Modern Creator
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Matthew Larsen · YouTube

The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus

A five-hour-fifty-minute operating manual for four hours of deep work a day, built over twelve years and taught in twenty-two setup steps.

Posted
2 weeks ago
Duration
Format
Tutorial
educational
Views
21.9K
973 likes
Big Idea

The argument in one line.

The constraint on ambitious people is not knowledge or strategy but the inability to execute consistently, and the fix is a physical and digital system that makes four hours of deep work per day the lowest-friction option available.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…
  • A business owner or solo operator who already knows exactly what to do next but keeps failing to sit down and do it for more than twenty minutes at a stretch.
  • Someone who has read the productivity books, watched the clips, and still cannot reproduce a focused day on demand without a deadline or a crisis forcing it.
  • A founder whose working hours exist but are shredded across messages, meetings and reactive tasks, so nothing that actually matters gets a full uninterrupted hour.
  • Anyone who wants a concrete, buildable setup rather than principles: what to print, what to block, what to time, what to record, and in what order.
  • A manager or team lead considering rolling one shared work protocol out to an executive team rather than nagging individuals about output.
SKIP IF…
  • You want quick tactics you can apply this afternoon. This is a one-time setup of roughly one and a half to three hours before day one, plus six hours of watching.
  • You are looking for balance advice. The framing is explicitly competitive, and it treats fewer obligations outside work as an advantage to be engineered.
  • You already reliably produce four or more focused hours a day. Most of the course is spent getting a person from near zero to that baseline.
  • You object to the premise that repetition, tracking and physical proof can change what a person believes about themselves. That premise is load-bearing throughout.
TL;DR

The full version, fast.

Focus, not knowledge or strategy, is the constraint holding back most ambitious people, so the answer is a system rather than more advice. The standard is four completed hours of deep work per day, done as fast as possible inside a protected five-hour window after waking, measured two ways: a timer for quantity and a handheld distraction counter for quality. The setup is twenty-two steps that build one physical and digital environment: blockers on phone and desktop, a three-tab limit, a wall of printed documents you reread between every hour, a sticky note for each completed hour, a crossed-off calendar for each completed day, a Google Form that syncs to a shared spreadsheet, and an accountability group with a leaderboard. Four routines then run the day. Do that, and the evidence you accumulate changes what you believe you are capable of.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 05:17

01 · Cold open and the promise

Credentials, who the course is for, the promise of accomplishing in months what would take years, and why six hours is the honest length.

05:17 – 09:16

02 · Inversion and the constraint

Charlie Munger's inversion and the theory of constraints combine into the thesis: focus is the bottleneck for roughly ninety percent of ambitious people.

09:16 – 18:35

03 · The Peterson lecture

A retelling of the lecture on women in high-paying jobs, the woman who did everything right, and why the interesting question is who stays rather than who leaves.

18:35 – 28:57

04 · The man with the axe

The naturally hyper-industrious archetype and the woman who buys the 45-second microwave. Whether these figures motivate or discourage you is offered as the course's litmus test.

28:57 – 49:06

05 · The 0.1% gap and three design goals

Income, net worth and basketball data showing the gap above the top one percent, then the three criteria the system was built against: 10x improvement, ordinary resources, self-perpetuating.

49:06 – 1:08:50

06 · The system and the four-hour standard

Systems over goals, the success criteria of four deep hours completed as fast as possible, why four and not eight, the role of tracking, and the six thinkers the system borrows from.

1:08:50 – 1:27:34

07 · Theory and the 10X rule

The direction problem and the execution problem, then Grant Cardone's rule applied to a worked example and to the host's own five goals.

1:27:34 – 1:36:35

08 · 10X standards and the magnum opus

Raising the quality you accept from yourself, nonlinear returns on quality using MrBeast's mentee, and choosing one project worth a thousand hours.

1:36:35 – 1:55:20

09 · Self-image, autosuggestion, three levers

Maxwell Maltz on why behaviour returns to identity, Napoleon Hill on repetition, and Alex Hormozi's split of performance into beliefs, character traits and skills across five business stages.

1:55:20 – 2:13:55

10 · Signal, habits, conditioning, momentum

Execution as a trainable skill, Steve Jobs' signal-to-noise ratio via Kevin O'Leary, James Clear's four laws, Pavlovian conditioning, and Newton's first law as the argument for starting.

2:13:55 – 2:41:36

11 · Setup: environment, inputs, calendar

Steps one to three. The work room and workspace, one monitor, the wall behind the desk, the information diet, and blocking the first five hours after waking in a real calendar.

2:41:36 – 3:05:25

12 · Timer, counter, and the blocking layers

Steps four to eight. The 60/10 timer, the handheld distraction counter as a second metric, a three-tab limit, desktop blockers, and four redundant layers on the phone.

3:05:25 – 3:32:51

13 · The wall documents

Steps nine to fourteen. The 10X rule sheet, top five goals, vision board, motivation list, the 1.0 versus 2.0 inventory, and thought habits, each printed twice.

3:32:51 – 4:10:32

14 · Proof, accountability, worry list, war map

Steps fifteen to twenty-two. Sticky notes per hour, a Seinfeld calendar per day, the work form and spreadsheet, a shared accountability group and leaderboard, the worry list, and the war map.

4:10:32 – 4:27:23

15 · The morning routine

Thirty minutes total, most of it stacked on a treadmill: twenty minutes walking, a litre of water, thirty grams of protein, motivational audio, planning all four hours, stretching, sticky note, small reward.

4:27:23 – 4:46:22

16 · Running the deep work hours

Rush the first hour, Monday's anti-worry hour, reset the counter, start the timer, log distractions, write the sticky note, reread five documents, submit the work form, take the reward.

4:46:22 – 5:01:32

17 · Between hours and the night routine

The two-minute between-hours routine at a dedicated spot, a break timer to stop the biggest failure point, then a three to five minute close: clean the desk, record the efficiency ratio, prepare tomorrow, protect sleep.

5:01:32 – 5:20:32

18 · Advanced: more volume

Getting a spouse's buy-in before expanding, stepping four to five to six to eight hours, stacking hours into 120-minute blocks, hiring an executive assistant, and 100-hour sprints on a magnum opus.

5:20:32 – 5:36:16

19 · Advanced: higher quality

Removing personal blockers, diet and body composition, sleep protocol, a two-level exercise plan, upgrading the room and hardware, and measuring useful output alongside hours.

5:36:16 – 5:50:39

20 · Advanced: effectiveness and consistency

Brian Tracy's rule of three, Naval Ravikant's four leverage types, rolling the system out to key employees, public accountability, antifragility, the self-improvement loop, lifestyle design, and the closing recap.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

  • Focus is the primary constraint for roughly ninety percent of ambitious people, so more courses, capital and strategy produce a fraction of their possible return until it is fixed.
  • The real competition does not begin until you are already in the top one percent, because below that nobody is paying enough attention to compete with you.
  • The gap between the top one percent and the top 0.1 percent of US household income is 2.82 million dollars, which is 2.7 times larger than the gap between the bottom one percent and the top one percent.
  • Of 540,704 American boys playing high school basketball, about 1.1 percent reach NCAA Division I and 0.04 percent are drafted to the NBA through that pathway.
  • A 2x goal lets you keep doing the same things slightly better, while a 10x goal makes that impossible and forces you to eliminate almost everything you currently do.
  • Four hours of deep work per day is 28 hours a week and roughly 1,460 hours a year pointed at your most important goals.
  • A day is a success at four completed hours, full stop, so a chaotic afternoon can no longer retroactively make the day a failure.
  • Anything you can measure two ways beats anything you measure one way: the timer counts the hour, the distraction counter grades it.
  • Assigning yourself a focus score out of ten is vibes, but recording that you were distracted fourteen times is a number you cannot argue with.
  • Blocking software will never stop a determined person, and it is not supposed to. It stops the mindless opening that happens with no decision behind it.
  • Stack four independent blocking layers and the twenty seconds each takes to defeat adds up to ten minutes, at which point the brain stops craving the thing entirely.
  • Two monitors do not double output, they split attention. One monitor with a split screen does the same job without the cost.
  • A tab limit of three forces a decision every time you want a fourth, because opening it means closing something you already judged necessary.
  • You are limited by your weakest of three categories: beliefs, character traits and skills. Ten out of ten beliefs and skills still cap out at a two if the traits are a two.
  • The combination of beliefs, traits and skills that got you to your current level is usually not the combination that gets you to the next one.
  • Repeating that you are hardworking while doing nothing is not autosuggestion, it is delusion. Repetition only works when actions supply the evidence.
  • Steve Jobs reportedly ran an 80/20 signal-to-noise ratio by naming three to five things that had to be finished in the next eighteen waking hours.
  • Focused work on the wrong tasks is still the wrong tasks, so four hours at fifty percent signal is effectively two hours.
  • According to MrBeast, a ten percent better video earns four times the views, because clicks and retention compound on each other.
  • One creator went from 4.6 million views and 24,000 dollars a month to 45 million views and 400,000 dollars a month by uploading fewer, better videos.
  • The largest single point of failure in the whole system is the break between hours, because forty-five minutes of screwing around pushes a five-hour block into the afternoon.
  • Handling every nagging unresolved worry in one dedicated Monday morning hour removes months of accumulated background stress in a single sitting.
  • Brian Tracy's rule of three holds that three activities produce roughly ninety percent of your weekly value, so weekend hours spent documenting and delegating the rest compound permanently.
  • An antifragile version of the system gets stronger from disruption, because rebuilding your wall in a hotel room is itself evidence of the person you claim to be.
Takeaway

Focus is a constraint, and constraints get engineered away.

THE OPERATING SYSTEM

Nothing here is a tip. The whole argument is that a person who cannot execute consistently needs a built environment, a hard definition of a successful day, and physical evidence accumulating where they can see it.

02Inversion and the constraint
  • Ask what is currently preventing the result instead of what to add, because adding more knowledge and strategy returns almost nothing while the real bottleneck stays in place.
  • For most ambitious people the bottleneck is not the plan but the inability to consistently execute it, which no additional course, tool or business model will remove.
03The Peterson lecture
  • The people at the top are not there because of a secret. They are willing to work longer, respond faster and absorb more responsibility than anyone else in the field.
04The man with the axe
  • Whether the description of a naturally hyper-industrious competitor motivates you or discourages you is a fair test of whether a system like this is worth your time.
05The 0.1% gap and three design goals
  • Serious competition begins only once you are already in the top one percent, because below that level nobody is watching closely enough to compete with you.
  • The measured gaps get wider as you climb: the distance between the top one percent and the top 0.1 percent of US household income is 2.7 times the distance from the bottom to the top one percent.
  • Design any personal system against explicit criteria: it must produce an order-of-magnitude gain, run on ordinary resources indefinitely, and get easier the longer it runs.
  • A self-perpetuating system is one where the output feeds the process, so completed work generates evidence, resources and momentum that make the next round of work easier.
06The system and the four-hour standard
  • Define a successful day as a fixed, achievable, non-negotiable quantity. Four completed hours works because it survives travel, children, a demanding job and a chaotic afternoon.
  • Finish the block as fast as possible, not just at all. Four hours stretched across ten hours quietly consumes the rest of your business and your life.
  • Systems beat goals because two people with identical goals diverge entirely depending on whether one has a repeatable way to do the work and the other waits to feel motivated.
  • Tracking replaces what you think happened with what happened, and the two are almost never the same once the numbers are in front of you.
07Theory and the 10X rule
  • Set the target ten times higher than feels reasonable, because a 2x goal lets you keep your current approach while a 10x goal forces you to discard most of it.
  • You will probably not hit the 10x number, and that is fine. The larger target still produces a more aggressive plan and a substantially bigger result than the original goal.
0810X standards and the magnum opus
  • Work on fewer things at a much higher standard, because past a certain level the final ten percent of quality moves the work into a different category and returns several times as much.
  • Choose one project worth hundreds or thousands of hours, so that any extra capacity you build has somewhere worth going.
09Self-image, autosuggestion, three levers
  • Behaviour returns to the identity you hold, which is why motivation-driven bursts fade and why changing what you believe about yourself is the durable lever.
  • Do not change identity with affirmations. Change it by generating repeated, dated, physical evidence that you already act like the person you claim to be.
  • Split your performance into beliefs, character traits and skills, then find your weakest of the three, since strong scores in two categories will not lift a weak third.
  • The combination that got you to your current level rarely gets you to the next one, so expect to rebuild beliefs and traits at each stage rather than only adding skills.
10Signal, habits, conditioning, momentum
  • Treat focus as a trainable skill with reps rather than a trait you have or lack. The first hour is supposed to be hard the way a first bench press is hard.
  • Focus aimed at the wrong work is worthless, so decide in advance which three to five things genuinely matter and let the rest be noise for the duration of the block.
11Setup: environment, inputs, calendar
  • Design the environment so that working is the lowest-friction option available and distraction is the expensive one, which inverts the usual habit advice on purpose.
  • Protect the time in a real calendar, not in your head. An unblocked schedule will be filled by other people, reliably and immediately.
  • Use one monitor. A second screen splits attention rather than doubling output, and a split screen does the same job without the cost.
12Timer, counter, and the blocking layers
  • Measure any important thing two ways. A timer records how long you sat there; a distraction counter records whether the sitting was worth anything.
  • Blockers exist to stop unconscious openings, not determined ones. Stack several weak layers and the cumulative cost of defeating them kills the craving itself.
13The wall documents
  • Put the goals, standards, motivations and target identity in print where you cannot avoid seeing them, because reading something once does not compete with everything already in your head.
  • Assign a pre-chosen thought to each recurring moment of weakness, so fatigue at minute forty-five reads as the growth phase rather than a reason to stop.
14Proof, accountability, worry list, war map
  • Make progress physical. A sticky note per hour and a crossed-off day per calendar square accumulate into proof that is much harder to argue with than a spreadsheet.
  • Add other people to the record. Shared submissions and a leaderboard convert a private discipline problem into a game you would be embarrassed to drop out of.
  • Spend one dedicated hour a week clearing every unresolved worry, because background problems quietly consume attention that the rest of the system is trying to buy back.
  • Connect every planned hour to a top goal through a simple two-level plan, so an hour is never spent on something specific but strategically pointless.
15The morning routine
  • Plan each hour before it starts and stack preparation into time you are already spending, since not knowing what to do next is one of the largest sources of friction.
16Running the deep work hours
  • Rush the first hour of the day. A slow start compounds into procrastination that pushes the whole block into the afternoon.
17Between hours and the night routine
  • Guard the breaks harder than the work. A forty-five minute break between hours is the single failure mode that no amount of setup can fix for you.
  • Close each day by recording an efficiency ratio and preparing tomorrow, so that measurement and reduced morning friction both happen without extra willpower.
18Advanced: more volume
  • Expand volume gradually and only after the baseline is automatic, and get explicit agreement from anyone whose life the extra hours will affect.
19Advanced: higher quality
  • Improve the hour itself before adding more of them: sleep, diet, room temperature, hardware and internet speed all show up in output across thousands of hours.
  • Track useful output alongside hours, because time invested says nothing about what was actually produced.
20Advanced: effectiveness and consistency
  • Find the three activities producing most of your weekly value, then spend deep work hours documenting and delegating everything else until your time concentrates there.
  • Prefer work that influences future hours over work that only fills the current one, whether through people, capital, code or media.
  • Aim for a version of the system that survives travel, illness and disruption, since consistency across a year matters more than intensity across a good week.
Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Deep work hour
One uninterrupted sixty-minute block spent on a single named deliverable that moves a top goal forward. Email, meetings and administrative tasks are explicitly excluded and are meant to happen afterwards.
Inversion
Attacking a problem from the opposite direction: asking what is currently preventing success rather than what should be added to create it. Associated with the investor Charlie Munger.
Theory of constraints
The idea that a system's performance is capped by its single biggest bottleneck, so improvements anywhere else produce limited results until that bottleneck is removed.
The man with the axe
A figure from a Jordan Peterson lecture describing a naturally hyper-industrious person who would chop trees nonstop with no motivation or supervision. Used throughout as the competitor you are measured against.
Autosuggestion
Deliberately and repeatedly placing chosen ideas in front of your own mind until they influence attention, belief and behaviour. One of the thirteen principles in Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.
Self-image
The internal picture of who you are and how someone like you behaves. Maxwell Maltz argued in Psycho-Cybernetics that behaviour reliably returns to this picture regardless of external change.
Signal and noise
The distinction between the small number of tasks that genuinely advance your goals and everything else competing for the same hours. Attributed here to Steve Jobs by way of Kevin O'Leary.
The 2.0 version of yourself
A written description of the next version of you, listed as beliefs, character traits and skills, set against an honest inventory of the current 1.0 version.
Thought habit
A pre-chosen thought assigned to a specific recurring moment of weakness, such as reinterpreting fatigue at minute forty-five as the growth phase rather than a reason to stop.
Work form
A Google Form submitted after every deep work hour recording what was completed, the distraction count, its causes, and checkboxes confirming the documents were reread. It syncs automatically to a spreadsheet.
War map
A two-level planning spreadsheet, credited to Sam Ovens, holding annual objectives at the top level and three to five concrete daily tasks below, so every hour traces back to a goal.
Magnum opus
Latin for great work. Here, the single project important enough to justify hundreds or thousands of hours, chosen deliberately so extra capacity has somewhere worth going.
Efficiency ratio
Planned time for the full block divided by actual time taken. A thirty-minute morning routine plus four hours plus three ten-minute breaks is five hours ten minutes, so five hours forty-seven minutes scores about 89 percent.
Antifragile
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's term for something that improves under stress and disorder rather than merely surviving it. Applied here to running the system while travelling, sick, or without your usual desk.
Leverage
Naval Ravikant's framing of the gap between input and output, split into four sources: labour, capital, code and media. One hour of high-leverage work influences hundreds of future hours.
Resources

Things they pointed at.

09:00linkmatthewblarsen.com/productivity (the written course document) ↗
09:00channelyoutube.com/@morematthewlarsen (second channel) ↗
10:20channelJordan Peterson lecture: Women in High-Paying Jobs
1:19:00bookThe 10X Rule by Grant Cardone
1:20:20book10x Is Easier Than 2x
1:31:00channelMrBeast on Joe Rogan (quality versus volume)
1:36:50bookPsycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz
1:42:20bookThink and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
1:43:00channelAlex Hormozi (beliefs, character traits, skills)
2:04:40channelKevin O'Leary clip on Steve Jobs and signal to noise
2:07:00bookAtomic Habits by James Clear
2:42:40bookThe 5 AM Club by Robin Sharma (the 60/10 method)
2:53:50toolChrome tab limiter extension
2:56:40toolOpal (app and website blocker)
2:57:00toolFocusMe (second blocking layer)
2:59:40toolBrick (physical NFC phone blocker)
3:00:20toolApple Screen Time
3:35:00conceptJerry Seinfeld's do-not-break-the-chain calendar
3:36:40toolGoogle Forms and Google Sheets (work form and spreadsheet)
3:43:20toolZapier
3:43:40productHyperOptimal (the host's own software, accountability built in)
3:51:40toolSam Ovens' War Map
4:21:40channelTony Robbins, Jocko Willink, David Goggins (morning motivational audio)
4:26:00toolBend app (five-minute stretching)
5:28:20toolFlux (screen colour temperature)
5:29:10productEight Sleep temperature-controlled mattress
5:36:40conceptBrian Tracy's rule of three
5:41:40linkNaval Ravikant's writing on leverage
5:45:00bookAntifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Quotables

Lines you could clip.

00:06
“I spent about 130 hours on this video and nearly 12 years of trial and error developing the system behind it.”
credential and scale in one line, no setup needed→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
24:50
“Knowing is really not the same thing as doing.”
seven words, the whole premise→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
08:40
“More knowledge, more resources, more skills will not help you if you can't consistently execute what you already have and already know.”
names the reader's exact loop of buying more courses→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
42:50
“If you ask God to move a mountain, be ready to wake up next to a shovel.”
memorable, quotable, sets up the whole system as the shovel→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
27:30
“The competition doesn't even really start until you're in the top 1%.”
contrarian claim that reframes what the reader thinks they are up against→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
1:21:20
“A 10x goal becomes a ruthless filter, because that makes it much easier to identify what matters and eliminate what doesn't.”
reverses the usual objection that big goals are unrealistic→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
1:28:10
“If you knew how much work went into it, you would not call it genius.”
attributed line, lands with zero context→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
1:41:00
“You're no longer convincing yourself that you're focused and hardworking. You have a mountain of proof.”
the core mechanism of the whole system in one sentence→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
1:45:20
“Repetition needs to be supported by action and evidence. Otherwise that is not autosuggestion, that is delusion.”
punctures affirmation culture without hedging→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
2:03:40
“You are often limited by your weakest category.”
short, diagnostic, invites the viewer to self-assess→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
2:50:50
“I was distracted 14 times. You can't really lie to yourself.”
concrete number replacing a vague feeling, very shareable→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
3:01:10
“It's almost like magic how much your brain doesn't even want it anymore.”
counterintuitive payoff of stacking friction layers→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
3:36:50
“If you do this for 30 days, four hours a day, that's 120 sticky notes.”
arithmetic that makes the abstract idea physical→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
4:52:30
“The biggest point of failure is you screwing around for 45 minutes between hours. I've solved everything else for you.”
unusually honest about the limit of the system→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
5:05:20
“We no longer need to convince you to start swinging the axe. Now we're trying to give you a chainsaw.”
clean payoff of a metaphor running the whole course→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
5:50:10
“Four hours is a successful day. You try to do this as close to 365 times per year as possible, and you do that for the rest of your life.”
the entire course compressed into the closing lines→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

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metaphoranalogystory
This video is about six hours long and I made every second of it using the productivity system that I'm about to show you. I spent about 130 hours on this video and nearly 12 years of trial and error developing the system behind it. And I'm not a productivity guru.
I'm a business owner. I've sold four businesses in my career and I've earned over $1 million in take -home personal profit, not business revenue, in eight of the past nine years. And this is the complete operating system that I use to focus and complete enormous amounts of work.
So let's get right into it. So yes, like before we get started, we need to talk about the elephants in the room. And before I explain how the system works, I'm pretty sure that I know what you're thinking, right?
Number one, who is this guy? And number two, like why is this six plus hours long, right? And both of these are fair questions.
So the first, my name is Matthew Larson. I'm 30 years old at the time of recording. I'm originally from Canada, but I currently live in Dubai and I've been an entrepreneur for 12 years now.
And I make videos and courses sort of like this. And then as for the second one, yes, like this is about six hours long. I know I am the worst.
Why would a course about becoming more focused and using your time better be possibly be six hours long? Right. But before I explain that, let me tell you exactly who this is for and who I think will benefit from it.
This course is for people who are extremely ambitious. They have enormous goals and they genuinely care about fulfilling their potential. So let's see if this resonates with you.
You're not confused about what you want. In many cases, you're not even confused about what you need to do. You can see the path.
You basically have everything you need to execute. But for some reason, it feels like there's this invisible force preventing you from consistently doing the work. You know, you want this outcome or outcomes.
You understand how important hard work is. Yet you struggle to begin, remain focused, finish the day and do it consistently. If that resonates with you, this is the course for you.
That is the exact problem that this course is designed to solve. So my promise to you. is that by the end of this course, you'll have a complete system for training yourself to focus for hours every day and accomplish in months what would normally take years, even if you currently procrastinate, become distracted, or struggle to remain consistent.
And that is a big promise, a substantial one. And delivering it requires much more than generic advice or 60 -second clips of productivity hacks. And that is why this course needs to be so long.
I do, however, understand the extreme irony of making a course this long about becoming more focused and using your time better. But generic advice really is not enough. I could make 60 -second videos telling you to prioritize, to eliminate distractions, to work harder, or just get started.
There's certainly no shortage of reels or blog posts or books and stuff like that about this topic exactly. And I'm sure that you've consumed many of those before. You're watching this right now, so apparently they didn't work, right?
You already know you should focus, stop procrastinating, and spend more time working on the things that matter. The problem is not knowing what to do. The problem is consistently doing it.
And if generic advice were sufficient, millions of people would not struggle with this every day. Because knowing is really not the same thing as doing, right? Everyone knows they should eat healthy and exercise to lose weight.
Doesn't mean everybody does it, or even many, or even a large percentage of people do it. Knowing is not the same thing as doing, and this course is not a loose collection of surface -level productivity hacks. It is a complete operating system that's designed to change how you structure your environment, plan your work, measure your performance, respond to distractions, reinforce your behavior, and view yourself as a person, your self -image.
And basically, knowing the system, if we go back to the 60 -second real example, is not the same thing as understanding it, internalizing it, and then implementing it. And without the proper context, you may skip important parts or use them incorrectly or abandon them when your initial motivation disappears. So giving the system without the context and theory behind it would be like handing you a bazooka without teaching you what it is, how it works, how to use it, or how powerful it could be, right?
So I am trying to make this course 100 % complete. It's not like you'll see this a lot on YouTube where it's just like a lot of people will edit their last 20 videos together and make it like 12 hours and just say full course, but all of them are just completely disconnected videos. You see this crap all the time.
This is not the case here. Every single second of this course was specifically recorded. for this as part of the same system.
I didn't purposely make it about six hours long to torment you. I just did it to make it complete. The goal is not merely to just yell at you and tell you to focus.
It's to give you everything required to become the type of person who has laser focus for hours per day and then you can continue doing it for the rest of your life. So there's two key concepts that I really wanted to go over before we get into the video. The first one is called inversion theory.
And this comes primarily from a famous investor named Charlie Munger. If you know who Warren Buffett was in Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger is his business partner. And he frequently discussed inversion, which basically means looking at the same problem from the opposite direction.
A lot of people will ask something like, what do I need to do to become more successful instead of what is currently preventing me from becoming more successful? Most people continuously search for more knowledge, more money, opportunities, strategies, or a different business model. But adding more does not necessarily fix the thing that's already holding them back, right?
And that's inversion theory. So it's how you can focus or what's preventing you from focusing. The next is the theory of constraints.
And it basically says the performance of any system or whatever is limited by its primary constraint. Until you identify and improve that constraint, improvements everywhere else will produce limited results. And the same thing applies to people.
You can have an excellent business model, valuable knowledge, enough money, enormous goals, and incredible opportunities, but none of that really matters if you can't focus and execute consistently. And in my view, focus and the ability to actually get this work done is the primary constraint for 90 % or more of ambitious people.
I've repeatedly seen this problem with employees. clients, business partners, and myself. They had all the information.
They had all the tools. They knew exactly what they needed to do, but they were still consistently not getting it done. They procrastinated, became distracted, switched between tasks, stopped when it became difficult, or just failed to remain consistent.
And buying another course or changing strategies or watching another reel or waiting for another opportunity does not and never will remove this constraint. And more knowledge, more resources, more skills will not help you if you can't consistently execute what you already have and already know. And until you remove this constraint, everything else will produce basically a fraction of the results.
So before we get started, we get into the course, there's four things to do. The first is to bookmark it to your browser or your phone or preferably both or send it to someone or save the link in your Apple Notes or whatever. It can't really...
change your focus and change your life if you lose it and never return to it, right? Don't leave that to chance. Number two is block off 60 minutes per day to consume it in your calendar.
It's about six hours long, so that should take six days, but generally, let's say seven, just in case. If you want to do more than 60 days and complete it faster, you're, you know, welcome to do that, but I don't expect you to do it all in one sitting. If you put it on your calendar, that basically guarantees you're going to have the time and the cue to come back and do this.
The next is to share it with others. Sending this course to at least one other ambitious person you care about. And I don't just say that so I can get more views, but it will be useful to them.
And selfishly, you as a viewer will be substantially more likely to finish it and then implement it if it's alongside someone else. There's a certain accountability aspect to the system. And if you have at least one other person you're doing it with, it's going to very much increase the results.
And then the fourth one is going to be to download the document. So I want you to finish this course, whether it's the written form or the reading form or a combination of both. So if you go to matthewblarson .com slash productivity, you'll be able to download it there.
That link will be in the description and the pinned comment. And with that being said, let's get started. So now that we have that out of the way, let's go into some background information and why I not only chose to make this course, but why I even spent so much time and effort making this system in the first place.
So my inspiration for this actually came many years ago at this point, I would say nine or 10. And it started when I watched a Jordan Peterson lecture. I'm going to walk through this lecture in some detail because I think it's valuable in the sense that it gives you a clear picture of the type of person that if you're in business and want to make it to the top that you're competing against.
And this would do a lot to explain where I was in my life and the mindset during this period. So if you don't know who Jordan Peterson was. He is a psychologist, an author, and a former professor of psychology at, I believe, the University of Toronto in Canada.
And he eventually ventured into political and social commentary. And he was extremely internet famous for a period of time. I don't really see too much of his stuff anymore, but I really liked him and I watched a lot of his lectures when I was younger.
And then there was one particular lecture that... became the main inspiration of this entire subject, like I said. And I actually found this old video and I watched it or rewatched it while I was making this course.
So to give you some background about it, basically it's a recorded lecture. Here's the video. It's called Women in High -Paying Jobs.
And he was talking to his university class and the topic was basically built around why there are fewer female CEOs and why there are fewer women on average in the extreme upper end of the workplace, in those high -paying, high -income jobs. And this is a productivity course.
I'm not going to debate or discuss politics or gender issues or anything like that. But the relevant part and the main inspiration for this is what Peterson said about the small number of people who are willing to do what is required to reach the top.
around the question on his students in this lecture. And it wasn't, why are there so few female CEOs? Peterson turned it around and asked, why are there any men or women willing to do this at all?
Why are there any men or women willing to do all of this to reach the top? And watching this clip was something of a transformational moment for me when I was younger, if there is such a thing. And to understand why it affected me so much, Let's go into the examples and the argument that he was using with his class.
So if you want to go watch this, it looks like this clip at least was nine years ago. It's probably around the time when I watched it. Maybe it's a re -uploaded clip.
Who knows? But this was a long time ago. So Peterson gives the example of what he says or what he calls or what he refers to as the woman who did everything right.
So he uses the example of an extremely intelligent and hardworking woman. She performs exceptionally well in high school. She goes to college.
She earns outstanding grades. She aces the LSAT, which is, I think it's the law school admissions test, but whatever. It's the test that you go to get into law school in the United States, similar to the SATs in high school and like that kind of stuff.
But for law school, she completes her articling. She becomes an associate and she eventually makes partner at a high -end law firm by the time she's 30. She may earn $250 ,000 or $300 ,000 per year.
This example was 10 years ago, so nowadays probably more than that. And she may bill her clients $500 or $750 per hour. And from the outside, she appears to have achieved everything in life.
However, from the inside, what does her life actually look like? She works 70 or 75 hours per week. She cannot make mistakes, and she must remain available at all times.
If a client calls her at 3 in the morning on a Sunday, she has to act happy to hear from them. If she does not immediately solve their complicated problem, another aggressive law firm in New York will happily take her client from her.
That is what remaining at the top actually requires in this example. And then he goes on to say, eventually many of these women leave. And it's not because they're unqualified.
It's not because women can't do the job. which is kind of the argument in spirit of this lecture. The law firms are actually desperate to keep them because they've already invested years into hiring and training and getting them up to speed.
They leave because they look at the life required to remain there and ask, why in the world am I doing this? Why would anyone in their right mind want to live like this? They usually go on to find a more controllable job.
work normal hours, have children, and spend time with their families, and then build a life outside their careers. And in the lecture, Jordan Peterson argues that this is usually the intelligent decision. So if leaving is the rational decision, the surprising question is no longer why so many leave.
The question is why anyone remains at all. And more specifically in this lecture, why are there so many men willing to do this for years, decades, and so on? That is the central question of the lecture.
Why are there any men willing to do this? There's a small number of hyper -competitive men who are willing to work 80 hours per week for decades and sacrifice almost anything else. Relationships come second, family comes second, children come second, everything comes second to them to reaching the top of whatever hierarchy they have chosen.
They're smart, disciplined, obsessive, and willing to work almost non -stop. They may be extremely difficult to live with. They may have poor relationships with their wives and children.
They may also be disagreeable because managing people requires making decisions that will cause other people to dislike them. However, they become incredibly, incredibly, incredibly good at what they do. And according to Jordan Peterson, that is the sort of people who run things.
They're not necessarily at the top because they discovered some magical secret. They are willing to work longer, respond faster, and accept more responsibility and sacrifice more than almost anyone else. From the outside, reaching the top may look like power.
From the inside, it looks much more like responsibility. He takes a break in the lecture for questions there, and then he goes into kind of his next point, and that his power is actually responsibility. And he says that people may have People have a completely unrealistic idea of what reaching the top looks like.
They imagine sitting in an office with their feet on the desk, smoking a cigar and telling everyone what to do and just rubbing their hands together and laughing and enjoying their power. Everyone just magically and automatically follows their instructions. Other people do all the work and their life becomes easy.
That's a very common thing. They're just exploiting other people, right? And taking all the credit.
That's a very common thing you might hear on the internet. But that is not really what it looks like. These positions come with overwhelming responsibility.
People expect you to make the correct decisions all the time. If you make a serious mistake, you may lose everything. You are constantly competing against other people who are prepared to work harder, respond faster, and take your clients from you.
It is not a comfortable position in which everyone simply follows your instructions and makes your life easy. The people at the top work flat out because the competition and responsibility never stop. The strange part is that some of these people may not need to force themselves to work this way.
That level of activity may be built into them. And then this will be a recurring theme for the entire course. And it's called the man with the axe, which he goes into in this lecture.
So he gives the example of a man with an axe and he says. This type of person is what he calls naturally hyper -industrious. He says if you would put one of these men in a forest with an axe, he would wander around chopping down trees non -stop for no reason at all.
It does not necessarily matter where you put him or what task you give him. He will find something to work on and continue doing it because that level of activity is built into him. He does not need someone to motivate him.
Work has become an obsession. And this is really what they mean when they say someone is built different, right? He also gives the example of the woman who buys a 45 -second microwave.
And it goes like this. He gives the example of a rare woman who manages to combine a high -powered career with children. These women operate at such an extreme level that they will buy a more powerful microwave because it cooks something in 45 seconds instead of one minute.
They wake up at 5 a .m., they exercise, make breakfast, prepare their children for the day. work 14 hours, return home, organize everything for their children, work again, go to bed at approximately 1 a .m., and then wake up at 5 a .m. to repeat the process.
Peterson's point, and as it relates to this subject, is that not that women are incapable of doing it or incapable of reaching high -paying jobs or being the CEO. Some women do it extremely well. His point is that anyone who lives this way must be extraordinarily tough, and very few people, male or female, are willing to maintain that schedule.
If a child becomes sick or any crisis occurs, the entire arrangement can become impossible to sustain. The man with the axe and the woman with the 45 -second microwave are extremely extreme examples, but they reveal the main point that I took away from this lecture and something that has shaped me since... Way back then, 9, 10, 11 years ago, whenever this happened.
And again, let's reiterate, the people at the top are not necessarily there because they discovered some magical secret. They're often there because they're unusually intelligent, disciplined, competitive, disagreeable, obsessive, and willing to work more than anyone else. You, as the person watching this, or the average person, do not have to live this way.
Peterson repeatedly explains why someone might intelligently choose a more balanced life centered around relationships, family, and children. However, if you want to compete for the highest positions or accomplish something exceptional, you need to understand who your competition is. You may be competing against someone willing to work 80 hours per week for decades and sacrifice almost everything else.
You do not have to do that. That's the main point of it. You don't have to do that.
But they will. And if you don't do it, you will be non -competitive against them. This is perhaps the main point of this entire course.
We're going to come back to it multiple times. A great litmus test for the rest of the course, and if you should probably even watch it or not, let alone do what it says, is whether hearing about the man with the axe or the 45 second microwave, whether that motivates you or discourages you. Some people hear about that and they instantly just shake their head and say, I could never be like that.
And if that's the case, you probably couldn't, right? And watching this course is probably a waste of time. Hearing about this type of person did not discourage me.
It made me curious. So I went on and did some research. And what I found was kind of shocking to me.
As I was digging, and this has definitely been confirmed by my personal experience in the past 9, 10, however many years this was, absolutely. But the competition really doesn't even start until you are already in the top 1%. And this is from a series of lectures and backed by my own experience.
So most people think everyone is like them, and they find it difficult to believe that people like the man with the ax in Jordan Peterson's lecture exist. And that makes a lot of sense, right? People tend to interact and socialize with people who are similar to them.
They might have heard about someone like this. They might have imagined a billionaire or a psychopath CEO to be like this, but they've never actually met someone like this, right? And most people have never met someone like the man with the ax because they've really never reached the level required to run into someone like that.
And one thing that I have learned from personal experience is that this competition doesn't even really start until you're in the top 1%, which is somewhere I guess most people will never get to, right? Once you're in the top 1%, it actually becomes a rude awakening for how competitive, how ruthless, how cutthroat it actually becomes.
Most people's thoughts about competition are not really accurate. No one's thinking about you right now. No one's looking at what you're doing.
You're essentially too small for anyone to care. And that all changes once you're in the top 1%. If we actually go into it and go into the top 1%, because one thing that...
I vehemently disagree with in things like, you know, the top 1 % is ruining everything, right? That's like a very common discourse, especially if you're in America, right? And the top 1 % is not really, you know, that powerful.
They don't really make that much money. They don't really have that big of net worth. And of course they do compared to the average person, right?
But what most people think about the top 1 % is more like the top 0 .01 % or the top 0 .001%. So let's go on. The competition becomes much more extreme as you work your way up, even after reaching the top 1%.
The difference between the top 0 .1 % and the top 1 % is often orders of magnitude greater than the difference between the top 1 % and the top bottom 1%. This is also true in my personal experience, but you could actually measure this and see it across tangible metrics. And I assume that the difference between the top 0 .1 % and the top 0 .01 % is orders of magnitude difference and then orders of magnitude difference and so on.
If you think about it, If you're top 1%, you're 1 in 100. If you're top 0 .1%, you're 1 in 1 ,000, right?
10 times difference if you just think of it numerically. So let's go over three examples using some USA data. This is data from 2024 and 2025.
Reasonably up to date, but nothing's going to be perfect. This is just what I could find online. So as far as income goes in the United States.
We have the level here on the left, and then we have the approximate annual family household income on the right. So the bottom 1 % of households made $7 ,800 per year. That technically represents like the benefits they receive from the government in the bottom 1%, just realistically, right?
The top 1 % in America, when you combine household, if you just do single person, it's 737K. But if you do annual family household income, it's 1 .07 million. So big difference between $7 ,800 and 1 .07 million, basically a million dollars in difference, right?
But if you go to the top 0 .1%, it's actually 3 .89 million. So the difference between the bottom 1 % to the top 1 % is 1 .06 million. But the difference between the top 1 % to the top 0 .1 % is 2 .82 million.
That is orders of magnitude difference, 2 .7 times larger gap, right? And that's kind of stunning when you look at it, but you can actually see this across many different categories, not just money, but we'll get into some here too. If you do the same thing with net worth, the bottom 1 % is essentially minus 76 ,000 in net worth, which is 76 ,000 in debt, basically.
The top 1 % is $13 .7 million in net worth, and the top 0 .1 % is $61 .8 million. So the difference between the bottom 1 % and the top 1 % are $13 .7 million. And the difference between the top 1 % to the top 0 .1 % is $48 .1 million.
And that's 3 .5 times larger, even better than the income gap. Now, in this specific example, this is just blended across all age groups. If you're in your 20s, it'll be different, of course, than your...
If you're in your 60s and this net worth is really backloaded as you go up in life, and so is income. But it just shows you, because these are equal comparisons blended, that the difference between the top 1 % and top 0 .1 % is staggering. Even consider being 1 in 1 ,000 is much, much different than being 1 in 100.
And obviously, you can see that. But someone like the man with the ax or the woman with the... 45 second microwave, like this is the situation that you're dealing with.
And I wanted to do something with, you know, not money because, you know, money, banking, you know, like they say in the big short, it just reduces people to numbers. So let's do basketball here, right? And this would be what I would probably guess to be quite similar with all sports, you know, music, acting, you know, anything entertainment wise.
But if we look at basketball, in the United States, we see these numbers line up very similarly to what we're saying here, but not perfect, right? So let's take a look at boys basketball in the United States, starting at the high school level.
So in this research, and you know, I literally have not gone and counted every boy who's played basketball, but bear with me here. 540 ,704 boys played high school basketball in America in the 2024 to 2025 season. Then approximately 5 ,900 of these boys, or 1 .1%, so very close to our top 1%, reached NCAA Division I, which is essentially the highest level of college basketball.
Then approximately 0 .04 of these, or 1 in 2 ,800, were drafted into the NBA through the NCAA pathway during this season, right? So 0 .04%, you know, close enough to top 0 .1%, but just over twice as good, right? But these numbers generally line up for what we're trying to illustrate.
So essentially 500 ,000, 40 ,000 boys, 5 ,900, and then 0 .04 % of these even got to the NBA. And it really puts it into perspective, right? A division one men.
basketball player in the United States of America would destroy almost anyone on earth at basketball, wouldn't they? But if you put him one -on -one against any active NBA player, he would probably look like a small child. It would look like you as a parent playing basketball against your six, seven -year -old.
It wouldn't really require any effort. It would just be you destroying them, right? The division one player did not necessarily or did not suddenly become bad at basketball.
right? They just reached a point where they are competing against the man with the ax, which in this case are the NBA players who are just on another level. And this is the point of all of these comparisons.
Someone in the top 1 % does and can and does dominate basically everyone below them in whatever you're talking about, but they're still completely non -competitive against the person at the absolute top. There was a Like a series of videos.
I can't remember the guy's name, but you can search it up. There was a player. This is when I was a teenager, I believe, who was always ridiculed some white guy for being the worst player in the NBA.
Right. So he invited people to challenge him to one on one, a bunch of fans, basically. And he recorded it and absolutely destroyed all of them.
And like the main thing was he said that he's closer than LeBron than you are to him. Right. And that's exactly true.
It's a perfect example of what we're talking about here.
So let's get into my goals because we got some decent background information. So what were my goals? When I heard this Jordan Peterson lecture and this research, what were my goals?
When I started this experiment many years ago, I had three goals. And I'm going to explain them in more detail throughout this course. But there are three main criteria.
that this entire productivity work system was based around. My first goal was that it had to produce an orders of magnitude improvement. I wanted to be at least 10x better than I was before.
A 10%, a 25%, a 50 % improvement would not be enough, and even doubling my output would not be enough. When I set out to do this, I was not really getting too much work done. A 20 % improvement on like...
30 minutes of focused work per day would barely change anything at all for me. It needed to be like a 10x improvement. I needed to get 10 times work.
That 30 minutes needed to be like 300, for example. The second goal was it needed to be accessible and sustainable for the average person, preferably forever, which the average person was me at the time. Now I have significantly more resources and flexibility, but didn't at the time.
So the system that I wanted to create had to be usable. without unlimited time, money, staff, or other resources. And it needed to also work permanently, not just for a week or a month or a year.
And I also wanted it to be sustainable for someone with a wife and kids and family, and not just for a single guy in his 20s, because that's what I eventually wanted. And I wanted a system that could be there permanently. And then the third one, at the time, I was kind of reading a lot about like systems and self -improving systems.
So my third goal was the system had to be naturally self -perpetuating and self -improving. And it's truly, not that I did this consciously, but this is truly the best decision that I ever made. So once I built momentum, I needed the system to become easier and more effective over time.
Basically, the work that I was doing would produce evidence, progress, resources, skills, and momentum that if I set it up right would make it easier to produce even better work. So those are where my three goals started. And those are really the three goals still today.
So let's go over these goals in a little bit of detail. So the first goal is 10 times better. I need to get 10 times the amount of work I was doing.
I basically started this process 10 times better. I was shooting for the stars. Because I did not want an average gain.
I wanted to be able to work nonstop and also be happy about it, right? I had this 10x mindset. And this lines up really nicely.
Many years later, there was a book called 10x is easier than 2x. This was published in 2023, since probably one of my top three favorite books of all time. And the book validated what I did back then.
Really put a, you know. legitimized it, I guess. I did it by accident, but this book really talks about it.
And the book argues that pursuing 10x growth can actually be easier than pursuing 2x growth because the two goals force completely different approaches, right? A 2x goal often allows you to continue doing the same things and do them slightly better or simply do more of them. You know, work more hours, be 1 % more focused, you name it.
But a 10x goal, you know, makes that approach impossible. You can no longer, you know, work 10 times as many hours. That doesn't really, not really possible or make sense.
If you were working four hours a day, you can't work 40 hours a day, right? Not possible. Probably can't be 10 times more focused, right?
So instead you think you need to rethink everything. You need to eliminate most of what you're currently doing and focus exclusively on the small number of activities producing extraordinarily results. The size of the goal forces transformation and it also clarifies the focus.
The thing is like a small 2x goal leaves many paths open. You know, I could do this, I could do that. You get overwhelmed.
But a 10x goal becomes a ruthless filter because that makes it much easier to identify what matters and eliminate what doesn't. So the original goal of becoming 10 times better lined up almost perfectly with this idea. I did not or could not.
make a small improvement on the way I was currently living or the way I was currently working, I needed to think at an entirely different level and become capable of producing an entirely different level of output, which is the level of system in this case. And we're going to return to this idea throughout the course. My second goal, of course, was accessible to the average person, which I was at the time.
Now, I would be so humbly say I'm a little bit more than average, but This system needed to be able to be used by an ambitious person with a normal life and ordinary resources. It could not depend on having unlimited money, employees, equipment, or the ability to reorganize your entire life around something, right?
The requirement matters because there's no shortage of advice on the internet or life in general. And there's three types of advice that are completely useless or actively misleading. And a good example, the first one is advice from celebrities, you know, the ultra rich, famous people.
And this type of advice, I would say, is incredibly tone deaf and ironic a lot of the time. A good example of this is when a celebrity is, you know, going for a new role, right? In a movie or a TV show.
And they have to just gain a bunch of muscle, right? So they do that and then they start giving everybody workout and dieting advice, right? Like, yes, let's totally listen to...
them about this subject. They have a personal trainer. They have a chef.
They have unlimited money. They have the ability to reorganize their entire life around going to the gym and putting on muscle. But the average person or the average business owner who this course is for cannot do that, right?
The celebrity's advice might work inside their life, but that doesn't mean it's applicable to yours, right? It's not the average person who can do it. The second type of advice is kind of from what I would say, like the alpha male motivational gurus at all.
And this type of advice is not really advice at all. It's usually often someone with a bald head on a stage just screaming at you, saying that you suck. You know, you need to be more disciplined, work harder.
You need to want it more. You need to do it for your bloodline, right? And they usually have a few different types of speeches like this, but it's usually more like the same.
It's just like. wow, you know, like, oh, just work harder. Oh, just be more focused, right?
Like, thank you. I did not think of that. Why don't I just do that, right?
I'm fixed. There's not going to be any stupid advice like that in this course, but you're going to have to work hard with the advice in this course, or you're going to have to actually put in the work. I'm not going to baby you or treat you like a child, but the advice in the system is generally or genuinely going to be helpful and realistically applicable.
to everyone watching, right? And the third piece of advice, in my opinion, is not really hated or mocked like the other two pieces of advice, but it actually, to me, is the one that causes the most damage. And the third piece of advice, especially around working hard, productivity focus, comes from the people who are extremely successful now, but either have forgotten or deliberately leave out what it actually took them.
to be successful. They basically are rewriting history a lot of the time. They tell you that working long hours are unnecessary.
They just tell you that you have to work smarter, not harder. Meanwhile, back in the day, and yes, they've either forgotten or are trying to mislead you. I'm not sure which a lot of the time, but they've built everything by working 12 or more hours per day for years, if not decades.
Now they have money, they have employees, they have systems, connections, and decades of accumulated leverage. They very well can work a few hours per week right now, and then they come on an interview and tell you that hard work was never necessary. That might describe their life now, but that does not describe how they reached to where they are.
The people at the top did not choose between working harder or working smarter. They did both of those things, and they did them for a very, very long time. This slide that we're going here, if you know now, it's called accessible to the average person.
It was actually called built for the average person originally, but I ended up changing the name because the original title was not really true, right? It's not built for the average person. It's accessible to the average person, but the average person is so apathetic that you can barely get them to do anything, let alone watch an ultra long course like this and go even further and actually do.
anything or everything it teaches. The average person, they're not really serious people and they're not really going anywhere with their life. And the average person is not who this course is for.
This course is built for people who are ambitious, like care deeply about fulfilling their potential, really bothers them that they're not, you know, doing all that they could be. And all they really need is an actual system to help them execute. It's going to work for this type of person, whether they're a young single person or married with a family or anywhere in between.
The distinction is that the system only requires an ordinary amount of resources, not ordinary amount of ambition, right? You're going to need to be very ambitious to do this. It doesn't require unlimited money, staff, space, equipment, or the ability to just do one thing 24 -7.
You're going to need to reorganize your calendar a little bit around completing your deep focus work, but you're not going to eliminate or... put off or reduce the rest of your life to do it. You know, average resources, but not average effort.
And then before we keep going, I wanted to basically define my third goal, which is naturally self -perpetuating and self -improving. So a naturally self -perpetuating and improving system is a system that keeps going and becomes better over time without requiring constant outside effort or motivation. So self -perpetuating means the output it produces helps sustain the process that created it.
Hopefully you understand what that means. And self -improving means repetition, learning, and accumulated resources make the process more effective over time. And then natural, the improvement happens because how the system is built and how it works, not because it is artificially forced.
So if I set the system upright, that is, you know. conducive or to one of my three goals. Better work makes better products, which make better resources, better people, better tools, better work, and even more.
And basically what this does, it creates a positive feedback loop that sustains and strengthens itself. I wanted to do a lot more work and I wanted this system to work in a way that by doing more work, it makes it more likely that I do more work in the future. And we're going to actually come back to this concept a few times throughout the course.
So basically, this became my experiment. And like this entire system has always felt like a science experiment to me. That's how I approached it.
And at the time, like when I set out, I did not relate to the hyper industrious people at all. I didn't relate to that man with the axe. If you saw me back then, probably like, wow, this kid's a little bit lazier on the lazier side of things.
And it always goes back to and it made me question, you know, the. nature versus nurture argument, right? I asked, because in his example, he said that these hyper industrious people are essentially born this way, right?
So I definitely was not at least. So my question and the point of my experiment is like, am I screwed basically, or can someone deliberately train themselves to be more hyper industrious just like that? What if we could take someone basically me at the time, regardless of where they started and repeatedly conditioned their brain until they developed an insane level of work ethic and focus.
What if we could hijack their environment, their behavior, their rewards, their beliefs, and their identity until just an insane amount of focused work became just basically who they are as a person, right? I'm very ambitious. I want to rise to the top of my industry now and back then.
So I was wondering, could I train myself or brainwash myself to work hard and focus like this. And of course that experiment is the result of this course.
So do those hyper -industrious people that I was wondering about, or do the people like with the man with the ax, do they use this system or something like this? No, of course, almost certainly not, but they don't need to, right? They're just built different.
They don't need a complete system to make themselves focus and work because that comes naturally to them. they're probably also not watching an ultra long productivity course. And you are, right?
So what does that say? And when I say that, I don't mean it as an insult. It's the reason that this system exists.
Let's just say that 1 % of people are born that way, as an example. That means the other 99 % need a system like this if they want to compete. And this system is for ambitious people who know they are capable of substantially more, but just cannot consistently.
do this. The naturally hyper -industrial people don't need the system, but we do, and we can use it to train ourselves to be more like them. One of my all -time favorite quotes is, if you ask God to move a mountain, be ready to wake up next to a shovel.
The course is the shovel, but the course is also not going to do any of the work for you. Watching this course is going to take hours. Setting everything up properly will take probably 1 .5 to 3 hours.
Then you're going to have to do the work, which means dozens of hours of work per week. You would need to do that anyway if you use the system at all. All of that will require real effort, but the kind of pain of going through the motions and doing the system is...
Much better to me than the pain of just sitting there over and over and knowing that you could be working and you could be achieving more, but you're not. One of the times that you grow up as an adult is when you realize that no one is coming to save you, right? So this process and this system also solved many of the problems.
experienced by people who are ambitious, who know they're capable, but who are underperforming. And I think this is like when I first got into it, one of the biggest things for me, once I finally picked up the shovel in that quote and I began doing the work, I realized that like that on its own solved far more than my productivity problem.
You know, I used to solve or I used to struggle with a lack of fulfillment, a lot of vices. a lot of procrastination and many other problems. And I thought that a lot of those problems were individual problems or separate problems that needed to be solved, you know, in a vacuum or they're different from each other.
But eventually I realized that many of those problems were basically symptoms of the same root cause, which is, you know, I was not working enough and I was not fulfilling anywhere near my potential. You know, there's a famous movie called A Bronx Tale and one of the biggest quotes in there, the saddest thing in life is wasted talent, right?
There I was sitting there not doing a lot and wasting my potential. And I knew that I was capable of substantially more than I was doing and everything, all of the other problems were essentially a way to cope with that. And once I began consistently completing meaningful work with the early versions of this system and making real progress, many of those problems started to disappear without requiring much direct effort or attention.
And I'm not saying that every single problem in your life is caused by not working enough, but if you're an ambitious person who knows that you're only achieving a fraction of your potential, it's probably a big problem for you, honestly. So it's just like the meme, right? On the extreme end over here, on the low IQ, you know.
I should probably work harder. Same with the high IQ. And then this was very me in the middle.
And I'm sure this is a lot of people right now. I just need to optimize my dopamine, my sleep score, my supplements, reduce my stress, do market research, map out my 48 -step morning routine. That was me back in the day.
I need to solve all of these different problems. And then eventually you just come to the conclusion, I should probably just work more.
Is this system fun? because you haven't seen the system yet, but I'm sure this is going to come to your mind. And I think this really depends on who you are as a person.
The system is not going to sound fun at first, but I would give it a chance, right?
You may not be able to tell from my background or my camera quality, even though it's not so bad today. And there's undoubtedly, you know, going to be me saying um a lot and fumbling over my words, but I've... made quite a bit of money.
And I've really tried over everything that I think most people would consider to be fun. It would not surprise me if I spent well over a million dollars, probably closer to two million on traveling and partying in my life, probably the same amount on vehicles, more on houses. I'm not really a watch person and I definitely can't afford a huge yacht or a plane yet.
And I think a lot of these things are you know, rites of passage, especially for a man. But once you do all of the stuff that a lot of people consider to be fun, you know, it really just blends into more of the same thing.
You know, every party feels the same. Traveling to every country eventually is just another big city or another quiet countryside. You end up seeing eating the same food at the same restaurants all over the world.
Nowhere that you can really drive an extremely fast or expensive car anyway without getting it impounded. And most of the time, like a lot of this stuff is to impress other dudes anyway. Houses are pretty awesome.
But to me, I found like over time, the only thing that I have considered to be fun is doing what I know that I was supposed to be doing. You know, being the best version of myself, fulfilling my potential. And a lot of the time, this just becomes, you know, doing more work.
I genuinely think it's fun after doing this for a long time to wake up at 5 a .m., blast through several hours of deep work using this system seven days a week. I'm probably weird or permanently ruined at this point, but if you implement the system, you become extremely successful, and you return to this video years from now, I think you're going to know what I mean.
The only thing that's really fun is doing what you know you're supposed to do in the first place. So with that background out of the way, let's get into the system itself, then the theory behind the system, because it's very important that you know about it. And then we'll get into the setup and how to do the system.
You name it.
So starting now, like when you see the purple, that is a signified of a new part. And to start every part, I'm first going to be like reminding you. about the man with the axe, because I think it's just something that requires such repetition.
You do not have to do anything or any part of this course. It is entirely up to you. However, if you want to achieve big things, you need to always remember who you're competing against.
You're going to be extremely hardworking, extremely intelligent. They're going to be able to choose and execute high leverage tasks. They'll never become discouraged, never quit.
They don't make mistakes and they require no motivation or accountability. These people are naturally hyper industrious. Most people are not.
If that doesn't describe you, then this system is designed to help you reach their level of activity. No one is forcing you. However, if you want to operate at that level, you will not be able to compete because the man with the ax is still working.
So for this overview. Most people do not have the complete inability to focus. They can focus when they're feeling motivated, when they're under pressure, when they have an approaching deadline or when everything's going well.
But the problem usually, and this described me a lot, is they just cannot consistently reproduce that level of focus. And that's what we're trying to do here. Instead of relying entirely on either motivation or willpower or discipline, we are going to build a full process that will help us complete.
focused work every day. That includes controlling your environment, planning your work, removing distractions, measuring your performance, creating accountability, rewarding the correct behavior and building proof that you are someone who can focus. And when you have it all together, to me, this system is very much like natural Adderall, just much healthier and much more sustainable.
And as far as getting a lot of work done, I don't think there's been a single thing that has made a bigger impact on me, my employees, my business partners, and my clients. This whole course and whole system is primarily explained from the perspective of a business owner, entrepreneur, or serious professional. But I suppose you could apply it to academics, to school, to basically anything.
The key of all of this is repeatable, not just for one day. or one hour, or one week, or repeatable, over and over and over. And this requires us to stop thinking about the concept of productivity, focus, work ethic as a collection of isolated tips and start thinking at the level of building an entire system around it.
And this is systems -level thinking, right? And one of the ideas I take most seriously in life and in business comes from James Clear. who's the author of Atomic Habits, which is one of the best -selling books of all time.
His idea is that you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, right? And James Clear and his work is going to be a central figure throughout the rest of the course, and we're going to talk about his ideas quite frequently. But for now, the important point is to understand it, and that's why we're building a system around productivity and work.
Most people already have goals. They want to build a successful business or make more money or become more productive or accomplish more. That is not the problem for almost anyone.
The problem is not that they lack goals. The problem is they don't have a consistent and repeatable way to do the work that are required to achieve those goals, right? Two people can have the exact same goal.
One has a system that causes them to complete more important work every day. The other works whenever they happen to feel focused or motivated. Over time, the results are going to be completely different with the first person absolutely dominating them, right?
A system in our definition here is going to be a repeatable way of doing something. We do not want to reinvent the entire process every day. We don't want to wake up and hope that we feel productive.
We want to know what to do. when to begin, what to work on, how to respond when we become distracted, and how to determine whether the day and system was successful or not. That is the difference between focusing occasionally and becoming someone who can reproduce an extraordinary amount of focused work per day, right?
And before we get into that, let's go into an overview of the entire system. So this is where it's important to note that if you're watching this on YouTube, everything is going to be timestamped in the description of the video with kind of like insane. I'm like really going to make my assistant go through this and timestamp it.
Trust me. So if you have to watch this course in multiple sittings, which seems likely, you can save where you are and go back and do it without losing your place or without having to screw around, right? Everything in the course follows a natural progression.
Like you really can't jump around without like, it's unfortunate in some way, but you can't really just skip to part eight and, you know, do what it says. Cause part eight, you know, goes on part seven, six, five, four, everything falls into place. It's not really a modular course, but we're going to begin with the theory behind the system.
Cause that's important to get you to buy into it. Then we're going to go through the setup. Then we're going to go through the morning routine.
Then we're going to go through our actual deep work hours, what to do between those hours, and then the night routine. And then finally, after that, we're going to cover the advanced material. If you're one of those people who really want to go for the top 0 .1%, you don't need to memorize any of this or the outline right now.
I'm just showing it to you so you can see basically where we... I'm going to go together and how the pieces fit in. So first part is theory, lots of stuff in there.
And then there's the setup. I'm not going to read this huge list out to you here, not really any value in that. Then we're going to go through the morning routine, then the deep work hours, what to do between those hours, the night routine, and then we'll finish it off with the advanced section.
So that's the complete system. But before we get into that, like what does the success criteria look like, right? Because you know, different people might do this system differently.
So what exactly makes this system proper? What should we use as our baseline? And the success criteria for me is two parts.
The first part is complete four hours of really deep focused work per day. And deep work is focused on, you know, uninterrupted work that moves you in a tangible way closer to your long -term goals, right?
or more of your most important goals or most important business objectives, this kind of work produces a specific deliverable, a completed task, reactive busy work, doing stuff like ordinary emails, messages, meetings. That does not count here, right? Those things probably still will need to be done, but they should happen after your four hours of deep work whenever possible.
And the second success criteria is to complete these four hours as quickly as possible. We want to condense them into approximately a five and a half to six hour timeframe at the start of the day. So if you basically woke up at 6 a .m., let's say, we want to complete all four hours between 11 a .m.
and noon. We don't want to complete four hours by 4 p .m. This standard is not designed really to make your life difficult or to turn you into a stressed out maniac.
It's designed to protect your life, the rest of your business, your family, etc. If we complete these four hours of deep, meaningful work, but we take 10 hours to do it, that is going to interfere with our business, with our exercise, with our spouse, with our children, our friends, and everything else that we need or want to do.
And we don't want that. So when we do these four hours as fast as possible, We can spend the rest of the day handling meetings, doing that administrative work, hanging out with our wife and kids, going out to dinner with friends, going to, like, you name it, right?
We don't necessarily want to rush through these four hours and, you know, make them very poor quality, but we want to make them as efficient as possible, which basically means reducing or removing the unnecessarily time spent procrastinating, being distracted, taking long breaks, or deciding on what to work next. It kind of, to me, should build up to this four -hour goal because if you can't do it yet, start with one hour of focus work.
That's probably more than what most people are doing. Once that's easy for a few days or a week, then you do two, then you do three. Four hours is the goal and the baseline.
And this is probably the most important part. Once you do four hours, your day is a success and you should consider it as such. You may do more than four hours eventually if you do the advanced section, but a minimum of four hours is a success.
And then whatever else happens, happens, right? Anything beyond those four hours is extra because four hours is possible no matter if. you're traveling, no matter if you have a wife and kids, no matter if the rest of your day is hectic, no matter if you have to work out, you could always get four hours done.
There's 24 hours in a day. You can sacrifice four, five, six of those to get these four hours of deep work done. And that removes a lot of the excuses in comparison to let's do eight hours of this today.
Eight hours of this today could take 10, 12 hours. That's not necessarily sustainable or universally applicable, right? But four hours is something that is sustainable.
basically forever. In terms as why specifically four hours, there's nothing scientifically magical about this, right? It is simply the number I arrived after doing this for years and introducing it to my employees, business partners, and clients.
I tried everything from one hour per day to 16 hours per day, and four hours per day kind of sits at the intersection of two main things. You know, like I said before, it's... Enough focused work to make an extreme amount of progress that changes the trajectory of your life, but it's also very realistic to complete every day.
One or two hours, I guess, would be better than nothing, but you probably can do more than that. But on the other hand, those six, eight, 12 hours of legitimate focused work will consume the most of your waking life. And that's not realistic for most people to do forever, right?
Four hours. Seven days a week, 28 hours per week, 120 hours per month, 1460 hours per year. Imagine directing 1000 to 1500 legitimate focused hours per year towards your most important goals.
The trajectory of your life will change insane, especially when you compound this year one, year two, year three, year four, year five. And again, before we move on, four hours is achievable for anyone who is a parent, who is a spouse. who already has a chaotic business, who works a demanding job, who travels regularly, who has to manage employees or take care of other people, who wants to maintain a social life, and or who deals with an unpredictable schedule, right?
24 hours of the day, let's say you sleep for eight, most people don't do that. 16 waking hours, four hours is 25 % of those waking hours, right? So you would still have time for a lot of your children.
and spouse and anything else. No excuses here. It should also be noted that these four hours are not necessarily just four extra hours you're added to your day.
You are going to be living these four hours doing something, right? Most business owners and busy executives spend more than four hours working in general. The problem is those hours are usually fragmented across so many different random messages and tasks who don't really matter.
So you might need to wake up a little earlier. You might need to restructure your schedule, but the time exists.
Everyone has 24 hours and you basically need to do something. So this is the point of the system. You know, how long are you going to do this?
You know, the key word here, forever, right? Till the end of your days. This is an important distinction.
And remember, that was one of my three goals, because if forever is the goal, That really changes how we view the system, right? It's not a temporary challenge.
It's not a 30 -day sprint, or it's not hacks that we can use to string a few days together. That standard basically is to change our permanent way of working. The circumstances may change.
The responsibilities might change. The type of work we're working on might change. Parts of the process will naturally improve, but our goal is to do this forever.
It's complete lifestyle change and personal transformation. So let's go on here. This system, when you first see it, you know, like admittedly might seem complicated.
It might seem like there's a lot of different parts and they are. And that's fair. You know, like there are a lot of individual parts, but I'm going to explain it very step by step.
You might be overwhelmed the first time, but you'll quickly get it. Think about it kind of like. a car, like a vehicle, right?
A car contains, I have no idea, hundreds, if not thousands of individual parts. You know, I know nothing about engines, transmissions, braking, steering, electronics, suspension, wheels, and all of the other things that make up a car. But, you know, once those pieces are assembled, driving the car is simple and straightforward enough, right?
You just sit down, you start it, and you drive, and the system works the same way. I would say, honestly, that the setup is probably more complicated than actually doing it. And that's normal.
Building the car is more complicated than actually driving it. Right. But once we have it all set up, you know, we're just going to complete a short morning routine, work in one hour increments, track our progress, you know, take short breaks and then repeat that process until we do four hours of work per day.
Like that's really all there is to it.
A key component of the system is measuring and tracking because measuring and tracking really changes your awareness and your behavior. There's so many different things that you could theoretically measure in life. You know, there's thousands or millions even of possible metrics and some are substantially more useful than others.
But most people don't track much of anything. And that's a shame because when you start tracking two extremely important things, begin to happen almost automatically.
Number one, like it allows you to improve because when you're tracking it, you know, okay, if I have a five out of 10, how can I make that a six or seven out of 10? And then number two, it makes your actions and results impossible to ignore. When you start tracking how much time you're working, if that number is zero or one, it becomes impossible to ignore that when it's spelled out right in front of you in the data.
So in this system, we're going to track how many hours we work, what we accomplished during those hours, how many times we were distracted, what caused those, how quickly we are going to get our first hour of the day done, how quickly we're going to complete all these four hours, and then we are going to get a clear record of what actually happened from that.
Tracking basically prevents you from lying to yourself, right? Without tracking, it's extremely easy to tell yourself that you worked hard, that you remained focused, that you had a productive day. And a lot of people genuinely believe that, but you simply have no proof that that's the case.
Tracking replaces what you think happened with evidence of what happened. And those are two very, very different things which you'll often quickly discover. So tracking is going to show us exactly where we're performing well, where we're failing, and exactly what we need to improve.
And it allows us to determine whether the changes and whether this system is genuinely working. So measurement is a major part of this system. But none of the ideas that we're going to go over really appeared out of nowhere.
They're all interconnected. So let's go through that.
In addition to my own theories and trial and error across this entire time frame, I've combined many amazing ideas from... very smart people to create something unique in this system. There are dozens of ideas from dozens of different people throughout this course.
And if it's incorporated, I will make note when they occur. But a lot of this system is primarily built on the work of six people. So number one is Grant Cardone's 10x rule.
The second is Napoleon Hill and auto suggestion from the book Think and Grow Rich. Next is from Maxwell Maltz work on The Self -Image, Alex Ramosi's work on beliefs, character traits, skills, and personal transformation, Steve Jobs' view on how to decide what you'll work on, and James Clear's work on creating habits and making the system stick for the long term.
As far as Grant Cardone and Steve Jobs' rules or contributions, I guess you could say, those will be talked about in their specific parts, but we're not really going to go back to them in a conscious way. At the end of each part of the rest of the course, we are going to be going back to Napoleon Hill's, to Maxwell Malt's, to Alex Ramosi's, and to James Clear's work, kind of like a checklist.
And as such, I thought it would be nice to put a little picture of them in a short bio. So if you don't know, Napoleon Hill was an author best known for Think and Grow Rich, which is one of the best -selling nonfiction self -improvement books of all time. His work explores how desire, belief, repeated thought, and deliberate action influence achievement.
Auto -suggestion is one of the 13 principles in the book and provides the foundation for repeatedly reviewing your goals, standards, motivation, and desired self -image. Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon and the author of a book called Psycho -Cybernetics. His work explores how your self -image influences your behavior, performance, confidence, and the results you believe you are capable of producing.
His identities form the foundation of the identity transformation part of the system. Alex Ramosi, if you're in business, you probably know who he is. He's an entrepreneur, investor, and business author known for turning basically complicated business ideas and performance ideas into useful frameworks.
I think that's the perfect definition of him. His work on beliefs, character traits, and skills provide a practical way to understand why people perform below their potential and what they need to change. And then James Clear is the author of Atomic Habits.
I referenced him once a few minutes ago. and one of the best known writers on habit formation and behavior change. His work explains how to design repeatable behaviors that become easier and more automatic over time.
His ideas help make the complete system sustainable for the long term. So that is basically what it is. So now that you understand what we are building, what success looks like, and where the major ideas come from, we can begin with the theory behind the system.
This is an important step to me. Because I need you to get bought into the system or you're never going to use it. The 60 second version, the short form videos, the quick productivity hacks don't work.
Partially because there's no deep understanding of the theory behind them and the lack of buy -in. So let's get to it. Okay, so again, on a new part, we need to remind ourselves about the man with the axe.
That hyper -industrious man that... Jordan Peterson talks about. You put him in a forest with the axe and he'll start cutting down trees non -stop.
The man requires no motivation. Work has become an obsession, right? This level of activity is built into him.
Most people are not naturally like this. And if you're not, the system is designed to help you deliberately become this way. Again, You don't have to do any of this.
You don't have to do anything I say, nothing in this course. You don't have to do anything at all. No one is forcing you.
However, if you want to do something like build a big business, you're going to have to compete with people like this. And if you cannot operate at their level, you are going to become non -competitive because no matter what you're doing, no matter what you're telling yourself, no matter what excuses you are, the man with the ax is still working.
So in the... theory part, which we're in now, we're going to cover quite a variety of topics. First off, we're going to do a little bit of an overview.
Then we're going to do the six ideas that will connect every remaining part of this course. We're going to explain everything you need to know about these six ideas, and we're going to go over why they explain how or why you cannot focus and how you can accomplish more. Then we're going to go through the 10x rule, 10x standards, your self -image.
auto -suggestion, beliefs, character traits, and skills. We're going to go through the signal, not the noise. And then we're going to go over James Clear's habit protocol from Atomic Habits.
Again, the theory part is very, very important. Like I could just probably go on LinkedIn, open Canva, for example, and put in like check by check, here's the things. You won't understand what they are and you won't understand the theory behind them.
And the theory is, in my opinion, What are those things that you have to understand to know why it's valuable or why you should do it? And you'll be a lot more bought in as a result.
Because you can technically follow a list of instructions without understanding why they work. But if you don't know or don't understand the ideas behind them, many of the steps I'm going to go over might appear unnecessary, excessive, or even ridiculous, right? And then that will make it so you're substantially more likely to remove them or ignore them or stop using them after the initial motivation disappears.
So this part explains what we're actually trying to change. And it also explains why the things in the system exist. It's not enough to know how they exist, right?
So to accomplish something important, you need to solve two different problems. First, you need to identify what deserves your time and attention. And second, you need to make yourself consistently executed.
These are not the same problem, right? You can be extremely focused on work that doesn't actually move your business or life forward. You can also know exactly what matters, but if you remain completely incapable of making yourself do it, it doesn't work either, right?
So the system has to solve both of these problems. So we are going to discuss the size of the goals you set, the amount of action you believe is required, the standard of work you accept for yourself, the way you view yourself. How repeated thoughts influence your beliefs and behavior.
The beliefs, character traits, and skills controlling your performance. Why focused execution is a skill that improves through practice. How to distinguish the small amount of work that matters from the enormous amount of noise surrounding it.
How repeated behavior becomes a habit. How repeated cues and rewards condition your brain. And why continuing becomes much easier once you create the initial momentum.
Like those might sound like... well, 11 separate ideas, if you can see it numbered on the screen, but they're not, right? Each of them focuses on and explains a different part of the same transformation.
Together, they explain how someone who currently procrastinates, becomes distracted, works on the wrong things, and struggles to remain consistent can train themselves to become substantially more focused, hardworking, and effective. So to build this explanation for you, we are going to connect six famous ideas together.
So I did not create the underlying idea or all of them from scratch. I have combined ideas from many important people, and I went over them before, right? We have Grant Cardone's 10x rule, which will help us establish the size of goal, the standard of work, and the amount of action required.
Maxwell Maltz's work on self -image helps us understand why people behave consistently with the person they believe themselves to be. Napoleon Hill's works on... Work on auto -suggestion helps explain how repeatedly exposing yourself to specific thoughts can influence your brain and behavior.
Alex Ramosi's framework helps us separate personal performance into beliefs, character traits, and skills. Steve Jobs' signal -to -noise principle helps us identify the small number of things that deserve our attention. And James Clear Habit Protocol helps us turn repeated focused work into something that feels natural and automatic.
And each of these ideas are very useful on their own, but the true power, the true 10X transformation, the orders of magnitude improvement that I set out when I originally made this comes from combining them, right? I'm not just focusing or even showing you these six ideas to... Make this sound more academic or more intelligent, right?
Together, they explain how to raise your goals, change the person you believe you are, reinforce that new identity, and then turn this into someone who basically does an insane amount of work, right? So these six ideas explain why you cannot focus and accomplish more. Right now, like these ideas are working against you.
It's not like we just add them to a... These ideas are in our life and control our life, whether we're aware of them or not. And if we're not aware of them, they're probably going to control and affect our life in a negative way.
There's very few things that are naturally good without any time, focus, or effort. So your ability to focus and accomplish more is probably not one isolated problem. It is the combined result of several problems working together.
The first that we'll talk about is the direction problem. A lot of the time, and I know this is true for me, a lot of the goals that I have set for myself are kind of just like too small to create any real urgency. And I think that's very similar or, you know, a lot of people experience that.
If your goal is to just be like 20 % better, it's just really not that compelling, right? The next thing is your standards may be too low to demand your complete attention. If you just have fast stuff, you don't really need to put your heart and soul into things.
The next is you may not know which work creates the most value, but this is pretty easy to train yourself to identify. You may treat emails, meetings, messaging, administrative work, and all that kind of stuff as if they're equally important. And then in this situation, If this describes you, working harder really isn't enough.
We need to identify the signal and not get lost in the noise. The second part of the problem is the execution problem, right? You might know what matters, but if you still struggle to execute it and view yourself as someone who procrastinates, get distracted, and isn't consistent, you may repeatedly reinforce the same excuses, fears, and thought patterns that created and match your current behavior.
In other words, your beliefs, your character traits, or skill may be limiting the performance. So even when you successfully force yourself to focus for a day or a couple of days in a row or a week, you may not have really designed the behavior in a way that makes it easy to repeat. And in that situation, it's not enough to know what to work on.
You need to be capable of consistently executing it. So these six ideas combined address... both problems.
The 10x rule increases the size of the goal, the standard of work, and the amount of action that you believe is required. Self -image changes the person that you believe yourself to be. Autosuggestion repeatedly reinforces the goals, standards, beliefs, and identity that you are trying to develop.
The beliefs, character traits, and skills frameworks helps identify the specific part of you that is limiting your performance. The principle of focusing on the signal and not the noise helps you identify the small number of things that deserve your time and attention.
And then finally, James Clear's habit protocol helps you turn the correct behavior into something you can repeat consistently for the rest of your life. This is a good example of why this course is hours and hours long, right? I could tell you to put your phone away to eliminate your distractions, to prioritize and try harder.
That might help for an hour or a day. but it's not going to fix any of these six things. It's not going to fix the goals, the standards, the self -image, the thought patterns, the beliefs, character traits, skills, priorities, and habits that are underneath all your behavior.
Being distracted, similar to my problem where I was struggling with all those vices and procrastination, that is the visible problem, but that is kind of the symptom, not the cause. Working on the wrong things is another visible problem, but again, that's the... symptom, not the cause.
So these six ideas explain what is producing those symptoms and the system will help you fix each one. So let's get into these. The first one, part 1a, is the 10x rule.
And this is the first idea in the system and it establishes the level of ambition, quality, and action behind everything else. It is called the 10x rule. It's most popular from a concept from a book called The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone, which in my opinion, one of my favorite books of all time.
And to me, The 10X Rule is an important prerequisite for the rest of the system because without the mindset, without the 10X thinking, I don't think that we'll use the system to its full potential. Now, if you've been on the internet, you've been in business for a while, you probably know a lot about Grant Cardone or you've seen him.
Think whatever you want about him, but this rule is... probably one of the best rules for anybody who's ambitious on earth. So I would summarize the 10x rule like this.
I'm not sure. I found this on the internet and tweaked it a little bit. I'm not sure if this is actually what it says verbatim in the book, but most people set goals that are too small and then underestimate the amount of action required to achieve them.
The 10x goal says to set a goal 10 times larger and take 10 times more action than you originally believed was necessary. People usually underestimate how difficult meaningful goals will be, how many attempts they will need, how much competition, delay, and failure they will encounter, how much sustained effort real success requires.
Most people create a goal based on what they think they can reasonably accomplish. Then they create a plan based on everything going reasonably well. That is almost always a mistake.
The goal is usually too small. The plan does not usually contain enough action, and they have not accounted for how many things will go wrong along the way. So the 10x rule corrects this by forcing you to expand your thinking, raise your standards, increase level of action, and alter your identity.
So this is, you can see if we're trying to build an overall philosophy around a system, probably sounds like a pretty good one, right? And it's important to know that the 10x rule is not necessarily literal. Will you literally achieve 10 times your original goal and take 10 times more action?
Maybe, but probably not, especially after you've already reached a certain level. But by setting a goal 10 times larger, it's very possible you will achieve 1 .5x or 2x or 3x or maybe even 5x the original goal within the same time frame. Even if you fall short of the 10x target, the Thing to remember is you may still accomplish substantially more than if you would have by thinking and acting normally and setting a 1x goal, for example, or a 2x goal.
And that's the point. The 10x rule is not a promise that writing down a large number will magically produce it, but it does force you to think bigger, create a substantially more aggressive plan, raise your standards, and take far more action than you otherwise would have. And that's the key value.
If you remember to one of my three goals, when I started, I needed to be an order of magnitude better. If I just set out to, you know, focus 20 % more, this system wouldn't even exist, right? Because I wouldn't have had to really think outside the box and really think of it from a huge perspective on how to do it.
So the 10X rule, a great book. I recommend everybody read it. So let's go through an example.
So let's say that, you wanted to earn $10 ,000 per month, right? That is your original goal.
Build a business that, as the business owner, helps you make $10 ,000 per month. If you approach that goal normally, you will probably create a normal plan. You will probably determine how much content you have to create, how much outreach you have to do, what you can sell, who you have to hire, etc.
And you'll find out what you'll think. what you believe is reasonably necessary to reach $10 ,000 per month. But if we were to change it to $100 ,000 per month within that same timeframe, you would immediately realize that your original plan is completely insufficient.
You cannot use the same level of thinking, the same amount of action, and the same version of yourself and reasonably expect to produce 10 times the result. You would need substantially more outreach, content, advertising, hiring, testing, execution.
You may even need a better business model. You might also need stronger beliefs, better character traits, and more developed skills, which we will discuss shortly. You may not reach 100 ,000 per month in the original time frame.
However, because the larger target forces you to create a more aggressive plan, and become capable of taking significantly more action, you may reach $15 ,000 a month or $20 ,000 a month or $30 ,000 a month instead of the original $10 ,000. Of course, you didn't achieve that 10x target about $100 ,000 a month, but you accomplished substantially more than your original goal.
And that is the point of this. It is also the philosophy behind accomplishing five years of progress in six months. which is what is on the title slide of this course.
You cannot compress five years into six months by continuing to think, work, and act like a normal person. You need a completely different standard, if that makes sense. And as you can see, this is the philosophy that's going to permutate every other piece of the course.
So every time you think something is a little bit much, for example, or a little bit complicated, or seems like a lot of work, Always come back to the 10 times rule or the 10x rule in your head if you can. So I actually recently went through this process again myself because I am recording this in 2026 and it's been an interesting and relatively slower year for me in comparison to the previous five years.
And a lot has changed at once. At the end of last year, I sold my shares in my latest business. I got out of a relationship and I moved back to Dubai.
full -time after traveling for a few years in a row, always being on the go. And for the first time in a long time, I had basically like no responsibilities. It was a full reset.
And this gave me the opportunity to step back and think seriously about what I wanted to do next. And I came up with these five goals. I wanted to reach 12 % body fat at 215 pounds in body weight.
I wanted to build a basically a business group to $200 ,000 a month in revenue with no one -on -one consulting. I wanted to build my software called HyperOptimal to 10 million in ARR, which is annual recurring revenue.
I wanted to reach a million YouTube subscribers, podcast listeners, newsletter readers, and Instagram followers. I wanted to accumulate $100 million in liquid after -tax net worth. So my goals were already what I...
And most other people would probably consider to be very ambitious, right? But then I applied the 10x rule to them again. And here is what I came up with.
Since I've done this, it's kind of been like pouring fuel on the fire that was already really quite good. I have not just... leapt out of bed at 5 a .m.
to this excited to smash the day in a long time. So instead of just my original goals, you know, reach 12 % body fat and 250 pounds. And then I have a bunch of actual weightlifting targets and like mixed martial arts targets in here too.
Instead of 200 ,000, how can I build my business community to $2 million and make it the most revered and the most, you know, sought after group that everyone wants to join on earth? How do I build my software to 100 million while remaining extremely profitable, fully bootstrapped, and completely free from investors? How do I reach 10 million business subscribers, podcast listeners, newsletter readers, and become the most famous business thinker on the planet, right?
These are completely different goals. And how do I accumulate $1 billion in net worth instead of 100 million? Since I changed my goals, the entire way I think has expanded and changed for the better.
I haven't been this disciplined, this motivated, this focused, this everything in quite some time. And that is the point of the entire 10x rule. If you 10x the size of your targets and the amount of action you're willing to take, you are going to be more motivated and you are going to create things at a higher standard that are more exceptional than ever before.
So let's talk about not only just the actions and the goals, but talk about the standards. And this is part 1b. The 10x rule is about setting substantially larger goals and taking substantially more action.
But this is about increasing the quality of work that you are willing to accept from yourself. And this course, to me, is a good example in my own life and an example to you here. I used to just make, you know, a little bit of low effort, 15 to 30, maybe 60 minute YouTube videos.
Now on this channel, I'm setting the standard to make long courses like this that... are perfect in every way, or at least the best that I could do at that time frame. And I'm going to take the attitude that I'm constantly trying to one -up and outdo myself with every subsequent course.
So I think it is important to introduce this idea early because it's going to change the rest of the course too. How you work, what you're going to do, etc. Most people...
dramatically underestimate how much time and effort goes into creating something exceptional. They see the finished product, assume that the person responsible for it is unusually gifted and call it genius. If you know who the famous painter, sculptor, among other things called Michelangelo, he was, you know, from Italy.
I can't remember the timeframe hundreds of years ago, but he. sculpted this statue of David. He painted the ceiling on the Sistine Chapel and so on.
And he has a famous line that's attributed to him anyway. And it went, if you knew how much work went into it, you would not call it genius. Exceptional work usually requires far more effort than anyone on the outside will see.
You need to be comfortable investing hundreds or even thousands of hours into one important piece of work. That doesn't necessarily mean everything you create takes 1 ,000 hours. That would just be ridiculous.
But the point is you should stop treating a large investment of time as an evidence that something is taking too long. I put in, well, let's just say I stopped counting at 130 tracked hours of this documented video, not including the time it took me to actually film it, which I'm doing now. So a little bit more.
So if the thing is important enough and you're continuing to approve it, investing a thousand hours into something might be completely reasonable. When you become completely immersed in something and generally care about producing an exceptional standard, the time flies by. You stop thinking about every individual hour in that four hours of deep work and you become completely absorbed in the project.
Every improvement reveals another improvement you can make and the standard continues rising and the work becomes more satisfying because you can see it becoming substantially better. And I know this is true as I was making this course and making the document for it. I would improve something and then I would be like, oh, I got to go back and add X, Y, and Z.
And I wasn't even focused on the hours of work that I was doing because it would completely fly by because I was so immersed in it. Although it took far longer. Creating this course so far, and it's almost done, I'm in the filming stage, as I'm talking to you right now, has basically been one of the most enjoyable things I've worked on in the last couple of years, at least.
The standard of work continues rising, like I said, and the work becomes more satisfying. And this is just, I'm living proof in my life of actually making this course and recording the video for you to watch that this is true. It comes with the mindset that we want to work on fewer things of higher quality.
One 10 out of 10 thing will change your life far more than 108 out of things ever will. You should really trust me on that. The biggest leaps in my career have come from probably five things, and I've probably done 100 or 1 ,000 or maybe several thousand different things or projects or things on the to -do list.
I can think of like five big things that really made most of the difference. But raising your standards will require you to do fewer things. You cannot produce an unlimited number of things while giving each one hundreds or thousands of hours of serious intention.
And instead of spending your time or spreading your time across dozens of mediocre projects, choose fewer important things and make them substantially better. Quality often creates nonlinear returns. I would argue that you have to do a lot of quantity, especially at the beginning to, let's just say, get good.
rapidly improve. But once you are at a certain level, increasing the quality of something by 10 % does not always produce a result that's 10 % better. Sometimes the final 10 % moves the work into a completely different category and produces several times the result.
And a good example of this, I think, is Mr. Beast explained this concept perfectly during an interview with Joe Rogan. I believe this was a few years ago.
It's not his most recent interview because I looked it up again for when I was creating this course. But he gave the example of a YouTuber that he had been mentoring. Before the mentorship, the creator was generating approximately 4 .6 million views and $24 ,000 per month.
If we go back, probably that person is in the top 1 % of YouTubers. Remember, the competition and the true grind starts when you are already in the top 1%. He wasn't helping someone who's at 5 views.
But seven or eight months after the mentorship started, the same creator was generating approximately 45 million views and $400 ,000 per month. The creator did not achieve this by producing substantially more videos. He actually uploaded fewer videos.
The videos were simply much better. Mr. Beast explained that it's easier to generate 5 million views from one exceptional video than 100 ,000 views from 50 mediocre ones.
One great video could receive more total views than 100 average videos combined. His reasoning is that the results are exponential. If people are 10 % more likely to click on a video.
and watch it for 10 % longer, that video does not necessarily receive only 10 % more views. According to MrBeast, a 10 % better video is four times the views. The stronger video gets clicked more frequently, holds attention for longer, and is consequently recommended to substantially more people.
And then that cycle keeps repeating. Each improvement compounds the other. He even explained that tripling the amount of time and effort invested into one video could produce 10 times as many views.
not merely three times as many. And that's exactly what I mean here by nonlinear returns. The additional quality does not produce an equal increase in value or result.
It can move the work into a completely different category and produce several times the result. More volume would have meant helping this creator produce 50 mediocre videos, but raising the standard meant producing fewer videos, investing substantially more effort into each one, and making them good enough to generate a disproportionate result.
So if we go back to what I said about Michelangelo, this is part of the ceiling at the Sistine Chapel. At least I hope it is. I got this image off Google.
And then I want to get into the kind of the phrase or the thing called a magnum opus. So magnum opus is a Latin phrase meaning great work. It's commonly used to describe someone's greatest and most important achievement.
Michelangelo is special. You know, he doesn't just have one magnum opus. He has at least two.
And those are the statue of David and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. You should have something that you treat this way. Something important enough that you're willing to invest hundreds or thousands of hours to making it exceptional.
For me, this course is a good example. For other people, it could be a webinar. It could be a lead magnet.
It could be a book. It could be a series of YouTube videos. It could be, you know.
a blog post. It could be whatever. But like I said, I have invested more than 130 hours into organizing, writing, and improving this material because I want it to be the most complete explanation of the system I possibly can create.
Little known fact, I actually recorded this video once before about several weeks ago, maybe five weeks ago, and it was 45 minutes. The same video describing the same system. I scheduled it to YouTube.
I was going to post it, and then I woke up in the middle of the night and said, No, I need to make it much more complete and much more just perfect. And now this is a result that, of course, is much longer, but I would say 100, 200, 300 times better than my original.
And again, the amount of time does not feel excessive when the standard is high enough and the work matters to you. These hours have flown by for me. Spend substantially more time improving.
fewer amount of things and I think that is going to generate a great result for you. So that brings us to your self -image and if you remember back, self -image comes from Maxwell Maltz. He was originally a plastic surgeon and then eventually, or I guess many years after he started, he wrote a book called Psycho -Cybernetics.
This was because Maltz noticed something interesting while working with his patients. Changing someone's physical appearance could dramatically improve their confidence and behavior. Yeah, that's why most people do plastic surgery.
However, this did not happen for everyone. Some patients received the exact surgery and physical change they had requested, but still believed that the operation had not truly fixed them, even though he did it. From their perspective, the surgery did not work.
They continued thinking, feeling, and behaving like the same person they were before. The physical problem had changed. Their internal image of themselves had not.
So in his book, Psycho -Cybernetics, Maltz calls this internal picture your self -image. So your self -image is the internal picture or visualization you have of who you are, what you're capable of doing, and how someone like you normally behaves. If you view yourself in the context of this course as someone who is distracted, lazy, inconsistent, and capable of focusing, your behavior will repeatedly return to that identity.
That's why these 60 -second reels and productivity hacks don't actually work over the long term. You might temporarily work harder because you feel motivated, but eventually you will begin acting like the person you still believe yourself to be. And the opposite is also true.
If, over time, you genuinely view yourself as someone who is a machine, someone who focuses, someone who works hard, remains consistent, and finishes what they begin, acting that way becomes substantially more natural. Just like that man with the axe we're always talking about. The thing we need to...
basically understand is you cannot permanently change your self -image by making up affirmations and repeating things that you know are obviously untrue. You need to define the person you're trying to become and then create repeated evidence that you are or have become that person. Every time you complete a report work, resist a distraction, keep a commitment, and return after making a mistake.
That acts as another piece of evidence. Eventually, the mountain of evidence becomes so big that it becomes difficult to argue with. You're no longer convincing yourself that you're focused in hard work.
You have a mountain of proof. And later, we will define the current and future version of yourself and create a process that repeatedly produces this evidence. However, defining a new self -image once is not really enough either.
You need to keep placing the correct ideas of who you want to become in front of yourself until they begin influencing how you naturally think and behave. And that brings us to the concept of auto -suggestion. So defining a new self -image is important, but doing it once is not enough.
You need to repeatedly place the correct ideas in front of yourself until they begin influencing how you naturally think and behave. And that brings us to Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill was an author best known for the book Think and Grow Rich, one of the best -selling business self -help, self -improvement books of all time, something that I read at least once a year.
And the book presents 13 principles for achieving success. And one of those principles is autosuggestion. We're not going to talk about the other 12 right now.
So what is autosuggestion? Autosuggestion is the process of deliberately and repeatedly placing specific ideas into your own mind. So suggestion, obviously, like bringing up an idea, and auto means to you, just like someone's autobiography is a biography they wrote about themselves.
The basic argument is that the thoughts you have repeatedly exposed yourself to begin influencing your attention, beliefs, decisions, and behavior. That is why something like reading your goals once is usually not enough to get them to seep in. You may read something, feel motivated for five minutes and then return to the same environment, distractions, thought patterns and behavior you had before.
The new idea never receives enough repetition to compete with everything that was already there. Later, we will create written material that keeps the correct ideas in front of you. These will include your goals, your standards, your motivation list, which is your reason for pursuing them.
The new behavior or the new beliefs. character traits and skills that you want to become, and then the correct thoughts that you want to deliberately place into your own mind. You're not going to just make these up, read them once, and forget about them.
You'll repeatedly review them until they become familiar, automatic, and difficult to ignore, all as part of the system. But we want to make something clear at the same time. Autosuggestion is not magic.
Autosuggestion does not mean you can repeatedly tell yourself that you're hardworking while you sit around doing nothing and scroll Instagram all day. And that will eventually make you become hardworking, right? That is not autosuggestion.
That is delusion. Repetition needs to be supported by action and evidence. However, repeatedly reminding yourself of your goals, standards, desired self -image, and the thoughts that you want to have.
does make it substantially easier to act in alignment with them. Your self -image defines who you're trying to become. Autosuggestion repeatedly places that person in front of you.
Your actions provide the evidence that the transformation is actually happening. And then the next framework explains the three parts of yourself that we're attempting to change. So part 4A is called Beliefs, Character Traits, and Skills.
And I want to explain why this framework exists inside a course about productivity focus and getting more work done. And I think that this is important because it explains why you need to implement the system and what the system can actually change about you as a person. So there's this business guy named Alex Ramosi.
If you are in business, especially if you consume any business of content, you've most definitely heard of him about this point because he's almost like a mainstream celebrity. I would say he's like, really like a... C, maybe B to your celebrity at this point.
One of my favorite frameworks for him is the idea that nearly everything about a person's performance or life can be reduced to a unique combination of three things, their beliefs, their character traits, and their skills. And for me, this is easily one of the five most useful ideas or frameworks that I've ever encountered.
And it's useful because it explains why someone and most of the time that someone is being you is not doing what they should be doing or achieving what they theoretically should be capable of achieving. So let's get into the beliefs first. The beliefs are the things that you believe to be true about yourself, others, business, work, success, and the world around you.
Basically, these are like... the things that make up your own self -image. So your beliefs affect how you interpret almost everything around you.
Someone who believes that great things take time will react differently to a difficult month than someone who believes every setback means the plan is not working. You know, that 10x rule is a belief. If you ask God to move a mountain, be ready to wake up next to a shovel is a belief.
So is the part about raising your standards. The character traits determine whether you consistently do the things that you already know you should be doing. Character traits include examples like focus, work ethic, and consistency.
And that is where the majority of this course fits into, the character traits framework. You can know exactly what you should do. You can believe the plan that would work.
You can have all of the literal and technical skills required to execute it. But none of that really matters much if you can't focus, work hard, remain consistent and continue doing so for a long time, which are character traits. And then skills are things that you've learned how to do.
Tying your shoes is a skill. Cooking is a skill. Like anything you can think of in terms of business and marketing, funnel building, offer building, paid advertising, hiring, training, you know, all of this stuff.
And of the three, beliefs, character traits, and skills, skills are usually the easiest to identify. If you don't know how to run paid ads or build a funnel or make an offer or edit a video or write copy or do sales, it's usually pretty obvious that you are missing that skill. Whereas beliefs and character traits can be harder to recognize because they're much more abstract and much easier to explain away than a skill.
You can tell yourself that You need another course or another strategy or another opportunity or new business model when the real problem is that you are inconsistent and cannot focus for more than 20 minutes at a time, i .e. you lack the behavior trait of focus.
The thing to remember here, and I made this little graphic, basically level one to level 10 with the ladders, you are often limited by your weakest category. So you can, in most cases, rate these three skills independently. So let's just say that you have 7 out of 10 beliefs, for example, and 7 out of 10 character traits, but you have a 2 out of 10 skill set.
Even though two of those categories are relatively strong, this person, this example's overall success may remain close to a 2 out of 10 because they don't have the skills required to produce the result they're trying to get. The same thing happens when character traits are the weakest category. Imagine you have...
exceptional beliefs. You take responsibility for everything. You have a great attitude towards service and client relationships.
You are patient and understand that meaningful results take time and you don't become discouraged easily. Let's imagine that you also have excellent skills. You are elite at content creation, you're elite at skill sales, and you have a great offer for your business.
But at the same time, you're lazy, unable to focus, extremely inconsistent, and you keep stopping and starting. Sadly, The person in this example will probably not be very successful and they might only achieve a fraction of their potential, but their weak character traits will continue placing a ceiling on everything they do.
It doesn't matter that they have 10 out of 10 beliefs and 10 out of 10 skills. Their character traits will always hold them back. And this describes so many people that I've known and worked with.
One of the three categories is clearly limiting them and they just can't quite see it. So maybe if they take this course themselves. and they watch this video, it might become obvious to them.
And this course is primarily designed to improve the character traits of focus, work ethic, and consistency. However, the beliefs, character traits, and skills that you need are not static. As you progress in life, as you go from the bottom 10 % to the top 30%, you'll need a different combination of beliefs, character traits, and skills to go from the top 30 % to the top 1%.
And then when you get to the top 1 % to go to the top 0 .1%, you're going to need a different set of beliefs, character traits, and skills to get. Again, it's kind of like progressing in a video game. You begin at the low level, you get to level 2, then to level 10, then to level 20, and then level 40, and then you just keep getting more and more power as time goes on.
The thing to kind of understand about this is you need to keep leveling up. and the unique combination of beliefs, character traits, and skills that got you to where you are won't usually get you to the next level, so to speak. So let's go through a few examples here.
And let's bear with me because I just want to illustrate what the difference is going from zero to 100K in a business, 100K to a million, a million to 10 million, and then so on. Let's go, I think, five examples I put here. So when you're going from zero to 100 ,000 in a business, at this level, you're basically proving that you can create something valuable, find customers, and deliver a result.
You might need beliefs such as, I can create something people pay for. I'm responsible for getting customers. I need to do a large amount of work myself, and I do not need everything to be perfect before I start.
The character traits, probably work ethic, persistence. resourcefulness, and willing to take responsibility. You might need some initial skills such as sales, customer acquisition, creating a basic offer, and a basic understanding about how to deliver the product or service.
At this stage, the primary requirement is usually action. You need to stop endlessly preparing, create something people want, find customers, sell it, and fulfill what you promised. You cannot delegate your way out of learning the fundamentals.
You need to become capable of producing the results yourself. So bear with me here as we go on for the other ones. So let's go to the 100K to a million dollar example.
At this level, the business has demonstrated that people will pay for what you sell. The problem is that the business is usually extremely dependent on you. You might need beliefs such as, I cannot do everything myself.
The business needs systems. Hiring people as an investment rather than simply an expense. Other people can learn to produce the result.
You might need character traits such as consistency. focus, willingness to delegate, and patience while training people. You might lean to develop some new skills such as hiring, management, process building, and training employees.
The person who reached 100 ,000 by personally handling every sale, every customer, every problem will eventually become the primary limitation of the business and you'll still need to work hard, but your work must begin shifting from completing every task yourself to making the result repeatable. through other people and documented processes.
To go from 1 million to 10 million at this level, simply hiring more individual employees is not usually enough. You need to start building an actual company. You might need beliefs such as my job is to build the company, not to perform every task inside it.
Better people can do certain jobs better than I can. Long -term decisions matter more than solving every short -term problem myself. The business needs leaders, not only additional workers.
You might need character traits such as patience, decisiveness, accountability, and emotional control as you learn and things go wrong. You might need skills such as recruiting leaders, strategic planning, allocating money, people, and attention, and holding leaders accountable for results.
At this level, your job shifts again. You're no longer responsible for directly performing every function or personally managing every individual. You need leaders who can take responsibilities for entire departments.
produce results through their teams, and make good decisions without waiting for you. Your ability to choose the right people and allocate resources correctly becomes more important than your ability to personally create the work. Then when you go from $10 million to $100 million, the company is too large for you to personally understand, approve, or control every decision.
You need to build a company that can continue operating, improving, and growing without depending on your involvement in every department. You might need beliefs such as I cannot personally manage every person and decision. The company needs leaders who can build other leaders.
Small improvements in people, system, and decision -making compound across the entire organization. My responsibility is to protect and improve the company as a whole. Now you might need to develop more character traits such as long -term thinking, emotional control, discipline, judgment, and the ability to even remain focused more so on a small number of...
extremely important decisions. You might need to develop new or further refine your skills at recruiting and developing executives, capital allocation, organizational design, building leadership and accountability systems, and making decisions through accurate information rather than personal involvement in every task. At this level, a small decision can affect hundreds of employees, thousands of customers, and millions of dollars.
Your leverage is dramatically higher, but so is the cost of poor judgment. You cannot simply work 10 times more hours or personally solve 10 times more problems. You need to make better decisions, recruit better leaders, allocate resources more intelligently, and create an organization capable of producing a result without requiring your constant allocation.
And then the last result, 100 million to a billion. At this level, you're no longer building a business that depends on one person, one department, one product, or one acquisition channel. You're building an institution.
You might need beliefs such as the company must be capable of surviving and growing without my daily involvement. The quality of the organization is determined by the quality of its leaders. Cultures and standards must remain strong even when I'm not personally present.
A small number of excellent decisions can create more value than thousands of ordinary tasks. Protecting what's already been built is as important as continuing to grow. Then you need to develop your character traits even further.
Extreme patience, extreme emotional stability, long -term thinking, restraint, exceptional amounts of judgment. The ability to remain calm while making highly consequential decisions. You might need to develop new or further develop your skills of capital allocation, continuing to recruit and evaluating senior executives.
Again, developing leaders who can develop other leaders, organizational design, risk management, entering new products, markets, and acquisition channels. and maintaining accountability across an enormous organization. So you can see there in those five quick examples how your beliefs, how your character traits, and how your skills need to continually develop as you continually go higher and higher.
In some cases, to get to the next level requires new beliefs, new character traits, and new skills. And sometimes it requires a higher level or further development of the ones you currently did. For example, you're going to need to be patient at every level, but that patience is more and more and more and draws out on a longer and longer and longer time frame.
So your ability to focus becomes even more important because as you grow bigger, you must separate the tiny number of decisions that genuinely matter from the nearly unlimited amount of noise surrounding you. As you get bigger and bigger, the amount of distractions actually gets much more. It doesn't get less.
You're never going to have less distractions than when you're at zero. essentially. But the beliefs, character traits and skills required at every level are different.
However, regardless of the level, there will always be a place for the ability to focus and work hard and to get four hours of deep work done every day. That will never change. So let's make it clear that executing this system, once we have it built and we actually do it multiple times per day, is a skill.
A skill is anything that can be learned. The beliefs and their character traits exist at a higher level, but the actual execution is a skill. Learning to focus for 60 minutes is a skill.
Avoiding distractions is a skill. Continuing to work when something becomes difficult, frustrating, or boring is a skill. After you're interrupted or between hours, restarting quickly is a skill.
And like any other skill, riding a bike, throwing a ball, writing, tying your shoes, you name it. the most important thing is repetition and practice. They're not really things that, you know, you either have it or you don't, right?
When you were first starting to ride a bike as a child, you probably fell off the first time, maybe the first few times, and that's fine, right? You didn't give up. You just keep going until it becomes easy.
At first, like focusing for even one hour, probably might feel difficult, but when you've done it dozens or hundreds and eventually thousands of times, it really just begins to feel normal. It's not like I'm even focusing, I'm working.
It's just how it is. It's how you do and it'll be as natural to you as tying your shoes or pouring a glass of water or you name it. If it is difficult in the beginning, it's just like a sign that you have not developed the skill yet and all you need to do is practice, right?
And that takes it to the, basically, the 2 .0 version of yourself. And we're going to go and do a whole exercise on this in a few minutes. But I like to refer as the leveling up of your beliefs, your character traits and skills as the 2 .0 version of yourself.
Right now, you're the 1 .0 version. Maybe when you implement this, it'll turn you into the 2 .0 version, then the 3 .0, 4 .0, 5 .0, right? I am probably on the 5 .0 or the 6 .0 or the 7 .0 version of Matthew at this point, but you get what I mean.
The theory behind all of this, everything we're going for, like it's important you understand it because understanding will unlock your potential, but it doesn't actually do anything on its own, right? You need to actually do it and not just one time, two times, three times, four times. You need to build this 2 .0 version of yourself day after day after day.
Just like in this picture here, it's like you're sculpting a new version of yourself, right? And every single action, every single thought, every single thing that you do, basically... Chips away and chips away until the new version of yourself is all that's left and we're gonna go through a full exercise on that and formalize it But it's important that we bring it up now because it relates to the skills and the beliefs and the character traits The beliefs the character traits and skills framework like this explains what controls our performance right and the self -image previously explained you know one level above that that we always act and think and do everything with accordance of how we see ourselves right but now executing this is a skill and we're doing basically all of these hours of deep work per day but it might bring up the question what if you just do a bunch of busy work right we've already explained that it's not necessarily counts as deep work the emails all of that kind of stuff but still like even if you're not doing emails you could be
working on stuff that doesn't really matter, right? Even if your beliefs, your character traits, your skills, and your ability to focus all become very, very strong, there is still another problem, and that is what deserves your focus. And I actually didn't have this in the first several drafts of this document, and I finished up the entire course, and I came back and added to this section.
I literally woke up in the middle of the night, another situation where I did that, and then I was thinking, because I... put this course, like this document through like Claude, through ChatGPT, through all this stuff. And I sent it to a few people and say like, I'm trying to create the biggest system here to make the most valuable course.
Like I need you to poke holes in it, right? And to be honest, I did a pretty good job the first time. There wasn't that many holes, but the idea that you could do all this, but still fail if you're not working on the right thing was a major hole in it.
And focus is only valuable. when it is directed towards the correct work. Like we could spend those four hours completely focused answering emails, meetings, reorganizing documents, you know, completing low value tasks.
You might very well have been focused on these things, but you're not focused on the right things. Those are the wrong things, right? And that is why we really need to understand the difference.
And that's the key to this concept, the signal versus the noise. And I have Very good explanation of it.
And it's one that I found from a clip from Kevin O 'Leary talking. If you don't know who that is, he was a member on Shark Tank. He's a businessman and investor.
That's where most people know him from. But he has like he has a finance company, like O shares, like ETFs and stuff. That's his company.
He was in the news. Recently, at the time of recording, getting protests and pushback on his huge data center project, that guy. But before becoming kind of a household name or famous on television, he built and sold a software company and he worked with many successful people in the tech industry.
So in the clip that I saw on YouTube, it was a 14 minute clip. But, you know, so I'm kind of paraphrasing here. He explained what he learned while working as a vendor for Steve Jobs during the early 90s.
The founder. of Apple. Everyone knows Steve Jobs.
And O 'Leary believed that one of the main reasons that Jobs became so wildly successful was his understanding of the signal -to -noise ratio. And in the clip, Kevin O 'Leary actually spends the first part of the clip talking about what an asshole that Steve Jobs was and how bad it was to work for him. But he said that this was the most profound thing that he learned.
According to Kevin O 'Leary, Jobs did not spend all day thinking about some vague vision for what Apple might accomplish next year. He identified three to five things that absolutely needed to be completed within the next 18 hours while he was awake.
Not tomorrow, not next week, not next month, not next year. Within the 18 hours he was awake. Those three to five things were critical to the mission.
He had already decided that they needed to happen and he expected them to be completed that day. That was the signal. And anything preventing him from completing those things was the noise.
Emails could be noise. Meetings could be noise. Phone calls could be noise.
Random problems, excuses, and requests from other people could be noise. But according to O 'Leary, Jobs maintained or attempted to maintain an 80 to 20 ratio. 80 % signal and 20 % noise.
O 'Leary said that he knew Jobs generally operated this way because Jobs would email him at 2 .30 in the morning and expect a response. Jobs was demanding, intense, and difficult to work for. However, O 'Leary's point was that Jobs was right about the signal.
He knew what needed to be completed, and he did not allow much else to interfere with that. And then later in this same clip, not right after, but he said, he gave the example of Elon Musk, and he said, The only person he's ever seen operate with a higher signal -to -noise ratio than Jobs was Elon Musk.
And according to O 'Leary in this clip, Musk operates at close to 100 % signal. Although, I don't know about tweeting all day, right? But almost every minute of every hour he is awake is directed towards something he considers part of the mission.
And that's very true if you read stories about Elon Musk. That obviously creates problems of its own. Normal conversations can become noise.
Spending time with family or friends can become noise. Playing guitar, social media, and almost anything related to the mission becomes noise. And operating at 100 % signal is socially awkward and probably unrealistic for almost everyone.
And I'm not recommending that you classify your spouse, children, health, or entire life as useless noise. However, during the periods that you have decided to work, i .e. these four hours of deep work per day, the principle is extremely powerful and important.
So for that period, you should attempt to operate as close to 100 % pure signal as possible. It's a very important part of this course. So what does the signal mean and what should you literally be focusing on?
Because, you know, theory is theory, but reality is another thing entirely a lot of the time, right? So signal means the small number of things that meaningfully advance your most important goals. So we're going to go over the top five goals again.
And I went over mine when I did the 10x versus original. Those are the end signal. And the thing or I guess those are the end results and the things that like you got to break down those and the things that become the broken down version into, you know, big goal broken down into actual steps become the signal in this case.
So like you can be very busy, but if you're not focusing on the signal, right, and you're just focusing on the noise, even if it's 50 -50 during your deep work hours. It really defeats the purpose. Like if you were even 50 % focused on the signal and you did four hours, that's basically like doing two hours, right?
Still probably better than most people achieve, but not exactly, you know, meaningful. The goal is not merely to get better at working and focusing. The goal is to become better at identifying what matters and then directing your complete attention to it.
So basically, we've... establish the size of the goal now we've done the required standard we talked about the 2 .0 version of yourself and we talked about the signal and noise and that is good right we know that but how do we make sure that we keep like doing it every day and that's where we go back to james clear's habit protocol and this is from atomic habits great book great book so let's go back again a little and break this up so like years ago When I began doing this experiment, I asked myself how to make it more likely that this becomes a habit and achieved every single day.
I've repeated that, of course, but I actually put a lot of thought into it. I'm not trying to claim that I'm some sort of philosopher, but I would actually sit there and think about this a little. And I would do little stuff, and eventually I was able to achieve a good result for myself.
For a while, I would work seven days per week, you know, four deep work hours per day. And I would literally just do this with 95%, you know, consistency or, you know, efficiency. I did it, you know, 30 days in a month.
I would do it for 27, 28 days perfectly. But, and that was a great result. Huge win, right?
But there was holes in the system that I didn't know because when I started teaching the system to employees, to clients, to friends, to business partners, I noticed a problem with it. They would like the system, well, of the ones who tried it anyway, they would like the system, they would implement it, and they would get good results from it, but they would just not really remain consistent over the long term.
And it was clear that teaching the system, just like I'm teaching you now, was not enough. And this, this hole is fixed. Now this is where we fix this hole.
I needed to find a way to make it somewhat addictive for lack of a better word and turn it into a habit. And naturally this led me to atomic habits. I read the book a lot.
I always loved the book. Clearly lots of other people like it too and love it too. It's one of the, you know, most popular bestselling books on like it's in the Amazon top 10 bestselling nonfiction books for like years on end.
This is the book if you want. And in the book, James Clear, who's the author, breaks habit formation down into four parts, the cue, the craving, the response, and the reward. So each part is connected to what he calls his four laws of behavior change.
The first is the cue, making it obvious. The second is the craving, make it attractive. The third is the response, making it easy.
And the fourth is reward, make it satisfying. So the cue makes you aware that it's time to perform the behavior. The craving gives you a reason to want to perform it.
The response is the behavior itself, and the reward creates immediate satisfaction and therefore reinforces the behavior. So if these laws, and if we take it at face value, which I did at the time and largely still do, if these four laws can make almost any behavior more likely to become a habit, then there was no reason that they could not be applied to this whole system, right?
and make the whole system a habit to do this. So when we apply the four laws to the system, and for now I'm going to keep this intentionally theoretical because it's not going to make that much sense to talk about the practical, each piece of the system and how it relates at this point because you don't even know what things there are.
But at the end of every part or at the end of every piece of the system, we're going to explain how this perfectly correlates and how this applies James Clear's thing. So throughout the rest of the course, we'll make deliberately focused work obvious enough that you do not forget or ignore it or avoid it, attractive enough that you want to begin, easy enough that unnecessary friction doesn't stop you, and satisfying enough that you want to repeat it.
So the system will not depend on one reminder or one motivation or one reward or one cue. Different components will reinforce each other, making the... pleat behavior substantially easier to repeat over the long term.
And once you've seen and implement these components, we will return to James Clear's four laws and evaluate the complete system against them. But basically the basic structure that you can remember, make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying. And James Clear gives us the structure for deliberately building that habit.
And that gets into the Pavlovian conditioning. This is not a core concept of the course. but it kind of builds a little bit on James Clear's habits, right?
We've all heard of the scientist Pavlov, Ivan Pavlov. He was a Russian scientist. And this experiment is the Pavlov and the dogs, right?
He rings his bell and then the dog eats. So this is, in my opinion, an extremely useful external experiment to basically understand this. So in the version that most people know, Pavlov would ring a bell before giving the dogs food, and after he repeated this enough times, the dogs began salivating when they heard the bell, even when no food was present.
The bell originally meant nothing. Pavlov connected it to something the dogs wanted until their response to the bell became automatic. This is called conditioning.
largely from James Clear's stuff, we are going to try to reverse that. The entire system is built around deliberately creating a consistent environment and repeating the same general series of cues, action, and rewards. Eventually, entering that environment should tell your brain exactly what's about to happen.
It's time to focus. It's time to work. It's time to make progress.
And the environment and the system become our version of Pavlov's bell. in his experiment. So throughout the rest of the course, we are going to show how to create this environment and which actions and rewards to repeatedly connect to it.
At first, it might feel a bit cringe and forced, but after repeating it hundreds of times, your brain should begin associating focused work with progress, accomplishment, satisfaction, and reward. James Clear gives us the practical structure for creating the habit, and Pavlov gave us a memorable way to understand how repeated associations can condition a response.
And then we have one more idea, and then I promise we will get into the actual setup of this. I know it's been a long time already, but without the theory complete, I don't think you would have the sufficient buy -in to do every part of the setup and the system to the level that it needs. Because remember, this is all interconnected, and it all works together, and, you know, we need it all for it to work like that.
So the final idea is momentum, and that comes from Isaac Newton, the famous scientist, right? This system may be difficult at first because you don't have any momentum. And one of the best ways to understand this is that Newton's law of first motion, or first law of motion, an object at rest remains at rest and an object in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.
When you are doing nothing, It's easy to continue doing nothing. Beginning requires the most effort because you need to overcome your existing state and force yourself into motion.
But once we begin with the system, it will become substantially easier. It's like starting a small snowball at the top of the hill and we roll it down the hill. And over time, it picks up more snow and more snow and gets so big that it continuously runs down the whole.
slope and picks up everything in its path, right? Work can operate the same way if we want it to. We just need a little bit momentum to get us started.
And then momentum makes the second action easier. And then every additional action, every single day that we do this system, the snowball becomes larger and larger and larger until the opposite happens and it's hard to stop. That is why in the next part of the course, we are going to go over the setup in, again, some painstaking amount of detail.
We are going to set up our environment and our just general work to remove friction, to prepare our environment and to make beginning the work as easy as possible. That is symbolic of placing the snowball at the top of the hill and preparing everything required to get it moving. At first, we'll need to push it a little, but eventually we, you know, us and everything else will have to get out of its way.
And at long last, we're in the setup. We're in a new part. We've talked about the system.
We've talked about the theory and why it is. And hopefully, you're bought in by now. But let's set the system up, finally.
So this is a new part. And at the beginning of new part, we have some reminders for ourselves, right? And that number one of the first one is the 2 .0 version.
of you must be built day after day after day. It doesn't happen all at once. It needs to be built.
It does not just randomly happen. It's just like you chiseling away the new version of yourself. And then we have to go back to our other reminder about the man with the axe.
Going back to the original inspiration for this, Jordan Peterson's lecture about the naturally hyper -industrious man or woman. If you put him in the forest with an axe, He will cut down trees nonstop.
He requires no motivation. He requires no accountability. Work has become an obsession and that level of activity is built into him.
Remember from the lecture. Now, most people, probably the ones watching this, I know I'm not naturally like this. And if you're not, this system is designed to deliberately help you become this way.
And you don't have to do this. No one is forcing you. You don't have to do anything that I or this course teach you.
But if you have tremendous goals and you're extremely ambitious, you are going to be competing with people like this. And if you cannot operate at that level, you will not be competitive with them. No matter what you do, the man with the axe is still working.
And look, he's making progress in the pictures. So let's go into the table of contents for the setup chapter. And I'm really not going to read off all of these here, as I don't really see too much value in doing so.
but there are 22 different parts to the setup. And remember back, probably sounds complicated, and it really isn't, but lots of things are complicated when you're setting up. Go back to our car example.
There might be hundreds or thousands of different parts. You probably don't know even the names of all of them or what they do, but they all come together to make the car, right? And then simple enough to drive it.
So we have spent the entire course so far. And now we're finally going to take some action, right? I don't want to hear this from you.
This seems complicated. 22 different parts. It is like a car and we only need to set it up once and then it becomes very, very simple.
And the setup is the most important part. The setup is easy enough too. Like if you constantly travel or, you know, move around a lot, it's easy enough, especially once you know how it works to just reset it up in those locations.
But if you... You know, you just live where you live and you're there in your office or your home every day. You only need to ever set it up once and it's perfect.
We don't want to have to recreate our environment and have our tools and decide what to do and track and remember between every hour of deep work, right? We want to set up our environment to make, you know, basically have zero friction into doing so. And that's the purpose of this part.
So you should just be able to sit down. Follow the process, complete your hours, and repeat it without really thinking very much about the individual components. After you set up the first time, it's just going to be, you know, everything's just going to be there.
It's no real complicated or distracted at all. So some components create awareness. Some remove distractions.
Some create accountability. Some reinforce your goals, beliefs, and identity. Some help you decide what deserves your attention.
And all of these... work together, and they're deliberately designed to be part of one system. There's 22 different steps, but one system, and that's very, very important to know.
So the system basically builds towards one completed digital and physical environment. You do not know what all the tools and components of the system are yet, but this is where you're going to learn soon enough. We're going to move back and forth between the digital and the physical, so try to keep up.
Basically, what we want is a clean digital environment that makes becoming distracted difficult to basically invert James Clear's rule of making it easy instead of, you know, well, we're trying to make it hard in this case. We're trying to do the opposite, make it hard to get distracted. Right.
And as far as the physical environment goes, the physical environment will be filled with cues, motivation and visible proof that makes it almost impossible to ignore the fact that you should be working and are capable of doing so. So by the end of this part, every component will be in its correct place and ready to use.
And then we'll actually get into doing this deep work. So I hope you're ready for this. So let's get into it.
So step number one is going to be environment design. And the complete setup is going to begin with the place where you are going to perform the work. The goal is to design your work environment so that working becomes your default lowest friction option, with the inverse being also true.
We want to make becoming distracted and avoiding the work as difficult as possible. So something that I have learned the hard way over time, and I'm very strongly opinioned about, is that you cannot rely on tricks, software, or anything external at least 100%. You can use those, but you still need to become this better 2 .0 version of yourself and become a person who is capable of focusing more intensely for longer periods of time.
Again, that doesn't really necessarily mean we should not use the tools at our disposal, but my philosophy is to remove or block as many potential distractions as possible. Knowing that if you're absolutely determined to access something you will like anything can be uninstalled anything can be gotten around no room application or Blocking software can permanently stop you and that's really not the point The correct environment prevents the mindless browser openings the phone checks the interruptions that happen Without any conscious decisions and that makes up a large part of your distraction.
It's not going to Permanently make it so you absolutely can't access something But this still makes a significant difference. So the first thing we want to talk about is the work room.
So whether you work from home or inside an office or I guess somewhere else, we want to make the room where we work as ideal as possible. There is many studies and good research that kind of says that the ideal temperature to work is between 21 and 23 degrees Celsius or 70 and 73 degrees Fahrenheit. I have noticed after a lot of trial and error, I prefer the room to be dark, quiet, and free from as much external movement as possible.
If your room has windows, don't set up your desk looking at the window because you're just going to get distracted. Install blackout blinds if you want to because that allows you to block outside light and movement when you need to focus but still can open it up and let the natural light in because you don't want to be some sort of vampire, right?
If you can, reduce or renew... Remove or reduce any predictable source of noise, people talking, televisions playing, doors opening. Hopefully you're not the victim of endless construction, but any movement around you can repeatedly pull your attention away from work.
We don't need the perfect office. We don't need an expensive office. We just need one room that is comfortable, quiet, and boring enough that the work becomes essentially the most interesting thing available.
I'm on the go right now as I'm recording this. This is essentially an Airbnb. I have done in this picture as good as I can.
My actual home office is 10 times more elite and perfect than this. My home office can get so dark that if I took this picture, you couldn't even see it. Like you wouldn't even really see anything besides black.
But it is what it is, right? We have our workstation. We have the blinds flows.
It's still a little light in there, but it's pretty good. And the next is the workspace. So I don't really consider the workroom.
and the workspace, the exact same thing. The room is the, well, the room and the workspace I consider to be your desk and everything immediately surrounding it and in your basically eyesight or like line of view, line of sight. The first thing is that we need to use one monitor.
And if we have a laptop that can be plugged in, put the laptop behind the monitor so you can't see it. And I'm very, very like passionate about this as part of the system. One monitor.
having multiple monitors does not make you more productive it just gets your attention between two different things we can have one very very big monitor if we want to and basically have our screen like two sets of browsers or split screen like that and have that same multiple tabs open so you can still you know copy and paste something from one form to the other and you don't have any excuses that you need a second browser but one monitor only and it's very very very important in my opinion The difference between one monitor and a single line of focus and multiple monitors is night and day.
And then your desk should contain everything that is required to complete the work and almost nothing else. Everything required to complete the work and nothing that is not required, better put. So basic workstation, your computer, your timer, which we'll get into, a notebook and pen.
bottle of water, either earplugs or headphones, either one. Remove any garbage, any empty bottles, any unnecessary accessories, documents, and anything else you don't need. Basically everything and every unnecessary object on your computer becomes one more thing competing for your attention.
If I listen to music, which I only really do if I'm like really struggling, I like to play the same song on repeat, an instrumental version where it doesn't like require any thinking or I don't know how else to describe it besides that. Just the same song.
You don't have to listen to any lyrics. You don't have to change the song or change playlists or whatever. And if I'm not doing that, I usually have nothing in or earplugs.
Earplugs are a very good hack to just get some comfortable ones. And in my opinion, it really helps you focus a lot more than having no earplugs. So the goal is to make the workspace so simple that there's almost nothing to do except the assignment directly in front of you.
This would be like what my direct workspace looks like right now. My computer, my laptop is actually on the floor behind this desk. There's my monitor.
There's my camera and microphone. There's my timer. There's my earplugs right there.
There's a reminder. This is really like if you're looking at me or in the video right now, like this is more or less what I'm looking at.
I had, you know, this workspace done up like this for a long time. But to me, the key came in the next part, learning to utilize the wall behind your workspace. So the wall behind your workspace will gradually become part of the system and will add more and more steps.
As we create each physical component, you will immediately place it on the wall. And this wall will create a permanent cue and source of motivation that will become impossible to ignore. So keep it directly behind your computer at all times so it remains visible while you work.
So for now, don't do anything. It will make sense when the time comes. But by the end of the setup, this wall will be full.
And essentially, this is what you're probably looking like right now. The next is your computer and the phone. The computer should give you the access to the tools required for your work without giving you unrestricted access to every possible distraction.
So during your work hours, keep only the documents, the applications and the information required for the current assignment open. We're going to do a few things to make sure this is true. First is we're going to install a tab limiter.
But make it so you can only open a certain amount of tabs at a time. And then we'll do desktop app blockers later in the setup. Your phone should not be inside your workroom during your deep work period or deep work hours.
Put it somewhere where it deliberately makes you stand up, leave the room and retrieve it. You should already have access to almost everything that you genuinely need through your computer. And there's usually no productive reason to keep your phone beside you.
And I'm not even going to name the exceptions because I don't want to give you any ideas. Every time I break this rule, I am reminded again of why it exists. I probably break it maybe every two, every three days.
We're going to complete the full phone blocking setup later, but for now, put your phone somewhere else while you work. So what we're going to do is we're going to set up a desktop app blocker in one of the steps so that like you go onto something that does not do with your work and it just changes the screen here. This implements a lot of the theory part of this because Environment design helps make focused work obvious and easy.
The room contains almost everything to work and almost nothing that encourages distraction. It's the same thing with your computer. And repeating your work inside the environment also begins creating the type of consistent association that we discussed with Pavlov and the dog's Pavlovian conditioning theory.
And over time, when you enter this room and sit at this desk, it'll become a cue to you. It is time to focus. It's time to work.
It's time to make progress. And the physical environment basically controls what's around you while you work. So the next step addresses what you allow to enter your mind.
Yeah, we should be locking our phone up during the day, just like that. But before we get into that, I want to do something that, in my opinion, is something that's easy to do with your physical environment, your computer and your phone. And that really gets a little bit of urgency for me, at least.
So I always recommend downloading any app that... essentially displays what percentage of the year is complete and then put that widget on the home screen of your phone and your computer. So every time you open this, it should display it and it should be the only thing you see or not the only thing you see, but you should see it like it wouldn't be possible not to see it.
To me, this is not part of the overall system. This is more like a power up. But it can be a good reminder to act with a sense of urgency when you open your phone and see, oh my God, 61 .6 % of 2026 is already complete, right?
It just shows you how fast time goes and any bonus, you know, urgency type thing that you can get yourself to act faster and more consistently like this is good. Not necessarily part of the system, but a good bonus nonetheless. So step two in the system is Dialing in our information diet.
So the previous step changed the physical environment surrounding you. Now we're going to change what enters our mind. So I'll never forget the opening line from a documentary I once watched.
I was not able to find the documentary as I was making this course. Couldn't find it. But basically the opening line said something like this.
Besides oxygen, content is the thing that humans consume the most on Earth. But unlike the quality of the air we breathe, we put very little thought into the quality of the content we consume. And I don't remember what this documentary was called.
I don't remember anything besides that line. But it has stuck with me and it caused a major shift in the quality of my life. And this has to do with your mental or information diet.
We all understand the importance of our physical diet, even if we don't always live up to it. We know that we feel and perform differently when we eat clean food compared to eating fast food and junk food. But there is a mental version of this.
The content you consume affects your thoughts, your focus, your mood, and the way you interpret your own life. If you consume nothing but short form video, social media feeds, news, pornography, and negative content, you should not be surprised when the ability to focus, think clearly, and your work begins deteriorating.
If you consume positive, motivational and useful material, it can help you perform at a higher level. And your information diet matters just as much as the physical information or physical environment that you work in. And it matters just as much, if not more, just as much as your like food diet, in my opinion.
See, like when you have all of this garbage in, it's just kind of the same thing as breathing in, you know, toxic air. So let's go through some of these. So as far as short form content and social media feeds go, I would never recommend letting short form video get anywhere near us.
It trains us to expect constant novelty and stimulation. And that really is like. the exact opposite of what we're trying to do in our deep work hours, right?
We should also remove the social media feeds, the stories, again, the short form videos, the recommended content and the explore page from platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. But we still might need to, especially if we're a business owner, we might need to use these to search for information or someone or publish content or respond to our messages.
I mean, we might still need to use these platforms for work, right? So we should just use like Google Chrome extensions, which we'll get into a sec, some blocking tools that we still have access to these things, but all of the algorithms and all the recommendations and all the bad stuff is blocked by default. So we're going to have to use it a much more intentionally.
It's not mindless distraction. It's intentional use, right? And using these platforms intentionally is better than allowing them to use you, right?
The software. going to help you block it, but we still need to become that better version of ourselves, right? We need to consciously decide that we don't want this content in our life.
I also think and I'm somewhat passionate about, you know, just excessive content consumption on YouTube podcasts and music, right? Like a lot of people, I'm not saying that a podcast is much better, almost. universally than any form of short form content and so is music but i still personally keep those to a minimum and i don't think that most people understand how badly just constantly having a podcast or music or something in like fries your brain after a while Even when the content is not explicitly negative, like the short form video, like the news, the politics, etc.
We want to really have a lot of time alone with our thoughts. And we want to focus on our own life instead of constantly consuming external stuff, podcasts, music, etc. To help us escape from our life.
Even the useful content becomes a distraction when consuming it replaces thinking, creating, or doing the work on yourself. You don't need to be taught. something new every hour.
You don't need all of the updates. Most of the time, we just need to act on what we already know. If we go further, we have news, pornography, negative people.
Don't look at the news, especially political news. For most people, there's almost no practical benefit, and it can cause significant harm to your attention, mood, and ability to focus. Most news does not help you.
Build the better version of yourself. It just gives you another thing to think and worry and doom about. Do not watch pornography or any kind of that material.
There's no benefit to it. It's another harmful source of stimulation that competes with your ability to focus or, you know, a lot of cases much, much worse, especially as time goes on and it's more and more studied. And finally, reduce the amount of time you spend around people who are relentlessly negative, discouraging, or distracting.
Not everybody's always bad, but if they're bad to the point where you would consciously label them as always negative, that is when you cut them off. If you consciously notice it. And that's not the same as the often dumb advice about cut off all your friends and lock in.
You don't need to do that. You need to cut off negative people who allow their negativity to affect you. So let's talk about choosing better inputs, because when you choose better inputs, right, that's like breathing pure and clean and beautiful air.
Removing bad inputs is only one side of the process. You should also deliberately expose yourself to things that reinforce the person you are trying to become. The first hour of your day is especially important because if we go back to the momentum example, of course, there's overall momentum, but the first hour of the day is like building momentum for the rest of the day, right?
So ideally, you're going to spend some of that first hour alone with your thoughts and keep your phone turned off. But if you are going to consume something, I always recommend listening to material that improves your mindset and prepares you to work. For me, like for example, I always in the morning listen to about 20 minutes of Tony Robbins.
Tony Robbins is my guy, my chosen motivational material. And this positive input for me, and when you do it, will create positive momentum that carries into the rest of your morning and your deep work hours. Later, we're going to create physical reminders that repeatedly expose you to your goals, your motivations, that 2 .0 version of yourself that you're trying to create and your thought habits that will help you do so.
But for now, This is good enough to remove the content that distracts us and to intentionally put in better content that makes us more likely to do what we're supposed to do. As far as how this implements the theory portion of what we talked about, your information diet is kind of like that auto -suggestion all day long from that Napoleon Hill.
Auto -suggestion repeatedly is a suggestion you make to yourself. If you just have a bunch of negative something in it, you are more likely to, you know, be negative, have negative thoughts, and negative thoughts are going to drag you down. Everything you repeatedly consume, which suggests what you should think about, care about, fear, want, and become, if you constantly expose yourself to bad stuff and noise, your thoughts will become noisier.
You know, brain fog, people like, oh, I can't focus. But if you reduce the noise and deliberately choose better inputs, it becomes easier to reinforce the beliefs, the standards, and the self -image that you are trying to develop. So basically what we've done, we've created a better physical environment, and now we've begun cleaning up the information entering our mind to basically create that better digital environment.
And the next step in the system is to protect the time required to... utilize both of these things to complete our four hours of deep work, and that has to do with time blocking. So here's a joke for you.
If you did not know, the root word of deep work is deep, and then there's a second one called work, right? I know, what a hilarious joke. But we cannot enter deep work and achieve the level of focus if our calendar is so messed up that we're constantly jumping.
through a lot of the stuff. We can't sit down and do an hour of focus if every hour there's 20 different things in it, right? And, you know, this course is made from the business owner entrepreneur point of view.
And that's a very common thing to have happen to you when you own a business and probably even when you have a job sometimes, right? If you leave your schedule open, just like your mind, people will fill it for you. So what I always recommend is to protect the first five hours of the day.
So if I woke up at six, I would block off everything until 11. That window gives you enough time to complete the four deep work hours with short breaks in between them and a little bit of inefficiency. No one is allowed to schedule a meeting with me ordinarily or ask for a call or place something on my calendar during this time period.
When you first do this, you might have to rearrange your schedule and clean something up, but it will be the best thing that you ever do. Remember, if you wake up at 6 and it's blocked off to 11, even in standard business hours, 11 to 5 is 6 hours to do all of this stuff. It kind of is an excuse if you don't do this.
So after my deep work periods are done, I can handle my calls, my messages, my meetings, my administrative work, and everything else that competes for my attention, but I can rest easy or... spend the rest of my day satisfied knowing that my deep work, the stuff that already matters, has been completed. And the key to this is you need to put this on your calendar, literally, not figuratively.
If you are in business or you have a job, you probably have a calendar, a Google calendar or a Microsoft calendar or something like that. You need to actually open it and create a recurring event that protects the first five hours after you wake up. Do not tell yourself, and lie to yourself that you'll just do this without doing this.
If you don't block your calendar, someone is going to do it for you. You've got to treat that time like an important appointment that cannot be casually removed or replaced. And if necessary, and a lot of people, you might need to wake up earlier so that the protected window interferes less with your family, your employees, your customers, or anyone else who needs you during the day.
Remember what the man of the axe, what I told you. Everything is a choice in this course. You don't need to do it.
You need to choose to protect this time because you understand that no one will protect it for you. And they'll usually do the exact opposite. So if you were to wake up at 6am, you'd block your calendar from 6am to 11.
If you were doing at 5am, you know, 5 to 10. If you're waking up at 8am, 8am to 1pm. And that's what I mean.
Like later that you wake up, it becomes more and more difficult to do this. The five hour window gives you enough time to complete four hours of deep work. And then, you know, you have your three 10 minute breaks in between because you wouldn't have a 10 minute break after.
And then you have like, you know, your time for your morning routine. So five hours really is enough. So again, we don't allow anything but our deep work hours done.
And the goal is, in my opinion, to complete your first four deep work hours as early and as efficiently as possible instead of spacing them around or spreading them out. It's not going to work if you sleep in until 11 and then you block it off until 4. It's just part of being a high -functioning adult.
So this implements the theory because time blocking, when you block it off in your calendar, it makes the behavior obvious, right? You open your phone or your calendar. Oh, there's my time blocking.
The recurring calendar event tells you exactly when the work begins and prevents you from deciding whatever else. It also protects the signal from the noise. You've already decided that the work inside this block matters more than the ordinary stuff.
And basically what this does is the protected block creates the time required. and the space required for every remaining part of the system to work. I find it difficult to believe that the rest that we're going to go over would work without this step.
So go into your calendar right now and block it. The next part is step four, and that is the timer. So that protected block of time creates the space and time you need to work.
And the timer is where we actually do these deep work hours. So you can use a physical or a digital timer. So if you look at the camera right here, that's mine.
I actually have this one. I just got a new one. You can see how it's ticking down.
I really prefer the physical, but digital works too. I like the physical one because it just sits there and like... You can just see it 24 -7, like the digital ones, there's like tabs and all this stuff.
But we want to work in one -hour increments. And I first started this based off something called the 60 -10 method from a book called The 5AM Club by Robin Sharma. 60 minutes with a 10 -minute break allows you to just focus for 60 minutes and then kind of recover or screw around or break it up.
You know, there's that Pomodoro method. I think that's essentially 25 -5, 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off. To me, that is not enough time to really focus and do deep work.
That's like the opposite of deep work. So basically, what you do is you start the timer. You literally train yourself to sit there.
This is a skill, remember? No matter what, like when you first start, I'm not even telling you need to work during the 60 minutes. I'm just saying that you're not allowed to get up until the timer goes off.
Do whatever you want, but you need to train yourself to sit there. And this is a skill that is developed and gets easier and easier and easier when time goes on. So you can think about this and training focus in the same way you would like train a muscle in a gym.
You know, the first time you go to the gym and you do bench press, you probably have the worst bench press ever. Probably be very weak, right? But you do this for 12 weeks, then it gets much stronger.
You do it for a year, gets much stronger, and so on. works the exact same way. Every completed hour is another rep.
The goal is not to prove that you can focus perfectly on the first day or even the first week. The goal is to basically repeatedly practice this skill until completing one hour of focused work is just normal. That's basically what it is.
This is going to be you after a while. The only thing you're going to be thinking about is deep work.
Remember that four hours is the baseline. That's the goal that we're trying to go for. And we're going to basically do this by doing one hour four times.
So start the timer, work for 60 minutes. Once that's up, take a short break, begin the next hour. And if, like I said before, if you cannot complete four hours when you first start, just do as many as you can.
Focus on quality, but don't be a baby about it. You want to get to this four hours as quickly as possible in terms of quantity too. We don't want to get into quitting early or shortening the individual hour every time focusing becomes uncomfortable.
You know, the discomfort is part of the process. When you look at your thing, like I have 22 minutes left. If I wanted to give up right now, I'd just be like, okay, just five more minutes.
And then you get through it. And then eventually, like you catch a second wind or another thing and you just power through it. I would rather you do 60 full minutes, one hour.
in the first week, then you do three hours of 48 minutes, 50 minutes, and 36 minutes. Train yourself to sit there for one hour. And after enough repetition, completing these deep hours, especially with how we have it all set up as part of the system, can become addictive and begin feeling more like a video game than an obligation.
Developing an addiction to deep work is probably a much better addiction to develop than anything else. You can just go on Amazon, buy a timer. There's so many different versions of a timer and all of them work basically the same.
So how does this implement the theory? The timer turns focus execution into a skill that you can deliberately practice. It gives behavior a clear beginning, a clear ending, and a consistent unit of measurement.
Starting the same timer inside the same environment also creates a repeated cue. Eventually, pressing start should tell your brain exactly what's about to happen. For the next 60 minutes, you work.
Just like Pavlov rings the bell, the dog eats. Once you start the timer, once you hear that sound, you're working, right? The timer measures how long you remain inside the hour.
And the next step is something that I didn't really add until years after. And this is a distraction counter. So the timer, you know, here we go, is, you know, tells you the time remaining in the hour.
Make sure it's all 60 minutes there. But it doesn't really measure. how focused you were, does it?
One bit of wisdom that I got early in my business life is you need to always have two ways to measure the same thing because a lot of the time only having one metric doesn't really tell the full story, right? So an example on YouTube. So on YouTube, you have those, you have the ads that come before the video, right?
So a lot of people like may just judge the quality of their YouTube video by how many views it gets, right? But if you're a YouTube creator, you get what's called an RPM, which is basically a revenue per meal. And meal is Latin for a thousand.
At least I hope it is. I'm going to sound really dumb. So basically, you get a certain amount of money from Google slash YouTube for every thousand people who watch your video.
Right. So the more valuable your audience is. Judged by the algorithms and they know.
You know, that is the secondary metric. It's not only just about views, but it's about your RPM as well, because that judges the quality. Like Mr.
Beast gets an insane amount of views, but I bet you his RPM is much, much, much, much lower than my RPM, right? Because business owners, people who are in theory judged by the algorithm to be much more financially, you know, valuable. to an advertiser versus the younger or the kids who watch Mr.
Beast. You know, this is a, that's a good example of this. So the timer in this case measures quantity.
It's like the views, but then you also have a distraction counter, which measures the quality because the timer doesn't remind, like, doesn't really like it checks. the hour, but it doesn't really tell you how focused we were because we could technically sit at our desk for 60 minutes while repeatedly checking our phone and you doing all this in the hours past, but that doesn't really mean we are doing some deep work, right?
And that's what the distraction counter is for. And this counter can either be physical or digital. I always use a physical one because it's more convenient and it doesn't require another tab open, but basically Every time that you get distracted, so picking up your phone if you didn't put it away or opening another app that you don't need to be using or just doing something, checking notification, you just go.
And it might sound ridiculous, but that sound is almost like a dog and like a dog whistle or a shot caller. Every time you catch yourself getting distracted after a while and you hear that sound or whatever sound your counter makes, you go right back to work. Trust me.
So it is basically personal moment by moment accountability. Because before adding the counter, I could always finish an hour pretty well. And then I actually arbitrarily used to assign like a focus score to each hour.
There was no actual measurement. It was kind of just vibes, right? And I wish I had this counter a lot earlier because I would just kind of basically, oh, I think that hour was a 10 out of 10 focus, right?
Or, oh, no, that wasn't good at all. That was a 5 out of 10. It's based on literally nothing.
But now when you change the measurement to something hard, I was distracted 14 times. Like you can't really.
lie to yourself. Remember what we said earlier about, you know, measuring and the tiny consequence creates awareness while the behavior was happening. And then if you really want to get into it, like record what caused it, you know, you have your piece of paper on your right hand side, you have your distraction.
Oh, okay. You know, I was stuck, you know, and looking for a distraction. That's what caused it.
Or there was a big noise or notifications weren't turned off. And then after the hour, after the workday, You're going to just see what all of these distractions or circumstances are, and then you can do your best to mitigate them.
This is a system for the most ambitious who want to improve, who are not apathetic about their life. It might sound like a lot, but you want to accomplish big things, don't you? You want to be able to focus, don't you?
So basically, imagine that I completed one hour of work and pressed my distraction counter four times. My distractions might open WhatsApp after seeing a notification. I clicked YouTube when the work became difficult.
I checked my phone just without thinking because it was in reach. I ran out of clearly planned work before the timer ended. That's a sleeper right there, a dark horse.
So the score tells you how many times you were distracted and then the notes basically tell you what you need to change. So basically how this implements the theory, the counter creates awareness and allows you to practice focus as that measurable skill. Instead of trying to focus better, you can compare your scores and attempt to reduce the number over time.
You know, if I have one hour I was distracted 30 times and now I'm distracted 20 times, that is a much more focused hour, objectively, not just vibes. So basically, like awareness makes the improvement possible. And once you repeatedly know what causes you to lose focus, you can begin removing those causes from your environment and like your workflow.
And the counter is really how you do that.
And once we have that timer and we have the counter, the next step is really one of the things that reduces the chance we'll get distracted. And step six is the tab limiter. The counter creates the awareness when you become distracted, but now we're just going to reduce the likelihood that this is possible.
And one of the simple yet most effective possible ways is the tab limiter. So basically, this is an extension on the Google Chrome store. There's probably a lot of them.
I just use one that looks like this. What you want to do is you want to set a maximum of two or three tabs open at the time. So during the deep work, you may need the document or application you're working in, something like your project management tool, maybe an additional tab containing required information, but you almost never need more than that.
And in my experience, you know, 99 % of the additional tabs over three of them during the deep work period become distractions. You know, every tab represents another unfinished thought or unrelated task or piece of content or message or opportunity to click away or get distracted. So this is what I would lose.
I always do it to three and we really want to force ourselves to choose. You know, we don't need 20 unrelated pages at the top. And whenever we reach the limit, if we set it at two or three, opening another tab requires you to close one of the tabs already open.
And that forces you to make a decision instead of just mindlessly doing it, which is what we're trying to avoid with this whole process. Is the new tab genuinely required to complete the task? Because you have to delete one of them, it must be more important to complete the task than the ones you have open.
And if not, we just don't open it.
tabs right now like look it's just closing it that's what that flicker on the screen is so if you're completing like like basically for me i was like i was basically i have when i was making this long long course i had the course document open i had my project management tool open and then i usually had an ai tab or something to check references open.
And if I ever wanted a fourth tab, I had to close one of these. I didn't have 25 different tabs open, and then you just eventually get distracted. And that is why I was able to focus so well and make this course pretty quickly, to be honest, judging by the size and the detail of it.
So in terms of how does this implement the theory, the tab limiter makes distractions more difficult. It removes unnecessary choices. reduces the amount of visual noise and keeps your direction toward the small number of things required to complete the current assignment.
The counter measures the distraction after they happen, whereas that tab limiter prevents some of them from happening at all. Remember, one of the rules, make it easy, and the inverse of that, make it hard to get distracted. That's one of them here, right?
But again, like the browser tabs are only one source of distraction. So we also want in step seven, a desktop app blocker. So again, I ultimately am of the opinion that you need to become a better person and break your addiction to distraction and become a better version of yourself who can focus.
Because I've tried this and no application can permanently prevent you from accessing something if you are absolutely determined to do so. But the blocking software can mindlessly Stop the mindless openings that happen because you are bored, uncomfortable, or you just don't even think about it.
You just open it. And the key here is to create so much friction that you just don't bother. It is not to solve any other problem than that.
You will be able to access it if you need to, both for bad reasons or for good, because sometimes you just might need to access something. You don't want to just permanently nuke it from your computer or phone, right? But don't...
Underestimate how much time that you can waste on your computer if you're given the opportunity. So as far as blocking distractions on the computer, I recommend getting both something called Opal and something called Focus Me. These are application and website blocking tools.
And I would add every distracting website and application and news site and short form content source and pornographic site and everything to this. You know, you also might do stuff as email, Slack, iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, all that kind of stuff during your work hours. But there are certain stuff that provide no value to your life.
Like I said before, that you just permanently block. So basically what we want to do is we want to set up these things where on them, it's pretty easy once you get into it, like you just set up the stuff and then you press start and then it will like, you could just set it for an hour and then that stuff you can't open for an hour.
If you do, it'll just show you a screen like this. That's the Opal version. The Focus Me one has something different.
I like both because it's just two layers of protection instead of one. The next thing is to remove algorithmic feeds. And we really, especially if we're coming at it from the point of view of a business owner, we might still need to use certain platforms like YouTube, Instagram, all that kind of stuff for legitimate work to publish something.
But that does not mean we need to sit there and be, victim to everything that the algorithm wants to show us. So there's a lot of browser extensions in the Google Chrome store that will block the YouTube homepage, the recommended videos.
There's stuff that will block short form videos on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. It'll block all of the feeds entirely, all the stories and all the explore pages. And it still lets you use the functions of each platform.
If you intentionally choose to do so, like I could intentionally search for a YouTube video. I could intentionally check my DMs or notifications, but it just doesn't let you just be cracked out and doing it over there. And the final couple of things are disabling the notifications, especially on desktop, especially during your work periods and your phone too.
Like you could whitelist something like the main thing that people like are hesitant to this. Like, what if I have like, I have a wife and kids.
What if there's an emergency? And although there's probably never been an emergency ever in your life, just whitelist from their phone numbers. So to give yourself peace of mind and you don't use this as an excuse not to turn the notifications off.
I like to create multiple layers because again, the blocking software is not a substitute for developing the character trait and skill of focus, but it makes distraction. Very difficult, and it makes it so it's just not one click away. Like the clean workspace from the first part removes the physical distractions.
The tab limiter does the browser distractions. The desktop app blocker does the applications, the websites, the feeds, and the notifications. And then the Chrome extensions do the social media stuff.
Each layer makes mindless distractions slightly more difficult. You could access it if you want, but... it does like at a certain point flip a switch in your brain where it's just like, it's just like, this is like the, it's just too much work, right?
And together they create an environment where working becomes easy or on the inverse, distraction becomes very difficult. How this implements the theory? The desktop app reduces more noise and makes the correct choice easier.
It prevents a moment of boredom from immediately turning into 20 minutes of distraction. You still have to do all of the work. You're just simply making it as easy as possible.
And now your computer is substantially more difficult to misuse. So the next step applies to the same principle, but it applies to the device that's even more distracting, which is your phone. So let's get into step eight, which is the phone app blocker.
Because the phone is probably the greater source of distraction than even the computer. Probably the greatest source of distraction that we have available to us. Because it's small, it's mobile, almost always in reach.
And that means we really got to take it seriously. So to me, success with the phone starts the night before. So what I like to do is I turn my phone completely off at night.
and I leave it inside a drawer or in the kitchen or somewhere outside the bedroom, bringing your phone to bed with you destroys your sleep because you're just, well, whether you use it or not, the anxiety and the thoughts about it are going to make it so you wake up more during the night, you have a greater chance of using it, etc.
And that means the focus in the morning can be destroyed before the morning even begins. And then what we want to do is we want to create at least four blocking layers. We've already gone over the concept of these blocking layers and stuff with other stuff, but basically what we want to do is we want to have a device that's a physical device.
So one of them is called Brick. Let me go get mine.
So this is a Brick device. I put mine on my... Fridge if I'm working at home or I put it in my car if I'm at the office and basically It like it's like this where it blocks the stuff and in order to unblock it You literally have to go and like touch your phone to it I don't have my phone with me because I'm recording right now doing deep work, you know but you put your phone to it like this and then it would Unblock it.
The next thing you want to do is use the same opal app that you got on the computer It'll do the same thing The third is you want to have like the Apple screen time, basically. It's just, if you have an iPhone, it's just a setup method where you can just block the same websites and then basically change the password and you only have the password to your mom or your spouse or your business partner, someone who has it for you.
So if you really needed it, you could get in, but you don't just have easy access to it. And then keep your phone, you know, outside your workroom somewhere. And then the brick and the opal.
just automatically activate based on a schedule before the work begins. Again, like the key thing here is we can't rely on these apps. We have to have become a better 2 .0 version of ourselves.
Nothing is completely unblockable, but the goal is really just to create so much friction that your brain just doesn't really, you know, view this as a possibility anymore. It's kind of like magic when your brain finally accepts that it's tough enough or high friction enough to actually Access this stuff.
It actually stops craving it all together. It's very weird to To explain basically The next is to turn off all of the notifications You can waitlist your spouse family or another emergency contact if you want because I know that's a big point of friction to doing this There has never been an emergency in people's lives But they say I can't do this and I can't do deep work because what if there's an emergency?
So just whitelist people who would be reaching out to you for an emergency. Keep the phone out of reach, ideally out of the entire room. We don't want to be on our phone like this while we're working, right?
There's usually no productive reason to keep it beside you. I don't even want to talk about the reasons that you might have it inside you because that's just going to give you an excuse. But nothing good comes with having it.
So the complete phone setup with multiple layers, phone outside the bedroom when you're sleeping, brick and opal, Apple restrictions, almost all notifications disabled, right? The phone stays outside of the workroom during the deep work hours. One layer might fail, but all of them makes it so it's very tough.
Like these are all redundant layers, but you know, oh, my brain takes me 20 seconds to get around layer one. But when you stack 20 seconds plus you know, another three minutes for the second one, another, you know, five minutes for the other one.
I could access this, but it's going to take me 10 minutes. It's almost like magic how much your brain doesn't even want it anymore. As far as how this implements the theory, it basically enforces your information diet and reduces one of the biggest sources of noise, prevents the moments of boredom, difficulty, or discomfort from immediately turning into messages, social media, email, news, or short -form content.
Of course, we need to develop the skill and character trait of focus, but we just don't want an unlimited amount of distractions in our pocket. This is kind of like a cue, too, in the James Clear habit loop. You know, when your phone is blocked, that is a cue to get to work.
And then you could kind of say it's a reward because between hours you could access it if that is something of your reward. So now that we've basically... Done, like, the information diet part.
We've gotten rid of the bad stuff and the negative pieces of our environment design. Now we're largely going to switch to how do we make our environment positive and good. We'll switch back, you know, without a moment's notice, so try to keep up, but largely these steps are grouped together just to make it as simple as possible.
We've removed many of the obvious distractions, and now we're going back to... the document phase. Remember when I said earlier, you know, the wall behind your computer is very important?
Now we're kind of getting into that phase. So the first is creating our 10x rule document. And we've already covered the theory behind it, but we need to turn that theory into reality, right?
So we need to either open a new document if we have a printer or take out a piece of paper, and we want to write the following on the page. We want to write the 10x rule at the top. And then we want to write set targets 10x greater.
Set targets that are 10 times bigger than what you currently believe you can achieve. The biggest mistake most people make in life is not setting their goals high enough. And then we need to take 10 times more action as a heading.
And then take actions that are 10 times greater than what you currently believe will be necessary to achieve your goals. You'll almost always underestimate the amount of effort, repetition, failure, and persistence required. And at the bottom, in big letters, take massive action.
We want to really keep this short, but we really want to put it like we want to make sure that our writing or our typing font size, if we're going to print this out, is large enough that you can just like read this at a glance. It's not like an incorrectable or like permanent mistake. But the first time I ever tried this, I just made the writing, you know, normal size for maybe what you would read on a piece of paper in front of your face.
But when it's several feet away from you on the wall, you can't really see anything, right? So let's keep this document short. It does not need a big summary of the book.
Realistically, set goals 10 times higher, take 10 times more action, and take massive action, or what you should be able to see on it. But when you do it, you can see the picture on the screen in the top right here now, where you will post it somewhere on the wall like that. So print it and post it.
So the document turns the 10x rule. into a form of auto -suggestion, if you remember back. Instead of hearing the idea once and gradually forgetting about it, you repeatedly remind yourself of the target, the standard, the amount of action you have decided to accept.
Repetition helps move the principle from something you intellectually understand into a belief that influences how you behave. The 10x rule, very important because we need to set larger targets. And then the next step, the next thing we're going to print out are, you know, what those targets actually are.
And that's step 10, your top five goals document. So now when we, you know, we have prompted ourself to do the 10x with every part of life, now we need to decide what those targets actually are. And that's our top five goals document.
So to me, like, these are almost always the most obvious, like, when I am doing this exercise, the top five goals are almost obvious, like always obvious to me, like instantly, I know what they are. I don't know if that's the case for all the people, like, some people have you know, one goal.
Some people have 30 goals. Like I would just probably say like a lot of goals that you'll have are going to be related or influenced by each other. So top five goals, like what are the top five things that will without question, like change your life the most, I would say.
So the top five things that you want to achieve within the next six to 18 months, you can stagger it, but especially if you are, let's just say, I would say a lot of people have never really achieved a goal before in their life, at least in a structured way. Not disparaging them.
It's just if you've never really achieved a big goal before, you should probably just set these six -month goals because they're very realistic. A lot of the time when you set goals, right now, one of my goals is to become a billionaire, right? That's not going to happen.
I would say it's pretty much 0 % chance that's going to happen in the next 6 to 18 months. I don't even know what steps I would have to take or what beliefs, character traits, or skills I would have to have to do that. It's not really fathomable to me.
But at the same time, I have actually achieved a lot of my goals before, unquestionably. I wrote something down in this practice, and I've actually achieved it. So my situation, I guess, would be a bit different.
If you've never really achieved a goal before, you're just starting this process, just do stuff that's six months into the future because that six months probably might turn into 18 months and you know it. So don't put a list of 25 things that you would vaguely like to accomplish. Just choose five within the next six months.
And basically these goals will become the filter to which we evaluate our work, the signal, not the noise principle, you name it. And we want to make every goal specific. I like to say it's a specific number.
I like to give it a specific deadline. I like to put a reason behind it because your reasons, you know, or your motivations typically will make the goal that much more powerful, right? An emotional connection to the goal.
So for your goal, what exactly do you want to accomplish? The number, like what measurable number defines success? The deadline, by what date?
So probably six months in the future for you if you're just starting. The reason, like one line, why is it important? Why is it like, why is accomplishing this goal important to you?
And then go. And I wouldn't rush this exercise. I would take it very seriously and think about it.
Because the problem that you learn the hard way is, you know, like the saying, careful what you wish for. If you don't think of it and you choose the wrong goals and you achieve them, a lot of the time, some bad things can happen to you. And I'll just leave it at that.
So make sure that these are things that you actually want and have actually thought about and actually care about. Because number one, choosing the wrong goal, you know, puts you in the wrong direction, I guess you could say. But then if it's not something that you genuinely care about, you know, like the urgency, the work is not going to feel that important.
And if the goals are vague, you don't know what you'll have to do to achieve them, which affects the, you know, subsequent sections. So we want to basically print off two of this or write down two of this. And one of them is going to be going on the wall.
And one of them is just going to be for us to place somewhere and read them. Because after every hour of our deep work system, basically between every hour, you know, we're going to take 30 seconds and review our goals because auto suggestion over and over and over repetition. right so we need one on the wall that we can see it in big enough writing where we can see the goals like you could probably have that as a simplified version if you'd like because you know the wall is probably far enough away that you're not going to read it anyway but then have a more detailed version on a piece of paper that you print out or elsewise and then when you basically print it and post it it'll be right underneath or right beside your 10x rule so basically we are Getting targets in our mind with our goals and then repeatedly using auto -suggestion and putting them in front of us.
And then the next step is step 11, and that's the vision board. And this was a much later addition to this system than even the 10x rule document, even the goals document. And I think this was one of the big ones because up until this point, and we're going to be putting more documents on the wall.
in, you know, step 12, 13, 14. But I put this at step 11 because the problem that I had with this and the hole in it a little bit is that everything was words and you could read your goals, your standards, your motivations, which we'll talk about soon. But there was no really powerful visual cues showing me that what I was working towards and image like words you got to read and kind of like mentally digest.
But my images are just like, you know, You just see them. Oh, I know what that is, right?
So basically, we want to create a vision board. So we want to choose images that represent our top five goals and the motivations behind them that are like instantly understood. And I don't mean hundreds of pictures of different stuff where it's a cluttered mess.
Having too many pictures is kind of like having too many goals where they just become, you know, each one dilutes and dilutes and dilutes and becomes less and less important. choose a small number of images. So on mine, I'm not going to show you, but I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.
So I have 16 images on mine.
And what you want to do is you want to get each image printed in full color. If you don't have a printer, you could do this at almost any printing thing for like $1 .50 per page. If you have 20 pages, for example, that's...
$30, and it's going to be well, well worth the investment. It doesn't need to be expensive, complicated, or like professionally designed. Just a normal piece of paper, color printer, choose pictures, choose symbolism, choose people, choose, you know, houses or cars or, you know, who you have in mind for your husband or wife one day or pictures of your kids or...
pictures of people you respect or mentors or like whatever, whatever is powerful to you, like just post on the wall and have it instantly understood. So when you're, you're where you're typing, like I'm typing right now, I sit back and go, this is, you know, oh my God, 40 minutes left. I look up briefly, like don't like just my eyes start and I see all of my reasons and motivations and then you're locked back in, right?
So you want to print and post it or get it printed if we don't have a color printer. Don't wait until the entire setup is finished. Pause the video and just do this right now.
We're building the wall one component at a time. So like this would be an example. You probably have more pictures than that and probably be spread out more.
But we want it to remain visible while we work. So that when an assignment becomes difficult or frustrating or boring, the images are a constant reminder to get back to it. And this implements the theory.
you know, auto -suggestion, visualization, you know, our self -image, and it really gets us to work and develop the beliefs and the skills and the character traits of being focused and able to work out or work for an hour straight. I also have step 11b here. So a bonus way to make these even more powerful is to print out and keep probably the most two visually powerful references with the most like symbolism or symbology onto your desk like this makes it so that you know you don't even have to look up the two most powerful things will be taped to your monitor like right on there like if you see mine if you look at the camera i have the man with the axe taped to a water bottle that just sits on my desk and then i have me doing the 2 .0 version of myself These like sit on my desk and no matter where I look, I like will see my vision board.
I will see these things. And it can be a very powerful like thing to do on your desk too. I like, you know, you don't want to crowd your desk or make it cluttered, but probably the top one or the top two things that are the most visually powerful to you, consider like doing that too as another power up.
So step 12 is the motivation list and the top five goals tell you what you're trying to accomplish, right? But just because you have goals doesn't mean you're going to want to feel like working towards it every hour. So this step gives you that emotional force.
So like we've heard the quotes like you got to rely on discipline, not motivation, right? Because motivation is temporary. And that is true.
And I would say very much so. It's only temporary if you don't re -motivate yourself at all times 24 -7 during the hour. So that is what your motivation list is.
So open a note on your phone or your computer or take out a piece of paper and title it motivation list. And you want to write down everything that genuinely motivates you. So we want to put a lot of things on here because the more motivations you have, like the more...
powerful it does become but we still want to balance the quality there too we don't just want to like put stuff on there that doesn't really matter to you like five things that really matter to you that like get your heart racing if they're positive or make your blood boil if they're negative like that's much better than 50 things that don't really provoke any sort of response for you right so I like to include on this motivation list both negative and positive things.
And I like mine. Well, I don't like it, but mine is probably 60 % negative and 40 % positive. And I'm not going to give you an example.
I would be embarrassed to show someone my motivation list. It's like pretty personal. But the positive items remind you of what you're moving towards.
And the negative ones remind you of, you know, what you're moving away from or, you know. something negative that happened that you never want to happen again, right? So together, like the positive and negatives create a much stronger emotional reason than just purely positive or purely negative, in my opinion.
And I wouldn't censor myself when I'm running this. And I like wouldn't recommend you do either. Like, don't worry if every, you know, item is noble or impressive or honorable or socially acceptable or healthy.
Write down the things that genuinely motivate you. The negative side may be petty things, painful experiences, people who were rude to you or doubted you or previous failures or circumstances you never want to experience again. And the positive side, the legacy you want, the family, the person you want to become, the life you want, and the people you want to help, or none of those things.
Whatever motivates you, there's no standard for this, but the only criteria I would say is Reading your motivation list should like... Part of it makes my blood boil, personally.
And I think that's the right sign. I'm very motivated every hour, trust me. So no one else needs to see this.
You can do whatever you want, but it's just very good. So print it out and put it, you know, underneath your top five goals. And then...
Print two of them out, and then just like your goals, you want to have one there so it motivates you during the hour on the wall. And then you have one where you can actually read it off. So every single hour, your motivation list is read, auto -suggestion takes place, the new version of yourself becomes more and more pronounced, and so on.
Your motivation list is what gives you the reason to continue acting. And the next step is defining and intentionally creating the person capable of acting that way forever, consistently. And that's step 13, which is the 2 .0 version of yourself.
And this is where we formalize some of the theory from before. So your motivation list gives you the emotional reasons to continue working or to take action, but the motivation alone can't turn you... into the person capable of achieving your top five goals.
So this step turns the self -image, the beliefs, the character traits and skills as part of the theory from earlier into something tangible that you can use every day. So the first thing we're going to do is define two versions of ourselves. Version 1 .0 is the person you currently are as you're consuming this course.
And version 2 .0 is the person that you need to become next to achieve your top five goals. And remember, Largely, we can consider ourselves the combination of our beliefs, character traits, and skills.
And the uncomfortable reality is the person that you are right now can achieve your top five goals. If you could, and you already are the person that could, you would have achieved it already, right? So something needs to change.
You are currently not good enough as you are now because you always get what you deserve in life. I am not a billionaire right now because the current version of me does not deserve to be a billionaire. and I'm not yet capable of becoming one, right?
You do get exactly what you deserve. Becoming a billionaire is a lifelong goal of mine, but right now I don't deserve it, and I don't really mind or try to deny this, and anything else is just essentially cope. So what I'm doing in my life is I always need to honestly identify what is missing, what is the difference between who I need to become and who I am now, and keep leveling up and leveling up.
So the first thing you want to do is take out a piece of paper or open a new document and divide it into two sides. So we want to create the 1 .0 version on the left side and the 2 .0 on the right side. It's very important that you take note and take inventory of the 1 .0 version of yourself, the one that you currently are, because that acts as your starting point.
Without a starting point and a destination, it doesn't really make sense. I might be on a plane whose destination is London. But if I don't know where I'm starting, like that, you know, it doesn't really work without the start point, right?
So version 1 .0, who I am right now, and then underneath it, you know, put beliefs, character traits, and skills. Try to come up with five to ten for each. You know, what do I currently believe to be true about myself, my work, my success, and what's possible?
What character traits do I consistently demonstrate? What skills am I currently capable of doing? Do not really write what sounds good.
Like, write as close to the truth as you could possibly do. No ego, no, you know, being embarrassed about it. Describe the person you currently are based on your behavior, your beliefs, your character traits, and skills.
This might take a little bit of thought. And then once you're done with that, on the right -hand side, let's create the 2 .0 version of yourself. So basically, you know, Probably have your top five goals next to you while you do this.
What beliefs, what character traits, what skills do I need to achieve these top five goals? For someone who's achieved these top five goals, what character traits would they consistently demonstrate? What are the things that they need to believe?
What are the skills that that person needs to have? What are the things they need to be able to know how to do? And the goal here is to create a clear description.
of the person capable achieving of those top five goals. And then if you have five to 10 things here, and I would recommend starting with five, like you have on the left side, the current version of you, on the right side, the version you need to be. And it's very, very simple to see, you know, the difference between them, essentially.
You don't need to perfectly describe the... final version of yourself, you know, who you want to be by the time you die, just the next version, right? The 2 .0 version.
After you achieve that, you know, 6, 12, 18 months for now, then you can do the 3 .0 version. But for now, just focus on what you can do. Like, for an enormous long -term goal of mine, such as becoming a billionaire, Like that person accomplished, like who's capable of achieving that or accomplishing that might be like version 15 .0, not version 2 .0.
And that's fine, right? Everything's step by step. You might not even understand all the beliefs and character traits and skills required to achieve the ultimate goal.
And that is kind of a sign that you are thinking big enough and applying the 10X rule. It's also a sign that you should take a step back and say, okay, what is the next version of myself? the end version, right?
So I'm probably on Matthew 5 .0 version right now, if I had to guess something of that nature. And I am really dedicated myself to this exercise more and more and more. And I'm trying to create a new version of myself every six months.
And I've up to this point in my life, since I learned this exercise or this theory or this concept, I've not done that as consistently as I want, but I'm trying to make it more systematic. And then once we have that, Put the 2 .0 version of yourself, two sheets, one on the wall, and then one with the other ones where you can read it between every hour.
So we want it on the wall so we always see it, and then we want the other one easily accessible, right? That 2 .0 version of ourselves needs to be built day by day by day by day over the course of weeks and months and years. It doesn't just show up because you do it, you know, this exercise.
You need to... Do the exercise, see what that happens, and then mold yourself to become more and more and more like that person until you start to view yourself like that person through autosuggestion and your self -image is changed, your identity is changed, right? So print that and post it where it will remain visible and then have another one where you can read it every hour.
And that brings us to step 14, which is actually the last step of like printing out and... doing all of this stuff and that is your thought habits so the 2 .0 version of yourself define the beliefs the character traits and the skills you need to develop but writing down a new belief does not guarantee that you will remember or act in that way when the time comes and that's where thought habits come in so everything is downstream of beliefs you know focus and work ethic are character traits but those character traits will not remain consistent unless you develop the beliefs to support them, right?
Everything is downstream of beliefs. And even though this is my system and I really like it, I still used to slow down and begin burning out after I'd already completed several hours of work. And once that happened, I would make a ton of excuses for why I should stop working.
And it was a beliefs problem. I viewed the work as a chore and an obligation instead of viewing it as a blessing and something that was making me better. So basically what you can do is if everything is downstream of your beliefs, your beliefs are kind of downstream or an accumulation of all of your thoughts.
So that's why it's called thought habits, where you're basically consciously choosing when XYZ moment happens, what you're going to think. So an example of this, whenever I started checking out or slowing down or feeling burned out in the middle of some work hours, especially later in the day, I would consciously choose to think, okay, great.
You know, I'm now in the growth phase of this. This is the mental or the work version of my muscle burning out in the gym when I'm working out. If I continue here, you know, I am growing bigger now.
I'm expanding the amount of work. I'm becoming a better version of myself. You know, you could also just say, okay, five more minutes and then five more minutes happens and then eventually you catch a second wind.
It probably sounds simple, but this thought habit completely changed how I interpreted that moment for a long time. Before I would like feel tired because I'm working so much, I should probably just stop. And but after it meant that I'd finally reached the part where, you know, this is forcing me to grow.
I'm now becoming the 2 .0 version of myself because I was always capable of basically working up to this point. Now, like this is going beyond my capabilities. I'm finally morphing into that second person of myself, 2 .0 version.
So basically, the discomfort did not disappear, but it had a completely different meaning. You know, now it's not wrong. It's a good thing.
And that eliminated the problem for me almost immediately because I deliberately chose a belief and a thought habit that supported the character trait I was trying to develop. It is a direct kind of example of replacing a 1 .0 belief with a 2 .0 belief. And you can consciously choose all of this stuff.
Create your thought habits, like when you are becoming distracted is a good one to address, when you're slowing down, when you're procrastinating, when you're making excuses or really anything like in the gym, you know, my thought habit is when it starts to burn and I think I'm done in the individual set. OK, five more reps and then you go for another five.
Doesn't mean you'll get five, but it resets, you know, OK, this is it. Time for to do five more and then you can be done and then you get five more. OK, five more.
You can choose them. They can be very simple. They can be very complicated, although you're going to need to remember them in the time, so probably don't have a paragraph describing your thought habit.
But whenever you have a situation that you know is a problem for you, just literally create a thought habit around it and try to choose better thoughts because thoughts over and over and over through just repetition and the concept of auto -suggestion. are what creates beliefs, right? Just thinking something once doesn't mean you believe it.
Thinking something a hundred or a thousand or 10 ,000 or a million times really sets in. But when you're doing this, I probably wouldn't do more than five thought habits. I think when you're starting, it's going to be hard to memorize 200 thought habits, right?
Once you get used to it, you can choose to do some more. So once you're there, post your thought habits. alongside your other ones, and then print out a second copy, which you can review in between hours of work.
And we're going to go over this in great detail later. We're going to read the 10X rule. We're going to read the top five goals.
We're going to read our motivation list. We're going to read our 2 .0 version and our thought habits. This is just like a one to two or three minute thing that we're going to do between hours to systematically use the concept of auto -suggestion.
So print and post that on the wall. And then go on to the next part. And step 15 to me, I would put a star or like really pay attention if you're kind of drifting in and out because this has got to be the most important part of the setup.
So your documents are now posted on the wall. The next step is creating physical proof of the work you create. And this compounds over time and becomes overwhelming evidence that you are...
someone who can focus and you have the character trait you can focus. So we're going to prepare the sticky note wall. So we want to have a stack of sticky notes and pen directly beside our timer.
And we need to leave an area open behind your workspace for the sticky notes to accumulate. So it's going to look like this over time, each one basically representing an hour of your work. So after each hour, you're going to write the date, the hour you completed, and one or two words describing what you worked on, and then the time.
So basically, you know, an example, August 1st, hour two, productivity course, 9 .42 a .m. And then you're gonna place that sticky note on the wall. So this turns work that would normally disappear inside a document or a spreadsheet, we'll talk about some of that later, or just not be represented at all, and it turns it into something physical that you can see.
So this, I'm... Like I said, I'm filming in an Airbnb, so this is not my normal one, but you can see all of the hours that I've been doing day by day, basically accumulating and stacking up over time. It becomes a source of absolutely overwhelming evidence when you have an office and there's hundreds and hundreds of things on the wall.
It shows you that you are becoming or you have already become someone who can focus. And then it also provides a source of motivation and as a cue to make it obvious that. you should keep working.
And then step 16 is a piece of advice. It's called the calendar and it's a piece of advice commonly attributed to Jerry Seinfeld, which is a very famous comedian. So him being a comedian, you know, you have to write jokes, right?
And a lot of people who write jokes or authors or anything suffer from what people call writer's block, which is you just can't think or something's stopping you from working. So his big thing was he would sit down for a certain amount of period, like certain amount of time every day. And basically, he didn't have to write, but he had to sit there.
And if he wrote even one word, that counts as a success for that day. It's kind of like our four hours count as a success. But essentially, if he wrote even one word or any jokes at all, he would...
cross off the day on the calendar. And then his only job became simple. And it was do not break the chain of days crossed off on the calendar.
Do not break the chain of success. Keep your streak going, right? So this is mine.
This is a little bit of an old picture, but it was mine from the start of August. Currently, it's deeper into August as I'm recording this. But we want to create this calendar wall right behind our workspace so we can see it while we work.
After completing all four of your deep work hours for that day, mark it with an X or a large checkmark. Do not mark the calendar for an incomplete day. But as the chain grows, you'll become increasingly motivated to protect it and protect your streak.
You've got to be very, like, don't do it when you do three and a half hours, even if you did three hours, 59 minutes. You need to do all four hours and check it off. If you miss some day, You got to develop the character trait of bouncing back quickly and persistence and restart immediately.
Never allow one missed day to become two days in a row. We want to complete the work. We want to mark the calendar and we never, ever want to break the chain.
The sticky note wall creates visible proof of every completed hour and the calendar creates visible proof of every successful day. This is an extremely, extremely powerful thing. This is kind of like this picture on the screen is kind of like what your workspace wall should look like when it's fully complete.
You have your vision board, which provides the instant kind of symbology, your sticky wall, where you have all of the hours you worked, and then the calendar where you have all of the successful days stacked up. So you have things that motivate you on the right, on your lists. And this, you can set it up however you want.
But in this example, you have your visual versions of that. You have your proof of each hour and then you have your proof of days. And over time, this has got to be the most powerful part of the system because it acts as a cue.
It acts as a craving. It helps you focus on the actual action. And then it acts as a reward.
Like the sticky note, putting them on a wall is kind of a reward for each hour. Crossing off a thing is a mental reward for each four -hour successful day. It's very, very, very powerful stuff and is an overwhelming form of proof that really changes you from the 1 .0 to the 2 .0 version of yourself the more you do it.
And the effectiveness compounds over time. Then that kind of is like the physical record or the physical proof. But let's also create a digital version of the proof.
And that basically is step 17, which is the work form. So the work form is usually a Google form or whatever form builder you really want. I just like Google form because it's free and easy.
And you bookmark this to your browser. And then after you've completed the deep work, after you have put the sticky note on the wall, after you've read your goals, your motivation list, your 2 .0 version of yourself, and your... Thought habits.
You submit this form. This is basically, this is a really zoomed out picture of it. It's basically a Google form that you just use as a digital record.
And this serves a few purposes. It serves as a much more detailed, longer form of record keeping. Because in this form, basically you do the following things.
The hour and the date, it'll be timestamped automatically. What you completed in detail. The category that you worked on, like marketing, sales, content, like whatever.
How many times you became distracted from your clicker. Situations where you became distracted. And basically, it will.
And then you have like a checkbox for your top five goals, your motivation list, your 2 .0 version. Did you create your sticky note? Did you read your thought habits?
And did you read the 10x rule? And this is kind of like the overall end of our final checklist that you did all of this. So 60 minutes of work, put the sticky note on the wall, cross off the calendar on the fourth hour of work, then submit this.
And this basically is the end of the actual action. We're all going to get into that later, but we need to set up this work form and put it in your browser. So basically most of the fields in the work form.
serve one of two purposes or both awareness or repetition so tracking your distractions and what caused them etc that creates awareness you can no longer lie to yourself about how focused or productive you were because now you're tracking those distractions and then reading your top five goals your motivation list your 2 .0 version the thought habits the 10x rule is repetition is auto suggestion repetition auto -suggestion, mother of all learning, right?
If we want to change our beliefs, our character traits, and our skills, and overall our self -image, we need this repetition. And this is a systematic way to do it every hour as part of our work form. A very good quote, one of my favorites, you know, do not practice until you get it right, practice until you can't get it wrong, right?
Repetition, repetition, repetition. It's not just... a work form where you're typing in some stuff.
It's the end of the process that makes sure you did the work and then the repetition to help your beliefs, your character traits, and your skills. So an example of my deep work form, you know, hour one, August 3rd, I basically worked on my productivity document for the whole hour. I did the work form section, I did the beliefs, thought habits, the character traits section, etc.
My category, content. Number of distractions. What were they?
I opened my email after receiving a notification and I picked up my phone when the work became difficult. Problem there. Should be obvious.
My phone was there. So then you complete the checkboxes confirming that you reviewed your top five goals, your motivation list, 2 .0 and so on. You really want to remember to do this step.
And I don't think that like without this step, you can forget a lot of the time to do the repetition part. And this step also provides just a very nice record of what you did that it's nice to look back on sometimes. And that happens in the spreadsheet.
So the work form records what happened during the deep hour, but then it should sync to the spreadsheet and then basically makes a spreadsheet of all of it. And that's another reason that I use Google Forms. It natively syncs to a Google spreadsheet.
So it automatically does it. So create a new spreadsheet and then connect it to your Google Form. and then bookmark that spreadsheet.
And then as you go, as you submit it, every single hour will have a record of exactly what you did automatically. And then you can kind of turn that into data over time, how many deep work hours you created, how consistently you worked, how often you became distracted. And that forms an easy and automatic form of measurement.
You can see like day over day, week out a week, I got distracted less and less and less. I worked more and more hours. I spent this much time on this.
this much time on that without the spreadsheet you're basically guessing but with the spreadsheet you know exactly what happens it's also useful when you really want to get into categories like it's one of my objectives and goals to spend four hours per day creating content so it's an easy way to you know do this for me and it's just very very easy to basically do this All of the examples I did on the work form, you know, what I did, how focused I was, that will be cleanly tracked in your spreadsheet.
And just a very, very useful thing to basically go back and look at in a form of accountability. Because what I said, tracking does two things. One, you'll find that you're never as good as you thought.
And two, when you find out you're never as good as you thought and the data is clear as day in your face. you no longer can just sit there and do nothing. You have to do something.
And the spreadsheet is a big part of that, in my opinion. The work form and the spreadsheet are very good if you just use it yourself. But the next step makes them substantially more powerful when you add other people.
And that is step 19, the accountability group. So I used the timer and the work form for several years before adding an accountability group. The system worked without me, but adding other people made it more and more powerful because the other people...
You know, it acts as a cue. You see them in the accountability group doing the form. It makes a craving.
You want to compete with them. And then having more work forms submitted than your friends, that's a reward in and of itself, right? So your accountability group is simply a group of friends or coworkers or business partners or your mom or your dad, like whoever.
But every person completes their deep work hours and submits their own work form. And then everyone connects their work forms to that same spreadsheet so that the entire group can see. Shouldn't be any sensitive information in there anyway, but everyone can see it.
So whenever someone submits a work form, everyone gets, you know, the email or the SMS notification or both. And then it just becomes mayhem, right? You have five people all doing four deep work hours a day.
You're getting 20 reminder notifications. Talk about motivation, right? And it's easy enough to set something up like this with Zapier or the hyperoptimal tool has this built in, which is one of my apps that I made.
And it really is the cure to male loneliness, right? Doing the work form system with the boys. Just the process is simple.
You complete an hour of deep work. You create that sticky note. You review those top five goals and all the other documents.
You submit your work form. That's added to the sheet and boom, now it's sent to every member of your accountability group. So this basically creates multiple layers of accountability, which is why it's powerful.
First, like you know that other people are going to be used to seeing you creating work, right? They're going to be used to receive your notifications, whether they send them or not. So you can no longer just stop using the system and pretend that you're still following it because people, especially if you use people who care about, they're going to notice, right?
And then secondly, receiving that notification that someone else completed an hour will bring it top of mind and re -motivate you. So if you're screwing around and then suddenly see that someone in your group just completed another deep work hour, you're probably going to feel more compelled and it's going to be a bigger cue to get back to work.
So like the final thing is that it turns this into like a game. You're no longer completing your hours in isolation. It's no longer you have to work hard.
Now you're completing like a video game. right you're competing with other people trying to keep up and trying to beat them and this friendly competition is very very good and this is like an example of the email you might receive and then on top of this we go to step 20 to create the leaderboard so the results from your accountability will skyrocket when you make a leaderboard so basically everyone's submissions are already in that spreadsheet you just make another tab and ask chat gbd how to put some formulas in, and then you can see, you know, today, yesterday, last seven, last 30, last 90, you know, who did the most.
And then it's just like a game on steroids at that point. So it's very, very easy. You can just track total deep work hours and then daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, and all time.
It's not really any complicated setup. Just one of you can set it up very, very quickly. And then it makes it even more effective.
And then we have an example of a leaderboard right here. But who completed the most hours of work today, this week, this month, this year, all time? You can even go further.
Who basically finishes their, on average, their first work hour the fastest? But it's just competition, accountability, and bragging rights. But there's one piece of this system that I think really belongs in it, and that's going to be step 21.
that I didn't add till years after. And that is going to be called the worry list. So everything we've talked about up to this point, especially, you know, and then the work form, the spreadsheet, the accountability and leaderboards, that all records the work that you've completed.
And then the other stuff shows you like who you're trying to become, what you're trying to work towards, you know, your beliefs, your character traits, your skills. But one thing that I found kind of derails the system. especially when we're focused on deep work that puts us towards our goals, are those unresolved problems in your life or business that sit at the back of your mind and consume your attention.
And the worry list is the solution to that. So I, for a long time, put a lot of things off that worried me. And I'm sure everyone else, including who are watching this, do the same.
And then one year, alongside the system, I just simply opened my Apple Notes and I wrote down every single thing at that time that was worrying me. And then I used one of my deep work hours to just knock them out. Basically, I had this huge list of worries and it didn't basically take me months to sort them out.
It didn't even take me weeks to sort them out, not even days. I literally just had things that have been piling up for months and months and months. And I fixed them all in about three hours of deep work.
And then it was just like I lost like... a thousand pounds worth of stress and that constant nagging feeling. So basically I always recommend just as a life practice, keeping the anti -worry list in your back or on your Apple notes.
And then basically the first deep work hour on every Monday should be knocking out this anti -worry list. It'll set you up strong for the week. It'll make it so you can focus.
I like to do it on Monday because I originally started doing it on weekends, but Some of this worry list oftentimes will require people to respond and a lot of people don't respond on the weekends. So you just smash it out first hour Monday morning and then you live a life of perpetual bliss.
It's just beautiful. I suppose that if you have really just really, you're like an exceptionally important person or you've just let your life implode, the first time it might be like me. three hours, four hours, five hours of work, but then it will keep going ongoing.
If you really need to, you could do the first hour on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, if you are just an exceptionally important person with just endless amount of problems, right? But this is a good use of deep work, in my opinion, and it unlocks the potential for greater peace of mind, more focus in your remaining deep work hours.
I would definitely mentally separate this from just like you responding to emails. These are the things that actually cause a lot of problems for you.
And some of them, to be fair, could qualify as traditional deep work. So this week, I basically, my anti -warrior hour, I was doing my US tax filings, talking to my UAE, United Arab Emirates bookkeeper and doing my tax filings there. Then I had to do a presentation for something.
And then I had to Fill out some health data form for my blood work. And then I had a bunch of unpaid invoices that I had to take care of because I got a new credit card.
And my old one's cancelled. And I just did that. And whew.
You should see how much lighter I was after. And then the final step of this is called the war map. Step 22.
And then we'll be basically done the setup. Can you believe it? The worry list gets the unresolved problems out of your head so you can handle them.
But the final step. This war map basically helps you connect your top five goals to the work you complete every day. This is how you work on the actual good stuff.
We talked about the signal, not the noise. This is how you literally apply that in reality, not just the theory. So I got this concept from Sam Ovens, who is a New Zealand entrepreneur and business educator.
I always thought he was Australian. Maybe he is, and maybe I got this wrong in my research. He used to be all over the internet.
He used to not be able to get away from his YouTube ads, but he now owns something called School. And I was in his masterminds. I consumed a lot of his material.
And one of the tools, very simple, but the greatest impact on me was what he called his War Map. Basically, the War Map is a spreadsheet that is basically like a planning software, but it's a spreadsheet and very simple. And it has two levels.
It has the annual plan, which basically looks like this, where you can see what you're doing at a high level. And then it has the, you know, monthly or weekly plan. And it has spots for three to five things each day that you can just put in there and you can just have this open and just knock them out.
It always makes it so you know what you're doing. And the template for this will be in the description or it will be in this presentation if you downloaded it. But you can really just search Sam Levin's War Map online and I'm sure you'll be able to find it.
It's one of the simplest but easiest planning tools that you can do. So every month, you know, you have your main objectives for the month. Then you have all of your calendar days inside.
How do I break that main objective down into actual tasks that I can complete? Plot three to five of those each day on the map. You know, three if they're bigger tasks, five if they're smaller.
You know, you just want to get four hours worth, however big or small that is. And then you just lock in and execute them, right? So for me, like my monthly objective, one of them was to make this course.
So, you know, what do I have to do? OK, finish this section, this section, this section and this section. And then the next day, OK, finish these five seconds.
And then when it was time to record, OK, record section X to section Y. OK, now edit them together. Now optimize the sound.
OK, now create the thumbnail. Right. Like these are three to five different things that all go into.
the objective of making this course, for example. And this really goes over the signal and not the noise by forcing you to separate the few actions that matter for your deep work hours from everything else that you could possibly be doing. So, with that being said, the setup is now complete.
Beautiful, no? Unbelievable. All 22 steps we've gone over.
And the hard part is done. Not that it's too hard, but time -consuming. And the car is now built, so to speak.
The car that contained thousands of individual parts, when you look at them separately, might make it extremely complicated. But once it's assembled, driving the car is relatively simple and straightforward. And now the car, or our work system, is built.
And now we're going to focus on operating it. So as a checkpoint, your workspace should look something of this nature on the screen. And then like this, it might be what your room looks like.
Unfortunately, in this AI generated image, the monitor is the right way. Just put your monitor the right way. Yeah.
So basically going forward now, we've built the system and now we're going to divide operating system into four distinct parts of the day. The morning routine. the deep work hours, what to do between the deep work hours, and the night routine.
So each of these parts that are following this will show you exactly what to do and which order to do it. So the complete setup had many individual parts. Now the day will be substantially simpler.
And what we're going to do is we're going to do a few things. First, I'm going to explain to you in very short terms kind of the order that I found out about... about all of these parts of the system and how it progressed over time.
You can skip it, but it's just useful to you to know and what hole each part filled as I was experimenting. And then at the end of each part, starting now and then going to literally every other part of the course, we're going to be at the end of each section going over how it self -perpetuates and improves, the auto -suggestion element, the self -image element, the behave.
beliefs, character traits, and skills element, and then James Clear's habit protocol. So we're going to basically do those as quickly as possible, just not to take up any time, but just to draw further intention to how it was in each way. So I am going to basically just do this probably five minutes for your own detail, because the setup we just went through is in what I view as like the most logical order to follow.
But that was not really the order that all of this was discovered. or incorporated. For long periods, this system worked pretty well, but it had enormous holes in it.
So let's go into how it actually happened, because each edition usually solved one problem and then exposed another. So the first was the top five goals. I always had goals since I was in high school, so this really wasn't a problem for me.
The first edition, I guess you could say, was the timer. And I found about this when I... Basically read a book called The 5am Club by an author named Robin Sharma, one of my top five most impactful books of all time.
And in this, one of the recommendations was the 60 -10 method. So that is the 60 minutes of work for 10 in between. And to me, this was substantially better than treating the entire day as like one enormous undefined blob of work.
And then I just started working this way and it made a big difference.
kind of addition to the system was the environment design. The timer was good, 60 minutes, but I found myself often getting distracted and was not really the most efficient 60 minutes. And the time that I was at the place, I was relatively, I don't know, probably not poor in what you're imagining, but much more poor than I am now.
And the place where I was living, very noisy, constant construction, all that kind of stuff. And I found myself constantly looking out the window instead of working. So that's how I really got this environment design that made focusing easier.
Basically, part of that, you know, for number four, the desktop app blocker and number five in rapid succession, you know, my physical environment improved, you know, but my computer, I'm still like, I didn't have any like looking at the window or any of that kind of stuff, but I'd still go on social media. I would still scroll.
It was just a habit, and that led to the desktop blockers. And then just kind of the exact same problem on my phone. I kind of just did these at the same time, so to speak.
But then I had the timer, I had a better environment, and I had blockers, and I eventually developed a decent rhythm. But I still couldn't complete all my work within the same period of the day. I had approximately seven employees, and I was not particularly good at managing them or myself at this point.
And I was constantly being pulled in so many directions and I never had time for this deep work. So I just blocked my calendar one day until noon, reset everyone's expectations around my availability, expected so much to go wrong and really like nothing ever went wrong. It was kind of weird and it just was a permanent change for me.
The next is the work form. And around this time I was reading, maybe rereading Atomic Habits. And I think it was for the first time, which I wrote here.
And I was pleasantly surprised to discover like I was already kind of applying a lot of this habit protocol without even trying to, just by chance. But the main thing that I was missing was like kind of like a satisfying ending and a reward. So submitting the work form created that ending to each hour.
And then after using the work form for a while, I found myself thinking, would it be nice to know what I was actually working on? Because I knew I was doing all of this work, but like what was I actually working on? And I would brag to people about how much work I was completing.
And then they would ask, you know, like what? And then I would be like a deer in the headlights. No answer for them.
So to my pleasant surprise, because I was using a Google form at this time, I found out that you could easily connect it to Google spreadsheets. And that's just what I did, right? And then the spreadsheet exposed another problem having to do with the awareness and what happens when you start measuring.
I was doing all these work hours, but I wasn't necessarily going anywhere. I was just working hard on random stuff. but no unified direction.
And the spreadsheet, I kind of like deep down knew this for a while, but the spreadsheet gave undeniable proof of this. You should just see the mess of things I did this hour that were not really interconnected in anything. And then I remembered this time I followed Sam Ovens and saw like, does he have a solution?
And then I literally found out about his war map in like five, almost five seconds after looking for the solution. And it just solved my problem. There's a relatively large gap, I would say, between, you know, the spreadsheet and the war map and this part.
But by this time, the system was better than it ever had been. But I was like one of those people who would just be like nonstop interested in politics at this time, you know, and constantly consuming the political news caused me to doom and be very negative on almost everything, kind of how it usually is. And this was also around the time that YouTube shorts were added, I believe.
I have no idea what time period this would be. But I was already watching too much long -form YouTube and I truly became an absolute victim. I just got absolutely nuked by YouTube shorts in addition to the politics.
And I had improved my physical and digital environments without really properly controlling what I allowed into my mind. And that is where the information diet came in. And then for a long time...
I was the only person following the system. And eventually I convinced three friends to try it with me and two of them still do it to this day. So basically we have a group chat.
We talk about our hours of work and compete with each other inside of it. And that was the accountability group. And it made me more likely to do the work and much more consistent.
And then shortly after, like, okay, not even like a couple of days after we started this together, leaderboards, right? How can we compete? Like we'd always argue, oh, I saw this much work forms, but.
Where is the leaderboard? And one of my friends basically made the leaderboard inside our spreadsheet. And then we made that shared spreadsheet.
Then like the next thing or next four things, and I just have them like they're these documents that we did. They all kind of happened at the same time. I like basically I read a book once and it said, always review your motivations.
Right. And I like really believe in that. I wrote them down before.
The problem is I just did it inconsistently. I would write these down weekly or monthly and then forget about it, return to it months or a year later, and I would just forget. So basically, the change was kind of formalizing the motivation list, the 10x rule, the 2 .0 version of myself, the thought habits into something you do every day.
And then that eventually went to something you do every hour. And then the addition 17 was the wall. Because even after formalizing these documents, the system, there's a decent amount of time between me deliberately starting to review them and then the wall.
You just forget sometimes, right? I don't know. I just forget to do work forms at the start of the system.
And then I added stuff and everything's a queue. And now it's impossible not to, right? So just printing them out and putting them on the wall solved big problems.
It kept them top of mind. It was a queue to start working. And when you combine the wall, the sticky notes, the printouts, the spreadsheet doing it digitally, the calendar stuff, like the wall, and I'm just looking at mine still, I set it up wherever I am in the world, every Airbnb, hotel, at my house, in my office.
It just makes it impossible to not do work when you have it. Edition 18 was one of the newer ones in this multi -year timeframe, and that was the distraction counter. Knowing that I became distracted wasn't enough, like exactly how many times, and hopefully you can identify the situation and remove them, which I did.
That was followed by the tab limiter, which really seems basic, but very important small refinement. You know, blocking these websites doesn't necessarily prevent you from opening an absurd amount of tabs. And the tab limiter basically closed that loophole.
And then by late 2025... I had become so focused on deep work that I, like my story suggested, basically neglected basic chores or personal responsibilities that I couldn't delegate. And I accumulated these until I felt almost crippled internally.
And those began making me less effective in my work forms and work hours themselves. So that was when the worry list was born. And then the vision board was actually the final one.
That was as relatively new as like this year, 2026. So I had the goals, the motivation list, the sticky notes and everything. And it was good, but like it was all just words.
Right. And I wanted some you have to like squint, see the words like you have to do it. But I just wanted some visual cues right away that were, you know, layered an emotional response and that the visual documents and stuff couldn't really provide by themselves.
So this is like step by step how the system came together over time and why, if you're interested. So now we're going to go through our four checks, right? Remember what I said earlier.
So let's go through, because this is one of the goals of the system. How is this setup naturally self -perpetuating and self -improving, if you remember back to one of our goals in that definition? The system is designed to keep itself going and become more effective the longer you use it.
It's self -perpetuating means it keeps itself going by... Every time you complete an hour of deep work, that creates progress, right? You have a sticky note on the wall.
You have a work form submission. You have a spreadsheet entry. The accountability group gets a notification.
You go on the leaderboard. Every time you do the four hours in the successful day, your calendar goes off. It's self -perpetuating because your timer is on the desk.
Your counter is on the desk. Everything in it. makes it more likely to keep going once you get momentum because it's so full of cues, cravings, and rewards.
It's self -improving because the counter, the work form, the spreadsheet, the leaderboard show you how much work you completed, how you used your time, and what repeatedly distracted you so you can eliminate it. Your war map helps you direct more of that time towards the work that matters the most. Every repetition of the system improves your ability to plan, focus, recognize distractions, and return to your assignment.
And over time, you become better at choosing the correct work and completing it efficiently. So the system sustains the work, and then the work continuously approves the system. As far as how this works with the auto -suggestion sign of things.
The system uses repetition to keep the correct ideas in your mind. After every hour and you read your top five goals, your motivation list, your 10x document, the 2 .0 version of yourself and your thought habits, posting them directly in front of you makes this repetition obvious and easy. And over time, the ideas should begin influencing your beliefs, your decisions, and your behavior.
As far as the self -image goes, the 2 .0 version of yourself defines the person you're trying to become. And then every completed work form, sticky note, and X on the calendar starts to create evidence that you're becoming that person. You're not merely telling yourself that you're focused, disciplined, and hardworking.
You're repeatedly proving it, and that compounds more and more over time. As far as the beliefs, the character traits, and the skills go, it works on all three. Your beliefs are your top five goals, your motivation list, the 10X rule document, the 2 .0 version of yourself, and the thought habits because they repeatedly change what you believe and think about.
Your environment, your information diet, your blockers, your accountability, your leaderboards, your calendar, and your sticky note wall make it easier to behave like someone who is focused, disciplined, and hardworking and consistent, and they help you with those character traits. And then for skills, your warm -up, your timer, your distraction counter, your work form, and your spreadsheet help you choose important work, which is an important skill.
You practice focusing, you practice measuring your performance, and you improve over time. All of those are skills. And then finally, as far as James Clear's habit summary goes, for cues, to make it obvious, we have the time block in our calendar.
We have our prepared workspace. We have the timer. We have the printed documents and the vision board and the calendar and the sticky note wall and the leaderboard and accountability group notifications.
As far as cravings, we have our goals, our motivation list, our 2 .0 version. Our accountability group with all their notifications is going to be... wanting us to compete, we have our leaderboard and then we have the visible progress.
And that gives you reasons to want to work. In terms of making it easy, your war map tells you what you need to do. Your environment is prepared.
Your phone is gone. Your tabs are limited and your distractions are blocked as much as possible. And then for the reward to make it satisfying, you complete your hour, you do the sticky note, you submit the work form and you notify your accountability group.
And that is a reward in and of itself. And then you take a break to do whatever you want. So the setup builds the entire habit loop around creating these deep work hours, and that is why once everything is placed, it becomes easier and easier and easier.
So this is an important part of the course. I'm going to have action steps at the end of every part. I'm not just literally going to sit out and read them there, but if you want to pause it or you want to look in the timestamps and come back to these parts so you do it all, that is a good idea, let's just say.
So really... That wraps up the setup part. And now we're free to move on to the next part, which is the morning routine.
Part three. So as we know, on every new part, we're going to start off with two reminders. The first is that the 2 .0 version of you must be built day after day, right?
It's another reminder that nothing happens all at once. You need to do it minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, month by month, maybe even year by year. If you're really slow, the 2 .0 version of you needs to be built.
This does not randomly happen. It's just like chiseling away. That's what you are right now, this picture.
The second, of course, is another reminder about the man with the axe. Remember back to Jordan Peterson's naturally hyper -industrious man at the start of this entire course. You put him in a forest with an axe, he'll begin chopping down trees nonstop.
He does not require anyone to motivate him. He does not require anyone to hold him accountable. Work has become an obsession and that level of activity is built into him.
Most people are not naturally like this and if you're not, the system is designed to help you deliberately become this way. And a reminder, you do not have to become this way. No one is forcing you.
You don't have to do anything that this course suggests. You're free to have your own will. But if you want to achieve the highest levels and you're very ambitious, you will have to compete with people like this.
And if you can't operate, At their level, you will be non -competitive against them. You'll be an absolute victim and get run over.
No matter what you're doing, no matter what excuses you make, no matter how you're using your time, the man with the axe is still working. And look at him in the picture. He's just...
half the forest is gone already, just in the time that you've watched in this course. So let's go into the table of contents for this section. I'm not going to read it all out here, but there's a few different parts.
So the setup is complete. Again... probably too many times, but to return to the car analogy, we finished building the car and now we have to drive it.
And that begins with our morning routine. And I have tried both extremes in a morning routine. I've been psyoped in both directions at different points.
I have been the person who wakes up at exactly 5 a .m., does their three -hour morning routine, their journaling, their meditations, their touching grass, their grounding, their insert whatever 30 steps that you think. are possible. Like I've tried it.
And I've also been the person who wakes up at 5am and just sleeps out of bed and is at their desk 501, 502 and begin doing the day. No morning routine at all. And I don't think either of these extremes are ideal.
If I had to choose though, I'd probably do the three hour routine because that provides structure and consistency and warm up and takes care of other areas of your life too. But we do not need three hours to prepare. So after a lot of experimentation, my morning routine is about 30 minutes.
And the purpose of the routine is basically to get our body and our mind in the best position possible to complete that four hours of deep work as fast as possible without with also maintaining the quality. It's not a routine that's, you know, 17 step biohacking, you know, meditation, visualization that consumes half the day.
So here's the summary. Walking on the treadmill for 20 minutes. Drinking a liter of water.
Taking creatine if you want to.
Consuming at least 30 grams of protein, usually pre -made protein shake from the night before. Maybe you buy them pre -made. Watch or listen to a motivational video, probably on YouTube.
Plan out what you're going to do hour by hour for your four hours of deep work. Stretch for five minutes. Create a morning routine sticky note for the wall.
And then take a small reward. So several of these things happen at the same time when you're basically on the treadmill. So this should not take more than 30 minutes total, including the time spent on the treadmill, stretching and like walking to and from.
So the complete morning routine might look like, you know, minutes zero to 20. You're walking on the treadmill, drinking the water, consuming the protein, listening to the motivation and planning. Minute 20, 25 is stretch.
You know, minute 25 to 30 is to come back to your workspace, etc. So mine, basically, I like to probably give myself 10 minutes of leeway in there. So mine's like 40 minutes, but the actual routine is 30 minutes.
But basically, what you want to do is finish it off with a reward and then get started.
If you are the person who would rather plan your hours the night before, you can do that too. Either one. But I do not like to skip this routine.
So the routine starts by waking up your body. And that is the... First step, which is the treadmill for 20 minutes.
I came to this conclusion because even 20 minutes of exercise and cardio can vastly improve your energy and focus, and that makes it easier to complete deep work. You don't have to do it, I guess, but it's overall a good habit that makes everything else easier. So what I recommend is an 8 -12 % incline on the treadmill, approximately 3 miles per hour for 20 minutes.
The reason I recommend this is because as far as all of the types of exercise that you could possibly do go, some of the only realistic ones that you could do at home with a treadmill and the whole year, no matter what the weather, inside, easy enough to get a treadmill, cheap enough to buy one, and something that is not so difficult or so tedious that you either avoid it or it becomes unsustainable to do every day.
So basically most of the morning routine happens on the treadmill. They're not separate steps. They're stacked together, making this very, very efficient in terms of time.
So if you have a full size treadmill at home or inside your building, if you live in a condo or apartment or within walking distance, use it. If you do not buy a, you know, like a compact walking treadmill desk, they're like $200 or less and put it inside your house. It might not be the perfect incline.
It might be a little smaller experience, but it doesn't really matter. You don't need a full -size treadmill to walk on. A lot of them will let you go up to like 8%, 9 % incline, 2 .53 miles per hour, and that is good enough.
Do not turn the fact that you either don't have a treadmill or you don't have the perfect one into an excuse to do nothing, right? Here's mine right here. It's a pretty bad treadmill, to be honest.
Basically, when you're on the treadmill, by the time, especially if you're going hard enough, you know. A liter of water is pretty easy to consume. A lot of the time you can do two liters of water if you want.
I drink way too much coffee and historically have not drunk enough water. So drinking one liter near the beginning does wonders for me for keeping me hydrated and makes you feel significantly more awake. Because a lot of the time when you wake up, you're not actually tired.
You're just dehydrated. Very, very simple thing to do. Optionally, you can take creatine in it.
I like to do it, but it's by no means required. And I like to prepare everything the night before. My water bottles, my protein shake, get my shoes, get my shorts, get my shirt ready, lay it out so that no thinking involved.
Just wake up, leap out of bed, throw all your clothes and just go. Very, very good.
I, if we go back to the information diet, I talked about positive stuff in there, like positive information. And when you're on the treadmill is a perfect time for 20 minutes to listen to something. I usually do Tony Robbins or motivational video montages or something.
Jocko Willick, David Goggins, whatever you want. But it makes the time on the treadmill go by faster. It hypes you up for the day, gets you motivated, gets you in the right frame of mind.
And it's very efficient because you're stacking it in the same process. As far as the 30 grams of protein go. Usually, this is a protein shake.
I don't see how it would not be a protein shake. But it should keep you full and feeling sturdy while you complete your full deep work hours without requiring you to eat a complete meal. Cooking, eating, cleaning, that creates a lot of friction.
It also wastes time and delays your four hours. But if you do this instead of eating full meals, it'll keep you energized and sturdy and good to go instead of tired and sluggish after a big meal. Very good thing I...
Would highly recommend it. And then we want to plan all four hours on the treadmill. Because remember, one of the biggest pieces of friction is sitting down and not knowing what to do.
Sometimes it's not enough to know the four hours worth that we're going to work on. We need to plan it out hour by hour. And that goes back to James Clear's third law of making it easy, right?
So you can pull the... you know, actual tasks from your work form or your warmup, but a lot of time they'll be bigger and just need to be broken down, right? Don't create, you know, YouTube course, you know, it should say, you know, finish X, you know, I'm going to finish this section, this section, this section, next hour, this section, this section, this section, and so on.
It's very, very important. And then one that I added after a long time is, you know, I would be grinding, I'd be doing these four hours. Personally, I do sometimes a lot more than these four hours, I was getting a lot done, but you're just sitting at a computer all day and your body feels terrible, especially as you get older.
And they often say strong in body, strong in mind, right? These things are interconnected. And if your body starts to feel achy or stiff, it's eventually going to be harder or another point of friction to doing these deep work hours.
So I added five minutes of stretching. You don't need to be like a yoga instructor or do some insane routine, but... Literally go on ChatGPT, put in your situation, whether you're stiff somewhere or whether you're hunched or who knows, and ask it for a five -minute routine.
Download an app on the App Store, put it in there, and you'll be good to go. I promise you of that. So very, very easy to follow.
And then I just use something called the Bend app for this. Then you can basically apply the same thing. as your work forms to your morning routine by creating a wall for your morning routine sticky notes.
Usually I'll put the sticky note at a different color at the top and then my work forms under it. We're trying to get our morning routine to stick, right? So it makes sense to do the same loop and same James Clear habit, four steps, four laws to get us to do that.
So we're going to create the morning routine sticky note. Maybe we'll have a blue sticky note for that. And then the work form sticky notes come later.
in a process during our hours. Then it's very important to abide by James Clear's laws that we have a reward for this, right? We got to make it satisfying.
That's the fourth law. All work and no play, right? Makes you a dull boy.
So if you want to repeat the behavior consistently, which we do, you should have something that marks the completion that's very satisfying. It doesn't have to be expensive or complicated or time -consuming. You just need to kind of enjoy it and consciously decide that this is your reward.
So upon the completion of my morning routine, I walk to the coffee shop, Starbucks, and I get a coffee. It's in the ground floor of the apartment building I live in, so it's not necessarily much of a walk. But that is my reward.
I completed my morning routine. Now I get to go to Starbucks, one of the best times of my day. Your reward does not need to be like this.
You can literally choose anything you want. mess around on your phone, short walk, a drink you enjoy, you name it. But I am a bit of a Starbucks demon.
So I always, you know, spend the two minutes going to the Starbucks right there. And that's me this morning. Yeah.
So the four hour reward is a bigger award that comes after you are done, basically your four hours. But this is a micro award after your morning routine, because of course, we want to get this stuff to stick, right? So I really, really love the morning routine and then the four hours because if you get these right, whatever happens the rest of the day happens, you know?
So it's just very, very important that we kind of get this right from the very start. So let's go through our checklist again, right? How is this naturally self -perpetuating and self -improving?
It's designed... to make completing your deep work hours easier. So it just becomes part of your routine.
The walking, the water, the protein, the motivation, the stretching, the planning. Prepare your body and mind to succeed. Then the morning routine sticky note gives you immediate proof that you saw it or you started the day correctly.
And then tomorrow you're going to see all your sticky notes wherever you put them. And that's going to be another cue to make the basically system keep going. So that creates a loop, you know, complete your morning routine, feel better and know exactly what to work on, complete more important work, make progress, become more motivated to do it tomorrow.
And then as far as the self -improving goes, as you repeat it, you just get better at planning your hours, you get better at preparing your body, you get better at stretching and walking on the treadmill and selecting those motivational videos, and you get better at moving to your first hour without any procrastination.
It gets easier over time. the plans become easier and you get to work faster basically after. As far as autosuggestion go, the morning routine makes deliberate use of autosuggestion that remember if we work back the definition is exposing yourself repeatedly to specific thoughts and messages until they begin influencing your behavior.
That happens when you listen to something motivational. That happens when you plan out your work over and over instead of allowing your mind to wander. And that happens when your morning routine complete with the sticky note.
You're giving your mind the same message. I wake up and follow the routine. I know what I need to do.
I know or I complete what I said I would complete. I'm the type of person who starts the day correctly. So if you do this once, it's not going to change your life.
But if you do it every morning for days, weeks, months, and eventually years, That is a whole different thing altogether, right? The motivational video, the written plan, and the sticky note repeatedly direct your thoughts towards the work and the person you're trying to become.
As far as the self -image goes, you know, as Maxwell Malks explained, people tend to behave consistently with the person they believe themselves to be. If you believe that you're lazy or inconsistent or incapable of waking up and following a routine, your behavior will usually support that belief. But when you do this morning routine and you prove to yourself through the experience and actually the morning routine that's physical evidence, it changes your self -image to I'm the type of person who wakes up and does what I know I'm supposed to do.
And that brings us to basically changing our self -image. As far as the beliefs, the skills, and the character traits, the motivational video gets your mind right and reminds you why the work matters. Planning your four hours makes the work feel specific and manageable.
The morning routine changes your beliefs and becomes proof that you are someone who consistently starts the day off right and values that. And then completing your morning routine, discipline, consistency, work ethic. You're not going to feel like it all the time.
You're not going to be motivated to do it. Sometimes you might be tired, but you are developing the character trait of consistency. And then like everything, doing all of this stuff is a skill and it gets...
Better over time. You're going to be better at walking on the treadmill. You're going to be better at stretching.
You're going to be better at planning over and over and over. And that will translate into other parts of your day as well. And then for the James Clear Habit Summary, making it obvious, right?
Waking up triggers a morning routine. All your sticky notes are going to remember or remind you that you should be doing. If you prepare and you have your shoes and you have your clothes and you have your water bottle the night before.
That's another cue. Making it attractive. The motivational video gets you excited.
You also know that your morning routine reward is waiting for you. We make it easy by preparing for the night, like we're preparing the night before. We make it easy and time efficient by doing all of that stuff while on the treadmill at the same time.
And we make it satisfying by having that sticky note and doing our reward. So over and over and over again, that completes the loop. and applies all the laws of the habit creation, and it makes it much more likely that you are going to stick to this.
Again, we're going to end off with an action step checklist. I'm not going to read all of these off to you, but if you want to pause the video and write them down, you are more than welcome to do that. So now we're going to go to part four, which is the actual deep work hours that we're going to be doing, right?
And as such, we got to go through our two reminders first, that the 2 .0 version of yourself must be built. day after day. It doesn't happen all at once.
You need to do it second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, week by week. And it has to be built. You have to build yourself and make yourself.
Just doesn't randomly happen just because you know all the theory behind it. And again, the man with the X is still working, right? You don't have to do anything.
You don't have to do any part of this course. You have free will and it's your decision. But if you want to achieve big things, we need to remember who we're competing against, right?
Extremely hardworking, extremely intelligent, very good at choosing and executing high leverage tasks, never become discouraged, never quit, no mistakes, no accountability, no motivation required, never stops, right? These people are naturally hyper -industrious. Most people are not.
If that does not describe you, then this system is help you to reach their level of activity. no one is forcing you but if you want to compete at the highest levels and achieve a really big goal you're not going to be able to compete without this kind of stuff look at them whole forest is getting chopped down at this point so here is the table of contents there's 20 parts in this 20 things we're going to go over in this part i'm not going to read it here and it's a lot of it is going to look extremely familiar to you already because most of this was done in this setup So as far as the overview goes, the morning routine now is complete.
The body is awake, the mind is right, and your hours are planned. So we need to execute them, right? What is the standard?
Four hours of deep work every day, but also as fast as possible without sacrificing quality, right? So if you do, and if you are a very good person at math here, you know, if you have a 30 -minute morning routine with a 10 -minute break, that's 40 minutes, and then you do another three hours with 10 minute break in between each three because you don't do it on the fourth hour.
I believe it's five hours and 20 minutes is you speed running this. So like if we want to get it done by 11 a .m., probably got to get up at 530, right? You can check my math on that.
But this is basically now like the execution manual, like how you're actually going to do everything that we did in the setup. We're not going to explain all of that again because that would probably just be redundant, but I'll briefly call back to stuff to refresh your memory in each part. So remember, like the deep work process, we want to choose one specific deliverable or set of tasks for every hour in the four -hour period.
Do that either at night before or as part of the morning routine. Then we set our distraction counter to zero. We take our timer here.
Well, it would have been better if it made a sound, but I have it on mute right now because I'm filming. But I'm doing two hours right here. You do an hour.
Then you work on that distraction or work on the assignment and record every distraction. And when the timer ends, I stand up. I go over.
You can't see it, but it's basically right there. Put a sticky note on my wall. I'll read my 10x rule, my goals over here.
Then I'll submit the work form. I'll take a short break. Right now, that usually means...
YouTube, honestly. And then I repeat the process until I do that four times per day. And then I do this all at once, but after the four hours are up, then I get like a bigger reward, so to speak.
There are several intentional redundancies that might seem a bit much in the process. You're going to see the same goals, beliefs, reminders, and piece of proof repeatedly. And again, that's the point.
That's where the auto -suggestion helps you change your self -image. which helps you build better beliefs, more consistent and better character traits and skills, right? Awareness is the first step and then repetition is the mother of all learning.
So the first thing what we want to do is we want to rush to get especially the first hour done. We want to keep this as a race because, you know, getting started is like the hardest part. So if you wake up at 6 a .m.
and your first hour is complete at... 7 .32 a .m., for example, your time delta would be an hour and 32 minutes. And that is where you would put your sticky note on the wall.
I finished this in an hour, 32 minutes. That would be extremely efficient. If you really want to put this on stuff like your work form and track that with your accountability group and your leader board, like that is good too.
But we need to rush to the first hour because that's like a hot start, right? That builds momentum. You'll find that if you often don't rush for the first hour, you're just going to keep putting it off and putting it off, and that procrastination spirals out of control.
So that's why I like to track my first hour completion time, just because what gets measured gets managed and can be improved. And that's why I like to put it as part of my accountability group. But it's not really for everybody.
It's kind of up to you. Like I said before, the first... hour on Mondays is the anti -worry hour.
And you want to handle as many of your worries that time as possible. Again, drawing back, I've tried this at different times and on different days. And I originally thought the weekend would make the most sense so no one would bother me.
But it's kind of the opposite because a lot of your worries are going to be dependent on someone else responding. You know, you making a phone call or sending an email or booking an appointment or paying something or contacting a business. And if they're closed or unresponsive during the weekends, that doesn't really work.
So Monday morning is perfect because people are working, businesses are open, and then you can receive responses immediately. And more importantly, you begin the week by removing all of those worries and problems that are in the back of your mind. So once you get that done, your hourly plan here is what you made on the treadmill and should be specific.
Not content creation, not work on systems, not improve marketing, but rather create this specific part. Create an SOP for uploading YouTube. Write three direct offer static image ads.
You don't need to plan it out in an insane amount or a microscopic detail, but it has to be an executable task, not just work on systems or create content. And here's an example of mine. There's my timer.
There's my hourly plan. And then once you have your plan and once you're at your desk and your morning routine's done, you start your timer.
You know, if you could condense one action to represent the entire course and entire system, like this is that action, right? You are working in 60 minute increments as focused and intensely as possible. You are setting that off and then you are training yourself to do that over and over and over again as part of your life forever to get better and better at 60 minute sprints.
And you take that, you know, 10 minute break to recharge and then you're just. It's just perfect, right? And then the eventual baseline for one of these one hour sessions per day for seven days a week.
So you're not vaguely working all day. You're completing one defined hour, taking that break and then repeating. And after a while, I got to tell you, this is insanely addictive and starts to feel more like a video game.
And you begin thinking about all of the high quality hours that you want to complete. It's just night and day difference to just, oh, I'm at work or I'm working. It's just so perfect.
Here is that on my desk right now.
During this hour, you should record every distraction. So you reset your distraction counter to zero at the beginning of the hour. And every time you become distracted, click the counter once.
Pick up your phone, opening an app, clicking away from the tab. Anything is a distraction. And it's even more effective on a separate sticky note or paper if you can write down, Like why you got distracted.
And the purpose of that is, well, it would be good just for awareness, to be honest, but then to try to solve that problem. So this is kind of that dual metric we talked about where the quantity is the timer, how much work you did. And then this is like the quality of your focus level.
So as I was making this on one of my hours, I got distracted three times and you see my timer there and did my best to fix the problem. After completing each D -Work hour, we need this physical record of it, and that is the sticky note with the date and the hour, what you completed, the number on your distraction counter, and basically the time that you completed it.
For example, August 3rd, 2026, hour two, created this section of the document, two distractions, finished at 8 a .m. And then you place that sticky note behind the wall on your desk or your computer screen, and here's an example. And then it's just in your peripheral all day and it compounds.
And eventually you have an overwhelming amount of physical proof that you are the type of person who can focus, work hard and consistently complete what you planned. If you do this for 30 days, four hours a day, that's 120 sticky notes. If you do it for over a year, you know, that's, I don't want to do math, but I believe 1400 and some sticky notes.
Can you imagine the amount of physical proof when your entire office or workspace is surrounded by proof that you are an absolute beast who can work hard, never takes a day off, is totally consistent, and you're going to be able to mog your spouse, your business partner, your employees, or anyone else who ever comes into this room.
So once you read the sticky note or once you put the sticky note on the wall, that's where you read your documents, and that's why they're posted on the wall or printed out too. You read the 10x rule. And that reminds you to constantly think bigger and maintain your standards and take more action.
You read your top five goals for auto -suggestion over and over and over. You read your motivation list to remind yourself of all the positive and negative reasons that you are doing this and you need to get back to work with more discipline and more urgency. You read the beliefs, the character traits, and skills you are trying to develop as the 2 .0 version of yourself.
And then you read the thought habits. You train yourself in certain situations where you're currently week for example if you're slow down burnout or make excuses at you know minute 40 or 45 of your 60 minute hour okay great now i'm in the growth phase i'm expanding my capacity and it's going to be easier and easier over time if i just have to keep going right or something like that that's a bit long to be a thought habit of course but something like that and then you finish it off by submitting your work form that you have pinned to your browser you basically do the same thing you did on the sticky note and then you use it as kind of a final check for did i do all of those things right and this ensures that you have this record you have this proof and it also ensures that you are using auto suggestion yes i read the 10x rule yes i read my goals yes i read my motivations yes i look at my vision board yes i look at this stuff and it's like just a very good end point to the end of the hour you completed the hour you documented
Other people can see it because it's in your accountability group. And now that work is permanently recorded and you take your first break or your next break. So this goes back, if we take back to the Pavlovian conditioning, remember we talked about where in the theory part where Pavlov connected the same cue to the same reward.
In this case, he rang the bell and the dog knew it was time to eat. We're doing the same thing with focused work. When your timer goes off and you hear the beep, you start the process.
When the timer goes off again, you write the sticky note, you place it on the wall, you read all your form or documents, and then you submit your form. And that is your reward. And eventually your brain begins connecting the end of the completed deep work hour with this sequence and the timer, the sticky note, the notification, and the growing wall of proof.
stop feeling like random tools, but more they start to become signals that you completed something important and earned the reward that follows. And then you are deliberately conditioning your brain to associate focused work with progress, satisfaction, and reward. And that's why at the end of the four hour, the end of this block, that reward becomes meaningfully larger than in between.
And look, it's going to be like you with the work forms. You're going to be the dog.
The reward after the four hours should be bigger because that is not just the hours, but your day. Remember, if we define success as four hours of deep work, this is your success reward and it should be meaningfully bigger. I always go to a coffee shop and get a coffee, set my timer for about an hour.
And then chill for 15 to 30 after I get my coffee and then I get back to work personally. Like you don't have to do more than four hours, but like I typically do that. And I consciously treat this as my reward for completing the system.
I don't feel guilty about, you know, wasting time or sitting around because I have had a successful day and then I can keep going on to the other stuff that matters. I'd also recommend you celebrate the successful day by just saying four hours complete to someone in your accountability group. But, you know, and then they could go, oh, my God, you're so sick.
And then they can do it to you. And then it's just an amazing system. And then we want to mark the day as a success, right?
We want to go to our calendar. We want to put the big red X. We want to literally just take note and say another successful day in a long line of successful days.
And even if the rest of the day becomes chaotic or something bad happens or you don't work as much as like you take the rest of the day off. You've already completed four hours of deep work and you are a success. You've moved your important processes and projects further.
You've reinforced the new self -image and the 2 .0 version of yourself. And you've added four more pieces of proof to the wall and your mind that you are someone who can focus, right? So the big reward finishes the loop of James Clear's habit protocol.
and makes it satisfying. And your brain begins associating the four hours of completed work and the successful day with a reward. And it becomes very, very, very, very effective.
There's me in Starbucks. So that is the deep work period. So let's do our checks.
This is self -perpetuating and self -improving because the deep work system becomes easier and more effective every time you use it. Each completed hour produces real progress, another sticky note, another work form, and more evidence that you can focus and work hard. That evidence improves your self -image and makes completing the next hour easier.
At the same time, your distraction hour and work form show you what is slowing you down. You can remove those distractions, improve your hourly plans, and complete four hours more efficiently. Better work creates better results.
Better results create more motivation, resources, skills, and momentum. And those things help you produce even better work. So complete the hours, you study what happened, you improve the system, and you repeat.
It's a self -perpetuating self -improvement system. For auto -suggestion, the deep work hours make extensive use of it. After every hour, you read your 10x rule, your top five goals, your motivation list, the 2 .0 version of yourself, the thought habits, you look at your vision board, and you repeatedly expose yourself to the same goals, standards, beliefs, and reasons for doing the work.
You do not read them once and you forget about them. You read them four times per day or more if you do it extra, while taking action that supports them. And over time, that repetition begins influencing what you think, believe, and do automatically.
The words tell you who you're becoming, the completed hours provide evidence that the words are true, and that evidence begins changing your self -image. For your self -image, Every deep work hour creates evidence that you are becoming the 2 .0 version of yourself.
Again, you create the sticky note, the work form, the hours added to your spreadsheet and leaderboards, and now you are not just telling yourself that you're focused, disciplined, and consistent. You are repeatedly proving it. And once you get all of this mounting evidence day by day, it accumulates and it becomes increasingly difficult to continue viewing yourself as someone who is lazy, inconsistent.
and incapable of focusing because that's no longer true. Your behavior changes the person that you believe yourself to be, and the stronger self -image will make repeating this behavior substantially easier over time. It's like an infinite cycle that both works.
So your deep work hours really change your self -image, but they also help you with your beliefs, character traits, and skills, right? Reading your 10X rule, your top five goals, your motivation list, your 2 .0 version, and your thought habits repeatedly changes what you think and believe to be true about yourself and the world.
And the sticky notes, the work forms, the notifications, and the calendar gives you proof that you can focus and work hard. Completing the four hours and all of this kind of stuff develops the character traits of focus, work ethic, consistency, discipline, and accountability. And again, this is the skills.
You're going to be developing skills during the hours that are Whatever you're working on, but planning, working for 60 minutes nonstop, reducing distractions, and returning to the assignments. These are all skills, and the more you practice them, the better you become.
And then James Clear's habit summary. Making it obvious. Your hourly plan is there.
Your timer is there. Your documents. Your vision board.
Your sticky notes. Your accountability group notifications. The time block in your calendar where you do this.
It makes it impossible to... not know that you have to do this. It's obvious.
You make it attractive by your goals, your motivation list, your accountability group, your leaderboards, where you compete with your accountability group, and the satisfaction of basically turning this into a game versus anything else. You make it easy because your work is already planned, the distractions are already blocked, and everything is prepared.
All you have to do, because we set it up properly, is start the timer and work. And then we make it satisfying. We create another sticky note.
We do another work form. We notify our accountability group and talk trash to them even more. And then after it's done, you take that large reward and then you repeat the process.
So it has a complete closed loop. Here are the action steps. As with other parts, I'm not going to just read them off here.
If you want to, you can pause the video and take a look.
That being said, let's get to the next part, which is part five. So that is what to do between hours. And I know that wasn't the longest section, but I promised you that we would be going back to our reminders at the start of each section.
So the 2 .0 version of you must be built day by day. Nothing happens all at once. You need to do it day after day, week after week, month after month.
The 2 .0 version of you needs to be built bit by bit. It's not just going to randomly happen. Again, the man with the axe.
You do not have to do anything or any part of this course. It's completely up to you. You have free will.
But if you want to achieve big things, you have to remember who you're competing against. You're competing against hardworking, intelligent people who never get discouraged, never quit. they rarely if ever make mistakes and they don't require anyone to motivate them or hold them accountable they're naturally hyper industrious and this level is built into them most people are not like this and if you want to achieve big things and this does not describe you this system is built to help you reach their level of activity no one is forcing you to do any of this but if you have achieved if you want to achieve big goals in life you need to be able to operate at this level or you will not be able to compete because the man with the axe is still working so let's go into the table of contents i'm not going to read it just as usual but the overview so like your deep work hour is complete because this is what you do between hours so you know you finish hour one what do you do for that 10 to 15 minutes you finish hour two etc so these are these short transitions before each hours and a lot can go wrong in here so like this is why i'm going to really focus on it you should take a short break
so that you can rest recover and prepare yourself for another hour of focused work i learned this concept from a book called the 5am club by robin sharma he refers to it as the 60 10 method so the 60 minutes on 10 minutes break like we have talked about so far 10 minutes is the recommendation but if it's 5 if it's 10 if it's 15 if it's 20 like do what helps you perform best but this is not like one hour on one hour off for one even one hour on 30 minutes off we need to finish this as fast as possible to make room for the rest of our day.
The break has four primary functions. Keep your energy up so you can maintain the quality of work across all four hours. Reward yourself for completing that hour so it becomes satisfying and you're more likely to repeat it.
Review your performance that hour and identify the biggest constraint and then get back to work as quickly as possible. The actual between hour routine that I'm going to suggest should approximately take two minutes and then you have, you know, eight to 13 minutes left. It's not separate from the overall system.
It's the transition between one deep work hour and the other. If we were just going to do four hours of deep work, we would be tired and the effectiveness would not be good. So we basically need this process, but we need to keep it time bound as well.
Because the goal is to complete the four deep work hours as fast as possible and not... take your entire day and ruin your life. So the first thing you want to do is to create your own place that you go during this hour.
And you can just make that very rough. This picture here is my place. It's right beside my computer desk.
But this is where I go during my break. So it's underneath a large part of my sticky note wall. I put this cabinet there.
And I have my print documents on the wall, but I also have them here because it's just easier to read them here for me. That includes my 10x rule, my top five documents, my thought habit, my journals, all that kind of stuff. And it becomes almost like a little shrine for my system here.
It does not need to be elaborate. It should just be a consistent place where you can write, review your performance, keep a drink there or something, read your documents, and just do this short routine. So once the timer ends, you stand up, you go here and you just kind of make this part of that two minute process before you take your break.
I typically, cause I am really locked in and I would kind of recommend you do this too, is you have a between hours timer or so just kind of really gets out of control. Like the biggest, one of the biggest hurdles or blocks to this whole system that I cannot build anything that solves it for you is you screwing around for like 45 minutes between hours.
Like this is the big point of failure that there's nothing that I can do about. I've solved everything else for you, but can't do anything about this. So really do the 10 hour, 10 minute or 15 minute timer as fast as possible.
Or like you do it and then you do this and then go back as fast as possible. It can be your cue to go back because even 20, 30, 45 minutes destroys the efficiency. And then Now it's not like you're blocked off from 6 a .m.
to 11 .30. Now it's like you're not going to finish your deep work till 2, 3 p .m. And now you're neglecting your other responsibilities as a business owner.
It just doesn't work. And this is a big point of failure. So as soon as your one timer goes off, turn that off.
Turn on this timer. Do the routine. Take a little break.
And once it goes off, you go to your next hour. So step one. Is keeping the energy up because, you know, it could be a little bit tiring and we need high energy.
So what we want to do is we want to take this time to rest as much as possible. No chores, no admin work, no other stuff. You know, like some of the things we can do are stretching if we want to.
If we like are feeling stiff, you can drink some water. If you have that treadmill, you can walk on it a little bit. You could clean up your desk or work area or you could listen to or watch something motivational.
You do not need to do all of those things or any of them during every break. You could just stand there or sit down on the couch and get back to it. But anything that you need to do, and those are some ideas to keep your energy up, is something that is very worthwhile and I would highly recommend.
The next is that small reward. That's part of the fourth law of habit formation, which makes it satisfying. So to some degree, submitting the form and putting the sticky note on the wall are a built -in reward.
But, you know, watch, listen to your favorite song, watch a YouTube video, grab a Coke Zero, you know, just otherwise screw around or play on your phone and consciously connect that reward to, okay, I'm doing this because I finished the hour. And you can say this out loud to yourself, to be honest. The third part is the self -improvement loop.
Because we're trying to get better over time, because we're ambitious and care a lot about ourselves and our future, we should try to improve every hour. And it's not some complicated life routine or journaling process, but it's just like journal entry. What did I do that hour like is my biggest constraint, right?
What are five or what are 10 different things or 20 different things that I can write down to improve? And just do this on a piece of paper. And even just like writing these down are going to get you to think about it.
And when you do this every single hour, the self -improving loop. And the 1 % improvements stack up so fast day to day that you're basically unrecognizable by the time, you know, you do this for six months. It's just so good.
And then what I like to do is I like to calculate my efficiency ratio. So, you know, if I woke up like with the 30 minute morning routine, with the 60 minutes of deep work and the 10 minutes, you know, how efficient am I being? Because again, the number one cause of failure in the system.
is you not getting these hours done fast enough, usually by taking too long of a break, to where it interferes with your other routine and other activities. So for example, if I had five hours and 10 minutes planned for this, and it took me five hours and 47 minutes, I would divide that to see how efficient I am, right? And then step four, get back as quickly as possible.
Not a 30 or 60 minute break, 10, 15 minutes. at the most because we are efficiency maxing here. We need to get back.
We can take a longer break once we finish our day, but we should be sprinting back to our desk and really finishing this off. So now we're going to get to the final part, part six, which is the night routine. Amazing.
And this is the last time, but the 2 .0 version of yourself must be built day after day. It's another reminder that nothing happens all at once. Second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, week by week.
The 2 .0 version of yourself needs to be built. It will not happen automatically. And then finally, the last time about the man with the axe.
Remember back to Jordan Peterson's hyper -industrious man. You put him in the forest with an axe, he'll begin chopping down trees non -stop. That level of activity is built into him.
Most people aren't naturally like this. But if you're not, this system... is designed to help you deliberately become this way.
Again, for the final time, you do not have to become this way. No one is forcing you. But if you want to achieve the biggest things in life, you are going to have to compete with people like this.
And if you cannot operate at their level, you will be non -competitive. So here is the final table of contents for this part. And the overview is that your four hours of deep work are complete.
Whatever else you did for that day is complete. and the night routine closes the loop and prepares everything for the next day. There is already enough to do in the system.
We don't need an entire 30 -minute or an hour nighttime routine, but take three to five minutes to clean up your workspace, review your progress, record your efficiency, and prepare everything for the next morning in your routine, and then set yourself up for the best sleep as possible. So we want to clean up our workspace.
We want that minimalist workspace and we don't want to live like slobs because the more stuff, the bottles, the papers, everything on your desk, the more noise is going to be in your head, right? So throw away any garbage, put everything exactly where it belongs and leave only the items that you need for tomorrow. The next is review and record your efficiency for that day.
This is part of the self -improvement loop, but we really need to know the total time it took for our four hours. If we woke up at five and we ended up... 1047, that's five hours and 47 minutes, right?
The fastest planned completion time is five hours and 10 minutes here. So if we did 30 minute morning routine, four deep work hours and four 10 minute planning sessions, that is five hours and 10 minutes, right? If I took five hours and 47 minutes, that means I'm 89 .34 % efficient there.
And we always want that to go up. I like to track this in a spreadsheet. because it just gives you more visibility.
Your wake -up time, your hour one time, the efficiency of your first hour, then the efficiency of all the other hours because the first step is awareness. And when you begin tracking this stuff, you're going to procrastinate less, you're going to take less long breaks, and you're going to become more efficient almost naturally.
To prepare yourself for the morning routine, put out your shoes, prepare your water, put out your headphones if you want those on the treadmill, set your alarms, and remove un... every unnecessary decision or source of friction ahead of time so you don't have to wake up and search for your shoes and do all this crap and you can just get to work.
And then prepare for a great sleep. Phone outside the bedroom, nasal, strip and mouth tape if that's your thing, white noise machine, make it as dark and cool as possible. And if you can't sleep right away, read for a little bit before going to bed instead of playing on your phone.
We need the best sleep as possible so we can wake up and crush it and be a maniac tomorrow, right? So that completes the night routine. And it's self -perpetuating because if you do the night routine, it makes it more likely you do the morning routine in the rest of the system.
It also makes you improve because you're tracking your total efficiency ratio. So you will naturally want to improve and you know where the distractions and long breaks took place. And then each night prepares the next morning, makes it easier to begin.
Each day becomes more efficient and it's just a loop, a loop, a loop, a loop. So for auto -suggestion, we have the exact same thing. Okay, I need to do this.
And it makes it more likely that we start the next day. We read all of our goals. We do all that kind of stuff.
It's just very, very important. For the self -image, it's you are the type of person who has a clean environment. You are the type of person who cares about how you perform.
You are the type of person who gets a good sleep. And when you start to view yourself that way, it becomes easier and more consistent and so on. For your beliefs and character traits, you believe that you need to prepare and recover and sleep are part of performing well.
You also reinforce the belief that measuring, whatever it is, in this case your efficiency, is the key to allow you to improve. For your character traits, you're clean, you're honest, you are disciplined, and you have personal responsibility. And then your skills, getting a good night's sleep really is a skill.
And as far as James Clear's habit routine goes, the end of the day and the condition of your workspace, you're all set up properly. All of your shoes and everything are down there. That makes it obvious tomorrow morning to start the morning routine.
Making it attractive, you have a clean workspace. You have prepared your morning routine and you know all of that stuff feels good. So you want to do it tomorrow.
Everything's laid out just perfectly and set up perfectly. That makes it easy. And then you finish the day with a clean environment.
you are satisfied that you did your four hours of deep work, and you can go to sleep, which is a reward all of its own, peaceful and ready to repeat the system tomorrow. So again, this is the final action step checklist. I'm not going to read it off, but if you want to pause the video and do it, that's up to you.
And there it is, the end. So the summary and the recap. We completed the one -time setup.
We do our morning routine. We do our deep work hours, four of them. We do the in -between hour routine.
And then we do the night routine. And then we replete the system tomorrow. And that is the end of what we're going to call the beginner course here.
You have now everything required to use the complete system. You do not need the advanced part, which will come after if you keep watching. I don't really know if I recommend it for most people.
But you have everything set up. You have all of your... habit loops, you have all of your self -image and auto -suggestion that you could possibly need, and you can do this system over and over forever.
I would just stick to this system first before you go to the advanced modules, and master, you know, even for a month, doing the four hours, seven days per week, not even a single day off. And then once you know that you can consistently execute, and if you want to go to the advanced modules, you can do that. So now let's go to what I'm going to call part seven, the advanced course.
I wasn't sure if I was going to put this in, but I thought I might as well because I know that this, you know, you post something on the internet and it will be there forever, right? So someone watches this course and, you know, does four hours a day for 30 days in a row eventually and wants more. They're ultra ambitious.
What would they do, right? And I think it's a good addition. And here is exactly how it works.
So here's the table of contents. There's four more ways to improve in the advanced course. We have more volume.
We have higher quality. We have increased effectiveness. And then we have greater consistency.
So any one of those four technically would improve you. And they're all part of the advanced because realistically, you do all of them at the same time.
So, I think that most people should not do this, probably ever. It takes a certain kind of situation and person to want to do this, because if you were 100 % efficient doing four deep hours per work per day, that's five hours to six hours of total time, right? Depending on morning routine, how many breaks you take, what time you wake up.
Let's just say it's five and a half hours. If you want to get done by 11, you need to wake up at 5 .30. 5 .30, you know, to wake up that early, you have to kind of put your whole life around it, right?
You have to go to bed by 9 .30, 10, 10 .30 at the latest if you want to do it over the long term. And then like, for example, you don't have to do it or you don't have to finish the deep work period by 11 a .m. But like if you don't, right, it's going to interfere with the rest of your...
your day. So I would definitely not begin the advanced section until you have completed four hours of deep work for like 30 days or 60 days or 90 days with like no missed days. And you just really want it because something consistent and sustainable for life or deep hours of work is going to get better results than eight hours of work, five days a week, and then two hours of work, two days a week.
It's just how it is. Consistency really is what matters.
But if you are that ambitious, I'm not going to stop you, right? So you should be noting that this is an additional layer on top. It doesn't replace the original system.
Nothing's different about it. But some of these improvements may also cost money. They also might include removing blockers, further upgrading your environment, buying back your time, and just a lot higher level, more advanced, right?
Even after you do the advanced section, I would always view that four days of success. I wouldn't say like six hours or eight hours or 12 hours a day is a success. Always just view it as four hours and anything else is just you are better.
Don't allow the section to raise your minimum standard. Four hours is great. You can do that forever for your entire life.
But once that distinction is clear, there is four ways to do this. And throughout the course, we've talked about the man with the axe, right? The original system is designed to help you, you know, become capable of working that way, albeit for four deep work hours per day.
But by the time, you know, you're at the advanced course, we no longer need to convince you to start swinging the axe, right? You're already swinging. And now what we're trying to do is we're trying to give you a chainsaw instead of an axe.
Chainsaw, cut more trees, cut each tree faster, you know. cut down the correct trees, add other people with chainsaws and keep this up over time. And that's the purpose of the advanced system.
More volume, higher quality, increased effectiveness, greater consistency, you know. Now you are going to become the man with the chainsaw. So like there's four ways to do this, right?
More volume, like that is basically you're doing more total hours past four. Higher quality, you are getting more work done during those deep work hours. increased effectiveness, you are spending those hours on higher and higher leverage tasks and then greater consistency.
Like you complete your work form system on more days, like 365 days a year. And these are four separate, you know, forms of improvement, but they work together and a single change might, you know, spill over and naturally impact or improve more than one area at the same time. For example, there's a change in here called the rule of three.
That increases effectiveness by helping you focus on the most activities, but that also gets a lot of obligations and gives you more time back to complete more deep work hours, which increases volume. I've placed each of the recommendations where I think they probably fit the best. Something might fit in all four, but one of them probably fits the best.
So just know that I'm going to present it as four separate things, but they're not necessarily in isolation or in a vacuum. So let's go to more volume first. More volume complete means like completing more deep work hours and always for the baseline.
And four is a successful day. Don't be annoying about this. But five hours, six hours, seven hours, eight hours, even better, assuming they're of quality, right?
So we're going to increase volume by gradually expanding past four hours, tailoring more of our life around supporting this. We're going to stack deep work hours together. We're going to hire an executive assistant to buy back our time.
We're going to decide on the magnum opuses, the high standard, high value projects that we, you know, we're going to do more volume. What are we going to invest that time into? And then we're going to talk about the idea of a hundred hour sprint.
So more volume is just more hours, right? Once the original four hours become automatic, boom, you know. Now we can do more.
So the first I'm going to talk about is expanding. Well, actually, I'm going to go and talk about this first because I didn't really, like, it's not really, I should have put this first. I put it in the wrong order.
But there's a big difference between going in the advanced section and, you know, especially doing more volume if you are a 21 -year -old single man who's hungry and ambitious versus... A 45 -year -old married man or, you know, woman who has a wife, husband, kids, right? So realistically, if you are in the latter section, and if you're not, just know that one day you'll have to have this conversation if you stick with this that long, is the main person that needs to be okay with this increased capacity or increased volume is your spouse, right?
Because anybody almost can do four hours per day. You're working eight hours a day. You have to make money to support your family.
You being more effective with it, your spouse, if you didn't tell them, probably wouldn't even know, right? But when you start going six hours a day, eight hours a day, plus the time and the breaks, that becomes a different story where they are going to be affected by it, right? So in this, your spouse is going to be, you know.
The biggest blocker, for example, your parents, you know, probably doesn't affect them. Your friends, they're going to survive. Your children, right?
You know, it'd be nice to spend time with them, but their kids, they're not going to have much say. Your business partner, you'll probably love it. Your employees will probably make them scared of you and they'll work harder.
So that's good. But your spouse, yes. And of course, this is not a marriage course or course on how to choose or deal with your spouse, right?
You're on your own with that part. But considering how much this will affect them, it is, in my opinion, like non -negotiable that you get their support. And support is measured on a spectrum, right?
This will be you negotiating with your spouse. And there's three possible scenarios. Scenario one is they love the idea.
There is a lot of spouses that will fall into this category. There's a lot, like, especially if you're a man, there's a lot of women who, you know, wish their husband would work more, become more ambitious, achieve more. And if that describes your marriage, it's your lucky day, right?
Probably won't need to elaborate much on why you want to do more volume. It'll just be yes. The second is they're neutral, right?
They're not like necessarily, you know, like they're not necessarily against the idea that you work more, but they're not, you know, necessarily excited about sacrificing more time with you. So based on my experience and the experience of business partners and clients and friends who have really gone in the advanced section here, I would say that approximately 25 % fall into scenario number one.
They love the idea. 25 % fall into scenario three, which, spoiler alert, will be they hate the idea. And 50 % fall here.
And in this scenario, it is up to you to sell the idea. So like you should probably, you know, assuming you're a business person, you sell stuff, sell it to your spouse that this will help you achieve more for your family, become a more fulfilled, happy version of yourself and how that will resonate. Right.
If you need to make an agreement with them, if you give me the freedom to do this, I'll do X, Y and Z in return. Just like that. You're asking them to support something that will affect their lives.
So it's reasonable that you do something in return. Right. And the scenario three is they hate the idea.
And there's going to be the spouses who already hate how much you work. For example, one of my business partners, his spouse, makes him log off at 5 p .m. on the dot every time.
If he asked this, it probably wouldn't go well, right? And I don't know, like, I don't think there's much that you're going to do or I'm going to advise you on this. You're on your own with this one.
It's life and marriage are complicated, right? Good luck to you. So the first thing you do is get your spouse on board, right?
And then the second thing you do is you expand past four hours of deep work. So I recommend you go to four, then to five. You do that for a week or two, then to six, then to seven.
You might find if you had problems going to four originally, like you started at one, two, three, and four, it'll be the same thing here. You're just not necessarily going to go from four to eight or four to 10 or four to 12. We need to keep up that quality and we don't want to, you know.
burn ourselves out. So what I do all the time, because I typically will do eight of these hours per day on an average day. Again, I consider the success four hours, but you know, at least six hours or five, six days a week, I'll do eight.
And what I do is I think of these as two separate work blocks, my first four hour work block and my second one. So if you're really doing this and you're really going to be committed to this, I wake up out of bed, do what the beginner system, finish my four hours as quickly as possible. Then I will usually take like an hour break.
I'll usually do some meetings if I have them or some work, respond to my team, etc. And then I'll lock in for another four hours in the afternoon to the early or even late evening. To me, that's the best way to do it.
You could always do your first four hours and then second block of one hour and then second block of two and then three and then four. This is called more volume and I will be supportive of you, but to me, more than eight hours, probably excessive. When you take into account the morning routine, the night routine, the time and breaks, this is going to be pushing 12 hours a day.
If you wake up at 7 a .m., 7 p .m., You should probably reward yourself, probably even more if you take two hours in between, right? So let's just say that you're going to do this to eight.
And the philosophy that you should do this here is passion. You want to wake more ambition, but you should also go gradualness. Five hours, six hours, seven hours, eight hours.
Don't just, you know, you get the point.
Eventually, like you're going to find. that it's often possible and often easier to stack hours together. So the default system is 60 -10.
A lot of the time, like, I will do just basically 120 -10, right? Or not even, I'll just be like, I guess 120 -10, sure, we could call it that. If you are really locked in, especially on a magnum opus and stuff, or you're filming a bunch of videos or creating a bunch of content or making...
systems around your product, you'll find that you can do 90 or 120 minutes without really stopping and the quality or quantity of work doesn't really decrease. You're still completing these four hours of deep work, you're just less total time, right? And that's the entire purpose of stacking.
Don't really do it and judge if you're that burnt out or the quality is, you know, going down that much, but it is possible to do it, especially for the first two periods of the day. You can just do two periods of 120 instead of four of basically that. So the next is going to be your executive assistant.
Stacking hours helps you condense that work, but your executive assistant is going to buy back time to free up your calendar to work more. And this is going to cost time. It's going to cost money, but you get what you pay for, right?
Like there's probably no one more important to this process other than your spouse approval than your executive assistant. You need someone who can you can basically task with, you know, the result or the solution, not just with the steps. You need something that you can simply say, go do this and they are going to do it right without babysitting, without an extensive explanation, without a step by step guide or answering 10 questions like they're going to need context, of course.
The long -term goal is to get an executive assistant who you can just say, go do this sort of vague and they will do it. That's why having the same executive assistant for a long time compounds. Don't cheap out when this executive assistant, like you do get what you pay for, pay 25 % over the market rate.
In my opinion, the market rate is 120, like 120 ,000, pay 25 % over that. If you pay like 25 % more, you can really get someone two, three, four times better. and it's an amazing trade -off you know don't compare price like if your time is valuable and you're doing an extra four hours of deep work per day and that makes you like let's just say your time is valued at 250 an hour that's a you know a thousand dollars a day that they are basically freeing up for you for like a three four hundred dollars a day it's just pure money if you think of it in that way So we're trying to buy back our time, right?
The purpose is not merely to have an assistant because I or someone else told you to. It's to get these work hours. So you need to spend them working.
I know that's kind of obvious, but a lot of people will be so efficient at buying back their time that they just have an open calendar where they don't do anything. Seen it time and time again. I've done that myself too.
It's just a huge problem when you misapply or you're first learning to buy back your time. The next is your magnum opuses or magnum opi. Basically, those huge, amazing things that you put in a thousand hours into it and it changes your life and business, right?
And at any given point, there's probably one project that you know that could help you more than anyone else. Like my big one that changed my business that I can think of was I spent about 2 ,000 hours on the same webinar. And that includes like running the webinar weekly and constantly fixing it up until it basically started printing money, right?
That thing, not 10x, but like 7, 8x revenue. And it's just one of those things or an ad campaign or a lead magnet or a course like this one. Or, you know, you probably know what it is.
It might be the product you need to build, the offer, the, you know, acquisition system. Maybe you're writing a book or a course. Who names it, right?
And when you put all these extra work hours, you're going to do it to something, right? And this is probably what you should be doing. You know, you're not just doing more busy work or creating more content.
Make it the finest work that you could possibly do. Like, think about it before you decide, because once you basically decide what to do and you really mentally put like, I need a thousand or two thousand hours on this over the course of a year or two years. and that will completely change my business and life, these hours become a lot easier because you're completely, completely absorbed in it.
You don't pay any attention to the time, that 60 minutes or 120 minutes. If you stack your hours, you just look up and there's five, 10 minutes, two minutes remaining. And it's just, it's a great feeling and it's a great way to do all of that work.
It makes it so it doesn't feel like a burden anymore. So it's just, what is that one project that really could change my life? And then if you really get advanced, Once you identify that magnum opus, that project, you basically will work in 100 -hour sprints across two weeks.
Focus entirely on that. And that sounds like this is the super advanced mode. But when you really buy back your time, you get efficient, you can put 100 hours divided by 14 days quite easily into it.
So it's approximately seven hours and nine minutes per day. So you're putting all eight hours of your deep work on this. and then you get really good fast you have those high standards and you just build something whether it's a book a course a product a webinar a paid ads funnel like and you just a content system uh who knows like all your systems and you just know that my entire day is dedicated to this and you just go and you just do it it's just such a amazing thing That is extremely advanced protocol that's temporary.
You probably wouldn't do non -stop 100 -hour sprints across two weeks, but when you're really locked in on it, it's very, very good.
The second way is higher quality, and that means getting more work done during each work hour. So two people obviously can do four hours of deep work. accomplish dramatically different results.
So we're going to improve our focus, our energy, our environment, and our ability to remove distractions, which basically means removing blockers, improving our diet, improving our sleep, exercising, upgrading our environment, and measuring useful output, not just output. So the first step is to remove all of the blockers, right?
And we tried to do this, or we did do this in the basic course, but this is like kind of to the next level, right? We might probably don't need another productivity tool or supplement or application or some technique. We just need to really, really dedicate our life to removing these blockers.
If the notifications break your focus, block them. If the phone repeatedly distracts you, go put it in your car during the day. If you constantly stop because you don't know what to do next, Make a better hourly plan.
If your poor sleep makes you tired and mentally slow, you know, buy a new bed, redesign your entire room, that kind of stuff. If eating too much makes you sluggish, wait until after your deep work hours are done to eat a large meal. And if your equipment or internet wastes your time, upgrade it, right?
So it's just like, do not only like, you don't want to ask like, how could I be better? It's like, remember way back to the inversion thinking, what repeatedly gets in my way? And one of the most common blockers is consistently bringing low energy and brain fog because of the way you eat, because you eat like an absolute animal.
And I've been there, like, don't worry. So one of the most important ways to improve the quality of your deep work hours is to improve your diet and then your body composition. If you're a man and substantially above 15 % body fat, I would like to try to lean down during this process, track all my calories.
That kind of stuff. Life as a man really starts at 15 % body fat. You're going to look better, you're going to feel better, and you'll notice people treating you differently.
And more importantly for this course, I noticed that I leaned down quite a bit. I, like my brain fog and many of the other negative traits associated with feeling tired and sluggish just kind of disappear. And like 15 % is just an example, but it's a practical target that's something to go after.
So I would definitely not have a complicated diet. I'd probably eat the same thing every day, but I would be tracking my calories, eating enough protein, not eating any fast food or anything fried and that kind of stuff. If you want to lean down, we talked about throughout the course how important tracking is, right?
Tracking your calories is just the same. It's annoying, but once you start doing it... and you start eating the same thing every day, that creates awareness, and what gets managed gets measured, and what gets measured can be improved, right?
Eating enough protein, that's part of the morning routine, but usually this should be one gram per pound of body weight. Take all of your supplements. I like creatine.
I find it really helps my mental version of this. Any additional supplement should support an already good diet, right? We don't need to eat like an animal and then try to solve this problem by taking 17 different pills.
It's not a replacement for eating properly. And anything like pizza, fried food, fast food, anything that like you should know. And when you stop eating this stuff, you stop craving it anyway.
And you really can get a lot more done. Trust me, when you're leaner, when you're eating properly, it's a lot easier to get. more work done in the same amount of time.
The next is your sleep and you spend roughly one third of your life sleeping. So let's try to get that dialed in, right? So we have to go to sleep at the same time every night or approximately because that is your circadian rhythm.
Your body gets accustomed to this schedule and probably like more important than everything else to sleep is combined. It's like getting to bed and waking up at a consistent time. Your bedroom should be cold, dark, and quiet.
I like to sleep between 17 and 19 degrees Celsius. If you're a Fahrenheit person, you can just do the math on that. And when the lights are off in the room, ideally, it would be so black and so dark that you couldn't even see your hand like this in front of you.
If you are serious about this, upgrade your room, black out curtains, remove unnecessary light from the chargers, TV, that kind of stuff. And if outside noise is a problem, I always recommend a white noise machine or pointing a fan at the wall.
Remove as many things as possible that could impact in a negative way the quality of your sleep. To me, the second most important part is no phone in the bedroom. Your phone should be associated with or your bed should be associated with sleeping, not scrolling or answering messages or watching videos or checking the news or anything.
Charge your phone anywhere but your bedroom. Keep it entirely outside. If you must use screens before bed, download a thing called Flux app where it will change the color of your screen.
No blue light before bed as long as you can. I always sleep with mouth tape and a nasal strip to force me from breathing through my nose. To me, that's cured dry mouth, that's cured snoring, that's cured a lot of sleep apnea.
They say that this is not proven and it's not, you know, medical advice. So I'm going to go with that. It's not medical advice, but definitely try it if you can.
I also got a temperature controlled mattress called an eight sleep and I really love it. So basically, you know, the most important thing is kind of developing a thought habit around this stuff. The more or the better I sleep, the more work forms I can get done.
You can write that on your thought habit. and review it every hour between the time that you're working.
The next part is exercise, and I think most fitness advice is far too complicated for the average person who just wants to look better, feel better, and be healthier. And we don't need to turn this into a full -time job. Actually, we need to make it as simple as possible.
So level one is the treadmill, and you should already be doing 20 minutes per day during your morning routine. And you can do a slower speed with little to no incline during your breaks if you want to. But depending on your fitness level, this can be a substantial amount of zone two cardio, which is good.
Because the treadmill is already built into the system, you don't really need to do any separate program here. But level two would be, to me, weights and a physical hobby, right? I typically will do my four work hours and then my fifth hour, if you will call it that, will be...
lifting weights in the gym. And I think that is a great breakup between the first four -hour period, you take a break lifting weights for 30 minutes to an hour, then you take a little more break, and then you do your second one, and three to four times per week. You don't need it to be complicated.
To me, just pick something like 15 sets four days a week, so 60 sets total. Do either two or three sets. If you can, you just choose your rep range.
Let's just say eight reps. If you can do three sets of eight reps, increase the weight and repeat. Remember, we're trying to grind here, not necessarily become a bodybuilder.
And in addition to lifting weights, a physical hobby that you enjoy, you know, one, two or three times per week. For me, that's Muay Thai and paddle, but realistically everything. Definitely for me, you should take the weight training with as much effort and seriousness as your deep work hours.
And to me, like a lot of the time, I will consider the... lifting session a deep work hour because it's that professionalized and that standardized and that focused so like it is up to you right so you're always walking on the treadmill three to four times per week in the weights you know your hobby one or two times per week and make sure you put this on your calendar because what's on your calendar you know it actually gets done the next is upgrading your environment that's a spectrum right Like, it's not, do you have a good environment?
It's to what degree your environment is. And if you're really good at Gride, you're going to spend thousands of hours inside this room or office or workspace. And it makes sense to spend money to make it ideal, right?
Just like your bed. You spend, you know, one third of your life roughly in your bed. It makes sense to spend a lot of money on it.
So you don't need to make any improvement or every improvement all at once. But start with the biggest ones. To me.
I love a pitch black room when I work or the option to make it pitch black. You still can open the blinds or you still can do whatever you need to do. But I find that I really grind and focus when it's early morning or at night.
So having the ability to put a pitch black room kind of replicates that for me. The next one is to have a separate deep workspace away from your main office or main workspace. I find this is very, very good to like ritualize locking in, right?
Okay, I'm going into my deep workspace. This might sound funny to some people, but for a long time before I could afford a separate space, so to speak, my deep workspace would be inside my walk -in closet because you could basically turn the lights out. It would be almost black anyways.
Like I personally wasn't using my walk -in closet that much. I don't have that many clothes. Just put a desk and chair in there.
Put a white noise machine in there. Turn out the lights and just basically grind. It wasn't the most spacious or the best place, but really, really strong in my opinion.
Next is the temperature and the air quality. There's a lot of research that shows 21 to 23 degrees Celsius is the most comfortable temperature to work. More than that or less than that, the productivity really slows.
I put a air purifier right on my desk. I also live in Dubai, so that matters a bit more than... But if you live in any big city, it's probably a good idea.
But having a water cooler near your desk because you need to stay hydrated. Like right here I have a water cooler. You can't see it, but I could just press it and fill up my water with nice cold water.
Always have an expensive chair and proper desk in my opinion. I spent a lot of money on my chair. My desk less so, but it's very, very sturdy, very, very big, very, very deep and wide.
It's awesome. I recommend, of course, the laptop with the one large monitor. You can make that monitor 27 to 32 inches.
If you travel a lot, I think 32 inches is too big. That's why I have 27. I don't recommend having two monitors ever.
I said that in the main course, but people try to justify this. That makes it more productive. You just split your focus and you end up getting nothing done.
You can have a split screen, two tabs in the same monitor, and it's the exact same thing. Your monitor should be at your eye level so that you don't strain or get a hunch. You know, like you're spending thousands of hours.
Let's get it properly. Get a monitor arm or a stand or anything. You should be able to look straight ahead, which I can.
My camera is right on my monitor on top, sits on top. High quality keyboard and mouse, like this is one of those things that you didn't know you needed, but when you have a high quality keyboard and a mouse that feels good to use, it actually probably gives you those five, 10 % improvements in productivity, especially if you have one of those very satisfying keyboards, like the mechanical ones that just like sound like you're doing a lot of work.
Again, if you use these tools four to eight hours per day, don't cheap out. These ones are very good, very important, a very powerful computer and very fast internet. Like, you should buy the most powerful and fastest computer that you could reasonably obtain.
Even if it takes, like, especially if you have a lot of these co -working agents in the background, they use a lot of memory. And anything that's even like a, you know, if you have 100 delays of, you know, 30 seconds a day or even a week, this stuff really adds up. And, you know, files should process quickly, applications should open immediately.
Video should render quickly. You should be able to do every single tool that you possibly have without the computer slowing down. Remember, you are going to be on this for thousands of hours per year.
Same with the internet, like waiting for pages to load, files to load, videos to process. Get the absolute fastest internet that you could possibly think or achieve. Like internet that's five times faster from the same company is usually like, you know, 20 % more anyway.
It's not like it's going to be that much. And then sound isolation, like remove as much outside noise as possible. If you can, soundproof the room.
You know, it doesn't exactly matter how you do this. You could also use earplugs or noise -canceling headphones or have some white or brown noise playing. However you have to make it, but very, very important.
And then finally, I've talked about this a few times, but we need to measure useful output. And that always means like measuring two things. And I gave this example before, I believe, but an example of, you know, we need to have a metric that is the total deep work hours, and then we have that one which is the distraction counter, so it shows you how focused, but we still need something that is useful output, right?
It's like the deep work hours, how much time you invested, but we need something to show us what we actually produced. And a simple... Not necessarily to show you this, but a simple two metric thing.
Take a YouTube channel. If you measure the success of your video by views, you might think that every video with more views is automatically better for making money. But views only tell you like how many times people watch the video.
They don't tell you how much revenue those views produce. If you have on YouTube or you ever done advertising, there's something called a CPM. and an RPM.
So a CPM is cost per meal, so cost per 1 ,000 impressions. Meal is Latin for 1 ,000, I believe. If it's not, you can laugh at me.
And then RPM is revenue per meal. So YouTube would charge a CPM, cost per 1 ,000 impressions, to an advertiser. Let's say it's $50, and then you basically share that with YouTube, and you get $25, for example.
That is very... common for a very high level business channel. But if you have like Mr.
Beast, for example, who's most, he's getting mass market, you know, kid viewers too. He probably gets paid like $5 RPM versus, you know, $25. So when you're baking a business YouTube video and you're trying to target business owners, like you judge not only the views, but the RPM, because that tells you in theory that a higher RPM means higher level people are watching it, right?
Because the algorithm knows who has the most money, who has the most purchasing power, and they charge you a premium for targeting that. So it's very, very important. So basically, if you want to apply this to deep work hours and you're just like creating a course, you wouldn't just track total deep hours.
You do words completed or videos completed or ads created or something like that, right? So you really need to add it to... your system, usually you're gonna add that on the sticky note in the work form if you're going to do that.
And you have to have these two different metrics that really help you determine the useful output as well. Now let's get into increased effectiveness. So this is basically like prioritization and working on the highest leverage stuff, the most important stuff.
And we're gonna do three things here. We're gonna talk about the rule of three. And as a business owner or executive, one of your main constraints is you only have so much time.
So no matter how focused or disciplined you become, there's always going to be things that you have to do that will not qualify as your deep work hours, like the messages, the meetings, the approvals, all of that kind of stuff. And one of the best ways to get more of your time back is with Brian Tracy's rule of three. Brian Tracy's an author.
So the rule of three basically says, sometimes it's called the law of three, states that Whether you do 20 tasks or 30 tasks or 100 or a million tasks during a typical week, just three activities will account for approximately 90 % of the value that you produce. And those are your big three tasks.
If you identify those three activities and basically compare those to every other thing you did and make SOPs, make trainings, and then delegate it and continuously do this, you're going to have more and more and more time. on those three tasks that produce the biggest, best result. So for me, that's system building, that's paid ads, and that's YouTube videos, in my business at least.
So once you have that, you know, you get your list and then you circle them and then basically you remove them and try to get everything else. And, right, so like, it's only logical if you have three things that produce 90 % of the results, meaning you should have... 90 % of your time should spend on those three things.
You're never going to get 100 % of your time, but keep doing this week after week after week. What you really want to do is either on Saturday or Sunday, dedicate your four deep work hours to just removing the non -rule of three tasks from your future. Use three, four hours to create SOPs, trainings, checklists, templates, systems, processes.
And then some of your time on Monday or Tuesday can be go to... train someone to do this on your team and then you can delegate it and now you have fewer obligations. When you do this month after month, year after year, you know, decade after decade, this stuff really, really compounds and you're going to spend 90 % of your time on the stuff that produces an insane amount of results.
So this is kind of an example about how you could work four hours or eight hours, but because you prioritize so well, those eight hours are really like 24 hours of work if you weren't prioritizing so well. And it's just one of the most important things that you can possibly do.
The next thing is about increasing leverage, and this is highly relevant. This is basically based on a blog post by an investor named Naval Ravikant, where he defines leverage in business as a force multiplier. And he basically says that Leverage is the difference between what you put in and what you get out.
So if you put in one hour of work and received approximately one hour of output, that's not much leverage. But if you really worked on the right things and built a lot of leverage in that one hour, influenced hundreds or thousands or millions of hours of future output, like that is a lot of leverage, right? So it's really, you could complete four perfect hours a day, but if you're not choosing the right tasks, like that leverage stops the moment that you're done your hours, right?
Versus, you know, you choose stuff and I'll go over some examples in a minute, but two people can work for the exact same amount of time to be equally focused, but the long -term results can be different based on, you know, who's doing high leverage work and who's not. And Naval divides leverage into four categories. He labor leverage, which means people working for you.
So instead of complete, like personally completing every activity, you hire people. And one hour spent creating processes, train an employee, or making an important decision can influence hundreds of future hours, right? So that is a form of leverage.
If you spend this making a checklist or a process that 100 employees over the next 10 years will use to create thousands of, you know, tasks or projects work, that's huge leverage. Capital leverage, if you basically, you know, you put $1 into an ad campaign. and $5 comes out, you spend all this time creating new ads that perform better and better.
That's a form of capital leverage versus not. Code leverage is you're telling a computer what to do, software, AI, all that kind of stuff. So you create the AI project or the software or the code once, and then it can potentially perform the same action thousands or millions of times without you repeating the original work.
That is a form of leverage. 10 tasks I had to do each day. I spent two hours automating those 10 tasks that was just as good, if not better and more consistent than I did them.
I freed up all that time, right? And then media leverage, which is a good example of what we're talking about now, where I recorded this course. I made this course and recorded the video once.
And who knows how many people are going to see it, right? I didn't need to fly to your house every single, you know, if 10 ,000 people end up seeing it, for example. I didn't need to fly around the world and explain this whole hours -long course to every single one of them.
I recorded it once and unlimited amount of people, in theory, could see it, right? So that is leverage in this sense. The next thing you can do to increase the effectiveness is expand this entire system to key employees, usually your executive team.
But this is the force multiplier that's better than pretty much every other force multiplier. If you can get your team members to do this, you have five, ten people doing this. Just imagine how successful it's been for you.
Now when you do it across your entire organization, it's fairly insane about how good it is.
So that leads us to the final part, which is number four, and that's greater consistency. And that's just more total days. So I guess in the course of a year, there is a measurable, like you doing this 365 days a year, even on Christmas, that would be 100 % consistency.
You doing this for one day a year would be like the least consistency, because if you did it for zero, like that doesn't count.
Consistency is that character trait that we've been talking to, but it's not, you know, true or false. It's a spectrum. How consistent are you?
Doing it for 330 days per year is better than 260. That's better than 90, which is better than 10. Right.
But we want to get it to as much as possible, even when we're traveling, sick, dealing with holidays, difficult circumstances, recovering from failure, etc. And there's four things that we're going to talk about. The first is public displays of accountability.
It's we already have kind of like this, but it's still private because it's with our accountability group. But we can raise a stake substantially if we make it public. And instead of just reporting to your small group of people, you begin posting it where someone or some people can see it.
And, you know, social media communities, you're sharing your work form submissions or wake up times or, you know, you're publicly documenting your hundred hour sprints or your. sharing your total work for the day. And people love following this kind of thing.
They want to see whether you can remain consistent, how much work you can complete, and that kind of stuff. And this can also be the source of attention in addition to accountability. And whether you can turn that attention to a business benefit, who knows?
But the primary purpose is to create consequences. If you publicly announce you're going to do 100 hours of work across the next two weeks, people are going to expect to see that, right? If you report four complete hours per day for several months, missing a day becomes substantially more uncomfortable.
But this really requires real stakes. If you don't have any social media followers or you don't have anyone that you would care if they judged you, basically, it doesn't really work, right? So the audience could be your employees, your customers, other business owners, community, group of people, social media if you want.
And the consequences, like there has to be a consequence and it shouldn't be just financial. Like, you know, you could, I don't know. The embarrassment basically should be shameful enough, but there has to be real stakes or it's not really going to do anything, right?
But again, like I put this in here because I could see someone like spending more time posting on social media than actually doing the work. Don't let, you know, it become the work, right? So prove that you could do this system in private first.
Do the basic beginner version of this. Do the four hours per day for six months. And then if you want to do this and you want to take on the challenge, do it like this.
Public displays of accountability can be very powerful for the right person. The next one is a concept from a book by the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Hopefully I said that right.
But it's about being anti -fragile. So antifragile means that a system or object does not merely withstand shock, stress, and chaos. It improves and becomes stronger because of them.
And a robust system withstands pressure and remains the same. So what we want to do here is we want to become antifragile and make our system antifragile so that we don't need the perfect deep work room. We don't need all the equipment.
We don't need these four hours blocked off. We don't need everything to go to plan. If we're traveling, if we're sick, If there's an emergency, if there's Christmas holidays, no matter what happens outside, everything on the inside is going to plan.
And we're consistent 365 days per year, even and especially when it's not perfect. Even if there's drama, changes to the schedule, losing access to your normal environment. This is one of the most important concepts.
It's in the advanced course, but if you're going to achieve the basic course, you really need to do this. We need to be able to do these four, five, six, seven, eight hours of deep work regardless of what's going on outside of us. You should also kind of take pride into it that every disruption improves the system, right?
This goes back to your self -image. You're in a hotel room. I don't have my things.
Okay, better be putting – I brought my sticky notes with me. I brought my vision board with me. I brought my stuff with me.
Let's recreate my workspace in this hotel room. That impacts your self -image, right? And then the next thing is the self -improvement loop, right?
It's a continuous four, like I got this concept from AI agents because I've been messing with those a lot. And those have been like in the news and stuff recently. But the four systems of making a good AI agent, execution, so you do it, evaluation, you see, persistence, and then refinement, right?
You're not an AI agent, but you should review your system kind of like that. You execute the system, you do those four hours per day. And then you evaluate where that went wrong.
We do that every hour in the basic system, but this is to an even higher level. You write it down and then you basically make sure that you store that lesson somewhere and you have a checklist of these are the things that I want to make true in my life. And over a week, a month, six months, it becomes, you know, five, 10, 20 things.
And then you keep refining those things over and over and over and you apply the loop to yourself and to this system. And then the final thing is lifestyle design. And this is where everything in the advanced modules eventually lead.
Basically designing your life around the advanced modules, right? Like, how would you describe this? Like you already have a schedule.
You already have obligations, habits, relationships in a particular environment. And the beginner part of the course is to fit that into this. But if you're really going to go for the advanced modules, that kind of needs to reverse.
Instead of forcing the system into your life, you have to change your life to make room for the system. You do everything you can to improve your sleep. You do everything you can to get a great executive assistant.
You move closer to your office or gym. You establish better boundaries. You improve your environment.
You get food delivered instead of spending an hour getting it and cooking it yourself. You remove obligations that waste your time. change your life on their own, but they compound.
You remove 10 minutes of friction here, 30 minutes there, an hour there. You protect 10 % more energy. You get distracted 5 % less.
And you can be, you know, 10x, 20x, 30x better. And then you basically set up your life so that, you know, about 7am to 7pm, working eight hours is the default. Like, this is what you're expecting to be doing.
This is what you want to be doing. And basically nothing under normal circumstances can get in that hours or in that time.
This is not exactly fun, and that's why it's in the advanced modules. You can't expect the average person to do this, but if you really want to be that man with the ax type person, literally everything in your life is around this system. You live close to everything, your office, your gym, your food, the restaurants, Starbucks, whatever you want, and you just basically put everything around there.
You also have very strong boundaries around communication. You buy back your time like you went, your relationships we already covered, and then even the recovery is designed too. So keep redesigning your lifestyle over and over.
Improve your biggest constraint, next constraint, next constraint, next constraint, and then you can be five times, ten times, a hundred times better at this. So that's the conclusion. Extremely long course, but...
It eventually becomes a simple way of living. Complete your morning routine. Do your four hours.
You start your timer. You record your distractions. Do the work form and the sticky note.
Use auto -suggestion to read your document and repeat it over and over. Four hours is a successful day. You try to do this as close to 365 times per year, as close as possible, and you do that for the rest of your life.
So I hope this was worth all the time you spent watching it, and I'll see you next time.
The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

Six hours on how to focus is either a joke or a proof, and the opening line insists it is the second: every second of it was made using the system it teaches, across 130 tracked hours. What follows is not advice. It is a parts list.

Frameworks

Named ideas worth stealing.

55:25concept

The success criteria

  1. Four hours of deep work per day, every day
  2. Completed as fast as possible, ideally inside a five to six hour window from waking

Deep work means uninterrupted work producing a specific deliverable tied to a top goal. Reactive email, messages and meetings do not count and belong after the block. Speed matters because four hours spread over ten hours eats the rest of your life; four hours condensed protects it.

Steal forany personal output standard that needs a hard, non-negotiable definition of a successful day
49:06list

The three design goals of the system

  1. Produce an orders-of-magnitude improvement, not 20 or 50 percent
  2. Be accessible and sustainable for a person with ordinary resources, forever
  3. Be naturally self-perpetuating and self-improving

The three constraints that shaped every later component. The third one is called out as the best accidental decision: outputs of the work feed back and make the next round of work easier.

Steal forspec'ing any personal or business system before building it
1:06:02list

The six ideas the system runs on

  1. Grant Cardone's 10X rule for goal size and action volume
  2. Maxwell Maltz on self-image
  3. Napoleon Hill on autosuggestion
  4. Alex Hormozi on beliefs, character traits and skills
  5. Steve Jobs on signal versus noise
  6. James Clear's habit protocol

Each idea maps to one failure mode: goals too small, identity mismatch, no repetition, an undiagnosed weakest category, working on the wrong things, and behaviour that never becomes automatic.

Steal fordiagnosing which layer is actually broken before adding another tactic
1:43:00model

Beliefs, character traits and skills

  1. Beliefs
  2. Character traits
  3. Skills

Performance reduces to a unique combination of the three, and you are limited by the weakest. Skills are easiest to spot, so beliefs and traits get explained away as needing another course or strategy. Each level of business demands a different combination.

Steal foran honest self-audit that separates a missing skill from a missing trait
3:24:38concept

The 1.0 and 2.0 inventory

  1. Left column: version 1.0, five to ten honest beliefs, traits and skills you have now
  2. Right column: version 2.0, the beliefs, traits and skills needed to hit your top five goals

A single sheet split in two. The starting point matters as much as the destination. Only the next version gets defined, not the final one, and a new version is drafted roughly every six months.

Steal forturning a vague self-improvement intent into a concrete gap list
3:28:09list

James Clear's four laws applied to the system

  1. Make it obvious: calendar block, timer, printed wall, vision board, sticky notes, group notifications
  2. Make it attractive: goals, motivation list, 2.0 sheet, leaderboard competition
  3. Make it easy: pre-planned hours, blocked distractions, prepared workspace
  4. Make it satisfying: sticky note, work form submission, group notification, reward

Every component is deliberately assigned to one of the four laws, and the inverse is applied to distraction: make it hard, not easy. The redundancy is the point, so no single reminder carries the loop.

Steal forauditing whether a routine you designed actually closes a habit loop or just states an intention
2:13:55list

The 22-step setup

  1. Environment design (room, desk, one monitor, the wall)
  2. Information diet
  3. Time blocking the first five hours
  4. Timer
  5. Distraction counter
  6. Tab limiter
  7. Desktop app blocker
  8. Phone app blocker
  9. 10X rule document
  10. Top five goals document
  11. Vision board
  12. Motivation list
  13. The 2.0 version of yourself
  14. Thought habits
  15. Sticky note wall
  16. Calendar chain
  17. Work form
  18. Spreadsheet
  19. Accountability group
  20. Leaderboard
  21. Worry list
  22. War map

One to three hours of one-time work producing a single physical and digital environment. Framed with a car analogy: thousands of parts to assemble, trivial to drive afterwards.

Steal forany workspace rebuild where the setup, not the discipline, is the actual missing piece
4:34:03list

The hourly loop

  1. Set the distraction counter to zero and start the 60-minute timer
  2. Work the single planned deliverable, clicking the counter on every distraction
  3. Write the sticky note: date, hour number, what you did, distraction count, finish time
  4. Place it on the wall
  5. Reread the 10X rule, top five goals, motivation list, 2.0 sheet and thought habits
  6. Submit the work form, which notifies the accountability group
  7. Take the timed break

The repeating unit of the whole system. Every step is either awareness or repetition, and the closing form doubles as a checklist that the repetition actually happened.

Steal forconverting a vague working session into a bounded, logged, repeatable unit
2:43:20concept

The 60/10 method

Sixty minutes on, ten minutes off, taken from Robin Sharma's The 5 AM Club. Twenty-five-minute Pomodoro cycles are rejected as too short to reach depth. Early on the rule is only that you may not stand up before the timer, not that you must work.

Steal fortraining focus like a gym progression rather than expecting it on day one
2:48:20concept

Two metrics for every measurement

  1. Timer: how much time (quantity)
  2. Distraction counter: how focused (quality)
  3. Later, in advanced: useful output produced

A single metric always flatters. The YouTube analogy used is views versus RPM. Applied to work, hours alone say nothing about focus, and focus says nothing about what was produced.

Steal forany dashboard where one number is quietly hiding the failure
3:00:00list

Four blocking layers on the phone

  1. Brick physical NFC device
  2. Opal app
  3. Apple Screen Time with the passcode held by someone else
  4. Phone physically outside the work room, off and out of the bedroom overnight

No layer is unbeatable and none is meant to be. Stacked, the cost of getting around them rises to about ten minutes, at which point the craving stops rather than the access.

Steal forany friction design where the goal is deterrence, not prevention
4:50:00list

The between-hours routine

  1. Start a break timer immediately
  2. Keep energy up: water, stretch, walk, tidy, motivational audio
  3. Take a small conscious reward
  4. Run the self-improvement loop: name the hour's biggest constraint in writing
  5. Get back as fast as possible

Roughly two minutes of routine inside a ten to fifteen minute break, done at a dedicated spot beside the desk. Named as the single biggest point of failure the system cannot solve for you.

Steal forprotecting the transitions, which is usually where a good schedule actually collapses
5:01:32list

The four advanced levers

  1. More volume: more hours per day
  2. Higher quality: more output per hour
  3. Increased effectiveness: higher-leverage tasks
  4. Greater consistency: more days per year

Four multiplicative axes layered on top of the base system, not replacing it. Four hours stays the definition of a successful day even at eight, so the minimum standard never inflates.

Steal fordeciding which dimension to push when the obvious answer 'work more' has run out
5:36:40concept

Brian Tracy's rule of three

  1. Identify the three activities producing ~90% of your weekly value
  2. Spend a weekend deep work block writing SOPs for everything else
  3. Train and delegate on Monday or Tuesday
  4. Repeat until ~90% of your time sits on those three

Whether you do twenty tasks a week or a thousand, three produce most of the value. The systematising of everything else is itself assigned to deep work hours, which is what makes it happen.

Steal forconverting a prioritisation insight into a recurring delegation habit
5:41:40list

Naval Ravikant's four leverage types

  1. Labour: people working for you
  2. Capital: money multiplying output
  3. Code: software and AI repeating an action
  4. Media: content produced once and consumed unlimited times

Leverage is the gap between input and output. Two people equally focused for the same hours diverge enormously depending on whether the hour influences only itself or thousands of future hours.

Steal forchoosing between two tasks that would take the same amount of time
CTA Breakdown

How they asked for the click.

VERBAL ASK
09:00link
“So if you go to matthewblarson.com slash productivity, you'll be able to download it there. That link will be in the description and the pinned comment.”

Placed at 9 minutes as the fourth of four housekeeping asks (bookmark it, block 60 minutes a day in your calendar to watch it, send it to one ambitious person, download the document). The share ask is justified on the viewer's behalf rather than the channel's: doing the system alongside someone else is genuinely part of the accountability layer taught later. No sponsor read, no product pitch, and the only owned software mentioned (HyperOptimal) appears once mid-course as an alternative to Zapier.

MENTIONED ON CAMERA
09:00linkmatthewblarsen.com/productivity (the written course document) ↗
09:00channelyoutube.com/@morematthewlarsen (second channel) ↗
Storyboard

Visual structure at a glance.

cold open
hookcold open00:00
download the doc
ctadownload the doc09:00
man with the axe
valueman with the axe19:43
the IQ meme
valuethe IQ meme46:01
why theory first
valuewhy theory first1:12:19
beliefs and traits
valuebeliefs and traits1:43:00
what we are building
valuewhat we are building2:18:04
four hours baseline
valuefour hours baseline2:44:22
top five goals
valuetop five goals3:10:39
the complete process
valuethe complete process3:45:43
treadmill
valuetreadmill4:16:24
axe reminder
valueaxe reminder4:47:05
magnum opus
valuemagnum opus5:17:46
increasing leverage
valueincreasing leverage5:39:41
Frame Gallery

Visual moments.

cold open00:00Frame at 06:34 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus06:34download the doc08:59Frame at 15:20 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus15:20man with the axe19:43Frame at 24:06 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus24:06
cold open00:00Frame at 06:34 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus06:34download the doc08:59Frame at 15:20 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus15:20man with the axe19:43Frame at 24:06 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus24:06Frame at 28:29 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus28:29Frame at 32:52 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus32:52Frame at 37:15 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus37:15Frame at 41:38 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus41:38the IQ meme46:01Frame at 50:24 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus50:24Frame at 54:47 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus54:47Frame at 59:10 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus59:10Frame at 63:33 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus63:33Frame at 67:56 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus67:56why theory first72:19Frame at 76:42 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus76:42Frame at 81:05 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus81:05Frame at 85:28 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus85:28Frame at 89:51 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus89:51Frame at 94:14 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus94:14Frame at 98:37 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus98:37beliefs and traits103:00Frame at 107:23 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus107:23Frame at 111:46 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus111:46Frame at 116:09 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus116:09Frame at 120:32 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus120:32Frame at 124:55 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus124:55Frame at 129:18 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus129:18Frame at 133:41 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus133:41what we are building138:04Frame at 142:27 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus142:27Frame at 146:50 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus146:50Frame at 151:13 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus151:13Frame at 155:36 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus155:36Frame at 159:59 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus159:59four hours baseline164:22Frame at 168:45 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus168:45Frame at 174:01 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus174:01Frame at 177:30 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus177:30Frame at 181:53 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus181:53Frame at 186:16 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus186:16top five goals190:39Frame at 195:02 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus195:02Frame at 199:25 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus199:25Frame at 203:48 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus203:48Frame at 208:11 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus208:11Frame at 212:34 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus212:34Frame at 216:57 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus216:57Frame at 221:20 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus221:20the complete process225:43Frame at 230:06 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus230:06Frame at 234:29 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus234:29Frame at 238:52 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus238:52Frame at 243:15 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus243:15Frame at 247:38 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus247:38Frame at 252:01 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus252:01treadmill256:24Frame at 262:12 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus262:12Frame at 265:10 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus265:10Frame at 269:33 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus269:33Frame at 273:56 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus273:56Frame at 278:19 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus278:19Frame at 282:42 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus282:42axe reminder287:05Frame at 291:28 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus291:28Frame at 294:47 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus294:47Frame at 300:14 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus300:14Frame at 304:37 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus304:37Frame at 309:00 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus309:00Frame at 315:13 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus315:13magnum opus317:46Frame at 322:09 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus322:09Frame at 326:32 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus326:32Frame at 330:55 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus330:55Frame at 335:18 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus335:18increasing leverage339:41Frame at 344:04 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus344:04Frame at 350:38 from The Exact System To Develop Top 0.1% Focus350:38
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