Daily Thought for Change

“It isn’t discipline if you like doing it.”
— Alex Hormozi

The guy started 10 years ago with $1000 in his bank account sleeping on his gym's floor, and recently broke Guinness record for selling the most non-fiction books in a day. I think he made $6 000 000 in that weekend.

Anyone can do hard things when they feel like it.

That’s not the skill.

The skill is doing them consistently when you don’t.

I’ve spent well over 10,000 hours studying self-development - research papers, biographies, podcasts, books, coaching.

Different domains. Same conclusion.

The ability to act without desire is the difference-maker.
In achievement.
In transformation.
In change that actually lasts.

That’s the skill I help my clients to build, while building my own as well.

Here’s the part most people miss: motivation isn’t one thing.

It has 2 parts.

Motive — the reason to act. (Simon Sinek talked a lot about it)
Motivation as feeling, the inner drive, the “up and go”, the one you can physically feel. (The one that coffee brings up)

They fuel each other🔄

If you want to do hard things consistently, especially when it gets uncomfortable, you need access to both.

When the feeling is gone, lean on the reason.
Ask yourself:
Why does this matter?
What does this unlock for my life?
Who or what do I care about enough to do this for?

And when everything feels pointless or heavy, do the opposite.

Start acting.

Behavioral Activation is one of the most effective tools in CBT for depression and avoidance that works on a simple principle: action comes first. Feelings follow.

Your brain releases chemicals, like dopamine, to give you energy to act, once you start.

You don’t wait to feel motivated.
You do things that create meaning, mastery, or even small moments of joy.
And motivation shows up after you begin.

So when you’re stuck, ask yourself 2 simple questions:

Do I lack a strong enough reason?
Or do I simply need to start?

Motivation isn’t a mystery that visits some people and skips others.
It’s a system you can fuel and recalibrate.

Whose achievements inspire you?
I’d bet on this without hesitation: they mastered the motivation skill.

Not luck.
Not talent.
This.

Over to you dear reader, what’s missing for you right now to give IT your absolute best?

Do you know when I feel the worst mentally and emotionally?

When I expect some results and I fall short even with all the hard work done.

Do you know what sabotages in my clients high performance, consistency, grit, and the ability to do hard things more than almost anything else?

Unmet expectations.

This was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn.
It’s also one of the hardest things for my clients to navigate.

The good news?

Once you learn how to work with your expectations, very little in life can defeat your spirit.

Here’s how unmet expectations quietly derail us.

We see a business succeeding. From the outside, it looks obvious. Logical. Almost easy.
So we think, I can do that too.

Then we start.

And very quickly we discover there are hundreds of things that can go wrong, things we didn’t know existed, couldn’t have predicted, and weren’t warned about. There’s a reason most businesses take years to take off. And that’s before you count the years of experience people bring into them.

That gap, between what we expected and what reality delivers, is where the biggest frustrations live.

And that frustration is the biggest reason for quitting.

But what if we expected the journey to be hard from the start?
What if we assumed it would take far more effort, time, and failed attempts than we initially thought?

A) We might think twice before starting.
B) But once we did start, we’d last much longer, without constant disappointment, because we’d know exactly what we signed up for.

Take your health goals.

If you expect to lose 10–20 pounds easily (as most people do), you’re setting yourself up for a lot of frustration, and usually quitting, by about January 21st, back to your “normal life.”

If you expect it to be hard.
To take at least twice as long.
To not work on the first attempt.

You suffer less.
And paradoxically, you give yourself a real chance to get there.

I often come back to this thought from Alex Hormozi:

“All your goals are possible, just not on the timeline you think.”

Most of the biggest successes you see today aren’t overnight wins.
They’re a lifetime of work. YOU just learn about them overnight.
A lifetime of skill acquisition.
A lifetime of adjusting expectations without lowering standards.

A note to self from this morning’s weekly reflection:

Think and plan negatively.
Assume things will be harder than you want them to be.
Then act like you can bend the odds in your favor.

Do that consistently, long enough, and reality starts bending for you.

Over to you dear reader,

Are you hoping for luck?
Or are you prepared to work so hard that, even in the worst-case scenario, it would be unreasonable to expect you to fail?

Or maybe the simplest move of all is to extend the timeline.

I’ve had my six-pack abs for over a decade now.
365 days a year.

Not for a season.
Through Christmases, New Years, summer family vacations.
Picnics, weddings, birthday celebrations.

Some people think it’s discipline.

I’ve just found out, that instead, I’ve been using time and research-tested decision-making frameworks from some of the best decision-making scientists and advisors.

PREMORTEM

Instead of telling myself, I’ll resist temptation, it'll be different this time, I'll try harder, I asked a different question:

“Imagine you failed, Angela. What made it happen?”

Annie Duke (poker champ, decision-making scientist) suggests listing 5 things in your control and 5 outside it.
Same idea as another technique, mental contrasting, imagining the obstacles before they show up to make a plan to deal with them.

Once you see the failure points, you design around them. You design your path to avoid them. You create barriers to the wrong decisions and actions. You lower barriers for the right ones.

Late-night overeating?
Tempting foods don’t live in my house.

Low energy → bad decisions, more hunger?
Sleep becomes non-negotiable.

Urges creeping in?
I shower. I change state. I interrupt the pattern.

You don’t fight behavior.
You redesign the environment that produces it. Or have a plan of action when the worst happens.

CATEGORY DECISIONS

People ask me all the time,
“What do you eat to get abs?”

I joke: I don’t eat sugar or gluten.

What I actually mean is this:
Most foods that wreck my willpower contain one or both.

So I don’t negotiate. I don't seek out gluten-free options. My life is just objectively better without bread, pasta and sweets.

No scanning menus.
No “just this once.”
No inner debate.

Automatic no.

Not because those foods are evil but because decision-fatigue is. No willpower stands a chance against it.

This single rule eliminated decision-making creep.
That slow slide of “one time won’t matter” that, repeated often enough, changes everything.

The upside?
I feel and look great every day with almost no effort.

The best part?
After enough reps, urges disappear.
Not through restraint. Through clarity.

PRE-COMMITMENT CONTRACTS

This is my clients’ favorite because it allows real-life flexibility.

Before a tricky situation, a wedding, birthday, party, you decide in advance.

2 drinks, then sparkling water.
No starches. One dessert🍦
Or whatever fits your goals and the occasion.

When the moment gets “hot,” your brain doesn’t improvise.
It executes the plan. So make one!

Pre-decided behavior beats in-the-moment willpower every time.

These frameworks didn’t just give me abs for life.
They gave me, and my clients, effortless consistency, where before were years of willpower struggle.

And that’s what most people are missing.

Everything you’ll ever do, build, or become is a product of your decisions.

And just like with eating, just because you’ve been deciding your whole life - doesn’t mean you have a good decision-making process.

Over to you, dear reader, 

Where are you still trying to willpower your way through when a better decision model would make it effortless?

150 minutes a week deciding what to eat, around 50 minutes deciding what to watch on Netflix, and 90–115 minutes deciding what to wear. 

Roughly 250–275 hours is what the average person routinely spends on decisions that barely matter.

Time you’re not spending on:

• Deciding what you want to dedicate your life’s work to

• Designing a life that’s aligned with your values

• Creating moments you’ll actually remember and services that make a difference

Fascinating, huh?

(Stats from How to Decide by world-class poker champion and decision-making scientist Annie Duke.)

Barack Obama famously reduced his decision time waste by wearing the same type of outfit every day.
Steve Jobs did the same.
Alex Hormozi outsources his wardrobe, food, and most non-work decisions entirely, and has been on a relentless growth trajectory for over a decade.

One example could be a coincidence.
A pattern across many high-impact leaders should make you pause.

If they needed to do it, you might benefit from it too.

Here’s the dichotomy of decision-making:

A big part of good decision frameworks is slowing down important decisions so you make better bets.

An even bigger part?
Knowing which decisions to speed up, or eliminate entirely. (So that you have time and energy for good thinking when it matters)

I never understood why people agonize over food choices so much.
In a month, you won’t remember what you ate.
Heck, my clients often can’t remember what they had for dinner last night, which is why retrospective food diaries are notoriously unreliable data.

So why spend so much time deciding something you won’t remember tomorrow? 🤔

Decisions you should NOT think long about

(Decide in advance. Or flip a coin.)

• What to eat

• What to wear

• What to watch for entertainment

• Things with mostly upside (asking someone out, making the sales ask - the worst case is “no”)

• Equally good or equally bad options (hard decisions in disguise that are actually easy)

• Two-way door decisions - easy to quit or reverse with minimal downside (Bezos' favorite)

• Choices that fail the happiness test: if this won’t matter to your happiness in a week, a month, or a year - pick anything

And then, slow down.

Slow down when the decision is truly meaningful:

• Choosing a life partner

• Committing to a new career path

• Moving countries

• Deciding which customers to serve

• Choosing who you build with, live with, dream with

Be deliberate about big decisions.
Automate the small, repeated ones.

Over to you, dear reader, what decisions can you automate today to free up mental space, energy and time for impact and meaning?

A friend asked me over coffee, “How do you help people see their broken thinking? You can’t see thinking.”
The question stayed with me for a while, and came up again as I was reading yet another book on decision-making.

How do you see your own mind? How do you spot the cognitive blind spots that quietly keep you looping the same habits and wondering why unwanted things keep reappearing in our life?

With clients, it's easier, you are not in their head, you see where their thinking works against their goals.

But what about your own head?

There’s a simple tool that shows up again and again in research, in leadership, and in good coaching: self-distancing.
It sounds almost too simple. But it works across domains - emotions, strategy, decision-making, personal growth.

In Dealing with Feeling, Marc Brackett shares, based on his deep research, that one of the most effective ways to navigate emotionally charged situations is to ask,
“What would I advise a friend if they were in my exact spot?”
The moment you step out of the emotional swirl, you rise above your own head, your thinking sharpens and clears.

Jim Collins found the same pattern in Great by Choice. Some of the most resilient CEOs in companies that stood the test of time routinely ask,
“If someone new stepped into my role today, what would they do to grow this business?”
Fresh eyes reveal what familiarity hides.

And Annie Duke, in How to Decide, develops it further: before writing your own inside view of a decision, you write an Outside View, a more distant, factual list of base rates, constraints, and environmental factors, taken from the perspective of someone else. And then you marry the two. That’s how you escape the gravity of your own biases.

So today I decided to put this to test.
I asked myself: If a highly competent friend suddenly took over my business for a week, what would they do that I’m not doing?
The answer was pretty clear: my weak spot isn’t ideas or skill. It’s the network. And in my field, trust is built through personal referral. Referrals come from relationships.
Relationships come from proven value.

And so the obvious strategy emerged, one that felt uncomfortable but right: give away some of my work to the right people for free. Not randomly. Intentionally. To the people who can actually see the value, use it, and refer the right others.
Painful to the ego. Wise for the business. And, aligned with what Alex Hormozi keeps preaching as one of the best ways to attract business - reciprocity, give away great stuff for free to the right people.

The bigger lesson:
Our thinking is biased. All of it. Even when we think it’s not. We will never be perfectly objective, but we can become better decision-makers with the right practices. Like self-distancing that has been proven to work across all domains.

Over to you dear reader,
Where would stepping outside your own head, just for a moment, help you see the move that’s been obvious all along?

What if your planning process is killing your motivation?

Theresa Amabile and her team sifted through 12,000 work diaries looking for one thing: what makes work feel meaningful and energizing? What makes people do their best work?

The answer was simple and powerful: visible progress toward something meaningful.
Not big wins. Not praise. Not perks.
Progress.

A client said to me the other day,
“I don’t see the point of this planning habit. I write things down and don’t accomplish most of them. It’s demotivating.”

I immediately thought about 2 things:

First, I clearly hadn’t explained what kind of planning we were doing: we were planning inputs, not outcomes. Actions we control, not results influenced by dozens of factors.

Second, the purpose of the planning wasn’t to create pressure but to increase motivation so you take more reps, so results become more likely and so you learn faster from doing.

It got me thinking again,

We confuse planning with predicting.
We plan for outcomes we can’t control, and then we judge ourselves on whether reality obeyed our script.

The goal of planning isn’t to guarantee the result. (Which you can't)
It’s to guarantee the reps, the only part you actually control.

If you’re losing motivation, working on things, it’s often because you’re tracking the wrong things. You’re measuring the harvest, not the planting. You’re trying to control outcomes instead of actions.

And when you’re trying to create results you’ve never created before?
It will take longer, be messier, and look nothing like the version in your head. Optimism bias will fool you into thinking it should have happened already. It won’t.

That’s why the role of planning is simple:
Make invisible progress visible.
Capture the learnings.
Show the foundation forming under your feet.
Reward the reps.

Don’t write “get a client” or “finish a launch” on a to-do list.
Write the actions you can execute with near certainty.
Then, if those don’t happen, it's a good place to explore your systems, not your worth.

So over to you dear reader, is your planner filled with things to do, or things to get?
And which one do you think is killing your motivation?

Stop expecting certainty from a probabilistic world

We love copying what works for other people.

Someone’s fitness routine. Someone’s diet. Someone’s “winning” strategy. Industry best practices. The formula your old company used. The approach you swear by because it worked once before.

It feels safer than facing a blank page. Than having to go through all the mistakes on your own not even sure if you'll end up in the right place.
In a world of infinite possibilities, uncertainty is heavy. A proven playbook lightens the load.

But this often backfires.
We mistake someone else’s map for our terrain.

We forget that strategy lives or dies by context - your personality, resources, constraints, other people, timing, mood, health, environment, energy, opportunities, partners, mindsets and beliefs we don't see. When context shifts, the old strategy quietly stops working… and we often don’t notice until pain of failure makes it obvious. (And even then we are often stubborn enough to continue)

This failing rigidity is the cost of outsourcing our thinking.

But there's a way to combine the best of both worlds - having a better chance of success with proven strategies, and a better system for flexible application that sees the context as well, and considers multiple options.

THINKING IN PROBABILITIES (As poker players would🃏)

A better way is defining success upfront, defining early signs of being on the right/wrong track, and learning to think in probabilities.

Annie Duke (world's poker champion) teaches a simple process that I'm coming back to again and again in business and when coaching clients:

1. List all the possible outcomes (not only the ones you want).

2. Clarify your preferences based on values and goals.

3. Estimate the likelihood on a 1–5 scale (1 = nearly impossible; 5 = almost a guarantee).

4. Identify the possible payoffs, positive and negative for each option.

5. Compare.

6. Decide.

No fantasy guarantees. Just probabilities, payoffs and preferences.

And with tools like ChatGPT, you can interrogate your assumptions even further, reduce bias, and get a third-person viewpoint when your emotions get in the way.

I used this with a client this week, helping them navigate a difficult negotiation.

I suggested to consider:

“What’s the worst possible outcome here?
And if it happens, what’s your plan?”

Once he answered that, he relaxed. Because he realized: he already had a path even in the worst-case scenario. His brain stopped catastrophizing. He could think clearly again about how to make better outcomes more likely to happen.

It's like preparing soil and all the conditions for your crop to thrive, knowing in advance, that the weather isn't a guarantee.

Different things happen.

When you prepare for the worst, and design around it, you give yourself the freedom to aim for the best.

It’s the same logic behind healthy meal prep. You don’t wait for willpower. You set up conditions. You remove friction. You skew the odds. And on the worst day you end up chewing broccoli because that's what you prepped for🥦

Most meaningful decisions in life aren’t certainties. They’re bets.

The question isn’t “Will it work?”
The question is:
“What can I do today to tilt the probabilities in my favor?”

When you exercise your whole life and then get hit by a bus and die early, we all agree that’s bad luck. But was exercising a bad decision? A waste of time?
Of course not.

A friend of mine smokes.

When I asked him why, since smoking is clearly terrible for health and longevity, he told me, “My relative smoked all his life and lived to 90 just fine.”
Was that a good decision framework? Or was he borrowing confidence from someone else’s genetic lottery?

This is the trap Annie Duke, the world-class poker player and decision-making scientist, calls resulting, judging the quality of a decision by the quality of the outcome. It’s one of the fastest ways to make worse choices over time, because luck always turns eventually.

Look at this matrix.

Good decisions can lead to bad outcomes. Bad luck.
Bad decisions can lead to good outcomes. Dumb luck.

But the long-term is where the quality of your process shows up.

You move to a new place, take a new job, start a new relationship, and you decide whether you’re “good at decisions” depending on how things turn out. But is that a fair evaluation?

You can study at a world-class university and still land in a dead-end career you hate.
You can move to some remote place by accident and find the happiest chapter of your life.
You can date someone who’s “perfect on paper” and end up in a miserable breakup.

So does that mean studying hard was useless?
That remote places are magical shortcuts to happiness?
That you should take zero time to think about future relationships and simply “go with the flow” with all the red signs staring at you?

Of course not. That’s the power of resulting.

You can leave early for the airport and still miss the flight because of unexpected traffic. Good decision, bad outcome. Bad luck.
You can procrastinate till the last minute, rush to the airport, and still make it because the flight was delayed. Bad decision, good outcome. Dumb luck.

But which habit do you want running your life?
Which decision pattern is more likely to give you what you want over time often?

That’s the whole point.

Good decisions don’t guarantee good outcomes — they simply increase the odds.
Bad decisions don’t guarantee disaster — they just make disaster much more likely.

It sounds obvious when we look at it calmly, and yet in the moment, when someone else wins with terrible habits or when we do everything right and still don’t get the outcome, we default to:

“They’re smarter.”
“I’m stupid.”
“I should have known better.”

That’s resulting.

Good decision-making is a process, not a prediction.
Outcomes are feedback + luck, not proof of intelligence or failure.

So, over to you dear reader,
Are you evaluating your decisions, your smarts by the quality of your process, or still chasing luck and judging yourself (and everyone else) by whatever outcome happened to show up?🍀

On the mornings when I wake up tired, overwhelmed, scattered, I know exactly what’s happening: my internal Operating System needs a reboot.

Saturday was one of those mornings.

I sat down with my notebook, wrote out what I wanted to make happen, why it mattered, and the things I’d focus on. Within minutes, my whole state shifted. Calm replaced chaos. My energy came back online. The tiredness didn’t need rest, it needed clarity.

Clear goals power up your machine.
Vague goals scatter energy all over the place - overload warning!

When your mind believes the goal is possible and the timelines make sense, it gives you a surge of energy stronger than caffeine. You feel directed, grounded, focused, locked-in.

But when expectations are unclear or the deadlines are absurd, your internal OS start throwing errors at you, indecision, overwhelm, anxiety follow. That’s the kind of stress that drains instead of charges.

We often misread these signals. We assume exhaustion is physical, and it means “do less,” when often it means “get clearer.”
Burnout becomes a psychological overload that shows up in physical symptoms.

And the body influences the mind back as well.
If you run it on low sleep, poor nutrition, and no movement, the mental software slows down.
Ideas dull. Motivation dips. Everything feels heavier than it really is.

This is why self-maintenance matters.
You wouldn’t run a business on an outdated system and expect peak performance.
Why run yourself that way?

A simple formula keeps everything steady:

Body Maintenance + Mind Maintenance = Predictable Output.

  - Weekly reflection.
  - Clear goals.
  - Reasonable deadlines.
  - Enough sleep.
  - Enough nutrients.
  - Enough movement.

The world isn’t getting more predictable.
Uncertainty will keep coming at you in waves🌊
The only thing you can truly rely on is your internal system... if you keep it maintained.

Over to you, dear reader,
How reliable is your internal OS?
Do you have a maintenance routine you can count on when things get unpredictable, uncertain and fast?

I always over-plan in the morning and under-do at night, have you experienced this effect in your life?

I noticed a long time ago that I’m a different person at different times of the day. My energy shifts, my mood shifts, and with it go my ideas, decisions, and,  often, my actions.

Over the years I got smarter about it.

I stopped pretending I’m a machine with consistent output. I started designing around the reality of being human, so I don’t make decisions I’ll regret.

I know nights aren’t my best.

I’m tired, less enthusiastic, not exactly excited to socialize. So if I need to show up for an event or record a podcast in the evening, I don’t rely on “feeling like it”. I rely on tools.

I ignore the inner monologue that wants to cancel everything, I put on energizing music, I prep in advance, might get some dark hot chocolate, and, inevitably, once I get going, I get it done.

I don't hope to feel good. I prepare to feel bad and put systems in place to work with it.

Same with snacking at night.

I don’t battle cravings; I set the stage. Hot tea. A minute of closing my eyes. A slow exhale. It’s ridiculous how quickly an urge dissolves when you stop feeding it attention, or stop fighting it.

Yesterday I listened to Andrew Huberman talk about how different times of the day are better suited for different habits. You you have a "different brain" for different parts of your day🧠

Mornings?

Perfect for high-friction tasks, your “eat the frog” moments.

Afternoons?

Better for actions that need a nudge, not a battle.

I use this with clients all the time. We wire new, difficult habits to the morning to increase their odds of success instead of forcing them to wrestle with willpower they don’t have at 3pm.

Later that day I spoke with a Behavioral Business Strategist for my Change Wired podcast, and we laughed at how obvious, and still radical, it sounds: work with humans as they actually are, not as we assume they should be. Our energy, emotions, and decision-making aren’t stable. But they are predictable.

Dan Ariely calls it “predictably irrational”. And if it’s predictable, you can count on it. Far more reliably than you’ll ever count on willpower.

Over to you, dear reader. Maybe it’s time to stop fighting your humanity and start designing for it instead?

Where are you pushing against your own biology?
Where do you keep struggling when a simple support system would remove the friction?
Where do you need to realign your best states, energy, mood, clarity, with your schedule so you can maximize returns and minimize unnecessary costs?