How to become the person you want to be

We all want to be better: be more athletic, have more money, have better relationships.

To get these things, we often set goals, to-do lists, and new-years resolutions that never seem to get us anywhere.

What if I told you it’s not your fault…

There’s actually a different, much better way to go about things.

Let me tell you about it.

Recently, I picked up a framework from Shaan Puri that seems to have had a huge impact on my life, and will definitely impact yours too.

It’s called the Four Kings Exercise.

Rather than memorize all sorts of goals and action-items, cultivate characteristics instead.

Specifically, four of them.

Rather than scrape productivity out of every minute of your day, the Four Kings Exercise allows you to focus on ONLY what you consider important, and nothing else.

Each King comes in four suits.

Each core area of your life, such as family, career, friendship, relationship, health, and so on, corresponds to a suit.

For instance, here are my Kings.

My Four Kings

Get healthy

I don’t have control over many parts of my life. The economy, the government, my work - but I do have control over my health. Now that I have time, I can experiment with new foods and workouts. I’m eating healthy, running for the first time in my life and I feel better than ever.

Give more praise

Praise small, feeble qualities in someone that you’d like to magnify. It’s like adding bark to an ember: you have the power to turn it into a bright flame. Critical feedback, on the other hand, is like a gust of wind: if you blow too hard on a weak ember, you’ll put it out. On a large enough fire? It’ll make it roar.

Make >$100 MRR

It’s not a crazy number, but it is a huge milestone for me. I hit the $1 milestone last year, and it was life-changing. This year is the $100 milestone. I know I can do it, it’ll just take some focus to stick to a SINGLE project. For $100, it doesn’t matter what the project actually is - all you have to do is grind.

Get amazing sleep

I felt amazing sleep recently for the first time, following Bryan Johnson’s tips. I’m not able to get it consistently enough. Even if I can do it a week in a row, it’d be amazing.

Here’s why The Four Kings Exercise works.

Rather than split your attention across twenty different aspects of your life, it lets you focus.

Focus allows your gains to compound.

Once you believe you’ve cultivated a King in your life, you can replace it.

This lets you accelerate your growth in a way that a to-do list cannot.

In fact, in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Ben lists thirteen of his own virtues that he wished to cultivate.

He writes,

“My intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judged it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time; and, when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another, and so on, till I should have gone through the thirteen…”

If you use this framework, you’d not only join the ranks of Shaan Puri, but also Ben Franklin.

So take just 5 minutes and try this before you forget!

Write down your Four Kings and a short reasoning why.
Paste it somewhere you can see it every day: in front of your desk, on the bathroom mirror, or above the kitchen sink.

You’ll see results within a day or two.

Hard to believe, but it’s true - I guarantee it!

-Armaan