10 Life Formulas and Concepts To Use In Everyday Life

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts / Overcast / Spotify

Note: This is a guest post and podcast by one of my best friends (and six-figure copywriter) Neville Medhora.

Here are 10 Life Formulas.

These are often low effort to learn, but high-value when practiced.

If just one of these things sticks with you, it can have a massive effect on your life (or not, what do I know)!

Let’s get started:

• 1% Improvement Per Week
• Amish Hour
• How can I solve this hilariously?
• It’s always your fault
• Brutally checking your value in society. People are a product.
• 2nd Order and 3rd Order effects.
• Toughen up you little bitch
• Life is finite
• Happiness = Health + Wealth + Love
• Write it out

1% Improvement Per Week

I’ve gone through every iteration of trying to raise my income by like 100% in a week. Or 10X in a year. Maybe I just suck, but what I’ve found most helpful is aiming at getting 1% better every week.

The ironic thing is this thinking makes you much better than just 1% better.

Amish Hour: 24 -1

This was a thing I invented for myself several years ago. Basically I try my best to take an Amish Hour before bedtime.

This means before bed I will “shun” a TV, computer, phone, or tablet.

Now obviously my air conditioner is run by a computer, and my lights work on electricity, so I’m not going full Amish here…..but the goal is to have some concentrated and uninterrupted learning time.

I put my phone in a different room, sleep mode on, preferably upside down so I don’t catch a glimpse of it.

I set my alarm in advance.

This extra hour each night gets in some good reading time, or thinking time, or planning time, or drawing….whatever low tech activity you feel is good for you.

It helps you wind down for the day.

It helps you fall asleep faster.

You aren’t bombarded by things that can possible upset you.

More info: https://kopywritingkourse.com/amish-hour/

How can I solve this hilariously?

Sometimes I’ll have a task that’s kind of boring.

Well I would rather have something that’s funny and fun than boring anyday.

So how can solve this hilariously?

Simply asking this questions puts a mischievous grin on my face, and for some reason my brain starts lighting up with solutions!

Sometimes they are absurd of course, but often times it leads to a legitimately great solution.

There’s some dumb things like…..I have this gif of a guy typing on a keyword. While drawing this, his hands KIND OF looked like a dick.

I erased it immediately and tried to re-drawn typing hands, but was so tickled by the idea of the dick hands that I went ahead and re-drew the hands where they DEFINITELY looked like dicks.

For some reason this gave my 12-year-old mind great satisfaction.

I don’t know why, but it made the work fun.

I like to optimize my life for maximum comedy, so for me asking How can I “solve this hilariously is great.”

For a cheap bastard like Noah: How can I solve this cheapest.

For an efficiency geek: How can I solve this the most efficiently.

Whatever metric brings YOU joy, no matter how unreasonable, is great.

It’s always your fault.

Blame → You^blame

No matter what, just assume it’s your fault.

When I did my Homeless Experiment, the language I heard from every person was always the same:

• It’s the government’s fault.
• It’s my ex-wife’s fault.
• It’s the systems fault.

Ok, whatever. I’m sure external forces had something to do with it. But in the end you’re in charge of your future. And if you spend all your brain energy on that, you’ll just keep playing the victim and suffer.

So maybe a better way to put this is: It’s your responsibility.

If you take responsibility, you’re able to analyze the problem, figure out a course of action, and pull yourself out of it.

Brutally checking your value in society. People are a product.

Everyone has value.

Everyone is unique.

Everyone is special.

NOPE! We all have a value in society.

If you are a guy:

If you are Tall, that’s extra points.

If you have lots of resources, that’s extra points.

If you’re super talented in some way, that’s extra points.

You can compensate by pilling on heavy in other areas.

Brutally taking inventory of what you have to offer is a helpful way to improve yourself, IF you are trying to improve yourself.

Having self value is great and all, but it often swings too far in the other direction where people are trying to falsely feel good about themselves. Yes you can temporarily mask the fact that you might suck, but it always ends up getting exposed in the long run.

At least having some sense that you need to improve will help you well….improve!

2nd Order and 3rd Order effects.

Everything has a 2nd order and 3rd order effect.

It’s like saying we should give

It’s like a politician saying we should guarantee easy access to student loans.

This seems like a good idea.

But the 2nd order effect is that a ton of new students start taking out student loans.

3rd order effect is a gigantic amount of new students can afford larger sums of money.

4th order effect is colleges raise their prices.

5th order effect is students take out higher and higher loans because it’s easy.

6th order effect is within a decade college prices go up by well over 2,000%

….THEN a whole other solution is proposed to counteract this! Like let’s forgive all student loans!

This is almost a dumb solution, as it doesn’t SOLVE anything.

The actual solution is to not guarantee these gigantic loans. This will mean students have to pay out of pocket, which means they’ll have smaller budgets and will question the value of their degree, which means colleges will have to lower their prices and offer better programs to get students jobs.

Think about these 2nd and 3rd order effects before you view a problem in such a simplistic manner.

NOTES:

So if you seem homeless people on the street, many people assume “Ok let’s just put them in a house!”

The 2nd order Effect is now you basically encourage certain people to be homeless because you give them free housing, which increases the problem and demand.

The 3rd order effect is now the city government is in the business of taking care of hundreds of people for life.

The 4th order effect is that you create a reliance on the government.

The 5th order effect is that a whole generation of people are trained to expect handouts.

The 5th order effect is the city government is now under extreme and crushing financial pressure to take care of an ever growing problem.

So you do one thing, and all these other weird things pop up down the line.

Typically people think of a simple solution without thinking about the other effects it may have down the line.

Toughen up you bitch.

There’s A LOT of talk about mental health, and that’s great. But like any trend, it tends to swing too far at some point.

It’s starting to get common for people to take “mental health days” anytime they’re sad or don’t feel like doing something.

Well toughen up bitch.

Being sad sometimes is normal.

Being tired sometimes is normal.

Being anxious sometimes is normal.

These are not mental disorders. There are normal, everyday, human feelings.

If you just tell yourself whilst feeling sad, “this is a pretty normal human emotion. It’s usually temporary. It can almost always be solved by hanging out with loved ones, getting some exercise, or taking a walk outside.”  You will then be able to bear this emotion like a big boy or girl.

The thing in my mind that most sticks out:

Someone once asked Arnold Schwarzenegger whilst he was going through a nasty divorce, and a cheating scandal, and other political stuff how he was holding up. And he replied, “Well it’s better than being in the coal mines in Austria.”

Use your common sense to figure out if you’re falling into a trap of blaming mental health as the problem, or if you’re just using it as a convenient excuse.

And if you have a real problem, why even wait to seek professional help on it.

Life is finite. You will die.

You gonna die. :-/

Every bacteria.

Every cell.

Every animal.

Every human.

Every self replicating organism before you has died.

We know the average lifespan of a cat is in the 10 to 15 years range.

We know a dog will last between 10 and 15 years.

A horse will go for 25 to 30 years.

A human can often make it around 80 years.

So why not plan it out, kind of like a vacation.

If you’re going to Italy for 2 weeks, you at least know you want to see the Eiffel Tower, and take a water gondola ride. You don’t have to plan out every second of your vacation, in fact 80% of the time can be spent just aimlessly wandering and seeing what happens.

However you still always have that 2 week timeframe to base it off.

Happiness = Health + Wealth + Love.

We just talked about happiness being on an ever-moving scale, and that’s true. And here’s a very simple formula to see what sucks in your life, so you can fix it.

Happiness = Health + Wealth + Love.

If you’re sad or depressed, barring some medical conditional, it’s likely one of these three areas is out of whack:

Health.

Wealth.

Love.

Health is your overall health.

Wealth is your money situation.

Love is your family and friends and partners.

Are any of these three areas SEVERELY lagging in your life? Then it’s likely the area that’s dragging will drag the others down.

More Info: https://kopywritingkourse.com/health-wealth-love-test/

Write it out. Writing is greater than thinking.

Your brain sucks at remembering stuff. So write it out.

Not sure why you’re sad in the morning. Write it out.

If you just lay in bed wondering why you feel like crap, your brain will go in this endless circle.

Instead if you write it out.

Is my brain chemically altered?  Not enough sleep? Hungover.

By writing this out, and seeing the text in front of me, I can instantly see: “OHH…I went out with my friends last night and drank, and this morning I’m slightly hungover. Hangovers make you feel like crap. The primary reason I feel like crap is because I’m hungover. I know that for the next few hours I 100% will feel like crap, and that’s normal. if I drink a lot of water, eat some food, and try to workout, in a few hours I’ll feel better. But for now, I will continue to feel like crap and being hungover is the reason.

At least now you’ve identified the problem and know what to expect, and how to start solving it.

Those are all the Life Formulas I’ve got for you!