I think the idea of a life audit is great. And how do you get the people close to you in on it?
That's a great question. I just ask people what their goals are; they'll say they want to lose weight, do this, do that. Then I ask why they haven't done it yet. People usually say they've been lazy, haven't mustered up the time or energy, or blame other things like the weather. That's when I switch into my willpower talk: I used to work with rats in experiments where we put them in cages with different setups—one side gave a shock, the other gave sugary water. The rats naturally chose the sugary water side. This is choice architecture: you can change behavior by making undesired actions hard and desired actions easy. We're all animals; we share DNA with rats. If you design your life so that the things you want to do—like exercise, going to the gym, cardiovascular activities, playing in the park—are easy, you'll naturally do them more often. If you make good things hard, you'll do them less often. It doesn't take much willpower when you've designed life to make the desired actions easy. For example, if a friend shows up at 6 a.m. asking to hit the gym, you have social shame saying no, the gym is easier because they're downstairs and might pick you up, and it's more fun working out together. All these make working out easier, so you're more likely to do it. If you have a big community cheering you on when you send cold emails or make sales calls, and you post daily accountability so you don't want to let people down, then growing your business becomes easier and stagnating becomes harder. A simple example: I put my vitamins on the counter instead of hiding them in the cabinet. Every time I go into the living room, I see them and think, 'Have I taken them yet?' If not, I take them. This simple change improved my vitamin intake by about 5x—a 500% improvement—with no extra energy.
You know, the reason I've always been hesitant to do a day-in-the-life vlog is because my days are pretty boring. For the most part, I'm just sitting in front of my laptop doing the same revenue-generating activities I tell you to do. These activities might look a bit different now that my brand has taken off and been very successful—I now have more distribution and leverage, so I spend more time on the brand than on my agency. But generally, I wake up, sit in this chair, and type for about ten hours. It's boring, right? There's no real day-in-the-life for people who are 'on the up and up,' at least in my case, since my business model is entirely digital. If I were a door-to-door sales guy or traveling the world for high-ticket deals, it would be different, but I don't really think a day-in-the-life vlog is that valuable. It's more entertainment—like me sucking my own dick, which is pointless. Or like showing me at the gym for two hours, which I get can be motivating for people who want that lifestyle, but I'll be real: I don't think a lot of people want my life. Sure, I have a ton of money and I'm making a big impact; it looks cool from the outside, but there's a lot of work behind it. Work tends to be the separation line between those who don't have stuff and those who do. I could get philosophical, but I won't go super deep. However, a friend once told me something that stuck with me: 'Everybody on earth gets paid exactly the amount they deserve.' It blew my mind because it sounds like one of those unnecessary alpha-male bro sayings, but pragmatically, it's true. You get paid $5 an hour for a shitty dishwashing job you don't want to do; at some level you deserve that because you haven't taken the actions to get a $15 or $20-an-hour job. If you're in a partnership where someone treats you unfairly—giving you 30% and taking 70% while skimming you off the top—it's your fault; you're getting paid exactly what you deserve because you could have avoided that partnership, enforced better boundaries, or become more valuable than 30%. Likewise, if you run a business and your average order value is $500, you deserve that $500 because you were unable to position the product better to make more money. It's unreasonable to assume otherwise—that's how the economy works under capitalism. Just like when you start a new game, if you're bad at it, you just haven't spent enough time getting better. When you get your ass kicked in Super Smash Brothers, it's because you deserve it. That's one thing I'll mention that I don't think a lot of people realize.
I think both starting and maintaining are difficult. For me, starting was actually very hard. Once I'm going, I can maintain whatever I do for a very long period—it's just that initial period. So, for me, it was about minimizing the friction required to get going. I leaned on an example from The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy: a woman wanted to pick up a jogging habit. She asked Darren how to do it; he'd tried jogging 20 minutes a day for months and couldn't. His advice: tomorrow, just jog for 1 minute—bring a timer, lace up your shoes, open the door, click the timer for 1 minute, jog, then return. She thought it was stupid—she wanted to jog for 20 minutes. He said, 'When you're done today, come back tomorrow and we'll talk.' She did it, came back tomorrow, and said, 'Darren, you know, I took longer to lace up my shoes than I did to actually go for the run.' He said, 'Today, we'll do it for 2 minutes.' She came back day three for 3 minutes, day four for 4 minutes, and so on. Within 20 days, she was running for 20 minutes because she built up a low-friction lifestyle and knew it was just one minute, then two, then three, etc., organically instilling the habit and overcoming the starting problem. That's more or less always been what it is for me. When I start my days now, I just do community management—very low friction. I wake up, wipe the crust from my eyes, respond to people's questions on Maker School or Make Money with Make using a voice transcription tool. I'm literally saying, 'Yes, Peter, great work.' That's the lowest friction thing ever considering the amount I make. It makes sense to start it right away. As the day goes on, I get into harder and harder things, eventually eating that frog, but I eat a lot of very tiny frogs instead. Zooming out my whole life, it's been a process of learning that daily accountability is the most important part. I was a student like many of you who would cram at the last second for exams, do spectacularly, but then lose sleep and be stressed out. Hate being that annoying old dude who puts his hand on your shoulders saying you should start now—you really should start now. You can save so much time and energy if you do it now. Believe it or not, small daily consistency over time is actually the lazy approach. Another related concept: when I was younger, my father would eat, make food, clean the dishes, and put them in the dishwasher while making food—because he's lazy. When I do it, I obviously didn't do that; I left dirty dishes in the sink. He said, 'Oh, I do it because I'm lazy.' I said, 'You're lazy? What are you talking about?' That seems way harder. He said, 'No, it's way harder to stack all of this stuff up and then have a giant load of laundry and dishes at the end if you just do it while you're doing the thing. If you just clean up while you're cooking, it's actually like the lazy approach.' So, I do it while I'm doing it because I'm lazy. Likewise, he vacuums once every few days because he's lazy. Anyway, the point is you don't do it because it's hard—you actually do it because it's easy. So, it's actually easier to do it this way. I think that's a really powerful mental model.
That's a great video topic, and I was actually considering doing something similar soon. The core 80/20 lesson I can share is: don’t live according to an environment that was designed for you—design your own environment instead. We’re born into a default setting, like being dropped into an ongoing football game (capitalism) without knowing the rules, and our initial training comes from whatever ‘coach’ happens to be around, often not the best. Don’t assume the lifestyle you’ve been given is optimal, or that the usual advice—go to school, attend office hours, ask questions, study with a specific method—is automatically true. Evaluate everything from first principles and only adopt what makes sense to you. Maker School is a good example: when I started it, people said I couldn’t do it alone, yet we now have dozens of coaches and staff managing replies. I questioned whether I really needed all that and decided to design my own environment first before taking others’ advice at face value. Small lifestyle tweaks—like leaving your vitamins out on the counter instead of hiding them in a cupboard—have led to major results for me. For instance, I wake up, see the vitamins, and remember to take them. I also keep a post‑it on my computer reminding me to send a certain number of Upwork applications each day, mentally queuing the actions needed to reach my goals. These tiny bits of planning run contrary to much of what society tells us to do, but as long as you build your environment from the ground up, you can often achieve the outcomes you want.
I don’t think sacrificing my health was necessary; I took an all‑or‑nothing approach, and part of the sacrifice was outside my control—I was playing pickleball, got sick with a viral infection, and strained my right shoulder, which together gave me brachioraditis and kept me from doing the health activities I wanted. Instead I went “balls deep into work.” I procrastinate like the average person and mentioned the 20/80 rule (likely meaning 80/20). I understand where you’re coming from. My view on health versus success is that once people reach a certain level of wealth or income, they start investing in health because it’s all they have left to invest in, and many wish they’d done it earlier. Investing in health means different things for different people: for some it’s mental health, walks on the beach, or the right partners; for me it was literal physical health. I see a trend where, after hitting a certain number, people wonder what’s next—and that number varies per person. For me that number was reasonably low; I’ve observed others at ten times that level arriving at the same realization. Chris then asked about the book I referenced—it’s The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfus, and I don’t expect a sequel. Casper praised the breakdown and congratulated me on winning the games, calling it cool and informative and thinking they’d already done it. Before moving on to delegating and outsourcing, I recommended Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell, which I’d just been tipped about and have in my Apple Books library. Benjamin said it’s incredibly interesting and highlighted the key insight that you don’t need to listen to Hormosi for two hours daily twice while working out because you’re already proficient at what he teaches; I’m doing that by listening to Hormosi at the gym, aiming to watch every long‑form video he’s published (he has too many shorts to count) to see his journey, since I feel mine is similar in a slightly different industry, noting Hormosi was bright‑eyed and young when he started seven or eight years ago and suggesting to check his early videos. I pointed out how funny it is to watch Hormosi walk through a sketchy, trashy gym with no lights, bad paint job, and hear him say, “Look at this thing—who would want to work out here?” while noting he turned that gym into $35,000 in five days, which I think is cool. I also said seeing his shift from management‑consulting style to bro‑gym marketing back to digital because of COVID is interesting and would illuminate my own path. Finally, Beyblade Knight remarked that I don’t have to follow that route.