Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Why Work-Life Balance Is BS, 3 Books Everyone Should Read, My Daily Routine, and More...

Episode Date: February 16, 2018

If you’ve ever wondered what a day in the shoes of yours truly is like, and how I generally think about and approach my work and life on the whole...then you’re in for a serious disappointment because it’s probably not nearly as glamorous as you might think. Seriously though, this episode is actually an interview that I did with Dan Bradbury for his podcast, which is called The Business Growth Podcast, and I thought you all might find it interesting, so here it is. In this interview, Dan and I talk about some topics that are more important than ever right now, including what gets in the way of us realizing our full potentials, what my daily routine looks like, what books have most helped me in my career, what are my most important pieces of advice for people who want to grow their businesses, and more. Check it out and let me know what you think! 3:54 - How do you balance multiple businesses and family? 9:31 - What do you think gets in the way of people achieving their full potential? 18:39- What is driving your businesses rapid growth? 34:00 - What is your daily routine? 38:54 - What’s your opinion on human growth hormone spikes after heat exposure? 52:02 - What are the top three books that have had the greatest impact in your life? 65:34 - What’s the most important piece of advice you have for people who want to grow their businesses? 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/

put in the time, suffer through whatever it is that you have to suffer through, then who knows what you're capable of. Hey everybody, Mike here back with another episode of the Muscle for Life podcast. And if you've ever wondered what a day in the shoes of yours truly is really like, and if you ever wondered how I generally think about and approach my work and life and my priorities on the whole, then I think you're in for a serious disappointment because it's probably not nearly as glamorous or insightful as you might think. Seriously though, this episode is actually an interview

that I did with a guy named Dan Bradbury for his podcast, which is called the Business Growth Podcast. And I actually thought that you all might find it interesting. So here it is. And in this interview, Dan and I talk about various things, including what really gets in the way of us realizing our full potentials as individuals, what my daily routine looks like these days, what books have most helped me in my career and helped me build businesses, what are my most important pieces of advice for people who want to grow their businesses, and more. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So

instead, I'm just going to quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my 100% natural greens supplement Genesis. Now Genesis is a very unique combination of greens, superfoods, adaptogens, herbs, and other phytonutrients that have been proven to increase immunity, heart and circulatory health, energy levels, libido, mood, and more. Genesis is also naturally sweetened in flavors and contains no artificial food dyes, fillers, or other unnecessary junk. And all that is why it has over 200 views on Amazon with a four star average and another 150 plus on my website also with a four star average. So if you want to be healthier, feel better, train harder, and increase your immunity and

longevity, then you want to head over to www.legionathletics.com and pick up a bottle of Genesis today. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code podcast at checkout and you will save 10% on your entire order. And lastly, you should also know that I have a very simple 100% money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. You don't have to return the products. You don't have to fill out forms. You don't have to jump through any other hoops or go through any other shenanigans.

So you really can't lose here. you really can't lose here. Head over to www.lesionathletics.com now, place your order, and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. And if for whatever reason, they're just not for you, contact us and we will give you a full refund on the spot. Alrighty, that is enough shameless plugging for now at least. Let's get to the show. So, hey, Mike, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me, Dan. There's so many areas I want to dive into, but a great place I want to start is,

I know from being an avid follower and listener of yours that not only have your various companies grown rapidly, but you've done all this while having a family. So you've got two young kids and yet legion at least I believe is now at eight figure revenues. You haven't even pressed the gas pedal when it comes to paid advertising yet. Just a broad question to start is how the hell do you manage to pull all this off? What's kind of the secret sauce? I know a lot of our listeners constantly struggling to how do they do the whole family business thing simultaneously? struggling to, how do they do the whole family business thing simultaneously? You know, mostly just cocaine, just a lot of cocaine.

You know, it's, I guess that comes down to that, that life work balance thing, right? Which I think is mostly just a myth. You can't have everything. I mean, that's just life. You can't have it all. You can choose what you want. So if you want to have a vibrant social life, and if you want to have a lot of free time, you can have a good relationship with your family. But you'd have a better relationship if you put more time into it, of course.

So things that you have to choose, what are you willing to sacrifice? So for me, for example, a lot of that has just come down to time. So especially in the first couple of years, because so it started with books and then Muscleful Life came into the picture and then Legion came into the picture. And then the app came into the picture and all have been moving simultaneously. And the workload has increased exponentially. And so for me personally, that means that in the beginning, let's see when we started, yeah, Lennox was a baby. So my son was there and I was working probably on average, let's say 70 hours a week. Let's just say on average. Which meant basically 10 to 12 hours, Monday through Thursday, sometimes Friday. Fridays, I'd usually end a little bit early. And then usually some work on Saturday and work all Sunday

was kind of the standard schedule. So yeah, that meant that I didn't have a social life. I didn't really take time to hang out with friends. Maybe I saw friends here and there, maybe on a Saturday afternoon or Friday night. And that was kind of just how it went for several years. I have some time with my wife, but not very much. And I wouldn't have very much time with my son, which I look back on it now. I wouldn't say I regret it, but I'm intentionally spending a bit more time, at least as I, whenever I can, even if it's just like with my daughter, cause she's six months old right now. And even if it's just like, like strapping her in on the baby Bjorn when I'm making dinner and just,

just to spend time with her. Cause I didn't spend much time with Lennox when he was a baby. You know, it's a cute time. It's something that at the time, I was just doing what I was doing. But I look back at it now and I'm like, eh, I wish I would have spent a little bit more time with him as a baby. So again, I just think that it comes down to how much pain are you willing to take? And that's, yeah, if you want to build a few businesses and I mean, all together, well, yeah, Legion did eight figures in sales and the other businesses are seven-figure businesses. And that's great. And it's great financially. But for me, it's not just about money. I mean, I just genuinely enjoy working. And I genuinely enjoy building businesses and just winning, just doing things that work.

I mean, it'd probably be that way regardless of whatever field I was working in, just because I kind of just like the game. Unfortunately, I don't have any great life hacks that I can't say that, again, I have everything. A lot of people would not enjoy my life. And I've had that discussion with people that I've known or that I know where they see success and they see the trappings of success. they see success and they see the trappings of success, they either say, oh, they wish they were in my position or maybe even are a little bit weird about it, jealous or envious. But I've had that discussion. I'm like, trust me, you don't want my life. You don't want my life. Come and hang out with me for a month and you will quit by week two. You will quit because you're not sleeping that much.

You're working a shitload. Also on top of that, in the gym every day, putting in work there, which is at this point, part of my job description. And you can forget about Netflix. Might as well just cancel your Netflix because you're not going to have any time for it anyway. You can forget about hanging out, meeting up with friends. Maybe you'll have a couple hours here or there once a week, basically. So yeah, that's just a choice that I made, but I made it consciously. I didn't just fall into a trap laid by myself. This was a conscious choice. In the future, because I like to work, I'll always be that type of person. But I probably will put a bit more time into my family in the future. But I'm doing what I'm doing right now because I think it's going to set me up nicely for the future.

I like it a lot, Mike. I mean, it's fascinating. As I mentioned before, I've been a fan of yours and listened to your material and read your books for a couple of years now. And I kind of feel like kindred spirits because the listeners of this podcast know I'm a numbers freak. I like measuring things. I like the science behind things.

And I think especially in the fitness industry, it's notorious for bullshit. And what I like, especially with Muscle for Life, but with Legion, is just the science behind it and how you debunk a lot of those myths that fitness businesses, I suppose, purport in order to sell their wares. There's definitely an expedience there. Lying makes it easier in this industry in particular to make easy money. Because if you can just prey on people's insecurities and you can prey on their desire for the quick fix, the instant gratification, if you can promise that in a pill or a powder or a program, it makes it a lot easier to make money. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because I want to tie it back to business, but I know that

it's fascinating to me how whenever you are discussing various legion supplements on a podcast, for example, you'll always very clearly state that it can help support muscular development, for example, but it's the minority. You know, there's no substitute for hard work. It's supplemental by definition, right? Right. So I'm curious because you've now built multiple businesses to a decent size. What are some of the biggest lies that you hear preached in the world of business? What are some of the falsities that are sold in order for the so-called gurus to sell their business development wares? That's an interesting question. I'm not well-versed in that space, honestly. I've read

a fair amount of, a fair number of business books and marketing books in particular over the years. I mean, some I liked more than others, but on the whole, I would say a lot of them were giving good advice, but they were books like The Lean Startup. Good book. I recommend anybody that's building a business to read that book. Scaling Up. Good book. It hits you with an overwhelming amount of information. I think the primary purpose of that book is try to sell you on consulting. But if you can face the sheer amount of things that that book says you should be doing and just kind of tackle them one at a time, you can get a ton of value out of it. So I'm not quite sure because I really don't like the kind of entrepreneur space, the people that just talk about wanting to do one

thing or another or wanting to chasing the Tim Ferriss lifestyle, I guess. Like that crowd is just not my kind of crowd. So I don't pay attention to that space at all. But I would say from just my personal experience, knowing people over the years that have had big ambitions, but failed to realize them, I would say the most common things that the biggest things that have gotten in the way and kept them from achieving the level of success that I think that they actually could have achieved. I'm thinking of a few people in particular that I really do think that they could be much further in their career than they are now.

I would say one, not – Well, I mean, if we just start first at not capable of really working hard. I guess definition of hard work, I would say probably starts at 50 to 60 hours of real work per week. That's not 50 to 60 hours of sitting at a desk and going to Twitter every five minutes. No, I mean real work, like focused. Some people would say you can't do that much, quote unquote, deep work per week. And I actually probably would tend to agree with that. Even I myself, I think I'm above average in my ability to just work. And if we're talking about deep work that requires deep focus, like writing in particular, researching and writing, I would say 30 or 40 hours a week is where I at least start to notice a drop off in my performance. I can keep going, but I can feel that it's not as productive per unit of time as it is in the first 30-ish hours,

but you can still keep going. But regardless, there are other tasks. That's why I like to block my time and look at it also not just in terms of managing my time in an absolute sense, but also managing my energy. Again, I think I'm a fairly high energy person, but as the day goes on, depending on what I'm doing, your energy reserves are not unlimited. And so save the more mundane routine stuff for your lower energy period. It's like email, for example. Email is obviously, that's not deep work. That's more just, it's something you got to do. It's a chore. So I would include stuff like that in that number of work. And even let's say reading. I mean, if you're researching for something, that's work.

So again, inability to work hard. I see it all the time. Just inherent laziness, unable to break free of that. I'm inherently kind of a cynical person. There's a joke in my group of friends that some people could, sure, they could go read a hundred books and they could listen to a thousand podcasts. And they could go get hundreds and thousands of hours of therapy to try to deal with this one issue alone of inability to work. Just too lazy, can't put in the time, too distractible, can't just make a decision and push it through and make it happen no matter what, regardless of how much time and effort it's going to take. Maybe a more effective therapy would just be like, just drop them in a rainforest with

nothing. And if they figure out how to survive, that's a changed person right there. It's just that necessity level. They just don't have the necessity level. And again, I'm thinking of very specific people. So I don't mean this as a generalization on everybody, but I've just seen this many times where it's like necessity, right? It's the mother of all invention. And if the necessity level is high enough, we can do extraordinary things. You have stories of women basically deadlifting cars off of their kids and shit like that. That's just a pure physical. That's because the necessity level in that moment is so high. You either are going to do that or your kid is

going to die. All of a sudden, you're Superman for five minutes or five seconds. So I think that we're also capable of things like that psychologically, maybe you could say even spiritually. But the question is, can you impose that on yourself or does it need to be externally imposed upon you? And unfortunately, many of the people, again, that I feel have just unrealized potential, they're not good at imposing that necessity level on themselves. They're not good at really putting the amount of pressure that it takes to push away all the distractions and all the reasons to give up and not try very hard and just kind of turn to decadence instead and just keep going, especially

when it involves doing a lot of things that you don't like to do. That's a big part of being successful. And I think another thing that I've seen that gets in the way of a lot of people is just, they're not willing to do the shit that they don't like. They're not willing to do the stuff they don't want to do. And I've seen this a lot with creative types where they can be pretty amazing creatively actually, but they don't want to have anything to do with the business side of things that it just is confusing to them. It's not fun. It's not interesting. It doesn't stimulate them. They don't want to have anything to do with the marketing side of things. And they struggle and they wonder why they struggle. And again, I've had conversations and I've straight upset. It's just because you're bad at business and you're bad at marketing. If you were half as

good at business as marketing and marketing as you were at your creative art, you would be a millionaire. I've given specific, I was like, dude, if I were you, here's exactly what I would do. I guarantee you this would work. And in a couple of cases, I would lay it out a little thing. Like this is exactly what I do. I do this, this, and this. And I would just rinse and repeat that until I have a customer base, basically buying my stuff. And in some cases, people have said like one person, I kind of laid it out. He's like, oh yeah, there's another dude doing exactly that in my space. And he makes a shit ton of money and he gets to do whatever he wants to do actually creatively. He just has a smart little business. I'm like, well, then you

already knew what, just go do it then. You know what I mean? Like it's right there. And then it's like, well, I don't know. It might not work. You start getting into the effort. It's the effort. It's too much effort. And again, I just think like, if you can't get over that, if things are just, everything feels too hard and you can't push yourself through that, then just stop. Just get a job. Why? Why go through the whole, if you can't suffer enough, you don't have the pain threshold to make it through, I just don't understand why fight the fight. If you're going to fight it, fight it. But don't just sit in this where you're not really doing anything and you're just feeling bad for yourself and you wish you had more, but you're not really willing to do what it takes to get more. You know what I mean? It just

doesn't make sense to me. Yeah. No, sorry. I'm curious. You've already very alluded to it, but have you read Principles by Ray Dalio? Have you come across that book? Yeah, yeah. I read it. I finished it a couple weeks ago, actually. I liked it a lot. I mean, it's obviously a bit long, a bit belabored, but a lot of great information. I really respect him. I like his perspective on things. That's a book that I would recommend that everybody read. It's kind of a slog because it could have been probably half the size, but that's okay. Yeah. He was trying to get his life's work down on paper. But yeah, the reason why I said that is I kind of feel that for anybody that's listening that's not remotely interested in health and fitness you've got to go and subscribe to some of Mike's read some of these articles and go and subscribe to his podcast because

how I came across you Mike and you don't know this it was purely by referral I was literally a couple years ago was in my office said hey to somebody in my office I said Miles I'm looking for a good health and fitness podcast what would would you recommend? And he recommended your podcast. And then subsequently, I started consuming your material and ended up becoming a customer sometime later. But when I look at it, I've now subsequently referred you and now most of our offices has bought some either Legion or Muscle for Life, some of your books. There's a whole plethora of it that goes around our office and our wider community.

It feels like your business is really referable because you churn out just, in my opinion, consistently a high volume of really, really good content. So my question was, I'm curious for those listening, they might go, well, I'm not an author. I don't want to be an author. How does this relate to me? Is what are the grounding principles, hence the Dalio tie-in, what are the grounding principles or philosophies that have driven your growth? Because the company's growing and it's growing,

you know, rapidly and kind of keeps moving forward. And it feels, if anything, you're just getting momentum. What are the principles that underlie that? Yeah, yeah. I'll answer that. Let me first though add, just because I know, again, I sound pretty pessimistic and cynical and there's definitely a part of me that is that way, but I want to add to the kind of maybe down note on everything I just said. The upside of that is if you can, I think if you can get to that point where you're willing to do whatever it takes, put in the time, suffer through whatever it is that you have to suffer through, then who knows what you're capable of. And that applies to me, applies to everybody. And it's a very Jordan Peterson thing to say, but I really

do agree with it. We have no idea what our capabilities are. We can say for a fact that they are much higher than our current state. That's the big payoff of embracing, again, that I guess stark reality of hard work and doing the shit you don't want to do and just suffering through and viewing that as a challenge, not as something negative and putting a positive spin on it and just putting a smile on your face every day and doing the things that you know are going to contribute to at least sort of the high probability plays that are most likely to get you to where you want to be. And one other thing, just to answer your previous question in terms of obstacles. So there's the hard work, the willingness to do things that suck basically. And hopefully over time, the emotional charge from them just dissipates and you don't really think about it much anymore. I do a lot of things that are just chores. That's really what they are. A lot of my work these days is chores. It feels like chores, but I'm emotionally neutral about them. I don't think though this sucks when I'm doing it.

I just know this is what needs to get done to get me one step closer to this bigger picture, this bigger goal that's three to five years out in the future. So I could care less whether I feel inherently drawn toward, I could care less how inherently stimulating it is. I'm going to do it and I'm going to put a smile on my face because I know that this is the type of thing that most people don't want to do because it's not very fun inherently. And those are the things though that have the greatest potential for payoff usually. And one other thing is getting very good at something. That's something that, again, a lot of people I've seen that I feel like they could have been more successful

than they are or were, is they didn't get really good at something that has a lot of commercial value. A single skill, let's just start there. And in my case, for example, if I were to boil it all down, what's my best, most marketable, saleable skill? Probably writing, probably. Content creation. I'm good at researching and I'm good at explaining things in a way that's clear and practical and that resonates with people. I'm good at communicating, I guess, is what it comes down to. And at least in written form, I think I'm okay in spoken dialogue like this, but I'm better. I haven't studied, I haven't practiced rhetoric, for example. So I think I'm better as a writer. And from there, I would say I'm also a good marketer

and I'm a good copywriter. So those are skills, very specific skills, things that I've gotten very good at. And I'm always trying to improve. I would say by my own estimation, I'm good. I wouldn't even say that I'm very good. Maybe I approach very good in certain little subsets of those things. But on the whole, I would say I'm good and I'm good enough to... Again, and that started everything that I've done and that my team, it's not just me, I have 20 people. So I can't take all the and that started everything that I've done and that my team, it's not just me, I have 20 people, so I can't take all the credit, but everything that we've done did start with books. And I was able to write a book, Bigger, Leaner, Stronger is where it started that resonated, that helped people. They started talking about it, it got results. So for anybody

out there that is trying to find their way, I understand I was there myself at one point, but my personal journey started with one, I was always willing to do the work. I understand I was there myself at one point, but my personal journey started with one, I was always willing to do the work. I was never one to try to look for the shortcut or look for the get something for nothing or the hacks, or I didn't mind hard work. I didn't mind putting in time. I didn't mind grinding. I didn't mind suffering a bit. Maybe I learned that through osmosis growing up because my dad is a successful entrepreneur. And I saw firsthand, I mean, some of the shit he went through and he just kept going. And I grew up playing sports and I was pretty into it. And so I got used to just that type of highly competitive environment where you either put up or you are put out basically. So anyways, I just wanted to,

I just wanted to say that there is the positive of if you can really just embrace it, it's unpalatable. I understand these things are pretty unpalatable. They're kind of like medicine, but if you embrace it, they're very empowering and they give you, it just gives you a huge advantage over the people who are more of the blue sky. Just over the years, I've met a lot of people where it's just cliche, I guess, some people where they say they're going to do things. And when I really get down to it though, and I really started drilling in, what are you actually doing? Where's your actual plan? Where is this leading? And where's your time going? As much as I would like to say, okay, keep going. You're going to

make it. Nah, they're not. If I had to put money on it, I just honestly, and if I had to put money on it, I would put money on failure just because I don't see the fundamentals there. I just don't see it. Go back to a sports analogy, like a Belichick kind of, or what was it? There was a book. I didn't read it. It's on my list. 49ers coach. I'm not good at football. I don't know much football trivia, but famous 49ers when they were dominant, the coach and his focus was fundamentals. Work on the fundamentals of the game. Don't even worry about winning. If you get the fundamentals right, the winning comes kind of approach. So if I don't see that in a business, I immediately just like, yeah,

this will probably fail because the fundamentals aren't there. Big thoughts and fucking dream boards and all that shit doesn't mean anything. You know what I mean? So anyways, to your question on the principles and specifically on the content. So that has been a pillar, obviously, of each of the businesses and it remains one so much so that that's my primary focus. I just wrapped up recently our yearly planning and we get pretty granular now because we have a few businesses and there's just a lot of moving parts. We have everything planned out, everything timelined. We don't go down to the day per se, but we go down to end of week. So if we're looking at it in terms of weekly sprints on all the different fronts that we are advancing on, what gets done by whom. So in looking at that, my focus is on content creation because that's, I think, my highest and best use of time.

So one of the things has been to consistently put out very good content. And there's also behind that is a lot of research. There's a lot of putting a lot of time also educating myself about things. I don't just sit down to write an article and just kind of turn it loose and just see what comes. There's in some cases, a lot of preparation. In some cases, I've already kind of done the research and I have to dig through my PubMed and make sure I have the studies and I can put it all

together. But the article kind of writes itself. But in other cases, I've gone into articles, you know, let's say I get asked a question quite a bit and I'm not sure. Like I wrote an article, what comes to mind is, this might've been six months ago, is dairy bad for you, right? I know that if I just give a quick answer, it's like, no, it's not bad for you unless you are lactose intolerant or unless you're just having way too much of it, like anything. But to really write that article, I had to do quite a bit of research and I have a research assistant. She's a PhD student at Oxford, smart girl. And she does a great job kind of combing through the literature and putting together a good summary and then sending the papers over to me so I can look at everything. So sometimes it might be 10 or 15 hours of

research before I feel confident that I can write a good article. And so again, it's just being willing to do that. And another big thing that has helped a lot is being very accessible and being willing to help people without asking for anything. So since the beginning, I have always been available via email, via social media, better via email, just because I hate social media DMs like on my phone. I need to get like a Bluetooth keyboard. It actually enrages me where I'm trying to like say something and it's auto-correcting me. And it's so, it's so slow. It feels so inefficient where sometimes I'll ask people to like email me if they have a long question or the answers and be like, could you please email this to me? Because it's just a lot faster, but that's been huge. I mean that the fact that people can email

me and yes, they, at this point, they're going to have to wait probably seven to 10 days to get a response. Cause I get a lot of emails, but they will hear back. And in some, in some, in some cases in the past, it would be, that would be like four to five hours of every day would just be doing emails and social media. Now I have someone that helps because some of the, a lot of the questions are very simple. You know, someone can jump in and just be like, Hey, you know, I work with Mike and just want to make sure you got an answer to this. But a lot of them need to come to me because their communications directly to me, or, you know, the person helping isn't quite sure he wants to make sure that the person gets the right answer. So I still, you know, every day I'm, I'm answering emails, I'm answering social

media messages, and that will never change because it's just, especially for generating word of mouth. I think that's probably, it's just very unusual, especially in the fitness space where you have a bunch of weird, narcissistic, neurotic people that don't really care about their following. It's just unusual to be able to send an email to someone like me who doesn't have to. Like, yeah, I don't have to do that, but I like to do it because I know it's very helpful. So that's been a big thing. Well, it makes sense as well. I think because if you think about it logically, on previous episodes of this show, we've spoken and we've had people like Jay Abraham on and Ryan Dice. And we've spoken about referrals being typically a much more likely to buy and spend more money.

spend more money because that, and if I just think of the dialogue about how we engage in conversation, it's ultimately because you responded to an email from one of my team who, who liked your content and he reached out to you and you reached out to him and that started a dialogue and, and, and then it just further fulfills itself because now that's ended up in us being on this podcast. And I'm sure, uh, you know, some of the guys listening to this are going to go and check you out and your books and and your supplements etc and therefore it grows and they're more likely to buy than hence why the company or i'm talking about legion uh specifically uh your supplement company has grown so much without without there even really being any focus whatsoever on paid advertising i mean that's that's just yeah that's been i mean now mean, now we're really diving into paid and it's going to be a pain in

the ass in the beginning. It's proving to be, but we'll figure it out. It's just like with any marketing endeavor, you have to try a lot of things and you have to kind of whittle it down until you really start getting to the messages that resonate in the ads that resonate. And it's easy to create stuff that has a decent. And it's easy to create stuff that has a decent return. It's hard to create stuff that has a decent or good return that you can scale to a big spend. Ideally, we'd be spending a million dollars a month and paid. But even getting to a mid six figures a month spend profitably, yeah, it's a pain in the ass. It takes time. So we're working through it it and I'd say, yeah, the primary reasons why Legion has grown as quickly

as it has are, I mean, obviously I had a, I had a, had a bit of a following and a bit of a platform when we launched it, but from there it's been continuing to grow the platform. So continuing to do things, to sell more books, to grow muscle for life, started a blog at Legion, which is now getting, I want to say about 800,000 visits a month. And that's continuing to grow. And so again, that's a grind. There's a lot of time that it's just writing a lot of articles, doing your SEO right and waiting basically. And now that obviously has really started to pay off. Another thing I would say is we're really big on customer retention and having good company fundamentals. And one of that, sure, customer acquisition is something we were very strong

in the beginning through organic non-paid channels. Now we really have to, because the big goal with Legion is 50 million a year in sales in the next three to five years. And that is very doable. I mean, I have that strategic plan laid out and it's very conservative. And how do we get there? How do we actually get there? One to $2 million a month from this channel, one to $2 million a month from this channel, really broken down. This is how we get there. And all of it is actually conservative. It's not pie in the sky, best case scenarios at all, really. Are you trying to say it's not on your dream board?

I don't have a dream board. Just because I don't... I mean, what do you put on a dream board? You put stuff, I guess. You put... Usually it's like a yacht and a McMansion and a Rolls Royce. And I just don't care about that stuff. I mean, I have nice things, sure. And I like nice things, but I've already... In terms of income, right? So I'm sure you've come across that research that for most people, it's what? It's about $80,000 a year is where money, the utility value of money really starts to drop off. It's that diminishing returns, right? That number does not apply to me. It's not applied necessarily to everybody. It really depends also, just even for example, it depends where you live. $80,000 a year in Nebraska is different than $80,000 a year in

New York City. $80,000 a year when you are 20 years old is different than $80,000 a year when you're like me, like when you're 33 with two kids. So that doesn't apply to everybody, but the point is everybody has, there's a point where you realize that more money doesn't really do provide much in the way of satisfaction. I'm beyond that point. And now I don't really care about income from the perspective of like, what can I buy with it. Really, I guess my primary, the reason why I care about income now is more what can I do with it to set up my future in terms of passive income and potentially other games that I'd like to play and so forth. 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 Muscle for Life Fitness. Let's talk daily routine, right? So a lot of people listen to this and i used to uh think this way until three or four years ago when actually i ended up buying my first uh it was a personal training studio and i now own a couple of uh different fitness businesses and i changed my

beliefs around it but uh let's talk about daily routine a lot a lot of the guys listening to this kind of feel like in order to make business work, they'd go, yeah, well, Mike was just saying that I need to work all these, uh, you know, 50, 60, 70 hour weeks, but how the hell can I do that? And can I keep my health in check and work out, et cetera. And so how does your daily routine work? How do you make sure that you, you get off productive and don't get caught down in the weeds with 73,000 emails and distracted by Facebook posts every three and a half seconds? Good question. So I wake up at 5.30, sometimes six, depending on, usually I'm going to sleep at 10 now. See, previously my sleep, I wish a few years ago I was even more like I was able to go to bed at 11.45 and my alarm was at 6.15 and that

was it every day. And I would just fall asleep in five minutes and I'd wake up like five minutes before my alarm every day. I was like a robot. I almost took it for granted because that was just my normal for years. And now my sleep goes, I don't know if it's from having kids. I mean, I know this is like a thing that people say. I'm just a lighter sleeper now. Like I'll wake up a couple of times. I can always fall back asleep. So it's not like an insomnia thing. But I also though, you know, I looked at it in terms of, this is a good point in terms

of health where I was like, you know, I was feeling better when I was going to bed at 1145 and my alarm was at 645. I was in bed for seven hours every night and I would sleep, maybe I'd wake up once to pee or something, but I was getting on average six and a half hours of sleep. And when I kind of cut that down and then I even tried to cut it down further, I was like, eh, maybe I can do like five and a half. And I did that for several months. And I just had to face the fact like this winter, I didn't get sick. I started, I got a bit of a headache even with all the flu shit going around. Whereas last winter, I got sick a couple of times. I just

had to face that I think my body needs more sleep. And I know scientifically, yeah, it needs more sleep. I need to face that just being able to mentally push through things, that's not necessarily the smartest decision. So now I'm in bed, I would say on average seven and a half hours. Because again, now I usually wake up a couple times at night, maybe to go pee and otherwise for no good reason, I'll like go through a sleep cycle. I'll come out of REM, my dream will finish and then I'll wake up and then I'll kind of roll over and go back to sleep. So I just put a little bit more priority to getting sleep. So I'm in bed around 10.

Usually I actually get in bed at 9.30 because I like to read. And so I'll read for at least 30 minutes. And so I'm in bed, let's say nine to 930 for reading. Because I also, I do listen to audio books earlier in the day and I do some reading. I like to get at least an hour of reading in a day. So I kind of do that. I read digitally, so it's convenient. That could be anywhere that I can get some pages in. So I'm up and then I go straight to the gym. I usually get my food together the day before. So I really all I have to do is kind of go to the bathroom. And I've been taking cold showers for like a year now.

I actually wrote an article about it over at Muscle for Life. Long story short is there's no real health benefit probably at all. It doesn't increase testosterone. It doesn't boost your immune system. Like, yes, cold exposure can. But we're talking about a cold shower is not enough suffering for what people think that they're getting out of it. you'll see among winter swimmers, usually you're going to see stronger immune systems. You're going to see less sickness, generally, yeah, hardier bodies, but you got to look at what those people are doing. They're not taking three minute cold showers. You know what I mean? They're out 30 plus minutes in the freezing cold, swimming in and getting in the water, getting out of the

water. That even biologically makes sense. Like, yeah, that shit hardens you. It does. There's no question. So it's not surprising. Right, right. It's where people have watched a Wim Hof documentary and they think if they turn the shower down by two degrees for 30 seconds at the end. And you know what's actually funny though, because of the power of the placebo effect, there's probably something just to that point alone where because they think, even if it's slight, just because they think, let's say it's, you know, they're going to get sick less often because yeah, they, they end with 30 seconds of slightly cool water. Who knows that alone might be enough to actually, uh, reduce sickness by, by some degree. But when you look at it strictly, uh, you know, in an objective sense, no cold showers are not going

to really do anything for your physiology but let me just interrupt my i feel like i remember that article and it was also on the on the podcast about the cold showers because i'd completely built the hype and i've been doing the whole cold shower thing which is why i'm laughing just hearing tell the story but what's your opinion just on a complete tangent about um i've read a little bit recently that suggested that you got a human growth hormone spike from having a heat exposure so saunas specifically after resistance training have you have you done any research on that yeah i mean i wrote an article on saunas it was it's not legion um it's on the legion blog and i wrote it over a year ago so all the details aren't fresh but i would say to that

point is no there's going to be nothing notable in that regard, if I remember correctly. Because I went through, it was a fairly long article, went through a number of points. For example, that was actually an article that Emma, my research assistant, really helped with because I hadn't looked into sauna. So I asked her, can she dig through the literature and pull some stuff that I can read, some reviews and meta-analyses and good clinical studies. And I don't remember anything along those lines, like anything that's notable. And that's also something that you have to keep in mind with any sort of natural intervention is the effect size.

Like even if that's true, let's say that's true. Let's say growth hormone does production. Because remember your body produces growth hormone in spurts, right? So it's not constantly producing. It produces a lot of it for your first sleep cycle, right? Your first deep sleep cycles were actually a lot of, if you look at it in terms of the day, where most of your growth hormone for the day is produced when you're sleeping. But otherwise, it kind of pulses in phases. So, let's just say that going into a sauna for a certain period of time does result in some growth hormone secretion. How much, for how long, and what's the biological significance? Again, unfortunately, I don't remember that point specifically. I don't remember if I. Now, saunas do have some health benefits. I wrote an article recently on an infrared sauna. And I bought an infrared sauna primarily because I like the anti-inflammatory effects for which there is good evidence, simply because the less inflammation in your body, generally, the better that is. Now, the reason why I say generally is when we're talking about muscle building, acute inflammation is actually good. You don't want to blunt inflammation after a workout, for example, because that's part of the response that leads to muscle growth. And you can see evidence of that, for example, in research that shows, if I remember correctly, it was a couple months of a 10-minute ice bath. it was like 10 to 12 weeks of a 10-minute ice bath after workouts, significantly decreased muscle and strength gain. The primary mechanism is the reduction of inflammation. So it's good for like, if you're a hardcore athlete, like if you're a football player and you just went and destroyed your body in a game, which is what you do,

you need though, you have a week to recover now, right? And then you also have practices. You need to bring that inflammation down as quickly as possible. So that's why you'll see stuff like after the game, right into an ice bath. And then at the professional level, you have a lot of drugs as well. Like a lot of GH, talking about GH, a lot of GH used to just, you wouldn't be able to do, take professional football. You wouldn't be able to do it without it, especially certain positions, impossible. Your body would literally just fall apart if you didn't have the drugs. So to that point, not really. But again, if you want to, anybody listening, if you want to learn about a bit of the science

of sauna, just head over to legionathletics.com, search for sauna, and you'll see two articles that I wrote. You'll see one on just sauna use in general and the other on infrared sauna in particular, which is a pretty, the technology is cool. And again, there's good science behind it now. It's not quackery. I thought it was going into it. I was like, this is going to be complete bullshit, isn't it? And I ended up buying, I ended up, I ended up buying one. I've got a feeling I've made a note. I'm going to go look at that article. I can easily see myself buying a sauna later, but that ties in with my last question.

Let me finish the routine though, just because people might, I know people like that stuff, right? So that's why I have a cold shower. I just do three minutes cold straight up, just go and freeze basically. Although now my cold tolerance is pretty good. I never really, I never really shivered much and now it doesn't really bother me. It hits me and I'm like, oh, that's cold. And then I kind of don't feel it after, you know, I kind of do like hit my face and the front of my body and then hit the side and then the back and then back around. And I basically bring, I do about three minutes, three and a half minutes to the point where I no longer dislike it basically, where I'm just like, yeah, it's just water. Like you almost get to a point. I don't know if you've experienced that, especially during the winter when the water is cold. I'm in Virginia and you know, we'll have

anywhere from, let's say it's 15 to 33 degrees outside, that's cold water, where it almost tricks your mind where you couldn't quite tell, is this really cold or really hot? It just kind of stings. I can't really tell. And so I do that. And then I'm in the gym, usually arriving, let's say 6.30 to 6.45. I'm in the gym for about an hour. Most of my workouts are 60 to 75 minutes. And then afterwards, I get a coffee on the way to work. And then I get to work anywhere from, let's say, 8.15 to 8.30. I'm at the office. And these days, I'm here at the office. I have my lunch with me. So that's just like a 5, 10 minute, just eat it and move on type of deal.

And I'm working. I usually leave the office at between 6.30 and 7.30. And then I go home and prepare my food. I used to work at night, but I also used to leave the office at between 6.30 and 7.30 and then I go home and prepare my food. I used to work at night, but I also used to leave the office a bit earlier when I was in Florida and I lived right down the road. So I just walk home. And so I was able to get some more work done at night because one, I was able to go to bed later because I had an extra hour at night. And two, I was getting home a bit earlier. So by the time I was done eating, it was maybe 8 PM and I still have a good two hours or three hours even that I could work. Now I'm staying at the office. I'm getting the office a bit earlier. I'm staying a bit later. And so by the, I just don't really have the time

because I, my wife is busy with the kids. And so I make my own dinner, which is usually just a one pot vegetable type of thing where my diet is very, I'm very much into eating a lot of nutritious foods because I demand a lot from my body. I do. I mean, I sleep a bit more now, so I'm giving it a bit more sleep, but you know, I'm in the gym five, six days a week. I'm working a lot. And a lot of the work is like, I'm asking a lot of my brain, you know what I mean? To just be on all the time. And even on the weekends are busy, it's not like I'm, my body just doesn't have that much downtime or that much rest beyond planned deloads. So I figure that I need to support it with as much nutrition as possible. So my diet is very

calculated. It's obviously a high protein, high carb, moderate fat diet, but even the foods that I eat, I've kind of chosen them intentionally for their nutritional value. So I'm eating several servings of fruit and vegetables per day. I'm eating, sticking mostly to colorful fruits, strawberries, blueberries, because there are compounds in the pigments, what gives them their color that are particularly good for you. I'm eating greens. So like usually it's spinach, several handfuls of spinach is for my dark leafy greens, as well as some red or green lettuce. For my fats, getting most of them from olive oil, avocado, and nuts. And the avocado and nuts are because they're rich in monounsaturated fat, which is the best,

I mean, that's really the best single form of dietary fat. Then my protein is mostly coming from lean meat and then also some protein powder, some whey, and then also some vegan powder. I have also a little bit of dairy. My diet is well-rounded and very nutritious, which matters a lot. If I were to let my diet go to shit, I wouldn't be able to do, I don't think I'd be able to do what I'm doing. It would run me down. I wouldn't have the mental energy. I wouldn't have the physical energy. I'd be getting tired and it'd just be getting in the way. But yeah, so really by the time when I'm home, I'm prepping my food, helping get at least one of the kids, usually my son, to bed and then kind of eating my food

and spending maybe 30, 45 minutes with my wife and then getting to bed and, you know, reading. So, so that, that's kind of every day, Monday through Friday, Saturday, usually I'm doing some work in the mornings. And then I do something with my family in the afternoons and Sundays usually just work for most of it. I would say at least five hours of work, say five to eight hours of work on Sunday. Yeah, that's it. I mean, that's really, that's, that's my life. As Mike's talking, I'm taking notes guys.. And my question list for Mike is getting longer. I should quickly just say is on the work in particular, I just have the habit of something that has served me very well is planning out, like having again, so we have our first two

quarters very specifically planned, but laying out what do I, I mean, in this case, I have several businesses, so there's several interlocking plans because they affect each other. But to keep it simple, it'd be what are the big things that I want to get done this year and why? How are they, what are they contributing toward? Then breaking those down into essentially checklists. So anybody listening, you could read Checklist Manifesto, but you don't really need to. You could just read the article. I think it was in the Atlantic or

New York or something that got that guy his book deal. He wrote a long form article on checklists. You could really just read that article. Take 20 minutes or whatever, as opposed to reading the book because the book is kind of an unnecessary elaboration on that article. And so I look from a checklist perspective, really, you want to get the big major things. I don't break it down into the most granular points because I don't think it's necessary, but what are the big things that need to happen to achieve each of those goals? And then take those things and start timelining them on an actual timeline by the end week ending, like, I mean, I could pull mine up week, I think ending,

what is it? February 9th. Yeah, February 9th. So this week I know that the big things that have to get done to keep all of my plans on target basically. So I start out with the most important things every day where I know this is what I have to get done today. And so if I'm going to bump something, it's probably not going to be this. It's going to be, you know, maybe an article goes up a day or two late, for example, because getting that article done isn't as important as getting right now. For example, I'm going to go back to a book proposal. So my next book is going to be a traditional book and I'm pretty excited about it. I think it's going to do very well. I need to get this book proposal done ASAP though, because we need to get this deal done. And then unfortunately, traditional publishing is slow. So I'm going to

try to fight for a 2019 release, but I wouldn't be surprised if they want to do a 2020 release. I don't want a 2020 release. I want 2019. So I have to get it done ASAP. If I waited two months to get this book proposal done, then it's much harder to argue for a January 2019 or February or March 2019 release. So I start every day with the most important tasks that must get done. And then I save the less important shit for after. And that means that, yeah, sometimes not everything gets done, but at least the most important things are getting done. Because one of the big things that it's just a pain in the ass about having a lot of

plates spinning, so to speak. So when you're in the moment doing work, the hard thing, at least for me, is not doing the work. And what has been hard, especially as everything has grown in complexity, is the question of, is this the best thing for me to be doing right now? Or should I be doing something else? This activity, should I be doing this is the first question. And should I be doing this right now is kind of the next question. And you have to, if you really want to be able to get into that flow state and be maximally productive and at least have a good time along the way and enjoy yourself, enjoy your productivity. You have to be able to say, yes, this is something I should be doing. I should not necessarily be delegating this or deferring it. And yes, I should be doing this

right now because I really can't think of anything else more important given the grand scheme of things for me to be doing right now. And once you have those things in place, I just think it makes it much easier to not only be more productive, but also to enjoy your work more. So that's been an important thing for me as well in terms of just my daily routine. And so then I can feel fine. At the end of the day, if a couple of things, if I didn't get to work on that article, oh well, I got the more important things done and I'll work on that article tomorrow. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I, um, it's funny you mentioned checklist manifesto, that book I found very useful in that it resulted in me getting the way of life app that the listeners have heard me harp on about

multiple times. And if you haven't seen that app, Mike, it's a very simple, just habit tracking app, And if you haven't seen that app, Mike, it's a very simple just habit tracking app. But it just really worked for me. I have my it's now 40 things on a typical workday, 40 things in order of priority. I find that if I'm not in the zone like this morning, I was a little out of sorts because my son, unfortunately, had an accident yesterday. So he was kind of up and throughout the night. had a accident yesterday so he was kind of up and uh throughout the night so i was a bit bleary-eyed this morning and it's just useful for me to be able to in effect look at my checklist which is in the way of ivap and go okay let's just do number one do it get it out of the way great move on to number two on to number three and by the end of it i'm at 10 or 12 normally firing on

all cylinders talking about checklist manifesto and you mentioned a few other books. You're obviously a well-read guy. One of your weekly podcasts is a book review. I think it's weekly. I also read an awful lot, and we talk about a lot of different books on this podcast. What are the top three books that have had the biggest impact on your business or professional or personal life and why? So, I mean, you've mentioned a few, you've mentioned the checklist manifesto, although that wasn't necessarily an endorsement. You mentioned the lean startup and scaling up so far. But if you think about it, what are your top three kind of books that you recommend most often or perhaps you've read in the last 12 months? I would say for business, I really liked the one Thing. Simple, short book, but a lot of good

information. And one that I recommend regularly. I also like The War of Art, which I think is great for everyone to read, not just artists. I just think that Pressfield really kind of stumbled on a fundamental truth there with this whole war against resistance. And that kind of ties back into being willing to just do the work and being willing to push through the pain and push through the suffering. Pressfield himself said, I think he said it in one of his books or an interview or somewhere that he thinks the number one skill that he has acquired over the years that has attributed or contributed most to his success is the ability to suffer. No matter how he feels about it, sit down every day and do the work that needs to be done.

And that resonates with me because I think it's true. I mean, this is a whole nother discussion, but there are just many aspects of today's current kind of Western culture and where things are going that I disagree with just toward personal weakness and glorifying that and trying to pretend like that isn't a problem. I really disagree with that. I disagree with that morally. And I disagree with that biologically even. I mean, if you look at it, we're just biological animals and you look at survival of the fittest. I think there's truth in that. And what happens in nature, the weak die off. That's what happens.

Yeah, we've constructed, we've done a good job constructing social mechanisms whereby the weak are allowed to survive quite well by really any standards, but it's unnatural. And I think that it's maybe arrogant to think that we can really outwit nature in the long game, that we can beat nature and we can be weak. That manifests in many ways. It manifests in just decadence and just chasing hedonistic pleasure, food, drugs, sex. You can indulge all you want in all of these things things like no you can't actually for just take food for example overindulgent food and you're probably going to get a disease and die and i that's the way it should be i don't disagree with that fundamentally like biologically right

yes why would mother nature if she wants to keep the species alive and what does it take to to stay alive like you need strong bodies out there to stay alive, to weather the elements, to weather all the viruses and all the different ways that we can just be eliminated. Anyways, War of Art is a great book. Again, Lean Startup, I actually like. I wouldn't say it's necessarily on the same level, but I do recommend anybody that's interested in business to check out the Lean Startup. I took away some good things from that. On the marketing side of things, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, very, very good. Fundamental book that everyone should read. Influence, also very good. Fundamental,

everybody should read. Persuasion, also I really did like. It's probably not going to go down into the hall of fame necessarily of marketing books like Influence, but it was very good. Breakthrough Advertising, it's hard to get, but you can probably find PDFs online by Eugene Schwartz. Very, very good book. Highly recommend it, especially for copywriters in particular. Other than that, in terms of personal stuff, I'm kind of over self-help and self-development books. It's been a while since I've read one that I really, really liked because at this point, they all kind of just sound the same to me, I guess. But Flow is one that Michele Csikszentmihalyi, I can't pronounce his last name. When you look at his last name, you understand why. It's like Csikszentmihalyi or something like that. Michele Csikszentmihalyi maybe. But Flow, I really, really liked Flow. Mastery by Robert Greene. Really, really liked that book.

Again, these are books that are a bit more academic in nature. I'm not big on motivation personally. I watch a Gary Vee video and I'm like, okay. Honestly, that's just not what I'm looking for. I'm not looking for someone to tell me you can do it. You know, you're fucking lazy and ignorant and you have no skills, but you can do it. I just, I just fundamentally disagree with that. And although Gary may not be like that, I actually don't really follow his stuff. I think that's actually more his thing, right? Isn't his thing like, Hey, stop being a lazy piece of shit and work. Yeah. So regardless, maybe I agree with him more than I realized, but I'm not into motivational speakers or motivational stuff. So I'm more into, I like what I find motivating are systems

and models and principles that I think will work. I don't care how they make me feel. I don't care what they're going to entail in terms of work and effort and difficulty. If something, if I'm like, oh, that's smart, like that, I agree with that is going to work or that, that really seems true to me. That's what I find motivating. So books like mastery, for example, is much more motivating to me than even the war of art as much as I like the war of art. And it's a book where I'm like, yeah, I really agree with that. It's a message that resonates with me. Mastery is more, more useful to me personally,

but that book I highly recommend. I really like biographies again, because I like to look under the hood of successful people, so to speak, and see really what makes them tick. And I know like, for example, daily routines is kind of a, maybe it's because Tim Ferriss popularized it or something, but a lot of people have a lot of interest in terms of daily routine. What's the optimal day, total day optimization or whatever. And I think that's fine. It's a good place to start, I guess. But if you look at it too much of those, like a shortcut or a hack, you know what I mean? Then- There's no substitute for the work. It's like when you said about biographies, one of my, I don't want to say favorite biographies, but it's prominent. And I only read it a couple of years ago was-ies, one of my, I don't want to say favorite biographies, but it's prominent.

And I only read it a couple of years ago. It was Tyson. One of my favorites. Which was the biography of- Chernow is such an amazing writer. He's probably my favorite writer in terms of just his ability to write, his ability to communicate, his command of the English language, his ability to tell a story over the course of 800 pages, incredible. And I love that biography. And that dude just knew how to suffer. He didn't give a shit. He just did whatever it took. And you remember in the book, he says that he doesn't think he

ever got a good night's sleep in his entire life, basically. That's the kind of shit though, when you really start looking at, I mean, he became the richest man in the world and left behind a fortune that is worth hundreds of billions of dollars in today's money. And that's not even something that I necessarily aspire to because even if I felt like I could do it, I know it would require giving up everything, everything. Forget it. Oh, it's unbelievable. I mean, and I know when I started raving about that book after I read it, a few people are like, oh, what are you so, you know, it's so capitalistic and it's immoral. And my attitude was like, well, look, I'm not saying that.

I mean, the first answer to that is like, you're going to read it in order to know. And then and then secondly, like you can of course still learn and take elements from it. And that man was unbelievable. And that man was unbelievable. I mean, the fact that he was able to sell oil profitably and make a profit for less money than it costs his competitors to get it out of the ground in the first place was just insane. And how he controlled the whole supply chain. Absolutely. There's lessons to learn for any business. Help but admire that he had the audacity to do it.

One, if somebody were to try to take – if it's just a purely anti-capitalism rant, I'd just say, yeah, you're stupid. That's the end of that conversation. No, you're stupid. You're just dumb. Capitalism has given us – has produced more wealth and has done more to raise the quality of living for more people on the planet than anything in history. the quality of living for more people on the planet than anything in history. Yeah, that's a whole – I could rant about that for an hour straight. But yeah, no, I understand a legitimate critique for me, and that is it's unfortunate that people like him were so – I mean, he was very immoral and unethical in his business practices, which was strange because he was very moral, and he had a strong integrity and strong ethics personally. In business, he was fucking ruthless. The things that he did to wreck his competitors,

also, of course, buying off politicians and the whole antitrust thing was just a farce, even though I do believe Teddy Roosevelt was trying to do the right thing. He was trying to break up these trusts and trying to just make people at least be able to compete. All that it really did was double John Rockefeller's net worth because he owned everybody. He owned everybody in government and in the judiciary that he needed to make sure that that deal went down exactly so the public can think something was done and people can say, yeah, we stuck it to the evil capitalist. When he says in his own letters, you remember in the book where he thought it was a joke, it was, it was hilarious to him. He's like, all right,

double my net worth guys. Thanks. Fucking good job. Smart. Because he, he was able to engineer the entire, even that you just go, I kind of, you know, whatever. I got to admire that. Same thing with Alexander the Great, another biography that was great. There are quite a few. There was one, Alexander the Great, that's just the name of the book, by Philip something, it was recently published. Really, really good. because what he did was – it's one of those instances where truth is just stranger than – The fact is stranger than fiction. If it were to be told as a story, people would say, this is stupid. You know what I mean? This is so unrealistic. Nobody could ever – nobody can do this.

But he did it. Benjamin Franklin by Isaacson, definitely recommend that biography. A lot of good – I mean, again, Franklin was a very interesting person, had good values. No one's perfect. That's also one of the nice things about biographies though, is you get an unprocessed view of successful people and you get to see the good and you get to see the bad. You yourself get to learn what it is that whatever is most relevant to you right now in your life is what will stand out to you, as opposed to getting a pre-digested pop psychology boiled down, raw, raw type of book that might include a couple anecdotes. But no, what I'm more interested in is the nitty gritty

details. What did these people, what were they really like and what did it really take? Elon Musk biography by Ashley Vance. Great book. Yeah, really enjoyed it. And again, a lot of the stuff we've been talking about is exactly the type of stuff that you'll business like a samurai. He'd rather dive and fail. That's who that dude is. And you see, that's not just talk. You get a real... Remember in the book when it's going through 2013, when it looks like everything is falling apart. It looks like SpaceX is going to... He has one last launch left. Then he's out of money. He's borrowing money just to make payroll. Tesla's a hundred and whatever million dollars in the hole. They don't even have a model car yet. His wife left him and she's slandering him in the media because he was kind of a dick to where he deserved some of that. But what was he doing? That's right. He was working 20 hours a day. He was living in his office where the employees were like, they had a joke that he doesn't shower. He never even leaves. What the fuck is, how is this possible? You read stuff like that. And those are the kinds of stories that really resonate with me because one, it puts my own

shit in perspective. So like, who am I to complain? Oh, I had to work, you know, 60 hours last week and I had to do some things I didn't want to do. Yeah. Who fucking cares? You know what I mean? Like it's, it's nothing. The fact that if I were to complain about that, what all that's saying is that I'm pathetic, basically. That's how I feel about it. Like if I were to complain about that, all that's saying is that I'm pathetic, basically. That's how I feel about it. Like if I were to complain about that, I would just feel like, wow, I'm pathetic. At least that's the perspective, again, of that's one of the reasons why I really like

reading the right types of biographies. That's kind of the modem in. I'm really focused on my work and focusing on success. And so, yeah, I want to read about very successful people and see what did it really take. You know, I'm reading the Da Vinci biography right now, which is interesting, very different person. Da Vinci was a creative genius, but he was kind of like Tesla in that he was not good at finishing things. There's still always takeaways though. There's always things you can learn from interesting and accomplished people, even if in the case of Da Vinci, he was not successful in a financial sense, but he was very accomplished in an artistic sense. And he obviously has gone down as,

now he's considered one of the greatest geniuses of all time. And it's interesting to see how did he get there in a very different way. He was not Rockefeller at all. He did not have the work ethic. He did not have the discipline. He was a very freewheeling type of person. Yeah. So anyways, the biographies are what I spend a lot of time. It's really like biographies and marketing are the two types of books that I like to read the most. And I've have given me the most, I guess, value in terms of my work. So tying it back to the very first book that you mentioned in answer to that question,

what's the one message you would like to leave the listeners with in order to help them develop and grow their businesses? If you can just make it your sole first focus to get so good at something valuable that you can't be ignored, then you're already halfway there. And I know quite a few people who have six-figure businesses and they're just individuals. Sometimes it's an individual with maybe an assistant. It could be more of a technical type of assistant or just general administrative assistant. And they don't really do any marketing. They don't do any advertising. And it's all of their businesses through referral because they're just so good at what they do. And anyone can do that. I wholeheartedly believe that anyone can figure

out how to make $100,000 a year, whether it's through just a traditional being employed type of getting a job, building a career type of approach, or as an entrepreneur. I really do think that anyone has that capacity. I do not think that anyone can make a million dollars a year. And I might be wrong. I might be wrong, but that's just the way I feel about it. But I really do think that anyone can figure out how to make $100,000 a year. And half of that, let's just say 50,000 of those $100,000 a year is just getting so good at something that you can't be ignored. That people see your work and they're like, wow, you're really good at that. And if that has value and that's pretty much everything now with the internet, I mean, if you can knit oven mitts really well, you can probably figure it out through something like

Etsy or whatever, maybe not, but you know what I'm saying? Like there are so many, so many different things you can get really good at. You know, that would be the first thing. I mean, I guess another thing that's just been on my mind recently, it's something again with me personally, and this is where all this stuff kind of comes from. Even some of my, again, more some of my cynicism and pessimism comes from me wanting to improve myself. And more importantly though, wanting to make sure I don't skid. I don't want to, because of success or because of

really any reason, move backward as an individual. And so I don't think I'm a tough person. I might be. I don't think I've honestly gone through enough trials and tribulations to say. I'd say I maybe have a little bit of toughness that I've exhibited. Ultimately though, when I think of toughness, could I go get through hell week, the Navy SEAL thing? I don't know. I think you have to be pretty tough as an individual to do that. Could I do that? I don't know. But I have at least tried to do things to cultivate toughness in both my mentality and my approach. For example, I don't complain about things, period. Like I have a standing rule with myself. And that means by the definition of complaining, constructive

criticism, yes. If something needs to be done better in my work or in somebody that works with me, of course, I'm going to say something. That's not complaining. But complaining where I'm just kind of griping, I'm saying I'm annoyed about things that I'm not going to do anything about. I just don't do it. And that means what's going on, whether it's current affairs or in my personal life. I like that because again, I like to think at least it helps cultivate at least a little bit of mental toughness. at least a little bit of mental toughness. Some of the weaker people I know are definitely some of the people most prone to complaining. And so I kind of see like the correlation there. I'm like, well, then I'm just not going to complain. Even the cold showers thing. The reason why I still do it is just because it kind of sucks. Like at this point, it sucks a lot less than it did in the beginning. I don't really mind it as much anymore, but it is most days something I'm not particularly looking forward to. And again, I think that the

fact though, that I'm just forcing myself to do it, I do think there's a psychological value in there because, and this is a whole nother discussion, but research shows that in many ways, our self image is really just formed around our actions. Many people have that backward and they think that they are how they see themselves to dictates how they act. And it's really the other way around. You're always going to change the subjective to match the objective. So the way that you behave really is what is going to determine your character for better or for worse. And if you see yourself behaving in a certain way, if it's negative and if it's destructive, chances are you are going to rationalize it. You're going to figure out the reasoning to accommodate your actions. It's not the other way around. You're not going to experience that cognitive dissonance and be like,

this is really going against my principles. I'm really not being the person I want to be. I'm going to change that. Man, probably not. And that applies to me as much as anybody else. We're all in it together. If that's true, then if we can string together enough of the right actions where we are exhibiting our values, where we are not just saying we're going to do things and not just saying that we are virtuous in any way, do it. Don't say anything, just do it. And if you do it, then the attitudes and the mental side of things takes care of itself. And so coming back to cold showers, I think there's value in that. There's a little bit of value in that I can say, yeah, I'm a person that's willing to wake up every day and eat a

frog and do something that just kind of sucks basically. And the only reason I'm doing it is because I want to be the type of person that can make myself do things that I don't want to do. In the case of cold showering, it doesn't have any greater purpose. But if I can do that in my work, if I can do that in my personal relationships, in my personal life, then that is, again, I think a huge part of just being successful. So it's like cultivating that skill and then cultivating that ability to just do whatever it takes. Those are probably, that's probably it. Like if you could just do those two things, you could have no real people skills. You could have no real marketing skills, but you

can do quite well for yourself. Same thing with working out. That's one of the reasons why I think working out is therapeutic in a way where one, it allows you that working out as my form of meditation. I don't meditate. I've tried it. It's just not for me. I don't really feel like I get anything out of it. And I keep spreadsheets on things. So I actually was like, you know, did a little N1 experiment. Like, can I really say that anything in my life is positively impacted by meditation? And I didn't really notice anything in any regard, but exercise is kind of my meditation because it allows me when I'm in there working out, I'm just focused on, you know, what I'm doing.

Also, I use that time in between sets. I'm learning German, so I can, it's kind of like two birds with one stone, but I don't, I don't have my, my mind on my work. I have my attention on what I'm doing. It allows me to kind of just like, oh, maybe you could say decompress, even though it doesn't seem like it's inherently a relaxing activity, obviously. So there's that element to it. But then there's also an element to it that sometimes I don't really want to work out. Sometimes if I didn't sleep well, in particular, I'm not looking forward to doing that workout. But again, the fact that I can just get in there and do it reinforces that habit that then I can apply elsewhere more fruitfully, I guess you could

say. So a long thing to leave people with, but that's my bumper sticker. Can you put that on a bumper sticker, please? Bumper sticker for a giant RV. I like it a lot. And I certainly think, wait, it ties together with what you said right at the beginning. You know, I think a lot of people aren't capable of working hard and, and they need to, you know, they'd have the necessity level. I could talk with you all day, but I just feel the need to throw this in. I completely didn't feel meditation worked for me either until, um, um, and I still don't meditate per se, but what I did find very meditative and helpful, because I equally keep a lot of spreadsheets and have tracked it and feel it's made a notable difference, is heart rate variability training. So for me, it was the kind of the controlling the variability of your heart rate. And I use the HeartMath Inner Balance app with a heart rate monitor.

And I personally got it. It's just for me, my HRV was always in the same range. It didn't really change. So I was like, huh, okay. And it was in a good range. Like I want to say it was around 80 or so, 70 to 80. And it didn't really change. So I was just like, all right.

I was just curious, you know, is there any correlation on some of these days? If I train harder, do I really see a difference? I didn't see much of a difference. I think I, at one point I saw something in the fifties and, and then it kind of just went to the seventies to eighties and it kind of just stayed there. And I, and then I was like, I did it for a while, actually I did it for at least four weeks, every single day tracking in the morning. And when it just wasn't changing much, I was like, huh, all right, I guess I'm fine. I guess I'm fine, man. You know what I mean? That's interesting. Yeah, because I tried it years ago and it never worked for me. And then I tried it again more recently and it really did. So,

for example, this morning, I had a very disrupted night's sleep with my son. I was all over the place this morning. So, I actually chose to, because this morning so i actually chose to because i was in sure did so poorly did you see an immediate effect i'm just gonna take today off and uh even in days where i wouldn't i wasn't like fucked but i was like eh i didn't quite sleep enough same hrv as always i'm like all right well whatever i guess i'll just go do my thing well i mean and it's interesting because it could be placebo but i don't think it is because i i've noticed on the days when it's been borderline you know like on the on the little graph or whatever when it when it's been borderline and i've gone to train i've found myself weak and performing

more poorly and it's genuinely not in my mind i don't feel like i'm going in there going yeah i think i mean i haven't looked too much in the science of it it's actually i just go there's somebody i'd like to get on the podcast or it might make for a good article, but it's something I'd have to research a bit. I just grabbed it on a whim because I've heard from some smart people who I listen to that, yeah, there's some good science to it. And so I assume that it's not just bullshit, just based on the people that I've spoken to already about it. But I can't say that I know very much because I don't. I just was like, oh, that's good enough for me. I'll try it. Yeah. It's interesting for me, the subjective

bits, the more interesting things. So with this particular, I've tried a few different apps for it as well, but the inner balance app where it was much more subjective, but I noticed being able to rather than just strap the heart rate monitor on and see what it worked out to be, I would do the whole breathing exercise and the meditation they do with it. I would see the score improve. Then I would feel better afterwards. That's a reason to do it right there. I would be likely to be reactive.

Yeah. That's great. That's why I felt the need to chip that in. I think also, you know, in terms of like personality, like I took Jordan Peterson's understand myself personality test recently. And, and I think it actually is very accurately described me. I score very low in neuroticism and volatility, which again, I've seen that play out. So I think in some ways, like, you know, I have definitely my, the thing that's wrong with me is my, I'm, I'm hyper disagreeable. Uh, and, but I think a stronger point of just my personality,

just the way that I'm wired or whatever is for whatever reason, like I, I, I don't get nervous easily. I don't ever really kind of worry about things and I don't have it. And that's not me bragging. I don't have even like an explanation for it. That's kind of just always the way I've been. So I think that that is partially why I haven't benefited much from those types of things. Cause it's not that I don't care. So I'm like, Oh fuck it. Who cares what happens? But for whatever reason, things that probably should affect me more than they, they probably should affect me more emotionally, but they just don't. So I don't know. I don't have an explanation for it. Right, right, right. So my, my, my, my last thing is obviously I'm, I'm a fan. If the guys are still, sometimes, sometimes

it's long form. I'm willing to do it because it's, you know, it's an, it's an, it's an interesting conversation. And I don't, I know that like, this is something I'll probably actually post up on my podcast. Cause I get asked by my people a lot about this kind of stuff. So I can say, Hey everybody, look, here's a discussion that it's that you might like. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a, it was a short form podcast that took 90 minutes, but, but I love it. I'm definitely gonna, I'm going to wipe this whole thing up. But,

but for the guys that are listening, I know we've mentioned a few places. We, we, I know you got to run. Muscle4life.com spelled just say Muscle4Life. We know you've got to run. Let's just say Muscle4Life.com. Spelled out Muscle4Life.com is kind of my central hub. If you want to check out what I'm doing on the sports nutrition side of things, that's LegionAthletics.com.

L-E-G-I-O-N Athletics.com. And those are my main two properties, I guess you could say. Yeah. And get on the podcast as well. So I'll endorse again. The reason why Mike's on this call is because I was a customer of his first and a fan and he puts out great content. So make sure you guys, if you listen to a lot of podcasts, check out the Muscle for Life podcast. And yeah, I use a lot of the different legion supplements. Although I'm not going to open this can of worms now, Mike, but I wanted to get into the whole nootropic discussion, but I guess we'll have to leave that

for another time. So, right. So guys, check out muscleforlife.com and, uh, Legionathletics.com. And all that leaves me to say is, uh, Mike, thank you very much. 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. 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 100% natural greens supplement Genesis. Now Genesis is a very unique combination of greens, superfoods, adaptogens, herbs, and other phytonutrients that have been proven to increase immunity, heart and circulatory health, energy levels, libido, mood, and more. Genesis is also naturally sweetened in flavors and contains

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