SNM035: Power of Ritual

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the power of ritual on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by fresh books. Accounting and bookkeeping mistakes destroyed thousands of small businesses every single day. Bookkeeping doesn't have to be hard. Turn to the number one invoicing software for small businesses. Start for free today at serve no master dot com Backslash Fresh Books Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. Every time I've become successful in life, it started with the development of a ritual ah, pattern that got me into the right minds at the right state of excitement. Last week, I decided I wanted to write a new book. I came with an idea last weekend on Saturday. By Wednesday had the title and the cover locked in and in the course of three days in the morning, I wrote the entire book 40,000 words. Most people can't write a 10,000 word book in four weeks, let alone four days. What separates me from other writers and my genius and my special men exception? No, It all comes down to developing rituals and patterns that get us into the right minds that they get us excited. I like to procrastinate as much as anyone else and tomorrow's episode. The next episode's gonna be all about procrastination, but I want to start with focusing on the way to prevent that in every area of life we have. A foundation of ritual and ritual, really is a series of systems patterns, things we d'oh to get started. Everyone working a 9 to 5 job has a building morning ritual. The time they get up the way they have their breakfast. Do you take a shower before after work? Do you lay out your clothes the night before in the morning before work These little steps, these organizational structures become very rigid. Nobody puts their socks on before their underwear. It becomes part of our ritual. I discovered working in other industries and traveling around the world. How important ritual is to maintaining a sense of rigidity to maintaining our sense of strength and consistency. It really provides the infrastructure of the scaffolding for a successful business as you move forward with school work and life. Many areas wth e infrastructure's already there. We already have a built in ritual built in pattern school starts the same way with the ringing of the bell putting on a uniform. We have these steps, but there comes a moment when you're going to step away from those things. Our goal is part of the serving. A master tribe. Working together is to get to the point where you can leave that job behind, and when that happens, you lose all that infrastructure If you don't have the power of ritual. If you haven't got your own patterns into your work life, now you're going to run into some real problems. This happens a lot to digital nomads and people traveling. Soon as they hit the road, all of their infrastructure disappears, and without ritual they run into trouble. So that's why today I want to really help you develop a powerful stares of rituals. They're gonna help you build your business and stay consistent. The brain is really wired to enjoy repeating things. We love cycles. This is why most people go to restaurants, even if a restaurant as 1000 things on the menu. The order. Four or five things in a cycle. We don't like experimentation as much as we pretend we to. Our brains are designed to like patterns. When we have a pattern, our brain doesn't have to work this hard. It stores the pattern and then it just clicks. Repeat. It's kind of like a macro on your computer. You could tell your computer that when you push a certain character, it's gonna take 7 10 20 Actions are brains or program the same way. This is why we always drive the same way to work from your house to your office. They're probably three or four routes. You could take 99% of people in 99% of the time. Take the exact same route every single time. Even if you have a different route to and from work, you take route a toe, work and route. Be back. The thought of taking Route B to work and round a back. It just sounds weird or broken. We have these patterns in many areas of our life. Try sleeping upside down in your bed, the beds the exact same size, but it feels weird and unnatural. We all sleep with our feet towards the door. Sleep with your head towards the door for one night and you'll see our brain doesn't like what we break patterns. Here's what's amazing about that. I didn't experiment about sleeping in college. Me and my roommate switch to sleeping with our heads towards the door. We we reverse the traditional ritual, and we discovered that after a few weeks it became normal to us and switching back became weird. We get locked into patterns when we change them to get locked in new patterns. You lose all of the ritual infrastructure around you when you quit your job. Suddenly, you can get up whenever you want to. You don't have to drive to work at a certain time. You don't have to deal with rush hour. You don't have to build plans around other people's rules. Many people, when they leave their job behind, they go home and there work really diminishes if you build an entire business working two hours a day and get to the point where you can leave your job behind. Suddenly you have 8 10 or 12 hours available toe work. Your productivity often drops through the floor. Your efficiency disappears, and I don't want that to happen to you. The more efficiently you use your time, the more free time you get. We start by building a ritual, and the ritual makes us comfort. Makes us comfortable. It breeds this sense of familiarity when we do the same thing over and over again. Suddenly our fears disappear. Ritual, more than anything else, is about silencing distractions and the fears in the back of your mind that say you might not make it. You might not be able to do it. You're not doing the right thing. We all have fears we go through very recently. I've been through several shocks in my business over the past two weeks. I discovered that I have to change my payment processor, my membership software, the platform which my entire website is built on all the infrastructure and the hosting company. I ran a series of problems that working together, all cascaded. It would be very easy for me to collapse, rolled into a ball and start crying. I woke up Sunday morning and discovered that my membership site was no longer working for my customers. The videos were no longer playing. When you have hundreds of videos and you spend months building something, it's very stressful to discover it's not working. I had a strong feeling about the cause of the problem, but when it's not working, sometimes you just want to run away from everything and you get this fear even at my level, even when you're running a business for a long time. Sometimes things happen there outside your control, in particular with this specific problem. I thought it was caused by my hosting company, and I accused him of changing a file on my server. I knew they'd made a change Friday than unmade. It's Saturday and something had gone wrong. I was 99% sure they'd reverted to a file that was six weeks old. Instead of reactivating the new version that had been edited and corrected was working properly. They reactivated one that was two months old, six weeks old and basically brought back a bunch of problems that they'd fixed months ago and in the past I spoke to sex support. They said No, no way. It's not us. We didn't do anything. It's definitely a problem with your software. It's your fault. You made a change. I'd logged on the website in two days. How could I possibly my fault doesn't matter. They were adamant. They blame me. They blame me. They believe me. I then reached out Thio Attack a specialist, 1/3 party guy and I said here the problem I'm running into, I need to jump servers He said the same thing. He said it was my fault in a way. It was caused by the host. I switched hosting companies. It took seven hours. Just switch to a new provider to get my website moved over and everything Immediately, the website began working perfectly. All of tech support the old hosting company dead wrong. The third party provider, this tech support guy, the specialist was gonna bring in for a large project. He just got fired because he was dead wrong. The only way I got through that's stressful day was by locking into my ritual my patterns. Tell me, don't quit and continue working to the day when you have a Siri's of rituals. When you have faced these challenges and fears they don't crush, you were able to endure them. Every time I sit down to write a book, I think it's gonna be terrible. It's hard to admit that, but I want to be really honest with you. There's a part of me that thinks the new book I wrote will be awful. It's a very small part of me. It's not the majority, but in every one of us we have this voice in the back of our heads that says Don't even bother. It's not gonna be good. Don't release it. I sent the final version of the book off to the editor about two hours ago. I almost canceled. I almost didn't hire him to edit the book. I almost said Wait, I shouldn't even do this. Why release this book? It's not Could be good. These little fears. They creep up into our minds and they come from nowhere. I know I'm a good writer. I've sold so many books, I should be totally confident. That's what we all hope we get to the top of the mountain. We think all of our books will be good. How many amazing actors have appeared in a terrible movie? How many great writers have eventually written that terrible book? The fear failure doesn't disappear. But having a powerful ritual a pattern helps us overcome these fears and get the job done. To be totally honest with you, I was really hoping to write the book in a single day. My original goal was to write a 25,000 word book for this new project. In the end, the book is just over 40,000 words. After editing, it's gonna be between 40 and 41,000 in that range. So I went 40% over my original estimate weight. 60% over Master. But he wrote 15,000 extra words, and it took me three days and another two hours on the final morning. And then it took me a day and 1/2 to edit Do my rewrite before I send it to the editor. I didn't hit my initial goal, but when I'm in my ritual, even though it took me a few extra days, I still wrote very, very fast. 13,000 words a day is pretty good. In addition to recording podcast episodes adding podcast episodes, writing the show notes for the episodes, I still wrote those all myself, working on other products for clients. I didn't even work exclusively on this project, but I still just sit down and focus for that long requires ritual. It's very hard for many people to sit down for eight hours straight and just right. When you have ritual, it builds comfort. And that bids confidence because you're then in a rhythm that you're familiar with and you understand, and it becomes a crucial bulwark to establishing your business and maintaining your productivity. When you leave your boss behind, it can speed up your work flow. Our days without ritual become distraction. Many people spend 56 or seven hours checking email throughout the day. A massive study showed that people use way more hours on any more than you would ever imagine. Most people only productive 20 or 30% of the time they are at the office if you work in an office and I have before too. We both know that kind of sounds right when you work for yourself, you don't want to do that. So let's begin together to talk about building an actual ritual. Now you agree it's useful. Let's get into the nitty gritty, the nuts and bolts, the value. Every little thing you d'oh, The more fixed it becomes, the more strict you are about times, location and setting, the better you'll get at performing your job if you're planning on traveling. If you have a desire to become a digital nomad, become someone who works all around the world. You want to develop a ritual that's location independent. If you're going to stay where you are right now, you could develop a ritual built around your home. If you just want to stay home, take care of your kids. Have a certain rhythm. That's great. We want to develop a pattern. The first piece of the pattern is always working at the same time of the day when you leave your job behind that piece of had and will break because suddenly you have more time available. You'll have to develop a new ritual the very next day. This is when I get up for work. Right now, I'm working on changing my morning ritual with my girlfriend. We just had a discussion. We moved houses a few months ago, and it changed my morning ritual in the previous house. Had an entire amazing workout set up on her porch, and every morning I could work out first thing in the morning. Out. Get up. I'll go outside and work out, and that's how I'd start my day here. We don't have the same set up on our balcony. It's a different location. I do have my exercise bike here, and I ride it every day. But I don't do it first thing in the morning and have used my cannibals in a few weeks, and I've noticed that my diet has lost its effectiveness. So we're doing a bunch of big changes rebuilding the infrastructure of our day to increase my efficiency, working out at the same time every day, getting up at the same time every day, working at the same time every day. Building these patterns will make it easier for you to become consistent with your work quality if you start every day differently. If you do things in random orders, it becomes hard for your brain to lock into a pattern. I check my email every day. First thing. When I start my work at the computer, I check my email. Then I close it, and I don't check any of my business accounts for the rest of the day. I do leave one of my personal email accounts, open that email account. It gets like three meals a day, and usually it's about things. I'm shopping for its never business, and it's never anything serious. For example, right now I'm trying to buy a new paddle board so that someone I have to email so the day that's the one email I checked a reply to today. Other than that only in the morning all of my business email accounts. If you email me, I'll only check it one today. That's how I do with my business, because if you allow it to become part of the day, it loses its ritual element. Checking the email every few hours or every few minutes, it becomes a distraction and waste. A huge amount of time becomes a time suck. Establish exactly how you want to start every day. Are you gonna exercise before work are you going to drink a glass of juice? Are you gonna bring a snack? Do you sit down and have something to drink with? You have a cup of coffee sitting down at your desk. All of these little pieces become very specific. I eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same time every single day. I'm very strict about the times of Dad. Eats very fixed for me. I always have the same drink to start every day. I always drink water at the same times every day. All of these things become a powerful pattern so that even though I'm on my own, there's no one watching me. I'm in the room by myself right now. My girlfriend and the kids. They're in the other room so that I can record this without background noise because my kids don't know how to be quiet. You would definitely be hearing them if they were in the room. Right now, all of these elements become our ritual. The more you can eliminate randomness from your daily plan from the structure of your day, the more successful you'll become when you notice a distraction entering your business. Entering the structure of your day. You want to take action to deal with it. Right now, I have noticed the number of Skype messages I get and the number of messages get through. Slack has gotten too high. Sometimes I'm working on something and I don't want any distractions. Today. When I was doing my final edits, everyone was messaging me, and I thought about shutting down. All those platforms normally leave them open because I rarely get a few messages, but not too much. It's not too distracting. But lately it's become too much, and if it be continues to be a problem for a few more days, then I'll shut it down and only leave Skype open for a few hours a day. I'll do the same, Dennis, right that I do to email all limit the amount of distraction that's available to me, and it will become a different part of my ritual every time you notice a distraction. I used to have a big problem with reading the news throughout the day. I would spend all day reading my favorite news site, and I would go back and check multiple times throughout the day. I tried to completely quit reading the news because it's never good news and totally waste. Now. I just read the news every morning for at 15 minutes, and then I've done have a strict time. It's become part of my morning ritual, and then it's gone. Each distraction that's a part of your life turned into a ritual, and the distraction minimizes. Part of the building of ritual in infrastructure is building up the times you communicate with other people, the entertainment blocks built into your day, the structure of starting your day and the structure of when you close out your day as much as starting your day is important. The way you end. It's important. Have a fixed time every day when you finish. If you started seven in the morning like I do at 3 p.m. U. Turn off the computer, you're done days finished. As an entrepreneur, as someone who works for yourself, sometimes you just want to push yourself so hard. This is just a cz rial for me as it is for everyone else. Sometimes when I want to get something done, I want to get so many things done. I put in those extra hours this is something again, being very real with you. This is another area I'm working on recently because I've noticed myself slipping. I used to, with my previous ritual move into this new house, damage my ritual a little bit, so I need to rebuild it with my previous ritual. Every morning I would start the day by writing my exercise bike or running and do my kettle bells falling Will work. Had a printout workout from a personal trainer. Do it every morning, start my day, follow my pattern very strict, shower up, walk over to work at same time every morning, working my little office till three o'clock and walk back to spend the rest afterward to kids and do something on the ocean in the afternoon so I would get to workouts a day since I've moved to my new house. My desk right now is like three feet from my exercise bike. I read the exercise bike every day for 20 to 30 minutes. Get a good sweat it, but now I'm accepting once a day. It's not as structured, and today, when I was in the ocean of my girlfriend went out surfing, I realized that I need to rebuild my old ritual to kind of take control of my life. I don't want my health to slip while I focus too much on business. This is why ritual and patterns are so important. It's not just about protecting your business. It's also about protecting your mental out, your physical health, your spiritual wellbeing, your sense of who you are, your confidence. When I don't exercise enough, I start to feel spikes of depression. If I exercise. If I get my exercise every day, I don't ever have that feeling. It really makes a difference in how I feel about myself. My internal thought life. So these steps these ways, we build structure very important and build ritual, build structure into your day and become strict about it. Have the clothes you wear when you work? Have the rules about how you do things when you work. What I'm writing. I always wear a certain pair of headphones so people know I'm writing and I'm in the zone. I do things in a very certain way. This podcast. I'm very, very specific about how I record it. I could probably record this podcast directly into my computer, and I bet the sound to be 98% the same. But it's not my original. Instead, I unplugged the laptop. I turn it off, I put it across the room. I unplug everything in the room. The water machine's unplugged, the air conditioners off. All the fans are off. It's getting so hot, and I record through this external microphone into my zoom age. Six. It doesn't have any computer components, so there's no hard drive running or fan running any of those things for background noise. I want to create the best sound possible and have the ritual or the pattern for high record each podcast episode. The steps I go through to prepare for it. All of these different steps. They're designed not to control you but to help you take control of your life. Help you have strong structure. Some people use the Pomodoro technique. They develop a very specific structure for what they're gonna do every 20 minutes or every 40 minutes throughout the day. Creating an astro structure to control your day is the best way to maximize your productivity and keep yourself from going crazy. If I didn't eat lunch at the same time every day. It would be very easy for me to lose track of time and work too long. Straight. I hurt my back, hurt my arms, sitting at a desk for too long. Even when you love what you're doing, you can still hurt your body. You don't have a losing track of time, and the whole day disappears. Having the moments in the day where you have your break, where you go to the bathroom, where you have lunch, having these things at fixed times, it also allows you to prepare for them so you don't put a meeting at the same time. All of these pieces of building a structure they're the key to really succeeding online and ritual has helped me in every area of my life to achieve success, developing patterns that get me into the right state to write the right state toe work, help me overcome my fears. Whenever I'm nervous about something, I go through my rituals and suddenly those fears disappear. I just start doing the job. It really helped me to overcome my procrastination and put myself in a powerful state. Tomorrow we're gonna talk even more about overcoming procrastination because I know that's one of the things that really kills young new start up businesses. But for now, just remember the power of ritual and help you to succeed as you leave your job behind and you build on amazing, successful online business. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Tuesday with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you Tuesday. Thank you for Listen to this episode of the serve No master podcast. Follow me at facebook dot com. Backslash Serve no master