5 Lifehacks to Inspire Happiness, Confidence and Productivity
Living a better life is surprisingly easy
DRINK BETTER COFFEE
Coffee is one of the greatest hacks. It can help prevent diabetes, lower your risk of certain cancers and cardiovascular disease, and help you lose weight. The caffeine in coffee has shown to delay the onset of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Beyond all those awesome health benefits, coffee is just a kick ass way to start your day.
Now allow me to make a distinction between good coffee and bad coffee. I’m not talking about good in a sense of how exotic and far out the tasting notes are. I’m talking about good in the sense of how quality beans translate into giving us better performance if all the right attributes are there. Good coffee shouldn't make you feel like a crackhead only to send you faceplanting into your keyboard a few hours later. Bad coffee contains mold and toxins which make you feel like crap. To get you on the right track, here are some of the attributes you want to look for: Organic, single origin, shade-grown, wet-processed, medium-roast, whole bean (grind yourself at home) and a recent roast date (1-2 weeks). Don’t worry about purchasing a coffee with every single attribute, but for each quality above that your coffee has, you increase the chances of having a kick-ass coffee experience. The first four offer the greatest chances of having a great coffee experience.
There’s a simple test you can perform to see if you've chosen the right coffee, I’ll paraphrase a conversation Dave Asprey had with Joe Rogan on a recent Podcast: “Coffee is a diuretic, but you shouldn't have to pee immediately after drinking a cup and your pee shouldn't be clear. Try drinking bad coffee (Folgers, Starbucks, etc) and note how soon after consumption you have to urinate and the color. Now try an organic shade-grown coffee and note the same qualities. I bet you’ll find a dramatic difference. When you have to use the bathroom immediately and your pee is clear, it means that your coffee probably has mold in it and your body is getting it out as fast as it can.” — I have tried this, it actually happens.
Finding clean coffee can feel like a daunting task, but it’s pretty easy. Luckily the self-professed Heisenberg of Coffee, Dave Asprey, offers 3 tips for helping you on your mission. If you can’t source locally, there’s always the internet. My personal favorites right now are the single-origin South American varieties from Larry’s Beans and La Colombe. Bulletproof Coffee is the undisputed king of clean. And there’s a new guy on the scene backed by UFC fighter Tait Fletcher called Caveman Coffee.
EAT BETTER FOOD
There’s a reason you never see successful people cramming their faces with KFC mashed potato bowls — BECAUSE THAT STUFF IS REALLY REALLY BAD AND IT DOESN'T PUT YOU ON YOUR A GAME.
If you want to be more successful, you have to give yourself proper fuel and that begins with a clean and healthy diet. In much the same way you wouldn't put 85 octane in a Bugatti Veyron, you wouldn't put crap food in your body in order to gain optimal performance. The good news? There’s all sorts of options. One of the most popular ways to get cleaner food in your diet is through implementing the principles of Paleo, which seems to have evolved from the idea that a more primal diet is best in these modern times. There’s also the Bulletproof diet, which arose from modern thinking about human diets, through years of personal research and studies and insights from health experts around the world. There’s the trusty fallback Atkins low-carb experience, and last but not least, Vegetarianism. The common thread among all of these is that processed foods are incredibly bad for you. Another thread among all of them except for vegetarianism, is that wheat is bad. What’s clear is that if you’re eating fast food or Hungry-Man meals for dinner, you’re killing yourself and you should stop, if maximizing happiness, confidence and productivity is one of your goals. If you’re overweight and want to shed some pounds, don’t look to P90X or the latest extreme weight loss fads to help if you haven’t changed your diet. If you simply modify your diet and free yourself from processed foods and opt out of exercise, I think you’ll be surprised at the results. You won’t get ripped of course, but being healthy is not about being ripped, it’s about feeling good and performing at an optimal level.
When you begin the clean eating journey and dive deeper into the research, you will discover all sorts of questions you have to consider. In part this is due to the overwhelming amount of mass-produced garbage that dominates our society. You have to consider the origin, farm conditions, harvest methods, workers, shipping, production environments — all kinds of things. You’ll have to decide for yourself which of these questions is most important and do research to pick products and companies that live up to your qualifications. That’s not the most important thing right now though. As long as you’re taking baby steps towards eating more whole foods and eliminating processed crap, you are on the right path.
Don’t think of clean eating as part of a fad diet, think of it more as a goal. Worry less about doing it perfectly and more about successfully implementing better foods into your diet in small ways. Once you know how good it feels to eat clean, whole, sustainable foods, you’ll never go back to the crap you were eating before. It will become a key role in leading a more happy, confident, productive life.
PRACTICE TINY HABITS
There’s a myth about habits commonly found on the internet and that’s if you do something for 21 days it becomes a habit. For some habits that may work, but the latest research suggests that habits take between 66 days and 9 months to form.
In this TED video, BJ Fogg talks about habit design and how to start with something small and let it grow. Summarizing the video, he posits that behavior change only comes with practice. Okay, that’s great, so how do I practice more? That’s where automaticity and trigger behaviors come into play. In order to practice a behavior, you must do it AFTER a pre-existing behavior that is already well established in your life. It could be anything — taking a shower, brewing your morning coffee, taking the dog for a walk — the important thing is that you link the new habit with the pre-existing behavior. Also important is that when you successfully execute the new behavior, you must celebrate in some small way.
So pick whatever you want: Flossing your teeth, doing push-ups, going to bed earlier — whatever you want. Just do more of it. Don’t worry too much about willpower or motivation — that stuff is more finite than you think.
lift.do is an easy way to automate habits. It breaks down habits and goals into step-by-step tasks that you complete daily. You can choose from popular pre-made templates or create your own. You’ll get reminders sent to your email, so if you own a smartphone you’ll be reminded on the go. For further reading on habitual practices, here are some examples of habits that happy people seem to have.
UPGRADE YOUR WARDROBE
A core principle behind every successful sommelier is looking great — because when you look great, you’re confident. Very few people must ever perform with the high level of confidence that a master sommolier brings to the table, but their story provides a great example of the looking great inspires confidence connection. The Master Sommelier Exam is probably the hardest thing to pass, well, pretty much ever. Only about 200 advanced sommeliers exist globally. You have to be a total Type A personality to pass. The way the test is set up, it weeds out every other personality type. An introvert won’t pass service. If you can’t memorize, you won’t pass theory. If you don’t have confidence, you can’t pass tasting…in which a contender must smell multiple glasses of wine for roughly 10 seconds each before running through a column, from memory, of over 30 qualifications with hundreds of potentially correct identifications for each of the 30 qualifications. THAT’S INTENSE. Even if you haven’t the slightest clue about style, go to a store like Men’s Wearhouse. It’s a low pressure experience and they know what they’re doing. Simple is key here. They’ll want to sell you a bunch of stuff you don’t necessarily need, so be ready to assert that you want to stick with the basics for now — a properly fitted long sleeve button down shirt (a shirt that doesn't make you look like a pirate) and dark slacks (you should have them altered for best fit — but that’s super easy too). Don’t forget some great looking shoes. Choose basic solid colors. Avoid stripes and floral patterns. Avoid worrying about ties, cuff-links, pocket squares, etc. Wearing a few properly fitted staples occasionally will allow you to be more confident. People will notice, even if you just wear them to important work meetings or on dates.
A lot of men’s dress clothes these days have built in wrinkle-free technology, but if you have clothes that need to be ironed and you hate the chore, take them to the cleaners. They’ll clean ‘em and steam ‘em for you. You can even wear the clothes a few times before sending it back, as long as you don’t stain them with your kick-ass coffee.
EXPERIMENT AND TRACK
What works best for one, may not work best for others. Everyone is different. Too often with diets and lifestyle plans, one can fall into the thought trap of assuming it will work for them. You have to change this mindset. In order to hone in on what works best for you, you’ll need to experiment and track your results. Your body is a system. What do we do when we want to improve any system? We experiment and track the results. It doesn’t have to be super formal, you can simply write out your experiences on a notepad or use one of these apps. When you implement something new in your life, you expect there to be change. When you don’t experience the positive change you had hoped, you can be discouraged and go back to the same thing you were doing before. Don’t do that. Two things: Manage your expectations and change the variables. Eventually you will find that something that works. As an example, I’ll talk about supplements. Supplements are great — they help to fill in what you’re not getting from your diet. There are literally thousands of supplements that pop up when you perform a quick search on Amazon. You could literally spend a lifetime researching supplements, but that wouldn’t be very productive. If you really want to get to the next level, enter WellnessFX, a program designed to give you the full picture of what’s going in your body by looking at your health markers. This allows you to set proper goals on your optimal health voyage. I’ve not used WellnessFX yet (Christmas present to myself perhaps), but I started out by taking dozens of supplements, most of which I probably didn’t need. After experimenting and tracking, I now only use 3 because I see a positive benefit in an area of my life when I take them and I consider them to be good insurance. Those 3 are NOW Food’s ADAM multi-vitamin, vitamin D3 and a prebiotic and/or probiotic. If you’re young and perfectly healthy you may not even see a benefit from taking supplements, but if you’re not performing at an optimal level, you may want to try them out.
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