Transcription
Hey guys, it's Ali. I'm a systems engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, and in this video, I'm going to show you seven steps you can take, seven things you can start doing in order to transform your life 180 degrees in the next 3 to 6 months.
Now, these things are things I've used myself to transform my entire life. About 6 to 8 months ago, I was very depressed. I was living in Boston by myself. I was struggling. I was still finishing school. Uh, I was kind of just hopeless in life, and I started doing these things. Uh, and six months later, I got a job at NASA as a systems engineer. I finished my PhD, I graduated. I built a profitable online business on the side. I grew my YouTube channel to 28,000 subscribers. Um, and I got so good at writing that even just a few days ago, I made a post on LinkedIn that got 1 million views in literally just 48 hours. So, it's kind of crazy how my life transformed, like upside down, in just like 6 months. Um, and now that I've reflected on the things that I have done, um, I want to propagate it back to you so that you can do it in as little as 3 months. So, here are the seven things that you can start doing.
And the very first thing I started doing, um, which is like, get crystal clear on what it is that you're trying to achieve and why. And guys, you'll be surprised. Like, 90 to 95% of people I talk to, some of my coaching clients, or some of the, uh, people who buy some of my online services, um, most of the time think they have a problem which is like, uh, related to ads or copywriting, or something's wrong in their business, or, "Oh, I hired the wrong person." But majority of the time, all these problems in their business and personal life stem to one simple fact, which is they don't know exactly what they want and why.
And one thing I started doing around six months ago, which has really, really served me, is I started using a document, and I called it the user manual, basically for my life and for my day. And on it, I sat down and I thought very deeply about what I want in my life, and I wrote that goal down, right? And the goal for me was basically graduate, get a job at NASA, build a company on the side, do all these things. Um, and the reason behind it, I, I wrote a very emotional reason why I wanted to do that, right? I don't want to waste my life. I wanted to live the best life possible. I want to retire my parents, give my family the best life possible. I want to give myself the best life possible. Like, I just made, I just, I just sat down for like 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and got crystal clear on what it is I'm trying to do and why. And the moment I figured out what that is, I slapped it somewhere on my desktop, and I looked at it every single day. And that was step one, which is clarity on where it is that you're trying to go. Again, it sounds simple, but you'd be shocked. A lot of people don't do this. A lot of people don't even know that this is their bottleneck.
Now, once you do that, the very second step is, ask yourself, "Okay, now in order for me to achieve the goal, what are the actions needed? What are the habits needed? What are the type of things I need to start doing to achieve the goal?" In my case, I needed to, uh, write some research papers, and submit a proposal to NASA, and, and, and submit my graduation thesis, as well as learn how to build an online course, learn how to build an online coaching program, learn how to run paid ads, learn how to create content, learn how to do all these things. So, you, you, once you figure out the goal, you figure out what exactly are the actions you need to do. Now, most of you guys already know what the actions you need to do are. And, and a reason you might be stuck is you're not connecting it to that goal and why on a day-to-day basis. Hence, you may lose motivation, you may feel a lack of discipline, and things of that nature.
But once you have these things figured out that you need to do, you really want to design your environment, um, to make doing these things very easy. Uh, there's an excellent book on this called Atomic Habits by James Clear. In my opinion, it's the best self-help book of all time because it is very practical in saying that once you figure out what you need to do, you need to just basically do it. But how do you do it? You make doing it easy. You remove discipline out of the equation, and you build a system, and you design your environment around doing that very simple thing.
And I'll give you an example. Like, one thing I've been really trying to do lately is just get in better shape. And I'm always like, "Oh, I don't have time to, uh, to do the workouts, or I don't have time to do anything of that nature." And then, um, something I learned from Atomic Habits is that like, you basically design your environment such that doing the push-ups is something that's very, very easy. So, and, and then you stack it on top of another habit. So, what I did is I just got myself a really nice, large yoga mat, and I placed it next to my alarm. And my alarm is across the room, such that every morning when the alarm goes off, and I have to get up to press the alarm to, to turn it off, I'm stepping on the yoga mat. And when I see that, I'm like, "Oh, I should probably just drop down and do the 10 push-ups." And then I started doing stretching as well. And now I'm just like, I built an amazing habit very seamlessly, just simply by tweaking my environment. I didn't change my willpower. I didn't become more disciplined. I didn't do any of that guru stuff that people talk about in self-help. I just basically made it very easy to do things that I need to do.
Now, when it comes to your business, and the things you need to do in your, uh, uh, like marketing or your sales, it could very much be the same thing. You will lay out your tasks and the things you need to do such that they are the thing that is easy to do. There are multiple ways to do that. You can have accountability. You could basically have entrepreneur friends or people that you can check in and bounce ideas, uh, from, and say, "Hey, this is what I'm doing. What do you think about this?" And then get feedback from other people. One other thing you can do is just design your digital environment in a way that makes doing the work very easy. For example, one thing I have on my computer is that my desktop, uh, is very organized and only has the things relating to the work I need to do. And then when I open my browser, I use Google Chrome, the default, uh, tab that opens in my browser is the one that shows me the work I need to do. So I'm like, "Oh yeah, I got to do it over here." And another thing I've, I've done is I've hired coaches, I've joined masterminds, so that I have other people in my virtual environment that just by thinking about them, or just by having a conversation with them, I'm automatically pointing my head to think more about, like, things like marketing, like business, like sales, things of that nature. So again, very, very easy hack is just, once you figure out what you need to do, first thing you got to do, like, no questions asked, is design your physical and virtual environment in a way that makes achieving that thing very, very easy.
Now, now, even, uh, this brings me to step three that you got to do, which is, once you are able to design your environment, um, you're not going to be able to fully automate yourself as a human. You're still a human. You still have emotions, and you still have free will. You're not going to be able to fully turn yourself into an assembly line. There's still going to be a little bit of an internal dialogue that you're going to need to learn how to do. This is also known as self-talk. Um, is a very, very, very powerful concept. This basically, uh, is the things that you tell yourself when a certain situation arises, or what you tell yourself on a day-to-day basis as well. And this is extremely, extremely important, um, especially if you're in a dynamic environment where things are constantly changing, and you have to make decisions all the time. You need to be very conscious and aware of your own self-talk, the things that you're telling yourself on a regular basis.
And I'll give you an example. Like, let's say you think of a task that you need to do. Let's say, I don't know, you have to write copy for your ad, or you need to sit down and write a few hooks. Um, very often, a very, a big cause of procrastination is people will say, "Oh, I got to write an ad down," or like, "Oh, I got to shoot a video." And like, the way you're kind of relaying that information to yourself is overwhelming, unexciting, uninspiring, and just kind of the brain ends up saying, "No, no, no, let's just put it off." Now, uh, the self-talk I use with myself, the way I communicate with myself, is I'm very wary of that, right? A big part of procrastination comes from overwhelm, and the other part of procrastination comes from fear. And I annihilate both of them with with simple things that I tell myself.
I'll give you an example. Let's say I need to sit down and, and write, make a YouTube video, like the one I'm, I'm recording right now. Uh, right before recording this video, my brain was like, "Oh man, we got to sit down and write, like, talk about a video. Like, oh, like, do you know what you want to talk about? What if we don't have the right thing? Like, do you have the right, like, is the lighting even?" Like, you know, that kind of chatter in the back of, back of my mind. And if you're not conscious, you can very easily give into these temptations because they, like, your brain will argue with you, and it will make a lot of sense. Yeah. But then you can basically tell it through self-talk, "Oh, I don't need to sit down and record a video. I just need to sit down, turn my ring light on, and turn my microphone on, and I'm just going to talk for a little bit, and then I'm going to see if I want to record it or not, right?" That's a much easier argument to win with your brain, right? Because the time investment and the energy investment on that is very, very little. And that kind of breaks the inertia of getting started, right? If you've studied physics in high school or college, you know that part of, uh, Newton's law is that an object at rest stays at rest, an object in motion stays in motion. It is very hard to accelerate. It's not hard to keep going. Part about talking to yourself is to make things as little overwhelming as possible, and always focus on starting and just saying, "I'm going to take a first step," rather than overwhelming yourself on the entire task.
But the other part of self-talk that is also very, very relevant is how you deal with yourself on an emotional level. And what I mean by that is, at the end of the day, let's say a day went by, and you got some work done, but you didn't get as much as you'd like, like, to do. How do you deal with yourself? Do you beat yourself up? Do you say, "Oh man, like, you could have done more. Like, of course, you didn't do that. Like, why? What?" Like, and then you kind of start berating yourself? Or do you say, "You know what? I got some work done today. Maybe it's not as much as I hoped, but I'm still okay with that. Let's see how I can get more done tomorrow." And just kind of be more progressive and focus more on improving the future than spending too much time and energy on, uh, like what happened in the past? That's another very important, underrated aspect in business and life. Um, how do you, how do you deal with yourself when things go right? How do you deal with yourself when things go wrong? Um, some people in psychology books call this self-parenting. I, I, I think that's like too kind, too esoteric of a thing to say, like, kind of assumes that you're a child and then you're a parent at the same time, and it kind of goes into some very deep esoteric stuff that I don't really like to, uh, think about. I think, I think of it more more as simply, like, from a computer science or a computer engineering perspective, like you're feeding your brain commands. You're basically, uh, you, you are a human, and you are a man riding a machine, which is your body and your mind. Um, or, or a woman. And, uh, you're basically telling yourself, you're, you're basically like someone, picture, picture your body and your mind as a horse that you're riding, and you're just someone who's in control. And, and you, is like the conscious you, the aware you, the one who's thinking, and who's making decisions. And then your mind, your, your programs that exist in your physical body are just kind of like the horse that you're riding. And you, and you get to steer the horse however way you want, using the right self-talk.
So again, in summary of point number three is, you want to make sure that you are reducing overwhelm by talking to yourself in a way that focuses on starting tasks rather than having to complete them, which can add a bit of anxiety and overwhelm. And then you want to make sure that you're giving yourself plenty of, uh, positive reinforcement and focusing on what works and doing more of what works. And sure, analyzing what doesn't work, but not spending too much time beating yourself up over it. That's something that's very, very important.
Now, point number four, that's very, very important. This is kind of a modern problem. This did not used to be a problem. But I have very good news for you because for this point number four, uh, if you tackle this point properly, you are ahead of 99.9% of people. And I think out of all, all the points I've mentioned so far, this was the one that was really like the big game changer for me. Um, and that is phone management. Um, as you can see right now, I don't have my phone on me. It's not even in my pocket. My phone is sitting somewhere over there in the corner of my room where I put it, uh, every day. And then I have an Apple Watch for emergencies. Where if my mom calls me, my dad calls me, my, my, my siblings, a friend in need, or something, if someone calls me, I have my watch connected to my phone. And even if you don't have an Apple Watch, what you could do is you could just simply put your phone away somewhere, not within sight, and just turn the speaker on, make the volume very loud, so if someone calls you, you can go and grab it. And another thing I do is I turn off all notifications, literally every single notification except calling is turned off. And, and I tell my family, and I tell my friends, "Hey, if you guys need me, call me. If it's an emergency, call me. Otherwise, I'm going to text you back. Just, it just may not be immediate because I have, I have work to do, I have important things to do." People are usually very understanding about this. Uh, this right here, I think, is the biggest game changer because I, even, even some of my entrepreneur friends who are making good money, they could be doing way better, but they're spending like three, four hours a day scrolling their phones on Instagram, on Facebook, on things of that nature. Uh, I don't, I'm not a big fan of like completely isolating yourself. Like, I still think, okay, maybe you need like an hour a day just to connect with your friends, see what social events are going on. I do believe in serendipity. I think focus is important, but you also have to leave room for things in life. Uh, but at the same time, you want to make sure that your phone is not something that's taken control of you, and it's not controlling your life, and that you're the one controlling it. Uh, that's something very, very important.
Now, a very simple way to start, uh, using your phone more properly is to track your screen time. Which brings me to point number five, which is tracking. And, um, I was reading a very cool, very cool book. It was called Measure What Matters. Uh, it was about the story of how Google grew the company, how, uh, Intel Electronics, uh, chips company grew, how Apple, uh, company that made the iPhone, the iMac, and all the other cool pro, uh, products, including the Vision Pro, I think the most recent one. How these, what, what separates these companies from, um, the other companies? And, and the immediate thing that comes to mind is, "Oh, they had great ideas, and they had great vision." That is true. But there's tons of other companies that had great ideas and great visions, but we never heard about them. And that's because what separates them is execution. And a big part of execution is tracking what you're executing, right? So, remember we talked about in points one and two, is that you got to figure out what you need to do, and then design your environment in a way that makes it easy for you to do. Okay, that's fine. We got that out of the way. But how do you actually know if you're doing the right thing on a day-to-day basis, on a week-to-week basis? Are you keeping up with your goals? And this is something where tracking becomes humongous. Is, once you set discrete goals that you want to achieve, you need to track them. Need to track, are we doing the inputs? Are we doing the lead measures? Are we doing the right things day-to-day? And this is not only true of business, this is true of personal life as well.
Now, I mentioned an example earlier of trying to do the push-ups in the morning, um, and basically one thing that has really motivated me to do it is, um, on my, on my computer, I have a document that pops up, uh, every time I open Google, my Google Chrome browser, and it's basically literally just a, a column with a bunch of checks and empty boxes that I took off day by day, and it has the date next to it. And it just asks me, "Did you do the push-ups today?" And that 80% of the time motivates me to go and do it, you know? Um, so that, in combination with designing my environment, has made me not miss a single day of doing that because it's so easy, it's so doable, it's so reputable. My environment is designed in a way to can encourage it, and I'm tracking it every day. So, something I encourage you to do is, if you want to change your behavior, or if you want to get different results in business or in life, figure out what the actions you need to do on a repeatable basis are. Now, in the case of sales, it could be reaching out to prospects. In the case of marketing, you could be writing new hooks for new ads or doing outreach. Uh, in the case of trying to grow a YouTube channel, you're posting, or you're sitting down and writing ideas, or you're making thumbnails, whatever it is. But figure out what the behavior or the action that you need to do is, and simply track it. And you don't need anything fancy. You can just literally use a simple Excel sheet or a Google Sheets, which is what I use. And just basically, in the Google Sheets or in Excel, there's a very simple function that you can have a cell with a box that you can tick yes or no, and then next to it, just put the date. And look at that thing every single day. And bam, you'd be surprised at how the very simple act of tracking, uh, is going to transform your life. I know it sounds crazy, but it's, it's, it's that simple.
Now, step number six, and this is where we're starting to get more, uh, detailed and more, more intricate, uh, territories, uh, which is, uh, scheduling. Some people call this time blocking. Some people call this implementation intention. It doesn't really matter what you call it, but, um, the reality is, we live in a physics-based world where a reaction requires an action. And if the reaction you want is a certain result in business and life, you got to take the right action. And if you want to take the right action, apart from, um, scheduling it, and apart from designing your environment, uh, and, and, and tracking whether you're doing it or not, if you want to increase the odds of it, you need to schedule it. You need to allocate a time and place to do it. And again, in my case, for example, with the push-ups, it was very simple. I told myself, "I'm going to do it every morning when I turn off my alarm, um, right there next to my alarm." So, it is very simple. My brain has stored the image, the visual, or what I envision would happen if I were to go ahead and do that.
Now, in the case of business, you need to do the same thing. Like, if you're currently struggling to attract clients in your business, then you might say, "Okay, my number one action is to attract clients." Well, how do I do that? Well, I got to do outreach, post content, run ads. And I, I'm going to make a decision, uh, about that based on my time and money tradeoff. If I have a lot of money and very little time, I'm going to go with ads. If I have a lot of time, very little money, I'm going to go with, uh, content, and I'm going to go with outreach. Um, and once you do that, if you don't schedule, if you don't say, "I'm going to do, I'm going to sit down for one hour tonight at 8:00 PM on my desk and do some outreach," if you don't do that, the odds of you doing it are slim to none. And that is very simple because the human brain is only going to prioritize based on things that it's expecting. And if you're not expecting that a certain time comes up and you're supposed to be doing something, you'll spend too much time deciding and arguing and not actually doing.
Now, the magic of scheduling is when you say, "Okay, tonight at 8:00 PM, I'm going to sit down, and I'm going to write three hooks for a YouTube content." And if you're hardcore, you can even set an alarm to help you do it. What that's going to do is when the alarm goes up, or when, when it's 8:00 PM and you sit at your desk and you're getting ready to do your hooks, then you don't have to argue with your brain that much. Like, sure, there may be a bit of procrastination, which you can address using the self-talk method I talked about earlier. But the idea is, most of the time, your brain is just going to do it because you've already made the decision. And very often, procrastination, stress, does not come from, like, anxiety, or, or, or, or overworking, or, or what. It simply comes from not having decided and putting off a decision. And when you're putting off the decision, you're building up all this anxiety and stress, and you're just kind of delaying things because you haven't decided. Now, the moment I decide, "Okay, I'm going to sit down, and I'm going to write three hooks for my YouTube videos today at 6:00 PM," and the time comes, there's a very high chance I'm going to sit down and do it.
Which brings me to the very last point, point number seven, uh, which honestly is one of my personal favorites because it makes the work a lot more fun, and it was a total game changer for me. And it's, once you sit down to do the work, like, let's say the scheduled time has arrived, and you're sitting down to do the work, obviously you want to close all the other tabs, or you want to, you want to, you want to remove distractions, you want to put your phone away. But you want something, uh, called an action trigger. What I mean by an action trigger is something that as soon as your body senses, sees, feels, hears, smells, you start getting into action. And the biggest hack I have found for that is music. So, I have certain playlists. I'm actually a DJ myself. I'm a musician. I, I produce music in, in my, my part-time. Um, and one thing I've been doing lately is I mix hour-long playlists for deep work. And my action trigger is, as soon as I sit down to do the work, I play one of those playlists. And it's an hour-long electronic music playlist, chord progressions that kind of loop with some melodies, very nice. Not only does it sound good, and it makes me enjoy, and it blocks out the noise, and it helps me get into flow state, but what it does is something magical is that now my brain knows the moment that music is turned on, the moment that playlist is turned on, I'm getting into work. I start getting into action.
And again, with, with doing the right things to transform your life, is really going to come down to your day-to-day actions. Obviously, in step one, you mentioned, uh, sit down, write down what you actually want to do and why, why you want to achieve it. But the moment you, you know that, then all the other six steps I've have mentioned are just helping you to do the right actions, right? Because that's really what life is about. It's about, uh, again, action, reaction, right? Action, right reaction. Obviously, there's a bit of spirituality involved, there's a bit of luck involved, there's a bit of, uh, rolling the dice involved. But the whole idea is that if you want certain results in your business and life, you have to do the right things. And if you want to do the right things, you have to take the right actions. If you want to do that, you have to figure out what it is that you want, such that you know what actions are needed. And then you have to design your entire life around making those actions the easy things to do. And that's where environment design, self-talk, putting the phone away, putting distractions away, um, scheduling the things you need to do, having an action trigger such as music. Uh, and I'm going to put a link to one of, um, uh, one of my playlists or, or my, my, my other channel where I make, um, some of these, uh, playlists. Maybe you can try them, see if they can help you focus. Um, but yeah, if you follow these seven steps, uh, within 3 months, and you do them consistently, uh, your life is going to be upside down. Your life is going to be turned upside down. Don't need to do anything crazy, nothing esoteric. You don't need to go and drop, I don't know, $10,000 on a mindset program. You don't need to do any of that stuff. You just got to figure out what you want, figure out what you need to do, and cater your life and an environment and build systems around doing it. And with that being, uh, the case, thank you for watching. I will see you guys in the next video. Peace, love.