“If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build end up building us.”
-Jim Rohn
In this article, I’ll discuss the 8 TOP habits that changed my life. I believe these will change your life as well if you implement them. Most of these are more recent changes I’ve made, but a few of them are habits I started years ago.
Anytime your life starts to feel like it’s going off the rails, you can come back to this article, and it will get you re-centered.
Let’s begin…
It took me a long time, years even, to figure out how to prioritize my day correctly.
Looking back, it’s incredible when I think how long it took me to really hone in on this, and get it right.
Overall, on the more macro level of my whole life, I’ve always had a VERY good grasp on prioritization. On a more micro, day-to-day level though, I just never knew how to truly optimize things.
The difference between being good at something, and being exceptional at it may only look like a small difference, but they’re further apart than they appear.
To be fair, my world did get turned upside down in August after I sold my business back in Texas, and moved abroad to Europe. That experience basically forced me to go back to the drawing board.
Why?
Because the kind of day-to-day life I used to lead with my old business, was drastically different than what it looks like now.
I used to have an outside office, down the street from where I lived. I used to drive to and from 3-4 appointments per day, in school buildings throughout an American suburb.
I spent a TON of time in my car, driving all over town. This was in Irving (Las Colinas), TX between the years of 2015-2020.
No, I have no problem telling you where it was at this point.
Towards the end of this run, I’d spend my mornings working out of the local Starbucks (3-4 hours), and then I’d head over to my 1st appointment, or into the office.
My office was more so just a place to print things, store things, and stir up some kratom, which helped keep the edge off.
Then COVID-19 hit and after that everything changed.
After 5 years of living the way I did, this sudden change drove me crazy, and it was not easy to adapt to it.
The thing is, my day-to-day life was about to change drastically anyway, I just hadn’t realized it yet.
I knew I was going to be selling my business and moving overseas to Eastern Europe, so I was going to have to get used to a new life anyway, especially a new work life.
COVID-19 for some reason wasn’t a big thing when I first moved over here (Eastern Europe), even though I’d moved in August of 2020, so right in the middle of the pandemic.
They just didn’t seem to give a shit about it over here, at that time.
That all changed after November 2020, when Serbia basically went into a full lockdown, closing ALL coffee shops, cafes, restaurants, ex-pat co-working spaces, etc.
I was resigned to having to work out of my apartment again all day, every day, for weeks…
No longer did I have breaks ”built-into” my day like I used to. I had to consciously take them now. Many other people experienced this after COVID also when they had to learn to suddenly start working from home.
Even for me, this was a mindfuck.
I wasn’t used to being home all day like that. I’d usually be getting in and out of my car all day, and having face-to-face appointments with people.
Another thing that messed with me over here, was the weather change.
I was used to living in the mostly sunny state of Texas. Where the days were long, even in the winter.
I realized as the fall wore on, that this was NOT the case in Serbia, due to its distance from the equator.
In Serbia, in the winter it’s pitch black dark outside by 4:20 pm in the afternoon.
While this may not sound like a big deal, it’s much different when you have to live through it, you work from home, and you have to keep yourself motivated to work all day, every day.
It’s much different when you’re not used to it.
If you grew up in places like Boston MA, Canada, or somewhere that’s the same distance from the equator, then this is par for the course.
I’m used to Texas, and I was having to get used to this along with:
A. Working from home all the time,
B. Being socially isolated all the time,
C. Living in another country halfway across the world,
D. Amongst people who spoke a different language than me, and
E. During COVID-19 lockdowns.
I realized quickly I was going to have to mentally adapt to my new life, in more ways than one.
All of these crazy life changes happening at once, meant it was now going to be much easier to get burnt out than it used to get.
I had 2 major burnout periods, one in December 2020, and one recently (a month ago in late March/early April).
I was forced to self-examine what was causing these burnout periods.
That subject is a whole separate article. For now, just know this was all a huge mindfuck to me. All these life changes happening one right after another.
I realized that if I wanted to preserve my energy levels, I was going to have to manage my energy better.
This article will outline what these were.
Let’s explore them:
1) Effectively PRIORITIZING My Day.
I wasn’t going to be able to ignore my daily energy like I used to.
I was going to have to start paying VERY close attention to how I was expending it.
Just to give you an example, here were the top 4-5 things I realized I was going to need to change:
—Starting on my work within 150 minutes of getting up each day. This helps ensure you get all the day’s work minutes in that day and still have time left over at the end of the day to do other things (it’s not fun having to work all the way up until you go to sleep).
—Making sure I implement reading time each morning. This was/is the one thing I allow myself to do first thing every day before I start working. It gets my creative juices flowing and always gives me ideas for Tweets too.
—Meditating, which is the other part of my morning routine. I started this in January, gave up on it after not really giving it its fair shot, and now I’m realizing I stumbled upon this when I did for a reason.
I shouldn’t have walked away from it.
—Prioritizing the ”Big 3” areas of my life above everything else, which are:
1. Mission Life Motion (work)…
2. my dating (sex life) & social life, and
3. the fitness/exercise part of my life.
These are the Big 3 in any man’s life and should be treated as such.
This isn’t a popular opinion in some online circles: but I firmly believe your sex life is important.
Without a girlfriend, a wife, or a dating life, you have no sex life.
And oftentimes men don’t even have sex lives WITH wives or girlfriends either…
There’s a reason for this by the way, read below.
You can’t get a quality girl without first dating many.
Unless you’re hiring prostitutes which is a bad long-term strategy (not to mention expensive). You simply aren’t going to find a diamond in the rough without sorting through MANY women. You won’t even know how to recognize a good one from a bad one, I don’t fucking care what anyone says.
Every quality girl I’ve dated, I only found after I realizing what bad ones were like. This article will help you know what to look for. So will this one.
If your goal is to find a wife or a girlfriend, then fine, yes if you’re still dating around after 5-10 years you’re doing something wrong. However, I firmly believe that it takes a solid 2-3 years of dating many women to find one worth committing to.
More than anything though (most importantly) you won’t know how to deal with women.
You won’t understand them.
Without the ability to understand women, which you only get by dating many of them, you’re flying blind. Every win you get is by accident.
Tangent over, let’s continue:
2) Waking up before the sun.
Nothing will start your day off on the right foot, faster than this will.
This is something I’ve been doing for years now.
I was doing this before I even had my insurance business.
I realized at a pretty young age, the immense benefits of getting/waking up early. Specifically for productivity (getting more done each day), and just the way I felt about myself.
Every time I have a day where I get up early, I feel very good about myself.
I have a sense of pride, a sense of accomplishment, and a sense of confidence and momentum.
Most of the time, not only do I feel this way at the end of those days, I feel this way right out of the gate.
So I’m starting my day off in a great way. I feel like a winner, an ass-kicker, and a champion.
The way you feel about yourself is so damn important.
Anyone who’s ever been successful in life will tell you that.
I remember hearing in Grant Cardone’s book one time that ”nothing good happens after 9 pm at night”.
Think what you want about Grant Cardone, but the guy is right on the money about certain things. This was one of them.
Nothing good happens after 9 pm at night, period (unless you’re having sex).
It’s like my Grandfather used to say: ”I get more done by 10 am than most people do all day.”
3) Eating energy-sustaining food.
What you put into your body, will make an ENORMOUS difference in the way you feel.
Who do you think feels better one day to the next? The guy that eats pizza, Doritos, and drinks Coke every day?
OR the guy that eats a high protein, low carb diet, drinks green juice, and exercises daily?
The answer is VERY obvious, isn’t it?
Yet people still often forget simple things like this. The months between January of this year, and the end of March were insanely productive for me.
Here’s a quick list of what I was putting in my body each day:
–Water (a decent amount of it).
–Coffee, a LOT of protein (meat and eggs mostly), potatoes and sweet potatoes, carrots, broccoli, green apples, bananas, cheese, a little milk, sardines (Omega 3 Fatty Acids), and an occasional snack of dark chocolate.
All my meals I would cook in butter, real butter. The only thing I wasn’t doing that would have made me feel even better would have been drinking green juice.
I wasn’t drinking (this is huge), and I would contain my cheat meals to only Saturday evening to Sunday evening. Not saying I wouldn’t occasionally fall off and start cheating a little early on some weeks, but for the most part, I adhered strictly to this schedule.
The longer I focused on living intentionally each day with this plan, the easier it got.
I had a weight loss and body fat percentage goal I was trying to hit by the end of March, so that time goal is what kept me on track. Coming up with one for yourself is likely to keep you on track too.
With each passing day and week, it got easier and easier to stay disciplined.
It was also easier to stay focused on my mission when I was fueling my body with the right food.
4) Dressing my best every day.
Dressing my best every doesn’t mean I wear a 3 piece suit from sun up until sundown. Dressing my best means I wear comfortable, form-fitting clothing that makes me feel like a winner.
When you look good, you feel good, and when you feel good, you more likely to win. Simple as that.
Remember what I said earlier in the article about feeling good about yourself? This is absolutely critical if you want to win in life.
Trust me, or don’t, and go find out for yourself the hard way.
I’m trying to save you the trouble.
Self-respecting men care about their appearance. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a jackass.
Find your style, if you need some help putting together a look for yourself, I suggest you check this guide out.
5) Lifting weights.
I’ve said this before, but you can’t really call yourself a man and not lift weights.
I’m sorry, you just can’t. Unless your doctor has said you shouldn’t, you don’t have an excuse.
I started lifting weights before I was a man, at the ripe young age of 14. Lifting weights will teach you a lot about life. It will teach you a lot about your own body, your own limits. It’s what helped mold me into the man I’ve become today.
You will feel better physically, you will look better, you’ll sleep better, people will treat you better. I could go on and on and on.
There isn’t one part of your life that won’t be VASTLY improved by lifting weights.
6) Fasting.
This is something I started doing this year, on a more serious note anyway.
Intermittent Fasting was something I discovered a few years ago, shortly after Mission Life Motion started, and was something I dabbled in.
I did it on and off over the next few years but was never truly consistent with it until recently.
What fasting has done for me for than anything, is its simplified my life a bit. And believe me, these days a little of this, goes a long way.
The more decisions you have to make every day, the sooner your energy gets depleted. When you’re a busy man with a business like me, having even one less decision to make each day is huge.
That one less decision in this case, is ”what to have for breakfast”.
I know every day that I get up at a certain time, I have my 3 cups of coffee, and I’m on high-energy mode until lunch. That’s another thing: not only is there one less decision to make, but your body doesn’t have to digest a meal in the morning.
Combine this with coffee, and you’ve got a recipe for an insanely productive morning. There’s no better way to get your day off on the right foot, than by getting shit done, and getting it done with energy.
This is how momentum is built.
Positive momentum leads to better things happening to you throughout the day.
Lunch and dinner are also both appreciated much more when I’ve earned them. Fasting trains your mind to be disciplined.
Anything that gives you discipline is a very very good thing.
These last 2 points don’t have quite as much to do with energy, but they were also two changes I made that changed my life for the better.
There was absolutely no question about this on these two, so I’ve included them here.
7) Reading (& listening) to books.
I started reading and listening to books years ago.
It wasn’t until about one or two years ago though that I really started taking it very seriously. I say that, but that’s by my own standards, I imagine many people would look at what I was doing eight years ago and would think even then it was a lot.
Yes, I was listening to books (mostly) back then, but at a much slower pace. Around 12-18 months ago I started taking this part of my life more seriously.
How so?
I started setting goals for how many books per month I would read. How many hours per week and per day I would listen to. In other words, I started setting quantitative goals. These work better for certain people, especially men. Remember guys:
”What gets measured, gets managed.”
-Peter Drucker
There were also certain books I’d make it a point to re-listen to a certain number of times. The more a particular book resonated with me, the more of a point I made it for myself to re-listen to that book.
”The Rational Male” by Rollo Tomassi is one such book, so are his first two follow-ups to it.
Over the last year, I’ve been tracking how many listens I’m on with each of these books (that I’m re-listening to).
I do this in Evernote by the way, but you could also do this with a Note App on your phone.
Right now, my schedule is I listen to about 16-20 minutes of Audible while I’m cooking my lunch. This makes ”cooking” lunch worth it to me, because it gives me time to actually listen to these Audio (Audible) books.
Otherwise when else would I listen to them?
The way I see it: time has to be carved out for this either way at some point, so why not do it while I’m doing something else? The other times of the day/week I listen to books are when I walk to the gym and back (about a 20-minute walk).
Again: this gives me time to listen to these books, so it’s not like I’m wasting the time. By walking there, I’m also getting exercise in before, and after my workouts too, while also I’m exercising my mind simultaenously.
Hell, I listen to the Audible books during my workouts too.
Beyond this, my plan now is to listen to 3-3.5 hours or so of Audible every Sunday.
Even if this means I’ll do nothing but sit there and listen to it for 1-2 hours.
I’ll be honest this last part hasn’t started happening yet, but it’s still my plan.
Take reading seriously, it’s one of the most important things a man that wants to excel in life can ever do.
8) Admitting to myself what my fears were, & FACING them.
A lot of people have trouble with this one.
This is unfortunate because if you’re not able to admit what you’re afraid of, you’ve never able to confront those demons and move past them.
I believe this to truly be an enormous distinguishing factor between ultra-successful men, and men who are losers.
The losers think they already know everything. They think they have it all figured out already.
They also either think they have no fears at all, or they might barely acknowledge they have some, but never let their thoughts on their fears go past this point.
They repress these insecurities deep down into their subconscious.
As a result, these weaknesses never get dealt with. They never get confronted.
These men go years and years and have no idea where they are weak.
The flip of this coin: is they also have a cloudy picture of where they are strong.
Where their individual strengths lie.
As a man in today’s world, you MUST know where your strengths and weaknesses are. You must know yourself in other words.
It may not be easy to look inwards at yourself, too bad, that’s what men do.
Stop being a pussy and admit to yourself where you need to improve.
CONCLUSION:
There you have it guys. If you want to change your life for the better, if you’re in a rut, use these 8 changes and watch your life transform.
Two to three months from now, you’ll be a changed man.
If you start slipping again at some point in the future, it’s often because you stopped doing one, or a few of the things on this list.
Simply go back to your center, re-read this article, and re-implement everything here.
Also, below is an excellent book that helped me tremendously as well.
In addition to what I discussed here if you also struggle with:
– Procrastination
– A lack of discipline
– Indulgence, saying ”yes” too often instead of ”NO”
– Porn
– No self-control (or not enough of it)
This book (Audiobook included) will TRANSFORM your life, forever, in just 90 days.
A NEW you:
LIVE INTENTIONALLY SELF-IMPROVEMENT PROGRAM
Thanks for reading.
-Matt Mitchell
