Key Points* Motivation is fleeting, you can’t rely on it* To do big things, you need consistency* You get consistent by making it a habit* You get a habit by starting small* You start small by taking the big thing you want and setting a process goal around the smallest unit of work you can do everyday* I then shared two examples of how this worked in my life:* Writing my first book* Transitioning from finance to tech* Time will pass no matter whatTranscript  Welcome back everyone. This is episode two of the bits of Chris' show. Thank you for joining me yesterday. I really appreciate it. I also appreciate some of the feedback I got in listening to myself. I noticed I already have a few things to work on. I think I said like, and so a bit too much, we're going to try to work on that today. But day two, I woke up and I'm not motivated to do this anymore. And I thought, oh s**t, this is going to be a long, 30 days. But that brings me to today's topic, how to do big things. When you're not motivated. I think motivation is fleeting. That's pretty obvious it comes and goes. And if you think you need to be motivated, you're not going to get much done. If you're waiting around for motivation to hit you. You're never going to go after the things you want to do. So motivation is not the answer with how to do big things. In my opinion, the answers to build consistency. Consisting meaning you show up every day and you just do the thing. There is a quote from bill gates that feels relevant right now. He said most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year. And underestimate what they can achieve in 10 years. Well, I think we could take that a step further. And just say most people overestimate what they can do in the short term. But underestimate what they can do in the long term. So, if you think about a to-do list for a single day or a week, You're probably overestimating what you can get done, but then if you zoom out to maybe a month, two months, or even a single year, You're probably underestimating what you can accomplish. And I have a few examples of this that I'll get to later. But if motivation is not the answer to doing big things, then how do you. Be consistent. And the answer there is. You make whatever you're doing a habit. So, how do you build a habit? There are some amazing books on this topic. I won't get into those today, but I think one or two pieces of advice on how to build a habit. The most important thing is to start small. Make whatever habit you're. Trying to do. A bite size, tiny step that, you know, you can succeed at every day. Because. If doing this podcast is Edie evidence. You can lose motivation very quickly. And so you need to just build it into your routine to find that consistency to power through those dips in motivation. And as you do more. As you get a little more success that motivation will come back and it might come back stronger and it will be easier at times, but it definitely ebbs and flows throughout any big project. So it's important to have whatever habit or whatever thing you're trying to do. Be small, something attainable, something you can do every day. So if our goal is to be consistent and we do that by building habit and the best way to build the habits by starting small, how do we start small? Well, you should take that big thing you're trying to do and try to find the smallest unit of work. That you can do every day. And make that goal a process-based goal, not an outcome based goal. So, for example, if you're going to write a book. Make your goal, a process oriented one. I don't say I'm going to write a hundred pages. And don't say I'm going to write 500 words even. The process there is writing a little bit every day, but just set a timer, make it really focused on just showing up and doing it. For example, when I wrote my personal finance book, my goal every day was to just write for five minutes. And I would say 70% of the mornings that I woke up. I did not want it right. And a lot of times I would just right for the five minutes and walk away, go do something else. But some of those days when I didn't want to write, I would write for five minutes and then I would keep going. And. That could have taken up to an hour, some mornings again, starting from that rolling out of bed, not wanting to do anything. So starting small can lead to. Some real powerful results. In the day-to-day. But it also just keeps you moving forward. And I think one of the biggest problems with a long project is. Humans. We want that instant gratification more or less, even if we are disciplined or thinking with the big picture. And so you have to. Give yourself these little wins to keep it going forward. Jerry Seinfeld has a famous story or method that he shares where he put an X on his calendar every day he was writing jokes or doing stand-up, something like that when he was coming up. He had a goal to just either perform standup every day or write jokes every day. And as long as he did, he put an X on the calendar and then his focus became just doing that every day. So he could put that X on his calendar and string together. Those successes. And I think that's really what you need to do when you're trying to be consistent and being consistent is the thing you need to do. In order to do big things. Another way you can start smallest trying to scope down your initial milestone. So again, with the example of a book, Instead of thinking you need to write a 300 page book. Just make your goal right now, writing the first chapter. And with that smaller scope, you get a little closer and as, and as you get closer to that finish line. The motivation tends to come back in my experience. So if you set incremental milestones, you can have maybe a more consistent distribution and motivation to make your day-to-day easier. You can always expand the scope later. So don't be afraid of scoping it down now. And you can have that longer term vision in mind as you work towards more intermediate milestones. So to recap. In order to do big things. We don't want to rely on motivation. We want to build consistency. To build consistency. You need to make. The thing you're doing a habit in your daily routine. And the best way to do that is to start small. By using a process oriented goal every day that you can achieve. And scope it down. And if you're thinking. You don't want to be patient enough, or if you're thinking. I need to get my big thing done now. And you bite off more than you can chew, or you take too big of a swing right away. You might regret it. And I would suggest you really heed the advice of starting small and scoping it down. Now I want to share two examples of how this has helped me over the years. I started to touch on the first one, which is writing that book. And it took me 10 months to write. But the key was doing it every day for at least five minutes showing up to right. Because as I said earlier, most mornings I did not want to write. And it would have been very easy for me to never make progress and just do other things. But because those days I didn't want to write. I moved the needle for five minutes. I was able to get closer to finishing a chapter or finishing a section. And seeing some progress and then motivation would tend to find its way back, making the next day easier. But also the magic of just getting started with that small process oriented goal of just doing five minutes. Would often lead to me doing way more than five minutes. But by making that barrier to entry super low. It became really easy to get those consistent wins. And I knew every morning, That's all I had to do. So it became easy to take some pressure off. And get a success that day. So I think when you do find that small unit of work, really make that process go for yourself. Just as small as possible, you can always do more than that. But make it small so you can build a habit, especially when you're starting out. Another example is when I left day trading to get into tech. That was a. Maybe a two year journey. And I knew the goal was in mind of, I wanted to get a job as a software engineer. But I didn't have a background in tech and I had only been. Coding at my trading job for maybe a year, year and a half or so. And that was all self-taught and there wasn't many people around me to help. Develop my engineering skills. So how to do a lot of that on my own, or with resources online. And the goal I had there every day was basically to spend one to two hours. Taking online courses or writing code in the morning before going to work. Back then I was a big proponent of the Pomodoro technique where you focus for 25 minutes and then you have a five minute break and you have a little timer running to track these units of work. And so I would measure my. Success in the number of Pomodoros I did focusing on learning something new. And it took a while. But after doing that for a year, year and a half, I started to get deeper into interview rounds. I started to actually have. This full computer science curriculum underneath my belt. And I started to do more interesting projects at work. So a year and a half of saying, let me get two to four Pomodoros of learning in every morning. And I had the skills to become a software engineer. And I think it was. Difficult because during that process, I didn't know when that was going to end. I didn't know when that jump was going to happen. And so that can be a challenge, but by making the goal something I could completely control and by making it relatively small of just learning for a certain period of time every day, That back then. I didn't have any kids, so it was easy to get an hour or two of time to myself. But by making, keeping things small, itallowed me to progress day over day, week over week, and then a year and a half later, I had a new career. You know, same thing with writing the book five minutes a day, 10 months later, I had a completed book that was close to 200 pages. And so to wrap up. Big things take time. Motivation is fleeting. If you need to do big things, you want to have small, consistent wins. Strung together over a long period of time. Your results will come from the compound effect of a lot of little wins. So start small. Focus on the tiniest bit of work you can do every day. And then focus on that process. Getting that done. And a month, a year, 10 years from now. You will surprise yourself because the thing is that time is going to pass no matter what. So you can look back and say, oh great. You know, five minutes a day for the past year. Now I have a book instead of a man I'm still waiting for that motivation to come. And with that. We're over the 10 minute mark that's episode two. Thank you so much. I appreciate your listening. Let me know how this is going, or if there's anything valuable you got from this episode. And we'll see you tomorrow. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bitsofchris.com

Episode Description* Expectations for the next 30 days* Reflections on writing for 45 days straight* Struggles finding a niche* Joyspan - the framework that fits all my interests* How to maximize your JoyspanTranscript Hello. I just think on. All right. I think so. Well, hello, everyone. Welcome to the first episode of the bits of Chris' podcast. I am not sure what I'm doing. So please bear with me. But for the next 30 days, I figured why not record myself speaking and try to figure this out. So here we are. I'm sure it's going to be. Bumpy and I'll make mistakes. And like I said, Not really sure what I'm doing. So we're just gonna learn as we go, please. Any sort of feedback or suggestions would be appreciated, even if you tell me I suck because then. I can think about it. What, what actually sucked? What, why didn't you like, how can I do this better? So let's get into it. My me try to speculate how I think this is going to go. And then maybe get into the reason why I'm going to do it for 30 days. And then I'll give a little context of where this all came from and what I learned from trying to write 45 days straight to start the new year and where we ended up. So one thing I think will happen is between this first episode and 30 days from now, We'll have 30 episodes, which has given me pretty cool. Assuming I don't give up halfway, which, because I'm telling you I'm going 30 days. I don't think I will give up halfway. If I do, you can call me out on it. But I do think the tooling and the scripting and the flow of the episodes and the structure is going to get so much better by the end of it. I also have no idea on how to take the show notes or how to organize things. So we'll see how that improves too. I don't have a logo yet. I don't have much of a name, I guess we'll just go with the bits of Chris' podcasts, but it should be fun. One thing I do know is I had a taste of podcasting at work earlier this week, and it was a blast. I started emceeing this community meeting and at the end. I decided to add a new segment with some feedback from folks. To interview a person. In that meeting live and that was so much fun. That I was like, this, this is a signal I need to talk more. I, I like doing this, so that's the one thing I do now. So even though I'm not qualified yet to really have a podcast, I know it's a lot of fun, so I really don't care. So I promise you over the next 30 days, I'm going to learn some stuff. This will get incrementally better, especially if you're giving me feedback. And it's also, I think, a fun way for me to explore ideas. I've had a lot of ideas and I've been trying to write more online. But writing is slow. And I think you have to be more polished when you write. But podcasting, like anybody can start one. You're just talking into a microphone and who cares if nobody listens, but at least you're getting your words and thoughts out there quicker. So I'm going to try for that sake, like exploring the ideas, maybe outlining future things I might want to write about. Or just giving me an outlet to talk. So I don't drive my wife crazy from talking too much. Or I think even chat GPT has had enough of hearing from me. With all my ideas and questions and things I want to explore. So I think this is going to go great. I'm excited to see what happens over the next 30 days. And let's just get into today's episode. So, as I mentioned earlier, To start the new year and actually even a little before then. I was writing every day online and publishing something short. And I did that for, I think, close to 45 or 50 days in a row. Where I would wake up generally had an outline in place from the night before. And I would write. 300 to 600 words. Try to quickly edit it and then publish it. And this was. Obviously new for me. I had been writing online for a few years, but very ad hoc, like maybe something once a month. Once a week, never anything this intense. And also rarely publishing it in a place where people could see it. So a big part of this challenge was to put it out on social media where you could actually get in front of readers. Forever. I just had it on a personal blog that I'm pretty sure. A hundred people a year might've came across from Google. If, if that, so this was actually more intimidating. I thought just like doing this today is because you're getting content right in front of people and sharing it. So that was interesting. But one thing. Doing this 45 day challenge was you get to go through ideas very quickly and you get to iterate on a bunch of stuff quickly, and you get feedback very quickly. And all that helps you figure out what you like. What you like to talk about? What's working like what other people like, and find interesting. And so I try to pick a specific niche. For that, and I kept changing it and I'm still sort of changing it. Some of the advice you get when you start writing online, if you want to build an audience is to get super specific and niche down. And the people that fit that niche will resonate so greatly with what you're saying, that they'll start following you or the internet will help you find those people. All those platform algorithms will bring you the exact people that are looking for the content. If you're speaking to them, Well, I find that very challenging because I have a lot of things I want to talk about. And a thing I've been struggling with for the past four months or so. Has been trying to put myself into one box and niche down to, to speak to a single. Audience or on a single topic. And I don't know if it's just me or if I haven't found it yet, but I can't do that. So. One thing, the writing for 45 days straight and what this podcast is, hopefully can help me explore is what's most fun for me to talk about. Now I've definitely narrowed it down to a lot of topics. And I think. If you're interested in writing or creating content, you don't want to just. Sit. In your room and plan and think about it. I think you need to balance what I've called the learn. Do reflect or learn, do think cycle. Where you consume some information, but then you spend equal time doing, like using that information, whether that's creating or writing code. And then you spend a little bit of time reflecting, like thinking about the process. Thinking about what it means, thinking about what you like. And so with the 45 day writing challengeI was so busy doing, I didn't have much time to consumer reflect. And I think that was good because it jolted me out of a cycle that most of us are in, I think, which is. We consume way more than we produce. And once you get going with the PR producing, you learn a lot and you start to figure out what, what you do like to talk about what you do have a lot to say about. And we'll get into that journey, but that's what I want to use this podcast to explore is. A lot of these different topics. But ultimately where I'm at today is. I'm a staff engineer at a data company, mainly focused on data analytics. I'm a former day trader. And I w. Years ago, wrote a small book on the basics of personal finance. And I find this money part of myself. I just really enjoy talking about investing, trading money and I've put that on the back burner for a long time. While I focus on growing my tech career. But it keeps coming back. And I think that's a signal that I should pay more attention to that part. So the topics I kind of have in mind for the rest of this podcast are things around money trading and investing, especially at the intersection of data and data engineering, which is what I do for work now., especially around like cryptocurrency markets and web three, because the technical nature of those different platforms and the different tokens that are being created are really fun or interesting to me. Also have a couple ideas around work-life balance and being a parent, how that ties into work. I have this concept of work from home fire for financial independence, remotely employed instead of financial independence retire early. I want to explore that. I'm not really sure what that means, but it just, it sounds catchy to me and I like the idea. For work and for more engineering focus stuff, I've been thinking a lot about how to adapt to AI. And so I've been calling my philosophy there, the augmented engineer, which basically is stating AI as a tool, we should focus on investing in skills that AI can't replace, like our thinking and our soft skills and communication. So I hope to explore more of that. And then ultimately in looking at these different. Ideas in these different pockets of. Specialization that I was considering writing about. They all sorta overlapped around this thing of making more money or making more time. And I started to reflect on why that was or what am I trying to get at? And that's what led to this idea of my life philosophy being to maximize my joy span. Joyce man, being the amount of moments in time over your life that you're spent in a state of joy. Joy being when you lose track of time, when you're in that flow state, when you're doing an activity that fully absorbs you. And when you're spending time with people where you just lose track of time. So spending quality time with loved ones, for example, That's what I've defined as joy and. That's the philosophy I was. Sort of trying to define. And how all these different pieces fit together. It made sense to me. So the joist fan philosophy won't get into too much, but that's the basis of it. And there was three pillars of how to maximize your joy span. One being to make more money. And then within that make more money pillar. You can grow your career. You can invest money. And you can do complimentary projects that could become income-producing assets, but at worst are teaching me new skills or fun stuff for you to learn. The second pillar was to make more time. And this is around productivity, longevity. And using money to buy back time, whether that's upgrading something or hiring things out. And lastly was to make more joy. And the way to do this was to explore your actual hobbies, figure out what you like, try to find your eeky guy. And what you enjoy doing? As well as nurturing relationships. So you have a strong bed of relationships, strong families, strong friendships. To enjoy life with. And then doing a bit of mindfulness. So you're aware of when you're outside the present moment and when you're removing yourself from the ability to be lost in flow and enjoy the moment. And so that framework. Maybe isn't my. Like purpose in life, but it felt. Very complete and that all these ideas I had that I wanted to write about. Fit inside different buckets of that. So I liked it as a central theme to tie together what I want to talk about and write about. And that's what we're going to be exploring over these next 30 days. So thank you for listening. This is getting a little bit longer than I want. I think most episodes should be in that 10 to 15 minute range as I figure this out. If you made it this far. I'm truly honored for you to have spent your attention on my voice. And what I have to say. So thank you. But really any feedback is welcome. Good. End bet. I am just in this to learn, so I won't take it personally. So please. Any sort of signal would be useful. And I hope. To see tomorrow. Thank you for listening. Cheers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bitsofchris.com