Recognize that you are 100% responsible for your life and have agency over your mindset, motivation, and actions, as every change begins with a choice. This empowers you to actively shape your reality rather than being a passive passenger.
Understand that your struggles can become strengths, adversity can be an advantage, and with challenge comes change, fostering a belief that everything is ‘figureoutable.’ This perspective transforms obstacles into opportunities for growth and resilience.
Sensitize yourself to your self-talk and analyze your beliefs, challenging negative thoughts like ‘I’m not good at remembering names.’ Managing your mind is crucial because a negative mindset cannot create a positive life, and you don’t have to believe everything you think.
Each morning, perform a thought experiment by imagining your day was amazing and asking what three personal and three professional things had to happen for you to feel that way. This sets a clear, intentional target for your day, ensuring you focus on what truly lights you up.
Identify and order your key values (e.g., love, growth, contribution, adventure) and use them as a filter for making daily decisions. This ensures your actions align with what is most important to you, leading to a more harmonious and fulfilling life.
When seeking to create a new result in your life, recognize that you can only make four fundamental choices: stop something, start something, do less of something, or do more of something. This simple framework provides a clear path for intentional behavior modification.
Prioritize continuous learning by having a daily ’to-learn’ list and committing to learning something new every month. Schedule this learning time in your calendar, as consistent mental engagement is vital for brain health and personal growth.
When learning new information, approach it with the intention of teaching it to someone else. This method enhances your focus, deepens your understanding, and improves your ability to recall and articulate the material.
Focus on the things that matter most by clarifying your daily priorities, such as Dr. Chatterjee’s ‘most important thing I have to do today’ question. This prevents busyness from overshadowing meaningful progress and ensures you’re not running in place.
Beyond a ’to-do’ list, develop a ’to-be’ list each morning, deciding which qualities (e.g., patience, kindness) you want to embody that day. By defining who you need to be, your behaviors will naturally align with those desired traits.
Use questions as a powerful tool to direct your attention, such as ‘How can I use this?’, ‘Why must I use this?’, and ‘When will I use this?’ when learning new information. This active questioning pulls relevant information into your awareness and aids application.
Group similar tasks together (e.g., all communications, all research) and complete them in dedicated blocks of time. This strategy minimizes the energy and time lost to ’task switching’ and improves overall productivity.
Categorize tasks by urgency and importance to decide how to handle them: delete unimportant/non-urgent tasks, delegate urgent/unimportant tasks, do urgent/important tasks, and schedule important/non-urgent tasks. This framework helps prioritize and manage your time effectively.
Implement the Pomodoro technique by working in focused 25-45 minute intervals, followed by a 5-minute brain break. These short breaks reset your mental energy, improve focus, and enhance memory retention by creating more ‘primacy and recency’ points in your learning.
Recognize that energy is not something you ‘have’ but something you ‘do’ or generate through your actions. This empowers you to actively cultivate high energy levels through diet, movement, empowering thoughts, and strategic supplementation.
Make going to bed at the same time each night, even on weekends, a high priority for optimal brain health and recovery. Adequate and consistent sleep significantly impacts cognitive function and overall well-being.
Regularly seek out time in nature to reduce stress, improve air quality, benefit from better lighting, and feel more grounded. This habit offers restorative benefits for both mental and physical health.
Intentionally look for things to be grateful for each day, perhaps by asking, ‘What if the only things you had tomorrow were the things you expressed gratitude for today?’ Gratitude acts as a powerful antidote to fear and stress, positively impacting brain health.
Develop a ’to-feel’ list for your day, intentionally cultivating desired emotional states like playfulness, focus, or confidence. Understand that your physiology affects your psychology, and you can actively shift your mood.
Actively manage your environment to be clean, organized, and inspiring, filling it with things that bring you joy or remind you of your goals. Your external reality significantly influences your internal state and productivity.
To remember lists or key points, associate each item with a specific, familiar location in your body or a room in your house, creating vivid, often humorous, mental images. This ancient technique leverages your brain’s natural ability to remember places, making information unforgettable.
Consciously eliminate or reduce habits that negatively impact brain health, such as consuming processed foods, engaging in negative self-talk, being sedentary, spending time with negative people, maintaining a messy environment, neglecting learning, chronic stress, and excessive screen time before bed. These habits deplete mental energy and hinder cognitive function.
Consider getting your vitamin and mineral levels tested and supplementing where needed, especially with essentials like Vitamin D and Omega-3 DHAs. Explore nootropics (science-based ingredients) to boost cognitive performance, memory, and focus if appropriate.