 When I first started reading biographies of some of the great people throughout history, one of the things that struck me was that they always said there were a few key moments in their life or a few key people they met or a few key habits they practiced that made all the difference. And very often these things were not big events but rather they were very small things. And this is one of the most common questions I get from many of you. What am I doing on a daily basis? Well in this video I want to share 12 of the most key habits that I have regularly cultivated to build and hopefully continue to build an epic life. What's up guys? Alex Hine, author of the book Master of the Day. Now for me the starting point of building an epic life always is some kind of thinking about getting the clarity and the vision for what you want to build. And for me one of the most important things that has helped me do that has been the habit of journaling which we will talk about later in this video. But I have included a free journaling worksheet and a free journaling email course you'll get. It's the first link in the description so just click that you'll get the free journaling e-course and we'll get back to the video. The first thing that's made a dramatic difference in my life has been reading 30 pages a day. Now with Audible and all these other online ways you can listen either reading 30 minutes a day or listening 30 minutes a day has been one of the key habits I've done probably for about 10 years now. And it's a way of constantly making sure I'm thinking about personal development growth and how I'm going to improve my life. The second thing I've been doing for a very long time almost religiously has been spending minimal amounts of time on social media. You guys think it's a coincidence that I've had my business now almost to the month for five years even having a YouTube audience and just now I started using Instagram? That wasn't an accident. It's because I really don't like social media. I really don't see it adding much value to my life and it really consumes a lot of time and doesn't always give much in return depending on who you follow. So for me if you think right now you're binging hard on social media track it for 30 days and see how much time you're really spending. For me I actually have that 30 minute cut off now because I have Instagram and I'm doing it okay time sticking to it. But if you realize you're spending three hours a day and you go down to 30 minutes think about what you could do with that time. The third thing I started doing about five years ago was I started pretending that all of the thoughts in my head would come true. So imagine that you have this thought in your head that you're dating someone they're going to leave you. What if that came true? So you decided to change the thought. You have this thought in your head how am I going to pay off all this student loan debt? How am I going to earn more money to take a vacation or help my parents? You pretend that that fear is going to come true. So then you really back in and you said put in a new thought. One of my first mentors who was a Chinese medicine doctor any time he found himself getting really busy and really stressed with patients at work he'd come up to me who I was the front desk person and he'd say Alex something terrible has happened and I'd look around like really weird and really nervous and he'd go I'm having thoughts. The fourth thing I started doing really almost immediately when I wanted to improve my life was track all of the things I'm scared of that I wasn't tracking and most of the time in my mind this means track your finances and it means track your weight and what you're eating. The fifth thing for me has been always making sure I'm on the right course and what that means is to watch the drifting going on. It's very easy as we get older to drift with our weight. You know Friday Saturday and Sunday we decided to go out with friends and get drinks or get a meal that's not aligned with our goals and then in a year or two or five years we're 20 pounds heavier but it didn't happen in one month it happened in multiple years. Same thing happens in a long-term relationship where we stop paying attention and we stop putting in effort and then the relationship begins to drift apart or even with our finances the same thing happens where we drift in a sense of we buy more things and we end up spending let's say a hundred dollars a week at the bar on Friday night and then we're stuck with four or five hundred dollars extra a month in credit card debt and then by the end of the year we're looking at five thousand dollars or more. So tracking drifting is just a matter of bringing back to the day and tracking what am I doing each day especially tracking the things we're afraid of like we talked about. The sixth thing for me has been a really religious focus now that I control my own schedule and it's to have a morning tea ritual as you go through your goals instead of having coffee. So for me I don't believe that coffee is the enemy but I do think that having some kind of morning ritual where you drink something warm it's a ritual to pour it and brew it and consume it and as you're going through this ritual you just take a few minutes to review the goals that you're working on in your life the most short term the long term and the things that you need to work on in order to advance towards that you're starting your day already with a clear focus in mind that I am not going to drift I'm going to be deliberate now on top of being deliberate the seventh thing I would always work on was always charting a course consciously. My belief is that almost anyone can achieve incredible things even if it takes a very long time if we are constantly consciously charting a course forward and for me that's the biggest value in goals nothing is guaranteed there's no guaranteed reaching any goal but the guaranteed value is I say I want to improve this part of my life I reflect on it work on it chisel away at it every day and some amount of progress will happen over the days the weeks the months and the years but you have to start off by charting a conscious specific course and not drifting the eighth thing for me has been journaling for me journaling comes in a lot of different ways right now it's mostly through Evernote every damn day you should be journaling something keep a record of your goals keep track of all your frustrations put down all your ideas to me the value of actually journaling is that you're compressing your thoughts organizing them into clear action principles that you can then use to improve your life the ninth thing for me has been the greatest thing I've ever done in terms of my mood and my attitude and it's the reason why besides a short break in my early twenties where I moved back from China I've never really struggled with any kind of depression since and that ritual is the five by 45 which is five days a week spending 45 minutes in the gym or yoga or meditating or Qigong whatever it is but primarily something that circulates your blood that by itself will produce such a dramatic change in your mood and your energy that I am shocked more people are not doing the tenth thing for me has been the habit of bulk cooking so if you're not in the habit of cooking already don't jump in and be like I'm gonna create these magical Martha Stewart meals every day start by just making a simple breakfast or try doing what I do which is on Sunday you dedicate two hours or so to create a whole bunch of food for the week and then you can either package that up for three days or so or you can start freezing those meals and eating them later because the reality is no matter how healthy food is when you go out the only way to truly control the quality and ingredients and calories is by making it yourself obviously if you don't feel well it's hard to really act at a high performance standard the 11th thing for me has been really important in recent years and it's getting in the habit of especially in the big decisions in life following your intuition more than the logical mind which usually argues in favor of fear intuition is something operating at a different level and you can't often rationalize that's the point of intuition it's the felt sense it's the animal sense that's always guiding you towards where you need to be the problem is your intellect and your intuition can often argue if you're a smart person or highly educated or always taught to use intellect to make decisions not intuition but I find in my life more often not it's the intuition that makes the accurate decisions both in my personal life and in my business life so it was developing the habit of blindly following my intuition the last habit for me the 12th has been dedicating my life to growth no matter how lost I was in my early 20s so I promised myself that if every day sucked as bad as today no matter what I did if it never got better at least I would focus on growing and improving my life so even if it's sucked then at least I would have a better job where that also sucked if it was miserable in the sense of my health my fitness by finances at least those domains of life would at least improve and realistically if you dedicate your life to growth like that you're gonna see a lot of things change much towards the direction that you want them to change now again for me the starting point of all change was going through journaling exercises and scripting things and getting clarity on what I'm trying to build what I'm trying to create and that doesn't always mean you know specifically but it may mean a general direction that's exciting to you and interesting and for me the journaling exercises I've included on that first link in the description those are the starting point they were for me and they still are on many levels for the clarity the direction the focus to achieve those goals so you can check them out right there in the description box below my last two videos right there right there