The light changed this week. You saw it on the drive in, grey at seven where it was gold a month ago, and something in your chest did the math before your head got there. Summer is winding down. The year is not over.
Those last four months are where most men lose the year they said they wanted.
October shows up carrying other people's plans. November shows up carrying other people's expectations. December is spent before you get to it. By the second week of January you are looking back at a year you can describe and cannot point at. You made money. You cannot name what you built.
It fills. An open calendar becomes a suggestion box, and every person in your life has a suggestion. Your calendar was built to hold your priorities and carry them into the week. Most men hand it over by the first week of October, then spend the rest of the year working someone else's plan with their own hours.
You know the sound of that one. It is the thought at eleven at night with the laptop still open. I was busy for twelve months and I am not sure I moved anything.
So we close strong. Three plays for the last four months. I am running all three myself, starting this week.
Before you plan a single thing for the fall, go back over the last eight months. Two columns on one page. What worked, and what you kept doing out of habit.
The second column is the honest work. That is where your hours went, and you do not get them back by planning harder on top of them. Most men skip this and go straight to a new plan for the fall, which is how the same year runs twice.
Two one-hour blocks on your calendar that go to things that build wealth. Period.
Give each block a title with a job inside it. The offer you have not finished. The call you have been avoiding since June. The asset you keep meaning to build. They go on the calendar the way a patient goes on mine, with a name and a time, and they get protected the same way.
Two hours a week from now until New Year's is roughly forty hours. Forty defended hours pointed at one thing will change what you own next year.
Mine go on my calendar this week. That is the only reason I am able to ask you for yours.
Every day from here through the fall, into the winter, through the holiday season. Walk, lift, stretch, get on the floor with your kids. Any movement counts, and the daily part is the whole point.
I have had my hands on bodies for over thirty years, more than 410,000 visits. I can tell you what October to February does to a man who stops moving. He calls me in February about his back. The back is the symptom. His energy left in October and he never noticed, because the calendar was full and full felt like fine.
Your nervous system, your breath, and your calendar decide your output before your willpower ever gets a vote. That is the part most performance advice leaves out, and then it blames you when the discipline does not hold.
Twenty minutes a day. I know how that sounds coming from the man who wrote it. I have to do it too.
Center yourself in Christ before the day starts asking things of you. In his goodness, and in prayer. Ten minutes with your feet on the floor before the phone gets a vote.
Then do the best you can in the moment you are actually in, with the body you have this morning and the week in front of you. It works out better. I have watched it work out better for thirty years, in my life and in the lives of the men I coach.
If you do not share my faith, take the same first move in plain terms. Ten quiet minutes, before the day, on what matters and who you intend to be inside it.
Which two hours this week are your wealth blocks? Give me the day and the time.
Let's get to work.
Yours In Health and High Performance,
Dr Howard Dennis, DC, CHPC