 In this video, we dive deep into the daily habits and routines that can help you as a creative professional to achieve goals that are bigger than yourself. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, my name is Chris Doe. You are listening to the service design show episode 157. Hi, my name is Marc Fontaine and welcome back to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design, what are all those hidden and invisible things that make a difference between success and failure, all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and our planet. Our guest in this episode is on a mission to teach 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love. He's the founder of the future, a must YouTube channel and podcast for any service designer out there and he's also becoming a recurring guest on the show. Yes, I'm talking about no one less than Chris Doe. I'm always super excited to talk with Chris, but especially this time. And that's because we decided to explore a topic which I feel is absolutely critical but rarely discussed in our community. I'm talking about the topic of daily habits and routines of a successful creative professional. Sure, we can talk about tools and methods all we want, but eventually it comes down to how you show up throughout the day and rise to the challenges that you encounter. Because if you're tired, stressed out or distracted, all those fancy tools and methods won't do you much. And that's exactly the reason I wanted to talk with Chris about this because I'm curious what he does to bring out the best version of himself every day. So we get down and personal with Chris, but I encourage you to listen to this episode and try to extract the bigger patterns that emerge. If you just get one thing out of this conversation, I hope it is that you'll see that just like an athlete who of course minds their daily eating, sleeping and exercise patterns in order to achieve the best performance on the field, you as a creative professional can also be more productive and happy when you pay attention to these things throughout the day. If you enjoy exploring topics like this that help you to grow as a service design professional, make sure you subscribe to the channel and click that bell icon to be notified when new conversations come out. Well, that about wraps it up for the introduction. Now it's time to dive into the fascinating conversation with Chris Doe. Welcome back on the service design show, Chris. Hi, Marc. Chris, you've been on the show twice before. Yeah, and one was on a regular episode. The other one was your signature roleplay kind of video, which I really enjoyed and inspired me. The first episode we did was in February 2018. Do you recall how many subscribers the future had back then? I don't, but not many. I'll tell you that much right now. It was still quite reasonable. It was 180,000. If I recall correctly, how many do you have right now? Almost 2 million. We're about 28,000 shy of 2 million subscribers. So we've grown a little bit since then. So you've 10xed the channel since your appearance on the service design show. Yes, and it's probably because of my appearance on the service design show that I 10xed it. What else? What else could it be? That's the only reasonable explanation. It's the universe calling us. So I'm really curious to see if you are able to make it over the 2 million mark. Probably once this goes online, you will definitely have hit that. Chris, we're joking around, but there might be still people out there who have no clue who this Chris Do guy is. Could you give a brief introduction? Sure. If you don't know me, my name is Chris Do. It rhymes with Play Doh. Play Doh, Chris Doh. I'm a loud introvert. I'm a recovering graphic designer, middle child, and a serial entrepreneur. And my journey into professional service design started in making commercials and music videos for really large Madison Avenue advertising agencies in America. And in 2014, one of my college friends, Jose Cabillet, approached me and said, let's make content. Let's start an education company. And this was going to be the most brilliant thing ever. And I wanted nothing to do with that at all, Mark. Nothing at all. But he made an offer that I couldn't refuse. I reluctantly agreed. And the decision to do so changed my life and my career. I no longer do service design work. And you may argue with me that I still do. I believe that's your perspective there. And now I'm a full-time content creator and educator, a title that I'm very proud of. And last year, in 2021, we grossed four and a half million dollars. And I'm client free. Good for you. Yeah, I think last year was really a pivotal year, looking also at the content. You've been publishing content for like ages now, like when was the first video that went online? January 2014. 2014, OK. So yeah, so it's been eight years plus. Yeah, eight years plus. Chris, when we did our first conversation, there wasn't the format that I have right now. And that is a lightning round. Five questions that you haven't prepared for, which I always love. And your goal is to answer them as briefly and as quickly as possible. OK. Maybe I'm a little nervous about this lightning round. OK, I'm ready. All right, OK. You'll handle this. Chris, which book or books are you reading at this moment, if any? I'm reading a really great book, How to Tell a Story by the Moth Radio Group. And I really love it. Also, there's another book that I'm really loving right now. It's called What's Your Problem? Well, I'll add the links in the show notes for sure. What's always in your fridge? I don't know. Sparkling water, I think. Another personal question, Chris. What was your very first job? My very first job was at Arby's as a fast food restaurant. And I was the fry person. I dropped French fries into the deep fryer. So I'd go home every day with a face full of grease. Chris, how many people know this story? The origin story, part of it. Next question is, if you could be an animal, which animal would you like to be? I'm most identified with an ant. Ants are hardworking. They prepare for the future. And they do a good thing for our environment. OK. And final question is related to service design. Do you recall the very first moment that you sort of heard about the term? I think I heard about it from this guy named Mark. I didn't really think about it, service design. So I think I first heard it from you. It could be. Yeah, it could be. I know. I remember our first conversation. It was interesting. Chris, thank you for completing, successfully completing this lightning fire rapid question around now. It's time to dive into the conversation of today. So I was preparing this conversation and I felt a bit of because usually I start off with like having a design challenge, pretty clear structure of the conversation. And now in my mind, it was totally flipped. I had a bunch of questions, like a bag of questions that I didn't know. Like what is the overarching subject? And in the recent days, as often it happens with me, this sort of starts to marinate in my head and things start to process. And I came up with two things, which I'm really curious how you feel about them. That sort of maybe capture the essence of what we're going to talk about. Let me share them with you. Habits to making goals, reality and habits of a person in their creative space. Is that does that sound a bit right? I mean, yes, I think. OK, yeah. Let's do this. Let's see. Let's see where we end up with. You'll need to help me in this conversation because I'm going to explore and sort of see where this leads. I have many things that I would like to ask you. But if we go into a completely different direction, I'm fine with that as well. So, Chris, the reason I reached out is I have an assumption that you have certain habits, rituals, routines that have helped you to get to the point where you are today. And we could talk about success, but I think it's more success has a specific annotation can be big, ginormous. But I think it's actually what I'm curious about is how your habits, routines, rituals help to achieve goals. And that can be that doesn't have to be a goal of two million subscribers. It can be goals of people in the creative space. So the first thing I would like to ask you is if you could share a bit about how do you set goals, how do you define goals? The way I set goals is a little bit different than how I think most people set them. And I'll give the example between myself and my chief operating officer. His name is Ben. And what Ben will do is he'll look to the past. And I think this is a fairly conventional way of setting goals. You look at the past, the data, and we have lots of data, how our channel is doing, who buys what, how often lifetime customer value. And based on that, he determines actions and goals to take to reach something. And it's very much grounded in reality. And I think that's fine for lots of people. But the way I do things is I sit around, I just think about where I'd like my life to be in a given amount of time, one, three, five, 10 years from now. And then I just set a goal. And oftentimes it's based on no data and it's fairly unrealistic. And when I set this goal and I tell the team, I want to do seven million dollars of revenue this year, they look at me like, are you crazy? We just hit four and a half or growing. Where'd you get this number seven from? And my answer is because I believe we can do it. And the reason why I point out the differences between these two models is if Ben looked at the numbers and our growth pattern, he might say, let's go for five and a half million, which is a million dollars for additional revenue. And it's based on some number, some projection, some financial modeling. But here's the problem with that is you're going to do more of what you've done before and you're going to be less likely to make a big move that could to change the game entirely. So when I say seven million dollars, I admit it's subjective and it's completely arbitrary. I just made up a number because I like the number seven. But what happens is then the team has to ask themselves, if we do what we did last year, there's no way we can increase the revenue by two and a half million dollars because it's not in the model. It doesn't exist. So what it does is it forces people to sit there and think, what is a big move that we have to make? And we're willing to to have many small gambles in order to reach a really big goal. And I like working this way. And this is how I also coach people. It's like, what kind of life do you want to live? Who do you want to be married to? Or do you want to be single? Where do you want to live? How much money do you want to make? What kind of clients do you want to work with? We start with some kind of desired future state. And then we design our life, our habits, our routine, our actions to achieve that result. What's really cool about doing it this way is when you set a really big goal and you formulate a plan, you start to change. You change the way you think, you change your beliefs, your values and your feelings. And even if you don't reach that goal, you'll have done something really wonderful, which is you have grown as a human being. I forget who said this. If it's Jack Hanfield or Jim Rohn who said that it's not so important that you actually achieve your big goals, but the person you become in the pursuit of the goal. So I think oftentimes people set really low benchmarks or milestones for themselves because they're afraid to fail you because they know they can hit it. And we've learned this through schooling that the people who volunteer for big jobs just carry bigger responsibilities and are more likely to fail. So we artificially hold back. I just don't like to live and think like that. So one of my traits is to practice some form of radical optimism. Optimism is trying to find the good and everything, but radical optimism to me is to try to find things that are good beyond the things that you can actually see. Cool. Let's unpack this a bit more. So nonlinear goals, thinking about where you want to be and not sort of linearly projecting the past. The thing that I think is key here is how do you define what's important to you? You already mentioned that you have to think about the life that you want to live and we can quickly skim over that. But I think that's super important because many people could get hang up there. Like I can dream big, but how do I know what's important to me? How do I prioritize? Yeah, let's keep it at that. How do you prioritize? Well, the first part of your question is how do I know this is a good dream or goal for me? And it has to be rooted in self-awareness. Do you know yourself? Have you been thinking about the things that you think about? And I think in our culture and in society, I think we're running from event to event, putting out one fire after the other, that we actually spend very little time asking ourselves, what would give me joy? What is something that can drive me beyond making money? And when we get clarity around that, I think our goals become pretty clear. And unfortunately, a lot of us don't get to that state. So we wind up pursuing the goals of other people, probably a parent, a sibling or someone else in our industry saying, this is what you should do instead of saying, this is what I want to do. There's a big difference there. So I'm really driven by having clarity and an internal compass that keeps pointing me in the right direction. I'm going to, again, get down and personal with you, because these are really important things. So that internal compass and self-reflection. What what do you do on a day to day, week to week, month by month basis to actually hone that, to to calibrate that? What do you do? Good question, Mark. I think when I talk to people, when I am creating content in a way that's interactive, not just like sitting down and writing, but talking to people, I get a tremendous amount of value from that and I get clarity over my own thoughts. I love hearing about people's problems and challenges because it forces me to think more and it takes me outside of my normal bubble. And this is the catalyst for the way catalyst for the way to kind of jumpstart my brain. And so now my brain is an overdrive thinking about how to solve problems. And in this state, like if I'm in the shower, if I go for a walk or a hike, I think it starts to open up all kinds of other ideas because it's like a muscle and it's ready to go. The pump has been primed. And so I start thinking about stories or ideas or concepts. And this is part of my routine, my habit. And if I encounter a problem and a solution that I know not enough about, I try to practice as much as possible, like doing hyper-focused research and become a learning machine. And so what I like to do is I like to do deep dives. And so if there's a topic about sales or marketing, two things that I did intuitively, but didn't really understand the theory and the language around that, I started reading books, watching videos until I felt like I've read enough. And so that's part of my process and routine of self development, while also creating value for myself and the people I serve. So when you're absorbing all these signals, external input, and it starts to pile up in your brain and then you have those shower moments where the connections are being made. I'm also curious, do you take deliberate time and do you take deliberate action to nurture or facilitate this reflection? So I don't know, going for walks, journaling and meditating, like do you do stuff like that? I do both of those things. I don't do the third one. I don't practice any form of meditation as people would think. I do hike and I like taking walks. And it's a part of my, it's part of my, my desire to stay fit and healthy and be around for my kids and to be alert and to have energy. And so I do like to exercise and to go for hikes or walks. But the thing that, that makes my brain fertile for coming up with ideas is to reach a saturation point of understanding. I find that when I try to come up with a solution, when I don't have enough understanding about the problem or what other people who've, who've come up with, who've researched and thought about on a particular topic or subject, then the idea well is quite empty. And so my first step is to immerse myself in learning and understanding and absorb the information until I reach saturation point. When I reach saturation point, and I know it's usually because my mind is tired at that point and I can't remember no more. I close the book and stop watching the video and I just move on to some other activity. And I need to have my archival brain, the smarter the two brain, there's the active learning brain and the archival brain to start to think and connect the dots. And so it's doing something that I'm not even in control of. It's connecting stories, childhood experiences and what I just learned and it's making sense of it all. And what I get out of the other end is usually the rough draft of the first idea, which is a condensed version of what I've learned process in a way that I think is simple to explain and hopefully easy to understand. That's super interesting how that works. I recognize this process a lot and I know that for myself, I actually have to get away from the topic to create space in order to give my brain the time and I don't know, other contacts to actually process this stuff. I want to quickly cycle back to self-awareness because that's where we started before we ended up here. And we started talking about self-awareness as something that helps you to guide the life that you want to live. I'm curious if you can say a bit more about that, like how do you do you feel like self-awareness is already that saturated for you that, OK, I know who Chris Doe is. I know what my goals are, like check and I just can live by those values. And if so, how did you get there? And if not, like, what do you do to keep expending the self-awareness? If you practice critical thinking and we try to understand what critical thinking is, it means that you challenge your own thoughts and I do this on a regular basis. And sometimes I can only see the problem from a very specific angle. I think Blaren's had said this, that all strategy is autobiographical, which means that basically we prescribe to other people a strategy based on what we believe works. Like I would not tell you to do something that I have yet not done or actually believe the opposite in, right? So there's some form of bias there. So I'm going to do more of what has worked for me. And that's exactly the problem is we get confirmation bias and we start to lock into our positions. And I love this expression. I think it's something like hold strong opinions weekly or loosely. So I have strong opinions and beliefs, high sense of self-awareness, but I'm also constantly looking at my own ideas and asking, is there evidence for this to be true? What part of this is subjective and what part of this is objective and what is my personal confidence level in holding this idea? I'll give you an example in a second, right? And so oftentimes what I'll do is I'll talk to someone and I'll say, you know, it's my belief based on no opinion, data or research that this is true. I say this to remind myself as much as to allow myself an out in case I want to change my mind. So in our culture, and I always just say like Western culture in particular, it's very important for you to be consistent with yourself. It's one of the most strongest desires is to be consistent. And so when we say an opinion that is not well thought out that we haven't reflected on, even though we don't believe it to be true, when someone challenges, what do we do? We dig into our position and we're not willing to let it go. And we've all been guilty of this because sometimes someone would say, well, why did you do that? Instead of saying, you know what? It was a really bad idea. I don't know why it was foolish. And I regret making that decision. Instead, what we do is we defend the decision and say, well, all the indicators led to this point and who could predict the future. And so you start to defend and you dig in. So for me, critical thinking is I need to recognize the things that I really believe, but always leave the door open for a new thought to enter that might be a superior way of looking at the problem. And when I have a loosely formed idea, I also want to label it in my mind so I don't fool myself into thinking this is something I've thought about for a long time and it's truly part of who I am. So when a superior idea is presented to me, I just quickly detached from the old idea and I grabbed the new idea. And for me, that helps with the critical thinking part and knowing who I am, that self-awareness. What I like about how you explain this is that it's an ongoing process. So the critical thinking and the self-awareness I was trying to get at is happening on all the time in conversations that you have with other people because of the fact that you've adopted an attitude of learning, being open, being ready to switch beliefs. So every conversation that you have is an opportunity to self reflect and adjust course. That a good summary? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I like to invite people to debate, not because I want to prove that I'm right or superior, but because I need a challenge. I was having a conversation with my wife yesterday. We went for a really long drive. And I was saying sometimes because I'm so optimistic, I write something and I cannot see the counter argument to it. Right. I'm blinded. It's in my blind spot because I'm so optimistic. I think, well, this can only help people. This is only going to improve their lives. What happens with the Internet? As you know, Mark, is they think dark thoughts. They think the worst case scenario and sometimes, even in what I believe is a relatively innocent, innocuous, positive thing that I'm saying, they will be triggered by it and they'll say something the opposite. And it's quite interesting for me. And my wife thinks I have some kind of savior syndrome, like I'm a martyr and I always want to save everybody. It's not true, maybe. Not sure. But what I'm doing is I need to see the problem from a different point of view so I can make sure I'm thinking clearly. So I actually really do enjoy, believe it or not, trolls who are so vitriolic in their anti-response to what it is I'm saying, that I get a perspective from the other side. I was talking to author Douglas Davis, who wrote the book Creative Strategies and the Business of Design. And in the opening couple of chapters, he talked about how his grandfather, he's an African American, spent time in racist groups and he was puzzled why his grandfather would do that. And he said, you need to spend time with people who don't believe what you believe so that you can you can see how they think you want to think how they think so that you know how to behave and you know how to potentially overcome that or at least adapt or modify. So it's like you have to spend some time in the enemy's camp to learn how they think. If you want to come up with a better strategy. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And I think you have no shortage of fans and trolls either. They come together. They come together and awards. So, Chris, I want to transition our conversation a bit away from goals because there is more to say about that. But like goals without execution or dreams without execution are just dreams. I don't know what saying is. But what I want to get to is achieving your goals on a day to day basis. You have to do stuff. And I really believe that there are fundamental things in our lives, maybe as creatives, maybe as humans in general, that we take for granted, but are super important like the foundational things that I feel aren't discussed a lot in the creative space. Maybe I'm in a bubble and I'm just not seeing it. But I do feel that they are like the cornerstones of even having a shot at achieving your goals or at achieving success. So this is a preface to my question. Chris, could you describe your morning routine to us? What do you do when you get up? Sure. I'm a very light sleeper. So when the sun comes up and it hits my eyes, I wake up or some noise. So I tend to get up pretty early right around six, six thirty in the morning, sometimes earlier, I give or take. I typically don't set my alarm unless there's an appointment that I have to make. I just naturally just wake up and usually I wake up before my alarm. And the first thing that I do is because I'm really groggy. I'm a little bit tired because I do work a pretty long day is the way I get up is I need to to jumpstart my brain and the way that I do that is I start going through the comments and the DMs that I'm getting on social media. So I have a pretty specific routine. I'll jump on Twitter, answer some questions. I'll jump on LinkedIn to see if there's anything burning or pressing. And then I'll go to Instagram and then YouTube and by that time that I'm done, my brain is fully awake and I'm now compelled to go do something. It's in those moments, too. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Yeah, let me let me interrupt you for a second. I just understand this. You get up, you're groggy. You grab your phone and you start start checking social media. Yes. I mean, let me let me just correct myself here. I turned to see if my wife is still in bed if she's still sleeping. And oftentimes she's good. She's already doing something or I'll say good morning to her and that and then I'll be on the phone. The reason why I'm on the phone is because if I don't get on the phone, I tend not want to wake up. I just lay there and like I'm asleep. I'm going to go back to sleep, right? But once my brain gets going, it's very hard for me to turn it off. So it's just my routine. What happens after that? So how long how much time do you spend checking social media? It could be anywhere from 30 minutes an hour and a half. It's a lot of messages to get through. All right. Yeah. When do you do breakfast? When do you do coffee? What do you do? What else do you do in the morning? Yeah. So once once my brain is on, I'm usually thinking about two or three things that somebody has said. And usually they're they're in emotional state and they have me in emotional state. And I like that because I am a much better thinker under duress, under some kind of emotional kind of energy. When I write when I'm bored, it just doesn't usually sound very good. It sounds very robotic. And so typically I'll brush my teeth. I'll shower. And in that moment, the brain, the the active I'm sorry, the archival learning brain or the archival brain is working on things I already forgot about. And usually there it's I'm like, oh, here's how you can answer that problem. Here's a framework or here's an idea for a post article that I think I want to write today. I am no longer eating breakfast, I'm trying to collapse down my eating window to be as small as possible. So I'm trying to eat as late in the day as possible. So it's two to three p.m. which I'm usually eating at my last meal typically ends around eight p.m. I'm trying to work towards eating one meal a day. I'm not there yet. I got some ways to go, but I'm just collapsing that down. And I find that my body has adjusted pretty quickly like it seems like it's an impossible thing. But if you approach any goal, any anything that you have and you take measured steps towards it like inch by inch, you will get there. So first it began with I'm not going to eat breakfast anymore and then I'll eat a late lunch and that lunch just keeps collapsing down until it's now two sometimes three or four o'clock. And I don't feel the hunger pains at all. And contrary to popular belief, I can even exercise in the morning without eating anything and not feel like lightheaded. I believe it's just an adjustment period. So I am then typically on my computer reading a few things. And I start to jot down any diagrams or loose ideas to make sure that I memorialize them because, you know, this whenever you have an idea, if you go do something else, you'll lose that idea. It's not put into long term memory yet. This goes against popular belief that the last thing you should do in the morning is check your phone or check social media. Yeah, you already mentioned that you needed to activate your brain. How do you do? And is it important to you to? It's it could be very reactive. So you read a message and your day gets or your morning gets dictated by a comment you read from a troll rather than working on that seven million goal and thinking of creative ways, how to get there. Do you encounter that that issue, that challenge? Is it an issue for you? No, I actually think it's a benefit. And I think the general sentiment about social media is addictive. It'll rot your brain and it's not a good thing for you to do. Probably is true for a lot of people, especially if you're emotionally vulnerable, if you're triggered and you've had traumatic experiences in the past, you don't respond well to criticism. I would say social media can be a very toxic place. But I really believe in this in that I'm a person with a solution looking for a problem. So I've trained my mind to look for problems and the problems tend to come from people who disagree with you. If everybody agreed, it's like, well, there's no problem. And so I have nothing to do. But when I hear about a problem and I'll give you an example of one right now, OK? I will give advice, say the best way for you to move forward as a creative professional and get paid what you're worth is to raise your prices. And I think pretty innocent. I'm a champion for creative people. And then I get pushback from other creative people. I'm like, wait, wait, are you arguing against your own best interests here? And they're saying what you're saying comes from a very privileged place that sure you may have done X, Y, and Z. But the advice that you're giving works for a very small percentage of people because you just don't understand me. And they don't say it as nicely as that. But that's how I read it. I try to strip away the emotion and the personal tax. I just look at it objectively as data points. So here's the benefit of this. I'm not getting pulled into an emotional cesspool. But what I'm going through right now is for everybody who believes this, I'm not going to win more people. I'm not going to make a better product or teach better by just having people who totally agree with me. So it got me to think, why is this person stuck? What is going on in their life? And I need to understand them a little bit better. And then this spawns new content ideas. And so here's the thing. I haven't made this video yet, but I plan to. I'm going to take the opposite approach. I'm going to say, let's try to charge as little as possible, because when you charge less, you have less buyer resistance and friction. Therefore, you'll be able to service more clients and have a greater portfolio. Let's try the opposite inversion thinking. Let's try the opposite approach and see where we net out. And it gave me a whole bunch of new ideas. And when I make a strong argument for charging less, I think people are going to freak out and say, this is fire content because it sounds so counter intuitive to charge less. But I want to reveal the absurdity of that thought so I can put this sucker to bed. So for me, it's what drives my content. It drives new new products, new workshops, new ways of teaching, new models. And this is how I'm going to get to that seven million goal. Got it. You see the difference. Yeah, absolutely. Because again, it's looking for that nonlinearity and looking for ways where you can break with the existing path or find new opportunities in chartered territory. And with your apparently very good at is not taking it personal, like you're just seeing a comment as a comment. I think you have tons of videos where it's your work. You're not your work. And I think you're Excel at that, right? This is a great example of that. I want to get to can add something to that before we move on. Yeah, I want to say something. The reason why I'm not so affected by this is because I have a strong sense of self. I know what my intrinsic worth and value is to the world. And I'm not looking for external validation. Like if I make a design that's really bad, I know it's bad and I'm going to course correct it until it's good. And so I don't put work out into the world thinking, I don't know how I feel about this because that's not practicing critical thinking. It's not having high sense of self awareness. And so when I put stuff out and people disagree, it's not that because they think it's stupid or dumb that all of a sudden I think I'm stupid or dumb. I just think you have an opinion. I have an opinion. So I just need to look at the data in what you're saying. What you're saying is I wasn't a great presenter and wasn't clear or maybe my tone of voice of delivery wasn't to your liking. And then I get to ask myself that question, which is do I want to accommodate this person or do I need to just continue doing what it is that I feel is an alignment with who I am. And when people get really solid about who they are, their self esteem, their self confidence, they can have a much healthier relationship with negative criticism. I don't know if we need to go into that avenue, but it's like how do you build that? It went like you make it sound so easy, like having a good sense of self and knowing your self awareness, who you are, what your values are. Like it's not that you wake up and it's clear. What kind of work do you have to put in to get there? What kind of work do you put in to get there? Yeah, again, I want to acknowledge the very fortunate circumstances that led me to develop into who I am. I don't want to get into all of that, but let's just go into the assumption that we or you or a person who's listening to us is struggling with self confidence and self esteem. I think that we think if we can just reprogram our brain that everything will change, that we can solve an intellectual emotional problem with an intellectual emotional solution. And I find that to be very difficult. I have friends who ask me for help who say like, oh, I need to learn to accept myself and to know myself better. What should I do? And they're trying to understand it on an intellectual emotional level. And what they do is they are still, unfortunately, holding on to this image of self and they've identified their identity as such that they're going to challenge any intellectual idea saying this doesn't feel like me anymore. Even though they don't like those parts of themselves, it's really weird. Human nature says that instead of changing, getting what I want, I'd rather hold on to the stuff that I don't want for whatever reason. So the best way I know how to overcome this is not to try to have a new idea, but to have a new action. Because when you take a new action, it will form a new narrative. You will write a new self story. What I mean by this. So my friend Ian Padgett, who's known as the logo geek on Twitter, he suffers from extreme anxiety. He's he can't he's not even comfortable around family members. And so he's telling me a story about how during dinnertime, especially if there were any guests that came over, he couldn't even eat the soup because his hands would shake so much from anxiety and that would cause the soup to spill out of his spoon. I was like, oh my gosh, what a horrible way to live? He's like, I know. So he went to see a CBT therapist, cognitive behavioral therapist. And what she told him was the more you concentrate on what makes you nervous, makes you even more nervous. So trying to hold your spoon steady and focusing on that actually makes your hands shake even more. So she said, I want you to do something different. I want you to stay at the wall. Don't don't worry. Trust in your peripheral vision. Trust in your motor skills that even if you stay at the wall, that your spoon will hit your lip and you'll be OK. So he would focus on a part of the wall and he would do this and his hands moved smoother and it built up the confidence and slowly his anxiety would go down. To such a point that a person who struggles with eating in front of their own family with such a simple thing as a soup spoon is now able to record and interview some of his idols for his podcast. He's he's gone a really far away. And so if we change the action, we don't need to understand intellectually or emotionally what it's going to do for us. He wasn't trying to understand from his therapist why it is staring at the wall work. He put his trust in somebody, changed his action, which then created a new result, which was, huh, my hands don't shake as much. I don't need to understand why. But if I do that, eventually the anxiety goes down and he rewires his brain. So the best way that I know how to increase your self confidence and your self esteem is first find somebody that you really trust. Holy 100 percent. And then just do what they tell you to do. And you'll start to experience new beliefs and you'll rewire your circuit. You'll reboot your operating system. I think I like the actions. I think it has Dave Gray, another author had an article or a video about liminal thinking that behaviors are or beliefs are formed through actions. And if you want to change your beliefs and you need to take out actions and it makes a lot of sense. Let's cycle back to the routine part and they habits part. So your morning looks like your get up. You look for stimuli that changes your thinking. You need to get your brain firing on all cylinders. And then you can you can start the day. Now let's fast forward and we'll get to the middle part later. But let's fast forward to the end of the day. When do you consider your day work day to be done? Great question. I'm in an awesome place in my business, my life that I have very few deadlines that are not set by myself. Very few. And so I've learned to listen to my body. And so when I feel I'm tired, I just shut down the computer and just go to sleep. And I feel like I don't have to carry guilt with me that more can be done. I just know I put in a really solid days worth of work and I'm tired. And I also realize the law of diminishing returns. When you're working through that fatigue fog, you're making really poor decisions and you're working much slower. You're working in a suboptimal way. What I like to do is like, OK, I'm feeling a little tired. I'm done. I will shut my computer down. I'll go get ready for bed and have a whole nighttime skin routine things. I don't want to get into that. But it's it's more than one step. So I'm like, I need to build that into my timeline here. And then I slip into bed. Also, guess what? Checking my social channels again. And it's quite strange here because in the morning I use the social as my caffeine, as my my liquid chemical boost. And at night, it's my it's my sleep aid. It's kind of weird because as I'm tired, as I'm reading, it will kind of medicate my my brain and hypnotize me. So I'm like, oh, I'm done because if I have to concentrate when I'm tired, it makes me even more tired. So I typically will just go through a few messages, read a couple of things and then I'll put my phone down and then I'm out like a light bulb in probably less than two minutes. Well, again, not not what I expected. And let's zoom in to the part between I close my laptop and I go to bed. Like there must be something in between most people shut down their laptop. I don't know, 4 p.m., 5 p.m., 6 p.m., 7 p.m. They have dinner, watch some TV, watch Netflix, maybe read a book and then maybe take a shower and then go to bed. Is it like, is it for you? OK, I the moment I open my laptop in the morning, it stays open until I go to bed and then it's literally like, is there anything in between between going to bed? But you he jumps to the end. I know. I don't know. So what's the terminator here? Yeah. So here's the thing. There's there's lunch and there's dinner at the beginning of the pandemic. I because I'm at home. There's very little social interaction, very few disruptions. My wife will cook something or she'll order some food and say, hey, lunch is here. I stop working. I go down. I have a meal. It doesn't take that long to eat 25, 30 minutes, whatever. We might have a conversation. We might not. And then I'm right back on the machine and I did this for probably the first six months of the pandemic. And then I realized something is I'm working in a hyper efficient way with very few distractions and I was taking very few and short breaks that I was completely wiped out. I couldn't keep my eyes open. My body started to hurt. I couldn't figure it out. Well, anybody listening to this will become aware, obviously, of what the problem was. So what I do now is I'll take probably an hour or an hour and a half for lunch and probably two, two and a half hours for dinner. And I give myself permission to do whatever it is I want. So I'll have lunch. It doesn't take that long. I might sit on the couch and watch some TV or watch some news or take a nap. That's usually what I'll do because after I eat, I'm pretty tired. I'll take a nap. I'll get back up. I'll get back on the machine. I'll work again. Dinner happens. And I asked myself, do I want to go back to work? Is there anything I need to do? I don't feel compelled like I have to do it. So sometimes my wife and I will sit down and watch two or three episodes of whatever our favorite TV show is. And then I'll feel like, OK, I think I'm done with work. I have learned to really attune my and to regulate my energy around what my body wants. If it wants to go to sleep, I'll just in the middle day, I'll just get up. I'll go to sleep. Like, I'll go to sleep for 20 minutes. I'll go to sleep for three hours. I just do whatever my body wants. And in that way, I think I can I can play this game for as long as possible because I'm taking regular breaks and I'm recharging when necessary. And when you say regular breaks, like, do you have more breaks throughout the day? Or is it just lunch and dinner? Or have you like, how's your rhythm? What's your rhythm there? Yeah, I will take regular breaks. For example, I think I can focus and do highly focused work for about 90 minutes. And after that, I know I need to stop. So I can work. I'm just pushing through something, right? And so I make a point like my kids are home. My wife is here. And so I'll just get up and go check out what they're doing. Maybe I'll water the plants or I'll do something very small, maybe put away a stack of books or something and I'll do that somewhere in there in that day, not all days, because I'm not always perfect about this, but I'll go. My gym is like literally behind me here and I have a lot of equipment. So I'll just go on to pull ups. I'll do bicep curls. I'll do something physical just to get my blood pumping and to clear my mind. I might also just take a social media break where I'm going to step away now. I'm going to have some fun. I'm going to catch up on the post that I made that morning and I'll read some comments and respond. Something like that. The way you describe your day could sound a bit unstructured, a bit improvised. I'm curious if you could share your thoughts about productivity because you mentioned that at the end of the day, you have a sense of accomplishment. You feel when your body is tired, you're done and you don't sort of have a struggle with yourself that you could have done more. So you have a sense of accomplishment. Going back to the question, what is your take on productivity and being productive? How do you see that? Yeah, I think this is going to sound strange and I think when you observe it the way you have, it does sound pretty unstructured probably because it is because there's a rhythm and a flow and I have for the most part, control and autonomy and I'm self-directed. So I know what needs to get done. And if you look at the output that I do in a day, it will probably be more than what people do in a week. I try to say that objectively and humbly, but I'm hyper efficient and productive when I'm working. I have systems organized where my files are. I know my rhythm. So I'm not going to sit here and try to write something when I know I'm not going to be able to write something. Conversely, if somebody's calling me to do something else, I'm in the zone for writing. I just say, no, I need to finish this and I will get it out. And so I'll give you an example. I was struggling with understanding why people aren't able to make the kind of money they make. I know it's a very strange struggle for me, right? Because in my life, because of my radical optimism, the way I set goals and my and having high sense, self-esteem, self-awareness, I'm able to achieve whatever it is I set my mind to. So I'm like, why can't other people do this? And so I decided to write a multi-threaded tweet about what somebody needs to do to scale from zero to building a business that they can own and run as an independent business owner. And I wrote this 70-step process and I think less than 10 minutes on my phone in a very archaic way. And I published it. And that has become one of my more high-performing tweets in the last, I would say, about three or four months. And it it caused a stir because everybody's like, wow, this is the most thorough, well thought out plan on how you can go from having a job to creating jobs. And so then I shared that on LinkedIn and that becomes the foundation for a three-part training session that I'm doing. So when I work for 10 minutes and I'm not exaggerating, it took me about 10 minutes to write. And can you imagine writing a multi-threaded sequence on Twitter via mobile? I had a copy, paste, and do all kinds of weird things because if I changed my mind, it would ripple through. And I did it in 10 minutes. And so the point I'm trying to make with you, Mark, is my 10 minutes might be someone's 10 hours. So once I sorry, obviously, it's not 10 minutes. It's all the years of experience that went into that 10 minutes, that 10 minutes just actually crafting and copy, pasting that stuff on Twitter. And when you and when you when you put this story into the perspective of productivity, so how do you define them productivity for yourself? Because sure, 10 minutes of work and lead to a lot of value. And that's because you've put in the years of work to actually get to the valuable content. So you're probably not measuring productivity in terms of time. No, I and I wouldn't do that for my staff and my do for myself. Productivity is measured in outcomes. It's not even in deliverables, right? So let's say, for example, I spent 10 minutes writing that tweet sequence, a threaded sequence on Twitter and it got no results. I would say that was unproductive. If I spent 10 hours on it, it would be even less productive because it took 10 hours to do something that no one cared about. Didn't achieve any result at all. And so when I talked to my team and there's many videos of me talking to my team about this. And oftentimes I'll say, hey, are you guys hitting your targets? And one person will say to me, Chris, I worked 60 hours this week. I'm like, you didn't answer my question. I don't care if you work six hours, six minutes or 60 hours. Did you achieve the result? And another staff member would say, you know, I finished 14 videos this week. I'm exaggerating here just to make a point. I'm like, what do I care if you made 14 videos this week? Did you achieve the goal? The goal was to increase our subscribers by X number, to increase revenue by X number and to increase watch time by X number. Did anything that you do result in that? And then they're looking around and no one wants to answer a question because they know the problem is they're just doing work to be busy to demonstrate that they're a good productive employee. And I don't care. All I tell them is these are our benchmarks in terms of productivity. Like these are the results and outcomes that I want. I really don't care how you do it or how long it takes you to do. And there's good and bad to that. Meaning if it takes you 80 hours a week to do it because you're slow, you're still new, you're inefficient with the way you think and process, it takes you eight hours. If you can do it in eight minutes, I'm not gonna sit there and say, where's your time sheet? Like, how could you do this so quickly? You just get the results that we want. That's it. That's how I measure productivity. Got it. And I have a question about this, but first I need to know one thing about this specific example because I think it's interesting. So what was the outcome that you had in mind when you shared this online? Oh, you're talking about the 70 step on how to scale from zero? Yes. The outcome was I'm trying to solve a problem because I'm inspired by this guy, his name is Alex Hermosi. And Alex has this very simple thing that he says, I'm not here to sell you anything. I want to help you get to $1 to $3 million in revenue so that I can invest in your company and grow it to a $100 million company. And I was thinking, wow. So here's an excellent salesperson who knows how to give you something and address your objection in one shot. So you can watch his videos and he doesn't pitch, there's no call to action, there's nothing. He's just trying to teach and give value. And obviously I'm not in that place where I do have to sell you something. I do have to make money somehow to sustain myself, right? Alex has built a couple of $100 million businesses I think at this point. So making more money is not really his primary drive for life. I was thinking, what is my version of that statement? Which is I'm not here to sell you anything. I just want to help you get to a certain point. So I thought about this. A lot of the people who watch our channel are struggling to make a career out of what it is that they're doing. Many of them come from places where there's not a lot of economic mobility or they come from a developing country. There's not a lot of infrastructure or job opportunities. So I wanted to focus on getting someone from zero to growing a business for $30,000. And I have nothing to sell you. I just want to teach you how to get to the $30,000. Kind of like Alex is one million. And then from that point, you'll have validated a business model. You'll have some clarity about what it is that you're doing. You'll have some experience around sales and marketing. I can then take that and help you get to the next level. For that, I would want to charge you or at least have you enroll in one of our courses or something. So I got to get people up to that baseline before they can make a reasonable investment in themselves and go from $30,000 to $100,000 to $600,000. Yeah, that's a long-term gain. And the short-term gain with that tweet was helping people. That's my translation. Now, for that sense of accomplishment and to be able to judge yourself if you were productive in that sense, if you achieved that outcome, how do you then measure for a lack of a better word? How do you gauge if you actually did a good job in this case? Yeah, excellent question. The one of the most beautiful things about social media is you're gonna get immediate feedback from your community. So I can tell by the engagement, the kind of comments, the way it's shared and talked about, relative to my baseline. So if a normal tweet from me might get a couple hundred likes, maybe 150 comments, when this one gets 1300 likes within the first day, 24 hours, and it's getting a ton of shares and comments and the kinds of things that they're saying and how they're sharing it, this is the most valuable tweet I've ever read. Or this is the whole plan. I'm on step 14 of 40 or 70 or whatever it is that I wrote. And then it formulates a hypothesis like, is this what people need to hear? Is this what they need to learn? And I'm taking the minimum amount of steps to test and validate the hypothesis. And the feedback that's coming back is really strong. So you know what I did? I went back, I copied all of the individual tweets and put them together as a post on LinkedIn. So it's one giant list, steps one through 70. And that thing right now is over 3000 likes and a gazillion comments on it. I'm exaggerating, but a lot of comments. So I know, huh, I tested an idea that took me 10 minutes. It took me 30 seconds to copy paste it all into one thing and then post and edit a little bit on LinkedIn. And now that's taken off. So each step, I'm making a greater commitment of time and energy to go deeper and deeper into the 70 steps. And so I'm also testing and building potentially new product, a course. This will be a free course. I just wanna give this part away. But that's how I measure whether or not it's effective or not. One question about this is do you make a distinction between outcome related goals and process related goals? Because my challenge with chasing goals and metrics that you have no or little influence of, increasing subscriber count or getting a number of likes, sometimes you just, like your, the algorithm does the work no matter how good your article was. So it's really hard to control if somebody actually buys your course or likes your comments on your video. The thing that you can control is did I actually post something today which I think is valuable? So that's a more process oriented approach towards goals. Any comments on that? I'm probably a hybrid between these two things. Because I'm not sure I 100% believe that the outcomes are out of your control. I can't control how people respond or react but I know how the algorithms work because I've been doing content for eight plus years here and I've seen what works and what doesn't and I've come to figure out certain things that make it work. And I had a pretty strong suspicion that this content was gonna work because people like lists, lists are easy to read. You understand exactly where you are in the steps because you know you're in step seven. You can see the end and the beginning and the middle. And for a lot of people, theory is good but they want step by step instruction like a recipe and those things tend to work. That's why listicles are very popular types of content, top 10 books that you need to read, 17 habits to develop a winning mindset, four ways to achieve your financial freedom, whatever it is. So a list helps the 30 best resources for social media. You see listicles work. So I'm already hitting a format type that works. The next thing is if you touch upon a common pain point that regardless of industry people are going to feel and you deliver a goal, an outcome, those tend to work really well. So at the very beginning of the post, I wrote scaling from zero, how to land your first five-figure client. That's a promise and an objection or problem all built into one. That's just copywriting 101. So I kind of know how to write these things now so that people will pay attention and to break it in a way that people look at it depending on what platform it's on. So you're at a level with this where the process is less important because you sort of master the craft of getting engagement, getting people to respond to these things and then you can focus on outcome. Like it's, for me, it's like running a marathon. If you don't know what you're doing, like don't focus on the time that you're running for the first mile. Focus on all the other things. Focus on putting on your shoes and getting out there once a week. And then at some point, you'll start to realize, okay, I need to pay attention to my food because if I pay attention to my food, it will impact my time. So with this specific example, you came to a point where you know all the variables and then you can be pretty rigid when it comes to outcomes, right? Yes, I think so. And yeah, yeah, you're right. Okay. Chris, we're almost talking for an hour and I don't wanna take too much of your time. We started off with habits, rituals, routines to sort of head towards the end of this episode. I wanna circle back to those topics. I'm curious if there are any habits that you got rid of recently, maybe like in the last two, three years of your life, like things that weren't contributing to your success, your happiness, and if so, what were they? Yeah, for sure. One of the things that I read in Darren Hardy's book, The Compound Effect, was about how to manage your time and how to manage your energy. There are a lot of things that wind us up emotionally that we have no control over. And he said, if you can identify the things that you'd like to change, but you have no power to influence change, try to eliminate them from your life. And at first I was like, okay, that's weird. But I used to consume news a lot. I'd read articles online and on traditional magazines and sometimes it'd get me upset. And the reason why is because what is newsworthy tends to be negative information about the environment, about mass shootings, about political parties and agendas and corruption, brutality, police brutality, those kinds of things. And I was consuming that, so I was becoming a negative person because this was weighing me down, it was becoming, in my own way, somewhat depressed about this, about that as human beings, we can't figure out how to get along in a society and do good for each other. And so I started to just cut out my news intake and consumption and it would free up my time and it would change my mental state. So from time to time I'll dip in, I'll read something, but then I remind myself there's a, I have a finite appetite, just nibble, snack a little bit and get out. And so I've replaced that habit with a different habit, which is listening to really well produced and research and written podcasts. One of my favorite is Radio Lab. I also love listening to stories so the moth radio hour is incredible. And so I'm replacing negative consumption, I think with positive consumption and it's really helping to reprogram me. And the thing that's really cool is I'm able to learn at a pace in which I've not been able to learn before. I'll tell you one other habit that's changed. I used to dread reading books, but I gotta tell you during the pandemic, I've read more books naturally. I'm sure that's not unusual for everybody, but the way in which I'm reading books is very different. Like I can read a book thoroughly from beginning to end, most times in one day. And the one habit that I changed around reading the book is first, I tell myself a different story. The story I used to tell myself was, I'm a slow reader, why is this so difficult for me? The new story that I tell myself is, I read differently. I don't read to consume, I read to teach. So therefore I need to understand the concepts thoroughly and so that I can share what I've learned with other people. And in conjunction with that, I take 90 minute breaks. I mean not 90 minute breaks, I take a break every 90 minutes. So I'll read instead of pushing through, I'll just stop, force breaks because I need to process what I just read. Cause sometimes I don't know if this ever happens, you mark. You read 35 pages and you're like, what did I just read? I don't even remember any of it cause your mind was wandering. It was telling you I'm tired. This is consuming too many calories. And so when I do this, I take short breaks, 90 minutes, I come right back to it. I'm fresh, I'm ready to go. And I'm learning as much as I can. That's how I'm able to read. So consuming less news, less mass media and replacing it with richer, deeper, more research, more maybe nuanced content. That's an interesting habit. I'm also curious, you mentioned self-reflection and self-awareness a few times already in this episode. Now, if you look at your current habits, the things you're doing, what do you feel is maybe the thing that's contributing the most to your productivity throughout the day and productivity in terms of where you describe it? And again, I'm looking for something like a habit. Well, I've learned to invite other people into my process, my crazy world and asking for help and being able to receive help has actually benefited me a lot. So I used to do everything by myself and then I couldn't get all the stuff I wanted to get done and it would make me feel bad. So I've hired younger designers to help me do things that take things off my plate so I can focus on the things that are more important. So I'm trying to optimize my productivity by delegating some tasks to other people which I've held on to pretty tightly. And I think that has helped me out a lot. I don't know if that counts as a habit but letting go of certain things and telling yourself it's okay to get help and finding good people to help you has actually increased my productivity. And that definitely sounds like a self-awareness thing as well on letting go and not holding on and sharing and yeah, the interesting thing is I think you talked about this on your channel so often like basically every topic that we've discussed today you've already created a video on on your channel. So if somebody's interested like just check out the future or the podcast and you'll find you'll be able to dive deeper. Chris, to sort of wrap this up, I'm curious we've been talking for an hour like if somebody made it to this point what do you hope is the one thing that they will remember walking away from this episode? Okay, I think I can try to sum it up. I'll try and sum it this way. Words matter if you want, I'm sorry, let me see. Words matter, all transformation is linguistic. That's a quote. So if you change the conversation, you change the culture. And so when we choose certain words it starts to form beliefs, opinions and values in our mind which then influences our actions and the results that we get. And if you're not careful, the words you choose become your life, your habit, your routine and ultimately your destiny. And so if we start to think about our habits and routines especially on the words that we choose to describe our state or how we interpret obstacles as opportunities instead of obstacles then we can have a healthy relationship. We can develop new actions that would then change the words that we use and change our self story. So if you don't walk away with anything else be more intentional in the way that you describe things to be more objective and neutral and not use such judging and violent language especially on yourself. And the word I'd like to use for that is gratitude and thank you Chris for sharing that. So many other notes that I had but I think we've packed this episode with a lot of content that people might need to listen to twice. Chris, it was awesome to complete that trilogy. I don't know what the sequel is. Maybe we're watching Pirates of the Caribbean at home. I think there are seven parts to that. Maybe we'll get to that one day. But for now I just wanna say thank you. Keep doing what you're doing and keep sharing. Thank you, Mark. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for asking such thoughtful questions. I wanna thank Chris once again for sharing so openly and giving us a peek into his daily life. If you've made it this far into the conversation please leave a short comment down below and let us know what is the daily routine you couldn't do without as a creative professional. My name is Mark Fontaine and I wanna thank you for tuning in to The Service Design Show. Keep making a positive impact and I'll catch you very soon in the next video.