Does anyone else wonder what people actually do for fun? Everyone is always talking about these cool hobbies, and I know sometimes I’m like, “Dude, I have an entire weekend free, what should I do?”
It’s funny. On one of our team calls, one of my co-workers told us that he recently Googled “What do people do for fun?” Now we all laughed, but I think there is actually something kinda true there. It’s funny when you think about it. We know when we hang out with our friends we meet at the same places. Maybe it’s a bar, and maybe it’s a restaurant.
When we get home from work, I’m gonna guess that you pull up the same websites. In fact, I’m gonna guess that you sit in the same place. And when we work out, most of us work out on the exact same machines.
It might seem boring, but I also think it’s easy to understand why we like to stick with what we know. Well, the realization I’ve had with learning things fast is that it’s a big world out there. There’s a lot of stuff to learn, there’s a lot of stuff to do. And to me, part of living a Rich Life is having those rich experiences. For example, in the last few months, my sister told me about a trapeze class. My friends all went to a sake tasting, and another friend took me to a gun range. Now, these are things I wouldn’t normally think to do but I loved it. Or I loved all of it except for the trapeze class, I’m not gonna do that again.
I learned something, we laughed at how bad we were, and we got better. These are the kind of experiences that we remember, and this is really important. If you think about the events you remember, the really memorable ones, where are they? Are they reading the same website or going to the same bar? Or are they trying something new, even if you didn’t love it. Are they about going through new experiences? I think that intuitively, we know the most memorable times are around new experiences. But it’s hard to do that every day. And listen, I love routine as much as anyone. So that’s why we tend to sit around doing the same thing every single day.
But what I’ve learned is that, all it takes is just a little extra effort and a little extra planning, and things can be very, very different. Here’s a couple of ways to do it. Sometimes it’s as easy as having a short list of things that you could learn right away. For example, at the same time that it would take you to watch a 22-minute episode on Netflix, you could learn how to dice an onion like a pro chef. Or you could learn basic HTML. That’s one more skill in your back pocket tonight. You don’t have to be a master chef, just cut an onion. Hmm, interesting, you don’t have to be a master chef, just cut an onion. I wonder if we can apply that to other parts of our learning process.
See then there are other things that you might want to turn into actual practice. Something that you do once or twice a week might take a little bit more time. It might take a little bit more effort.
But you should also keep a running list of those things that you wanna get into at some point. Maybe it’s for your career like being an amazing public speaker, maybe it’s just for fun like martial arts, or doing improv. And sometimes there are just these general life skills, like learning how to cook or maybe you wanna learn how to become a handyman around the house. And whenever you get to the point where you’re sitting there, you’ve got a whole weekend ahead of you, or you’ve got a couple of nights free, and that word. The B-word: “Boring.” “Ah, I’m bored, I need something to do.” Well guess what? You have an entire list to draw from.
Now we all go through periods of life where things get boring and stagnant. That is normal, it’s fine. I’m not going to tell you that life should always be exciting, this is not true. But my solution is not to just wait it out or to keep doing what I’ve always been doing.
Remember what I always say: “80% of the work is done before you ever get in the room.” So maybe you get into a routine and it’s comfortable. That’s fine, cool, I love routines. But inevitably, I start to feel, “Hey, I feel kinda stagnant. I feel stuck. I’m doing the same thing. I’m eating at the same place. I’ve been watching the same shows, having the same conversations over and over.” Imagine how powerful it is to have an idea of things you can do. In fact, even a list of things you’re excited about, and they’re actually easy to tackle.
We all know that we wanna do these cool things, but we have this problem of not thinking about it. Run autopilot, doing the same things over and over again. It’s like cooking the same bowl of pasta for dinner every single night. Hey listen, I like that pasta, but eventually, I’m gonna get sick of it. It’d be awesome if I had a few variations that I can add to it to make it fun and exciting again. And as you can imagine, this isn’t just about pasta. It’s about your hobbies, what you eat, where you go. It’s about learning anything fast.
So here’s what I want you to do. Make a big list — in fact, the bigger, the better — of at least 20 new things that you might wanna learn. And remember, like we mentioned, it could be things you wanna learn for fun, things you want to do with your family and friends, or even things that would make you more valuable at work. Now, I’ve included the PDF with this lesson, of 30 things that you can learn right now, to help you get those ideas flowing. Feel free to draw from that PDF or come up with your own ideas. What I want you to do is come up with as many as possible, and then I’m gonna challenge you to circle just five of those skills. We’re gonna use those as this course goes on. So think big, don’t worry about choosing the wrong thing, you can’t go wrong, and we will continue on in the next lesson.
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