Nov 1

Nov 1 5 Habits That Changed My Life

They say that when you hit rock bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up. We all have our different versions of what rock bottom means. For me, it was feeling like I didn’t have a purpose. In my early 20’s, things were looking pretty, pretty bleak. I was trying to figure out this thing called life and I chose the path of least resistance because it was easy. It was easy not to care about the present and the future. My personal and professional relationships were horrible. I didn’t care about my work. I tried to escape reality by drinking one too many adult beverages. Overtime, I put on a significant amount of weight and I had a wake up call one day that really put everything into perspective. When you feel seriously winded by walking up a flight of stairs, it’s time to make some changes. Little did I know that those changes would lead to incredible relationships, working at MIT and the University of Miami, competing in natural bodybuilding shows, and sharing instructional design with the world.

It’s weird. Life is weird. I feel like 22 isn’t that far away, but at 35, I am a completely different person. So, what happened? I started to embrace 5 habits that became a change of lifestyle. They didn’t all click at first, but overtime, I began to adopt more practices, found my own way, and now I’m sharing them with all of you. I really don’t expect you to embrace all of these at once, nor do I want you to. Learning is an ever evolving process that takes time. If it was easy, we would all be superhumans. I’d like to just share what I’ve experienced with some personal reflections and even if these words help you ever so slightly, it will be worth it.

Here we go:

Acceptance and Channeling Negativity

Let me take you into my past subconscious for a second. “It’s not your fault. Everything happens for a reason. They didn’t mean to say it that way.” I found myself hoping to hear these phrases as if I wasn’t directly responsible for the consequences of my own actions. When I could shift the blame off of myself to a particular outlier or some oddity, it was easy to brush things off and move along with my day. When my world was constantly falling apart and the only common denominator was me, maybe it was time for some soul searching.

I began to reposition how I viewed problems and situations. For instance, instead of thinking, “If only this other person didn’t apply for the job, I would’ve gotten it,” my mindset changed to thinking, “I accept that this happened. I am going to use this as motivation to work harder than ever until I’m undeniably the best candidate.” In essence, I used negativity as fuel to channel my emotions and to direct them towards a goal.

I’m going to assume that when I said acceptance, you were picturing me under a Bodhi tree searching for enlightenment and peace, but that’s not my inner monologue. The inner voice inside of my head has been the “I’ll show you” mentality. If I’m doubted, I work twice as hard. I thought for a while I was just insane until I heard Dr. Layne Norton, a scientist and prominent figure in the fitness community, share this similar mindset. Now, is this the healthiest approach to processing negativity, I don’t know. I can’t see this being a long-term solution, but this practice of accepting reality and processing negativity as motivation truly helped me to get out of my own way.

Focusing on Sleep and Waking Up Early

If you read any self-help book, I guarantee you’ll find a chapter about waking up early, but what’s the big deal with getting up before the sun rises? A study conducted in 2019 took a group of night owls and changed their habits over time into making them become morning people. The results? Significant improvements to self-reported depression and stress, as well as improved cognitive (reaction time) and physical (grip strength) performance measures during the typical ‘suboptimal’ morning hours (Facer-Childs et al., 2019). I acknowledge that there is no way this can work for everyone and this is just one study out of the thousands of sleep studies. What I can tell you though is that I decided to place a significant level of importance on scheduling my sleep and sleeping for 8 hours a night.

I wasn’t necessarily a night owl, however, my schedule at the time was all over the place. I would fall asleep anywhere between 9 PM and 1 AM. This, of course, meant that I would go on a journey every night with falling asleep on my couch and then being confused as to what time it was when I awoke. Starting every day with an unhealthy dosage of unpredictability and sky rocketing out of bed because I was late for work was not sustainable.

Writing my dissertation, or should I say lack there of, forced me into rethinking about my sleep habits. I always told myself that I would write more after work or buckle down on the weekends, but that never panned out. Like clockwork, I found myself making excuses and my dissertation sat there mocking me. In a bit of an extreme way, I decided that if I just get up earlier than literally everyone else, I will have zero excuses for distractions. The first time I did this, I made such a substantial dent in my writing that I vowed to become a morning person.

It was not an easy task. I was so used to mindlessly scrolling on my phone until I passed out, that I had to make changes to my phone habits. For instance, I knew I would pick up that addicting lightbox if it was anywhere near me. I had to place it in another room so I would force myself to wind down. I found myself without thinking, reaching for where my phone was on the table only to remind myself that indeed, it’s in the other room.

I finished my doctorate in 2019 and never went back to my old ways. Waking up early is now a natural thing and it’s one of the key reasons for why I’m so productive. Whenever people ask about how I have the time to juggle all of my projects, the simple answer is that I make the time. And for me, making the time is by powering down early at night without my iPhone and waking up earlier than everyone else.

Exercise

Have you read the book Spark yet? If you haven’t, you should and that’s an affiliate link by the way to help me with keeping the lights on around here. Spark, written by Dr. John Ratey, an associate clinical professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, details about the power exercise has on the brain. I’m going to assume you know that exercise is good for you, but how exactly does it help you? With exercise, you can reduce stress, increase your mood, fight memory loss, function better, reduce aggression, lower addiction tendencies, and even boost your intellect. The benefits of exercise on the brain are undeniable, but I really wanted to see for myself what would happen if I took on exercise in a serious manner. Besides the physical results, would I actually feel better? Would I become smarter? Just what exactly would happen if I gave this 100% of my effort?

So, as you all definitely know me by now, you can bet that indeed I went all in. To start with this process, I made a game plan around how learning works. I took into consideration my prior levels of knowledge aka with my past experiences of repeatedly quitting on fitness, identifying the moments of when I was facing pressure to quit, and thinking about my circumstances. What could I do differently next time I’m faced with the same obstacle? I prepared before they came about. I have to say, it was fascinating to do this before making such a commitment.

What no one tells you about with trying to exercise and eat right is that A) it’s stupidly hard and B) to do things correctly and sustainably, it will take way longer than you think. Companies who sell supplements, diets, gym memberships, and workout equipment have done a brilliant job with marketing to consumers about how everything is fast, easy, and painless. It’s much harder to sell the fact that our cozy lifestyles have warped our senses and that you now need to seek pain and discomfort in order to change for the better. Seeking pain and discomfort is a great name for a metal band.

Anyway, knowing how hard this was going to be, I decided to not associate a timeline with my goals. My goals were also not to lose X amount of pounds. The goals revolved around mentally feeling better, having more energy, reducing stress, and increasing my brain power. However long it took was my deadline. About 10 months later, I was a different human. Yes, I saw physical progress after about a month, but the new cognitive abilities came afterwards. It felt like my brain was finally firing on all cylinders. My habits changed, my cravings changed, my desires changed, basically, everything changed. All of the positive changes made me want to push this even further and I found myself competing in natural bodybuilding shows. This fitness lifestyle is actually why I started podcasting in the first place because I wanted to share with people about what I found that worked for me.

If you want to listen to this entire adventure, you can check out the podcast episode where I talk about each step in this process. All and all, the point is, exercising and eating right completely changed the game for me when it came to my energy, drive, passions, motivations, and more. It made me want to pursue more opportunities and it’s still a huge part of who I am today.

Saying Yes

In 2008, Jim Carey starred in a movie called, Yes Man. Carey played Carl Allen, a miserable man who decided to turn his life around by constantly saying yes to everything. While at first, this led to amazing changes in Carl’s life, eventually he realized that too much of anything, even positivity, can lead to disaster. While Carl overdid it, there is power behind saying the word yes.

The more I started to share about instructional design and online learning on the internet, the more opportunities came about. Initially, these terrified me. I was just trying to share about the joys of learning. There was no secret agenda of trying to build a brand, write books, create courses, or anything else. There was zero plan for any of this. I mean, clearly there wasn’t any long term thinking as you are listening to the Dr. Luke Hobson podcast and if I was more creative back then, I would’ve found a better way to incorporate instructional design into the title somewhere for SEO purposes. With every piece of content I put out online, came another opportunity in my inbox.

Now let me say that I was batting a thousand by shooting down every single opportunity. And here’s why:

I didn’t understand why people wanted me to speak to their students and employees
Who do they think I am? I didn’t feel qualified enough to do any public speaking event
My schedule was a dumpster fire already. Adding more was not going to help.
It was so much easier to say no

It became hard to say no when friends began to ask me to speak at their events. Eventually, I caved in. I said yes to speaking to a group of instructional design graduate students. This one speech went so well that I decided to record it, put it on YouTube, and now it’s entirely possible you only know me from YouTube. The point is that I started to say yes to every opportunity I could. I wanted more experience, exposure, connections, and to meet more people. I never went into these conversations thinking I was going to get something out of them, but the more I connected with others, the luckier I became.

Create your own luck and say yes to more opportunities. Hopefully, this goes so well that you can become more selective and get to focus on the ones that provide you with more meaning in your work.

Pomodoro Technique

What I like about the Pomodoro technique is that it actually works. I wrote my book in six months due to this technique. If you haven’t heard of it before, this is a time management method where you have long periods of time of dedicated work followed by short breaks. What started off as a cooking technique using a kitchen timer, has evolved into one of the most productive ways to get work done. Here’s hope it works: you set a timer for 25 minutes and wait to hear the bell ring. You then set a timer for 5 minutes of rest and then when the bell rings again, you continue this process until the job is done. You are essentially training your brain to become like Pavlov’s dog.

While searching online for studying techniques one day, I came across an entire dedicated section on YouTube that I had never seen before. These were called, “Study with me” videos. These videos would have relaxing lo-fi music in background play while the timer appeared on the screen. You can find thousands of study with me Pomodoro videos. What I love is that you can find them for however long you feel like working. For instance, 25 minutes isn’t long enough for me and I found that videos that had a 50-10 split worked better.

Remember how I said before that I would wake up early before anyone else to get work done? While that was extremely effective, it does feel isolating after a while. Some YouTubers film themselves doing the Pomodoro technique beside you, which oddly feels like you have a new study buddy. This idea that someone else is working hard keeps you accountable and has a sort of presence like a bunch of people are working together in a library. While you never talk to anyone there, seeing others read and work is motivating. There is one YouTube series called StudyMD that I would highly recommend. StudyMD was created by Jimmy Kang, a Cardiac surgery resident in Canada. He doesn’t know me, but he has worked alongside me for years. I grew so obsessed with this idea that I made a few of my own videos. If you want to study along with me back when I had my wizard beard, feel free to check out these videos.