Katy kicked this one off with a question: how do you prioritize when you've got a bunch of things you want to change? My honest answer is that trying to attack five big life changes at once is the surest way to finish none of them. And usually the thing you actually need to work on isn't even on the list. If I want to build a writing habit, the real work is spending less time on my phone, or moving my morning routine, or going to bed earlier so getting up earlier is possible. Katy pointed out that setting your alarm 15 minutes earlier only works if you also go to bed 15 minutes earlier, because sleep is a zero sum game and almost nobody I meet is getting too much of it.
So we did the math on the page. Sleep eight hours a night and you've got 112 waking hours a week. Give 40 to your job and you're still holding around 70. That's a big chunk of time, and you either allocate it on purpose or you let it get allocated for you, which is how most of us ended up in the situation we're in. We also talked about what discipline actually looks like, and it's smaller than the Rocky training montage in your head. If you want to start running in the morning, the discipline is laying your clothes out the night before, when the decision is easy. By the time the alarm goes off, you're just continuing something you already started.
We got specific about our own trade-offs. Katy's weekly screen time report has dropped dramatically since we started this show, and she didn't set out to make that happen. The time just went somewhere better. I've basically stopped playing video games since starting the business, and there's some melancholy in that, but I'd make the trade again. Katy made the point I want people to hear: don't deprive yourself. If you love video games, put a video game Saturday on the calendar. The goal isn't optimizing every hour for money. It's making sure how you spend your week actually adds up to the life you want, and then following through on what you committed to.
The back half is about how much more you're capable of than you think. Katy taught herself Photoshop by fumbling through it for hours upon hours, and six and a half years later about half her last 24 hours went to graphic design. I went to school for computer science, didn't finish it, took a psychology degree partly because I was ready to be done, and landed right back in a computer science career anyway. Fifteen years of that still has tremendous value in what I'm building now. We also talk about who gets a vote in your life, how we handled our first mean comment on the internet, and the Chuck Close line I keep coming back to: inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work.
If you've got a question, a topic you want us to cover, or you just want to say hi, email us at [email protected]. We'd genuinely love to hear from you. Thanks for building with us. We're cheering you on.
Chapters
0:00 Welcome and subscriber goal
1:21 Travel and marathon training
4:05 The Build Bravely cattle mix-up
6:28 How to prioritize changes
13:26 Your 112 hours a week
20:00 Discipline as small acts
27:30 Trading hobbies for the business
33:10 You're more capable than you think
43:12 Choosing a college or career path
51:28 Handling mean comments
52:21 Internal vs external validation
57:12 Show up and do the work
