- [Thomas] Thanks to Notion for sponsoring this video
and supporting my channel.
When you think about the idea of being rich,
what's the first thing that comes to mind?
Well, if you're like most people,
the answer is probably money.
That's what we think of when we think of a rich person,
somebody who has a lot of money,
- I gotta do it, man.
- Or if you're somebody
who spends a lot of time watching online content creators,
maybe something that also comes to mind is audience,
somebody who has a lot of followers, a lot of subscribers,
a lot of people commenting on their videos,
but I think this idea of richness
can be a lot more broad than we typically think.
It's not just money we can be rich in.
In fact, the other day, I saw somebody tweeting
about the idea of time billionaires.
If you're 20 years old,
you have more than a billion seconds left to live
on average, whereas somebody who is a little bit older,
even if they have a big bank account,
they're not a time billionaire.
So I got to thinking the other day
while I was out on a bike ride,
like, what does richness mean to me?
And indeed, that definition comes out a lot more broad
than just money or followers.
For me, I wanna be rich in not just time,
as in like being a time billionaire,
but also in having free time,
time to explore, specifically,
time to build new skills, to pursue ideas that interest me.
I wanna be rich in relationships
and not just casual relationships,
not just audience members who follow me online,
but deep relationships,
people with whom I can have deep conversations,
people who I love and who love me back.
And I think if you really asked yourself this question,
you would come up with the same answers
or some very similar answers, or at the very least,
money wouldn't be the only thing on that list.
And yet in my own life,
I continually find myself with priorities
that align with the money side of richness
or with the audience size side of richness.
And I often find myself deprioritizing
these other more ethereal parts of richness,
even though when I really think about it,
when I really think about what I want,
these are the things I want more.
And I wonder, why is that?
So here's a theory that I have right now, at least for me,
but I think this might apply to other people as well.
These sides of richness, the money, the audience,
the business growth, they're easily tallied.
It's very easy to keep track and keep score of these things.
You can easily see how much money is in your bank account
or how much money you make every year.
It's very easy to say I make six figures,
I made five figures last year, I made six figures now.
You can put a growth number on that.
You can make spreadsheets
and see different percentages, put reds and greens.
And with audience growth, it's the exact same.
You can easily see how many followers you have,
be it on YouTube or Facebook or Instagram
or any social network.
And by contrast, these other areas of richness
are a bit more ethereal.
Having free time is a little harder to really keep score of.
It's harder to really focus on what that means.
Relationships. It's hard to focus on what that means.
And I think, as a result,
we tend to take these areas for granted
and to deprioritize them,
or at least we're very incentivized to do so.
Not least of which because of the society we live in,
the economy we live in,
and the companies that we interact with
when it comes to these platforms.
Like with social networks,
these companies are highly incentivized
to keep you on the platform
and to keep you focused with growing your audience
if you are a creator.
And with the economy,
all businesses want to have more sales.
They wanna have more economic activity,
so they're very incentivized keeping you focused
on how much money you can make
so you can therefore spend that money.
They are not incentivized
to make you think about how much free time you have,
how deeply you are invested in your close relationships.
So as an individual, you have to find a way
to prioritize these other areas of richness
if you do care about them.
And I've been thinking about that lately.
How can I prioritize these areas
when the money and the followers
and the business success are so easy to get addicted to,
so easy to keep score of?
And this is a tough problem,
and I'm probably not gonna solve it for myself overnight,
but I think there are a couple of things that I can do
to start moving in the right direction.
And the first one has to do with intent.
What actions can I take
that will solidify my intent to prioritize
these other areas of richness more effectively?
One of them is just simply writing down
and then periodically reminding myself
of what I truly care about.
So I've written down my priorities,
and I've put the money and I've put the audience growth
at lower on the list than these other things.
I think we need to kind of periodically look
at what our priorities are
because it's very easy to get lost
in the minutia of our day-to-day lives
and with all the different opportunities that come at us,
and we need to remind ourselves
again and again and again, I think, of these priorities
so we can make more informed decisions
instead of just chasing the shiny thing
when it presents itself.
Beyond that though, I think it's very important
to think about our proximity to the sources of information,
the tools, and the relationships
that cause us to focus on the things that, long term,
we don't wanna be constantly focused on.
And in terms of focusing on the money,
focusing on the audience and business growth,
I am constantly exposed to
and I'm very close to a lot of those things.
My social networks, my YouTube channel Stats page,
Slack, where I have a lot of my business conversations.
They're all right behind me on this computer,
which is in my home.
It's not at some far-flung office somewhere
where I can commute and do my work
and then come home at the end of the day
and be physically separated from it.
It's all right here.
And in many cases, it's all on this distraction rectangle
that's in my pocket most of the time.
And that presents a problem.
I've been thinking a lot about bad habits lately.
And one of the things that causes us
to continue to engage in a bad habit
is when we're in very close proximity to it.
I think this is why cold turkey
is the best way to break a bad habit
rather than trying to self-regulate
because if you have a bad habit in the first place
and you've called it a bad habit,
then you've already stated to yourself
that I have a problem self-regulating.
And if you remove yourself from the source of temptation,
that's the strongest way
to not engage in that lack of self-regulation.
So if I wanna increase the time
that I spend focused on these more important aspects
of richness, then I have to figure out
how to increase my distance or decrease my proximity
to everything that incentivizes me
to keep focusing on the money,
to keep focusing on the audience.
And that might mean turning off this computer
at the end of the workday.
That might mean signing up for social obligations,
making plans with friends more often.
That might mean leaving my phone up in a room
for most of the day, so I don't have quick access to it.
And these are just a few ideas.
This is less of a tactical video
and more of a video designed to get you and me thinking
about the overall concept here.
How can we decrease the amount of time we spend
focused on these easily tallied aspects of richness
and increase the amount of time we spend
focused on the other things
that we might care about a bit more?
So I know this wasn't as much of a scripted video
as I usually do,
but I've been thinking a lot about this idea
over the past couple of weeks,
especially since I just moved into a new house.
And this is actually the first house that I've ever bought,
which has got me thinking
about wanting to learn how to make it my own.
In fact, you're probably hearing the echo down here
and it's because this basement
will, at some point, be an amazing studio,
but right now has a lot of work.
I just started tearing up the floorboards
so I can have people come in here and lay carpet.
And I've been thinking about, like, I could hire people
to come do everything here,
but there's a lot of it that I just wanna learn how to do.
I wanna learn how to make this place my own.
In fact, I've gone as far as setting up an entire project
in my Notion task manager for home improvement projects,
things I need to buy, things I need to learn,
and that brings me to Notion, I guess.
If you haven't heard me talk about Notion,
well, number one, I'll be very surprised
because I kind of talk about it all the time
on this channel, but number two,
Notion is my absolute favorite productivity app
in the world, and it's something that you should check out
if you haven't already
because it really gives you a toolset
that you can use to build an all-in-one productivity system.
I use Notion to run my entire business.
We manage all of our video projects in it,
all of our podcasts, we have a company wiki in there,
we have all kinds of stuff,
and I also use it for my personal life.
I have a note-taking system.
I have my task management in Notion.
I've built all these templates
that allow me to do things I couldn't do before
when I was using a bunch of disparate productivity apps
to try to manage my life.
Students use Notion to take notes in class.
Companies use Notion to build things like company wikis,
run their processes, onboard new employees.
It's really kind of just a toolset
that you can use and bend to your will.
So if you haven't tried Notion,
now is a great time to try it.
Not least of which because their personal plan
used to be five bucks a month to get unlimited blocks,
but now, it is completely free,
so there's no real downside to giving it a try,
and there'll be a link in the description down below
so you can sign up and start building something
that works for you.
Also, once you're signed up,
once you've played with it a little bit,
you'll also find a ton of tutorials
over my brand new channel, Thomas Frank Explains,
and free Notion templates for things like task management,
note-taking, project management, and lots more,
so check those out after you use that link
in the description down below
to sign up and give Notion a try.
Big thanks, as always, to Notion for sponsoring this video
and being a big supporter of my channel.
And if you liked this video, hit the Subscribe button,
which will probably be covering my face right now.
Check out that new channel, Thomas Frank Explains,
and check out the other videos
that I'm gonna have on screen right here and right here.
Or don't do any of that, go buy your own house,
demo your own basement and do it better than I did
because, as always, I'm not your dad.