How to move out FROM depression and apathy TO happiness and exciting life. F🔥cking personal guide.

At least once a year I find myself in an apathy hole, where I drown in depressive thoughts. I slip into thinking that I’m losing in life. That everyone is so far ahead. Everyone is successful, rich, married, launching + selling startups every week left and right, etc, etc…

Depression is a pretty strong self-fulfilling condition and requires an equally strong, radical pull to get out of it. That’s why this blog will have
plenty of F 😳CK word in it. Buckle up!

As for most of my articles, I address it to myself. So when I’m fed up with myself, I can read it and get my lazy ass back on track of shitting 🌈 rainbows, technological ✨miracles and golden nuggets of products and services 😃, that people want to pay real 💰 for.

Okay. Here is my list of TO-DO items that I need to fucking do:

💪 Discipline

• 10pm — should be in bed. Ideally sleeping. Worst case, reading a book. On a kindle or paper. NOT on a phone, iPad or a laptop. The Phone should be on airplane mode and in a different room.
• Before sleep, I should think about 1 most important thing I need to accomplish tomorrow. And then add two more items so that it’s a “TOP 3 things I need to accomplish tomorrow”.
  Perhaps an even better approach is to think of the TOP 10. Then prioritize them. Then say “F*CK YOU” to the bottom 7. Then visualize how you’ll be excited to get the TOP 1 thing done in the first half of the day.
• Wake up at 8am [or earlier].
  Don’t pick your f*cking phone. You should not be able to — it’s should be in a different room anyway… Remember the point above?
• Make your bed. Think of it as your “first accomplishment”, your “first success” of the day. Seriously man. It’s small — but it’s an accomplishment. Be grateful for it. Be proud of yourself that you are off to a great start of the day, you are sticking to the discipline and in charge of your life.
• Push-ups. Sit-ups. Planks. Crunches. 10–30 of each. Run. If no have space — run in place. Get your heart pumping.
• Raise your hands high up. You are a winner. Look in the mirror. Smile. Say that to yourself.
• Does that sound pretentious to you? Take “fake it till you make it” approach? Well, f*ck you — you’d rather drown in your depression and rot in life apathy, than take action, do something bold and stand up for yourself. You choose.
• Break the sweat. Done? Good. I’m proud of you!
• Now shower. Ice. Cold. Shower. 💪❄️🚿
• While you are drying — 10–20 minutes of meditation. It works.
• Did I tell you not to touch your phone? Good. Don’t f*cking touch it yet. Because you decide when you look at it. Or you can let your bad habits and addictions decide…
• Done meditating? Okay. Check your paper planner. Think of that main thing you need to accomplish today. Start working on it in your head.
• Prepare a healthy breakfast. Proteins. Some carbs. Fiber: 2–3 eggs. Spinach. Beans. Sausage / bacon / chicken. Veggies. Vitamins. Supplements.
• Okay. While eating, perhaps you can check your email, phone, notifications.
• Start getting work done. …

Okay. This isn’t a productivity article, so I won’t go at length about how to be focused and get things done. This is a kick-in-the-ass article to get you out of the self-doubt, anxiety and apathy mode, into the move-that-mountain mode. F*cking get angry at yourself and get shit done. You are a man. 👊Mood swings are for p 💅ssies. Beyoncé got more testosterone than you do.

👋 People

• Get toxic people the f*ck out of your life. Don’t be rude. Be nice. Acknowledge that that’s not something you need around you.
  Remember — you are the average of five people that you spend the most time with. It’s scary how real this is. Make a deliberate effort to be surrounded by the best. Don’t be shy about this.
• If you need help — reach out. Contact people. Make the first move. Don’t wait for people to notice you or ask you “how are you feeling?”. Make the first step yourself.
• Stop thinking what other people will think of you. No one cares about you. Get sh*t done. Just do the right thing. Reach out. Punch above your weight class.
• Overthinking how embarrassing it will be if you’ll approach that CEO or VC, hot girl (handsome guy) or some-other-important-dude/girl in a wrong way?
• You messaged someone, it’s been 15 minutes and he/she is still not responding? Even though you know they’ve read your message/email? Don’t overthink. Nothing is wrong with you or your message. They are just busy. As all worthwhile people are. They will get back to you in a day or more. Train your patience. If they ended up not responding — too bad for them — they missed an opportunity you were providing.
• Invite people for lunch.
• Go to smart events. Lift your ass and go. You’ll meet new interesting people and reconnect with existing connections.
• Ask a question to the panelists / presenters in public. I struggled a lot with it and made a conscious effort in 2018 to improve. Ended up publicly asking people like Gary Vaynerchuk, Dan Larimer. Does not matter what you think about these names, does not matter how smart or stupid my questions were. It was a huge-ass audiences. It was scary. I did it. Check 💪Over-fucking-come your fears.
• Chat up a random person. A cute girl (or a handsome guy). Especially if they are out of your league. It takes guts. Your heart will be beating and palms sweating when you are about to do that. Perhaps even more than when you are asking an important person in public. Because now it’s personal, not just professional. You fear rejection. It’s normal. You should embrace it. You can’t control how the person reacts. You can control how you react. And this is why you are still reading this. Because you want to win. Let’s get it!
• Set monthly goal-setting ☎️ calls with one or two peers you trust and respect professionally. Someone you can be open and vulnerable with. I only recently started doing this, and it’s great! Especially if you are a remote worker / nomadic entrepreneur. Example: I’ve got a monthly call set up with Sebastien Couture — he’s one of the hosts at Epicenter podcast. We are both in crypto space, both independently run projects and having a monthly call just keeps us both in check. Yesterday, before the call we both felt down, and tired of the crypto winter — after the call we are both energized, full of new ideas and ready to move mountains! 🌋

🗄️ Things

• Get shit you don’t need out of your eye-sight. Have minimal things that that you actually use and make your life easier.
  Never expect things to make you happier. Focus on finding things that will make your life easier and simpler.
  Example: When buying a new item, I have a rule, that it, ideally, should replace 2 other items that I already have. That makes my life easier, lighter and simpler.
• Don’t buy sh💩t you don’t need on daily basis.
• Consider paying more for a good, important thing, than a cheap low-budget copy. E.g. when buying headphones buy a fucking Bose QC35ii — market leader. They are more expensive, but they also save you time & money in long run (within months even) — worldwide free warranty that actually works with no questions asked + great quality + you’ll be able to sell them on a secondary market if you’ll decide to get rid of them. You won’t be able to do that with any other product but with the market leader. Same goes for GoPro, Apple/Samsung phones, video/audio recording gear (Rode microphones, etc).
• Have fucking order in your apartment. At least visual. So that when you wake up, come in and out of apartment, you see order and success.

😅 Expectations

• Tone your expectations the fuck down
• Expect nothing from no-one
• Still do your best
• Still treat people nicely
• Let me elaborate: there is a fine difference between inputs [what you can control] and outputs [what you can’t exactly control]. Separate your actions, from the fruit of your actions. In other words: you should have high expectations for your actions, your process, what you do, your effort — but low or no expectations from the output. Because you can’t control the output, only the input. Do everything you can for the right thing to happen, but expect it not to. Don’t be upset that it did not happen. In fact, you can’t be upset if you had no expectation to win. Be grateful and happy that you did your best, that you did what’s right.
• I have fucking zero expectations from this article. Even worse, I expect to be embarrassed right after publishing it, that everyone will be pointing fingers at me… I’m writing and publishing it anyway because I feel that’s what I should do.

🎯 Focus

Okay. After you’ve done your kick-ass morning routine, ate, warmed up… you:

• Sit down
• Put on headphones with some techno
• Open your work materials (laptop, IDE, notepad, marketing plan, etc…)
• And fucking focus on it
• Be aggressive, concentrated, move to your goals — and don’t let yourself get distracted and disturbed.
• Mom, dad, girlfriends, notifications, emails, “nice” strangers — all can f*ck off for a few hours. You are getting things done. You are in a zone. In your flow. They have time — you don’t. They have time because they are poor and unsuccessful and are not occupied by anything that matters. While you slay! 💪
• Also, while you are on your task — control yourself. Don’t check stats on that tweet you just posted. Resist the urge to share your sudden idea that came up during your bigger task. 1000% focus on your current big rock you are moving. Pebbles are for distracted losers. You are moving mountains here. It’s better to move 1 mountain than a 1000 pebbles. And yes, you can move a mountain. Trust your gut.
• Set fucking time constraints for that thing you need to do.
• Focus on the positive. Ignore the negative. Focus on your strengths, what you have, what you can, what you’ve accomplish. Don’t focus on you weaknesses (find a way to go around them), don’t focus on what you don’t have, what you can’t. Just don’t.
• 🔥”Do X in Y <hours/days/weeks/months>” challenge — is what made my 2018. These things work time and time again. They both keep you accountable and make people want to follow you.
  Example:
  “12 startups in 12 months” by levels.io
  “10 Startups in 24 Hours” by Ben Tossell
  “24 hour startup while streaming on Twitch” by Pat Walls
  The list goes on:

👌 Small things

• Manage your phone or it will manage you. Turn off most notifications. Including messengers. Yes! Especially email. Unsubscribe from newsletters. Do you really get value from them? Or do they just make you feel smart?
  Turn flight mode “on” on your phone. Do not disturb mode all the time.

• The beauty of flight mode over completely turning off, or other full silent modes, is that you would not miss your alarm clock,
• When in public — silence all sounds notifications. Unless you want to become public enemy. Literally.

This is what got me thought 2018. Let’s see if this approach will still work in 2019!

💬 Would these tips work for you? What would you add? 👉 Tweet me

🙌 Big thanks to Roman Zolotarev, Sébastien Couture, Andrey Azimov and Pavel Bushuyeu for reviewing this post, challenging my thoughts and squashing nasty grammar mistakes. You guys rock 💪