8 steps to get your sh** together

Here are eight steps to get your together.

Step one: Tell no one. The urge to tell everybody you know, especially the people closest to you, about this big change you're going to make is often overwhelming. Because it feels really good to announce to everybody that you're going to start going to the gym every single day, or that you're going to read a book a week for a whole year, or whatever the hell you want to do. Whatever it is, it's exciting to tell people. You know you're thinking to yourself, man, it would be really cool to be this person. You start imagining it as if it's real, right? You imagine the more jacked version of yourself, the more well-rounded version of yourself, the person whose house is always clean.

You start to get infatuated with this future projection. So you let your friends know; you let your family know. But I would urge you to resist the urge to do this, not because it's useless, but because it's genuinely destructive. Because think about it: what's the best possible thing that they could say as a response to you in that situation? You say to them, "I'm going to start going to the gym every single day." You would want them to say something like, "Oh wow, that's great! Good for you! I can't wait to see the results."

But if that is the response, what will that do to you? It'll make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. You just gained a bunch of praise, even though you did absolutely nothing. You've been generously rewarded for inaction. And if the response is completely different, you know, if it's a very negative response, if they call you out on your shit and they say, "Ah, good luck sticking to that," you might take offense to that. You might say to yourself, "Damn, maybe I don't have what it takes," or you'll be the kind of person who says, "F you! I'll show you!" And then you end up being very consistent for a short while out of spite.

This is a very immature reason to start doing something that you already know you want to do, right? Who are you doing this for? To prove the haters wrong? Nobody hates you! And if people somehow do hate you, why would you do anything for them, right? Why would you say, "Oh, these people hate me, so I'm going to act and live my life differently?" That gives them all the power. You see what I'm getting at here? It's pretty much lose-lose all across the board. If you get in the habit of just talking about this person, you're going to be so…. If you're very excited, and rightfully so, about a big change you're going to make, keep that to yourself. Use that energy and that excitement to actually do the thing, and let the results of your consistency be something that's discovered rather than announced.

Step number two: Start before you're ready. The feeling of readiness is something that will almost never come. You don't need new shoes. You don't need the perfect system. You don't need to remember anything that that one health guru said on that YouTube short that you watched the other day and you can't find it. Forget about it! You need less information, not more information. Transformation is something that happens through action.

So prove to yourself that you can act regardless of the weather, regardless of your levels of motivation, or the amount of sleep that you got last night. All of these things are helpful, but they're not requirements. You can do the thing anyway. You've always been able to do it. Now figure out the details along the way.

Step number three: Don't hide. So a lot of people, when they want to transform their life, get very infatuated with this idea of going away up a mountain somewhere, isolating themselves away from society, self-improving in a bubble, and then coming back as this unrecognizable, superior version of themselves, and everyone claps. It's very obvious to see how this is an extremely insecure mindset, right? It rides pretty heavily on people having some sort of reaction to you, or something like, "Oh wow!" But again, you have to ask yourself: Who are you doing this for? Is this not your life? Who do you want to be?

That's the great thing about life: you get to be who you want to be. So don't isolate yourself and only participate in society when you're this improved version of yourself. You're okay now! Spend time with the people that care about you. Go do the things that you want to do today. Improve what you want to improve on the back end, right? That's healthy. But don't somehow twist this whole self-improvement thing with self-hatred. Do it because it's good for you, and it feels good to feel good.

Step four: Stay on track. Life is like a train, and it's leading you somewhere, and there's no way to stop the train, right? You can't stop time. You will always end up at a different destination. There's no such thing as staying in the same place because time won't allow for it. All you can do is pay attention to where the train is currently going. What's the trajectory? Do you need to change course? Will you end up in your desired destination?

Doing something positive every single day is like making sure you don't veer off course. Keep in mind what the ultimate destination is. Where are you going, and where do you want to go? Making substantial progress in your life is a lot easier when you realize that it was never about climbing a huge mountain. You never needed to make a huge journey up Mount Everest in order to change something. It was always about simple decisions. Decisions that you make every single day.

It's just about bringing consciousness to those decisions and then doing the better thing instead of the worst thing. So to bring this back to going to the gym—it's probably the easiest example—becoming a healthy person to achieve a physique that you want has never been about going to the gym super hard one day, getting super motivated, you know, watching all the necessary clips on YouTube, getting super jacked up, and then going to the gym really hard.

All it is is a decision you're already familiar with. When you get that urge, when you get that sort of conflict in your mind about, "Should I go to the gym right now, or should I not?" and you say, "Ah, you know, I'll go tomorrow," that's all it is. It's finding a way to just say, "Yeah, what the hell! I'll go to the gym today." That's it. Just doing the better thing instead of the worst thing is the answer to everything.

We would like to think that the answer to all of our life's problems is some other conflict that we're not already familiar with. It can't be that little thing—that's all it is.

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Step number five: Grease the grooves. I cannot stress enough the importance of taking advantage of environmental cues to make it as easy as possible to stay on the path. Everybody is aware that if their Xbox is visible, they're more likely to play it; that if junk food is in the house, they're more likely to eat it. Our environment shapes our mindset and our behaviors more than we probably realize. But we can take advantage of this fact and set traps of growth.

It's extremely easy to take your vitamins every single day if they are sitting out on display where you tend to drink water. That is basically the only reason why I ever take vitamins—ever. Another little hack that gets me into the gym: I'm addicted to caffeine, so what I've done recently is instead of quitting caffeine—'cause that would be ridiculous, what, am I insane?—I take advantage of my caffeine addiction. I use it as a strength.

I usually have three cups of coffee in a day: two in the morning—one when I first wake up, another one right after—and then there's this period of time where I want that third cup of coffee sometime after lunch, so around 2 p.m. So what I've done is I don't let myself have that third cup of coffee. Instead, it has to be pre-workout. My emotions, my little monkey brain wants a pick-me-up; it requires a pick-me-up.

I say to myself, "You can have a pick-me-up—a scoop of pre-workout." When I have the pre-workout, I find myself automatically setting off a chain reaction, putting on my gym shoes, and heading to the gym. Work with what you got! Survey your life and all the little weird tendencies that you have and all of your behavioral insanities, and use it to your advantage. Hack your environment and your behavior and your current lifestyle to work for you. Make it as easy as possible to do what's good for you and what you want to do, and as difficult, strenuous, and kind of inconvenient as possible to do what's bad for you.

And leave a comment saying, "Joey, I like your mustache," or roast me.

Step number six: Do it your way. I don't know what you're going through. I don't know the reasons why you would want to get your together, but nothing is more powerful than your own reasons for doing this. Ask yourself, how do you want to live this life? Who is the person that you want to be, and in what ways do you tend to fail achieving that? How can you course-correct? The answers to these personal questions are by far the biggest motivator that will help you stay on track.

Figure out a way that works for you. Figure out a way that complements your little insanities that you have. Find a way to work with your weird procrastination habits, your strange intrusive thoughts, your freakish brain that you might have. Who cares? You know what you're like; you know how you tend to fail. So work with yourself and do it your way. You don't need an AA moment; you just need to see the truth.

This leads directly into step number seven: Pay attention. Once you've been on the path for a while, pay attention to how you feel. Notice how much better it feels to live in a reality where you've consistently been who you want to be, doing what's good for you more often, more frequently. It literally feels better, right here, right now. This feeling is why it's worth it.

It feels better to be alive knowing that you're on the righteous path rather than on the path to destruction. Like the trains I was talking about, it feels good knowing that you are on the right track. Your existence feels better! So pay attention to that feeling. When you realize just how much better you feel now, it'll become obvious that white-knuckle tactics and little tips and tricks and mental hacks to stay on track become completely obsolete. You don't need that stuff anymore because it's so obviously better that you wouldn't want to go back.

People who conquer addictions for their whole life really understand this feeling. It's not like they're sitting there free from the shackles of their addiction, feeling deprived and super pent up and angry that they can't go back. Right? They realize that it feels better to be free. They don't need to do that anymore. So that's the type of truth I'm talking about.

When you've been on the righteous path for a while, then the benefits of transcending mediocrity are no longer this distant hypothetical that you have to think about and conjure. The benefits become inarguable. They become your overwhelming reality that you enjoy in the present moment. That's when you know that things have clicked.

Step eight: Rejoice! Take time to reflect and be grateful that you're on the righteous path. Now, this might sound like a waste of time or very woo-woo, but it is very important because what a lot of people tend to do is they're starting to actually live the life that they want to live, and they start feeling really good.

Then this little voice creeps in—a voice of regret, of bitterness for not starting earlier. You know, for all this wasted time. "I wasted so much time! I'm so old now! Why didn't I start doing this when I was way younger?" Stay on top of this little voice. It is absolutely useless and destructive because the truth is, there could have been a million reasons why you didn't start exactly when you did. But you're on the path now, right? You are in the best possible reality that you can be in at this moment.

All of the failed mindsets and white-knuckle tactics that you had to try out led you to this moment—the moment that worked. So rejoice and be grateful that you got here because not everybody does. It feels good to feel good! Be at peace because, as Seneca once said, "The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but by building the new."

And like this video because when you actually hit the like button, the video genuinely does do so much better. You could see it with the last video. The last video was a banger! If you haven't watched it, go watch it! But so many of you hit the like button because I said to hit the like button, and it got way more views than the previous couple of videos. So it does make a huge difference, and I really appreciate it.

Other than that, thanks for watching! We'll catch you in the next video. If your anus was this big, it would be a black hole.