Transcription
Hey guys, it's Ali, and in this video, I want to talk to you about a book which, in my opinion, is worth a $5,000 productivity course. And I say that because I've spent a lot of money on productivity courses, business courses, programs, coaching. And if I really had just stuck to what's taught in this book, I wouldn't have needed to go and spend all that money elsewhere.
The book I'm talking about, of course, is called Atomic Habits by James Clear, and it is my absolute favorite for one very simple reason. Now, if you're here for the first time, my name is Ali Alcaragi. I am a systems engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the founder of Next Level Systems, where we help entrepreneurs scale their businesses while working fewer hours. So, based on what I do in my job at NASA and in my company, it is very clear I'm a very systems-oriented person, very practical type person. And this is exactly why this book wins in my opinion.
What James Clear has really done a great job doing is basically make his ideas as practical as possible. There's no like Law of Attraction stuff, there's no manifestation, none of that. There's just inputs and outputs, actions and results, and how to build the right systems and design your environment in the right way, such that taking the action is the path of least resistance.
And there's a quote in this book that I absolutely love, and you've probably read this before. It says, "We do not rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems." And this quote is so true because what I've noticed whenever I try to be productive or build habits or stick habits for a consistent amount of time, no amount of willpower or discipline can simply overrule the fact that how you design your environment, whether it's your room, your office, or your digital environment, your computer, your phone. Discipline is is is only going to serve you so much. If you design your environment in a certain way where doing the work is actually the path of least resistance, then your life becomes a lot easier.
And I'm going to give you a few practical examples from my personal life. And the first one I'm going to start with is sleep. For a very, very long time, I struggled with going to sleep early or trying to go to sleep on time. I would always stay up late, and I tried the good old discipline of telling myself, "Dude, you just got to get to sleep earlier. Like, you just got to do it. Come on. Like, man up, you know?" And that stuff obviously does not work. It may work for a day or two, but after a while, your environment will take over, and whatever environment dictates will start happening.
And the only way that actually started to change is when I got that light over there and this light over here. I basically bought two lights which their colors change based on the time of the day. And basically, every day around 6:00 PM, the light would go pink. And every day around 10:00 PM, the light would go brutally red. And that brutally red was basically an environment sign for myself that, "Okay, the day is coming to an end. Let's wind down. Let's plan the next day and let's relax." And you'd be shocked at how such a simple change as just changing the color of the light in your room, done repetitively day after day, has put me in the habit of every day around 10:00, when the room gets red, I literally just say, "Okay, it's time to chill." I go sit down, plan my next morning, and I relax. Obviously, there are days once in a while where I don't feel like doing that, or I may stay up a bit later, but that's not the whole idea. In this case, we're not going for perfection, we're going for consistency. And the way to be consistent is to design your environment in a way that makes being consistent the easy thing to do.
This alone is a really, really, really powerful idea. And it was, in fact, so powerful that I built an entire productivity system just based based on environment design and based on making doing the work the path of least resistance. Basically, I'm obsessed with the idea of wanting to make the work the path of least resistance because if, if you're like me, sometimes you just don't want to do the work, you don't feel like doing the work, or you're just like, you want to go do something else, you want to have fun. And the only way to do that sometimes is just to make doing the work literally the only fun thing available.
This is why in my channel, you'll see that I preach the idea of subtract before you add. Before you go on and sign up for a bunch of things, just remove things that are distracting you from your environment. So, as simple as your phone, or too many folders on your desktop, or notifications coming from your social media apps. Once you get rid of these things which are clouding your environment, then you'll clear up some space and some room to go and do something that matters.
Now, if you're an entrepreneur and you're interested in using environment design alongside other concepts to double your revenue in four to six weeks, I'll put a link below on a video I made on how I might be able to help you. Other than that, you can go ahead and check one of my videos over here. Thank you for watching. I'll see you in the next video. Peace, love.