You Become What You Consume

“You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.”— Charlie Tremendous Jones

I had a great chat recently with my friend Kirin Sinha, who’s the founder of Illumix and one of the leading figures in the metaverse and augmented reality – she’s helping some of the most well known companies in the world bring the future to our doorstep as quickly, vibrantly, and immersively as possible.

That means she needs to be at peak brain performance for the massively important tasks she needs to do day in day out.

In our conversation, she mentioned that an enormous part of her success is paying close attention to her diet. But it wasn’t the ‘diet’ in a traditional sense, being simply the food and drink you put into your body. Kirin defined ‘diet’ as anything she consumes that will potentially alter how she feels — good or bad.

When you go by that broader definition of diet, you expand it to include things like the books you read and the people you meet – as Charlie Tremendous Jones alluded to – as well as the TV shows you watch, the music you listen to, and the conversations you engage in with your friends.

You get the idea...

If all of those things stir up negative energy, or make you slow, miserable, or angry … well, you need to make some changes. Because one thought, becomes an action, becomes a habit, that will derail your week, your month, your year, and eventually your life.

And one of the biggest realizations I’ve had on this professional journey from the last 16 years — where I’ve read hundreds of books, interviewed 500+ of the world’s most successful people, and written more than a million words on the subject, is that you don’t need to include additional energy into creating the life you want…

You simply need to take the exact same amount of energy that you’re using to complain about what you don’t have, and transmute that to create the circumstances that you want.

Everything you’re already consuming – your diet – is constructing the future for you. And if you have a hard time winning the day, or you’ve mapped out your future based on your current actions and it scares you, then you need to start upgrading your diet by transmuting the destructive inputs and turning them into constructive inputs.

Not adding extra output – but simply tweaking the existing inputs.

One of the best ways to do that is to take an audit of a typical day for you – which includes everything you do from the moment your eyes open in the morning to when they close at night, such as:

• Watching television
• Scrolling through social media
• Lying on the couch
• Doing exercise
• Eating food
• Having conversations with friends
• Etc.

Step 1:

Take an audit of your day so far – or an audit of what you did yesterday – and write down every action you did.

Step 2:

Next, put a + or - next to it, which will reveal how productive or destructive your day was. If it was something that made you happy, stronger or more enthusiastic, or helped you achieve your goals, it would get a '+'. If it was something that made you miserable, weaker, or sabotaged your goals, it would get a '-'.

Step 3:

Finally, review your list.

This should either make you proud – if it does, well done – or it should scare the sh*t out of you.

But even if you’ve got a lot of work to do – and it’s important to remember that we’re ALL a work in progress – creating that awareness of where you’re at, which is exactly what we just did, allows and empowers you to be able to change your circumstances so you can get to work creating the future you want.

The worst thing you can do is have your head in the sand and not recognize how destructive your current diet is.

And once you’ve upgraded your diet – which is your actions, your thoughts, your friendships, your nutrition, your sleep, your growth – you will create momentum that will make it easier to take each step from there to achieve all you want.

To finish, I wanted to share a quote from Andrew Carnegie that I included in the book Andrew Carnegie’s Mental Dynamite . He said:

“Every thought we release, and every act in which we indulge, becomes an inseparable part of our own character, to aid or curse us, according to its nature.”

When you hear a quote like that, and truly understand it, you’ll have very little time – and tolerance – for thoughts and actions that don’t serve you. So upgrade your 'diet' and enjoy the results.

Onward and upward always,

James Whittaker

PS?— If you want to learn more about what tweaks you can make to your day for optimal performance, check out this interview with Kirin Sinha .

#WinTheDay