 Look, everyone wants to build their dream life, but very few people know what the behind the scenes really, really looks like. Now, I'm not a millionaire. I don't live in a McMansion in the hills, like some YouTuber you're following, that you don't really know whether they own it or they just rent it or they rented it for the day. But there are some things that I know that have made the biggest difference. And I wanna share those three things in this video here today. What's up, you guys? Alex Hein here. So before we jump into this video, I've put together a free seven-day self-growth challenge. It's a new email series I've put together. The first link right below this video will help you check it out. You're gonna get an email every day with some simple steps you can take to improve your life. So check it out, the first link right below this video. Now, when it came to my story, I think for so many people becoming entrepreneurs comes down to one thing, which is really freedom. You know, we all have people we work with that we hate. We've all had bosses that are assholes. But for me, what I realized was that I was working 40 hours a week, earning not that much money, doing something that I didn't hate, but I didn't love. And I just thought that there was so many hours that I was spending at my job every day that I could have spent towards my own future. You know, for example, 40 hours a week, nine hours a day. In nine hours a day, I could work four hours a day towards building my own business. I could spend one hour a day towards writing another book every single day. I could spend an hour a day just working on miscellaneous, fun, creative projects. And even then, for all of that work getting done, that would only be six hours in a day. And I would have so much time for life, so much time just to do things. So for me, it was just the possibility of thinking that, you know, what if I could just work six hours a day and push towards all these various dreams and these goals, these, you know, dreams of writing these books or dreams of being able to travel every other month. And it was clear to me that the people that I knew, the only people that had the dream lives that I admired were not just business people, but they were specifically entrepreneurs. They were people who are self-employed and people who focused on building something more oriented towards a lifestyle business. So for me, you know, I was just sitting at work one day thinking in one particular day, I had maybe four hours of work, but I had to be there for nine hours. And I was literally just playing a video game on my phone in the office thinking I could be building my own dream or my own goals or my own business, whatever I wanted right now, but I'm sitting here for nine hours doing very little productive work at the end of the day. And that was really the impetus for me. So for me, the first thing that makes the biggest difference that I don't see people do is really having a very specific deliberate vision because look, people call life and work the rat race, right? You're working all the time. You never feel like you're getting ahead. You never feel like you're anywhere closer towards financial freedom. So for me, the first thing is you have to think about what you want. Now there's a great book called The Seven Habits of How the Effective People. And one of the chapters is Stephen Covey talks about, you know, you don't wanna climb the ladder and realize your ladder was up against the wrong wall. I see entrepreneurs all the time. And you know, everyone wants to make six figures, right? So you make six figures, but do you wanna make 100K working 100 hours a week? Because I know a lot of entrepreneurs that do that. Do you wanna make 100K where you can never take a vacation because you have nonstop client work? Do you wanna earn 100K where you actually don't like it? You're doing some finance thing that's not aligned with your strengths or interests or passions or hobbies? So the level of specificity that I think people need to have is really important. So for me, I sat down one day and I just thought about my perfect day. And for me, the perfect day was, what time do I wake up? Let's say 7.45. What exactly do I do from nine to four? Like hour by hour, what do I do? So I said, you know, the first three hours of the day, I would love to, for example, work on writing a book. An hour or two, I would love to shoot videos. An hour or two, I would love to work on whatever fun, free creative projects I could work on. And then by four, I wanna be done, go to the gym and have dinner with friends. I mean, look at the specificity of my list of goals. I mean, you see eight or 10 things here, right? But look at the level of specificity on the back. I mean, look at just each goal I've written here has a paragraph of specifics about what habits do exactly every day to make that happen. So for so many people, there's no deliberate vision and so nothing ends up happening because if you don't have any plan, very often life will just happen and you're gonna get to 40 or 50, you're gonna realize you thought you'd be further by now. So the second thing I would say is find your daily deliberate rituals if you wanna build a business, right? Coming back to this thing, first part shows my goals, what I want. Second part shows what I have to do every day. But building a business is complicated and what do you actually do? For me at the beginning of my journey to really be self-employed, I decided that my one thing is that I'm gonna go to my nine to five, I'll leave by five 30 and go to the gym and by seven, I'm gonna go eat and then I'm gonna go to the cafe and I'm gonna work from seven 30 until 1030 every night, seven days a week. So that became my one thing, my one daily habit for my business was I'm gonna dedicate three hours a day from seven 30 to 1030 and that's gonna be my productivity bucket for building my business. And at first, because I didn't know what the hell I was doing, two hours was dedicated just towards studying my craft and an hour towards doing, two hours was how do I build a business? One hour was write articles and then eventually as time went on and I knew more of what I was doing, it became skewed all towards action and maybe 30 minutes towards studying and strategy. So what is the daily ritual that you can commit to that will help you actually build this business? For me, three hours a day, every day in the same cafe at the same time dedicated towards making this vision a reality. And the final thing is that for me, guess how long it took before I was able to quit my day job? It was 1,200 days, which means that it was over three years of me coming home, going to the gym, going to that same cafe for three hours every single day, seven days a week, for three years before I even made enough money to quit my day job. And it wasn't like I was making six figures, it was like I was making 40K to actually be able to quit my job and not stress about going broke effectively. So I think so many people undervalue patience and how long it really takes to build a real business. If you're gonna build a business that requires an audience like this, it's literally gonna be years. It's gonna be three to five years for most people. So unless you've put in those 1,200 plus days that I did, sit your ass down, put in your three hours every day, do the work and build that business. So these are three of the business habits and rituals that made the biggest difference in me building a real business, not because I had a sugar mama or sugar daddy or because I was living with my parents because I had all this money in the bank but with a full-time job doing a doctorate in grad school never even worked full-time in my business. So if I figured it out, pretty sure you can too. Before you guys go, check out these two other related videos and I'll see you guys soon.