Upgrade your decision making using these 4 boxes

Key Takeaways

I said that crying yeah real tears tears were coming out of my eyes onto my study notes you see it was like November 2010 or something like that and Here I am sitting trying to study for the final maths exam and I realized getting all my papers together trying to read the textbook and I realized well you know what I don't really been paying too much attention this semester I've just been taking it easy cruising playing with my new iphone inside popping bubble wrap actually inside my pencil case and lo and behold teachers and realized that you could do that then and so I felt really great that I could hide the fact that I was using my phone but then felt pretty terrible the night before an exam crying to my mother to go please tell me it's going to be all right please tell me it's going to be all right and let's be real I didn't pay attention to this little square here and now I hope you can see it of what's going on if not I can talk to it but it's a it's it's something that oh wait you might want to know what happened to that exam I'm pretty sure I ended up getting some sort of barely scraping through passing mark but I don't think I deserved it looking back I think it was just because I was fairly and a fairly good terms relationship with the teacher like he was it was probably too nice to fail me put it that way which is at the time seems like a good thing but in hindsight maybe he should have thawed me then I would have got the message a bit sooner anyway it was because I wasn't adhering to this little square that I'm going to introduce you to and it's it's not new but it's not like I've thought of this but I heard of it the other day and I remembered it clicked so if you do have the the reference of where this square actually comes from of course hopefully you can see it if not I'll talk through it if you do leave it in the comments we've much appreciated but essentially it's just thinking of how or approaching each of your decisions in day-to-day life by thinking about where they put where they fit into these four boxes and so what we've got here is we've got urgent and non-urgent on the x-axis they've got important and not important on the y-axis and so when you break it down you get you get four different boxes here and I've intentionally left these two boxes blank because we're gonna in this video we're gonna fill them out and so I heard this someone mentioned this this box the other day and I remember reading it a few years ago but I didn't really pay much attention to it then but now I've kind of figured out I've kind of inadvertedly inadvertently been doing this just over the last couple of of years but this kind of really makes it more concrete than just me sort of blabbering on about how I I think about things so that's what we're gonna we're going to go through in today's video and I've got a few points here that we're also going to discuss and so the reason why I'm talking about this box is because I want you two to feel the benefits of it because there's nothing in life that is more beautiful than someone fulfilling their potential and this is if you and of course every decision that you make doesn't necessarily have to funnel through this but if you have this tool that you can apply to different ways of living well then you have the opportunity to fulfill the potential within you and there is and it's a selfish reason because if I see someone else fulfilling their potential it makes me want to do the same and so let's get through this now point number one is a man's role in life is to what are you ready to receive your arm ring income online yes and what does a man do he fights he looks after his family now of course you might be thinking and uh you can substitute men when I say man I'm talking about humans you can substitute fighting doesn't mean necessarily going fisticuffs with someone punching someone in the face or kicking them or wrestling to the ground but you should at least have some sort of training in that so I think everyone should do it at least some sort of martial art the fight is I've got the warrior poet here now whether you're a warrior or an artist you're going to have to find the same struggles the same fears for example when I turn the camera on a little fear inside me starts up and goes oh I'm putting a little bit of my my soul out there I'm putting my thoughts out there but you know the first law of thermodynamics don't you is that you can use that energy to create it so the fight may be getting up in the morning the fight may be taking care of your family even though you'd rather be doing something else and now the other caveat here is that your family may not just be the immediate family that's around you of course you should always seek to to look after those closest to you but at the same time you're not going to be much help to those closest to you if you don't look after yourself and I'm talking about the that 8 to 23 personalities that that are inside your head now don't pretend like you don't have them and so you might start there it starts at the individual remember all of these things it's best when it whatever problem you're facing whatever fight you bet whatever battle you are you have to battle it's best to break it down into its smallest entity so we'll get to that in a second why it's easier in terms of choosing your decisions day by day and planning for the long term but you're not going to be much help to those around you if you don't take care of yourself so that's the first battle you have to solve take care of yourself you have to think about what is important and urgent these to fight and family go in there so let's put in that fight family and I'm going to add in one more here health but realistically now you might be thinking I'll is it always urgent well it's not always going to be urgent of course of course different things in this different boxes can go in different places but think about health in the context of fight and family how many things does a sick person want a sick person wants one thing to not be sick anymore a healthy person wants 10,000 things they forget about the important and the urgent the fight the battle that we have to face every day that is existence that is the 3:30 wake up but you have to go urinate that is a battle family tank of your family that's a hard job but again starts from the individual then goes to your extended family those closest around you maybe your parents maybe your children maybe the small little community that you visit every day I was working out with a friend this morning and we talked about this and there's a piece of trash in the ground or whatever and it feels better to clean up your community you don't have to be paid for that that's that's a that's an example of something that's important but not urgent right where family can go important non-urgent would be to clean up this could be room could be park right the reason why I say not urgent is it goes okay I've got a few things misplaced in my room but it's not like it's affecting my existence right now I will get to clean it up it is important but it's not dramatically urgent and so when I come back down here to the warrior-poet as I said before whether you're a warrior you're a fighter or you're an artist you're gonna have to face daily battles and that is your primary role is to fire and look after your family that's when it comes to this box I'm gonna spend most of our time up here spend most time all right so now point two is the rock through water now if we said this if we want to say but if we said that we want to spend you're like yes Daniel I want to spend most of my time working on things that are important rather than non important I want to get better at direct differentiating between what's urgent and non-urgent for example another another quick one is your health can move over to here non-urgent you might ask why well if you've been taking care of your health well then it's it's rare I'm lucky a sort of sign of faith that something may come about and ruin that but the best treatment is prevention so that's why it's important if you prevent ailments from arising suddenly even though health is still important to take care of it's not urgent that's the this is doing the simple things every day it's it's eating well getting enough sleep moving done but let's get let's get on to point two what you want to be the easiest way to spend you want to make this easy for yourself is to spend time up here in the important zone there's two boxes up here you want to be like a rock through water what I mean by that is going brackets yeah make it easy for yourself but this is the the monk-like discipline and the reason why I filled out these two boxes down the bottom here they're not important first was because a lot of the time you might not know what exactly is the best part for you but it's probably more likely that you do know what's not the right part for you and so there's some robustness there and that knowledge is that knowing is the knowing of what's not important and so in my case again I'm giving you this tool of this box to make your own decisions than we're talking through these points I only share stories from my own experience because that's the only real stories that one can share and so for me I figured out that distraction basically all distraction is not important except it acts it masquerades itself it's it's really it's got this little appearance it puts itself in a red bubble and it says excuse me click on me please and you know what being the sucker that I am I used to spend a lot of time clicking on those red bubbles maybe you're ahh maybe you're the same so I had to get rid of them all no notifications on any of my devices permanent do not disturb no social media all that have to get rid of them all because I knew that they were in my non-important box and remember I want to spend most of my time up here so that's how I became the rock through water now I forgot to say I forgot to paint the picture in your head but I believe you can imagine it is what happens with a rock in water if you throw a pebble if you're standing on the side of a lake and you go well maybe you want to skip it because that's way more fun than just going that's a bit lame what happens to that rock eventually well it's dust to fall through the water but it what is it doing remember the most beautiful thing that I said well at least for me the most beautiful thing in life is is seeing fulfilled human potential that's why I cry at Olympic Games medal ceremonies and hearing beautiful stories and whatnot it's because that's that's true human potential realized what you don't know what we still don't know what we're capable of it actually I'm feeling excited right now about it because far out anyway the rock through water I'm getting distracted here I'm getting to be getting too much in the clouds the rock through water it's fulfilling its potential its gravitational potential it's traveling to the bottom its gradient descent in for all of you machine learning nerds like me and so that's what you want to be once you've figured out what is your most important task maybe it's defined maybe it's your family maybe it's your health you want it the way you can be the rock through water is to remove all of the non-important it's you just go yeah you know what anything in this not important that that's just fairy dust out of mine out of my mind that you got here as well not important not urgent fancy clothes like the a lot of people might try and buy fancy clothes to look good to impress others rather than just being good being a good person now of course I'm not going to deny the fact that looking good makes you a bit appear good makes you appear as a better person it can in fact had the psychological effect on you is is that if that you look good you you become better it's not always a case of course but the the best way for the clothes the best way to look good and clothes is to first of all take care of your health is to be Fiat and lean and then rather than brand-name clothes you just buy clothes that fit like this beautiful my t-shirt that you can see look pretty good don't I and now the new iPhone technology 2.0 these things come out every year they're great of course and but if you're just using them to fuel this well then it's not urgent and it's not important and then finally of course the endless scroll I don't think I need to talk too much on that but the endless scroll is the endless feed of social media connecting the world so that brings us on to part three but yeah the rock through water make it easy for yourself use this box figure out what's not important to you and just remove it remove it out of your life number three choosing one thing means not choosing another and then in brackets the battle between now this is where the fight comes in so this is why I had this pointy of the fight there is a battle between the things that you want and the things that you want most and there is always a battle between the shallow happy and the deep happy alright so that is that that fight that is that fight that is urgent and important well the fight can go in here in this just important battle the thing that the face the battles that we face every day that you and I face every day for example what now I stopped looking at all the metrics on on all of my youtube videos and and a whole bunch of different things that I create now of course I know that they have their place but to me they're they'd be in this non important bucket this is this is me using this matrix I stop looking at looking at these things because what most is - something that I want is for those metrics to go up something that I want most is to be true to myself is to create the things that I'd like to see in the world and do they always coincide with the thing that I want most were the thing that I want of course not but if I'm being honest with myself I'm being true to myself I'm thinking about what is it the thing that I want most I have to choose that thing instead of the other whereas if I choose this what I want like the worst think one of the worst things that you can do in life is optimize for the wrong thing same with building machine learning model if you choose the wrong evaluation metric and you optimize for that evaluation metric well it's not gonna be a great outcome is it so if I'm optimizing for the things that I want in life it means that the things that I want most are going to miss out I'll give you an example with shallow happy versus deep happy a simple one is you want to you want to be fit you want to take care of your health very important very very important if you're not doing that take care of that first the shallow happy is yes I want to have some delicious ice cream but the deep happy is up and you get happy you eat the ice cream yum yum yum ice cream is delicious I'm not gonna lie cookies are my favorite and the shallow happy is yeah you get that you get that fact you get that 10-minute mouth filling of yeah this tasted beautiful but the deep happy is the missing out on on the ice cream or forgoing it because you know that your longer-term mission now this is the most this is one of the most important boxes here I'm gonna pull it up here it's the not urgent and the important the long-term mission now of course that's going to be different for each individual that's why I want you to be thinking about these things because whatever I say of course is always going to be biased by my own experiences so that's why I want to provide rather than just telling you what to do I want to provide you with the tools that you can use for almost all of eternity like this this little box whatever you fill it in is not going to change over time but the deep happy is a long-term mission we said that the short-term happy or the shallow happy is the eating I scream but the deep happy is being shredded we're keeping this channel PG by the way it's been shredded it's been fit it's been now let's use being able to rely on your body to take on different challenges and so in order to win that battle of shallow happy versus deep deep happy you have to understand what is most important to you whether it's urgent or non urgent anything below this line can basically be wiped off the face of the universe now of course we're not robots we're human beings but the way I like to think of it is that we're we're like programmable mush so if you treat yourself your brain is programmable mush this is some of the rules that you can program into your brain to start looking at things differently now one final example is that every morning just to get real tactical I create two less sorry once it once a day I create a list because I try to keep I like writing things down as much as technology helps out at the start in the week I write down a bunch of things that I want to do and day to day I write down things that I'd like to do based on the things I'd like to get done in the week the things I'd like to get done in the week ah trying to contribute towards my long term mission which are things like build things that bring value to others these can be non nonspecific things by the way you don't have to be very specific is is that for example my long-term mission is to create to learn and learn to create and so that's that's very broad so whatever kind of fills in fits into that bucket at the moment it's machine learning I'm really obsessed with machine learning and writing in and spoken word I know I have to do these videos to to practice my ability to to talk about different things and so when I'm writing things down of what I have to do during the day what I have to do during the week what I have to do to try and fulfill my long-term mission I'm thinking about it in in terms of this box here it's really easy to make the decisions because I'm a rock through because I understand what's important to me so basically everything in this this bracket of non importance doesn't go on the list and so maybe that's something that you could try I found it really simple and the beautiful thing about having it and now I only take out about half the page for example this morning was read write work out with Justin at 5:30 shoot important verse not important video that's what we're doing here that's going to get a tick after this video the beauty of only using half a page is that you're limited to a certain number of things because there than a day there are only so many fights that you can take on now let's wrap this up probably gone too long as usual but the exercise you could do is in the comments leave leave down what it what's most important to you what's important in urgent to you what's important in non urgent to you what's not important to you maybe you're different to me maybe you've got some things that are that I've said a non important but are important to you so maybe you could leave those in the comments that's that's one of the really ways to improve your knowledge is to talk to someone who disagrees with your point of view but in summary a man's role in life is to fight and look after his family to be the warrior poet to battle but still create art too you want to be like a rock through water make it easy for yourself that doesn't mean that it's going to be easy right that comes back to fine you're still gonna have to even if you know what you have to do you're still gonna have to fight sometimes to to take on that challenge and number three are you going for shallow happiness or deep happiness no of course I said we're we're human beings we're not robots we're programmable Marsh so of course there are going to be times where you're going to eat the ice cream in bloody enjoy it and so you should but just remember the difference between shallow happy and deep happy now that being said it is Sunday and it's Pancake Day for me so I'm gonna go cook some pancakes actually I just cook really one big pancake it's it's really delicious pancake and berries and some yogurt but I hope you enjoyed this video if you've got any questions leave a comment below as always keep learning keep creating and I'll see you next time