 If you've been trying to change your life, then no doubt, you've been trying to figure out productivity hacks that will help you do the things that are hard to do. But in this video, I wanna share a pivotal realization in my life. Why energy, not productivity, is gonna be the thing that dramatically changes your life and helps you reach all your dreams. What's up, you guys? Alex Hein here, author of the book Master the Day. Now, before we jump in, I've put together a free link down below, which is for a free seven-day self-growth challenge. It'll give you one practice to do every single day for seven days that can change the direction of your life by focusing on working on yourself. So you can check it out right below the video. Now, ultimately what happens when you want to work on yourself is that you find it difficult to actually work on the things that you know will make your life better. You know, for example, it's difficult to know to work out four days a week because it'll make you fit or to know to meal prep. But then when it comes to Sunday night, do you wanna sit down and cook for three hours? Do you want to have to get up at 7 a.m. to go work out four days a week before work? Obviously, that's easier said than done. But in reality, so many of us think that by doing productivity hacks or being more disciplined or watching these videos on YouTube about how to be more productive are gonna be the thing that make us succeed. And I guess in my experience, they really aren't. The first reason is that for most goals in life, anyone can push for a certain period of time, but very, very, very few people can push for their entire lives. I mean, whether it's Tony Robbins or Richard Branson or many of the business icons you admire, a lot of the time what it comes back to is they're working on things that interest them and excite them. It doesn't mean it's not hard. It doesn't mean they never have to push. But inevitably, what these people intuitively end up focusing on is what gives them energy, what interests them, what fascinates them, what draws them. You know, I think back to writing my first full-length book, Master of the Day, writing this book was not hard for me. There were a certain number of lessons that I wanted to impart to people I had coached and people I had worked with. And even for people that follow me here, there were certain things that I wanted to share in an organized way. And so each day I sat down for an hour and I decided to share one of those lessons. And those lessons together became Master of the Day as my first book. And then Milk the Pigeon as my second book. But there was nowhere in there until I got to the very, very end where I was thinking, all right, time to be disciplined. I got a push. I'm gonna have to figure out how to get this done. That wasn't the case for all of my books and even starting the YouTube channel. It all just began with this experiment of something is interesting and something is fascinating and there's something here that I want to try and just see where it goes. And it gave me energy. That's the only reason I was able to put out this book with a full time job or to write my second book while doing my doctorate or to build this business while doing a doctoral level education that never would have happened by just me being disciplined, by just me pushing. And so in reality, the things you want to do are best achieved by chasing energy, what energizes you as opposed to pushing and being very, very disciplined. The second reason why chasing your energy and not productivity will change your life is that there are always these unknown side paths to doing things you're passionate about. I think about, for example, when I started doing these YouTube videos, they just started off as a break from my original business which was writing articles about personal development and wellness and that sort of thing. And after three years, I was getting so exhausted writing these articles that I didn't even want to do my business anymore. And so as a result, what did I do? I was like, let me shoot a video a couple times a week and let's just see if people like them and find them valuable. So I put out a video a couple times a week, lo and behold, it started catching on. And then from there, they started catching on more and more and more and I was still feeling very energized by them and found them to be a lot easier actually than producing blog content. Well, interesting side path, then someone said you should write a book and I just so happened to have a couple ideas for a book. So when Master of the Day came out, who did I launch it to? Those same people that I had coincidentally been teaching like this too. And when it came out, I just pushed it to all my audiences and it was a number one best seller in all the categories it was in on Amazon. So that was not something I expected. I didn't expect to send many of these or to sell many of them. I just thought that it was going to be a useful sort of gift for coaching clients or a cool kind of thing to give away to people. But it turned out to be something much more than that. So there are always these interesting side paths that happen when you pursue your energy, these chance encounters with people, these interesting other opportunities that show up. And the thing is you can never plan them in advance. They just sort of come up organically over time. So often when you're pursuing your energy, chasing those things that light you up as opposed to just doing what's productive and what's right and what the logical mind wants, doors open that you never could have predicted. Now the third piece of chasing your energy and that productivity is that you will have way more stamina than anyone else if you are doing things that excite you versus doing things you think are right or are disciplined. Around the time I finished grad school, I was finishing up my doctorate. I was working on a doctoral capstone. And even that doctoral capstone was something like 80 pages long by itself. And someone said to me, you know, I went into school with, I think, just one book, Master of the Day. And I came out with another full length book, Audible, Kindle, Endprint, and two other smaller books. And all of those were written during getting a doctoral level education. And someone who said like kind of like a backhanded compliment of, how did you do that? You must be like this or you must be like that or you must be so focused on success or money or some kind of backhanded compliment. What I said to them was, you know, when I think about what excites me the most and what I would most like to be doing on a Saturday morning, sharing this kind of knowledge are these things that excite me that I'm passionate about. And so those things became my other books. And the only reason I was able to create those was because I was drawn by them. They were tugging on me internally. Not because I felt I wanted to do them to be an expert, not because I wanted the money from them, not because I wanted the clout, but because I wanted to do them. And I think back to Angela Duckworth's book, Grit. She says that when she interviewed people that were these successful icons, the two things she noticed was Grit, which is work over time, but something else, which is passion. And that would lead to the great Grit was like she interviewed a music producer, I think in Los Angeles. The producer said, you know, on Saturday morning, there's nothing else I'd rather be doing than in my studio making music. And it's like, how are you gonna compete with that guy? Where on a Saturday morning, there's nothing else he'd rather be doing. He's not forcing himself. He doesn't have to push. He doesn't have to do drugs or take antidepressants to show up to his work every day. He's drawn by something greater than himself. So that is why energy more than chasing productivity will change your life, not to mention, if you're pushing and feeling tired all the time, that's gonna come out in all the other parts of your life. And you may succeed in work, but you're gonna fail from a sole perspective in all the other quadrants of life. So as best you can chase your energy, not productivity, and it'll change your life, guys. All right? Download the free seven-day self-growth challenge. I'll catch you in these other videos.