Transcription
And welcome to this video. I'm going to show you how you can make the most out of those remaining four months of the year. And if you're watching this, then you're in time because usually if you're like me, maybe you're higher up on the AD spectrum, maybe you're not. But usually you can finish something very strong. It's when you have a deadline or when you feel like you're close to the end where like something in you really kicks in. So if you've even done absolutely nothing this year, that's totally okay. Obviously, you've done some things, but maybe you have not reached your full potential. But not to worry, we're going to figure out what we how what we can do to make the most out of those four months.
So what I have over here is just a four-month system for you to focus on for the next four months. As of the time of recording this is August 30th. We're about to go in September. So we have literally exactly four months going into it. And the way I have broken this down is based on the four key pillars that make the most out of your life. And I'm not just talking about personal productivity obviously, like in order to achieve goals and and well, in order for you to live your dream life, right? You need to set certain goals and you need to go and achieve those goals. In order to achieve those goals, you need to take certain actions, which means you need to behave in a certain way. But in order for you to achieve that certain behavior, you need to have certain things. You need to have clarity, you need to have identity, you need to have prioritization, and you need to have execution. What do each of these things mean? I'm going to explain to you that in detail. And I'm going to walk you through why every single month, uh, why every single month in here has a specific focus on one of those key four key pillars. Um, even though that's something that you can do iteratively, it's something that you can in theory work on all at once, but I would encourage you to go in this direction. And this is something that you can do in four months, but you can also collapse it and do it in as little as four weeks. Towards the end of the video, I'm going to show you how you can do that.
So, the very first thing you need is clarity. And this is something that's underrated because a lot of people think they know what they want, but they actually don't know what they want. A lot of people think they want a certain amount of money or they think they they want something specific, but that's not actually what you what what they really want you to do. So, the very first thing we need to start with, suppose you're watching this right now, end of August if you're if you're getting a head start, or even early December, is I want you to grab a pen and paper, just like this pen and paper. Um, you could do it digitally, although I would strongly encourage you to do it analog. Analog is much, much better. Um, and you just basically write on top of the paper one question. And I'm writing it right now. And the question you're going to write is this: What do I want? What do I want? Um, my apologies, my handwriting, uh, should have been a doctor. Well, I am a doctor, but I'm not a medical doctor. I have a PhD in systems engineering. But, uh, handwriting is not the greatest thing. But the handwriting here in this case says, "What do I want?" Right? And that's a very important question. And that's something that a lot of people I I notice, I mean, at this point, I've worked with almost 10,000 people who have ADHD, ADHD entrepreneurs. And what shocks me is that 90% of people don't know what they want. They think they know what they want. They think they have like they have like a mechanical brain goal, but deep in their heart they want something else. And until you reach that heart-mind alignment, you're not going to make progress because you might have that mechanical intellectual goal, but then you're going to actually sabotage yourself and you're not going to stick to it. Or you might have you might overindex on some emotional feeling and you're following that feeling, but because you have you don't you have not set a logistical or a clear or tangible outcome-based goal, then you're not making progress there either. So you can't be on either side of the spectrum. You have to be right in the middle where you have to have heart and mind alignment. You have to know what you want intellectually. You have to know what you want emotionally. And only when you marry those two things do you actually make progress.
Now, why is a whole month allocated to this process? You you might you might say, "Well, Ali, I could actually just sit down and ask myself what I want and I could I could figure that out." Well, the problem is that when you're when you're when you try to figure out what you want, you're going to have to do so iteratively. What I mean by iteratively is you're going to think that you want this thing and then you're going to go and and pursue it. You're going to spend time. You're going to sit down. You're going to you're going to act on that goal. You're going to build the necessary systems. And then you're going to notice, am I actually being excited about this goal or is this actually not what I want deep down? So, this is not something that you just ask yourself once and done. This is something that you have to keep asking yourself over and over. I mean, at this stage, I as of the time recording this, I've accomplished so many so many things. I've gotten a PhD. I've grown a business. I've grown YouTube channels. I've like I'm very grateful. I've accomplished a lot of things. But to this day, I still wake up every single morning and I ask myself, "What do I want?" Right? Sometimes I I know it and I just start executing right away. Sometimes I just wake up and I feel very foggy. And I just grab my notebook and I write down on a pen and paper, what do I want? And I start writing the things that come to my mind. This is what I want. This is what I want to feel. This is what I want to experience. This is the thing that's on my mind. This is the thing I want to go after. And all that just distills to clarity. And it is an iterative process. So if I were you, I would spend a lot of time in September. You can keep doing what you're doing. Like this is the beauty of this system is you don't have to just like drop everything you're doing and then just overnight like adopt something brand new and just break everything that you have. Like some of what you're doing probably works. Keep doing it. Just add to it this element of like, what do I want? And just ask yourself this question repeatedly. Um, and and and you can achieve over time iteratively. It's going to help you get what you want. So that's the first thing that we want is just to ask what we want. We're going to go and just like change the color of this.
The next thing that we need to work on is identity. And identity is one of those things that are so nuanced and it just makes me so angry even talking about identity because so many people think of identity as like this kind of um I don't know, like woo-woo thing that's like, oh, you just say affirmations and you say I am this and I am that and whatnot. And yes, there is merit. Like I am statements are powerful and they are something to be very careful about because what you say I am like actually does reflect into the real world. But most your identity is not based on what you tell yourself. It's what you see yourself doing. This is something that really took me a long time to figure out. But and like for example, in Next Level P Performance, which is our flagship program to help entrepreneurs get six months to work in six weeks, we focus on something called evidence-based identity reinforcement, which is like once we design your identity, we start asking, what external evidence can we install in your life to actually help you like literally see that you are that person? I'll give you guys a very simple example. Like the reason I don't know, you've probably seen a lot of my videos, I wear either like a NASA shirt or a SpaceX shirt. I wear the same like Lululemon khakis and I wear like a really nice pair of white sneakers that look very professional. Um, and I wear my the same watch. I I kind of like I have a very similar look, especially in a lot of my my recent videos. And why is that is because I have like designed an identity for myself of like, I am this kind of tech CEO. Like I'm wrapping up my NASA postdoc. I'm starting two I've been working on my companies. I started a company called Terink. I have this company Next Level Systems. I have company called Engineers. So, in my head, I have this identity of I'm this person who's running these companies that are genuinely changing the world. And it's like I when I dress a certain way and I look a certain way and I set up my desk a certain way and I set up my chalkboard a way, what not, like I don't have to tell myself, oh, I am this person. I have evidence every day that just by looking at it tells me who I am. And and very often, especially if you're someone who has ADHD, you may literally forget who you are. Like, you might forget who you are. You might forget your goals. You might forget everything. So if you have things that remind you externally of who you are, you have evidence in your face that you are who you say you are, that is the fastest way to actually change your identity. So you still need to design the identity. You still need the I am statements. Obviously, you need to do it in a way that's engineered, carefully done, not kind of the generic way most people do on you on YouTube. But the idea is that once you go and do that, uh, that's only like a third of the job. The other two-thirds that actually matter is designing the environment in a way to create daily evidence and and to design self-talk techniques. Teach yourself talk yourself in a certain way. Like there's so many things you could do to actually start creating external real-world feedback that you cannot deny that you are the person that you say you are. Right? And that's a lot of a lot of identity. I'm going to allocate a whole month to doing that because something that's not easy, especially if you don't have a coach or if you don't have someone who knows what they're doing walking you through it, is going to again be an iterative process where you might set that up, it doesn't work, it breaks, that's totally fine. Like if you adopt an iterative mindset, that's really, really important as well. So once you go ahead and do that, then that basically takes care of October. We're going to go ahead and take care of that.
Now, once you have covered your identity and you've covered your clarity, you're basically clear on what you want out of life. Then you have designed who's the type of person that you need to be to achieve that. And now you have started generating evidence that you are that kind of person. Now we need to get very tactical and we need to get very minute. And the way for us to do that is for us to actually have a prioritization system. Now, prioritization is arguably the single most important skill in life because prioritization is about decision-making. It's about what decision do I do, do I make and what do I actually work on? And that's something that's very, very important. A lot of people don't really talk about this because what they what they think is like, oh, I just work on what's urgent or I just work on what's important. But really, if you don't have a well-defined prioritization system, all that tells me is you're just simply reacting to life rather than living life proactively. Even if you're setting goals, even if you have a to-do list, if your to-do lists are not fed out of a prioritization system, meaning a system that once you're clear on the goal and identity, ties your day-to-day task specifically to that goal and that identity and helps you enforce them and helps you actually pick the things that move the needle, not the things that actually feel important. Until you have that kind of prioritization system, you're not making the most out of your life. And that's something that breaks my heart about a lot of entrepreneurs, especially entrepreneurs higher up on the ADHD spectrum or ones struggling with overwhelm, ones that are not sticking to schedules, ones that are just kind of playing life in a reactive mode is the default human tendency to prioritize is prioritized based on urgency. So if a fire breaks out or something urgent happens, or or or an email comes my way, or a text message comes my way, these are all things I can react to. And reacting to them is the path of least resistance unless I have an intention to go and do something else. Now, with the lack of prioritization system, there's no intention to go ahead and do something else. So that's why it becomes very, very problematic. So once you go ahead and design your identity, then you need to start prioritizing decisions in accordance with that identity. And obviously, there's methods for how you can do that. But I would say again, allocating a whole month to doing that is no exaggeration because all all of these steps are going to be iterative. Like you can run it the first time, but I guarantee you they are going to break. And once they break, you don't want it to you don't want to just like be discouraged. This unfortunately is what a lot of people do. They just set something up, it breaks, and they're like, "Oh, that did not work out. Um, I guess since it didn't work out, then I'm I'm just going to stop trying."
Finally, you need an execution system. This is actually the one that most people think they really, really need and most people do actually need this. But most people skip the work of clarity, identity, and prioritization. They go straight to execution. I would not do that. Even though execution is the action, it's the tangible. It's the interface between your thought and the real world. Um, I would I would not skip those first three steps. So once you have installed those three steps, finally you need an execution system. Now, execution is pretty much just action, right? Execution is just a fancy word for implementation. It's like, okay, now that I've loaded the gun, I've pointed in the right direction, how do I actually pull the trigger and and go, right? Action is usually about starting. Again, if you're higher up on the ADHD spectrum, execution, action is really, really hard. Why? Because especially if the task is boring or daunting or unclear, it takes a lot of dopamine to initiate a task. But it takes a lot less dopamine to go check your email or go open your phone or go to even clean your room or go to something else. There's productive procrastination, which is basically doing a task that requires less dopamine, or in some cases, there's besides procrastination, there's emotional avoidance. There's basically a task that you avoid emotionally just because it makes you uncomfortable. Could be a fear of success, could be a fear of failure, could be a fear of just the unknown in general. Um, that's something that's like very, very common. But the way to tackle execution is many, many different ways. First is again, environment design. If you make if you make starting the path of least resistance, that's already like step number one. If you make it incredibly hard for you to start, that's not that's not good. Uh, so put things in your face that you want to do. All right? Obviously, for example, if there's a task and and depending on what productivity system you're using, if you have a calendar, to-do list, what not, all these kind of things are covered in detail in some of my other videos, but you want to first put it in your face. Once you put it in your face, then you want to execute. And there's and there's different ways to do this. You want action triggers. And there's different kinds of action triggers. Some can be done using self-talk, something that's excuse me, very underrated, very, very, very not many people are using. Um, some of it could be things that are using external action triggers, like for example, if you're noise-canceling headphones and you clean your desk and you play like a certain song, that could be an action trigger. Action trigger could be like me putting my shoes on. Could be like something externally stimulating to me. Trigger could also be like a quick workout, quick run, quick shower, cold shower, what not, things of that nature, although that's a bit of an extreme one. Um, that may be good for like jump-starting the day or like prolonged periods of action. Um, action trigger could be like closing your eyes for five minutes or even five seconds or or doing something of that nature. Action trigger could be making a countdown in your head from like five, four, three, two, one, start, or something like that. Like there's all these kind of techniques. But again, a lot of what people struggle with as execution is actually usually a prioritization issue, an identity issue, or a clarity issue. Because if you're not even clear on what you want or where you're trying to go, you're going to procrastinate. If you're not the type of person who actually sits down and gets the work done, you're going to procrastinate. If you don't know what what to actually work on right the second that actually moves the needle on your goal, you're going to second-guess the task at hand. Or worse, you're going to be overwhelmed by the number of things on your to-do list and you're like, "Ah, which one do I start?" And you're going to be an analysis paralysis because you cannot pick. Then you won't be able to execute. So again, execution is one that is is pretty complicated because while there are action triggers needed to actually make them a reality, um, there are all these steps that precede them that actually help you execute a lot better. And execution could be, we could dive into it like that's a whole topic of its own. I've made separate videos on procrastination and things of that nature. But the whole idea is that like in those next four months, you have the chance to turn your life around if you were to focus on those three four things. and four things only. And again, I'm going to reveal them to you. Again, it's clarity, it's identity, it's prioritization, and it's execution.
And if you want to go ahead and do that on your own, that's fine. If you need help from me personally or from my team at Next Level Systems, it's something that we obsess over. We specialize over. We've now had we now have, I think, almost 10,000 clients um for our first program, Hyperfocus, and we have over 300 clients in our program, Next Level Peak Performance. If you need help from us, if you want professional help on how to become someone who's always clear on their goal, always knows how to prioritize, always manages um their their schedule and their calendar in a way that's effective without losing sleep, without burning out. You want to have the identity of someone that like you're actually proud of, confident, no shame, no guilt. Just look at yourself in the mirror and you're like, "Holy, this is the best version of me possible." I'm going to put a link below where you can learn more about that. Uh, how we can help you if we can. So, go ahead and check it out. If not, that's totally cool. I'll see you in one of my other videos. And I hope you found this useful. Peace, love.