You Only Need 6 Months to Change Your Life

The four-week edit I’ve run with thousands of founders – and why you don’t need to burn your life down to use it.

Six months ago you told yourself this was going to be the year.

You set the goals. You made the promises. And chances are, you fell behind.

It’s happened to the best of us. I’ve been there, wondering how the heck I was going to catch up on everything I said I’d do.

Here’s the good news. It only takes six months to change everything. Some of the most successful people alive made their biggest leap in a single six-month stretch. They weren’t smarter than you. They just had a plan that made turning their life around feel inevitable.

All you need is four weeks to set up the next six months. I call it the edit, because you don’t need to burn your whole life down. You just need to edit.

Envision. Delete. Install. Track. One week each.

Week 1: Envision

You can’t change your life if you don’t know what you’re changing it into.

Skip this week and you’ll spend the next six months busy and end up in the exact same spot, because you never decided where you were going.

Start by visualizing your 10.0 self. Most people set goals like “get healthier” or “make more money.” If you can’t describe the vision for your life with the same specificity you can describe your current situation, that’s not a vision. That’s a wish.

Your 10.0 self is every one of your best moments, all the times you showed up put together, stacked into a single day. That’s the target. You’ll never hit a target you can’t see.

Get specific in four areas. No vague words allowed:

1. Body. Your health, your training, how you feel in your own skin.
2. Bank. What you earn, what you keep, what you invest.
3. Calendar. Where your time goes and how you’re investing it.
4. People. Who you’re surrounded by.

Then write it like it’s already true. I go to December 31st and write from there. Not “be healthier” but “I weigh this, I completed the marathon.” Not “make more” but “I made this, I profited this, I invested this.” On people, write both sides: who you’re surrounded by, and who you no longer spend time with.

Present tense or past tense. Never future tense. Future tense is where goals go to die.

Then turn it into a vision board. Take everything you just wrote and make it visual. Here’s the prompt I use:

“I want to visualize what my life is going to look like six months from now. Ask me about any gaps you need for context, then create a hyperrealistic image that puts me inside that life so I can see myself living it every day.”

The models are good enough now that you can feed them a photo of yourself and make it real. Save it as your desktop wallpaper and your phone lock screen. Now every time you open your laptop you get asked the same question: how am I doing on that?

I look at mine three times a day, and I mean actually look. Pause. Sit with it. I want every action I take that day pointed at it. Ten minutes of this will give you more clarity than you’ve probably had in ten years.

Now reverse engineer it. Most people do the work and hope it takes them where they want to go. Hope is not a plan. You can have all the hope in the world and the wrong strategy will still leave you exactly where you started.

So we flip it and work backwards from the end. I use identity-based goals: have, be, do.

Have is everything you just wrote down. The body, the bank, the calendar, the people. Those are your goals.

Be is who you have to become to have them. These are your “I am” statements, and you write them before you have any proof. I wrote down “athlete” when I decided to fix my body, and then I started doing CrossFit. First workout I walked in and the coach goes, “Hey athletes, what’s up?” And I remember thinking, oh crap, I guess I became an athlete. Write down “I am valuable.” “I am productive.” For some of you the big one is “I am an extrovert.” You can be an introvert in moments and still show up as an extrovert. Write it down anyway.

Do is the habits. What does the person who already has those goals actually do every day? “I don’t drink.” “I eat healthy.” Simple stuff.

Your life today is a reflection of decisions you made six months ago. Identity is a byproduct of habits. You can have a vision for a six-pack, but if you keep eating in the kitchen you will never have abs.

Two years ago I realized I was an Ironman who didn’t look the part. Didn’t look like I trained. So I woke up one day and decided I was going to have visible abs, and I went on the journey, and it was hard. Even while I was doing it I worried it would never happen. Two years later I’m still holding the same body weight, and it isn’t discipline anymore. Habits stop being habits once you adopt them as identity.

Week 2: Delete

You can’t build a new life on top of the old one. You have to cut before you build.

Two things are quietly eating your six months, and they live in your calendar and your circle.

First, avoid the dragon. These are the things pulling you off track that are just so easy to reach. The app one tap away. The one glass of wine every night to take the edge off.

You will not beat those with willpower. Willpower runs out. So we add friction instead and make the wrong thing hard to do. It’s easier to avoid the dragon than to slay it.

Here’s how to run it:

1. Log your time for a full week. Most people have no idea where their time actually goes. Set a timer and write down what you did every fifteen minutes. Be precise. Do it for seven days.
2. Circle in red every entry that pulled you away from your vision. Circle in green every entry that pushed you toward it. Joining a call with peers who are where you want to be? Green. Picking up the phone for the friend from high school who you know is going to complain the whole time, because you always pick up? Red. Be honest with yourself. Does it support or does it subtract?
3. Take the red list and kill it. Cut what you can cut. What you can’t cut, make hard to reach. There are these little NFC bricks now where you tap your phone and your social apps lock until you walk back and tap it again. That’s a decision you only have to make once.
4. Tell people. This is easy to say and hard to do, so recruit witnesses. Tell your friends, tell your spouse, tell everybody. “These are my decisions. If you see me breaking them, question me on it.”

And once you free up the time, do not go waste it again. That’s why I built a perfect week template for CEOs juggling a team, a family and travel.

Second, run a friend inventory. Your time is only half the battle. The bigger problem is who you’re spending it with.

You are a byproduct of the people you spend the most time with, and they quietly set your ceiling. Some of them take your energy. I call them energy vampires. Others energize you, push you, teach you something every single time you talk. Those are amplifiers.

When I was 17 I made a bunch of bad decisions and ended up in rehab for eleven months. I learned a lot about myself in there, but the most powerful thing they made us do at the end was build a transition plan. We had to decide who we were removing from our lives and what kind of people we needed to add, even if we didn’t know their names yet. If I hadn’t done that, I would not be here today. For me it was life or death.

That decision saved me at 17. It’s the same decision that scales founders at 40.

If your enemy puts sugar in your water, that won’t hurt you nearly as much as your friend accidentally putting poison in it.

Here’s how you run the inventory:

1. Write down the traits of the people who match where you’re going. The habits, the vibe. Mine are positive, driven, financially successful, kind. I love me a kind, driven person.
2. List everyone you’ve spent real time with in the last 60 days.
3. Sort them into two columns. Vampires on the left: the ones always asking you for something, or worse, the ones who make you feel bad when you share a win. Amplifiers on the right: the ones who pump you up, teach you things, bring you new ideas. Your amplifiers will almost always have the traits you’re trying to become. Everybody else is a vampire.
4. Adjust your time. Less with the vampires, more with the amplifiers. If your amplifier column is empty, go find them.

This is a tough one, because a lot of the names on that vampire list are family. Some are friends you’ve had for twenty years. I’m telling you anyway: creating some space and loving them from a distance will change your life.

Pro tip – run the same inventory on your feed. My rule is simple. If I saw this person in the mall, would I pretend not to see them? Then they’re a vampire. Unfollow. You don’t owe anybody a spot in your life because you sat next to them in grade seven.

Week 3: Install

Now you’ve got a vision and a clean junk drawer. Time to fill the space back up with the stuff that actually moves you.

Start by setting your thermostat. Every person has a thermostat for what they believe they’re allowed to have. When the number goes above or below what feels normal, you react. You put on weight, or your bank account gets bigger than you’re used to, and something in you pulls it back.

I hear people say they’re all in on visualization and positive mental attitude. Cool. If I stick you in a commercial-grade freezer, I don’t care how positive your attitude is, you’re going to feel cold. Environment wins.

Look at Lewis Hamilton. Seven-time world champion, one of the greatest ever, one of my favorite drivers. In 2025 he leaves Mercedes for Ferrari and suddenly he can’t win. Can’t even get a podium. He called it his nightmare. Same driver, same talent, different environment. He’s turned it around since, but that’s how much your environment matters. It can take amazing talent and make it great, or it can hold it back.

Last week you made the bad stuff hard to reach. This week you flip it and make the good stuff easy.

1. Put the good stuff in your path. Committing to the gym tomorrow morning? Lay the clothes and the shoes right next to your bed so you wake up and step into them. Need to drink more water? Fill the jug the night before and put it on your desk. Do something today that makes tomorrow’s decision easy.
2. Upgrade your inputs. I use social media to feed my mind. I’m building an AI venture studio to a billion dollars, so my whole feed is people building billion-dollar AI companies. Anybody who complains about things they can’t control gets muted or unfollowed. They just don’t make it into my world.
3. Get in rooms with people who already have what you want. This is the ultimate hack. I don’t care how successful you are, put yourself in a bigger room where you’re the low person on the totem pole and you will naturally rise to meet it.

Pro tip on getting into those rooms: don’t ask the person for the thing. Ask past them. “Hey, do you know anybody who could help me with X?” If they’re open, nine times out of ten they come back with “well, I could – what do you need?” And if they’re not, they just point you to someone who can. Nobody feels put on the spot.

Get this right and doing the right thing stops being hard. It doesn’t take discipline or willpower. It’s just automatic.

Then lock in your non-negotiables. The perfect environment with nothing you do daily inside it still gets you nowhere.

One piece of the coaching work I do is five daily non-negotiables. The question I asked myself building that program was: what could I ask a client to do every single day that, if they just did it, would guarantee their success whether or not they ever talked to me again?

Remember those habits from week one? Now we make them permanent. Because habits only go two directions. Either you’re doing them and your life is spiraling up, or you skip one and you start slowly spiraling down.

That’s why I have a rule: I never skip the gym more than two days in a row. Years of this. One day of travel, no problem. Two days in a row, no chance. That’s the whole difference between people who change and people who don’t.

Here’s how you turn a habit into a non-negotiable:

1. Pick one or two for each area. Mind, body, business. Straight out of the “do” list from week one.
2. Start embarrassingly simple. One page of your book. One short workout. One call to somebody you don’t know. So small you’ll just do it because it seems dumb not to. You’re building momentum, not proving anything.
3. Habit stack them. Attach each one to something you already do. You take vitamins and you brush your teeth, so the vitamins go next to the toothbrush. I keep a Kindle next to my hot tub, so every time I get in the hot tub, I read.
4. Put rewards and stakes on them. This is my favorite part.

When I ran Project Visible Abs, I had real stakes. Ninety days to lose 32 pounds, and if I missed it I’d committed publicly to entering a fitness competition exactly as I was. No tan. No shaving my chest. Straight up on stage in a mankini. I did not want that. Luckily my desire to keep those photos off the internet was bigger than the pain of getting visible abs. The reward on the other side was a new supercar, and I’ll tell you the truth: I did more to avoid the thing I didn’t want than to get the thing I did.

I run this constantly. Last year in my media company, me and Sam and Todd set a goal of 8.8 million followers across all platforms. If we missed, all three of us were putting our Porsches on the line. Actual cars. Right up until the last day it was a question mark. But it kept every one of us aligned. The upside was I bought them some very cool Rolexes. The downside was losing the car, and none of us wanted that.

Week 4: Track

Everything’s built. This is exactly where most people fall off, so let’s make sure it isn’t you.

Setting all this up is the easy part. I said four weeks, but honestly you could do most of it in 45 minutes. Sticking with it for six months is the hard part, and the reason people don’t is almost always the same: they never tracked it.

Most people don’t quit because they failed. They quit because they can’t see that they’re winning. They never stop to look back at how much elevation they gained climbing the mountain. All they see is the gap between here and the summit.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Seeing the proof stack up is the thing that keeps you going.

1. Pick one north star metric. The single number that proves you’re moving. Weight. Revenue. Pages read. Workouts done. One. Not twenty. Pick the leading indicator, because when it moves everything else falls in line behind it.
2. Build a daily scorecard. A simple spreadsheet with the handful of activities that feed the north star. Log it at the same time every day, no exceptions. Mine is in my calendar. It’s the last thing I do before I close the laptop.
3. Do a weekly check-in. Every Friday, the last thing I do is review my week against my calendar, my time and my energy. Then I pick one or two moves for next week. Not fifteen. One or two, installed.

Those tiny daily wins feel like nothing on day one. Do them three, four, five, six days in a row and you will feel completely different about yourself. Most people have never gone to the gym eight days in a row. They take a rest day. From what? You’re not even sore. Eight days in a row is where momentum starts and identity gets built.

Pro tip: share the progress publicly. I’ve done this over and over. 75 Hard, post the photo. Ironman training, post the photo. Project Visible Abs, post the videos. Make it so you can’t hide.

Sunlight sanitizes all things. It sanitizes bad habits and it covers for willpower you don’t have.

The Loop

Here’s the twist nobody sees coming.

This isn’t a one-time thing. You set it up over four weeks, you live it for six months, and then you run the whole thing again. Envision. Delete. Install. Track.

Except this time you dream bigger. You ask what more you’re capable of and who you need to become next.

A life well-lived is a life well-examined. This is how you examine it.

Don’t wait for New Year’s Eve. The calendar was never the point. Six months is six months whether it starts in January or on a random Tuesday in July.

Do this and stack the wins, and in six months you’ll wake up in a completely different life.

So here’s my ask: what’s the first thing you’re going to delete this week?

-DM