If I could start from a blank slate what would I do?
I’d say, start quick and dirty.
To let go of commitments and say no to things.
I’m now where I’m like,
would get a pie in my face if I didn’t stick to it.
That could help us get through that dip.
Even if you dive off that cliff, you’re going to be okay.
Don’t keep doing the same thing over and over, right?
Having that trust, you can’t buy that.
You become addicted that’s your dopamine.
– He’s a blogger, journalist and published author.
He’s the creator of a blog called Zen Habits.
Time Magazine names Zen Habits at the top of its list
of the Top 25 Blogs in 2010.
He’s Leo Babauta, and here are his Top 10 Rules for Success.
(firework whooshing)
– So actually, I had someone on Twitter,
I ask people, like what’s the one change
that has helped you the most?
And one person’s, I really loved his philosophy
because it matches up with mine,
which is that, he replaced opinions with curiosity.
And I love that because, to me,
a lot of people get to this point where
they think they know something.
And when you think you know something,
that’s when learning ends. – Right, you’re done.
– You’re done.
But if you just think, I might know something
but let’s find out more, maybe it’s wrong.
Maybe there’s more to learn,
maybe there’s a next step.
And there always is more to learn.
So that’s, to me, if you just start with curiosity
rather than, I think I know it or I don’t need to know it,
or there’s no way I’m going to know it,
that’s a much better place to start, and it’s fun.
Like, learning new things and trying new things.
It’s really important to look at your habits
if you’re a new entrepreneur or been doing it for awhile,
I think we tend to fall into these routines, right?
And that routine is a lot of times
if you don’t know consciously, it’s a routine
that just happens to build up over time.
So like, you might be busy checking Facebook and Twitter,
and all your stats and everything else
and so that you develop this routine
of quickly checking through everything online.
And what that means is, that’s just through,
just through building that up over time,
that routine of checking everything.
And what that means is that you don’t have time
for the creation, the part that I think,
for me at least is really important.
And so, I think it’s good to sometimes just step back,
and take a look at what habits you’ve created over time.
And say, what can I do more consciously?
If I could start from a blank slate, what would I do?
And start to change those, to build those consciously.
But what I found, though, is that,
a lot of times what we do is we try to implement
an entire system, of habits all at once,
this new thing that we read about,
and it collapses after a little while.
We go back into our old habits.
And one of the problems with that,
is that we’re implementing a whole series of habits at once.
And again, if you start a new morning routine,
you might actually be doing 5-10 different habits,
one right after the other,
and so you’re chaining them together, a bunch of new habits,
and that’s great for like a week or so,
and then it collapses.
And I’ve seen that so many times,
I’ve done it myself plenty of times,
and what I found is that doesn’t, that’s not very effective.
Some people can make it work
but most people are not going to succeed at that.
So what you really want to do is
keep doing what you’ve been doing
that’s going to keep the boat afloat,
but if you wanted to start to make changes,
start making little changes one at a time.
To get going, a lot of people are afraid
to just get started, they want to have it perfect,
perfect design and everything like that.
I’d say, start quick and dirty.
Just start, start writing posts,
and the posts be as useful as possible.
And think about what your readers’ problems are,
and help them solve those problems.
So, don’t let that kind of fear
of getting started stop you, just start.
We all have the same amount of time in the day,
but it’s just, we have filled the day up
with all these things that we think we need to do,
like commitments.
One thing, I was coaching soccer,
because I thought that was important for my kids.
I was on the board of the PTO at my kid’s school,
because I thought that was important.
But I realized that I was spending time doing stuff
with other people instead of the actual kids.
So I realized if I let go of those commitments,
even though I thought they were important,
I have time then to actually spend with people
who are important to me.
So you learn to let go of commitments
and say no to things, so that you can say yes
to the things you really want,
that are really important to you.
So I’ve had to, I mean, sometimes it’s simple as like,
an email saying I can’t do this anymore.
I don’t have the time.
And you feel like you’re going to disappoint people
so you don’t want to say no to them,
but you know what I learned,
life goes on, they figure it out.
If you have a group around this habit change,
all of a sudden, you now have a whole different environment
that gives you a different feedback system.
So, if you’re going to, if you say, if you tell your group,
and this has to be a group of people
that you actually care about their opinion,
because otherwise you’ll just forget about it.
But if you care about their opinion,
and let’s say it’s 5-10 people,
and you say, I am going to write every day
before I check email, or I pay you $10,000, right?
If you told people that, you would definitely do it.
Or, you know, I’ve done one where I’ve like,
would get a pie in my face if I didn’t stick to it,
things like that, or I’d donate to
the political party you don’t like.
– Or you’re going to have to eat
some factory-farmed meat or something.
– Exactly.
Something you definitely do not want to do.
Actually I went up for my book.
You know, I’m a vegan.
I promised you and some other friends
that I would eat a beef burger,
not just a veggie burger if I didn’t have this book done
by the end of the year.
And so I was motivated to get up and start writing.
But anyway, commit to this group,
create a consequence that you definitely are not going to…
you don’t want to have, and you’re definitely not going to fail.
And so when you do the habit,
you get the positive benefit
of getting to report back to them.
And even as you do the habit, you’re thinking,
oh, I get to tell Corbett that I’m going to do this,
or that I did this.
And so that’s positive feedback for doing it,
and if you didn’t do it, you have negative feedback
and have to tell your group that “I didn’t do it.”
And that would be shameful,
and you don’t want to look bad in the eyes of your peers.
And you probably have to, you know, eat the burger
or get the pie in the face.
And so you wouldn’t want to do that.
So now you’ve just reversed the feedback loop
with that very simple change in your environment.
So I think, a lot of times we have a dip in motivation,
and if we have a purpose,
that can help us get through that dip.
And it also helps guide us as we like,
’cause there’s tons of decisions that we have to make
on a daily basis and over the long term,
and if you have some kind of purpose,
that kind of gives you a little bit of a compass.
And that has helped me tremendously in the last,
I think, seven, eight years since I’ve been doing this.
Even if you’re just starting out,
you haven’t gone to that place where you’re like
all confident, you’re in this place where you’re like,
you’re in this little comfort zone,
you know what you’re doing, and you don’t want to venture out.
Or maybe you’ve gotten that confidence,
and you hit that cliff or that door
that’s like really scary,
and what do you do then?
And what you’ve developed,
and I think what I’ve developed too,
it’s just, it’s not a confidence that I know everything,
but a confidence that even if you dive off that cliff,
you’re going to be okay.
And that’s, I think that’s really the crucial thing,
is learning, it doesn’t matter if I fail,
it doesn’t matter if I don’t know anything,
it doesn’t matter if I stumble around in the darkness
not knowing what I’m doing.
I’ll be okay.
And there’s really, that’s the confidence that you need.
You know my story back in 2005
when I was stuck with all these bad habits,
and I couldn’t make any changes.
I kept trying to change them all at once.
I would change my entire diet,
which, you know, diet is actually a series of habits.
I would change my entire exercise routine,
I would try and quit smoking, try and be productive
and stop procrastinating, wake up early.
And I would do all of these at once.
And I kept failing, I couldn’t understand why.
It wasn’t really that it was me,
a lot of times I would internalize it.
Actually all the time I would internalize it
and think, I have no self-control, I’m not disciplined,
I’m not good enough, I’m not strong, I’m just weak.
And so I would feel bad about myself
and develop this negative self-image,
and basically destroyed any trust that I had in myself.
But really it wasn’t a problem with me,
it was a problem with the method.
And so what I’m proposing is,
instead of failing over and over
at creating a whole bunch of habits at once,
or one really big habit instead of a small one,
instead of failing at that,
change the method and if you failed,
don’t keep doing the same thing over and over, right?
You got to make some changes.
So what I’m proposing is, take that failure as a lesson
and adapt your habit change and be smarter.
Do it in a smarter way.
This public image that we try and create
either for ourselves or for our business,
I mean it’s not real, first of all.
And second of all, if you let that image crumble
and have cracks and stuff
and show the honest reality of things, people like that.
– I agree, yeah.
– And they start to trust you because you’re honest.
And what you and I know is that,
that trust is more valuable than anything else.
It’s more valuable than getting a click to subscribe
or share or buy.
Having that trust, you can’t buy that.
And the only thing you can do is be trustworthy,
and be honest and be real.
And if you have this veneer
of this public image that you have,
I’m preaching to the choir here,
but I’m hoping other people will hear it.
That is fake and people can sense that.
People have intuition about whether this person is just
giving you a marketing pitch,
or if they’re giving you the real deal.
And if you give them the real deal,
they start to trust you because they know you’re sincere,
you’re not just trying to get their money,
which most people are trying to do online.
And if you are one of the few who aren’t,
you’ve set yourself apart as trustworthy, honest, sincere,
and someone who is there to genuinely help them
rather than…
You just, you become addicted, that’s your dopamine.
And so I’m totally addicted to helping people
change their lives through habits, through mindfulness,
and all these other things that I’ve been working on.
But I don’t think that I have done all my work on that yet.
I think there’s a lot that I have to learn
about helping people.
I think there’s a lot of people out there
who I haven’t reached yet, and so
that really is what gets me up in the morning.
– Thank you so much for watching.
I made this video because Harold Kuhn asked me to.
So if there’s a famous entrepreneur
that you want me to profile next,
leave it in the comments below and I’ll see what I can do.
I’d also love to know which of Leo’s Top 10 Rules
meant the most to you.
Leave it in the comments and I’ll join the discussion.
Thank you so much for watching, continue to believe,
and I’ll see you soon.
(firework whooshing)
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