I have found that tailoring my social media for a specific purpose has been extremely helpful for me to develop advantageous habits. I use twitter for mostly economic, investing, and other nerdy stuff like history. I pretty much only follow people on twitter that post articles or graphs or something educational. I use snapchat to basically just talk to friends, and that’s pretty much it. Now, the app I use the most is Instagram. I used to only follow people I knew and meme pages, I was addicted to the endless scrolling through memes and the classic pictures of supermodels that pop up on any fitness guy’s feed. Got to love the algorithms social media companies use to keep you on their site. Anyways, one of the guys I follow wrote a book called How to make sh*t happen, that guy is Sean Whalen. Definitely someone to look into.
Trimming the fat
Recently, I have been focusing on cutting all the crap from my Instagram feed. In an effort to become more focused on what I want from life, and hopefully happier by focusing on what will move me towards my goals, I decided to use Instagram to follow people that I want to learn from. There are a few doctors that specialize in nutrition, a lot of bodybuilders, and A LOT of entrepreneurs.
One of those entrepreneurs that I have been following more recently is Sean Whalen. He is the founder of the brand LIONS NOT SHEEP. It is definitely a cool brand, and one you should follow if you enjoy freedom, no sugar-coated advice, and actually doing work. Those are the main reasons I was drawn to follow him in the first place.
I have never been drawn to the everyone gets a trophy culture that seems to permeate a lot of today’s youths, at least as I grew up. What’s the point if you get an award that everyone else is getting? At least for me, it always took the incentive to pursue excellence away.
How to Make Sh*t Happen
After following Sean for a few months, watching his Instagram stories, checking out his merchandise, looking into him as a person, I found out that he wrote a book he titled How to Make Sh*t happen. I found it on Amazon for less than $6, so I bought it to see what he had to say. It is rather short; you could probably read it in less than an hour if you sat down and read it straight through.
However, just because it is short does not mean it is worthless. He talks about what he calls the Core 4: Power (body), Passion (relationships), Purpose (mind and spirit), Production (business). Essentially, these are the four aspects of your life. To have any amount of success in life, you have to invest in each of those areas every single day.
We hear about concepts like how we are the sum of our habits. The Core 4 is a way to intentionally move forward every day in every aspect of your life. You have to have all four, without all four, all of them will crumble. He explains exactly how and gives examples throughout the book where he uses it to make the analogy that your life is like a table. It needs all four legs to be strong (hence core, as in core for your life). If one is weak or missing, the table will not hold the weight it needs to be successful because eventually one of the legs will break.
Power
Power is of the body. Your body is what moves you around and actually carries out the tasks that you need to complete each day. If your body is not operating efficiently, nothing you do is. As your physical health improves, so will your mental health and cognitive function, if you let it. This is not just about looking great, although it definitely doesn’t hurt.
As Sean says a few times throughout the book, how you do one thing is how you do everything. This really is true. This is the reason I prefer to train in the mornings. I have noticed throughout the past few years of training that the rest of my day pretty much mirrors how my workout went. Whenever I have a great workout in the morning, I have a much easier time carrying that intensity throughout the rest of the day. The more I focus on optimizing my training, the better I do everything else in my life.
That being said, it’s imperative that you work out. It does not matter what it is. The best exercise is the one you will do, just like the best diet is the one you will eat. (If you want more on this specifically, look up Stan Efferding, that can lead to some deep rabbit holes if you look for them and you will gain a deeper understanding of nutrition). Do it with a friend or hire a coach. As long as you invest in improving your physical health in some way every day.
Passion
As Sean states, and probably a lot of you guys have noticed, terrible relationships will ruin your life, business, health, spirit, and everything else quicker than anything. These relationships are not only with significant others. It can be with friends, family, co-workers, or anyone else, just relationships in general.
This is where it is time to grow up and own up to things. Realize that the only thing you truly have control over is yourself. You can control your actions, but not other people’s. It doesn’t matter what terrible thing the other person has done or said, YOU control how you react to it.
You only have so much capacity to produce and do things. Don’t let someone else take up your capacity with drama that doesn’t help you in any way. If it doesn’t improve your Core 4, get rid of it. This doesn’t mean the relationship; this means the drama. Get rid of the drama. Attempt to fix the relationship. Be the first one to apologize or whatever is needs for the case.
A lot of people will start making excuses that “oh, you just don’t know what its like”. Just know that this is just another excuse not to improve. I will leave further explanation into the nuance of this to Sean’s colorful and much needed way of explaining.
Purpose
The mind is where everything starts. This is one of the reasons I started tailoring what shows up in my social media feeds. Your thoughts will follow your behavior. If you allow yourself to get drawn into very depressing or sad stories on a regular basis, you probably are not going to have the most positive outlook on life. If it isn’t going to be constructive for you, why pay attention to it? It’s not a great idea to let other people dictate your mood and outlook on life. Doing so can lead to some very dark paths.
That being said, purposefully consume positive content. Watch motivational videos every morning if you have to, if it works for you, do it.
Production
Your business and/or career lies in the production aspect of the core 4. Making more money would improve pretty much anyone’s life. Everyone has heard the saying that money can not buy you happiness. Which is true, it can’t, but it sure can buy you a lot of freedom. And Freedom is becoming more and more of a scarce commodity in today’s world.
Money is a medium in which value can be stored or transferred. So, in order to make more money, you need to produce more value. Whether that be through providing housing by being a landlord, being a doctor, being a business owner or whatever, you want to do. As long as you provide value for other people, you will be compensated. The universe has an uncanny ability of bringing wealth to people who improve it.
Sean explains how to do this in 5 steps. The first is to add value, as I alluded to above. Read the book and he will explain it more in depth, along with the other four steps.
Conclusions
A disclaimer before you buy the book, there is a lot of cussing if you care about that stuff.
This is something that I am definitely going to try out for an extended period of time. I plan on writing down how I will intentionally improve my core 4 each day in my habit journal that I write in the mornings. I did a whole post on the habit journaling that can be found in the Personal Development section.
To legitimately try something does not mean only for a couple weeks. To see if something will actually improve your life you need to develop it into a habit and do it for a decent amount of time: at least 3 months is a good target. If after 3 months you aren’t seeing any results, then it probably isn’t best for you, and it’s safe to say it didn’t work. The 3 months is sort of arbitrary, the point is that it is a significant amount of time and if it were to improve your life, the results would most likely manifest by then.
I will definitely let you guys know after a few months of this.
To your wealth and future,
James Forsythe
Link personal development section
https://jamesdforsythe.com/category/personaldevelopment/
