Ep. #306: Jeff Haden on the Biggest Motivation Myths That Are Holding You Back

Jeff: If you want to do something, you don’t have to have this lightning bolt that says, this is my life’s purpose and passion. You can just have something that you are interested in trying to be better at whatever it may be, and you can create your own motivation as you go along.

Mike: Hey, Mike Matthews here from muscle for life and Legion athletics. Back with another episode of the muscle for life podcast. And this time around, we’re going to be talking motivation, a topic that is very popular, especially in the fitness space. And something that I have recently written very extensively on in a new book of mine, that’s coming out in a couple of months called the little black book of workout motivation.

This podcast, however, is not going to be about the book. It’s not going to be Excerpted from the book. I will be doing that soon in this podcast. I’m going to interview Jeff Hayden, who is a very popular columnist over at ink. com and also the author of a new book called the motivation myth, how high achievers really set themselves up to win.

And this is actually how I found Jeff. And I really liked what he had to say in this book. So I got him onto the podcast. Now. Have you ever wondered why some people are so motivated and other people are not? Have you ever wondered why some people just seem to have it, grit, willpower, conscientiousness, whatever you want to call it, and other people do not?

Were these people that have it just born with it? Did they develop it through training? Does it have to do with them finding and pursuing their true calling? Or is there some other explanation? In today’s interview Jeff is going to argue that motivation doesn’t come from luck or genes but from something much simpler and more practical.

He says that it comes from small wins. Jeff believes that the best way to get and stay motivated is to set goals. Yes, of course you need to set goals and there are good ways to set goals and bad ways to set goals. But, Once you’ve set goals, the next step is more important. And that is creating a process that allows you to experience and celebrate regular small wins along the way toward those larger goals.

And this is something that I completely agree with so much so that I think goals are not nearly as important as many people think. I think many people think that put way too much attention and emphasis on goals and way too little attention and emphasis on processes and routines. And that’s what today’s discussion is going to be about.

Now here’s a little bit of what you are going to learn in this interview. You’re going to learn how to stay motivated to achieve your goals even after repeated failures. Which is very important because no matter how smart you are, no matter how good your plans are, no matter how hard you are willing to work, you are going to experience failures.

I’ve experienced many failures along the way to getting to where I am today. And in fact, a number of those failures have taught me very important lessons that I’ve been able to use to slingshot myself to higher levels of success. You’re also going to learn how to create a daily routine that gets you closer to your goals every day and which helps keep you motivated.

If you’re into fitness, which you probably are, if you’re listening to this, you know exactly how this works. You know exactly how motivating it is to make small incremental gains in the gym and in the mirror. And you know that although the changes are slight day to day, they add up to something significant over time.

And that’s how you go from being a skinny fat dude to a jack dude. That’s how you go from being very weak to very strong. It doesn’t happen overnight. Yeah. It takes time and you’re okay with that. So long as things are moving in the right direction. So long as you see small, frequent wins, Jeff’s also going to talk to you about the right way to think about self doubt and critical feedback and how you can use this to fuel your motivation and drive.

And like the failures point, this is also very important because all of us are going to experience self doubt. All of us are going to experience imposter syndrome to one degree or another, and how we respond to it is key. If we allow it to deflate us and slow us down, we will lose. If we can use these things to increase our drive, however, To increase our desire to succeed, then we will have learned to clear a hurdle that many people get tripped up on.

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Jeff: Oh, thank you. It is. It is my pleasure. 

Mike: So we’re gonna be talking motivation, which is something that I’ve been reading and writing about a lot because I’m actually wrapping up a book, which I’m calling the little black book of workout motivation.

And it’s called, And I’m excited to have this conversation because I like your book, the motivation myth. And I have some things I’d like to ask you about and get your thoughts on. And some of the stuff is stuff you’ve covered in the book for the people that haven’t read it. And then other stuff or things that, again, I was just curious as to some follow up with you.

If we want to start at the top, I’m curious, what kind of spurred you to write this book? Cause obviously a lot has been said on this subject and I guess you could say that about anything, but what was it that inspired you to write this book? Throw your hat into the ring. 

Jeff: It started, I’m lucky enough in what I do that I get to talk to lots of really successful people in a variety of fields, and I can use a bunch of different examples.

We’ll go with a metal one just for fun. I was talking to Kirk Hammett, which, if you’re going to drop a name, Kirk’s is a good one to drop. He’s the Metallica guitarist. He’s been in this band forever and they’re wildly successful and they still sell out stadiums. And I was saying, what spurred you on early to, decide you wanted to have a career in music and to do this.

Cause I was assuming there was going to be this watershed moment, like this lightning bolt thing that hit him. And he said, I just, one day I was looked at my guitar. It was in the closet. And I thought, I want to play you better. And that was his big moment. And so I thought about that and I thought about I talked to Venus Williams about the same thing and all these people that I’ve talked to and not one of the people that are these, what we would consider to be super high achievers had this lightning bolt moment where they said, wow, I have figured out what I want to do.

I figured out my life’s purpose. I figured out my goal and I have all the motivation I need to carry me through all the years of struggle. And. Everything else to get there. So I contrasted that with lots of people that write me and say, Hey, I feel stuck, don’t know what to do. I can’t seem to find the motivation to get going.

I have all these hopes and dreams and goals, but I can’t really do anything. And all of them were waiting for motivation to somehow pop down upon them and fill them with all that they needed to go off and.

So I looked at that and I thought, okay, you’ve got these highly successful people that see motivation is something that they get to create on a daily basis. And then you have the people that feel stuck that think that motivation has to come to them. So that was the central premise there was that.

If you want to do something, you don’t have to have this lightning bolt that says, this is my life’s purpose and passion. You can just have something that you are interested in trying to be better at, whatever it may be, and you can create your own motivation as you go along, which. If I look at the stuff that you’ve done, I’m sure that resonates with you because that’s how you’ve achieved what you’ve achieved.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I can totally relate to that. That’s I’ve actually said as much, many times that when I first got into this, it was really just on a lark. I was I wrote a book, bigger, leaner, stronger Self-published it wasn’t really sure that anybody was gonna care and didn’t have any grand ambitions, really didn’t have any master plan beyond see if anybody.

Wants to read my book and gives a shit. And then now it’s turned into this whole thing. But even going back for that, how I found writing was just like that. It was, and I’ve always been a good student. I’ve always liked to read. I’ve always liked language. Maybe I’d like to write that and then that was it.

So I was like, yeah, maybe I could be good at it. And I would say, now after a lot of work and a lot of grinding, I’d say I’m pretty good at this point by my standards. Not very good, but yeah, I can absolutely relate to that. 

Jeff: What it comes down to is that like for you, and I’m going to assume that I know you really well, which I don’t, but we’ll pretend you said, okay, I want to try this.

I want to get a little better at that. So you didn’t look out and say, okay, some someday I want to write, a Tim Ferriss four hour work. We can sell, millions of copies. You didn’t think of it that way. You thought I want to get better. I want to see what I can do with this. I want to improve.

And so by focusing on that day to day, So that at the end of the day, you looked and said, that was pretty good, or I did this well, or I’ve gotten fitter, or I’ve gotten stronger, whatever the different pursuits you had, if you had those little successes that made you feel good about yourself, which we all love, that made you feel happy, and that gave you enough motivation to carry you to the next day.

And really, where motivation is concerned, that’s all you need. You don’t need this endless storehouse of it. You just need enough to carry you to tomorrow to make you go, okay, here’s another day. I’m going to grind today. And I love your use of the word grind because people see grinding as like this negative.

It sounds like it’s a horrible thing, but grind is actually a really positive thing. Venus Williams, she calls every year, like this is grind fest 2018 and that’s how she sees her life is okay, in 2018, I’m going to put my head down and I’m going to do the work and that’s what grinding is and then if you can create a little bit of motivation through success as you go along, just small ones, then you can keep grinding because you’ve got that little virtuous flywheel going of effort, success, fulfillment, man.

Motivation, which gets you to the next little dose of effort. 

Mike: And from there, I think it’s a good segue into some myths, some common motivation myths. So that’s of course, one is that people think that people have achieved great things, but they think that it’s more because they’re just so motivated to keep doing what they’re doing and they just love it so much and they wake up every day, absolutely ecstatic to go hit some more tennis balls and so forth.

When that most definitely is not the case. One of the. Common things that I mean, I’ve found just to just with different athletes, high level athletes that I’ve known is that a lot of them have gone through periods where they felt burned out. Even people that were playing professionally, making a lot of money and one of the more difficult struggles for a lot of people has been to still have fun with it and not have it just become a job.

Or then you speaking of grinding where they lose motivation. So what are some other common myths out there about motivation? 

Jeff: That brings up an interesting point because that idea, you are right. There are people that will reach a certain level of success in it. It almost does burn you out.

The opposite thing can happen though, when you’re holding out, when you have this big goal in mind, we’re all taught to create smart goals, like that acronym of, I have to, I even forget what it stands for because I don’t necessarily believe in it, one of them is it has to be meaningful and it has to be Tainable, there’s all kinds of stuff, but we’re taught that you have to pick out this goal and you have to hold it in front of yourself and you have to maintain this laser like focus and always have your eye on the goal.

And I think that’s actually an incredibly defeating way to go about it. So to use a fitness metaphor, say you, a bucket list item of yours is that you want to run a marathon, but you’re not a runner and you don’t run. So you go out today and you run a mile. You come home tired, you collapse on the couch, you feel terrible, your knees hurt.

If you pop your head up and look out at that 26 mile goal and say, Oh my gosh, someday I have to run 26 of these. That laser like focus on that end goal is going to make you quit because the distance between here and Which is you on the couch having run a mile and feeling like hot death and they’re having to do 26 miles.

It’s too far and it’s defeating it. It makes you give up. But if your goal today was to go out and run a mile, that’s your plan. That’s your process. That’s what you have to do. If that’s your process and you do that, you get to feel good about yourself. Because you did what you set out to do, and that’s all that matters today.

And the accumulation of all of those days is what gets you to that end goal, not the laser like focus thing. So I think that is another big myth of being motivated is thinking, okay, I’ve got to keep that big goal in mind because that’s going to motivate me because oftentimes that’s a demotivator because it’s too freaking far if you’re trying to do something really big, if I want to put on, I’m old, so it’s hard.

If I want to put on say 15 pounds of muscle. Like actual muscle, not just 15 pounds. That’s a big ass goal. And if I sit there every day and think, Oh my gosh, I’m still trying to get there. I’m still trying to get there. I need this 15 pounds. I’m going to quit because it’s going to take me a long time.

Mike: Yeah. That reminds me of I believe just what pops in my head. I think it was a study. I remember who conducted it, but basically they were looking at measuring progress in terms of how far you’ve come versus how far you still have to go. And it’s basically whichever is smaller is the one that’s more motivating.

Yeah. So if you’re in that first, you’re really, you’re trying to get to being able to run a mile comfortably, let alone 26 miles. Then if you just focus more on, this is comes back to focusing on that process because that’s really where you’re at in the scheme of things. You are not close enough to the 26 miles to really gain anything by contemplating it.

But if you can contemplate, all right you’re able to run a mile, even if it’s uncomfortably, at least you can run a mile. From there, maybe you can get to, two miles and three miles. And eventually and anybody who has done anything that has taken a significant amount of time and work has probably experienced this.

That once you start getting toward the end, you’ve definitely experienced this as a writer. Once you start getting toward the end of your book and then you start looking at, Oh, this is all I only have, this, I have to do one final edit and then the manuscript is done. You start, that starts to become motivating.

But in the beginning, yeah. Just thinking about, cool, I have a hundred thousand words to write and research and edit I think you can build your resilience to a point where you don’t care either way, but you have to get there. And yeah, Vega goals in some ways can be inspiring, at least initially, right?

Jeff: I think you can have a very specific goal if you want, say it’s that, we’ll use your example of a hundred thousand words. Maybe that is my goal because I need that for my book. So that goal though, it can be very specific, but then The only real thing to do with that early on is to let that inform your process.

So it’s okay, that’s where I have to go. So how do I build a process that allows me to get there? And then once you have that, you’ve set your goal. And in my mind, you need to forget that end goal for a while and just put your head down and look at those intermediate goals. Because like you said, at some point when you do pop your head up, you look around and say, holy crap, I’m up to 60, 000 really good words. This is pretty cool. I don’t have that far to go. And then that becomes a really motivating thing. And like you said, the distance to the end is shorter now. So it feels better, but early on, you can have a really specific goal, allow it to inform your process, figure out your process, and then try as best you can to forget that big goal and just stick to the day to day.

Mike: Yeah, I agree. 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 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 Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. Do you have any specific insights to share in terms of how you go about creating processes for your goals?

Jeff: Probably my favorite, which which I’ve also gotten the most heat for would be one of the chapters in my book is you don’t need a coach. You need a pro. And I’ve had lots of people that are in the, especially the business and life coaching profession that have taken great offense to that. The point of that chapter was, let’s say that I’ve decided that I want to gain, we’ll use muscle again.

I want to gain 10 pounds of muscle. So I can go to my local gym, I can get the personal trainer who is, taking some personal training courses or whatever, and I can say, hey, I want to put on some muscle. They’ll sit there and ask me, what do you like to do? What’s your fitness level?

What’s your interest? How much time do you have? They’ll ask me all these questions about me and they’ll construct this basically generic program that’s pretty soft. And probably is not going to get me where I want to go. Or I can go to you and say, dude, I want to gain 10 pounds of muscle. What would you do if you’re me?

And you’re going to say, all right, you’re going to work your ass off. You’re going to lift heavy. You’re going to do compound movements. You’re going to forget about a lot of isolation stuff because. You need to lift heavy, hard, and often. You’re going to talk about my nutrition. You’re going to do all this stuff.

That is a real world practical. Here’s how it works. If you actually want to succeed guide to me gaining muscle, as opposed to the person who’s going to give me the sugar coated, soft, Here’s some stuff you can do. Here’s some stuff you can work on. So the reason that I like the hardcore approach from someone who has actually done it and will give you the real deal is because at the end of this, let’s say I do it for six months at the end of that six months, all the work I put in on either one of those plans, it’s already behind me.

So I don’t care. What I care about is where am I at the end of that six months? And I would rather be at a place where I have come really close to, if not having achieved my goal, then be at a place where, wow, I didn’t get very far at all because the effort is gone. The results are what you’re living with.

My thing is if whatever you want to achieve, if it’s start a business, write a book, I don’t care what it is, find someone who has done that and we’ll give you a clear Cold clinical assessment of here’s what you have to do, and then all you have to do, the cool thing is, all you have to do is follow that because people seem to think that they need to reinvent the wheel for themselves, because we’re all unique and special and individual.

And yes, we are all individuals. But most things work for most people. So there’s no reason to go out and reinvent a perfectly good wheel. There are great wheels out there. If you look to the people who have actually accomplished what you want to accomplish, and if you ask in a nice, friendly way, I found that most really successful people will actually help you.

I know that sounds odd. We’re taught to think that no one responds, but if you come at it sincerely, I’ve decided I want to learn to play guitar. I’ve thought that my whole life. I’m 57 and I finally decided it might be fun. So I asked Kirk Hammett for some advice and he’s not going to be my teacher, but he’s given me a lot of advice.

Mike: What’s some of the advice that he’s given you? I’m just curious. 

Jeff: He gave me some gear advice. He told me, and I hate this, cause I wanted to learn to play some riffs from some songs right away. And he said, you can do that on your own time. But first you really got to actually learn a little bit of theory and learn some scales and learn some technique and, get your fundamentals down, which is like everything else in life, if you’re going to tell me about lifting, you’re going to work on my form first.

You’re not going to worry about weight and you’re not going to worry about other stuff you’re going to care about is my form correct so that I get the most out of what I’m doing. So a lot of it is that, which I didn’t really want to hear because I just wanted to learn how to lift. Do the opening Dan or saying, man, I thought that would be fun.

Yeah, I want to be able to, I want to be able to go to a party or somebody had a guitar, pick it up and play for 20 seconds and put it back down and be like, I’ll die. Even though I have, 

Mike: I think you have to just decide that you can do that. If you go, that’s all I want to do. You can do that.

But if you’re saying, I want to be good at playing guitar, I think, those are different, very different things. 

Jeff: That’s how I try to approach most things. If I’m not going to get something intrinsic from it, if I don’t feel good just myself for having learned to do something or gotten good at something, then I really don’t want to do it.

Because that validation you get from other people, like my ability to go to a party and play for a few seconds and impress people, that’s fine, but I don’t feel like that makes me stick with something that goes away. But when you feel good about yourself for being able to do something, you get that all the time.

And that at the end of the day is what makes you feel good about yourself. So his advice was perfect for what I wanted to do. 

Mike: Yeah, it makes sense. There’s that extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation, right? And extrinsic motivators mostly are fleeting and they lose their appeal relatively quickly.

Jeff: What also happens is that you find yourself, because they do go away quickly, you find yourself searching hard for that, and you put effort into getting that external validation when you could have been putting that time and effort into just getting better or being able to do whatever it is that you said you really wanted to be able to do.

So the chase of the applause becomes a bigger thing than actually doing the work that makes you feel good. 

Mike: Yeah, and going back to the coach versus pro. I like that. My question to you is then this might be something people are wondering is because you have so many coaches out there for everything.

How would you go about finding somebody who’s believable? I guess to use like Ray Dalio’s word, right? Because it really depends. I totally agree. And I think it’s a bit easier in some way. Areas like if you want to, I’ve taken a lot of golf lessons and I’ve taken some golf lessons from very good golfers that were also good teachers that I would say were, they weren’t professional golfers, but they were pros in that respect.

They had achieved what I wanted to achieve and they were good at teaching. They had achieved that with other people. They had taught other people to do what I want to do as well. But in the case of let’s say it’s just business or money making or some specific skill related to those things, it can be hard to find.

Someone who is believable because most people that are good at business, good at making money are doing it. They’re not teaching people how to do it. They don’t have time to do that. And a lot of people, and this comes back to that point, you’re saying of life coaches and so forth, a lot of people that, and that’s such a kind of squishy, what is a life coach?

Who even knows, right? But a lot, it’s, in my experience, it’s been I’ve come across a lot of people who would build themselves as business coaches or even marketing coaches, life coaches who have never really built a business to that’s worth speaking about, or are really not good marketers or whose lives you wouldn’t want yourself.

Jeff: I guess the distinction that I would make is if it’s a. A physical skill. Like when you said a golf coach, that’s a perfect example of where finding someone to teach you, like to work on your swing mechanics and things like that. There are lots of really good people there. And I think that’s a fine use of a coach in that situation.

If you want to start a business or you’re running a business and you’re not really getting very far, then I don’t think that I would look to, a business coach per se. Because that’s what they do for their living, because most of the work that you have to do in your business still comes down to you.

So what you really need from a coach point of view is someone who does that and has succeeded to a really high level where you just, you get a lunch with them or something like that. And you say, dude, I’m struggling. I’ve gotten my sales to this point, but I can’t seem to break through that.

And I’m not sure where to turn and probably in five minutes, that person is going to be able to say based on your product mix or whatever your parameters are, here’s what you probably need to do. And it’s going to be something hard and it’s going to be advice you don’t necessarily want to hear, but that you need to hear because the people that have done it and succeed it at a very high level can look at your stuff and very clearly say.

Here’s a fundamental place that you need to make a shift. And so like in business stuff, you just need to find someone who’s really good. And I know it works all the time. I know it seems hard to find people, but find someone who has built a really successful business. Send them a note, give them a call, stop by and just say, I’m an entrepreneur too, and I’m hoping if I take you to lunch, can I just run something by you and do it in a nice and gentle way?

And I’ve rarely found that people will turn you away if you are nice and sincere about it. But the caveat to that is when they give you advice, you can’t automatically argue. And I see people do that all the time. If I say to you. Hey, I want to do X and you say okay, then you need to do one, two, three.

And I say, wow, wait a minute. One doesn’t work and two is stupid. And, people do that all the time too. Usually, you know what you’re talking about. And so even if you disagree, you should go home and say, all right, I really need to look at this because what I think is right. Isn’t getting me to where I want to go.

So clearly I need to look at something that somebody else is doing. I talked to a guy the other day, he was a major league pitcher for. 10 years, all star team. A couple of times he runs a bunch of car dealerships and he said he used to, when he got traded to a team, they would say, it’s not how we do stuff here.

And he would say yeah, but you guys have been in fourth place for the last three years. So who gives a shit about what it is you do here? But that really is how that works out. What you’re doing, if what you’re doing is not getting you to where you want to go, then you need to open up and listen to other people who have gotten to where you want to go, because they probably know better than you.

I’ve. Can’t think of how many times that somebody has said, you’re doing pretty well at this, but if you would only do this, then that would really change. And, I would fight it and I would hate it and I would not want to do it. And then sooner or later I would say, I should try that.

I need to give that a go. And it invariably turns out to be right. 

Mike: Yeah. And I would just add to that something that, and I totally agree. I’d add to that something again, that I personally look for Is I like to see someone that has done something that I wanna do more than once, because sometimes people can get lucky and the luck can play a much larger role than you might realize, and that they even might realize or might want to accept.

But if they’ve had repeated successes, that of course. Much less likely and also someone that can explain the mechanic, they can explain why they can explain how did this thing work and how are they able to make it happen? Because again, I’ve come across instances where people did have something to show for, but then they couldn’t really because they actually did just get very lucky.

They couldn’t really break down how they did it. And how they might do it again or how they might, what have they learned that can be extrapolated to other industries or activities. So those are also two things that I look for. And I also definitely agree that there are a lot of successful people out there who actually would like to help others.

They’re very busy and so they’re not gonna probably be able to give much time. To people who are outside of their inner circle, my experience of this is I’ve been emailed many times by people who want to do something similar whether it’s just entrepreneurial or working particularly in the fitness space.

And while honestly I wouldn’t be going to lunch, I don’t even go to lunch. Like I eat lunch at my desk. So I would be the person that. Right now I’d be declining lunch invitations and I actually have, but I’m happy. I’ve done Skype calls with just random people. I’m happy to email and answer questions.

However, I would add to what you have already said that I think it’s important to not only consider the advice being given and not just instinctively rejected for one reason or another. Also, if you do agree with something, you have to follow through on it and you have to do it before you come back with more questions, you got to go do something.

Here’s the reason why. I say that because I’ve seen that many times as well, where people will ask me questions and I’ll give answers. And in some cases it’s like, Hey, you should really read this book because it goes over these specific things. I can’t just break it down in an email for you, read this book and come back to me.

And then they’ll come back at some point later. Hey, did you read the book? No excuses, reasons. And. Honestly, I, at that point I’m nice, but that’s the end of the the relationship because I can see that they’re just wasting my time and they’re wasting their time because it’s, it’s annoying to take your time to try to help somebody.

And then they just don’t have the follow through to read a book. Then maybe you shouldn’t be trying to build a business. Maybe you should just go get a job. 

Jeff: Yeah. I, the lunch thing, it’s funny you say that because I always say, Hey, I’ll take you to lunch or something. But you’re right, nobody ever wants to, and I don’t really want to either, but I’m trying to show that, hey, I’m extending a gesture here and I’m willing to do something.

I’m willing to meet you where it’s convenient for you or whatever. But it always turns out that you end up on Skype or on the phone or something else, which is cool. And I actually prefer to, because I eat at my desk. As far as the taking the advice, the That’s a really good litmus test of a person who can help you is that they can give you advice, but they can break it down into the how, and it doesn’t have to be super detailed, but they can say, here’s what you need to do.

And I would do 1, If they don’t have the how, then probably they’re just giving you platitudes or theories. And, theories are fun, but they, Don’t help you make changes. If you’re going to help somebody do something, you have to actually tell them what to do and teach them so that then they can do that themselves and they can learn from it.

So I remember when I decided a few years ago, or it’s been a while, I wanted to ride this Grand Fondo, their mass participation cycling events, and it was a hundred and some mile, 11, 000 feet of climbing. And I went to a local guy, he’s a mountain bike professional. He’s won national championships and almost made the Olympic team.

And he lived nearby and I said, Hey, I want to ride this Grand Fondo. What would you do? And my first day out and I had the farthest I’d ridden before that was about 20 minutes, maybe. And the first day out, I had to ride for three hours. And I said, three hours is a lot. He said you’ve got four months to train.

So if you want to get there, here’s what you have to do. So had I not. Done what he laid out for me the first week and then went back and say, Hey, what do you think I should do now? You’re right. He would have just said if you don’t want to do what I say you need to do, then find something else or find somebody else.

But clearly it’s not, it’s a waste of my time, but he was willing to engage the whole way through because I listened and I tried to do what he told me to do. And I was trying to learn and. That’s an incredibly attractive trait. When people come to you and ask you for advice, it’s flattering.

First of all, it implies that you are a smart person that has advice to give, and then when they follow it, that feels really good too. And that’s a really cool thing. And I have found that most people enjoy mentoring people as long as the other person appreciates it and tries to act upon it.

And, someday your mentor, Can become a colleague because, you’ve developed stuff and then someday it goes back and forth and that’s even better, but you have to do the work early on or you’re like you said, you’re wasting everybody’s time. 

Mike: Absolutely agree. It makes me think of the tiger wood story might be apocryphal.

I don’t know. I don’t know. It just sticks in my brain where he was apparently golfing with somebody, some business person or whatever. And the guy asked tiger for advice on how to. What should he do with his game? How can you improve his game? And apparently Tiger told him that he should just take two weeks off.

Take it easy. Don’t think about it much and then quit.

Jeff: That probably is I don’t know. I think Tiger had his less than tactful moments along the way. So it may have, might’ve happened, but it was funny because the Jeremiah Bishop is the guy that, that helped me to end up writing that grand Fonda. And. When he went out for a ride with me the first day, we only rode for 15 minutes and went back and he said, okay, you’ve got to do three things.

You got to get stronger. You got to work on your form. And I just said, what’s wrong with my form? And he said you’re inefficient, you’re wasting your pedal strokes. And I said, and so he showed me what to do and it was really uncomfortable and it hurt really fast because I was trying to use all of my legs instead of just the push part of the stroke.

And I thought, I don’t want to do this. And he looked at me and said, if you want to do this, you got to do that. It’s like that thing from the wire. I don’t know if you remember the scene with Marlo and he goes in the in this little convenience store and he steals a sucker or something and the security guard comes outside and Marlo says to him, the security guard’s giving him a hard time and he says, you want it to be one way, but you can’t.

But it’s the other way. And what’s funny about that is that we often want things to be one way, which is our way, but usually it’s the other way, which is the right way or the hard way or the way we need to follow. And yeah, I know I’m repeating myself, but it’s really important. If you’re going to try to do something and you want to succeed at it, there is the right way.

And then there’s the way that’s not going to get you there and leave you feeling defeated and demotivating. And man, what’s the point of that? If you’re going to put the effort in, have every chance of succeeding or else don’t put the effort in, find something else that you would rather do. 

Mike: It comes to that point though.

Effort, right? That’s a word you’ve used multiple times. And of course the allure of many of the wrong ways is that. They promise a lot more for a lot less effort. And the more you chase that, I think in life, the worse off you’re going to be period. And the more attuned you, you become to the fact that if you want to have things worth having, they take a lot more effort and it’s a lot less fun getting there than you would like it to be basically.

And you have. Is I think it’s like happiness in terms of it’s a roller coaster some days, you have, you’re happy and then you’re unhappy. You’re happy and happy. It’s, I think it’s impossible to always be happy all the time. And that’s, I think the case with anything, if you’re really trying to work towards something, you’re not going to be really feeling it all the time.

Sometimes you’re going to have to do things that are completely unfun that you do not like at all. And you’re really just relying on your purpose at that point. Like, why am I? Yeah. Doing this thing that sucks. That’s right. This is why I’m doing it. Cause I know, it’ll get me there. And then sometimes you enjoy the thing that just was sucky the day before.

And I don’t know about you, but I cherish those moments. I stop and I take a moment to enjoy that. You know what I mean? Hey, this is fun right now. Cause I know tomorrow it may not be so fun. 

Jeff: That the funny thing about that is The whole premise of hacking your way to success is a very pop is a very popular thing, but I don’t know, correct me if I’m wrong, if you know somebody, but I don’t know anybody that’s achieved anything really difficult back to their way there.

And I don’t know anybody that’s hacked their way into some fleeting success that actually derived a whole lot of satisfaction out of it because it’s, a shortcut may get you somewhere quicker, but it doesn’t necessarily make you feel good about what you did to get there. It’s almost like a little trick and, that you’re right every day.

You can’t be happy. You can’t get a new car every day. You can’t get a new house every day. You can’t. The accolades don’t come every day, but if you’re working hard and you see the effort as part of the reward, which I think it is, because at the end of the day, if you think about it, if you look at today, tonight, if you say to yourself, Hey, I had a good day, you’re not thinking of.

Three phone calls where somebody congratulated you or some extrinsic reward. You’re looking at back at your day and saying, I had a lot to get done today. A lot of important stuff I wanted to do. I worked hard. I got it done. I got somewhere. I feel good about what I did today. And that’s, that comes from effort and from being tired from doing the work, not from hacking your way through something and feeling that fleeting momentary.

Sense of satisfaction. And that’s the cool thing. If you do work hard and you are working towards something you want to achieve every day that you put in that effort, you do get to feel good about yourself. And you do get to feel a little bit happy because you’re on the road to where you want to go. And that’s really fun.

Mike: Yeah. There’s actually talk about this in this new book that I’m working on. The work that needs to be done often is the hard work, the uncomfortable work, the exhausting work, the stuff that, that, that. The people who aren’t successful at whatever it is you’re working at do not want to do.

And so the rewards of that are almost never instantaneous. You’re having to put in, it could be hundreds of hours of that before you are really getting a reward that is pleasurable or gratifying. But what you do get is to your point is you get the immediate feeling of Hey, I did a good job.

And, I made a little bit of progress. I’m a little bit closer. You get to feel good about yourself and you learn to, I wouldn’t say chase that, but if you can learn to appreciate that, as opposed to staying, Too focused on what it is that got you into this in the first place. Like we were talking about in the beginning of the interview, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, if you’re too much focused on that and you don’t appreciate that, Hey, if you do the right things every day, you can feel good about yourself because you’re moving in the right direction.

And I think that’s a way to come to learn to love the process, 

Jeff: it’s funny, think about, if you’re somebody that works out and I’m sure lots of your listeners are, if you think about a day. When you thought, I don’t want to go to the gym. I don’t want to work out today, but you somehow made yourself go, whatever it was that caused you to do that.

Every time you do that, once you’re there, or especially when you’re done, you do have that moment of, huh, I didn’t want to come, but I’m glad I did. That always happens. I never can think of when it doesn’t. But, when you decide not to go and you don’t, there’s that little thing in the back of your head that goes, Yeah, I bailed on today.

And that doesn’t feel very good. And that is that short term part of it. But then the other side of, we’re talking about lots of effort and working towards something big. When you do that one time, if you put in a ton of effort and you do the work day after day, and you get to the other end and you achieve something you set out to achieve, the cool thing is that you have that in your pocket for the rest of your life.

And when something else comes up, maybe it’s something you choose to do, or maybe something that happens to you that you have to work through, you can, you get to go. This is going to suck, but then again, I did do that. So I know how to do this. I can get there. It’s just a matter of figuring out the process and doing the work.

And I can get to the other end of that. And every time you do that, you actually get this cool confidence that you carry with you, that when something hard comes up, you can say, huh, this is going to suck, but I know how to do it. And I’m not that intimidated by it. I. I did something stupid a few years ago.

I decided it would be fun to do a hundred thousand pushups in a year. That’s in my book and it was a meaningless goal and we won’t talk about it much, but every once in a while, something will come up and I’ll know that it’s going to take me a month or two to do, and it’s going to be hard, but it’s worthwhile and I should do that.

And I’ll say this is going to suck. But then again, I did do 100, 000 pushups, so if I could do that, I could do this. And that is the cool thing about effort because it gives you an earned confidence that you carry with you where you say, I don’t have to hack my way through this. There’s no confidence that comes from hacking something, but you have this earned confidence of, yeah.

I can do this. This will be really hard, but I can do that. And as you go through your life, you’re going to have lots of things, hopefully that are challenging that you want to do. And so building that confidence and building that effort muscle, you carry it into any pursuit that you have, no matter whether it’s physical or business or whatever it may 

Mike: be.

You have every area of your life. It takes what it takes effort to have a good relationship. It takes anything that makes life worth living requires effort. There’s just no way around it. It’s really what you’re describing is you’re able to, you get into a routine of having powerful, positive self talk, which there’s quite a bit of research on, and that makes a huge difference, not only in your attitudes, but also in your performance.

They’ve researched this with a lot of athletes, as of course, The stories that you tell yourselves, or even just the, what are your, what’s your mantra? What do you say to yourself when you are faced with discomfort or you’re faced with insecurity? And to that point, that’s a great, when you have past performance, you can lean on and you can say I’ve done this before, so I can say with certainty.

And I think it’s a logical thing to assume that I can probably do it again. And then you do it again. And you’re like, now I’m even more believable to myself. I’ve done it a couple of times now. I can probably do it again. And, that creates a very positive feedback loop that again, can even inspire you to do other things in other areas where like to that.

Push up point. You could say this thing that has nothing to do with doing a bunch of pushups is going to suck, but I’m pretty sure I’m good at doing things that sucks. They did all those pushups. Yeah, whatever, this will be another thing. And then when you do that, now you have two very disparate, very different things that suck that you can lean on the next time you have to do something else that sucks.

Jeff: Yeah, the cool thing about there’s two types of self talk. There’s the, I’m just going to say something positive about myself and I’ll say it and hope that someday I believe it. Which I do know it does work, but what’s a lot more powerful is when you have self talk that’s backed up by an action that you have taken in the past, then you actually have the confidence of, yes, I can do this, because I have done this.

And I know that means you have to do it once, but that’s okay. But, me just looking in the mirror and saying, I’m going to go out and crush it today, whoa. Okay. Yeah. 

Mike: When you’ve never crushed a single minute of any day ever, it’s a little bit hard to believe. 

Jeff: But that does actually, oddly enough, that does help people, but it’s a lot more helpful when it’s you know what, last week I did X, Y, and Z.

And this week I’m going to do it again, or I’m going to do whatever an extension of that is. But self talk is much more powerful when it’s based on history and past and results and things that you’ve done. And it doesn’t even mean that you have to have succeeded. Just the fact that you in the past have put out real focused effort to try to get somewhere.

That alone is a positive self talk affirmation that you can use if you want to. Because you’re not going to succeed at everything. 

Mike: I would say there’s the difference between right between success and failure and mistakes are along the way. I’ve made plenty of mistakes that qualify as miniature failures, but so far, at least in the health and fitness game, I haven’t, there’s nothing that has been an outright failure yet.

Although I’ll say my app has been like, I went into it. It was a conditional type of project for me. I was curious how it was going to go. I didn’t, I wasn’t sure how much I really believed in it and how much I really needed it and how much work I was willing to put into it because I don’t want to be distracted from what I believe are more valuable things like researching, writing, and and I have whatever various things that I’m needed for in Legion and stuff.

So just to that point where I would say even with the app, we’re doing, still doing some work on it, but even if at the, in the end, I’ll have spent a fair amount of money and a fair amount of time, if I’m not just going to delete it or abandon it, but if I’m like, okay, this no longer like this is going on the back burner now, I could look at that as a failure, but yeah, look, also look at it as a.

There, there are some lessons to be learned there. Like I didn’t even need it in the first place. And I didn’t do my planning correctly in the beginning of really estimating how much effort it was going to require to, to do what I wanted to do initially. Yeah, I think even just talking about motivation and failures in some ways, I find mistakes and even failures that can be used to increase motivation because I choose to learn from them.

I choose to take something away from them and look back on it and say, okay. What could I have done differently here? And what can I extract from this and abstract from this in the way of a principle, maybe, or something that I can use to then inform future decisions and maybe spot in the future.

Oh, this is another one of those types of things. I learned my lesson the first time I’m going to do this differently. I don’t know about you, but in terms of failures, I’m, I actually, I don’t mind failing. I just. Refuse to fail due to laziness. That’s what would annoy me. You know what I mean?

If I can tell myself I worked hard and I really gave it a strong effort, I’m okay with something not having gone well. If it wasn’t that important. And in the case of the app, honestly, it’s not that important. It was a kind of a side project that I was curious. It was more of a curiosity than anything else.

Where I would be disappointed in myself is if it was just due to pure laziness. If it’s I just didn’t, I just dropped the ball. Yeah. That’s not, that’s just, sure you can learn that lesson. I just would hope that I don’t need to learn that lesson now. Hopefully I’m beyond that and I can learn some better lessons.

Jeff: I would, I would argue that, I won’t even argue you if you’ll never have a perfect success rate in everything you do. The only way to do that is to maybe only do one thing and do it all the time and then hope it. Somehow carries you through, you learned some big overarching lessons from your app experience, but you also learned lots of strategic or tactical stuff you learned about dealing with tech folks.

You learned about there’s all kinds of pieces and parts of that, that you carry with you. So I think that’s valuable in itself, as long as it didn’t kill you, which clearly it didn’t, but then also you just. If you don’t have some side things going on and this applies to business, it applies to personal life, it applies to whatever.

If you don’t have some side things that you’re exploring and saying, this might be something interesting. It might be something I want to do, or it might be helpful or whatever it is. You don’t have some of that stuff. Then eventually you’re stuck. And you, if you cruise along and you do it for a little while and you.

Get to a certain point and you say we’ll pretend it’s you with your app. Let’s say you’ve decided to abandon it. We’ll pretend. That’s fine because you carry everything that you’ve learned about that with you the rest of the time and you took a shot, it didn’t work, but you’ve learned things that will make it more likely that next time we take some other shot.

It will work because you have experience in all these different areas and you know yourself a little bit better than you did before. And all those things are really important. People will argue with me. Maybe they do YouTube. They’ll talk about me time and how, you can’t work all the time and you can’t be so focused and driven and you don’t, aren’t you allowed to have personal life and free time?

And I do, I have plenty of free time, even though I. Work a lot too, but I try to make my me time be stuff that I really want to do and think would be fun or would be fulfilling or something. So me time to me, isn’t like vegging out on the couch and seeing what’s on. If I’m going to watch TV, it’s going to be something that I’ve decided I want to watch and I’m ready to go.

It’s, I try to do that with my me time. It’s okay, what would make this the most fun? Cause we can relax when we’re dead, but you can have fun. Yeah, you should. And you should. 

Mike: You have to think about it ahead of time. Or because what happens in the moment if you haven’t really worked it out, especially if you’re more work oriented, I’ve run into this forum, like, all right, what do I want to do exactly?

And it’s easy then to be like, yeah, I don’t know. I’ll just start. I’ll just work. 

Jeff: Yeah. But it’s it’s a dumb example, but TV is a great one. You’re tired. You want to wind down. You sit on the couch, you turn on the TV and you hunt around a moment. Ton of terrible choices to find the least terrible choice of whatever happens to be on.

That’s one way to do it. Or maybe the other side is you’ve got some series that you really want to watch and you really like. And so when you do sit down and you say, you know what? I’m going to watch a half hour at this because I really like that. And I’m enjoying that. And that’s cool. So if you’re purposeful about your me time.

Then that can be a lot more fun and rewarding too, as opposed to the, oh, I just need to veg, cause most people don’t venture, but about five minutes and they look for something to do, but it usually ends up being the least fun choice out of a bunch of terrible choices. 

Mike: Yeah. It’s the Robert green the guy who wrote, 40 laws of power and master and so forth.

There’s an interview somewhere talking about a lifetime versus dead time. And that time is. Where you’re just passively biding your time, maybe consuming, whereas a lifetime, it doesn’t have to be work, but it’s something that you’re engaged with. Something that, that makes you feel alive. 

Jeff: Yeah. I ran into Michael Fassbender, the actor, he’s Magneto in the X Men and stuff like that at Daytona at a racing thing.

And he does, he races in this Ferrari challenge series, which Ferrari challenge, if you put quotes around, that just means very rich people who have the money to. Pay someone else to build a car for them. Seriously if these guys didn’t have if they weren’t racing there, they’d be the guys with the shirt button unbuttoned halfway down in the gold chains.

It had that vibe to it. And the 50 year olds with the 20 year old girlfriends, that was, that would be that group, except for my like Fassbender. But I saw him 

Mike: Just like Ferrari drivers in general. 

Jeff: Yeah, cause you do have to own a Ferrari to be doing it. I ran into Fassbender in the garage area.

He’s like I’ve never seen somebody seem that excited and fired up and, I’m assuming this Hollywood actor type is going to be too cool for the room, because typically they are. And I, I said, man, you’re fired up. And he said, I do movies and I do stuff. And, we’re on the set for 12, 14 hours a day.

He said, yeah. I know that sounds like hard work, but mostly it’s just really boring because we’re waiting for the lighting to get set up and all that. And my time isn’t my own for large periods of time. And so when I get time, I want to do something that I really love. And I really love doing this.

And so I thought okay there’s a purposeful me time, work life balance is never going to balance out in terms of hours. But you can balance it out in terms of quality of experience if you try hard. And so I just thought that was a perfect example of why don’t you plan your me time just as much as you plan your professional day.

And wouldn’t that be a ton more fun. 

Mike: I agree. I try to do it. I guess these days, honestly, I don’t have very much me time. My me time is family time. And so we’ll plan little things take the kids and do things otherwise right now, 

Jeff: but that’s cool too, because that’s what matters to you.

And that’s what’s important. And that feels good at the end of the day. And if you weren’t planning that And you were haphazard about it, you wouldn’t get as much out of it. It doesn’t mean that it has to be professional or it has to be successive oriented. It could just be, you know what, we’re going out to dinner tonight and we’re going to have fun and I’m going to spend time with my wife or my family or whatever it may be.

But I’m actually going to make this something good as opposed to we’ll just breeze through this and then tomorrow will be another day. 

Mike: Yeah. And speaking of work life balance, what are some of your thoughts on that? Because I have thoughts, but I’m curious as to your thoughts.

Jeff: Let’s hear yours. What? 

Mike: I think it’s a myth. I don’t think you can really balance. I think if you want to, have a mediocre life across the board, you can keep the main areas of yourself and your relationships and your work and so forth balanced.

But if you want to have anything extraordinary by definition beyond the ordinary in any regard, you’re going to have to, there have to be periods where your life is pretty imbalanced and you can work. To bring things back into balance, which again, speaking to that point of, you have quality and you have quantity of time.

It doesn’t, when you have very high quality time, you don’t necessarily need, it’s like with your body recovering from sleep deprivation for every hour of sleep that you’ve missed. You don’t need to sleep an extra hour because the body gets very efficient with the sleep it does get. So research shows, I think it’s about one third of the sleep.

So if you’re like six hours behind in, in sleep, in terms of what your body would like to have, that you sleep a couple hours extra, I find that it works similarly in. In other areas of life, where if you have been in my case, let’s say I’ve been neglecting my, my family, cause I’ve been working a lot where it’s not that I need to repay that necessarily a one to one, but if it’s high quality time that can make up for it.

I don’t know, my experience so far has been basically that kind of things. Trying to not let them get too imbalanced, but being aware of there are stretches where, yeah, it gets imbalanced mostly because of work right now. And that’s the way that it is. And that’s the way that I’ve chosen to live my life right now.

And maybe in the future, I’ll change that. But yeah, those are my initial thoughts. 

Jeff: Yeah, I agree. And another place that I would go is that. It’s easy to try to separate work and life and see them as two separate things, but it is possible to blend them somewhat. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. You always have to be working.

It’s more of a I have a friend who says he hates his job. I say, what would you rather do? And he says, I really would like to be in something where I would, could help people. But okay. And I said, But you’re a manager and you have a hundred employees. What if you just tried harder at work to help people, develop people, help them, help them reach their goals, whatever it may be.

What if you spent more of your time at work? Because that is your job is to develop your folks and hopefully help them succeed and help them achieve their goals because that helps your company achieve goals. What if you looked at it that way? It’s Oh, and it should have been blindingly obvious.

It’s not like I came up with this magical thought. There are things that if you have personally that are important to you, that you’d like to do, take a look at your job and say, what about my personal interest? Can I bring to that? That would also be a positive thing that helps me. So clearly with what you do.

You like to help people, you get a kick out of that. And that’s an outcome of the things that you do. And so while, yeah, you’re working and you’re putting effort into it, you’re also getting some personal gratification out of the fact that you are managing to help people. That’s my big thing with work life is take a step back and say, what is it that I would do if I wasn’t working?

That I want to do more of in my life, and then see what avenues you have at work to actually explore some of those things. And they almost always exist. 

Mike: I totally agree. I think, though, there’s still the point of time, though, right? Because you put your time into your work and you are. Working towards certain goals with certain people.

And that’s just different than your love life. And that’s just different than, the experience that you might have. What’s let’s say with friends or other groups, it could be your community. If you care about that or it could even be maybe some of the larger problems that we face culturally or politically really depends on who you are and what you care about and what you think that you could influence.

And so again, for me I really enjoy a lot of aspects of what I do. There are other things that I care about in life as well. And time that I’m spending recording podcasts like this or researching articles or writing health and fitness books is time that I’m not spending doing other things that also do matter.

And again, that could be my. Something closer to home, like family or in many people’s cases, right? It’s something even closer than that. Like health, a lot of people neglect their health so they can just work more and they don’t exercise and they don’t eat well. And of course that kind of spirals out of control.

So 

Jeff: I think that’s, I have to interrupt, that’s of course because if you are fitter, if you are fitter and healthier, you are better and more productive at your job. And so to me, that’s a, I’ve seen working out and being fit and trying to be healthy Part of being more successful professionally, and that’s how that works.

You can do it for short periods of time, but sooner or later, it’ll get you. And, none of us are in this for two years, every, we’ve got a lot of years to work and a lot of things that we can achieve. So that the idea that working out is a luxury. That you’ll fit in you a step back and say, okay, I need to reconstruct my life a little bit so I can do that both because it does help you professionally, but also, you got people if you have a family, they want you around for a long time 

Mike: and then there’s the quality of life, right?

It’s not just the time, but it’s it’s everything that exercise gives you beyond just like muscles and abs and stuff. It gives you a clear mind. It gives you better moods. It gives you. More energy, you’re going to be a lot more efficient in your work because of how much better you feel.

And then there is something to be said for just like that sense of wellbeing. It’s a trope at this point where you have the super successful person that has just cratered their health getting there. And now they would trade any amount of money in the world for just to feel good again, just to feel like they used to feel.

Jeff: I would find really successful people who see working out as part of the recipe that makes them successful. So it’s not say an athlete who, clearly has to work out because that’s their product. And then I would do their workout for a week just to see what that was like. The working out for a week like they did, it was interesting, but what I think is more germane to your point is that every one of these guys, and one of them was Dick Costolo.

He was the CEO of Twitter for a while. There were startup founders. I did Jimmy Johnson, the NASCAR drivers workout. Phil Collin from Def Leppard. He’s a workout fool, but they saw the physical part of it as important, obviously to their health fitness for doing their career, but they saw the mental benefits of it to be even greater than the physical because it’s the discipline and it’s the focus and it’s the grind and it’s the, I can do hard things and it helps with willpower and determination and all sorts of stuff.

And they saw the mental benefits of working out from a professional point of view. To be as important, if not more important than the physical benefits. So if you add all that up, man, you’re missing out. 

Mike: Yeah, I can relate to that. I think in many ways, exercise is a form of therapy in your book. One last thing I wanted to ask about you.

You mentioned being a serial achiever and why we should strive for that instead of never switching our focus to new things. Can you talk about that? 

Jeff: Sure. Another thing that I run into a lot where people will say they feel stuck is that they think they have to come up with one avenue or one pursuit that they will do the rest of their lives because if they do something for 10 years and decide to do something different, then all that 10 years is wasted and they’re starting over.

And I think that’s BS because one, very few of us are going to be able to go 40 years doing the same thing all the way through. That’s not how it works anymore. But the other part of it is that I don’t think we’re really made. To do that. So let’s say that, I don’t know, we’ll take you, you do your fitness, you do the stuff that you do.

Let’s say four or five years from now, you say, I’ve gotten really good at this. I’ve been really successful. It’s been financially rewarding. I’ve got a lot of benefits from it, I think I’d like to act. I just made that up. You’re going to be an actor. 

Mike: I hate Hollywood and pretty much everything it stands for, but let’s do it.

Let’s do it. I’ve changed my mind. I just really want to be. Famous. And I really want to like molest. 

Jeff: You don’t want to be famous. Want to act. Okay. There is a difference. Cause if you just want to be famous, that’s a whole different deal. And you’re not that kind of guy. 

Mike: So it’s famous and molesting. I want them both.

You know what I mean? 

Jeff: Okay. Then I just want to 

Mike: run the casting couch. Okay. 

Jeff: Really? You can do that in other ways. But anyway so you decide to do that. While that seems like a big switch, and it seems like you will have wasted everything you’ve done, if that’s really what you want to do, and you’re willing to work at it, and put in the time and effort to become good at that, all the stuff that you did up until that point, you bring with you.

You understand better how to market yourself, you understand better how to prepare, you know how to put together. Plans together, a lot of stuff that you bring to that pursuit. And then maybe after six or seven years, you get tired of the casting couch routine and you decide you want to go and be a professor, I don’t know, pick something, go work on that.

Those are terrible examples, but the point is that you don’t have to be one thing. And I would argue that you should not be one thing because one, that’s a pretty limiting professional move. Puts a lot of eggs into one basket, which is scary. But the other part is that it’s really fun to achieve different things.

I think that’s really fun. So I go through phases. Let’s just talk personally. I go through phases where like for a while I was into cycling and I did it for three or four years and rode some cool places and got to ride with some really cool people and was never super fit or super good, but I felt like a cyclist and I enjoyed it.

But then I got bored with that and decided I wanted to start lifting and see if I could get stronger. And I got into that and it was fun. That period of being a beginner and learning and embracing a new world, so to speak, and becoming something different, that’s really fun. And I, you don’t leave anything behind.

You still have some of those skills and you bring all the stuff that you learned with you to your new pursuit. If you’re sitting around right now, if you’re listening and you’re sitting around right now and you’re thinking, I really, I think I’d like to start a side hustle for instance, do it.

It’s not going to be wasted time. It’s not going to be wasted effort. You’re going to learn something from it. You’re going to learn something about yourself. If nothing else, get to a certain point. And if that’s not what you want to do, pick something else that you would like to do, shift and work on that.

And you can carry these things with you. Your whole life basically, and it’s a really fun thing to do and it’s gratifying and as long as you give it your best and you try really hard to succeed at whatever you’ve chosen to do, then you can’t lose. And if you’re not willing to give it your best and not willing to try really hard, Then, okay.

You probably shouldn’t be doing it in the first place because you don’t care. Yeah. 

Mike: Yeah. have a few thoughts and I think one, just preserving your willingness to exert effort and willingness to work hard toward things is very important, even if you’re successful and maybe even more important if successful, because I’ve seen, I’ve known a number of people that.

At one point in their lives were willing to work hard. They did work very hard. They achieved quite a bit of success. And then they went soft because, they didn’t have to work as hard anymore, but then things eventually went South for one reason or another. And I’m thinking of a few people that it’s been many years and they were never able to bounce back because they simply didn’t realize they had become lazy and they didn’t want to go through the whole grind again even though they know that’s what it takes.

They did it once, but they, for whatever reason, they haven’t really faced that things are not the way they were. They are not even necessarily their skills are not as relevant now as they were, the skills that allowed them to succeed the first time. And the real problem that they’re running into is that they’re just not willing to work nearly as hard now as they once were.

So if you are doing what you’re saying, let’s take a side hustle. If nothing else, if you work on it. Yeah. One, there’s something to be said for newbie gains, right? In anything, whether it’s exercise or, that’s always fun in the beginning because you’re learning new things, you’re making pretty quick progress in the beginning, and that’s fun.

But also will, if nothing else, will allow you to maintain your edge, I guess you can say. And that is gonna serve you well in everything that comes. And that’s something that I myself, have tried to really. Keep in mind. And one of the reasons why I’ve personally pushed myself very hard, despite not quote unquote, not having to, there are many other people.

And if they are in my position would not be doing much of anything because I don’t technically have to do much of anything. If we’re just talking finances, I could work very little and do just fine and have time for who knows what. One, that’s just not me. But also I think that would be a very stupid choice because that’s just, I’ve seen it too many times.

That’s just asking for the universe to come kick you in the nuts. It just is. And then it can be a lot harder to get back up. So I figure if I’m going to go down, I’m going to go down swinging. 

Jeff: The funny thing about success is that success creates this sense of. What armor where I’m successful.

And that armor though, is an ego armor. I’m really successful and therefore I’m smart and I’m all these things. And it actually makes you less willing to be a beginner again, or to show weakness or insecurity because you’re successful. So how, I don’t do that. I know tons of people who will never try anything new because they are afraid it will make them look bad because they look really good in this one avenue of their life.

And if you can stay in touch with that beginner side and that one, it makes you more humble, which I think is always positive too. It helps you relate to people, especially if you have employees, it helps you relate to them better because people always make mistakes and you make mistakes. And so you’re not perfect.

So it’s good to remind yourself of that. But like you said, the other part of it is you get to have newbie gains. You get to learn something. You might. Become part of a different community that you weren’t part of all sorts of really cool things happen and you keep flexing those Muscles that if the universe does come around and kick you in the ass it’ll kick you But then you can look around and say okay this sucks, but I know what I need to do And I know how to do it.

And so let me get going Because I may have gotten kicked, but I’m not going to stay kicked forever. 

Mike: Yeah. I actually have, this is something I’ve been doing for a while myself, where I like to always be doing something that I’m not good at, that I’m working at getting better at. That’s, I use that for my hobbies, so to speak.

So for example right now I’m learning German and learning a new language is the perfect way to go. It’s a pain in the ass. It’s definitely an endurance exercise for the mind, but it’ll be cool because my wife is German. And my kids even speak a little German, so I’m moving along, but that’s an example of again, doing something that is humbling where it’s yeah.

And then, and before that there was for, I was, I took up ice hockey. I played ice hockey when I was a teenager, played for a bit. I was decent, but I hadn’t skated in a long time. So taking that back up again. I was doing it partially because I wanted to see, maybe I’d play again. I want to try it out and see if I liked it as much as I did when I was younger, but also just because I would be the idiot just because I know that, the people that show up to even some of these open skates and some of these scrimmages are people, some of these guys played professionally.

Some of these guys play D one, these are really good hockey players. Now it wasn’t. It wasn’t a rough game. Like we weren’t out there to try to hurt each other, it’s just, I was the dumb ass basically. And before that, even taking up golf again, where I wanted to take up a sport that I could play for a long period of time, and that wasn’t too physically demanding, so it wouldn’t cut into my workout recovery and stuff.

And again, I was thinking like. And golf is an awkward, terrible sport. In the beginning, you’re terrible. You’re at least like basketball. You can shoot some baskets, especially if you have any sort of athleticism, you’re not that you’re good at all, but you can do something. In the beginning at golf, you can’t do anything.

You can’t even hit the ball 50 yards, let alone play the game. And it takes a lot of work just to get to the point where you even feel like you’re playing the game. So anyways, my point with all that is I like to always have something I’m doing that I’m not good at. For the reasons that you gave, because it’s humbling.

It’s also challenging. It challenges my mind. It challenges my ability to learn. And yeah, and also I think it’s good. It’s healthy for the ego to, cause I can look at myself in maybe certain respects or certain spheres and, Get puffed up, but then if I have something to counterbalance that, we’re like, yeah, but I’m fucking terrible over here.

So at least that’s good to know that I might be, I might think I’m hot shit at this or that, but I’m most definitely just dog shit at this or that. I think it’s healthy. 

Jeff: What you just said brings this all full circle in a way, because you’re trying to learn German. And it sucks and you feel awkward and you feel stupid and all of that stuff.

But in the back of your mind, you are at the point now where, because of other things that you’ve done in your life, where that will only be the case for now, if you keep working at it and you have that confidence of, yeah, I know this sucks now, but I know I can do it because I’ve done this kind of thing before.

And like me with a guitar, my fingers feel incredibly awkward making them move to the right place and do the right thing at the right time. I swear. I feel like I’m too, but it’s fine because it’s like other stuff that I’ve done. That’s how it works. 

Mike: And in my case, I have a five year old son that can now I’m, now I have surpassed him at the beginning.

He could speak better than me. So it’d be like, if you, it’d be like, if you had a two year old that could actually play the guitar, he was like why are you bad at this? Why can’t you do this? 

Jeff: Exactly. But I know. It’s fine. That sincerely. It’s fine that it feels that way, because I know that’s how it works.

And with time, that gets better. And I’ll eventually look back and say, this is actually a little easier than it was. It’s easier, but if you keep doing new things and stretching yourself, that does give you the confidence in those early days of when it feels terrible to know that, yeah, but that’s how that works.

That’s how this is. I have lots of friends that try new things and they give up after a few days and they say it was just really hard. I’m like what’d you expect? It’s hard, that’s how that works, but it’s okay because if you stick with it, you’re going to get better at it. No, it’s too hard.

I’m just not going to do it. I’m not cut out for that. And I think people are cut out for just about anything to a certain level. You may not become world class, but you can be 75 percent good at just about anything you try to do if you’re willing to work at it. 

Mike: So why not? Better than most. I think most people could get to a point where they are better than most if they’re just willing to suffer enough, basically.

Jeff: Absolutely. And it’s just a matter of time and effort. And so if you do that enough, do that a few times, exercise that muscle. The early days. They don’t really bother you because it’s just part of it and it’s okay. And so that, that would be a good place, I think, to leave this on the motivation side, because if you have done that a few times, the world opens up to you and it feels very empowering because you have the confidence to know that I’m interested in something.

I can go do that fairly well. I just have to work at it. And that’s a really empowering thought. 

Mike: Yeah. When I hear something like that, I think of it was Richard Branson had said in one of his books that at four years old, his mom dropped him off about two miles from his house and basically told him like, figure out your way home and how that was a transformative experience for him.

And I think of Thomas Edison, who he was. Yeah. What at seven, eight or nine or something was working on trains just was gone. He just went off and started to make a life for himself. I have a joke in the office. Sometimes some people I’m like if this person could just go get dropped in the middle of South America or something with nothing, that would be there’s your therapy.

Like you figure out. How to make it back and you are now all your problems. Let’s say 80 percent of your problems that you’re facing right now are now fixed. You’re never going to deal with those problems again, if you can just make it back. So I think of that sometimes that, that’s a whole nother discussion, but just how our, how coddled our youth are, especially in my generation, I’m a millennial and it’s just, it’s bizarre.

Some of the stuff that I see, some of the things that this, again, especially in my generation of. Just how weak some of these people are. I can’t, it’s hard for me to comprehend. 

Jeff: On a point you just made, don’t you think it’s like with fitness stuff, if you’re working out and you’re doing something that’s really hard, like for me cycling and climbing a mountain, say effort after a while is almost like being dropped in the jungle.

You, it strips away all of that surface stuff to where if you’re. Right on the red line and snot dripping out of your nose and you feel like throwing up and all the little petty problems go away and you’re just left with yourself and you’re just left with who you are and in that moment and that is a really cool cleansing thing that does actually make you go, some of the shit that I worry about.

It really isn’t that big of a deal. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. Wow, you have to have a near death experience in order to realize that the truth is actually trivial, but it does clean you up where you say, there’s big picture stuff that does matter, but there’s a lot of little stuff that I don’t really care.

It doesn’t matter that much. I can let that go. 

Mike: Absolutely. I think it comes down though, to you have necessity level, right? So that, where do you find, you got to have the necessity level before you’re willing to exert the effort. You have to feel the desperation that it takes, whatever level of desperation is to do it.

And sometimes that’s obviously what people are lacking is they don’t feel the that it is important enough to exert that much effort. And again the Richard Branson therapy or the Thomas Edison therapy or the South America hella drop therapy is, then you got to figure it out.

Branson had to figure out how to get home or he was, it was either that or die. And I’m sure like to a four year old that’s how he experienced that. And so it wasn’t so much about the effort. It was the necessity. I have to. Do this, if I don’t do this then there’s nothing, 

Jeff: But I think you can ratchet up your, cause we all have these limits that we set on ourselves to say, okay, this much effort is all I can do, even though it’s not really all you can do, but we have that effort.

If you’re lifting failure, oftentimes it’s not really failure. If you got to 10 reps. And I said, 1, 000, 000, if you get the 11th, you’ll probably get the 11th. Whereas you said, you would have said to me, Hey, I’m, I fail at 10. There are times when I will do something that’s pretty bizarre. I don’t know, I guess it was about six months ago.

I decided to do a thousand pull ups one day. I just decided to do it. And what’s weird about it is when you get done with that, it changes how you look at your normal limits on your everyday stuff. And if you work a 14 hour day, it’s really hard. But when you come back the next day and you only work eight, eight seems really short.

So I do think there are ways sometimes if you do an extreme version of whatever it is you do, that you can change that limit and cause yourself maybe not to feel as coddled, or I guess a better way to put it is to not coddle yourself as much because you realize that you are capable of doing a lot more than you thought you were.

Mike: Yeah. That’s the whole Jesse Itzler, the book living with a seal, David Goggins thing where. Whenever you think you’re about to, that’s it, this is all you’ve got. You’re like maybe 40 percent there actual reserves. Anyways, for everybody listening, I’d recommend reading that book. It’s a fun book, interesting story, but also the guy Goggins is just a psycho.

It’s 

Jeff: he’s a crazy man. He’s 

Mike: He’s someone that sticks in your mind whenever you’re going through something or you think your shit is bad or uncomfortable. And you remember that he ran a hundred mile super marathon with a bottle of water and some crackers. And he just, anyways, 

Jeff: yeah, you don’t have to take it to that extreme, but it is a good example of.

Most of our limits are arbitrary and self imposed, and you can create new limits for yourself if you’re willing to do it doesn’t mean you have to kill yourself. It just means that, if nothing else, if I know people that say, I can’t focus for more than 30 minutes and I have to do something else.

And I. Okay, whatever. So just force yourself to do 40 and realize that you can do 40. There’s all kinds of ways you can stretch yourself in a positive way, not in a negative, harmful, harsh way that will cause you to redefine your limits and realize that you are capable of doing more than you thought. And I think that’s what all of us are looking for is that ability to do more than we thought that we could do better, faster, stronger, whatever it may be.

Mike: Put. Put. All right. That’s everything I had. Jeff is a great talk. I’m really glad we were able to do it. Where can people find you and your work? Is there anything in particular you’d like to tell them about? 

Jeff: I write for ink magazine. It’s ink. com. If you go there and search my name, there’s about 1500 articles, I’m a LinkedIn influencer, which is the only time I’ll ever end up on the list with Richard Branson and Bill Gates and those folks. So if you go to LinkedIn and I actually do engage with people and my book is wherever books are sold. 

Mike: Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful.

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