Modern Wisdom - #295 - Ben Bergeron - Creating A Life Of Excellence

Episode Date: March 15, 2021

Ben Bergeron is a CrossFit Coach and the Owner of CrossFit New England. As far as we know, we only get one shot at life, so we'd better make it count. Fulfilling our potential and making the most of our abilities is the name of the game, but how do you do this? Expect to learn why core values are so important to achieving your goals, how Ben focusses on maximising his minutes, how to embrace adversity in your life, why intentionality and focus are so crucial and much more... Sponsors: Get over 37% discount on all products from MyProtein at http://bit.ly/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on Reebok’s entire range including the amazing Nano X1 at https://geni.us/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out CompTrain - https://comptrain.co/ Follow Ben on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/benbergeron  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back. My guest today is Ben Bergeron. He's a CrossFit coach and the owner of CrossFit New England. He has also been the man behind some of the fittest athletes on the planet. As far as we know, we only get one shot at life, so we better make it count, fulfilling our potential and making the most of our abilities is the name of the game. But how do you do this? So today, expect to learn why core values are so important to achieving your goals,

how Ben focuses on maximizing his minutes, how to deal with adversity in your life, why intentionality and focus are so crucial, and much more. This is exactly the sort of episode that makes you want to go and train, or fight someone, or start a business. It's so inspirational in the right sense of the word. Ben's reminding us just how great our capacities are and how much of the outcomes in our life are within our control. I really hope that you take away as much from

this episode as I did. It's been a very, very long time coming and I'm very glad that I finally managed to get Ben on and introduce him to some of you. If you enjoyed this episode then press that subscribe button. It would make me very happy indeed and it makes sure that you do not miss any episodes when they are released. But now it's time for the wise and wonderful Ben Bergeron. Welcome to the show. I'm Chris. Glad to be here. I'm really happy to have you here, man. It's been a long time planning, very glad that we finally got to sit down. Well, that's because you were traveling the world. You need it hard to get you to settle down and from your adventures.

That's true. Dubai was fun briefly. Today, I want to dig into your principles for excellence. This is like your specialist subject, right? I don't think I'm a specialist in anything. I'm a generalist, I would say. Yeah. And I, an excellent, I don't think, and it's like an oxymoron, right?

Like you can't be a specialist in excellence because it's so elusive. It's like, that's why it's the idea is like to chase it. It's not to own it. Like you're not going to get there. So at least I'm not there. All right. So what does excellence mean to you?

What is it? Yeah. It's a good question. In real time, I'm going through my head right now. I was like, you should have a good answer for this. And I don't. It's like, I wrote a book called Chasing Excellence and you ask, what is excellence? Wow, that's, yeah.

Something I should have an answer to. But really, it's a catch-all term for greatness. It's a term for achieving what you want to achieve. It's life on your terms. It's world class. It's being incredibly proud of something. And I think that it's supposed to be. Like yeah, you can put all these like, what is, you know,

it goes from the spectrum of like world class to like Bill and Ted's excellent adventure, you know, it goes from the spectrum of like world class to like, Bill and Ted's excellent adventure, you know, slang word to whatever it means, whatever you want it to mean. To me, though, when I say the word, excellence, it means like the best of your ability. That's what it really means. It's like, and that's why it's about chasing that because you're never, you know, call it maximizing your potential if you want to, which is a complete unknown, no one knows how much potential they have or whether they actually capable of.

And you could also argue that people, every now and then, exceed their potential in some extended, you know, extraordinary circumstances. People actually perform better than they are capable of because they get whatever these magical powers are, the people can lift a car off a child, whatever it might be. There's these moments that people have when they can get to these incredibly deep flow states where they magnify their own abilities by twofold whatever it might be. So I'm not so interested in the definition of what excellence is. I'm more interested in what are the practices that we should put

into our everyday lives to get as close to whatever that term might be as possible. Because whether it's fulfillment, whether it's success on your terms or success on society's terms, whether it's winning, whether it's freedom, whether it's the disciplined pursuit of less, whether it's kind of like, it's up for you to decide what excellence is, and then the pursuit of that is fairly consistent across all those different domains, right? It's, I'm not writing anything that, anybody that's kind of dabbled in this world, I'm not doing anything unique.

I'm just putting it through the prism of a coach. That's it, like I'm taking the same things I've been talking about for years, whether you talk about it from the early Stoics, to the monks, to the Abraham Lincoln, to the Ryan holidays, to the James CLEARS, to the Stephen Coveys, to the... It's all the same principles put into action. It's just I'm pointing through my own like little prism and the things that I've found worked and I'm learning a lot more than you know continually and you know when I wrote the book I don't even know when I guess it was 2016 and that's five years ago. There's a lot of things in the book that I'm like I

I I'm not like Damn, I wish I didn't write that, but I don't agree with it anymore. There's some interesting things that I've just changed perspective on. What are some of those? I put in the book, one of the tenants, so basically the book that I wrote,

it's called Chasing Excellence, and it's these half dozen or so different characteristics or principles that people, at the time I was saying that these are the kind of the tenants. These are the things that people need to have in order to become quote unquote excellent. And things like, things have changed. One of the ones I said was positivity. And the idea behind that was people that are in a positive mindset, you know, I know you're preparing for it to give a Ted talk. So when you go on stage, if you're in a positive frame, mine, you're, you're, you're a lot more likely to knock it out of the park than you are. If you go out there and like, I'm going to fuck this up. This can be terrible. Like, oh my God, what if I summon my words? But if I forget my words, like, it's kind of obvious, right? Everyone knows that that's like success literature, one on one, visualization, one on one. But what's interesting is when you kind of dig into it, there's a

case to be made for negativity. So in terms of prisoners of war, people with a negative mindset live longer than the optimists. The pessimists live longer than the optimists. The optimists say, we'll be out, and this is the stockdale paradox. This is, there's a lot of examples of this, but basically the people that live the longest, the ones, it's not the people that are like, it's okay, we'll be out by Christmas, because Christmas comes and goes,

and they're still in prison. That's like, okay, we'll be out by Easter. Easter comes and goes, and they're still in prison. And almost any rolls around to next Christmas Christmas and they die of a broken heart. Well, it's also not the pessimist. That's kind of obvious. Like a pessimist is not the optimal state to be in either because the pessimist goes this sucks so bad like I can't believe this and they just end up eating

themselves alive of negativity and they're not going to thrive. You can't thrive in a negative mindset. But you could also create that same parallel to, let's say you have a, you're three months out from your TED talk. When you're three months out from your TED talk, I'd rather have you have a negative mindset. Because we have a negative mindset,

you're gonna think about all the different things that can go wrong. And you're gonna mitigate those things. But then when you walk on the floor, I want you to be in that flow state and that positive optimum mindset. So it's not really just like positive versus negative. It's not as binary as that. If you're a salesperson, again, I want you when you're preparing for that sales pitch to be a little bit negative. Like, what are all the things that they could say? What's every question, what's every hole they could punch in our sales presentation? Then we walk in the door and be like,

Joe, we got this because you're so prepared. The only way you're prepared is if you've been willing to brace for the hard stuff. Optimus have a tendency to go, the sun is always gonna shine. The grass is always green. There's unicorns growing in the backyard. There's rainbows everywhere.

Well, that just is not reality. Like, reality is there is struggle. There is suffering. There is hardship in life. So the way I would frame this now is, it's not about positive or negative. You know, maybe the Shakespeare thing, but there are no, there is nothing, no, since this thing is positive or negative, but thinking makes it so. So let's embrace harsh realities.

Let's prepare for the worst. Let's be ready for the easy roads if they come and celebrate them along the way. But to me, it's more about being an extreme realist. Like I would rather have people be a realist than an optimist or a pessimist. What I got confused of was like, when you walk on the floor, I'd rather be an optimist or a pessimist. What I got confused of was like, when you walk on the floor, I'd rather be an optimist.

And I got confused with a little bit about like the enjoying the journey so much. And like for people that are trying to truly, you know, another side of the thing I talked about was passion. Like, screw passion. Like passion is like screw passion, like passion is like when people, when you find passion, people are excited for you. Like Chris, I'm so happy that you found something that you enjoy so much. I'm so happy for you. Like passion, passion, passion, passion, passion. That's not

going to get you to where you want to go. What you want to go is obsession. Like world class, like it's reserved for people that are obsessed. And the athletes I work with, I'm lucky to work with, you know, a half dozen or so of the very fittest people on planet earth. And I see differences inside of those just four or five athletes of levels of passion versus obsession.

The passionate people come in and they work their ass off. The obsessed ones go home and do film review and they obsess over it and they obsess over their nutrition and they obsess over their recovery and they obsess over their sleep and they obsess over the right and, I mean, what I'm describing is Matt Fraser, like that's Matt. Like Matt left no stone

on turn the entire way along the whole thing like every he was obsessed. He edited his life down to the things that are going to move him closer to his goals. And if it didn't move him closer to his goals, it was gone. It was eliminated. And there was no second guessing it. It was a complete obsession. Now, if you were to go to Matt and go like, are you passionate about this? Matt would be like, it, it was a complete obsession. Now, if you were to go to Matt and go,

like, are you passionate about this, man, I'd be like, no, it kind of sucks. Like, he's not, he wasn't passionate about it, but he was certainly obsessed. So, there's things I've changed along the way, which I think is good. Like, I'm proud of that. I'm not like wishing that I was still had those thoughts

because, you know, one of the other things I would have put in the book is curiosity. Like curiosity to me is like, if I was to list like three tenants of character traits that the world class have, like you got to be curious, you got to like want to know. And I didn't have that vocabulary, I didn't have that word. One of my employees gave it to me. We were talking about the differences of like

world class coaches versus good coaches. And they're like, one of the things I've seen is this certain coaches have this level of curiosity but they're always trying to like, just make it better. Like it's this, you know, I tend to talk about like excellence on a spectrum. On one end, if you have excellence in the middle, you have competence, the ability to do things.

And then the far end, the opposite end, you would have complacency, which is like, eh, it doesn't really matter. Whereas excellence is like geeking out about every sign of little thing. It's the obsession. But the only way you get from competence to excellence is curiosity. If you're cool with being good, then you're cool with being good. And you'll stay there. Not right or wrong, I think you need to be competent

in most areas of your life, because you're not gonna be able to be excellence across the board. You don't need to be excellent at doing your taxes. You just need to be competent at doing your taxes. Holy crap, I just like literally the call I had before this was with my accountant. And like when you just said that,

I was like, dude, what's it like? Have you been watching me? Yeah. Like literally I hung up with my account and I am so bad with that crap. Like that's, yes. Yeah, I really like the curiosity idea. It's the number, it's the first personal value

that I've got in my list of five. Oh, I love it. Very cool. What are your other four? So it spells cases, curiosity. I want to learn about myself and the world around me. Adventure, I want to meet new people and have experiences, selfless development, I want to improve myself

and then teach other people what I've learned. E, excellence, I want to make the most of my minutes, I want to fulfill my potential and S, self-care, in order to be everything I want to be for everyone else, I have to look after myself first, cases. Good for you, man, that's great, I love it. Yeah, I think curiosity is a very scalable way to constantly be pushing towards more, because curiosity is all of the good stuff around relentlessness without any of the bad stuff. Like the grinding side, the Gary V. Hustle and Grind side of relentlessness is a bit that people

kind of realize is going to be the grind. But the curiosity side is just constantly fulfilling an inquisitive nature. I want to know more. I want to know more. Not I have to know more. Yeah, before people even start thinking about excellence, is there something they need to do beforehand, before they start learning your tools and tactics and strategies and what are the tenets? Do they need to do something before? Well, I love what you just laid out there in terms of this. It's beyond the grind, right?

It's this level of curiosity. I've just better for betterment's sake, right? It's like just the evolution of our being. So I talk about this in terms of like the hierarchy of mindset. So I'll get to the question you just asked. I'm purposely, I'm, I'm gonna revert back to the earlier thing you said

because I think it's really interesting. Because I think it ties this conversation together. And to me, we need to give a language to mindset. We need to be able to create the prism and know where we are in the spectrum. Because what everyone does is they go resilience, grit, fortitude, mental toughness, tenacity, like passion perseverance. Okay like what do we do with those things? Like what do we do with that? And the more you kind of get exposed to those things, it shows the gap of where you actually are. So what I would like to know is, for this moment that I'm experiencing right now, how am I doing? And I think about that in terms of four different layers,

or five different layers levels. Level one, the lowest level is the victim mindset. The victim mindset, you have no control of the situation, and you are truly just at the whim in the mercy of the world. And you give up total control and responsibilities. There's zero ownership. That's the worst level. And probably people that are listening

to your podcasts in mind, they're not there. But maybe every now and then something like that pops up and with the boss says you're gonna work on the weekend. And maybe they slip into it for a minute, right? It's like, oh, what was me? That's everything. Most of people though would be a little bit above that level, um, which to me is the pessimist.

And the pessimist goes, it's not like the whoa is me as much as is just like, ah, this sucks. All right. I'll work this weekend. But it's a negative. It's a negativity that they're bringing to it. And what we know is people won't perform well if they have a negative mindset, then an optimist mindset, which is the next level, which is obstacles, not opportunities. I'm sorry, opportunities, not obstacles, right? You got to work this weekend. Okay, got it. I got to work this weekend.

That's an opportunity for me to do this, this, and this. It's not. So, the lowest level is the victim. The next level above that is the pessimist. The level above that is the optimist. The level above that is the optimist. And that's where most people start. Stop. They're like, we got to surround ourselves with positive people. We got to be glasses half full. We got to enjoy the journey and all that stuff. And that's, that's where I wrote my book. That's what's

like, that's the top. And what I realized is I've already alluded to it as a little bit. I would rather have the extreme realist, you know, Ray Dallet's words, like which is people that embrace harsh realities, except life for what it is and realize that there is going to be struggle, there is going to be strife. And we can navigate it. That's okay. We don't need to pretend like this doesn't exist. Like there's a pandemic.

Okay. No big deal. Pandemics happen every hundred years. And this one is nowhere near as bad as the last one. Totally cool. Now we can still thrive in this moment today. Like, babies crying in the middle of the night. Victim goes, like, oh my God, why is my baby crying?

The pessimist goes, oh, this sucks, I'm not gonna sleep tonight. The optimist goes, it's okay, maybe my baby will stop crying in a minute and the baby doesn't stop crying obviously because the realist realizes Babies cry like that's what happens But what you alluded to which I love so much is the language that I've even started using is there's a level above the extreme Realist which is what I call the curious competitor

Which they're actually seeking out adversity. They're seeking out challenges. They're seeking out hardship. They're seeking out the hard conversations because they know they're seeking out the discipline because they know it's only through those actions that they forge their character. That is the actual where you get to put all of the practice, all of the meditation or journaling or listening to podcasts or self-reflection or whatever it is, that's where you actually get to put it into practice. And people in our space like the CrossFit World know this. That's why we choose this sport. We recognize that the greatest adaptation is between your years. It's not what the hour and the gym. It's about the hour and the gym affects the other 23 hours outside the gym.

We're becoming better, stronger, more formal and human beings because of the hardship that we're going through. We're not looking for the shortcut. In fact, we want the opposite. We want Murph in a weight vest. We want the hardest possible thing because we know what's at the other side of that, a better version of myself. So why would we shy away from the baby crying in the middle of the night?

That's an opportunity for us to see if we can be more patient. Can I be present during this moment? Can I still bring love and affection to my child in this moment? And if I can't, what you alluded to, it's not a winner or a loss. It's not about the leaderboard. Sometimes we're not going to do great at this, but it's the awareness of that journey and that constantly walking through this life with that level of awareness and that prism. That's what gets us closer to quote unquote chasing

excellence. I tweeted something the other week that said, people are rarely fearful of the future when they're genuinely curious about what it holds. And this is something that I keep on falling back to. It's taken a lot of time to get it from system two to system one, but it is becoming more automated over time. And I genuinely think when something occurs that's uncomfortable, a thought, or the texture of my mind gets me to a place where I don't want to be. It's almost automatic now for me to think, how interesting. Like, why? Yeah, love that. Why is that there? What triggered that? So earlier on today, we had like a message that pissed me off to do with work. And I thought, I noticed that I could

feel it inside of me. I was getting hot. My neck got hot. I remember observing it and going, I noticed that I can feel it inside of me. I was getting hot. My neck got hot. I remember observing it and going, that's so interesting. I wonder why that's there. There's a story. I think it's in chasing excellence of Catrin. Maybe she was going into training and hadn't slept very well the night before, or maybe hadn't eaten very well the night before. I think you said that her mindset wasn't this training sessions are right off its completely pointless. It was this is a great opportunity for me to train at suboptimal preparation. How well can I get through this session with that? Isn't it interesting that I have this opportunity? Maybe, and a couple of years later it happens, maybe we're going to be flown to the other side of the country to go and do an event that we weren't prepared for at the beginning of the CrossFit Games, with no

sleep, without our food, with no coaches, with no this and the other. And that curiosity is so much more scalable, it can go across every situation. The hacks and the tips and the tricks are great, but their domain is narrow. The curiosity scales. What you're highlighting, which is so powerful, is that awareness, right? That awareness that when that trigger happens, and you get that bad email, or, Catherine doesn't feel like she's prepared for the workout, or your spouse says, hey, we need to talk or you get that bad comment on social media or whatever, or someone cut you off in traffic.

Whatever that thing is, that gives you that little feeling, right? The power is recognizing that that's a trigger and it's not a tunnel. A trigger is something that sets you off but you don't need to follow it through. A tunnel is you get in a tunnel and you follow it through to the end, right? It's data, it's not a decision.

Like it's just this feeling. It's like, there's that data point. Huh. And as you said, isn't it interesting that that made me feel that way? Well, why did it do that? Well, there's evolutionary biology can kind of let us know what's going on. So what happens is,

when we were like cave men and women kicking around the camp fire, it was all about survival. It was like 100% about survival. Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It was about shelter, air, food, not getting put on the exposed to the elements. So the biggest most powerful thing we had there was our tribe. Like the tribe was the safety.

So what we were so became so innately aware of through our sub conscious brain, not conscious, it was not like, hey, this person, it's why trust, it's why love are these, you can't define them. Tell me why you love your wife, you can't, but you can say it's this feeling I have. Those things are real. It's part of the lizard brain, the limbic part of the emotional part of the brain. It's really good at picking up these signals. What happens is, as cavemen and women, when a twig would go snap in the woods,

you would start a flinch. It would be thought out. It would just happen to be a reaction immediately to protect yourself because it might be a saber-two tiger. That same reaction happens when maybe you hear someone gossiping about you. Because if they don't like you, if they see you as a threat, or they don't think that you're contributing to the group, or you might be an outcast, they push you out of the group, and you're going to die. So the thing is, those feelings don't serve us anymore. We're not going to be pushed out of our three bedroom apartments with the two car garages into the wild because somebody said something bad about it on social media.

Yet from an evolutionary biology perspective, nothing's changed. You can take the person out of the paleolithic era, but that the brain parts comes with it. And we are still hardwired to respond, to react, to those situations like their real life threatening events. So you get an email from somebody that says something bad about your business or whatever it might be, and your brain goes like life threatening, life threatening. When it's not, it's just an opportunity to make your business better. It's a data point.

It's a point of feedback. And if you didn't react to it emotionally, instead you took a calculated response, you were responsible, you took ownership, response able, able to respond. You did it calculated, you did it through a thought out process. Something that you're going to be proud of later on, that's going to be productive. Those are all characteristics of responding as opposed to reacting, which is emotional, overreacting, instinctual. Something that you're going to regret later on, unproductive, it's the way amateurs act.

One is going to serve us and one is not. It's so much more powerful for us to take this curious approach of, whoa, where that feeling come from. Isn't that interesting? And then we can respond instead of react. It's the single best advert or the single best justification that I can give anybody that's still not convinced about meditation that the trait change of meditation comes very very slowly to get yourself to the point at which you've made a system wide OS update to the texture of your mind it takes a lot of time I'm over a thousand days deep on insight time and now. Whoa, good for you, man. Yeah, I mean, it's the 10 and 15 minutes sessions, but still, it doesn't matter like that's consistency, frequency. Yeah. And the main thing that I've got is that what Corialin refers to as the mindfulness gap,

which is the brief beat between stimulus and response, just the moment where you notice the texture before you actually decide to react. And even if I meditate for the rest of my life and I don't get any closer to Navana, then that, if enlightenment for me is simply not being at the mercy of the wind as soon as it hits me. That, for me, I'll consider that I went. And I think that it's something that I really wish. Not only that I'd had earlier in my life, but I wish it was like a gift that I could give to other people as well. Yeah, that's really cool.

I'm so... I've been very introspective for a long time and kind of like trying to figure out my values and principles and who I want to be and what I want to stand for and how I want to spend my time and how I want to react to certain situations and where I want to put my energies and all that stuff. But for whatever strange reason, I pushed off meditation for a long time and I think it's because it was always sold to me as it's a great way to become calm and lower stress. And I'm a fairly calm, low stress person. So I was like, I don't

see if that's, if that's the carrot at the end of the race, like I don't think it's a race worth racing. And I got, I got kind of tricked into meditation when I started doing Wim Hof. So I started doing breathing practicing, not realizing I was going to be falling into a meditative state. So I'm on day about 55 of Wim Hof consistently. I've missed I think two days along the way. And it's a really powerful breathing technique. And then afterwards, you just, you, you sit in this incredibly deep, deep meditative state. And I had these amazingly powerful

awakenings really, really early on. And of course, like there's the roller coaster of like some of them suck. And you wish that you could go back to the good ones and it's not linear and it's such as the journey of all of our lives and every form of fashion why would meditation be any different. But it's again like I only wish that I had found this earlier. And to the point where I'm doing research on the super high achievers, 10 years ago and everybody's journaling and everybody's meditating. And I'm like, eh, not for me. Like how arrogant, how ass-n-eyed.

Like, oh, this is the best in the world across the world. Everybody's doing these two practices. But not for me. I'm like, eh, eh, I got it. How funny, man. And then, yeah, I mean, I'm only, you know, and here I am again, kind of like espousing how amazing it is, and I'm only a few months into this thing, but I realize how ignorant and arrogant I was in that field because I agree with you.

It's incredibly enlightening practice. The moment that you realize that you can step into your own programming is the day that your life changes as far as I'm concerned. The fact that you know that you don't have to be at the mercy of the next thought that comes careering into view. It's like watching traffic on a road, you don't control whether the traffic comes or goes. But yeah, so getting back to the excellence discussion, is commitment the foundation? That's the first chapter from Chasing Excellence.

Is that still kind of the first tenant that people need to take on board? No, so I would, so it made this why, because what you just said there is, when you feel like you can control the operating system in your inside of you, it's the first step of the rest of your life and you send a take control. I sort of found that a different way than meditation.

So that's like I found this through another portal and that's probably why I was like, oh, I don't need it. So to me, it starts with, in terms of like the pursuit of excellence, it starts with not necessarily commitment because what the hell you committing yourself to? How can you commit to something where you haven't figured out what that should be?

So to me, it's knowing thyself and what better way to try to figure that out than meditation and journaling. And for that, you need solitude, you need the self-reflection, you need a bunch of things. And that is a practice I did. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out, you know, what is it that is going to make me fulfilled? And that's the word I use all the time. So if I was to write the book again, it would be called Chasing for Filament, because that's

like, that to me is the most important thing. It's not about excellence, excellence is subjective and are you just trying to impress other people? Are you looking for the applause in the accolades? Are you looking for the awards and the trophies? That's to me sucks. Because what you might end up doing, which a lot of people do is they get to the top of the ladder only to realize the ladder was leaning up against the wrong wall. Like that's just, that's my biggest nightmare in the world is to be chasing excellence to something which ultimately does not matter. Like, oh my god, I worked my ass off. Like, worked so damn hard for what?

Like, so my first step is, I think the most important thing is what you've done, your cases, right? Which is established to you. What is it that you want to, what are the values that you want to use to guide your life? What do you believe in? Who are you as a person and what do you want to get to the end of the race with? So otherwise, what you do is you let other people decide that for you. Either the education or your parents or the normal traditional roots is going to be

laid out for you and you're just going to be the lemming following along and maybe you're a really good fast lemming or you're really smart lemming or you're really good looking lemming but essentially you're not making the decision lemming or you're really smart lemming or you're really good looking lemming, but essentially you're not making decisions where you want to be. And you actually have, you control the directives of your life. And when, to me, it's like, when you understand that's like, I talk about in terms of like the circle of control, you know, like what are the things that you ultimately control

in your life? And you have to put all of your effort into those things in which you can influence, ignore everything else. What I think people don't realize is how much they actually can influence. People are like, well, like, okay, so I can't, I don't like my boss, okay, I can't control my boss, so I'm not gonna worry about that.

I don't like the weather, can't control the weather, so I'm not gonna worry about that. I would say like, what are you talking about? Like, you can control your bosses. If you're not like your boss, like quit your job and get a different job. You are not a victim. Like, if you don't like the weather, there are plenty places in the world that have better weather than where you are living right now.

Now, if you live in Maui and you don't like the weather, then you're just a pessimist and I can't help you. But like if you don't, if it's that much, if it means that much to you, take control. Feel like well, I can't move because my family's here and I can't help my family. Okay, if that's actually true, cool. Like family is a real value to you

that understand why you're here and stop complaining about something that now you can't control because you're going to be here and to me it's that understanding of What is it that really means a lot to you? What is important to you? What is your identity? Like who are you? For me, I love your cases to me. It's a 4Ls I found that and I've fumbled through this a bunch of different ways. I've been tracking this on a daily basis. I have about 25 things I track on a daily basis.

And it's, for me, it's, it's, live, love, lead, and learn. So. You've got rid of legacy. Yeah, I got rid of legacy. Yeah, I got rid of legacy. Yeah, good call. Wow, I'm impressed. Legacy's outside of my control.

And what a legacy to me is like, do I want people to, I was using legacy. I didn't want people to wreck statues of me. I didn't want people to write books about me when I was gone. And I realized that I'm gonna be one generation star dust. Like my kids were a memory, my grandkids might have vague recollections with me, and after that it's done. Like, and anything after that, it's like,

it to me is all ego. Like you are just trying to drive the ego. And it's the last thing I want is I'm trying to melt my ego as much as I possibly can. So, and legacy never was supposed to be about that for me. Legacy for me was like, I want my kid, I want to be the hero of my kids' lives. So, I just wrap that into love. Um, I, to me, it's the love aspect of it. Um, so once you kind of figure out what those things are, and it's nice to have alliterations or acronyms for sure,

because I think that those carry weight because you gotta be able to know them. If you're like, people like, what are your values? What's important to you? And you go, hold on, let me follow you. You always forget the full of the one or something. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's probably not that powerful to you. So, so to me, it starts with that. It starts with like, and I came back to this and I eliminated legacy through meditation, realizing like, you know, what makes me feel alive? What makes me feel alive, like really alive? And for me, it's like, living life for you, that's adventure. That's me. It's like, have experiences.

Say yes, get outside, go do things. Like, that's living life for me. So we're very similar than that fashion. Learn is curiosity for me. So it's the same thing to me. It's like I feel so alive when I'm becoming honing skills and figuring stuff out. And the curiosity thing is just like that's up. Like curiosity means like the fastest way into a flow state like I just love like oh my god like yes

Love is basically it's about me. It's it's my family. I love like family means so much to me. I'm a family first guy if it's Comes down to this or that and That is family. It doesn't matter what this is. Like it's gonna go away. And then the last one's lead, which I found is like I like being a coach.

Like that, there's a reason I became a coach is I like, I feel really good. I feel really fulfilled when I'm helping other people. And I've tried to do this in other ways, like giving it to charity or teaching or it's that nothing fulfills me quite as much as the leading thing. It works for me in business too. So when I'm like, you know, helping develop our staff for whatever it might be,, I love that aspect of things. I like the responsibility of it.

I like having, trying my best to help other people. So, to me, that's where you start. And then from there, we can get into the commitment thing. And there it becomes like the daily actions and then it gets into the next stuff. Good, let's talk about commitment. How important is it? If we don't commit to it, what we're doing

is we're just kidding ourselves. And it's easy to kid ourselves. Because us sitting here talking about this right now, we feel good. If you talk about your goals, your body releases dopamine. That is one of the really scary things about goals. If you talk about running a marathon this year, you're going to feel really good. And you talk about the running program you're going to do, you're going to start feeling really good. You start talking about like, I'm going to actually do this in under four hours. You're going to start to feeling really good. You start talking about like, I'm gonna actually do this in under four hours. You're gonna start to feel really good.

You haven't done anything yet. Like you've done nothing. All you're doing is kidding yourself. So I like it the few, like it's, you know, I can't hear what you're saying because your actions speak so loudly. Like it is only about what you commit yourself to. So I can pretend to espouse like leadership.

I can pretend to espouse like family. I can spend to espouse like living my life. But if I'm not actually doing the daily tasks that inch me closer to those, I'm just to have some sort of like salesman. I'm just kind of like throwing it out there. So, I know that this is, I don't even know if this is, I know you can see this, but other people can't. I started tracking my commitment to see how committed I am.

So, I write down my values. And then for down my values. And then, wow, for under my values, for every day, I have four or five things for each value, and I check them off if I do them each day. And I've done this for since 2015. So they iterate, they change, they morph, but you know, So they iterate, they change, they morph, but you know, but it lets me know in what, when I don't do it, guess what happened? So it's not rocket science either. It's like, it's really simple.

So like, to give some context to it. So love, to me it's about love. So love is, be home by six o'clock every night. Have family dinner. Contact my wife in the middle of the day. So while I'm at work, contact her before I get home, play with, I call them the littles. I have two little kids.

So play with the littles, call my mom and dad. So there's the five things I have for love. And I'm tracking those. And what I found was those things come in and there's other things that check their place. But what I found is when those, if I haven't done those things consistently enough, something feels weird in me.

Like, but if I'm doing those things, that kind of category, I'm kind of good. Like, I'm kind of good with that family love thing. I'm really good with that. So for leadership, it's like, have a hard conversation. Like I actually now seek out a hard conversation every day. Like, that's what leaders do. They have hard conversations with people. The next one is like connect, like,

emotionally, empathetically, whatever is with an employee. So with somebody on my team, another one is connect with a member. So connect with somebody that works out at the gym. Another one is thought leadership, which is code word for me, if it's like I give a talk after my classes. And when I don't give a talk, it doesn't feel like I've given everything I have to it. But the talks are hard, I have to prepare for them.

And the last one is, which I found is leaders need to be prepared. So did I prepare for a meeting today that I'm going to have tomorrow? Because otherwise, what last thing you want to do is a leader is walk into the area where you're supposed to be the leader and be unprepared. So that to me is like the commitment thing. It's like, are you actually doing it? So people have core values, organizations have them, and what they fail to do is operationalize them. Okay, you got these cool things

that you said are important to you. Like, we are about integrity, we are about faith, we are about customer service, we are about whatever it is, and they just leave them there up on the wall, and they forget to operationalize them, and it's only when you operationalize them that they mean anything That's the commitment aspect that's when it comes to fruition. That's when you're actually taking steps forward What does maximizing minutes mean?

So in stoic philosophy, I'm gonna butcher it, but it's a morafati, I believe it is, which is that love thy fate? Love thy fate. Yeah, no, it's the other one. It's the one, so there's two sides, it's the, butchering it. It's the idea that we're all going to die. So, is that not memento? Mori all going to die like again, it breaks harsh realities. You only have so much.

So this is kind of cool. When you think about like, okay, I'm going to live till I'm going to live to 90. Cool. I feel like, all right, cool. And I'm in my early 30s. It doesn't put that much urgency into anything. When you change it to how many summers you have left. So you have 57 summers left. I'll say you're like, whoa, like summers go by pretty quick. Like, yeah, you're only have 57 more summers left. And that's if you're in your 20s or 30s. So I'm now 44 years old.

So now I get 40s something more summers left. I gotta make sure that each of those things matter. Now that's a summer. Now all you have to do then from there is go like, okay, we gotta make these weeks count., we've got to make these weeks count. Then okay, we've got to make these days count. Then okay, we've got to make these hours and minutes and seconds count. And when I start to think about this this way, there's a cost to it.

Like, I can't sit through a movie anymore. I don't know the last movie I've watched. People are like, you've got gotta watch this show on Netflix. You gotta watch Yellowstone. You gotta watch Breaking Bad. You gotta watch Mad Men. You gotta watch Game of Thrones. You gotta watch, and I'm like, I've tried.

Honestly, I've tried, and it's, I can't do it. It's, to me, I'm wasting my minutes. It's not moving me closer to my end goals. Now, what I could do, and if I could create the translation between how this would help me maximize those values, then I can do it. I can sit through it. I seek out documentaries. I love documentaries, because I'm learning in a documentary.

That's one of my values. I love, love, love them. I will watch four documentaries back to back to back to back because whether it's about, you know, Jay Z, whether it's about a chef, whether it's about Taylor Swift, whether it's about soccer team in England, whether it doesn't matter to me, whether it's about guys soccer team in England, whether it doesn't matter to me, whether it's about guys building shelters in the jungle, any sort of like, because to me, I'm learning, and it's like, that to me is maximizing my minutes.

Now, I have a little bit more... My wife is a lot, even more tipped over the edge than I am on this like my wife can't do anything that's not productive. She's but she meditates she reads. She journal she does all these types of spiritual practices. But she can never just, if she's sitting down, the sitting down is for a purpose and I'm meditating. And what she's like, she's so, to her, like every day matters so much.

And we gotta get as much value out of every day as we possibly can. That's where it stems from, but then when it comes in terms of like me training my world class athletes, everyone is in the gym for six hours a day. At you and all of your competitors in the gym for six hours a day,

if you go to the gym more, you're just gonna overtrain. That's not beneficial. If you go to the gym less, you're gonna under train. So, okay, you have that set amount of time. What are you doing with that time? And it's not a matter of like, are you rowing? Are you doing rope climbs? Are you clean and jerking?

It's what's the intention? And what's the level of focus you're bringing to those minutes? He or she who brings the most intention to their training and practice will win. That's how it goes. Like all else being equal, meaning that everyone has the same athletic background, everyone has the same genetics, everyone has the same equipment, same availability of opportunities. He or she, so everyone puts on the same training program

in a vacuum laboratory study. It's, everyone knows that certain people are not going to, people are going to do better than other people, even if they're twins and they have the same identical makeup, because some people are going to bring more intention to their practice. To me, that's what maximizing minutes are. Don't let the minutes slip away. They are the, people like to say that time is the most valuable resource because it's the only non-renewable resource. I like that. That's where that's maximized minutes idea comes from.

But time is not the most valuable thing. Your focus is the most valuable thing. What are you focusing on during that time? Because most of us that are 30, 40 years old have driven cars for 10,000 hours. Yet none of us are professional race car drivers because we're not intentional when we drive. Yet there's 16, 17, 18 year olds that are knocking on the door being pros

that have driven half the time we have, but they're doing it with so much intention and focus. So it's not the 10,000 hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell made really popular. It's the deep, deliberate practice that Eric Anderson originally espoused in his 10,000 hours study. That's the thing that matters. That's maximizing your minutes.

If everyone gets 10,000 hours, why do some people become better than others? Because some people maximizing minutes others don't. I'm going to guess that you're familiar with Cal Newport's Deep Work, and he's got a formula in that for work done, and he says work done equals time times intensity, and I guess that you could replace intensity for intentionality or intention here.

The interesting thing is that time passes at the same speed for all of us. You can't add more hours into the day, and time actually to compete on that, there's a minimum buy-in, as you said. You've got to pay the price, you've got to do six hours. But six hours is always going to be six hours and it's six hours for everybody else. The variable with which you can change is the level of intensity.

Far more easily, you're going to be able to change the intensity, the intentionality, the level of commitment and focus that you bring to the gym, or any of the tasks that you do. Far more easily than you're going to be able to bend the laws of space time. So that's the thing, that's the variable to play around with. There's another concept from the EMYTH revisited where they say that idea is the constant execution

is the multiplier. A lot of the time people come in and they think, I've got this awesome idea, but I'm going to have to get you to sign a non-disclosure agreement before we talk about it. And you like, dude, Joe Rogan isn't necessarily the best podcaster on the planet because he had the idea for the best podcast. He's the best podcaster on the planet because he has executed on that over and over and over again for 1,500 times. And what you said in the commitment side, basically was a bias for action. It's you need to execute more than you plan. You cannot plan more than you execute. It's this like masturbation by procrastination type thing that you just continue to make yourself feel good with this, but it needs to be action focused.

And again, with this, a good heuristic that I think everybody can do is, as soon as you have the beginning of an idea, what is the smallest next step that I can do that brings me toward that happening? Even if it's just opening the word document, finding the person's email address, even before you know what you're gonna email them, because it's like, right, I'm doing a thing,

learn to bias for action, not bias for planning, because as you say, planning, it doesn't manifest in the real world. It's not moving you anywhere forward. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we can sit here all the time and talk, you know, wax nostalgia about all the things that we find important to us, but you don't take action towards those things, like what's it for? So you, what you've done in both of these sections, in maximizing minutes and in your commitment, your commitment is I want to ensure that my daily actions contribute to my long-term goals. I want to ensure that my minutes contribute to a life where lived.

You've taken broad goals, a direction that I want to go in, you've broken those down into sub-goles go in you've broken those down into sub goals And you've broken those down into daily actions that are going to contribute and move you in that direction that I think to some people might feel overbearing Like I haven't got any time to chill out or what about I Ben says he doesn't he feels like every minute's got to be productive like that doesn't sound very fun Ben says he doesn't, he feels like every minute's got to be productive. Like that doesn't sound very fun.

How do you avoid burnout when you're moving toward this maximizing minutes and this level of commitment? Yeah. What I'm, what I'm, what I'm doing is I'm being intentional with the things that actually make me feel most alive, that give me the most feeling of joy and elation. It doesn't mean that it's joy and elation in the moment. Like if we only chase pleasure,

we're gonna end up with a world of regret at the end. Like the most pleasurable things in the world are like ice cream, partying, Netflix, sex, like whatever it is. Like that's pleasure. If we just seek that, we're gonna be, you know, heed in a stick slops. If we just seek that, we're going to be heat-inistic slops. What we should be seeking out is the things that move us towards the end date that

we're looking for, which is for me as fulfillment. It's a little bit of this exercise of hindsight in the present moment, right? It's like on my deathbed, when I look back in my life, what are the things that I can be really glad that I did? What are the ways I'm going to be glad that I spent my time? What are the things that I'm hoping are the ways that I'm living out my life? And I don't think that I'm going to go like, man, I was so glad I watched, you know, those four hours of Instagram today. So it's one of the things I've done in terms of like trying to like, I, I track

my Instagram, like how much time I was spending on it. And it was, I was horrified to find when I first started doing this, that it's super easy to do on an iPhone. You go settings, battery, change it to hours and look down and see what you're just, and I was spending like four to six hours in a 10-day span on Instagram. I was like, oh my God. And then I had my athletes pull up there and it was like, double that.

I was like, whoa, this is terrible. So I did what I do with my life. I started adding it down. I'm down to, I follow 44 people, 44 different things. And most of it is just purely, I think that Instagram is this double edged thing, which is that it's also the greatest education tool it's ever been created. Like, it's a may, you get more content easily through that platform than any other platform ever,

which I think is so cool, but it was also, there's a lot of dangers to it. So, I'm now down to about 44 minutes in a 10-day period. So So four minutes and four minutes a day. So that's just like, it's not pleasure. It's not the thing that I wanna be doing. So I'm not saying like you have to live your life as a robot at all, what I'm doing is I'm not wasting time mindlessly on the things that I think are making me feel good, which is actually a fallacy

because it's just a fake dopamine response. You don't want to get tricked by feelings. Feelings are lying to us. They're lying to us. They're going to make us because it's survival mechanism. We are calorie preservation machines. We want you to go and do a 90 minute hunt and then we wouldn't go and leave the camp for the rest of the day We just lounge out preserving calories. We go forage for berries for 30 minutes and we chill out forever

Like that doesn't serve us anymore and this idea of like the Netflix binging of watching nine episodes in a row of Gossip girl. I think I'm getting at the end of that and be like Okay, where do that help me live my life? Where do they help me love more and create better, stronger relationship to feel me the most in my life? Where do they help me lead other people, help give back? Where do they help me learn the curiosity and grow myself as a human being? And maybe gossip girl will give me some good tips.

Yeah, maybe. There's a concept that I was thinking about for a long time. So just like, sorry, if I do like doing other things, like I go like in the summer, I love going on a boat with my family and going to a beach and hanging out like that I do, I love that, love, love that. I do that. I go skiing with my family and do things like that. I do watch documentaries.

I do like, so I'm not just like 1% robot machine go, go, go. But to me, it's about the balance and the intentionality, right? I want the balance in my life. I don't want to be the most successful business person. I don't even want to be the most awesome dad is really strange and weird as that for me to say aloud because I want to be able to do four or five different things Really really well across the spectrum There's a concept that I've been thinking about for a long time to do with your future self. So we have Three selves. We have the past self that we remember. We have the present self that is experiencing and we have the future self that we anticipate right

the is experiencing and we have the future self that we anticipate, right? The person that remembers your life lives for far, far, far longer than the other two. The present moment's always fleeting. It comes and goes. The anticipating self only has a fairly sort of short window about what you think is going to happen in the future, but the remembering self exists literally from the day you're born until the day that you die and it compounds over time. So what I've been trying to do in my life is live for the remembering self. To do the things that I know me tomorrow are going to thank me today for doing. And there's a quote from a TED talk that says, we pamper the present, the present self like a child that continues to cry.

We constantly do things that make the present self feel good. We're planning on going to a new salsa class tomorrow. The anticipating self thinks, amazing. Salicy class, that might be really cool. I might meet some new people, but it gets to the next day and it's salsa class time and it's a bit cold outside and you had a bit of a shitty day and maybe that glass of wine would be quite nice and Netflix is comfortable and I'm on the couch, present self pampered child. Remembering self tomorrow looks back and thinks I can't even remember what I watched, the

glass of wine was alright but I've had a million of them before it doesn't really matter. Flip that around and be the person who says, okay, I'm going to do the salsa class. I'm going to go and attend because I know tomorrow when I look back, I'm going to gift this present moment to me in the future. This is every single present moment is a gift that I can give myself, money in the bank, memories in the bank, and I'm going to be able to look back and remember the new people that I met and that memory that happened, And I'm going to be able to look back and remember the new people that I met and that memory that happened, we do nothing memorable with our days and then complain about the fact

that life is forgotten. Life's going so fast. It just keeps on moving really, really quickly. Like if you want to remember the days that you've spent, you have to do something memorable with them. And a lot of the time, I think, we get stuck into very convenient, very comfortable routines. And that is what makes this last year. The last 12 months will have been probably for a lot of people that are listening to quickest 12 months of their life. Why?

Because variety's been tuned down. You haven't been able to go and do as many different things as you want. You sick of staring at the same four walls. So yeah, if there was ever a reason, a justification for you to focus on doing things for your remembering self in the future, you should be that. Yeah, that's really cool. Have you done salsa classes? I did.

So I learned salsa for like my second ever girlfriend. She was like a professional salsa dancer, so I took secret salsa classes for a month. Oh, did you really? Yeah, I did. It's such a romantic man. Yeah, that's really cool. There's a potential danger that lies inside of that. I think, which is you could just be constantly chasing the next high, chasing the next activity for the sake of the activity. So this is like the adrenaline junkies.

This is my former life. I was a ski bum. I would just like, I chased the next snow storm. I chased the next pow pow day. You know, it was Sikki Bluebees, Shred the Pow Pow, Sikki Richter buddy, bro. I don't know what any of that means. That's like, that's like, skiers are like surfers in a sense. They have their own language.

So, but that's what it was. And what I found out with after doing this for two or three years is, yes, you have a lot of really cool experiences, but are they truly fulfilling you? You have to start with that. Like what are the things that are going, which is for me, like, if it's a matter of,

like you just said, like the glass of wine and the Netflix or the salsa class, if it's a salsa class by myself or the glass of wine and Netflix with my wife. I'm going to choose the glass of wine and Netflix with my wife my own, the direction I want to go towards. And I think it's really easy for a peonal just to fill their days with, it's the opposite of the laziness is the filler days with active activities, because it's a distraction from figuring out truly what they want. I think you're right. Talking about adversity, it's something that I think is missing in a lot of people's lives and then can exist in extremes in other people's lives, like the athletes that you coach. How can people learn to embrace adversity?

So adversity is essentially hard things, right? So it's whether it's COVID, the pandemic, whether it's, it's raining outside or there's traffic, whether it's a hard workout. The first thing we have to realize is this is a part of life. Like, it's the most important thing is this acceptance level. We are not as human beings or any other living thing on planet earth not going to face adversity. Like every, there was a study done where these scientists try to grow,

try to create utopia. This perfect garden, and they put it in this dome in the desert with a perfect humidity, the perfect amount of rain, the perfect soil, and they try to make this perfect place. And once the trees got to a certain height, they just started toppling over. And what they found out was the trees need resistance. They need wind to grow strong. Without the wind, there's without resistance, they're gonna be weak. They're not gonna be able to fulfill

their own destiny of being trees. It's, we in our space and the people that do it, like our sport and it's just known like the heart if you work hard You're gonna read better results. So why would we not just kind of like embrace it? Like why would not just kind of seek this out and the reason is because you're afraid you're gonna fail So the example would be like let's say one of my athletes is at the CrossFit Games. And it's really, really hot out. Okay, like, that's gonna make it harder.

Yes, it's gonna make it harder. So the first is, you have to accept it like it's outside of your control. Okay, and then from there, it's like, it's this hot for everybody. Okay, and then from there, the best like it's this hot for everybody. Okay. And then from there, it's best thing is like, why would you want it any other way? Like you're at the CrossFit Games. So it just wants this to be hard. It's a David Goggins thing. Like if you're going to go through Hell Week, give me the coldest, hardest freaking Hell Week ever. I don't want this easy Hell Week. I don't want the one that people go like, yeah,

but that wasn't a tough one. Give it to me like I'm going through this for a reason That's our lives. We're going this for a reason now I also want the sunshine and rainbows and I also want to you know the grass to be green and to enjoy myself but I also I also want the struggle and I really mean that I want the struggle when COVID first happened you know, I own, I own a small business and I thought, I might lose the business. I own a gym. And gyms were closing down, we closed the gym. And it was a couple days filled with anxiety. And when I started to figure out like, okay, like we just talked about, like action cures anxiety, like just start moving

forward, taking steps, like you said, like we just talked about, like action cures anxiety, like just start moving forward, taking steps, like you said. I just started writing lists of the things I needed to do. I need to like, start taking action. And as I started going to, I started to get this like, this like early on, the thing I hadn't had for 10 years, like it was like, I'm fighting for my survival again. And it was the best couple weeks of business ownership

that I've had since I started my business. is the best couple of weeks of business ownership that I've had since I started my business. That's what we wax in the salge of all, is the days out of the hardest. Nobody goes with their team, or at their business, it goes, maybe those three months where it's like really smooth sailing, we all went home at 4.45 and, we were just meeting the numbers

and everything was kind of just like hunky-dory and you know it's kind of a blah like people go meron we stayed up that weekend and we tell two in the morning again that project done and we ordered pizza and we were burning the midnight oil and like we came at just under deadline and we crushed it and like how that's what people remember as your point is like create the memories. The adversity is the opportunities for us to get better. And talk about in terms of your core values in mind from learning your curiosity, what better you need that moment.

You're going to be curious about something as you said, I got this feeling, that warmness in my neck, what does that come from? That didn't come from the warm and fuzzies. That came from a bad feeling, adversity. And now you get to dig into it and expose things and learn things and become better from it. I love it, man. I really think that some of the lessons

that come from adversity in retrospect are the ones that we really relish. And if you were to tell someone that in advance, it sounds so dumb, but 60, but 2 thirds of people report post-traumatic growth, not post-traumatic stress. So the trauma makes them stronger. They are anti-fragile.

I had an Achilles rupture, full Achilles tear at the middle of last year, I playing cricket, which is like the most British way to rupture an Achilles rupture, full Achilles tear at the middle of last year, playing cricket, which is like the most British way to rupture Achilles. And um, in like a four day long cricket match? No, no, in my first return to the game in a decade, which was obviously just as stupid. What happened when I ruptured my Achilles was I found in myself a level of fortitude that I didn't know existed. I didn't think I would have a particularly good constitution to deal with this sort of trauma.

And something happened, I'd spent a fair bit of time, it was a lot of Ryan Holiday and Ross Agile, but I did a bit of prep, but then when I needed time, it was a lot of Ryan Holiday and Ross Ejli, but I did a bit of prep, but then when I needed it, it was called, like when I needed that fortitude to arrive, it was there, and now I have so much more faith in future me. I believe that the things that, if something occurs that I don't think I'm capable of doing, if I need to, my

constitution will get me through it. There's like areas of my programming that I can't access unless they're needed. You said at the very beginning, the woman that pulls the car off the infant. There are things that you can do that you don't know that you can do. And for the most part, you're not crew or the pilot on Spaceship Human. You are fucking cargo. You are along for the ride and your program is running in the show. And for you to think that you know the levels and the limits of your potential is, you're believing the hype in a way that is not only untrue but also not productive. You can do things that you don't know that you can do

and you won't know that you can do them until you need to. Boom. Talking about confidence, I wanna know how people can build confidence. It's just preparation. I mean, it's the same word. Like people are confusing.

Like if they're trying to create confidence, you don't create it. Confidence is a side effect. It's the result of something. People are like, okay, go on the field and be confident. It's like, what? Like get on that stage and be confident. What?

No, you earn confidence through your preparation. If you put in the work, you know that you can do this. Now, what I would ask of my athletes and what I would coach people to do is to define success in controllable terms. And when you start to do that, confidence becomes a lot more attainable. Because if confidence is I'm going to win while winning

and results are outside of your control. So now how in the world could you be confident when you don't even, when you have, you have no direct impact on the end result of what you're doing? So if you define success in, you know, regardless of the adversity, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of the score, regardless of what happens, I am going to give my very best effort through this. Yeah, cool. If you know you can do that, that's confidence. That's what that is. And if you bring a high level of preparation to that endeavor, now we're really talking.

Because that's what it is. Then really, whatever situation pops up is probably not going to be new. Imagine you're a football team or whatever it might be or a business navigating a new situation. Well if you've prepared for those situations you can be confident for sure. But I think people think that they can call upon confidence. And you can't call upon confidence. It's the net end result of preparation and effort. Confidence needs to be earned. There's a Naval Rava can't quote where he says, self-esteem is the reputation you have with yourself. You'll always know. And I think we look at people

because we only get to see that, that outward display of confidence. And you see Beyonce on stage or Matt Fraser at the games or some cool dancer person up on a stage somewhere. And you think, like, look at that confidence. And you go, well, what's the difference between confidence and so much preparation that you know, even your worst effort is far better than you need it to be? Yeah, right. That. Yes. That's confidence. Exactly right. What advice would you have for a young guy or girl who feels like they've built for more than their currently achieving. So there's stuck in a bit of a mediocrity rut and they know that they've got potential

but they're just kind of bogged down. Is there a realization that you can give them to snap out of it? Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, I don't know if it's a matter of, I don't think that snapping out of it really exists and without the work, right? Like so, if you've done your thousand days of meditation, you might have this snap moment, but it's coming from the other thousands of days that you've done this.

So to me, it kind of starts with that first piece that we should talk about, which is, like pull yourself out of the matrix, right? The operating system, which you, the words that you use, which I love, is there is this either already self-designed program running you, and then you're also inside of the matrix where the society is just guiding you. And basically, you're just kind of like trying to walk down the hall without bumping into the walls. Like, that's not like pop your head up

and look at the entire maze and go like, wait a minute, wait, wait a minute. I don't even want to, I don't want to be in this game. I want to go play that game over there. So if people are feeling bogged down, if they're feeling like they have so much more attainable, I would say that you probably do. And if you can't figure out what that thing is that you want to do, so what you say, Chris,

is like, I would just go start having some experiences. Like, you just need to start experiencing things because you learned so much more through experience and action than you ever will sitting and staying stuck. You can't, I'm a big fan of fast, big decisions. Like when 9-11 happened, I was working in a bank in Boston, like an investment bank. And that was enough for me to, that was a snap moment for me. And I was like, this is not for me. I don't want to play this game. I'm going to go, I want to have impacts. I left the investment world, moved out to Wyoming to try to get some space and some

tallitude and be a ski bum, and figured out what I want to do with my life. And that's when I came across it. I was like, I want to do fitness. Like this is what's the thing at this is when I feel alive. So one of my principles, one of my guiding, guide posts is blur the line between work and play. Like, I love doing this with you, Chris. Like, if I was, am I at work right now, or am I playing right now, right? And it's the same thing.

Like, come with me, my athletes. Like, I'm not working. Like, I'm doing what I love to do. And when I'm running and leading the business, that's what I love to do. And when I'm running and leading the business, that's what I love to do. And when I don't, Mondays and Saturdays are the same. It's just like, I'm all like, find something that you love to do. I know this is so cliche. It's the most cliche thing in the world. But I thought I loved to ski. So I went out to become a ski bum. And that's when I realized it wasn't just chasing the next big wave or the next

storm that didn't really ultimately fulfill me. I wanted more. So then I made the next big dress decision, which was let's move back and start a training business. And just start going and doing that. And if you fail, you fail. Like, when I did the, you know, there's plenty of things that I did that, like, I was like, I would say that I failed that, but I don't really believe in failure. I just don't think it's a thing. I think that you do things and you,

you just learn from them. You just kind of, and you have another experience and you learn from that. And some of them come out the way you expected from that and some of them come out the way you Expected them to and some don't come out the way you expect them to but it's not a matter of Successes or failures because even success on whose terms

Like we don't know the scoreboard of life. So how are we going to the time to find successes? So that's why to me it's I, I've come down to this fulfillment word, which is, don't chase joy, don't chase pleasure, but certainly don't chase what mom and dad told you to do, or what society's telling you to do. Certainly, don't just do what you're doing now because it's what you did yesterday in the day before, in the yesterday and the day before and the day before that and the day before that. Pop your head up, take a look around and go, what do I want with my life? And when you come to that answer, maybe ask yourself why a couple times because it's the asking yourself why.

So we have this thing like ask yourself the five wise. So, you know, I want to start, I just want to get, I want to go, I want to ski, why? Because like it makes you feel, I want the freedom and the experience. And you just like, you keep backing up and we find out there wasn't a good why behind that. But it's like, I want to start a training business.

Why? And it's like, I end up coming all the way back to like, I just feel this incredible responsibility to turn people from potentially liabilities to assets. My biggest fear is that I'm a liability to my family. My family is the whole jam. My biggest fear is that my family has to take care of me at some point. I just want to be able to be like, grandpa's here and go skiing with them and do all this really cool, fun stuff.

I want to be an asset all times. I want to be able to do that for other people. And that's the reason why. That's my thing. I want to be able to make other people's lives better by being a part of it. I just want to, and I want to be able to do that for other people. And that's a pretty powerful why for me.

That's enough to like get me really, really excited to get up at 5.15 every morning. And when you can ask yourself that one thing, there you go. Yeah, that's the thing. Maybe we won't be as stuck. That's it, man. I think the best heuristic for whether or not you, your life has meaning is are you excited to get out of bed or not? If you're excited to get out of bed in the morning, you have a reason to if you're not I think that there's probably some questions to be asked one thing you've kept on using the word fulfillment throughout this conversation

What I think is fulfillment is excellence with meaning The excellence without meaning can be perfection for the for its own sake But excellence with meaning can be perfection for its own sake, but excellence with meaning is excellence with direction. It's going toward a thing. I got a last question. I got asked this on Twitter the other day and it was really good. So I'm going to ask you it as well. What do you think Ben 10 years from now would advise Ben now? It's a question I asked myself a lot and that's kind of how I got to where I am tracking all this stuff and thinking about this kind of hindsight in

their in this present moment right now is I think I would go hey it's important that you have some levels of success from the business thing. I think that you're going to find a lot of fulfillment out of that. I think you're going to feel value out of that. That seems to be something that you should chase. But more so and equally is important, or let's not forget about also your family. And also, let's also continue to learn things as well. So the biggest thing for me is that I want to create this balance across.

If life is made up of family, career, hobbies, spirituality, health, and maybe another thing. What's my kind of objective is to just sort of like balance those at all points, not a seesaw, but like a frisbee on a pencil where nothing tips too much. It might swing a little bit one way or the other, but I've seen too many times friends and parents of my friends that have chased one of those things too far. And it affects all the others.

And what I'm trying to do is create that balance to achieve what I think is hopefully going to lead to a fulfilled life. You know, I think along with that is like, the thing I'm trying to learn a little bit through this meditation practice would be, so I'm answering this question twice. Like, let it go, bro, like, just like this ego thing, this, like, this subconscious pattern recognition thing that we have of like this need to be right and this need for Attention and this need for You know, I don't know what I'm in I'm pretty you know, it's kind of weird because I have a. I wrote a book and I like a social media platform, but I'm a very introverted person.

So when people are introverted, it's kind of like, well, that person doesn't have much of an ego. But ego is more than just like the need to be in the spotlight on them and all that. The ego is like, it's so powerful and potentially destructive. And I think my future self would go try to be more at peace in harmony with those around you and just connect more with people. Because I think that at the end of the day, you know, in terms of like we were talking about like chasing experiences, I think if you're chasing connection, whatever the experiences you have, whether it's sitting and meditating with somebody, literally kind of like doing nothing or bungee jumping, it doesn't really matter.

Cause it's the connections we have people that are probably gonna matter the most. That's such a fortunate cookie way to end the podcast. I think it's right, man. The trajectory that everyone can look to to kind of predict where they're going to end up is where older people are.

The vast majority of older people, if you look at them, they're not bothered about, like your grandparents aren't bothered about what car they drive, not necessarily bothered about what shoes they're wearing, not really even to bothered. They've stopped playing stator games. Like what are the things that they're concerned about? They've simplified their life down. They've probably got a little bit more conservative politically. They are not subordered about sort of chasing pennies,

but they're fairly concerned about going to church on Sunday or going to play balls with their friends or whatever night they have with their partner. That's what they care about. And we can almost look, the same way the evolution works, evolution of life, evolution of a philosophy within a life. That's quite easy to look at, just look at the people that are older than you, what are they doing? That's probably where you're going to end up. Man, this has been awesome. I, uh, we've waited

for a long time. I'm very, very glad that we did. If people want to check out CompTrain, download the app, do all that stuff, where should they go? Yeah, CompTrain, just Google CompTrain, it'll pop right up. Otherwise, it's in the App Store. That's the training program that we have.

Yeah, that's, it's easy, is that the Google machine knows where to go. Chasing excellence, the book will be linked below, along with Ben and Patrick's fantastic podcast, which I, I continue to listen to, man, it's appreciated, Chris. Thanks, man. The stuff that you do there, dude, thank you for today. You got it buddy, thank you.