5 Habits That Will Fix 99% of Your Problems​

read time 4 minutes

---

Tired.. lethargic… apathetic…

Which is frustrating, because just last month you were feeling awesome and you were absolutely crushing it…

You were focused, energized, and productive.

And then one day ya just woke up and your mojo just disappeared overnight.

Don’t worry, this is completely normal.

We all experience these highs and lows because that’s just how life is.

Half the time you’ll feel above average and half the time you’ll feel below average.

The trick is to simply recognize when you’re spending too many days in a row falling below average, so you can quickly take action to reverse the trend.

If you make a habit of this then in time your baseline of how often you feel “good” starts to increase. And now what constitutes a “bad” day would’ve actually qualified as a “good” day only a few years ago.

Now, I’ve fallen into a whole lot of ruts over the years and what I’ve found is that to get out of’em and get my baseline trending back up, it doesn’t require me to anything crazy. I don’t need to take massive action.

No, I just need to recommit myself to dialing in 5 small habits, which I’m gonna share with you in this video.

So here are 5 habits that will solve 99% of your problems:

The first habit is to:

---

 1. Define Winning the Day

Imagine you sit down to play a game for the first time…

Your friend tells you all the rules, explain how the pieces move, and maybe even shares some basic strategy…

But, if he leaves out one piece of vital information, then none of it is actually helpful.

So what is the one thing you need to know in order to play any game effectively?

Simple:

You gotta know how to actually win the game.

Is it the person with the most points? The fewest points? Or is it the person who completes the level the fastest?

I mean, you would play golf very differently if you thought the goal was to get through all 18 holes as quickly as possible, right?

So, the truth is, if you don’t know how winning is determined, then it doesn’t matter really matter how smart or creative or hardworking you are…

Ultimately, your strategies are useless and whether or not you actually win the game will be determined by blind luck.

Now, it’s pretty obvious to see why this is a bad strategy when we use it in the context of a game, but this is exactly how the majority of people are playing the Game of Life.

Most people never stop to define what Winning The Day looks like.

And as a result, they go through the motions of life just hoping they get lucky and somehow stumble into a Win.

But that’s generally not what ends up happening…

Here’s what does:

Since you don’t have a clear idea of what Winning looks like, you go through life always feeling like you’re losing because there’s always more that “could be done”.

And this leads most people to experience a state of perpetual low-grade discontent and frustration.

They never get that euphoric high that comes from winning the championship game.

And not only does that suck, but it’s entirely avoidable.

If you want to get off this treadmill of psychic discontent, then just take 10 minutes every morning to chalk the field and define what Winning That Day looks like.

Get clear about what it is you want to accomplish and, perhaps more importantly, HOW you want to accomplish it.

Here’s a pro-tip: Make the game easy to win.

If you go above and beyond, that’s great, but it’s more important to just get positive momentum moving in the right direction.

When you do that, you get to end your day on a high note which gets you excited to tackle the next day and this creates a virtuous cycle of success.

Now, in our next habit, I’m gonna share with you a super simple trick for initiating that virtuous cycle, and to do that, all you have to do is:

---

 2. Wake Up When You Say

So much of success in life is just maintaining momentum in the right direction…

Which is why it’s so important that we start the day with positive momentum.

And the easiest way you can do that is by giving yourself an easy win before you even get out of bed in the morning…

When you’re still in that moment where your alarm has gone off and you’re groggy and half-asleep, you are faced with one of the most important decisions of the entire day:

Will you do as you said, hit the alarm, and get up…

Or will you break the promise you made to yourself and hit snooze?

Now, I get it… this might seem like a small decision and you’re probably thinking:

“What’s the big deal, Anthony? Another five minutes isn’t really going to change anything.”

And to that, I say, yes… yes it will. It changes the most important thing…

Which is:

Are you the type of person who shows up and does what you say or aren’t you?

It’s that simple.

Now, listen… only one person in the entire world is even going to know what decision you made in that moment…

But it also happens to be the only person who’s opinion of you matters…

Yourself.

Your self-esteem is the reputation you have with yourself. When you break the promises you make to yourself, such as, I’m going to wake up at this time, or I’m going to hit the gym 3 times this week, or I’m going to make 100 cold calls today… whatever it is, when you don’t follow through, you subconsciously degrade the opinion you have of yourself…

You stop setting ambitious goals, you lower your standards, you stop taking the actions which would lead you to success because deep down in your heart of hearts you don’t believe you have what it takes because you can’t even get out of bed in the morning when you said you would.

But to clarify:

I am not saying you need to wake up at 5am or compromise your sleep in any way.

The key here is to make a decision the night before about when you’re going to wake up… and then follow through with that.

So, if you say I’m gonna wake up at 9am. Great, get up at 9am. If that’s 5, then get up at 5.

Also, it’s okay if using the snooze button is part of your process, but don’t compromise the process.

For instance, if you know that the alarm is gonna go off at 530, but you plan to hit the snooze 3 times and be out of bed by 6, then that’s fine…

But when 6 o’clock comes around, you’d better not hit that snooze button a fourth time or you’ll be starting your day behind the 8-ball with a loss.

Which is going to make our third habit way harder than it already is… and that habit is all about:

---

 3. Fighting the Dragon First

Now, I’ve got a confession to make:

I am a massive nerd.

In a past life, I was a science fiction author and wrote a whole bunch of novels… and one of the things I love most about science fiction and fantasy is how every story revolves around a hero doing something incredible.

Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star.

Frodo treks across Mordor to drop the ring in a volcano.

Katniss Everdeen goes full-Rambo mode on a bunch of teenagers to save her sister against impossible odds.

Our lives, by comparison, are dominated by to-do lists filled with things like go grocery shopping, walk the dog, and pay the bills.

As a result, this can start to make you feel like you’re the hero of a really lame story.

Now, I’ve discovered something pretty incredible recently:

We can make a thing feel more or less epic simply by which words we use to describe it.

For instance, if you want to motivate a child to do something they wouldn’t normally want to do, you’ve just got reframe it as an adventure.

So instead of: We need to find your coat so we can leave.

Reframe it as: We need to go on a quest to find your mythical missing jacket so we can go on an adventure to the grocery store!

Alright, so this works incredibly well on children, but you’re not so gullible, right?

Wrong.

You’re nothing but a big kid and the same principle applies. We can alter our behavior simply by changing the words we use to describe the actions we need to take.

For me, reframing things so that they feel EPIC, is incredibly effective for improving my productivity.

And a really powerful reframe is in how we think about our One Thing.

The One Thing is all about determining what is the single most important task that, if you were to complete, it would move you towards your goal the fastest.

Recently, I’ve started calling my One Thing the Daily Dragon.

And again, I know, I’m a nerd. I’m not gonna apologize for it. But something about the idea of fighting a dragon is just so much more motivating to me than a simple to-do list item.

Now here’s the thing about the Daily Dragon:

It’s never gonna get any smaller or weaker than it is at this very moment.

So delaying isn’t gonna do you any favors…

In fact, you’re probably delaying the inevitable by wasting time and energy fighting smaller monsters…

All you’re doing is tiring yourself out which is going to make your battle with the Daily Dragon harder than it needs to be.

So, to get out of a rut and get your life back on track, wake up in the morning (when you said you would), define what Winning the Day looks like, and then go fight the biggest, baddest dragon as early as you possibly can.

Just get it out of the way and then get on with the rest of your epic life.

Which leads us to the fourth habit that’ll solve 99% of your problems:

---

 4. Get More Sunlight

For the majority of humanity’s existence, we’ve only had access to two sources of light:

The Sun and Fire.

Of these two, the Sun has BY FAR been the biggest source of light in our lives.

As a result, our brains evolved to process sunlight in very unique ways.

For example, exposure to sunlight increases the brain’s production of serotonin which boosts our mood and helps us feel calm and focused.

Take away sunlight and the brain thinks it’s nighttime and therefore triggers the release of another hormone called melatonin, which make you sleepy.

Our relationship with sunlight, which evolved over millions of years, has been massively disrupted over the past century by the rise of artificial light now dominating our lives.

Now, this is great for society at large, but not always great for the individual who spends more and more of their life disconnected from natural sunlight. The result is that our cycles and rhythms are all out of whack, which leads to issue with sleep, focus, and creative thinking.

As a result, more than ever people are experiencing increased feelings of anxiety, depression, and overwhelm.

The solution, though, is simple:

Spend more time outside in the sun.

But we can actually make our time outside even MORE effective for our mental health by adding in just one more thing…

A walk.

A meta-analysis of 15 different studies found that taking around 6,000 step/day wards off premature death and boosts levels of psychological well-being.

That seems like a pretty achievable goal all things told, but if you really want to get the most bang for your buck:

Go for a walk in nature.

Studies show that a 60-minute walk in nature (versus in an urban environment) decreases the activity in the Amygdala (which is the part of our brains that regulates emotions).

So this can go a really long ways towards getting you out of a rut.

Now, all of the habits we’ve discussed so far are great and they will produce beneficial results in your life, but if you want to get the most out of all of them, you gotta make time for our fifth habit, which is to:

Defining what Winning the Day looks like is only half the battle…

The other half occurs when we review our performance for the day.

And this is one of the most important steps, because if you don’t do this, you’ll just go through life on auto-pilot, repeating the same actions again and again and again, never stopping to question whether or not you’re actually getting any closer to your goals.

Now, here’s a crazy concept that really changed how I move through the world:

I started thinking about Living Life as a skill.

And like all skills, it’s something that can be improved if we deploy something called the Learning Loop.

See, improving at any skill requires three things:

1. Feedback
2. Reflection
3. Iteration

Feedback is required so we can know whether or not the thing we just tried worked or not. For example, if you shoot a basketball, and it hits the backboard and misses, then you’ve got immediate feedback that whatever you just tried, didn’t work.

So now we need to Reflect on what we did and come up with a hypothesis for what we might’ve done wrong.

Then, we use that information to Iterate, which is just another way of saying we change our behavior to test our hypothesis.

And this leads us back to the beginning of the Learning Loop, because one way or another, whether the ball goes in or not, we’re collecting more Feedback.

Now, our rate of learning any new skill depends on how quickly and effectively we can cycle through the Learning Loop.

Unfortunately, most of us aren’t improving our Living Life skill because while we might be collecting Feedback and maybe even Iterating… if we’re not actually taking the time to Reflect on what and how we’re doing, then we’re just a monkey throwing a ball mindlessly at the hoop hoping we get lucky.

This is why it’s so important to take time each evening to just do a quick scan and evaluate your day’s performance.

Personally, I like to use my Values as the scorecard.

To do this, I use a technique called Vision Casting which I broke down in this article. 

I highly recommend you check that out, because I’ve found Value Casting to be a really powerful tool for solving so many of my life’s problems.

Combine that with the other 4 habits we’ve discussed in this video, and you’ll never get stuck in a rut again.

Stay Hyperfocused, My Friend.

AV

P.S. We’re getting closer to releasing more info on Beyond the Apex University. This community includes every course I’ve ever created, monthly group coaching calls with, weekly accountability sprints, and so much more.

Follow me on ​Twitter​and ​LinkedIn​

Listen to the ​Amplified Impact Podcast​