The antidote: How to stay focused on what matters and away from the noise
A couple of months ago, my brother asked me how I was able to maintain myself focused, balanced, motivated, driven, and able to cope very well with high stress situations. He told me that I seemed sort of immune to them. Until then, I had been totally unaware of that. Without noticing I’d built a daily personal routine to do so.
Two years before that, while I was researching companies, I stumbled upon a peculiar one: Lululemon. It piqued my interest due to its tremendous growth trajectory in such a short period of time, and above all because it had successfully competed with a lot of incumbents like Nike winning a massive market share. I ended up reading Lululemon founder’s book out of curiosity on how he had grown his company into a 30 billion company [1].
To my surprise, this is where I found one of the first parts of this antidote [2]: the runner's high. Simply put, it's just running more than 15-20 minutes over 130-140 BPM (i.e. beats per minute) consistently. After that threshold, you release a natural hormone that gets into your brain, and makes you feel in balance, happier and allows you to think clearer [3]. In short, Lululemon’s founder used it daily to counterbalance the ups and downs in the early days of his company, when everything was falling apart allowing him to stay a float.
So I started to use the runner's high in the same way he did. That worked amazingly for me, and was the first part of what would become a complete antidote for navigating through my daily life: A powerful set of daily habits for counterbalancing daily stress, pressure and intensity, operating with excellence, thinking clearly and to become the one you need to become to achieve your goals.
This antidote is composed of the following nine daily habits.
1. Ask with congruency and be careful with what you ask for
Gratitude. Being grateful opens up the doors of equilibrium and balance. It keeps you on track on the things that really matter, and away from the noise (i.e. mundane distractions). Consequently, allowing you to be present and thankful solely for being alive.
Although it’s hard to be grateful about everything all the time –especially when things are not going well– you should still give it a try; maybe only because you and I are breathing, for what you’ve been through in your life, and for what you have.
Simply by starting every morning being deeply grateful and doing it consistently, you’ll unlock a floodgate of peace and balance. When in doubt about what to be grateful for, just look around you and you’ll know right away. The easiest way to seamlessly integrate this into your daily antidote, is combining gratitude and asking with congruence into your same routine. I usually do it through my early morning meditation.
Congruence. Be in alignment with what you are asking for and the actions you are taking, because if you are only asking and not acting accordingly, there is a chance the Universe/God is not going to deliver it to you, so ask and act upon that with congruence.
One thing I’ve seen countless times, is people wanting the other party to deliver first for they can act upon it, and I think that’s a lack of commitment and incongruence. As a very interesting social exercise, be aware of this misalignment wherever you go, and you'll find a lot of incongruence among people.
How do you know if you are on a similar behavior? Simply observe yourself being self-aware of your actions and change the ones that are misaligned from what you ask for, then you can start asking with congruence. Once corrected, you course-correct the way you ask and how you act.
There are countless books on how to ask, so being unbiased and respectful of all beliefs and focused on the essence/dynamics of it, I can recommend a great book as a starting point: The fourth dimension. [4]
2. The power of words and the self fulfilling prophecy
How you talk to yourself and others can either construct you or consume you. Very often, you’ll notice that positive spoken people are better off than others who speak negatively or/and complain regularly. It seems like a coincidence, but I don't think so.
Whenever you speak positively, you and your mind state changes: your thoughts are clearer, your stress levels decrease [5], you can think clearly, and your cognitive performance improves [6]. As a consequence, you feel in control and you operate accordingly: empowered and confident.
Words carry a lot of power, and more often than not they become a self fulfilling prophecy, one that can go either way. Strangely enough, the people who think and talk positively about being able to do something are often the same ones who do it. Have you ever noticed how some words make you feel? Now imagine how they affect you as a whole.
Some ways to incorporate this into your daily antidote and the ones that I've seen works really well are: being conscious of how you talk, erasing the negative words from your internal dialogue when they appear, and replacing those with its positive equivalents. Then after applying these, pay close attention to how you feel, how you operate and how the ones around you may positively change.
3. Your health is your temple
Treat your health as the backbone of everything you do in life, treat it as a holy temple. You’re not only what you eat, but how well you take care of yourself. A really profound concept that has stuck with me since I heard it was to get in the habit of feeling good.
Although it’s nearly impossible to feel great all the time, it’s how well you know yourself how most of the time you’ll feel. In the end, the better you feel the better you operate, and most of this is under your control. As a caveat, I always say that aren’t the tricks which matter but your consistency in doing them.
As a general overview and only as a starting point, the following are some basic and general suggestions to start with. I personally use them and they have had a profound positive impact on me. Remember, this is not a recipe but a base point.
In the morning and before starting your day:
- Learn something new that makes you wiser before going to bed [7].
- Get some runner’s high [8].
- Have a quick self guided meditation session letting gratitude and congruence guide it.
- Take general supplements such as: magnesium, potassium, d3, k3, omegas and a multivitamin or a whole-veggie juice.
All day long:
- Adopt a diet tailored for you, a good starting point could be focusing on nutritional biochemistry [9].
- Keep on check your glucose levels, blood pressure, and heart rate.
- Stay away from inflammatory foods, grains [10], and foods that spike your glucose above the healthy levels. A continuous glucose monitor [11] can be very helpful.
- Drink a lot of mineral water to stay hydrated.
At night:
- Learn something new that makes you wiser before going to bed —yes, for the second time in the day.
- Take some supplementation to wind you down —something like magnesium works well.
- Sleep well and know why it's important [12].
As simple as this may seem, applying this will allow you to reduce stress levels, increase your focus and drive, raise your mental clarity, and unlock a balanced mind-body to tackle your day.
Additionally, if you’d want to slightly improve brain performance, some natural brain foods and neuroplasticity [13] exercises are two things that can allow you to achieve that. As a result, this will give you an edge on letting you learn faster, retain information better and stay sharp all day long. The following are a great starting point and I personally use them.
- Walnuts and non-inflammatory sugar-free chocolate —made with coconut/MCT oil instead of cocoa butter.
- Develop new habits that promote daily neuroplasticity. These are things you’re not used to that stress yourself out of the ones you’ve mastered, like learning a new language, a challenging skill, etc.
4. Failing to plan is planning to fail: Write down your goals.
This is a great example of a self fulfilling prophecy. I think it’s very unlikely you get so far without goals, and specifically ambitious goals. A couple of months ago while we were struggling to align our whole team, my brother came to me with a suggestion on how we should define and track our company goals, and to my surprise the same method applied to personal goals too. Since then I’ve been creating my goals with the same methodology.
The method is called OKRs (objective and key results), and was invented by Andy Groove and later on perfected by John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins [14]. Nowadays, It’s used by companies like Google and Amazon to help them realize their most ambitious goals.
Focusing on OKRs gives you leverage to create and track your own goals. The method is simple but powerful, and it goes as follows:
- Create your foremost goals for the year —these are the most important things you want to achieve—, then for each goal and before each quarter begins you should create 2-3 objectives that support the progression towards your yearly goals —think about them as outcome milestones, not activities— , next for each objective you’ll create 3-5 key results; they’re simply the result from a set of initiatives/activities —The outcome you achieve when all of the tasks/initiatives are fully finished.
- The same process repeats itself for the other yearly goals and for each of the following quarters. Finally, you need to do weekly check-ins to follow up with your key results and objectives to update your progress —You don’t need more than an excel worksheet to set up everything.
Then you just need to connect your daily activities to the goals themselves, having a prioritized repository/backlog of activities works well. Next I recommend planning beforehand your weeks, choosing the most important tasks that can take you closer to your goals. Finally, leave time buffers each day; so before going to bed or early in the morning every day, you can fill those with whatever urgent/important tasks might appear.
You need to be strategic about what matters the most each day, being single-minded in only a few activities at once, and make the habit of getting things done really fast, but at the same time being flexible and adaptable. Balance is key.
As a recommendation, never start your day without planning it beforehand, otherwise your life/business will drive you and not the other way around, and you’ll be more focused on putting out fires instead of what can strategically take you closer to your goals.
Finally, I’ve seen that the more you check your goals the closer you get, therefore I suggest keeping them in a place near to you to see where you are and how you are progressing.
5. Long lasting habits and unbreakable discipline: Connecting the dots forward and stop relying on motivation.
If there were a route map to achieve your goals, surely this would be your habits. I've always thought that If your goals and milestones are the staircase, your habits are the stairs. If you set positive and powerful habits deeply in your daily routine and stick to them, they could help you connect the dots forward rather than backwards [15].
For some people luck happens when opportunity meets preparation, and I truly believe it. For me, preparation is a combination of three things, first is your habits, second is being willing to take risks exposing yourself to things that challenge you and stretch you, and third is becoming a learning machine.
Trying to create long lasting habits I learned one simple truth: the easier the habit is to follow and the seamless integrated into your life is, the easier to stick to it. So a great way to start is defining some quick-to-do and easy-to-follow but life-changing habits. When in doubt about which ones to integrate first, I’d choose the ones which compound health and knowledge [16].
Most of us have driven somewhere without knowing how we got there because we did it unconsciously. When that starts happening to you but with your daily habits, you start not relying on external motivation that makes you feel you are progressing when most of the time you’re not: the brittle and ephemeral motivation most people run into —e.g. motivational videos.
I’ve always thought that endurable habits kill the need of external stimulus to keep you motivated. They unlock a different type of motivation, an endurable one coming from within from a powerful natural source: you vs an artificial one.
6. Operate with excellence: How you do anything is how you do everything
Do everything you do at the highest standard possible. It's that simple, and it's really easy to spot when you’re not operating with excellence. If you observe yourself you'll be aware of it really fast. When was the last time you fell short on something you did and left you unsatisfied? Probably not long ago.
You don’t need to overthink in which specific scenarios you are falling short, you just need to look at the simplest activities you do every day, something as simple as how neat you leave your room or how you cook your food. If you start from the basics, then it would be easy to spot when you are below excellence in whatever activity you do.
Getting your mind reminding you every time you are not operating with excellence, or when you just finished something not at the highest standard possible, is a sure way curse-correct your path towards excellence. After doing it for a while, I can say is quite simple: just pay attention on how you act, then whenever you are not operating with excellence, just vividly picture this phrase in your mind: how you do anything is how you do everything.
After doing it consciously for a few days, your mind will go off the reminder automatically and without your help, then whenever you hear the reminder it's up to you to curse-correct.
7. Choose what burns you inside out: What ignites you to get up in the morning
It’s finding what ignites you to get up in the morning and what keeps you so eager at night you can't wait waking up next morning. In other words, it is what fires you up. I think It’s fairly easy to sustain a quick period of hard work without something that ignites you, but it's not when you're in the long run of doing hard work for a long time. Ideally you find it when working on something that is very interesting to you, and that really excites you: a personal project, a company, etc.
However, what about when that’s not enough, or when you’re in a situation unable to choose. In that case, you can compensate that by finding some activities that fires you up. Therefore, any activity able to feed your mind and body every day with joy, peace, calm, drive and balance are perfect candidates. A few good examples are: reading, writing, meditating, exercising, learning something new, etc. For me, it’s spending 2 hours early in the morning everyday learning new things/skills that gets me closer to my goals.
I think the perfect balance is finding something exciting to work on and these types of daily activities you can incorporate in your day.
8. Be a learning machine: Go to bed wiser than you were in the morning
I can say almost unequivocally that most people stop learning when they graduate or when they stop going to school. I can even say that the past couldn’t be a predictor of the future if people continued to expand their capabilities as human beings, but more often than not, it is.
The best way to break that adagio is simply asking yourself: what do I need to learn and who do I need to become to achieve x? This question will show you all the gaps between your actual state and the one you need to be to achieve x. I’ve used the same question to draw a line of where I am and who I need to become to achieve x, and it works really well.
Incorporating the habit of learning something new everyday, would eventually take you to the version you need to be to achieve x. if you could only improve as little as .1% daily, the compounded result would be so enormous you wouldn’t recognize yourself in one year, as a consequence becoming x would be inevitable.
To start, first define what you need to learn to achieve x, these are your learning blocks, such as skills, abilities and knowledge, then find the most reliable resources to study from across reputable sources, next cross compare the data to avoid biases, spotting patterns, finding gaps, and for knowing how the sources complement each other, finally create a study plan by prioritizing what can take you faster to what you want to achieve.
I think learning will only take you so far. Applying what you learn, learning through feedback, adapting yourself, and executing fast will do.
9. Shit in shit out: Stay away from the noise
The things you often consume either improve you or consume you. This is a conscious choice and it’s up to you to decide which one to choose. The farther you are from daily distractions, the closer you are to achieving great things. Walking lightly —not letting yourself be bogged down by mundane and materialistic stuff— and being frugal is one of the best remedies against most distractions.
A great method to keep you away from any distractions, is simple learning to say no to almost everything, and using Warren Buffet’s method is a sure way to get there: “The best way to prevent yourself going gambling into a casino: simply, don’t go”, so simply don’t go to wherever gets you distracted.
An useful way I've found to achieve balance is considering everything you consume as a catalyst to become the version you need to be to achieve x, so the more things you consume that improve you, the more leverage you have to turn into that version.
For me, if your habits were the scaffoldings to take you to realize your goal, the things you consume would be the screws and bolts which strengthen them, and your daily actions the workers building the path towards your goal.
Final thoughts
At the end everything is a decision, what you decide to focus on and at what level. Whichever path you choose, you can increase your odds of success by using your own antidote as a lever: a powerful set of daily habits to become the one you need to become to achieve your goals, operate with excellence, think clearly and feel great everyday.
Footnotes
[1]: https://chipwilson.com/book/
[2] A powerful set of daily habits for counterbalancing daily stress, pressure and intensity, operating with excellence, thinking clearly and to become the one you need to become to achieve your goals.
[3] https://www.healthline.com/health/runners-high
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Dimension-David-Yonggi-Cho/dp/1610369998
[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-94328-9
[7] https://fs.blog/the-buffett-formula/
[8] https://www.healthline.com/health/runners-high
[9] https://peterattiamd.com/outlive/
[10] https://www.amazon.com/Grain-Brain-Surprising-Sugar-Your-Killers/dp/031623480X
[11] https://peterattiamd.com/cgm-in-non-diabetics/
[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MuIMqhT8DM
[13] https://www.healthline.com/health/rewiring-your-brain
[14] https://www.whatmatters.com/okrs-explained