Change Your Life So Fast They'll Think You Used A Cheat Code - The 60-Day Self-Reinvention

If you had a blueprint that showed you exactly how to do in 60 days, what most people can't achieve in a full year, would you follow it? If you could disappear for a couple of months, level up beyond anyone's wildest expectations, and then come back as a newer and better version of yourself, would you take that opportunity?

Read closely because in this article I'm going to give you my formula for doing just that.

There comes a point in your life when you look around and you realize that your current situation is no longer serving you well. Maybe you’ve played by the rules all your life, you’ve done everything you’re supposed to do, and you’re living the “American Dream.”

But now you realize that what society told you to go after is not actually what brings you fulfillment or purpose.  Or even worse playing by the rules, following the status quo left you feeling aimless, depressed, or unhealthy.

If you feel anything like this then you’re definitely not alone.

"So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation." — Christopher McCandless

88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy meaning they’re on track towards the premature onset of preventable chronic disease. Some estimates suggest that 75% of Americans lack a clear sense of purpose or direction. And men who work in corporate jobs suffer from the highest rates of erectile disfunction than any other occupational category.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds more like a nightmare than a dream.

But since you’re reading this article, I don’t think I need to make a convincing argument that the standard life model just doesn’t cut it for a lot of people.

So now you’ve decided that this isn’t the life that you want for yourself anymore. You know that you can be way healthier, mentally and physically. You know that you can take the exit ramp from the status quo and create what I call a “designer lifestyle” custom tailored for you to align with your purpose, your vision, your values.

The good news is that you can absolutely create whatever reality you want for yourself, and you can do it much faster than everybody thinks is possible if you approach it with an extreme level of intention.

I know this because I’ve had a few big life transformations where I leveled up and basically became unrecognizable to the people who once knew me in the past.

Most people I’ve met in the last ten years have a hard time believing that I was once a super unhealthy person. I was the center of a million jokes about being skinny, timid, and unhealthy.  It became such a core part of my identity that nobody, not even I, could see myself as anything otherwise.

But today it’s a very different story. I went from being laughed at for being skinny and weak to doing pushups in a handstand and building a business around my fitness.

More recently I went from living in Chicago working my corporate 9-5 job to living in Europe as a solo-entrepreneur, spending way more of my time working on projects that I’m passionate about and living life on my own terms.

Recently I took a look back at what I did wrong and what I did right. I found all of the commonalities throughout my experiences as well as all of the elements that really drove rapid change for me, and then I reverse-engineered the process.

I’ll admit I didn’t do this out of the goodness of my heart, I did this because I want to have a framework for myself in the future so I can save myself a bunch of time.  Any time I have my sights set on a new life goal, my time window for forcing massive change in that particular area of my life is 60 days.

What’s so special about 60 days? Well, it’s about the amount of time that it takes for new habits to be formed, and habits are the leading indicators of life.  You show me a man’s habits, and I can tell you where he’s going. So, to change one’s life, one must change his habits.

With that said… It just so happens I have a blog so it only makes sense that I share my process with you so you can also reinvent yourself so fast that everyone will think you used a cheat code.

So, grab a pen and paper. Get ready to read closely and take some notes because if you can nail this down, 60 days is such a small price to pay for a lifetime of being in closer alignment with your truth and with your values.  And if you stick around to the end, I have a special offer for you, so stay tuned.

There’s this book called the Top 5 Regrets of the Dying written by Bronnie Ware, who was a hospice care nurse taking care of people who’ve reached the end of life.  Naturally she would develop a sort of bond with these people, and they would tell her about their biggest regrets in life.

The common theme across all of the regrets was that they didn’t allow themselves the opportunity to live fully.  They played it too safe, they followed the rules of society, they dedicated too much of their lives to things that didn’t matter instead of prioritizing the things that matter to them like spending more quality time with people and living life on their terms.

Now that I have access to this wisdom that people left behind, I can’t imagine being 80 years old and looking back knowing that 60 days was the difference between really LIVING my life and merely existing.

So, let’s start off by talking about the single most important component of any transformation, whether it’s a lifelong journey or a 60-day sprint which is…

Getting Your Mind Right

Anyone who tries to fundamentally change their life without first doing the inner work to be in the right frame of mind is destined to fail because in most cases, your mind is the weakest link.

I talked in my last article about how the cognitive and psychological functions in your brain need to be trained just like your muscles. Your mindset is a muscle, and you need to build mental fortitude so it’s strong enough to endure the inevitable psychological resistance that you’re going to experience as a result of growing and pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone.

“Your mind is the governor of your success. It will decide how far you go.” – David Goggins

But unfortunately, people haphazardly jump into new transformation efforts without doing the inner work first.  I saw a lot of this with my fitness clients who have these grand expectations of dropping a bunch of weight and having a smooth path toward looking like an action figure, but the moment they face a bit of uncertainty or adversity, they’re ready to call it quits because they didn’t condition their mental. They didn’t build their psychological strength.

This leads me to the first prerequisite for rapidly transforming your life which is knowing your “why”.  What is your reason for doing this in the first place?

This it’s so important to nail down because the ability to endure discomfort is directly proportional to your “why.”

"Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how” – Viktor Frankl

So, the stronger and clearer your reason for experiencing discomfort, the higher your ability to endure said discomfort.

Let’s talk about a strategy for making sure that you have a strong enough “why” to carry you through, and it begins with…

Anti-visioning to set your purpose, your values, and your goals

I always like to say that “your pain is your purpose.” Or in other words, solving whatever problem is your greatest source of pain today is your current purpose in life.

So, the thing that keeps gnawing away at you more than anything else, whether its your health and fitness, your relationships, or your job situation, overcoming the challenge in that specific area of your life is your purpose.  That’s where you’ll find your “why.”

We should use our pain to guide us because the animalistic mind inside each one of us is predisposed to reflexively avoiding what it perceives as danger.

"They say though that we do more to avoid pain than we do to gain pleasure. So it is when the pain becomes too much that we finally find the courage to make changes." – Bronnie Ware

We instinctually are much more responsive to negative stimuli than positive because, as far as the primal brain is concerned, negative stimuli come with the potential for death. So, we don’t have to try very hard to avoid pain or discomfort. That’s our default.

With anti-visioning we can use this to our advantage. If you sit down and try to formulate a vision, you might find it really difficult to actually produce something that’s accurate because humans are susceptible to letting societal pressures influence our thinking, and we can end up with a vision that’s not actually what we want. 

But it’s much easier to spell out what we DON’T want. You know for sure you don’t want your hand on a hot skillet. There’s very little debate there.  So, your anti-vision is the life you don’t want for yourself.

The first step in figuring out your anti-vision is to define the general area of life that you want to transform. It could be fitness, or it could be your career, or your marriage or relationships.

Spend a week journaling and writing down every negative feeling, thought, or worry that you have specific to the general area of life that you just defined.  And then from there you’ll synthesize your journal entries into a 5-10 sentence statement describing the worst case scenario for you in that particular aspect of life.  So, the worst case health scenario, the worst case career scenario, etc.

Then you’ll produce the opposite of your anti-vision to create your vision.  So, you’re literally inverting the worst case scenario to now describe your best case scenario. Use this as a foundation for your vision but spend some time customizing it a bit more to make it specific to you. 

Now that you have your vision. Save that somewhere so you can come back to it.  Then prompt chat GPT to create a list of 10-20 individual words that capture the essence of your vision, along with a one to two-sentence explanation for more context, then you’ll want to manually narrow it down to the best 3-5 words that resonate with you most.

Those 3-5 words are your values. Save them. Write them down. Put them in your back pocket, because from this point onward, every decision you make and everything you do must be aligned with your values.

This is really important because you’re going to find yourself making decisions that are uncomfortable, and sometimes your values are going to lead you away from the option that comes with safety and certainty.

And now that you’ve set your vision and your values you can come up with a goal that you believe you can achieve exactly one year from now if you push yourself. Use your vision to set the direction, and your values to add specificity to your goal.

Your goal should be very specific because you can only focus on ONE thing at a time, so if you want to get more fit then come up with a goal accordingly. If you want to escape the rat race then come up with a goal accordingly. If you want to improve your relationships then come up with a goal accordingly.  Keep your goal specific to one aspect of life. Don’t try to do everting at once..

But there’s a catch. Your one-year goal, is actually your 60-day goal… It might seem ambitious, but it is definitely possible for a focused mind to achieve in 60 days what the unfocused mind can accomplish in a year.

Which leads me to the next point which is to…

Use A Process of Elimination to Focus Your Life Energy

We live in a highly distracted society, and most people are not very intentional about how they navigate through a world full of distractions that constantly demand one’s time, energy, attention, and money.

“Extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus. The best way to achieve extraordinary results is to build a system that eliminates distractions and allows you to channel all your energy and efforts toward the one thing that matters most." – Gary Keller

The average American spends 3 hours each day watching TV and another 2 hours each day on social media. Over a 60-day timespan that’s about 300 hours or 13 days spent passively consuming content instead of intentionally focusing on goals.

People will gladly fork over their hard earned money for alcohol, for expensive dinners, for nice vacations, but in the same vein they’ll say that they don’t have enough money to invest in themselves or in their goals.

This is what being distracted looks like.  It’s the world covertly draining you of your time, your energy, your attention, and money.

So, if you seriously want to level up in 60-days, then you have to ruthlessly eliminate distractions from your life.  This is how you focus.

“Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.” – Bruce Lee

People think about focus as a thing that you do, but getting focused begins with the process of elimination. It means taking a full inventory of your daily activities and dropping anything that’s not aligned with the values that you came up with earlier in this article.

So if your focus is a fitness transformation, then you should be evaluating how you are spending your time, your energy, your attention, and your money in ways that are misaligned with your values, and then make a conscious effort to eliminate those behaviors from your life.

The same goes for if you’re trying to leave the corporate 9-5 life and become an entrepreneur.  What are you doing that’s taking away the time, energy, attention, and money that you could otherwise be dedicating to activities that are true to your values?

To focus on your goal, you need to ruthlessly eliminate, or put on hold, all distractions to create the space needed to go 100% on whatever area of life your goal is aligned with.

When you do this, you systematically reduce your exposure to the sources of cheap dopamine that have been preventing you from focusing on the things that are going to help you manifest your vision.

In my last article, I talked about the importance of controlling your dopamine to build greater cognitive strength. What people don’t realize about cheap dopamine is that it chemically inhibits executive function in the brain.  It literally reduces your brain’s ability to focus even if you try as hard as you can. So, when you cut distractions from your life, you are doing a sort of dopamine detox that is physically re-wiring your brain to focus better.

One last thing I’d be remiss to mention is that reducing clutter in your physical space can also help you to focus better. So, keeping your home and any other spaces that you spend a lot of time in clean and orderly will go a long way.

Now that you’ve eliminated distractions, you’ve reduced the clutter from your life, and you’ve created a less dopaminergic lifestyle, you’re ready to begin focusing on building the new habits, behaviors, and skills that will rapidly move you towards your goal while everyone else is unfocused and basically spinning in circles.

You’ll do this by…

Building Competency and Capabilities

Now that you have your 60-day goal defined, and you’ve created an environment that’s conducive for extreme focus, the next thing that you have to figure out is how do you get from where you currently are to your goal state in the next 60 days. 

I use what I call the three N’s framework, and don’t attack me on this one because it’s not actually 3 N’s but it is what it is… “Knowledge, Know-how, and Network.”

Knowledge is the foundation of everything.

“There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know” – Donald Rumsfeld

If you want to change anything then you need to know which levers to pull to produce the desired change.  And you also need to know which levers not to pull. For example, if you’re trying to transform your body through fitness, then you need to know where to focus most of your energy.

There are some people who spend hours in the gym trying to burn calories while neglecting their diet and their sleep. They’ll almost always struggle to see transformational change compared to someone who spends 30 minutes exercising daily while focusing most of their efforts on dialing in their diet and their sleep.

There are some people who want to start an online business, and they’ll focus on building a large follower count instead of building a compelling product along with a systematic approach for connecting with potential customers and delivering value to them.  So, they’ll end up with a large following and no clear path to monetization.

The same goes for anything in your life that you’re trying to change. You need to know WHAT to know so you can focus on building the relevant skills and capabilities.

This leads me to the next N which is “know-how”.

With the foundation of knowledge that you build, you also need to apply that knowledge to begin manifesting tangible change in the real world. This is what I refer to as know-how.

Know-how is the skills and capabilities necessary to actually bring your goal into fruition.  So sticking with the fitness transformation example, now that you have the knowledge that your diet and your sleep is equally, if not more important than spending hours in the gym, you need to know how to apply that knowledge to burn fat and build muscle.

You need to know how to source and prepare the right foods, how to exercise for only 30 minutes while producing the same results as people who spend hours in the gym, how to naturally improve your sleep quality, and the list goes on.

The same can be said for creating a solo online business. There are specifics skills and capabilities that are necessary to accomplish your goals.

The key for building know-how is through actually doing.  You have to practice, you have to experiment and then receive feedback (which is new knowledge), then iterate.  Whether it’s learning how to properly bench press, or write code, or how to set up a marketing funnel for your business, the only way to learn how to do it is to do it.

This leads me to the final N which is your network.

When I use this word, I’m not talking about your network in the traditional sense. Rather I’m referring to your sources of information and skill acquisition as it relates to your goal. So yes your network can be other people, but it can be anything that helps you grow your knowledge and your know-how.

This includes courses, lectures, podcasts, newsletters, YouTube videos, books, mentors, coaches, communities, etc.… My rule of thumb here is that it cannot be short-format information, and it cannot be information presented as entertainment.

In either case you MUST invest heavily in your network to quickly attain the knowledge and the know-how.  This is where a lot of people get tripped up because they’re too short-sighted to understand how valuable investments in themselves can prove to be.

People will happily spend thousands of dollars every year on things they don’t need, and things that don’t bring them any closer to their goals, but will hesitate to spend a few hundred dollars on a course that will give them the tools and understanding to take their lives to the next level.

Don’t be one of those people. Be intentional about your lifestyle and take care to divert your resources away from sources of instant gratification and towards investing in your network.

Now that you’re focused on the three N’s, the last step is to…

Build A System for maximum efficiency and consistency

All of this work is good but if you don’t give yourself structure, then you’ll be operating in chaos, and chaos is inefficient. So, you need to bring everything together into a system that will lead you to the sustainable habits that drive massive and rapid life transformations.

“If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Your habits are shaped by the systems around you, and if you want to make a change, you need to redesign your environment and your daily processes." – James Clear

If you don’t have a system in place to support your dreams, your dreams will always be fleeting." – Mark Manson

When you start anything, your motivation is going to be high, but motivation is fleeting. It’s not always going to be there, and it will betray you if you put your faith in it.  So, over the next 60 days, you want to turn your temporary motivation into lifelong habits.

It’s in the habits that you develop where the real life change is going to happen. Remember, habits are the leading indicators of life.

So, to move from motivation to habits, you need discipline, and discipline is built through systems.

Your system is going to be highly customized to your lifestyle and your needs. I can’t tell you what your system needs to look like, but at the bare minimum it should include daily rituals that support everything we discussed earlier in this article along with dedicated blocks of time to fully immerse yourself in the process of building your knowledge, your know-how, and your network.

This should be easier to do now that you’ve cut the distractions from your life.

Some examples of my system for really leveling up super fast include going to bed and waking up an hour earlier every day. Since I’m more productive in the morning and embarrassingly unproductive at night, I systematically shift my day forward to be awake during my more productive hours.

I also make my bed and spend 15 minutes cleaning my home every morning so that my physical space is orderly and puts my mind at ease.

I have a no-phone policy during the first and last hour of my day. I have a daily workout and meditation practice. I take daily walks for at least 30 minutes to help spur creativity. And I surround myself with people who share similar values as I do.

I delete all social media and streaming apps from my phone (with the exception of YouTube because I use it as a learning resource).  This removes a huge distraction from my life.

I also usually schedule three 90-minute time blocks dedicated to focused work and deep learning throughout my day.  I’ll do one first thing in the morning when my creativity is highest. There’s plenty of research out there that supports the idea that cognitive function spikes after a workout, so I’ll do another 90-minute session in the early afternoon just after my mid-day workout. And then I’ll have one more session at night before I start my night time routine.

This is just a small sample of the system I designed for myself, but you can have a completely different system that better suits your needs, your goal, and your lifestyle.

The point is that you need to have structure and consistency, and once you have this structure you’re ready to…

Leverage The Flow State for Ultra-Productivity

At this point you have all the ingredients, so now you need to pull it all together so that every unit of input produces exponential output.

This is where the flow state comes in. Flow is a state of consciousness that’s arguably the pinnacle of the human experience.  It is the state in which the mind is fully present and focused on the task at hand.

A mind that is in a state of flow is at peak productivity which translates to insanely rapid skill acquisition and healthy releases of dopamine that keep you locked in and moving forward.

“When you are in flow, you are so absorbed by the activity that you lose all sense of time and self-consciousness. It is in [the flow sate] that we experience our highest levels of creativity and accomplishment.” – Tony Robins

The challenge is finding your flow. It’s not like you can just flick a switch and be in a state of flow. It takes introspection, intentional living, and a strong sense of purpose to be able to achieve the flow state, especially to the level that you’ll need for your 60-day transformation.

There are many different strategies for entering the flow state, but I have a few main tactics that I’ve found useful.

Firstly, is having a regular movement practice, preferably one that includes resistance training, but some form of moderate to intense movement is essential for keeping your brain in peak operating order. I personally am a huge advocate of calisthenics due to the combination of resistance training and the intense focus on mind-body connection which amplifies the cognitive benefits even more.

Secondly, a routine mindfulness practice is also essential for being fully present. So, meditation or other practices that take your mind out of survival mode will make it easier to slip into a flow state.

Lastly, just before I’m about to enter a 90-minute deep focus session, I spend a few minutes thinking about my anti-vision and my vision, and then I put on headphones and play binaural beats at a 40hz frequency to stimulate higher brain activity.

I’ve found that these steps help me to slip into the zone for peak focus and channeling my life energy into leveling up in a major way in just 60 days. 

If you also find your flow, then you’ll be able to re-invent yourself so fast that everyone around you will think you used a cheat code.

The will not understand how you were able to level up so quickly.

I do realize this is a lot to take in, and to be frank, a blog article is going to introduce you to the concepts but you're not going to retain most of this information. That's just not how we the human brain operates, so it's best to actually map out your transformation process by writing it down.

That's why I created an interactive field manual called “The Self-Reinvention Cheat Code." In it I guide you through a process of mapping out everything I talked about in this article for your 60-day transformation. You'll do everything from creating your vision to establishing a deep work protocol. If you're ready to get focused and start being super intentional about taking your life to the next level then this is a good tool that can use to structure your own lifestyle transformation and move forward with both confidence and clarity.

I also offer one-on-one consultations and a 60-day lifestyle transformation program for people who are serious about breaking away from the status quo and leveling up in their fitness, their careers, or in life in general, and want to change their lives forever.