Journal on the following questions:

What is one thing I can do for so long I forget I’m hungry?

What can I work on into the late hours of the night?

What would I rather do than watch TV?

What am I already good at that I enjoy doing?

What’s the one thing I can do each day, such that by doing it over time, everything else would become either easier or unnecessary?

What’s the one thing I can do each week, such that by doing it over time, everything else will become either easier or unnecessary?

What’s the one thing I can do each month, such that by doing it over time, everything else will become either easier or unnecessary?

Now take your answers, pick one, and try doing it for at least 30 minutes at some point every day. Don’t think too much. Every time a thought comes to your head to do that thing, and you have a moment, just stop what you’re doing and do it. Best if you block out some time each morning or night to do it.

Don’t have time? Ask yourself this questions:

“If I keep doing what I’m doing, will my problems get better or worse over the next 6 months?” 

If the answer is no, then maybe it’s time to make time for your new one thing, or to put systems in place so that you can.

Do it for thirty days and share it with the world.

(heavily influenced by Gary Keller “The One Thing” and Tim Ferriss “The Four Hour Work Week”)

Cars drive.

Dogs make you happy.

Does your dog try to be anything other than a dog?

Do any car companies try to sell you a car that can fly?

Are any airplane companies trying to create a plane that you can also drive to work?

These are all silly ideas.

Stop trying to be a Jack of All Trades. Start being really good at one thing. Fall in love with it. Do it well. Share it with the world.

In tomorrow’s post we will talk about how to find your one thing.

If you read the previous blog.... you will know that being first in a category helps, but only if you market yourself this way from the start.

This is the battle of “perception”.

When you meet someone new, it is very hard for you to shake your first impression of them and visa versa.

The way we are first seen by people is most often how we will be remembered by that person.

Crea Tyler went viral for his “College Dropout” video… it’s unlikely than anyone who has known about him since then will ever remember him as anything else. Obviously he may create new content that a new audience will find him and know him for, but his original audience from the College Dropout will likely never change their perception...

That girl or guy who rejected you in high school is almost never going to have respect for you no matter how successful or how much you change.

Something in our minds pushes us to see people as we have always seen them.

What if we intend to change our image? Never fear, it is possible.

From my experience, the best way to change you perception in one audiences eyes is to have social proof of many other people viewing you a certain way.

Social proof alone is a powerful emotional trigger that influences people to change in order to fit in with the group or herd mentality… Otherwise they are weird, and weird is not safe to our reptilian brain!

Remember the song Skater Boy?

He was a skater boy, she said see ya later boy

He wasn’t good enough for her!

Now he’s a super star, slamming on his guitar

(whatever the rest of the lyrics are.... she takes him back because he's popular I think?)

But, ultimately, I think the main message of this post is that you should really take a moment to consider who your audience is. Who do you want to help the most? Who do you want to create content for to entertain, inspire, or educate?

More on choosing your audience and why it is the most important thing ever in a future post! promise*

Instead, create something new. Then, you are automatically the best, and people will remember you for it.

Who was the third person to fly around the world? No idea right?

But who was the first woman to fly around the world? Amelia Erheart. See? She was third in one category, but define a new category, and all the sudden you become memorable in the mind.

If you are first in a new category, it is likely you will also be known as the best.

Casey Neistat was the first Vlogger, and still many consider him the best.

Coca Cola came before Pepsi, and the majority of people prefer Coke over Pepsi.

When you become first, something else really cool happens...

You become generic. When you go to a restaurant and they only have Pepsi, they will still refer to it as a coke.

Rather than trying to beat someone who already made a category, just be first and create your own.

(Ideas heavily influenced by Al Ries’ book “22 Immutable Laws of Marketing”)

Yesterday I made a video about my top five books for lifestyle design. In this post I’d like to give my biggest tip for lifestyle design:

Self awareness.

This term gets thrown around a lot in the entrepreneurial and self development space. But I think it’s a word that not a lot of people really understand, ironically.

We might think we have self awareness about our skills and such, but there is so much more depth to it than that.

Self awareness is important because:

1. It’s the thing that gives us a true understanding of what we truly want in life, so that we are able to design our lives to get there

2. It shows us what we are good at and what we enjoy doing so that we can achieve what we’d like while enjoying the process

3. It shows us that our lives are actually already amazing as it is

So how do we develop self awareness? Meditation is huge. I have found that a daily practice of meditation, shooting for thirty minutes of silence in the morning, followed by some free form journalling really helps. While I meditate, I first become aware of my body and myself. I observe my thoughts. I do not judge my thoughts, I just notice them. Then i become aware of how my body feels. Then I look around me and I see the beauty of life around me. All the colors, all the sounds, and smells. Then I realise the connectedness between myself and my external environment, and I kind of just sit there in a really happy state knowing that everything around me has been brought to me by the universe. The universe brings you what you most truly desire, so the fact that I am sitting here means that at one point in my life, I really wanted this. And then am I am grateful. During this thirty minutes, I will observe myself, but I will also purposefully send thoughts of love and happiness to people around me, strangers, and people I care about. A thought is a powerful thing. More powerful than we think. People say that thoughts hold weight. I literally believe this. There’s a substance in the universe called dark matter, and it accounts for more than half the mass of the universe, yet scientists literally cannot figure out what it is, because it’s not made of atoms like everything else. My hypothesis is that thoughts are at least a part of this force. Thoughts and intentions. I’m aware of this and so I send my happy thoughts out into the world. Then once my meditation is over, I go into a stream of consciousness journal…

Stream of consciousness journalling is basically putting all your thoughts that flow out of you naturally onto a paper. Anything I woke up thinking about, or for some reason is just on my mind, I’ll put it on the page, and that way I don’t feel attached to keep thinking about it. Then I’ll usually direct my pen to start recognising things I am grateful for. Gratitude is the source of all abundance, because it is the recognition, the awareness that we already have what we are searching for.

Often in my meditation and journaling practice, I recognise that the thoughts or desires in my mind are a lot of the time far more trivial than I imagine in my head.

This realisation helps me recalibrate into presence and come to deeper realisations about what I truly desire, (achieving number 1)… I might have a thought in my head about an argument I had and wanting to fix it. But then I meditate and journal and realise wait… this doesn’t matter at all…

From here, I let go, and then comes a bigger more important thing, perhaps a new video idea or an idea to start a blog.

The deeper I go into meditation, the deeper I am able to connect to what I truly care about, what matters in the world. And when I get here, I can then think about how I can take action toward this. From here, I take action, because I recognise that the only way to grow is through experimentation and action. Maybe I take a wrong turn, but at least I tried.

Lastly, self awareness gives you the perspective that this entire process is what it’s all about. Not achieving a goal, but the process of achieving a goal.


Ultimately, there is no where we need to arrive… The journey is the only thing that matters.

Okay, super deep today hah!

Now i”m more aware of how deeply I think… Cool… 

My goal is for this blog to be consistent for you.

Essentially everything I have consumed or read in the past four years has been directed toward achieving my ideal lifestyle.

Nothing gets me more excited than showing other people that they can also design a lifestyle they are in love with.

My first topic for this “Lifestyle Design” blog is the concept of “showing up”.

From my two years into posting YouTube videos, I can confidently assert that “showing up” in this digital age pretty much guarentees success. Let me unpack what I mean by this: I think if anyone wants to start something online, the most important thing you can do is set yourself a realistic schedule and actually follow through with it.

Do something consistently for a year (that of course you love doing) and people will follow and support you.

It’s like that old saying, “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”…. but like, more applicable to your current situation.

You love making videos? Great. Post a video everyday on youtube for 100 days and people will follow and support you.

Love writing? Awesome. Post a blog everyday for a year at least and see where it takes you. Chances are you will find at least 1000 readers who love your posts. Why not try it? What do you have to lose? Would you rather sit back and think about doing it, or actually do it?

Anyway - I intend to show up everyday for this blog. Now the only question becomes will I actually follow through?

What are the reasons I wouldn’t show up…. well a travel day I suppose… Or if I spend some time in a country with no wifi… For these times I guess I have 2 options… One , just let you readers know that I will not be posting, or two just write some backup blogs when I know I won’t be able to post and schedule them.

My goal is for these blogs to give you the advice I give myself, to expand our minds on what is possible, and ultimately to design a world where you and I wake up excited to help design the world for the better.

Today’s topic has been showing up. Tomorrow’s topic will be whatever is on my mind… Alright, I think I have gotten the point across here. I’m going to write my first backup post because I am going to Bali soon and in the event that wifi is down or something (like last time) then at least I can have something scheduled to post in advance.

Question for you… How will you start showing up?

So I'm sitting in the kitchen while everyone else pregames to go out.

Spent all afternoon trying to figure out DNS servers or some shit.

Well, it's ready.

See you tomorrow morning....

fuk.

okay let's edit the vlog now lol...

To Do:

secure arlins.vlog URL

finish YT mastery and email blast

connect this thingy to email

Steps for posting a blog...

(meditate)

1. Write the blog in a new page template that I will create at some point

2. Copy that blog and post it in here but also copy the link and link it here so people can share that post

3. Email it to people...

4. Read stuff, hang out, have fun live life

5. Do it again

One thing that's on my mind today is taking action and doing the 20% of the work that produces 80% of the results.

The thing today with the blog is that I just want to figure out how to make it work...

Whatever it is you do today, make sure it is the thing that will produce the most results for you.

You can make it look pretty later.

I've been thinking about doing this for a while, but hey, thinking gets you nowhere so i'm just doing some doing.

I was low-key inspired by the Jackson Minute to start this, HA... so here it goes!

I'm excited.

I actually do a lot of writing, but not for the public. I'm thinking this will be a good way for me to #1, solidify in myself AND of course share a lot of the weird, business-y, self help related thoughts jumping around my head that I pick up from various podcasts and books I consume.

That's a good place to start I guess :)

Let's start with the idea of book reading (or reading books, lol, w/e).

Ever since I can remember, I HATED reading books. It had always been a chore. However, I did it because my parents and teachers would replace a reward at the end of it. "Read cat in the hat and we'll buy you a new toy!" "Read A Tale of Two Cities" and you'll get an A+!

These bribes were nice and got me through the work, but they really distracted me from the main reason I read books now:

To make these racks baby. lol. no. but sort of.

But how did I get here?

How did I get from someone who hated reading to someone who reads every single day for hours on end, and is exhillerated every minute by it?

Well, here's how I did it...

For starters, it was actually my senior project in high school. My project was to discover why it is that despite all the benefits of reading people hate to read, and is it possible to case by case turn a non reader into a reader... (was that jargon complicated, sorry.. i'll get better lol)

To be honest, I didn't really care about the research and all that stuff... My main goal was to make myself enjoy reading. To figure out how to develop this habit and love it.

My senior year in high school, I had big dreams for myself. I started watching a lot of TED talks, and one day came across a TED talk called, "Why I Read a Book a Day and Why You Should Too" by Tai Lopez. In this talk, Tai showed me, so clearly, that the pathway to literally anything you want in life is to read it in a book...

How the f could that be possible you might be wondering?

LOOK.... here it is right now... The most successful people who have EVER lived... the billionaires, the masters of seduction, the most fit people who have ever lived, the happiest, the best negotiators, the most charismatic people, etc., ALL of the most successful people in any area of life ever... have written books...

They have taken their thoughts, their paths, their wisdom, and put it in prose, easily digestible language, in f-ing books, and given them to us for free (thanks to ben franklin)...

Do you want to be happy? How would you like it if one of the leading experts on happiness and internal motivation and success was by your side telling you what to do every day... Well guess what, you can. Shawn Achor, the top in his field for this, wrote a book called the happiness advantage. - https://amzn.to/2Imcc9i

Do you want to build a business? How would you like it if Tim Ferriss, angel investor and master of building passive income businesses, was there with you guiding you every step of the way. Well guess what, he wrote a book doing exactly that. Check it out here - https://amzn.to/2rJyCKn

Do you want to be rich? How would you like to be mentored by Sam Walton, creator of Walmart? Guess what, you can... He wrote an autobiography with his life story and all the lessons he learned about making money on his death bed. It's freaking $5 to buy right here - https://amzn.to/2IiUnbb

You can find a genius or top performer for literally anything in life who has written a book showing you the way to where they are now... It's that freaking simple.

The average American reads 1 book a year.

Buddy.

That's sad.

But you know what's not sad? You can get ahead of the average american easily. Here is my recommendation. Get an audible subscription. It's $15 a month and you get one free book free. $15 a month? Is that crazy???? WELL LISTEN UP. YOU WILL NOT BE SUCCESSFUL IF YOU DON'T INVEST IN YOURSELF. SO SACRIFICE AN EXTRA NIGHT OUT DINNER AND PAY THE SUBSCRIPTION OKAY! YOU KNOW WHY? BECAUSE YOU WILL READ A BOOK LIKE "Think and Grow Rich" or "You Are A BadAss at Making Money" or "The $100 Start Up" or "4 Hour Work Week" AND YOU WILL LITERALLY 400x your return on investment BY CREATING A FREAKING BUSINESS BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT THE FREAKING BOOKS SHOW YOU WHAT TO DOOOO AHHHHHHH!!! IT'S SO CLEAR JEEZ JUST DO IT.

okay. 

deep breathe.

we're back.

Here's your audible membership - ➜ 

https://amzn.to/2IhIwhH

The last thing I'll say about books is how you should go about reading them... Don't look at books like a chore... treat them like a friend, a relationship with the author... Hangout with the friend you know you're going to have the most fun with! That means this - if money excites you, read a book by Jen Sincero... If weight lifting is getting you pumped up today, read Arnold Shwartzeneger's biography... All you need to do is read a little bit at a time too! Sometimes only a page or two can give you a valuable chunk of info that you can take with you and improve yourself for the day...

So what are you waiting for?

Oh... probably some suggestions huh.

Well, I wrote this for you and I want you to have it :)

Arlin's Top 80 Books