Welcome to The Growth Booth. This is episode number 77 where in this show today, we're talking about life lessons at 40. I've just entered my fifth decade, I've just turned 40 years old, and I've spent some time reflecting a little bit, thinking about some of my best moments, some of my biggest wins, some of my toughest losses, some unexpected outcomes. I'd like to share these with you over the next couple of episodes. 

This is episode number 77, and as always, you can find show notes, links to other resources and all that good stuff over at TheGrowthBooth.com. Just head to episode number 77. In this episode, I'm going to go through 20 different tips, life hacks, thoughts that I've had as I've been reflecting here. And then in episode number 79, which will be released in a couple of weeks’ time, I'll go through the second half of the tips and ideas that I've come up with. 

Just before we begin here, I know that there are a lot of listeners of this show who have got far more life experience than me. In fact, recently I received an email from a woman in her 80s who is a regular listener to the show. So I'm not here to tell you that I've got all the answers or all the life experience. I just want to share some experiences that I've had, lessons that I've learned in the hope that you can add them into your own toolbox of life hacks. So with that said, let's dive in.

In no particular order, the first tip or lesson that I've got for you is to focus on one thing at a time. If you really think about it, is there a simpler way to get more meaningful work done than by simply focusing in on one thing at a time and not multitasking? I know that for me personally, I've always got my best work done when I am focused on just one thing at a time. In fact, there's a book which is one of my favorites, called The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. I think his name is Jay Papasan. But Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, the one book, it's one of my favorites.

The book argues against the notion of multitasking tasking and instead encourages people to focus their energy and attention towards the most important work. It really promotes this idea that success isn't about doing more, but actually rather about doing less. By narrowing your focus to one thing at a time, you can get better outcomes. The One Thing is something that you can apply to your personal life, to your work life, to any area of life where you're striving to achieve your best outcome possible. Like I said, I've certainly found this to be the case in my own life.

The second tip here is that understand that it's never too late to start something new. So my most recent personal example of this is studying Italian, which I started just over a month ago, and I'm loving it. In fact, if you check out episode number 72 of The Growth Booth, where I talk about explosive growth hacks, you'll find out more about my rapid Italian learning project. 

From a business standpoint, I hear about people well into their 60s, 70s, 80s who are making breakthroughs. Maybe it's earning their first dollar online, setting up an ecommerce store or a niche website for the first time ever. We don't have to look far for a lot of different examples of people who have made massive breakthroughs in the later stages or the later decades of their life. 

One of the most famous ones is Colonel Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken. At the age of 62, he was cashing in Social Security checks. He was not earning a lot of money, he was living on Social Security. He began visiting restaurants across the United States, cooking batches of chicken for owners of the restaurants and their employees. If they liked it, then he entered into a handshake agreement on the spot, negotiating franchise rights. That was the beginning of KFC, one of the world's most popular fast food chains. Colonel Sanders’ story is a really good example, I think, of that. It's never too late to start doing something new. 

Another lesson that I've thought of as I've been reflecting here, is that it's important, in my opinion, to ask for help when you need help. I think we all need help sometimes, and asking for help from someone who has been through whatever it is that we're going through, it could be something related to business, it could be something related to fitness, could be something related to parenting, or whatever it is, it's one of the most effective ways to succeed. It's one of the most surefire ways to shortcut or sort of hack your way towards getting better results faster.

The fourth tip that I've got here is to prioritize self-care and well-being. It's easy to fall into this trap of treating yourself like a machine at least from a work or online business perspective. I've been through this where there have been periods of my online business where I've sort of been grinding my way to income through just brute force, but that's hard to sustain and normally results in a collapse of some kind or a breakdown or burnout. Warren Buffett's got a quote here which I'll just read out, which has always stuck with me, and he said that “Imagine that you had a car and that was the only car you'd have in your entire lifetime. Of course you'd care for it well, changing the oil more frequently than necessary, driving carefully and so on. Now, consider that you only have one mind and body. Prepare them for life, care for them. You can enhance your mind over time. A person's main asset is themselves. So preserve and enhance yourself.” 

I think this really sums up the importance of investing time, effort, and resources into maintaining and improving our physical health, but also our mental capabilities as well. It highlights this principle of self-care and lifelong learning and reminds us that we should take care of our health and well-being as these are key assets that we truly own in our lives. If we don't have these two things right, then we're never going to be able to perform at our potential.

The fifth tip I've got for you here is to learn to say no without feeling guilty. This is something that comes more easily to some people than others. I can tell you that after well over a decade of working on this myself, it's still something that I keep working on because opportunities are endless. As an entrepreneur, I think we want to say yes to as much as we can. As someone who enjoys helping other people, I like to say yes when people ask me for things. But the more you can say no to, the more you're going to be able to focus. 

I've just given you a quote from Warren Buffett, but Charlie Munger, his business partner, said, “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that the really successful people say no to almost everything,” and I think there's a lot of truth in that. They've got a single minded focus. 

The 6th lesson that I've got for you here today is valuing experiences over material possessions. When I look back at my first four decades, it's easy for me to spot what my most cherished memories and moments are. None of them are items or physical things. They are all experiences and relationships. I do enjoy some nice things. I like traveling business class. I like the fact that I've got a holiday home and a beautiful spot in New Zealand. But the things that have made me happiest and feel most fulfilled in life are the small things. It might be skipping stones in the river with my kids, or dancing on the street with thousands of other happy people after Argentina won the football World Cup, or going to a concert with my wife, or swimming in the ocean, or whatever it might be. 

These are experiences that have left me feeling fulfilled and other things that are really burned into my memory as cherished memories. I can't say the same for when I've purchased the latest pair of virtual reality goggles as an example or other material items. People with much, much more life experience than me will tell you that this idea truly crystallizes when you get to the later stages of your life. So again, I think experiences trump possessions every single time. 

Embrace learning and failure as opportunities. So I can't tell you the number of times that I've failed. I can tell you though, that I have failed far more times than what I've succeeded. And failing often feels like a sucker punch. But at the moment when you are most down feeling most dejected, that's when you really need to get back up and see what you can learn from the failure. Turn that failure into a learning opportunity and make it part of the journey. 

And an example that comes to mind here related to my own online business was I remember way back in 2007, 2008, my Google AdWords account was shut down. This was at a time when I had battled to start building an online income, and I had finally got it. My ads that I was running paid traffic were being seen by hundreds of thousands of people. I woke up one morning and I hadn't made any commissions, and I said, “What's going on here? Why haven't I made any commissions?” And it was because my advertising had been turned off. So I went and had a look at it, and I saw this horrible message saying that Google had shut down my account. 

To this day, I don't know why that happened. I don't know what I did wrong. It was quite possibly just an algorithm decision to shut my account down. It was soul destroying at the time, but what I did out of necessity was I changed the way that I started to get traffic. So I'd already become somewhat of an expert in paid traffic, at least from Google. I used this as an opportunity through necessity to start becoming an expert in other areas of traffic. I dived into search engine optimization traffic and other types of traffic as well. 

And when I look back now, I realized that getting my account shut down way back in 2007, 2008 was just a blip on the radar, because today I've got multiple Google accounts, and I can spend thousands of dollars a day, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars every single day on advertising. But back in 2007-2008, that was a big deal for me. So I think when you look at things through a longer term lens as well, it allows you to have a bit more perspective, and embracing failure as a learning opportunity is an approach that's that's never let me down. 

The 8th idea or thought that I've got for you here today is to make time for your hobbies and interests. I can remember my grandma saying to me when I was growing up, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” I think there's a lot of truth to this. If you don't have hobbies or interests, you're missing out. There have been times in my life when my focus has been almost exclusively on my work, and they've been the moments when my life has been the most one-dimensional and unbalanced. 

Sometimes I think you need to actively look for something that interests you. It's not until you actually start doing something that the things that you're doing start becoming interesting. So for me right now, I'm interested in learning Italian. For the past ten to 15 years, I've been doing a lot of swimming as a pastime. Travel adventures with my family is something I enjoy. I've been following the Formula One races a lot over the past couple of years, even getting to watch some of them live. Reading a lot of books, just to name a few.  I also put this podcast in the hobby basket as well because although it's related to my business, I enjoy it. It's an outlet that is quite different from a lot of the other areas in my business. 

I think when you have got or when you make time for hobbies and interests, your business and your relationships automatically benefit from that. So it's not like, “Oh yeah, I'm going to spend some time on my hobbies at the expense of my business,” it's quite the opposite. You spend some time doing something that allows you to recharge the batteries, to get some rest from maybe focusing on the business, and then it actually helps build the big business up. These are things that all help rise, all the activities sort of simultaneously there. 

Number 9 I've got here is to be intentional about who you spend your time with. Toxic relationships are called toxic for a reason. I found that people are either going to charge you up or drain your batteries. They'll either bring out the best in you or they will bring out mediocrity in you. There's not much middle ground here. People are either battery chargers or battery drainers. They're bringing out the best in you or they're bringing out mediocrity in you. 

It's easier to be happy and easier to be successful when you're surrounded by people who bring out the best in you in all areas of your life. And there's another saying, I can't remember who said it, but “You become the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” And I think there's actually a lot of truth in that as well. So think about who do you spend your time with on a business standpoint, on a personal life standpoint, and are these people people that are truly bringing out the best in you? And if not, then maybe it's time to start spending some less time with them and finding people who really do bring out the best in you. 

Cultivate a Growth Mindset and Lifelong Learning. I remember a professor at university used to say to me and my classmate, but he would say to me all the time, “Aidan, even the best can get better.” He would say that every single day. So much so that it became a bit of a joke actually. But he was right. We've seen this over and over again through practice. I'm sure you've seen it as well. You think you get to a point where something's working really well, but you can still get better. 

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, says “Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effect of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over months and years can be enormous,” and this is also known as marginal gains. James Clear also said that if you improve by just 1% each day over the course of a year, that would be more than 37 times doubling on itself. So 37 times better, which is massive. This is all down to that compounding nature of improvement, and it's right at the heart of a growth mindset in my opinion. Lesson number ten there was to cultivate a growth mindset and lifelong learning. 

Lesson number eleven is to let go of the past and focus on the future. You can't do anything to change the past, but you can change the future by focusing on what you're doing today. Now this isn't rocket science, it's just common sense. Ditch the baggage. Ditch what you have or haven't achieved in the past, because every day you start with a clean slate and every day you've got an opportunity to choose what you're going to do and there will be flow on effects and you can use this to your advantage. 

Number twelve I've got here is to maintain a balanced diet and regularly exercise. Another nugget of wisdom from my grandma was an apple a day keeps the doctor away and the underlining meaning here speaks to the value of consistent small actions, like eating healthily and exercising for maintaining good health and keeping illness at bay. As a side benefit of exercising the body, I find that I get my best ideas and indeed my best clarity of my ideas while I'm working out. So in my experience, exercise does far more than just keep you physically fit. It does far, far more than that, and I think at least for me it's been a really important part of my most successful projects have happened when I've had that balance, especially of diet and exercise. 

Number 13 I've got is to not undervalue the importance of sleep. So don't undervalue the importance of sleep. There's a book which is one of the best ones I've written in the past few years called Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. It's a book that really changed my understanding of the importance of sleep and a must-read book in my opinion. In the book you'll learn why sleep is really crucial for good health, how it impacts memory and learning, how it can help can decrease the risk of disease or a lack of sleep will increase the risk of disease, how regular sleep and sleeping on a regular schedule actually improves your quality of life, emotional processing, why sleeping pills don't mimic real sleep. Sleep positively impacts human development, enhances creativity and so much more. 

Now this might be one of those things where you're like, “Oh yeah, of course you need to have a good sleep and stuff,” but I think if you're someone that easily falls into the trap of not sleeping enough then if you read that book it'll give you some timely reminders. So that was called Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. 

The 14th idea that I've got for you here is to embrace vulnerability as a strength and not a weakness. And this means really acknowledging your emotions and accepting that you're human and not infallible. And vulnerability is often seen as a sign of weakness, but in reality, it takes courage to show your true self and all your strengths and your flaws that go with them. 

For example, traditional leadership often encourages leaders to maintain that image of invulnerability or strength, but admitting that you don't know something, admitting that you've done something wrong, it can actually help foster a relationship of trust, openness, and mutual respect with your teammates, your loved ones, and so on and so forth. I think embracing vulnerability is so much more about strength than it is about weakness and it's something that I've learned to embrace in my life.

Number 15 I've got here is to spend time outdoors and recharge and find inspiration by being outdoors. In an ideal world for me, this would mean a walk along the beach, it would mean a walk through the mountains, through the bush in the nature. But because I live amongst the hustle and bustle of Buenos Aires, I can't really do that. I manage to get my recharge by walking down beautiful avenues, by walking through the park, sometimes by listening to music and sometimes just by absorbing life and everything that's going on around me. Similar to when I'm doing physical exercise I get some of my best clarity and my best ideas when I take time to go for a walk and be outside in general. 

Number 16 I've got here is to celebrate the small wins as well as the big victories. There are a number of reasons that you might want to do this. For one, motivation. So small wins will help you maintain motivation and it can often be challenging to stay motivated, especially when you're working towards a big goal that can sometimes feel unachievable. It's a big long term goal, but if you break that down to smaller targets and this ties in quite nicely by the way with the 12-week year that I've spoken about before project planning, then you can knock off smaller goals and you can celebrate them. 

I think it's also good for tracking your progress. Small wins show that you're on the right path and you're moving forward. It's great for building confidence as well and recognizing that small victories are going to help build up your confidence and give you that self confidence to believe that you can achieve what you're ultimately trying to achieve. Positive psychology can come out of celebrating small wins, so can momentum. Also, small victories are a little bit like stepping stones that lead to larger achievements. I think recognizing them and celebrating them is really important and you can do this in different ways, whatever it means to you to celebrate something. It's going to be different for everyone, but at least recognizing them and using them as a way to generate that good momentum is a good tip there. 

Number 17 I've got is to practice mindfulness and stay present at the moment. Prior to the pandemic kicking off, I really got into using Headspace, which is an iPhone app or a smartphone app for meditation and mindfulness. Nowadays, I actually prefer one called Waking Up by Sam Harris. The idea is similar. Sam Harris provides quite a pragmatic approach to mindfulness and his app is packed with useful and perspective building discussions as well as guided meditations as well. I find that this helps raise my level of focus and awareness and keeps me grounded with a perspective of life in general. I think practicing mindfulness and staying present in the moment is really important. 

Number 18 is to regularly express gratitude for what you've had. Something that I practice every single day when I wake up, and this is just a habit for me at this point, is to think of three things that I'm grateful for, three wins from yesterday, and three things that I'm looking forward to achieving or doing today. This simple routine takes about 60 seconds. I do it when I'm lying in bed, before I've even got out of bed. 

The process of consciously thinking about what you're grateful for goes a long way to keeping your feet on the ground and living a positive life. The first part of that little routine that I go through is to think of three things that I'm grateful for, and these could be the most trivial things, like I'm grateful that I didn't get woken up at 02:00 AM in the morning by one of my kids, or I'm grateful that my family is healthy, or I'm grateful that I've got an amazing team that I work with on a daily basis. It could be anything. It could be anything. It doesn't have to be a major thing and you could repeat the same thing regularly. It's just to give you perspective and to help you kickstart the day in the right frame of mind. 

Number 19 I've got here is to prioritize your mental health as much as you prioritize your physical health. Holistic well-being impacts productivity and performance and quality life and so much more. A lot of the ideas that we've spoken about here on this show today already will help maintain balance in your life and will go some way to maintaining good mental health. The likes of mindfulness, exercise, diet, sleep, social connections, surrounding yourself with positive people and so on, these are all things that will help give you that balance and keep your mental health on the even keel. 

Now, number 20 that I've got here for you and this is the last one that we'll do today and we'll pick up with number 21 in episode number 79, but number 20 that I've got here is to spend quality time with loved ones and nurture these relationships. For me, this is what it's all about. My business is not the meaning for my life, it's just one piece of the jigsaw puzzle. It's the relationships that really matter to me in my mind. The way to develop these and get the most out of them is to invest time in them, to invest energy in them. Just like anything, you reap the rewards of the things that you focus on. If relationships are at the core of the things that are important to you, then spend time on them.

So that's a wrap for episode number 77. You can head over to TheGrowthBooth.com and navigate to number 77 to get show notes, links to some of the different things, the different books, and different ideas that I've mentioned, transcript and much, much more. Make sure you tune in to The Growth Booth number 79 to get the second half of my life lessons at 40.

Now, next week in the next episode of The Growth Booth number 78, we're going to be looking at Decoding Success, and I'm going to be doing an interview with someone who I think you're going to find incredibly motivating and inspiring. Make sure you tune back in to get episode number 78 as well. 

And with that said, I'm going to wrap this up. Thanks for listening today. Wish you all the best with whatever you're working on, and I'll see you in the next episode of “The Growth Booth”.