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You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by GoHighLevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet. Just go to gohighlevel.com travis. What's up everybody? Welcome back to the show. Today on the podcast, it's just me, you and the mic. I say today, but I mean there's two other episodes that are dropping today because we release three episodes a day because, you know, why not? So these ones are solo shows. We have a co hosted show that will go out today as well as an interview. So solos aren't your format that you enjoy the most. Go check out, you know, the interview or the co host with my producer Eric. There's some good stuff in all of these, mostly related to money. Usually when it's just me, you and the mic, I try to get a little bit more self growth, personal development. These are some of the things that I've learned over the years and hopefully it helps you out as well. So today we're talking about the quality of your life. When you look back at the end of your life and you measure the quality of your life, I've found that there's three things that really influence that the most. So we're going to jump into that today. The first thing is the questions that you ask. I have been accused of simplifying the difficulty of life into this before because I said that and then somebody mentioned that, you know, some BS about how it's a privilege to take to have or something like that. And I was like, well, you're probably just asking the wrong questions, you know. So I found this to be extremely helpful. The questions that you ask, that's one of the things that the quality of your life will be determined by. Because if you are asking the wrong questions, you're going to get the wrong answers. And the majority of life is really coming down to the self awareness to understand what you actually want and then the discipline and desire to go get what you want. But the discipline and desire part can actually be the easier part of the equation. Figuring out what you want is essentially the hard part. Once you really know what you want and you have a strong purpose, a strong why behind what you want, then going and getting it is almost the easy part of the equation, right? It's not easy, but it is the easier part of the equation. So it can be difficult to get the answers that you want if you're asking the wrong questions. Regardless of if you're asking that question to yourself, like it's an introspective self reflection point, or it's you asking those questions to other people. And for me, obviously, it's a little bit exaggerated because they're on a podcast and I interview people for a living, essentially. So obviously I've seen that play out in a, in a much. In like this container of podcasting. Because the better questions that I ask during an interview, the better answers that I get, the better answers that I get. It forms my beliefs, my opinions, my values, it informs my actions. Everything starts with the questions that I'm asking to these people who have seen a massive amount of success on the show, but also then permeates into the questions that I'm asking myself. So when I'm in this period of like, I don't know what I'm doing right now, which has been quite a bit lately, to be honest with you, the best exercise that I can do is I just sit down with a blank sheet of paper and I start writing out questions, questions that I can ask myself, questions that I can ponder, questions that will lead me to a path to actually give me a crystal clear idea of what the next step should be. So ask better questions, you get better answers. Start writing out a list of questions that are just good to ponder from time to time and make sure that you're actually on the path that you want to be on. So the quality of the questions you ask would be the first one. Second thing is the quality of the habits that you form. We are nothing but a combination of all the habits that we have. That, that. Who, who, who, like. Show me. Show me your habits now. I'll show you who you'll be at the end of the year. Show me your habits now. I'll show you who you'll be in five. The. The ability to create the life that you want comes after you nail down the habits that will help you to create the life that you want. Because here's the beautiful thing about habits. Habits are basically the lagging effect of discipline. So people tend to overvalue discipline, at least in my opinion, because the, the, the, the danger of doing this is that you can fall into the trap of believing that other people are just more disciplined than you are. Well, you know, you see somebody who gets up at 5 and goes to the gym and writes for an hour and does this thing for two hours, and then they're doing sales calls from this time to this time, or they're going to this marketing thing, or they're doing all the things that they're supposed to be doing. You look at somebody like that and you go, man, I'm just, I'm just not disciplined. And it's sort of just an excuse that you can write off and just say, well, hey, those people are disciplined. I'm not disciplined. But what I found to be true is that discipline is sort of like a bank account and it resets every day. You start every day with a certain amount of discipline. This is why we get something called decision fatigue by the end of the day, is that even the smallest decisions, which is the age old argument of husband and wife trying to figure out what they want to eat for dinner or where they're going to go for dinner, it's, I don't know, you pick. I don't know, you pick and it's always for dinner. It's never for breakfast because dinner is at the end of the day. And you've both been up making decisions and doing stuff all day. So by the time it comes down to the end of the day, you can't even think about, about what you want to eat for food. You're just trying to think about what you're going to feel like when you finally get nestled in bed and have the comfort of the day ending so you can get some sleep. So that's why you see people like, you know, Steve Jobs, who was famous for the black turtleneck that he wore every day because he was just trying to eliminate decision fatigue. He wanted his decision making power to be for the biggest decisions of his day and didn't want to have to use any of that quote unquote bank account to decide what he was going to wear that day. So, you know, Mark Zuckerberg has like whatever black T shirt, black V neck or something like that, but for Steve Jobs it was the black turtleneck. And then he was obviously disciplined about how he used his decision making ability throughout the rest of the day. Right. Wearing a black turtleneck every day is not gonna make you Steve Jobs. But the, that, that is an important principle to take away, which is to say that you start every day with this certain amount of, you know, decision making ability, but you start every day with a certain amount of discipline as well. And if you are starting with zero good habits, then what can happen is you get overwhelmed with the idea of completely changing everything about yourself. So you see somebody hyper disciplined, right? And then you go, well, I'm just going to do everything that they do, right? I'm going to adopt their morning routine, right? You read like the Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod or some of these other morning routine things that have been out there and you go, okay, cool, I'm going to do that. So then all of a sudden you wake up the next morning, you're eager to get started. First day takes an enorm amount of discipline just to get yourself up out of bed at, you know, 5 o' clock or 6 o' clock or whatever feels early to you, whatever, you know, time you set to say that this is where I'm going to start my day. Then you're like, okay, well I got to do my affirmations, then I got to do my meditation and I got to read 10 minutes of a personal development book and then I got a journal afterwards. And then as soon as I'm done with that, I'm going to go to the gym and then as soon as I get home, I'm going to have this protein, I'm going to eat this healthy meal and then I'm going to do my most productive activity for the day. And it's like you've, you, you're overdrawn in a disciplined bank account. 7:30am and then wonder why four days later you can't keep up with the routine. And then you just go, Then you just give up, throw your hands up in the air and go, okay, well I'm just not disciplined then. So it's not a factor of whether or not you're disciplined enough to do it. It's a factor of that it's impossible to be overdrawn on that discipline account every single day of the week. It's not going to work. That's, that's why, you know, 90% of people or some massive number like that give up on their New Year's resolutions before the end of January because they, they set weight, they every single aspect about themselves and they want to do it overnight. As if the change of the year has any effect on the person that you've been on the person that you've been for the past, you know, however long you've been alive. So the idea behind the habits that you form is that allows you to use the discipline that you have in the account to form good habits so that those habits at some point appear to be disciplined. Right. So those who appear to be hyper disciplined don't just have more discipline than you. They just, they have, they've wisely used their discipline to stack habits over time. So once something becomes a habit, you no longer have to use as much discipline to do that thing. You might stop to use a little bit, right? Especially if it's not something that's, that's, that's easy to do, right? Like, you know, put on your workout clothes and go to the gym, right? Like, that's not something, that's just something habitual that you do without thinking. You still have to like, intentionally do it. But I'll tell you, as somebody who goes to the gym five to seven days a week, it's not something that I think about too much. It's more. It's not necessarily a factor of like, am I going to the gym today? It's more of a question of like, when am I going to the gym today? So it, it's become such a habit, something that I do something that's a part of my identity so much that I no longer have to use an enormous amount of discipline to make sure that I actually get up and go do that thing. So then you do this for three years, four years, five years, six years. And then you can start discipline. You can start using the, the that discipline to create this habit stack. And then that habit stack appears to other people like, you are really disciplined. Then you're all of a sudden the person that people point out and go, like, well, you're just really disciplined. I'm, I'm just disciplined of a person and maybe I should be more disciplined. And it's like, you know, in your heart of hearts, like, look, that was me five years ago. The difference is I just focused on one thing at a time and I stacked those habits as sequentially as I possibly could. And as sequentially as I could is what I. I mean, like, start with the one that makes it easier to do the next thing and then, and then do the next thing. That's easy. That makes the next thing easier. So, you know, the first habit is I wake up in the morning at this time. That's it. I'm gonna get up at 5, 5am no matter what. Even if it means that I take a nap at 8am Because I'm struggling to make it through the morning. Doesn't matter I' at 5am no matter what, regardless. And you do that for however long it takes to create a habit. There's numerous schools of thoughts on numerous schools of thought on this, but nothing is really like objectively a science about it. You just gotta kind of do it until you no longer have to think about it. Then you go to the next thing that triggers that response. So you say, well, I want to go to the gym. Okay, well, after I'm up at 5am, I'm going to put on my workout shoes or I'm going to get dressed in my gym attire rather than getting dressed in my professional attire. So just the habit of putting on those clothes will make you more likely to go to the gym. Then you can just start going to the gym and walking on the treadmill for five minutes. Even if that's the only thing that you do where you don't get a full hour weight training session in like you really want to do. Okay, just make sure you darken the doors of the gym every single day for the next however many days it takes for you to form that habit. Then you can start taking that 10 minute treadmill walk to when we do some weight training now we add this thing in. So, so think about, think about the ideal habits that you want to create and then order them sequentially in the way that makes each subsequent habit a little bit easier to adopt because it's the next logical step in the equation. And then you do that long enough, then you can become the person that appears to be hyper disciplined. Then it's like, well, I don't think about the fact that I wake up and then first thing is I drink some black coffee and I, and I write for an hour. You know, like that might seem like a heavy lift for now, but if you, you know, take the next couple of months to do that one thing, then after that it's not going to feel like you're using that much discipline to do it, because you're not, then you can use that leftover discipline to then go work on the next habit and form the next habit. So the habits that you form, the quality of the habits that you form will determine the quality of your life in a few years down the road. So the quality of the questions that you ask, number one, the quality of the habits that you form, number two, and then lastly the quality of the relationships that you build along the way. Now this, to me it's like the, it's relationships plus nothing equals everything. To me it's like relationships are the, the, the best thing in life. Not even just from a professional perspective, which I think could potentially be arguable. Even people that I like a lot and people who I follow would say like networking is a waste of time or you know, they encourage you just to get really good at the thing that you do rather than spend your time going and building relationships with other people. And I see, I see what they're saying, but even those people, I'll look in their past and I'll look at and I'll be able to point to relationships that turn them into the person that was capable of achieving the things that they wanted to achieve because they had this mentor, because they had this person that told them this one piece of advice and it changed their paradigm and changed the way they thought about things. So even the people that sort of vilify the activity of quote, unquote networking are still doing it to a certain extent. It just isn't the entire goal of that activity, if that makes sense. So then long term, the longest study ever on human happiness that was conducted by Harvard, which is a famous study now found by and large to a significant degree that the overall happiness that any individual person has in life is largely dependent upon the depth and quality of the, of the relationships that they hold most dear. So I can't really, I can't leave this out of the equation because it's too much of a factor for overall human improvement. Human happiness, fulfillment, contribution. There's so many things that come from the relationships that you build. So there is no greater indicator of long term success and happiness than the quality of the relationships that you have with the people who are closest to you. And the data is overwhelming on this. It's, it's, it's too much. It's too much. Too much data that's proven this over and over and again, time and time again. So the quality of relationship, the quality of the relationships that you hold in your life, whether it's close personal friendships for people that you've known since you were 5, whether it's your spouse or your business partners or your colleagues, the quality of the relationships that you hold closest to you will also largely determine the quality of your life. So the quality of the questions that you ask, ask yourself better questions, ask other people better questions. The quality of the habits that you create and then the quality of the relationships that you build, those things will have the greatest impact on your life. Like you, you, you, you tell me the questions that you're asking others and yourself now, you show me the habits that you're forming now and you show me the relationships that you have now and I'll be able to largely predict what the outcome of your life is gonna look like in two years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, assuming that you don't change any of those things. So make an active decision to, to positive those three things and your life will be positively affected by that. So that's it for today's episode. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you on the next one. Peace.