先烧掉 90% 的燃料，再让自律变成你是谁

00:00You probably want to change your life. That's probably why you clicked on this video. But for some reason, you just can't do it. You're tired of your physique or how your mind has not been your friend lately or how you have to stress over not being able to pay the bills each month or how you're going to end up alone or just whatever it is. And so you finally gain the motivation to start going to the gym or to start the business or to start talking to more people. You know the drill. You just get motivated. And then you fast forward two to four weeks and you find yourself in the exact same position that you were in before. And you don't even know how it happened. You just ended up back in your

00:37old life and it looks the exact same. You're not going to the gym anymore. You stopped working on the business. You just went back to your old habits. And this probably isn't the first time. You lock in, then you fall off, then you lock in again, then you fall off and 10 years go by. For some people, their entire lives go by without breaking the habit of being your worst self. It sucks. It's like you never even tried to change because, well, frankly, you didn't. You didn't actually try. So what do you do? Well, if you look at the top athletes or startup founders, visionaries, and strategists who seem to work 16 hours a day without breaking a sweat, do you think that they struggle to do that or is that what they want to

01:16do? Is it actually hard for a successful person to go to bed at the right time, to eat the right foods, to go to the gym every day, to work on their business like it's a normal thing to do? No, it's not hard for them at all. It's actually extremely hard for them to do what the average person does. It's honestly a living hell for them to sense that they're devolving into a mediocre life. Why? Because that's who they are. So how do we replicate this in our own life? How do we become someone where doing the things we want to do to achieve our version of success is just as normal to us as brushing our teeth, if you brush your teeth. Well, what you have to do is

01:53you have to become so disgusted with where you are that you have no option but to win. Now, I've talked about this many times before, but I recently watched a video from Call Rom, and he had this incredible analogy. And it's that rockets use 85% to 90% of their total mass as fuel during launch and acceleration, whereas coasting requires zero fuel once orbital or escape velocity is reached. So, in other words, what gets you started isn't what keeps you going. And in other other words, you need a very potent source of fuel. You need that extreme motivation to get started, but that's not what creates sustainable change. You need to use that launch fuel to, of course, get started, get over the hump of getting started,

02:37but then create the habits, routines, systems, so it just becomes who you are. And then it doesn't take that motivation or that super potent fuel to maintain those results or reach success. So, it's counterintuitive, as most of life's truths are, but if you want sustainable change in your life, you have to brute force your way into it. And that's only stage one, the launch fuel, the motivation, the pain, a win, a loss, or just a burst of willpower, something that launches you into an intense period of change. And this can be anything. I think the classic example is when a dude goes through a breakup and then decides to start going to the gym, and then he becomes the jacked gym bro. Or how a college student gets fed up with being broke and just does everything in his

03:18power to make his side hustle or his side business a success. I have experienced both of those things. That's kind of why I love going to the gym and I love health and fitness today, and it's why I have my businesses today. That's not the fuel that I run on right now, but it's what got me started and it worked. There's also been many times in my life where I use something that I like to call tactical stress. As an example, I move into an apartment I can't afford, so I'm forced to make my business successful enough to afford it, or I go homeless, as one example. I wouldn't go homeless, of course, but I believed I would have, and that provided

03:52me with the fuel to actually make it work. And I've done this multiple times, and I personally think it's the single greatest business growth hack that there is, or financial growth hack. And of course, that sounds extreme because it is. It's not for everyone, but those who believe in themselves are nodding as they're watching this video. Another example is that about 5 years ago, I would go to music festivals, and I would drink, and I would party, and I would stay out late, and I would do this every 2 months or so because that's how far the music festivals were spaced out, and I would treat it as a form of a glitch in my over-optimized lifestyle because I

04:28was the very I was the productivity dude. I went to bed at a specific time, I woke up at a specific time, I ate a very strict diet. Again, I said health and fitness is one of my values, even though this contradicts it, but I did enjoy that throwing that little bit of chaos into my optimized routine. And it acted as a nice little shock to the system because I would wake up the next morning, and I would feel absolutely terrible. Obviously. But what would happen is I would feel my business and my health progress slipping, and those goals are values of mine. I They're really important to me. They are a part of my identity, and so it felt like a

05:02part of me was dying. And then I would have this really potent fuel source for the next month, 2 months to just keep going. And that's just what allowed me to continue to hit new highs in business. And so that leads to the second most potent fuel source that I found, which is quickly developing a strong disgust for the life that I do not want to live. It's like an anti-vision, something that I can hold in my mind and compare my current actions to. And I feel like that's something that almost everyone can take advantage of or use as their initial form of launch fuel. And usually, you have to be pretty close to rock bottom in order to make this realization

05:38because you reach this point where you're like, "Man, I've been stuck in this position for so long. I don't like this part of my life, this part of my life, this part of my life. And some people would tell you to just accept it and retreat into your mind and learn how to reframe or change your perspective to view it in a more positive light, and that's a great skill to develop. But it also does not change the reality of your life. You can have both, and I would argue that both are better. It's the way of water and the way of fire. It's becoming a spiritual warrior, so to say. So, for the entirety of this week, what I want you to do is this. I want you to observe society and see where most people end up. It's really not pretty.

06:17They usually end up broke, overweight, married to someone they grow to hate, and drowning in financial responsibilities that take advantage of their situation, making it nearly impossible to get out. That is the default end state of the average person's life. So, if thinking about that and really contemplating it for a week doesn't create this fire in your belly to actually get up and pursue your goals, then I don't know what will. You're going to have to find your own source of launch fuel. What it could be is my version of tactical stress. You put yourself in a do or die situation. You move into the apartment you can't afford, and then you're under this immense amount of financial stress, and you can't do what you've been currently doing for the entirety of your life in order to solve that problem, because

07:00it's not providing you with the financial security that you need. So, you need to do something different. You need to be creative. You need to solve problems. And you probably won't see those opportunities if you're just operating from your current perspective. So, you need this vast change in everything. So, now we have the launch fuel. How do we actually turn it into something sustainable, so it's just easy? This discipline is easy. And the idea here is that you aren't disciplined because you aren't the person who doesn't view it as discipline. That sounds confusing. You'll understand it in a second, but I want to start with this quote from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

07:35At this point in our history, it should be possible for an individual to build a self that is not simply the outcome of biological drives and cultural habits, but a conscious personal creation. In other words, if you do not create your own life using this process, it will be created for you. If you don't have a routine, you will be assigned one. If you don't have a goal, you will be assigned one. If you don't have a vision, you will be assigned one. So on and so forth. You have to create yourself and your life. And now I'm begging you to understand this concept, that discipline is a feature of identity. Discipline is a part of who you are. Because do you think that Elon

08:11Musk lies around in bed when he wakes up dreading the day ahead? Do you think he hits snooze five times dreaming of not having to go to work? Do you think Arnold Schwarzenegger had to trick himself into eating healthy and training twice a day? Do you think that high performers of this caliber consider it hard in your sense of the word to do hard things, or do they love it? It's just what they do. It's automatic. Now, personally, if I am laser focused on a goal, that's really what matters here. Like I'm focused on cutting weight while hitting my macro targets and getting my lifts in, and that's all that matters to me, which is right now in my life. A cheat meal at McDonald's just doesn't sound appetizing at all. It sounds

08:51disgusting. And if I wasn't laser focused on this goal, if I was laser focused on another one, so my health and fitness goals took a backseat. They're still important to me, but not as important, then the idea of McDonald's would kind of shift along with that. Depending on the situation, if it's been a year since I've had McDonald's, and it's a one-time thing, then yeah, I would consider it at least. But right now at this point in my life, when laser focused on a goal, it's just disgusting. It's not even an option. You would have to pry me from my chair, throw me in the car, tie me up, and drive me to a remote location in order to get me to sniff a double quarter pounder with cheese. In

09:28other words, it would take an immense amount of discipline for me to eat mediocre food. And that sounds pretentious. I'm aware of that. I'm aware of how it sounds, but it's going to be far easier for me to drop 10 to 20 to 30 lb. I don't need to drop 30 lb. 10 to 20 lb than it is for the person who just can't stop thinking of the next time that they get to drown in grease. They're on their diet, but that's not who they are. That's not who they even want to be cuz their mind isn't aligned with that. They can't wait until they can go back to their old self. And eventually, they snap and they can't stick to the goal. And some people just can't fathom this. It just doesn't click for them. And so what they'll say to you is, "Oh, you just need to lighten up.

10:09You need to have fun. You need to live a little bit." As a defense mechanism for protecting their identity. Because what you're doing is exposing their lack of values for something good and positive in their life. But what they do not understand is that I am having more fun than I would be if I were going with you to spend my entire daily caloric allowance in 15 minutes just to go into a food coma and lay around for the rest of the day. That doesn't sound fun. The same thing goes for when I'm super focused on business. Yeah, sure. I'm at my desk for way too long and my health is dwindling at that point, but your version of fun is not my version of fun

10:48at that point in time. Because it is one of the greatest feelings in the world to be in pursuit of your potential with little to no gap between who you are and who you want to be. You live in the flow state of video game taking on a string of challenging quests you choose to accept and being rewarded amply for doing so. Maybe not in the form of money, but insight, experience, and direct feedback from reality. But the thing is is that identity change is just so abstract. You can't see your identity. It's not like business where you know exactly what you're doing wrong because you have reality as feedback. In other words, if you aren't making money or you aren't increasing revenue or you

11:25aren't moving toward your business goals, then you're doing something wrong and you need to experiment and you need to try new things until you move the needle and then you do more of that thing. If you aren't making any money from your business, then reality is telling you that you're doing something wrong. And if you are making money, a certain amount of money, then reality is telling you that you're exactly where you should be based on the actions that you're doing. How do we take the dirty launch fuel and turn it into a sustainable system that eventually just becomes who I am. So I want you to give me a few minutes and I'll show you how to become someone entirely new. And a

11:59James Clear quote comes to mind for this. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results. Now you are the statistical sum of what you repeatedly do and what you do is more than the physical decisions you make. You or your self-image or your identity is the accumulated result of everything that flows through you in both directions, input and output. Input equals everything you're exposed to, every book you read, every post you glance at for a split second, every person you call a friend, every belief your parents and teachers installed before you even had a chance to consent, the news you read to stay informed, the conversations you overhear, the peoples whose lives you watch from a distance. And output equals

12:42everything you produce in the world, your decisions, actions, and work. It's what you do when no one is watching and what you do when everyone is. So that is literally the entire equation. Input shapes the mind that perceives situations and makes decisions. Output shapes the life that presents the next input. It compounds. It's a feedback loop. So to change who we are, we have to change this flow of information. Now for changing your input, the rule is very simple. Curate and protect everything your mind is exposed to on a daily basis. You must immerse yourself in stimuli that matches the person you want to become and starves the person you used to be. The old you must die.

13:23Now for the remainder of this video, some of you may watch it and just think, "Oh, that's basic." or "Oh, I already knew that." But, if you actually knew it, you wouldn't be in this situation, would you? Writing it off as basic is preventing you from seeing how simple all of this is. You are not special and you do not need to do what everyone else does in trying to find some new tactic or new method or novel ways of doing things to change your life. You just need to change it. You need to do what's been proven to work for the entirety of human existence. So, first, you choose your information diet because most people are intellectually obese.

14:00Unfollow, mute, and unsubscribe from anything that lowers your standards or waste your attention. Follow and read the people and ideas that raise it. Your social timeline is an environment just like any other. You live in it and it influences you. On that idea, you have to understand that our phones are so new. It's not something our brains are wired for. In the past, our physical environment is really all that we had and what did we do when there was a threat? We built shelter. We built tools. We did the things that protected us from the threat. And yet, you don't have this. You don't have this house that protects you. You haven't set up the environment so that it actually

14:37contributes to your success. Now, what I personally like to do for this is just curate and read information from idea-dense sources. So, I have the people that I like to follow and what I do is I'll save their Substack articles or books, PDFs, or even YouTube videos to Eden, which is a second brain and a place to capture ideas and import all your highlights. And there is a reader mode in there. So, on my phone, on the mobile app, I'll open the reader mode and then I can read it from there from my reading list. And then I can save my highlights in there and since I'm a content creator, I can then ask the AI chat in Eden to pull highlights and

15:13ideas as I'm writing and or give me content ideas. And there's also the discover feed, which many users have said that they actually scroll on instead of social media now, which just shows top performing ideas according to your filters, which you can save to swipe file boards or chat with to reverse engineer. And if you're a content creator, you understand the immense benefit of that. And we just introduced the store feature, so you can sell digital products and your own AI products. You sell your own knowledge in Eden. So, if you have multiple interests or you plan on ever becoming a creator or you are a creator and you don't want to go into software or e-commerce or other things, you want to sell your knowledge, then Eden is the place to do

15:52so. There's actually a full video on the Eden channel that goes over the store and how to use it and a few ideas that you can use for your first products. So, try out Eden. Now, the second thing to do is to choose the people you surround yourself with because their values, fears, and assumptions about what's normal and possible leak into you even if you think they don't. This is the most difficult part. You can try to bring your friends along with you, but it is extremely difficult to help people who don't want to be helped. Now, the third thing to do is interrogate your mind for beliefs that do not serve you because most of your beliefs about

16:26money, what you deserve in this life, and what's possible to achieve were determined before you could even understand the language you speak. So, if you haven't become aware of these beliefs, you don't understand what I'm saying and beliefs don't come to mind that you've already shed, then it's likely that they haven't been examined and they haven't been changed. And as someone said, some famous person, I'm going to sound stupid for not knowing who said this. Oh, it's Carl Jung. I'm pretty sure. The examined life is not worth living. Or is that like Aristotle? I don't I don't know, sorry. Or actually, it's the unexamined life is not worth living. It's probably something completely different. I'm an idiot. Now, the fourth thing to do is exchange passive for active consumption because the difference between reading

17:0610 posts fast and one book slowly is drastic. I bet you can't even tell me about two of the social posts you read yesterday. But a life-changing YouTube video, podcast, book chapter, or Substack article that is created with care by someone who is passionate about what they do is something that sticks with you and influences you for the better. So, that's the input part, and that's just a daily practice. That's a constant thing. You can't really plan that. Yeah, you can create a reading ritual and implement the nice habits, and you should, but it's really just this constant awareness of what you're putting into your mind that you need to realize when you're not in that state of

17:41awareness and bring yourself back into it over and over again until it's just what you do. So, now we need to make it so easy to succeed, you look stupid if you fail. Now, I forgot to mention something important. This is the second stage of change. The first stage is the launch fuel, that's getting yourself off the ground, that's like 80% of it because, frankly, without that launch fuel, you're probably not going to change your inputs because it's just an ingrained habit. You're going to pick up your phone, and you're going to start scrolling, and then you're going to get lost in it because there isn't this just potent little voice in the back of your head telling you to do better. And so, without that, you won't be able to break

18:18through the atmosphere into orbit and then coast the rest of the way toward your goal, let's say the moon. And so, once you're in orbit, how you coast and what you need to set up before you get into orbit is a sustainable system. Now, your outputs or decisions and actions occur as a four-part feedback loop. It goes environment, signal, behavior, payoff. And this is essentially the habit loop from B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning, which went on to be popularized by Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit and James Clear in Atomic Habits. So, it's cue, response, reward. That's just textbook behavioral psychology, and it works. So, the first step is making the desired output the path of least resistance and the undesired output incredibly inconvenient. The second is creating a trigger or signal that starts the behavior that leads to the desired

19:06output, preferably on a daily basis. The third is reducing success to a minimum recognizable version of the output. So, not a great workout, but just stepping into the gym. And the fourth is the reward, which is something enjoyable delivered right after the behavior every single time until the behavior is the reward itself. So, that's the feedback loop, and now I just want to go over two examples so we can ground it and understand it. And the first, of course, is just going to the gym. I love going to the gym. It's a great thing to do. I think more people should do it. Of course, you get to look good. You get to look jacked. But, if you build muscle

19:40now through resistance training, then in your older years, when you get older, you're not going to be as frail. You're not going to need a cane or a walker so early. You're going to be able to be more active. It's just a good thing to do. And it's very enjoyable. And if you don't create that enjoyment or understand that enjoyment, then it's just going to be a pain to do for the rest of your life. So, here's what we do for going to the gym. First, you curate your inputs. So, you follow two to three sources of inspiration and education, so your feed or social media reminds you of your goal as you make this change. What I like to do, right now, as I'm cutting, is I just find someone that I resonate

20:14with, and I just listen to them on YouTube on my walks, and they give me little tips and tricks that I can try, and it just keeps me in the mindset because I'm taking in that input. And it makes me feel like I'm doing it with that person. And, of course, I learn new things. And in order to do this, you kind of have to unfollow or just not watch or listen or read fitness content that sells insecurity and the acceptance of mediocrity. Then surround yourself with at least one person who already trains because their normal becomes your normal. Then examine the beliefs installed in you about your body and what you're capable of. Then after that, you need to engineer your outputs. So,

20:51your environment. You set your clothes out the night before, remove all junk food from your cabinets, fill it with foods that allow you to hit your caloric intake and macro targets and micronutrients, and study the exercises you're doing in tomorrow's workout so you have clarity and maybe a bit of excitement to try them out. The next thing is signal. So, go at the same time to the gym every day. For me, that time is around 11:00 a.m. And if you're just starting, set an alarm for that time and make the alarm a distinct tone that represents going to the gym. The next thing is behavior. So, show up and only promise yourself that you'll do the minimum, one hard set. Chances are

21:26you'll want to keep going since you're already there. The next thing is reward. So, stop at the local smoothie place or even a gas station to get a protein shake. And this was my reward when I first started because the protein shakes, frankly, are pretty good. And of course, you're going to get the purists who say, "Oh, you don't need the protein powders. You don't need the artificial sweeteners." But compare it to what the person was doing before. Do you really expect someone to just go on to a fully clean diet after not having one at all? The end state of what you are pursuing outweighs any minor damage that is done.

21:56Now, the second example or the second goal is just turning your interests or your writing or your creativity into a business because that's what a lot of my audience wants to do. So, for your inputs, follow the creators you want to model and the thinkers who sharpen your ideas. Starve yourself of everything else. Let your algorithm become a source of inspiration. Read books and long-form content from people who have achieved what you want. They are your mentors. Create a new digital friend group of people who are doing the same thing. You could probably meet them just in the comments of this video. I'm serious. There are so many people that comment who are doing things similar or trying to grow online or have very distinct interests that you could just reply to and be like, "Hey, what's your Instagram? What's your Twitter?" And then DM them there. And you never know

22:43where that's going to go. I met Joey, my business partner, co-founder of Eden, six or seven years ago when we started on Twitter at around like 300 followers. And now he lives across the street from me and we have been building businesses together for 3 years. And we've actually been building a lot of things together for way longer than that. It's just crazy. And you're not going to find that type of person in your everyday routine, especially if you don't even talk to people right now. And then after that, examine your beliefs about money, whether you believe it's difficult to make and whether wealth generation is luck or skill. And then for your

23:16environment, add your idea capture app as a shortcut on your phone, have your writing or scheduling app open so articles, posts, and newsletters write themselves. In other words, eat and you capture ideas to your library, you write inside of documents on boards, and then you schedule content to go out on all social platforms. And then batch your highest priority, highest leverage, and most difficult tasks in the morning. And then signal, this can be your first coffee in the morning at your desk or a specific song to start off the writing session or something like that, but never only relying on inspiration as a signal to create. And then behavior, so post the minimum amount of content necessary. One post a day, one newsletter a week with the minimum

23:56quality. You just need it to go out. You don't need it to be perfect or brilliant. And then the reward. And for me, I just love going on walks. I know that's not really a reward, but I like being outside. So once I finish my two to three main priorities in the morning, then I'll go out on a walk and I look forward to that and it's something that I do every day. For you, it could be something completely different. It could be eating breakfast. I still do that as well. I don't eat in the morning until I get my work done and go on my walk and then I eat. And so I think you get the point. You launch the rocket, you become heavily inspired or heavily disgusted with where your life is. Whichever fuel you thrive on, neither is bad when channeled towards something meaningful.

24:34Do not waste that beautifully potent fuel. Use it to create the system, make the behavior automatic, and eventually it will become just what I do. And speaking of launch fuel, check this out. This is finally almost ready. sander.shop for the waitlist. I know many of you been waiting for this. It's a nootropic, a very potent nootropic, not any of that oh calm feeling nootropic. It's you sit down and you want to work. And we have a great team. We have a genius-level biochemist and formulator for other companies on the team. So, the formula inside of this is incredibly efficacious. And this isn't your average nootropic. You will find that out when you try it. But, we are getting ready

25:15for launch. So, join the waitlist. Again, saunder.shop. And I'm sure I'll have a video that goes over the entire formulation, the science, all of that stuff because it's pretty freaking good. I'm not the type of person who would just throw this random crappy nootropic together and try to sell it to you. I like to think that I have high standards for the things that I promote. You haven't seen any sponsorships or brand deals on this channel. So, that's it. That's how you become disgustingly self-disciplined. You take Saunder. You use Eden. You use the new store feature to sell your knowledge as an AI product or course or a digital download. And you live a sovereign lifestyle. But, no. In

25:50all seriousness, you don't need any of those things unless they appeal to you. But, you create the launch fuel. And then you create the sustainable system. So, with that, I'll see you in the next video. Like, subscribe while you're here. Bye.