Like many, once, I was a slave to my phone, my diet was a mess, and TV was my constant companion. The concept of sports was foreign to me.
Over the past three years, I've embarked on a journey of profound transformation. I made a decision to strive for monumental success in life, a success that transcends the conventional notions of a house and family. It wasn't easy. I had to battle with distractions, bad habits, and the allure of instant gratification. But I persevered, and for six months, I lived a life free from anything that could hold me back. Once a mere flicker, my discipline has become a blazing fire.
Why do we need this text? It's because modern technologies, if not used mindfully, can become addictive time killers and distractors. Look at mindless social media consumption. It's a time, attention, health, and emotional energy drain for some meaningless entertainment. This constant distraction leaves you with no time to pursue anything authentic, and your diluted attention keeps you stagnant in life. The damage bad habits create is well-known, yet many try to numb and distract themselves even further. Life becomes a perpetual stress if you waste time. After all, “you can’t be productive 24/7 and need to switch off”. But this principle of life: adaptation, means that sooner or later, those fun things, such as internet usage, don’t provide the fun they used to. Hence, you need more and get even more addicted and look for new pleasures. Such is the life of a hedonist. It’s a painful cycle, seemingly filled with joy. It's time to break free from this vicious circle.
Fun things, e.g., the internet distracts you → Waste of time → Stress, caused by the waste of time → “Switch off” by distracting yourself from the stress → Eventually distracting yourself is no longer enough → You seek new distractions.
There are two core motivators: pleasure and the desire to counter pain. For example, sports are the desire for health. Getting rich creates pleasure in the form of freedom. Yet, those motivations aren’t too great. The motivator to avoid pain is magnitudes more potent. The potential to lose everything makes people defy insurmountable odds and work like there’s no tomorrow.
What about motivation, then? You need pain to change your life. Turning points are always marked with pain. Pain is the taste of change. Only if you are miserable will you be willing to change, to abandon what you deem holy. – Here’s how I finally broke free from my phone addiction. I estimated that I had wasted seven thousand hours. There are eight thousand hours in a year. This realization hurt enough to make me never touch the internet again. Indeed, it was a bit more nuanced, but the message remains. The pain was large enough to trigger a cascade of change.
If you do not experience the pain necessary to break free, allow a few more years to pass by. You will see how many opportunities you missed, how your health deteriorated, how much potential was buried, how many days passed without progress, and how often you struggled for nothing. You will realize how many years of your life have been wasted, especially those of your youth. Let regret give you motivation. It may be too late, but at least you were convinced you had fun.
Unfortunately, it's not enough to decide rationally. If life was just as simple as making a simple decision… If you decide without pain, comfort and complacency will get you. Exceptional progress comes from expectational pain. Visualizations can, of course, help to magnify pain. Outside of that, there is no shortcut. You may understand this text now, but you will truly understand this if a bit of time has passed.
You will be willing to change once your destiny has hit you hard enough. If you haven’t reached this point, save this text for later.
For one week, better for two weeks, you cut out any bad habit at once. You’re not allowed to compromise, not under any circumstances. That means you cut out sweets, movies, stimulation, social media, junk food, warm water, internet, sugar, and coffee… Yes, coffee is a bad habit for most people. You need to cure your brain.
The most important thing to eliminate is excuses and delays. You don’t need social media for friends, family and business. To hell with business; do you even have a product? You don’t need to watch videos. Since the dawn of human existence, people survived without social media. Go for a walk. You don’t need to eat sugar; you will thrive without it. Stop listening to your brain; it has put you in a terrible place! Start today.
What does it truly mean to decide? Deciding means carving in stone, then throwing the chisel away. Deciding means cutting alternatives. People who can’t make decisions and constantly make excuses are frowned upon. No legend attained their status through excuses.
Your belief system is based on past experiences and aims to predict or manifest the future. Chances are, your beliefs are unproductive ones to pool from. The fastest way to change your beliefs is to surround yourself with people already possessing productive beliefs. Since the mind can’t differentiate between reality and thoughts, there’s an even easier way. Absorb the productive beliefs by reading from great individuals.
After initial progress and motivation, you will notice a decline. Your discipline and willpower were stretched far beyond their capacity. Logically, they exhaust. Hence, you will slip back, and that’s natural. Slipping back is part of the progress, often even multiple times. Only after many trials can mastery be attained. You can’t skip stages, and falling back is a necessary test.
Here's an example. I started showering cold roughly a year ago, and I lasted pretty long for the first time; I was full of motivation. The following times, my motivation decreased, and after two months, I kind of stopped showering cold. Life is always intertwined. At that time, I also slipped back from my journey to removing my digital addiction. Then, I started to regain momentum by showering both warm and cold for the last few seconds and using my phone consistently less. Momentum built up with discipline, and now I shower cold only and haven’t wasted a second online in months.
Accepting that slipping back is part of the progress will prevent your mind from bullying you. Things take their time.
After making massive initial progress and slipping back, it’s time to progress - slowly. Don’t overthink and overcomplicate things. Do fewer bad habits because you must remember that every decision is compounded. Whenever you are about to make a decision, ask yourself if it brings you forward by a point or backward.
Change your identity. When I say, “I’m the sexiest person in my town of twenty-five thousand people,” I mean it. People conclude I'm a narcist. What they don't understand is that every spoken word is energy. Every word is self-manipulation. Saying "I'm strong" and believing it will make you train harder. Thus, it materializes. Why, then, should you demolish your energy? Why direct your words to contradict your will? Viewing myself as the most attractive person makes wasting my time on social media not even cross my mind.
Keep accountability. Find an accountability partner—it could even be your friends or family. As of June 2023, I have no one to hold me accountable to; hence, I use my website and notebook. That’s good enough since I never lie in my notes. You must become inseparable from your word.
Cute tools. Screen timers or app limits are valid options initially, but they leave temptations. To remove temptations, delete your social media accounts. If YouTube or Instagram is necessary for you, at least use the PC versions; otherwise, delete them. There is absolutely nothing that you are going to miss out on.
Find lower alternatives. Replace videos with podcasts. Replace ultra-process sugars with honey and fruits. That will calm your cravings. It happens that podcasts saturate the mind more than short videos. Thus, your content addiction disappears. Apples saturate more than gummi bears ever could, yet with less sugar.
With enough consistency, you should approach mastery. Soon, you will see light at the other end of the tunnel and gain further motivation. You will be able to look back and conclude that you have improved.
While removing bad habits and distractions, you gain a bunch of time. There’s a simple solution—set goals. If you don't know what goals to set, boredom helps with creativity. Write down every goal you can think of. These goals should be just out of reach to maximize results.
Read and do sports if you want to fix your life without aiming for massive success. In the right atmosphere, reading is pleasurable. Sports nurture both body and mind and harness social energy. If you have too much time, why not go on a massive hike?
I started writing because I had to balance my work with something else. Writing changed my life forever, and you, too, will discover new passions.
Now, there are also new priorities.
I never worried about the appearance of my website. I only focused on writing.
Only do the important things. Say no as your default answer. Ask yourself why you do something. There are more than enough essential things; if you only focus on them, you will live a fantastic life.
Now, let's say you have removed distractions, replaced bad habits with good ones, set goals, and know what to work on; now, imagine how your new life will turn out. It’s focus that makes an arrow fly and speed that makes a small bullet dangerous.
Work hard, play hard. You could live your whole life in this focused mode; a certain caliber of person does. They’re called legends. Yet, virtually all people are not built to function that way. Hence, plan to rest and have fun. What proportions work and rest you need, or how exhaustion shows to you, I don’t know. Emotional pain out of nothing is a sign of you needing a break.
What do you want to get out of life - is it some meaningless hedonism or progress? Do you want to avoid regret? I think this is one of the truest ways to live.
Use motivation to gain momentum. Then, use discipline to focus and maintain momentum using it.