Ep. #524: Donata White on How to Set (and Achieve) Ambitious Goals

Mike: Hello and welcome to another episode of Muscle for Life. I’m your host Mike Matthews. And as you can imagine, over the years, I’ve heard many January resolutions. This is my year, I’m finally going to lose 20 pounds. I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. I’m going to get fit again. I’m going to set a great example for my friends, family, spouse, kids, and so forth, are just a few examples of the types of things that I hear from people every year.

And I’ve seen many people, when they are armed with the right know how and an extra helping of some piss and vinegar, I’ve seen people do exactly as they intended. And that’s great, and I’ve often been able to be a part of that by at least providing the know how. But I have also seen many unsuccessful attempts at personal transformation, and while a sheer lack of discipline and stick to itiveness is often at least partly to blame, many times the problems begin right at square one.

How people go about setting goals. And then to add insult to injury, people often botch the next crucial step and that is creating a system that will produce the desired results that will allow them to achieve those goals. And the reality is if you can do those two things well, if you can set goals. and build systems.

If you can do those things correctly, then I really do think there’s no telling what you might be able to achieve. And that’s both inside and outside of the gym because those abilities are what you need to build a great body and a great life. And so that is going to be the topic of today’s discussion, given that it is February and January resolutions everywhere.

are beginning to wane are beginning to lose their luster the free trial memberships at gyms are expiring and so i thought it would be a timely topic and to help break it down i invited denata white back on the podcast to share her personal story transitioning from a successful law career To a social media and business consultant, as well as how she helps her clients tackle goal setting and execution.

And in this episode, do not. And I talk about things like why people often fail at their January resolutions or just resolutions in general, really doesn’t have to be new year’s resolutions. Why it’s important to create goals that you really care about, as opposed to ones that just sound good, whether to you or to other people, how to set up systems.

That will allow you to achieve those goals, maybe not easily and definitely not effortlessly, but systematically and consistently and in a way that you can track and believe in. We also talk about the importance of outlining core values and what failure really is. It’s not what many people think it is and more.

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That’s it. No catch. Truly just 99 cents for any of my best selling books. Hey, Donata. Happy New Year. And thanks for being willing to come back on my show and talk to me again. 

Donata: Of course. Happy New Year to you guys too. All of you listening. And I’m excited to be back. 

Mike: Yeah. So I wanted to bring you back because in looking at the top 20 or so most popular episodes I’ve done over the years, yours was one of them.

And so I was like, Oh, there were some Eric Helms episodes that are up there, but he’s been on several times. Mark Rippetoe been on several times, but you were in like, I think it was the top 10 or top 15, but only once. So it only made sense to bring you back. 

Donata: I’ve got to catch up then 

Mike: set a high bar to get over.

Yeah. 

Donata: Yes, of course. 

Mike: So it’s January and that means it’s New Year’s resolution season. And by the time this comes out, although we may have to look on our schedule, we’re probably gonna actually sneak this in. Cause I got way ahead on interviews before the holidays, just cause I wanted to make sure didn’t have any last minute kind of scrambles while I was out of the country.

But as this is going to be, it’s just topical, it’s relevant, given the time, we’re going to see if we can sneak it in maybe within the next couple of weeks. But you just mentioned this before we got started that many people, statistically speaking, by the time this comes out are going to be in the process of quitting on, At least some of their new year’s resolutions or have already quit.

And so I thought it can make for a good discussion to talk about that, to talk about not just new year’s resolutions, but resolutions in general, right? Goal setting and what does it take to actually. Take a wish, something in that you envisioned as desirable and then make it happen to actually realize it.

And that I think will take us into really, how do you build systems that allow you to achieve your goals? 

Donata: I love this topic, so I’m so happy that you have me back on to talk about this is some of my favorite things to talk about. I actually have a online course all about goal setting. And 1 of the main components of doing this thing right is setting up systems.

Because we’re human and life happens. So I would love to share some of the secrets and systems that are working for me that I’m sure it’ll work for your audience as well. 

Mike: Yeah. Great. So let’s start with why do so many people fail in their, let’s say New Year’s resolutions specifically, because I guess statistically it’s 90 something percent, right?

Donata: It is. It’s really high. It’s over 95%. Maybe not 95. I think it’s actually 92 percent of New Year’s resolutions are given up on. And most of those are actually by the end of January or mid February. I can’t remember the exact date, but it doesn’t last very long. Many people are very gung ho at the beginning of the year.

If you’re listening to this and you’re still in that mode, good for you. But statistically speaking, most people, the novelty wears off by this point. And I think a few things go wrong. Number one. I think we have a tendency to set the wrong goals, and this is something we can talk about in more depth, but we tend to, in general, set goals that kind of sound good, rather than really taking the time to think about what we actually want our lives to look like.

When we do that, we don’t really have an underlying reason why we would continue to do the work that it takes to achieve something when it gets hard, because we don’t really want the result anyway. It just sounds nice. The other thing that goes wrong is people do not set up goals. Systems in their life routines that will put up the guardrails for when things get difficult or when they don’t feel like it.

They’re riding the wave of again, the novelty of it. 

Mike: Yeah. Or a surge of motivation just because it’s a new year and it feels like it’s another chance to make something happen, it’s completely arbitrary, but, I understand we’ve all experienced it. 

Donata: But there’s also the, it is an arbitrary date.

There’s nothing magical about January 1st, but since everyone around you is getting excited, the holidays are over. You just had a great time, stuffed your face with holiday food. Now is the time to start fresh and get excited about the new possibilities of a new year. So I get it. I get that the motivation is high then, but motivation is, it’s a feeling, it’s emotional.

I think a lot of people fail to set up guardrails, like I said, for themselves when the motivation is no longer there, because it comes and goes. You’re going to feel motivated some days and not other days. Let’s just talk about fitness goals. Cause they’re again, statistically speaking, some of the most set new year’s resolutions.

Oh, this is the year I’m going to lose 50 pounds or, go to the gym five times a week or whatever. The day comes when it’s raining outside. It’s cold. Cause it’s January. You don’t really feel like it because your deadlifts made you sore the other day and you’re hungry because you’re in a calorie deficit and you just don’t feel like going.

So you hit the snooze 

Mike: and you’ve had a shitty day at work and you didn’t work out in the morning. So you’ll say you’re supposed to go at 7 PM and you’re frustrated and yes, you’re hungry and you are low energy and you are completely not in the mood to work out 

Donata: exactly. I would say in that particular situation, just doing 10 minutes puts you in the mood to work out.

But if you don’t have a routine set up for this is when I go, this is the routine that I’m working on. This is the plan that I’m doing. I do back on this day and legs on this day. If you don’t really have a system or a routine set up, you’re very tempted to just skip it. And then if you skip one day, it’s not a big deal to skip it the next time.

The more you get lackadaisical with your routine, the more you’re giving yourself permission to do that again in the future. And then that’s what happens by, March. You’re going to the gym once a month and you’re paying for a whole membership that you’re not using. 

Mike: Yep. Yeah. And I can relate to that personally in that I find the more structured and organized my training is, the more interested I am in it.

I’ve gone through periods where, like for example, when I was writing a new third edition of my book, bigger, leaner, stronger, which is meant for people who are new to proper weightlifting. I was doing the program. Myself for about six months, just working through all the workouts, just want to make sure that I was happy with the programming and the best way to do that is to just do it.

You only can anticipate so much when you’re trying to think your way through it. And the workouts themselves, though, were not very interesting to me because it’s not enough for me to make real progress. Progress for one. So I knew that I was just going to be stagnant basically for six to eight months.

And two, there wasn’t as much variety in the programming as there would normally be. And variety just for the sake of variety isn’t necessarily good, but variety, if it is Introduced properly, not only keeps things interesting, but also just makes for better results. And so the difference is that I’m a, an intermediate or maybe even an advanced weightlifter, depending on like how you’re going to look at it by which metric.

And I was doing a beginner’s program. And so in going through it, I didn’t skip any workouts because I was quote unquote unmotivated, but I do understand some days I would just be like time to do a boring workout. And I would go and do it. And I, I would work hard enough, but now that’s done and I’m now wrapping up a second edition of my Book for intermediate weightlifters specifically for men.

And then I will end up doing one for women, but the book’s called beyond bigger, leaner, stronger. So this is the male version and I’m doing that program. It’s a lot more interesting because that’s more the style of training that I should be doing as where I’m at, in my journey, so to speak. And it’s just more interesting.

And it’s just something that now I look. Forward to, and I enjoy my workouts more. So I do understand when people get started with something and it’s not very organized and they don’t quite understand why they’re doing it or how it’s supposed to work. Oftentimes they don’t even know how to track their progress and they just get going and then quickly lose steam because the effort.

Can feel wasted. Is this working at all? I don’t see it really working. I don’t really feel like it’s working and I don’t understand it and I don’t know how to make it better. So fuck it. 

Donata: Exactly. And I think you bring up a couple of really great points. The first one is you have to know why you’re doing something.

So for you, even though this workout program, the workouts themselves were boring and they weren’t really for you. You didn’t write them for somebody like yourself. You wrote them for a beginner. You knew why you were going through the program, right? You were testing your own product and that was important to you, right?

It was important to you to know that what you were putting out there with your name on it was a high quality product. So even though the workout, the, the workout itself wasn’t. Something you were interested in, you were interested in knowing that what your product was a high quality thing.

So there was still a reason you were doing it. And the second thing is that you really have to know yourself. You have to know what to expect of yourself. And this isn’t a invitation to beat yourself up about anything about your personality. But for me, I know that I am a morning person, but I don’t say that in a braggy way.

I say that in a, by 4 PM, I don’t want to do anything kind of way. So I have to work out in the morning or it’s not happening. And there are some people who are the absolute opposite. They’re groggy in the morning. They’re low energy. And they know if they go to the gym at that time, It’s just not going to be the most productive time of day to go.

So you need to create a routine for yourself that guards against all of these. Human nature elements that could get in the way. If you’re not a morning person, don’t try to go to the gym at 6 AM. It’s not going to work because you’re going to try to be forcing yourself to do something brand new at a time that you’re not normally even doing anything.

Mike: I would challenge you to try it though. First for anybody listening. Who’s Oh yeah, that’s definitely me. If that’s definitely you. Then I understand. And if you’re. Don’t quite know. You think maybe I think I, I don’t think I’m a morning person. I would say give it a try because there are big benefits to working out first thing in the morning.

The two main ones are one, it sets the tone for the rest of the day. It elevates your mood, puts you in a good mood. And there’s research on this, but this is one of those things that we don’t really need science to tell us this. We can just experience it firsthand the first day we do it.

And that is start your day with. A good workout and you’ll notice that you’ll just probably be in a better mood than usual throughout the day. If you usually work out later and then it’s also the other big benefit is it’s done. And for those of us, and that’s many of the people listening who live busy lives, we have jobs, we have families, we have obligations.

For the men listening, their obligations include other outside work obligations. And for women, it includes their own. So I get it. And by getting it done first thing in the morning, you then don’t have to worry about what we were talking about earlier, where, okay, now it’s 7 PM and you’ve worked out the logistics of being able to go to the gym.

Maybe your spouse is going to take care of the kids for you. So you can go for an hour. And so you’ve made that. Work, but now it’s 7 PM and all you want to do is get home, eat some food and sit down and be left alone, which I understand you can just go to the gym and you can just push yourself to do it.

That’s fine. If that’s the only option, but you might find it. Better to rearrange things so you can just get it done first thing in the morning. And then like you were saying, as the day winds down, you can also wind down. And I understand that as well. Some days it’s more so than others, depending on what I’m doing.

But for me, it maybe comes a little bit later, but there is a point where I’m like, Yeah. I think I’m just done. I think it’s time to just maybe just sit there and read. Sometimes I don’t even want to talk my wife. She understands. Sometimes it’s not a matter. It’s not anything against her at all.

It’s just, if I’ve been going all day and recording podcasts and having meetings and writing and doing whatever I’m doing, and then there’s a point where it’s 30 minutes of just silence actually is, it feels therapeutic. 

Donata: Yeah. I totally understand that. And I don’t disagree that working out in the morning is actually the better option in general, if you can make it work.

I think that having a good workout in the morning gives you energy and it gives you a thing to check off your list, puts you in a good mood, makes you feel accomplished. Like you said, it sets the tone for the day, makes you feel good. So I do hope that many people will try working out in the morning, but I think my larger point, which I believe you agree with is get it in when you can and don’t give up just because you can’t work out in the morning. If you’re finding that you can’t drag yourself out of bed at 6 a. m. to go before work don’t just say, oh working out’s not for me, maybe try a different time of day. The key, I think, is to shift things around and make tweaks.

To try different ways of making things work rather than at the first sign of difficulty, just saying it’s not for me. I give up. And that’s a larger issue. In any goal is that I think a lot of people are primed to look for excuses rather than for ways to make things work. And that’s a mindset shift that I work with my clients on.

And also, that I recommend to everyone listening instead of asking like, Oh, why isn’t this working? That kind of primes you to look for an excuse. Instead, the question you should ask yourself is how can I make this work? Because then your brain starts looking for ways to make it work rather than the negative.

Mike: Yep. Where you can start tapping into your creative thinking. So we have generalized intelligence, right? Like IQ test type intelligence, you have emotional intelligence, but I think there’s also a, I don’t think, I don’t know if it’s a term, I’ve never Googled it. I have to search, but a creative intelligence.

It’s there are some people who maybe don’t have the highest IQ on a test and maybe they’re socially awkward, but they’re just creative. They can come up with, and not necessarily, Oh, because they can paint well, sure. But also just like when they’re in difficult situations, they can come up with creative solutions.

I find that with people who are good at marketing tend to be that way where maybe they’re not the best creatively in terms of aesthetics, but they. Just are good at generating ideas and generating enough ideas to then find the good ones and are able to oftentimes save themselves from very precarious situations, or just come up with really smart ideas that help them grow their business very quickly.

And that type of ability also applies to life though. And I agree that it’s easy to find. Excuses and find reasons why something couldn’t work or won’t work, but it requires creativity and it requires effort to come up with ways that it can work, but everyone can do it. I think it ties into something I wanted to get to.

Get more of your thoughts on ties into something you mentioned earlier, which is picking goals that really matter to you. And because really, we’re talking about is how much does it matter, right? How necessary is it that you accomplish this goal? And if it’s anything, I don’t know. I would say if we want a scale of 1 to 10 in my experience, if it’s anything under a 7 out of 10, there’s a pretty good chance that I’d say that’s where it starts to get shaky, where then when met with resistance, my likelihood of not following through.

Increases. Whereas if it’s an eight, nine or 10, chances are, I’m just going to keep going regardless, and I’m going to keep looking for solutions and going to keep looking for ways to make it work. 

Donata: I would absolutely agree with that. I think the biggest and best examples are from my own life are growing my business.

Number one, that was So the last time we spoke, I was secretly, I don’t think I mentioned this on the podcast because I was still at the law firm at the time, but I was a practicing attorney and I was looking for a way out of that career. I knew it wasn’t for me at this point, it was at that level 10 priority of I need to make this work.

So I started my own. Content marketing agency, and now we have online courses and coaching and all kinds, we know we serve seven and eight figure corporations doing their content marketing. So growing that business was a level 10 priority and it took years. So the priority level assisted the consistency that was required.

To actually get it done. Now, another one is my fitness goals. I’ve been more consistent. The last 6 months going to the gym and working out and lifting heavy and doing all those things that I enjoy because I’ve decided at this point in my life, it’s a priority to do and also because I got a trainer and just, here’s another.

Side tip accountability is so key. So when you have somebody waiting for you at the gym, it really makes it easier to go and that’s anything, right? If you have a friend who is working on the same goal as you getting accountability, buddy really helps not for the purposes of losing weight. Like for me being in a calorie deficit and shredding down is like a level four or five.

So I haven’t done it. I’m still going to the gym. I theoretically could very easily, count macros and Figure out where I needed to be in a calorie deficit. I just haven’t done it because I’m doing other things. So it’s like you said, how much you want it, but also are there other things that are taking up your time and attention?

Because there really is only so much of it and decision fatigue is a real thing. And if by the end of the day, you’re. Having to make a bunch of decisions about do I do this thing that I know is the right thing to achieve my goals or do I just sit down and watch Netflix? If you don’t guard against this decision fatigue or you’ve set too many goals or too many goals that aren’t the right ones, you’re setting yourself up for disaster because You’re not putting your focus where it needs to be.

Mike: Yeah. And that comes to this idea of creating systems in your life that support your goals. It’s lifestyle design, I think is a buzzword, but I think there’s value in that concept because I completely agree. It’s just why make it harder than it needs to be. And if you put yourself in that situation where yes, the last hour of your day is what you have tentatively.

Given over to some high importance activity, then it’s probably not going to work out very well. If it does, then Hey, you’re a machine and hats off. But I’ve been there for years when I was starting out in my line of work, I was working a lot. I was working every in the day and then I would come home, eat some food, work another couple hours, usually up to close to the point of going to bed.

And I would work. Pretty much all day Saturday and then probably half day Sunday. And I did that for years. And so it’s nice to be able to do that for sure. I think that it obviously paid dividends, but I don’t do that now because not so much because of like physical or psychological reasons, but it’s actually just cause I have a family now and I have two kids.

I don’t want to be a complete absentee. And but again, it’s a matter of what are my goals and what are my, what’s really important to me and what are my priorities. And I was just reading an article just, I think it was about specifically about the Silicon Valley area, but just the hustle grind 24 seven kind of culture and how unhealthy that can be.

Even if you can do it, this is an example just of a goal that I’ve come across. I’d be curious to some of the, some of what you’ve come across working with people that people will set because it sounds good, but without really. Deciding what do they want in their life? And that is this goal of working crazy hours to, there’s wanting to achieve success, but then there’s also, it’s almost like a virtue signaling thing.

Look what I can do. Look at how much I can work. Look at how much caffeine I can consume every day. And if you’re not doing that, you’re just fucking lazy. What are some other kind of goals that again, maybe sound good, but where people, when you really dig into what kind of life they want, just don’t really make sense.

Donata: I think anything that’s that all consuming can probably for most people fall into that category because I don’t think people intentionally want to. Make themselves 1 dimensional. I don’t ever think that’s anybody’s real goal. Some people, like you said, have that. Oh, I’m the best at working and I could just make money all day and work all the time and sleep 2 hours.

And I’m, if you don’t do that, I don’t even want to hear your opinion sort of thing. Those people. I guess have a value system. That means that sort of one dimensionality is okay or even desirable. But I don’t think for most people, like you said, they have families, they have hobbies, health, things they want to learn, things they want to participate in friends.

They want to see, they don’t want to intentionally be one dimensional and only focus so hard on one area of their life to the exclusion of others. So I think anything that sort of. 

Mike: There are fitness versions of that too. 

Donata: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And that’s what I was actually just reminded of was, prepping for competition.

That is a fitness goal that I see a lot of people make is particularly like. Older people. Oh, I just never was that lean in my youth. So I want to do a master’s like fitness competition, but like why you could just be fit and healthy. And I don’t think they fully think through the 

Mike: for the plastic trophy.

Duh. 

Donata: Obviously. I don’t mean to It’s like shit on competitions, but you know if that’s something that you truly want to do, wonderful. But I think before you decide that’s what you want to do, you have to understand the implications of that. Because it’s not just something you flick a switch and you do.

There are sacrifices that need to be made and there are You know, time commitments that need to be honored. You’re not going to be able to probably eat a cheeseburger and fries for the next, however many months 

Mike: you’re going to get to the point of feeling like complete shit 

Donata: absolutely makes you feel like if 

Mike: you’re going to get to where you need to be competitive, 

Donata: exactly.

Mike: I recorded, I’m not sure where it’s in the lineup. So it may already be live by the time this goes live or it might not. I’d have to look at the calendar, but I recorded a podcast with Paul Revalia, a fitness coach, people don’t know who he is, a fitness coach, works with a lot of competitors about this, just what does it really take when you say that you want to do a competition, even if that’s it’s not, I want to be, I don’t want to be a competitive bodybuilder or a competitive physique athlete, not even that.

And I just want to do a competition and do it right and do it. What are you actually committing to? And it was a good discussion and the purpose wasn’t to discourage people at all. It was just to ensure that people are understanding what they’re committing to and understanding the costs, because there is a cost, not a long term cost.

You’re not going to fuck your body up for the rest of your life. You do it right. If you do it naturally, but you’re going to fuck your year up probably. Cause it’s going to take many months to get into shape. And then even if. People often, if they put that much work into getting in that kind of shape, they don’t want to do just one.

They do several in a row. They do several. And so really it turns into a year long affair. And then you have a recovery period, which when you look at case studies can be up to six to eight months before hormones are completely normalized again, for example, and before people really feel like they’re Themselves again.

So I just thought it would be a good discussion to have because I do often hear from people mentioning, toying with the idea of competing, I think, without realizing what it’s going to take. And I don’t personally think. There’s all that much pleasure to be gained from doing it. Half assedly either.

I think that would probably be a bigger letdown if they tried to do it. And then they got up there and I’m fucking fat and just look bad. Like, why am I here? 

Donata: No, I totally agree. And I also think, especially for, and this is any competitor, right? It’s very. It’s a strange situation to be standing on stage and having people like nitpick how your body looks, but especially for women, like you’re signing up to feel like you said, like crap for a year and then have somebody zoom in on all your insecurities.

Yeah. 

Mike: Yeah. What’s that one movie? It was something how, or it’s like her elbows were too pointy. I don’t know. There’s some movie where there was some like beautiful woman, but Oh no. Elbows too pointy. Definitely one out of 10 would not bang. That was the joke in the movie. 

Donata: You really do have to know, and this is not just exclusive to fitness competitions, or bikini competition, whatever.

Competitor, powerlifting, even any competition of physical strength or appearance is going to be pretty much the same way. Athletic competitions the same way, but then other goals outside of that as well. Like I hear a lot of people in my space because I work with a lot of entrepreneurs who are they’re not at zero, but they’re not, replacing their full time income. And I hear them say things like, I want to make a million dollars next year. And, do you know what that means? Do you know how many programs that is? Do you know how many clients that is? Do you know how many hours of work that is?

Mike: That’s a whole nother discussion that would be interesting. So I get asked fairly often about business related things, and I’ve intentionally not produced really much in the way of business related content, really just because of time. Like I don’t have any time I want to give to that because I’m pretty much all consumed with the health and fitness projects that I have, but I can.

Kept on getting asked over and over. So my solution is I’m going to do a podcast that is going to be probably, I’m just going to record eight, 10 episodes and have that be like a season. Cause I can’t promise it’s going to be a regular thing like this, but I’m going to do that. And I’m going to, I think I’m going to do just interviews with very successful people from different backgrounds and different industries.

And I think that’s a good way to do it. And also just cut down on how much time it would take me to do it. But that’s one of the points I want to cover. I haven’t exactly decided who I want to interview for that point, but even the point of, should you be in business for yourself, should you be an entrepreneur?

Because it’s not for everyone and it’s glorified and it’s sold as some sexy thing, but it’s really not, there’s so much that is unsexy about being an entrepreneur, there are of course, major upsides. If you can make it in a big way, but there are major upsides to being a really good employee as well.

Donata: Absolutely. And 

Mike: Again, I don’t want to get too far off on a tangent, but just to finish my thought on this and then you can reply, we can just get back to what our goals discussion. But for example, me personally, I wouldn’t be interested owning my own business unless I could make at least three times, probably five times or more the money that I could make working for someone else.

Because it comes with so much extra shit that you have to deal with that is just annoying. It just, we all have the type of work that we like to do. And if you’re a really good employee, you can pretty much just do the type of work that you like to do, get really good at it. And that’s pretty much it.

And just continue getting better at that and building out your skillset there and making yourself more valuable. And there’s so many things now you don’t have to care about. And even if you want to be an enterprising employee, for example, somebody who’s always looking to move up and take on more, if you work in the marketing department, payroll is not your concern ever.

The owner of the business never wants you to even think about whether so and whether he can make payroll or not. He wants you to focus on your work. 

Donata: You don’t even have to book your own flights. If you’re 

Mike: production logistics, all inventory management. Please, Mr. Enterprising employee, I love that you want to take on more.

Do not worry about it. We’ll look over here. Just stick to what you’re good at. Really? That’s what you, one of the big benefits of being an employee, for example, whereas if you own your own business, there are so many other things now that. You have to make sure you have to personally take care of initially.

And then eventually hire people, delegate, build out systems and make sure it all happens. And then there’s all the added risks that comes with it as well. And so again, minimally I’d have to be three times as much money as I could make working for someone else. But. Five times or more is where I would start to actually consider it.

That’s how the calculus works for me. 

Donata: That would be me too, as well. Like I said, I was a practicing attorney, so that number is quite large. 

Mike: You’ve probably had this discussion number of times where you start working. Okay. You go, all right, let’s say you set your number 500, 000 a year. Let’s just say that’s your number, right?

That’s where it starts to get interesting. What does your business have to earn for you to make 500, 000 a year? Exactly. When most businesses, their profits are in the range of probably. On 5 percent on the very low, that’s bad. 10 percent is considered pretty good. That’s considered decent. And 15 plus percent is considered outstanding.

So if you have a business that has a profit margin of let’s say it’s 15%, let’s be very generous. Look at how much money that business needs to generate for you to make 500, 000 a year. And you can’t just take all the net. You have to also reinvest unless you have some weird kind of business where that requires no reinvestment.

But that’s very few, 

Donata: Very little. I would say even online coaching businesses, which is primarily who I work with, their overhead is very low. So they’re on the very favorable end of this. Calculation, I still hear them say, oh, I want to be, I want to have a million dollars or I want a million dollar business.

I’m like, yeah, a million dollars in revenue or a million dollars for you personally, because those are two different numbers, 

Mike: even in a coaching business, if you want to make a million dollars personally, I would say. Probably shoot for 1. 5 million net would probably be a fair, like figure that you’re going to have to eat up a half a million dollars, just continuing to grow the business.

And 

Donata: then you’ve got to pay taxes too. So there’s that. 

Mike: Yeah. Sure. That comes out of your million. 

Donata: Yeah, exactly. So I think going back to our original point is people set goals that sound good or sound impressive without thinking about what it’s actually going to take to achieve them or what the implications for other areas of their life are going to be.

It ends up being a mess because they either, there’s no good outcome, right? They either try it. Figure out that it’s a mess and then quit or they try it, do it and then get to the end having checked off the box and realizing that they’ve left disaster in their wake in other areas of their life, right?

Like their spouse is not talking to them. Their kids haven’t seen them in months. There’s no good outcome that comes from setting a goal. That sounds good, but maybe you haven’t thought all the way through. 

Mike: Yeah. My. Wife and I were talking the other day, just about different levels of wealth and what is and isn’t worth it in our perspectives.

And so take, becoming a billionaire, right? That’s something my mom would joke that I’m going to be a billionaire one day, me. And I would tell her, I’m like no, probably not because one, there’s just statistics, but two. Even if I were willing to do what it takes, which if to do that, let’s just look at it from take luck out and take timing and industry and whatever.

And I say this having actually personally no wing, a couple of people who are legitimate billionaires when one case he’s 75. And. Since he was, I don’t know, in his twenties, since he got out of college, literally all this dude has done is worked, sacrificed, let’s say everything on the altar of work. And yes, he may, he has made more money than he could ever spend or need, but he’s paid a price and in his family.

And I’ve met quite a few very successful people over the years. And that’s common, for example. Where either it got so bad that it fell apart and it’s divorce and estrangement from kids and kids also fucked up because they’ve had access to so much money and, but they’ve had no guidance or it got bad and then they had to fix it and they did fix it, they had to fix it.

So that’s something where I would look at it and I go, no, it’s not worth it to me. The only way I could see myself becoming a billionaire would be writing the next Harry Potter book or something. It would have to be like that. I would not be willing to do it the way that normally goes, which is work like an absolute madman for decades and get super lucky and do a bunch of unethical shit and, those things too.

Donata: I don’t want to say that. Things are not, anything is possible. I think that. 

Mike: Sure. I’m open to the possibility. 

Donata: That everyone reads your new version of your book. Every single person is at the gym now doing their workouts. 

Mike: I don’t think it’s going to come from that. It’s fiction. If I’m going to become a billionaire, I’m going to have to write the next Harry Potter, the next great American novel series.

Maybe, 

Donata: you totally could. So I’m, I believe in you, but I totally get what you’re saying though. And I agreed, you have to really think about the entire picture before you decide to commit to something, because you’re either going to end up uncommitted to that thing or totally committed and not realize what you’re actually, what the opportunity cost of that is.

And I was listening to a great, do you listen to Eric Thomas? 

Mike: No, I don’t even know. He is 

Donata: wonderful. He’s ET the hip hop preacher on YouTube, but he’s a great motivational speaker. And he talks about something called the triple double life where, yeah, you can make money, but money is the easy thing to get in terms of like things you would want out of life.

Because money’s available, they don’t sell relationships, they don’t sell, happiness and peace and spiritual, enlightenment or whatever else it is you might want out of life. So he talks about, really building your life in a way and setting your goals in a way that compliment the whole picture rather than just like we were saying before.

Make you unnecessarily one dimensional in one area. And I think an area that a lot of people focus on is finances because it’s the one your mind immediately goes to, but it’s the low hanging fruit, right? You do anything with skill and excellence and you could probably make money at it, no, one’s going to pay you for being a good husband or a good wife.

No, one’s going to pay you for being a good parent. 

Mike: Totally. And you can’t buy those. Skills either. 

Donata: No, absolutely not. That’s something you have to work on and it doesn’t end. It’s not a box that you can check. So those goals I think also get over overlooked a lot of times when people are setting New Year’s resolutions or setting goals anytime of the year.

Because it’s not easily measured. 

Mike: As a culture, we have so much emphasis on quantitative things and much less on qualitative aspects of whether it’s business or our personal lives. Again, I think it’s probably. Mostly a consequence of the scientific revolution, but we see it manifested in many ways where, again, if something is, it feels real, if you can measure it clearly, and if you can’t, it just doesn’t really seem to be as important, but that’s not necessarily correct.

In some cases it is, but in many cases it’s not. In many cases, the most important things are more qualitative in nature. You can’t just assign a number to them. 

Donata: But I would say that a lot of times goals do get done. If you can. Measure something. . So even for those goals that are more qualitative oh, I wanna be a better, for me, I wanna be a better wife, or I wanna spend more time with my husband.

Okay what does more time mean? What does better mean? So you can put a number or a measurement on something that kind of is an indicator. So how many times are we spending? How many hours are we spending together intentionally? Per month. Okay. What’s that number now? And what would I like that number to be?

So even for the qualitative goals, I think if you’re having trouble figuring out what the improvement is, like what you’re actually looking for, the result, you can stick a number somewhere. There is something you can measure that is indicative of success in that area. And that will make it easier for you to determine whether or not you’re doing well.

Mike: Yeah. That’s true. For a relationship, the first thing that comes to mind for me would probably be if I were to track something, it would probably be pleasurable experiences just based on the research of the ratio of it comes straight down to there’s even research that just shows the ratio.

I think it’s a sex to fighting. Like the joke is fuck don’t fight, but it’s that I’m serious. There’s research on 

Donata: this that 

Mike: indicates the likelihood of divorce it was, but there’s also research that of just general, like you need to keep the ratio of pleasurable. Experiences where you are enjoying each other’s company.

And we all know what a pleasurable experience is. It can be physically pleasurable, or it can be emotionally pleasurable that you need to have. I don’t remember the exact ratio is minimally two to one. It may have been as high as four to one to unpleasurable, which Mostly comes down to arguing and fighting about stuff in relationships, the relationships that lasted the longest and released likely to end.

And this was marriages and in divorce were ones that maintain that ratio. Again, I don’t remember. It was at least double. It may have been as high as four to one. And it just stuck in my mind. Cause I remember when I was reading that I was like, yeah, I agree with that. That research makes sense to me. It seems like it’s a good, just criterion for quickly.

Analyzing, like, where are things at in my relationship? 

Donata: Yeah. And we love data. We love measuring things and statistics and all of that. That makes total sense to me as well, because, you would have zero negative, you might have some negative experiences of like loneliness if you were by yourself, so it would be.

That ratio might be the tipping point of like when it’s worth it to be in the relationship versus not. 

Mike: Like where the pain of being in the relationship outweighs the potential pain of just not having it at 

Donata: all. Exactly. Exactly.

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And, 0. 99. That’s it. No catch. Truly just 99 cents for any of my bestselling books. So let’s talk about your system for goal setting and achieving your goals. What does that look like? 

Donata: Of course. So I think the first thing that I do often and not probably more often than I would expect other people do this because I just enjoy it.

But. It’s a lot of visualization and I’m sure you’ve talked about this on other episodes, but a lot of elite athletes use visualization to, perform well in their sport. And it’s because your subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between real and fake. You can feed it anything and it gives you the mental experience of having had that thing.

So 

Mike: it can affect your physiology too. 

Donata: Exactly. Your emotions are physical things that happen in your body. So if you’re mentally. are likely to physically experience the emotions of it as well. 

Mike: Then there’s the potential of the spirituality of it all, right? Which is up for anybody to decide for themselves, but you can’t just simply write it off.

And I’m not a very woo person. I’m, I don’t pretend to know to say, Oh everything’s material and everything we feel is just chemical reactions in our brain. And there very well could be other implications. And those ideas have been around for a very long time, thousands of years. And generally speaking, Ideas remain in currency because they at least have some sort of truth to them and some sort of workability to them.

So there’s something to be said for that too, 

Donata: right? Exactly. So let me back up a little bit before the visualization. I always double check what my goal would be against my core values. I have them listed, I very highly value integrity. Hospitality, generosity. There’s these, this list of things that I want to make sure that I maintain as core values of mine and also in my life at all times.

So I check my goals against that. If something is going to require me to compromise one of those things, I just don’t. 

Mike: How did you make that list? Because that’s an important, I wouldn’t just gloss over that because I completely agree with that. That’s almost like at the level of first principles for how you’re going to behave in your life and the penalty for trans.

Aggressing against your values is myriad. Like for one, you then start to experience this cognitive dissonance where, you’re not really being the type of person that you want to be, but you start trying to rationalize it. And then it also is demotivating. It’s hard to be very motivated about something that is fundamentally disagreeable to you.

And you’re trying to sell yourself on it. 

Donata: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things that I did to come up with this list was figure out what makes me so super angry. What values, when somebody ignores them or goes against them, make me really really heated? Because I figure if I have that much of an emotional response about something, it’s probably because I very highly value that thing.

One of them is lying. I can never Even white lies to people just to make them feel good, I never felt good about that. I know that one of my core values is Integrity and honesty, and because that’s the one that often rubs up against the others, and it’s always the one that wins. So I knew that one was one of mine.

And if you think back of like tense situations or situations where you got very heated or upset or things that really affected you, there was probably some value that’s either you were upholding in a. Very unfavorable situation for you. Like you could have compromised it, but you didn’t, or somebody else did something that really went against something that you felt was a value in your life and you got very upset by it.

I feel like those sort of tumultuous moments are good indicators of things that may be on this list for you. Another thing is just like how you envision. Your perfect life for me, it’s inviting my entire family over for Christmas. I love Christmas. I love cooking. I tell people I love them by feeding them.

So like for me, hospitality is a big deal because that’s how you show people that you love them. So that I knew was one of my core values because every time I envisioned Oh if life was perfect, what would you be doing? Of course I’d be inviting people over my house to feed them. And you can there are lists online you can look at of like typical core values. Some people value creativity and adventure and travel, and I’m not like that. I’m a homebody. So it’s not that some of these are better than others. It’s just what really is a part of you as a person. Versus what kind of just sounds nice when other people are doing it.

Mike: Totally. That makes me think of Ray Dalio’s book principles and something he talked about in there. This strive and savor spectrum, right? He was just basically saying that if you really want to have an impact in the world and you want to strive and achieve big things, you can’t also simultaneously take it easy and savor life.

You can have one or the other. And he chose obviously to strive. And now though, that he’s later in his life, he’s in his sixties. He is intentionally swinging that pendulum in the other direction, where now he’s gotten to a point where he looks more forward to just spending time with people he likes and his family, then figuring out the next big win in his business.

And he’s a billionaire. So at this point, it’s not about money. It’s just about winning. And I understand that. That’s there was an interview with Tiger Woods where they, this is when he was at his. Peak in his prime and they were asking him what drives you to keep going is when he was just dominant and he was just destroying the field.

What is it? What really means the most to you? And I think they are expecting the interview is expecting something profound and you just said winning. That’s it. That’s what, that was what he loved. He just loved winning. And I understand there’s some people like that is their number one core value is just winning.

Whatever they do, they’re going to try to win as much as they can. And that’s what makes them feel most alive is that point of winning. And he was that person. So that’s just something that I’ve spoken about and I’ve thought about it myself in terms of, cause work and it’s not just about working and making money, but having purposive activity to engage in every day, but at the same time you have to decide for yourself, where are you going to fall on that spectrum?

How much do you want to strive? Because the more you want to strive, the more you’re going to have to sacrifice the savoring of life. And the more you’re going to have to sacrifice. So you’re not going to have much time to spend with friends and invite people over and cook food because it takes fucking time.

It’s like you were saying, you only have so much time and it takes far more effort than many people realize to build anything that matters in life. And I just think that Dahlia was absolutely right in that regard. And for me, I’m much more on the strive end of the spectrum now, but I can definitely see later in my life.

Intentionally moving it in the other direction for the same reasons where it’s okay, I’ve done a lot of striving. I’ve done a lot of winning. Now I have kids and grandkids and I can see where that then can become just more pleasurable than winning more in business, 

Donata: yeah. And that’s why I re evaluate because things can change, right? I don’t have children now, but if I did, I’m very sure my priorities would be much different, right? I wouldn’t necessarily be trying to build a business and start a nonprofit and do all of these things. I may just want to be. A seven figure parent, so it’s important to, I think, 

Mike: and there’d be nothing wrong with that.

Again, it’s a whole different discussion, but we’ve somehow gotten to this point in today’s culture where being a mom is looked down upon as something as like a relic of the patriarchy and something that men have forced onto women because they want them barefoot in the kitchen. But this is my mansplained take on it, but it’s my perspective is no, honestly, is that I think that raising children well is far more important than the vast majority of work that’s available out there.

Donata: And that’s exactly why not everybody should do it. 

Mike: I agree with that too, actually, a hundred percent for sure. But that, that’s literally the future of our entire species. It’s our entire future is in the hands of mothers mostly because in the case where you have Moms that are very, say, they spend a lot of their time being a mom.

Usually the guy is, the dad is around as much as he can be, but most of his time is out working. So it’s mostly the mom has a lot more influence in that regard. 

Donata: Yeah. Whichever parent spends more time. And I’m, I would hope to have more of an equal cause I don’t ever envision myself not working, if we were to have children.

Whoever’s around more has got that, that mantle. 

Mike: Totally. A hundred percent. Yeah. I’m just saying in most cases, if you have one kind of, whether it’s a part time working situation or a no working situation, it’s usually the woman. 

Donata: Yeah. Statistically it is. I would hope that it would be You know, whoever, whatever the family, 

Mike: I don’t know if it’d be better the other way around.

I think, I don’t know, women are better with children. Generally, they just are. How 

Donata: could 

Mike: that not be the case? Simple biology would dictate. 

Donata: Yeah. You would think, I don’t know. I haven’t been around enough babies recently to know for myself one way. 

Mike: I’ve just seen too many times. I’m like, could they have a mom?

Not that there’s anything wrong with the dad. It’s just also men in general. Imagine a world without women. It would be a disgusting shithole. It would be absolutely ridiculous. It would be like Mad Max. That would be the world. It would just be a bunch of testosterone raging dudes trying to kill each other for their shit.

At that point, it would just be out raping each other. ? It would be pre, I don’t 

Donata: make it out this discussion, right? It 

Mike: would be pre-history. We would never make it out of pre-history. Without women, 

Donata: you’d still be clubbing each 

Mike: other. Only women can moderate the insanity of men. 

Donata: I’m not gonna disagree , but I am gonna wonder how we got here.

It is because 

Mike: it’s a podcast and we just talk about stuff 

Donata: because it’s 2020. And this is a, 

Mike: yeah, exactly. Anyways, as we were saying with goals, 

Donata: yeah. 

Mike: So anyways, choose your values and put some thought into that. I totally agree. And I actually went through this process myself. I was trying to pull it up. I thought I had it.

It’s probably in my Google drive. I was looking where it should be and I couldn’t find it, but I’ve gone through this process and I think it is enlightening to do it and decide for me. Yeah. I didn’t think of it the way you had thought of it. I think it’s an interesting way to think of it for sure.

It was, just looking for the things that really resonate with me and that make me excited. And also that. Where I could see the world being a better place. If everybody behaved that way, 

Donata: that’s another great measure of it. And I check any goal that I’m about to, think about committing to against these.

Cause if I have to compromise any of these values, I just don’t do the thing. Like it’s not going to be worth it ever to me. And then I think the next thing is just thinking through, like we were talking about before. What it’s actually going to take to achieve this, because it’s not always pretty.

A lot of times it’s very much not pretty for that. Whether it’s business or fitness or whatever, the process. You have to learn to enjoy it, obviously, because you’re going to be doing it for a while, but it’s not always sunshine and butterflies. There’s going to be times where you don’t feel like doing it, and you have to be prepared for those times, because it’s not going to be always fun.

Mike: Yeah. In fact, there’s, who wrote, there was an essay, something, his last name was Green. It’s been around for a while. I’ve written about it, but basically the key takeaway is. That successful people, the common denominator, and this doesn’t just mean financially successful, it’s really actually successful in any regard.

Are the people who are willing to do the things that other people that the unsuccessful people are unwilling to do 

Donata: exactly. 

Mike: And they’re willing to do them every day. And I think that is a good way to look at it. Consistency 

Donata: is huge. This is one of the things we were talking about when we were talking about doing this episode was being consistent over a long period of time because I would never have been able to build my business.

I would never have been able to be in the physical shape that I’m in. If I wasn’t able to do things that I knew I should be doing, even when I couldn’t see what was happening, like when you can’t see the results, sometimes the change is so incremental that you can’t even detect it. On a day to day basis, but when you look back months ago, you can see a larger change.

And that I think is obviously the case in fitness, but also in many other areas you may not be able to see a change today or tomorrow or even next week or next month, but over a long period of time, that’s where the real transformation happens and being consistent when the results are not apparent.

It’s a big deal 

Mike: and that requires giving some thought if we’re talking about systems thinking to feedback, right? So in systems lingo to be feedback and take fitness, whatever you’re trying to do with your body composition, it’s going to take time. And so we know though that in fitness, okay, the feedback system is very simple.

You take some measurements, you take some pictures, you do it consistently and you look not at the day to day because that’s not really going to, you’re not going to see the change there. You look at it every few weeks and maybe it’s. One to two week averages on some stuff like weight or a waist measurement.

And then you look at your pictures every few weeks and there you go. There’s your feedback in more complex systems though, or in areas that aren’t just so simple, then there aren’t. Immediately obvious ways to get feedback. And so I think a mistake that many people make is then they don’t put anything in place for getting feedback.

So then they get one, two, three months into something and maybe they’ve been pretty consistent, but because they didn’t give any thought to feedback, they actually don’t know if they’ve made any progress. Take writing, for example, how do you really quantify or even How do you know, are you getting better or 

Donata: not?

But I think that also comes back to the individual, right? Like, how are you going to measure your progress? 

Mike: You do have to think about it is what I’m saying. 

Donata: Because for some people, like in my industry, It matters how quickly we can get it done because the client is waiting for it. But for many writers, it does not matter how quickly it gets done because they’re doing it for other reasons.

So for me, speed is a thing, but for other people, it’s not. And the same thing goes with any area. How many pleasurable experiences are you having with your spouse? That’s a really good measurement because that’s the whole point. But, fewer fights is also a measurement. Yeah. 

Mike: I guess if you were going to track your relationship numerically, then you would have to have pleasurable and unpleasurable experiences really.

And then, cause then you’re looking, if you want to just go by the simple research, you’re just looking at the ratio and can you maintain a, again, I would say it’s a minimum of two to one, but it may have been as high as four to one. And if you can do that, then chances are your relationships.

Probably in a good place. 

Donata: Yeah, but I think your point stands that you have to know how you’re going to evaluate your progress. Otherwise you’re going to become discouraged and think that you haven’t made any. 

Mike: Yeah. There’s a book it’s called triggers and it was by, oh, Gold something, there’s a marketing book triggers, but not that one.

And it was all about this point of just being able to, I think it was that kind of one of the key takeaways was tracking. If you did your best in to improve or move. The different areas that you want to improve in your life forward. I read it a couple of years ago when it first came out. Marshall Goldsmith, I think that was his name.

So I don’t, I’m not remembering it exactly, but it was along those lines. And I did it for a bit and I found it interesting. It think if I remember correctly, you’re rating on a scale of one to 10. And the key was, did I do my best? To improve, whether it, let’s say it’s a foot, say you’re working on fitness things, right?

So this week that I do my best to improve on my fitness, how do I rank that on a scale of one to 10? And the idea then is to, of course, then you can just monitor, are you putting in the effort that’s required to make strides toward whatever it is that you want to do? 

Donata: That’s an interesting measure, measuring your own effort, like self measuring your own effort.

It’s it reminded me of like the pain scale they give you in the hospital, like from smiley face all the way to terrified, sad face. How? Yeah, totally. Yeah. 

Mike: Basically, yeah. 

Donata: Yeah. But measuring your effort is another way. I personally don’t think that I would do very well with such a measurement, but if that’s something that people would.

I think you have to know yourself well enough to know whether that’s going to work for you. 

Mike: Totally. I did it for a bit and I found it interesting, but ultimately I didn’t feel like it was really adding much. It was adding just a little bit of administrative, like clerical work to my week. And I, and beyond that, I didn’t.

Find it really necessary. So I stopped doing it, but I did do it for a bit just because I was like, yeah, why not? It seems interesting. Let’s see if I can get something out of this and see if it’s something I want to keep in. 

Donata: Yeah. And I think for me, just someone like me and perhaps like you, I would always be like, no, I didn’t try hard enough.

That would be my inclination would be to rate myself lower than probably necessary because it would just make me feel bad. So you have to know yourself, but it is an interesting measure. And it could for hard to quantify goals, be one that works for a lot of people. 

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. And I think in general, again, the concept is again, because it does require a lot of consistent effort and high quality effort to make anything meaningful happen is how do you keep an eye on that?

How do you see whether you are, because there’s a, there are those. Interstitial periods between milestones where you can actually measure progress. And so you’re floating, you don’t know you’re putting in the work, but are you actually getting closer to anything? I don’t know. And so theoretically then if you at least could say I’m doing my best.

There is something psychologically warming about that. You know what I mean? And that’s a concept that I do personally like where I don’t mind. They don’t teach failure in school. I don’t think it’s as great as maybe some motivational speakers would say, yeah, you want to fail. No, actually you don’t want to fail.

You can make mistakes, but you really actually don’t want to fail. But in the end, I don’t mind whether it’s making mistakes or even failing nearly as much, if I can say. Hey, I did my best. I worked hard on that, but the idea didn’t pan out. That’s actually okay with me because I value the effort and knowing that I did the best I could versus it was a good idea and I was just lazy about it and I didn’t really exert myself and failed.

I’m not a very self critical person, so I probably wouldn’t care that much, but that would annoy me more. I’d be like that’s dumb. I should have tried harder. You know what I mean? 

Donata: Yeah. And I think this might be a good. I don’t want to cut you off, but I think this might be a good wrap up topic.

Mike: This is your interview. My habit of of hijacking conversations. 

Donata: No, not at all. I’m just this, I don’t know how you can top this. The topic of failure and fear of failure is my point because the way I teach it is as long as you’re still trying something, you really haven’t failed at it.

That’s not just a woo thing. Oh, feel good. Yay. You haven’t failed. You’re still trying. It’s like the definition of failure is that it’s an ending event, right? Like you can’t have possibly failed something if it’s still in process. 

Mike: And you can find so many good stories of that too, where again, yeah, that sounds nice, but no, I totally agree.

I think that is an actual just objective fact. And when you go and review how many people have achieved many impressive things, there often were. Periods where they did feel lost and it wasn’t just some pretty nice linear progression to greatness or to even goodness. 

Donata: And no one gets inspired by that anyway.

Like how many times have you been inspired by a story that goes I tried a thing. I was perfect at it. And then I lived happily ever after the 

Mike: rich and beautiful and everything that you don’t have. 

Donata: No one is inspired by a story like that. So I feel like when you’re in the moments of, Oh God, am I failing at this?

This feels so hard. It didn’t go the way I wanted. Those are the two things to remember, right? If you’re still trying something, you can’t possibly have failed at it. By definition, objective fact, I’m not making this up to make you feel better. If you’re still trying it, you haven’t failed because you haven’t ended the process yet.

The only way you fail is if you stop. 

Mike: Sometimes you should stop though. 

Donata: No, absolutely. If you find that the effort you’re putting in. Or the time it’s taking or, the end result that you’re striving for is not really worth it to you anymore. Yes, stop. But even I wouldn’t even consider that a failure because then you’re just reevaluating and you’re saying my priorities have changed and I don’t want to do this anymore.

And you’re putting your priorities first. So is that even a failure? Would you even qualify that as one? 

Mike: Me personally, I could care less about what words we’re using. I could. I’m going to say Oh yeah, that failed and be like, okay, whatever, moving on with my life. That 

Donata: doesn’t make you feel any type of way.

Mike: Yeah. The thing is though, I think there’s a difference between saying, Oh, I failed at this and I’m a failure. Like those are very different. I wouldn’t consider myself a failure because I failed at something. I would just say yeah, that didn’t work because I’ve seen this firsthand with particularly over the last five years or so actually with just people in my, orbit inner ish circle where I feel like that they are really at the point of Like they’re all in on sunk cost basically and have committed to goals that don’t seem to really make much sense anymore.

Like what are you actually doing and they don’t want to quit where they probably should and just re evaluate everything. But they just don’t want to because they’ve already put so much effort into it. And they don’t want to feel like a failure and they don’t want to say that they failed. And they’re afraid of what other people are going to think about them because Oh, you were doing that thing for how long?

And then you gave up, Oh, 

Donata: yeah. And I think that anytime you focus on what other people think of you, that’s, 

Mike: it’s not gonna help anything, I think, 

Donata: right? No, not at all. No. And that’s how you get into deep water with setting the wrong goals, right? And then go, like you said, going all in on sunk costs and not wanting to share that you haven’t performed perfectly, or that things aren’t going as expected.

When you are setting goals and trying to achieve things just because you’re worried about how other people are gonna look at you. That’s not a recipe for a good life. Even if you succeed at everything you try, you’re still not going to be satisfied because you never evaluated what was important to you personally.

But also in the situation where you’re been doing something for a while and you know that it’s not something you actually want to do anymore, your options are to publicly fail. Or to keep going and get the thing you don’t want or never get the thing you don’t want you try 

Mike: or yeah, likely never right.

Just because of what it takes, it’s hard to become successful accidentally or despite your unwillingness to work hard. And despite your disinterest, really that doesn’t lead to make it anywhere. It takes a lot of work and a lot of. Sustained interest, right? So most likely outcome at that point is going to be, you’re going to fail.

Eventually 

Donata: you’re just putting off when you have to tell people about it. 

Mike: Yeah. When life really actually just forces it on you, you can take your medicine now, or you can wait for when it gets so bad and then it gets foisted on you. 

Donata: Exactly. And I think that a lot of people don’t think about the holding pattern time.

Like how much time are you wasting doing this thing? And, yeah, you don’t want to rip the bandaid off and say yeah, I was not really doing a great job here. 

Mike: Or maybe like I can think of, I don’t want to get too much into details in case they’re listening, but I can think of one instance where there was a project that the assumptions going into it were wrong in terms of what it was going to take effort wise in particular.

And the idea was probably a bit flawed, but they go into it, they work on it. They work on it. They get into it and they realize Oh, this is going to be way more work than I anticipated and actually not worth it. It doesn’t make sense given my situation to continue putting so much of my resources into this.

And so it’s time to abandon it. And that was the win actually, like that’s the out and there’s a, there’s an opportunity cost. They would have been losing whatever they could have been doing instead of that by keeping going. 

Donata: Exactly. Exactly. And I have no. Qualms about saying, that was me in my legal career.

I thought it was gonna be cool. And then I wildly miscalculated what it was gonna take out of me to do it the way I wanted to do it. 

Mike: How, I’m just curious, like specifically how did that play out? 

Donata: Yeah, of course I was a litigator, so those are like the courtroom attorneys that you see on tv, always walking around in suits and all that stuff.

Rarely did I ever personally go to court because I was more of the writer. And research person. But what I miscalculated that made the job so much different for me was how much I took on other people’s conflict emotionally. So not that there was anything bad about my coworkers or the job itself, but how it affected me.

I just. Total miscalculation. I thought I was going to be able to leave work at work, and I was unable to do that because I would become so stressed out by other people’s issues. And that’s your job as a lawyer is to help other people solve their problems, right? So I would become so stressed out by other people’s issues as if they were mine.

And. That was literally my job, so it was my job to apparently make myself stressed out for, 60 hours a week and not just in a work kind of way oh, I have so much work to do stressed out, but emotionally feeling as if my clients problems were my own problems, which I’m sure my clients appreciated, but it was.

Like I keep saying a wild miscalculation on my own part about what it was going to take out of me to do that job. 

Mike: And that was an aspect of your personality. You just weren’t aware of until it got there. 

Donata: Yes. And maybe this is because it’s a male dominated industry and we’re going back to the whole thing.

But I think a lot of women are more empathetic than they. Believe themselves to be or that has 

Mike: been there’s research on that. You can just, if there’s anything even remotely controversial like that, you can actually just defer to research. Like we don’t need, we don’t need science. You don’t need science to tell us that anybody who can observe patterns can be like, yeah, women seem to be a bit more empathetic and compassionate than men.

Yeah. Fact. And then you can go, just go to the psychological literature and be like, Oh, there’s a huge body of evidence that backs it up. But sure. 

Donata: A lot of the values that I cultivated were, hard work and being very serious and doing the job no matter what, and those sort of more masculine tendencies, but then what I ignored was the fact that I am in fact a woman, hi, and was feeling emotionally a lot of the issues that just went along with the job, but there was nothing wrong with it for many people.

And many women do the job very well. I personally, and I was good at it too. I don’t want to make it sound like I was a shitty lawyer. I was really good. I was very good. But My issue was that it was not, it didn’t provide for the life that I thought it was going to because of the emotional impact it was having on me.

Mike: Yeah, no, I totally understand that. And I’m sure it was a big decision to walk away from it because you put so much time. That was the core of your identity at that point. It 

Donata: was, and it was. Embarrassing to tell people going back to this whole, did you fail? How do you define failure? How do you tell people that you failed?

Not only a big decision, but to tell my husband I don’t want to do this anymore. And that’s just my husband who loves me and knows me better than anybody else. But then to tell like my parents, Oh my God, my parents, 

Mike: my 

Donata: mom was great. I think my dad didn’t totally get it because one of his core values is security.

And so to him, it was like, Oh, my God, what are you doing? This is such an insecure decision that you’re making. 

Mike: Yeah, it probably sounds absurd. Like you’re going to go from being a litigator to what are you talking? To what are 

Donata: you even doing? What’s up? 

Mike: Life coaching, like you’re not a life coach, but yeah, what about my business? How 

Donata: do you make money? How do people pay you if there’s no like direct deposit happening? But yeah, so one of his core values is security. My parents are amazing, so I don’t want to make it sound like they were angry or in any way, disturbed by this decision. They just want the best for you always.

But I don’t think he quite got it until the business started doing well. And then he was like, Oh yeah, good job. 

Mike: Yeah. But I was just going to say, that’s always the story, right? Where you’ll have doubters and people will be behind your bag. Oh, do you know what Tanata did? Retaliate. This is ridiculous. This is going to go so badly for, and then when things go well and oh yeah, of course it’s you.

Of course it’s going well. That was a great decision. Great decision. 

Donata: But that’s exactly why you can’t. Allow people to have any input on what your goals are going to be or how well you’re doing on them or whether the result is worth it to you because you’re going to get mixed messages from everywhere.

People’s values are different from your own. So they’re going to be evaluating the facts differently. You could put the same list of facts in front of two people. And, they’re going to evaluate it differently and weigh certain things differently. 

Mike: Yeah. There’s research on it was people reporting accidents, what happened in accidents.

And it was crazy. The variability where you have groups of people and what they would say that they saw and what happened and how often it was wildly different, like to the point where it was baffling. I remember reading it. And I was like, how, what does this even mean? How the person was standing right there.

And then they saw what they saw and then they report something completely different. And that’s just objective reality. So yeah, when you get into subjective, anything subjective, it can get crazy, I actually don’t know. I wouldn’t say I don’t know. I simply, I don’t agree that you shouldn’t care what other people think or seek out advice about your goals or other.

I think you have to be very careful with the advice that is out there. 

Donata: And I don’t mean to say you don’t seek the input of people whose lives it may affect, right? Like it’s going to affect your spouse. 

Mike: Probably. Oh, sure. Sure. That’s just, I would say it’s probably just good manners, right? But in terms of the viability of the goal, the viability of your system, anything that you’re missing, they’re going to get advice one way or another.

So they might get it via friends and family. They might get it. Most people, for example, don’t read, right? So where do they get A lot of their ideas. They get it from whatever they do consume the ideas. They can just, yeah. My crowd, they’re all special unicorns, of course, but I say most people don’t, yeah, exactly.

Most people don’t high protein cupcakes. Most people. Don’t give much time to learning or embedding themselves at all. So where are they getting their ideas? They’re getting it from the media they consume. They’re getting their ideas from Netflix and that sounds ridiculous, but it’s not. It’s true.

Like people 100 percent the operating systems that they’re working on many people if they’re not actively trying to expose themselves to good ideas are based on random shit. Based on tweets they see, based on Instagram captions, Facebook posts, TV shows, movies, Oh, that one character said something and it stuck and, or that one character behaved some way and they think that even if it’s subconsciously, they’re drawn to it and they start to adopt a bit of that.

Style of speaking or dealing with situations and that’s insane and dangerous. And so I would say that you should seek out input on your ideas and your goals and your attitudes and your beliefs and your systems, but you have to be very careful where you get those ideas from. And you have to be very skeptical.

So for me, for example, I’m interested, let’s say business. I’m interested in people’s I’m interested in ideas, period. I think. At this point, I feel like I have a pretty, I have a good enough judgment of ideas where I can reject things that are obviously bad. But when I’m seeking out information, I like to go to sources where there have been multiple instances of success.

So take business, right? If somebody has one successful business, that’s what they’ve done in their life. That’s great. And I’m going to be interested in their ideas. And I’m not going to say they have no credibility. But somebody who has done it multiple times, a lot more credibility in my eyes. And I would go for relationships.

I would go for any area of life. So take fitness, right? Somebody who just got in shape themselves. Yeah, they probably have something to share of value, but somebody who has helped many other people get in shape to a higher order of mentor, so to speak, and. And the reason why I say this is something I’ve just thought about a number of times with people in my life who I’m a brusque person as you and everybody who follows me knows I’m capable of diplomacy and charm.

I just, I don’t use it maybe as much as I should. So how that will manifest sometimes is where somebody I’ll see somebody in a situation and I’ll just be like, not, Oh, this is dumb. I’ll just say objectively look. If you want some advice, here’s what I see and here’s what I would do if I were you. And a number of times I’ve seen situations play out where if that person would have just taken my advice, they would have saved themselves all kinds of trouble.

And I understand that I could say it’s on me for being an ineffective communicator in the end, right? Take the time and the effort to make it palatable enough and make it persuasive enough or whatever. But I wish I had more of those people in my life. Honestly, I wish I had people who knew enough about me and what I’m doing in any aspect of my life and straight up would just tell me like, Mike over here, this is dumb.

You should actually just stop doing it that way. And you should start doing it this way. And here’s why I would be listening. I wouldn’t be like automatically defensive and trying to say how, no, I’d be like, really? Okay. Tell me more. And that’s one of the reasons why I put a lot of time into reading.

I’m looking for good ideas. I’m not looking to reinforce my biases or try to stroke my ego. I’m looking for What are some new good ideas that can make me better and make my life better? So I know it’s a long monologue and I’m hijacking again, but I just thought it’s worth saying because it’s something that I think a lot of that idea Oh, just, keep your own counsel and never listen to what other people have to say.

That’s not bad advice if it’s 80%, but if you still have a willingness to look for good ideas and have some criteria of Who you’re actually willing to listen to and how are you going to judge the value and the workability of ideas that for me has worked better than just being very close minded and being like, I am what I am and I have the ideas I have and I have the beliefs I have and I’m just going to do it my way.

Fuck it. You know what I mean? 

Donata: Yeah, no, I would agree with that. And I think that’s the difference between Like you said, having criteria to evaluate the information you’re getting versus letting other people’s ideas just totally sway you. And I didn’t mean to say don’t ever listen to anybody else ever, because obviously you need to be open to, like you said, new ideas from new places and people who have achieved successes that you have not.

Especially if they’ve done so multiple times in order for you to even know what it takes to achieve the thing that you’re hoping to achieve. But then there’s also the taking things with a grain of salt portion, 

Mike: which is most I understand. That’s most information. That’s most ideas. That’s going to be most of the advice should be taken with a whole lick of salt, but you can quickly know that.

Okay, who’s giving you this advice and why should you listen to them? I understand that many people have an aversion to quote unquote being judgmental and that’s another tangent I won’t go on but I completely disagree with that. I think there are productive forms of judgment and Unproductive and just where it comes down to just being mean and I understand that but when we’re talking about this like no, you need to judge who’s giving you this advice and why should you listen to them?

And if you determine, and it really comes down, I think it starts with how are they doing in this area? So someone wants to offer you relationship advice and they’ve been divorced three times and their fourth marriage is on the rocks. So What you can do then is you can ask them for their advice and then consider doing the exact opposite.

That actually would be make sense. You know what I mean? But to take someone’s idea, like in that situation, they give you any piece of advice and to seriously consider implementing it into your life. You have to wonder like, You do understand that they’re in the condition they’re in because of the decisions they made and the actions they took.

They’re sharing with you their beliefs and their ideas that led to their actions. It’s if they’re offering you a virus and want to become infected and that applies to any area of someone’s life. If somebody has a disordered, broken, dysfunctional body, Life, you probably shouldn’t care about their thoughts about much of anything outside of the daily.

Like anything that really matters to you. Probably not the person to go to because they probably don’t have much of value to add because if they did, they would be doing it in their life and they wouldn’t. Have a scorched earth for a life, 

Donata: right? And I think that’s a really important point, which is don’t seek advice from people whose results you don’t want, or like you said, do seek the advice, but then only to determine what not to do.

If somebody’s results are the exact opposite of what you want. They’re obviously doing something that gets them those results. And that’s the other point that I took from your thoughts was that, and I don’t think many people even actively agree with this, is that you are responsible for the results you’re receiving.

Some people want to blame luck or circumstance or, whatever, without anything to not take full responsibility for what it is that they are receiving or experiencing in life. And yes, there are events and circumstances beyond our control, but. We also always have a choice about how to handle and respond to those things.

I think that, and maybe your crowd is, there are a bunch of special unicorns who have all already accepted this truth. 

Mike: We already established 

Donata: that. That you are responsible for the results that you’re seeing. And if you’re not liking the results, it’s because of something you’ve done in the past or inconsistently and haven’t done.

Enough of to get you to where you are now. And if you want or 

Mike: fail to do, there are plenty of times where maybe there are things that should have been done that weren’t done. And that again, that’s a whole nother discussion, but I’ll say this, that I totally agree with that. And I could definitely talk through those individual points.

I’ve thought about it quite a bit, but if nothing else, even if somebody like, I don’t really, I’m not sure I buy into that there’s too much, not under my control and too much luck involved in whatever, simply pretending like that’s true. Works. There’s research on that, that even if you don’t believe it, just act like that is the case and force it on yourself to start behaving that way.

And you will start behaving more effectively and your life will improve. So regardless of whether it’s ultimately true or not in the metaphysical cosmic sense of things actually doesn’t really matter because it just works. 

Donata: And it doesn’t matter at all because. You won’t ever be able to control those things anyway.

So you can either try to change the results you’re getting or not try to change them and complain about them. So you’re right. It doesn’t matter if in fact, you have ultimate responsibility over every result you ever receive in your life. But if you just act like you do, you will be. Affecting those results to your maximum capacity.

Mike: Yep. And you will have a better life. We’ve gone all over the place and I know it was a great discussion. I really enjoyed it. And I know that my crowd’s going to like it because it’s just something different than the usual kind of me rambling about. How to lose fat faster or gain muscle faster.

So I appreciate you taking the time to do it and let’s wrap up with where people can find you and your work. And if there’s any product or service in particular that you think was particularly, that was relevant to this conversation, or if you have anything new and exciting coming. 

Donata: Of course. So you can always find me on social media.

I love Instagram. It’s my favorite. And I know that you guys are probably all on Instagram. So if you go find me at Donato white on Instagram, I will say hello. That’s where I am most of the time. Of course, donenotawhite. com is just my home base, but what I really think would be great. If you were super interested in this discussion, you want to learn about how to set and achieve and create systems to, really set yourself up for success with your goals.

If you head to goalgettercode. com, I really, I just made this course available all the time. This is something that I used to only launch for a very short period right before new year’s. But I decided that it was so important that people have it available always. If you go to goalgettercode. com, I have an online course that teaches you my exact system, like literally how I break my goals down into pieces and put it in my calendar and make sure things get done every day so that you can look back several months from now and say, Oh, I have made progress in this area.

It teaches you how to measure them, teaches you how to set your mental state up, right? How to put things in your schedule, how to eliminate things you don’t want in your schedule. It’s all of the logistics of setting and achieving the right goals for you. And it starts with those values that we were talking about earlier.

So I really think that you guys are going to love it. 

Mike: Awesome. Thanks again, Donata. I appreciate you taking the time and sure this episode do quite well. And I look forward to doing another one. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the, if 

Donata: not, I’m going to try again next year. 

Mike: Thanks again, Donata. I appreciate it. 

Donata: Thank you so much.

Mike: All right. That’s it for today’s episode. I hope you found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don’t mind doing me a favor, could you please leave a quick review for the podcast on iTunes or wherever you are listening from? Because those reviews not only convince people that they should check out the show, they also increase the search visibility.

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New stuff that I have coming. And last, if you didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at Mike at muscle for life. com and share your thoughts. Let me know how you think I could do this better. I read every email myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback. All right.

Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.