide how you'll act before anyone provokes you.
675. 46:27So every morning the warders came down the corridor shouting, inspection.
676. 46:30Mandela stood outside his cell with all three buttons of his khaki jacket fastened and his hat off every single morning for years.
677. 46:37Now that might sound small, but it was a decision that he had already made.
678. 46:40A man out of uniform gave a warder a reason to punish him, and Mandela refused to hand over a reason to them.
679. 46:47He'd already worked out how he was going to behave before anyone gave him a reason not to.
680. 46:52Neville Alexander, who was on the island with Mandela, described Mandela's rule this way.
681. 46:57If they say you must run, insist on walking.
682. 47:00If they say you must walk fast, insist on walking slowly.
683. 47:03That was the whole point.
684. 47:04We are going to set the terms.
685. 47:06So Mandela lived that for 27 years.
686. 47:08When a canvas bag of smuggled goods was lowered into his cell at Polesmoor on a rope, he handed it straight to the warder instead of taking it.
687. 47:15He was building the warder's trust and he knew that he would need it.
688. 47:19In January 1985, the real test came for him.
689. 47:21President P.W.
690. 47:22Botha stood up in parliament and said Mandela could walk out, be free, on one condition.
691. 47:27He had to publicly renounce violence as a political weapon.
692. 47:31After 22 years inside, with his mother and his oldest son both buried without him, he was being offered his freedom.
693. 47:37He answered in 10 days.
694. 47:38His daughter Zinzi read it to a packed stadium in Soweto on February 10th, and the line people still quote is this one.
695. 47:45only free men can negotiate.
696. 47:47Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
697. 47:50He also told them, I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I and you, the people, are not free.
698. 47:57He didn't work that out in 10 days.
699. 47:59He had worked out years earlier what he would do and what he wouldn't trade.
700. 48:03So when the biggest offer of his life turned up with a string attached, he was able to answer it quickly.
701. 48:08Now, being lead to doing,
702. 48:10He decided who he was in that jail first.
703. 48:12He trained his brain and the behavior came out of it automatically because he wasn't deciding what to do in the moment.
704. 48:18You lose your temper in the same three situations every time.
705. 48:20You already know which ones.
706. 48:22Write down before the next one happens exactly what you're going to act on when it does.
707. 48:26Just one sentence, one command, one idea.
708. 48:28Then read it again before the next hard conversation and the one after that.
709. 48:32You're not going to outthink it while it's happening.
710. 48:35You have to have already decided how you were going to respond.
711. 48:41Write it down while it's still happening.
712. 48:43In the mid 1970s, the other prisoners talked to Mandela into writing his life story, aiming to have it ready for his 60th birthday.
713. 48:49He wrote it down at night and passed the pages to Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada to mark up, and the originals went into cocoa tins buried in the courtyard garden.
714. 48:58In 1977, warders building a wall to seal off B section, they dug them up accidentally.
715. 49:03All three men lost their study privileges for four years.
716. 49:06And studying was the thing Mandela cared most about in there.
717. 49:10But he kept writing.
718. 49:11He also copied every letter he sent out into his own notebooks by hand in handwriting.
719. 49:16So there'd be a record of what he'd actually said, even after the censors got finished with the version that went out to the public.
720. 49:22Four years of study were gone.
721. 49:24For a manuscript he had no guarantee anyone would ever read, that manuscript became Long Walk to Freedom, and it's the reason the world has his account of those years in his own words instead of what the prison said happened.
722. 49:36All progress begins with telling the truth, and you can't tell the truth about your own year just from memory, because memory rewrites things that make it look different.
723. 49:44So write down what actually happened today, what you did, what worked, what you avoided.
724. 49:48Do it tonight, do it again tomorrow and keep that on file.
725. 49:51In six months, you'll be able to see your own patterns instead of just guessing at them.
726. 49:55And that record is gonna be worth more than anything else that you can reconstruct later.
727. 50:03what he actually proved.
728. 50:05There's a line about a bird sitting on a branch.
729. 50:07She isn't afraid of the branch breaking because her trust was never in the branch, it's in her wings.
730. 50:13Mandela's branch broke completely.
731. 50:14They took his house, the work, the name, the family, the food on his plate, the clothes on his back was all gone.
732. 50:20What they couldn't reach
733. 50:22was the 30 minutes before the bell rang, the school in the quarry, the language he chose to learn, the little patch of ground he grew things on, the buttons on his jacket, and the pages he buried at night.
734. 50:32Your purpose comes from your pain, his did too.
735. 50:35The years that were meant to erase him are the years that built the man who could sit down with his own jailers and end a system of injustice with a conversation.
736. 50:45You're not in a cell.
737. 50:46You have more control over tomorrow morning than Nelson Mandela had for any morning for 27 years.
738. 50:50And that means you have no version of his excuse available to you.
739. 50:54If you have the ability, then you have the responsibility.
740. 50:56If you can, then you must.
741. 50:58So pick one of these six and start it before you go to bed.
742. 51:01Just one of them, then do it again tomorrow because doing it once gives you a start, but doing it daily changes how you think.
743. 51:08To dive into the billionaire mind and know what they focus on, check the video right there next to me.
744. 51:12I think you'll love it.
745. 51:13Continue to believe and I'll see you there.
746. 51:16People stay broke because they focus on the wrong things.
747. 51:19Focus has always been a strong part of my personality.
748. 51:25You have to be good at saying no.