5 Things to Change Yourself #shorts

If you want to change yourself in a way that actually compounds, you need to shift five specific inputs — what you invest in, who you spend time with, the credibility you build, what you feed your mind, and how often you push past your comfort zone. Get these five right and the rest of your life starts moving without you forcing it.

Direct Answer: To change yourself, invest a fixed percentage of your income and time into skills, surround yourself with people who are one to three steps ahead, build public credibility through consistent work, control your daily information diet, and complete one uncomfortable challenge every day. These five inputs operate as a system — weakening one weakens all of them.

1. Invest in yourself before you invest anywhere else

Most people invest in stocks, real estate, or crypto before they invest in the asset that actually generates the income — themselves. As a Chartered Accountant, I look at this purely as return on capital. A $200 course that lands you a $2,000/month skill returns 1000% in the first month. No equity index does that.

• Allocate 5-10% of monthly income to learning — courses, books, coaching, conferences.
• Allocate 5 hours per week minimum to deliberate practice on a high-leverage skill (AI, sales, writing, automation).
• Pick skills with a 10-year shelf life — communication, AI tools, systems thinking, persuasion. Avoid skills that one software update can erase.
• Track what you learned each week in a simple note. If the page is empty on Sunday, the week was an investment loss.

I started teaching online with one Udemy course in 2018. Reinvesting every dollar of early earnings into better mics, courses, and editors is what turned that into 74+ courses and 79,000+ students. The first investment was always in the next version of me.

2. Associate with people who pull you up, not down

You become the average of the five people you spend the most time with — and this isn't motivational poster talk, it's pattern matching. Your standards, vocabulary, ambition, and tolerance for mediocrity all drift toward whoever you sit with daily.

How to audit your circle in 10 minutes

• List the 5 people you talk to most in any given week (not counting family).
• Score each one 1-10 on whether they raise your standards or lower them.
• If your average is below 7, you have a circle problem, not a goal problem.
• Add one new high-standard person per quarter — through paid masterminds, communities, or genuine outreach.

You don't need to cut people off dramatically. You just need to spend more time with the ones who treat ambition as normal and less time with the ones who treat it as suspicious.

3. Build credibility — it's the only currency that compounds

Credibility is what makes future opportunities cheaper. The first client takes 100 hours. The hundredth client takes a referral message. That gap is credibility doing its work.

Direct Answer: Build credibility by publishing your work in public consistently — write, teach, build, post results — for at least 12 months without expecting a return. Credibility is not what you claim about yourself; it's what other people are willing to claim about you when you're not in the room.

The credibility stack that actually works

• Pick one platform where your audience already lives (LinkedIn, YouTube, a niche newsletter).
• Publish 3 times per week minimum for 12 months. Most people quit at month 3 and call the strategy broken.
• Document, don't perform. Show what you tried, what failed, and what the numbers were.
• Collect proof aggressively — screenshots of results, testimonials, case studies, before-and-afters. Save them in one folder.
• Earn one third-party citation per quarter — a podcast appearance, a guest post, a quoted mention.

4. Feed your mind right — control your information diet

Your brain runs on whatever you feed it for the first and last 30 minutes of the day. If those 60 minutes are doomscrolling and Netflix, no productivity hack later in the day will fix the foundation.

• First 30 minutes after waking: no phone. Read 10 pages of a book or write 200 words.
• Last 30 minutes before sleep: no algorithmic feeds. Reading, journaling, or planning tomorrow.
• Audit your subscriptions monthly: unfollow anyone who leaves you anxious, jealous, or distracted. Subscribe to 3-5 sources that make you sharper.
• Replace one podcast with a book per month. Books have higher information density per minute than 95% of podcasts.
• Use a 30-day rule on news — if a news story still matters in 30 days, you'll hear about it. If it doesn't, you saved the bandwidth.

I read or listen to 30-40 books a year. Not because I love reading — I love the compounding. One useful idea per book, applied, beats 50 podcast episodes you forget by Friday.

5. Challenge yourself daily — comfort is a slow leak

The brain rewires through resistance, not repetition. If today felt easy, your trajectory flatlined a little. The fix isn't a 75-day extreme challenge — it's one small, deliberate discomfort every single day.

The daily challenge ladder

• Physical: a cold shower, a 20-minute walk, 50 push-ups — non-negotiable.
• Mental: learn one new concept, solve one hard problem, write one piece of work you'd be nervous to publish.
• Social: have one uncomfortable conversation per week — ask for the raise, send the cold pitch, follow up on the proposal.
• Skill: attempt one task slightly above your current ability, even if you fail.

Track it on a simple wall calendar with an X for each day. The chain itself becomes the motivation by week three.

How the five inputs work as one system

These five aren't a checklist — they're a flywheel. Investing in yourself gives you skills. Skills attract better people. Better people raise your standards. Higher standards force you to publish credible work. Credible work earns you the right inputs to feed your mind. And daily challenges keep all four from going stale. Pull one lever and the others move.

Pick the weakest of the five inputs in your current life and fix only that one for 30 days — your daily challenge ladder is the fastest place to start, because it costs nothing and rewires everything else.

Keep Learning

If this was useful, these are worth reading next:

• Do you go for a bigger tv or library?
• The Prime Ministers letter for #sunitawilliams
• Or go further with the AI Mastery Course — used by 79,000+ students across 150+ countries.

Source: Platform pricing pages as of May 2026 — Udemy.com, Coursera.org, LinkedIn.com/learning, Skool.com.