So many people are stretched too thin. We have commitments at work, intentions to prioritize our self-care, family and friends to spend time with and support, major life events and holidays to attend... and it all feels like so much. People have too much on their plate, they're already getting crushed by it, and they can’t take anything else on for fear that it will push them over the top.

I really empathize with that. It’s sad to be so busy that you can’t enjoy life as much as you want to. That you’re so worried about ‘doing all the things’ that you aren’t present when you’re doing them. And unfortunately many people accept this as their permanent reality and are unwilling or unable to disrupt the current pattern and create something more sustainable.

The reason life feels so full and overwhelming is because it literally is - the current demand of life is greater than your capacity to fulfill it. 

In order to fix that, there are only two things you can do. You can try to decrease the demands of life by saying “no” more often - Removing yourself from commitments you’ve made, and scaling back the size of your personal and professional goals. But I’ve found that’s either a bottomless pit (with more things that fill in the space you create) or it's a version of life you’d enjoy less.

The other thing you can do is expand your capacity. To become capable of taking on more in life so that you can rise to the occasion and exceed the demand. When you create more energy in your life you become more efficient with what you do. When you’re more efficient with what you do, you compress time and can fit more things more effortlessly into the time you have.

But counterintuitively, to expand capacity you first must add more demand. You need to invest time and energy into building the life-systems that create efficiencies, and building routines that improve your output. But the payoff is, once those systems and routines are in place they work for you and make everything else easier to do.

For the New Year I’m leading a 21 Day Challenge to help people implement a new life system, the same one I've used for a decade, called the Super Habits System. If you want 2025 to be the year 'doing everything better', and not another year of 'too much to do'... Then this is for you!

I have a quote on the wall in my office, attributed to John Assaraf, that says “The universe wouldn’t be so silly to give you a dream you couldn’t achieve.” I know talking about making your dreams come true in life can seem cliche and out of touch with reality, so let’s talk about it from another angle - let’s call them 'aspirations'.

Aspirations are what you want and desire in life. It’s the potential future that you’d trade your present for if you could. But just because you aspire for something to be better does not mean you’re ungrateful for what you have. Our aspirations drive our personal evolution.

You might have some pretty big dreams and crazy aspirations for yourself, and the very fact that you aspire for them means that you’re capable of it. Whether it’s to write a book, be an Olympian, retire in Europe, or whatever it might be for you… The fact that it has been planted in your consciousness as something that you want means that you can have it. Not everyone aspires to be an astronaut, but only those that do are the ones that become one.  “The universe wouldn’t be so silly to give you a dream you couldn’t achieve.” 

Branding and business expert Jasmine Star says it a little differently - “You wouldn’t have a dream if you didn’t have the capacity to achieve it.” But it follows the same sentiment. The reason you chose your aspirations is because they first chose you. Your mind wouldn’t be fooled into doing something that was actually impossible.

That’s not to say you’re going to achieve all your dreams or that success is guaranteed. It doesn’t even mean that it’s likely to happen. It simply means that it’s possible. In order to really give your dreams their fullest chance you might need to sacrifice, and other things might need to suffer in order for your one thing to rise. 

And that’s the beautiful part of the process. Once you’ve quantified the consequences of pursuing your dreams, you get to choose if it’s worth the cost. Is that dream actually what you want? With this new awareness you get to update your dream so that it represents the aspirations and future reality you actually want to live.

My life and progress transformed when I made this simple switch: To stop focusing on habits and start building new systems.

Don’t get me wrong, habits are incredibly important because they are the consistent actions that most influence your results. But when you place your time and attention on locking in a new habit, you’re fueling your growth from a source that runs out. To be consistent with a habit every day means you need to find the motivation and will to take action, and it can taxing to demand that of yourself day in and day out.

However, when you invest in building a new system, you make the consistent action more doable on a daily basis because you’ve created efficiencies. You design your environment in such a way that you’ve set yourself up to succeed sustainably. It’s the gift that keeps on giving because the effort that you put into building the system works for you every time thereafter.

For example, I have a daily system to plan the when, what, and where of my workout for the next day. This commitment then gets in my schedule, which supports me in doing it consistently. Then every evening I have a system for reviewing my performance and understanding the factors that caused me to not workout at the times I intended to. As you can imagine, this is a powerful force that drives me toward achieving my fitness goals.

But as it goes with systems, they're only as strong as the weakest point. Let’s say that I often fail to make a schedule for the day. That compromises my ability to follow through on my workout, no matter how thoughtful I am about the details of it, because I don’t have a plan to integrate personal and work responsibilities alongside my self-care. It’s much more likely to be deprioritized, and for excuses to be made, when you’re trying to figure it all out in real-time. When we build a system we become dependent on it, and if it starts to become unreliable or ineffective, our results suffer with it.

That’s why the output of a system should always be evaluated. When you can see the consistency, quality, and results a system produces, you can be aware of when behaviors are starting to fade off. And you can more quickly recognize the bottleneck, giving you an opportunity to make positive adjustments so that the system flows smoother. 

I call my life-operating system the Super Habits System and if you want to install it in your life for yourself, and start living at the higher standard you know you’re capable of, you can check it out here.

Even though society paints a certain picture of what it looks like to be successful - to be wealthy, have influence, and get the things you want in life - you’ve probably heard that there’s no one definition of success. In order for us to be successful we each need to know what success looks like for ourselves, and measure ourselves up against that.

Easier said than done, especially with all the conditioning you’ve experienced over the course of your lifetime, but it becomes more doable when you realize the part of it we all share and make unique to ourselves. This is where I want to bring in the most successful basketball coach in history, John Wooden, and his definition of success because it’s the best I’ve heard:

"Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.”

First, “Success is peace of mind”. It’s not something that you achieve externally, it’s a way that you relate with your life internally. When you have peace of mind it means that you have no regrets, that you can accept the results with a state of contentment. 

How do you arrive at that peace of mind? That’s the rest of the definition - “Knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.” When you fully apply yourself, and give yourself credit for doing the best with what you have to work with, then you tap into this ultimate contentment. 

Even with this fair and achievable definition of success, many people are falling short of meeting it. Many people recognize that they haven’t done their best, and a lack of discipline, or motivation, or execution is getting in the way. Perfect! Today’s another opportunity to make new choices that get you closer to the fulfilled, inspired, successful path that you know you’re capable of.

If that’s you, then click here to fast-track your self-improvement!

Michael Jordan, who’s known to be one of the most competitive people to have ever played sports, has his own ways of cultivating personal high-performance. Being self-aware of what he responds well to, he uses games and competitions to pull him to be at his best. Because of that, he’s known for playing games within games.

For example, he’s on the basketball court playing against the Utah Jazz. The game is obvious, two teams, 4 quarters, the team who scores more points wins. But with 2 minutes left in the 3rd quarter, Jordan would make up a side game - To extend the lead from 4 points to 10 points. And he’d take over to win that mini-game, which of course puts him in a better position to win the real game.

There are a few things just about everyone responds positively to, among those are urgency and a clearly defined task. That’s the environment playing a game creates. Long-term high-performance is made up of many moments of high-performance done consistently. A way to get yourself to step up in the short-term, so that you can stack instances of high-performance, is by creating short-term games that demand more of you.

Here’s my favorite way of doing that. I find fulfillment and joy in holding myself to a high standard so that I can live an extraordinary life and make an extraordinary impact. To achieve that, I need to show up at my best every day. So I play a game called the Win The Day Game. The criteria for winning involves meeting outlined expectations for myself in my exercise, diet, sleep, work output, time on social media, and other things. Each one of those focus areas is its own game within the game. I’m committed to winning each, and motivated to make good choices in each so that I don’t ‘lose the day’.  It’s by creating a game like this that I stay consistent in doing the fundamentals that support my health and career goals.

It’s easy to do and it really works. Play a game to not press the Snooze button in the morning, and to not check social media until after your workout is done. This will help you to make the most of your mornings. Or a game to see how many days in a row you can hit your #1 goal for the day.

There are mechanics we can use to support us in being the best version of ourselves. These mechanics aren’t crutches, or only needed for people who don’t have discipline, they’re the environmental design pieces that help high-performers achieve at the level they do. And if you incorporate them, you will too!

One of the things that has most improved my diet is simply practicing mindful eating. Mindfulness is having an awareness for what you’re doing and what’s happening around you. This means that mindful eating is an awareness for the details of how much you’re eating, what you’re snacking on, and how healthy the choices you’re making are.

Practicing mindful eating has transformed my health. I used to snack a lot during the day, causing me to feel more bloated and sluggish than I needed to. So I cultivated an awareness about it and now have great control of my snacking.

Even this past Friday I was out at a party and there were bar bites on the table. A past version of me would have kept taking mindless bite after mindless bite, enjoying them socially, only to realize how much I ate when I got home with a stomach ache. But because of the work I’ve done in this area of my life, I was able to be more thoughtful about my choices and try just one bite.

The primary purpose of eating food is to provide our body with the nutrients it needs to function. But many of us have a more complicated relationship with it. That’s why one of the most powerful questions to ask yourself, offered by author and researcher Michael Easter, is “Why are you eating?” 

He says that “80 percent of eating is driven by reasons other than physiological hunger.” Among these reasons are to emotionally soothe stress or sadness, alleviate boredom, acting from a belief system that it’s bad to waste, and to socially enjoy. But often when we eat for these reasons, we disagree with our choice and wish we would have made a better one.

This is exactly what I’ve had to work through myself. Everyday in my personal performance tracking system, I reflect on my eating - The level of overall nutrition of my meals, amount of snacking, and portion control. I have a standard for myself that I need to answer to which holds me accountable. Reflecting on your eating daily is what I call a Super Habit, and if you want to incorporate it in your life to radically improve your diet, among other life-changing Super Habits, then check this out!

You might be, or might know someone, who suffers from all or nothing thinking. They’re the type of person that makes a commitment and dives fully into the deep end. They commit to being healthier and set a goal to workout 5 days a week after missing months in the gym. They have an idea to start a new project and register it as a business and open a bank account, even before having basic conversations to really assess the market. 

Big, bold, fast action is a hallmark characteristic of high-performers. It’s critical to be able to step powerfully into an idea and turn it into action. But this mentality often comes at the cost of taking things on at a level that is unsustainable, leading to burnout or a fast regression when things become overwhelming or they aren’t getting results fast enough.

That’s why I want to propose an alternative called ‘Small Or Nothing Thinking’. It’s the best of both worlds - You’re still taking fast and immediate action when inspiration strikes, but now you’re doing it in a way that is manageable. ‘Small Or Nothing Thinking’ gets you focusing your efforts on things that help you make progress on your goals, but the demand is not so dramatic that it feels overwhelming.

I love the play on words because it outlines the polarity. Either you do it small, or you do nothing. That’s because an ‘All Or Nothing’ approach has two paths that most often lead to nothing. The first path is taking big action that flames out and doesn’t last, and the second path is that you never reach the threshold to take action and end up doing nothing about it. 

Here’s an example in my life of how this mindset has served me. I’m making some big requests and hustling in certain ways in my career right now, and fired up about it. There are some major partners I’m looking to lock down and collaborate with. I could have set a goal to reach out to one every day, which would be a 30 minute commitment… But that’s something that would likely flame out and lead to me no longer reaching out at all. Instead I have a cadence of reaching out to just one of those partners a week! Much more doable and designed for consistency.

Think about the goals and ambitions you have in your life, what efforts you’ve made to achieve them, and ways that oversubscribing in the past might not have been helpful. And instead, arrive at the smaller and slower pace that you can actually maintain for it, and commit to trying that.

A few months ago, my wife Irene got us new electric toothbrushes. Both of us had been using normal brushes for a while. Any time you do something new there’s a learning curve - in this case getting used to the tickle on your gums, figuring out your favorite setting, and perfecting your new form. It didn’t take long.

But one night, something odd happened. I caught myself brushing my teeth with my old toothbrush and for whatever reason I found that fascinating. Nothing happens on accident, there’s an explanation for everything but often you don’t have the awareness to know it. 

So I challenged myself to explore it. What issue might I have with my new toothbrush? Did I find the sound annoying? No, it’s not that…

I have some sensitivity on the top of my molars sometimes, was I unconsciously avoiding the electric toothbrush to avoid pain? No, the sensitivity isn’t any more significant with the electric toothbrush than the old one…  

And then it hit me. There’s one, hardwired, inescapable belief that is deeply embedded in humanity, and it was the reason that I chose to use my old toothbrush instead of my new one.

Familiarity. We are designed to do what is familiar and resist what is not. It’s a defense mechanism to keep us alive. Something that is less familiar is less predictable and therefore could pose a threat to our safety and survival. It’s this underlying belief that unconsciously led to me going back to using my old toothbrush.

Living with more consciousness is a process of treating everything like this. With curiosity you understand the engine that’s working behind the scenes to produce certain results in your life. Your belief system is evidenced in environment. 

For example, right now as I prepare this I see a pile of mail stacked in the corner. Why haven’t I gone through it? It’s easy enough to just do it, isn’t it? A deep and honest reflection reveals that I’m uncomfortable doing things I don’t know how to do, and there might be some of that in the mail so I avoid it. And a part of it relates to how I value my time and choose to do things that I reason to be more important, even thought sometimes it’s misinformed and creates a pattern of getting behind on things.

Every moment of life is a moment to understand more about yourself and what drives you to do certain things. It’s with that awareness that you can make new choices and create new results.