What if the “game of life” is simply how you structure your waking hours? In this Daily Podcast, Jonathan Doyle unpacks Eric Berne’s insight—“the eternal problem of the human being is how to structure their waking hours”—and shows how small, repeatable routines compound into purpose, prosperity, and service. You’ll learn practical ways to design mornings, defeat distraction, and turn everyday choices into long-term results for your health, relationships, work, and impact.

You’ll learn

• Why routine beats willpower in a world of infinite options
• The compounding effect: how daily choices aggregate into your future
• A simple blueprint for mornings (move, pray/reflect, hydrate, plan)
• How to align success with service—use your gifts to bless others

Try this today: Audit one hour, remove one distraction, install one repeatable habit.

Connect: IG @jdoylespeaks | YouTube Jonathan Doyle Speaks | jonathandoyle.co

SEO keywords: time management, daily routine, productivity, personal development, motivation, entrepreneurship, habits, morning routine, focus, discipline, compounding, self-improvement, purpose, service

Enquire about booking Jonathan to speak:

https://jonathandoyle.co/

Book a coaching call with me now

https://jonathandoyle.co/

Jonathan is on Youtube here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpCYnW4yVdd93N1OTbsxgyw

Karen's MasterClass for Women is here:

https://bit.ly/geniusmasterclasskaren

hey there, my friend Jonathan Doyle with you once again.

Welcome back to the Daily Podcast.

I am pleased you are here.

You ready?

Let's you and I get on this journey of personal growth and development

because it is the best game in town.

What better game could there be than trying to daily, in small

ways or large improve your life?

Why?

So you can bless more people.

That is the ultimate goal.

You win the game of life by fully developing and actualizing your

unique talents and abilities in love and service of other people.

That's pretty much my take.

I'm just jumping straight into it today, but I think that's what a

successful full life looks like.

It's got something to do with taking the raw material that you've been given.

And making something outta that raw material, not just for yourself, but

in a way that blesses other people.

I'm deeply convinced that the best days of your life, the times when you go to sleep

and feel happiest about everything, will be the times when you have lived well.

Done something cool with your skills and abilities and you've loved people.

I don't know if you had that experience, you just go to sleep

and go, that was a good day.

Like you did good stuff with good people.

I don't think there's much more that you could enjoy.

I was talking to my kids the other day about Charles Dickens, Christmas Carol.

It's explaining the story to them and you look at that character, Ebenezer

Scrooge who Dickens uses as such an incredible exemplar of the human story.

Somebody that had the money.

The success, but had this deep unhappiness.

And the good news is, especially from this podcast, is that you can have the

money and the success and the happiness.

You can, you actually can have that.

Now, I'm not saying that everybody will, or that even that everybody wants that.

But this idea that, if you are successful, if you develop your talents,

if you do really well, that you know you're gonna be, you'll be unhappy,

or that there's some problem with it.

I don't think that's true.

I think that success and whether it's financial reward are often byproducts of

just really developing what you've been given and using it to serve other people.

That was just a random introduction to today's message

from the author Eric Byrne.

I came across this and just thought, gosh, that is so good, and it

describes part of my life, and maybe this will be helpful for you.

He says this super simple.

He says, the eternal problem of the human being is how to structure.

Their waking hours.

The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure their waking hours.

That's good.

Why?

Because as I said, I think on Monday we live in this era of

weapons of mass distraction.

Okay.

Weapons of mass distraction.

Your distraction Could be a 2-year-old, it could be a 2-year-old child.

It could be a 2-year-old Labrador, it could be Instagram, it could be any number

of problems, but we're all distracted.

I think we have these, so many things coming at us, and one of the interesting

things about late modernity that we live in late post postmodernity is the sheer.

Level of options that we have on any single day.

I always talk about this, like the world that we inhabit at the moment is

really new in global history up until at least the industrial revolution.

So we're talking post 1860 into the early 20th century.

Very few people.

Had any choice around most of their life.

If you were super wealthy and had options, it was really only because

you were usually born into it.

So most people lived in the same village.

They worked in the same village, they did the same jobs, and

life was pretty predictable.

Like you know it, for better or worse, it was just, tomorrow looked

pretty much like today and yesterday looked pretty much like today.

But one of our challenges now is we live in these incredibly

technologically complex societies where.

There's any number of things we could do.

Yes, I guess most of us have to go to work somewhere, and we've got other

certain responsibilities of every day.

But what I like about this quote, let's hear it again, the eternal problem of

the human being is how to structure their waking hours, is, I think what

he's really getting at is you have this option of what you actually do in

that 16 or so hours that you're awake.

And we have a lot more options than we think.

And I just wanna give you a couple of thoughts.

I think the first main thing is just to give you some power back.

Just to go, you know what?

You actually do have quite a bit of choice over what you do in

any given period, any single day.

What you eat, how hydrated you are, how much sleep you get, whether you

develop social contact with people that you love or you don't, whether

you read something good, whether you prioritize exercise, you have almost

endless optionality on any given day.

That's a really interesting thing, and I think it's one of those things

that surrounds us and it's just so ongoing that we don't stop and go.

What do I want my life to look like?

Like how can the success of your life be anything other than what happens on the

due to the compounding effect of each day?

Your financial health, your physical health, your relational health, your

spiritual health can only ever be the compounded outcome of what you're

doing on any given individual day.

I'll give you an example.

If you get up every day, do no exercise and eat 10 donuts every single day, you

will get a compounded result and it will not be a compounded result that you like.

If you get up every day, have have a great sort of start to your day.

You exercise, you hydrate, you do these different things.

You have some time for prayer, then you get a different kind

of compounded effect over time.

So the decisions that we make about what we do with the days that are given

to us each day is pretty significant.

So my, and the second thing I wanted to say, so the first thing is just

to realize how significant it is that you need to structure what you do in a

day and second, the power of routine.

The, we've talked about this in many episodes, that so much of our

behavior, one of the things our brain does, distortion deletion.

We tend to try and remove complexity by developing sort of repetition.

So habitual behaviors help us because if every single day we had to relearn

how to brush our teeth or we had to rediscover that, brushing our teeth

was even important, that's a problem.

So your brain starts to look for these shortcuts, these hacks, these things

that it just does automatically.

So routine can be so powerful.

So my current routine, it has changed a little bit over the

years, but I'm a super early riser.

I'm a 3:30 AM 4:00 AM kind of guy.

I'm not saying you should be.

I'm just saying that's I go to bed early.

I'm a very much morning guy at the moment.

I've got my coffee machine, which is on a timer, so by the time I wake

up, it's fully charged and heated.

I have a coffee.

I maybe spend five or 10 minutes just waking up, hydrating,

and then I'm out training.

So whether it's pits, black, whatever, I'm running, walking, rocking, doing whatever

I'm doing, and my day starts that way.

And then I have time for prayer.

So straight away those things are just built in.

So my structure, my waking hours, I don't have this perfect.

I'm sure there's other parts of the day that I don't do as well, but.

These are these structures.

These routines are very powerful, and you do find this in the literature.

You do find that successful, happy, influential people tend to

have very predictable routines, particularly morning routines.

So one more time.

The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure.

They're waking hours.

So my invitation to you today is just to think about this time wasting.

There's definitely times when you should enjoy life.

You can chill.

You just, you don't have to just, you can have days when things are a

bit more laid back, but in general, you've got this one precious life.

And so we want to be disciplined.

We want to be awake and aware about how we're using that time.

Why?

Because what other game is there?

What other game really is there than developing these beautiful gifts and

talents that you have living a full human life and blessing and loving other people?

What other game is worth playing?

And it seems to me that's the game we're being asked to play, isn't it?

What leads to a full, happy, successful human life?

Using your talents and abilities, building beautiful relationships with

your people that you care about and friends and God and just living fully.

And to do that, you don't wanna just burn your days and waste them.

Alright, so get after today.

Homework.

Look at the structure.

What are your day?

What are you doing?

Build some structure in.

I know it's not easy if you haven't done a lot of it, it's not gonna

be easy, but it is possible.

How many years have I said that?

It's never easy, but it is possible.

Alright, please make sure you subscribe.

Hit that subscribe button.

Grab your phone, come and say hi on Instagram.

J Doyle speaks up on YouTube at Jonathan Doyle Speaks and

everything else is on the website.

Jonathan Doyle dot co.co.

You can book me to speak.

You can book me for consultancy projects and coaching.

Jonathan doyle.co.

God bless you my friend.

This has been the Daily Podcast and you and I are gonna talk again tomorrow.