How I Changed My Life Forever For Good And How You Can Do The Same

13 min readJul 31, 2023

After going turbulent time in my life (like we all have sometimes in our life) and going through some depression I had to find a way to change my life. It was difficult, especially when you are going through hard times. It’s difficult to get up, stand and continue to move on with your life.

I felt empty sometimes like something was missing and my life was not on track.

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The Story

I have a habit. A habit of trying to walk at least 10K steps every day in summer. What I also do with walking is I like to listen to either music or something useful via YouTube.

One day when I was walking and I was about to play something from YouTube I found a video about “How to understand women” by Jordan Peterson. It was about 8 minutes long, so I decided to listen to it. Don’t get me wrong I respect women and all people as who they are, but this was somehow an interesting topic. So I listened to it, and he brought up a couple of things that inspired me to evaluate myself as who I am and my current life situation.

I am a very positive and kind person who firmly believes in God and I am thankful for what I have but I felt that I was not in charge of my life and something was missing in my life.

Decision

So I decided to change my life and I started listening to Jim Rohn. (If you don’t know him, then I highly recommend listening to his lectures about self-development I can guarantee that it will change your view about yourself, life, and how to develop yourself in a very good way. You can find his lectures on YouTube.) The first lesson I heard from Jim Rohn was about mastering the art of communication and how it can increase your value by 75%, yes you read it right by 75%. It has such a tremendous effect on your life.

Now you might ask me how I ended up with Jim Rohn. To be honest I got that suggestion also from YouTube. I have always noticed that I am not having great communication skills even though I love talking with people. So I thought maybe I can learn something from this video of his.

What I learned besides mastering the art of communication is that the lecture had hidden gems in it which expanded my thinking even more and inspired me even more.

He inspired me to change my life and take control of it and oh boy did my life change after I made that decision. A decision that I have never regretted, a decision that changed my life forever and had an immense effect on me.

This is why I wanted to share you my story but most importantly how I did it and how you can do it.

I don’t care about your situation in life, race, your condition, your wealth, your status, no matter who you are YOU CAN always change your life and sail for a brighter future if you wish.

The Blueprint

Step #1

When I started to change my life, the first thing I did was list all things I wanted from my life and what things I would like to achieve them. For example, some of the things I wanted are:

Getting in better shape and achieving 13–14% body fat
Retire early at the age of 50 (if I would have done this change in my life I would have had a chance to retire much earlier but I try to be realistic)
Make $250K/year
Establish family
Buy Tesla car
Grow stock portfolio

Notice that I didn’t put any deadline yet. I just listed what I wanted.

Do: The first step is simply to list things you want to have in your life.

Step #2

Now that I have the list of what I want, the next step is to decide what I want to achieve this year. I would then write down my yearly, monthly, and possibly weekly goals for each of these selections for me to have a clear plan on what I am going to do. All in my journal.

So let’s take some examples. Let’s say I want to “Get in better shape and achieve 13–14% body fat”. Let’s suppose my body fat is now 24%. I would set the following goals for it:

Year: Achieve 13%-14% body fat, eat healthy food, and abandon junk food to support it

Month #1:

Learn about weight loss, healthy food, and junk food
Make a plan at a weekly level when you will allocate weight lifting, cardio exercises, and days of breaks
Walk at least 10K steps a day, 5 days a week
Make a meal plan
Make a tracking journal of your weight loss progress

Month #2:

Start your weight lifting, cardio exercise, and walking weekly routine
Achieve 22% body fat
Abandon restaurant junk foods
Do at home something healthy that would satisfy your sweet craving (for example homemade chocolate protein bar)

Month #3:

Achieve 20% of body fat
Abandon cookies and candies

Month #4:

Achieve 18% of body fat
etc.

You got the point. Remember never to set too heavy goals when you start your journey. Goals should be quite simple, and achievable in a set period of time.

Do: Select in this step things you want to achieve this year and write down your yearly, monthly, and possibly weekly goals for each of them.

Step #3

Now that I have written down my yearly, monthly, and possibly weekly goals, the next step I did was to make a clear plan for each of those goals on how to achieve them.

So for example, I have the following goal “Learn about weight loss, healthy food, and junk food”. Here’s how I would plan to stay on track and focus:

Monday: Watch 1 hour of YouTube video/Read about weight loss
Tuesday: Watch 1 hour of YouTube video/Read about weight loss
Wednesday: Watch 1 hour of YouTube video/Read about healthy foods
Thursday: Watch 1 hour of YouTube video/Read about healthy foods
Friday: Break
Saturday: Watch 1 hour of YouTube video/Read about junk food
Sunday: Watch 1 hour of YouTube video/Read about junk food

It can be as simple as that. The idea is to write them down so that you have clear steps on how to achieve them. This will all manifest with the compound effect which I will discuss below in this story and I show you how amazing it is.

Do: Make a clear plan for each of your goals.

Step #4

Now that I have set all my goals, and made a clear plan for each of these goals, the next step is very simple. Whenever I woke up the first thing I did is to open my journal and read all my yearly and CURRENT monthly goals. I don’t care at this moment about the upcoming month's goals, I will only concentrate on the current month.

The idea behind this is to keep you always updated on what you should be focusing on to achieve your goal and remind you as well about your goals.

Do: When you wake up in the morning just read your yearly and current month goals.

Step #5

The next thing I did, was when I woke up in the morning I made a TODO list about the tasks I am planning to do today. These TODOs are meant to help you stay on track with your goals, gives you the ability the next day to evaluate what tasks you did, and also work as a motivator when you see that you have done the tasks you planned to do. This way it will encourage you.

Do: Create a TODO list for today

Step #6

The next morning when I woke up the first thing I did when it came to the TODO list is to evaluate yesterday's tasks. I check what tasks I was able to do and what not. I also wrote down the reasons why I couldn’t do or complete some specific tasks.

The surprising thing about this when you have done it enough many days is that it will teach minor ways how to estimate things and it’s a great yet difficult skill to master.

If you don’t finish some task, don’t let it affect you. Treat it as a good lesson and always ask yourself “What I could do next time better when I estimate my tasks?”. One of the reasons could have been that you didn’t have time.

Do: Check your previous day's TODO list, tick all completed tasks, and think about why you couldn’t finish other tasks you were not able to finish.

Step #7

At the end of each month, it’s time to revise the goals and how well I did. This is a very important part of the blueprint. What I do is simply check my monthly goals, then I would write each goal, and under it, I write in bullet points how I succeeded with this goal, what went wrong, what I could have done better, and why I didn’t achieve the goal.

Now that I have analyzed those goals, I would take the failing goals and add them to next month's goal list, and with the successful goals I would either keep them or if I have achieved them and there’s no continuation then I will just leave them.

The most important thing in this step is honesty. Be honest with yourself and write how it went. The idea of this step is to remind you how you could improve your goal plan better in order to achieve it.

Do: Revise your monthly goals and evaluate how well you did with them at the end of the month.

That was my blueprint which is very simple yet very effective. Now let’s check next the results of it.

Effects After One Month

Here’s the list of what I have achieved after one month only, after I decided to make a permanent change in my life. This is the real list and I am not twisting it, just giving the truth:

Personal

I am in control of my life. No more “where I am heading” feeling
Learned how to manage my time effectively, setting yearly, and monthly goals, clear plans for each of them, and how to achieve them
Able to stay more focused on any task in life, because I have learned to concentrate on one thing at a time, thanks to clear plans and avoiding social media
Feel much happier than before
Read two books in under a month by spending every day for each book 30 mins
Learned so many lessons about life and self-development
Learned self-discipline and how important it is
Became more self-aware
Learned the importance of having a journal and tracking own habits, spending, achievements, and goals
Started having good ideas about different aspects of life (some of them are actually quite good)
Learned how much I wasted precious time on unnecessary things like watching streaming services
Learned to take always an extra step when doing something
Inspired people around me to take action using this blueprint when I have expected it to happen at least

Health

I have lost 1.5 kg of weight
Developed new healthy habits
Eating only healthy food and avoiding eating junk food -> has boosted my energy tremendously
I am able to think much more clearly and am much more productive
I feel much better every day because I also do weight lifting, cardio, and walking
Have enough power to resist junk food

Wealth

Grew my stock portfolio by 15% with the extra income I had
Started building a new income stream by harnessing my software engineering skills
I am able to save more money because I cut all unnecessary expenses

Job

I am able to be more active, helpful, and productive
Able to contribute more because I am reading constantly and doing side project that helps me to improve my career

Spiritual

Wake up at the designated time for prayer
Read religious books to improve also my spiritual side of mine

The Compound Effect

Let’s talk a bit about the compound effect, what it is, and how useful it is.

The Compound Effect is the way of doing things repeatedly so many times until you see the outcome of it. Let me clarify that more. Whenever you do something and repeat it you become better at it even if you don’t notice it until one day you notice the clear difference between where you were at the beginning and where you are now.

Let’s take some examples.

Examples

Losing weight

A person has a habit where he/she eats junk food every day and this brings them 1000 kcal/day. This person likes to walk and also do cardio, but when he/she tracks his own calories he/she notices that he/she always ends up gaining 200 kcal/day more. Thus he/she is gaining slowly but steadily a fraction of weight each day.

Now imagine that same person would have made a decision to cut junk food even by 5 days a week. Meaning on those 5 days they would have been in a calorie deficit of -800 kcal/day. If the person would have stuck with such kind of habit for:

4 weeks -> total calorie deficit: 4 weeks * 5 days * -800 kcal = -16 000 kcal
8 weeks -> total calorie deficit: -32 000 kcal
12 weeks -> total calorie deficit: -48 000 kcal

One kg of fat contains about 7700 calories. So, if a person would have stuck with that habit, they would have lost weight by 2.07 kg after 4 weeks, 4.14 kg after 8 weeks, and 6.21 kg after 12 weeks. Can you see already the effects of compound effect? :) Let’s take one more example.

Saving money

A person is spending $4 on buying a cup of coffee every day. If they would have not bought from a coffee shop but instead drank water they would have saved in one year $1460. This person could have then used that money for paying some necessary bills or even better invest it in the way of compound interest.

Just changing one choice in your life can have a tremendous effect on your life.

This method can be applied to all aspects of your life. Whether it is your relationship, business, religion, income, self-development, etc. It’s easy to implement but yet has a tremendous effect if you can be patient with it.

It’s like you planting the seeds of the plant and later on, you will reap its reward.

The Why-power

One of the most important things I learned about the compound effect is what motivates you to do something. I always thought it is all about WILLPOWER, but that’s incorrect I will give you an example below, but the real driver is the WHY-power.

A book I read about the compound effect is called The Compound Effect. In that book, author Darren Hardy brought very clear examples about the WHY-power and let me explain:

If I would ask you to walk on wood plank this is on the ground and I promise you $20 dollars just to walk on that wood plank you would do it without any hesitation. Right? Why? Because you can get quite easily $20 and it’s not a big effort to walk on a wood plank from one side to the other side when it is on the ground.

Now let’s change the scenario a bit. What if that wood plank is between two high-rise buildings and I would ask you to walk on that wood plank and I will give you $20? I don’t think you would do it. Why? Because there’s a risk that you could fall to the ground and that $20 is not worth it.

Now let’s change the scenario even more. What if there’s a child in another building and it is on fire and you are in another building and I would say that if you save that child I would give you $20? You wouldn’t even think of that $20. Why? Because you care so much about that child and you would save that child without any hesitation.

Did you notice there was always the WHY-power that gives you a reason to do something? This is exactly the motivator that keeps you up and gives you a reason to do something and not the WILLPOWER. Even if you have willpower it can prevent you from doing something. All we need is laziness.

If you want to gain more information about The Compound Effect and how to harness its power even more, then I highly recommend reading The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy.

Important Tips

Set one of your goals to be reading books. This will have a huge effect on your life, self-development, and character. You will learn new things that would nurture your future in a positive way. What I recommend reading is any kind of book that has useful information in it. This will open positive hidden doors in your life.
Learn more in detail about the compound effect. I highly recommend buying “The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy.
Buy a journal and write down in it your ideas, thoughts, strategies, what you have learned today, and what you are thankful for. You can use that information
When you develop yourself in this manner, you become more valuable because you have more knowledge and more skills you could learn. This can even affect your income. You could earn more. How? Remember this lesson “Your income is determined based on how valuable you are to the market” — Jim Rohn. What a great lesson.
The real driver of doing things is not Willpower but Why-power

Conclusion

There you have it. I hope it has been a useful story that could affect your life in a positive way. I would also love to hear your results if you decided to try my blueprint.

Did you enjoy the story? Let me know what you think and also if you decide to give it a try to this method. Nothing would make me more happy than hearing that you have taken this blueprint into action and you have gained success.