Do These 6 Things After 7PM If You Want to Change Your Life
None of these are cookie-cutter B.S.
I am cursed.
Through my writing online, I get to meet thousands of people. They tell me what they’re working on. They share with me their hopes and dreams. But only a small percentage of them ever make progress.
It’s frustrating as hell.
Seeing people fail because of the simplest reasons makes me think I can change their lives. Often it’s too late. Or their mindset is so far gone that not even the emergency room at the local hospital can bring them back to life with a defibrillator.
I should’ve been one of these people who wastes their life building someone else’s dream. Through sheer luck, I got to escape.
The difference? What I did after 7PM each night.
As soon as I talk about this topic, the hustle culture losers will come out of their troll craves and say “you’ll burn out, dontcha know!” NO YOU WON’T.
We burn out when we’re working on something we don’t give a f*ck about. What you do after 7PM is the opposite of that.
If you’re sick of not making progress in life and living the nightmare of groundhog day every day while also feeling lost, then do these things.
1. Secretly work on a side business that’ll make your boss fire you
I can’t believe how many people are afraid of their boss.
Like, dude, if your boss fires you then you can always get another job. There are thousands of jobs where you live that are hard to fill because the marketing campaign for the 9-5 job life is at an all time low.
People just don’t buy this nightmare anymore of “get a college degree, get a good job, then retire at 65 with a gold watch before you die of a heart attack from too much fried food that you ate to numb the pain of a job.”
It’s a clown show.
The best thing I ever did after 7PM was work on a side business. Read that again.
Success didn’t happen overnight (never does). But eventually I found another way of looking at the world that didn’t involve worshipping a boss and repeating painful company values like “it’s all about the customer.”
At the start, I thought my boss was watching what I did online. By the end, I found out most people I worked with had no idea what I’d done online for 7 years. They occasionally saw what I wrote on LinkedIn, but even then they still had no clue.
You can either live in fear or set yourself free.
My advice is build something online after 7PM. Dare to dream a little. Try and make your first $100.
The real transformation isn’t in the hashtag 1M followers or 7 figures of book sales while smoking a cigar in Bali at the side of the pool with a Macbook laptop. No.
The real benefit is the psychological shift.
Your beliefs about yourself and what you think is possible start to subtly shift. That’s what undoes the toxic 9-5 programming and helps you believe there’s more to life.
Throw in a cancer scare, and you’ll probably never waste your time stuck in a cubicle again (is it crazy to wish people get cancer? … okay, probably Timbo.) We only get 4000 weeks to live. Why would you waste them building someone else’s dream forever?
Level 1: Job
Level 2: Job + Side Business
Level 3: Business
2. Write without thinking twice about it
After 7PM is when the work notifications dry up. It’s an escape.
You can waste the time watching another repetitive season of some hero you’ll never be on Netflix … or you can write.
Writing after 7PM is when I did some of my best thinking. It helped me process my life and see where my limitations were. Because I wrote online in public, it forced me to turn my thoughts into ideas that’d be helpful to strangers.
You can write a private journal entry but the temptation is to rant. To complain. To feel anger. To feel like a victim. To ask existential questions you’ll never answer.
Writing in public is different.
You must attach meaning and value to your writing. Otherwise, no one will ever read anything you write (side note: if your writing has no engagement, it’s because you’re thinking about yourself too much).
What stops people writing after 7PM is the idea they need to be an expert, or be special, or live some grandiose life that’s full of controversy and intrigue.
The truth is if you share stories and lessons, then that’s about as fancy as you need to go to gain loyal readers.
Relatability is more important than virality.
3. Reflect on your day
People often never progress because they can’t get out of their own way. Their thinking traps them.
They are stuck in their day rather than working on their day.
Reflection is how you gain insight. An easy framework I use is, “What sucked about today, and what was awesome?”
The first time you do this exercise not much happens. After 90 days of doing it, patterns start to emerge. The answers to the life you should be living become obvious. Do more things each day that are awesome, and fewer things that suck.
Without reflection all you have is disconnected experiences that have no meaning. That’s how you live a meaningless life.
4. Read 30 minutes of a book full of naked people
Okay, I was just joking about the naked people. But if that floats your boat then knock yourself out.
The point is high performers in every field are readers. You already knew that. The problem is the average sales pitch for a reading habit is “Read 1000 books this year or you’re not reading enough.” Screw the self-help junkies and their cold showers.
A great reading habit is one you can maintain.
Anyone can do 30 minutes. It won’t break the time bank or steal your kid’s childhood away. Reading is crucial because it exposes you to new ideas and thinking.
This helps you get out of your bubble and consider outside possibilities.
It might surprise you to know the average person doesn’t read. And once they graduate from high school or college they stop learning altogether. It’s sad but true. That’s why Netflix’s watch time is at an all-time high.
If you’re not learning then what are you doing?
You’re consuming mindless entertainment to keep your brain occupied. What the brain really wants is learning, but it’ll settle for dopamine stimulation from Netflix if that’s the only junk food you give it to survive.
So if you read for 30 minutes each night you’ll become uncommon. Then valuable. Then a learning machine. Then unstoppable. Then perceived as special.
Sounds wild but it’s true.
I met a group of new parents at a kid’s birthday party on the weekend. Random people kept saying I was smart or articulate. But really, all I do is read 30 minutes after 7PM, which makes me rise above the baseline of normality and look like a genius when I’m actually a lazy mofo with no special talents.
Read.
5. Read one social media post that pisses you off
This one might seem odd.
Why read posts from people you hate? It sharpens your thinking. It makes you see the world through the opposite lens. When all you do is listen to people you agree with, you start to accumulate blind spots and live in an echo chamber.
There’s one other good reason…
Anger is untapped energy.
When I read stuff written by people I hate, I get fired up. It’s like someone lighting a match under my skinny ass. This energy starts to bleed into whatever I’m working on, and it can do the same for you.
So embrace the enemy. Get pissed off more. Question everything. Consider what it must be like being a blue voter living in a MAGA red house. Eventually, you realize the people you hate are more like you than you previously thought.
6. Start tomorrow the night before
Our days are busy.
Show me one person who ISN’T busy …. you can’t.
So if you don’t manage your time well, busyness will take over and nothing will happen after 7PM. You’ll be so overloaded by the day’s events, you’ll either drop dead on the couch or have no choice but to numb the pain away with Game of Thrones.
Make tomorrow’s to-do list tonight. Look at the events in your calendar. Now ask yourself, “What can I remove?” And, “What’s my #1 priority right now?” Cut as much fat as you can no matter how much it hurts.
Now you have a rough plan for tomorrow that won’t rely on luck.
Conclusion
The mindless life is a nightmare.
Obviously you have to meet yourself where you are right now. You can’t go from zero to hero in 24 hours. But you can start to build a better life after 7PM that makes the rest of your life improve.
Use the dark hours after 7PM wisely. Watch it change your life.
Tell me the most valuable thing you do after 7PM in the comments section below.
I send this email weekly. If you would also like to receive it, join the 107,000+ other smart people who absolutely love it today.
👉 If you enjoy reading this post, feel free to share it with friends! Or feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
Here's some more ideas for things you can do after 7PM:
https://open.substack.com/pub/timdenning/p/if-the-average-person-did-this-for?r=k5d2o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Hey Tim, I don't hate you but I get fired up after reading your stuff :)
No joke - your stories give me ideas for my stories. Which I tend to write in the evening. My girlfriend knows she must give me two hours after dinner.