Daily Thought for Change

You know that saying,
“We make our choices and then our choices make us”?

The same has been said about our habits.

Yesterday I was moving to a new place.
Almost no reading.
No learning.
No quiet thinking time.

I even took a day off work for it.

And this morning, I felt different.
Writing was harder, stiffer.
Ideas didn’t come as easily.
The page felt like a heavy dumbbell.

And then I remembered something I once heard from James Clear, the habit guy - that before he writes, he reads.
That creative output is almost always the result of prior input, at least in his years of writing experience, and the book that has been on a bestseller list for a decade.

Then I realized something else.

It wasn’t just the missed reading.
It was the environment shift.
The broken routines.
The lack of those small, familiar anchors my brain relies on.

Everything needed more conscious effort.
Nothing felt quite “in place.”

It reminded me of starting a workout in a new gym.
Or doing groceries in a new country.

The first day is clunky.
You’re slower.
Out of rhythm.
A little (or a lot) off.

And realized once again,
for most of us, routines aren’t restrictive, they’re freeing.

The less your brain has to think about life logistics,
the more energy it has for creative work.

So I did a simple thing.

I sat down.
I read for a few minutes.
Just like James Clear does.

And almost immediately, ideas started flowing again.
Like finding your favorite machine in a new gym.
Like slipping back into your groove.

Rep by rep.
Word by word.
Letter by letter.

This move has me thinking a lot about how the environment shapes us - what we do, what we create, who we become.

"The easiest way to grow is to put yourself in the conditions where growth is the only option", ~ Alex Hormozi.

This it’s left me with this question:

What’s the right place for me now, the one that makes the next level of me almost inevitable?

And, over to you, dear reader,

What places, habits, and choices can give the next-level you fertile soil to grow? 🌱

When I used to do a lot of fasting, I learned something very useful about controlling where my focus goes.

During fasting, the hardest part isn’t the physical discomfort.
Especially with short fasts.

It’s managing your own mind. Where your thinking goes.

Thoughts about food show up long before your body actually needs fuel. Way before hunger is real.
And the fastest way through a fast doesn't depend on more willpower. It’s all about attention management.

Get yourself busy with something low-key.
Admin. Cleanup. Simple work that absorbs you just enough.

When your attention is occupied, there’s no space left to obsess about food.

I also noticed something else.
When something in my life fully absorbs my attention, intense work, a personal situation, an emergency, I naturally forget about food entirely. 

Not because my body needs less fuel.
Because my spotlight is pointed elsewhere🔦

Your attention works like a spotlight.

It’s a spotlight you can control.

Whatever you shine it on gets more thinking, more energy, more bandwidth.
And if you want something not to dominate your mind (food, worry, anxiety, distraction), the solution isn’t to “stop thinking.”

It’s to start thinking about something else.

TI use this principle when I work with entrepreneurs on work-life integration, burnout prevention, and actually enjoying the life while they’re building, I often give them a simple exercise.

I call it Time Budgeting. And it's all about managing spotlight.

You get 168 hours per week.
Not expandable.
Not extendable.
Not transferable.

Before the week starts, list the areas of your life you want to matter, grow, or maintain - work, health, relationships, learning, recovery, play.

Then yourself ask 1 simple question:

Which of these 168 hours will each area actually get?

Because if something gets none, none will happen.
Just like hunger during fasting fades when it gets no attention.

What you don’t give the spotlight to slowly disappears.

So, over to you, dear reader,

Want to get through a fast?
Get busy.

Want more of something in your life?
Decide when it gets the spotlight of your attention, and schedule it.

One of the best habits to prevent overwhelm, overcommitting, and constantly rushing from one thing to another, barely having time to do a good job, let alone a great one - is a simple sentence:

“I need to think about it.”

That’s a response you’ll hear from me more often from now on.

Now more than ever.

With all the automations and AI tools that can speed things up, the temptation will be to say YES to even more. To juggle more balls. To stack more commitments on top of each other.
And then to be surprised that, somehow, you still don’t have more time. Probably less!

Because just like before with the telephone.
Just like before with email.
Just like before with remote work.

Convenience does not equal more thinking time. Or more of any time!

If you respond to more emails, you’ll get more emails.
Will more get done?

If you measure productivity by emails sent back and forth - sure.
If you measure it by finishing meaningful projects - maybe not.

As Cal Newport, the author of Slow Productivity, said on the Finding Mastery podcast:

“I might fear that productivity actually will go down. Because the noisy work will go up.”

We’ll see.

But when I look back at my past year, almost 3 years now in South Africa, the thing that got me into trouble wasn’t lack of opportunity, lack of consistency.
It wasn’t lack of ideas.
It wasn’t even lack of tools.

It was saying YES too quickly.

Yes, before thinking through how much work it would actually take to do something well.
Yes, before checking whether I had the energy, focus, and capacity to show up properly.
Yes, before asking whether this was a project that could change everything, or just another thing keeping me busy.

If we equate productivity with being busy, then yes, AI is making us wildly productive.
If we equate productivity with moving meaningful work forward, then a much better habit is this:

Think first.
Decide deliberately.
Commit only when you can do it outstandingly well.

So over to you, dear reader,

Maybe it’s worth scheduling not only time to learn new AI tools, but also time to learn how to think better about what’s actually worth doing.

PS Stay tuned. I’ll be running events soon where I’ll share practical frameworks for thinking and deciding well before doing.

I’ve decided to restart my weekly 24-hour fasts this year.

My reasons are plenty. I used to do them a few years back.

But the final push came from something a client said.

She was talking about wanting to restart her own 24-hour weekly fast and said, almost casually:

“It’s quite simple. You just stop eating on Sunday at lunch and you don’t eat till Monday lunch.”

That was it.

When she said it like that, it sounded easy.

Before that, for some reason, I had built this whole complicated story in my head.
That I had to not eat an entire day.
That I’d feel low on energy.
That my morning workouts would suffer.
That I wouldn’t be able to function properly.

So I never started.

I couldn’t see a scaled-down version that could actually work with my life.

This client made it sound simple. Almost effortless.

Nothing fundamentally changed about the process.
It’s still a 24-hour fast.

What changed was the story.

In his book $100 Million Offers, Alex Hormozi shares a value equation for creating great offers:

(Dream Outcome × Likelihood of Achievement) / (Time Delay × Effort)

What I’m only now really getting, after years of coaching and studying behavioral science, is this:

Every single part of that equation can be changed by perception.
By framing.
By story.

Not by changing the thing.

In the fasting example, my client “sold” me on the idea, not because the habit became easier, but because her framing made the effort feel smaller.

Same habit.
Different story.
Different motivation because of less PERCEIVED effort.

This works the same in the transformations I'm taking my clients through.

You can focus on:

• the hard work

• the uncertainty

• the time it takes

• everything that might go wrong

Or you can talk about:

• working on one new skill at a time

• measuring progress and seeing change every day

• getting closer to a meaningful outcome every week

• having focus, structure, and support you need

• feeling momentum again, maybe for the first time in years

We often get stuck not because the thing is too hard, but because the story we tell ourselves about it feels heavier than it needs to be.

We assume there’s only one way to see it.
One way to do it.
One way to feel about it.

In reality, there are always multiple perspectives.

And sometimes all it takes is an outside view, or a zoomed-out perspective, to make forward movement feel obvious instead of overwhelming.

Over to you, dear reader,

Where might the way you’re looking at something be the exact opposite of what you need to get you going toward what you want? Where do you still have a "heavy story"?

PS: And if you’re in the business of “selling”- ideas, change, services, transformation - where might the story you are telling be the thing standing in the way of your customer action?

For a long time, I felt that networking was a waste of time.

Not because relationships don’t matter.
But because most networking felt fake.

Meeting more and more people.
Exchanging smiles, business cards, LinkedIn requests.
With no real framework for turning any of it into something meaningful, except hoping that luck, timing, or serendipity would magically do the work.

It wasn’t clicking.

I can’t keep up with endless surface-level connections.
And I don’t want to.

There’s no depth there. No real trust.
And I don’t feel good pitching my business to every person I meet, hoping that maybe one day they’ll need me.

By the time they do, we’ve usually gone our separate ways.
And when that moment comes, people don’t choose the best option, they choose the one that comes to mind first.

Luck plays too big a role in that system.

And honestly?
I want to eliminate luck as much as possible from my success equation. If it's there - good. If not, I want to still win.

Yesterday I came across a post by Sharran Srivatsaa, entrepreneur and investor, President and Managing Partner at Acquisition.com with Alex Hormozi. He wrote:

“Your network isn’t who you know.
Your network is who knows you can deliver.
Connections mean nothing without credibility.
Build credibility first.
Show up consistently.
Deliver results.
The network builds itself.
Focus on the work. Not the networking.”

That gave me chills. I felt - that I could work with. In fact, that what I understand and prefer.

This year, I started doing something different.

On January 3rd, I ran a Clarity Reset, a free space for strangers to reflect on their 2026 direction.
No pitch. Just value.

Then I ran my first-ever 5-day challenge, High-Performing Entrepreneur Reboot.
One hour a day. Real tools. Real value. Real connections.

I also onboarded 5 new clients for free for a month.
Not as a gimmick, or hack.
But so they could experience what I can deliver.

So that when the time is right, they don’t just “know me.”
They know I’m useful.
They know I can help.
They know I deliver.

Let me ask you this:

Do you think these connections are gonna be tighter and better than with someone you’ve randomly met a couple of times at another networking party, vaguely understanding what they do?

In 2026, I’m putting this approach to a real-life test.

Not trying to network with the right people.
But trying to be genuinely useful to the right people.

Let’s see where it goes.

Einstein famously said:

“Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.”

Maybe the answer to networking isn’t doing the wrong thing harder.

Maybe it’s doing what we already know works.

Over to you, dear reader,

Where are you still hoping that “the wrong thing” will finally work this year?
And what might happen if you tried different instead?

What evidence do you have that your brain isn't lying to you?
How is it working for you?
What are other possible outcomes?

Yesterday I blogged about cognitive biases, the ways our brain gets reality wrong.

The halo effect, for example.
The first impressions.
How the way someone looks influences how smart, competent, or trustworthy we think they are.

Wikipedia lists around 200 cognitive biases. They’re still being added.

Then there are cognitive fallacies, or errors in logic, and we have dozens or hundreds of them as well.
Like: “If you’re a bad person, you must always be wrong.”
Or: “If you’re a good person, you must be right.”

That’s not how reality works.

The bottom line is simple and uncomfortable:
our brain is a terrible judge of objective world.

So no, don’t listen to everything you hear in your head.

At the very least, take it with a grain of salt🧂
The same way you would with advice from someone else.

A good question is,
how do you do that consistently?

Here’s a simple framework I use with clients.
3 questions I shared above.
Best asked in writing, so your logic is recorded and can be evaluated and checked against reality later, by you, or by someone else.

1. What evidence do you have?

Not vibes.
Not stories.
Not intuition.

Actual evidence you’re reasonably sure of.

If you don’t have much, ask:
How can I test this assumption before going all in?
How can I dip my toes before diving?

Small experiments beat big leaps based on our biased thinking.

2. How is it working for you?

Whenever clients propose a plan, even when I know it’s probably unrealistic, I say:
Try.

And after they do, I ask:
How is it working for you?

Because if it isn’t, continuing in the hope that you’ll magically change or the world will adjust is usually just wasted time.

Time that could’ve gone into something that actually works.

3. What are other possible outcomes?

Not just the best-case scenario your brain shares with you enthusiastically.

All the other explanations.
All the other paths this could take.

Annie Duke, world's poker champion and decision scientist, introduced me to decision trees, mapping all plausible outcomes before deciding, not just the desired one.

Even better: invite an outside view.
Ask yourself: What would my friend say here?
Or actually ask them. Or ask ChatGPT. Or Claude.

Then consider probabilities.
Downside costs.
Upside potential.

Is the potential upside worth the potential risk? How likely are both to occur? On what evidence?

No, you don’t need to analyze every idea to death.

But before you invest serious time, other people’s time, money, energy, or say no to things that might work better - it’s good decision hygiene to scrutinize your own thoughts the way you’d scrutinize someone else’s advice.

Over to you, dear reader,
Where do you need to doubt your own thinking more?
And what small thinking habit could help you do that consistently?

Not every idea that comes into your mind deserves your attention.
Not every idea is meaningful.
And not every thought you think is good for your life and is worth keeping.

Wikipedia lists around 200 cognitive biases, predictable ways our thinking goes wrong.

A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking.
It happens when we process and interpret information in ways that feel logical and true but aren’t.
Biases are mental shortcuts. They help us navigate a complex world quickly, just not always accurately.

Example of a bias: availability heuristic.

We give more weight to information that comes to mind easily or vividly.
Plane crash headlines. What's social media algorithm keep bringing to you? What keeps coming into your email.

Your brain (and mine) will literally judge something as more true or more important simply because it appeared in your head more often.

Nobody becomes bias-free.
But almost everyone can build better decision-making habits to work around bias to get better results.

One simple practice:
Keep a parking lot for “great ideas”, like an idea journal (many successful entrepreneurs have them)
Write your ideas down.
Evaluate them later, during a reflection session, every week or so.
Don’t start executing just because an idea showed up.

The more mature business owners I’ve worked with, the ones who built something substantial from nothing, know this well.

To build something great, you must say no to a lot of ideas.

They’ve also learned that ideas are almost nothing on their own.
Without the right opportunity, matching resources, timing, a sprinkle of luck, and a truckload of sustained execution, ideas stay ideas, and sometimes a waste of time.

I once heard Alex Hormozi say:

“Every day I could have about 100 ideas about things in business I could work on. When I write them down most of them sound like total nonsense a month later.”

Most things we regret later, or keep repeating even though we know they’re not working, started as ideas too.

A thought.
An assumption.
A decision that felt right in the moment.

If every idea were a good one, we wouldn’t:

• Prioritize social media over our learning

• Choose food that makes us sick, not healthier

• Stay in relationships that drain us instead of growing us

Not everything that comes to your mind is working for you.
Not every idea is possible (for you).
Not every idea is a good investment of your time.

When I coach clients, I know something important:
Every suggestion I make needs a clear explanation of why it’s worth their consideration.

But when we hear our own thoughts, we rarely apply the same standard.

We assume: If I thought it, it must matter.

And that’s where things quietly go wrong. Sometimes for years and decades.

So, over to you, dear reader,

Where are you still treating your ideas as the most important source of truth in your decisions, and where would a more deliberate evaluation process lead to better results?

It was Day 2 of the High-Performing Entrepreneur Reboot challenge I’m running.

Someone shared an insight:

“I looked at all the goals for our company and realized I had to put some down because it’ll take too much from other goals, and I’m not sure it’ll be worth it. So maybe this goal is for later.”

One of the things that I really wanted participants to take away from this challenge, the thing that makes more people fail than the hardest challenge ever could - diluted focus.

Not discipline.
Not motivation.
Not willpower.

Diluted focus.

We start yet another year with noise in our heads🤯
Feeling late.
Feeling behind.
Feeling like if we don’t start everything now, we’ll miss our chance, again.

And that’s exactly why we fail at most of the things we start.

Because we want to have it all now.
Because we want to start it all now.
Because step-by-step feels too slow, too boring, too unimpressive.

Someone wiser than me once said:

“You can have it all. Just not at the same time.”

The most fundamental truth of any real achievement is simple:
To get it, you must keep going.

And to keep going, you need to do what you’re capable of now, while slowly building the capacity to do more.

Sprint into a marathon as a newbie and you might beat the elite runner… for a moment.
But not for long.

Guess who wins in the end?

The one who didn’t go all-in at the start.

At the beginning of this year, instead of listing 50 goals, I asked myself a different question:

What do I really want to create that would make this year meaningful?

Not:

• run races

• write a book

• make a million bucks

But this:

• build a business that grows sustainably and consistently, and that I’m proud of

• bring my parents to a warm place for winter

• finish a meaningful coaching certification with people I deeply admire

Small list.
Clear list.

Focused list.

And if I do that, I'd have the happiness, and the foundation for everything that comes next.

A quick spoiler: I just won a scholarship for a Self-Actualization Coach certification, accredited by ICF and all, from the Center for Human Potential, led by scientists I genuinely admire.

I’m also on Day 3 of my first group challenge, part of my plan to get great at working with people at scale, and grow my business.

And it’s only January 7.

Last night, lying in bed, I had a quiet, uncomfortable insight:

“Angela, the only reason you’re not further ahead…
is that you never truly focused, with clarity, on any ONE thing.”

Maybe this is the year I finally do.

Over to you, dear reader, 

Where could you use less ambition, and more focus, so you finally give yourself a fair chance to win the prize you actually care about?

What would have to be true for me to win?

In the strategy book Playing to Win, one of the core practices is to brainstorm many different ways to win in a specific market, with a specific customer, toward a specific goal.

And then you ask one filtering question:

“What would have to be true for this to actually play out?”

This helps to see clearly the odds of any strategies to succeed.

I use a version of this with my clients who want to change careers, shift businesses, or start something new.

First, I ask them to brainstorm everything:
All the things they might do.
All the projects.
All the gigs.
All the business ideas.

Then we slow it down, we ground it.

We write criteria.
Boundaries.
Their life's reality checks.

What would have to be true for this idea to have a real chance of winning in your REAL life?

Income requirements.
Skills you already have, or would need to build.
Connections you’d need access to.
Market dynamics.
Actual customers, not imagined ones.

Where can you realistically win, instead of where you hope you’ll win if luck happens?

This is usually when something clicks.

Not everything that’s a “great idea” has a high chance of success for you.

Especially if you care about certain lifestyle.
Energy.
Health.
Freedom. People to take care of.
Or you have a very specific definition of success.

This principle worked at scale.
Procter & Gamble is the flagship case in the book.

And I keep seeing it work in the micro, too.

I’m currently listening to a 5-hour podcast with Alex Hormozi, where he walks through how he got to where he is today. From $1000 in the bank to over $100 000 000 of revenue in a weekend.

One detail caught my attention.

He used to keep a small trampoline next to him and bounce on it between sales calls.
(Tony Robbins does something similar before going on stage.)

Why?

To get his energy light, bouncy, playful.

Because energy transfers.
And high energy increases YES-rates.

So Alex asked, consciously or not:
What would have to be true for me to win?

One of those things was consistent high energy (which he's not naturally at).

So he didn’t “hope” for it.
He built a system that made it more likely.

Over and over again, when I look closely at success, of people, teams, companies, it’s rarely random.

It’s clarity about how you want to win.
Honesty about what must be true.
And then designing systems that shorten the odds.

Not motivation.
Not willpower. Or luck.
Design.

So, over to you, dear reader,

Have you thought through your winning strategy?
And more importantly, have you set up your life so winning is the default, not a struck of luck?

We were talking about taxes and company setup in one of the entrepreneur groups I’m part of.
The usual fork in the road: figure it out yourself, or hire someone to do it with/for you, explaining things as they go.

There are nuances, sure.
But in most cases, unless you’re genuinely fascinated by tax law and want to spend your limited, non-renewable time on it, the struggle isn’t noble. It’s a waste

More than that, it quietly steals your best resources.
Time. Attention. Cognitive energy.

Resources you could be using where you’re actually dangerous.
Where you create value.
Where only you can solve the problem. ("Who not How" is a phrase I love by one business coach I follow)

Or… you can try to win every battle yourself.
(I’m not sure how many wars have ever been won that way.)

One of my unofficial mentors, Tim Ferriss, once explained how he deals with social media and junk-food temptations.

He removes the apps.
Turns off notifications.
Never keeps food he wants to eat less of in the house.

“Yes, you can train your willpower, but why would you want to? You might need it for something else in life and work.”

Another mentor of mine, Alex Hormozi, put it even more bluntly:

“The most sure way to change is to put yourself in a situation where you have no other choice but change.”

Same idea. Different words.

If you talk to almost anyone who’s overcome a lot, who people label as “disciplined”, you’ll usually find the same pattern.

They don’t rely on heroic self-control.
They design conditions.

They make the right action the path of least resistance.
They remove exits.
They stop negotiating with themselves.

Instead of spinning their wheels in battles that never needed to be fought.

I tell my clients this all the time:

“Don’t try to battle it out by becoming a different person.
Be the person who builds systems that make the right choice inevitable.
Save your energy for the battles that actually matter.”

Over to you dear reader,

Where are you still fighting, when changing the circumstances would effortlessly take you to the next level?