75 Hard: Is it a bad idea to start now?
“If you were born with the weakness to fall, you were born with the strength to rise.” – Rupi Kaur
The virus is still on the loose, and a lot of businesses are still trying to recover from the sheer drop that the quarantine threw them into. Now more than ever, a good portion of the business world is trying to get back on its feet. More losses means more profit to win back in order to resurface from this seemingly endless recession. So with that said, how can we even fit 75 Hard into our schedule?
At first glance, 75 Hard does seem to take up much of your 24 hours. Collectively taking 4 hours to finish, this will get you thinking about how- or WHY- it should even be something you want to do on a tight sched. Yes, the challenge takes 4 hours in total. Yes, that is a lot of time off your schedule. But to my surprise, it didn’t hinder my growth or eat into my hours. In fact, it did the opposite!
I’ll explain exactly why, and more importantly HOW the #75Hard Challenge helped skyrocket my daily productivity, and the overall growth of my career. This article will discuss key notes such as how getting into 75 Hard helped me focus on my business and important daily goals, as well as how it made me realize that some of the things I did during my day were trivial in comparison. The challenge even gave me more time to even communicate with people I needed to reconnect with in long-awaited calls.
First thing’s first: What exactly do you have to do?
As we know, 75 Hard involves a lot of challenging activities that can help break through the limitations of both mind and body. Though a large portion of it includes a very strict routine for physical maintenance, a good part of it also helps sharpen our minds. I’ll go ahead and give you a breakdown of what these activities are, and how they personally helped me and my business’s growth. If these activities helped me out, these key notes could help you too!
Exercise twice a day – Whether it be HIIT or Cardio, perform two workout sessions a day for 45 minutes each. One workout session should be done indoors, while the other must be done outdoors. These two workouts must also be done separately by a gap of at least 3 hours.
- It’s important to make time allowances – The workout sessions should be done within a span of 45 45 minutes each. This means that the “extracurricular” things that we have to do still need their own time allotment. Showers, restroom breaks, pre-workout meals, or even stretching prior to the workout session can tally up the total duration to 1 hour and 30 minutes. (90 minutes)
10 Pages of a Non-Fiction book per day – Since 75 Hard is generally considered a mental toughness program, it’s definitely bound to have a good form of mental training. For each day within the challenge, you must read at least ten pages of any non-fiction book. Whether it be about lifelong philosophies or business guru advice, it’s required that you read 10 pages of it every day to help you grow as a person. Not only physically, but mentally as well.
Take a progress pic every day, and share it! – Although you might not notice changes at first, you’re sure to notice the differences later on until the end of the challenge. It’s important that you document your progress, and realize how far you’ve come from when you first started the challenge. Don’t forget to share your progress to everyone! You’ll find out a lot of things about yourself that you can be proud of. If you can’t see them, then let the people point them out for you.
Everything That Came With #75Hard
Remember, it isn’t passive consumption after all. It’s proactive.
It Lines Up Your Priorities – With the workouts and the books eating into a good portion of my time, I felt that my days were much shorter. But this didn’t necessarily become a hurdle for me or my business. In fact, it helped me take into account all of my priorities and compress what I had to do for the rest of the day. I pushed aside unnecessary calls and meetings, prioritized family and only working on the crucial parts of my business, and created a fixed schedule for the routine to help maintain that rhythm. On shorter days, you are more efficient.
Walks Help – Walks are healthy in every way! Even for your connection with people. When you go for a walk, it’s normal to put on your favorite songs, walk to the beat, and enjoy the view of passing events around your neighborhood. That’s a great way to enjoy your walk, but there’s more that a walk can offer than just good music and the neighbor’s jolly dog that greets you from their lawn. When I went for walks, I realized that it helped me connect with people and learn more than I thought I could.
I made important calls that were long overdue, followed up on potential leads and clients as there’s now so much time to focus on relationships with potential customers and employees. It also helped me learn through audiobooks! A lot of crazy things happened during my walks, such as discovering new endeavors to pursue, hiring a new coach to help me, and hiring a company to help me market my business. All of that through just phone calls during walks!
Learning and Applying – As you make your way through 75 Hard, you’ll discover that there are lessons that you’ve learned from just reading through those daily 10 pages or listening to those audio books during your daily walks. You might not even realize that you’ve started to apply all of these lessons to your life! This was the case for me, because I remember reading and utiliziing important pieces of Pat Flynn’s Superfans.
I eventually started a WhatsApp group at the onset of the pandemic, where I invited other aspiring entrepreneurs (you’re also invited!) and began to do group meditations with them. This was to help us go through the motions and de-stress within the first 3-4 months of the Covid-19 lockdown. It’s safe to say that a lot of the books I’ve read so far have greatly helped me and others improve both in the mind and through our businesses. In case you’re interested, here are two other titles:
Online Traction – Taking progress pictures and selfies every day, I decided to share my progress on Instagram and other social media platforms. I shared my struggles, I shared my achievements, I shared everything I could because I was proud of what I was able to reach. This helped me because the more I shared, the more people became interested in what I was doing. They started to become more involved with my updates, and eventually looked into me as a person. Pieces fell into place and they found out about my UI/UX company, which eventually led them to contact me for business opportunities.
One of my clients, Kieran O’Brien (fantastic guy!) found out about my business because he was simply following my progress on 75 Hard. Just like that, we connected and discovered that we have the same mindset. Remember, more traction means more attraction. The more you put yourself and your progress out there, the more you let others grow involved with you and your journey. The more people are involved, the greater the chances are that you’ll make new connections.
Confidence – Though this does directly connect to online traction, confidence itself is less about other people and more about yourself. This helped toughen my mindset and really allowed my confidence to grow. With the virus running rampant, I was taking care of 2 kids and running multiple businesses all on my own. Despite how dire things got, I pushed through with the challenges and persevered with a strong mindset. Even though the situation was getting out of hand, I was thankful and proud to have been able to stay afloat, even overcoming the challenge itself in the middle of a viral storm.
Mental State – We all know that running a business could get very hectic and chaotic. Running a business in the middle of a pandemic? Even more so! Schedules start to get overwhelming, management work starts to pile up, everything just bursts in a violent wave that could swallow you whole. Maybe that’s happened to you, maybe it hasn’t. Wouldn’t you want to be prepared for when it does (again?) For me, I was able to maintain a clear mindset in the crises that followed. I realized that the 75 Hard Challenge fortified my mindset. Reading every day, learning new things and doing workouts which built my confidence, 75 Hard gave me strength and clarity of mind that I needed to keep myself above water.
Energetic Channels – It might sound crazy, and you might think I’ve got a screw loose for saying this, but I believe in Energy frequencies. Some people achieve a lot more than others, and are able to get more goals done and their dreams realized sooner. How is it possible for them? I believe that this has a lot to do with a person’s “frequency.” It’s your spiritual outlook towards life or the world. Remember the law of attraction? That kind of frequency. With 75 Hard, I strongly believe that it’s possible to take one’s limitations and break it. To expound oneself as a person, in mind and spirit. Personally, I hold onto this belief because I earned my first 100K month with this in mind!
Everything on this list greatly impacted my business, and me as a person. The coolest thing about it is that you can start NOW, and as long as you stay on-track, you’ll surely see how 75 Hard can also impact your life in an abundantly positive way.
Will #75 Hard affect my business? Yes it will. And I can almost assure you that the effects will be fantastic.
With all that said, I hope this article equipped you with something new to further help you expound on your knowledge. If you did enjoy, don’t forget to stay tuned on my YouTube channel.
The good news is that this article has its very own YouTube Video!