Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Motivation Monday: The #1 Unspoken Rule of Success

Episode Date: July 2, 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: https://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 fitness book for men, bigger,, Leaner, Stronger. Now, this book has sold over 350,000 copies in the last several years and helped thousands and thousands of guys build their best bodies ever, which is why it currently has over 3,100 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average. So if you want to know the biggest lies and myths that are keeping you from achieving the lean, muscular, strong, and healthy body that you truly desire, and if you want to learn the simple science of building the ultimate male body, then you want to read Bigger, Leaner,

Stronger, which you can find on all major online retailers like Amazon, Audible, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. Now, speaking of Audible, I should also mention that you can get the audiobook 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account, which I highly recommend that you do if you're not currently listening to audiobooks. I love them myself because they let me make the time that I spend doing stuff like commuting, prepping food, walking my dog, and so forth, so much more valuable and productive. So if you want to take Audible up on this offer and get my book for free, then simply go to www.bitly.com slash free BLS.

And that will take you to Audible. And then you just click the sign up today and save button, create your account. And voila, you get to listen to Bigger, Leaner, Stronger for free. All righty. That is enough shameless plugging for now, at least. Let's get to the show. Good morning. Mike Matthews here from Muscle for Life and

Legion Athletics. And it is Monday, which means it's time for the Motivation Monday episode of the podcast. Sorry, I missed last week. Again, like I said previously, I was traveling and schedule was a bit random. Locations were a bit random, but I'm home now back on track. So I'll get back onto my weekly podcast grind. All right. So let's start this week with a quote. As always, this quote comes from Ray Dalio once again, because he said a lot of neat things in his book Principles, which once again, I'm going to recommend, but here's today's quote from Ray. There's nothing you can't accomplish if you think creatively and have the character to do the difficult things. And that's a perfect introduction to today's episode and what

I want to talk about because I've asked a lot of very successful people that I've met throughout my life how they did it. Some of them regaled me with stories about their brilliant strategic moves and uncanny intuitions and superhuman endurance and so on. But the truly great ones, especially the people that I've known that have had repeated successes, not one hit wonders, not people who just were at the right place at the right time and who simply caught a big wave of people who achieved great things multiple times and usually in multiple different arenas, building different companies, creating different products and so forth. These people often had a much simpler and deeper explanation for why they were doing so

well. They didn't attribute their success to just hard work like you might expect. Yes, of course, it takes hard work, but I think we know that hard work alone doesn't guarantee anything. We can look around us in every direction and find people that work plenty hard, but don't have that much to show for it. These people didn't chalk their success up to extraordinary luck either. These people didn't chalk their success up to extraordinary luck either. Sure, there often was serendipity, but there were also plenty of difficulties and misfortunes and often great misfortunes that almost took them down. So if it's not hard work or luck, what is it?

Well, these people said that there was one primary factor that made all the difference in their journeys. And it's something that a guy named Albert E.N. Gray actually wrote about decades ago in an essay called The Common Denominator of Success. I believe that's the name of it. You can Google it to check it out. But it's simply this. It is the habit of doing the things that other people simply don't want to do. You know, the things that most of us instinctively dislike that go against our natural preferences and our natural prejudices, the hard things, the uncomfortable things, the complicated things, the unexciting things, the exhausting things. These very successful people that I've known, they did these things.

They did them all. They did them every day. They did them every week, every month, every year without fail. And in many cases, they didn't necessarily learn to like these things. They just had a strong enough purpose to ignore their feelings and do them anyway. These people just cared more about achieving satisfactory results than doing things they innately liked to do. And in the end, producing desirable outcomes and fulfilling their purposes, their desires, their intentions made it all worthwhile. Now, unsuccessful people have that backward. They care more about the experience of doing things they like than the results those things produce. These people choose the comfort of mediocrity over the struggles of greatness. It doesn't have to be like this though. Every one of

us can change our behaviors and thereby our habits. Every one of us can change our behaviors and thereby our habits. Every one of us can find something that matters to us enough, can find a purpose that is strong enough to override our self-defeating natural inclinations, which seem to be hardwired into us. It is very normal to want to be complacent. It doesn't mean we have to be complacent, but we all have that devil on our shoulders whispering to us every day. 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 MuscleForLifeFitness, Twitter at MuscleForLife, and Facebook at MuscleForLifeFitness. If you haven't read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, I highly recommend you read it

because it's a book about just that, about the internal resistances that us people trying to do things struggle with and how to win that war. And a big part of that is something that every one of us can do. And that is to simply learn to do the things that failures don't like to do. Because once we can do that, we can do a lot more than build a great body. We can build a great life as well. One of the reasons I wanted to share this message is because it accounts for a lot of my own success as a writer and entrepreneur. My life is far less glorious than you might think if all you heard were big numbers. If all you heard were Legion doing millions of dollars of sales per year and selling hundreds of thousands of books per year and getting millions of visits to the

websites per year and so forth. Yeah, that all sounds good and it is good. And yes, it is satisfying. But what does it take to create all that though? And what does it take to continue to create that and continue to keep things going in the right direction? Well, part of it is doing a lot of work that many people don't want to do. I was reading an article in, I think it was Inc or Entrepreneur, one of these magazines. And they were talking about a survey that was done with everyday people as to their opinions on CEOs in particular. And what they found is that many normal everyday people thought that CEOs don't really do anything, that they just kind of sit around and shop for new things online and tell their assistants to do personal errands for them. And just kick their feet up, have a good time, make 500 times as much money as the average

lower echelon worker in their business, head out early most days to the country club to hang out with other rich white people and so on. And the reality is so, so different. Even in the corporate world, it is not like that. Corporate CEOs are some of the hardest working people that you'd ever wanna meet and also have to carry tremendous amounts of responsibility and play some pretty high stakes games that are very unforgiving. If you mess up badly enough

in that world, you may not get a job again for a very long time. And as far as small businesses go, which I guess, technically speaking, I think a small business is what, under 50 million in revenue. It might actually be higher now, but as far as everyday, you know, more entrepreneurial type of businesses go, the CEO position is not one to envy unless you like working 70 or 80 plus hour weeks and like constantly running around putting out fires and constantly feeling behind trying to catch up with all the things that need to get done because that's the reality, even in decently organized and decently run businesses. And as a small business owner, if you are ever going to have a business that can not necessarily grow, just run without your constant attention, that's the first big

milestone. Having a business that won't fall apart without your constant attention, that's milestone one. Having a business that can grow and do well and continue to do better without your constant attention, that's like rarefied air. That's reaching the summit. And that requires a huge amount of work, not just hard work, but smart work, building systems in your businesses. It's laid out nicely in a book actually called The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, been around for a long time. And I completely agree with the overall message of that book is if you want a business that can run really well, you have to build extraordinary systems that ordinary people can run. You don't want it to be the other way around. Many businesses

have ordinary systems or worse, in some cases, no real systems even codified and rely on extraordinary people to keep the show on the road. And that of course is a risky place to be because what if you lose one of these key people or even worse, what if you lose two or three or all of them? The business can literally evaporate overnight. So my point with all of this isn't that you should feel bad for me and I'm not complaining. I'm just relating my own experiences and sharing how much of my own success I attribute to simply doing stuff that isn't all that interesting to me, but that I'm willing to do to achieve the bigger goals. You know, truth be told, building a business isn't that interesting to me, but that I'm willing to do to achieve the bigger goals. Truth be told, building a business

isn't that interesting to me. It's not something that I feel all that drawn to personally. What I most like to do is research, write, and record podcasts and videos. I like to create content. I like to research and create content. And beyond that, I also really enjoy and am interested in marketing and persuasion. The psychology of it is just very interesting to me and the application of it is fun, but that's about it. Everything else that I do is in service of a greater purpose than my own desires and my feelings. And I really don't think that's going to change. And I'm okay with that. We can liken it to the gym, right? Some of our workouts, some of the stuff that we do in the gym, not very enjoyable, but we do it

anyway because we are more interested in what we get out of it in the long run, in the bigger picture than how it makes us feel in the moment. And you can apply that lesson really to any activity or any endeavor in life. I think really any area of life. I really do believe that if you want extraordinary results in anything that you are putting your time and attention into, a large part of that is going to be simply forcing yourself to do things that you don't really want to do, but that move the needle, that really get you closer to your goal. And of course, you know, habit formation being what it is, the more you do these things, the easier it is to continue doing them. You have less and less resistance. There's no question that you're going to wake up and go to the gym every day.

There's no question you're going to put in that work, whatever it is, but you may never really come to enjoy the experience of doing it in the way that most of us think of enjoyment, at least in the more hedonistic comforting sense of enjoyment that we might experience during activities that are very inherently enjoyable, like eating really good food or having really good sex or watching a really good movie or whatever. And just know that that is totally normal. It doesn't indicate that you are not worthy of the goal or that you are never going to get there or you're not good enough for anything else. Everybody that has achieved whatever it is you're trying to achieve

has gone through the exact same experience and they simply didn't give up. They just kept on going despite how much unpalatable work they had to do. 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 fitness book for men, bigger, leaner, stronger. Now this book has sold over 350,000 copies in the last several years and helped thousands and thousands of guys build their best bodies ever, which is why it currently has over 3,100 reviews on Amazon with a four and a half star average. So if you want to know the biggest lies and myths that are keeping you from achieving the lean, muscular, strong, and healthy body that you truly desire, and if you want to learn the simple science of building the ultimate male body, then you want to read Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, which you can find on all major online retailers like Amazon, Audible, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. Now, speaking of Audible, I should also mention that you can get the audiobook 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account, which I highly recommend that you do if you're not currently listening to audiobooks. I love them myself because they

let me make the time that I spend doing stuff like commuting, prepping food, walking my dog, and so forth so much more valuable and productive. So if you want to take Audible up on this offer and get my book for free, then simply go to www.bitly.com slash free BLS. And that will take you to Audible. And then you just click the sign up today and save button, create your account and voila, you get to listen to Bigger, Leaner, Stronger for free.