The Only Life Hack I've Ever Used to Get My Shit Together

I’d vomit, pass out, get random diarrhoea, or have an anxiety attack at any moment.

Photo by Halil Ibrahim Cetinkaya on Unsplash

Your life can fall to pieces in a day.

That’s the harsh truth. It happened to me. Everything I worked for blew up overnight. Pretty soon I was lying against the side of my ridiculously priced BMW and wondering what the heck to do.

I’d never done proper job interviews before that moment and I was 26. The words “startup” and “entrepreneurship” were the fastest way to be shown the door. Apparently established companies hate these words.

You’re a threat if you’ve tried to start a business. You might steal their business and the peeps in suits are afraid (mostly afraid because they wouldn’t dare to try themselves).

So I did something that shocked everybody: I took a job with an enormous pay cut in a call centre. My friends said “this job is beneath you.” They didn’t understand the point.

The job helped me get my shit together, and that’s worth more than a mediocre salary.

Quit Complaining

The traditional approach when everything falls apart is to complain. I did that. The problem with complaining is it quietly turns most people against you.

People stop taking your calls because they know you’re going to complain before you open your mouth. Complaining is a nasty form of demotivation for the average person. I mean life is freaking hard enough already, isn’t it?

Who needs an oxygen thief telling you about how bad the world is? The average person is a complainer because the news and social media teach us to complain.

In fact, Twitter rewards you with likes if you complain a lot about every-little-thing. So what do people do? They complain. They talk about politics and newsworthy events they have no intention of doing anything about.

Complaining gets you nowhere. The first step is to notice your complaining and then write down your complaints. When your complaints are written in your phone’s notepad app, they look different.

You think to yourself, “Am I saying this shit to myself every day?”

Avoiding the Inevitable

Humans hate having difficult conversations.

I was in a crappy romantic relationship a few years back. I knew it had to end, but I couldn’t say the words. So I stayed in the relationship and wasted many good years of my life that could have been spent with a partner who got me and supported me.

If your job is toxic and you want to quit, prepare yourself to do something about it.

If your romantic relationship is full of life-draining arguments daily, prepare yourself to do something about it.

If your life feels like it’s empty and there is something missing, prepare yourself to do something about it.

How?

The Power of Tiny First Steps

Write down the steps you need to take, to do the inevitable. When we do something as dumb as write a list of actions and number each one, the mind starts to map the journey. It creates a different dialogue in your head.

You get into the shower in the morning and start daydreaming about the future and what you want it to look like. You start washing the dishes each night and the action plan appears again in your mind.

The reason most action plans don’t work is the first step is too big. That’s why the greatest solution I’ve ever come across is this:

Make the first step tiny.

When I had to get my shit together, I took a series of lame steps that don’t look life-changing at all (that’s the whole point). Here are a few:

• Read a book from a totally random non-fiction category

• Have a 15-minute call with an existing mentor

• Get a two-paragraph reference from an ex-colleague

• Take a 60-minute Google AdWords course

Nobody can tell you where a first step will lead.

I did nothing with my Google AdWords certification. I ended up getting a job in banking. Then I started writing online. Then many years later I actually joined a digital marketing agency where the AdWords training became incredibly useful.

When you join the dots looking backwards it all makes sense. But trying to join the dots looking forward is almost impossible. Trust tiny steps to help you get your shit together.

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This “Life Hack” Obliterated All Others

This is the life hack that changed everything: doing produces evidence you can trust.

I used to overthink every tiny thing. I couldn’t even attend a dinner or a work event without saying to myself, “But can you survive until the end without being sick in front of everybody?”

I’d vomit, pass out, get random diarrhea, or have an anxiety attack at any moment.

Mental illness taught me not to trust myself.

The solution was to get evidence against mental illness that the self-talk was wrong. I began doing things that weren’t supposed to be possible. The only way I could stomach enormous failure was to disconnect from the outcome.

I’d say, “Well if this is a disaster then that’s okay. Things can’t get any worse. I’ve got nothing to lose.”

Now you may not have mental illness, but let me tell you how powerful evidence from action can be. When you take action you get feedback. You start to find a loose sense of direction. You start looking in places you’ve never looked before. You even meet people who would normally not enter your life.

Willpower can destroy your dreams

The problem with doing is that it takes willpower. There is an easy self-improvement answer: make the daily task of doing a habit.

Here’s how:

1. Decide on the one tiny action you want to take each day.

2. Take the action for ten minutes per day.

3. Repeat the process for two weeks.

4. Increase the time period to fifteen minutes per day.

5. Then in two more weeks increase it to thirty minutes

6. Keep repeating and increasing the time

I followed this formula. It led me to write every day for the last seven years and completely change my life. Writing helped me get my shit together. Writing gave me a brand new life.

But I didn’t start with writing.

I started by doing, and then adding automation to the doing.

You can get your shit together too. You just have to take tiny action that builds insurmountable evidence against the lies you tell yourself. Evidence from action helps you trust yourself more. Trust helps you drastically change your life.

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