- The speaker initially thought journaling was for "dorks" but started doing it to improve their life and figure out what they wanted.
- Through journaling, the speaker realized they had negative beliefs about making friends and that having good friends was the key to their happiest years.
- Journaling also made the speaker realize that they were always focused on the next goal and never felt fulfilled, even when they achieved their previous goals.
- The speaker learned that making small improvements, such as saving $100 a month or writing 1,000 words a day, can lead to significant progress over time.
- Journaling is a daily discipline that can make a big difference in achieving goals.

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Journaling is for a bunch of dorks, or at least that's what I was telling myself before I started journaling.

I started journaling a couple years ago, but I never started journaling religiously on a day-to-day basis.

It was just to improve my life, figure out how to make it better, and get clear on what I wanted.

Now after doing it every day for 90 days, I want to show 3 realizations that I've had that I think will help you live a better life.

Now don't forget there's also a free companion journaling worksheet I've put together here.

It will help you figure out what you want, how to make it happen, how to have a vision for it, and what are the daily rituals and habits that will most likely make that happen.

So check it out as we go through this video.

Now 1 thing I've learned is that your life only changes looking backwards.

That's the only way you're going to realize what was not working and how to make things work.

You know, I used to complain a lot about not having friends, right?

It wasn't because I was weird or strange or alternative.

It was purely because I was just an introvert who'd rather go home and play video games than meet people and be social.

I start journaling and I'm writing down all the things that frustrating me.

I really wish I had that weekend feeling, you know, in those certain phases of life where I was like, alright, I'm hitting up my buddies.

Let's go have dinner, drinks, let's go do some fun event or let's do a weekend trip.

And there are lots of years in my life where I haven't had that community, right?

And I've moved around and I've lived all over the world.

So it was by looking back through journaling that I realized I had a lot of negative beliefs around basically people.

I'm not a people person, I'm an introvert, I don't like people that much, I don't like that many people that much.

It's like a second job and I'm already self-employed, which is 80% of my life force energy goes into staying in business.

So I realized by journaling, the first is that I had a lot of beliefs about this friend situation.

And those beliefs were a barrier to me actually having success.

So by writing that down, I became aware of a lifelong pattern of believing a certain thing.

That I don't have a lot of friends, there are these issues I have, that I'm not that social, that I don't like that many people.

And I realized, really, I wanted that, but I just didn't want to put in the amount of effort because it felt like such a chore.

Now, perhaps the biggest realization I made looking back was purely the fact that the best years of my life had only 1 commonality.

Wasn't how much money I made, it wasn't where I lived, it wasn't a nice apartment versus bad apartment, loved where I lived, the state or country, hated where I lived, it was 1 factor.

Did I have lots of good friends to do things with in the evenings and the weekends?

And when I realized that, everything changed.

Because I didn't expect to have more happiness from more success, from more followers, from more income.

I realized that the best years had 1 thing, a lot of friends.

Which is a sobering thought because that blew up all my beliefs around, I don't want to, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, right?

But it showed me a fact and that came through pages and pages of reflecting on what is working, what's not working.

Now, the second thing that journaling made me realize is that we tend to only focus on the gap in life.

When I came back from China, I bought this small skin, and lots like these, I have a whole list of them down below this video.

The ones that I use are these middle-sized ones and the little ones.

I got back from China and I realized, okay, what do I want going forward in my life?

What I want is, I want freedom, I want to be able to travel a lot more than an average employee could, and I want to have the flexibility to work on multiple different projects per day.

So I need to be self-employed, how can we make this happen?

And I was just thinking, you know, if I could just make 50k, which is what I made in my full-time day job, if I can make 50k less boring than my day job, and realistically I could probably do that in about 4 hours a day, if I could just do that, then you know what?

I could probably have a lot of free time and freedom to live the life any way I want to live.

So you know every day I would work my 9-5 job, I would go home for an hour to eat, and I'd go to a cafe for 3 hours and work on my business.

Now as time goes on, I think was like 3 years before I could quit my job, just making 50k for my business.

I have a new job, which is self-employment.

So fast forward another few years, and I'm going through this journal and I'm realizing that I'm stressed financially.

I make a lot more than that at that moment when I was reflecting.

And I looked back through this journal and on 1 particular page I saw that I wrote, I would be ecstatic if I just made 50K so I could quit my job, have the freedom I want to live any way I want, maybe just work 4 or 5 hours a day to get that same income or to work on whatever I wanted to work on.

When I realized that now I was earning many multiples of that, but I was less happy and I was financially stressed all over again, and I had just superseded that last goal that was my dream goal.

And it made me realize we have what a lot of entrepreneurs call the gap, which is that there's a kind of horizon you're always looking towards to try to get to.

And you think that when you get there, you're going to be happy and you never are.

Typically, you can't even reach that horizon because once you make enough money, then you're like, well, Christ, enough is stressful.

I need to make double enough to be relaxed And then when you're double enough, then you're like well if I had a little bit more I could save for a home I live in a little apartment and then it's like well crap now I'm married now I need to have support my kids and my wife and on and on it goes until 50k turns into 350k and now suddenly 350k is break-even 0.1 thing that journaling regularly showed me was that my mind is obsessed with the gap which is where I have to go next and what that does is produces success but not fulfillment and by journaling you can help track what is going on in the mind.

The story, the narrative, as I call it, in Master of the Day, there's a reason why the first half of the book is all about the story.

And for some people, the story is I'll never succeed.

Some people, the story is, if I just get there, I'll be happy.

Other people, the story is, I'm gonna build XYZ thing.

But the journaling is what will help you illuminate what is the pattern in your mind.

So the third thing that journaling has showed me is that you only have to improve 1% to reach your wildest life goals.

What's the difference between saving 100 a month versus 0?

Now I think even if you have an entry-level income wherever you are in the US or Europe you can save 100 US dollars per month.

But after a year you have 1,200 a month right?

You're not gonna buy a McMansion, but you have a safety blanket that a lot of people don't have.

We're not talking about investing a thousand a month or saving a thousand a month for a home.

The difference between maybe living a healthy life and not is just eat a healthy dinner every night.

If you can just pick 1 thing, you will see significant improvements.

Or what about if you want to write a book?

At this point, I've written multiple, and all of them I had written with just 1,000 words per day.

1,000 words a day is what leads to eventually a full book.

After 90 days, 1 season of the year, you've written almost 100,000 words.

If you talk about journaling, just writing in that journal for 10 minutes a day about what your goals and your dreams are and what you can do to always be improving and growing to reach them, in 5 or 10 years, you'll be shocked what you achieve.

So a lot of little progress is what leads to the big things in your life.

And the people who tell you you need to do these big things are the ones who typically haven't achieved them in their own life because most of those great achievements come from doing little daily disciplines on a daily basis.

And journaling is 1 of those tiny daily disciplines that can make all the difference guys.

So before you go don't forget to check out that companion journaling worksheet and also there's another journaling video I've put together right here that has more exercises I haven't shared here.


Speaker 0: Journaling is for a bunch of dorks, or at least that's what I was telling myself before I started journaling. So I'm a total hypocrite, ignore me. I started journaling a couple years ago, but I never started journaling religiously on a day-to-day basis. There wasn't a specific strategy. It was just to improve my life, figure out how to make it better, and get clear on what I wanted.

Now after doing it every day for 90 days, I want to show 3 realizations that I've had that I think will help you live a better life. So let's jump in and we'll check it out. Now don't forget there's also a free companion journaling worksheet I've put together here. It's the first link right below this. It's free.

It will help you figure out what you want, how to make it happen, how to have a vision for it, and what are the daily rituals and habits that will most likely make that happen. So check it out as we go through this video. Now 1 thing I've learned is that your life only changes looking backwards. That's the only way you're going to realize what was not working and how to make things work. You know, I used to complain a lot about not having friends, right?

It wasn't because I was weird or strange or alternative. It was purely because I was just an introvert who'd rather go home and play video games than meet people and be social. So what happens? I start journaling and I'm writing down all the things that frustrating me. I really wish I had that weekend feeling, you know, in those certain phases of life where I was like, alright, I'm hitting up my buddies.

What are we doing this weekend guys? Let's go have dinner, drinks, let's go do some fun event or let's do a weekend trip. And there are lots of years in my life where I haven't had that community, right? And I've moved around and I've lived all over the world. So it was by looking back through journaling that I realized I had a lot of negative beliefs around basically people.

I'm not a people person, I'm an introvert, I don't like people that much, I don't like that many people that much. It takes a lot of work to make friends. It's like a second job and I'm already self-employed, which is 80% of my life force energy goes into staying in business. So I realized by journaling, the first is that I had a lot of beliefs about this friend situation. And those beliefs were a barrier to me actually having success.

In this case, having a lot of friends. So by writing that down, I became aware of a lifelong pattern of believing a certain thing. That I don't have a lot of friends, there are these issues I have, that I'm not that social, that I don't like that many people. And I realized, really, I wanted that, but I just didn't want to put in the amount of effort because it felt like such a chore. But that was the reality.

Now, perhaps the biggest realization I made looking back was purely the fact that the best years of my life had only 1 commonality. Wasn't how much money I made, it wasn't where I lived, it wasn't a nice apartment versus bad apartment, loved where I lived, the state or country, hated where I lived, it was 1 factor. Did I have lots of good friends to do things with in the evenings and the weekends? And when I realized that, everything changed. Because I didn't expect to have more happiness from more success, from more followers, from more income.

I realized that the best years had 1 thing, a lot of friends. Which is a sobering thought because that blew up all my beliefs around, I don't want to, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, right? That annoys. But it showed me a fact and that came through pages and pages of reflecting on what is working, what's not working. Now, the second thing that journaling made me realize is that we tend to only focus on the gap in life.

When I came back from China, I bought this small skin, and lots like these, I have a whole list of them down below this video. The ones that I use are these middle-sized ones and the little ones. I got back from China and I realized, okay, what do I want going forward in my life? What I want is, I want freedom, I want to be able to travel a lot more than an average employee could, and I want to have the flexibility to work on multiple different projects per day. So I need to be self-employed, how can we make this happen?

And I was just thinking, you know, if I could just make 50k, which is what I made in my full-time day job, if I can make 50k less boring than my day job, and realistically I could probably do that in about 4 hours a day, if I could just do that, then you know what? I could probably have a lot of free time and freedom to live the life any way I want to live. So you know every day I would work my 9-5 job, I would go home for an hour to eat, and I'd go to a cafe for 3 hours and work on my business. Now as time goes on, I think was like 3 years before I could quit my job, just making 50k for my business. And it was this great celebration.

I quit my job. Now, great. I have a new job, which is self-employment. So fast forward another few years, and I'm going through this journal and I'm realizing that I'm stressed financially. And I'm thinking, this is weird.

I make a lot more than that at that moment when I was reflecting. Why am I stressed out financially? And I looked back through this journal and on 1 particular page I saw that I wrote, I would be ecstatic if I just made 50K so I could quit my job, have the freedom I want to live any way I want, maybe just work 4 or 5 hours a day to get that same income or to work on whatever I wanted to work on. When I realized that now I was earning many multiples of that, but I was less happy and I was financially stressed all over again, and I had just superseded that last goal that was my dream goal. And it made me realize we have what a lot of entrepreneurs call the gap, which is that there's a kind of horizon you're always looking towards to try to get to.

And you think that when you get there, you're going to be happy and you never are. Typically, you can't even reach that horizon because once you make enough money, then you're like, well, Christ, enough is stressful. I need to make double enough to be relaxed And then when you're double enough, then you're like well if I had a little bit more I could save for a home I live in a little apartment and then it's like well crap now I'm married now I need to have support my kids and my wife and on and on it goes until 50k turns into 350k and now suddenly 350k is break-even 0.1 thing that journaling regularly showed me was that my mind is obsessed with the gap which is where I have to go next and what that does is produces success but not fulfillment and by journaling you can help track what is going on in the mind. The story, the narrative, as I call it, in Master of the Day, there's a reason why the first half of the book is all about the story. And for some people, the story is I'll never succeed.

Some people, the story is, if I just get there, I'll be happy. Other people, the story is, I'm gonna build XYZ thing. But the journaling is what will help you illuminate what is the pattern in your mind. So the third thing that journaling has showed me is that you only have to improve 1% to reach your wildest life goals. What's the difference between saving 100 a month versus 0?

Now I think even if you have an entry-level income wherever you are in the US or Europe you can save 100 US dollars per month. But after a year you have 1,200 a month right? And after 10 years you have 12,000. Now that's a decent savings cushion. You're not gonna buy a McMansion, but you have a safety blanket that a lot of people don't have.

That's just a small change. We're not talking about investing a thousand a month or saving a thousand a month for a home. Just a hundred. The difference between maybe living a healthy life and not is just eat a healthy dinner every night. That's 1 of your meals per day out of 3.

If you can just pick 1 thing, you will see significant improvements. Or what about if you want to write a book? At this point, I've written multiple, and all of them I had written with just 1,000 words per day. 1,000 words a day is what leads to eventually a full book. After 90 days, 1 season of the year, you've written almost 100,000 words.

And that's a book right there. If you talk about journaling, just writing in that journal for 10 minutes a day about what your goals and your dreams are and what you can do to always be improving and growing to reach them, in 5 or 10 years, you'll be shocked what you achieve. So a lot of little progress is what leads to the big things in your life. And the people who tell you you need to do these big things are the ones who typically haven't achieved them in their own life because most of those great achievements come from doing little daily disciplines on a daily basis. And journaling is 1 of those tiny daily disciplines that can make all the difference guys.

So before you go don't forget to check out that companion journaling worksheet and also there's another journaling video I've put together right here that has more exercises I haven't shared here. So check it out.

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I Journaled Everyday for 90 Days. Here's What I Learned.