Building mental strength

🦋162: Plus iterating for success, thinking in laws, and making bad habits hard.

Oct 16, 2023

Welcome to the 162nd consecutive edition of the newsletter.

The greatest skill you can ever learn — and one no one ever bothered to teach you — is how to change yourself.

This newsletter is my answer to this injustice.

Knowing how to solve your own problems is the ultimate superpower and the secret to a happy life.

Each week I share 5 ideas you can use to change yourself — and your life.

Enjoy this week’s wisdom.

1/ Thinking in laws.

My note-taking is a disaster. My notes are all over the place. Some are in…

Evernote
Apple Notes
Google Docs
and many are in the countless hand written journals I have.

The problem is I seldom go back to look at any of these, so I don’t remember anything I have highlighted or written down.

So I am trying something a little different.

My mindset is to “Think in laws.”

When I consume content, my goal is to summarize it into laws that are concise, memorable and useful.

For example…

I have been thinking a lot about consistency of late, especially when it comes to my daily calorie consumption.

I have always focused on short-term consistency over the course of a day, week or month.

But the real transformative power of consistency is what my numbers look like over the course of a year.

Yearly averages reveal just how consistent I have been with my consistency.

So I created a law for myself…

Honestly, this is too wordy and will need to be pared down to something more concise, but for the time being all my notes, research, and thinking on the topic of consistency have been boiled down into a simple law that I have a much better chance of remembering and applying to my life.

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🦋 Transformation Tip…

Morgan Housel stated we don’t remember books, articles or blog posts. We remember sentences. Thinking in laws helps you create sentences you will remember.

2/ Belief.

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🦋 Transformation Tip…

Our success is not determined by what others believe we are capable of, it’s determined by what we believe we are capable of.

3/ Making bad habits hard to do.

I use the free version of MyFitnessPal to log all my meals. Three times over the past few months I have accidentally purchased the premium version of the app — which I don’t want or need.

The first two times I was able to get a refund, but the last time my request was declined.

I’m not sure what shenanigans were going on in my pocket, but the reason these purchases were made is because I have Touch ID activated for purchases on my iPhone.

When I hit the home button to activate my phone, I was also unknowingly activating an unwanted purchase.

To make this bad behaviour less likely to happen I deactivated Touch ID.

Now when I want to purchase something, on purpose or by accident, I have to enter my password manually.

And my accidental purchases are no longer a problem.

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For example, I don’t keep foods in the house that I don’t eat responsibly. If I want them, I must go out to get them. Using distance as a barrier allows me to behave better more frequently.

4/ Always be iterating.

When it comes to my life, the one thing that shapes everything else is the state of my body.

My life goes as my body goes.

When I get my body right, everything else is exponentially better.

So each day I make sure I complete these 10 essential habits.

But this ScoreCard for Success has changed a lot as I have evolved over the last 4.5 years. This is probably the 25th iteration.

Here is what the first two iterations looked like.

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🦋 Transformation Tip…

Start where you are at. Then iterate so you can grow as you go.

5/ Mental strength insights.

From the world’s best tennis player of all-time — Novak Djokovic.

There are two big ideas buried in this short clip.

Negative thoughts are inevitable. What matters is how quickly we can recover from those thoughts and get back to positive ones that will help us achieve success.
Conscious breathing is an excellent skill that helps us recover from those negative thoughts.

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