The Seinfeld Secret

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Jerry Seinfeld was one of the greatest comedians of all time and I want to share a story with you today that relates to the secret of how he became so successful. There was a reporter for the New York Times who happened to be an aspiring comedian and one night, he actually was on the undercard, for Jerry Seinfeld at a comedy club in New York. So backstage, he got to see Jerry, and he went up to Jerry and he asked Jerry, he said you know, if you are an aspiring comedian like me, would you have any great advice for somebody like me, to help me succeed? Jerry said to him, he said, Well, actually, I do.

He goes, how serious are you about this? He goes, Well, I'm very serious. I want to be a comedian, like you. He said, Okay, well, so let me give you this piece of advice. He said, I want you to go down to the office supply store and I want you to get one of those big wall calendars, the kind of calendar that has the entire year in one view, that you can stick to the wall. Here's I want you to go get one of those giant calendars, and I want you to get a red sharpie and what I want you to do is I want you to take that home and I want you to put it on the wall where you can see it someplace prominently in your in your apartment. Then what I want you to do is I want you to make a commitment that you'll get up at 5am every morning, every day of the year and you'll sit down right away, and you'll start writing jokes.

So this is what I did. I got up at 5am and I spent two hours every morning, before I went to my regular job before I did anything else writing jokes. Because if you'll do that, I promise you, you'll make it. So what you do is, you sit get up at 5am, you write jokes for two hours and for every day that you write jokes for two hours, you walk over to the calendar and you put a big red X on the calendar and the next day you do it again and the next day you do it again. Here's pretty soon you're going to develop a chain of red X's. He goes, you all know what the secret is and Jerry leaned up to him and put his finger on his chest. He said don't break the chain. That's the secret. Don't break the chain. With that, Jerry walked away. Isn't that fascinating? Let's relate this back to what you want to do.

There's five key steps to achieve your major goal in life. The first is you’ve got to be clear about what you want. Most people are actually not clear about what they want. Most people actually can tell you a bunch of stuff they don't want, but when you actually press them on what they want, they can't actually tell you. You've got to get clear about what you want. In Jerry's case. Jerry wanted to be a great comedian, so his top priority was writing jokes to put in the fundamentals to be a great comedian.

Once we get clear about what we want, then what we do is before we go to bed, we write our intention for the following morning. We write it before we go to bed like, last thing you do before you turn the lights off, you write down what it is you're going to work on in the morning. So tomorrow morning, I'm going to write jokes or tomorrow morning, I'm going to study a trading system or I'm going to write a trading plan. Whatever it is, you state your intention.

Then you go to bed. What happens when you do this is the subconscious mind goes to work. You're telling your subconscious mind what you intend to do. So your subconscious mind is going to work while you're sleeping, so that when you wake up in the morning you're going to have all these new ideas. Now when we get up in the morning, this takes us to number four.

Number four, when you rise in the morning, we want to get to the desk or wherever it is that you do your work as quickly as possible. I want you to think about when you wake up in the morning, you're kind of groggy, that's actually an asset that you're groggy because your brainwaves are low, you're down and alpha and theta. You have low brainwaves, so there's no interference. So if you get right to your desk as quickly as possible, then all these things that your subconscious mind was working on while you're sleeping will then start to pour out of your brain into the paper or wherever it is you're working. This is key.

The more time you spend away, the more distracted you're going to become, the more likely you are to lose what you learned at night and the harder it will be to focus when you sit down. No social media, no checking emails, maybe go to the bathroom, that's it, get your ass into the chair and get to work. Now, once you do this, then you can go for anywhere from 30 to 120 minutes.

I'll share with you there's an app called Focus keeper that I love. Here you can see, it's in the App Store, see it counting down. This is the concept of a Pomodoro block, 25 minutes, you can make it whatever you want, but a Pomodoro block is set for 25 minutes of work, five minutes arrest. So you get in a chair, you turn on the Pomodoro block. and off you go. So I did a Trader Tip Tuesday, a few weeks ago where I talked about three part breathing and getting into a meditative state. So when you sit down in a chair, do three part breathing, turn on the Pomodoro block, run the 25 minutes and go to work and you have a five minute rest, it's a 30 minute block. If you just do the 30 minute block, just the 30 minutes, everything will change for you. If you can do more, if you can do 60 minutes, or up to 120 minutes, two hours, a Pomodoro block is considered to be four Pomodoro sessions. 30 minutes each. Do not go longer than two hours, two hours is the max you should work on this. Somewhere between 30 minutes and 20 minutes you'll get major work done and what would that give you? Well, as you go into your day, you will have communicated to the subconscious mind that this is actually the top priority.

Becoming a comedian, becoming a trader, a great investor, whatever it is, you've communicated to your subconscious mind that it is the top priority and second, by starting your day with this, you're gonna get massive momentum. Because there's no procrastination, there's no trying to fit time in later. No, you're doing it right now, you get out of bed when there's no interruptions. If you're getting up and there's interruptions, you're getting up too late. I pretty much get up at 5am every day. Go to bed at 11, get up at five, seven days a week, little bit here, they're on vacation, or maybe on a Sunday, they'll slip a little bit of sleep till 5: 30 or six. But most days, probably in a given month, probably 28 out of 30 days, I'm up at 5am. This gives me massive momentum because the house is quiet and I can focus.

What I want you to understand is that your subconscious mind is an asset, it is a weapon for you to get what you want. The path of least resistance is to engage the subconscious and superconscious mind which is God and let your subconscious mind and let God work on these problems for you. When you start your day, they're now in your neurology for the rest of the day. When you're out working or you're with your family, or you're working out or whatever it is you're doing, your subconscious mind is working on this problem and it will create massive leverage for you. If you are serious, the question is how serious are you? If you're serious, and you follow this, you're going to see massive results, I promise you.

Think about this. By doing this, if you did one hour every day, that'd be 365 hours per year. That's over nine work weeks, over nine full work weeks just by doing one hour a day. In one hour a day you could write a best selling book. In one hour a day you could be in the best shape of your life in one hour a day. You could be a great trader or a great investor. Just in one hour a day before everyone else got up. That's all you got to do. This is what Trader Tip Tuesday is all about. It's about tips like this to teach you how to take your performance to an elite level. Here's the Seinfeld secret, I'll see you next Tuesday bye.