The last 18 months have been rather stressful — I can now officially say I know what a burnout feels like! For my 26th birthday, my beautiful mother who is always worrying about me booked me a 4-day health retreat at Gwinganna in the Tallebudgera Valley. God knows I wouldn’t have gone myself, so being dragged into it is just what I needed.

It was one of the best things I’ve ever done. I will look back on this weekend decades from now and remember it was a pivotal, life-changing moment. The profound realisations and ideas I had after spending time alone with my thoughts, surrounded by strangers and just taking time out was incredible.

I also took with me the PERFECT book called Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss, which is a book full of golden nuggets from billionaires, athletes and the most accomplished people in the world. This contributed even more to the great ideas I had, and it resulted in pages and pages of hand-written notes. I wanted to share some of those with you, so here they are.

Healthy

• The #1 most powerful stress tool is the ability to choose one thought over another. 

• Your mind controls your body and every thought has a meaning. Negative thoughts and self talk have real physiological affects. With practice, you can control your mind like you control your body.

• Stress creates adrenaline and cortisol. This makes you sleep poorly, which creates more cortisol. This gives you sugar cravings which creates inflammation. If that is not addressed, it leads to all sorts of diseases.

• The ‘Red’ zone is the sympathetic nervous system. This makes you angry, hot and reactive (monkey brain). The ‘Blue’ zone is the parasympathetic which makes you calm and clear (CEO brain). The ‘Purple’ zone is the perfect place for productivity (flow state, energetic but not reactive).

• The more you go into the Red zone, the more you have to do in order to get back to the Blue zone (by Bluezoning). You can’t keep pushing or you will literally break.

• How you think about something is more important than the thing itself.  Thinking negatively makes you more stressed and anxious. Pull thoughts out of your head and ask... ‘is this helpful or unhelpful?’. Discard the unhelpful ones.

• Diaphragmatic breathing and stretching is key to relieving stress and tension. 

Wealthy

• Investing in yourself is the most important investment you can make. No financial investment will ever match it because you will develop more skill, ability, insight, capacity and more. That’s where the real economic freedom will come from. 

• Whatever your definition of ‘success’ is, someone has done something similar before. Do what they did.  

• Busy = out of control. If you’re ‘too busy’ you’ve made choices that put you there. It’s a cue to re-examine your systems and rules.

• Being busy is a form of laziness — lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is often used as a guide for avoiding the critically important but uncomfortable actions.

• Make yourself useful. Chris Sacca would invite himself into Google meetings and said he’d take notes. Eventually he was included in the meetings.

• There’s no pride in doing what’s hard just because it’s hard. That’s just dumb. Hard work doesn’t equal success. If that were true, labourers would be billionaires.

• Solve the simplest, easiest, most valuable problem. It doesn’t have to be hard.

• When you wake up, work on the most important problems first.

• If everything is important, nothing is important. Prioritise. Simplify. Focus.

• What problem do you face every day that no-one has solved yet?

• Raise your prices. Is your product any good if people won’t pay more for it?

• In negotiation, the person who cares the least wins.

• It’s not what you know, it’s what you do consistently.

• Ask yourself... ‘how can I have little to no risk, and still get huge rewards?’

• You’re going to be wrong, so diversify your risk with asset allocation (Ray Dalio).

• You need to have bad ideas to have good ideas. Think of at least 10 ideas every day.

• Growing 2x is obvious (hire someone, increase prices, invest in marketing etc). Growing 10x requires non-linear thinking. You have to think outside the box.

• Are you starting with a big share of a small market (monopoly)? Have you identified a unique opportunity others don’t see yet (secret)? Do you have a way to not only create but deliver your product (distribution)?

Happy

• Life’s not what you do, it’s who you do it with.

• You don’t work the piano, you play the piano.  You’re meant to enjoy the music, not get to the end of the song. Don’t live to retire, putting all your money away until you ‘arrive’.

• Know your value. Don’t overestimate the world and underestimate yourself. You are greater than you think. And you are not alone.

• Success is how little time you spend doing things you hate. If you don’t like someone or something, cut it out.

• Do what you love. If you love it you’ll be curious about it. If you’re curious about it, the work is easy. If the work is easy, you can master it. If you become a master, you will be paid for it. The only way to become a master is to love it anyway. (Connor McGregor didn’t start fighting because he wanted money).

• Why can’t you achieve your 10 year goal in 6 months? If you had a gun to your head, what would you do to accomplish it?

• Stop trying so hard to please people you don’t like or even need.  

• Figure out how much money you need to live (rent, food etc). For me it’s around $4000 ($5800 pre tax).  How can you make that in 1 - 2 days a week? If you can do that, you have the rest of your time to follow your dream (what you actually want to do).

• Think of the current challenges in your life. Which did you assign yourself, and which are you doing to please someone else? Your inbox is a to-do list that anyone can add to. Get out of your inbox and back to your own to do list.

• Don’t look for problems before you even start. Don’t put limits on yourself like saying “it’s this way and I can’t do that because XYZ”. 

Wise

• The mind is a beautiful servant, but a dangerous master.

• Mindfulness is about cultivating a present-state awareness that helps you to be non-reactive.  It’s a warm bath for the mind. It allows you to observe thoughts instead of being tumbled by them.

• Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process. You will spend far more time on the journey than on the all-too-brief moments of triumph at the end.

• Throw out a timeline. It will take what it takes.

• Make your bed. Not only does it start the day off with a win, but no matter what happens throughout the day, at the end you will come back to something you accomplished.

• Set your intention (e.g recharge/enjoy this moment) and your attention (e.g listen to the sounds/take in your surroundings).

• Everything that you call ‘life’ was made up by people who are no smarter than you. You can change it, improve it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

Notes

• Marry Kaz — she is my everything.

• Making helping animals (with marketing/tech/AI) my career.

• Systemise/delegate to remove myself from day to day.

• Stop making it so hard. What would Tim Ferriss do?

• Keep investing in myself (coaching, health, fun stuff)

• Manage stress/nervous system by recharging Qi daily.

• Stretch often to remove tension. 

• Stop hanging out with scorpions and hang out with other frogs.

Blue Zoning Techniques 

• Meditating 

• Getting a massage

• Staring at a fire

• Looking up at the sky (in the pool or a park)

• Watching a lighthearted, inspiring movie

• Reading a casual book / biography 

• Having a cat nap

• Petting/cuddling/watching a pet 

• Having an interesting conversation 

• Walking the dog 

• Journaling 

• Sitting near/by the water

• Listening to music

• Visualising