Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Motivation Monday: If It’s Not a “Hell Yeah!” It’s a “Hell No!”

Episode Date: May 21, 2018

This episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed “Motivation Monday.” (Yes, I know, very creative of me. What can I say, I’m a genius…) Seriously though, the idea here is simple: Every Monday morning, I’m going to post a short and punchy episode that I hope gets you fired up to tackle the workouts, work, and everything else that you have planned for the week ahead. As we all know, it’s one thing to know what you want to do, but it’s something else altogether to actually make yourself do it, and I hope that this series gives you a jolt of inspiration, energy, and encouragement to get at it. So, if you like what you hear, then make sure to check back every Monday morning for the latest and greatest installment. Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

This episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my one-on-one coaching service. So the long story short here is this is the personal coaching service

that I wish I had when I started in the gym many years ago. Every diet and training program that we create for clients is 100% custom. We provide daily workout logs and do weekly accountability calls. Our clients get priority email service and discounts on supplements and the list goes on and on. Furthermore, my team and I have also worked with hundreds of people

of all ages, circumstances, and needs and goals. So no matter how tricky you might think your situation is, I promise you we can figure out how to get you results. If I have piqued your interest and you want to learn more, then head on over to www.muscleforlife.com forward slash coaching and schedule your free consultation call now. I'll tell you there's usually a wait list and new slots fill up very quickly. So if you're interested at all, don't wait. Go schedule your call now. Alrighty, that is enough shameless plugging for now, at least let's get to the show.

Hey, Mike Matthews here from Alls for Life and Legion Athletics and welcome, welcome to yet another Motivation Monday episode of my podcast. And hey, if you liked this episode and if you like my podcast in general, what I'm doing, please do spread the word about it. Please do tell others. It really helps me. Okie dokie. So let's start with a quote. As always, this week, it's going to be Theodore Roosevelt. And he said, in pleasant peace and security, how quickly the soul in a man begins to die. A fitting quote for this week's episode, because let's face it, our time is limited, too limited. Our life is short, too short. Why would we want to waste either our time or our lives with people or work or activities or even entertainment that are less than fantastic? Now, I know that sounds cliched, but seriously, why?

If the thought of taking that job or going on that next date or learning that instrument doesn't enthuse you, doesn't bring you alive, doesn't make you want to push all of your chips into the middle, then why bother with it? If you're not sprinting out of the gate, how far do you really think you're going to get before you run out of steam? Now, this doesn't apply to everything, of course. I very much do believe in satisficing. That is accepting good enough when there's not that much at stake and the thing that we're talking about really isn't that important. In fact, I think that that's an important distinction to make. I think it's important to learn when you should accept

something that is satisfactory versus when you should demand for excellence. And of course, the main benefit being with satisficing that you can make decisions faster. You can just move on to more important things. You can put time and energy into more important things as opposed to overwhelming or even paralyzing yourself with a tremendous amount of factors that you're trying to juggle and maximize. Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying

this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it. It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at muscle for life fitness, Twitter at muscle for life and Facebook at MuscleForLifeFitness. So, for example, I recently got a new car and I had certain parameters and certain criteria for the deal. And I first went to a local dealership and ironically, they ended up kind of just blowing me off. And I don't even know if they ever even got a proposal to me that I couldn't even buy a car from them if I wanted to. But then I was introduced to

somebody that works at a dealership in Florida and he got me exactly what I wanted and the numbers looked good. And so I just went with it. I didn't continue to shop around. I didn't call 15 other dealerships and try to play them off against each other because while I'm sure I probably could have shaved a little bit more money off of the car, if I would have done that, it would have taken quite a bit of time. And I have a lot of things on my plate these days and it's just not worth it to me there. I'm willing to satisfy. So I got the deal that I'm happy with. Um, it was a deal. It wasn't a great deal. I didn't expect a great deal, but it was a deal and it allowed me to be done with it and get back to things that are more pressing. Now, when I bought my house,

however, I was not willing to satisfy. So I wanted exactly what I wanted and I had a certain price range and it took, and my wife was obviously closely involved. She's very much a maximizer type. She has a hard time satisficing with anything just because she's German and that's German. Germans demand perfection with everything always. But we looked for over a year to find exactly what we wanted. And eventually we did. We got actually exactly what we wanted, but we had to skip over a lot of houses that would have been satisfactory, that would have been okay, but we didn't want okay. That was something that I wanted to maximize in. So bringing this back to the topic at hand,

what I often see is many people embroil themselves in lukewarm relationships and pursuits, and then wonder why they're never excited or never fulfilled. In other words, they satisfy where they should be trying to maximize. Or in some cases, people just betray their own personal sense of what is fantastic and instead live up to other people's tastes or standards and are also disappointed. And so here's a lesson that I learned early on in my life, and I think I learned it fairly well. And that is if you want to save yourself from all kinds of trouble, avoid half-hearted commitments. Avoid maybes. Avoid we will sees. And yeah, that means that you say less to a lot less, but I think it makes all the difference. I think if you want to wake up

excited every day, then you really have to search out jobs and partners, activities, and endeavors that make you say, hell yes, because anything else should be a no. It's not hard to jump out of bed at the crack of dawn when you know that you're going to spend the majority of your time doing things that turn you on with people that fire you up. I think that this binary approach to living also makes you weigh your options more carefully and inevitably helps you make better long-term decisions because it means less groping and worrying, fighting, crying. It helps you achieve a calm, quiet type of confidence that really only can come from truly living in harmony with yourself. And I think this rule also helps with something that I like to call strategic quitting. Now, quitting anything comes with a

stigma because we generally see quitters as weaklings and losers. Quitting out of laziness or fragility or fear is one thing, but sometimes quitting a person or a path is the absolute right play. We've all known those people who, it's easy for us to say, of course, because we're on the outside looking in, but who we feel should have quit someone or something a long time ago and they would be much better off for it. And we wonder why they could never see it. In my case, I've gone through this situation with several people in my life. And I've even openly communicated to people that have been close to me that I really think they should give up on this person or this thing. And here's why. And I think here's what I think they should do instead, not just give up and mope, but here's a better path, I think. In a couple of cases, ultimately,

my observations did pan out, even though my advice wasn't taken. But anyways, my point is that a lot of life is trial and error, no matter how smart you are or no matter how well laid your plans are. Remember, Thomas Edison had to test and scrap over 10,000 ideas before he could get the light bulb to work the way that he wanted to, and that was Thomas Edison. So what does it say about us? Now, the key to quitting like a winner, though, is just knowing when it is time to bail and then doing so as quickly as possible before you get too mired down in a relationship or a situation that is really probably going to be forever cold, windy, and gray. And when is that time? Well, I think it is when you know with certainty that on the whole, the undertaking in question simply isn't going to wow you. It's never

going to get there or the person is never going to get there. If you were to envision the ideal situation, whether it's a job or a hobby or a person, a relationship, what would this look like ideally? Within the constraints of reality, of course, I mean, if we're talking relationships, I think it's very important that you have deal breakers and negotiables. And the more deal breakers you have, just realize the harder it is to find the person. You're going to have a harder time the more deal breakers you have on your list, but we all do have deal breakers. Whether we like it or not, there are at least a few things that all of us would say, I simply cannot be with someone that has these few traits

or behaves this way or whatever, but everything else needs to be negotiable. Now, let's say you're with someone and they do not meet your deal breaker criteria. Let's say there's something about them that really does not work for you. Well, you can either wait and see if they're going to fundamentally change who they are. Very unlikely, rarely ever happens, at least in my experience. And if it does happen, it requires a true rock bottom experience, a true catastrophe level event, which of course affects everybody in that person's orbit. So basically everybody gets to suffer and then maybe the person changes for a little bit, at least until things are going a little bit better and then maybe they

just revert. So anyways, let's say you're in that situation and you know that this is just never going to happen. That's really what you know in your heart. Well, I think that's a good reason to move on. So for example, years ago, a couple of years ago, I decided to take up learning another language. I didn't really care which language. I just wanted to do it as a hobby because I like language in general and sounded like it'd the opportunity to raise my children in a bilingual home, which of course could be done without me because Sarah speaks German, but I could, I mean, we could only speak German in the house, for example, which would be really good for them if they grew up like that. Then, you know, I know a few people that grew up like that and it has really stuck. And then there was simply a desire to do something that's, I don't know, kind of

unusual and kind of interesting. So I attacked that project fairly vigorously. I was spending upward of probably an hour to one and a half hours per day doing German audio courses like Michael Thomas and Pimsleur. And so I did these courses when I drove and when I cooked my food, walked my dogs, when I was doing cardio, because you listen and repeat, listen and repeat. And every day I looked forward to the next lesson, things were going pretty smoothly. And after I had gotten about a hundred hours of coursework done, I started to see that my general understanding of the language was okay, but I couldn't really explain why the grammar worked the way it did, why syntactically German was so different than

English. I understood how to say things, but I didn't understand any of the underlying theory. And also my vocabulary was utterly worthless because these courses are made for tourists. So they're mainly just about asking where the bathrooms are and where the bank is and asking, how do you pay for things? How much is this? How much is that? I just couldn't speak about anything that I actually cared about. And I also couldn't form the, even the types of sentences that would allow me to say and ask the things that I actually wanted to ask. I could only, again, ask very simple questions and make very simple statements. But I kept going because I thought maybe in the more advanced

courses, it would get beyond just the touristy stuff. And so I went about another 200 hours and made it through all of Pimsleur's and all of Michael Thomas's stuff and was even redoing certain lessons until I had it perfect. Still had the same problem. My grammar was okay and I had okay comprehension of basic conversations, but my vocabulary was bad. I didn't have any sort of theoretical understanding of the language and how it worked. And I still couldn't say the thing, even the types of things that I would want to say. And so at that point, I had to reassess my situation. I had put in a few hundred hours of attentive, diligent work, and I really didn't feel anywhere close to the level of fluency that I was looking for when I started or what I expected for

about, I don't know, four and three, 400 hours or something like that of work. I know now that fluency, let's say high school level fluency probably does, if you're really smart with your work, probably is six hundred maybe more hours but i was spending a fair amount of that time on something that could be spent on another high value activity like i could listen to audiobooks to kind of work through my to read list which is way too long and it also became clear to me at the time that my original goal of speaking german fluently was going to require a different approach and a different chunk of time. It wasn't going to be as simple as doing some audio courses while I drive. There was going to be sit-down work. I was going to have to work at the computer.

I was going to have to approach it like a student. And so at the time, I weighed all the factors and continuing to learn German was no longer a hell yeah activity for me because it was going to take too much time away from other activities that I felt were more valuable. Because if we're talking sit down time, at that time I was working every evening. And so I was going to have to take at least probably an hour a day away from my work to work on German. And I didn't want to do that at the time, so I dropped it. Now, did I regret quitting or did I consider the time wasted? Absolutely not. I used that time well. I got back to getting through one to one and a half books per week, and I still found the whole

experience enjoyable. I learned that learning a language is not as easy as the language marketers would like you to believe. And I could have very simple conversations in German with my family. And now as I'm learning German again, I'm going about it differently, of course. And the work that I put in previously is helping because I did learn some things, but more importantly, I learned what it actually takes to get to fluency. And so now I have a very different approach that is a lot more productive. I'm making a lot better progress. Things are sticking better. And I'm getting closer to actually being able to converse in the way that I want to converse.

So my point here is I try to apply this hell yeah, hell no rule to many areas in my life. This is how I try to generally approach my life. I turn down business opportunities all the time simply because they don't excite me. I don't voluntarily hang out with people or do things that I find boring. I drop books and TV shows if I don't find them excellent. Basically, with many things, if I wouldn't rate it at least an 8 out of 10, then it's a 1 and I want nothing to do with it. Now, that might sound a bit cutthroat, but the net effect is I spend the majority of my time doing things that truly interest me with people that truly matter to me. And if that's not a recipe for happy living, then I don't know what is. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting

and helpful. And if you did, and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show,

then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in, so instead I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my one-on-one coaching service. So the long story short here is this is the personal coaching service that I wish I had when I started in the gym many years ago. Every diet and training program that we create for clients is 100%

custom. We provide daily workout logs and do weekly accountability calls. Our clients get priority email service and discounts on supplements, and the list goes on and on. Furthermore, my team and I have also worked with hundreds of people of all ages, circumstances, and needs and goals. So no matter how tricky you might think your situation is, I promise you we can figure out how to get you results. If I have piqued your interest and you want to learn more, then head on over to www.muscleforlife.com forward slash coaching and schedule your free consultation call now. I'll tell you, there's usually a wait list and new slots fill up very quickly. So if you're interested at all, don't wait.

Go schedule your call now.