Reboot Your Life with These 8 Simple Things

#3 – Rethink what a kindle book is.

Photo by Demba JooB on Unsplash

I felt like I was stuck in quicksand and couldn’t breathe.

Being numb to… well … everything and anything is a terrible feeling. Earlier in my life I was lost. I worked in a bank – great. But I knew that my life was about more than bank accounts and slick credit cards.

I didn’t know what to do.

One day I was explaining the 90s computer game Command And Conquer to a colleague. My computer in 1996 struggled to load games. (It wasn’t because of porn, don’t worry.)

Whenever the computer shat itself, there was this glorious button at the front that rebooted the computer. Once the computer started up again, like magic, it felt like a new machine again, and the game would work.

When I felt stuck in banking, this idea hit me. Maybe I can simply push the reboot button on my life. It wasn’t like I’d be losing valuable data. Everything was already screwed. Things couldn’t get any worse.

After much thought, I made some drastic changes to reboot my life.

• Go for opportunities you’re not qualified for.

• Eat clean food.

• Rethink what a kindle book is.

• Ditch cry babies.

• Post daily on social media.

• Destroy your daily habits.

• Learn the other side of how money works.

• Rewrite your life story.

Some of these things look obvious. But the best ideas look cliche as first glance. When you go deeper there’s so much more. Individually, none of these things would have got me out of the quicksand. Altogether, though, these things produced a sort of alchemy I can’t describe to you easily.

The hardest thing to do was ditch the adult babies. I explain why shortly.

Go for opportunities you’re not qualified for

At work, I shut up and did my job. I was afraid to go for promotions. When a team leader role came up, I ran the other direction. Even giving a simple Powerpoint presentation at work scared me.

The problem was I fell for the rules of the factory worker age. I believed you needed to have experience. I thought you needed facts to justify why you should be given an opportunity you’re not qualified for.

Then I met Lidia. Lidia had zero experience as a manager. She was mediocre at sales. A secondment came up and she took it. Within months she was given a sales leadership role with much more money. She went from working the phones to sitting back, relaxing, and delegating most tasks. She started leaving the office early.

That’s when it clicked: you’re qualified for an opportunity if you think you are.

The truth is most of us are just making shit up as we’re going along. A lot of the people you look up to had no idea what they were doing either. They just pretended they did. If you sit in enough leadership meetings, for example, pretty soon you start to talk like a leader.

Eventually I took this idea and became a sales leader with sixteen direct reports. I worked four days, not five days. And I spent a lot more time writing, yet made three times the money.

Remember this: you’re qualified if you think you are.

Eat clean food

Food can be tasty. Easting a cheeseburger is delicious. My guilty obsession while working in a bank was eating a greasy Grill’d hamburger for lunch. The taste helped me forget my problems for about ten minutes. Then after lunch all the problems would come racing back.

I ended up attending a seminar where I learned one simple idea: food = energy.

When I ate crap food I felt like crap. If I kept eating crap food then I would feel like crap and not want to reboot my life. So, I changed the meaning of food.

If tomorrow was an important day, then I wouldn’t eat junk food the day before because I wanted to be at my best. I started with eating better for big events. Then, eventually, I ate better every day so that I was at my best all the time.

When my energy levels became higher, I started being able to do things my colleagues were too tired to do.

Rebooting your life requires energy. You can eat more energy.

Rethink what a kindle book is

Before my reboot, I hadn’t read a book since high school. Why? Books seemed lame. A book takes a while to read. You can’t sip a beer and read a book.

Then my friend Andrew picked me up by the balls and gave me a slapping.

“Books give you ideas, stupid.”

He explained to me that consuming information via 60-second videos on social media isn’t how you get smarter and fix a broken life.

“Books help you go deep.”

A book registers in your brain differently. You feel connected to the writer. The words arrange themselves differently on a page. What changed the game is when my mother got an iPad for work. I previously dismissed Steve Jobs and his Apple company as overpriced tech trash. But then I played with the iPad. WOW.

Reading a book on the kindle app with an iPad is glorious. You can highlight. You can google parts of the book. I started reading a lot of books. All of a sudden, I thought, wow there are so many ideas I haven’t even tried.

Books gave me ideas. Ideas led to experiments. Experiments led to action. And the rest is history amigo.

Bottom line: read books with kindle apps to get ideas. You’ll stumble across a good one, I promise.

Ditch cry babies

This was the hardest decision to make. Many of my close friends were adult babies. They played with addictive drugs. They partied all night. They continuously got fired from their day jobs. They were always broke.

I realized my friends were holding me back. I was becoming like my adult baby friends. One day I decided to cut the bad ones off like poison ivy. I simply stopped taking their calls and replying to their messages. They got the hint fast. They found other dropkicks to complain to about growing up in a mansion with a pool and jacuzzi.

The change didn’t happen overnight. But with all the babies gone, I had room to add new people to my life. I added thoughtful adults. I added people who were far more successful than I was. I added people who built me up instead of those who would say “the system is rigged, man.”

Who you spend time with is who you become – without realizing it.

Post daily on social media

My thoughts used to stay in my head. I’d never let anybody in. I thought my ideas were terrible. Then one day my boss challenged me to start a new work goal.

After a lot of contemplation, I thought about LinkedIn. What if I posted every day on LinkedIn for a year. What might happen? I decided to find out.

Every day I would publish at least one post – often, a full-length article. Nobody cared. No likes. No comments. Silence. I kept doing it. It felt like a way to get out of my head and try and connect with new people.

I looked at what others were doing on LinkedIn. Most of the content was silly Einstein quotes or tacky work hacks. I started posting stories. I scoured the internet looking for inspirational stories. I chose inspiration, frankly, because it was exactly what I needed.

I learned this: Inspiring others helps you inspire yourself.

Over the course of a year I started to get enormous traction. People loved feeling inspired. I got messages on LinkedIn almost every day. I replied to the messages. I started conversations. Before I knew it, I was getting invited to events, being asked for my opinions, and even asked to join the boards of tech companies.

Social media became like a magnet. It attracted people and opportunities to me rather than me having to go and find them. Or worse, stand still and wait for stuff to happen.

Pick a social media app. Share stories. Stories never go out of fashion – and they don’t have to be yours.

Destroy your daily habits

I was stuck in a pattern. Every day I’d wake up, eat breakfast, shower, watch Youtube, get ready for work, get in the car, drive to work with techno cranked up, park the car, walk 30 minutes to the office to avoid paying for parking, arrive late, drink coffee, and then turn on my laptop.

It was such a predictable life. Every day felt the same and I didn’t know how to escape. All I knew was this: I was bored as bat shit.

Habits are touted as self-help superpowers. But habits have a dark side. What you do repeatedly becomes unconscious and you live life on auto-pilot. I decided to ditch my habits. I stopped waking up at the same time every day. I stopped eating the same breakfast. I stopped myself watching so much Youtube.

Instead, I woke up at 4 am. This is a crazy time of day that I don’t expect anyone to copy. But it was an experiment. At 4 am, the world is quiet. It feels different. It feels calm. I started reading in the morning. I started working on a plan. The big thing I did was start writing articles online before anybody else woke up.

Everything changed after nuking my habits. By waking up at 4 am I had 5 hours before work to experiment. By going to bed at 9pm each night, I stopped binge-watching Hollywood movies until midnight. And I stopped making phone calls to friends for two hours to complain about my day.

None of these changes would have occurred if I hadn’t decided to interrupt the pattern of daily activities and start again. You can do the same, although maybe aim to wake up later than 4 am.

Learn the other side of how money works

Work was a necessity at this point in my life because I needed the money. Without money, my bills would eat away my tiny amount of savings.

It hit me one morning on the way to work: what if this money problem didn’t exist? What would I be doing?

These two questions led me to study money. I realized even though I worked in a bank, my understanding of money was worse than a 5th grader. All I had up until that point was a savings account. I spent most of my money as soon as I earned it.

Thankfully, one of my former work colleagues was a finance guy. I asked him about how money works. He refused to tell me. Instead, he gave me a list of books about money and told me to read each one. I read them all. The books taught lessons about inflation, stocks, bonds, gold, the psychology of financial market, savings, spending, and managing expenses. Pretty soon, I became a personal finance wizard.

My net-worth started to rise over the next few years. I didn’t have to work as much which led me to do 4-day weeks.

Money is a representation of time. When you have money you can buy time. Or you can waste money on buying stuff. Choose time. Stuff gets boring a few weeks after you buy it – including a Lambo.

Rewrite your life story

During this period of transition, I realized that my life is nothing more than a story I tell myself each day. If the story is boring it’s because I’m choosing the experiences that fill up the chapters.

I started telling my story differently. Instead of hiding from the low points – mental illness, catastrophic business failures, romantics breakups – I leaned into them. The low points became the inspiration for the high points.

There is a chance to reboot your life when you rewrite the story. How? By remembering you are the storyteller. If you tell the story like you’re a bum, then you’ll get the results that follow. If you tell your story like a person who wants to make an impact, then your story will subtly shift to match the narrative.

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