How to fix your entire life in 1 day
Youâre probably going to quit your new years resolution. And thatâs okay. Most people do (studies show 80-90% failure rates) because most people donât actually want to change on a deep, internal level. That is, they go about changing their life in the completely wrong way. They create a new years resolution because everyone else does â humans want to impress others more than they want to impress themselves... we create a superficial meaning out of status games â but they donât meet the requirements for true change, which goes a lot deeper than convincing yourself youâre going to be more disciplined or productive this year. Iâm not here to talk down on you. Iâve quit 10 times more goals than Iâve set. I think that should be the case for most people. But the fact that people try to change their lives and utterly fail almost every time holds true. So much so that itâs a meme for the gym to be crowded during January and return back to normal in February. However, as much as I think new years resolutions are stupid, itâs always wise to reflect on the life you hate so you can launch yourself toward something that much better, as we will discuss. Human nature is a b*tch, and the worst feeling is when you make a promise to yourself and canât help but break it. You start to feel helpless, and if you donât know what youâre doing, you may continue the cycle for years on end: always wanting to change, but never being able to. So whether you want to start the business, transform your body, or take the risk toward a more meaningful life without quitting after 2 weeks, I want to share 7 ideas you probably havenât heard before on behavior change, psychology, and productivity so you can do just that in 2026. This will be comprehensive. This isnât one of those letters that you read through and forget about. This is something you will want to bookmark, take notes on, and set aside time to think about. The protocol at the end â to dig deep into your psyche and uncover what you truly want in life â will take about a full day to complete, with effects that last far longer than that. All I ask is that you dedicate your full attention to this. If you get bored skip to the next section and go back to fill in the blanks if you need to. Letâs begin. (I also turned this letter into a video if you would rather watch it) When it comes to New Yearâs resolutions, people only focus on one of the two requirements for success: Changing your actions to make progress toward the goal (least important, second order) Changing who you are so that your behavior naturally follows (most important, first order) Most people set a surface-level goal, hype themselves up to remain disciplined for the first few weeks, then go back to their old ways without much struggle, because they were trying to build a great life on a rotting foundation. If this doesnât make sense, letâs run through an example. Think of somebody successful. It can be a bodybuilder with a great physique, a founder/CEO worth hundreds of millions, or a charismatic dude who can chat up a group without a shred of anxiety entering his mind space. Do you think the bodybuilder has to âgrindâ to eat healthy? Does the CEO have to discipline themselves to show up and lead the team? To you, it may seem like that on the surface, but the truth is that they canât see themselves living any other way. The bodybuilder has to grind to eat unhealthily. The CEO has to force themself to lie in bed past their alarm clock, and they hate every second of it. To some people, my own lifestyle seems a bit extreme and disciplined. To me, itâs natural, and I donât say that to contrast it with any other kind of lifestyle. I simply enjoy living this way. When my mom tells me that I should take a break, go out, and have some fun... I hold my tongue from telling her, âIf I werenât having fun, why would I be doing what Iâm doing?â Do not take this next sentence lightly. If you want a specific outcome in life, you must have the lifestyle that creates that outcome long before you reach it. If someone says they want to lose 30 pounds, I often donât believe them. Not because I donât think they are capable, but because there are too many times when that same person says âthey canât wait until theyâre done losing weight so they can start to enjoy life again.â I hate to break it to you, but if you donât adopt the lifestyle that led to you losing the weight, for life, and find a reason with a higher gravitational pull than the one tying you to your previous ways, then you will go straight back to where you started, and you can unhappily say that you wasted the resource you will never get back: time. When you truly change yourself, all of your habits that donât move the needle toward your goal become disgusting, because you have a deep and profound awareness of what kind of life those actions compound into. You are okay with your current standards because you are not fully aware of what they are or what they lead to. We will discuss how to uncover this, but we need to build up to that. You say you want to change. You say you want to âbecome financially freeâ and âget healthy,â but your actions show otherwise for a reason. And it goes a lot deeper than you think. Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement. â Alfred Adler If you want to change who you are, you must understand how the mind works so that you can start to reprogram it. The first step to understanding the mind is to understand that all behavior is goal-oriented. When you think about it, this is kinda obvious, but when we dig into it, most people donât want to hear it. You take a step forward because you want to reach a certain location. You scratch your nose because you want to make the itch go away. Those ones are clear, but most of the time, your goals are unconscious. You may not realize that when you sit on the couch in the middle of the day, you are trying to burn time before your next responsibility, as one simple example. On an even more unconscious and complex level, you pursue goals that can harm you, but you justify your actions in a way that is socially acceptable and doesnât make you seem like a loser. As an example, if you canât stop procrastinating your work, you may justify it with the fact that you âlack discipline,â but in reality, you are attempting to achieve a goal like you always are. In this case, that goal could be to protect yourself from the judgment that comes from finishing and sharing your work. If you say you want to quit your dead-end job, but stay in it without any real reason, you may start to think you donât have enough courage, or that you were never really a ârisk taker,â but the truth is that you are pursuing the goal of safety, predictability, and an excuse to not look like a failure to everyone else in your life who also works a dead-end job. The lesson here is that real change requires changing your goals. I donât mean setting some surface level goal because the act of doing that serves an unconscious goal that is actually harming you. Thatâs been ran through enough in the productivity space. I mean changing your point of view. Because thatâs what a goal is. A goal is a projection into the future that acts as a lens of perception which allows you to notice information, ideas, and resources that aid in you achieving that goal. Now letâs dig a bit deeper, because if you donât understand this, it only becomes more difficult to get out. The important thing for you to remember is that it does not matter in the least how you got the idea or where it came from. You may never have met a professional hypnotist. You may never have been formally hypnotized. But if you have accepted an idea - from yourself, your teachers, your parents, friends, advertisements, from any other source - and further, if you are firmly convinced that idea is true, it has the same power over you as the hypnotistâs words have over the hypnotized subject. â MaxwellâŠ
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