Episode Details

The quality of your life is directly impacted by the quality of your habits. The problem is, most of us did not consciously choose to habits we currently possess. We drifted, stumbled, or otherwise accidentally acquired most of our habits.  Not all of those habits support the outcomes we truly want for ourselves or the ones we love.

In today's episode, we will examine five common habits that will completely wreck your life and how to get rid of them.

Tip of the Week:

Maybe you read The Four Hour Workweek and tried to outsource different parts of your job or business. Maybe that even worked well for you. And maybe, just maybe, you are still kind of stressed out. Perry Marshall suggested something to me once that was actually life-changing. It's one of those "tiny hinges that swing big doors". It's a twist on the idea of outsourcing.

What if, instead of outsourcing high-level tasks at your job or business, you outsourced tasks in your personal life? You may scoff at first, but think about it: if you could outsource things like your laundry, yard maintenance, shopping, cooking, cleaning, mail pickup and drop-off, etc… how much time and energy would that free up for you?

Perry's suggestion to me was that it's better to start by outsourcing those things to clear out space in my life so that I could have time for critical thinking. This gives me margin so that I can spend time on creating ideas, reading, making connections, and generally performing the kind of alchemy that entrepreneurs get paid for.

I've been experimenting with this idea in a serious way recently, and my latest find came to me through my friend Stu McLaren, who turned me on to Fancy Hands. Basically, Fancy Hands will do anything for you that can be done in 15 minutes or less. So far I've had them:

• Research a long list of inspirational quotes for an upcoming presentation.
• Find me the best deal on a Keurig coffee maker.
• Proof some blog posts.
• Find and recommend a list of local people who might be available to do some personal assistant work for me (like the things I listed above).

One of the things I really like about their service is they calculate how much time you've saved by having them do this stuff for you. So far, I've invested about 10 minutes typing up the tasks I wanted them to work on: they estimate they saved me 1.4 hours. I think that's about right.

Currently, I plan to have them proofread all my blog posts, which I estimate should save me anywhere from 4 to 6 hours per month. Not that I spent that much time proofreading my blog posts, mind you…that estimate comes from the number of emails I get from people who say things like, "Do you realize what a goofy typo you made in this blog post?"

For the record, I had them proof this post. How did they do?

This is a very easy service to try, and if you decide to stick with them it's cheap. And there's no contract. Click here to check out Fancy Hands now.

Spiritual Foundations:

Are you worried, anxious, stressed out, overwhelmed? If you are troubled about a lot of different things today, I have an answer for you.

You've heard me talk about a book called

Listen Now