Life Hacks: 4 Ways To Improve Your Life
I was recently asked to give a talk to students at Stanford GSB about “life hacks” and “career hacks.” People have different definitions of the word “hack.” I tried to focus on activities that meet one or more of these criteria:
They are not widely followed,
They answer the question Tim Ferris poses, “What is the one thing you can do which will make everything else easy or irrelevant?” and/or
They produce a wildly asymmetric impact, in which a unit invested produces a disproportionately large positive return.
I came up with four life hacks and two career hacks. This is part 1 of the talk, which focuses on the four life hacks. A link to Part 2 of the talk, which focuses on the two career hacks, is here.
I have tried to compress my 49 years of life into six hacks. I chose these hacks that met a few criteria. First, Tim Ferriss asks, "What's the one thing I could do that will make everything else easy or irrelevant?" Great question. Some of these hacks will answer that question. And then the other ones are about working smarter, not harder. When you transition out of the GSB, you're going to need to start building some different muscles. The muscle of individual contribution, of just working more and doing more, is going to tap out. Many of us get to the GSB because we crushed individual contribution. We excelled at academics and our first jobs, et cetera. But to become a leader, you're going to have to unlearn that a little bit.
And lastly, these are the things that have been the most wildly asymmetric for me. A unit of energy invested in the six things I'm going to share today will yield many fold of that in terms of return.
I want you to try to commit to adopting at least one or two of these hacks by the end of this talk. I don't know which will resonate for you at this exact time in your life, so I'm giving you a menu. But I think you'll find that committing to at least one is going to make a big difference. I'll spend the bulk of the time today on the sixth one, because it's probably the most complicated.
LIFE HACK 1: Get an executive coach
My life changed in 2009 after I hired my first executive coach. And if you were to chart our performance at Alpine, you would see the trajectory completely change. Our assets, our people, our returns. It was just incredible. So why would I add, “get an executive coach” to this list? Well, first off, you don't need to hire a coach. You can coach each other. My first coach was my business school roommate. And we would talk on the phone and meet in person and spend X amount of time on his things, Y amount of time on mine.
I became a good coach by coaching him. And I got amazing feedback from him. To this day, he’s one of the best coaches I've had. You don't have to pay X hundred dollars an hour to get a coach. You can find someone at the GSB. But find a coach. Now.
Why? Think about what's happening. One, you're forcing yourself to schedule time to think, reflect, and plan. Just the act of scheduling it and holding yourself accountable is awesome. Two, a great coach will ask great questions. The power of questions is magical. You can read more about powerful coaching questions on my blog.
When you talk, you activate different parts of your brain compared to when you think or write. When you're having a coaching conversation, you're accessing neurons that you don't otherwise access. Finally, you get to have someone who holds you accountable. I believe to my core that if you do this regularly, it will cover the cost of Stanford tuition many, many times over.
LIFE HACK 2: Write out your goals regularly
Hack number two will also pay for the entire cost of tuition. And it’s simple. Write down your goals, daily if you can, but at least two or three times a week. Less than 3% of people write out their goals. And those 3% are the very top performers.
I learned this hack when I used to mow lawns in Ohio. I listened to motivational tapes on my Sony Walkman, walking back and forth in the hot sun. And nearly all of them talked about the power of writing out your goals. This practice has literally shaved years, if not decades, off the time it's taken me to achieve things. Remember, only 2% of our thoughts are conscious and 98% are subconscious. When we write out our goals every day or every other day, that 98% works for us. But that 98% left to itself can also work against us. We're trying to pull all 100% of us to work toward the direction we want to go. It sounds simple, it can feel mundane, but it has a lot of power.
The exercise: Write out your three goals for the year, and then the three most important things you’re going to do today. That will also force you to write out how you’re doing to move toward those yearly goals. That's it. It takes less than five minutes. If it helps, send these goals to an accountability buddy. You could send them back and forth once a week or something. I promise you will make progress faster than you can imagine.
LIFE HACK 3: Manage your physical energy
This goes in the category of the question Tim Ferriss asks, "What am I going to do that makes everything else easier?" What are some important things going on in your life? Many of you have a really important decision you need to make right now, maybe a career decision or a decision about a relationship. Or maybe you're thinking about an incredibly important project or presentation or fundraising meeting. You will approach those events differently if you come at them with your full self and your full energy.
My number one priority is to have energy. I invest tremendously in how much sleep I'm getting, what I'm eating, and how much caffeine I'm drinking. I don't drink alcohol. I do all of this because I'm solving for being able to show up with energy for 16 hours per day.
It almost doesn't matter what life throws at you if you can meet it with your best self and your best energy. For me the meta habit would be sleep. Sleep is the life-changing foundation, so I work backwards from bedtime. I don’t use a screen an hour before I go to bed. I don’t eat two hours before bed. I stop exercising three hours before. I've got earplugs and eye shades and blackout blinds. My room is cold. I try to do all the things they tell you to do.
The science of sleep is incredible. Ample sleep reduces inflammation, improves your mental health, heals your body, increases your metabolism, helps your memory, reduces cortisol, and on and on. Many say, "Oh, if I sleep less, I'm going to get more done." But the exact opposite is true. When you show up as your best self, you'll make better decisions, and you'll move faster. Then there's this other belief that geniuses never sleep. There's a study that shows that the people who most people consider geniuses (writers and painters and other skilled contributors from over the last several hundred years) actually slept seven to nine hours on average.
LIFE HACK 4: Manage your emotional energy
Number four is a close cousin of managing your physical energy. Emotional energy is the most finite resource that we all have. Where are we spending our energy? Imagine that there is this really small lens that you view your life through. There is all this stuff going on in life all the time. Things are happening, right? You have only a small screen. And on this screen, you see that, interpret it, then tell yourself a story about it, and figure out where you want to focus. Many of us don't pay any attention to where our emotional energy goes. We have a tough conversation with a friend, and all of a sudden, we start writing a story about what happened and how they don't like us or whatever. Or we start writing a story about the comparison like, "Hey, I'm not Mark Zuckerberg." That could be my story. That could be my lens. I could be spending my emotional energy comparing myself to other people.
But you can control where you spend your focus and your emotional energy, and it'll change your life. You will gain control of where you choose to focus, which story you choose to write, and then how you choose to interpret that story. The first three life hacks I gave you are the three best tools for managing your emotional energy. Find a coach, reflect, and decide where to spend your focus. Ask yourself, “Where do I want to go? What's important to me?” Writing out your goals is a great way to get your emotional energy focused on where you want to go. And then manage your physical energy. It turns out, when you have the physical energy, you'll actually tend to focus on more positive things that are moving you forward, and to approach events with a more positive outlook.
Here's the recap of my four life hacks. Get an executive coach, write your goals out at least several times a week, manage your physical energy, and manage your emotional energy and your focus. I hope those are as helpful to you as they have been to me.
Click here to read Part 2: Career Hacks.