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Your Life Systems is a podcast about building practical systems for everyday life.
Join Wes as he shares simple ideas, practical frameworks, and real-world experience to help you make consistent progress in the areas of life that matter most.
Most people don't need more information. They need better implementation.
Instead of relying on motivation, you'll learn how to build systems that make success easier, more consistent, and more sustainable.
Build a Life That Gets Easier to Live Every Year
Hi, I'm Wes. Welcome to Build a Life That Gets Easier to Live Every Year. Please subscribe to this channel so you don't miss any new episodes.
The idea today that I jotted down first was Design for Decades.
Again, the title is Build a Life That Gets Easier to Live Every Year.
Now, do you want your life to be easier a year from now than it is now? I don't know anyone that wouldn't say yes.
Everyone has different things going on in their lives. Some people's lives are easier than others, but the fact is the reason I started creating systems and using them in my life, the reason I've done many different business things, the reason I do consulting, the reason I work with people, the reason I create businesses for myself, is because I want things to be easier in the future.
And that's what I meant when I said design for decades.
Design everything about your life for decades. Design things so it gets easier in the future, not more difficult.
So here's your question for today to remember as we're going through this.
What could you build now that will make your life work better in five years or ten years?
It sounds simple.
What's one thing you could do today?
What could you design or build or create, or a simple system you could put in place, that you know would make your life or whatever better in five years or ten years' time?
Now, five years, ten years is a long time.
What could you put in place today? And it doesn't have to be complicated.
You can start with one simple thing that's going to make your life better.
And I'm going to give you a very simple example from my life.
And this won't be for everyone, because not everyone has the same desires, feelings, goals, whatever as I do.
But one thing that I did that greatly simplified my life was several years ago, I decided on what I was going to eat for breakfast every day.
Now, a lot of people would find this extremely boring.
I eat exactly the same thing for breakfast every day and have for years now.
It's a very simple, very simplified system, but I never have to get up and start looking around for what I'm going to eat for breakfast.
I never have to worry about making that decision.
I don't have to waste any energy at all.
I know what I'm going to eat for breakfast every day.
When I go to the store, I make sure I get the stuff, the same thing for every day for breakfast.
Again, some people would find that very dull, but to me it simplified my life.
Now, that's how simple this could be.
I'm not telling you that this is the thing you should do, even though for some of you this would probably help.
If you simply take away one decision that you make every day, it simplifies your life from then on.
I don't have to worry about what I'm going to eat for breakfast in five years, or ten years, or tomorrow.
I know exactly what I'm going to eat for breakfast, and to me that's empowering.
That frees up my mental capacity for more important things.
I don't have to worry about it. I don't have to think about it.
I get up, I have the same thing for breakfast every day, then I go on to the next thing.
So that's how simple this can be.
What's one thing that you can do in your life, put in place in your life right now, today, that's going to improve your life a year from now, and continue to improve it five years from now, ten years from now?
Let's look at this from an entrepreneurial or a business standpoint.
Most people could figure out how to make ten dollars.
Now, a lot of people, the first thing they think about is, yeah, I could work for however much time it takes me to make ten dollars.
If you make ten dollars an hour, you have to work to get ten dollars.
If you make twenty dollars an hour, you have to work a half hour to make ten dollars.
But what I'm talking about is figuring out a way to buy and sell something to make ten dollars, or create something and sell it to make ten dollars.
So let's say you could figure out one thing that you could create and sell for ten dollars, or buy for ten dollars and sell for twenty dollars, so you make ten dollars profit.
One thing.
Now, if you did that once a month, it would mean you made an extra ten dollars a month.
That doesn't seem like much, right?
It's not much in today's monetary system.
An extra ten dollars a month is not much.
But if you did that, and it was repeatable, and you made an extra ten dollars a month, every month, for the rest of your life, that would be a small improvement, right?
What if you could do the same thing, but instead of once a month, you could do it once a week?
Then there's 4.3 weeks in a month.
You would make an extra forty-three dollars a month, every month, for the rest of your life.
Still not a tremendous amount of money.
Forty-three dollars is better than nothing, right?
Depending on what you drive, it probably won't fill up your gas tank.
But it would help, depending on where you go.
You could go out to eat, maybe go to see the movies for forty-three dollars a month.
This gets even better, though.
What if you could make an extra ten dollars every day?
Now, we're talking roughly an extra three hundred dollars a month.
And if you could put that into place, wouldn't that make your life better a year from now? Five years from now? Ten years from now?
That's the type of thing I'm talking about.
Build a life that gets easier to live every year.
It can be monetary, business-like.
It can be life, like my example, if I eat the exact same thing every day for breakfast.
That made my life better.
It made my life simpler, which makes it better.
Your challenge today is put one simple thing in place that's going to make your life better a year from now than it is today.
It can be anything you choose.
You get to choose what better is for you.
Not because I say something's better.
You choose.
It made my life better, deciding what I was going to eat for breakfast every day, without worrying about it ever again.
That might work for you, but yours could be something entirely different.
Maybe yours is, you can walk outside when you get up and take a deep breath of fresh air.
Maybe that makes you feel better.
Maybe it's healthy in the long run.
The point is, it can be whatever you want.
Okay, long-term improvements come from systems that reduce repeated problems and protect what matters.
Long-term improvement, that's what we're looking for here.
You don't have to do a lot up front, as long as it improves a little, and then the next step improves it more.
Go back to, if you can figure out how to make an extra $10 once a month.
That's an improvement, very small, doesn't seem like much.
But as we discussed, if you can keep stacking that, it doesn't even have to be the same thing.
But if you can figure out one way to make an extra $10 every day instead of every month, then you start looking at more serious money.
And it doesn't have to happen immediately. It can happen over time.
Invest in your health, relationships, skills, finances, and routines that compound over years.
Again, you can do this in all kinds of different areas of your life.
What's one thing you can do today that's going to be a little bit healthier, that it's going to make you more healthy in a year if you keep doing it?
What's one thing in a relationship you can do today that, if you keep doing it, is going to make your relationships better in a year?
Skills.
What's one little skill that you can improve today that's going to make your life easier in a year, or five years, or ten years?
Finances, routines, all these things can compound.
So don't focus on too big.
Focus on finding a small step that you can repeat easily that's going to make life better for you in the future.
Solve recurring problems in ways your future self can reuse.
So every time you solve a problem, a problem that keeps coming up, try to think of a way to not just solve it once.
Try to design a way that solves it forever, or a system that will solve it every time it comes up, so you don't waste time figuring out how to solve it.
Avoid choices that improve today by quietly making tomorrow harder.
And we all do this.
We all choose things today because we want it, or it looks good today, without thinking about the long-term consequences.
What I've been talking about is the opposite of that.
We're supposed to put a little work in today that's going to have long-term improvements, instead of getting something today that's going to have long-term costs.
Review what has improved over the last year and what keeps creating the same friction.
Do more of the things that have led to the improvement, and eliminate as many of the things that have created friction over and over.
Identify the friction, design things to reduce or eliminate the friction, and also identify the things that are going well, that are working well.
Figure out what you've done to support those things, and put more of those things in place.
Think in decades while still choosing the next small action today.
Again, when you think of what you can accomplish in five years, or ten years, or twenty years, you can accomplish a lot.
And it's good to have those kinds of goals.
Where do I want to be in five years? Where do I want to be in ten years?
But you also need to realize that a lot of small things you can put in place today can lead to these bigger things.
That's why I talk about the small steps.
Find the smallest step that's going to bring you closer.
That's what we're talking about.
And that's really how this works.
If you want to build a life, or create a life that gets easier to live every year, you don't find a lot of big things.
You find a lot of little things, and you start stacking the little things to create momentum, create a better life, better decisions, better outcomes.
And the more little things you find and stack up, the better each year gets as you move along.
This is Wes.
Please subscribe. This is Your Life Systems. Thanks for being with me.