BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 451: Stop Chasing the “False Summit”: Have Better Relationships and Results with Michael Hyatt

Episode Date: March 14, 2021

Does it ever seem like working overtime is a competition? We often see people bragging about how they work 60 hour weeks, work on weekends, or spend the most time at the office or in front of their computer. Does this constant overworking actually accomplish something or is it more of a chest-beating competition? Michael Hyatt argues that working crazy hours rarely does anything for our productivity, and if anything, can make our work sluggish and dull. He should know, in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as teams were working more than ever from home, Michael decided to do the opposite. Michael lowered his (and his team’s) working hours from 40 hours a week, to 30 hours a week. The result? A profit increase of nearly 100% and company-wide productivity boost. Not only does your work quality benefit, but so do your relationships, your health, and your outlook on life when you are off of the “grind mode”. Michael believes this so much that he wrote a book about it. Win at Work and Succeed at Lifegoes through what Michael calls the “double win”: winning at life and work, with no tradeoffs! Michael lists a handful of ways you can instantly improve your work/life balance. Tips on sleep, nutrition, and getting your “daily big 3” done so you can accomplish goals that matter, instead of just being productive. If you ever feel like a workaholic, these tips will help you align back to a productive yet enjoyable schedule. In This Episode We Cover: Fighting the “cult of overwork” especially when working becomes a bragging right How to keep your business running at full speed while having time for your family The importance of putting up “hard boundaries” so your day can be respected Identifying the “big 3” tasks that you need to get done everyday How to implement “double wins” in your life Knowing which work is important and which work can be put on hold And So Much More!  Links from the Show BiggerPockets Podcast BiggerPockets book store Brandon's Instagram David's Instagram BiggerPockets Podcast 363: How to Work (Way) Less but Accomplish (Way) More in 2020 with Michael Hyatt Click here to check the full show notes: https://www.biggerpockets.com/show451 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 4.51. Not all work is created equal. What you want to focus on is the work where you've got passion, you've got proficiency, and is going to drive the results in your business. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place.

Stay tuned and be sure to be sure. to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. What's going on, everyone? It's Brandon Turner, host of the Bigger Pockets podcast, here with another phenomenal show with my friend, Mr. David, the Workhorse Green. What's up, man? You're not such a workhorse anymore.

You've been taking it a little bit light and easy lately. Yeah, well, I don't know about light and easy, but I'm definitely taking more down. Leveraged. You've been leveraged lately. Yeah, Michael's interview today is amazing, first off. If you are here, get excited because it's going to be a great one. We talk a lot about ways to basically improve your performance by looking at rest and having balance as something that isn't necessarily a negative.

What we didn't talk about, but what I think is a great analogy is the fact that a Honda Civic that's used to commute doesn't need to even be looked at except every 5,000 miles when you go change the oil. They can check your tire pressure. It's a very basic car that doesn't need a lot of maintenance. But if you're trying to be a race car, if you're trying to be a Lamborghini or NASCAR, man, a NASCAR needs a pit stop a couple times of race. They're changing tires that frequently when you're trying to perform better. Can you imagine trying to compete in NASCAR without ever taking a pit stop? That's how many of us that are listening to this podcast have been living our lives.

Yeah, because high achievers need to take that time to make sure they're focused on not just work. But like work's important. We talk about work today. We talk about the things you can do to improve your work. But we also talk about things to make sure that you have a clear definition between work and life and something that I'm always trying to improve. because that work-life balance, like to quote the one thing, doesn't really exist as much as work-life balance scene. It's almost more of a verb, right? It's something that we continually do.

And so this episode is going to help you a lot with that. Plus, Michael just got a ton of great stories and anecdotes. And like, he's just a super cool guy. We actually had Michael on here back on episode 363 where we talked a lot about virtual assistance and hiring people. We talk about that a little bit today. But today we go into it a little bit different. I get a different approach, more of a holistic approach to are you living a balanced life. So all that and more to come. But before we get to that, let's get today's quick tip. All right, today's quick tip is brought to you by David Green. Today's quick tip is ask yourself in what areas of life am I trying to make up for lack of impact

with just extra what we call butt in seat time. It's very, very tricky to convince yourself you were productive because you sat in front of a computer eight hours that day when in reality you didn't get a whole lot done. You could have worked for two hours and been much more productive than the eight. So break yourself out of the W2 mindset that says, I get paid per hour. So I just have to be at the office, be at the computer, say I'm working. And instead ask yourself, what activities do I need to be taking that will make me successful? And how can I break those activities down into smaller bite-sized chunks that, like you said, in the podcast,

sometimes you can do in five seconds. Yeah, there you go. Awesome, man. All right. Well, with that said, you've upgraded how to buy properties. But did your insurance get the memo? When investors start scaling, insurance can't be an afterthought. Most policies were designed for a single property, not multiple rentals, LLC ownership, short-term stays, or properties mid-rehab. That's where blind spots can creep in. NREG works exclusively with real estate investors. They understand portfolios, how risk compounds as you grow, and why insurance should protect your upside, not just a checkbox. One uncovered claim can undo years of progress. Before your next acquisition, review your insurance. Talk to NREG and get investor-specific coverage

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our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's Indeed.com slash rookie. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed is all you need. Do you ever notice how every passive investment somehow turns into a very active lifestyle, active spreadsheets, active phone calls, active stress? Here's a better question. What if you could buy brand new construction homes, 10% below market value, in the best markets across the country, without making real estate your second job? That's exactly what rent to retirement does. They're a full of, full-service turnkey investment company handling everything for you. In some cases, investors get 50 to 75% of our down payment back at closing, plus interest rates as low as 3.75%. They've partnered

with BiggerPockets for over a decade, helping thousands invest smarter. If you want to do the same, visit BiggerPockets.com slash retirement to learn more. I think it's time to jump in an interview. Anything you want to add right before we bring in Michael? No, this is a great one. Let's bring him in. All right, here we go. This is our interview with Michael Hyatt. All right, Michael, welcome back to the Bigger Pockets podcast, man. It's awesome to have you here. Hey, thanks, Brandon. Good to be with you. Sweet. So let's jump into this thing. So last time you're on the show, we talked about, I mean, we talked about a lot of stuff last time, but specifically we talked a lot about assistants and hiring executive assistants for you in life, which I then did. And now I have, actually I have two assistants now, which is awesome. So thank you, by the way. I took action. Well, congratulations. I can tell by Bell, who was just on that you did well. I'm proud of you. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, she's awesome. So, and by the way, I used a belay for that one. And I know, like, I know you worked with belay in the past as well. So yeah, they were, yeah, they were great. So it's awesome. Yeah, they make it easy. Yeah, very much so. So cool. All right. Well, let's jump in today. So you've got a new book out. And I want to just start talking about that. Because I mean, I'm a reader. And I know you're a reader and our audience is readers. Let's talk about the book. So what is it? What's it about? We'll just start there and we'll dive in. Yeah. So my new book is called When at Work and Succeed at Life. And it's basically. kind of a manifesto against the cult of overwork. And so we're kind of presented today with this

idea that you can win at work or you can succeed at life. And by that, I mean maintain your health, your most important relationships, hobbies, etc. You can do one or the other, but you can't do both. But what we argue in the book, and I wrote this book with my oldest daughter, who's now the CEO of Michael Hyatt and Company, we wrote this book together. And we really wanted to articulate these five principles to free yourself from the cult of overwork. The cult of overwork. And it is kind of a thing, right? It's a bragging point in today's culture of like, oh, I'm just so busy. I'm working all the time. I'm hustling, hustle and driving, driving, right? It's very much a status symbol. Definitely a status symbol. And, you know,

woe to the person who doesn't respond in that way. You know, somebody says, well, how's work going? You're going, well, I don't, you know, it's pretty manageable. And I'm working about, you know, 35, 40 hours a week. I mean, you look like a slacker. Yeah. So yeah, that is definitely the cult of overwork, but it also comes at a very, very high price. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure we've all seen that meme or that the Instagram post. I've seen it before. And it's just something like, I'm going to butcher it. But basically it says like wealth, family, friends, something else. And it's like you can pick two. And it basically is like you can only have a couple of these things in life. And so you're saying that that's not true that there's another way around it. Absolutely. You know, I felt like for most of my career, I was faced with this impossible choice where I could pick one or the other, but I couldn't do both. And as a result, I kind of had this unspoken pact with my

wife, and that is that she would raise the kids. I would work hard, make enough money to try to, you know, fund the entire enterprise. But we kind of lived on parallel planets, basically. And finally, I just, you know, I woke up one day and I start the story in the book where, you know, I'd been hired to turn this one division around at a big corporate publicly held company. And this division happened to be number 14 out of 14. So it was dead last in every important financial metric. And so the CEO said, how long will it take you to turn this division around? Because it's a total drag on the corporate earnings.

And I said, I think we can do it about three years. So I went back, rolled up my sleeves, shared with the team, the vision of turning it around. And we worked hard. We were working like 70, 80 hours a week, you know, working on the weekends, working in the evenings. I was eating junk food. It wasn't working out. I thought all that stuff could wait. But it paid off because in a year and a half, we went from number 14 to number one in profitability, in growth, every significant metric. I got the biggest bonus check I'd ever received in my life. It was more than my entire annual salary. And I could not wait to get home to share it with Gail.

And she's always been, you know, super supportive, my biggest cheerleader, we've got five kids. So I walked in, you know, bounced into the house. I unfurled the check and I said, look at this. Can you believe it? And I could tell there was just kind of a hitching or giddy up. You know, she just wasn't her normal enthusiastic itself. And she said, babe, we need to talk. And so she led me into the den.

We sat down. She said, you know, I love you. I've always tried to be super supportive. But she said, I've got to be honest with you. You are never home. and your five daughters need you. And so she started to cry a little bit. And she said, even when you are home, you're not really here.

And then she really started crying. And she said, honestly, I feel like a single mom. And that gutted me. You know, that was the last thing I wanted to do was to put her into that position. I felt like, you know, I justified it that I was doing it for the family, you know, the entire time. but I realized that this was no longer sustainable. You know, the people that I was doing it for, I was hurting. And I said, there's got to be a better way.

And I think, you know, when most people are felt, when most people confront that kind of choice, they do one of two things. Either they hustle harder. They think, oh, my gosh, if I can just work harder, get the big payoff, have enough money, then I can relax and give attention to my health. I can give attention to my family, pay attention to my kids, all the rest. But the problem is that number keeps growing. You know, it's like, it's like an unreachable carrot.

The other alternative is what we call in the book, The Ambition Break, where you say, you know, I am not going to be a slave to my work. You know, I'm not going to do what my dad did or I'm not going to do what my mom did. I'm going to give attention to my family. I'm going to be really there for my kids. And so we throttle back our professional ambition. But the problem is for people that are high achievers,

that's not very satisfying either. You know, you feel like you've got all this wasted potential. and, you know, that just doesn't work. So that set, this was 20 years ago, that set me on a quest to find a third way to say, what if there was a way to win at work and succeed at life? And, you know, a lot of times it was three steps forward, two steps back. But I started getting momentum. And this is now something we call the double win and we teach it to our clients.

We practice it ourselves with our staff. And it works. So the double win, you're winning at home, you're winning at work. That's right. And I think that that is super important because, again, people, especially, like, I noticed this was like starting to entrepreneurs, like the real estate people listen to our show and I was there as well. Like, I just would go all in on something, like all in on it. And I was just, I was there because I felt like I had to get there and had to climb this mountain. And I would always tell myself, like, like, I'm almost at the top. You ever like climb a mountain, right?

Or do a big hike. And you're like, you see that, you think at the top right there. And so you start, you're like, oh, I just got to go over that ridge. I'm there. I'm at the top. And you get up there and you're like, okay, that wasn't the top. I can see the next top right there. You start going that one. There's always this other top and I never make the top of the mountain. And that's what I feel like 15 years of my life was, was always saying I'm almost there. When I get this thing, that's going to be there. I'm going to be at the top and I can relax a little bit. And it's a lie. It is. And inside the book, we call that the false summit. Yep. You know, it's like you think you've made it and you get up there and you go, man,

this is not what I expected or this is not what I hoped or did I really? sacrifice all those years of my life for this? And it's very, very unsatisfying. And, you know, I, I, we pick in the book on Elon Musk. And without a doubt, I mean, he's a phenomenal entrepreneur. And he's become sort of an icon, especially to an entire generation of young entrepreneurs. And he famously said at one point, he said that unless you're working 80 to 100 hours a week, you know, you're, you're not going to create that big thing and make a dent in the universe. And the problem is that it's just not sustainable. And in fact, it hasn't worked out for Elon.

He's gone through two marriages now. He admits that his five boys hardly speak to him. And he's basically all he's got is his work. He's married to his work because everything else is in the trash heap behind him. You know what brings up a good point about the people we idolize in life. Like we see these people like, oh, I would love to be like a Jeff B. is those sort of Bill, you know, Bill Gates or Elon Musk or even like, you know, anybody, even in our own industry, like, you look at them, you're like, wow, I would love to be like

them. But at what cost? And so I've tried really hard lately to like when I think about people I want to be like, I also want to look at the rest of their life. And do I really want to be like them the rest of their life? Because a lot of times answer is no. No, that's exactly right. And that's why you have to consider the totality of their lives because life is multi-dimensional. And one of the things that we argue in the book is that all these different domains of life. You know, you've got a spiritual domain, intellectual, emotional, physical, financial, your vocation, you got your marriage, you got your kids, you got all these different things. But they're all interrelated and they all affect each other.

And this is just common sense, right? I mean, you get sick and it's going to affect your work. You're feeling stress at work. It's going to affect your marriage. You're having a spat with your spouse. You're going to drag that to work. All these things are interconnected. And that's why, you know, work-life balance, which a lot of people love to make fun of today, is actually essential and it's possible.

But it depends on how we define it. Yeah, you know, I think when I hear work-life balance, I often thought it means a perfect balance of two hours a day for this, two hours a day for this, two hours a day for this. And then obviously when you get into the trenches, you find that that is pretty much impossible to actually maintain that you sort of swing back and forth between work needs me more, family needs me more. Can you maybe illustrate a little bit of how that should work in your opinion, Michael? Yeah, I think that sometimes when we define balance, we think, you know, that every compartment of our life, every category of our life gets the same distribution of resources, our attention, you know, our focus, our money, our time. But that's not what it means at all. What it means is that every category of our life gets the appropriate amount of attention. And it's more like walking across

a balance beam where when you're walking across a balance beam, most of the time you're out of balance, right? And you're trying to kind of shift your weight around to stay in balance. And that's how life works. You know, there are seasons when you have to go all in on work. You know, maybe you've got, you know, in your world, you're launching some, you know, new development project or some new apartment complex that's coming out of the ground. I don't know what it is, but you've got something that requires all in for a period of time. But you've got to be careful that that doesn't become a way of life. And where it usually goes off the rails is you get seduced into thinking that situation is temporary, but one temporary emergency leads to another temporary emergency leads to another

temporary emergency. And before long, you've got, you know, maybe 10 years of being completely out of balance. And that's why, you know, you've got to visit the honest planet occasionally, you know, look in the mirror and say, okay, what's really going on here? And the problem is work is incredibly seductive. Yeah. You know, I mean, you think about spending time at work compared to spending time at home. You know, at work, there's a defined win. At home, not so much. You know, kids, especially, a marriage, these are long-term projects where you see little incremental improvement. And sometimes you think you're going backwards and not forward. at work, there's a lot of rewards.

There's a lot of attaboys, a lot of satisfaction. At home, not so much. You know, it's pretty thankless a lot of times. And at work, you get to experience flow, you know, where you're doing something you love, you're really good at, and time just seems to fly by because you're enjoying it so much. At home, sometimes it feels like, you know, you're watching paint dry. You know, it could be so slow.

I think we've got to realize all these psychological effects on us that kind of keep us in the work mode. You know, that's the place where we know what we're doing. Sometimes at home we don't really know what we're doing. Maybe we weren't taught or whatever. But we've got to get over that if we're going to build long-term success. Yeah, that's such a good point. I struggle with that a lot where, yeah, when I'm doing work, whether it's the real estate stuff I do, whether it's the educational side of what I do, like with bigger pocket stuff.

Like, I love it. I'm in it. I just feel like so good. and I'm like conquering things. I'm like, you know, I'm like, dude, I love to conquer things, right? But then I go home and I'm like sitting on the floor with my daughter. And I love Rosie with like all of my heart, right? But after an hour of playing tea games and, you know, I'm like, I need to go out to my office and go get some work done.

Like I just, I like, I struggle because like it just feels so mundane to sit there and play, you know, a tea party for an hour or two hours because I'm not getting those like dopamine hits of like I just conquer. this new thing or I recorded this video or whatever. But I'm, I'm really trying because I know that at the end of my life, I'm never going to look back and say, I wish I would have spent less time playing tea party. That's exactly right. Or too much. And take it from me, I've been married for 42 years. Wow. And my wife and I have a great marriage. You know, we occasionally don't have a great marriage, but most of the time, it's pretty darn great. Sure. And we have five daughters.

And they're all adults, between 30 and 40. We've got nine grandkids. Buddy, I'm going to just tell you something. It is worth it. It is worth whatever you have to do to make sure that you give the proper attention to your family. Because when you have kids that are grown that are among your best friends that actually want to be with you and spend time with you, when you actually want to be with the person

you're married to and go vacation with them and you can't wait. to get home from the office and share with them what happened. I mean, that's, that's like priceless. One of my buddies once, kind of jokingly said, but it was half serious. He said that he didn't want kids, but kids are a 20 year investment in the last 40 years of your life. And I love that. And so he ended up having, I think he has six kids right now. And like he obviously loves kids, but his point was like, like you have kids and then you get grandkids later. And then grandkids are a lot. I mean, I'm sure you know, like they're fun. People love them. You don't have to change the diapers every time, but you still get the joy of having them around. And like, yeah, you go,

otherwise, I really do worry about, like, if I get like, you know, before I had kids, like, my wife and I kind of struggled to have kids for a number of years, I thought, well, if I went and had no kids ever, like, and I get 65, 70 years old, 80 years old. With our technology today, we're probably going to live to 130, 140. Yeah. I'm like, that's a long time to have no family afterwards. So, like, you know, obviously you can build good solid friendships and you can be kind of adopted to other people's families. But that, uh, Yeah, I wanted to always make sure that like that my kids were, they're number one because a good chunk of my life will be after the work kind of years are over.

And yeah, a reminder. Absolutely right. Yep. All right. So let's talk about, you know, in the book, you talk about that the double win. We talk about that. So what are some things? Like, let's go tangible here.

What are some things people should be doing to get more balance in their life to get to get the double win? Yeah. One of the things that we talk about in the book, in fact, the way the book is structured is around these five principles of the double win. And let me just jump to the second one, because it's super practical. And it's this, constraints foster productivity, creativity, and freedom. So typically we think if there's a constraint that that is the enemy of freedom, right?

We want to work in a world without constraints. If I need to work 12 hours a day, 14 hours a day, I want to work that way. But let me tell you a story. So back, after I had that experience with my wife, Gail in the Den, where she told me she felt like a single mom, I thought, I need an executive coach. I got to have somebody that helps me figure this out. So I hired a guy, I hired a guy named Daniel Harkavy of Building Champions. He became one of my best friends. We co-wrote a book together called Living Forward.

But one of the things that did- I love that book. Oh, thank you. Yeah, great book. Thank you. Well, Daniel said to me, he said, as you began to coach me, he said, I want you to to put hard boundaries on your day because you don't have boundaries, buddy. He said, here's what your day looks like. He said, you in the middle of the afternoon, when you think, oh, well, might not get this done this afternoon, you think to yourself, and he'd coached,

you know, tons of people so he knew what I was thinking. He said, you think to yourself, well, I'll go home, eat a bite with a family, and then I'll crack, open my laptop, and I'll get right back to work. There's no, there's no boundaries in your life. And by your own admission, he's saying to me, he said, you're working Saturday mornings, you're working Sunday night, you don't really take vacations. I mean, you might go with the family to a vacation destination, but you're working in the morning for most of the morning while your family's at the beach, you're taking phone calls, answering emails, all that stuff. You're not really present there. So he said, I want you to establish hard boundaries. So I said, okay, I would. So back in those days,

I decided that I would establish a hard boundary. I wouldn't start till nine in the morning, and I would finish promptly at six. Now, I do a lot better than that. now, but that was a start back then. I said, I won't work on the weekends and I won't work on vacations and that was really hard. Daniel asked me for permission if he could call Gail periodically and check in and see how I was doing. Jolly. That was like the scariest thing ever, you know, but I said, okay, gulp. So he did. You know, he would follow up and say, you know, how's Michael doing? And, you know, I was, because I had that accountability, because I had the coaching and because I established the hard boundaries, everything shifted right then. Because here's what started happening. Do you know

how it is like on the Friday before you go on vacation? You know, you've got all this stuff. You've got to get done. You've got a hard deadline. And you're like Superman. You know, you get a week's worth of work done in a Friday just because you've got that constraint. Well, the same thing happens every day when you have a hard quit time. Because I would say, look, I don't have time to goof off. I don't have time to check Facebook or, you know, chit-chat with this, you know, person in the hallway, I got to stay focused here because at 6 p.m. I've committed to Daniel and I've committed to Gail and Daniel's going to check in with Gail. I got to finish at six. And I can't work on the weekend. So I can't drag the work home. So what are my priorities for this week? How can I stay focused on them and actually get

them done? Now, here's what's really interesting about constraints. Can I tell you another story? Please. Okay. So back when the pandemic started, hard to believe it's been. almost a year as we're recording this. But we have a we have about 40 full-time employees. And most of them are younger couples or younger parents who have small kids. Now, all of a sudden, they had no child care. They had no nannies. They had no daycare. They had no school, nothing. The kids were underfoot. They're trying to work from home. It was crazy. A lot of stress. Plus, they're getting all the stress from the macro environment. You know, the economic downturn, you know, all the stuff that was happening with the summer,

with the protests and the riots and so forth, somebody was under a lot of stress. So we said, for the end of March, we said, okay, as an experiment, we're going to move to a 30-hour work week. We're going to work from 9 to 3. And we've already, we're practicing the hard boundary thing with our previous work day, which was 9 to 5. But we're going to go 9 to 3. We're not going to dock anybody's pay. Everybody's going to get paid the exact same they were before. before this started. We're going to try it for two weeks, and then we're going to analyze the

productivity and make sure that the constraints that we've implied have actually improved productivity or at least allowed it to remain the same. The end of two weeks, executives got together. We said, okay, what do we think? Seems to be working. We can't see any slip. We can't tell any difference, honestly. So we said, okay, let's do it for a month. And then we said, let's do it through the summer. And then when we got to our strategic planning in late September of this last year, we said, guys, let's make this permanent. That's cool. I mean, I can't tell any difference.

We're working 30 hours a week. Everybody's just as productive. We just finished 2020. And we were up 100% over last year over our profit. We were highly profitable last year. We doubled it this year. We grew our top line by about 50%. And that was in a pay.

pandemic working fewer hours. So this stuff does work. Yeah, that's really good. And it's, it's true for our clients, too. They've been doing very similar things with similar results. That's so good. You know, to add to the to the constraint thing, what I did recently, and this goes back to the comment we talked about having an assistant. One of those valuable pieces of an assistant is that she, I tell her my constraints and then she make sure that I hold to them versus like, so let's say I was only going to work. Like, I'll just a true example. I am taking Tuesdays off for what I call just creative work. I can go surf if I wanted to.

I could go sit by myself at a coffee shop or I could go film a video or whatever. It's just creative work, no meanings. And then Friday, I'm trying to take off just entirely. I don't work Fridays, right? So that's, so I'm trying to cram everything in the Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. And it's working just fine.

But if somebody asks me, hey, Brandon, you know, a friend of mine, hey, can you do a podcast episode on Friday? Or, hey, can we go analyze this deal together on Friday? I would always say yes. I'd like, oh, yeah, I got the whole day free. Look, my schedule is wide open, right? But as soon as I had an assistant and I told her what my constraints were and then she just made everything fit within the days that I have. And now I like on Fridays, I'm like, I have nothing to do today.

This is amazing. Like it's, it's an, that alone is worth the cost of an assistant just for the amount of free time it's given me because it forces me to not emotionally say yes to things, but to make her fit within the constraints that I've given her. So that's been huge. Well, I'll tell you what's at play there too is that you're doing what Stephen Covey talks. about when he says we need to put a pause between the stimulus and the response. Yeah. Because in that pause, Dr. Covey says, is our freedom. The problem is when you get the stimulus, somebody says, hey, Brandon, how about we do this on,

on, you know, Friday? I need to pick your brain. Can we have coffee? Whatever. If it's like, I'm in the same way, by the way, I would just say, yes, because there's no pause. Yeah. But now what I say is, look, that sounds amazing.

like if I didn't know what the day. I'd say, you know, I'd love to do it with you. But I'll tell you what, you got to check with Jim, who's my assistant, because Jim runs my calendar. And we have an agreement. I don't touch my calendar. So work it out with Jim, we'll find a time. Exactly. And that gives me the pause because Jim can come back to me later and say, hey, I know you kind of wanted to do this in the moment, but do you still want to do this or is it really important or can we push it out? Now we've got all kinds of options. So good. Yep. All right, let me play devil's advocate here for a minute. Let's say you're a young hustler, you want it to do big things in life. You know it's going to take some work to get there. And you hear Brandon say, I want Fridays free. And the first thought that goes through your head is,

well, that's 20% of the week that I can use to be more productive than Brandon. I'm going to catch him and pass him if I work Fridays and he doesn't. Michael, is that what you found in your experience is the case. No, no, I didn't find that. I think that makes rational sense. I think that that makes sense. That's basically the same kind of argument that Elon Musk makes when he says you work 100 hours a week because you'll work in three months, but it takes everybody else to do in a year.

But the problem is those last few hours are not as productive. Now, I have nothing against working five days a week. I work three days a week, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. But I have nothing worked five days a week or working 40 hours a week. But the science says that once you get past about 50 hours a week, it's counterproductive. In fact, there's a Stanford study that we quote in the book that says people who work 70 hours got nothing more accomplished than those that work 50. Amazing. So 20 hours of just busy work, or we call it fake work.

And yeah, you can keep yourself busy. You can do low leverage work. But here's a cool thing. And this is kind of the Prado's principle. we've got this baked into our planner, the full-focused planner, but we identify our daily big three. Now, based on our survey with our clients, the average person with a task list has 15 items when they wake up in the morning that they've got to get done. They think that day, 15 items, okay?

But those are all kinds of items. Some of them are really important related to a, you know, quarterly goal. Some of them are just, you know, kind of low leverage work, you know, check an email, whatever. So what we say is if 20%. of the effort drives 80% of the result, which is the Prado principle, then 20% of 15 would be three. So what are the three tasks among those 15 that if you could nail those, you could declare victory because they contribute to an important project that they contribute to a goal. And so that's what we do. So I declare victory when I get my big three done for the day.

And if I get other things done, that's just bonus. You know, I can choose to do it or choose not to do it. but getting those big three done, if you do that every day, day in and day out, five days a week. And that's where I think David, to answer your question, it's more about focusing on tasks that matter, not on time with your butt in the seat. Yeah. Yeah, that's so, so good. You know, it's Tim Ferriss in the four-hour work week, you know, it came out, what, I don't know, 15, 15 years ago, maybe not a long time ago.

But, like, that was probably the most impactful thing he said in that book was where he said, if there was a gun to your head and you could only work four hours, it's where the word came from, the phrase came from the title came from, if you could only work four hours a week and there was a gun to your head that said you cannot work more than that, what are the tasks that you would actually do to move your business forward? And so it really forced you to think, well, what would I do? So to apply this to real estate investors who are listening right now, like if you, I would guess 95% of what a real estate, like a new real estate investor does is not contributing towards the things that's going to get them the next, get them the deal.

get them in the game. Like if you're not actively like analyzing a property, looking at a property, talking to a real estate agent, making an offer, sitting at a bank, talking to a banker, like, those are the things that actually drive you forward. What they're doing is they're reading a little bit. They're making a business car. They got a really nice logo. They got all this stuff, but they're not doing like the work because they don't have the constraints. They're not like, they just, they're just working here. But you really boil it down to like what are the fundamental things that you do. And the great part is you can ask somebody who's further along in any industry who's further along. I mean, like, Michael, you ran publishing for a long time. So if like,

if our, we have a publishing company at bigger pockets, if we came to you and said, hey, we want to get on the New York Times best sellers list, what are like the five things I got to do? And like, I know you've been there. So like, you'd be like, okay, do one, two, three, four and five. And then I could, like, now I know what those fundamental tasks are versus me just like, just wandering around, trying to figure this out with 40, 50, 60 hours a week. Yeah, it's amazing. Or just do it a lot of busy stuff, right? You know, like I could, you know, in promoting this book, I could go out there and be on, you know, 150 different podcasts and probably 140 of them wouldn't matter. Being on bigger pockets matters, right? This is a high leverage opportunity for me to promote the book. And so not all work

is created equal. And that's a fundamental principle that we, that we have in the book. Not all work is created equal. What you want to focus on is the work where you've got passion, you've got proficiency and is going to drive the results in your business. And that's a few things every day. Yeah, that's so good. Yeah. And I love the whole like, what are the three things you're going to accomplish today, get that done.

I always also add like, and I know you do as well. It's like if you can define like what is the next step to get that done today. Because a lot of people just haven't defined what that is. And usually it's a five minute task. And like it's like you send an email, make a text message, right, make a phone call. It's like it's always like a simple little thing. Go on a website and type in a couple of words. And now you've got the next step.

And if you just did that, if every day people, I mean, and again, this, I got a lot of this from reading your, your content over the years, if you have a vision of where you want to get to. And then you boil that down to like annual goals, quarterly goals, what are you going to do this week? What are you going to do today? What am I going to do in the next five minutes? And if you always ask that question and it was all aligned in this nice aligned thing, all,

all success, I believe all success is a series of five minute easy tasks. everything. I mean, from brain surgery is a series of five-minute tasks or less. Some of them are three seconds, right? Cut here, put here. But people aren't, they don't define what those steps are. They're doing steps that aren't actually aligned in that vertical. So, like, they're doing things that don't get them closer. But if that's all people did, and I'm ranting here, but this is just so important, right? If they just knew where they're headed and then aligned their daily actions with that, it's like success should not be a surprise. It would be like, well, of course I got a six-pack. I lined up. of course I got a million dollar net worth.

Of course I bought an apartment complex. Of course I published a New York Times bestseller because it's not a mystery. Well, you know, it's kind of interesting this morning. As we're recording this, it's the day after the Super Bowl. Yep. And Tom Brady just had his amazing seventh championship, which just killed it. And he was like a machine, so methodical, so calm, so confident, just executed one play after another.

So I was talking to my business accelerator clients today and I was saying, you know, Success is not an accident. Tom Brady just didn't show up to play that game, right? And so I found this article in the New York Post this morning, and it talked about his training regimen. Oh, my gosh, unbelievable. But it's a series of small things. It's him taking care of the small things working a system. And a system will beat a goal every time.

If you've got a system, it'll beat a goal every time. And Tom Brady has a system. And so it's what he eats. It's the fact that he sleeps. nine hours every night that he works out, you know, with the trainer, that he really works on his mindset. He exercises his brain. He uses this app called Brain HQ. He plays it for a couple hours every day because when he's, you know, they're on the game field and he's got a few seconds to look down field, identify somebody that's open and throw a pass. He's got just seconds to do that.

And so he's got to keep his brain sharp as well as his body sharp. But it just, it just, made me see that, you know, that the people that really succeed are people that have a system and they work that system every day. You know, we think sometimes that it's got to be this massive killer deal, this big breakthrough thing that's going to, you know, launch us into orbit. Not usually. Not usually. That's so true. Yeah, nobody's ever like, I mean, I don't know anybody who says, yeah, Tom Brady just got lucky today. Like nobody says Tom Brady. Like the guy didn't, like that would just be, it would be horrible. But why do we say that about every other business? Like, oh, yeah, that CEO just got lucky. That, that real estate investor got.

lucky. But if you look at their life, like they're doing it. And so then to twist that one further is when if you're wondering, if you're listening right now, wondering why you haven't had success the past year or six months or two months or whatever, like ask yourself, are you doing the actual steps every day that should have given you the success? And I think the answer most of the time is probably not. There are two kinds of real estate investors, those who have reviewed their insurance and those who think that they have. Most don't realize their coverage wasn't built for how they actually invest. Vacancy periods, rehabs, short-term rentals or LLC. held properties. These gaps surface only when filing claims. That's why investors work with NREG.

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Things like occupancy, delinquency, and net promoter score, and they have the results to prove it. Go to mine.co slash show me to see how mine performs and get your first month free, which is much cheaper than learning the hard way. Now, I want to twist this a little bit and actually and fire this over to David real quick because David here is probably the most picture, perfect example of somebody who is a, was a complete workhorse. Like, David's whole story, we don't have to go on the whole thing, but you worked 100 hours a week for years as a cop, right? Why don't you to explain that?

And then where you are today, I mean, the fact you've been just hanging out here with me for the last month in Hawaii. Like, how did, talk about that. It fits in really good with what we're talking about. I'm like a case study in everything that are being sold. And to be frank, I was the most stubborn human being of all

where I heard people say this and I just didn't stop. As Michael, talking, what I realized was I was that person who would say, well, you work four days a week. I'm going to work seven and I'm going to be twice as successful as you. And it was formed because in the post-industrial era, W-2 environment, you are compensated for hours for butt in seat time, whatever you want to call that. This is important. This is important. So I learned I was, I was succeeding by having my butt in the seat. And so my brain would rewire itself to say, how can I rearrange my life so that I can be at work all the time, right? I bought a car that I could

sleep in so I wouldn't have to commute back and forth. I set up my life and my businesses to the point where I was not responsible for buying Christmas presents. I need someone else to do it because I had to be at work all the time. And when I got out of that world and into the entrepreneurial world, which is just a way of saying like a world where there's some creativity and freedom that will make you successful, I brought that old way of thinking into it, just like I brought a football body into a soccer match. It was the stupidest thing you could do. You just, you can't keep running with the football body. Well, my brain had been built a certain way. And I did not understand that your brain is much more like your body. It needs rest. It needs recovery. Short spurts of intense activity and then

a period of rest followed. Make it perform so much better. Imagine if you went to the gym and said, I'm going to get a seven hour workout in because you're only going to work out for half an hour. I'll be 14 times stronger than you when we're done. But that's how I was actually living life. And so now I'm in this, it felt like a leap of faith, but like what you guys are saying is what I'm trying to do. I came to Hawaii and said, I'm not going home until I like something breaks in my business and I'm needed or I think I'd be happier there than here. It's not going to be because I think my business needs me. And the opposite happened of what I was afraid of. We just put 51 houses in escrow. This time last year, we were crushing it at 28. We've almost doubled it all during. COVID and I've been working less. I've been doing less of the tasks. Every time something comes up

that needs butt in seat time for David, I say, okay, if I have to do it, I will, but I'm never going to have to do it again. Who do I have to teach? How am I going to leverage this? What do I have to make sure that this never actually makes its way through all the firewall and gets to my desk? Someone else should have caught it. And I think the reason I'm seeing more success is that this forces me to train everybody that's underneath me. I now have 10 Davids of people on my team. instead of a me. And I'm recognizing the less time my butt is in the seat, the more people there are that are doing this. And we're getting exponential returns. Like it's sort of embracing leadership as opposed to just doership. Doership. And I love that. I love that times 10.

That's such a great example. I wish I could have interviewed you for the book because it's a good example. You know, the other thing, too, that I think that illustrates, David, is, you know, tension is the enemy of performance. So I don't know if you guys golf a little bit, but the worst thing you can do, well, yeah, I don't golf well either, but, but it's true for any sport. If you're tense, you're not going to perform. You know, so like most of my, my golf instruction, my golf instructor has just said to me, okay, just relax your grip.

You're holding that golf club like you're trying to choke it. And I think that's true in life too. You know, when I've got the biggest deals, when I've made the biggest deals, when I've made the biggest advance in my business, had the big breakthroughs, it's been when I was in a state where I was relaxed, not tense, not stressed out of my mind. And usually when I was doing something other than work. And so one of the things we argue in the book, and again, it's called when it work, succeed at life.

But we talk about, you know, rest is the foundation. of productive, meaningful work. And, you know, sort of the cult of overrest or cult of overwork devalues rest. It's like it has, rest has no commercial value. It can't be monetized. So we want to try to minimize it and get by with as little sleep as we can. I, I once published a book back when I was in the book publishing business on it was basically how to survive on four hours of sleep a night. And it was kind of the same argument that David was making that, man, if I could work those four hours that my competitors are sleeping. Think how much, you know, the leg up I could get on them. Well, that's, that has all kinds of dangerous, debilitating

health impacts, social impacts, relational impact, and all the rest. So we argue for rest, you know, being really methodical about it. And boy, that was a thing that there was really clear in that Tom Brady article in the New York Post is that he is religious about getting to bed at 8.30 at night and waking up at 5.30 because he knows he needs that much sleep in order to perform at his best. So we talk about sleep. We talk about hobbies, you know, another way to be relaxed. You know, when you're doing something like for me, it's, you know, it's fishing, golfing, playing a musical instrument. You know, some of my biggest breakthrough business ideas have come, not when I was working on the business, but when I was doing something relaxing like that.

Yeah. Yeah, I would say a lot of my good ideas have been either driving around, like when my kids are in the car sleeping. There's driving, no music, jogging. If I'm just jogging, if I'm listening, even if I'm listening to music when I'm jogging, it'll just be like songs that I like. So my mind just wanders and it's just like, yeah, that's where I get all of it. It's like that resting, that resting time. And then sleep in general, I, like, I'm not good at sleeping because I stay up way too late, either working or just watching Netflix or whatever. And then I'm like, oh, but I got to get up early because, you know, miracle morning, you got to wake up early. So then I wake up early. So I'm getting like six hours a night,

sometimes five and a half and I'm, and I feel it in my body. And then once or twice a week, I just crash. And it's it for like nine hours. And it's a really unhealthy way to, so, function. You got any tips for just in changing that about myself? And those people are listening to might be nodding along right now. Like any tips on? Yeah, you know, I used to think that having an alarm to wake up by was the important thing. I don't think that anymore. I think having an alarm to go to bed on time is an important thing. But to just be rigorous about that. Because sleep is so tied to performance, to focus. You know, sometimes people wonder why they're, they feel like they're ADD. They may be clinically ADD. So that's, you know, that's the thing. But sometimes we're

just unfocused because we haven't had enough rest. You know, like when you're sitting there reading the same paragraph over and over again in a book, that's usually because you haven't had a good night's sleep. We have an inability to deal with conflict when we're tired. It impacts our heart health. This is what got my attention. When you sleep only on average anything less than seven hours sleep a night, you increase your risk of heart attack dramatically. I can't remember what the exact stat is, but heart health and rest are key. In fact, it's true for every disease, you know, one of the best ways to build your immune system. You know, we all know this is getting adequate rest. And if there were two other books that I could recommend to, you may have read them already.

but one is Rest by Alec Pang P-A-N-G. And he wrote another book that actually got us into the shorter work week, a book called Shorter. And in that book, he presents all the scientific evidence for why a shorter work week is actually more productive, why you'll accomplish bigger things if you do that. That's cool. Yeah, I haven't not read that. But I fully believe it.

And I fully believe it. And that does worry me. Like if I've heard like lack of sleep is the new smoking. Like it's worse for your body than like smoking. So I'd be like, oh, you, you know, you drink soda every all day or you smoke every day. Like I'm way better than that, right? But am I? Because like, if I'm not getting there at sleep, I need, then, you know, no, it's true. And I, like I even, I advocate and have practiced now for about 30 years. I take a 30 minute nap right after lunch every day. I've done it in every kind of environment. I've done it when I was working in a

corporate environment when I was the CEO and when I was in middle level management. You know, I figured out a way to do it. And that. That, like, completely reboots my system. That's another thing that's worth studying is the value of naps. Yeah, 100% agree. And I read this somewhere. I don't remember what book I read it in at one point, but I do this. I had never taken a nap from the time I was like four up until I think I was 32 maybe.

So like three years ago, maybe I started like trying to get. And what I did a couple things. One, they say drink a cup of coffee. You've heard this before. Drink the coffee right before you take a nap. Right? You take, yeah, drink a cup of coffee. Then you fall asleep.

And then 20 minutes later, if the caffeine hits you and it wakes you. you back up again. And that's worked really well for me. If I sleep more than about 25 minutes, though, I'm shot for the next four hours. But 25 is like my like, 15 to 25 is like ideal for me. Well, what the science says is that 26 minutes is the ideal length. Really? Yep. Yeah, I just had my doctor tell me that. That's funny. Yeah. If you go over that, you like, you just start feeling worse. And the longer you nap, the worse you feel. Totally. So don't turn your computer off, but hit control, delete, let it restart. Yeah, a quick restart. It's reboot.

Yeah, there you go. One thing that has actually improved my sleep dramatically, probably one of the, if I had to like pick an app that's changed my life, the most of all the apps in the app store, you know, on my phone that I've used. I have the app calm, that's C-A-L-M, right? It's a meditation app, but I actually don't use it for the meditation, really, because I just can't get myself into the habit. But the sleep stories on calm have come, like, I went from taking an average of an hour to fall asleep every night, which was very, it was very like typical hour, hour and a half. two hours of fall asleep. My brain just won't stop working. So I put on a stupid sleep story, like a train ride through the Switzerland Elps or something like that. I don't know. And like, within five minutes, almost every single night, I fall asleep. So the key though, is it's a

story. It's literally a story. They just like, they're like, you get on the train at this stop and there's your clouds out the window. And like they just tell you the story. And sometimes it's like reading things like childhood stories like Alice in Wonderland. But it's just, it's engaging enough to keep you interested, but not enough so that your body, sleep. And it changed my life. So I still struggle with actually turning it on and going to bed because I just want to stay up because I'm like, ah, I like staying up late. But for people who struggle with the mind, like just relaxing. And so then they have another one called Mashi for kids. And this works for my daughter as well. She'll take a half hour to fall asleep at night,

just wiggling and whatever. But I'll put on this Mashi app. It's like a story about these little Mashi characters, little stuffed animals, basically. And within a minute, she's out. It's just something about getting your brain focusing on a fairly dull story. that just changes lives. Yeah, it's cool. This could be a whole new market for books that are boring. Yeah, it could be. Yeah, we just get to like read them very, very dry, boring books and let people fall sick to them. Yeah, I try to doing it with like fiction. I can't do it. I'm like into this like into the book. Wonder what comes next. It's a terrible idea. But or like real estate, I start listening to like strategies or business stuff. I just can't do it. But a story about a train ride through the Alps and I'm out. My books are perfect for this.

Your books are going to be having trouble sleeping. By any of my books, they will put you right out and they will make you more productive the next day. It's actually why I wrote terrible books was because I wanted people to be more successful. There you go. I love it. It was a public service. Yeah. You're a good man. All right, man. Well, as we slowly move towards the back half, like, I'm wondering where, like, let's talk about some more tangible things people can do. I know you have the five things that leaders can do to implement the double win. I mean, we talked about one of them. But what else can you throw at us? Yeah. So if you want to implement. implement this with your team and all that, which I think is really important. One of the things to do is to make sure that you're modeling it, that you're leading by example. And I think this is true for anything that you want to change in your company because I don't just want the double win for me. I want the double win for my team. Right? Because I want them not to burn out. I want to retain them. I want them to show up as the best version of themselves where they're highly focused, highly productive, and actually get it done. And so I think that, you know,

that starts with us as leaders, because if we're saying one thing and modeling something different, guess what people are going to do, right? They're going to, they're going to follow our example. I used to have an executive back when I was at Thomas Nelson Publishers who was a total workaholic. I mean, he literally, and he was running a major division in our company, had hundreds of people working for him. And he would work till seven o'clock at night, eight o'clock at night. And I said to him, buddy, I said, this is contrary to the kind of culture that we're trying to build here. You know, and by this time, I was, you know, an alcoholic that had gotten sober. And I was on this, you know, big thing to try to get everybody to not work so much. And he said, well, I just, I just can't do it.

I said, well, here's, and he said, I don't have any kids at home. It doesn't matter. And I said, but what about for the people that are working for you that do have kids at home? There here trying to keep up with you instead of being home with their family and their kids need them. I can never get him to do it. But it's got to start with you. It's got to start with you. You've got to model the behavior that you expect. And I think to teach on this and to give explicit permission, and by the way, when we say double win, we're not talking about compromising your professional goals. We're not talking about somehow, you know, putting the break on your ambition or pulling back on what you want to achieve. If anything, my goals are bigger today than they've ever been.

And so I say to my people, when I teach this, and I think you've got to, if you want to have a company that's practicing this and actually benefiting from it, then I think you've got to give them a lot of reason why. And one of the reasons I keep telling them, I said, look, I want you to not burn out. I want you to be highly focused when you're here. And we expect you to be productive when you're here. So modeling it, teaching it, giving people a lot of why. And then I think, you know, also modeling it in terms of corporate culture like, don't be sending emails, you know, after hours. Now, I know the real estate business, you know, that could be dicey, right? Because, you know, depending on what kind of real estate business you're in, you know,

that may be evening work. But don't be sending emails after hours or text messages. Don't do it on the weekends. Again, real estate may be an exception. But there's got to be some parameters. There's got to be some boundaries that you respect as the owner or as the leader and that you also expect your people to respect. And if you do that, then the benefit is that everybody in the company is their most focused, most productive, best self. Yeah, that's good. Does that make sense? A hundred percent. And I will be honest, I'm a real estate broker. I run a real estate team and a lending team. So this is a thing where you have to work weekends when you're a real estate agent. You're there for your clients. They're free in the evenings. They're

free on the weekends. You have to be there for them. However, that is not an excuse to become a workaholic. We have created and are working on creating systems to where when somebody has a question, like this is something I'm working on right now. I haven't talked about it. I'm on a chat feature where anybody who's buying a house with us, when they get that moment of anxiety at 1030 at night saying, oh my God, what about this? Or what are my closing costs going to be? Do I have enough money that they can immediately get a hold of somebody who will respond to them, acknowledge what they're feeling and say, we will look into this and get back to you in the morning. And then they can have some peace and call them. Okay, I got it out of my head as being worked on. But that's not an

agent taking a 1030 at night phone call that turns into 45 minutes of listening to somebody go on and on about how scared they are. There are all kinds of things we can do, which I've found usually if these stuff pops up where you have to do something because you didn't put a system in place ahead of time to prevent that. The, oh my God, the toilet's leaking. What am I going to do? Landlord phone call is because you didn't explain to your tenants what to do when when the toilet would break. So I guess what I'm saying, Michael, is I found that it is often an excuse to say, I have to do it, I have to do it, it has to get done. That is justifying some other motive that we have. And I was wondering if you would share what you found in your experience is the best

advice for the person that maybe is a workaholic because they don't have a family life or because they have bad eating habits and they don't like working out. And this just becomes a distraction from everything in their life that they don't like so that they can get started breaking themselves out of that cycle and maybe recognizing that they're lying to themselves when they say things like it has to get done. Yeah, no doubt. And I think, you know, the conversation I've had with people is the trajectory conversation. You know, if you continue like you're doing, how does this story end? You know, we don't have to guess. We know how this story ends. You know, when people are workaholics, here's what's going to happen. You're going to probably go through

your marriage. You're going to probably, you know, have your kids go off the rails in some way. And the thing that you're trying to protect work is going to be dramatically impacted, you know, for asking anybody that's had a divorce or where the kids have gotten on drugs or the kids, you know, something else. They just won't talk to them. You know, those have vocational impact. And I think that, you know, if we don't, don't take care of those things, then the whole thing comes unraveled. So I think to have that trajectory conversation and say, if you continue on this present pace, where is your health going to be in 20 years? Yeah. You know, are you kidding yourself thinking that as soon as I get this next big deal,

you know, as soon as I get this, this next thing sold, then then I'm going to take time for myself and I'm going to really work out. Then usually work. I mean, that's how people, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I think I'll have a heart attack. No, that was that was, that was, you. years, years and years of doing little things that led to that heart attack or to that relational crisis. Yeah, it's actually kind of a counter or the flip side of the coin we talked about earlier, which was success shouldn't be a surprise. But heart attacks are rarely a surprise either. Failed marriages are rarely a surprise either. They're a product. So as much as like the things that we do give us the great things in life, the things that we do give us the bad

things in life too. Now, there is the occasional, like, hey, you had a brain aneurysm, right? Or, you know, an accident happens. But a lot of the times, like, yeah, like, it just is there. I mean, this is going to sound horrible. I probably shouldn't say this, but like, I just spent like a couple weeks from my parents. And I was like, I told my wife when they left, they just left back to the mainland. And I was like, I mean, I love, love, love my parents. But I worry every time they leave, it might be the last time I see one of them. Because the way they eat. And, and, and take care of themselves is, it will not be a surprise if either one has a heart attack. Will not surprise me at all. I hope they don't. I really hope they don't. I try everything I can

to get them to like, eat some vegetables and take a walk. But like, it's hard because that's like, that's the penalty or that's the consequence of a life that you lead. It won't be a surprise. So I guess that's the question for everyone right now is like, what in your life right now is not a surprise. It's not going to be a surprise if it happened. That should wake us up. And to cast it a more positive light, and you've read Living Forward, you know what we do there, but to be thinking about, you know, where would you like to be in 25 years? You know, if you could really impact the quality of your most important relationships or your health or your finances or your vocation, where do you want that to end up 25 years from now,

and go ahead and, you know, write a paragraph about what that looks like. You know, we do that in the book, Living Forward, talking about a life plan. And it's something that I've done now for 20 years, regularly review it so that I don't lose focus, you know, sort of in the fog of war, I don't lose sight of the destination. You know, I, I, my marriage like it is today, and again, it's not perfect, but it's not an accident. You know, it's not an accident that I have a great marriage or that I have a good relationship with, with my kids or my grandkids. You know, it's, I kind of see life as like a recipe and the cake that you've got.

is because you use certain ingredients and cooked it at a certain temperature, right? And if you want to change the cake, if you want a different cake than the cake you've got right now, because the cake you've got right now, which is your life, is a result of all the ingredients that have gone into it up until this point. But if you want to change it, you can. That's the good news. But you've got to change the recipe. You can't keep doing the same things you've been doing and expect a different result.

Or the worst thing is kind of the wishful thinking, the lottery kind of thinking, that, you know, once I win this big deal, once I do this big deal, you know, will be on an easy street. That just, that just doesn't happen. That's just fantistful, fantastical thinking. That's a really good picture to the cake thing. I'm going to totally use that analogy in the future with people because it's exactly it. Like there's a recipe you're building in your life right now and there's ingredients that you're added to this cake and it's going to create something. And so if it's not the something you want, then you better find another way. And that's what I said earlier, like you can ask a person who's already got the cake in their hands.

They already cooked the cake last week. You're like, hey, how did you make your cake? And they can tell you what ingredients to put in the cake. It's not a horribly complicated thing. Let me ask you one more question here about what about people who they're listening to us a lot. We talk a lot about family, right? Because I'm a family guy. I got a couple kids at home.

You got your kids and grandkids now. What about those who don't have the kids yet? They're young. They're young or they've been single so far. They don't have a significant other in their life. Why shouldn't they just work and just hard? work for 80, 90, 100 hours a week. Like, what's the other reason besides just spending more time with your family that this is important?

Well, one of the things that do we map out in the book is there's basically 10 domains of life, at least 10 domains of life. And so marriage and parenting are two of the 10, but that still lives eight. And so if you're going to focus on vocation, which is one, to the exclusion of the other seven, not including parenting or marriage, that's going to produce a very lopsided life. Yeah. And it's going to make, you still got your health that you need to be concerned about. You still got your emotional health, your intellectual development.

You still got your finances, your hobbies, friendships. Man, I'll tell you, one of the things that is key to longevity, and I've done a lot of study on this, you know, in the blue zones and all that kind of stuff, them done a lot of reading about that. A lot of people think it's just diet and exercise, diet and exercise, diet and exercise. No. The quality of your relationships with other people that you have social connections and deep friendships are as important to heart health, to combating autoimmune diseases and to longevity as your diet and your exercise. So you just can't hunker down. And don't mistake thinking just because you have relationships at work with other people that

Those are the same as friendships. They're not. Those are based on the luxury of proximity. You just happen to be in the same office or whatever, but you're not really doing life with them in the sense that you do with your friends. And you need friendships outside of work because if you suddenly lose your job or your business collapses, most people can be resilient as long as those other domains of their life are fleshed out and healthy. But if you've got all your eggs in one basket and it's work and you lose that, it's a crisis.

And I've seen this happen. My successor at Thomas Nelson Publishers, he was a guy that his work was everything. And when suddenly I became the CEO as his successor, he was lost as last year's Easter egg. He didn't know who he was. He literally said to our CFO, he said, if I'm not the CEO, Who am I? His identity was so inextricably linked to his work that without his work, he didn't know who he was. He was lost. And man, I don't want to get to that place in my life. I want to have a life that's bigger than my work. You made another point that I really like and want to highlight.

And it's that not just because someone is in close proximity to you does not mean you have a deep authentic relationship with them. Because someone's been your friend for 20 years does not mean you are actually deep friends with that person. Even if you're married, I think there's a lot, I'm not married, but I think there's a lot of married couples that are going through life because it's convenient, but they're not connecting very deeply. And it's easy to trick yourself into thinking, oh, I spend time with my family, but you don't know your kids very well. They know that you don't know that very well. Those are the kids that go off the rails that then takes a lot of time that you've got to go after them and try to bring it back. It's a good practice to know, like the reason we're investing

our money wisely and working on self-growth is just to have a better life. And you're not going to have a better life if the relationships that you do have are convenient and shallow rather than like a deeper, meaningful connection. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, the quality of your relationships equals the quality of your life. That's a great way to put it. And when you don't have that, I guess this is what I was getting at, you're more likely to throw yourself into work. Yeah. You don't consciously think of it, but you're like, well, what else am I going to do? This is what makes me feel better. Yeah. It's all you've got. And I mean, you know, I think we have to admit too, people medicate with work. Yeah. You know, they feel the discomfort of having to engage at home or having to work through this issue with, you know, your spouse or with your kids. And it's just easier to, you know, people run to the bottle. They run to drugs. Some people run to work. You know, they don't call it being a workaholic for nothing. It is addictive, highly addictive.

Yeah, that's a really good point. Well, speaking of kids and family, I'm going to go see mine. few minutes. So let's start to move this towards the end here. Okay. And I got jiu-jitsu in a little bit, too, which I have a really good analogy for jiu-s. I was thinking about this too. Before I jump into the famous four, I was just thinking about how, so David and I have been, we're starting our jujitsu process and we're like working on this wrestling stuff. And what we're learning from Jerry, who's our, it's kind of our private instructor is how much, like when you first jump into you, you're first get into it, you like expend so much energy and you're pushing and pulling and like all, like you do so much. And you work up a. And you work up a.

sweat in like three seconds, then you're dead for the rest of the day. But when you roll, as we call it rolling, when you wrestle with someone who's like really good and what we're learning is how little energy they use because it's all very controlled, controlled movements and a lot of holding, a lot of things like that. And it just made me think about how like, we talked earlier, like, you can just do a whole lot of different activities in life and burn yourself out really well and work 80 hours a week because you're just doing everything and not fighting, fight, fight, fighting. But like the masters at any kind of martial arts, they're controlled. They're not sweating even how.

Like Jerry doesn't even sweat when we roll. Like he's just like it's this he's doing the right moves at the right time because he's practiced it so many times and he's intentional about it. So anyway, there's just another. I like to throw. That's a great one. But yeah, I like that's a great one.

I mean, we saw that with Tom Brady. Yes. He didn't look like he was breaking a sweat. No. Yeah. Patrick. Patrick Mahomes looks like frantically trying everything that he could.

You know what the last couple minutes he was getting killed. What scares me about what Brandon just said is like he was showing a couple of guys yesterday. I completely have no idea what they're doing new guys after the Super Bowl a couple moves. And they were throwing everything they had at him, just exhausting themselves. And I remember watching thinking, you look like a bozo. What are you doing? You think you're going to impress him? Why are you doing that?

And now I'm realizing that I work 80 hours a week. I work 100 hours a week is telling, yes, the successful business people, the people that have life right, I'm a bozo. I look just like those people looked. And so that's funny. That's really good. That's great. All right. Well, before we get out of here, let's move over to the last segment of the show.

This is called our Famous Four. This is the Famous Four. It's the same four questions we ask every guest every time. And we've asked you this before, but maybe your answers have changed. So the first question, which we've tweaked a little bit, is there a habit or trait you are currently trying to develop in your life, Michael? Yes. I am trying to be more consistent in healthy, clean eating.

In fact, I just started a 14-day cleanse today. And it's basically a version of the Mediterranean diet. But my wife and I are doing it together. So yeah. That's cool. And we're we're eating good already. But yeah, we're trying to take it to the next level. All right.

All right. Cool. Next question. What is your favorite business book other than your own? I would have to say, I don't know this is a business book or a personal development book. Yeah, either. The seven habits of highly effective people. I just keep coming back to that again and again and again.

Yeah, that's a good, really good one. All right. Number three. All right. When you're not changing the world and helping improve people's lives, what are some of your hobbies? I love bass fishing. I love fly fishing. We bought a lake house in August and I've got access to both now, which is amazing.

That's cool. I also play the Native American flute. It's awesome. So that's a fun thing. That's so cool. And then golfing. I just watched the video this morning and I'm shamefully going to admit it was on TikTok, but it was this guy who was like teaches men how to be like it was one of like his whole thing is like how to make men more attractive.

And he said the number one thing, the number one thing you can do to be more attractive to women is to learn an instrument. That's what he said. And he said, like, wow. They've done, I guess, apparently studies that says that's one of like the number one thing. that you can do is learn instruments. So Michael, you're tracking. You know, I'm still trying to win the same girl I'm married to. There you go. You got to keep up in the game. So the flute is definitely doing it. All right. Last question for me. What do you think separates successful

entrepreneurs. If you had to kind of boil it down to one or two things, what separates successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail, or just never get started? I think the really successful ones have a real clear vision of what it is they're trying to create. And they're just dogged in pursuing it till they get there. Love it. Love it. All right. Well, this has been a great interview. I appreciate your insight into this. I think that there's a lot of people that are doing well and they think that they're, they're doing everything they can be. And this will open some eyes as towards the fact that we can all do better and have a more balanced life instead of just being successful one thing. So thank you, Michael, for your time today and sharing that. Thanks, David.

For those that loved this, where can they find out more about you? Yeah, well, you can find out more about the book at win and succeedbook.com, win and succeedbook.com forward slash bigger pockets. And if you buy the book from your favorite retailer and go there, you can get what we call the double win cheat sheet, which is an amazing visual that will keep all these concepts front and center. So when you're tempted to veer off, you know, you stay in the straight and narrow. So yeah.

And then my main website is just Michael Hyatt.com. And that leads to my podcast and everything else we do. Very cool, man. Well, everyone go check it out. Go get the book. And, yeah, super cool. Are you on Instagram as well? I am.

I am. At Michael Hyatt. Okay. Well, you're all over the place. All right. So I'm going to go. I already follow you there. But everyone else go follow Michael there.

And wherever else you can find him. And I guess that's all we got. So thank you, Michael. This has been amazing. Thanks, Brandon. Thanks, David. You're listening to Bigger Podcast. Rockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn

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