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today to prepare for tomorrow. Join into the Soap From BCG wherever you get your podcasts. What have you learnt from your experience on YouTube about the importance of consistency and also from what you kind of what typically happens with viral videos is just there's it's so impossibly hard to predict the outcome right so a lot of people think that a lot
of people on YouTube will make videos called How to Make a Varyll Video and in marketing it's all like here are the secret source, here are the secret principles but in reality you can only you can how you can guess a couple of principles but the outcome is hard to predict so what have you learnt about consistency but then also being able to predict the outcome?
Yeah, when I was listening to your your company chapter I just found myself like nodding along like an absolute maniac to everything you were saying I think it applies so much to YouTube. These days I teach people how to be part-time YouTubers and the thing I say is that if you make one video every week for two years then I 100% guarantee it will change
your life. I can't put any numbers on it I can't tell you'll have 100,000 subscribers or how much money you'll be making but I can 100% guarantee it will change your life at the very least in terms of the skills and the experience and the contacts and the friends you're going to make through that process but you have to put that one video week and you have to do it for at least two years. Just ask on that then on that point there what is it that would make someone do that?
Because I mean that's like fucking clean the floor every day for two years and I promise you'll work out for you. People don't seem to be able to do those kinds of things without some kind of intrinsic driver so I'm curious because you could say that to a million people you could broadcast that through a ton of 95% plus will still fail. So what is it that makes people from your experience but also from your own life makes them do the work without guarantee of outcome?
Yeah I think again I feel like this bit of a cop out because this is the stuff that you talk about like enjoying the process and this is kind of the theme of the book that I'm writing around how you know it's actually quite hard to show up week after week not
see any results not see the views and the subscribers going up and stuff particularly quickly but the thing that makes it bearable the thing that makes it fun is actually enjoying the process and shifting away from outcome oriented goals like a certain number of views
or certain number of subscribers and more towards goals that are 100% within our control like I just want to make two videos a week and if I'm happy with the video then it goes out and in fact even if I'm not happy with the video it goes out anyway and everyone
I know who has succeeded on YouTube has had that kind of attitude at some point I just have to get that video out every Tuesday without fail it's not an option it's going to get done and you know like you say when we talk when we talk about compounding
that video and day one isn't going to do anything the video and day two or day three or day 24 is not going to do anything but you find when you're on day 300 and day 600 oh actually all of this stuff has been compounding very very slowly and then the results happen really really really slowly and then all at once as soon as you just get that one video that goes viral.
That is I think that's the chapter I talk about the eighth wonder of the world yeah that's it with Warren Buffett and my dog Pablo being the opposing investor and I genuinely I think I learned that lesson when I wrote the book when I looked back on my life and I thought
about all the things that I'd compounded in my favor whether it was like my honestly it's going to be keep it facts with you my teeth had some problems with my teeth and I thought do you know why and I took a probably references in the book like I hadn't been
brushing one of my teeth properly and it never mattered today or tomorrow the day after but there I was in that dentist chair but having my teeth fucking pulled out and then my Instagram was the same health and fitness at the moment the same my business was the same
and it just goes to show that it's not those key critical big decisions we make to drop out it's that like yeah so the compounding small almost irrelevant decisions yeah but people don't the because I heard you started working out I did yeah and you stopped so I've had
a personal trainer now for the last kind of eight months and I've been going on and off with the workout things since the age of 18 and I've never done it properly until I got a personal trainer where now I'm having to show up I'm paying someone so it could an hour to basically just
be with me while I'm doing stuff and that has been the thing that's given me the most results so I think whatever like I find in my life for things for things that I actually care about where I'm like okay I actually care about becoming a happy sexy millionaire or whatever let me try and
figure out ways that will remove my own need for discipline and willpower from that equation and instead get an accountability buddy or get a coach or pay a friend a hundred quid if I don't do the thing this was what my brother and I did when we were trying to motivate ourselves I was
doing songwriting he was doing stand-up comedy like right if we don't do this every Thursday for half an hour we're gonna pay each other 50 quit things like that to remove the choice the motivation the willpower the discipline at all the more of that can be outsoaked to someone else or remove
completely the more I find I actually get stuff done and then I don't worry about it because I'm like okay this is taken care of I just show up I guess you're removing you're moving the motor it's basically like removing it you're moving it to another pact like the near I L refers to it is
what you've described there's a financial pact where now your motivation is to not lose 50 quid because that is that's a greater motivating force than you have within yourself to work out yeah is that sustainable no it's not okay this is all the stuff that I'm researching for the book
at the moment and you talk about this as well like in intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and the way that I think of it when I think back on my life is that everything that I've done sustainably has been because of intrinsic motivation I've genuinely enjoyed the thing but you can genuinely
enjoy a thing and still find it really hard to get started and I think that's where the biggest procrastination comes in for all of us where it's actually just showing up to the gym that's the hard part like what once you're there it's kind of easy it's writing those first 10 words
because once you've started writing the first 10 needs kind of easier to enjoy the process of writing the rest of them and so the and so the way I think about it is to get over that like hump of procrastination that activation energy to get started at that point I will use every tool
that in my arsenal to just just get me to do the thing for two minutes because I think once once you do the thing for two minutes it becomes so much easier to actually enjoy the process and sustain it and and you're so right when it comes to procrastination like that getting started point
I've again just learnt this from podcast guests that have had me or I like and I refer to him he he said to me one day on this podcast he was like people procrastinate usually because there's a great deal of psychological discomfort surrounding starting the task and a lot of the time
especially with a gym or even an essay that psychological discomfort is like you don't have the answers so I don't know how to use the machines at the gym or I don't actually have I don't feel competent enough to even write this essay so I'm just going to do the fucking dishes yeah that's like I'm
going to hoover the whole house and anyone else's house that means hoovering today exactly um you you wrote you made a video about procrastination didn't you yeah yeah break that down for me what's what's in the video um so the video is called how to stop procrastinating really yeah um
um so the the way to think about procrastination basically procrastination is a problem with getting started um kind of this this law of inertia uh in Newtons First Law that if something is that rest it will continue to stay at rest but if something's moving it will continue to move
without needing an external force and so the key to overcoming procrastination is that little that little that little nudge at the start towards actually getting started and all of the techniques around that like in the whole like psychology researcher research around this is just around
making make make it as easy as possible um so reduce all of the friction to doing it if you want to learn the guitar then have the guitar by your so far rather than in the wardrobe where you're never going to see it and if it's out of sight it's out of mind you're never going to do it there's
like the external environmental friction towards doing the thing but then there's also the internal friction it's like those narratives that we tell ourselves the uh either the psychological discomfort of going to the gym that I don't want to see how other people are going to see me the
even even having having the wrong sort of goal like if my goal in writing the book is I really want to hit the New York Times bestseller list then it's really really hard to bring myself to write anything because now every single water has to be a New York Times best-selling word
whereas if the goal is to be honest I just want to write a book I'm proud of that's fun to fun to write that's actually within my control and it becomes so much easier to get started doing the thing um so to overcome procrastination we need to eliminate external friction i.e. the
environmental stuff we need to try our best to get rid of the internal friction like the emotional side of it the mindset the perfectionism the the fear the discomfort and then if we still need help there are a few a few hacks the the one that I use all the time is the the two-minute rule which is
where I will genuinely convince myself I'm only going to do it for two minutes uh and if I want I'm allowed to stop after the two minutes because two minutes is better than nothing but like 95% of the time I decide to continue because two minutes is all you need to change your life yeah sure that's good yeah that's really good and I that two-minute thing is fascinating to me because I one of the things that um I see is another psychological barrier to starting is people view it as
like they view the challenges Mount Everest whereas it like they've got to eat i'll say it in another way they view the challenges moving Mount Everest and really if they viewed it as just like moving one pebble at a time it becomes such a simple task yeah and I get this a lot when entrepreneurs ask me they say see if I want to start a business where do I start and you can hear in the question that they see it as moving Mount Everest and I'm like well today all you have to do is think of a name
just think of like 50 names make a short list of names and then we'll revisit it tomorrow and then tomorrow maybe think of you know go and check if the website's available and then we'll revisit the day after yeah and when it becomes that when it becomes sort of really small itemized one small
step at a time and you're not having to get from zero to a thousand immediately it becomes so you know the psychological discomfort fades away it feels achievable and that your two-minute rules doing a similar thing where it's saying well today only I've only got to do just just
just open the word document right title and then we're done you know and that's fascinating what about we're gonna see something else there yeah I mean just just to your point there um heavy heavy come across the blog wait but why no oh it's incredible you should definitely
interview Tim urban on your own America oh I literally yesterday went on his Instagram and sent him a DM oh great yeah he's he's awesome any any podcast he's ever been on I've been like like this is so sick uh he has a great blog post series about overcoming procrastination and the
way he refers to that that that point you just made is that um there are a lot of tasks that are very like vague and eaky and you have to be able to un-ickify a task uh and something like start a business is eaky something like learn to code is eaky because like what the hell does that even mean
like where do you even start whereas brainstorm 10 ideas for a name and pick one of them is a very clearly defined next action step and so I get this with students all the time where people are like oh I don't have the motivation to study for my chemistry exam it's like what's on you to do list
study for my chemistry exam that's never gonna happen reach chapter one and answer questions four to five are a reasonable thing a reasonably defined next action step and so what I do is anytime I find myself procrastinating from something I think okay am I procrastinating because I actually
the the task is too eaky I I don't know what I have to do because once I know what I have to do I can then do it for two minutes and it gets done this episode is brought to you by Lincoln financial group pickles are amazing but how do I avoid
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