Hack the System

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg presents the idea of Keystone Habits: habits that, once implemented, naturally improve the quality of life in a variety of other habits. The most common one is exercise: one someone builds the habit of daily exercise into life, they naturally begin to sleep better, eat better, create a better routine, etc. Once a keystone habit is in place, the rest of the pieces seem to fall into place around it. In attempting a year of drastic self-improvement, it's often best to focus on "big wins." If you can start building the proper keystone habits, you'll save yourself a lot of work in small individual habits down the line.   Building Daily Routines So I want to talk about the mother of keystone habits --- building a daily routine. In particular, building a morning routine. Here, you can see my old morning ritual (from about a year ago): Redefining the Morning Ritual The moments you wake up are the moments you can actually control. Once you get going, make it to your work or school, you suddenly are playing in someone else's ballpark. So, I focus on building the morning ritual as the most important facet of my routine. You might have seen in my last post: Jumpstarting the Habit Change Process. In it, I made a list of 7 habits I want to develop. I'll paste that list below for reference. 1) Daily Meditation 2) Writing 750 Word Every Day 3) Daily Floss 4) Before sleeping, write 3-5 MiTs (Most Important Tasks) down. In the morning, start working on them BEFORE checking email. 5) Turn off computer every night by 11pm. 6) Keep a gratitude journal and write 3-5 things I’m grateful for every night before sleeping. 7) Add a ritual to my morning routine: Visualize my day ahead of time and how I’ll approach it, then watch inspirational videos. These are all daily items --- the types of habits I want to achieve every day. But, some take longer than others. So, I sat down and wrote my ideal routine, for the whole day. And then I tried to see which habits fit the easiest into my daily plan.   But, the act of codifying a perfect morning routine made it seem much more believable, likely. So, I tried throwing in flossing and the gratitude journal --- so far, it's stuck for four days, and we'll see how long that lasts. So, here's the fact: creating a morning routine, writing it down, and making it visible so that you're reminded of it daily is a very valuable action to take. In the comments below, list out your current daily routine, and your dream routine. By writing it out, you'll have a clearer understanding of what you need to do tomorrow. So, try it out --- build a morning routine, commit to it using the Bet Switch Mechanism for 5 days, and see how productive you become.

Over the last few months, you might have noticed a lot of articles and emails about productivity from Hack the System. Earlier this year, I had a moment of revelation while traveling --- a very private moment that I only detailed to my newsletter re...

I mentioned that, for the past few months, I've begun attempting to: 1. add a new habit 2. solidify the previous month's habit. I've realized that trying to add more than one habit a month is a recipe for disaster --- the best we can do is to add one, and solidify another. This month --- Write an article (~750+ words / day) For the month of September, I'm working on adding the habit of "Writing 750 words a day" and solidifying August's habit of "hitting the gym five days a week". I'll likely be publishing the majority of these posts, and emailing out a lot of them. So, expect a lot more content from me. So, I thought I would tell you the process I'm going through to make my new habit a reality. The process for building a new habit I've researched habit change and behavioral technology for years, and in doing so, I've refined my ideas for building a new habit. Let me show you my process --- hopefully you can take something away from it. 1) Have a baseline foundation for locations I'll be. While traveling, I never know what I'll be doing each night or even where I'll be sleeping in a few days --- clearly a recipe for habit failure. Now that I'm living in Boston and trying to solidify my daily routine, creating the basic "home" and "work" locations are paramount. I've rented an apartment in Beacon Hill, about a 15 minute walk from my office. My office is also a five minute walk away from my gym. So, now I can add a location element to my habits. Last month, I tended to arrive to work around 9:30am or 10:00am, and headed to the gym at 1:00pm. This month, I'm aiming to add my “Writing 750 words a day” to my morning routine, meaning that I'll finish writing the words before I arrive at the office. In my dream routine which I jotted below, you'll see that my goal is to finish up writing and head immediately to the gym on my way to the office. 2) Identify the components of the habits I'm trying to build The book The Power of Habit was extremely powerful for my understanding of the habit creation and replacement process. In the book, Charles Duhigg breaks a habit into a three-stage process. You can see that a habit is made up of a 1) CUE, 2) ROUTINE, and 3) REWARD. The process for adding a new Habit is different than replacing or subtracting a new habit. For my purpose, I'm trying to add a new habit, so I need to work through the 'habit creation' process. I reviewed my mentor and past-professor BJ Fogg's Behavior Wizard to identify his system to creating a new habit. BJ's Behavior Grid says the following about 'Building a New Habit from now on': If you want someone to do a new behavior for the long term, you are seeking a Green Path Behavior. Examples include: Health: Consume flax seed oil each morning, from now on. Environment: Always use fluorescent light bulbs. Commerce: Buy a new brand of toothpaste from now on. To achieve a Green Path Behavior, three elements must come together at once. As the Fogg Behavior Model describes, you must Trigger the behavior when the person is both Motivated and Able to perform it. This combination must happen over and over, as the habit gets created and then strengthened. Couple the trigger with an existing habit Increase the perceived ability (self-efficacy) by making the behavior easier to do Reduce demotivation by making the behavior more familiar The challenge is in influencing the target audience to perform the behavior and then getting them to repeat it, from today onward. Green Path relates to forming new habits. So, what does this mean to me? I must couple the trigger with an existing habit, make the habit easier to do, and reduce demotivation by making the habit more familiar. 1. Couple the trigger with an existing habit. Today, on Day 2, I woke up early and intended to start working on writing as the first thing after showering and brushing. I found myself a little distracted,

Welcome to the newest episode of the Hack The System show! You should subscribe to this show on iTunes. The Hack The System Podcast is your access to interviews with the world's foremost experts on blogging, lifestyle design, traveling, and life/...

Welcome to the latest episode of the Hack The System show! You should subscribe to this show on iTunes. In case you haven't heard, the Hack The System Podcast is your access to interviews with the world's foremost experts on blogging, lifestyle design, traveling, and life/system hacking. In short--you're going to learn how to kick ass. In this episode, I feature Ryan Holiday, author of the bestselling book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, a book about how to exploit the media, and hack marketing and media. He's currently the Director of Marketing for American Apparel, a media strategist for clients like Tucker Max and Dov Charney, Ryan and I have a funny past: we went to middle school together in California. For some reason, I remember us as not-friends--enemies almost. I reconnected with Ryan after college, and found both of us followed similar paths: we both left college without completing it, and then ended up doing work in similar industries. Ryan worked for incredible authors like Robert Greene, who wrote The 48 Laws of Power and The Art of Seduction (both which had a significant impact on my life). When I began working with Tim Ferriss on The 4-Hour Chef, I found out that Tim had also hired Ryan to help on the book as well. We worked together on the project. Check out the interview: learn how to manipulate the media, and engineer ways to get your video to become viral. Watch it here: Transcript of the Podcast Episode Don't forget to subscribe to this show on iTunes. Maneesh: [00:00:00] Hey, guys. Maneesh Sethi from Hack the System. I’m here today, I’m with Ryan Holiday from Ryan Holiday.com and “Trust Me, I’m Lying: The Confessions of a Media Manipulator,” your new book. What’s up, Ryan? Ryan: [00:00:13] Thanks, man. Maneesh: [00:00:13] It’s good to see you. It’s good to see you again, yeah. It’s been a while. So Ryan and I actually … a funny story. We went to middle school together. Ryan: [00:00:19] Yeah. Maneesh: [00:00:19] I remember sitting next to you in Ms. Thatcher’s class. And then … Did we go to high school? Ryan: [00:00:23] No. I moved and then you went to Bella Vista, right? Maneesh: [00:00:27] Yeah. Ryan: [00:00:27] And I went to Grand Bay. Maneesh: [00:00:28] Got it. Yeah, I remember like seeing Ryan’s name pop up and I remember talking about how there’s very few people from our high school ever did anything interesting. Ryan: [00:00:35] I think there are very few people from our generation that are doing anything. I feel like they’re still in school or they’re living at home with their parents sort of trying to fig – like the economy and sort of the toughness of the job market so overwhelmed everyone that they’re just like still reeling from it. Maneesh: [00:00:53] It’s definitely true, and one of the biggest themes that we’ll be talking about today is about pursuing excellence or becoming … like doing something in our time [inaudible 00:01:00]. But before we get to that, introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your book. I think it’s interesting. Ryan: [00:01:06] Yeah, so in my day job I’m the director of marketing for American Apparel, the fashion retailer. Then I work with a bunch of different bestselling authors, public figures, strategists, and I advise them on Internet marketing, marketing and just sort of general all around strategy. So the book is sort of an expose of what I feel like is the dark side of that business, the forces that control what we see and hear online. The first half of the book is sort of the how-to for how to do all this stuff for people who’d want to do it. And then the second half of the book is for people who want to sort of enlarge their perspective about this. It’s sort of the consequences and the risks that playing with these dark arts entail. Maneesh: [00:01:49] Yeah. The first half … what was really interesting for me, I was like taking notes on my … how can I [inaudible 00:01:53]? Ryan: [00:01:53] Right.

Welcome to the newest episode of the Hack The System show! You should subscribe to this show on iTunes. The Hack The System Podcast is your access to interviews with the world's foremost experts on blogging, lifestyle design, traveling, and life/system hacking. In short--you're going to learn how to kick ass. In this episode, I sit down with Steve Kamb of Nerd Fitness. Steve has built a community of hundreds of thousands of readers through his web site, which shows regular nerds (like you!) how to "Level Up" and get fit. Listen to the audio podcast here: Below, I'm pasting some highlights of the interview, and the transcription. The full video interview is below. Highlight 1: Who is Steve Kamb? What is Nerd Fitness? Highlight 2: Steve's Fitness Philosophy and Exercise Routine Highlight 3: How Steve Kamb Built A High Traffic Blog Watch the full interview here: This podcast can be heard on iTunes. Click here to follow it via iTunes (and automatically sync it to your iPod) Transcript of the Podcast Episode Don't forget to subscribe to this show on iTunes. 00:00 Maneesh Sethi: Hey guys, this is Maneesh Sethi and right now I'm in Portland, Oregon. I'm going to be sitting down with Steve Kamb from NerdFitness.com. Great site, great guy, come with me, let's check it out. I'm really, really excited to talk to you Steve. You're one of my inspirations online, one of the bloggers that really do some cool stuff. 00:19 Steve Kamb: Really? 00:20 Maneesh Sethi: Yeah! 00:20 Steve Kamb: Aw, thanks, man. 00:21 Maneesh Sethi: No matter how much shit I give you, I kind of like your stuff. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit about your blogging, and your website, and your vision. Why don't you introduce yourself to the Hack the System audience? 00:35 Steve Kamb: Absolutely. So, I've been running a website called NerdFitness.com for three and a half years now and really it started, I want to say, about five years ago. I had this idea, pretty simple. Hey, I'm a nerd, I like fitness. Maybe there's something we can do to stick them together. And I googled and nothing popped up so I bought the domain to nerdfitness.com and came up with the tagline 'Level up your life', and decided that I just wanted to just kind of start helping nerds get healthy. I thought it was a group of people that could use some direction and guidance and have a little bit of fun along the way so I write about things like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and push ups and the Paleo diet. People are like, 'How does that connect?' I'm like, don't worry about it, trust me, it makes sense. Check out the site and I guarantee you'll be like, 'Oh! I get it, that's kind of cool.' So, yeah, I've been running it for about three and a half years now. 01:27 Maneesh Sethi: So how did it progress? I guess you started off just - were you already in shape when you started the site? 01:32 Steve Kamb: Honestly, my journey with fitness probably started over a decade ago. I got cut from my high school basketball team, which is not really surprising. I couldn't dribble with my left hand, I was like 5'10", 100 pounds. I had no business being on a basketball court. But I decided, damn it, I'm going to come back next year and I'm going to be really strong and big and make the team. So I signed up for a gym membership and almost killed myself by dropping - I went to the nearest bench press and loaded up 45 pound plates on either side and my arms are shaking before I could even take it off - Boom, right on my chest! I had to rotate and the weights spun off and aw, dude, like the most humiliating moment of my life. But I very quickly rised then and there like, 'Okay, I didn't die and this is kind of cool. I like this concept of getting a little bit stronger.' And for me, as a gamer growing up, it just made so much sense. Okay, cool, you can pick up ten pounds this week, next week you can pick up fifteen. When we get that,

Welcome to the newest episode of the Hack The System show! You should subscribe to this show on iTunes. The Hack The System Podcast is your access to interviews with the world's foremost experts on blogging, lifestyle design, traveling, and life/...

Welcome to the newest episode of the Hack The System show! You should subscribe to this show on iTunes. The Hack The System Podcast is your access to interviews with the world's foremost experts on blogging, lifestyle design, traveling, and life/system hacking. In short--you're going to learn how to kick ass. In this episode, I sit down with Sean of Location180. I met Sean in Portland a few months ago, and it struck me instantly how similar we are. Sean had decided to quit his job, try traveling the world instead, and see what happened. Along the way, he has had major successes, living all over the world and speaking in at places like TEDxCMU. Sean's new course, Hacking the High Life, launched today. Check it out! Transcript of the Podcast Episode [tweetlock] Don't forget to subscribe to this show on iTunes.Maneesh: Hey guys, this is Maneesh Sethi, your no. 1 Digital Nomad, coming at you live again today from Portland, Oregon. I am here with Sean Ogle from Location 180 and Location Rebel. Sean and I are, this is the first time we’re meeting, but I have been following him for a few years. He is one of the main location and independent professional guys online you have seen these days, one of the four hour peaks of lifestyle. And Sean agreed to be interviewed by me to talk a little bit about his lifestyle and talk about what he is doing in his projects. So Sean, can you go ahead and introduce yourself to my readers? Sean: So, I am Sean Ogle. I run a site, location180.com. Basically 2-years ago I was unhappy with my life so I quit my job almost exactly 2-years ago. And I did not know what else I was going to do so I decided to move to Thailand and actually started doing all of the stuff that I wanted to do in life. Travel, built a business that I have no idea how it was going to happen, but things slowly fell into place and I started learning more skills and here I am now, and I have got number of online businesses, I am able to travel around the world and kind of do whatever I want at the same time. Maneesh: and what took you 2 years? Sean: You know I would say after a year, I was completely self-sustaining.Maneesh: It is amazing. It is really cool to see, like the amount of time it takes for people and the amount of time or the time of like the ways in which the people monetized or figure out the way to finance their lifestyle. And I have noticed that a lot of people have start off by doing some kind of like freelancing and such. But before we jumped into monetization on your blog strategy, let us talk a little about what was your job before you started to turn-around. Sean: So I used to be a Financial Analyst. I work for a small investment firm here in Portland that I sat at a cubicle for 60-hours a week just analyzing stocks and trying to find you know the best things to buy and sell for our clients. I realized very quickly, I was probably the only person in Portland that had to wear a suit and tie to work and that was really just not cool. And so, finally, it took me the better part of the year to actually get up the guts to do it. But it was a trip to Brazil that finally, I used all my vacation time for the year to go to carnival in Brazil. And after that, I was like, something has got to change. Maneesh: Did you go to Rio? Sean: I went to Rio. Maneesh: Nice. Sean: Dance in the carnival parade. And literally the day I got back, I found Chris Guillebeau’s Blog. So that’s what started this whole thing. So I sent him an email and he had just moved to Portland. He agreed to meet me for a cup of coffee and from there, you know, I started my blog, and the rest is history. Maneesh: So where have you been travelling since the last 2 years? Sean: So last 2-years, so I quit my job on October of 2009 and I took off for Bangkok, Thailand where I live for 7 months. Travel around Southeast Asia. I went to Bali then I went to the Philippines, came back, did a bunch of travel around the US to meet up with various,

Welcome to the fifth episode of the Hack The System show! You should subscribe to this show on iTunes. The Hack The System Podcast is your access to interviews with the world's foremost experts on blogging, lifestyle design, traveling, and life/system hacking. In short--you're going to learn how to kick ass. In this episode, I sit down with Tynan of Tynan.com. Tynan was one of the first bloggers that inspired me to become a lifestyle designer. Hell, his digital nomad packing list was the basis for what I still travel with. Tynan was Herbal in the book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. He traveled the world with just a small backpack, and lives the most interesting lifestyle that I've ever seen. And now, he just launched a new blogging platform (different than wordpress) called Sett---you can see it in action at Tynan.com. Tynan has been a huge inspiration for me, and you're going to learn a ton of info from him. Below, you'll see a list of things to listen out for--and a full transcript of the conversation. Transcript of the Podcast Episode [tweetlock] Don't forget to subscribe to this show on iTunes.Maneesh:Hey guys! This is Maneesh Sethi your number one digital nomad. I’m coming at you today from Portland, Oregon. I’m here with my good buddy Tynan, from tynan.com better than your boyfriend. And, Tynan is freaking awesome. Men, I love this guy. This guy is one of the, like, one of my inspirations for travelling. Ty, why don’t you introduce yourself a little bit?Tynan: I’m Tynan. I tend to do really extreme weird things and then try to convince other people to do them. Take the best parts of them. I program, I write, I travel pretty much constantly. Yeah, what else is there? Maneesh: And that’s all basically all you do. Tynan: That’s all I do. Maneesh: That’s all it is. Tynan, like, you guys remember my webinar that was recent, “How to take advantage of the system.” There’s nobody in the world I know who’s better at taking advantage of the system than Tynan. I’m going to tell you exactly why Tynan is here, because he is not from Portland. He is from San Francisco. And, basically, I was just going up to Portland and I told Tynan on chat I’m like, “Yo man! I’m going to head to Portland. I’ll talk to you later.” Twelve hours later I get a little IM from him, he’s like, “Yo man! Just booked a private jet, see you on Portland tomorrow.” The fuck! He’s like, “Yeah, it was a dollar.” How did that work out? Tynan: Actually free, they didn’t charge me the bag. I got an additional discount. Yeah, it was a company called Jet Sweep, private jet chartering company. You know, all these jet companies, they have to constantly move their planes around to get them in position for the next client. And, I think most companies they want to see them like, “hoity-toity”, so they don’t want to offer discounted rates when they have to move the plane but Jet Sweep does, normally for 500 bucks. And, for a week they have them for a dollar. And so, out of the past five days, I’ve won four times. Came back from Vegas on a private jet, won one from LA to San Francisco, couldn’t give it to any of my friends, no one will take it, then came out here and then I won one from Austin to Houston yesterday for my friends, who are actually on it right now. Maneesh: Amazing. So like, do you ever feel that it, like whatever, like, first of all, it’s most hilarious thing I ever saw was your PJ’s in your PJ’s in a PJ, Kanye West’s song, he’s going to take a photo of himself and all of his buddies in their pajamas on a private jet. Insane! But, tell me more about like, other stuff, other deals that you’ve done. What kind of cool things have you like, taken advantage of in this situation? Tynan: Men, I mean, I feel like almost everything I buy or do, you know, like, I definitely don’t try to get like, the cheapest of everything because I feel like that’s sort of like, a losing strategy. But I try to,

You should subscribe to this show on iTunes. J.D. Roth started his blog as a hobby in 2001. Now, his blog has almost a million monthly visitors---and continues to attract more. J.D. has become a bit of a renaissance man, going from working in a box factory, to now being recognized by Time Magazine as one of the Time's top 25 bloggers. So how did he do it? How J.D. grow his site---without even intending to? What psychological tricks did he use to build a business out of a personal web journal? I sat down with J.D. to ask the tough questions, and his insights provided a ton of information. I'm sure you're going to love this interview. J.D. has been a huge inspiration for me, and you're going to learn a ton of info from him. Below, you'll see a list of things to listen out for--and a full transcript of the conversation. Transcript of the Podcast Episode [tweetlock] Don't forget to subscribe to this show on iTunes.Maneesh: Hey everybody! Welcome back to ManeeshSethi.com. And, I’m here today with JD Roth of the blog Get Rich Slowly. Get Rich Slowly is one of my favourite personal finance blogs. Most of you know that my brother is Ramit Sethi, was also in the personal finance space. And, it’s really interesting to get to see lots of different perspectives on personal finance and on excellent blogging tactics. And I’ve been talking to JD. I’m here in Portland visiting JD and a few other people. And, yesterday we went out and we had an amazing conversation about really cool stuff. And, JD do you want to introduce yourself a little bit to the readers? JD: Sure. Well, hey, I’m JD Roth. And, as Maneesh says, I write at GetRichSlowly.org, not .com, .org. We can talk about whether you should get a .org or a .com for your blog. And, I’m a lifelong resident of the Portland area. And, yeah it’s great to have visitors from down south.Maneesh: So, JD is actually was one of TIME Magazine’s top 25 most influential bloggers last year. And, it’s amazing to see like somebody I’ve been following us since many years ago, get up to that rank. And, so anyway, I wanted to ask JD a few questions. And I know that a lot of you guys had a lot of questions about personal finance and about building a successful blog. So JD, tell me a little bit about like your blogging method. Like how many posts do you write a day? What kind of posts do you try to write? JD: Okay. Well, my method has changed over the years. First of all, I’ve been blogging for a long time. I’ve been blogging since before blog was even a word. I started keeping a web journal in 1997 to chronicle my weight lost, my attempted weight lost. And, I started a personal blog in 2001 and that eventually morphed into a personal finance blog. So, along the way I’ve had a lot of different ways of blogging. And, it used to be that I would just, I would write when I felt like writing and I would post and that was it. And so sometimes I would post 8, 9-10 times a week. Sometimes I would post once a week. When I started Get Rich Slowly, I continued that pattern. I just posted rather irregularly. But it grew really quickly and I had an audience and I felt this obligation to the audience. And I felt like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to produce content, people are reading. I’ve got to put content out there.” And so I got into this habit where for a long time I thought I had to post twice a day and then once a day on weekends. So, I had to do twelve posts a week. And, it’s a lot of pressure to do twelve posts a week.Maneesh: How long were each of this posts? JD: Well, it depended, I mean, when I was doing twelve posts a week, I gave myself permission to have shorter posts, so some of them would be maybe 200-250 words. But most of them were, like now where I’m doing about a thousand words a post. And, but what I found is, you know, I would aim for the twelve posts a week and then I would, I felt really bad like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve only put up 10 this week. I’m a failure.” And,