Q&A Part 2: Sleep needs, future of MFL and Legion, my “past,” and more…

[00:00:00] Hey, it’s Mike. And I just want to say thanks for checking out my podcast. I hope you like what I have to say. And if you do what I have to say in the podcast, then I guarantee you’re going to like my books. Now I have several books, but the place to start is bigger leaner, stronger. If you’re a guy and thinner leaner, stronger, if you’re a girl, these books, they’re basically going to teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training, and supplementation to build muscle.

Lose fat and look and feel great without having to give up all the foods you love or live in the gym grinding through workouts that you hate. Now you can find these books everywhere you can buy them online, Amazon, Audible, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes Noble, Kobo, and so forth. And if you’re into audio books like me, you can actually get one of them for free with a 30 day free trial of Audible.

To do that, go to www. muscleforlife. com forward slash audio books. And you can see how to do that there. I make my living primarily as a writer. So as you can imagine, every book sold helps. So please do check out my books if you haven’t [00:01:00] already. Now also, if you like my work in general, then I think you’re going to really like what I’m doing with my supplement company Legion.

As you may know, I’m really not a fan of the supplement industry. I’ve wasted who knows how much money over the years on worthless junk supplements and have always had trouble finding products that I actually liked and felt were worth buying. And that’s why I finally decided to just make my own. Now a few of the things that make my supplements unique are one, they’re a hundred percent naturally sweetened and flavored to all ingredients are backed by peer reviewed scientific research that you can verify for yourself.

Because we explain why we’ve chosen each ingredient and we cite all supporting studies on our website, which means you can dive in and go validate everything that we say. Three, all ingredients are also included at clinically effective dosages, which are the exact dosages used in the studies proving their effectiveness.

And four, there are no proprietary blends, which means that you know exactly what you’re buying. Our formulations are a hundred percent transparent. So if that sounds interesting to [00:02:00] you, then head over to legionathletics. com. That’s L E G I O N athletics. com. And you can learn a bit more about the supplements that I have as well as my mission for the company.

Cause I want to accomplish more than just sell supplements. I really want to try to make a change for the better in the supplement industry, because I think it’s long overdue. And ultimately, if you like what and you want to buy something, then you can use the coupon code podcast, P O D C A S T.

And you’ll save 10 percent on your first order. So thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast and let’s get to the show.

Hey, this is Mike Matthews with musclefullife. com. And welcome to the podcast. In this episode, I’m going to do part. Two of the Q and a from different readers. I set up a Google moderator, which I’ll link down in the description below. If you’re on, [00:03:00] YouTube or if you’re on the website here, you’ll see it where you can go submit questions and then vote on other questions that people have submitted.

Works basically like Reddit for questions. The more popular questions rise to the top and the ones not so popular fall off. And I’m just going to be going through and, spending 30, 40 minutes answering the popular questions and just keep it going. People like the last one. Thought I’d do another one.

So let’s get to it. Starting with the first question. So the first question here is by Alec Han. And he or she says, Hey Mike, how many hours of sleep do you get per night? And what do you do to balance sleep with family time and working 60 plus hours per week? So my sleep, it’s my sleep is randomly, I don’t need a lot of sleep.

And I’ve actually spoken to a couple of doctors about it. Dr. Lee from GeneSolve, who I had on the podcast a few weeks ago. I was curious what his opinion was because I rarely sleep more than six or six and a half hours a night. Sometimes on the weekend, although I’ve been getting up early to golf, so [00:04:00] I’ve been getting up like I get up at about six 30 on weekdays to go work out.

So then on weekends I was getting up at six 30, I was doing that to go golf and now I’ve switched it where I’m doing my work earlier in the day and then I’m going to the golf course later in the day when it’s empty and the weather’s even a little bit better and whatever. But. Still so maybe on the weekends now, maybe I sleep seven hours.

I don’t know, but I don’t need much sleep and I don’t really have that great of an explanation for it. Like I said, it’s not a health issue. I’ve spoken to Dr. Lee and a couple other doctors just to get their opinion. And basically. The general, like that general advice of sleeping eight, nine hours a night doesn’t apply to everybody.

There was even some research recently that showed that certain people have a gene that allows them to get by with less sleep, basically. So I haven’t had gotten myself tested to see if I have that gene. I would be a little bit surprised if I did have it because I wasn’t, it wasn’t always like this when I was younger.

I’m 30 now. So when I was younger I remember needing more sleep. If I slept six hours, it would have felt like a zombie. Now, I sleep six [00:05:00] hours and I’m like fully ready to go. I can’t even sleep more if I wanted to. Like I wake up after six hours of sleep and I’m now awake. If I go back, maybe if I sat there for 30 minutes, I could fall back asleep.

But I don’t, I don’t feel tired. I’m just ready to go. And I guess that’s the important thing is if you’re not setting an alarm how long do you sleep? That’s generally how much. sleep your body needs. Recently my son, he’s been teething. So my sleep’s even been a little bit less, but it hasn’t really bothered me.

I probably slept five hours last night. I feel fine. When did my workout went up on my deadlifts? I’m happy. I don’t know. I know that, like my partner in Legion, Jeremy, he’s tried to do my sleep schedule and he does it for two days and then he can’t even think. I think, you got to find how much body, how much sleep your body needs.

That’s really what it boils down to. Actually what an article on sleep, I’ll link it down below. If you want to just check out a little bit more on this. But I’m not even sure if you can just train your body to sleep less. A couple of years ago, it just happened randomly. where I started waking up after about six, six and a half hours and just full of energy and not [00:06:00] needing any more sleep.

So I was like I guess I don’t need to sleep seven, eight hours anymore. So I’ll just sleep six hours and I love it because it gives me more time in the day. I’m able to get my workout done first thing in the morning, early. Get to the office, do all my work and whatever. Whereas in the past, if I was working out at night also the gym is empty at, I get there seven 15 ish or so nobody there.

So that’s nice. So yeah, it’s great for productivity per, reasons. And also I like, being able to get my workout done first thing in the morning, good start to the day. I feel energized and so there’s that as well. So yeah, I guess that’s it on the, on, on the sleep and then balancing, family time and working.

I do work a lot. I actually wrote an article on this, which I’m going to link down below, but like the key points to it are in terms of finding balance for me are one, I don’t take very much time for I take very little time actually for just doing random things. I don’t watch much TV.

I usually watch one show at a [00:07:00] time. My wife and I will watch a little bit before we go to bed. And that’s usually like where my recommendations on cool stuff. Those are like, those are shows over the years that like, if I’m watching one show at a time, then I get through it and either I end up losing interest or, make it through and then whatever.

And I don’t my, I don’t hang out with people during the week, ever. I’m never hanging out at Starbucks. The, I just, I follow a bit of a schedule and I find that’s important. I guess it’s not a bit of a schedule. It’s a pretty rigorous, like a rigid schedule really, where every day I’m waking up at a certain time and going to the gym at a certain time.

I’m arriving here at the office at a certain time. My first couple hours are spent doing a certain type of work. And then my next couple hours are spent answering emails. And my next couple hours are spent doing something else. And then I’m going home and then I’m eating from this time to this time. And then I’m.

Spending my now I have, an hour to work on this and an hour to work on that. And now it’s 10 30 or, I usually get off, stop my work at about 10 30 ish. Sometimes it’s later to get ready for bed, spend some time with my wife. And at dinnertime, I spent some time with my wife and my kids.

So for me, [00:08:00] balance is. I just work a lot. There is no like real secret to it other than just I don’t need as much decompression time or whatever as some people I guess. And a lot of that I think is just your own, how much like play time you think you need, I think is a is how much you’re going to feel you need.

I’ve heard people say things like what a. I don’t remember where I saw this, but like someone was saying that they find like the 8 8 8 rule is for happy living. Every day is 8 hours of work, 8 hours of play, 8 hours of sleep. That’s ridiculous to me. 8 hours of just dicking around every day?

That makes no sense to me. I would be so bored. Assuming that play is just like inherently pointless activities. Watching TV, I don’t know. Playing video games stuff like that I mean I can do it in very short dosages But I could never just do hours a day of just random kind of pointless activity, and that’s I don’t know That’s just the [00:09:00] way that I am and in the future.

I’m willing to in the future. It might be different It might be as my son gets older. I might be wanting to take more time You know if he’s me playing sports that there’s traveling involved in that and whatever, but I figured Now is the time to work hard and set myself up financially.

So maybe in the future, if I want to work less, I can, but for me, work is not something that I am looking forward to getting away from or something like that. I enjoy working and I, I don’t know if that will ever really change because it doesn’t matter how much money. I would have I’m not working to just hit a number.

I’m not working to try to make a certain amount of money so I don’t have to work anymore so I can go on awesome vacations. I can go on awesome vacations right now if I wanted to, but I don’t because I just want to work. So I don’t really see that changing much. And So yeah, that, that’s really it.

And Sarah, my wife is very good with, she understands and she doesn’t give me a lot of shit for how much I work and I do try to keep in time [00:10:00] and make sure that we, we, we’re spending time and Friday nights we go on a date and then Saturday I take off Saturdays to do stuff with her and my son and then Sunday is I play some golf and then I just work.

So I’m not really around on Sunday, but yeah, we’ve worked it out between the two of us to a schedule that Allows us to, still keep our marriage together and still enjoy that. And, also give me the time to do what I need to do to do what I’m doing with my work and all that.

I guess that’s my rambling answer to that one. Okay, let’s go to the next question here. Chris from Boulder, Colorado. Mike, how have your goals changed as you’ve become more successful with your books, blog supplement range? Where do you see muscle for life in the next five, 10 and 20 years?

That’s a good question. Really honestly, my goals haven’t changed. They haven’t changed so much. It’s more become just what the possibilities have become more real, I guess have kind of crystallized where I’m in the very beginning. I published bigger, leaner, stronger in January of 2012 with just, I, I was just interested in seeing really, I had been hearing things about [00:11:00] Amazon’s publishing platform KDP and heard that it was picking up and, as a self published author, you could actually sell some books.

So I figured I’d just give it a go and see what it’s like. I didn’t do, I didn’t have any sort of marketing plan, nothing. I just wrote the book, put it online. I think it sold five copies the first month or 10 copies or something like that. And I was like, somebody bought it. Okay. And then the next month it was like 30 copies.

Oh wow. And then the next month it was 70 copies. And so there was a point like maybe by month six we’re selling a few hundred copies a month. And I was like actually saying this could be something. So I’ll start writing another book. And so in the beginning I didn’t really have, didn’t have any big goal other than.

Put a book online, see if anybody buys it and even likes it. And I was getting some emails and some reviews and people were liking what they were reading. So that was in the beginning. I’m I’ll probably write an article on this, a metaphor of kicking if you’re up on a mountain, right?

And you have a snowy mountain, you you kick the rock over to see if you can create A big massive snowball so you can get that momentum going that turns into something big as opposed to Trying to make something [00:12:00] big in the beginning just get something out there get something, you know like the minimum viable product type of mentality and just see does it have any life?

Is there any possibility? The quality while I always try to do my best in terms of quality the quality of everything has improved and I’m always looking to improve. That’s why I’m working on second editions of bigger than you’re stronger and thinner than you’re stronger because since publishing it, I’ve made some updates already just based on people’s feedback and questions, but I was gathering a lot of feedback and questions and just, suggestions for clarifications and things over the course of the last eight, nine, 10 months and in anticipation of, Not like the principles of the books are the same, but I’m now just upgrading.

I’m a better writer now. I’ve done a bit more research I’m going to be organizing the book just a lot of stuff that people had suggested to me So I’m always looking to improve quality going forward I knew that you don’t have to have something perfect in the beginning people are You know if they can see that you put effort into it and you’re [00:13:00] trying to be helpful and you put out a decent product, people are a lot more forgiving than, than you might think.

And I understand the wanting to be a perfectionist and wanting things to be, trying to produce the ultimate product right off the bat. But in more. I see that failing more often than not. The, a lot of the successful business people that I know and art, that includes artists as well.

They did, they started out with something even instances of where the beginning actually acquired a bit of time and bit of work because the product being launched was actually a pretty sophisticated thing. But relatively speaking, it wasn’t sophisticated compared to where it’s at now.

So it may have cost a couple hundred thousand dollars. Like I think of a friend of mine who he owns a company that they have a whole automated software thing for car dealerships to like schedule your appointments and tell you when your car’s ready and whatever. So I know it was quite a bit of money and time going into putting that there.

Because just getting a minimum viable product there [00:14:00] cost a lot of money and time. But now, now this company is huge and, it’s way more sophisticated now than it was. Yeah, in the beginning, it was just Alright, I’m going to put something out there that I’m going to try to, do my best.

Put everything down that I knew at the time and organize as best as I could and see what people think. Now rolling forward, of course, it’s turned into this whole thing. There was no muscle for life at the time. There was no website. There was nothing I didn’t even have. I didn’t even know a single person in the fitness industry.

I just got something out there. So now. My goals, I, so I guess they have changed of course from the beginning, but once I started seeing it becoming something, the goal was I mean I could see that in the distance it’s possible that this could become something big. I could build a website.

There is a niche here. I can fulfill a need that other people and I can do it in a way maybe better than a lot of the other people in this space. So that, that then was, In the future, but I’m I don’t get too fired up like now, fast forward to today and muscle for life is receiving over [00:15:00] 800, 000 visits a month and it’s growing at a rate of 100 to 150, 000 visits a month.

That’s, so next month it’s going to probably break the 900 mark and then it’ll break the million mark and so forth. Legion is doing very well. So yeah, now if I look forward, yeah. I don’t really like when I’m setting my personal goals, I don’t sit and dwell on the real big picture that much. I don’t, it’s not Oh, sure.

Legion could become a 50 million, a hundred million dollar a year company. Yes, that’s possible. Is it probable? I don’t know. But 10 to 20 million is that’s like, all I have to do is just keep going and it’s, it’ll be there. So when I’m looking at my goals, it’s more just i, my focus is on the present and what I’m doing to get there and I don’t focus too much on, I don’t, I’m not like, I don’t even want to talk about it.

I’ll say that to you guys and girls, but I’m not like people that when they ask how’s my work going, how are things going? I’m not wanting to talk a lot about Oh legion is going to be a hundred million dollar a year company and we’re going to sell it for all this money one day, which I don’t even know if I would do.

It really would depend on who would ever [00:16:00] buy it and if they would continue it. The way that I would want to be continued and whatever, but or, selling a million books or muscle for life, this or that, or whatever, it’s just for me I even wrote an article on this point, which I’ll link down below on what I, on just more effective way to set goals and not to go around just talking about them.

So in terms of what has changed is really just, the change was seeing that there’s a possibility and then seeing some of that possibility getting realized and pouring more into seeing okay, if I go more in that direction then it’s going to, get bigger. So I’m going to do that.

It reminds me of the book good to great which is written by Jim Collins, a big, very popular business book where basically You have a lot of these big companies that they were good at one point and they exploded and became huge and maintained it.

Where one of the big things that they did is they focused on as they were growing, they’re getting all these different opportunities to go in different directions, to diversify, buy into different markets and do different things. [00:17:00] And they were turning down. More operative, way more opportunities than they would actually take because they wanted to stay focused on what worked for them and they had their what Jim calls their hedgehog concept, which is something that they can be very good at, something that they’re passionate about and something that makes money.

And they had that very narrowly defined and they just focused on that and they ignored all the other distractions, even if they were technically good opportunities, if it didn’t fit within that narrow focus. They ignored it. So I’ve applied that where my focus is on with muscle for life. Producing high quality content and that I give away for free and interacting with everybody and actually being helpful and doing my due diligence on, on the content and taking the time to do the research and also walking the walk.

Like I, I’m, I’m in good shape. I practice what I preach. I lift heavy and I’m not one of these like flabby gurus that try to tell people how to lose fat. And then with Legion, it’s focusing on creating high quality products that where all ingredients are backed [00:18:00] by valid scientific research that everyone can go review for themselves and are, and all are, all ingredients are included at clinically effective dosages, meaning the actual dosages used in clinical studies and then naturally sweetened and just not full of all the artificial crap that we find.

products that can be harmful to our health. If like in the case of artificial sweeteners, they may not be as bad as some people say, but more and more research is coming out that a regular consumption of these chemicals can there was a new study that just came out recently that showed that believe it was sucralose.

It just alters the gut flora, which it can mess with how your body how it deals with sugars and can cause different cravings and problems with sugars. And there was research that was, there was research that I saw about a year and a half ago that showed the same in rats and now they show it in humans.

Yeah, so that’s the focus with Legion. Instead of having, 20 different products that we cycle through and people just get sick of and trying to do that constant product [00:19:00] launch where we have the new product and then, and then it dies off because it’s crap, because it doesn’t actually do anything, but people get excited to try it.

And then it runs out its life cycle of six, seven months, and then it’s gone. It’s replaced by the next generation blah, which is equally crappy. They just make a different, make a different formulation and emphasize a different ingredient this time. And just rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. Yeah, that makes money, but, it’s unethical.

It’s just not how I didn’t. It’s not necessary. I want to produce high quality products that are gonna stay. The only thing I would like to do in the future is maybe as because of economies of scale as prices come down for me and manufacturing because my caught my products cost quite a bit more to manufacture than, when a product has four times the effective ingredients as another.

Per serving, it costs more to manufacture, but as the manufacturing costs come down, the only thing I would like to do is we have some ideas and what we’d like to even add to some of the products when, if when we have some more room cause that’s basically how we do our research is when we’re going to be producing a product, [00:20:00] we we start with the ultimate formulation.

So for, we just launched our multivitamin, our Our first formulation was going to cost us like 45 a bottle to produce. Or it might have been more actually. It might have been closer to 60 a bottle actually. So that’s where we start. We go, that would be the ultimate multivitamin if we could just have that.

Oh, it’s 60 a bottle for us. I, if we were just to use a standard margin of 50%, if we were just to mark it up, a hundred percent, which is, it would be a, it would be okay. I don’t think people are gonna be buying 120 multivitamin. So we, then we have to work backwards. Then we have to go, okay, so find out which of these ingredients are really expensive.

And some of them are, they just don’t warrant the amount of money that it costs. It might cost. 7 a bottle to have this one molecule when you can use a different molecule that has very similar effects and it costs 50 cents a bottle. So you know, there’s, that’s the process of paring it down to what’s the best possible product we can do given a high production budget, very high compared to other companies.

So that’s [00:21:00] like how, I’ve been focusing on things, just pouring all my energy and time into the single narrow kind of like. Actions and it’s almost like a philosophy or ideology of how to, of, doing business and that’s how I approach it.

So going forward, where do I see things in the future? It’s hard to say because I don’t, there, there are things that I haven’t been putting time into, which would be like networking. Like I don’t, I’m not very well networked in this industry, despite having probably one of the biggest fitness blogs.

I don’t know how many fitness blogs are out there doing a million visits a month, but there probably aren’t that many. And then in with Legion and whatever. In the future, I definitely want to get more networked. I want to do some PR stuff. Like I haven’t really, I haven’t tried to get into magazines.

I haven’t tried to get any real exposure. Anything that I’ve gotten has just been word of mouth. In the future, shit, I don’t know. All I know is if I just keep doing what I’m doing. Then I could make muscle for life, the biggest fitness blog on the internet for sure. By the end of next year, let’s say it’s 2 million visits a [00:22:00] month, or there’s a point where if it just, it’s in this growth has just been steady since the beginning.

It launched in March of 2000 last year, March of 2013, and now it’s already doing over 800, 000 visits a month. But where if our, who knows what I would like to see is I want to build out muscle for life into, I want to have a bunch of tools. I want it to be not just a source of information, but like where you can come to your meal planning.

You can come to your workout planning. I’m building this app. I want that all integrated. It’s almost like I want to build like a muscle for life ecosystem in a sense where You know, I guess you see that on other websites, not that’s all that revolutionary, but I have some cool ideas that would make it a little bit different and offer some things that other other companies or other websites aren’t offering and that having all linked together, this workout apps going to kick ass.

And so having that, and then everything synced up on muscle for life and whatever, that alone would be cool. And just, I enjoy the writing of it. That’s something I’ll probably always see myself doing. Obviously expanding the content with guest writers is it’s fine.

It’s hard to [00:23:00] find guest writers that I want to. Put on the website, but I’m sure there are more out there and with Legion, yeah, it’s just creating more products and getting into retail. We already have, we have GNC interested. We have some other retailers that are interested in some online bodybuilding.

com is very interested right now. It’s just we have to, yeah. We have to be careful to not over to expand essentially not take on too many commitments that we can’t meet because of production times because of capital requirements. So right now we’re on a, we’re on a, it’s growing very quickly, but it’s we’re trying to manage it and not grow so quickly that, we get into all kinds of production problems and which then can really hurt the brand image.

I think people are probably Because it’s a new company, this is it’s first year in business. We’ve run out of stock. If any, if you’ve been following Legion at all, you know that. And we, we were switching manufacturers to a bigger manufacturer that can give us even better prices and give us faster turnaround [00:24:00] times.

So in that process of there, we like ran out of stock of everything because it took them longer than we thought to get the flavoring right and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that’s like where we’re at with Legion right now. And in the future. I would love to see legion, not just because it’s a financial thing, but I’d love to see, I’d love to see it getting very big not just because it would make me a lot of money or sell a lot of products, but because of what legion stands for in terms of the product quality and what we’re doing with our formulations and naturally sweetening everything.

I think that those, it would be very cool to see that becoming more of a trend. It’s going to be hard. I don’t know how some of these bigger companies exactly would do it. Like I can guarantee you no, no big company. Could produce pulse with their current business model. It costs too much to make because the current business model is to spend very little on the products themselves and pour tons of money into advertising and marketing and sponsoring all the bodybuilders and doing all that stuff to drive sales.

It [00:25:00] works, The big supplement companies make tons of money and the margins are huge. And in some cases, the staffs are skeleton for how much money they’re making. You’d be surprised. You have a company doing 80 million a year with five staff. It’s out there. But it would be cool to see, at least it’d be cool to see consumers a bit more educated and a bit more aware of what they’re putting in their bodies and demanding things like the proprietary blend.

Proprietary blend blends just need to go away. They it’s only used for deception. And that’s something that I don’t do with Legion. We’re completely transparent with our formulations because we’re proud of our formulations. The products sell themselves. If you look at our sales copy is quite a bit different than other companies.

We don’t, we’re not like, we don’t use hyperbole and big muscle pictures to sell products. It’s a much more sober type of sales pitch based on research, based on, There are this many grams of this in the product and here’s what research shows that does and that’s why we’ve included this and in some [00:26:00] cases, for instance, in our multivitamin, we’re including quite a bit more of the RDI on certain vitamins and minerals and we explain why.

And then with all the additional ingredients, We talk about clinically effective ranges because, you don’t have, it could be a clinically effective dosage of something could range from, I don’t know, let’s say a hundred milligrams to a gram. It might be that the lower end is used for.

Fighting stress and anxiety. And the upper end is used for, some other use for instance, and as we want the stress and anxiety effects, we’re going with the lower end, maybe we use 200 milligrams. I, we get into a lot of that and give details and assume that the customer, that you as the customer want.

to actually know what you’re buying. You don’t just want to be told, by, we don’t want to see some mass, a couple of massive bodybuilders doing curls and then just have some simple little texts like, trust me, bro, this is the sickest multivitamin. This is what you want.

This is gonna make you build more muscle now. I hate that kind of stuff. So that’s the way that, we’re going about it and it’s really resonating with people. Guess that’s [00:27:00] like where I see things going in the future. And as I said earlier, I’m always, I’m not looking forward to being able to like not work.

That’s not my thing at all. The money that’s made from it, it’s cool. Financial security for my family and I like having nice stuff. So there’s that, but it’s not I’m not one of those people that I’m not very money motivated, and I’m not a greedy person either. I don’t see that changing.

I’m trying to just stay always keep that because also I don’t like people like that. I just growing up, I’ve known quite a few people with money and I’ve known people that kids that came from money and there’s certain I really don’t like when people get I guess it’s just an arrogance thing when they get very arrogant because they’ve made money or because they’re making money.

And yeah. Whatever. That’s just something that I have definitely told myself. I do not want to be like that person. I just want to be some dude who’s doing some stuff. That’s how I look at myself. I do my work and it goes well. That’s about it. Yeah, let’s move to the next question.

All right, so we’ll do one more and then [00:28:00] I’ll just continue. There’s quite a bit more popular ones so that I can just continue in the next Q& A. So let’s do one more here from this is a question from Ben from England. What did you do before becoming an author? And why did it take you seven years for deciding to take the gym seriously?

So before I was an author, I actually was working in a company where I was building employee training programs for companies mainly healthcare professionals, very random. I know is a company actually I was in, I had with my dad and it’s still going, I just. I don’t do anything with it now. My brother just takes care of it.

It’s like a niche publishing company. So in a sense, I was an author actually. I was writing a lot of this training and I would go to companies and meet with all their people and work out had the interview people and build training programs and blah, blah, blah. And before that I worked in my dad’s company.

My dad has a company that sells energy. So I spent some time working there doing various things. I didn’t go to college because I graduated high school early. I was 15 turning 16. I had all my credits because I never took [00:29:00] summer breaks. I just studied through summer and never even took spring breaks.

All I did is just study. So I had all my credits that I needed here in Florida. That’s just how it works. So I didn’t, as I wasn’t planning on going to college, I. I was like I guess I don’t need to I didn’t need to take it anywhere beyond where I was at by the time I was 15 or 16 where I’d finished my high school curriculum the, it was a private school I was going to.

And so I just got my diploma and then started working in my dad’s company at that time, doing various things, I just had to find what I, what it is that I wanted to do and where my interests were. And that was a matter of Studying different things and just doing different things.

So I and then I worked in a real estate company that was They actually never ended up doing it, but they were gonna build a whole hotel chain they’d raised a bunch of money and I was helping one of their project managers and learning that whole business and a couple other random things and then I really liked to read and study, so that’s how I originally got the idea, maybe I would like to write.

And originally my interest in writing [00:30:00] was actually fiction to write, storytelling. And which is still an interest of mine. It’s still something I actually work on. Just I don’t have much time to give it, but it’s something I kind of chip away on. In the future, that will be probably a bit more of a focus of mine.

But not right now that’s my indulgence. Basically, my indulgence is like that kind of work. And maybe I have 45 minutes every other day to give it. But I keep going on it and I will get something done on it. Next year I’ll have my least a short story out and I have some ideas and whatever.

Anyway. So that’s how, that was my original interest in writing. And and then it, as I said earlier, it the opportunity came with publishing bigger, leaner, stronger, and just seeing how it went and seeing that’s actually something I can do. So when I stopped, eventually I stopped doing the training company just stopped working on it cause it just, my dad didn’t care.

He just wants. Whatever would be best for me is what he wanted me to do. And he saw that there’s a bigger opportunity in the fitness stuff. And it’s also something that I, I care about and I’m passionate about. Yeah that’s basically that story. And on the college thing, some people are [00:31:00] surprised to, to learn that I figured that There wasn’t a specific vocation that I was interested in in, I couldn’t say I want to do this and that means that I have to go learn it in school and getting one, I was like 16.

I’m not going to college at 16 and just be the weird, awkward thing. So that wasn’t even, I would have been later anyway. But getting a degree for general business. It’s just the people that I spoke to and asking them about it. My dad and then different people that he knows.

And a couple of them even had degrees from Ivy league schools where they basically said it’s a waste of time. Like these were people, that had MBAs and in some cases from some big schools. And they’re like, don’t even bother. If you want to be an entrepreneur, go be an entrepreneur.

If you want to go climb the corporate ladder. Then, try to go in, try to get into an Ivy League school and get an MBA. That’s basically what they said. And I don’t want to do the corporate thing. I want to do my own thing. They’re like then just go do your own thing and you’re going to be better off.

So I took their advice on it and did a bit of traveling, which was fun. My wife is from Germany. We started dating when I was 17, turning 18. And so that was a cool experience to where I’d go there. She would come [00:32:00] here. Went around, did the whole traveling thing, went around Europe.

And so that was, that’s a fun experience that I definitely want. My son and any future kids to have. So yeah, that’s basically how I came to where I’m at now. And in terms of taking the gym seriously, I actually took the gym. I wouldn’t say, I don’t even know if I’d say I take it seriously now.

I put less time into the gym now than I did when in the beginning for my first six, seven years when I really, yeah, I made some gains, but not what you would expect from seven years. I’ll link an article down below where you can see my little story of that and what that got me. But the. I was very consistent.

I would, I was in the gym on an average two hours a day four to six days, no less than three days a week. Cardio lifting harder workouts, like in terms of perceived effort, harder workouts then than now because when you do a lot of high rep stuff and drop sets and super sets and you’re, everything’s on fire, that is less comfortable to me than, trying to squat 380 pounds or something like that, or trying to [00:33:00] pull 500 pounds, something like that.

Sure. The, you have. The heavier weight feels harder, but it’s a shorter duration of discomfort, so it wasn’t so much that I didn’t take it seriously. It was more that I didn’t, I guess the one thing I didn’t take seriously is the education side. I didn’t really get myself educated.

I just read magazines and did workouts and I had friends and we all just did our thing. And at the time I didn’t have a particular, like it wasn’t even real to me that I could maybe look the way that I look now. Like I didn’t really, I never, I didn’t know anybody that was lean.

Like I didn’t know a single person under 10 percent body fat that lifted weights. I knew like a couple, naturally skinny kids, but that was like the whole you’re skinny with abs. Who cares? It doesn’t count kind of thing. I was never fat. I was probably like 16, 17 percent at the highest, which isn’t lean.

It’s not fat. It’s somewhere in the, a bit fatter than athletic look. And I was eating a lot of food though. I was like on a permanent bulk, basically not, no, I wasn’t eating junk food. I just ate a lot of food. Like I, my lunch could be a couple of chicken breasts and like a pile of rice or something like that, or a [00:34:00] pile of pasta.

I would just eat I would eat a lot. And I used to think I had to eat absurd amounts of protein. I used to think I’d eat 400 grams of protein a day. I thought my carbs, I thought I had to eat a lot more food than I actually had to eat. But in terms of the educational side of things, yeah, that was the.

That was probably the main reason why I didn’t really take it seriously was I didn’t know that I could do much better, because I just wasn’t exposed to it. And I enjoyed my workouts and I enjoyed hanging out with my friends. It just worked. But then as I got a little bit older and I started seeing some other people and being like, oh wow, like I want to look like that.

What is that guy doing? Then that’s when I started to take it seriously from an educational, standpoint and start actually learning how the body works and what is going to get me to the, that type of look and what doesn’t get me there and whatever. Yeah, that was basically my, my.

Experience. And that was about five years ago now, four or five years ago when I really started to look at it and changing how I’m eating, changing how I’m working out. And again, you’ll see in the article that I’m linked that kind of tells the story how my body has [00:35:00] changed since. All right, I’m going to, I’m going to cut it off there.

I don’t want to go too long on these. Yeah. If you comment, let me know if you like this, if you want me to continue. Also, I will link to the Google Moderator page down below. You can go submit questions and you can go it allows you to vote on other people’s questions and stuff.

And if you like it, I’ll just keep it going. Just make it an ongoing thing. Do one every couple weeks or something like that. So Again, thanks for checking out the podcast. If you like it, just go ahead and subscribe. I come out with them every week or two and you can also find them on youtube and you can of course find me and all my work at a muscle for life.

com. Thanks again and see you next time.