YOUTUBE 📚 THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 📚 PATREON

*Lifelong learners and students who want to implement a sustainable, science-backed system for beating procrastination and staying on top of their course work, without falling back on self-destructive habits or substances that blunt their potential in the long term.

*Creatives at all levels seeking methods and strategies for increasing their output and staying focused in a world of constant distractions, without dulling their artistic sensitivities or relying on motivation or discipline to carry them through.

*Business owners and professionals looking to find a more balanced approach to life and work that has them feeling more energized and effective, while consistently achieving and becoming more at the same time.

*Anyone who wants to beat procrastination forever by utilizing battle-tested and laboratory-tested techniques for reducing stress, gaining clarity on what really matters, and living a life of meaning, alignment, and purpose.

The definition of productivity has gone through a reimagining in recent years, and so have the best methods and mindsets necessary to achieve it. Nowadays, productivity doesn't mean crossing off as many tasks as possible, regardless of their actual importance or meaning, all while desperately wishing you were somewhere else.

Today, I think of productivity as doing exactly what you intend to do, when you intend to do it, and as long as you're doing that, you're perfectly productive. Even if it's your intention to recharge by taking the night off. In this book, Ali Abdaal, a former medical doctor and the world's most-followed productivity expert, takes issue with the idea that productivity has to be about discipline and drudgery at all. It can be about joy.

Feel-Good Productivity is based on the idea that we'll get more done by making work feel good, instead of dragging ourselves through it, regardless of how we feel. The approach Ali lays out in the book is supported by a litany of scientific studies, empirical observation, and personal experimentation, and it's laid out in an extremely practical way, featuring 54 "productivity experiments" you can conduct on your own to put these insights into action.

The book also contains overwhelming psychological and neuroscientific evidence for why positive emotions fuel success, and how feeling good in your work can boost your energy, soothe your stress, and improve your life.

I'd never try to claim that discipline doesn't matter at all, or that it can't be extraordinarily valuable in a wide variety of situations, but what I love about Feel-Good Productivity is that Ali doesn't make it a matter of "discipline or nothing." Success and fulfillment is possible without constant pain and suffering, and for the majority of the work that most of us do each day, it's probably more joy that would help us out the most.

Work isn't always going to feel good. Sometimes you do have to suffer (at least temporarily) for what you want in this life. But it's far from the only way there is to succeed, and Ali's book is the perfect counterbalance to that claim. Discipline shouldn't be the default; it should be that extra gear that you drop into occasionally when you really need to dig deep.

With all that in mind, Feel-Good Productivity is split into three sections:

Energize

In the first section, we're introduced to the three hidden "energizers" that enable enjoyable productivity, and they are Play, Power, and People.

Ali charges out of the gate, where he recounts the stories of six different Nobel Prize winners who attribute their success to Play, including Richard Feynman, Alexander Fleming, and Donna Strickland. Play provided these luminaries with a sense of psychological relief, restoring their formidable mental powers through participation in activities that were pleasurable and relaxing.

The second energizer, Power, refers to a sense of personal empowerment, not power over others. It's not something you take from other people, it's something you give to yourself. It's that sense of, "My life is completely up to me, and I alone am responsible for my success, satisfaction, and peace." For lack of a better word, it's a powerful mindset to adopt, one that's shared by high-performers in diverse fields all over the globe.

The third energizer, People, is all about social connections. It's about helping others, and being helped in return. As it turns out, if you surround yourself with people who inspire, support, encourage, and energize you, you'll not only get a lot more done, but you'll enjoy yourself a lot more at the same time.

Unblock

The second part of Feel-Good Productivity addresses the three "blockers" we must overcome if we want to beat procrastination. They include Uncertainty, Fear, and Inertia, and by removing these barriers a whole new future of increased productivity and life satisfaction opens up before you.

The first blocker becomes a problem when we become overwhelmed by the unknowns or the complexity of the work ahead, leading us to do nothing instead. But we can fight back against this uncertainty using a variety of methods introduced by Ali here, including commander's intent, NICE goals, time-blocking, and more, all of which is discussed below.

The second blocker, fear, has a number of viable solutions, but understandably it's a real issue faced by many people as they stare down their dreams, goals, and projects. Understanding fear and utilizing various techniques to combat it can work wonders, and that's Ali's project in this chapter.

The third blocker, inertia, is a real productivity-killer, although it can be overcome with some startlingly simple solutions. Starting small, reducing friction (both environmental and emotional), and enlisting additional support are all ways that it can be beaten, and again, we'll get into all of that below.

Sustain

The final section of the book focuses on maintaining not just productivity over the long term, but also alignment and purpose, both critical components of a life well-lived. It addresses three different types of burnout, and Ali delivers several high-impact strategies to deal with each and every one of them.

I devote an entire section to the three types of burnout below, so I won't go into too much detail here. But they are overexertion burnout, which occurs when you push yourself too hard for too long, depletion burnout, where your energy reserves remain low for long periods of time without devoting enough time to recovery, and misalignment burnout - possibly the worst of all - which occurs when your daily actions aren't aligned with your core values.

Taken together, here you have an incredible array of practical, workable strategies - most of which you can implement immediately to improve the quality of your life from Day One. You'll probably start to notice positive changes before you even finish reading the book!

Personally, I consider a book worth reading if I come away with even just one life-changing idea, and Feel-Good Productivity is packed with a ton of them. I took pages and pages (and pages) of excellent notes, which I'm sharing with you here in this breakdown, along with a selection of Key Ideas, including the five-minute rule, the tension between "goals" and "systems," time-blocking, environmental engineering, and many more.

It's all backed by solid scientific research, as I've said, including something known as the "broaden-and-build" theory, according to which positive emotions broaden our perception and build up our cognitive resources in all kinds of beneficial ways.

What happens when we prioritize positive emotions in our life and work is that we put into motion this virtuous cycle of productivity, whereby feeling good causes us to become more energized, which allows us to become more productive, which leads us to accomplishing what we set out to do and feeling great about that, at which point the cycle repeats and we find ourselves steadily constructing a life of meaning, purpose, fun, and excitement that is literally a joy to live. In that way, we build a life for ourselves, instead of merely existing.

Simply put: “Success doesn’t lead to feeling good. Feeling good leads to success.”

#1: You've Got It All Backwards!

This is the fundamental idea from which everything else in this book flows. We've become so accustomed to believing that reaching success is a seemingly endless slog, achieved only through drudgery and discipline, that we've lost sight of the fact that the journey toward success can actually feel good. It even should feel good, especially if we want to get there faster.

There's another book Ali references called The Happiness Track, by Emma Seppala, one I read back in 2018 and that supports this idea. She writes that it’s not necessary to sacrifice happiness in the short term in order to gain it in the long term, and that positive mental states help you reason more effectively, learn faster, and think more creatively.

This coheres with the Broaden-and-Build Theory, first developed by Barbara Frederickson and also explained by Ali in Feel-Good Productivity, which suggests that positive emotions like joy, love, and curiosity expand our thinking and behavior, encouraging creativity, exploration, and connection.

Over time, these positive emotions create upward spirals, "virtuous cycles" in other words, where the resources we build lead to even more opportunities for positive experiences and success, in a process that just keeps getting better and better.

This being the way life works is great news for us, because we don't need to wait to feel good. We can feel that way now, knowing that it'll even help us achieve the success we're looking for in the future. You feel good first, then you succeed, then you feel even better because you're succeeding, which leads you onward and upward to help you achieve even more. The winners keep winning, and the good times don't have to end.

#2: What to Say When You Talk to Yourself

An astounding number of the key ideas in Feel-Good Productivity apply to so much more than just "getting stuff done." Personally, I view a person's self-talk - and really, their entire relationship to themselves - as one of the most critical areas of life to get right, and that's why I hammer on the following idea so consistently.

One of the most important things in life is that you must never, ever, ever lie to yourself or let yourself down. You must speak the truth to yourself at all times, you must support yourself at all times, and you must uphold the promises you make to yourself at all times. Because the truth of the matter is that regardless of who's around, there is always at least one person listening to everything you say and watching everything you do. That person is you, and that's a tremendous responsibility.

Research suggests that most people have up to 70,000 thoughts each day. However, most of these are fleeting impressions, with the periods of focused mental activity on a single idea or concept before the brain shifts to a new one being closer to 6,200. Going with the number 70,000, which can include self-talk and rumination, if the number of positive thoughts outnumber the negative ones even just 35,001 to 34,999, that means you're winning the battle for your mind.

If you can get the percentage of positive thoughts going through your mind up to 51%, then 52%, then 55%, then 60%...you're well on the way to shifting your entire worldview, your entire orientation to life itself, and that's a contest you MUST win each and every day.

I've always felt very strongly about this, and it pains me greatly when I see and hear people berating themselves for their perceived inadequacies, shortcomings, or failures. Acknowledging them is healthy and necessary, but dwelling on them is definitely not.

You have to - and I mean have to, have to - be on your own side; you have to treat yourself like a really good friend would, like someone you wanted to see happy and healthy and successful. That begins with how you talk to yourself and what kinds of thoughts you let slip past your mental defenses.

Protect the border of your consciousness at all costs. Defend your mind from negative intruders. Never break a promise to yourself, never let yourself down, and always keep moving forward. No matter what.

#3: Accumulating Reference Experiences

Ali refers to these as "vicarious mastery experiences," and they're a powerful tool for personal transformation. What you're doing here, essentially, is stacking up evidence that the success you seek is possible. You'll know it's possible because you're seeing other people doing it, and eventually, you'll have a solid database of "reference experiences" you can draw on from your own experience.

It was Tony Robbins who first introduced me to the idea of reference experiences, and how they work in my own life is that, whenever I'm faced with a new challenge or difficulty, I can look back on all the times I've succeeded at something, and draw strength from that - the very strength I need to succeed in the current moment.

I've found that the original reference experiences don't even have to be from the same field as the area I'm using them to succeed in! For example, whenever I have to give a speech or presentation in public, I can look back on the time when I won my last heavyweight boxing fight by unanimous decision, in front of hundreds of people as the main event of the evening.

That overwhelmingly positive experience is lodged forever in my consciousness, supported by the sights, sounds, and emotions I've associated with that event. I can then borrow that confidence, vitality, and life-force to help me blast through my current challenge.

There are other key moments in my life that I'll look back on during certain situations, but the point is that you've experienced success before too, and you can go back there anytime you want, even if only in your mind.

You've been there before, and so have other people. Success is possible for us as human beings, and if you haven't achieved it yourself, there's likely someone else out there who has. All you have to do is borrow confidence and capability from them. All you need is an opening: a fleeting, flickering thought that occurs in your mind as you're watching them succeed that quietly says, "I could do that."

#4: Beginning with the End in Mind

In Stephen R. Covey's classic book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Habit #2 is to "Begin with the End in Mind." This involves working backward from a desired result and asking, "How did I end up here? What steps did I take? How do I move forward from where I am right now?"

Ali Abdaal builds on this idea by bringing in the concept of "commander's intent," which is basically the practice of explaining to soldiers on the ground the ultimate purpose of the operation, so that they keep the end in mind, while remaining flexible on the details of how they get there.

For example, your goal might be to become a full-time creator like Ali and I. There are a number of ways to do this, and obviously they all involve increasing your monthly revenue. You can start a newsletter, a YouTube channel, a paid mastermind, etc. There are literally dozens of monetization options, but whichever one(s) you choose are going to serve the ultimate purpose of going full-time with your creative passions. That's your commander's intent.

Even though your ultimate goal is to become a full-time creator, you can find yourself getting so caught up in scripting videos and organizing your shot lists and editing vlogs you forget that you're not even enjoying making YouTube videos! In that case, you'd likely be much more fulfilled as a text-based creator writing a paid newsletter or something, but you've forgotten to ask the commander's intent question, so you end up trying to force yourself to be productive on YouTube.

When you're up to your neck in alligators, it's easy to forget that your original purpose was to drain the swamp, but you can always get back on track by asking yourself great questions. "What is the purpose behind this?" is one of them. It reveals that even though methods and tactics can and will change, a strategy will carry you through to the end.

#5: Getting to Mount Olympus

Socrates was widely recognized as being the wisest man in Ancient Greece (because, he said, he knew that he knew nothing), and one of my favorite stories about him is when someone asked him how to get to Mount Olympus.

Mount Olympus being the home of the gods, you could say that the questioner wanted to know how to become more godlike, more worthy of entrance to a place of such grandeur and excellence. Socrates being Socrates, he answered that the best way to get there was to make sure every step you take is in that direction!

I love that answer, because it points to how every action we take in life is either a +1 or a -1, something that's taking us closer to our goals, or further away from them. Whenever we choose a +1 action, such as making a sales call, publishing a YouTube video, applying to that job, etc., we're doing something positive for ourselves that will take us that much closer to our own version of Mount Olympus.

What Ali's getting at in the quote above is how we need to gently remind ourselves over and over again each day why we're doing this particular thing and not some other thing. We have to keep this greater purpose in mind at all times, constantly asking ourselves, "Is this taking me to Mount Olympus or not?"

Speaking for myself, on my best days, I measure every single thing I'm doing against the importance of my ultimate goal. I ask myself, "Is this more important than my goal?" Usually, the answer is no. So ask yourself, "Will this get me closer to Mount Olympus? Will this contribute to the accomplishment of my highest and grandest aspirations? Is this a +1 or a -1?"

#6: N-I-C-E Goals

#7: Goals vs. Systems

There's another book recommendation I have for you, and it's How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, by Scott Adams. The author is the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, and while I wouldn't necessarily suggest that it's a book you need to rush out and buy right now, Adams did open my eyes to the vital importance of systems.

For the purposes of our discussion here, I'll define a "system" as any collection of processes, routines, or structures in place designed to produce consistent results over time. Most importantly, while you can never "achieve" a system, per se, you can successfully implement a system every single day. This is different than having a goal, where, by definition, you've "failed" every single day your goal hasn't been achieved yet. This is no way to live!

For example, losing 10lbs is a goal. Eating nutritious food every day and working out at the gym 3x per week is a system. Gaining 10,000 YouTube subscribers is a goal. Publishing three videos per week, doing competitor research, and scripting out your videos ahead of time is a system.

Systems will bring you closer to your goal every day (even if your progress isn't immediately obvious), whereas goals too often remain simply wishes. With systems, you're successful every day that you run the system, making you feel good in the process, and giving you confidence that you're the kind of person who's capable of taking consistent action without giving up, all while making it more likely that you'll reach your goal sooner rather than later.

#8: Going Fast vs. Going Far

There's an African proverb I quite like which states that, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

In the context of finding support for our projects and goals by joining up with accountability partners, we trade some freedom and autonomy ("I can just go to the gym whenever I want") for increased support ("I'll be at your place at 5PM so we can make sure we both go to the gym today"), but in the end, we can in fact go much further by going together.

One of the researchers Ali Abdaal credits in the book, Albert Bandura, goes on to state that the benefits to us individually can go even deeper:

This applies to so much more than sticking to a fitness regimen. Being part of a study group that meets regularly can show you that there are people out there willing and able to devote large amounts of time, effort, and focus to achieve their academic goals - and that you're just as capable as they are.

Sure, you can study at "convenient" times without being a member of a study group. You can go to the gym "whenever you feel like it" if you don't have a workout partner. But without support, it's also easier not to go, not to study, and you can find yourself going nowhere fast.

#9: Environmental Engineering

This is perhaps one of the most important ideas in the entire book, and I don't say that lightly. Everything in your environment is subtly (and not-so-subtly) influencing you all the time, and identifying the ways in which this is the case is one of the highest-leverage activities you can explore.

For our purposes, "environment" encompasses everything from the people you spend time with, the shows you watch, the books you read, the music you listen to, the neighborhood you live in, etc. It's everything, and there's nothing within your environment that doesn't have an effect on you, for better or worse.

It's almost like there's a kind of "cultural gravity" either lifting you up or pulling you down. Certain elevating influences - like great books and great friends - are bringing out the best in you, and other, more damaging influences - the news, gossip, doomscrolling on TikTok - are just bringing you down. They're certainly not bringing you any benefit, so why do they remain in your life? I mean, you're trying to fly with the eagles, but you're down there scratching with the turkeys!

The quote above refers to engineering your environment to make your habits easier or harder to engage in (and more on that later), but environmental engineering in general is one of the most important factors in whether you succeed or fail - in whether you live a productive life (in every sense of that term). Again, I don't say that lightly.

So take intentional action to set up your life in a way that's going to serve you! In a way that's going to support your highest aims! Yes, remove distractions. That's a massive part of it. But it goes deeper than that. It's about removing everything from your mental, physical, and social environments that leave you feeling apathetic and uninspired, and that don't serve a productive purpose.

#10: Think Like a Productivity Scientist

This is one of the most refreshing approaches to productivity (to life!) that I've seen in a while, and it involves seeing everything as an experiment, not simply in black/white, pass/fail terms.

The slightly imperfect productivity system that you actually use is always going to be superior to the completely and totally perfectly optimized productivity system you don't use, and every system will evolve over time. It's a process of constant iteration, and I would never have developed the productivity system I have now if I had tried to set up everything perfectly right from the very beginning.

Each addition and improvement to your own productivity system is going to be an iteration of what came before, and every "failure" is really just a data point directing you toward what might work, and what you might want to try next. No failure is a total failure, either. You can virtually always take something from an experiment that "failed" and use it in your next iteration or your next experiment.

I'd also add that you should record what works and what doesn't work so that you know what to improve on and what to ditch completely. Every scientist worthy of the name records the results of their experiments, and doing so is absolutely critical if you want to extract maximum value from every attempt.

#11: The Best Way to Learn Anything

The best way to learn something ourselves is to teach it to someone else. It's a form of "learning through doing" called the Protege Effect, whereby we strengthen our own understanding of a subject in the process of passing it on to others.

Before you can successfully transmit your knowledge to someone else, you have to make sure that you understand it yourself, which naturally occurs when you're forced to express that information in a way that others will be able to digest.

In the same way that writing can clarify to yourself what you actually think, teaching someone else clarifies what you actually know. And if, as it usually happens, your understanding is partially incomplete in some critical areas, awareness of those areas surfaces when you try to teach someone what you know and can't quite do it.

There's another great book I can recommend if you want to take your studying and reading comprehension skills to the next level, and you can access my complete breakdown of that book here.

#12: Gurus vs. Guides

At this point, you'd never go to Bill Gates and ask him to teach you how to build a website - he's simply too advanced. When he was just starting out in his career, sure, I mean he built plenty of websites, knew how to code, etc. Nowadays, however, you're much better off seeking guidance from someone just a few steps ahead of you, not someone who's miles ahead of you like he is.

Abdaal makes an important point above when he points out that you can be perfectly well-suited to teach someone else, regardless of whether you're an expert or not. In fact, it may be better that you're not an expert, because they suffer from something called the "curse of knowledge," which means that they tend to forget what it felt like to be a beginner. They forget what it's like not to know.

So instead of being a "guru" that knows everything, can dictate the correct path forward at all times, etc., you'd step into the role of a guide, someone who's traveling the path of knowledge with them; someone who's slightly further ahead, sure, and able to "see around a few corners" that they simply couldn't at this stage, but not some infallible expert who could never be questioned.

For example, in my private community, I take on the role of a guide when it comes to helping educational content creators attract attention, monetize their knowledge, and go full-time pursuing their creative passions. I don't pretend to have all the answers. I'm a guide: always testing, experimenting, and assisting - never "commanding" the group members to take my word as law.

What this all means for you is that to teach someone else, you don't need to be some world-class expert, and you certainly don't need a bunch of letters after your name. What you do need, however, is the intellectual humility to become a guide, and the desire to become an expert - or at least to improve and level up your skills over time. As long as you never stop learning, you'll never stop being able to teach.

#13: Implementation Intentions

Implementation intentions are your secret weapon in the ongoing fight again procrastination. They can be explained simply and easily, and in a basic sense they involve specifying exactly when, where, and under what circumstances a desired action is going to take place. Expressed logically, you could say:

For example, "If it's Wednesday morning and my alarm goes off, then it's time to do an hour of deep work on my thesis." Or, "If it's 10PM, then I'm going to put my phone in the other room and read a physical book before falling asleep." There are innumerable examples you could give of implementation intentions, but they all serve to take the guesswork and "bargaining" out of your decision-making.

Much of the value of implementation intentions comes from this reduction of "decision fatigue." The cognitive load of having to remember all these habits and routines is reduced, and, at the allotted time, you simply get down to work:

#14: Discipline Equals Freedom

I've written about the above idea in this book breakdown, but if you find yourself resistant to the idea of adhering to a strict schedule, I'd invite you to recognize that doing so is not so much a restriction of your freedom, as it is the gateway to greater freedom. I'll briefly restate the basic argument here.

Following a workout and meal plan may look like you're making a massive sacrifice - and you are making a sacrifice - but it's one that offers you greater freedom in the future. By working out today, eating healthy foods today, and getting a great night's sleep tonight, you're giving yourself the freedom of staying healthy and active well into old age, of having enough energy to play with your grandchildren for hours without getting tired, etc.

It's exactly the same with entering your commitments into the calendar and sticking to them. You're "sacrificing" some of the false freedom you'd gain by being able to make last-minute changes in how you spend your time, but like Ali says, you're gaining the real freedom to build a life around your highest priorities.

#15: Newton's First Law of Productivity

Isaac Newton could easily have been a productivity scientist, but luckily for all of us here in the 21st century, he chose to study physics instead! Here, read this, from Ali in Feel-Good Productivity:

I'm not going to regurgitate the points already made by Ali in the quotes above, but in my own life and work, I've proven the truth of this idea over and over again. Getting started really is the hardest part. The easiest thing in the world is to keep doing what you're doing now, whether that's working, playing, or wasting time.

The key really is to just get started, and before too long - before you know it, even - you'll act your way into feeling like it. More on this in the next Key Idea, but once you actually get started, you'll usually see that sticking with it is the easiest thing in the world. Once caught in the task's "gravity," virtually all you can do is keep going.

#16: The Five-Minute Rule

The five-minute rule is one of my go-to productivity tactics and I use it almost literally every single day of my life. It's that effective. Starting really is the hardest part, like I said above, and once you blow past that initial inertia, there's not much you can't continue doing for longer.

In my own case, what I used to do when it comes to working out (and I still would do this if I needed to, although nowadays it rarely comes up) is tell myself that the only thing I had to do was put my gym clothes on, or pack them, etc. That's literally it. If I did that, I wouldn't have to take the next step. But of course I usually did take the next step.

Once I had my gym clothes on, I told myself that the only thing I had to do was get in the car. I didn't have to drive anywhere - I didn't even have to start the car! All I had to do was get in. Then, once I was in the car, I'd tell myself that the only thing I had to do was drive to the gym. I didn't even have to go inside! Just drive to the gym, and sit in the parking lot if I wanted to. You can probably sense where this is going...

By the end of it, through a series of miniscule mini-victories, I found myself in the gym changing room, with my workout clothes on, headphones in, basically ready to go. Now, importantly, I still told myself that I could go home if I really wanted to. And I meant it! Ali's right when he says that you do actually have to allow yourself to stop at any time. Trying to "trick" your brain into going ahead with it 100% of the time dilutes the effectiveness of this exercise.

But I've been successful with this tactic about 85-90% of the time when it comes to working out, and probably 80% of the time when it comes to starting a work project that I was procrastinating on. Starting is the hardest part! I'm tellin' ya!

#17: Something vs. Nothing

If you're an overthinker like me, you can probably point to times when you've had so much to do, when your to-do list was sooo long, that you simply didn't know where to start. My recommendation? Ali's recommendation? Start anywhere!

Do something, rather than nothing. You can course correct along the way. If you get started (or even finish) and realize that it wasn't actually your highest priority, that's fine. You'll know for next time. But you will have completed something. You will have stacked up undeniable evidence that you are a finisher - evidence that you mean business and that you get stuff done.

#18: What Gets Measured Gets Managed

I'm a big believer in the benefits of tracking your key metrics (in various areas of life), but it can easily become a form of procrastination itself. I'm a list-maker by nature, and I have lists for everything. But so many times I'll make up a to-do list, then divide it into priorities, then assign an estimated time of completion to each item, etc., only to realize that I haven't actually started on any of the tasks!

So tracking is one of those things that can be exceptionally valuable, but it can also be a big trap. You don't want to spend hours organizing your reading list, or making up a beautiful table of your word count by day and by month, etc...and then not do any reading or writing!

Ali's right though: tracking your progress can be incredibly motivating, and that's one reason why I've been keeping track of every book I've read since 2014. I'm up over 1,300+ books now at the time of writing, and every time I add a new book to the list I experience a fresh surge of motivation to head back to my library, pick up the next one, and dive right in. I do the same thing in a multitude of different areas, such as my finances, fitness, and more.

There are additional benefits too. Tracking your progress (and your key metrics) lets you see where you're doing well, and where you might need to make a few adjustments. It'll help you see what's working and what's not, and it'll also remind you to celebrate your victories as you keep stacking up wins and writing them down. Not everybody is motivated in the same way, of course, and if you find it demotivating to do things like track the number of books you've read - don't do it!

The last thing I'll mention here is that you can (and perhaps should) track both process and outcome goals. The difference is that the process goals are ones you can control, and the outcome goals are ones that you can only influence.

For example, a process goal is to write 1,000 words per day, or publish a YouTube video per week, etc. An outcome goal would be to hit the NYT bestseller list, reach 1,000,000 YouTube subscribers, etc.

Some of my own process goals are to publish a certain number of posts on social media, publish a certain number of newsletters per week, and connect with a certain number of my engaged leads each day. My outcome goals include things like reach specific follower counts, subscriber counts, number of sales, etc. One I can control, and the other I can only influence, but I make sure to track both.

#19: Your Three MITs

The original root word priority was meant to signify only one important thing. It comes from the Latin, prioritas, meaning "first in rank" or "precedence." Interestingly enough, even though it first appeared in English in the 1400s, the plural form, priorities only started showing up in common usage in the 1900s!

Unsurprisingly, it most often showed up in business contexts, when people basically forgot the original meaning and started acting as though they could have multiple "most important things" at once, conveniently ignoring the literal impossibility of this being true!

Latin root words might bore you to death, but the philosophy major in me feels the need to bring them up because, by definition, you can only have one priority at a time. If you must - as in, absolutely have to - go against hundreds of years of English usage and eons of sage wisdom, I'd recommend setting a maximum of three priorities each day. These are your MITs, or your "Most Important Tasks."

I would do this the night before, but doing it in the morning works too. Setting your priority (uggh, or priorities) the night before allows your subconscious mind to get to work making sense of them while you sleep, and many times you'll wake up with fresh insights on how best to attack them. Thomas Edison is widely quoted as saying that you should never go to bed without giving an instruction to your subconscious mind, and setting your MITs the night before counts in this regard.

You decide on your MITs by looking at where you want to be in a year's time and working backwards from there. For example, if you want to finish writing a book in a year's time, your six-month goal could be to have a first draft written, your 3-month goal could be to have a detailed plot outline prepared, and your 1-month goal could be to have all of your initial research completed.

Knowing that this is where you want to be a month from now, your daily MITs could be selecting 3 people you wish to interview for your book, 10 books on the subject you wish to read, and a rough outline of various character sketches or plot points. Then tomorrow, your MITs could be getting each person's contact information, buying or borrowing each book, and sitting down for an hour to begin mapping things out. Repeat until you've hit your Month One goal, and keep repeating until the entire project is completed.

I’ve been taking detailed notes from every single book I’ve ever read since 2014, and they’re all here on my Patreon for just $1.

They’re updated monthly (sometimes twice a month), and by supporting me on Patreon you’ll also be able to keep up with everything I’m reading and learning, and get my best notes, takeaways, and summaries from every book that I finish.

More Patreon rewards are available as well, like being mentioned by name in all my YouTube videos, Patron-only discounts, special offers, and more.

Click here for instant access to all of my book notes for just $1!