Ep. #234: Why Work-Life Balance Is BS, 3 Books Everyone Should Read, My Daily Routine, and More…

[00:00:00] Put in the time, suffer through whatever it is that you have to suffer through, then who knows what you’re capable of.

Hey everybody, Mike here, back with another episode of the muscle for life podcast. And if you’ve ever wondered what a day in the shoes of yours truly is really and if you ever wondered how I generally think about and approach my work and life and my priorities on the whole, then I think you’re in for a serious disappointment because it’s probably not nearly as glamorous or insightful as you might think.

Seriously though this episode Is actually an interview that I did with a guy named Dan Bradbury for his podcast, which is called the business growth podcast. And I actually thought that you all might find it interesting. So here it is. And in this interview, Dan and I talk [00:01:00] about various things, including what really gets in the way of us realizing our full potentials as individuals.

What my daily routine looks like these days. What books have most helped me in my career and helped me build businesses. What are my most important pieces of advice for people who want to grow their businesses and more. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in.

So instead, I’m just going to quickly tell you about something of mine. Specifically my 100 percent natural greens supplement Genesis. Now Genesis is a very unique combination of greens, superfoods, adaptogens, herbs, and other phytonutrients that have been proven to increase immunity, heart and circulatory health, energy levels, libido.

mood and more. Genesis is also naturally sweetened in flavors and contains no artificial food dyes, fillers, or [00:02:00] other unnecessary junk. And all that is why it has over 200 views on Amazon with a four star average and another 150 plus on my website also with a four star average. So if you want to be healthier, feel better, train harder, And increase your immunity and longevity.

Then you want to head over to www. legionathletics. com and pick up a bottle of Genesis today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps use the coupon code podcast at checkout, and you will save. 10 percent on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100 percent money back guarantee that works like this.

You either love my stuff or you get your money back period. You don’t have to return the products. You don’t have to fill out forms. You don’t have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans. So you really can’t [00:03:00] lose here. Head over to www. legionathletics. com now, place your order, and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet.

And if for whatever reason, they’re just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot. Alrighty, that is enough shameless plugging for now at least. Let’s get to the show. Hey, Mike, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Dan. There’s so many areas I want to dive into, but a great place I want to start is, I know from being an avid follower and listener of yours, that not only have your various companies grown rapidly, but you’ve done all this while having a family.

So you’ve got two young kids and yet Legion at least, I believe is now at. Eight figure revenues. You haven’t even pressed the gas pedal when it comes to paid advertising yet. Just a broad question to start is, how the hell do you manage to pull all this off? What’s the secret sauce? I know a lot of our listeners constantly struggling to, how do they do the whole family [00:04:00] business thing simultaneously?

Mostly just cocaine, just a lot of cocaine. No it’s, I guess that comes down to that life work balance thing which I think is mostly just a myth. You can’t have everything. That’s just life. You can’t have it all. You can choose what you want. If you want to have a vibrant social life, and if you want to have a lot of free time, you can have a good relationship with your family, but it’s, it, the more you’d have a better relationship if you put more time into it, of course.

So things that you have to choose, what are you willing to sacrifice? So for me, for example, a lot of that has just come down to time. Especially in the first couple of years, because, so it started with books and then Muscleful Life came into the picture and then Legion came into the picture. And and then the app came into the picture.

And all have been moving simultaneously and the workload has increased exponentially. And so for me personally, that means that in the beginning, let’s see, when we started, yeah, Lennox was a baby. So my son was there and I was working probably on average, let’s say [00:05:00] 70 hours a week. Let’s just say on average, and which meant basically 10 to 12 hours Monday through Thursday, sometimes Friday you Fridays, I’d usually end a little bit early and then usually some work on Saturday and work all Sunday was the standard schedule.

So yeah, that meant that I didn’t have a social life. I didn’t really take time to hang out with friends. Maybe I saw friends here and there. Maybe on a Saturday afternoon or Friday night. And that was the, just how it went for several years. I have some time with my wife, but not very much.

And I wouldn’t have very much time with my son, which I look back on it now. I wouldn’t say I regret it, but I’m intentionally spending a bit more time at least as I, whenever I can, even if it’s just like with my daughter, cause she’s six months old right now. And even if it’s just like strapping her in on the baby Bjorn when I’m making dinner and just to spend time with her.

Cause I didn’t spend much time with Lennox when he was a baby. It’s a cute time. It’s something that at the time I was just doing what I was doing, but I look back at it now and I’m like, eh, I wish I would have spent a little bit more time with him as a [00:06:00] baby. So again, I just think that it comes down to how much pain are you willing to take?

And that’s yeah. If you want to build a few businesses and altogether yeah, Legion, Legion did eight figures in sales and the other businesses are seven figure businesses and that’s great. And it’s great financially, but for me, it’s not just about money. I just genuinely enjoy working and I genuinely enjoy building businesses and just winning, just doing things that work.

It’d probably be that way regardless of whatever field I was working in just cause I just like the game. Unfortunately, I don’t have any great life hacks that I can’t say that. Again, I have everything. A lot of people would not enjoy my life. And I’ve had that discussion with people that I’ve known or that I know where they see success and they see the trappings of success.

They either say they wish they were in my position. Or maybe even are a bit, a little bit weird about it, jealous or envious. And, but I’ve had that discussion. I’m like, trust me, you don’t [00:07:00] want my life. You don’t want my life. Come and hang out with me for a month and you will quit by week two.

You will quit because you’re not sleeping that much. You’re working a shitload. And also on top of that, in the gym every day, putting in work there, which is at this point, part of my job description. And you can forget about Netflix, might as well just cancel your Netflix. Cause you’re not going to have any time for it anyway.

You can forget about hanging out, meeting up with friends. Maybe you’ll have a couple hours here or there once a week, basically. Yeah, so that’s just a, that’s just a choice that I made, but I made it consciously. I didn’t Just fall into a trap laid by myself. This was a conscious choice in the future.

I always, because I like to work at all, I’ll always be that type of person, but I probably will put a bit more time into my family in the future, but while I’m doing what I’m doing right now, because I think it’s going to set me up nicely for the future. I like it a lot, Mike. It’s fascinating.

I’ve as I mentioned before, I’ve been a fan of yours and followed and listened to your material and read your books for a couple of years now. And I feel like kindred [00:08:00] spirits because the listeners of this podcast know I’m a numbers freak. I like measuring things. I like the science behind things.

And I think especially in the fitness industry, it’s notorious for bullshit. Yeah. And what I like especially with muscle for life, but with Legion is just, is the science behind it and that how you debunk a lot of those myths that fitness businesses, purport in order to sell their wares.

There’s definitely an expedience there. Like lying makes it easier in this industry in particular to make easy money. Cause if you can just prey on people’s insecurities and you can prey on their desire for the quick fix, the instant gratification, if you can promise that in a pill or a powder or a program, it makes it a lot easier to make money.

Yeah. It’s funny because I want to tie back to business, but I know that. It’s fascinating to me how whenever you are discussing various legion supplements on a podcast, for example, you’ll always very clearly state that it can help support muscular development, for example, but it’s the minority.

There’s no [00:09:00] substitute. It’s supplemental by definition, right? So I’m curious. Cause you’ve now built multiple businesses to a decent size. What are some of the biggest lies that you hear preached in the world of business? What are some of the falsities that are sold in orders for the so called gurus to sell their business development wares?

That’s an interesting question. I’m not versed in that space. Honestly, I’ve read a fair amount of a fair number of. Business books and marketing books in particular over the years. Some, I liked more than others, but on the whole, I would say a lot of them are giving good advice, but they were books like the lean startup, good book.

I recommend anybody, that’s building a business to read that book, scaling up good book. It hits you with an overwhelming amount of information. I think. The primary purpose of that book is try to sell you on consulting. But if you can face the sheer amount of things that book says you should be doing and just tackle them one at a time, you can get a ton of value out of it.

So I’m not quite sure because I really don’t [00:10:00] like the kind of want your preneur space. The people that just talk about. Wanting to do one thing or another or wanting to chasing the Tim Ferriss lifestyle, I guess like that crowd is just not my kind of crowd. So I don’t pay attention to that space at all.

But I would say from just my personal experience, knowing people over the years that have had big ambitions, but failed to realize them. I would say the most common things that the biggest things that have gotten in the way and kept them from. Achieving the level of success that I think that they actually could have achieved.

Like I’m thinking of a few people in particular that I really do think that they could be much further in their career than they are now. I would say one not well, if we’re just to start first that not capable of really working hard, definition of hard work, I would say probably starts at 50 to 60 hours of real work per week.

Not that’s not 50 to 60 hours of sitting at a desk. And [00:11:00] going to Twitter every five minutes. No, real work, like focused. Some people would say you can’t do that much quote unquote deep work per week. And I actually probably would tend to agree with that. Even I myself, I think I’m above average in my ability to just work.

And if we’re talking about deep work that requires deep focus, like writing in particular, researching and writing I would say 30 or 40 hours a week is where I at least start to, I start to notice a drop off in my performance. I can keep going, but I can feel that it is, it’s not as productive per unit of time as it, is in the first 30 ish hours, but you can still keep going.

But regardless, there are other tasks. That’s why I like to block my time and look at it also, not just in terms of performance. Managing my time in an absolute sense, but also managing my energy. Again, I’m, I think I’m a fairly high energy person, but as the day goes on, depending on what I’m doing, you just, your energy reserves are not unlimited.

And so save the more, Mundane routine stuff for your lower energy periods, like [00:12:00] email, for example, email is a, is obviously that’s not deep work. That’s more just, it’s something you got to do. It’s a chore. So I would include stuff like that in that number of work. And even let’s say reading. If you’re researching for something that’s work.

So again, inability to work hard. I see it all the time. Just inherent laziness, unable to break free of that. I just, I’m inherently a cynical person and I just there, there’s a joke in my group of friends that like some people could, sure you can go, they could go read a hundred books and they could listen to a thousand podcasts and they might, they could go get hundreds and thousands of hours of therapy to try to deal with this one issue alone of inability to work.

Just too lazy. Can’t put in the time to distract the bull. Can’t just make a decision and push it through and make it happen no matter what, regardless of how much time and effort it’s going to take. Maybe a more effective therapy would just be like, just drop them in a [00:13:00] rain forest. With nothing. And if they figure out how to survive, that’s a changed person right there.

Like it’s just that necessity level. They just don’t have the necessity level. And again, I’m thinking of very specific people. So I don’t mean this as a generalization on everybody, but I’ve just seen this many times where it’s like, Necessity, right? It’s the mother of all invention. And if the necessity level is high enough, we can do extraordinary things.

You have stories of women basically deadlifting cars off of their kids and shit like that. That’s just a pure physical, that’s because the necessity level in that moment is so high, you either are going to do that or your kid is going to die. All of a sudden you’re Superman for five minutes or five seconds.

So I think that we’re also capable of things like that psychologically. You could say even spiritually, but the question is, can you impose that on yourself or does it need to be externally imposed upon you? And unfortunately, many of the people, again, that I feel have just unrealized potential.

They’re not good at [00:14:00] imposing that necessity level on themselves. They’re not good at really putting the amount of pressure that it takes to push away all the distractions and all the reasons to give up and not try very hard and just turn to decadence instead and just keep going, especially when it involves doing a lot of things that you don’t like to do.

That’s a big part of. Being successful is, and I think another thing that I’ve seen that gets in the way of a lot of people is just, they’re not willing to do the shit that they don’t like. They’re not willing to do the stuff they don’t want to do. And I’ve seen this a lot with creative types where they can be pretty amazing creatively, actually, but.

But they don’t want to have anything to do with the business side of things that it just is confusing to them. It’s not fun. It’s not interesting. It doesn’t stimulate them. They don’t want to have anything to do with the marketing side of things and they struggle and they wonder why they struggle. And again, I’ve had conversations and I’ve straight upset.

Like it’s just because you’re bad at business and you’re bad at marketing. If you were half as good at business as marketing and marketing as you were at your creative [00:15:00] art, you would be a millionaire. I’ve given specific. I was like, dude, if I were you, here’s exactly what I would do. I guarantee you, this would work.

And in a couple of cases, I would lay it out a little thing. This is exactly what I do. I do this, and this. And I would just rinse and repeat that until I have a customer base, basically buying my stuff. And in some cases people have said one person, I laid it out. And it’s Oh yeah, there’s another dude doing exactly that in my space.

And he makes a shit ton of money and he gets to do whatever he wants to do. Actually he just has a smart little business. I like then you already knew what, just go do it then. You know what I mean? Like it’s right there. And then it’s I don’t know, it might not work. You start getting into the effort.

It’s the effort. It’s too much effort. And again, I just think if you can’t get over that, if things are just, everything feels too hard and you can’t push yourself through that, then just. Stop. Just get a job. Just why go through the whole, if you can’t suffer enough and you don’t have the pain threshold to make it through, I just don’t [00:16:00] understand why fight the fight.

If you’re going to fight it, but don’t like just sit in this. Or you’re not really doing anything and you’re just feeling bad for yourself and you wish you had more, but you’re not really willing to do what it takes to get more. You know what I mean? It just doesn’t make sense to me.

Yeah. No, I’m curious. You’ve already alluded to that. Have you read principles by Ray Dalio? Have you come across that? Yeah. I read it. I finished it a couple of weeks ago. Actually. I liked it a lot. It’s obviously a bit long, a bit belabored but a lot of great information. Like I really respect him.

I like his perspective on things. That’s a book that I would recommend that everybody read. It’s a slog because it could have been probably half the size, but that’s okay. Yeah. He was trying to, he was trying to get his life’s work down on paper. But yeah, the reason why I said that is I feel that.

For anybody that’s listening that’s not remotely interested in health and fitness, you’ve got to go and subscribe to some of Mike’s, read some of his articles and go and subscribe to his podcast. Cause [00:17:00] how I came across you Mike, and you don’t know this, it was purely by referral. I was literally a couple of years ago, was in my office and said, Hey, to somebody in my office.

I said, Miles, I’m looking for a good health and fitness podcast. What would you recommend? And he recommended your podcast. And then subsequently, I started consuming your material and ended up becoming a customer sometime later. But when I look at it, I’ve now subsequently referred. Yeah. You and now most of our offices has bought some either Legion or Muscle for Life some of your books that there’s a whole plethora of it that goes around our office and our wider community.

It feels like your business is really referable because you churn out just, in my opinion, consistently a high volume of really good content. So my question was, I’m curious. For those listening, they might go I’m not an author. I don’t want to be an author. How does this relate to me is what are the grounding principles?

Hence the Dalio tie in what are the grounding principles or philosophies that have driven your growth? Cause [00:18:00] the company’s growing and it’s growing, rapidly and keeps moving forward. And it feels if anything, you’re just getting momentum. What are the principles that underlie that? Yeah.

Yeah. I’ll answer that. Let me first though, add just because I know, again, I sound pretty pessimistic and cynical and there’s definitely a part of me that is that way, but I want to add to the kind of maybe down note on everything I just said, the upside of that is if you can, I think if you can get to that point where you’re willing.

To do whatever it takes, put in the time, suffer through whatever it is that you have to suffer through, then who knows what you’re capable of. And that applies to me, applies to everybody. And, it’s a very Jordan Peterson thing to say, but I really do agree with it. We have no idea what our capabilities are.

we can say for a fact that they are much higher than our current state. That’s the big payoff of embracing again, that. I stark reality of hard work and doing the shit you don’t want to do, and just [00:19:00] suffering through and viewing that as a challenge, not as something negative and putting a positive spin on it and just putting a smile on your face every day and doing the things that you know are going to contribute to at least the high probability plays that are most likely to get you to where you want to be.

And, one of the things just to answer your previous question in terms of obstacles, So there’s the hard work, the willingness to do things that suck basically. And hopefully over time the emotional charge from them just dissipates. And you don’t really think about it much anymore.

Like I do a lot of things that are just chores. That’s really what they are. A lot of my work these days is chores. It feels like chores, but I’m emotionally neutral about them. I don’t, Think though, this sucks when I’m doing it. I just know this is what needs to get done to get me one step closer to this bigger picture, this bigger goal that’s three to five years out in the future.

So I could care less whether I feel inherently drawn toward, I could care less. How inherently stimulating it is. I’m gonna do it and I’m gonna put a smile on my face because I know that this is the type of thing. [00:20:00] That most people don’t want to do because it’s not very fun inherently. And that’s, those are the things though, that have the greatest potential for payoff usually.

And one other thing is getting very good at something. That’s something that again, a lot of people I’ve seen that I feel like they could have been more successful. Then they are, or were is they didn’t get really good at something that has a lot of commercial value, a single skill, let’s just start there.

And in my case, for example, if I were to boil it all down, what’s my. Best, most marketable saleable skill, probably writing, probably content creation. I’m good at researching and I’m good at explaining things in a way that’s clear and practical and that resonates with people. I’m good at communicating, I guess is what it comes down to.

And at least in written form, I think I’m okay in spoken. Dialogue like this, but I’m better. I haven’t studied. I haven’t practiced rhetoric, for example. So I’m, I think I’m better as a writer. [00:21:00] And from there, I would say, I’m also a good marketer and I’m a good copywriter. So those are skills, like very specific skills, things that I’ve gotten very good at.

And, I’m always trying to improve. I would say. By my own estimation, I’m good. I wouldn’t even say that I’m very good. And so maybe I approach very good in certain little subsets of those things, but on the whole, I would say I’m good and I’m good enough to, again, and that started everything that I’ve done and that my team, it’s not just me.

I have 20 people, so I’m not, I can’t take all the credit, but everything that we’ve done did start. With books, and I was able to write a book, bigger, leaner, stronger is where it started that resonated that helped people. They started talking about it. It got results. So for anybody out there that is trying to find their way, I understand.

I was there myself at one point, but my personal journey started with a book. One, I was always willing to do the work. I was never one to try to look for the shortcut or look for the get something for nothing or the hacks or I didn’t mind hard work. I didn’t mind putting in time. I didn’t mind grinding.

I [00:22:00] didn’t mind suffering a bit. Maybe I learned that through osmosis growing up because my Dad is a successful entrepreneur and I saw firsthand, some of the shit he went through and he just kept going and I grew up playing sports and I was pretty into it. And so I got used to, just that type of highly competitive environment where you either put up or you are put out basically.

So anyways, I just wanted to, I just wanted to say that there is the positive of, if you can really just embrace it. It’s unpalatable. I understand these things are pretty unpalatable. They’re like medicine. If you embrace it, they’re very empowering and they give you, it just gives you a huge advantage over the people who are more of the blue sky.

It’s just over the years, I’ve met a lot of people where it’s just cliche. I guess some people where they say they’re going to do things. And when I really get down to it though, and I really started drilling in you. What are you actually doing? Where’s your actual plan? Where is this leading and where’s your time going [00:23:00] as much as I would like to say, okay, keep going.

You’re going to make it like, nah, they’re not like if I had to put money on it, I just honestly, and that’s, if I had to put money on it, I would put money on failure just because. I don’t see the fundamentals there. I just don’t see it. Go back to a sports analogy, like a Belichick kind of or what was it?

There was a book. I didn’t read it. It’s on my list. 49ers coach. I’m not good at football. I don’t know much football trivia, but famous 49ers when they were dominant, the coach and his focus was fundamentals work on the fundamentals of the game. Don’t even worry about winning. If you get the fundamentals the winning comes approach.

So if you don’t, if I don’t see that in a business. I immediately just yeah, this will probably fail because the fundamentals aren’t there. Big thoughts and fucking dream boards. And, all that shit doesn’t mean anything. You know what I mean? So anyways, to your question on the principles and specifically on the content.

So that has been a pillar obviously of each of the businesses and it remains one so much so that. That’s my primary [00:24:00] focus. We, I just wrapped up recently, our yearly planning and we get pretty granular now because we have a few businesses and we have, there’s lots, just a lot of moving parts.

And we really want to make sure that we have everything planned out, everything timelined. We don’t go down to like the day per se, but we go down to end of week. So yeah. If we’re looking at it in terms of weekly sprints on all the different fronts that we are advancing on what gets done by whom.

So in looking at that, like the focus, my focus is on content creation, because that’s, I think my highest and best use of time. One of the things has been to consistently put out very good content. And there’s also behind that is a lot of research. There’s a life put in a lot of time, also educating myself about things.

I don’t just sit down to write an article and just turn it loose and just see what comes. There’s in some cases, a lot of preparation in some cases I’ve done it. I’ve already done the research and I have to dig through my PubMed and make sure I have the studies and I can put it all together, But the article writes itself, [00:25:00] but in other cases, I’ve gone into articles, say I get asked a question quite a bit, and I’m not sure, like I wrote an article, what comes to mind is this might’ve been six months ago is dairy bad for you, right?

I know that if I just give a quick answer, it’s no, it’s not bad for you unless you are lactose intolerant or unless you’re just having way too much of it, like anything, but. To really write that article, I had to do quite a bit of research and I have a research assistant. She’s a PhD student at Oxford, smart girl, and she has a great job combing through the literature and putting together a good summary and then sending, the papers over to me so I can look at everything.

So sometimes it might be 10 or 15 hours of research before I feel Confident that I can write a good article. And so again, it’s just being willing to do that. And another big thing that has helped a lot is being very accessible and being willing to help people without asking for anything. So since the beginning, I have.

Always been available via email, via social media, better via email, just because I hate social media DMS, like on my phone, I [00:26:00] need to get like a Bluetooth keeper. It actually enrages me where I’m trying to say something and it’s auto correcting me. And it’s so slow. It feels so inefficient where sometimes I’ll ask people to email me if they have a long question or the answers are like, Could you please email this to me?

Because it’s a lot faster, but that’s been huge. That the fact that people can email me and yes, they, at this point, they’re going to have to wait probably seven to 10 days to get a response. Cause I get a lot of emails but they will hear back. And in some cases in the past, it would be, that would be like four to five hours of every day would just be doing emails and social media.

Now I have someone that helps because. Some of the, a lot of the questions are very simple. Someone can jump in and just be like, Hey, I work with Mike and just want to make sure you got an answer to this. But a lot of them need to come to me because they’re communications directly to me or, the person helping isn’t quite sure he wants to make sure that the person gets the right answer.

So I still, every day I’m answering emails, I’m answering social media messages, and that will never change [00:27:00] because it’s just. especially for generating word of mouth. I think that’s probably, it’s just very unusual, especially in the fitness space where you have a bunch of weird, narcissistic, neurotic people that don’t really care about their following.

It’s just unusual to be able to send an email to someone like me, who doesn’t have to like, yeah, I don’t have to do that, but I like to do it because I know it’s very helpful. So that’s been a big thing. It makes sense as well. I think Because if you think about it logically, on previous episodes of this show we’ve spoken and we’ve had people like Jay Abraham on and Ryan Dice.

And when we’ve spoken about referrals being typically a much more likely to buy and spend more money because that, and if I just think of the dialogue about how we engage in conversation, it’s ultimately because you responded to an email from one of my team who liked your content and he reached out to you and you reached out to him and that started a dialogue.

And then it just. further fulfills itself because now that’s ended up in us being on this podcast and I’m [00:28:00] sure, some of the guys listening to this are going to go and check you out and your books and your supplements, etc. And therefore it grows and they’re more like to buy then hence why the company is Or I’m talking about Legion specifically your supplement company has grown so much without there even really being any focus whatsoever on paid advertising.

That’s just, yeah, that’s been, now we’re really diving into paid and it’s going to be a pain in the ass in the beginning. It’s proving to be, but we’ll, we’ll figure it out. It’s just with any marketing endeavor, you have to try a lot of things and you have to whittle it down until you really start getting to the messages that resonate in the ads that resonate.

And it’s easy to create stuff that has a decent return. It’s hard to create stuff that has a decent or good return that you can scale to a big spend. Ideally we’d be spending. Shit, ideally we’d be spending a million dollars a month and paid, but even getting to a mid six figures a month spend profitably.

Yeah. It’s a pain in the ass. It takes time. So we’re working through it and I’d say, yeah, the primary reasons why [00:29:00] Legion has grown as quickly as it has are, obviously I had a bit of a following and a bit of a platform when we launched it. But from there, it’s been continuing to grow the platform.

So continuing to do things to sell more books, to grow muscle for life, started a blog at Legion, which is now getting, I want to say about 800, 000 visits a month, and that’s continuing to grow. And so again, that’s a grind. That’s a grind. There’s a lot of time that it’s just writing a lot of articles, doing your SEO, and waiting basically. And now that obviously is has really started to pay off. Another thing I would say is we’re really big on customer retention and having good company fundamentals. And one of that, sure. Customer acquisition is something we were very strong in the beginning through organic non paid.

Channels. Now we really have to, cause the big goal with Legion is 50 million a year in sales in the next three to five years. And that is very doable. I have that strategic plan laid out and it’s very conservative. And how do we get there? How do [00:30:00] we actually get there? One to 2 million a month from this channel, one to 2 million a month from this channel really broken down.

This is how we get there. And all of it is actually conservative. It’s not pie in the sky, best case scenarios at all, really. And you’re trying to say that you’re trying to say he’s not in your dream. I don’t have it. I don’t have it. I don’t have it. I meditate on it. It’s because I don’t, what do you put on a dream board?

You put stuff, I guess you put, usually it’s like a yacht and a Mick, a McMansion and a Rolls Royce. And I just don’t care about that stuff. I have nice things. Sure. And I like nice things, but. I’ve already in terms of income, right? So there’s, I’m sure you’ve come across that research that for most people, it’s what it’s about 80, 000 a year is where money, the utility value of money really starts to drop off.

It’s that diminishing returns, right? That number does not apply to me. It’s not applied necessarily to everybody. It really depends. Also, just even for example, it depends where you live. 80, 000 a year in Nebraska is different than 80, 000 a year in New York City. 80, 000 a year when you [00:31:00] are 20 years old is different than 80, 000 a year when you’re like me, like when you’re 33 with two kids.

That doesn’t apply to everybody, but the point is. Everybody has, there’s a point where you realize that more money doesn’t really do provide much in the way of satisfaction. I’m beyond that point. And now I don’t really care about income from the perspective of what can I buy with it?

Really? I guess my primary the reason why I care about income now is more, what can I do with it to set up My future in terms of passive income and, potentially other games that I’d like to play and so forth.

Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who [00:32:00] might enjoy it as well, Please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle4Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle4Life, and Facebook at Muscle4Life Fitness. Let’s talk daily routine, right? So a lot of people listen to this, and I used to think this way until three or four years ago, when actually I ended up buying my first it was a personal training studio, and I now own a couple of different fitness businesses, and I changed my beliefs around it.

But let’s talk about daily routine. A lot of the guys listening to this kind of feel like In order to make business work, they’d go, yeah Mike was just saying that I need to work all these 50, 60, 70 hour weeks, but how the hell can I do that? And can I keep my health in check and work out, et cetera.

And so how does your daily routine work? How do you make sure that you get off productive and don’t get caught down in the weeds with [00:33:00] 73, 000 emails and distracted by Facebook? Posts every three and a half seconds. Good question. So I wake up at five 30, sometimes six, depending on usually I’m going to sleep at 10.

Now. So previously my sleep, I wish I, a few years ago, I was even more like I was able to go to bed at 11 45. My alarm was at six 15 and that was it every day. And I would just fall asleep in five minutes and I’d wake up five minutes for my alarm every day. I was like a robot. I almost took it for granted.

Because I was just how that was just my normal for years. And now my sleep goes, I don’t know if it’s from having kids. I know this is like a thing that people say I’m just a lighter sleeper now. Like I’ll wake up a couple of times. I can always fall back asleep. So it’s not like an insomnia thing, but I’m also though, I looked at it in terms of, this is a good point in terms of health, where I was like, I was feeling better when I was going to bed at 1145 and my alarm was at 645.

I was in bed for seven hours every night and I would sleep, maybe I’d wake up once to pee or something, but I was getting on average [00:34:00] six and a half hours of sleep. And when I cut that down and then I even tried to cut it down further, I was like, eh, maybe I can do five and a half.

And I did that for several months. And I just had to face the fact like this winter, I didn’t get sick. I started, I got a bit of a headache, even with all the flu shit going around. Yeah. Whereas last winter I got sick a couple of times. I just was, I had to face that. I think my body needs more sleep and I know scientifically.

Yeah, it needs more sleep. I need to face that. Like just being able to mentally push through things. That’s not the, that’s not the, necessarily the smartest decision. So now I’m in bed, I would say on average seven and a half hours because again, now I usually wake up a couple of times at night, maybe to go pee and otherwise for no good reason.

I’ll go through a sleep cycle, I’ll come out of REM, my dream will finish and then I’ll wake up and then I’ll roll over and go back to sleep. So I just put a little bit more priority to getting sleep. So I’m in bed around 10. Usually I actually get in bed at nine 30 cause I like to read and so I’ll read for at least 30 minutes and, some in bed, let’s say nine to nine 30 for [00:35:00] reading.

Cause I also, I do listen to audio books earlier in the day and I do some reading. I like to get at least an hour of reading in a day. So I do that. I read. Digitally. So it’s convenient. That could be anywhere that I can get some pages in. So I’m up and then I’m in, I go straight to the gym.

I get my, I usually get my food together the day before. So I really, all I have to do is go to the bathroom and I’ve been taking cold showers for a year now. I actually wrote an article about it over at muscle for life. Long story short is there’s no real health benefit probably at all.

It’s, doesn’t increase testosterone. It doesn’t boost your immune system. Like yes, cold exposure can, but we’re talking about. A cold shower is not enough suffering for what you want, what people think that they’re getting out of it. If you want to, if we’re going to, and this is fresh in my mind, because I just recently looked at the literature to write this article.

For example, you’ll see among winter swimmers, usually you’re going to see stronger immune systems. You’re going to see less sickness generally. Yeah. Hardier. bodies, but you got to look at what those people are doing. They’re not taking three minute cold showers, they’re out 30 [00:36:00] plus minutes in the freezing cold swimming in and getting in the water, getting out of the water that even biologically makes sense.

Yeah, that shit hardens you. It does. There’s no question. So it’s not surprising. It’s where people have watched a Wim Hof documentary and they think if they turn the the shower down by two degrees for 30 seconds at the end, you know what, it’s actually funny though, because of the power of the placebo effect, there’s probably something just to that point alone where, because they think, even if it’s slight, just because they think, let’s say it’s, they’re going to get sick less often because yeah, they stand with 30 seconds of slightly cool water.

Who knows that alone might be enough to actually reduce sickness by some degree. But when you look at it strictly in an objective sense, no cold showers are not going to really do anything for your physiology, but let me just interrupt my, I feel like I, I remember that article and it was also on the podcast about the cold showers.

Cause I’d completely pulled the hype and I’ve been doing the whole cold shower thing, which is why I’m laughing just hearing tell the story, but what’s your opinion Just on a [00:37:00] complete tangent about I’ve read a little bit recently that suggested that you’ve got a human growth hormone spike from having a heat exposure.

So saunas specifically after resistance training, have you done any action on that? Yeah. I wrote an article on saunas. I, it was, it’s not legion. It’s on the legion blog and I wrote it over a year ago. So all the details aren’t fresh, But I would say to that point is no, there’s going to be nothing notable in that regard.

If I remember correctly, cause I went through as a fairly long article and through a number of points, for example, that was actually an article that Emma, my research assistant really helped with. Cause I hadn’t looked into sauna. I asked her, can she dig through the literature and pull some stuff that I can read some reviews and meta analyses and good clinical studies.

And I don’t remember anything along those lines. Yeah. anything that’s notable. And that’s also something that you have to keep in mind with any sort of natural intervention is the effect size. Even if that’s true, let’s say that’s true. Let’s say growth hormone does production because remember your body produces growth [00:38:00] hormone in spurts, right?

So it goes, it’s not constantly producing. It produces a lot of it for your first sleep cycle, right? Your first deep sleep cycles were actually a lot of, if you look at it in terms of the day where. Most of your growth hormone for the day is produced when you’re sleeping, but otherwise it pulses in phases.

So let’s just say that going into a sauna for a certain period of time does result in some growth hormone secretion. How much for how long and what’s the biological significance? Again, unfortunately, I don’t remember that point specifically. I don’t remember if I initially came across anything on that point specifically.

It would be in the article though, because it was pretty extensive. So the answer to that is probably, that’s not a, I wouldn’t bet on that as like a reason to go in the sauna now saunas are, or they do have some health benefits. I wrote an article recently on infrared sauna and I bought an infrared sauna primarily because I like the anti inflammatory effects for which there is good evidence simply because the less inflammation in your body generally The better that is.

Now, the reason why I say [00:39:00] generally is when we’re talking about muscle building, acute inflammation is actually good. You don’t want to blunt the inflammation after a workout, for example, because that’s part of the response that leads to muscle growth. And you can see evidence of that. For example, in research that shows, if I remember correctly, it was a couple months of a 10 minute ice bath.

It was like 10 to 12 weeks of a 10 minute ice bath after workouts, significantly. Decreased muscle and strength gain. The primary mechanism is the reduction of inflammation. So it’s good for if you’re a hardcore athlete, like if you’re a football player and you just went and destroyed your body in a game, which is what you do, you need though.

You have a week to recover now. And then you also have practices. Yeah. Yeah. You need to bring that inflammation down as quickly as possible. So that’s why you’ll see stuff like after the game, right into an ice bath. And then at the professional level, you have a lot of drugs as well. Like a lot of GH talking about GH, used to just, you wouldn’t be able to do take professional football.

You wouldn’t be able to do it without it. Especially certain positions, [00:40:00] impossible. Your body would literally just fall apart if you didn’t have the drugs. To that point, not really. But again, if you want to anybody listening, if they, if you want to learn about a bit of the science of sauna, just head over to legionathletics.

com search for sauna and you’ll see two articles that I wrote. You’ll see one on just sauna use in general and the other on infrared sauna in particular, which is a. Pretty, the technology is cool. And again, there’s good science behind it. Now it’s not quackery. I thought it was going into it. I was like, this is going to be complete bullshit, isn’t it?

And I ended up buying, I ended up buying one. I love it. I’ve got a few and I’ve made a note. I’m going to go and look at that. I’ve got like an easy myself buying a sauna later, but. Let me finish the routine though, just cause people might, I know people like that stuff. So that’s why I have a cold shower.

I just do three minutes cold, straight up, just go and freeze basically. Although now my cold tolerance is pretty good. I never really shivered much. And now it doesn’t really bother me. It hits me and I’m like, Oh, that’s cold. And then I don’t feel it after, I do Okay.

Hit my face and the front of my body and then hit the side and then the back and then back around. And I basically bring, I do about three minutes, three and a [00:41:00] half minutes to the point where I no longer dislike it basically. Or I’m just like, yeah, it’s just water. Like you almost get to a point, I don’t know if you’ve experienced that, especially during the winter when the water is really cold.

Cold. I’m in Virginia and we’ll have anywhere from, let’s say it’s 15 to 33 degrees outside. That’s cold water where it almost tricks your mind where you couldn’t quite tell, is this really cold or really hot? It just stings. I can’t really tell. You know what I mean? And so I do that.

And then I’m in the gym, usually arriving, let’s say 630 to 645. I’m in the gym for about an hour. Most of my workouts are 60 to 75 minutes. And then afterwards I get a coffee on the way to work. And then I get to work anywhere from let’s say 30. I’m at the office. And these days I’m here at the office.

I have my lunch with me. So that’s just like a five, 10 minutes, just eat it and get up, move on type of deal. And I’m working. I usually leave the office between six 30 and seven 30. And then I go home and prepare my food. I used to work at night, but I also used to leave the office a bit earlier when I was in Florida and I lived right down the road.

[00:42:00] So I just walk home. And so I was able to get some more work done at night because one, I was able to go to bed later. Cause I had an extra hour at night and two, I was getting home a bit earlier. By the time I was done eating, it was maybe 8 PM and I still have a good two hours or three hours, even that I could work.

Now I’m staying at the office. I’m getting the office a bit earlier. I’m staying a bit later. And so by the, I just don’t really have the time. Cause I, My wife is busy with the kids and so I make my own dinner, which is usually just a one pot vegetable type of thing where my diet is very, I’m very much into eating a lot of nutritious foods because I demand a lot from my body.

I do. I sleep a bit more now, so I’m giving it a bit more sleep, I’m in the gym five, six days a week. I’m working a lot in a lot of the work is I’m asking a lot of my brain, to just be on all the time. And even on the weekends are busy. It’s not like I’m, my body just doesn’t have that much downtime or that much rest beyond planned deloads.

So I figure that I need to support it with, as much [00:43:00] nutrition as possible. So my diet is very calculated. It’s obviously a high protein, high carb, moderate fat diet, but even the foods that I eat, I’ve chosen them intentionally for their nutritional value. So I’m eating several servings of fruit and vegetables per day.

I’m eating, sticking mostly to colorful fruits, strawberries blueberries, because the, there are compounds in the pigments, the, what gives them their color that are particularly good for you. I’m eating. Greens. So like usually it’s spinach several handfuls of spinach is for my dark leafy greens, as well as some red or green lettuce.

I’m for my fats getting most of them from olive oil, avocado and nuts and the avocado and nuts are because they’re rich in mono unsaturated fat. Which is the best that’s really the best single form of dietary fat. And then my protein is mostly coming from lean meat and then also some protein powder, some whey, and then also some vegan powder.

I have also a little bit of dairy. So my diet is well rounded and very nutritious which matters a lot. If I were [00:44:00] to. Let my diet go to shit. I wouldn’t be able to do, I don’t think I’d be able to do what I’m doing. I just it would run me down. I wouldn’t have the mental energy. I wouldn’t have the physical energy.

I’d be getting tired and it’d just be getting in the way. But yeah, so really by the time when I’m home, I’m prepping my food, helping get at least one of the kids, usually my son to bed. And then eating my food and spending maybe 30, 45 minutes with my wife and then getting to bed and, reading.

So that, that’s every day, Monday through Friday, Saturday, usually I’m doing some work in the mornings. And then I do something with my family in the afternoons and Sundays usually just work for most of it. I would say at least five hours of work, say five to eight hours of work on Sunday. Yeah, that’s it.

That’s really that’s my life. As Mike’s talking, I’m taking notes guys. And my question is for Mike. So I should quickly just say is on the work. In particular, I just have the habit of something that has served me very well is planning. Out like having, again, so we have our first [00:45:00] two quarters very specifically planned, but laying out what do I, in this case, I have several businesses.

So there’s several interlocking plans because they affect each other. But to keep it simple, it’d be what are the big things that I want to get done this year and why, how are they, what are they contributing to that? Toward then breaking those down into essentially checklists. So anybody listening, you could read checklist manifesto, but you don’t really need to.

You can just read the article. I think it was in the Atlantic or New Yorker or something that got that guy, his book deal. He wrote a long form article on checklists. You can really just read that article. take 20 minutes or whatever, as opposed to reading the book. Cause the book is an unnecessary elaboration on that article.

And so I look from a checklist perspective, really, you want to get the big, major things. I don’t break it down into the most granular points because I don’t think it’s necessary, but what are the big things that need to happen to achieve each of those Goals and then take those things and start timelining them on an actual timeline by the end [00:46:00] week ending.

I could pull mine up week, I think ending. What is it? February 9th. Yeah. February 9th. So this week I know that the big things that have to get done to keep all of my. Plans on target, basically. So I start out with the most important things every day where I know this is what I have to get done today.

And so if I’m going to bump something, it’s probably not going to be this. It’s going to be, maybe an article goes up a day or two late. For example, ’cause getting that article done isn’t as important as getting right now. For example, I’m gonna go back to a book proposal. So my next book is gonna be a traditional book, and I’m pretty excited about it.

I think it’s gonna do very well. I need to get this book proposal done ASAP though, because we need to get this deal done. And then unfortunately, traditional publishing is slow. So the, I’m gonna, I’m gonna try to fight for a 2019 release, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they want to do a 2020 release. I don’t want a 2020 release, I want 2019, so I have to get it done.

ASAP, if I waited two months to get this book [00:47:00] proposal done, then it’s much harder to argue for a January 2019 or February or March 2019 release. So I start every day with the most important tasks that must get done. And then I save the less important shit for after. And that means that, yeah, sometimes not everything gets done, but at least the most important things are getting done.

Because one of the big things that. It’s just a pain in the ass about having a lot of plates spinning, so to speak. So when you’re in the moment doing work, the hard thing, at least for me, is not doing the work. And what has been hard, especially as everything has grown in complexity is the question of, is this the best thing for me to be doing right now?

Or should I be doing something else? Like this activity, should I be doing this is the first question. And Should I be doing this right now is the next question. And you have to, if you really want to be able to get into that flow state and be maximally productive and at least have a good time along the way and enjoy yourself, enjoy your [00:48:00] productivity, you have to be able to say, yes, this is something I should be doing.

I should not necessarily be delegating this or deferring it. And Yes, I should be doing this right now because I really can’t think of anything else more important given the grand scheme of things for me to be doing right now. And once you have those things in place, I just think it makes it much easier to not only be more productive, but also to enjoy your work more.

So that’s been an important thing for me as well in terms of just my daily routine. And so then I can feel fine at the end of the day if a couple of things, if I didn’t get to work on that article. Oh I got the more important things done and I’ll work on that article tomorrow. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I it’s funny you mentioned checklist manifesto, that book I found a very useful in this. It resulted in me getting the way of life app that the listeners have heard me harp on about multiple times. And if you haven’t seen that app, Mike it’s a very simple just habit tracking app, but it just really worked for me.

I have my, It’s [00:49:00] now 40 things on a typical work day, 40 things in order of priority. I find that if I’m not in the zone this morning, I was a little out of sorts. Cause my son unfortunately had a accident yesterday. So he was open throughout the night. So I was a bit bleary eyed this morning and it’s just useful for me to be able to.

In effect, look at my checklist, which is in the way of IVAP and go, okay, let’s just do number one, do it, get it out of the way. Great. Move on to number two, onto number three. And by the end of it, that’s a 10 or 12 normally firing on all cylinders. Talking about checklist manifesto. And you mentioned a few other books, you’re obviously a well read guy.

One of one of your weekly podcasts is a book review. I think it’s weekly. I also read an awful lot and we talk about a lot of different Books on this podcast, what are the top three books that have had the biggest impact on your business or professional or personal life and why? You’ve mentioned a few, you’ve mentioned the checklist manifesto, although that wasn’t necessarily an endorsement, you [00:50:00] mentioned the lean startup and scaling up so far, but if you think back what are your top three?

Kind of books that you recommend most often, or perhaps you’ve read in the last 12 I really like the one thing, simple short book, but a lot of good information. And one that I recommend regularly, I also like the war of art, which I think is great for everyone to read, not just artists. I just think that Pressfield really stumbled on, on a fundamental truth there with this whole like, war against resistance.

And that kind of ties back into being willing to just. Do the work and being willing to push through the pain and push through the suffering. There’s a Pressfield himself said, I think he said it in one of his books or an interview or somewhere that like he thinks the number one skill that he has acquired over the years that has attributed or contributed most to his success is the ability to suffer.

No matter how he feels about it, sit down every day and do the work that needs to be done. And that resonates with me because I think it’s true. This is a whole nother discussion, but [00:51:00] I, there are just many aspects of the, of today’s current kind of Western culture and where things are going that I disagree with just toward personal weakness and glorifying that and trying to pretend like that isn’t a problem.

I really disagree with that. I disagree with that morally. And I disagree with that. Biologically, even, if you look at it, we’re just biological animals and you look at survival of the fittest. I think there’s truth in that and what happens in nature, the weak die off. That’s what happens. Yeah.

We’ve constructed, we’ve done a good job constructing social mechanisms whereby the weak are allowed to survive quite well by really any standards, but it’s unnatural. And I think that it’s maybe arrogant to think that we can really outwit nature in the long game that nature is we can beat nature and we can be weak and we can be in that, that, that is that manifests in many ways and manifests and just decadence, and just, [00:52:00] Chasing hedonistic pleasure, food, drugs, sex. You can indulge all you want and all of these things. No, you can’t actually for just take food, for example, overindulgent food, and you’re probably going to get a disease and die. And I, that’s the way it should be. I don’t disagree with that fundamentally, like biologically.

Yes. Why would mother nature, if she wants to keep the species alive and what does it take to stay alive? Like you need strong Bodies out there to stay alive, to, to weather the elements, to weather the, all the viruses and all the different ways that we can just be eliminated. Anyways, war of art is a great book.

Again, the lean startup I actually did I know it’s, I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily on the same level, but I do recommend anybody that interested in business to check out the lean startup. I took away some good things from that on the marketing side of things. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.

Very good fundamental book that everyone should read. Influence also very good, fundamental. Everybody should read Persuasion also I really did it’s [00:53:00] probably not going to go down into the hall of fame necessarily of marketing books like Influence, but it was very good. Breakthrough Advertising.

It’s hard to get, but you PDFs online by Eugene Schwartz. Very good book. I highly recommend it, especially for copywriters in particular. Other than that, in terms of personal stuff, I’m over self help and self development books. It’s been a while since I’ve read one that I really liked because at this point, they all just sound the same to me, but Flow is one that Michele Csikszentmihalyi I can’t pronounce his last name.

, when you look at his last name, you understand why it’s like Chicka Chick Maha or something like that. Maha Chick, Maha maybe. But Flo I really liked Flo Mastery by Robert Green. Really liked that book. Again, these are books that are a bit more academic in nature. They’re not, I’m not big on motivation personally.

Like I don’t really, I watch a. A Gary Vee video. And I’m like, okay, honestly, that’s just not what I’m looking for. I’m not looking for someone to tell me you can do it. You’re lazy and ignorant [00:54:00] and you have no skills, but you can do it. I just fundamentally disagree with that. And although Gary may not be like that, I generally follow his stuff.

I think that’s actually more his thing, right? Isn’t his thing like, Hey, stop being a lazy piece of shit and work. Yeah. So regardless, maybe I agree with him more than I realized, but I’m not into motivational talk. Speakers or motivational stuff. So I’m more into, I like what I find motivating or systems and models and principles that I think will work.

I don’t care how they make me feel. I don’t care what they’re going to entail in terms of work and effort and difficulty. If something, if I’m like, Oh, that’s smart, like that, I agree with that is going to work or that, that really seems true to me. That’s what I find motivating. So books like mastery, for example.

Is much more motivating to me than even the war of art as much as I like the war of art. And it’s a book where I’m like, yeah, I really agree with that. It’s a message that resonates with me. Mastery is more, more useful to me personally. But that book, [00:55:00] I highly recommend. I really like biographies again, because I like to look under the hood of.

Successful people, so to speak, and see really what makes them tick. And I know for example, daily routines is a, maybe it’s because Tim Ferriss popularized it or something, but a lot of people have a lot of interest in terms of daily routine. What’s the optimal day, total day optimization or whatever.

And I think that’s fine. It’s a good place to start, but if you look at it too much of those, like a shortcut or a hack, and then there’s no substitute for the work. There’s no, so it’s when you said about biographies, one of my, I don’t want to say favorite biographies but it’s prominent.

And I only read it a couple of years ago. It was one of my favorites, which was the biography of such an amazing writer. Probably one of my favorite writer in terms of his, just his ability to write, his ability to communicate his command of the English language, his ability to tell a story over the course of 800 pages.

Incredible. And I love that biography and that dude just knew how to suffer. He didn’t give a shit. He just did whatever it [00:56:00] took. And you remember in the book, he says that he doesn’t think he ever got a good night’s sleep in his entire life. Basically, that’s the kind of shit though. When you really start looking at, he became the richest man in the world and left behind a fortune that, it was worth hundreds of billions of dollars in today’s money.

And that’s not even something that I necessarily aspire to because even if I felt like I could do it, I know it would require giving up everything. Forget it. Oh, it’s unbelievable. And I know when I started raving about that book, after I read it, a few people like, Oh, what are you it’s so capitalistic and it’s immoral.

And and my attitude was like look, I’m not saying that. Yeah. The first answer to that is like. You’re going to read it in order to know. And then secondly, like you can still learn and take elements from it. And that man was unbelievable. The fact that he was able to Sell oil profitably for a make a profit for less money than it costs his competitors to get it out of the ground in the first place.

It was just insane and how he controlled the whole supply chain. Absolutely. [00:57:00] There’s a lesson admire that he had the audacity to do it. One, if somebody were to try to take, if it’s just a purely anti capitalism rant, I’d just say, yeah, you’re stupid. Like we’re that’s the end of that conversation.

No. You’re stupid. You’re just dumb. Capitalism has given us, has produced more wealth and has done more to raise the quality of living for more people on the planet than anything in history. Yeah. That’s a whole I could rant about that for an hour straight, but Yeah. No, I understand.

What a legitimate critique for me, and that is, it’s unfortunate that people like him were he was very immoral and unethical in his business practices, which was strange because he was very moral and he had a strong integrity and strong ethics personally, in business, he was fucking ruthless.

The things that he did And to wreck his competitors. Also, of course, buying off politicians and, the whole antitrust thing was just a farce, even though I do believe Teddy Roosevelt was trying to do the right [00:58:00] thing. He was trying to break up these trusts and trying to, just make people at least be able to compete.

All that it really did was double John Rockefeller’s net worth because he owned everybody. He owned everybody in government and in, in the judiciary that he needed. To make sure that deal went down exactly. So the public can think something was done and people can say, yeah, we stuck it to the evil capitalist.

When he says in his own letters, you remember in the book where he thought it was a joke, he was, it was hilarious to him. He’s like, all right, double my net worth guys. Thanks. Fucking good job. Smart. Because he was able to engineer the entire, even that you just go, I kinda, whatever. I gotta admire that.

Same thing with Alexander the great. Another biography that was, Great. There’s quite a few. There was one Alexander the great. That’s just the name of the book by Philip. Something a recent it was recently published really good. And Alexander is just one of my favorite characters in history simply because what he did was it’s one of those instances.

Yeah. Where truth is just stranger than the fact is [00:59:00] stranger than fiction. If you were, if it were to be told as a story, people would say, this is stupid. This is so unrealistic. Nobody could ever, nobody can do this, but he did it. Benjamin Franklin by Isaacson definitely recommend that book, that biography, a lot of good.

Again, Franklin was a very interesting person, had good values. No, one’s perfect. And that’s also one of the nice things about biographies though, is you really get to, you get an unprocessed View of successful people and you get to see the good and you get to see the bad and you yourself get to learn what it is that whatever is most relevant to you right now in your life is what will stand out to you as opposed to getting a pre digested like pop psychology boiled down.

Raw type of book that might include a couple of anecdotes, but no, what I’m more interested in is the nitty gritty details. What did these people, what were they really like? And what did it really take? Elon Musk biography by Ashley Vance. Great book. Yeah. Really enjoyed it. And again, [01:00:00] a lot of the stuff we’ve been talking about is exactly the type of stuff that you’ll find in that book.

Elon Musk said right in one of his early businesses to pit when he was pitching investors that. He approaches business like a Samurai. He’d rather dive and fail. That’s who that dude is. And that’s not just talk. You get a real, remember in the book when it’s going through 2013, when it looks like everything is falling apart, it looks like SpaceX is going to, he has one last launch left and then he’s out of money.

He’s borrowing money just to make payroll. Tesla’s a hundred and whatever million dollars in the hole. They don’t even have a model car yet. His wife left him and she’s slandering him in the media. Cause he was a dick to where he deserves some of that. What was he doing? That’s right. He was working 20 hours a day.

He was living in his office where the employees were like, they had a joke that he doesn’t shower. Like where does this, he never even leaves. What the fuck is, how is this possible? You read stuff like that and that, those are the kinds of stories that really resonate with me because one, it puts my own shit in perspective.

So who am I to complain? Oh, I had to work, 60 hours last week [01:01:00] and I had to do some things I didn’t want to do. Yeah. Who fucking cares? You know what I mean? I guess it’s nothing. It’s the fact that if I were to complain about that, what all that’s saying is that I’m pathetic. Basically. That’s how I feel about it.

If I were to complain about that, I would just feel wow, I’m pathetic. At least that’s the perspective again of, that’s one of the reasons why I really like reading the right types of biographies. That’s the mode I’m in. I’m really focused on my work and focusing on success. And yeah, I want to read about very successful people and see what did it really take.

I’m reading. The Da Vinci biography right now, which is interesting, very different person. Da Vinci was a creative genius, but he was like Tesla and that he was not good at finishing things. There’s still always takeaways though. There’s always things you can learn from interesting and accomplished.

People, even if in the case of Da Vinci, he was not successful in a financial sense, but he was very accomplished in an artistic sense. And he obviously has gone down as now he’s considered one of the greatest geniuses of all time. And it’s interesting to see how he got there in a very different way.

He was [01:02:00] not Rockefeller at all. He did not have the work ethic. He did not have the discipline. He was very, a very freewheeling type of person. Yeah. So anyways the biographies are. What I spend a lot of time, it’s really like biographies and marketing are the two types of books that I like to read the most.

And I’ve have given me the most, value in terms of my work. So tying it back to the very first book that you mentioned on in answer to that question, what’s the one message you would like to leave the listeners with in order to help them? If you can just make it your sole first focus to get so good at something valuable that you can’t be ignored, then you’re already halfway there.

And I know quite a few people who have six figure businesses. And they’re just individuals. Sometimes it’s an individual with like maybe an assistant. It could be more of a technical type of assistant or just general administrative assistant. And they don’t really do any marketing. They don’t do any advertising and it’s all of their businesses through referral because they’re just so [01:03:00] good at what they do.

And anyone can do that. I wholeheartedly believe that. Anyone can figure out how to make a hundred thousand dollars a year, whether it’s through just a traditional being employed type of getting a job, building a career type of approach, or as an entrepreneur, I really do think that anyone has that capacity.

I do not think that anyone can make a million dollars a year. And that’s, and I might be wrong, I might be wrong, but that’s just the way I feel about it. But I really do think that anyone can figure out how to make a hundred thousand dollars a year. And half of that, let’s just say 50, 000 of those a hundred thousand dollars a year is just getting so good at something that you can’t be ignored, that people see your work.

And they’re like, wow, you’re really good at that. And if that has value, and that’s pretty much everything now with the internet. If you can knit together oven mitts really well. You can probably figure it out through something like Etsy or whatever. Maybe not, but you know what I’m saying? There are so many different things you can get really good at, that would be the first thing.

I [01:04:00] guess another thing that’s just been on my mind recently and something again with me personally, and this is where all this stuff comes from. Even some of my, again, more, some of my cynicism and pessimism comes from me wanting to improve myself and. More importantly, though, wanting to make sure I don’t skid, I don’t want to, because of success or because of really any reason, move backward as an individual.

And so I don’t think I’m a tough person. I might be, I don’t think I’ve honestly gone through enough trials and tribulations to say, I’d say I maybe have a little bit of toughness that I’ve exhibited ultimately though. When I think of toughness could I go get through? Hell week the Navy seal thing.

I don’t know. I think you have to be pretty tough as an individual to do that. Could I do that? I don’t know, but I have at least tried to do things to cultivate toughness in, in both my mentality and my approach. Like for example, I don’t complain about things period. Like I have a standing [01:05:00] rule with myself.

And that means by the definition of Complaining constructive criticism. Yes. If something needs to be done better, in my work or in somebody that works with me, of course, I’m going to, I’m going to say something that’s not complaining, but complaining where I’m just griping.

I’m saying I’m annoyed about things that I’m not going to do anything about. I just don’t do it. And that means what’s going on. Whether it’s current affairs or in my personal life, I like that because again, I think it, I like to think at least it, it helps cultivate at least a little bit of mental toughness.

Some of the weaker people I know are definitely some of the people most prone to complaining. And so I see like the correlation there. I’m like then I’m just not going to complain. Even the cold showers thing. The reason why I still do it is just because it sucks. Like at this point it sucks a lot less than it did in the beginning.

I don’t really mind it as much anymore. But it is most days, something I’m not particularly looking forward to. And again, I think that the fact though, that I’m just forcing myself to do it. I [01:06:00] do think there’s a psychological value in there because And this is a whole nother discussion, but research shows that in many ways, our self image is really just formed around our actions.

Many people have that backward and they think that the, or how they see themselves dictates how they act. And it’s really the other way around. You’re always going to change the subjective to match the objective. So the way that you behave really is what is going to determine your character for better or for worse.

And if you see yourself behaving in a certain way. If it’s negative and if it’s destructive, chances are you are going to rationalize it. You’re going to figure out the reasoning to accommodate your actions. It’s not the other way around. You’re not going to experience that cognitive dissonance and be like, this is really going against my principles.

I’m really not being the person I want to be. I’m going to change that. Yeah, probably not. And that’s include that applies to me as much as anybody else. We’re all in it together. If that’s true, then if we can string together enough of the right actions where we are [01:07:00] exhibiting our values, where we are not just saying we’re going to do things and not just saying that, we are virtuous in any way, do it.

Don’t say anything, just do it. And if you do it, Okay. Then the attitudes in the mental side of things takes care of itself. And so coming back to cold showers, I think there’s value in that. There’s a little bit of value in that. I can say, yeah, I’m a person that’s willing to wake up every day and eat a frog and do something that just sucks basically.

And the only reason I’m doing it. is because I want to be the type of person that can make myself do things that I don’t want to do. In the case of cold showering, it doesn’t have any greater purpose. But if I can do that in my work, if I can do that in my personal relationships, in my personal life, then that is, again, I think a huge part of just being successful.

So it’s like cultivating that skill and then cultivating that ability to be successful. To just do whatever it takes. Those are probably, that’s probably it. If you could just do those two things, you could have [01:08:00] no real people skills. You could have no real marketing skills, but you can do quite well for yourself.

Same thing with working out. That’s one of the reasons why I think working out is therapeutic in a way where one, it allows you that working out as my form of meditation. I don’t meditate. I’ve tried it. It’s just not for me. I don’t really feel like I get anything out of it. And I keep spreadsheets on things.

So I actually was like, did a little N1 experiment. Can I really say that anything in my life is positively impacted by meditation? And I didn’t really notice anything in it in any regard, but. Yeah. Exercise is my meditation because it allows me when I’m in there working out. I’m just focused on, what I’m doing.

Also, I use that time in between sets. I’m learning German so I can, it’s two birds with one stone, but I don’t have my mind on my work. I have my attention on what I’m doing. It allows me to just maybe you could say decompress, even though it’s not, it doesn’t seem like it’s inherently A relaxing activity, obviously.

So there’s that element to it. But then there’s also an element to it that sometimes I don’t really want to work out. Sometimes if I didn’t sleep [01:09:00] well in particular, I’m not looking forward to doing that workout. But again, the fact that I can just get in there and do it reinforces that habit that then I can apply elsewhere more fruitfully, I guess you could say.

So that’s it. A long thing to leave people with, but those are my that’s my bumper sticker. Can you put that on a bumper sticker, please? Bumper sticker for a giant RV. I like it a lot. And I certainly think, wait, it ties together with what you said right at the beginning. I think a lot of people aren’t capable of working hard and they need to, they’d have the necessity level.

I could talk with you all day, but I just feel the need to throw this in. I completely didn’t feel meditation worked for me either until I still don’t meditate per se, but what I did find very meditative and helpful, because I equally keep a lot of spreadsheets and I’ve tracked it and feel it’s made a notable difference is heart rate variability training.

So for me, it was the kind of the Controlling the variability of your heart rate. And and I use the heart math in a [01:10:00] balance app with a heart rate monitor and I personally tried it just for me, my HRV was always in the same range. It didn’t really change. So I was like, huh. Okay. And it was it was in a good range.

Like I want to say it was around 80 or so 70 to 80 and it didn’t really change. So I was just like, I was just curious, does there any correlation on some of these days? If I train harder, do I really see a difference? I didn’t see much of a difference. I think I, at one point, I saw something in the fifties and then it just went to the seventies to eighties and it just stayed there.

And I, and then I was like, I did it for a while. Actually, I did it for at least four weeks, every single day tracking in the morning. And when it just wasn’t changing much, I was like, huh, all right, I guess I’m fine. I guess I’m fine. You know what I mean? Huh. That’s interesting. Yeah. Cause I tried it years ago and it never worked for me.

And then I tried it again more recently and it really did. So for example, this morning, cause I had a very disrupted night sleep with my son. Like I was all over the place this morning. So I actually chose to, cause I was in, did so poorly. Did you [01:11:00] see the news here in the media effect in RetroVision?

Yeah. They often even in days where I wouldn’t, I wasn’t like fucked, but I was like, eh, I didn’t quite sleep enough. Same HRV as always. I’m like whatever, I guess I’ll just go do my thing. And it’s interesting because it could be placebo, but I don’t think it is. Cause I’ve noticed on the days when it’s been borderline, like on the little graph or whatever, when it went, when it’s been borderline and I’ve gone to train, I’ve found myself, Weak and performing more poorly.

And it’s genuinely not in my mind. I don’t feel like I’m going in there going. I haven’t looked too much in the science of it. It’s actually, I just go there’s somebody I’d like to get on the podcast or it might make for a good article, but it’s something I’d have to research a bit. I just grabbed it on a whim.

Cause I’ve heard from some smart people who I listened to that, yeah there’s some good science to it. And so I assume that it’s not just bullshit just based on the people that I’ve spoken to already about it. But I can’t say that I know very much because I don’t I just was like, Oh, that’s good enough for me.

I’ll try it. Yeah. It was interesting for me, the subjective bits, the more interesting things. So with this [01:12:00] particular, cause I’ve tried a few different apps for it as well, but the inner balance app where it was much more subjective, but I noticed being able to, rather than just strap the heart rate monitor on and see what it works out to be.

I would. Do the whole breathing exercise and the meditation they do with it, and I would see the score improve and then I would feel better afterwards and I would react. That’s a reason to do it right there would react likely to be reactive. I’ve, I can’t Yeah. No, that’s great. And I, so that’s why I felt the need to chip that in. I think also, in terms of, like personality, like I took Jordan Peterson’s understand myself personality test recently. And I think it actually was very accurately described me. I score very low in neuroticism and volatility, which again, I’ve seen that play out.

So I think in some ways I have definitely, My, the thing that’s wrong with me is my I’m hyper disagreeable. And, but I think a stronger point of just my personality is just the way that I’m wired or whatever is for whatever [01:13:00] reason. Like I don’t get nervous easily. I don’t. Ever really worry about things and I don’t have it.

And that’s not me bragging. I don’t have even like an explanation for it. That’s just always the way I’ve been. So I think that is partially why I haven’t benefited much from those types of things because it’s not that I don’t care. So I’m like, Oh, fuck it. Who cares what happens? But for whatever reason, things that probably should be.

more than they, they probably should affect me more emotionally, but they just don’t. So I don’t know. I don’t have an explanation for it. So my my, my last thing is obviously I’m a fan. If the guys are still sometimes it’s long time to do it because it’s, it’s an interesting conversation and I don’t.

I know that this is something I’ll probably actually post up on my podcast because I get asked by my people a lot about this kind of stuff. So I can say, Hey, everybody, look, here’s a discussion that it’s, that you might like. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it was a short form podcast that took 90 minutes but I love it.

I’m definitely gonna, I’m going to whack this whole thing up. Boom. But for the guys that are listening, I know we’ve mentioned a [01:14:00] few places.

Muscleforlife. com is my central hub. If you want to check out what I’m doing on the sports nutrition side of things, that’s legionathletics. com L E G I O N athletics. com. And those are, yeah, those are my main two, Properties, I guess you could say. Yeah. And get on the podcast as well.

So I’ll endorse again, the reason why Mike’s on this call is ’cause I was a customer of his first and a fan and he puts out great content. Make sure you guys if you listen to a lot of podcasts, check out the Muscle Life Podcast and, yeah, I use a lot of the different Legion supplements.

Although I want, I’m not going to open this can of worms now, Mike, but I wanted to get into the whole new topic discussion, but I guess we’ll have to leave that for another time. So guys check out muscle for life. com and legionathletics. com. And all that leaves me to say is Mike, thank you very much.

Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don’t mind [01:15:00] doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

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Lastly, If you didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at musclefullife. com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. Alright, that’s it.

Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. [01:16:00] So instead I’m going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my 100 percent natural greens supplement.

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