Focused - 81: Breaking the Twitch, with Anthony Ongaro

Episode Date: September 3, 2019

Anthony Ongaro joins us to talk about practical minimalism, designing an intentional life, and his multipotentialite resume which covers everything from musician to log roller.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. How's it going, David? I'm doing great, Mike. How are you today? Doing well. I'm very excited. We've got another special guest lined up for today. And welcome to the show, Anthony Angaro. Hey, thanks for having me. Garo. Hey, thanks for having me. Absolutely. So Anthony is someone that I met at the Craft and Commerce conference that I was at earlier this year. So David, I know you had mentioned that you want to try to come to that. You should, because then you get to hang out with me and Anthony in person. Yes, and I think that's in my future. Yeah, and Anthony has a whole bunch of stuff online. I was kind of amazed at how much you've got, Anthony, around this theme of Break the Twitch, which when I met you and you mentioned just the name, I'm like, that sounds like

it's very much in line with the Focus brand. We got to talk to this guy. But as I dug into this, there is a lot here. So maybe we should start with just what is the inspiration behind this? Can you explain what you mean when you say Break the Twitch? Well, thank you. Yes, I've been at this for about five years now. And so there's some stuff out there. And the Twitch essentially was what came to be after I realized what was going on with some online spending for myself. That was what originally started this whole thing, self. That was what originally started this whole thing, that Amazon one-click purchase button. And after a while of seeing a lot of packages coming to the house and seeing this repetitive kind of thing, I realized more that what I was doing was just like a physical twitch of just

clicking the mouse button rather than an intentional choice. It was this sort of discomfort driven action that I was taking that really was not lining up with the things that I always talked about wanting, the things that I knew that I valued, but it was this little dopamine hit along the way just each time. First when you click it, then when the package comes, even if it was just a small, cheap thing. And so that's where the name The Twitch came from. It's an unproductive, impulsive response to different forms of discomfort. And so when I started exploring The Twitch, I started seeing it everywhere in our technology, just in the way that we treat ourselves in our lives, health-wise, all over the place. There are these small things that we do that don't really align

with our overall intentions, our focused goals, and that's how it came to be. Yeah, I spent a good portion of yesterday binging some of Anthony's YouTube content. We're going to put a link in the show notes, which is excellent. And one of the things, Anthony, I really like about the stuff you've been bringing to this is, I mean, you talk on your channel a lot about minimalism. And every time I hear that word, I have a little bit of a knee jerk. It's like, oh, somebody's going to tell me how to organize my socks again. But you don't do that you actually get into you're looking at this in terms of your life and and really if it's right in with what we talk about unfocused about you know what are your core values and how you're putting together this this runs much deeper than

just you know being careful on amazon yes to me this has become a life philosophy. It's become a model. Break the Twitch, essentially, through minimalism, habits, and creativity have become a model for meaningful life change and intentional living. And it's worked really well for me. So that's why I'm really excited about sharing all this stuff. Awesome. So you, do you have any, like, other than the Amazon realization, which you talked about, is, can you kind of paint a picture? You mentioned this has worked really well for you. So kind of like, what was the, the before and after? What, what did it look like? Not just with Amazon, but once you started breaking the Twitch and embracing minimalism, habits, creativity, all that sort of stuff, what did that kind of get for you?

There's results across the board. I mean, like I said, I've been kind of writing about this and then making videos and doing other things for almost five years now. And in that time, a lot has changed. I was working full-time as the marketing director of a non-profit and I moved into self-employment because of the practices and minimalism that we got into and removing distractions and doing that kind of thing. A lot of things that come around when, it's just like a lot of things just simply having to do with the small day-to-day changes as well. I work out five or six days a week now consistently and have for the last year or two. And those are the types of things that have been made possible that I've tried in the

past, but either haven't stuck to or haven't done as well of a job of just simply executing, that breaking the Twitch or the continual practice, I'll say, of breaking the Twitch has allowed me to do. So travel more. I've been traveling probably once a month. At first, it was my challenge to stop buying stuff and travel once a month, just go anywhere, go to a thing. And I did that for the first year back in 2015.

And now that has expanded really just to less travel for pleasure, but travel for work and to speak at different events and do different things. And, you know, it's not really about collecting trips or collecting stuff or anything else like that, but just sort of realigning the day-to-day that makes sense in terms of the long-term vision, right? The idea that you hold for yourself and who you are and who you want to be. Right. Yeah. Now, what was the hardest part about embracing minimalism? I think that's kind of one of those terms that maybe, I mean, we had Sean Blanc on the show recently. He was talking about margin. And I think minimalism. I think that's kind of one of those terms that maybe, I mean, we had Sean Blanc on the show recently, he was talking about margin. And I think minimalism is probably similar in that

it sounds appealing on one level, but for a lot of people, they're thinking, oh, I'd have to give up X, Y, and Z, and there's no way that I could do that. What was the toughest part about going, embracing minimalism for you? The hardest part was the decluttering process. I mean, it's so funny because minimalism itself is fantastic. And my reaction to the idea of, well, I could never do that. I would have to get rid of my ex is you don't actually, you don't actually have to get rid of any one particular thing. If you're a book person, you can have a thousand books and still be a minimalist. It just means that you're reprioritizing your space in your life to highlight those books that you love so much and actually getting things out of the way so you can spend more

time enjoying them and reading them. That's the beautiful thing about practical minimalism. But for me, it's the situation, and for most people, I think, is the process of getting to what looks like a minimalist life, whatever that means for you, it's harder before, like it gets worse, right? It's darkest before the dawn, they always say. And it's like you open the closet and stuff is just in there. And up to that point, it had been hidden from view, right? Because it's packed away. It's in the back, it's in boxes. And essentially you're pulling that all out and facing the brunt of the pain of going through those things that

previously you weren't dealing with. Emotionally, maybe they would have been there, the things you're holding onto for various reasons, but you're bringing it out, setting it everywhere. The closet just explodes all over the dining room table. And you're like, why am I doing this? So to me, that's the hardest part, but it's part of the process. It's part of like, I hesitate to call it the healing process, but that's really kind of what it is. I mean, you're pulling these things out, you're addressing these different things that you're holding on to for different reasons, and you start slow, you start small, and you work your way up. You know, no one needs to be getting rid of the family heirlooms on day one. on day one. Maybe not at all. I think it's really just about finding that paperclip that's been sitting on your desk for a year and a half that, you know, you start there, make it really small, really easy and start exploring what it means to effectively remove distractions from your life. Yeah. Okay. So one of the things I really like about your channel is that you echo some of the things I really, and Mike and I really try to focus on this show, is when you want to do this, when you want to become more focused, when you want to apply the idea of minimalism not only to your stuff but to your mind and your thoughts and your life, you have to be self-forgiving in this.

You don't have to go at this like you're mad at yourself. I'm a bad minimalist because I have too many books on the shelf. And your videos do such a good job, I feel like, of getting people started. Because we get that question all the time. People writing and saying, look, I've listened to the show. I want to get more focus with my life. How do I start? And you've got so many videos talking about ways to just start with small baby steps. And you also flatly reject this idea. Because, like I said, I had this kind of knee-jerk reaction to minimalism. Because I'm used to seeing these guys on YouTube that say, well, I'm going to get my life down to 100 things. Which, to me, is just another phobia.

It's just trading one neuroses for another. And you actually reject that. You're like, for another and yeah and um and you don't you actually reject that you're like no you you minimalism means you keep the stuff that you need and um and nothing else that doesn't mean that you have some arbitrary number you have to hit and uh i don't know i guess i don't really have a question i'm being complimentary but i think someone listening the point is you have to be kind to yourself when you decide to do something like this. Well, maybe the second most effective thing, but up there in terms of really effective things that I've done is that simply letting go of the frustration I feel if I screwed up and just carrying forward. For me, fitness has been an interesting thing over my life. I've had intense

periods of working out and pursuing health in that way and then not for a year or a year and a half, depending on what job I'm in or what I'm doing. And the last two years have been really interesting because the biggest thing, the biggest change mentally that I've gone through is simply just being kind to myself. I don't know if that sounds crazy, but it's like if I didn't make it to the gym that day or I didn't eat as well as I don't know if that sounds crazy, but it's, it's like, if I didn't make it to

the gym that day, or I didn't eat as well as I would have liked to just being like, well, that was today. And I can't really change that because that happened, but it's okay. And I'm just going to go back and do my best. You know, it's so simple yet so deeply important and complex because a lot of the time, if we're harsh on the decisions we make around food, diet, focus, just the habits that really are important to us, if we kind of screw up a little, often if we're really, really unkind to ourselves, it usually leads to just completely blowing it the next day because you're like, well, I screwed it up and it's over. And so why bother? And so if we can just get into that mindset, right, of like, it's cool. You know, life is short, but also life is long. This is a practice for the ages and I'm

just going to keep showing up. On the topic of being kind to yourself, do you have any sort of process or system that you use to help develop that? I mean, it kind of sounds like it's a mindset thing where once you get it, maybe you don't need as much support, but it could be difficult, I would imagine, at the beginning, learning to forgive yourself when you mess stuff up. For me, anyways, I would be really tough on myself. more have more of a mental dialogue that that can have some negativity sometimes and truly i think um i'm not saying this is like a catch-all solution but i really think that the three things that i focus on with break the twitch are a catalyst to to do that and that's really it's not just minimalism habits creativity but it's actually like a daily practice framework of sorts for how to restructure your life. And the best thing that I've seen in terms of changing anything around mentality or attitude is being

living proof. Like the proof is in the pudding. You know, you say actions speak louder than words and in your own life, when you see evidence of things working, of you showing up repeatedly and doing those things, it starts to, that evidence starts to collect and you start believing in that as a possibility, even when it's really small. So, I mean, the whole thing is kind of like every day, remove one distraction, work on one small habit and create something. Like just every day, just do one of each of those things. And it can be the tiniest of things. It can be a paperclip off your desk to remove. It can be walking around the block to start a walking habit. And it can be literally writing a sentence,

but you've done all three of those things. And under that framework, you can radically change the way you're living on a day-to-day basis very, very quickly. It still takes time, just like anything worthwhile, but that process of seeing yourself consistently creating things, like taking the discomfort on directly and putting some things out into the world when it comes to blog posts or any kind of creation or creativity those are small but bold steps into embracing this idea of self-confidence and being kind to yourself and and doing more of what matters which which is in a way my catchphrase. Love it. I like the advice of just doing the one small thing

in those three different areas every day. I love the examples that you gave. Is that something that you kind of keep a log or a journal of, those decisions that you make on a day-to-day basis? Yes. So I have, I use Todoist. That's my system of choice.

And an app called Momentum. And in Momentum, sorry, in Todoist, I have a thing saying check momentum every day at eight o'clock p.m. And Momentum is just like you put in however many things you want to do and how many times a week you want to do them. And you just check off the box if you did it that day. And so you get a nice little streak going of boxes if you just do the simple thing. And so again, this goes back to the self kindness kind of thing. You're going to miss a day, right? And the easier you can be on yourself and the quicker you can get right back to it, the better in any case, no matter what it is. So I do track it through that. It seems to work pretty well.

Yeah. Yeah. Atomic Habits comes up on like every episode. But one of the things that came out of that book for me was the thought that if you miss one day, that's okay. But if you miss two days, you're starting a new habit, one that you don't want. And I think about that all the time because I do fall off the wagon once in a while. And, you know, I get back on, I don't want to make a new habit in the wrong direction. Yep. Definitely. The two-day rule is a big one. And James, yeah, he's awesome.

What about, do you find yourself ever falling off the wagon with your system? I mean, I'm sure you do. Everybody does. Oh, yeah, for sure. I very much see intentional living is funny, right? Because we're surrounded by all of these things in our modern culture and life that try to pull us away from what we want. And for me, a lot of the practice of Break the Twitch, of doing this stuff regularly, is actively pulling back our intentions and choosing what it is that we want for ourselves

so that we're not constantly allowing other companies, organizations, and other people to determine that for us. And so it is very much a practice as much as it is just a thing. This comes up. So have you broken the Twitch? Like, do you not get the impulse to check Instagram anymore or check your phone or buy stuff on Amazon. And it's like, no, I mean, it's a practice just like anything. It's, you know, the most practiced Buddhist monks don't just meditate better than anyone else. You know, they meditate constantly. Thich Nhat Hanh once said to Oprah, I remember, she said, do you still meditate? He's like 80, 85 years old, I think. But Oprah asked him in an interview, do you still meditate? I mean, you've reached this peak of sort of enlightenment and he's

influencing millions of people around the world. And he said, no, I meditate in everything I do. So whether I'm walking or getting dressed or washing the dishes, everything, instead of just like a 20-minute sit-down meditation, you're taking that and applying it to every aspect of your life. And I think this is, in a way way very similar that this practice of showing up of actively participating in the day-to-day aspects of our lives is what becomes the blur of a life well-lived that we'll look back on and say, hey, there were small steps, but I showed up and this is what I did. This is how I spent my time.

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slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, and enter the code focused in the how did you hear about a section. Again, that's freshbooks.com slash focused and enter focused in the how did you hear about a section for a free 30-day trial. We thank FreshBooks for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Anthony, before the break, you had talked about the idea of living this, you know, bringing it into your everyday existence and just making it a part of you. If you're listening to this, how do you get started with that go from words to action. And there's a really, really beautiful way to do that. And that is something that is in Atomic Habits that he writes about quite a bit. And it's this idea of tiny action, tiny habits.

We often, in fact, I just heard this on your podcast, we often underestimate what we can do in a year versus a day, right? We overestimate what we can accomplish in a day. And we underestimate what we can do in a year. And the reality is, with any kind of habit, the goal is to maintain it, not to do as much of it as possible immediately, and to take this life and spread it out as consistently as possible. So the whole idea, well, I like to use working out a lot because that's an example that has been particularly relevant for the last couple of years for me. But if you go to the gym for the first time in a long time and you go and do all the machines and you push yourself because you

think you're really going to go crush it and you want to get back in the habit and really drive it home, you're probably going to be so sore and uncomfortable the next day that you're not going to go again, right? If you can barely walk, you're not going to go again, which completely defeats the purpose of changing your lifestyle, right? Of changing so that you do this thing. Because we've all seen this. As soon as you stop doing the thing, your body, your health returns to the level that it was. You may see some long-term benefit from muscular skeletal changes that come from exercise. But the overwhelming point here is just that the point is to keep it up. And so in order to do it, if you want to be someone that runs,

if you want to be someone that works out, if you want to be someone, if you want to be a runner, the only way to do that is to run. If you want to be someone that gets out and walks, the only way to do that is to walk. And the beautiful thing about this is that if you walk for five seconds, you're acting and you are now changing your identity based on your action. And so that's how you do it. And so that it doesn't matter if this is decluttering, getting rid of one thing every day from your home, getting rid of one thing every day from your home, removing one notification off of your phone every day. There are a lot of ways to remove distractions, right?

Spending less, buying one less thing, bringing one less new thing into your home, or whether it's with habits, right? A lot of people want to write a book. How does a book get written, right? One word at a time. And it'll take you a long time to write a book if you write one word a day. But, right, a lot of people have this thing in their head that, oh, I need to write a book. And then the whole idea becomes so overwhelming that nothing happens. And then it's years later and we're still talking about it. But can you write a hundred words a day? Yeah,

I think most people can write 10, 15, 20 words a day. And the funny part about starting is that once you're going, once you've gotten past the blank page syndrome, you keep rolling. It's just that first element of discomfort, right? That moment that prevents us from getting into the flow state where work just happens and we get lost in it in a really positive way. It's getting past that that's the challenge. And it's the same thing with decluttering. It's the same thing with any general habit or just creating. We build it up in our heads and instead of starting picking a small thing,

we like just sit on it. You mean like subscribing to running blogs and buying shoes doesn't make me a runner? That would be, that would be what I would call a false first step. So fortunately and unfortunately, you know, we're, we're in this environment where we have a lot of marketing that is identity based. And so we're told that if we buy the running shoes, if we buy the really good smartwatch or different things like that, that we will assume that identity. And if by buying it, we have taken a step towards improving ourselves. And there's nothing wrong with buying really nice running shoes. There's nothing wrong with gadgets like a running watch or a heart rate monitor. Those things are fantastic.

But the best thing to do is to get them after you've already spent 30, 60, 90 days starting on the thing, because it's really easy to have that purchase, tell our brain, feel like we did something, but actually we just spent money and that's it. And we added something else to our house. I'm going through that right now. My wife and I are doing a gym together. And speaking of sore muscles,

I'm not even sure I can lift my left arm over my head right now. But either way, we're going and I've got this old ratty t-shirt and a pair of shorts I wear. And she's like, don't you want to get like some real gym clothes? And I'm like, no, I it's like part of me feels like that's a jinx. If I go and buy the the stuff for the gym, then suddenly somehow it's going to break. I want to get through. You got to earn it. Exactly. I want to get through three or four months of this in my ratty old gym clothes before

I actually spend any money on it. That's an amazing mentality. I mean, it's a frugal mentality, which is to me very smart, but it makes a ton of sense. It has nothing to do with the money. Honestly, I can afford to buy a pair of gym shorts and one of those, was it moisture wicking shirts or whatever? I can afford that. The technical shirts, yeah. But I just feel like, like Mike said,

I don't feel like I've earned it yet. Not until I'm actually a gym person will I own gym clothes. Has that been a tendency of yours or is this something that you've come into? I think I've always been a little bit that way. I like it. Yeah. Follow-up question to that. Where would you define the line where you've done it enough, you've embraced this identity, this now qualifies as something that is a part of who you are, it is something that is important, and even if you're embracing minimalism is something that you're going of who you are. It is something that is important. And even if you're

embracing minimalism is something that you're going to keep in your life. Do you have just like a general rule of thumb? Like I'm going to do this for 60 days using David's example. I'm going to go to the gym for two months and then I'll allow myself to invest in the tools which will maybe allow me to do it better. Yeah. this is a very deep question of knowing thyself, right? When I was younger, so generally, I say 30 days. I say, look, if you go to a yoga class for 30 days, or if you are drawing for 30 days and you're creating something new, most days out of 30, right? Consistently. Sure, buy the new pack of more expensive charcoal pencils or like buy that yoga mat or that headband or whatever it is that you think would enhance your experience. Maybe even keep you

kind of excited about it, you know, and level up slowly because there's the whole hedonic treadmill thing going on too uh with we tend to just get used to the things we get very quickly so the faster we level up the gear and other things the quicker we'll get used to it and then have to look for something else so we all want that shiny new object. For sure, for sure. It is, it's kind of just the part of somehow how the capitalist energy that is around us has captured our psyche of whatever has made us progress to this point as humans, you know?

And so it's an interesting situation, but here's the thing too, right? Earlier in my 20s, I'm what some people might call a multi-potentialite. So lots of passions, lots of different interests. And earlier in my 20s, this was a particular theme for me where I would do something for five to six months while it was new, fresh. I was deep in the learning curve. That was my favorite part of learning any new thing.

I just really enjoy that part. And as soon as I got jack of all trade, moderately competent or good at the thing, I'd get kind of bored with it. And so for me, that time was like, I don't know, maybe that time for me would be a year, right? Or six months. If I hit the six month mark, I'm still really excited about something. I want to pursue it further. At that point in my life, that's when I should probably start making those types of investments. But now in my 30s, I guess now mid 30s, I've learned that I need to focus in on the things I'm doing and find new ways within the things I do to stay engaged and keep interested. So it's a different thing now, but it really depends on,

again, kind of knowing thyself, looking at some of your past patterns and not beating yourself up, being like, I don't want to make a false first step and having that be a whole thing. You know, it's, it doesn't have to be this self-flogging thing either, just like anything else. It's really just about kind of moving slowly and looking at your past actions and questioning like, oh, is this a, am I, do I really need this right now? And would I like it? Would it? Cause it's funny. I've had people tell me that, well, I get excited when I buy a new pair of running shoes and it makes me want to stick with the habit. Well, then keep doing it, man. You know, that's, it's really personal. You mentioned, not heard this word before, multi-potentialite? Is that it? Okay. So as somebody who has a lot of passions and a

tendency to go all in with them for a short period of time, like you mentioned about six months, and then jump to something else, how did you define or land on what was or were the things that you were going to really embrace for an extended period of time? How did you decide that this is the thing for me? That's a wonderful question. And I can attribute a lot of this to my friend, Joel Zaslavsky and Emily Wapnick, who both are involved with a project called the Putty Tribe, where they talk specifically about multi-potentialites. And the most important thing that came out of this for me and learning about what they're doing is called the overarching theme. And what I learned late, deep into my 20s

and now over the last several years of running Break the Twitch, which is a YouTube channel, a podcast, a book, a blog, right? Lots of different forms of media is that I needed to create and do things that had a lot of variety within them. And that is what now has kept me engaged for five years in this project. And for me, what that looks like is simply video. So when I started doing YouTube, I really got into video and I started diving down that rabbit hole of producing video, which led me to start a production company and make making videos for clients, nonprofits, organizations. And what I realized is within video, there's like infinite stuff to learn all the time. Right. stuff to learn all the time, right? You can get better at lighting. You can get better at framing storytelling through color and, and then sound. And, and you can literally just

change the way you tell stories by changing the order of things in your video. And it, So what I did is I learned to seek out genres or things, skills that were incredibly multifaceted. And that has been the thing that has kept me in it now for years because I took this overarching theme of creating video and I've just been working on getting better and better at it over the last several years. And that is what has made a huge change for me. Just finding the thing that allows me to, because I can make a video about anything, right? I can film a video for someone else. I can make a video that's like this really inspirational kind of travel video, or it can be me sitting at a desk and it can have this color pattern or not. I'm getting into the minutiae at this point, but finding that overarching theme

for me has been what has helped the most. But also I would say to anyone listening that it's okay to go six months down a path and decide, okay, that's as much as I want to learn of this. I think that's just part of the process. I mean, you've got to i mean it's you didn't land on video and this message you're sending with your first swing you know you gotta correct you know and nobody does you know you know i would love to reinforce that sentiment and that statement in that it's easy to look at say break the twitch or the video production company that we're doing in this kind of thing and go wow like that you know there's a lot of stuff there whatever but i mean i used to log roll i mean i've done so many different things

and i failed wait wait you're not you're not getting away with that one you know this is joe about being focused but i just have to talk to you about log rolling for And I failed at more of that. Wait, wait, wait. You're not getting away with that one. You know what I mean? I know this is a show about being focused, but I just have to talk to you about log rolling for one second. Sure, sure. All right. Bring it on. So do you guys, is there something on your shoes? How do you get the log to stop?

I'm from Southern California. We surf down here. We don't have log rolling. Sure, sure. I'm from the Midwest, and I'm making my way towards you in the next six months or so. But yeah, so there are a couple different ways. Usually, so the logs will actually have, a lot of them in competition will have kind of a carpet on each side where each competitor will stand on each side and there'll be a roll of carpet around it. And it's that really low pile, dense carpet kind of thing. And so even with bare feet, you can get relative traction with that.

But the loggers, they have spikes on their shoes. That's why. That's how they like complete stop. So really it's carpet log roll is what it really is. Yeah, more or less. Okay. Sorry, I interrupted. Go ahead. Do you have any other crazy examples of stuff that you've gotten into and then decided, you know, that's not really for me?

Like I never would have guessed the log rolling, even though we hung out for basically three days straight at Craft & Commerce. Oh man, so many things. BMX, I'm a musician. So I play guitar. I sang. I was in a barbershop quartet in college. I was in an acapella group in high school and all throughout. I played in a and probably spend the next 10 minutes just talking about random things I've tried, gotten into, Tai Chi for a stint at one point. I started a company selling headlights online for a year and a half, and that was my first ever successful

entrepreneurial venture with with two friends that kicked off a lot of other things you know it it's uh i know this is a show about focus but the path that i've taken to get to where i am and figuring out a lot of this stuff has been anything but and and that's been my journey and it's been great. And that's the point, really. Nobody gets this right to begin with. And I don't think one of the things we like to say in the show is you never actually arrive. And even though you're at a good spot right now, if we talk to you in 10 years, I suspect you'll be doing a few things different than you're doing right now as well. I've never felt like I've arrived, so I'm glad to hear that. Yeah. I hope that'll be the

case. I mean, I hope it's a continual journey of growth and of learning. And I hope to always look back no matter how long, six months ago or 10 years ago and look at it like, wow, I had no idea what I was doing. Yeah. I often look past me and realize what a bozo he was. lets you easily create a website for your next big idea with a unique domain, award-winning templates, and more. Doesn't matter if you want to create an online store, a portfolio, a blog, or even a podcast, Squarespace lets you do all of that with an all-in-one platform, nothing to install, no patches to worry about, and no upgrades needed. You don't have to worry about any of that stuff because Squarespace has got it covered for you. And if you need any help, they have award-winning 24-7 customer support. They let you quickly and easily grab a unique domain name. And all of those award-winning templates are beautifully designed

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happen to be. Squarespace plans start at just $12 a month, but you can start a trial with no credit card required by going to squarespace.com slash focused. When you decide to sign up, use the offer code focused F-O-C-U-S-E-D to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain and to show your support for this show. Once again, that is squarespace.com slash FOCUSED and the code FOCUSED to get 10% off your first purchase. We thank Squarespace for their support of FOCUSED and all of RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. Anthony, one of the things I'd like to talk to you about is this idea of minimalism. We kind of started on it at the beginning of the show. We didn't really get into it very deep, but you have

addressed in your videos and the materials you created minimalism both with respect to our stuff, but also with respect to our values and our focus. And I'd like you to kind of explain that kind of on both of those levels. Yeah, I think fundamentally a lot of the conversation around minimalism right now is focused on physical possessions, especially here in the US. I think it is driven simply by the fact that 30% of households with a two-car garage can't fit any cars in their garage, you know, just because of all the storage and extra stuff that's in there. And so with Marie Kondo and a lot of the other folks talking about that aspect of it, it's a very pertinent portion of what minimalism is, right? But there's

to me a lot more to it than just physical stuff. To me, minimalism is really about any form of a distraction that takes us away from our core values, from the things that really matter to us. And this is something that can look very, very different for everyone. And that's the beautiful thing about it and why I get so frustrated at some YouTube videos that show these really what seem like impractical situations in a household, but it looks beautiful because it has white walls and a single bed in a room and a lamp and a plant. And I'm like, okay, where are your clothes? Like where's your underwear? Like where do you put underwear? Like, where do you put stuff? It just doesn't make any sense. So I think going at it from a perspective of a very personal

distraction removal process is what works best for this kind of thing. There's a guy, Greg McKeown, who wrote a book called Essentialism, whose philosophy I really love as well. And he talks about it from a perspective of essentialism and creating, well, margin, right? Creating buffer is to reference your earlier comment about Sean's stuff. And it's really about like leaving some space between you and the car in front of you, as he says in his example, so that if they slam on their brakes, you're not plowing into the back of their car. And when it's put like that, you're like, oh yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. It could be a calendar, right? That's completely full. It can be just monetarily full. So a lot of things that are getting spent

on that are really pulling you away or distracting you or distracting your credit card from the things that you value, the things that you know are important, but the other things are just there. So there are a lot of ways to look at it outside of the physical realm outside of this also outside of this weird like everyone has to live in this bright loft with brick walls and beautiful everything and drink tea on a white bedspread minimalism thing whatever that is and uh to experience it in a more day-to-day way. So how did you identify, because you mentioned values and specifically core values, how did you land on yours and how do they determine what is essential for, you know,

help shape what minimalism looks like for you? Through kind of what we were just talking about before the break, really deep diving into a day-to-day practice of acting on removing and creating. So this was something that evolved with me just like anything. I thought when I first started, I thought, oh, my value is travel. I want to be able to travel more because at that time I wasn't really much at all because I was spending my discretionary income on crap on Amazon. Some of it was fun crap, but it was mostly, you know, it was mostly things I didn't overwhelmingly need and and so at that point I was like okay I'm gonna dedicate myself I'm gonna do what I can to afford to go on 12 trips and then I look back at that now and I go well that was fun at the time but that was kind of

silly because I kind of moved from collecting stuff to collecting trips. And while yes, I do value travel and having new experiences and stuff like that was just kind of one iteration of what that value showed up as for me. And looking back, it doesn't really make a ton of sense for me now unless I'm traveling for a project or going somewhere specific. I don't feel like I need to go somewhere every month. In fact, I'm less productive when I am traveling really frequently. So there's a really careful balance there. But it has evolved and I'm sure that it will continue to. In fact, when Break the Twitch started, it was just a minimalism blog. It was a blog simply about removing distractions, living with less stuff. That was it.

And I reached a point about a year and a half in like, well, I'm kind of tired about just talking about getting rid of stuff. What do I fill this space with? How do I show up in a way that's productive? And after about a year and a half of that, I was like, well, once you're effectively showing up and doing the things that in small ways every day that you want to do and that matter to you, why not? Like, what are we creating, right? We talk about the balance of consumption versus creating and human nature is to constantly create, right? To innovate and create, but we're stuck consuming so much.

innovate and create, but we're stuck consuming so much. So what if we started putting some things out into the world that we make to create some new opportunities for ourselves? Like this conversation is happening because I made something and because you guys made something. And so that opens up amazing opportunities. And so that's where this whole minimize distractions, build habits, create, explore creativity and creative flow came from a simple evolution over the course of now five years. Is there going to be a fourth thing? I don't know. Is there a fourth dimension?

Maybe I'll discover something new in a couple of years. But for now, this feels like, wow, this feels like a very complete picture. But it always has, even in the first step and this first two steps. So it's kind of funny. But my very direct and short answer is that it has evolved every single day. I want to address something that you mentioned, because this is something that I have heard over and over again. And I'm glad that you framed it the way that you did. and over again, and I'm glad that you framed it the way that you did, because kind of general advice that people who maybe are just kind of dabbling with the whole idea of minimalism that I've heard over and over again is don't collect things, collect experiences. But you basically

shared that that wasn't the thing for you either. And I think that's really valuable because that never really sat well with me because I never wanted to travel the world. Yeah, I like going new places, meeting new people, but it's not something that I'm going to live for. And I always thought maybe I was a little bit weird because that didn't excite me. about how as human beings, we're kind of naturally creative. Now, I just gave a talk at the MaxDoc conference and the theme was create. And I kind of made the point at the end of one of my talks about how I believe that everybody is creative. So what would you say to somebody who would push back on that and say, you know, I just don't feel that I am creative? I would look them in the eyes and tell them that they were wrong, firstly. How do they start to embrace that creativity? Intimidate them into believing that they're creative. No, this really shows up in a lot of different ways. And it's usually

finance types or engineering types that will say this kind of thing. And I have done the exact same thing in talks where I talk about this framework and I talk about how we are all innately creative. And so one of the beautiful ways to break down this perception is to go to Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote a book called Big Magic. And she talks about creativity in the context of And she talks about creativity in the context of living more based on curiosity than fear. And when you start to look at creativity that way, you start to realize that anyone and everyone is and can be creative. It simply means that we are looking over that wall of fear to see what's on the other side, to explore your curiosity, despite potentially feeling uncomfortable with it sometimes. And again, for every single different

person that can show up in different ways. But, you know, in the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, he talks about this guy who would come home from work and then plant a garden in his backyard. And then he wanted to automate the watering of that garden. So he built this really intricate watering system. And then he liked rainbows. So he made this spray up so that the sunlight would pass through. But then he decided that he wanted to see rainbows over his garden all the time. So he installed this really impressive lighting system to light through the misting sprinklers and always have this circular rainbow over his backyard garden.

To me, that is insanely creative, but it is a feat of engineering. And it's so different from something that I would think to do. Yeah, and I do think people are too limiting with the application of the word creative. I mean, engineers use creativity every day. I mean, I don't think we got a rocket ship to the moon because people were not creative. Exactly. Right. And so it's just a little thing. It just bugs me that people just think if they're not making the next portrait painting or they're not writing music that they're not creative.

And there's so many ways to be creative. Absolutely. Rewinding a little bit, one of the things you said that stood out for me was that you started out with a minimalism story about stuff. But in the process of getting rid of your stuff, suddenly you made room in your life for thoughts about other things. And I do think that's another part of this, of your story that I think is fascinating that, you know, you don't always start this journey knowing where it's going to lead you, but little successes in one area often make room for you to do things in

another area. And that's another thing I think about focus that is just a huge benefit. If you can make that space, you just never know what little bit of sunshine is going to come through. Absolutely. It's the beauty of space, of margin, to go back to that. It's the beauty of having the space. And the funny thing is about this is the space that I created was not used well initially. And that set me off. That's what triggered this thought around, wait a second, because all of a sudden our house was looking much more tidy all the time. We were never hoarders. It was never overwhelming, but we've still gotten rid of thousands of stuff, thousands of things, stuffs, thousands of things. We've still gotten rid of thousands of things over the last several years, right? But our house was looking better,

felt more relaxing, and all of a sudden I was spending more time on Reddit. felt more relaxing, and all of a sudden I was spending more time on Reddit. And I looked at that and went, huh, so if we're not intentional about the space we create, it becomes a vacuum and is filled by other people, other organizations, companies choosing how to fill that space for us. And so that's where this idea of the habits came into play, right? That that space becomes an opportunity for either you or other people to direct your attention and your focus in a way that either serves them or serves you and the people you care about. And so it is an opportunity, but it's also one that needs to be approached with intention. Going back to the consumption really quick of trips, right?

Collect experiences, don't collect things. There's actually a really fascinating Hungarian study all about this. And the results are pretty, I guess, expectable in a way, but it said that it was not the pursuit of experiences nor the pursuit of physical possessions that made us happy, but the intentional pursuit of both. And this was a pretty large study and one I cite in my book, and it's, to me, the right answer, right? No matter what, if we're just obsessed

with collecting something, no matter what, we're still just obsessed with collecting something. And if that collection is not really doing it for us, then we obviously have to address that. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Daylight from Market Circle. Use the link in our show notes to get started with a 30-day free trial with Daylight. So what is Daylight?

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and peace of mind knowing your team's work is streamlined, check out Daylight. We've got a link in the show notes that gets you a 30-day free trial. I've known the gang at Daylight for several years. They've been longtime developers on the Mac. They really understand what it takes to make a great Mac app. And they've

done that. And they've combined that with a back-end cloud service to make it super convenient. 95% of customers surveyed said that Daylight improves their overall organization and productivity. Don't you want to get that? Go check out Daylight. Like I said, we've got a link in the show notes that gets you that 30-day free trial. Our thanks to Daylight for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. Anthony, you have a TEDx video, which we'll link in the show notes, where you kind of introduced this whole idea of breaking the Twitch. But one of the things that really stood out to me from that video, which we haven't really talked a whole lot about here yet today is this whole idea of intentional friction. Do you mind explaining what you mean by that? Yes. Intentional friction is essentially my

word for environmental design. And what it comes down to is making your environment reflect the things that you most want to do in both making things more difficult and making things easier for yourself so that it's actually easier on a day-to-day basis to do the things that you want to do and less of the things you don't. So intentional friction and applying intentional friction to a process looks a lot like, well, a small change. If you want to check social media less, you take your Instagram app, which I'm pretty sure most people could open without even having their eyes open because the thumb movement is just so programmed. You take that and move it to another screen on your phone so that it's not on the default screen.

The next step would be maybe dropping the app into a folder so that it's three thumb movements and three movements that your brain is not expecting because your brain is always looking to short wire to just hack whatever movement. And if it knows where to go, it's just going to take the shortcut, go exactly to where it knows. So by creating intentional friction, you're essentially creating space between impulse and action, where you can give yourself a fighting chance to process what you're doing and take a moment to decide if you actually want to do that or not. It's one of the essential elements of Twitch breaking where you design

your environment in a way that helps you substantially. Same thing, another element of environmental design would be never bringing, like never baking a pan of brownies and leaving them out on your kitchen counter, right? It's like take them, if you're going to bake them, take them to a party and leave them so that you don't have like this very low friction environment between you and like 8,000 calories of sugar, right? So that is what I mean when I talk about intentional friction. And you can do this to any level. You can delete the app entirely from your phone.

That's pretty much the highest level of friction because you can't do it at all, right? So there are a lot of different ways to approach it. And this can be applied to just about anything. But the opposite side of it removing friction would be putting your gym shoes and stuff into a bag that's ready to go when you head out the door for work in the morning instead of having to do it in the morning that reduces the friction and you increasing the likelihood to go to the gym after work if you have your stuff with you. I love that. I think this is kind of the missing piece in a lot of productivity advice, which focuses on the efficiency and doing things faster without ever questioning whether the thing

should be done in the first place. Peter Drucker, you know, nothing is so useless as to do efficiently that which should not be done at all. I love this approach that you just defined where the things that are positive that you want to do, make those easier by all means. But the things that you don't want to do, the things that are not in alignment with your values and they're not part of the intentional life that you're trying to live, create some space, add some friction between the impulse and the action so that you can reconsider those things before you do. I think that's great advice. Thank you. There's an amazing quote in the book, Hooked. It's a book that's all about how to

design addictive smartphone applications. And I read this book from obviously wanting to reverse engineer the things that it was talking about. And it said basically that companies have found it is much easier to reduce the effort required to complete an action than it is to increase a user's motivation to do it. So you can run a million ad campaigns trying to inspire people to sign up for snap. But if you can sign up for Snapchat in, I just said the ticker, the stock symbol instead of the thing. But if you can sign up for Snapchat in one click, that's going to get more users than getting a bunch of people to want to do it really badly and sign up with a huge form. And so Amazon's already doing this with the one-click purchase, with the dash,

with the automatic ordering, with subscribe and save, lowering the effort required. So we have to play the same game and kind of counteract that lowering of effort with our own increasing of effort to make it more difficult and then hack our own lives in a way that creates a path of least resistance for the things we want to do because we should know ourselves and pursue the same thing. So share with us some of the clever ways you've been hacking your life using these tools.

That's a great question. If you're willing. Like I think, was it James Clear took the batteries out of his TV remote? I thought that was pretty smart. Yep. I use a lot of different tools. Like I use the

screen time in the phone itself. I will completely delete social media off of my phone for varying lengths of time, especially when I have specific projects that I need to do. I find that generally everything in my life improves when I don't have social media on my phone, which is an interesting thing that I'm still trying to figure out how to balance being a person that maybe not needs to be on social media for break the Twitch and the different things that I do. It's so ironic, but, but, you know, seeing that I, I, it's an interesting thing to balance, but what I'll do is do digital detoxes. I'll use apps like Forest, which will completely block any sites you want. I use a browser extension called Xtab,

which only lets me open five tabs in my browser window at any one point. And so that makes me be really intentional about how many things I'm leaving open, how many things I'm focusing on, and very quickly trains you to close things when you're done with them instead of just leaving your email open all day, those sorts of things. Little things around just changing language too, like, oh, are we going to go to the gym today, is a question you can ask. Or you can ask, what time are we going to the gym today? It's a very subtle difference, but it's one that psychologically changes your approach to, is it an option or not? Just little things like that.

Any other advice you have for people on designing an intentional life? I know you got a whole video on this, which we'll definitely link to in the show notes. Oh, well, we just recently did one around values-based intentional living, taking your top five core values and figuring out day-to-day what you do and which category of value that falls into, and then finding the things that don't really reflect any of your core values and slowly addressing those. But what I would say is just changing and showing up every day and looking and being active and participating in your life. I mean, that's the biggest thing is just finding these little things day to day and actually changing them, even if it's tiny, because that stuff adds up in a big, big way.

You know, you talked about briefly your core value video, and I would recommend anybody listening take a few minutes to go watch that. I thought it was really good. And what Anthony's done is he's asked you to think about, you know, what are your core values, which is an exercise we should all do. But the most important part of that video, to me at least, was the final column, which is an exercise we should all do. But the most important part of that video, to me at least, was the final column, which is not applicable. And he went and categorized all the various things he does in his day-to-day life. And the things that he found that didn't

fit under any of his core values, those are the ones you put the microscope on and figure out, do I need to have this in my life anymore at all? And I thought, what a great way to kind of take your own personal inventory of not only what your core values are, but how much you're living to them. Thank you. Yeah, it totally is an inventory. You're going through and checking all the stock and seeing what stuff you shouldn't be carrying anymore. Yeah, and it's a great exercise. So watch the video on that. I think that's a great takeaway. And I love kind of the direction you're going with those kinds of things. I think that's stuff that we all need to be thinking about. Thank you. So what was the biggest surprise to you when you did your own core value inventory, if you want to share it,

the not applicable one? I think I saw in your video, you had junk food in there. That's a pretty good one. Yeah. You know, it's, it's funny because a lot of the things that, that are there that I can't necessarily put, it's, it's funny when you look at this from a micro level and a macro level, right? If you look at it from a bird's eye view, if I look at generally, you know, a bunch of being on my phone a lot, I don't really see it fitting into any one thing. But if I look at it on a micro level, I can start to look and see, well, if influence and wanting to inspire people is one of my values, then, well, sharing something that might inspire something, some action, or it might inspire someone on Instagram. Okay, It might inspire something, some action, or it might inspire someone on Instagram.

Okay, so I can see how that element of it fits in. So it's kind of funny when you start breaking down these things. In the video I mentioned, like, well, if you're putting your job, your entire job in NA, like maybe break it down a little bit more, right? Say, okay, what aspects of my job are not applicable? And then what aspects are? Because there have to be some elements, right, of communication and ideation or some different strengths or values that go into that on a day-to-day basis. So regardless of what it is, I mean, for me, the big one obviously is junk food. But it's funny because we just had like a cheat day yesterday. We went to this Taiwanese bakery and got some delicious baked goods from there and it was

really good. Right. And so it didn't, I don't feel like it took away from my life. I really enjoyed it. And now we're, you know, going back to a week of just eating generally more healthy things, proteins and vegetables and all that good stuff. So it's a funny exercise in that it really requires you to sort of break down the things

that you're doing on a day-to-day and figure out where they fall at what level. It's also a great mechanism in my feeling to kind of bring a mindfulness to what you're doing during the day because the act of categorization can be a good one. As you go through, it makes you question the things you're doing. Where does this fit with my values?

Is this something that maybe I should throw overboard? And kind of getting back to the beginning of the show, Thich Nhat Hanh, the whole idea of bringing that meditation to everything you do, that's the goal. Yeah, definitely. And it's increasingly challenging in what I would call our current environment. It's a lot harder, yeah. Yeah. Attention is revenue, right, for most organizations these days, and including us as people who create things and put them out there. Attention is our lifeblood. And so finding out ways to capture that attention and to spend our own and help people spend their attention mindfully is the name of the game. uh it's getting harder and harder every day i will say though and mike you and i have had mike and i've had so many conversations i can't remember what we've said on mike and what we've said off especially since we just spent a weekend together but the um i feel

like there is a bounce back that you know we had this crazy period i think i said this last episode now that i think about it we had this crazy period where these new electronic mobile computers that fit in our pocket and are connected to the internet showed up and we all just kind of got drunk with it. And I feel like there's a lot of people starting to say hey, wait a second. What are we doing here and how are we going to take control of this?

And I think that's the goal of this show and that's the goal of your site and your videos and I hope that we can make a little difference. Agree. Absolutely. wallets. But essentially, if you view your attention as revenue, you're doing the exact same thing whenever you're giving your attention over to whatever is screaming at you as a distraction. And I think that was a big realization for me that that has value. It's not just 30 seconds of being pulled away from what I was

doing. It has a much bigger impact than that. And that's why I think that your message is so important. So keep up the good work, Anthony. Likewise, I could say the same. Thank you. All right. So Anthony, folks want to learn more. We're going to put a link in the show notes to your website and your YouTube channel. What else am I missing? Fantastic. Well, there is an online member community that we run called the Break the Twitch member community. And we have a year of 21 day audio episodes, basically little tidbits, three to five minutes.

You listen to each morning focused around different goals that people seem to really enjoy. So that's at Breakthetwitch.com slash community. But other than that, the website, the YouTube channel, that's where it's at. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Anthony, for coming on. Thank you to our sponsors, Market Circle, FreshBooks, and Squarespace. And we will talk to you in a couple of weeks.