Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - Why Your Morning Is the Prime Time to Build Your Empire - 045

Episode Date: May 2, 2018

In this episode, Bedros Keuilian and Craig Ballantyne explore the power of being productive in the morning. Plus, Bedros hands you the template for a successful morning routine based on his own success habits. Watch or listen to discover how preparation and gratitude help you dominate your day before the competition even wakes up. “If you want to build an empire, you have to go to the extreme in everything.” - Bedros Keuilian Here’s what you’ll discover: 2:00 - How your self-discipline levels up when you hang around the right people. 3:43 - How killing the snooze button will help you get better sleep. 6:12 - Why your morning success depends on your preparation the night before. 10:47 - Why leadership comes down to delegating, motivating, and selling. 12:32 - How to dial in your mindset before you attack your morning work. “If you’re not moving ahead in your business, it’s because you aren’t doing the hard work first thing in the morning.” - Craig Ballantyne

But if you are not moving ahead in your business, if you're struggling, if you feel like you're on the bubble, on the outside looking in, you don't know why you're not getting ahead. It's because you aren't doing the hard work first thing in the morning. All right, we're going to talk about having an empire morning. We are here. This is Badros Kooley, and I'm Craig Ballantan. Welcome to another episode of the Empire podcast. Empires are built in the morning. Yes, indeed.

All right. All right. So before we get into how empires are built in the morning, let's be honest and truthful with everyone watching. and admit how our mornings were not Empire mornings back in the day. Oh, my gosh, dude. I was the king of hitting the snooze button. In fact, on any given morning, it didn't matter for weekdays or weekends, I would hit the snooze about three times.

And then when I would wake up, I would have no idea on what I'm going to do. What helped me make a decision was I would open up my emails and see what the first fire was that I had to put out. And then I would start there, right? And so every morning would start off with an anxiety attack for me before I actually learned to master my mornings and build my empire. What about you? All right.

So I remember the day in 2007, I'm lying in bed, downtown Toronto in my condo. I would wake up, roll over, check the Blackberry. Not the same BlackBerry, but a different one. And it would be, first of all, 7.30 in the morning for a morning person, I already felt like I was chasing the world, so I had that anxiety. Second, I'd get in. There'd be one bad email in there. 20 great emails, lots of sales, and then one bad email would.

send me down this rabbit hole and would ruin things. So what did you do first? Well, you know what's funny is what I did first was environmental exposure to you. Now, full disclosure, Craig and I have known each other for almost a decade. And truth of the matter is you became more self-disciplined, more self-aware with your time and personal time structure than I was. When we would go and run our masterminds, I would laugh at you when you said, hey, let's go have a 5.36 o'clock dinner. And I go, Craig, that's like a late lunch. Why are we having dinner so early, right? And so thankfully, through environmental exposure to you, I always tell people, before that book, the perfect day formula was written by you, I got the knowledge through

environmental exposure. You lived it. I lived it. I lived it. And so it was weird. All of a sudden, it made sense to eat at 5.30 in the morning. All of a sudden, it made sense to take notes at night, do a brain dump, and then dominate those notes first thing in the morning instead of diving into my email. So I owe a great debt of gratitude to you where that's concerned, because without you actually leading the way, I would have probably been lost a lot longer period. Yeah, and so what I did, I remember thinking about this is my window of opportunity, and I need to keep on getting up earlier and checking my email later. And that window of opportunity grew. And that is how I was able to write the book. I was able to write all my articles.

I was able to do so much and become the world's most productive man by having that system in place. So let's go to the snooze button because that's where a lot of people are frustrated and wasting their days right now. I have some science behind what happens to your body, but you have such a better argument about what happens to your mind and your hopes and dreams when you hit the snooze button. Sure. So, rant on, brother. So where the snooze button is concerned, and this is while I was writing my man-up book, I realized that if I want to man-up and step into my fullest potential as an entrepreneurial leader in my space here, then I've got to stop hitting the snooze button. I figured out why. Your subconscious mind can glom on to one thing or another, but it cannot glom on to do not glom on to do things. And what I wanted my subconscious mind to glom on

is the idea of, I'm going to take this Fit Body Boot Camp brand and blow it up to 2,500 locations worldwide. Well, then I figured out every morning that I hit snooze, when I'm really telling my mind, my subconscious mind is, I value 10 more minutes of sleep over taking the idea of Fit Body Boot Camp and blowing it up to 2,500 locations. So the way I still visualize it is, Imagine if on your nightstand, you have two rows of dominoes. And row one, there's a sign on it that says, your day is lost. Lost, confused, over. Row two, successful, productive day, right?

When you hit that snooze button, you're really knocking down the first domino in that first row of having a day that is lost, confusing, and frustrating. And so ever since then, realizing that... It's a crop duster day. It's a crop duster day instead of a fighter jet day. So I found the feature in my iPhone where I can turn... off the snooze feature, so I'm not even tempted to hit it. And instead, when my alarm goes off at 5 o'clock in the morning, I wake up and I work right

off my list. Beautiful, beautiful. And so I will be honest, there are days when I wake up now and I'm like, well, you know, maybe I'll just have a nap right now. Instead of hitting, I call it a nap instead of hitting the snooze button. And I think, no, what would Beidros say? Baderos would say, get your butt out of bed, Craig, and go to work. And so there's the physiology of it goes like this.

When you wake up and you go back to sleep in the snooze, you go back to sleep in the snooze, you You get into a little bit of sleep, but not a deep sleep, and then you're woken up and you're really actually grogier than if you had gotten up in the first place. Plus, I did the numbers, and if you hit snooze, 10 minutes at a time, that can be up to two years of your life wasted in really crappy sleep. Two years of your life. Yeah, so it is absolutely imperative that you do not hit the snooze button. But in order to not hit the snooze button, you really have to do some stuff the night before,

planning the night before. So, let's talk about... Planning and preparation is everything, right? Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about how, you know, you're married, you have kids, your busy life, you have, you know, you still watch a little bit of TV, you know, with the wife. How do you still get to bed on time and what do you do in order to wind down? So it really...

And this is for anyone who's got a family, this is going to work out well for them. But if you've got a family, you've got a spouse, you've got multiple things you've got to do, you have to have structure to your date, right? And of course, what we talk about in our Empire Mastermind is all about structure and scale, how to structure your life and scale your business. And so if you're one of those people where you're kind of ignoring your kids, ignoring your family, just so you can get work done, but then trying to catch up later with your spouse, you're going to have a broken relationship, a damaged relationship with your kids only to have a successful business, which really are you successful or not. So it goes back to structure. And where structure is concerned, I learned that, okay, if we have dinner by 6 o'clock as a family, last night you were at our house.

Sure. By 5.30, we were eating dinner as a family. We have dinner by 5.30. That means Chloe can be in the shower and out of the shower and ready to sleep by 8.30. Andrew by 9 p.m., which means now from 9 to 10.30, I have an hour and a half to hang out with my wife, watch a show, go in the hot tub, and we only watch one episode, even if it's Game of Thrones, and we're locked on and want to binge watch. We watch one episode, hit the hot tub. I get out of the hot tub. I do a brain dump onto my iPhone.

What are the things that are swirling around in my head that I'm thinking about for tomorrow? I do a brain dump onto my iPhone in the notes section, three to five. things and then I'll put those things in order of the most important and challenging thing because what I found is when we wake up in the morning if our most important thing is the second or third thing we don't want to do the top stuff just to not get to the the big one right so put the hardest thing first on my list and then I go to sleep it's as simple as that this way when my alarm goes off at 5 o'clock I shower have my morning protein shake coffee and water

and then I go right to my iPhone and what are the top three things that I need to focus on and I just do dominate those by 9 a.m. I'm at the gym. And so already by 9 a.m. I've won my day. But it takes a high level of discipline to not look at Instagram, not look at Facebook, not open up YouTube and emails and text messages. In fact, there's a feature on your iPhone and most phones, I imagine, even Android's where you can turn off text notifications. I turn them off the night before. So in the morning it says I have zero text messages, even though I might have 20 of them waiting. Got it. Right? So there is this level of discipline you have to have to. have to not click that doggone icon because if you fucking click that icon and you go down the Instagram, the YouTube, the Facebook, the text, the email rabbit hole, you're fucked. That whole list you made the night before, fucked, fucked, fucked. And you don't want that, right? No.

And you know, it's funny is I've learned over time, it's like, I'm not going to text Beiros until like this time, like it's about 10 o'clock in the morning, Eastern Standard Time, because he's not going to get back to me because I know that he is off the phone. You are in GSD mode first thing in the morning, right, man? Getting shit done. Please do. The reverse alarm. The reverse alarm.

So if you don't have a system like Beidros does where, you know, he knows exactly what he's doing at 9 o'clock, 10, 30, et cetera, you should have a reverse alarm. And that is a real like, it's like training wheels for getting to bed on time, essentially. And so, okay, you want to go to bed 11 o'clock? Great. That means at 10 o'clock the reverse alarm goes off. Then you shut down all the electronics. Then you start doing old school stuff. Like you do the dishes.

You make your lunch for the next day. You read a book. You spend some time with the spell. And that way you are able to wind down and you're able to fall asleep at 11 o'clock. No electronics is a key because email watching stuff while you're sitting in bed is a killer for your bed time. Make sense? Oh, absolutely. I mean, how many times have people seen, and I've seen this and you've seen this, where some troll is bagging on your product, your service, your company,

and you just happen to see it right before bed? It's always the last email you check. Always. It's either the last email, the last Facebook post. You saw all these great comments, but the last comment you saw was about some troll, making fun of your shoes or your weight or your hair or whatever. All of a sudden you're locked on to that and you have shitty sleep. And shitty sleep leads to a shitty morning. Yeah, absolutely.

And then another thing that is a game changer from my clients is making sure that they work on the business, not in the business first thing in the morning. So Jason Phillips, one of our Empire Mastermind members, he and I just had a phone call the other day. he is having a great first world problem, which is way too busy because the business is growing so fast. And we had to step him back and say, okay, Jason, somebody else can be doing this, this, and this, you're going to step away from that. This is where you need to be focused on by working on the business. And you have your 5% and 95% split, but also talk about the importance of how a leader just needs to be in that delegate, motivate, and sell mode. Yeah.

So it's really simple in that when you're a leader, when you're starting your business, business. When you're starting your business, you might have to do 100% of it. If you're the solo panur, you're it. You're the one writing the checks. You're the one doing the P&L reports. You're the one marketing, selling, and doing everything. But as you start growing a team, as you start building a two, three, five, 10, 20 employees, you've got to start thinking empire, scale levels. And at that point, the leader needs to just focus on the 5% that matters. So for me, I have to do this podcast. The guys behind the camera, we can't switch roles here, and they can't come here and do this podcast. I'm the face of it. We're the brand of it.

That's it. We're doing it. So it's delegate, motivate, sell. And believe it or not, we're selling right now. My 5% of the things that I do is to delegate, motivate, sell. And we are selling, we're selling a thought, we're selling knowledge, we're selling an idea of how you should run your business in your life. And so everything else outside of that, the filming of this, the editing of this, the posting of this content on all the different platforms from social media to SoundCloud and Stitcher, et cetera, that's somebody else that does that. So learn to outsource the 95% of the stuff that are trivial for you, but critical for your team members, and focus on your critical 5% of delegate, motivate, and sell. So we delegate to team members,

we motivate each other as business partners, and I sell the message that I want to deliver. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, one last thing, one mistake that I see people doing is not getting into the important stuff early. And they're doing gratitude and meditation and journaling and yoga and interpretive dance and all this stuff, right? Before they get into actually doing something, So I love your little system. You have a very nice, quick, short little system that really allows you to center your mind for the day, but then still get into work and dominate early. So walk us through that. Yeah.

So, as I said, I wake up first thing in the morning and I'll jump in the shower. And from there, I'm downstairs having my protein shake. And, you know, people, I've actually gotten this question, so I'll share it here. It's just two scoops of egg white protein powder. And I use the J. Rob brand. And I'm not affiliated with J. Rob. I just like the way. You've been using that stuff forever, ever.

Forever, yeah. two scoops of protein powder of J-Rob, egg white protein, a tablespoon and a half of oatmeal, ice and water, and I mix it up and I chug a lot. Then I have my coffee and my water as I'm playing catch with cookie, my dog, right? Take her out there in the backyard, play catch with her, exhaust her. And in between her runs, I just go and do this little gratitude exercise, which takes you, I don't know, so if I'm playing with cookie for about five to ten minutes, it takes me somewhere between five and ten minutes.

Who are the three people I'm thankful for that day? and I'll send them a text message and thank them for being a positive person in my life and helping me play up a level. What are the things that I'm thankful for? My health, my house, my business, my mind, whatever. And I'll just actually stop and just feel it. In between playing with Cookie, I'll feel what it feels like to be grateful for my health and really look at my house and my property and be thankful for it because I grew up in

shit hole apartments throughout Anaheim and San Anah that was gang infested. And then I'm done. Cookies done playing. I'm done going through my gratitude text messages and gratitude feelings. And I go and turn my phone upside down because I've already got my list that I'm going to dominate. I push my phone away because I get tempted just like everyone else to check, right? And I start dominating. It's usually on the computer or, in fact, I even have two phones.

And let's be honest here, I'm not saying all of you should go out there and get two phones. Craig has two phones. I've got two phones. I got the phone that I get calls and emails and text messages from. That's the one that gets turned upside down and pushed away. And then I've got my what I call my social media phone. That's the one that I make my content videos on first thing in the morning for all the different platforms because I'm selling right delegate motivate sell I'm selling I'm writing my emails on my MacBook I'm going through my emails that have to do with my publisher or business partners and then I close my computer and off I go to the gym Right now beautiful. Yeah, and so I will say that I also have that system in place. So what I do is I turn the I put the phone in airport

mode, turn the phone off, put it in another room in a drawer. And some days I will actually get all the way to having to move that airplane button back into, and I was like, oh my God, you know, slap my hand, put it back in, get back into the room and get back to work, glue my butt to the chair and do the work. So I really think that, listen, I love all the people that are into the soft side of things, but if you are not moving ahead in your business, if you're struggling, if you feel like you're on the bubble on the outside looking in, and you don't know why you're not getting ahead. It's because you aren't doing the hard work first thing in the morning.

That's where empires do their work. Richard Branson, Warren Buffett, all these guys, they are doing hard work first thing in the morning, and that's what you need to do too. You know, it's funny that you say that too, because I wonder if people watching this and listening to this are going, man, that's pretty hardcore to turn off the text notifications, turn off the Facebook notifications, put it on an airplane mode,

push the phone away or put it in a drawer. You have to go extreme. Listen, if you want to build a business that's going to be an empire that's going to make legacy wealth that's going to create like fuck you money You have to go to the extreme and everything I remember Gary Vaynerchuk years ago said this he goes You're gonna sweat for the Millies, but you need to bleed for the billies right? You're gonna bleed if you want to make billions Truth of the matter is you can just take that if you're gonna sweat for a few hundred thousand dollars a year You need a bleed for a few million dollars a year

That means you have to go to the extreme and do the extreme things so that you're not tempted to grab the phone and go down a wrap a round a rabbit hole that's going to take you nowhere and distract you. Yeah, and eventually you can build that muscle up over time. Like when I was in Denver and had an apartment there, I didn't have the internet at home. So I had to, I sat there from 4 o'clock to 6 o'clock and train myself to avoid, well, there were times when I would click on Firefox and I'd be like, oh yeah, I'm not connected to the internet. But I was able to work for two hours a day and I built up the muscles where now I can

get up even if I have access to the internet and I don't go on it. I get the work done, then reward myself with the social media, move the business I had build the empire. Yep, that's exactly right. So what are some big takeaways that our viewers and listeners can do right now? The thing that you need to do is start planning the night before for a perfect day tomorrow. Make sure that you do that brain dump, as Pedro said. Make sure that you prioritize the big thing so that the number one hard activity is going to get done first thing in the morning before you get sucked into anything else. And then make sure that you have a fence built around yourself. That's what I call it. Building a fence around yourself, keeping the temptations out

so that when you get up, it's smooth for you to get into that number one priority activity. And that's how you dominate your days, right? That is. And that is how you actually dominate your mornings, dominate your days and dominate your weeks. And so if you like this episode of the Empire Podcast Show, please do us a favor and share it with as many people as you can. Be sure to leave it positive review for us. And, of course, give us five stars on all the different platforms. We really appreciate you guys watching and listening to the show,

and we'll see you next time.