Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Strauss Zelnick on Becoming Ageless, Dauntless, and Limitless

Episode Date: August 17, 2018

Today’s guest is Strauss Zelnick, who’s known in the Fortune 500 circles as the “world’s fittest CEO.” At 61 years old, Strauss maintains a two-a-day workout schedule while running the media juggernaut Take-Two Interactive, which has given us blockbuster video game franchises like Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and NBA 2K, as well as his private equity firm, Zelnick Media Capital, which has about $12 billion in assets. Oh and Strauss also has managed to do all of that while also being a husband to his wife of nearly 30 years and father to his three children, which is no small feat, either. As you can tell, I’m kind of a fan of Strauss’. You just don’t get to meet people like him very often. So, in this interview, Strauss talks about his upcoming book called Becoming Ageless, which is his personal blueprint for looking and feeling young and vibrant at any age, as well as his thoughts on a number of topics, including work-life balance, goal setting and achievement, key life lessons learned, and more. I hope you enjoy it. 5:15 - Why did you decide to write "Becoming Ageless"? 8:14 - What are the biggest lessons you've learned?  11:37 - Have you found that recovery isn't as good as you get older? 13:26 - Do genetics play a role? 15:21 - What about work life balance? How do you keep it all together and be successful? 17:40 - Start by knowing what you want. 20:47 - How important is it to look towards the future? How do you prioritize? 23:26 - What hard choices have you had to make? Any mistakes? 26:22 - Do you drink alcohol? 29:24 - What does your doctor say you should cut out of your diet? 30:24 - Have you developed any rules or principles that you live by? 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/

Knowing you want is saying, look, I think I want to change my life. And then my advice is start very slowly. Be kind and gentle with yourself. Take baby steps. Ease your body and mind into it. And over some long period of time, you can begin to create new habits. And those new habits will lead to good results. Hey, Mike here from Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics, and welcome to another episode of the Muscle for Life podcast. This time around, I interview Strauss Zelnick, who is known in the Fortune 500 circles as the world's fittest CEO,

because at 61 years old, Strauss maintains a two-a-day workout schedule while also running the media juggernaut Take-Two Interactive, which has given us blockbuster video game franchises like Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and NBA 2K, as well as running his private equity firm, Zelnick Media Capital, which has about $12 billion in assets. Oh, and Strauss has also managed to do all of that while also being a husband to his wife of nearly 30 years and father to his three children, which also is no small feat. So as you can tell, I'm kind of a fan of Strauss's. You don't get to meet people like him very often. And how he met is very serendipitous. He read my book, Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, liked it, emailed in just saying, hey, I liked your book.

I'm asking if I would get on a Skype call with him. I get a lot of requests like that every week. And if I said yes to all of them, I would just be sitting on Skype all day, which would actually be kind of fun, but then none of the hard work would get done. But in this case, for some reason, I thought I would just Google his name to see who he is and quickly learned, oh, wow, this is an interesting dude. So that's how we met. And he has a book that is coming out in October or November. He talks about it in the podcast called Becoming Ageless. So I got him on the show to talk about the book, which is his personal blueprint for looking and feeling

young and vibrant at any age. And we also, though, get into his thoughts on a number of other things that I personally just wanted to ask him about, like work-life balance, goal setting and achievement, some of the key life lessons that he has learned, and more. life lessons that he has learned, and more. 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 500,000 copies in the last six years and helped thousands of guys build their best bodies ever, which is why it has over 3,300 reviews on Amazon.com 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, 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 Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. Now, I should also mention that you can get the audiobook 100% free when you sign up for an Audible account, which I highly recommend you do if you are not currently listening to audiobooks. I myself love them because they let me make the time that I spend doing things like commuting, prepping food, walking my dog and so forth,

more valuable and productive. So if you want to take Audible up on this offer and get my audiobook for free, simply go to www.biggerleanerstronger.com slash audiobook and you will be forwarded to Audible and then just click the sign up today and save button, create your account and voila, you get to listen to Bigger, Leaner, Stronger for free. Hey Strauss, thanks for coming on the show. I'm excited to have you. You are a different change of pace for the normal guests that I have, which is exciting because I mean, this is kind of selfish and personal because I myself have questions that I would love to, that I want to ask you. But I also know that a lot of my listeners who are also into not just fitness, but self-development, self-improvement, just success,

you know, inside and outside of the gym, they're into that stuff as well. And so I think this is going to be a great conversation. Well, thanks for having me. Yeah. So first I want to start with this book. So you have a new book that's coming out soon. Can you quickly tell us about it? And I have some questions for you regarding even like specifically, why did you decide to write this book versus something related to business or investing? Well, first of all, thanks for the plug up front.

That's always appreciated. The name of the book is becoming ageless the four secrets to looking and feeling younger than ever and the the premise is that you can be your best self at any age and that using age as a limitation whether you're young or old is unnecessary and and probably stands in the way of success and achievement. Age is one of those things we can't do anything about like our eye color. And so to focus on it as opposed to focusing on the choices and actions that you can make and take seems to me not to make all that much sense.

The reason I decided to write this book is that fitness is my avocation. It's not my vocation. And in the past decades, I've made a point of focusing more and more on health and wellness. And a number of people have asked me what my secret is and how I'm able to train competitively with people who are less than half my age, how I'm able to be the same weight I was an awfully long time ago. I thought I'd share those ideas in terms of why this as opposed to a self-help business book. I actually did write a book. My first book is about success in life and in business. That was self-published, so it's not readily available. So I think I ticked that one off the list and moved on to this. Okay. I didn't know that you had a book

previously. I guess that's why, because when I'd search on Amazon, this is the only one that came up is the one that you have coming up. You can find it, but you got to look long and hard. And so what are some of the, because this is something that I get asked about a lot from people who I would say mostly guys and gals, it starts in the mid thirties. And then it goes from there where I get asked it more frequently as you get in with people in their 40s, 50s and beyond where, yeah, they are afraid that it's too late, right? It's too late to gain muscle. It's too late to lose fat. It's too late to be healthy, to have a good hormone profile and blah, blah, blah.

And of course, I mean, obviously the book is, this is your, and I understand because this is how I've gone about writing my stuff, which is you're sharing your blueprint, so to speak. And obviously it's not all just anecdotal. I'm sure there's plenty of scientific evidence for the approaches that you are sharing, but it's at bottom, it's saying, Hey, look, this is where I'm at. This is what I've been able to do. And I want to share with you the biggest lessons that I've learned, learned along the way. What are some of those lessons

that, uh, and, and also I'm curious, like, so you, you, you said that fitness health, putting fitness has become more important to you as you have gotten older. Um, how does that fit into the story as well? Well, the, the, the story does revolve initially around the notion of being one's best self. And at first I, I think I looked at that through the lens of business success and personal success. And more recently, I think I've begun to pay attention to what you do with your body and what you put into your body. To your point about, is it too late? It's a fair question. And the answer is, well, it's too late to make an overnight success. But in fairness, all overnight successes are other people's successes. Nothing happens overnight.

If you are heavier than you'd like to be, if you are in shape that doesn't reflect what you want, that probably didn't occur overnight. And turning it around, while eminently possible, won't occur overnight either. The research says that you can get fit at any age. The research says that you can get fit at any age. In fact, there's some remarkable research about what happens to you as you age. And conventional wisdom was a man's muscularity peaks at about 25 and it's just downhill from there. Well, I suspect the reason that that was conventional wisdom is that the average person was smoking not eating well and not exercising and then indeed that is what will occur it turns out that if you eat a moderate diet you exercise regularly and relatively intensely if you don't carry extra weight then you

can be a middle-aged person until pretty close to the bitter end. Naturally, the end does come for all of us. And the book does say becoming ageless. It doesn't say being ageless. Immortal is unfortunate on the cards yet. Sadly, that is not the worst part about being immortal, I suspect, is you'd probably get to live everything after 90 in a way that you'd rather not be on the face of the earth. That's true. Yeah. I mean, so it's at that point, right? That getting old is optional. Yeah. The days go by, the years go by, but getting old is optional. And yes, there's quite a bit of research. And then I'm doing like an overhaul on my books for men and

women, Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, Thinner, Leaner, Stronger. And I'm not gearing them toward this topic per se, but in the end of the book, when the frequently asked questions, I'm expanding a little bit on this because this is a frequently asked question and citing some research that shows that, for example, there's one study that was conducted with a middle-aged, so it was guys in their forties and then college age guys following the same type of resistance training program, eating more or less the same type of resistance training program, eating more or less the same type of diet. And the long story short is the middle-aged guys over 10 or 12 weeks did just as well as the college-age guys in terms of muscle and strength gain. And yeah, your recovery is... And have you noticed that, that your recovery... And that's

really what we see in the literature is that you can recover. You can abuse your body a bit more when you're younger. You can probably get away with intense weightlifting six or seven days a week, even, and maybe being able to go for months before you even have to deload. And as you get older, eh, not so much, but you still can train hard. You just have to be a bit more cognizant of recovery. Is that something that squares up with your experience? It actually has, hasn't. And if I have, uh, if I have any, anything in my genetic makeup that sets me up well for lots of exercise, it seems that I have really good recovery. So I, I think the bottom line though, is you have to listen to your body. And I do listen to my body. I, um, I, I do a pretty strong endurance

and I seemed to have the ability to train quite a bit and bounce back, bounce back. Well, I have plenty of things that, you know, plenty of other parts of me that aren't so well disposed. But recovery comes relatively easily to me. It has lately in about the last four or five years, I've insisted that I take one rest day a week. insisted that I take one rest day a week. I didn't use to do that because I actually love exercise and because I'm a relatively focused and driven person. I do now take one rest day a week. It's actually often challenging for me. Sometimes I feel as though I need it, but I do take it. There are times when I do feel overtrained. For example, if I'm on a bike trip and I've gone to the gym and lifted weights, or if I'm involved with our morning program activities here in New York and I'm

lifting weights and maybe I'm running or cycling and I have taken off two, three days in a row when my body clearly needed it. So I think, I think everyone is different with regard to recovery. You have to listen to your body. Yeah. Yeah, I absolutely agree. And whether it's, uh, it could be something as simple as genetics. Um, I don't know if you've ever done any sort of DNA tests, but there are certain, um, genetic markers where that like they've now associated with, uh, improved recovery, but like I did, um, I forget the name of the company DNA fit. I don't even know if they're around anymore. Maybe my fitness gene. I did my fitness gene. Did you find something along those lines that. Yeah, it seemed to, I mean, to, to the extent these are reliable tests and I believe they are, but you know, I w I was woefully, uh,

inadequate on all the elite genes for fitness with the exception of an elite gene for recovery. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that was kind of my story. I had a recovery gene and a gene that was associated with high testosterone, but I had no genetic advantages for, for weightlifting, uh, at all. Like I, my body is an endurance body. I was not built to be a strength athlete, for example. Right. I think I had one other gene that indicated I had a fast metabolism, but that didn't come as a huge surprise yeah and you know some of this stuff is speculatory um the in terms of because because this is such a new area of research where um there's there's there's what they walk a line between marketing and hard

science and so some stuff is like well we think maybe this is associated or it seems to be. But anyways, it's interesting for anybody out there. If you're curious, I wouldn't take it as dogma, especially when it comes to like specific, oh, your genes say you should be eating a moderate carb diet, not a high carb diet, stuff like that. Your genes say you should train in a high rep range, not a low rep range. I wouldn't put that much faith in it, but it is interesting. I agree. Yeah. Uh, so shifting, shifting gears from, from fitness to, well, I guess it just,

it's just kind of the bigger picture is something I'm often asked about. Something I want to ask you about, which is work-life balance, right lot of people, especially people who want to be successful in their work and their careers, see that I've achieved some measure of success and ask me about that. How do you keep it all together? What's your take on this? What has allowed you to become not only incredibly successful in your work, but also not just stay in good shape, but stay married and raise a family. I mean, that is to me, I mean, I appreciate that having two kids and having a marriage. And I'm just curious as to your thoughts. Well, it's a great question. And of course, in these situations, it's tempting to say, yes, I am. That's exactly right.

It all looks just as shiny as it seems. The truth is we all have to make meaningful trade-offs. And when I was early in my career, building a business, had little kids at home, I don't think my wife or even I would have described my day as a balanced day. I had to make hard choices. There are times when I had work to do that, you know, I had to put to the side to be there for the family. And there were times and there were family obligations I put to the side in order to pursue my work. And I, I shoehorned

fitness in there. So when I, when I talk to people who are at that stage of their lives and I'm, I'm older now, my kids are, are out of the house. I say, look, this some sort of Coca-Cola commercial view of life doesn't really exist. The notion of having it all is a fantasy and you have to choose. My friend, Kevin Ryan, feels like you can have three priorities in your life. I stretch it to four. Mine are my family and friends, my work, my fitness, and my mentoring and charitable activities. And that means there are a lot of things that I like and I like to do that just don't make it onto the top four priorities. I had to choose though. And if I had 10 priorities, I think I'd do a bad job at all of them. So I don't think I want to hold myself out as someone who has incredibly balanced life.

I think people who know me would find that amusing at best. I do think that I'm pretty good about knowing what I want. And one of the things that I encourage people to do in my coaching sessions and in this book is start by knowing what you want. is start by knowing what you want. You know, it's a lot of people will be, you know, you're sitting at home, you're watching television, a commercial for some exercise equipment,

some supplement comes on and your immediate take is, yes, you know, I need a quick fix. I'll buy that thing and I'll get a quick fix and I'll lose 25 pounds and I'll get active and more healthy. That's not knowing what you want. That's engaging in fantasy. Knowing what you want is saying, look, I think I want to change my life. And then my advice is start very slowly,

be kind and gentle with yourself. Take baby steps, ease your body and mind into it. And over some long period of time, you can begin to create new habits and those new habits will lead to good results. Yeah. I mean, that's an important point. I feel like I've come across some research on this in researching for this new book that I have coming out, but basically it's actually fairly rare for people to find people who are thinking much about the future in any capacity. I mean, thinking even not just a month ahead, but a year ahead or three years or five years ahead of time. And I was just having a talk about this with someone who is at a point in their life now where they're about my age, 31 or two or something, and not quite where he thought he was going to be. And I was trying to explain to him, at least from

my limited experience, it seems like, and we see this in the physical world as well, where, I mean, look at how much effort it takes to maintain a possession. If we don't constantly pour effort and energy and time into things, they all fall apart. And eventually everything does fall apart and goes away. And I found that to be true in life as well. If you're not every day envisioning a future, working toward it, knowing exactly what you're doing, whether it's, it doesn't have to be necessarily work. I mean, if you're spending time with your family, hopefully it's toward a future, you're trying to create something more than what is currently there. And if you're not, things basically are just getting worse. And so, you know, knowing what you want, that just,

that's just immediately comes to my mind is, is really, I think not just in the immediate of, like you said, you're sitting on the couch, you look down, you look at your stomach and you're like, oh, gross. You look up and you see an ad for, I don't know, an ab machine or something. And you're like, yes, I want abs. But when I think of like, what's the bigger picture? Because that's not very motivating. It maybe motivates you to buy the thing and maybe that's enough of a dopamine hit to that's it. You never even use the thing. You know what I mean?

No, they mostly stay in the box. Yeah, exactly. But really giving thought as to the bigger picture, what do you really want? Is that something that I'm assuming you being just in your nature, that's how you operate or am I wrong? No, that is how you operate or am I wrong? No, that is how I operate. And like you, I have a healthy awareness that time is passing, a willingness to believe that there is an arc of life, beginning, middle, and end, and to try to optimize within that. So most people look at mortality, if they're honest about it, and their view will be, I know you, Mike, are going to die. But I, on the other hand,

I'm going to live forever. I don't engage in that fantasy. And I never did. And even when I was young, I thought, okay, so what is life going to look like at 30, 40, 50, 60? I'm 61 now. And I asked myself, okay, what does life look like with luck at 70 or 80 or beyond? What does that look like professionally? Personally, where will I be located? What does it look like from a fitness point of view as well? And knowing that, owning that we have a limited amount of time on the planet allows you to make choices that optimize the time that you have. And everyone makes individual choices.

My wife and I were talking about this a couple days ago. And we don't always agree on everything. But we did agree that I don't have a bucket list because if there's something that I think I want to do or should do, I set out to do it. And that isn't always admirable. And I hope I don't do it in a selfish way. I don't believe that I do. But if something is a priority to me, I make it a priority and I try my hardest to act against it.

And I'm okay with looking at something and saying, yeah, that could be great for someone, but it's not a priority. For example, I've always talked about learning, not talked about, I've thought about learning Italian. I love the language. I love Italy, like Italian food. Yeah, well, guess what about, I've thought about learning Italian. I love the language. I love Italy. I like Italian food. Yeah, well, guess what? I haven't gone to learn Italian.

When I worked at a German company, I did learn German, but I haven't learned Italian. I'm okay with that. I own it. And I try really hard not to engage in that fantasy that, well, wait, maybe next week, maybe next week, I'll find Italian lessons here in New York and I'll fit them into my schedule. Instead, I look at it and say, what is important to me? Let me do that thing. And that's worked out well for me because while I don't imagine I have the life too many other people would want,

I pretty much do have the life I set out to have when I was much younger. Of course, nothing's worked out perfectly, plenty of ups and downs. But the general tenor of my life, I'm happily married, I have three kids, I live in a part of the world I want to live in, I get to do what I love every day, and I'm in shape. These are things that I did set out to do. And along the way, I had to make hard choices, very hard choices to pursue the things that were meaningful to me. What are some of those hard choices that you had to make? And were there any kind of key inflection points along the way where you feel like you made mistakes that you would be willing to share that you learned important lessons from? Well, I make mistakes every day.

I, like everyone, I distinguish between a mistake and failure. Mistakes are are things that occur or you do, and hopefully they can be corrected with words or actions pretty quickly and we can learn from them. Failures, in my opinion, are a collection of mistakes that we didn't acknowledge or weren't aware of or or didn't address in a timely timely manner and like a stack of dominoes, they come crashing down. I haven't had too many big failures. I've had a few. They mostly involved business situations where I kicked the can down the road and things escalated and I ultimately ended up with a result I really didn't like. Personally, I've made numerous mistakes. I guess I'd probably had to enumerate them. They'd all have to do with how I raised my kids and they'd probably agree. But I think they'd also agree that I did the very best that I could and understand that we're all

imperfect. So in terms of inflection points, oh, I don't know. My first inflection point about getting fit was I was in grad school and hanging out with some friends and a buddy of mine. I'd always been thin. I had never really been actively in fitness, although I ran a bit and I lifted weights a little bit, played squash, but not actively. And we were hanging around drinking beers. And he said to me, Stratus, you have a paunch.

And I was like, I don't have a paunch. I'm skinny. That's not even possible. And he said, me, Stratus, you have a paunch. And I was like, I don't have a paunch. I'm skinny. That's not even possible. And he said, well, look down. I looked down. I was like, wow, he's right. The next day, I went over to the new gym at my school and I started a pretty rigorous training program.

But to be clear, I had the sense to start slowly. I remember my first training program was a 20-minute circuit, one set of 10 or 12 reps. And the only thing that kept me going was thinking about how good the shower would feel when I was done. I'm sure I didn't even work up a sweat initially. But I did do that, and I knew not to add more difficulty or more intensity until I got used to it. I don't know how I knew that, but I knew that. So that was inflection point one. And then there have been numerous ones along the way. I guess the other thing that comes to mind is when I decided to stop drinking. And I don't have any problem with moderate consumption of alcohol, but my

consumption was too frequent and too immoderate to fit in line with the things I wanted. And I had to reflect on, you know, what kind of life do I want? I finally had to decide, well, which is it? Are you going to be the guy who has a couple of scotches a night? Or are you going to be the guy who's in the gym at 6 a.m.? And I decided to be the guy who's in the gym at 6 a.m. Interesting. And so you just stopped drinking altogether.

Like you don't drink socially anymore. You don't drink at all. Yeah, I don't. And, and again, this is not by way of proselytizing. Sure. Sure. You know, I do, I, you know, I'm also, you know, very much of the belief that refined carbohydrates and sugar are both really bad for you. All doctors would agree. And while I've, I've definitely reduced them in my diet, I can easily be found eating some chocolate or having dessert. You know, not all the time and not in huge quantity. But we all have to make choices. It just happens that the choice with regard to alcohol, alcohol was good for me, but I haven't yet given up layer cake. And the good news is, I mean, I can I can actually to the alcohol thing. I don't drink. I've never even been drunk, which is, I guess, strange by at least normal standards. I've had a few drinks at like a friend's wedding and whatever. But on the sugar side of things, the good news is, even if you were to completely abstain, what would you really be gaining from that? Given all your other habits, it would be so negligible.

It would probably be nothing, honestly. Well, my doctor, Peter Attia, would not agree with that. And there is a lot of evidence that affecting your insulin response is really meaningful in terms of health and longevity. Um, I have, uh, I have hereditarily high cholesterol, so I have to particularly pay attention. But if, if he could, if he could wave a magic wand and get me to abstain from refined carbohydrates and sugar entirely, he would, I think he too recognizes, look, I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't stay up late. I exercise a lot. I'm not overweight. And I eat by all standards, a rather healthy, balanced diet. I also eat some bread now and then and eat some dessert now and then, and sometimes more than now and then. And we're all

human and we have to decide how we want to live. I know a couple of people who, who, who write, who insist on having, you know, an incredibly disciplined diet. My experience of those people is diet just does food doesn't really resonate for them, but I'm not one of those people. And I suspect there are other areas of their life that maybe aren't optimal, that those areas do resonate. We all have to make our own choices. But if your choice is, look, look you know you take that to mean

yeah i'm going to smoke a pack of cigarettes today i'm going to carry around 50 pounds extra i'm not going to go to the doctor i'm not going to take my medication i'm not going to get exercise and you think something good will come from that now you're engaging in a fantasy agreed and so that's interesting with your doctor so he would prefer that even if it were once a week he would say nope make that zero times a even if it were once a week, he would say, nope, make that zero times a week. If he could have his way, he would say, if you could do it and it wouldn't make you insane, please do it.

But he cares about me and he knows that he wouldn't want me to be insane. But I think my point is that what he would say is, look, and I'm sorry to quote him when he's not here, but he'd say, look, you know, the three things you should cut out of your diet are refined carbs, sugar, and alcohol, period, full stop. That said, I've had dinner with the man and he has a glass of red wine. None of that's 10, but he has one. I've seen him eat dessert and I've seen him eat a piece of bread and he's in incredible shape and he's very focused on nutrition and longevity. He too understands that, you round and full, or at least one hopes it is. And we have to make trade-offs and what is the purpose of living longer and living in a

healthy way, if not to enjoy your life? Yeah. I think that's well said. That makes perfect sense. And if we were robots, then we would all be doing things, at least some things a little bit differently. If we were all just robots optimizing, if life was just a bunch of mathematical equations that you optimize for, uh, then sure. But unfortunately that's, that's not the case for anybody. Yeah. And then that's a good thing.

So last question for you. So then we have a few more minutes, then you got to run. Have you developed any kind of, I think of Ray Dalio because of his book principles came out, right? So any like hard and fast rules or principles that you live by? And that could be in any area of your life. Just, yeah, I'm just curious. Well, we already talked about one, the primary principle, which is know what you want. And that said, without judgment, know what you want, know what is right for your life, and then own that and go for that. And I'd say probably that's the only rule, if there is a rule.

And I think the rest is exactly what you'd expect. I aspire to be a decent person who tries to do the next right thing, who owns my mistakes, who acts with integrity and treats people with kindness. And, you know, most of the time I would say that describes me and not all of the time. And I'm not proud of my lapses and I keep trying to do better. But I don't think that's a rule book. I think that's what we were all taught in Sunday school. And I like to say, choices matter. Your choices really matter. It's not a great idea to meander through life, hoping that good things will happen

to you. That's magical thinking. It's better to say, this is what I really want, and I'm going to aim towards it. And when I started my business, it was an incredibly risky thing to do. I knew very much what we were trying to build. There were absolutely no guarantees of success. In fact, the odds of failure were great. And I looked at it and said, I know the odds of failure are great. I know success is in no way guaranteed. But when I'm 75 or 80 years old and the end of my career, how will I feel if I don't take this chance? And I recognized I would feel no matter how successful I were as a professional manager working for other people, I would have felt as though I had left a stone unturned. And for better or for worse in my life, I have left no stone unturned.

That does not imply it's all worked out as planned. It hasn't. And it doesn't imply that those choices mean that I'll have success at anything I do, whether that's fitness or diet or a marriage or my relationship with my kids or business. There are no guarantees. But what I advocate, and I guess not at all a rule, just an encouragement, is think about what life looks like. Paint your own watercolor of your life in, not tomorrow, but in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, and move in service of that vision. And it's yours. So anytime you want to change it or revise it

or you feel like things have changed, you should feel free to do that. But whether you believe it or not or like it or not, time will pass and this too will come to an end. And how do you want to spend this limited time we have here? Personally, professionally, spiritually, make choices that are in service of your goals. I think that leads to not a perfect life, but an optimal life.

I love it. Very inspiring. I agree wholeheartedly. Yeah, it's affirming. I look to someone with you with honestly a lot of admiration and respect because of just who you are and what you've done and how you go about things and how you think about things. So yes, it's very cool. That type of stuff resonates with me deeply. So that's great. And thank you for sharing everything that you've shared in this interview. And the book is becoming ageless, right? And it comes out in October, right? September 4th. September. Okay, good. So everybody- And you can order it now. You can order it now on Amazon, just saying.

And right back at you, I admire you greatly. You motivated me. You know how I met you? I just reached out over the transom having read your book and being incredibly impressed and motivated. And you are everything you seem to be when you meet in person and then some. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that. And again, thanks for taking the time. Really do appreciate it. And we will talk soon. Pleasure. Thanks so much. 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. Oh, and before you leave, let me quickly tell you about one other

product of mine that I think you might like. Specifically, my fitness book for men, Bigger, Leaner, Stronger. Now this book has sold over 500,000 copies in the last six years and helped thousands of guys build their best bodies ever, which is why it has over 3,300 reviews on amazon.com 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 Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. Now, I should also mention that you can get the audiobook

100% free when you sign up for an Audible account, which I highly recommend you do if you are not currently listening to audiobooks. I myself love them because they let me make the time that I spend doing things like commuting, prepping food, walking my dog, and so forth more valuable and productive. So if you want to take Audible up on this offer and get my audiobook for free, simply go to www.biggerleanerstronger.com slash audio book, and you will be forwarded to audible and then just click the sign up today and save button, create your account and voila, you get to listen to bigger, leaner, stronger for free.