Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Jonathan Goodman on Writing, Success, and Finding Your Way

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

Why is simplicity so important in marketing? What is the “unique game” approach, and why does it work? And how does storytelling help you build trust and achieve long-term results? In this episode, I sit down with Jonathan Goodman, acclaimed author and entrepreneur, to discuss the insights behind his latest book, The Obvious Choice. Jonathan Goodman is the creator of the Personal Trainer Development Center and host of the Obvious Choice podcast, a top show for coaches and entrepreneurs. Featured in Men’s Health, Forbes, and more, Jon has helped over 200,000 small business owners worldwide grow their businesses. In this interview, you’ll learn . . . What it means to define your “unique game” and play to your strengths Why storytelling is critical for connecting with your audience How to focus on solving problems, not chasing likes or algorithms The power of community, specificity, and familiarity in building trust Why success comes from simplicity and identifying your "good enough" And more . . . So, if you want to discover practical strategies for finding your way in a crowded market while staying true to your goals, click play and join the conversation. --- Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (04:57) Why “The Obvious Choice”? (09:30) Winning the Internet (17:57) Growth strategies (26:01) Smart marketing (32:38) Writing a book: why and how (39:46) Writing focus (47:02) Choosing your game (01:00:38) Exploring your hypothesis (01:07:05) Finding focus (01:13:36) Commitment and consistency (01:17:59) Knowing when to quit (01:22:32) Achieving excellence --- Mentioned on the Show: Pulse The Shredded Chef Creatine Monohydrate Jonathan Goodman X Jonathan Goodman Instagram Jonathan Goodman YouTube Jonathan Goodman Linkedin The Obvious Choice Podcast The Obvious Choice: Timeless Lessons on Success, Profit, and Finding Your Way

there are so many people that are working so tremendously hard on their businesses and getting nowhere. It's not for lack of information or knowledge or work ethic. It's just, they're just doing the wrong thing. It's not even that the thing is wrong, it's just wrong for them. What the obvious choice is, ostensibly, is a book about recognizing the fact that

there are different games that you get to choose to play today. And it's up to you to choose the right game, right? There's the game, just as one example, there's the game of trying to win the internet, and then there's the game of trying to build a business. And while there might be some crossover, at the core, they're fundamentally different games with different rules of engagement, time horizons, odds of success, and reward mechanisms. And a lot of people are playing the win the internet game, and it's a gloriously inefficient way to build business. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to a new episode of Muscle for Life. I am your host, Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today to hear from my buddy, John Goodman about his new book, all the material in his new book called The Obvious Choice, which is out now. You can pick up a copy wherever

you buy books. And the book and this conversation is about simplifying business success and focusing on what truly matters. And Jonathan's business playbook isn't just theoretical. This is the playbook that he has personally used to build multiple multimillion dollar businesses and help over 200,000 small business owners worldwide grow their businesses as well. And in this interview, Jonathan is going to share pages from the playbook, like why you need to define what he calls your unique game and why you need to play to your strengths.

He talks about why storytelling is critical for connecting with your audience, how to focus on solving problems, not chasing likes or algorithms. Talks about the power of community, of building community, of building familiarity, building trust and more. Before we sink our teeth into today's episode,

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Why did you want to write this book now? Why did you want to write the obvious choice? And also, why you want to write the obvious choice? And also, why did you call it the obvious choice? I self-published a lot of books, and I told myself that I wasn't going to write and learn the book until I couldn't write the book. And so it's been, god, seven years, eight years since my last self-published book,

since my last book that came out. There's this frustration that I felt that's been bubbling underneath the surface for a very, very long period of time that really came to ahead with COVID and after COVID, where there are so many people that are working so tremendously hard on their businesses and getting nowhere. It's not for lack of information or knowledge or work ethic. It's just, they're just doing the wrong thing.

It's not even that the thing is wrong, it's just wrong for them. What the obvious choice is, ostensibly, is a book about recognizing the fact that there are different games that you get to choose to play today. It's up to you to choose the right game. There's the game, just as one example,

there's the game of trying to win the Internet, and then there's the game of trying to build a business. While there might be some crossover, at the core, they're fundamentally different games, with different rules of engagement, time horizons, odds of success, and reward mechanisms. A lot of people are playing the win the Internet game. And it's a gloriously inefficient way to build business.

And so we saw this with all the folks that we talk to, that we help build online fitness businesses, for example. I see it with a lot of my entrepreneur buddies who are trying to build personal brands now. They've done great things building their business. And then it's interesting because they built their business from the ground up, you know, doing what you do when you build a business, the Peter Thiel thing, you want to build a monopoly as fast as possible. So you find the smallest available market to monopolize. And then you monopolize that and then you begin to expand outwards as you gain more resources. And they did that,

and they did that really successfully, but then they kind of forgot about that, you know, when it became time to build their personal brand. And all of a sudden now they're trying to just go everywhere and as big as possible on day one, thinking that their way of pointing at words and space, the three things you need to know about e-commerce is somehow going to stand out.

And so, you know, the best books are always in Maria Popova's words, timely yet timeless. Charlie Ho and, you know, the great book marketer, kind of behind the scenes guy, but he's always told me, he's like, you want to make sure that the book, whatever you're talking about is timeless in nature. It's always going to apply. But the angle with which you write it hits into this underlying cultural zeitgeist that's bubbling underneath the surface that's

frustrating people right now. For all those reasons, I think what I wrote about and what I published in The Obvious Choice really hits it. Like, hey, actually, maybe you shouldn't be spending much time on social media or maybe you shouldn't be, you know, trying to do a podcast or whatever. Or if you do use these media platforms, maybe you should use them differently for your goals and measure the success of your use on them different. Goodhart's law states that when the measure becomes the goal,

it ceases to be a good measure. The measure is not the amount of followers that you get or the engagement that you get. It ceases to be a good measure when you make that the goal. That's an instrumental goal. That's not the final goal, perhaps. Or it might not be involved. And it's up to you to decide.

Can you give some examples of how, I mean, you've, I know you've worked personally with a number of people and you've had many, many conversations over the years. And I mean, I could jump in with examples, but I'm not here to interview myself. You went to me, I thought we were having a conversation. If I don't interview you, then people are going to email me about how I need to shut up and I talk too much. I've learned that lesson over the years. I've had to curb my tongue. But no, do you have some real life examples of some of what you just described? For example, I agree. I see a lot of people trying to win the internet as you said, almost just for its own sake under the assumption

that if you win enough of the internet, that you can then leverage that to produce all different types of other outcomes. Question mark, question mark, question mark, profit. Exactly. That eventually, eventually means I get rich somehow. But first I have to win the internet. I haven't figured out that step two yet, but I'll figure it out when I get there. Once this becomes big,

I'll figure it out as like there's just too many things unknown. There's lots of examples in the book from all over industries. One of the examples that I really love telling because I think it really showcases it is a guy named Greg Finch. Greg is a, call it a mental and performance coach for surfers. And Greg was doing what you would think that you would do. If you're any kind of a coach for anything, you start creating content around your coaching.

But what people often miss when they create content on, call it Instagram, which is what he was doing. What people often miss is that you're not actually competing with other people who have a business like yours on those platforms. You're competing against full-time content creators. You're competing against full-time influencers and kind of there's always gonna be somebody

who is better looking, more well-spoken and has more money and resources than you do. And in the surf community, holy hell, man. Talk about that times 10. You're competing for attention against people who are shooting the most beautiful videos of the most beautiful people that are wearing very little amounts of clothing in the most beautiful locations. There's just no way you're going to stand out with your content in that market.

Even if Greg could, even if he shot beautiful videos or whatever, nobody would hire him for mental and physical performance. They'd be like, can you shoot videos of me? Which is actually what you see a lot of the time with these like, particularly like fitness coaches who are able to break through the content. Nobody hires them as fitness coaches. What they do is they basically become coaches

of how to be an influencer. Yep. And which is fine, you know, there's a market for that. That's totally cool. But Greg didn't want to do that. So, so Greg started working with us, right? And, you know, I always say to people, you want to fix what's inside of your fence first.

You want to become famous to the family before you become famous to the internet. Well, that might mean physically, people who live within a two or three or four or five mile radius of you. In a lot of cases, it is. You know, you have way more customers for your business that live locally, that know somebody, you know somebody that you're connected with

in your community, that's going to trust you way faster and be an easier and more profitable sale than anything you're ever gonna convert online. So for a lot of people, it starts there. For Greg, though, it didn't, which is why I like this example. Because surfers are kind of by definition scattered all throughout the world in remote locations

on surf breaks. And not only that, a lot of them don't even like to tell you where they are because they want to protect their surf break and they don't want other people to know about it. And so how do you access these people? Well, we've already established you don't only do it through content. I mean, you could have content, sure,

to nurture them, but you're not going to attract them with it. You're not going to stand out with it. So what Greg did is he became famous to the Soph community through a podcast. Now, he started a podcast called Soph Strong, and this is not a podcast that's ever going to get a lot of downloads. This is not a podcast that's ever going to be on a top 100 list. He's not ever going to be able to look at the data or the metrics from Spotify or his

YouTube views and be like, I'm winning now. But what he did before he even launched the podcast, he created on Canva a little, you know, kind of crappy, if I'm honest, like image. You know, he's made it better over the years, but you start fast and then you make it better. And he started reaching out to people who he kind of knew or who he knew of or who had some connections with in the surfing community. For example, the physiotherapist on the island of Kauai who treats surfers, the community outreach director for the Maui Auli Foundation, which helps people with special needs take up surfing, and various other people involved that serve the surf community in some way through organizations or actually like on location. And within a few days, he had his first eight podcast guests booked.

He didn't have a podcast yet. Yeah. He had to buy a microphone to record this. Right. And so he recorded those and then, you know, they introduced him to other people. Oh, you know, do you know any other physiotherapists? Oh, do you know anybody, anybody else, you know, with organizations,

charity organizations that serve surfers who might? What he was doing is he was becoming famous, not to the listenership. He was using his podcast to become famous to the person he was interviewing systematically one by one. The way to build a business these days, oftentimes the most scalable thing that you can do is the unscalable. So he had a one-on-one conversation where he was talking about other people. What does Dale Carnegie say and how to influence and influence people? Imagine

every single person walks around with a big sign on their forehead that says, please make me feel important today. That is the single number one way to ingratiate yourself to them. And so that's what he was doing with the podcast. And then of course, these people are the people who others are going to come and complain about, oh, you know, my back's hurting, or, you know, I just don't have the energy to pop up on the board the same way or whatever. And Greg started getting the call. So Greg's adding one to two $1,500 for three month coaching clients a week, every single week on Clockwork. And the hard part about all of this is it always seems random when he gets a referral, but it's not, of course. But it always seems random when it gets a referral. So I like that

example because whether it's a podcast, whether it's not a podcast, you can make it work. We have somebody else who we work with named Miles, who's always had a hard time kind of breaking through with his fitness business locally, online, whatever. And he's in Toronto and he's a Filipino guy and he's really interested in self-development and fitness. And he told me about this event that he went to.

He went to this meetup in Toronto with all of these other Filipino entrepreneurs, finance people, that type of thing, restaurant owners, right? And I was like, all right, so here's what you do. Everybody wants to connect. Nobody wants to go to the work to make connections. That's where you come in, man.

So I said, start with this guy who you're friends with that owns a restaurant. Get him on board. Then everybody else that you can go to, you know, you call up a finance guy who you kind of know, you kind of don't really know, and you say, hey, you know, this guy who owns this top restaurant is going to be there. I'm going to host a Zoom call. It's an hour. There's going to be no more than eight or nine or 10 of us.

And we're all going to get five or six minutes to introduce ourselves and talk about the cool shit that we're doing. And if we need any help, you know, ask for help or we could talk about how maybe we can help others. What are we good at? Right? It's only Filipinos. It's, you know, do you want to join the call? Three days later, he had seven people on the call.

And now he's becoming systematically famous to the Filipino high net worth entrepreneur business owner community in Toronto. Well, that's a pretty damn good position to be in if you're a high end fitness coach in Toronto, isn't it? So it's that type of thing. You're not going to see his content.

You would never, you know, and he makes content. Sure. People hear about it. They go and check him out. That's a business card, right? Fine. But that's how you get in there. And that experience can be invaluable if at some point you are trying to go wider

with a lot of people who have succeeded very widely. We often don't hear about their beginnings and we don't hear about these very unscalable small activities that they got involved in initially and how long they did those things for and what they learned while doing those small scale, generally quote unquote unsuccessful, if just judged by external metrics that are associated with winning the internet. And so we just, you often don't hear about that phase.

You only hear or really see about the. That's the why it's the idea. That's the idea. You don't hear it. I would argue, sorry, just to interject, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. So I would argue to somebody and just just if you and I were talking somebody about this, that, yeah, that if somebody can't figure out how to execute on the type of playbook that you're talking about, it's almost certainly not worth trying

to go any larger. Because coming to your point of trying to stand out, I mean, this is really what you're talking about is you're talking about a value proposition of a personal brand. I've had this discussion with people, right? So value proposition has different definitions, but a definition that I like is, it's simply the answer to a question, right? So here's the question.

If I am your ideal prospect for whatever it is that you're offering, and I am, here's why, I fit one of your little avatars or whatever, why should I buy your thing rather than a competitor's thing? Or in the case of the context of this conversation, why should I pay attention to your content? Why should I give you any of my time rather than all of these other people who you're competing with? And coming back to what you said is, if you don't have a compelling answer to that, and in the case of creating content,

then your content is your answer. But if you don't have a compelling answer, you are not going to succeed. And that's true in business. And I think that's true in building a personal brand as well. What I love to do is ask people. I'm like, look around you.

Look around you in your home, wherever you are right now, everything you're wearing, everything you own. Do you even know if any one of those companies has a social media account? If so, have you ever consumed the content in any way? Have you ever been to another reviewers talking about the best microphone

or exercise bike that you've got behind you or whatever? If you looked up those, the person doing the review, did you even look at who they were? Let alone interested in whatever services they offered in thinking that they were a view of the thing? Maybe they were just an affiliate marketer or maybe they were like a coach trying to get attention for their coaching and they were talking about exercise bikes because

if I can perhaps kind of, what's it called when you're like behind a bike in a Peloton? You're you're you're you're you're trailing behind them. Yeah yeah yeah yeah I don't know the time I've maybe it'll come to me but where you're you're you're basically you're in the wake you're in the wake of them yeah so you've been a little bit I think it's like a little advantage right because there's a little bit less wind resistance. They're gonna get attention and people are gonna search for it. So if you talk about them,

maybe you can take some of that attention and hey, maybe question mark, question mark, question mark these people. Think about that. Think about coaches that you hire or services that you go to, or restaurants that you attend or whatever those things are. I would ask you the same question. Do you even know if they have a social media account? If so, how much did that impact your, either consciously or unconsciously,

like be honest with yourself, how much did that impact your desire to purchase from them? Or, and even if it did, was it the leading factor? Like is that how you discovered that? Social media can be a very good way to nurture or convert attention generated elsewhere, but it's very much a lagging indicator of success. It's not a leading indicator of success. There's this wonky misconception

that you have to do dope shit on the internet in order to enable you to do dope shit in the real world. It's the opposite. You do dope shit in the real world, and then you perhaps amplify it by talking about it in a dope way online. The real reason why over 90 percent of purchases are made through mostly offline word of mouth is some combination of specificity, familiarity, and community.

I call it the trust triangle. Specificity is what you were talking about. How unbelievably specific is this for you? You can create that with content. For example, a friend of mine, John Finkel runs a newsletter called Books and Biceps. It's the first time ever that I've come across the name of a newsletter where I'm like, I got to subscribe to this. Like, it's just so amazingly for me in obvious ways.

I've never had that before. And so, you know, you could create that with content, but you could also create that in conversations, you know, Your thing is specific and can help somebody else, but do they know that? All you're really looking for is one spec or one credential of what you do. All that somebody else is looking for is being able to feel like they can justify their purchase based off of one spec or one credential.

That's all that they need. So maybe you could do that through content. It's way harder. It's much easier to ask that person a single question and say, hey, I'm curious. What are you looking to gain from this? Then you can talk about one part of your background or one part of your product or service about how that

specifically solves that one problem. And you've hit specificity, right? Familiarity is like, oh, people like me doing this thing. Familiarity is how often you see something. And so there's a lot of neighborhood stuff for sure with that. And then the final one is community. We exist on all of these really tight communities

and algorithmically filter bubbles online, but also in the real world. Somebody who your church buddies with or play pickleball with, you will actually, we don't like to admit this about ourselves, but you will follow their recommendation for something. More than you will follow the recommendation of an actual credentialed expert in that same field.

Even if this dude you play pickleball with, really doesn't know anything about the thing, and this other person has spent their life studying. That's actually the reality of how almost every human purchases almost everything. This cuts at the core of a frustration of a lot of people, right, that their customers just don't get it. And it's true. They don't, your customers don't get it. And you can't expect them to. You get credentialed, you build your education, you build a great product because it helps

you solve their problem once they've already hired you. But that actually won't contribute much to getting them to hire you in the first place. I think that's the misconception is how you got to think about these things. If I'm hearing you correctly, I mean, a lot of this is, it's the importance of marketing. And I would say the essence of marketing is messaging. What's the message? And the, and that also ties into the value proposition. I think that that's probably the most important message you can give to someone, especially when you are making that first contact

and the person is trying to decide whether they should care about anything you have to say or not, whether it's a personal brand or a business and a service. And a mistake that I have seen many people make over the years, particularly people who are more creatively inclined, is focusing all of their efforts on the creation of products and services or even the creation of content.

And not only focusing very little, if any, efforts on marketing, but almost disdaining it, like feeling that it's beneath them and not understanding how vital it is to be able to communicate to people very quickly, very simply what this is, what do you have to offer? And again, why should they care? And something that I do, just for example, whenever I'm working on anything related to marketing,

whether it's copywriting, which I still do a fair amount of, or branding, is I take the perspective of someone who's cynical, skeptical, doesn't really care, is half a second from just leaving the page or moving on from the piece of content. And that's kind of like, that's an editorial lens that I view my work through. And so I have to convince me as this person

who basically I'm just repeating, I'm repeating, so what, who cares? So says you, you know, I don't believe you. Yeah, right. And work to try to convince that person to give me a shot, like to get them to think, okay, well, maybe, maybe there's something of value here. I mean, yes, I agree. Because a lot of the time what you do have, there is value. But where do you go from there then? How do you do it? I mean, you've been able to break through in

a exceptionally bloody ocean in a market that has a very, very small TAM. The total available market is pretty small. So you've been able to break through in fitness publishing where the total available market is very small and then break through in supplements where it's just a very noisy, very, I don't know, complicated, saturated, like, like, dishonest, dishonest, like, like corrupt, like legions great. Sure. Is there other other supplements that are as good as it? Absolutely. Are there a lot of supplements that are not as good as it? Sure. Does any consumer really know the difference? Probably not most of them, if you're honest.

And so you can say nice sounding words, but a lot of people do. And, you know, a lot of people don't take as much care into making the product as you do, say the same nice sounding words as you. So, and then there's the evidence though. So you have the words and you get their attention with the words, but then you have to give the evidence and I like to think about it in terms of a

preponderance of evidence. So try to over deliver on the evidence that backs up the claims, that backs up the words. And so in the case of sports nutrition, there are various ways to do that. You have different types of testing you can do and different types of endorsements you can get for products and which would include also social proof in the way of customers. And anyway, we have to make it about. I mean the social proof, like a customer who's had like a transformation that used your product, let's say performance transformation, physical transformation, whatever. I mean there were just so many factors involved in that transformation.

That yes, but like the fact that we don't even promote transformations, for example, is what is one of the reasons. So if we're talking about Legion, one of the reasons that a lot of people choose Legion over our competitors is how we market our products, the type of claims that we make and the type of claims that we don't make and the support of the claims that we do make. And it's even how those claims are worded, but then there's the support of the claims that we do make with research that is openly referenced.

And so that's one of the things, that's one of the things that there's many, many people when they spend a little bit of time consuming content, whether it's on our website or on social media, probably more so on the website, but also on social media. A lot of people get the impression that we are more trustworthy than a lot of our competitors and that it's less likely that we're just blatantly lying to try to get their money. Because that is what a lot of supplement companies are doing. They are just lying to take people's money. That's 80% of the business.

And it's so egregious that it's actually in some ways, it's kind of ironic that it's not, it's actually not that difficult to create a different impression, but you have to actually back it up. You have to, and so that's, that's where just the words. Oh yeah. None of this, none of this matters if your product isn't good. Yes, correct. Like, like, like no marketing. I mean, what is what is what's the famous line? It's like, good marketing is only going to make a bad product fail faster. Like, it's not it's not going to make a difference. Yeah, 100%. 100%. I talk about this with books with all of my entrepreneur buddies all the time. They're just like, they're, you know, they're all trying to write books now. And, and it's interesting because they're all trying

to, what's the first question? How does that, what book should I question? And what do you say though? Like, where does that conversation start for you? Cause I've had these conversations too. And I always have the first question and I often don't get a good answer to it. Well, what I tell them is that there's three types of non-fiction books that exist. Type number one, call it like translators, like non-fiction authors, call them translators. You're talking the James Clears, you're talking the Malcolm Gladwells.

It's not their original thoughts or their original research, but they are exceptionally skilled at translating those thoughts for a mass audience. Like it or hate it, it is what it is. They're incredibly valuable to society. Translators in the non-fiction genre, I believe, have the most success long term, because kind of by definition, they're able to write a lot of books because it's not the original work of research.

So they can just like find other research and write books about it, which is why you see these types of this type of nonfiction. These are authors who generally write a lot of books. James Clear is an exception. I mean, that's what I's what I've done. I call myself a desk researcher. I haven't done any first-hand scientific work. I don't pretend like I'm a scientist. My goal from the beginning was simply to take other people's hard work that isn't accessible to laymen and make it more accessible, curate this information, present in a way that most people can understand and apply and get results with.ate this information, present in a way that most people can understand and apply and get results with. I would say that you're a combination of one and three.

I'll tell you what three is in a second. Number two are like journalists, so experiential journalists. So like Michael Easter with Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain is a really good example of this. Somebody who really is skilled at telling stories, but they go out into the world. Like when Mike wants to talk about addiction, he doesn't sit back, he reads the research, but he doesn't sit at home. He goes to Iran in an opioid crisis and he does ride alongs with the drug police,

you know, and then uses that to tell the story. And so that's number two. And then number three are probably most of the people you're speaking to. I would say that you probably fit in this bucket as much or more than the first bucket, which is somebody who's done something that is in some way meaningful could be physically, right? It could be professionally. And then what they're doing now is they are creating a post-narrative and trying to pull out central lessons as a way to teach others and lessen the curve for others

to make that same jump or go on that same journey. And so you combine it. You read the research. You might read some of the work of others who are also talking about this thing. Generally, I mean, you surround with lots of friends who think about health and fitness and supplements and stuff like that all the time.

And you talk to them and then you take that all when you wrap it in with your experiences. And it all comes down into this really neat miasma of like, okay, here's my own unique way to talk about this. And then obviously some people like you, a good example, are just so skillful at putting this together and communicating it. And then of course marketing the work afterwards.

And part of marketing the work is not just the titles of the work, it's, hey, how can I actually build an economic engine behind the book that allows me to continue to talk about the book and promote the book is very, very important. So I tell them that first. Then what I say is the majority of people who fit in bucket three,

which is most people I'm speaking to, they ran some business and they want the world, really it's a lot of ego. Maybe they want to speak and get on bigger stages or make more money. But when you break it down, it's often ego. They just want the attention. They want the prestige, which is fine. People need to know who I am and what I've done. Look at that guy getting all the attention. Fuck him, I'm better than him. I know the background

of his story. I know the skeletons in his closet. Why don't other people recognize this? I don't have those same skeletons. Whatever, whether that's true or not, it is what it is. And so a lot of it is that. And so I tell them that first and then I say, and I say, what's your approach? Because most people who are in bucket three, have their books ghostwritten or are using a lot of AI generators or hybrid publishers where they do interviews. They're not obsessed with the art of what

makes a book great. Like the stuff that I can tell you that I've done with the obvious choice that most nobody will ever notice in terms of attempting to make it readable, narrative structure, transition statements. I obsess over this. I mean, I don't just save covers and titles. I study authors and I study authors who do very specific things well. For example, Ryan Holiday is able to write in a cadence that I think is really, really enjoyable. Morgan Housel begins and finishes sections exceptionally

well. There's just all of these different authors, and then you look to fiction for how you tell a story. And then you look at magazine writers for how they are able to do business writing. And Jason Pfeiffer calls it the bricks and mortar. You tell the story, then you pull it out and you say why it matters to the person.

Then you enter back into the story, then you're the steps to solving. What do you do about it? Then you enter back into the story, brick, mortar, brick, mortar, brick, mortar. I'm looking and ethically swiping and using and maneuvering all of these things around each other. Most non-fiction authors that are in that category three,

this isn't what they do, they're not obsessed the same way. What they try to do is they try to build efficiencies, because that's what they learn with business. They're like, I'm going to find somebody doing this on the greatest scale and I'm going to deconstruct it, and then I'm going to find somebody doing this on the greatest scale, and I'm going to deconstruct it. And then I'm going to build it back up. And whenever anybody says anything like that to me, I'm just like.

I'm a wait for like 20 people to tell me your book is good before I pick it up. It's just not the same kind of care and consideration and and an artistry around, but what do you say? What do you say? My first question is why, why do you want to write a book? And, and, and then to the point of ego, uh, often there either isn't a clear reason at least that they want to share, or it is something more just kind of egotistically driven. Again,

look at me, look what I did. People need to know about this. Yeah. But that's, for me, that's not, that's not a good answer to write a book because to your point, I mean, something I'll tell people is I don't recommend writing a book, at least doing the work yourself, unless you really like writing. Yeah.

Because it's a lot, it's a lot of work and it might seem like it's gonna be fun, but if you don't really enjoy writing, it's going to become a slog. And then also I tell people another bad reason to write a book is to try to make a bunch of money. And you can fill your mind with outliers all you want. But if we start at base rates. This is what I explained to people, whatever, whatever genre you're thinking about writing in, even if it's,

what is it? Romanticie, which if you want to just make money, right. Uh, software porn for middle age women, that's where all the money is. Ever since the invention of the kinder where you could be reading soft core porn in public and nobody knows all of the sudden, that's where invention of the Kindle where you could be reading softcore porn in public and nobody knows. Exactly. That's where all of the literary dollars. But have you looked at the growth chart? Yes, I have. When the Kindle started taking over, have you looked at the growth chart in that industry? And you actually have quite a few mega success stories of self-published women who just churn

these books out and make millions of dollars a year. Because you don't need to hide your book inside of a magazine anymore. Or you take the dust jacket off. But generally, you look at what are the base rates in terms of success in just about, I mean, again, even in Romanticie, in any genre, the base rate level of success is quite low. And so if you have this idea that you are going to succeed at a much higher level, you have to make a case for it.

Why? And, and- So you get them to actually, you say to them like, like what's your case? I mean, in not so many ways. Yeah, yeah, I argue. I'm an investor. You're trying to get my money to invest into your project.

What's your business plan? Why do people care about you? What are you gonna do? Or just why you? Why are you going to succeed where all these other people have failed? Explain this to me. Because there's such a power law distribution with books.

There's such a power law distribution with them. Yeah. Yes. Okay, I like that. And so, I mean, I can speak personally at this point. My interest in writing is at least 50%. What do I want to do? What work draws me in. And if hopefully there's some commercial demand, if there were no commercial demand, I would find something else because I don't

only write for my own entertainment. I do like to put the work out there and hear from people and see what people think about it and feel like I'm making a difference in some way. But for me personally, and this is something that I recommend to people who are wanting to write a book, is just make sure that you're working on a project that is genuinely interesting to you and is something that you genuinely want to work on. Because coming at it purely from an economic angle simply does not make sense. Where in business it can make sense. There are many businesses you

don't you can have no passion for, no even particular interest or curiosity in, but it's just a good opportunity. You're a good operator, you're a good marketer, and you go for it and you make it happen and you succeed. That can work in business. It rarely, if ever, will work in books. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can, you can, if you're a big enough influencer and have a big enough audience, you can guarantee that you're going to sell a few tens of thousands of books, right? Massive, you know, a,000, let's say. Yeah. But big deal.

How many? It's probably going to be ghost written to your point. That's going to be six figures to if you want to hire a good ghost writer, they're not cheap. And so in the end, it's probably going to be traditionally published as well. So you likely won't even earn out your advance and you're going to look back on it and say, well, that was a waste of time. But, but you know, this is why, like, like I said, the concept of the book is extensively about, you know, figuring out what game you're playing. You know, your favorite Twitter influencer came out with a book this week, right?

And it's interesting because it actually makes perfect sense for them to do it. You know, they probably got a000 to $500,000 advance from a big publisher. Their agent's happy. They're happy because they got that money in. They'll spend, call it 150,000 on hiring a ghostwriter and marketing the book, and they'll keep the rest. They're not going to earn out their advance.

They're going to be able to put out their book. But the publisher knows that're not going to earn out their advance. They're going to be able to put out their book. But the publisher knows that they're going to sell enough books to make back the advance and a few extra hundred thousand dollars. It's virtually guaranteed to be, you know, call it a single for the publisher with a chance that it's going to be a Peter Attia you know, not a not a odds on good, but it could. But then. This this Twitter person will probably hit the list. So now they're going to be able to call themselves a Wall Street Journal or New York Times bestseller, and they're going to be able to commands higher rates for speaking.

And everybody goes home happy. Right. Except the reader, because the book was never good. Because the book never needed to be good. You have to, and so that's why I say like, I need... And there are so many of those books out there. There are so many. And so it's not that it's necessarily bad, but whenever I see, you know, book come out from...

Does the world need another one though? Especially when every idea is derivative, which is fine. You can say that about any idea if you're willing to read widely enough. But even how the ideas are presented even, it's all just derivative. If you've read one, you've read them all. So as a reader, I'm sitting here and I'm saying, I get the game you're playing.

I need to wait for a lot of people to tell me this book is good, that I really trust. Before I pick up this book, you know, not the same kind of circle joke of like everybody doing the same thing that all endorses, you know, each other's books. You know, I need to I need to figure that out. But again, I don't knock them. I get the game. I get the game that everybody's playing participating of it. And I think that it's perfectly reasonable to play that game. As a consumer, you need to

understand it. As a consumer, you need to understand it. But that's it's fine. This is a business. That is a way to run the business. And as someone trying to figure out what game that they want to play, it would be helpful for them to understand what game that person is actually playing. Because a lot of people mistake. They think that the person is playing a different game and maybe it's the game that they want to play and they what they didn't realize is what you just said is like, no, this was ultimately about raising speaking rates from 20,000 to 40,000 a keynote. Like that's ultimately what this was all about.

And once that's done, they'll never talk about the book ever again. You won't hear about that book ever again after the two weeks that it's launched. Yep. Like, it'll be there. You know, it'll be there. But you won't ever hear about it. Because it served its function. We will get back to today's episode shortly,

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of all time, with over 300,000 copies sold, and why it has helped tens of thousands of men and women of all ages and abilities transform their body composition, fitness and health. And so if you want to see if it can help you reach your fitness goals faster, just head over to Amazon, pick up a copy and enjoy. I want to I want to hear more of your thoughts on on finding. And this this comes back to this comes back to your book. Is is this is this topic of finding the game that you want to play or I guess at first is is maybe it's finding a game but but or identifying and clarifying the game that you're trying to play because I think that that is something that is sorely lacking among early stage entrepreneurs? Right. Right. So I have a process and I actually have the final version, which is very exciting.

I got this like two days ago, but it's the first hard coffee version of it. So there's a potent, which is it's a process. I'm of the opinion that just about everybody with enough work can go from bad to good at just about anything. I think that all of us have one, maybe two, maybe three things that we can go from good to truly great at. Our natural energies, skills, attributes really don't lend themselves to us being great, truly great at more than one or a few things. And so the question is, what is that thing? Right? Like, like, I think that with a tremendous amount of work, I could be a mediocre to decent YouTuber. I think with that same amount of work, I could become a

truly world-class writer. I don't think that I'm there yet. I don't think that I'll be there for decades. But you bet your ass that's what I'm playing. That's what I'm doing. That's what I am focusing all of my efforts on that are pointing towards. And so how do you find that? I have a very, very simple process. And it goes like this. You take a piece of paper and you write down all of the things that you think it might be. Podcasting.

I'm going to write books. I'm going to build an e-commerce brand, drop shipping supplements. I'm going to write books. I'm going to build an e-commerce brand, drop shipping supplements. I'm going to whatever, all of the things you think that it might be. I'm going to become a YouTube. Whatever. I'm going to start a local restaurant. It could be anything. And make your list.

You really don't want more than four or five on there. If you do, you could probably eliminate a few things pretty quick, like what feels good, no gut, what doesn't. And then you're going to go for a series of two-week testing cycles. Two weeks is not long enough to get good or see any results of any of these things, but it is long enough to answer three questions, which is, did I enjoy this? Do I believe that I could become truly great at this? Do I think that this has

the amount of potential that I need in an opportunity? I say that I need an opportunity because a local restaurant does not have the same type of potential as a software business, let's say. But your ambitions might not be to be a billion dollar Silicon Valley entrepreneur. So it's whatever potential you want for the type of life that you live. Once you can answer those three questions confidently as a yes,

that's your thing. You close the book and you execute on that. Not to say that there's not going to be other opportunities. And so in those two week cycles, you obsess over that thing. All of the information that you consume has to do with that thing. You're listening to podcasts or reading books or whatever you're doing. That's what you're Googling.

You're going down to Reddit, rabbit holes, left, right, and center. You are trying to find like earning statements and you're actually producing content on these things. So if it's podcasting, yeah, you're going to record a podcast every day for two weeks. Nobody needs to listen. Doesn't matter. All that you need to do is you need to figure out how to answer those three questions

confidently. Two-week cycles. Once you finish that two-week cycle, do I believe that I can get truly great at this? Did I enjoy this? Does this have the type of, does this present the type of opportunity that I desire? Once you have that, that's your thing. Everybody's got a thing.

There are lots of things that could work in this world. There are lots of opportunities that could work in this world. What's important is that you find yours. I don't know if you've seen the same thing. How old are you Mike? I think I've asked you this before. Forty. Okay. So I'm 39. important is that you find yours. I don't know if you've seen the same thing. How old do you make? I think I've asked you this before. Forty. Okay. So I'm 39. In and around 35, I started to notice that many of the people that I knew

kind of just stopped evolving. Like they stopped learning new things. They were perhaps less interested in going to new places. Probably closer to 25 for like basically once they're out of college for a lot of people that I've met. Maybe, I mean, I maybe, you know, I just noticed that- You've been surrounded by better people than I have over the years. Like just those lines started to more sharply accelerate away from one another at that point, whether it was happening before and I didn't notice it as much. I started to notice those-

It's one of those two types of people moments. You have many of them. It's wild. One of the things that I noticed is, it's not for lack of hard work. It's not for lack of knowledge or smarts or IQ. It seemed to me that it was just a lack of focusing on one damn thing that they are really passionately interested in.

A lot of folks are working very, very hard these days and getting nowhere, not because they don't know what to do, it's because they're doing too many damn different things. And so I think that... I made that mistake myself. Well, I think being a grown-ass adult... Taking on unnecessary projects and- Yeah.

Being a grown-ass adult means accepting trade-offs. Means accepting that you're not gonna be able to do it all. So what's your thing? How can you point all of the rest of the elements of your work life and even perhaps your personal life towards that thing, to amplify that thing? Like you and I have known each other for a lot of years I've decided that really probably for the rest of my career I'm going to consider myself primarily

as an author and that's about 90 percent of my time is committed to my career and authorship you know me well enough to know that there were other opportunities that had perhaps greater financial outcomes that I could have stepped into. But this is my thing. There's no other thing that I've ever found that gives me that same beautiful combination of struggle and frustration and creative fulfillment where every single day I finish it and I'm like, that was hard, I suck. How am I ever going to make something come of this?

Then I wake up the next day and I can't wait to do it again. There's nothing else I found. That resonates with me. I still enjoy the writing that I do more than any of the other work that I do. And if I look at the business work that I do of that, I enjoy the marketing work the most because it has the most capacity for creative expression. It doesn't have to be writing. I mean, I really do enjoy writing, but there are other elements of marketing that, uh,

I really, what it comes down to for me is it's creativity. I like creative. That's, that's what I like. Operations. I do not like, I've done a lot of it and I've gotten good enough at it to get to a point where I could give it to people who are better and who love operations. You've learned the language enough to be able to recognize when somebody is speaking in tongues or when somebody is speaking well. And that's it. Yeah, I mean, I've always viewed you.

I mean, you're such a cerebral guy. To me, maybe it's writing with you. To me, the way that I've always viewed you, it's just deep thinking. You and I get along because we are both disagreeable to the core. We are always going to question every assumption and every way that anybody else does anything and say, I think there might be a better way. That's what I've always respected about you,

but it's deep thought. Maybe creativity is the word. I don't know if I'd even use that term with you. I'd use a different term. I would just say you are creatively disagreeable. You think much deeper. You gather a much wider variety of inspirations and information, and network, and contacts to be able to attack problems that

your industry has in new and profound ways, that others that are much more insular in their approach simply don't see. That's the way that I look at it with you. Writing is part of that because writing is how you learn, at it with you. And writing is part of that because writing is how you learn. Writing is how you understand. Writing is the best way to think through what you're thinking. For sure. But organize your thoughts, even make new connections, come up with new ideas. Totally. And I want to come back to, I think this two-week concept that

you shared is quite profound. And there's a concept in it that I use in business a lot. And that is, well, it's the generation of hypotheses and understanding that hypotheses need to be tested and looking at something. And so a hypothesis, if I make this change by doing the things that would produce this change, I think this will result because of this reason. Okay, so there's your hypothesis.

And then you have to go and test this hypothesis. So in the case of, and again, I'm speaking personally here. I mentioned that an interest and enduring interest of mine is writing fiction. And I've been working on the side, I treat it like a hobby. I don't give it the priority I would like to give it because life is irritating and I have to do other things. However, this is a hobby that I've been chipping away at

for some time now and thinking about it very much through the same lens that you just shared. And so for me, it's looking at, okay, so what's my real objective here? And for people listening, if you just think about what John shared about, okay, so you make this list of potential things that might be your thing. So really what you're doing here is you're generating hypotheses. It could be this, and whether you are explicitly outlining that hypothesis, why that, it's implicit regardless. You put it on the list, right? And so looking at, okay, so what is my real objective here?

And some of the things that you're like, oh, I feel like I should because so-and-so was doing that thing. You put it on the list and then you look at it and you're like, that ain't for me, man. Yep. And I totally agree with the gut check. You probably don't need to go much further than that. I mean, you could become maybe a little bit more analytical if you had to, but gut checking makes sense to me. And looking at what's the real objective.

So that's kind of a first question that when I'm considering doing something, what am I actually trying to do here? So to your point of wanting to commit yourself wholeheartedly to becoming the best possible author that you can. And I would argue that why not shoot for doing something the best that it's ever been done, even if it's just one project. And if you could accomplish that as an author, I mean, at least I can speak personally that that to me is very appealing, just the challenge of it and whether

I can do it or not is another question. But not just trying to become great, but and not just necessarily word class, but can you write a book that is the best of whatever type of book recognized as, let's just say, at least one of the best of that type ever? Look at what James Clear did with Atomic Habits. I know it's the cliched example, but everyone has heard of this book. I think at this point, it's clear that he has done it, a Habits book, the best that it's ever been done. I mean, this is going to become the number one bestselling nonfiction book probably of all time. And and so anyway, so what's the real objective here? Right? It's not just to make money.

There's much more. And if you think about it, he has effectively moqueted like built and moketed that book, that one project focused on that and nothing else really for 15 years and counting. Yep, very true. Eight years building up the audience and testing the ideas for the book. And remember that started with him writing,

he wrote fitness, he wrote, I forget, a number of different pieces, different topics. And he just saw that there was this habit stuff that was getting the best response. So he'll just keep doing more of that. So eight years of basically preparing to write the book, you know, put out the book and now seven years and counting. Well, he really hasn't done anything but promote the book. I mean, he came up with an app that like, you know,

he worked with a tiny right with Andrew Wilkins's thing. And they did a 60 40 thing. And, um, you know, how involved was he really like probably kinda, but like, you know, it's not like he's building a software company and operating it. Um, there's some pens, there's a, there's a journal, but like, he really hasn't done much else for seven years, other than promote that book every single day all day. Yeah. And so you're talking 15 years and counting on one product. Now, this product is a multi billion dollar business. But you're right.

Can you do the best in the world? There's a lot of rewards when there's a power law distribution in that. But just coming back to, so what's the real objective here? And what am I trying to achieve here? And so if somebody's trying to figure out their thing, what is the real objective here?

Is it just to make money? Well, I think that that is, is not not a great if that's the only reason that you can come up with. Maybe that shouldn't be on your list. Because to to to your point is accomplishing extraordinary results requires a lot more effort than I think a lot of people realize. I think that if you are going to try to become great, it's going to require the type of effort that you outline, which is you're going to have to give everything you've got for a long period of time to that one thing. And when the only reason you chose that thing is money, it rarely ever works

out. I mean, this is the story that just repeats over and over and over of the person who chose the safe career of medicine or law because it comes with status, it comes with easy, well, it comes with not easy, it comes with stable income, above average income, but then they do it for five, 10 plus years and end up hating it because there was nothing else there, right? So okay, what's my real objective? Now what's the most effective way of accomplishing this objective? So in the case of what's my thing? Okay, so I'm trying to determine my objective here is determine which of these things could be the thing that I'm going to focus all of my efforts on, and

that I can break through in and what's the most effective way to accomplish that objective? And then what's the best way to test the effectiveness of this method? What's the what's the how do I adjust? And then how do I adjust my objective? Yeah, the way that I'm going to get to that objective and the way that I'm going to test based on my results. Yeah, and I just I see I see that the flavor of that in what you're sharing. And I think it's I just think it's something that is, is uncommon in that I don't I have not seen

many people go through a process like that before choosing a thing. And I think that it can be very powerful if it's done honestly. Yeah. Yeah, so long as you understand the outcome that you're going for. You know, like the outcome is not to be able to gauge whether something is successful or not, because that takes a long time. And kind of by definition, there's gonna be a lot underneath the surface

that you're not going to see or recognize for a very long period of time. And so you can't have testing cycles. It takes too long if you're judging yourself based off of the outcome. So you have to figure out how to measure something. You also only have so much time and energy. I mean, if it's gonna take three to five years

to go through a testing cycle, that doesn't work. And the outcome specifically, you had said of, well, first is, is this something that you can keep doing a lot of for a long time? And I mentioned fiction writing because I've gone through a very similar process of initially the beginning of this little testing, this little hypothesis that maybe this is a thing that I want to give time to. It was in the past, but that was, I don't know, 10 years ago. The first objective was just to see how much I like the work for its own sake.

And that actually starts with learning. Now, I had read previously 10 years ago when I was actually planning on writing fiction, I had read probably 10 or 15 books of some of the classics on storytelling and fiction writing to understand some of the art and science of storytelling because there is very much a science of it as well. It's not just telling a story that you think is interesting. And so to come back to that though, to review a lot of that material, to fill in some of the holes of answer questions I had of how to make this work and to gain a better overarching

understanding of effective storytelling. So the first question was, how much do I enjoy studying about this? Because if I don't enjoy studying about it, forget it. I would just go on to something else because I'm never, never going to get great at something that I'm unwilling to even read a book about. Like that's that's in your spare time. You're not saying I'd love to read a book about this. You probably it's probably not your thing. Totally agree. So so that was the first question is in my spare time when I'm not reading for my professional for my job. Do I want to read a book about storytelling? Yes or no.

Do I even want to read fiction books? Yes or no. Then from there, so that was a yes. Then from there, it's do I like doing the work for its own sake? Yeah. That was another binary yes or no. If it was going to be a no, then I'm taking it off the list. It's not going to be a hobby and I've answered my question question and I'm going to move on to find some other hobby.

And from there, though, and I'll be curious to hear your thoughts. Okay, so you have somebody and they found something that they really enjoy learning about. They can, I mean, for me, I was looking for something that I almost could just consume endlessly. Like I mean, for me, I was looking for something that, that I almost could just consume endlessly. Like I could, I can read a book and then I want to read the next book. And I had this long list of books that I would like to read on it. And I have to force myself maybe to even read something else

because I have a business thing and I need to learn about it. So I got to read that book before I can get back to it kind of thing. And then, okay, so they have that. They enjoy doing the work for its own sake. Now, speaking personally, it's like working out. Do you enjoy every workout? Sure.

But you enjoy most of them. And you always enjoy having worked out. So for me, writing is similar in that way, right? Not every session is thrilling. But I always enjoy having that. I'm always happy I've done it. I'm always happy I've done it. Correct. I'm always happy I've done it. Correct.

And sometimes I'm also having a good time while I'm doing it. Yeah. I'm just speaking personally. I like editing. I like editing. First drafts, I'm always frustrated. And you have to care less in your first draft. That's what I've learned.

Like, you have to resist the urge to be a wordsmith. You just have to barf your ideas out and be okay with that and know that nobody's going to see it. And yes, it's, it's, it's disorganized and there, there's, uh, but you're always comparing yourself to what you did before. Like, like, I've got this book coming out in a month that's finished, that's beautiful, that's been three years of work. I'm seven-eighths done the next book, the first draft of it. Every morning I'm waking up and I'm writing the next book.

But I'm comparing that because I'm having to review this book because I'm doing so many podcasts on it. And so I'm comparing what I'm writing now to this finished product. It's like, how the hell am I gonna get there again? Man. Editing, that's how you're gonna get there. Editing, editing. So I like the editing part.

I like taking something and then I look at that and I can put the puzzle pieces together and move some sentences around and maybe say something that took me 11 words and six words and or throw in a great metaphor in somewhere and really take pride in that. I like that part of it for sure. Yeah, I understand that. The same goes for me. But so you have somebody now and you talk about now finding out whether this is something that you can become great at.

What does that look like? How does somebody go about determining? Really what we're talking about is probabilities. We're not going to get to 100 percent probability, but if you're going to pursue a thing, in my opinion, you probably need to feel like- That's when you decide to give it two or three years. When I take on a new project, I took on, I decided to start a software platform, for

example. I'm like, this is a maximum five-year project. It's no more than that. But I'm willing, if I'm going to do anything now that I'm committing myself to, what I'm doing in the back of my mind is saying, am I willing to commit a minimum of three to five years to this? If I'm not, then I don't do it. If I am, then I need to be very much all in on that thing,

which means perhaps going and acquiring new skill sets. For example, if I wanted to be a YouTuber, I would go and study and go to an improv comedy troupe and study stand-up, study presentation. You have to acquire the skills of that. You'd want to take acting classes too, in my opinion. For sure. You would have to. I mean, if I thought that I wanted to be an influencer who was going to influence around any idea, whether it be fitness, whether it be anything, I would do that.

I think that's how you have to stand out. And so, study the skills of the thing. Build your network in the thing. Create a local group of other up and coming YouTubers. And arrange the get-togethers and reach out to more established YouTubers and have them come in and present to your group. You build the network for that thing that you want to do.

I would learn the ins and outs of the technical aspects of the platform of the thing that I want to do. If it was supplements, the infrastructure, the management of your materials. It's got to be insane. Even down to, if I live in Canada, for example, you're looking at even USD to Canadian dollars, like conversion, FX trading, like all of those details, like I would study the nuances of those details and get into the nitty-goody

again using a YouTube example, like how does the algorithm work? How do the thumbnails work? Like all of that kind of stuff. And then the final thing, and this is the part that a lot of people miss, is how do you convert people within the confines of that? You know, like it's not just how do you get attention on YouTube, how do you convert attention on YouTube? Because it's different than how you convert attention via email, it's different than how you convert attention

on Instagram and so on and so forth. And so how do you convert people on an e-commerce store? How do you increase lifetime customer value? What tests can you put into play? What best practices should you start with? And so once you've decided on your thing, you break it down. I was a bit messy in how I was describing it, but you break it down. I have it in the book, like those things, right? You got the network, the details of the thing, the skills of it, how you convert

from it. And that's your job. That's your job. You either do it. On the cover of this book is a whale chasing after a whole bunch of pennies. The whale is origami $100 bill. That's the representative of the final chapter, which is whales and minnows. Whales and minnows is my life philosophy

and my business philosophy. It's either free or expensive. You show up or you don't. You do the fucking thing or you don't do the thing. You just don't stand anywhere in the middle. The middle is a dead zone. The middle is why you're frustrated. The middle is why you're not getting anywhere.

You're not committing to anything. If you've decided that this is gonna be your thing for the next two years, you'll make it your thing. Or don't, both are fine. But don't say that you're frustrated that you're not getting anywhere when you're only half-assed putting 50% of your all into it. Because you're kind of doing this other stuff on the side. I want to hear your thoughts on the period of this three to five years you've made this commitment because inevitably, and I'm sure you've experienced this and people listening are going to experience

this if they were to go through this process is, you know, what Seth Godin calls the dip. There's a point where it's gonna get really hard and it's gonna be harder than you thought it was gonna be. And you're gonna start to question whether this really is your thing and whether you should quit or not. And there's only one thing is not always bad. How many how many points how many points like that are we to expect? You said it like there's only one. Well, I actually I like I like how Godin explained it where it's it's actually an expanse. It's not it's not really a point

It's an expanse that you got to get you got to get through this dip as I never read that one of his either that or either that or you need to quit and I do think that there are times when it makes more sense to quit then to keep going. What are your thoughts on that? my thoughts on that? My thoughts on that are you got to take an anti-fragile approach to your business which means you look for asymmetry and you appreciate the fact that if the odds are in your favor they are eventually going to win out but favor, they are eventually going to win out. But it might not happen right away. It probably is not going to happen right away.

The best investors in the world, for example, best investment advisors in the world. So the smartest people in the world with the most resources, with the most money, have about a 60 to 65% success rate, which is really, really good. Like they get really rich. But in vote that and four to 10 times they're wrong. And so what you actually have to do is you learn a lot of this in poker, any Duke has any Duke's book quit is really, really good on this. And she talks about, oh, I forgot what the term is. But she talks about the power of celebrating when you made a good bet, not celebrating the outcome. And that's what poker players do. Serious poker players don't get angry

if they lose a hand if they play the hand properly. Because they know that over time it's going to even out. And so long as they have a big enough bankroll to be able to withstand it. And so where do I come in with this? Is I say, don't ever make a move or do something that if it does not work is going to take you out of the game. If you are able to continue showing up in a way that if something works, it's going

to work really, really big. And if it doesn't work, you're going to be able to show up the next day. Keep showing up. But if you get to a point where you start feeling like the odds begin to be skewed the other way. Where if this thing works, it's actually not going to do that much for you. Then you should quit. You know, like, are you executing at a level eight on a level three opportunity, for example,

or are you executing at a level five at a level eight opportunity? Like be real with yourself. If whatever you're doing works, if you call it a self-published author, or if you own a local restaurant or whatever, if whatever marketing thing that you're doing, if it works, what really is going to be the impact of it? How big is that going to be?

If everything that could go right goes right, what's the impact of that? How big would that be? Okay. Is it worth the time and effort that you're putting into it? Are there opportunities that meet your guidelines? That maybe you should turn to. I look at it that way. I'm always just trying to skew the odds in my favor

and make sure that I can keep showing up for long enough to have those play out. And what about excellence in terms of achieving excellence? Because if somebody has set even moderately ambitious goals for themselves. They're probably gonna have to eventually get to the excellent spectrum. Even if they don't get all the way to world class,

they need to get at least mildly excellent at something. Which means that they're going- Achieving this real objective, whatever that is, probably going to require some excellence. Which means that they're going to have to accept the fact that they can just be good to okay to mediocre at just about everything else. Right. That's just the reality. I mean, there's just not enough time and there's too much competition and there's too much

information out there. And I think there's something to be said for being, I know it can be hard, but I've done it myself for whatever it's worth, try to be objective about how am I progressing here? What does excellent truly look like in whatever realm of activity we're talking about? And this can be objectively analyzed, even if it's something like writing. So what is excellence?

How do you analyze writing excellence? How would you do that? Well, I mean, some of it is probably personal taste. But you can start with people who are generally considered the best to ever have done it. They're probably excellent. You think about biographies, right? Walter Isaacson, I would say, is an excellent biographer. Ron Chernow is even above him in my eyes.

But I don't know anybody who would argue that he's not an excellent biographer. But would they have recognized that as they were writing the biographies, particularly the earlier ones, that they had an opportunity to be excellent? May or may not. But that doesn't matter because for us. Isaacson knows now that he's excellent. Of course.

Of course, what I'm saying for us, though, for looking at, what does excellent look like? Now, that's world class, that's world class. So we can go down a few rungs from them and still be on the spectrum of excellence, right? And so if it's going to require that we become excellent at something, for this to really be a thing that is going to support us

for the rest of our lives financially and otherwise, we're going to have to get to at least mildly excellent at some point. Well, what does that look like? And how long have I been working on this? And how close am I to excellent? I mean, the reason I'll give an example, I'm not going to say who it is, but so actually, I'm not going to give that example. I'll leave that idea. Lisa S. No, no, no, that's too obvious.

L. Simpson. I'll keep it more generalized. I'll just say I've seen this a number of times where I have known and know people who have come up with ideas that they want to become a certain thing or do a certain type of work, become excellent at something. And they have been working at that for some time. And this happens to also be something that I'm fairly good at. At least I truly do know what excellent looks like. And they are so bad at it that they don't realize it.

But objectively speaking, they're so bad at it that they are never going to be excellent. It's just not going to happen. They've, they've read the books, they spent the time doing it and the results are simply not my advice. We all know people, my best advice, if they were to ask would be to quit doing that thing, not to give up on everything, just quit that thing. It is not your thing because it's been two years now and you don't even have an odor of excellence. It's just not going to give the example of somebody that I called Jessica in the book that had 20,000 plus Instagram followers It's like she had enough people following her to fill Madison Square Garden

I don't remember the exact number but 20,000 she she messaged me and she was like, hey, you know, I I need your help I need your help with my Instagram to get more clients for fitness, right and I said How many clients do you have? She said, I have six. It's OK. What do you think that you need to do? She says, I feel like I need a social media manager, better pictures, and more time. And that struck me as crazy. I mean, this is a person who objectively

was good at Instagram. Her content was fine. And despite all of this, she had six clients. Her conversion rate was like 0.03 percent. She still was foaming her conviction and belief that the solution to her problem of how to build a business where she can feed her family is with prettier pictures. It's so clear to me that it's not just, I mean, sure, you know, could she have

built a better conversion system off of her Instagram? Like, yeah, but it's so clear to me that there's something else missing, but she was so deep into it. And of course, because she was so deep into it, everything else that she saw, and the stories that she told in her mind, all had to do with this idea of Instagram is how you get clients. And all of these other people are successful. It's like, well, first of all, do you even know that? Is it your definition of success, not theirs? And are they even successful in the first place? You know, are they even generating business in the first place? Maybe they are, maybe they're not.

You're telling yourself that they are, but is that true objectively? And so in that case, it's like, how long have you done a good job with this? Which time and work and effort have you put into this? How much really of you all have you put into this? Is it like- A question I like to ask in the context of business is, how many books have you put into this? Yeah. Is it like a question I like to ask in the context of businesses?

How many books have you read about? So you're saying you have these business problems or you want to be an entrepreneur? How many books have you read? If the answer is zero, there's your answer. And so how far down the rabbit hole have you gone? Right. And is it still not working for you in any capacity? Do you not even have a hint? Do you not even have an idea of how this could be unlocked in a big way?

Then maybe you should quit. But to get to that point, you talked about excellence. What does that mean? How do you pursue it? How do you perhaps get there? To me, it's you have to design your life and your business to point towards it.

I can give you an example of my own world. I have a podcast. It's also called The Obvious Choice. The podcast's sole purpose is to workshop ideas from the book. I wanted to provide myself with the external accountability to keep writing, and so I know that I have to record my podcast every week and present to two others who are my co-hosts what I'm writing. It keeps me going. The two others who are my co-hosts live in my blind spots. They help me make my work better.

I'm a middle to upper class, I'm from a middle to upper class white Jewish family in Toronto, Canada. Amber is a single mom to a son far along the autism spectrum of a military traveling family in South Carolina. Wren is the black son of a preacher from North Carolina. They're able to provide insights and opinions and metaphor and stories and give feedback in ways that I would not otherwise have access to.

So if anybody else listens to the podcast, wonderful, but I'm not measuring the success of my podcast based off of the downloads, based off of the Spotify wrapped, you know, how many of those we need. It just simply doesn't matter because it points towards my writing. It points towards my one thing. The businesses that I run, I have the two primary businesses are my mentorship and my software platform.

They're both operated by somebody else. I've given away a comically large amount of my business. I still own 100 percent, but the upside, they have so much of the upside. All of my business owner buddies, when I tell them what they do, are like, you're an idiot. You should hire a CEO, pay him a salary. You're an idiot. Why?

You took all the risk, funded the thing, built the thing. You're primarily responsible for getting the customers for the thing, and yet you just give it away. I'm like, yeah, because my goal is writing. My goal is authorship. You've got to give more if you want to get more. And then where do I spend a lot of my time? Where do I spend a lot of my professional networking time? It's what I call literary citizenship. It's a part of the world of authors. I'm reading their stuff, I'm sharing it with them, I'm emailing them,

I'm following them on Twitter. When I'm traveling, that's who I'm meeting up with. Everything points towards the one thing you want to become excellent at. Now, I have already received the evidence that there was opportunity here. Big book deals, sold, I haven't sold as many books as you,

but sold a couple of hundred thousand self-published books, and built businesses off of the back of the book. So I've already received that evidence that there's something there, right, and could be something in a much bigger way. And I don't know whether it's going to happen with this book, I don't know whether it's going to happen with the next, to the next, to the next, but I've received enough evidence to know that if I stick to

this plan of pursuing excellence, it will happen. I might be 70, but it will happen and I'm fine on the way there. But it would never happen if I tried to be a famous thought leader at the same time. I hired Robert Green's video guy. You want to know why? Because I found out that Robert Green is somebody I admire, he writes great books. He's built massive online platforms in the last couple of years.

I don't know if you've paid attention, but millions of followers, subscribers. I've come across a few social media accounts that are large. Like, I look at stuff like that. You know, if somebody who's like really good looking, and really eloquent, and like, clearly sophisticated at marketing builds a great platform. I'm like, okay, there might be something to learn here, there might not. But then you look at Robert Greene, and it's like, an older guy who clearly didn't grow up with the internet. He's not particularly eloquent. You know, he's hella smart. He's a phenomenal writer and author. But like he's not a speaker. You know what I'm saying? He's not a presenter. He hasn't studied how to how to present and put it forward.

And you know, he's he's clearly not somebody who studied the art of marketing in the age of social media. And yet he's built these massive platforms. So I found out how he was doing it, which is basically this guy travels to him, one or a few days at a time, with a camera, peppers him with questions, lets Robert talk, and then goes home with the footage and doesn't bother him for a number of months.

I was like, that's not an ideal way to build a social media audience, but his guy and his friend, I flew to Mexico, they just left two days ago, they were here for three days. We filmed for three days straight. I'm not going to see them for another six months. I'm not going to see them for another six months.

Is that the best way to build an audience? No. But all that you need to do is pursue excellence and make sure that you prepare the platform. Make sure that you have everything that needs to be there to give you a thing that is right, the platform, make sure that you have that, you have everything that needs to be there to give you a thing that is excellent, an opportunity to get in the hands of enough people so that if it is in fact excellent, it takes on a life of its own.

What does Seth Godin say? He says, it's the author's responsibility to sell the first 10,000 copies. It's the book's responsibility to sell the rest. I agree with that. He also says, this was in the dip in,000 copies. It's the book's responsibility to sell the rest. I agree with that. He also says this was in the dip in a free market. We reward the exceptional. And there's some hope in that for people

listening who look at different markets and look at all of the competition, all the noise and wonder how can I ever to go all the way back to the beginning, how could I ever stand out? Well one way and I would say the as far as probabilities making bets, the best strategy I think is to try to achieve excellence. That's the best way ultimately to stand out to create something that is excellent because to your point, you can take a book or you can take many different products and services things that you can sell and you can supercharge them with great marketing and you can sell

a lot for a period, but then you're not going to be selling a lot. In the case of a book, it's going to drop off. Or in the case of a business, you're going to have a high churn business that is very expensive to acquire customers with, to maintain customers with. It's going to be very stressful. But you can count on excellence carrying you to success if you can truly achieve excellence in whatever your thing is. I think the more excellent you are, and that means producing excellent products and services, the less expert you have to be or excellent you have to be with marketing. And Robert Greene is a good example of that. I don't think anything about his books would suggest that he is, is much of a marketer at all.

Actually, he's just focused. He's always been focused on producing excellent material and he's, and he's gotten very good at that. So we've been going for a while. We should, we should probably wrap up. I know you got to run. So again, I appreciate the time.

It was a great discussion. The book is the obvious choice. And by the time this episode is out, the book will be available, right? That's how you want to... Yep. So... Yeah. I mean, the book is available already for pre-order, but yeah.

I mean, look, the book is HarperCollins. It's available anywhere you get books. It's in audio. It's in Kindle, it's in hardcover. What I've been saying to people is buy the book. Don't even think about it. You've been listening to us for an hour and a half, buy the book. If you don't absolutely love the book, send me a message. I'm on Instagram, I'm on Twitter,

I'm at it's coach Goodman, I'll send you back 100 percent of your money. I'll say that if you buy it as a Kindle ebook and if you don't like it and if you don't, if you buy any of my ebooks and you don't like them, you can also just refund them right from the device too. Just a lot of people don't know that. But hey, make it hurt for me. Don't even refund it, but then also send me a message and make it hurt for me and make me send you money. So it's one of those 200% money back guarantee. 200% money back guarantee and you will inflict personal pain on me. Um,

that's how confident I am. And then, and then otherwise, where can people find you, find your stuff? Instagram, Twitter. Where are you? Where are you active? Where, where would you send people? Yeah. I mean, I got, I got a podcast. If you like podcasts called The Obvious Choice, but then Instagram, Twitter. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, John. Appreciate it.

You got it, mate. Thanks, man. We will conclude today's episode shortly, but first, there are very few supplements that I would say everyone should be taking. Most supplements are very supplemental by definition. They're not essential. An exception, however, a supplement that I do think everyone should at least strongly consider taking is creatine.

Now you probably know that creatine is the most studied molecule in all of sports nutrition. You probably know that hundreds of studies confirm that it can safely boost muscle and strength gains and improve muscular endurance. It can reduce muscle damage and soreness from exercise, helping you recover faster from your training. It can help you preserve lean mass and strength

while you are restricting your calories during a cut. So you can maximally improve your body composition when you're cutting, which is the goal. It's not weight loss per se, it's fat loss and muscle gain or at least muscle retention. However, what you might not know is that there is new research suggesting that creatine also supports various aspects of brain health and cognition. And that's why experts are now starting to think of creatine as less of a fitness supplement for meatheads and more of a must have supplement for everyone like vitamin D or vitamin K or

omega-3 fatty acids, a few supplements that I also think everyone should strongly consider taking. And all that is why I just, and finally, I should have done this a long time ago. This was a mistake, but I just released a micronized creatine monohydrate supplement, or my sports nutrition company, Legion, has just released a micronized creatine monohydrate supplement,

which you can find over at bylegion.com slash creatine. That's B-U-Y, legion.com slash creatine. And in case you're wondering why creatine monohydrate versus another maybe more exotic form or at least exotic sounding form like creatine citrate or creatine malate, it's because creatine monohydrate is the most studied form. It is the gold standard in the scientific literature

of creatine's effectiveness. And contrary to what many marketers would have you believe, research has also shown that a number of these other more quote-unquote exotic forms of creatine actually perform worse than creatine monohydrate. And in case you are wondering about the micronized part, that simply means that the creatine molecules have been broken down into very small particles up to 20 times smaller than regular creatine monohydrate crystals and the primary benefit is solubility it mixes in water better and it also can be easier on your stomach some people can get an upset stomach from creatine and they often don't get an upset stomach from micronized creatine. There also are

some claims about enhanced absorption with micronized creatine monohydrate faster and more efficient uptake by muscle cells, but I think that is mostly speculation. So the bottom line is creatine is not going to help you pack on brain shrinking amounts of muscle in 30 days. It's not going to add another plate or two to the bar, but it is going to help you train harder. It's going to help you recover better. It's going to help you gain muscle and strength faster. And contrary to the supplement fake news,

it's not bad for your kidneys. It doesn't cause men to lose their hair and it won't make you bloat it. So if you wanna see for yourself, head over to bylegion.com slash creatine, B-U-Y-L-E-G-I-O-N dot com slash creatine, pick up a bottle, take five grams a day if you are mostly after the performance and body composition benefits and take 10 grams per day if you want to also maximally benefit your brain health and cognition because that is the amount that research is suggesting is optimal

for both body composition, physical performance, and mental health or brain health and cognition and see how it goes. Well I hope you liked this episode I hope you found it helpful and if you, subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes, and it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you, and if you didn't like something about this episode

or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email. Mike at muscle for life dot com muscle F O R life dot com and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about. Maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback. So thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.