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Podcast notes: The power of gratitude with The 5-Minute Journal

A lot of planners help you plan your work so that you can make it efficient and free up time to squeeze in more work so that you can make it efficient and free up time to squeeze in more work so that…

The 5-Minute Journal helps you start your day with gratitude. Pat Flynn interviewed the creators of the 5-Minute Journal, UJ Ramdas and Alex Ikonn.

(Check out the full interview on SPI 271: An Interview with The Five-Minute Journal Founders UJ Ramdas and Alex Ikonn – it’s better than this post!)

The power of gratitude

Why gratitudes?

I’m not quite a type-A personality, but Tim Ferriss definitely tips the scale. Tim talks about why he uses The 5-Minute Journal in Tools of Titans:

“It’s easy to obsess over pushing the ball forward as a type-A personality, which leads to being constantly future-focused. If anxiety is a focus on the future, practicing appreciation, even for 2 to 3 minutes, is counter-balancing medicine. The 5MJ forces me to think about what I have, as opposed to what I’m pursuing.”

(This episode also has them talking about how they met Tim Ferriss. He’s become one of biggest promoters of The Five-Minute Journal. I first learned about it on Tim’s podcast.)

How can I apply it?

They talk about creating the 5-minute Journal for themselves. Like many people, they were information junkies but they knew how much a difference it is to read something and actually apply what you’re learning.

“But in reality I didn’t really care, because I just wanted to have this product in my own life, because I wanted to use it and practice it. Because I knew the power of doing this on a daily basis. Especially in writing.”

The journal is centered around gratitudes. They’d read the books and seen the research on the power of daily gratitude. They wanted to make something that would make it easier to capture their gratitude daily. There were plenty of planners out. These were the ones that allow you to be efficient with your work to fit even more work in to make efficient to fit even more work in.

A journal for gratitudes didn’t exist, so they made it.

My use of the 5-Minute journal

I downloaded a 5-Minute Journal quick-start PDF explaining how the journal works and it included a few sample pages. I imported one of the pages into Notability and then just copied and pasted it and filled it in.

Then each day I would duplicate and clear the page. I had the same Rick Rubin quote every day.

“On their deathbeds, people don’t think about their work or their life experiences or the items remaining on their to-do list. They think about love and family.” — Rick Rubin

I bought the app after a couple weeks of that. I’ve put an entry in probably 4 days a week ever since. For a couple months, I recorded a voice note going through the 5-Minute Journal template on my walk to work. It’s a little harder to go scroll back through voice notes, but those really capture the mood of the day.

Something different in the app is the daily photo entry. It’s great to just scroll through that. You know how people say it can be bad scrolling through your friends’ highlight reels? Scrolling through your daily highlights is better and probably healthier. It reminds you of all the things you’re grateful for day to day, not just tropical vacations.

How can I apply it? Part II

Last year I read a book a week. This year, I’m on about the same pace with reading and have increased listening to 2-4 each month. I haven’t been applying it all, though. UJ Ramdas and Alex Ikonn created the 5-Minute Journal to make things easier for themselves.

“With all these books you read them, but what about the follow through? How do you actually implement all these things into your daily life?”

“Prototyping” might be overstating things, but I’ve been trying to create one-page PDFs that I can fill out to remember to apply things I’m learning from books. So far I’ve got two. One is a W.O.O.P sheet to apply something from Barking Up the Wrong Tree. The second is a Stretch + S.M.A.R.T. sheet to apply something from Smarter, Better, Faster.

I want to create a few more and start sharing them. Then maybe someone will use them like I used the one page PDF sample of the 5-Minute Journal.

Picking activities

Some Creative Pages will turn into full posts. This one seems like a pretty good outline for a full post.

I’ve been reading about writing again. After listening to a bunch of Psychotactics stuff I’ve started reading content by a few copywriters. I started with The Brain Audit by Sean D’Souza (who makes Psychotactics) then I got Everybody Writes and Content Rules by Anne Handley.

I’ve been thinking about how to write things that help other people. It’s better in a lot of cases to be direct with the reader. Too often, I write about how I’ve tried applying things. Which is useful as part of a post, but it should only be a part of it. If it’s going to be useful, the directives should be clear.

This year, I’ve continued reading about happiness. I’ve seen some common themes between books and wanted to boil that down to a few steps. Your day-in day-out activities mean a lot more than some random goal.

For example, if your random goal is to own a Ferrari, at least make sure you drive it when you get it.

Here are some steps to picking your daily activities:

  • Write down all of your activities
  • Put them in buckets
  • In each bucket, rank the activities against each other
  • Schedule the top activities
  • Purge the bottom activities

My full post would detail these steps with incredible stories to make them sticky.

First, I need to become a better writer.

Creative Pages: Morning Creativity Routine version 2.0


Here’s the first of what I’m going to call Creative Pages — aka the Morning Creativity Routine version 2.0: 

  • Notability: I’ll write and draw whatever comes to mind. Sometimes I’ll use a template.
  • Evernote: I’ll paste that page in and write about it. Sort of like what this post is. 

I can make these in under an hour, so it’ll be possible to share 2-3 each week. They also can help with future video posts and podcast segments. For example, the page I made today has initial thoughts a couple chapters into The 5-Second Rule by Mel Robbins. I can use this for a future book notes video.

Why the name change? “Morning creativity routine” sounded a little robotic. I had the fantastic idea of calling these things “Creative pages”, paying homage to Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages.

As with any fantastic idea, I researched and found out someone thought of it years ago. There used to be an online companion to The Artist’s Way and one of the tabs was called “creative pages”. 

I’m going to use that name until there’s reason not to. But back to the process.

I’m switching from starting with typing then going to handwriting. There’s power in writing by hand. It’s much easier to really focus, mostly because it’s harder to switch context or jump around. 

I have a few blank templates that I use regularly in Notability. For example:

  • 5 panels with text
  • 6-up storyboards with text
  • Crazy 8s

Some have lines for text. Some don’t. I want to create more of these and share them.

Yes, I’m an adult creating worksheets for basically a kindergarten class. I am also attending the class. 

How to live as an artist: 1000 fans, 10000 readers, but it all starts with ten

How do people make a living through writing? Find 1,000 true fans. There are a few milestones along the way.

1,000 true fans?

Kevin Kelly wrote about the importance of finding 1,000 people who will pay for what you make.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version.

Paul Jarvis calls them his rat people:

Not literally “rat people”, unless rats really are your thing. I’m talking about the people that get what you do, appreciate it, and love you for it.

How do you get to 1,000 true fans? They’re going to be a subset of your wider audience. So you’ll need more normal fans. How many? Let’s take a look.

10,000 people who will read your work

You need people who check out your work regularly. They probably won’t pay for it, but they’ll give you some of their time. You can have a money-back guarantee, but you can never give readers their time back.

Let’s say they’re your mailing list subscribers. That’s a clear metric with a higher barrier than a Twitter follow or a YouTube subscribe.

Shawn Coyne says 10,000:

How hard is it to find 10,000 people who when handed a free copy by a friend would actually read it? If you can’t give ‘em away for free, chances are you won’t sell very many

Okay, so how do you get there? Let’s go back to the other end. Not 1,000. Or even 100. Find an audience that could fit in your living room.

First, ten

Seth Godin says you should focus on finding ten people who trust, respect, need, and listen to you.

And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they’ll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.

If the first ten share with another ten, you’ll get to 100 and if they share with another 10, you’ll get to 10,000.

The great thing about the first ten is that they’re also true fans. They’ve into your empty restaurant and enjoyed it. They took a risk and you didn’t waste their time.

07: When did you realize wrestling is fake?

0:00:00 • Welcome! Wally talks slow motion
0:06:42 • Ces stumbles through explaining what keto is
0:19:04 • Wally recommends something manly
0:26:52 • When did you realize wrestling was fake?

Is that… Jason’s music?!

0:30:44 • Jason dials in before the biggest weekend of his life
0:39:15 • Which wrestler does Jason feel like?

We’re re-thinking the book-a-week format because we can’t read fast enough. Instead, we each recommend a couple of podcasts. Ces recaps the Iron Man Match between Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels.