Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Winning Tactics for Business Building, Email Marketing, Dealing With Impatience, and More

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

While my world revolves around lifting heavy objects and learning how to eat “like an adult,” I occasionally dip into talking about entrepreneurship, marketing, and business in general. And feedback on this sort of content has been great. People with the entrepreneurship bug want to know what’s worked for me, what hasn’t, and what I’ve learned while growing my own businesses. The truth is starting your own business isn’t for everyone. You have to do a lot more work, take on a lot more stress, and generate a lot more revenue to be successful than most people think. In other words, it’s not for the lazy or faint of heart. These are things I recently talked about with Cody McBroom, who interviewed me on his Tailored Life Podcast, in which he asked me about all things business. I wanted to share this interview on my own podcast because I think it will be valuable to my listeners. It provides a peek behind the curtain of what it really takes to run and grow a business, build and maintain momentum, and more. In the interview, I talk about . . . The myth of “overnight success” stories and how to deal with impatience Reasons why you might not want to start a business or become an entrepreneur Work life balance, stress, and parenting Reflection and “self-care” routines (and why I don’t meditate) And a whole lot more . . . So if you’re interested in getting an “inside scoop” on what it takes to be successful in business, I think you're going to enjoy this episode. Timestamps: 6:35 - What are your thoughts on patience and people not being patient enough? 17:59 - What allowed you to become more patient? 25:18 - What does it take to start a business? 45:42 - What are your thoughts on reflection and balance? 56:06 - Rapid questions Mentioned on the Show: Cody McBroom's Podcast: https://tailoredcoachingmethod.com/podcast/ Cody McBroom's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codymcbroom/ Books by Mike Matthews: https://legionathletics.com/products/books/ Want free workout and meal plans? Download my science-based diet and training templates for men and women: https://legionathletics.com/text-sign-up/

Hello, and welcome to a new episode of Muscle for Life. I'm Mike Matthews. Thanks for joining me today for something that is a little bit different. I do this every now and then when I think it's appropriate, and here is another one of those times. So a couple of weeks ago, I went on another podcast. I went on the Tailored Life podcast, which is hosted by my buddy, Cody McBroom. And instead of talking about the stuff I normally talk about, like how to pick heavy things up and put them down and how to not eat like an asshole, we talked about entrepreneurship and marketing and business in general. And whenever I release content along those lines, whenever I write about those things or speak about those things, I always get good feedback because I have a lot of entrepreneurs

in my orbit. I have a lot of people who own businesses or who are thinking of starting businesses or who work at a business, who work at a company and are happy to keep doing that, but who are striving to accomplish more in their career. And a lot of the principles that allow you to succeed as an entrepreneur apply just as much to someone who wants to succeed in a business, working for somebody else's business. For example, a very viable path to both meaningful work, work that satisfies you, that you generally enjoy doing, as well as financial success, is to become an intrapreneur, meaning somebody with an entrepreneurial type of spirit who doesn't want to own their own business, but who would like to own, in the sense of responsibility, a piece of a business, maybe an entire department. Maybe it's

the marketing department, for example, where they are going to preside over an array of activities that produce something very valuable to the business. And that person is going to treat that part of the business like it's their own business, coming up with new ideas and always looking to move things forward, both personally and for the area of the business that they're in charge of. Anyway, as content that I've released in the past along those lines has always done well, I thought I would post up this interview again that I did on another podcast on my podcast, because it is in the same vein. In this interview, Cody and I talk about the myth of overnight success stories. We talk about how to deal with

impatience. I am by my nature, a pretty impatient person. And that's something I've had to force myself to get better at. We talk about reasons why you may not want to start a business, why it may make more sense to work in another company or for someone else. And that ultimately may allow you to, again, be more satisfied with your work and earn more money. We talk about work-life balance and dealing with stress and particularly in the context of parenting, which is something I now have a bit of experience with. I have two kids, an eight-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter. Cody and I talk about self-care routines. I talk about why I don't meditate. That's something I get asked about fairly often, actually, and more. Also, if you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere,

definitely check out my health and fitness books, including the number one best-selling weightlifting books for men and women in the world, Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, and Thinner, Leaner, Stronger, as well as the leading flexible dieting cookbook, The Shredded Chef. Now, these books have sold well over 1 million copies and have helped thousands of people build their best body ever. And you can find them on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play, as well as in select Barnes & Noble stores. And I should also mention that you can get any of the audiobooks

100% free when you sign up for an Audible account. And this is a great way to make those pockets of downtime like commuting, meal prepping, and cleaning more interesting, entertaining, and productive. And so if you want to take Audible up on this offer, and if you want to get one of my audio books for free, just go to www.buylegion.com slash Audible and sign up for your account. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, and if you want to learn time-proven and evidence-based strategies for losing fat, building muscle, and getting healthy, and strategies that work for anyone and everyone, regardless of age or circumstances, please do consider picking up one of my best-selling books, Bigger Leaner Stronger for

Men, Thinner Leaner Stronger for Women, and The Shredded Chef for my favorite fitness-friendly recipes. All right, dude. So like I said, you're the most frequently returning guest as far as I can remember. We're almost on episode 600, but I'm pretty sure that that's the case. But I'm excited for this one because like I told you, I want to take it a different route. Let's see if I can earn my invitation. Yeah. I think you will, man. I think because I've heard you talk on this stuff maybe, and I haven't probably listened to every single interview you've done. You've done so many, but I've only heard you talk on this like a few times

and it, and it tends to be the ones that I'm like most excited for when I see your interview and I see the title and I'm like, and maybe it's cause I've been in this industry a long time, but people ask me often too, like, you know, who do you follow or look up to from a business perspective? And a lot of times it's not necessarily other online coaching companies doing exactly what I do, which is a good tip for people. Like you shouldn't just follow the people doing your thing. You're in my industry, but you're mainly a supplement company. But from your content to marketing, to branding, to your philosophy on like longevity, all those kinds of things. It's something that's always resonated with me. And I've always kind of, for the last few years, at least just followed and watch and really like you've, you've kind of been a trailblazer for a lot of the actions I've

taken. So for one, thank you for that. And you have been a role model, but because I want to use this podcast to talk about that shit, because usually we talk about fitness and how to be evidence-based and stuff like that, which tends to be more simple than people realize. Um, so the first thing I want to talk about is, is just like patience with it all. You know, like when I think of your development and going from being an Amazon author to what you're doing now and how long that's probably taken. And although it seems like for some people, like you blew up or you grew quick, or it hasn't been that long, I'm sure you feel like it's probably been a really long fucking

time. Um, it feels like it's taken too long. Yeah. And so like, what are your thoughts on that? Like, I mean, people not being patient enough, how, how, like, did you have to remind yourself throughout the process to be more patient? Like, well, how important is that? Yeah. I mean, this is a good topic because I am naturally an impatient person and a lot of successful people I know are the exact same way. And some very successful people I know, you know, nine figure net worth people are extremely impatient. This is something I wouldn't say they struggle with. They just have to be aware of because if they don't keep it in check, it will cause problems. It will cause problems with personnel, for example, or they're then railing on employees for not getting things done as quickly as they want them to get done when there actually is no way to get them. You know what I mean? Like there, there are, there are constraints of reality. I mean,

we all do have to at least sleep and like poop and eat food and stuff. And if we're going to maintain some health and wellness, we have to also exercise and get outside and have a social life to some degree. Right. And, uh, so that, that is one thing I'll just throw out there quickly. And then I want to jump just to this point of this, this like overnight kind of success sensation, just quickly comment on that, that that is always an illusion. Almost always. Of course, you can find the exception. You can find like, I don't know, maybe Justin Bieber, wasn't he just some kid on YouTube and then the right person found him and a year later he's Justin Bieber or something like that. Yeah, it can happen. But in business,

that almost never happens. It is almost always what you just alluded to, which is a lot of work, a lot of grind, and eventually things reach that critical mass and then you can see exponential growth and then more and more people start hearing about you or start coming across your work or your products or whatever. And it appears like you were nothing, nowhere, doing nothing to just, oh, wow, that's the next it guy or the next it girl. But that's, again, that's almost never how the illusion is not the reality, right? But anyways, coming back to this patience point, I am, again, I'm an impatient person by nature. I want things done

quickly. There's an objective analytical side to that in that speed is extremely powerful in business. It's a force multiplier. It's one of those, quote unquote, little things that has a disproportionately large effect on your success. The faster you can get things done, the faster you can seize on opportunities, the faster you can put out fires and fill in holes in the business and so forth, the faster you can win. And I mean, that's probably something I could go on a long tangent on that, but that is a true, just a basic kind of maxim of business. So I come to my work with that, at least looking through that lens. I mean, there may be other things that go into it, but that's a major priority for me is getting things done quickly and not getting stuck in perfectionism, for example, where

things take a lot longer than they needed to take because I have to get every little detail right before I even know it's a good idea, for example. So I also have to balance that with my for example. So I also have to balance that with my impatience. And so for me, what I've tried to do is be... So when I'm planning, I try to think with, okay, what am I trying to do here? And what is a realistic estimate of, let's say, time and resources that it's going to take to get this done? And then double the time and cut the proposed ROI. And that may not be financial. It depends what we're talking about. But what's the outcome that I think is a conservative estimate?

Cut that in half. So double the time that it's going to take and the money, if we're talking about money as well. And cut the conservative estimate of the result in half. And then think with those numbers, with that scenario, do I still want to do this or not? Does it still make sense to do it or not? And so that's saved me from committing myself to projects that, because what I don't want is I don't want to get into the middle of something and then start questioning the cost of the opportunity. Like, should I be doing this? Because that makes my impatience go out of control, right? Where I'm like, all right, now I really just want to get this thing done because I don't even know if this was worth doing

in the first place. And there are so many other things I could be doing, right? And so I've found that by working a little bit more on the front end before I commit myself or any of the people who work with me or commit money or whatever, that I've done my due diligence, so to speak. In the past, I was quicker to just go with my kind of gut instincts of, oh, yeah, that's a good idea. We should just do that and then go and do it. Sometimes it worked out. Sometimes it did not. And so that's one thing that has helped me. And another thing is, this is more just a kind of dealing with the emotion of impatience is now that I'm in the middle of a process and I've done my initial work and on why I think this is a good idea. And I haven't changed my mind. There hasn't been some

market shift in circumstances that makes me have to now redo that basically of, okay, I don't want to just put more money after bad. You know what I mean? I don't want to keep going on something just because I said I'm going to do it. It needs to keep making sense. So let's say it is making sense and it's not getting as done. It's not getting done as quickly as possible. And what aggravates me the most in that scenario is when I start thinking about what could be happening if it were done right now. Like if I had this book out right now, I could be selling X number of more copies. And I know what that does strategically.

And it brings more attention to Legion. And so there's that element of it. And then there's the element of maybe a little bit of like a fear that the opportunity is going to disappear by the time I actually am done, right? Like it might be too late or it may just not go very well because it's been three months and who knows, circumstances can change. And so in my experience, what I've learned is that those kind of worst case scenarios, even though maybe that's not a worst case scenario, but that's a bad, bad case scenario. They don't seem to happen nearly as often if we, if I were to look at it in terms of like actual probability, emotionally, I'm quick

to take something that is a, maybe a smaller probability and make it a larger one. And this is just kind of a human thing. I think, I think in that book, Thinking Fast and Slow, I think that was a book where the authors were talking about, this is, this is just humans, right? This is all of us. We have this, this, it may be biological or who knows, but it seems to be kind of hardwired into us to take small probabilities that have emotional value and make them into larger. And then to, in some cases, take larger probabilities and make them a lot smaller. And so I try to consciously fight that cognitive bias and remind myself that it's unlikely that the opportunity is just going to be gone. It's unlikely that someone's going to preempt me so effectively that when I'm done and it's going to do nothing. Right. And so I try to almost like have a dialogue with myself. There's the emotional side, right? And then there's the

more analytical side. And so that, that has, that has helped me just be more patient and understand that, uh, it, it, when it gets done, it will, um, it will likely the conditions will be likely very similar to when it began and it'll have its chance to do well. And then also I would say that maybe an analogy would be take speeding, right? If you look at, okay, if you're going to drive to wherever you're going to drive at the speed limit of 50 miles an hour, if you speed up to 60 or 65 miles an hour, there's emotional satisfaction there. You feel like you're getting there faster. But if you actually run numbers, you're like, what do I save? I save a few minutes. It doesn't really matter, right? You're getting there more or less just as quickly. So as far as work and really, again, this is really just if I'm trying to pursue any goal, I try to remind

myself of that effect where so long as I'm making good progress and that also is going to have to be quantified to some degree, like take training, right? It's important to track your workouts and see what's happening to make sure you know you're at least moving in the right direction. And so long as things are moving in the right direction. And so long as we are more or less on target, or I am more or less on target for my deadline, I actively resist that emotion of I'm not going fast enough because that's where I'll go. If I, if I don't like really show myself that this is okay, the speed that I'm going at is okay. It's fine. It's going to work. Then I will go there and I'll be like, I need to work on this more. I need to work all weekend, which I tend to do maybe not all

weekend, but I always work on the means, but you know what I mean? I'll just be like, all right, I'm not doing anything today. I'm going to work on this until just 10 PM. That's it. You know what I mean? So those are some initial thoughts. I don't want to go on and on and on, but. I think it's, you brought up a couple of interesting points. Like even, even the kind of self-sabotage stories that you create in your head of, of worst case scenarios or how big or how small I often tell people too, is like, just logically ask yourself, is that really true? Because if you really break things down, it's like, you're creating things that probably aren't going to happen realistically. And that's why you start self-sabotaging yourself. And sometimes,

you know, reverse engineering the process can help. And, but on the patient's note, I think it's, cause I'm a very impatient person too. And I've come to realize that I think it's, and I'd be interested if you agree. I think it's, it's kind of, it's a double-edged sword in a way, but it's kind of a blessing and a curse. Like I, I think it's, it's nice because it pushes me to keep going. Like I have to stop it sometimes, but like you said, like, I have to be like, okay, you're going at the right pace, slow down. It's okay. Chill. But at the same time, there's people who are, aren't impatient enough. And so they just don't grow. They don't push themselves. They don't push the people around them. And because of that, they're going too slow. Um, do you think like, and that's, see, that's the fear though, right?

For people like us that it's, we don't want to be that. So if, if we're going to err in one direction, it's going to be in the other direction, right? We're going to err on, uh, over, overburdening ourselves, so to speak, and overreaching, not underburdening or underreaching. And I don't think that's bad, but I think that's going to be to your question. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's, it's one of those things that like, obviously there's times where you can get burnt out or you can go too far, but I mean, you never regret trying too hard, really. Like, you know, I think that's the biggest thing.

But along the lines of, you know, patients and impatience, is there ever like, what was the thing that allowed you to become more patient or learn how to control that was, do you think like people have to find what their thing is? Like, I know a little bit about your past. Like, I don't even think you were going into the fitness or supplement space or anything like that. Was it when you decided to make that shift and you saw that it was working and that you had this skill or this passion or this, this purpose there that you were like, okay, now I can be patient because I can see the long-term plan. I can see that if I am patient, this will work out well. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. I would say

initially, no, probably because I don't remember having these types. What I was just describing is I would say more of a recent thing as I've had kids and just more obligations. Whereas at that time, I mean, eventually my son arrived, but I was working most of the time. I mean, I was like kind of, I would wake up at 6am, I'd go to the gym, go to the office, work all day, go home and eat some food, do like 30 minutes of cardio, go back to work. That was Monday through Friday. Maybe sometimes Friday evenings were off, but that wasn't every week. I would work all day Saturday, just kind of morning until at least morning till dinner, sometimes after dinner. And I would work half days Sunday and I got into playing golf. So sometimes that was like my other afternoon or whatever. And I got into playing golf. So sometimes that was like my other afternoon or whatever. And that was pretty much my life for several years. And I don't think I took a vacation in, I don't know, for like four or five years. And the easiest antidote, my drug of choice for dealing with impatience is to just work. That's it. Just work. Just work on the goal. And then I'm happy. And then I know I'm making progress. And then I can also say that if it doesn't work out, and again, this is initially when I was building things and now take Legion or books,

whatever, there's a lot of momentum. So at this point, it would take, I don't know, a major economic catastrophe to just delete what's there. But at the time when I was building things, I don't want to fail. I'm the person, I never want to fail because I didn't work hard enough. I don't want to be that kind of person. I don't want to be the person who fails because they just didn't put in the effort. To me, that's the most pathetic reason to fail. Failing because it wasn't a good idea. Okay. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes there's actually the only way to not have that happen is to not even try because a good example of that is in marketing conversion rate optimization. I'm working with

a firm. I've been working with them sometime and they're good. And we come up with ideas and there are some ideas that I was certain were going to work. They were so obviously good ideas. We dramatically improved our checkout process. Legion's old checkout was janky. It was just bad. By best practices, by anyone's standard who knows about building a proper e-commerce checkout, it was bad. We rebuilt it. We basically swipe Shopify, which has a really smooth flow that a lot of people are used to now. And it did statistically, it did nothing. Like it was a, I mean, maybe if it did do something, it was probably 5% and a 5% increase in checkout rate or less. And I was like, how, how is that? Now Now, the hypothesis that we came up with is that although the previous checkout was bad,

the checkout rate was actually quite good. It was like high 60s. And it's basically impossible to get over like 75. And I learned that later. And so I was like, oh, okay. So I guess now I see why. That's probably why it didn't. Because once a person starts the checkout,

a lot of the people are just committed to finishing it regardless of how ugly it is. And so my point with just saying that is that that was an idea though, that I was like, this is a great idea. I'll bet you we see a 10% or 15% increase. Absolute, not even relative in checkout rates. And nope, it turns out that's basically impossible. To hit a checkout rate of 80% plus, I guess you're Amazon now or something like that. And so coming back to just working hard, again, if I come up with an idea, let's say it's an idea for a book, write the book, launch the book, and then it doesn't meet expectations, it doesn't do as well as I had hoped, or maybe it completely flops. If it's just because the idea didn't resonate, fine. That actually doesn't really bother me.

But if it were to flop because I just didn't work hard enough, I kind of tried to phone it in and I didn't really do it up to the standard that I feel like I should have, that would just bother me more. That's unacceptable to me. And so in the beginning, I was just committing as much time as I could to work and building things because if it wasn't going to work out, I wanted to make sure it wasn't going to be for the lack of effort. And, and so, so now though, you fast forward to where I'm at. I still work a lot. I don't work that much. It's not that I don't want to, or that I couldn't, it's just, that would mean that I would, I don't want to be a derelict dad. I don't want to be just never there and have no relationship with my kids and, and try to tell myself that like, well, I'll, we'll be rich. Like, Hey,

whatever. They'll have a nice house and they'll have trinkets and things or, or be like, Oh, well, you know, so-and-so didn't even know his dad until he was like 12 and he's okay. Like that's magical thinking. That's, that's, uh, that's talk coming back to these ideas where like, I'm creating, if I were to do that, if I were to create this narrative and I assign a high enough probability to make me want to go with it, like, yeah, it'll, it'll be fine. Well, what am I saying? It will be fine. I'm saying that there's what, at least an 80% chance that it's going to be fine.

If I'm not even there for my kids at all. No, no. If I were to go look at some data, there's research out there that would immediately disagree with my fake illusion fantasy that I've just created. So now though, with less work, the opportunity cost of my work time has gone up. So I've had to care more about priorities and what am I going to work on? And that's helped me with, whereas previously I could quote unquote afford to do things that may or may not work. And I didn't really have to do very much thinking or analysis. If it seemed like a good idea and it

wasn't going to cost an inordinate amount of time or money, do it, see what happens. But now I've isolated, I've found a lot of things that work that I can put my time into and that can get me to my bigger strategic goals. And so I'm more protective of my time, so to speak. And I'm more just cognizant of like, I really should be putting most of my time into these things, even if doing all of these other things would be more fun or more interesting. It's kind of in service of a bigger goal. And so that has helped as well. Yeah. I think there's a couple of things that I think are really, really important for people to hear in that. And I think one of them is this really what it takes to create a business. And that's something that I appreciate about you is that you openly say,

I worked every single day of the week for a long time. And I did the same thing and shit. I would even say for my daughter's like first one and a half years of life, at least that's how it was too. And it was like, it took me a while, but I had this, I had a conversation with somebody recently about this, about entrepreneurship and about how they, they want to, like, it was, it was this idea of like being an entrepreneur, so you can have more

freedom and flexibility and travel. And I was like, I, like, I hate to tell you this, but I'm just now to a point where I could do that if I didn't have a kid, you know? And I still can, if I take the kid, but like what you're talking about, like, if you want to become an entrepreneur, you got to remove that for quite a while because it actually takes so much more than people realize on the back end to create and consistently build something big. Very true. Yeah. I mean, for the first couple of years of my son's life, I don't have very many memories with him, which is not something that I feel bad about for my sake. And I'm not asking for pity or anything. It's just a fact. And I probably still would have

done it the same way because that period produced a lot and it's going to mean a lot for his future. And now that he's a bit older, I mean, to be fair at that time, he really just wanted his mom most of the time. But I could have made more of an effort. It just would have taken time, of course. And maybe I should have made a little bit more of an effort. Fortunately, though, he's eight now and I do still work a lot. And there are certainly better dads out there. But I give him time.

I give him importance. And I'm not as just inaccessible as I was then. And I think it matters a little bit more that he's older. So I totally understand that. And to your point about entrepreneurship, I totally agree. I've said this in interviews and here and there on my own podcast when the topic of entrepreneurship has come up. It's not for everyone. And that's okay. I don't say that by putting us entrepreneurs up on a pedestal, looking down at the dirty peasants like, no, peasant, you can't come up here.

No, it's actually just not for everyone. And there's a lot to be said for having a job that you enjoy that allows you to focus on the work that you're good at and that you like to do, and that allows you to build a skill set that's going to be commercially valuable and viable for the decades to come. And a lot of that is changing because of technology and what's happening in the economy. And there's a lot to be said for not having to worry about payroll and not having to worry about inventory issues, unless that's your job, not having to worry about so many of the other things that come with owning a business. And it's not because you quote unquote couldn't do it, but no, there's a trade-off there. And in my opinion, if we're talking about owning a business, the benefits of...

Let's talk about this idea of freedom. Yeah. If you can get to a certain level of financial success and you can put enough systems in place and have enough people, you can have more time to play around, I guess, than if you had a steady job that keeps you busy 40 to 50 hours per week. You can take more vacation time, so to speak. But there, and I'm sure you can relate to this, to get to that point, you have to be the kind of person who doesn't really get off on not working. You know what I mean? Like you're going to probably be the person who,

who defaults to work, who enjoys work, who takes for me like a vacation. Sure. Five days, uh, after five days or so, it doesn't matter where I am. I can be in Italy. I can be in France. I can be in beautiful places, whatever five days. And I could leave. And I'm like, yeah, that was good. You know, a little change up of the routine, looked at the rocks, ate the food. Fine. You know, that's it. That's traveling. Cool. And I've done a lot of traveling. I'm just kind of whatever about it at this point, right? Seven days, I'm now looking forward to coming home. 10 days, I'm like, I want to leave. I want to get back to my routine. I want to be productive again. I want to have my workout schedule in. I want to

eat like an adult. I want to stop just randomly eating in this restaurant here and there. It's just, I want to get back to my system, my personal system that works for me. And that is the case with a lot of successful people I know. That said, where I've seen it change is in the case of either large amounts of wealth, hundreds of millions of dollars net worth type territory, where I've seen people who have worked tremendously hard. I'm thinking of one person. He started at like 16 and he has worked, he's my age, so 20 years of the type of lifestyle that we're talking about. And he's at a point now where, I mean, his net worth is in nine figures. And at some point he'll probably sell his business for, I don't know, 400 to $900 million, depending on what he wants to do. And he now is more

interested in just kind of finding other things that interest him. But it's been 20 years of that, of really working his ass off and achieving a certain level of success where he now, he can't pretend like money matters anymore. It just doesn't. He can do whatever he wants, right? He made eight figures in the markets last year. It just doesn't matter at this point. But I know just as many very successful people who are still just, they just default to work. They want to have fun. That's more how it has changed, where at one point they did whatever they needed to do to get that financial freedom. But for them, the financial freedom was to only do the things they want to do now. And that means work though, to only work with people they want

to work with, to only work on projects they want to work on, to only invest in businesses they want to invest in. And that's what they're looking for. And in a couple of cases, I can think of people who went through the phase that my buddy's going into right now and then got bored and went back to their... I was happiest and I felt most excited about my life back when I was working to build my businesses and build my net worth. And now that I've done that, and then I tried to take it easy and just live the good life, quote unquote. I mean, in a couple of cases, people have told me like they were even depressed. They were just, they just didn't, they weren't happy and they had everything, but they didn't have a game that they

wanted to play. And that's really what it comes down to. Right. Yeah. I think it's that creative process. I was even going to say, when you were, you mentioned that person that was very successful after he sells, he probably will start another company. Right. Oh, he already says he will. Yeah. He knows. Exactly. And I think that's, it's a, it's a trait. And I've even, I've had conversations with my wife about this, where she has talked about like working on Sundays and she's like, we don't have to do. And I'm like, no, I definitely don't like things are good, but like, I really want to, because like, I get this antsy feeling of like, well, it's Sunday sets me up for Monday. And it's like this whole cycle. And it's just, it's what I love to do. And it's that creative process.

And that's important. That's, I would say for entrepreneurship, if somebody is not that way, and we don't have to make a character judgment or a moral judgment. They're just not that way. I know people who are just not that way, and so do get out of bed in the morning. No, it's just work is an important part of their life, but it has very clear boundaries and it serves a very specific purpose, which is usually to just pay the bills, maybe a little bit into the 401k for retirement and slowly grow it over time and retire that, that, that kind of approach. And then they have their other things. That's totally fine. But I would say to the people who are more of that inclination that I would seriously consider not becoming an entrepreneur because like one of the criteria that I have thrown out there to people just to, again, this is kind of that due diligence

before you get into something, right? Is can you consistently work at least 50 hours? And I'm going low here. I really think it probably should be more like 60 or 70, but let's just start with 50. Can you consistently work 50 hours per week indefinitely? Not like, oh, you can muster the metal to do it for a week and then you need to take a week off. No, can you just do that forever, basically? And again, that's a low number. And that's work too. That's not with the TV on or with social media going or with your phone and you're just kind of quote unquote multitasking and jumping between email. And that doesn't have to work. Like, I don't even know if I could do 50 hours of actual true deep work. Yeah. And not that I hold myself up as like a paradigm of productivity,

but I'm pretty good. I've done a lot of deep work. I've just practiced it a lot over the years, like writing, writing is deep work. I'm not sure I could do 50 hours of productive writing work per week. It's probably something around half that. Well, if it's seven days, it's a bit more, but if we're talking, let's say just five, I'm good for probably four to five hours of deep work per day. I know that I can do that. If I need to push and go further, I can, but there's more of a burden to it. I feel the gears turning as opposed to for the first few hours, it's pretty smooth, right? But we go from the deep work to the light work. You do have to do email.

You do have to make phone calls. You do have to coordinate with people, blah, blah, blah. So if you can't work consistently at least 50 hours per week, I would say I would not. That's a red flag as far as starting your own business goes. It's not a red flag as far as being a human goes per se. I mean, maybe a little bit, but that's a different discussion. But as far as starting a business goes, it's going to work against you. Let's just put it that way. And then another thing is understand the economics of business, right? So with all the extra bullshit that comes with owning a business, and I don't

care what business we're talking about. I mean, I, and you've probably spoken to a lot of successful business people I have. And in every case, there's always the analogy that I use is it's like, everything feels like it's on fire all the time. And you're just trying to pick the fires to put out. You're just like scrambling around, trying to prevent the whole thing from burning down. And even if that's not reality, that's how it feels. That is just how it feels. And there is some truth to that is the reality to some degree. There are always problems that need to be solved. Sometimes they are hard to solve and sometimes they suck resources and whatever. And so to produce a high enough income to make it worth it, you first need to think about that because if you could get a job

and you could make a hundred thousand dollars a year, and again, not have to worry about all that stuff, just work on what you're good at. And you're only expected to produce in that discipline, that domain. And there's value to also now you don't have to educate yourself about 19 different things that come with running a business. You just need to get really good at your one thing. Let's take writing. You create content for a business. You just need to get better and better at researching and writing and improve your quality and quantity and your value goes up. If your business doesn't see that and they don't continue to pay you more, go somewhere else because that's a valuable thing.

And you could find a lot of individual examples of like, just get really good at this thing and you're going to be able to make good money and you're going to be able to make more and more money as time goes on. Your wages don't have to remain stagnant. Now, if we're talking about physical labor, for example, yeah, you only can do very simple physical actions so well. And so, of course, it's hard to expect the value of that to go way up, especially with automation and AI and whatever. So let's say you can get a job $100,000 a year. If you had a business, how much money would that business have to make for you to make $100,000 a year? If you had a business, how much money would that business have to make for you to make $100,000 a year? And you know this, but many people who are not in business, they

don't realize that the average business, if we're looking at profitability, is probably around 10% to 15%. That's actually considered good in business. 10% is okay. 15% is good. 20% plus is great. And you don't really see 20 plus often. You see it maybe in some software companies and digital agencies and you can do it. But most businesses are going to be, I would say assume 10% unless you know for a fact that margins are just higher. Like if you're starting a SaaS company and you know what you're doing on the marketing and you're not going to waste a bunch of money there, sure, you might be able to get 20, but let's just say 10. Okay. So you have 10% profits. And that means that after all of your expenses come out, your cost of goods and your overhead and blah, blah, blah, there's

10% left for you, the owner. And in the beginning, you don't get a salary plus your distributions. Where's the salary coming from? You get your, that's it. That's all there is to pay you is 10% of the revenue. Now, if you take all of the profit out of your business, you're going to struggle to grow it because what's going to happen is you're going to create systems that are going to get you to a certain level of revenue. And to scale those systems, it often takes investment. And if it doesn't, if you find something that is continuing to grow at a certain level of investment, eventually it will taper off, right? So you have your systems now that are producing your income. How do you double that income? Something has to happen. It's not just going to come from the government, although these days maybe it will. But no, something has to happen. It's not just going to come from the government, although these days maybe it will. But no, something has to happen in the market. You have to make something happen. You have to launch a new product, for example. Great. That's a good

way to grow your revenue, depending on where you're at in your business. That costs money. Where does that money come from? It comes from your bottom line. It comes from your profits, because that's the only money you have left after all of your expenses to just stay where you're at. So there are different schools of thought on how much money the owner should be pulling out of the business if he wants to also, or she wants to also maintain good growth. But if we want to be conservative, 50% is a high number. That's high. 25 or so is, and this is going to change based on businesses. So if somebody listening is taking more than that out of their business, I'm not saying they're doing it wrong per se, but I'm just going with kind of middle of the curve here. But even if

we're really generous and we say, all right, you can take 50% of your profits, that's yours. And you can figure that out. So it's going to probably be hard to grow quickly, but whatever. Let's just say that's the case. So now let's do some math. What does it take to get to $100,000 a year in income given those parameters? Well, now you need $2 million a year in income because you have $200,000 profit and half of it is yours. How many businesses make it to $2 million a year in consistent revenue? I mean, forget it. You have one year, it's a small percentage. I don't know what it is off the top of my head, but it's small. Most businesses fail within the first five years, for example. A lot of them fail within the first two years.

So it's a very small percentage. I would not be surprised if it's less than 10%, maybe even less than 5% ever even see $1 million in annual revenue. I'm not sure. I'd have to look, but that feels about the right range. I might be a little bit off there. But then you go to $2 million and a year, again, assuming what we just laid out is true, that's $10 million a year in sales. it's not just, what does it take for a business to get to 10 million a year in revenue? What does it take for a coaching business, for example, to get to 10 million in revenue? What does it take for a supplement business, a book publishing business? And you can get more granular with that data and understand that, hey, you may be in a great place that makes it a lot easier to get to that than the average, but it also may be the other way around. And so understanding the economics, I think is very important because when people understand that, they're like, oh yeah, wow, making millions of dollars a year consistently in sales is, maybe I could do it, but that's not as

easy as I was thinking. I was thinking, hey, if I get my business to like 200K a year, I could probably take half of that. You know what I mean? And that's not how it works. So that's also a discussion that I've had with people. And then also for them to think with and assign a value, try to assign a monetary value to the extra bullshit that you are going to have to deal with as an entrepreneur, because that has certainly added to the stress quotient in my life. Like I guarantee you part of the reason why I'm no longer as good of a sleeper as I once was is because the stakes are just a lot higher. Like, yeah, you know, I make more money now. My net worth is higher,

but unfortunately the emotional counterbalance, the weight of that, it's just not very much. It's just bigger problems, more problems, and more... Again, I'm not trying to pretend like I'm a victim. I'm just saying reality. There's just more stuff on my mind all of the time now than ever before. And of course, there are rewards that are associated with that, but it takes its toll, so to speak, even though I do a pretty good job managing it. And so you have to assign a monetary value to that. If you could make 100,000 a year in a job and have none of that, or you could own a business and make 100,000 a year and have all of that, why? Why would you even bother?

You're not going to have the freedom, right? You're not going to be able to just walk away from your business and go to Indonesia for a month and think you'll still have a business when you, when you come back. A lot of people I know who own businesses, they about two weeks is the point when business things start to, unless they've really put in good systems, things start to go wonky after about put in good systems, things start to go wonky after about two weeks. And you also remember, you're probably not going to want to do it very much. You're not going to enjoy your trip to Indonesia nearly as much when you know that your business is starting to unravel every minute of every day. And so for me, the math is I would personally have to make probably three to five problems that come with that, or I could have less money and not have those problems. The value to that is probably about equal at that point,

three to five times. And people don't need to work that out for themselves individually. And so, yeah, that's a discussion I've had many times. If you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my health and fitness books, including the number one best-selling weightlifting books for men and women in the world, Bigger Leaner Stronger and Thinner Leaner Stronger, as well as the leading flexible dieting cookbook,

The Shredded Chef. What do you do personally? Do you, I mean, I've never, and I don't know if you do this, but I've never heard you speak on like journaling or meditation or anything like that. But I'm curious of like reflection work because some of the stuff we talked about just now kind of made me think of like, you know, there was like this, uh, and I have nothing wrong with Gary Vee, but there was like a Gary Vee era where entrepreneurship came, became like really, really fucking cool. And then everyone was doing it, which is cool.

I mean, but I respect Gary V. I don't know him and I don't really follow him very much, but I've seen a lot of his stuff. And I'm like, this guy has energy and he's not giving bad advice. Exactly. Right.

And then there's also this aspect of the whole balance thing of like, you know, having balance and needing balance and all this stuff. And I don't think people, I used to always say balance is bullshit, but I don't think balance is about time because you're never going to balance time period. If you want something to be, if you want to be the best dad, you have to put all of your time in being a dad. If you want the biggest business, you have to do that, you know? So, but is there ever like practices or like, what have you done

to kind of stay in your own lane, so to speak mentally, because a lot of what we're talking about, isn't the normal thing, or people would kind of look down upon working too much to build something or not having this balance or even like what you just talked about shit. I mean, entrepreneurship does not sound cool or fun at all based on what you just talked about. Right. But there's something that like makes you want to do it. Right. Exactly. And that, but that's, that to me is like, if somebody just listened to my litany of, of reasons to not be an entrepreneur and they still want to do it, they feel like they're up to the challenge and they're willing to put in the work

and then they understand the economics and they believe in their business plan, so to speak, and they still want to do it, then I think great signs. And those are all green flags to me. And as far as self-care goes, I don't talk about it because I feel like I'm not a good role model in that sense because I've tried journaling and just got bored with it. I'm like, I'm not getting anything out of this. I'd rather be working. I'm wasting my time.

Meditation to me is, is okay. It's just, I don't. So, so really what we're talking about, right. Is just not spazzing out for like 10 minutes. I mean, really, right. They're breathing exercises. We're not talking about Zen Buddhism meditation, six hours a day, like trying to absorb into the universe or something. It's can you just like chill out and not have 8 million thoughts a second for like 10 minutes. And for whatever reason, I don't have a great explanation for this. That's very easy for me. And again, I don't say that as a brag or, or try to put anybody else down. again, I don't say that as a brag or, or try to put anybody else down. It's just, uh, I can relax easily. I have good control over my thoughts, my focus, my attention, maybe the fact that I've done

a lot of writing for a long time now, and a lot of reading for a long time. Now I was always a good student and I was always into studying outside of school. And so it may just be a matter of practice. I've practiced controlling my mind, controlling my attention, and in some ways, maybe even controlling my impulses to the point where I'm pretty good at it. I can always be better and I'm not perfect. But with meditation, it was similar to where I just didn't really feel like I was getting anything out of it. I didn't notice any difference in any element of anything. And maybe it was making a difference and I just wasn't aware of it. But if I couldn't put my

finger on this is why I'm doing this, I'm not going to do it just because everyone's doing it or that's what you're quote unquote supposed to do. That's not a good reason. I need to know for me why I'm doing it. And so I've done that and it was just kind of, it was a wash. It didn't hurt, but it was not, I didn't see that I was going from, let's say, even though I tend to be a higher strung person, I wasn't going from like clearly feeling anxiety to feeling calm. Like that would have been, oh, cool. That's a great benefit. Like I'm starting my day with that. You know what I mean? But there was nothing like that. And I did some gratitude journaling for a while, which I didn't mind where I was looking for. It was three things that I was anticipating the next day. This would

be at night. So three things I was grateful for. Very simple. I didn't overthink it. And three things I was looking forward to the next day. And again, I just felt like after doing it for a while and staying committed to it, I didn't care whether I continued to do it or not. You know what I mean? I didn't notice a market improvement in my mood, which is generally when I'm in my workflow, I'm generally in a good mood. If I. Uh, if, if I'm not working, sometimes if I feel like I should be working, I'm going to not be in a very good mood, but, but generally, generally I'd say I'm pretty, pretty balanced, uh, emotionally. And I do tend toward irascibility. I will say that. Um, but not, I don't think to the extreme

or to an extreme fault. And so that's something, that's another example that was just, it just didn't really seem, again, I'd rather, it didn't take much time, I guess. It just, I didn't notice any benefit from it. I liken it to like cold showers, right? Which I've done for a long time. And I continue to do simply because, I don't know, I've kind of gotten used to it. And maybe there's, I think there's a little bit of value in it. It's almost like

a little bit of a metaphorical, just forcing myself to do something that is uncomfortable. And I understand there are no health benefits. If I were to take like a six minute ice bath every day, they're actually bring down some inflammation levels or there could be a few things to be said for that, but just a few minutes in cold water, you know, just raining down on me is not, not going to do anything health wise. Uh, it has though, if we're talking about physical effects, it has increased my cold tolerance. That's kind of cool. Like I do not get cold easily since then. And that's kind of useful living in Virginia. Now I'm moving to Florida. So that is no longer useful. In fact, I probably, if the body has counterbalance, like if I'm now a warmer person, if I run hot now, I'm fucked. It's going to, it's going to be disgusting. I'm

going to be sweating literally every day, all day. But, but to the cold showers thing was something that I've continued to do because it continued to make sense to me where even though I didn't quote, I didn't, I couldn't like tell you, Oh, well, here's the before and after like before cold showers, I was the person who couldn't. And then after, no, not at all. But I like things that are, are, are high leverage that, um, uh, it's, I mean, ideally you have things that are relatively easy to do that can have big effects. And, and so this is one of the things that I don't think it has big effects, but because it's at the level of character, because it's, it's at the level of, I'm the

type of person who blah, that is appealing to me because I think that that level of personal development takes precedence over all more tactical types of things, like how to be more productive and how to be a better marketer. Or if we're talking about how to be a better person, like we talk about a relationship. People, research shows that people who have sex more often have better relationships so much so that the joke is like, fuck, don't fight. Right. And, and, but above that is more, I think of the book, like the seven habits of highly effective people, where it's what type of person you are, your values, your principles, your own precepts, your ideas, your attitudes that drive your behaviors. And in the case of a cold shower, does it really matter? No, but it is just one little indicator that I am the type of person who can force myself to do uncomfortable things. And I don't even have a good reason to,

in the case of a cold shower, in the case of maybe doing work I don't want to do, I have a reason to, but it's just, I don't allow my desire for comfort to drive my decision-making. So that's why I continue to do it. So that's maybe an example of something that's kind of trendy that I have maintained. And that's one that we're doing actually like a challenge. It's a fruit completely free daily routine challenge thing. And cold showers are on one. And somebody was like, well, what's the purpose of like, what are the health benefits? I was like, oh, there's not really any, but when you, when you want it, do you want to

do it though? When you turn it to cold and you don't want to do it, but you still turn the water on cold. Like it's just that little bit. I don't care if you do it for 30 seconds or three minutes or whatever, like doing that consistently. And then, and like, I have a similar thought with meditation in the sense that like, I know people who have anxiety where it like, it helps them for me. It's, it's more about visualization. And like, if I can get quiet and think about one thing, long-term big picture, and then

go to my journal and kind of write that out, it gives me ideas to come to my team with and then say like, this is the next step. This is what we're doing. This is the direction we're going. And that, and that. That's a, that's a spin on it. Cause the, when I think of meditation, again, I stopped looking into it some time ago when I did my little thing with it and was like, okay okay i guess it's just not really a thing for me but that point of it was it was like oh focus on your breathing or

focus on a body part or scan your body or different things like that uh but how you're using it uh it would be more appealing to me because i do think there's value in that yeah i get antsy when i'm it's like okay like now think about your toe and then think about your heel and then think about your knee and they're like going and like that i can't do it some people would say like oh but if you're getting antsy that means that you need to do it yeah i don't know i get it maybe um i i would say i would agree again if if somebody can't calm their mind down and just relax really, and just kind of chill out for, for 10 minutes, then there's certainly value in being able to do that. Right. Um, because again, there's this point of let's come back to work or really any activity you have to be able to control your attention,

right? You have to be able to put your attention on something and keep it on something. And sometimes for extended periods of time and you can't be flitting all over the place. And so I could see meditation helping with that. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Um, I want to use these last little bit of time to run through this over under. So we're going to dive into like, it's just going to be rapid fire. Um, you don't literally have to say overrated and stop. You can, you know, give your speed on it. Um, but we'll run, run through a handful of things and, uh, and I wanted to just get your, whatever comes to mind first. Uh, and these are random topics. So, uh, and, and the reason we're doing this too, just so you know, like we did a couple episodes doing over under people fucking

loved it. Like it was like some of the most downloaded people just, and I thought it was fun. I just got to sit there and just fucking answer, answer, answer. It was really cool. So, um, yeah. All right. So the first one is, uh, the big three compound lifts. Yeah. All right. So the first one is the big three compound lifts. Oh, you know, I say who are taught who, who, according to who, because if they're not, you can't overrate them. I mean, if you're going to make an argument for overrating them, you would say that, well, maybe if you were to only do those and nothing else, like maybe the Mark Ripito message. And I love Rip. And, but that, I mean, that's his brand. I understand. I think though, from that like

kind of purist dogmatic, this is literally all you need. I don't care what your goals are then a bit overrated. But then of course we have the people who would say like, well, those exercises are not, there's nothing really special about those exercises. You can recreate all the same effects with a bunch of other exercises. Yeah, that's true to some degree, but I would say those exercises are certainly the most efficient way to increase whole body strength and increase whole body muscularity. So in that case, they would be, I'd say those people are underrating them. Yeah. It's funny. Cause it was so hard for me to do any of these without saying it depends. So like, and that's the sign. I know. I know. It's like the, who, oh, there was a little anecdote.

I forget which president the joke was. He was looking for a one-armed economist, somebody who didn't preface everything with on the one hand, but on the other hand, just tell me one thing come on make a stand not everything is 50 50 yeah well in our industry it's it's it's probably a good sign you know because because you're thinking about it both ways and i would agree too i think that like there's people that are like oh you want big biceps just do squats it's like no you should do some fucking curls because yes that's how you're going to get your bike period yeah i mean even even if you're dead lifting and you're rowing that may not be enough to get you big biceps like exactly they

want big biceps you're probably gonna have to do some curls too yeah yeah um all right knowing your one rep max uh that's a good one i would say uh it's not something i get asked about very often but if that is like a thing out there that people are very concerned with, overrated for sure. Because unless your programming uses that for, let's say, telling you how much weight to put on the bar, you don't have to ever estimate your one rep max. Certainly you don't have to do a true one rep max test, which you can do, but increases your risk of injury and it shouldn't be done very often. And it needs to be done appropriately in terms of your programming and like where it falls in a, in a cycle of training and what you do after. Uh, and so if though, like, for example, if someone's following, let's say it's a guy following my bigger, leaner, stronger,

which is double progression, a lot of four to six reps, or a woman following thinner leaner stronger, a lot of eight to 10 rep work, double progression. They can do really well never calculating a one rep max, never knowing a one rep max ever. Because what they will know is that the weights are going up over time. They're getting stronger. And of course the one rep max is going up, but to know it explicitly is for bragging or, or for programming. And it is useful like in, in my beyond bigeliner stronger program, which is for intermediate and advanced weight lifters. The primary exercises actually are programmed according to percentage of calculated one rep maxes. Now I'm not asking people to do true one or M tests. These are, these are calculations based on AMRAPs with some heavy weight and that's useful. So I think, I think that's my spiel on that. Do you think that the, the value of percentage-based training lowered when RPE was discovered and actually, you know,

used in science? I don't actually, I think when used together, I think they're very complimentary. And I think though the value of percentage-based training is much higher for intermediate and advanced weightlifters than it is for novices, novices, people, guys who have yet to gain their first 25 to 30 pounds of muscle, women who have yet to gain about half that and who have yet to achieve some kind of like novice level strength standards. They, they sure they can, they could grab my beyond bigger, leaner, stronger book that and do well with that program, but it's unnecessarily complex for them. It also would have more volume than they need. They can do really well with double progression, just kind of auto-regulating their training and knowing that, okay, they're

going for that one set of six or two or three sets of six before they add weight to the bar. And that's all they have to care about is just put that weight on the bar. Oh, you got five. All right, cool. You got three sets of five. Great. Can you get six on your first set next week or in the next workout? If you can, cool. Throw some weight on the bar. Does that progression stick? Great. That's your new weight. Do it again. Oh, it doesn't stick? All right. Go for two sets of six. Real simple, right? It doesn't require a spreadsheet. And so that though, eventually doesn't work so well. Once you have gained that initial, your newbie gains are well behind you. You're pretty big now, or you're pretty muscular to put it in terms that women would more relate with, right?

Even though you're not bulky, but like you are not now a frail a hundred pound woman. Like you have some, some, some muscle mass and you've gained some strength. There is a point where that double progression model becomes hard to continue working with because the weights are heavy and how you feel doesn't always correlate well to how well you can perform. And with a percentage-based system, what it allows you to do is bake progression into it and know that if you can just hit these numbers, you are progressing. Now it's going to be slow. And it's not like in the beginning where you're adding weight every week and then every other week and then every month. I talked about this recently. Over the course of a four-month macro

cycle of training, I increased my 1RMs by, I'd have to pull up my spreadsheet but i'm gonna guess the total increase was no more than 30 pounds and that's on that's on bench overhead squat and deadlift it may have been a little bit more because i was still coming back from home workouts and getting kind of back to where i was and on the whole i'm still regaining i'm coming back to my previous prs uh which are about three four five like three plates, one rep max on the bench, four on the squat, five on the deadlift. Although actually I think it was a bit less than five. It was high fours on the deadlift. And so I'm still, it's not muscle memory per se. There's no such thing as strength memory, but I'm still working back to something I'd

already done. And so that was four months of of training. Then in the next macro cycle, which is the one that I'm just wrapping up now, it's going to be less than that. My bench was a wash, no 1RM gain on the bench. I did my 1RM, I did my AMRAP on a trap bar deadlift. It looks like I think I gained about 10 pounds. I went from 460 to 470, one rep. And we'll see how my squat goes. My overhead press went up by about 10 pounds as well. And we'll see how my squat goes. So it may be similar. We'll see. My squat will determine, I guess, how it goes. And that was with training disruptions toward the end of this macro cycle from traveling. And then I got COVID, which I was mildly congested

for a couple of days, but I quarantined like a good boy. I waited for the symptoms to subside. 10-day quarantine before I got back in the gym. And then I got a PCR test to test negative. And just because I don't care about it for my personal health at all, it did nothing. And so I will never probably care about it ever again. I never really cared once the data came out and I realized how little risk it actually posed to me personally, not to others, just me personally. So I didn't like, okay, I don't have to worry about it for myself. But now that I've had it, what they're saying is that if you get it again, it's likely to

be even less severe than the first time. And it didn't even rate as a cold for me the first time. But it still disrupted my training because I didn't have a home gym to work out in. So I didn't, uh, I just didn't train for those days. Uh, I didn't bother doing pushups or I was like, whatever, I guess I'm taking 10 days off. So then I got back into the groove couple of weeks to try to get back to it. Um, but so we'll see on that macro cycle. And that progress is going to slow down. I know once I start getting back toward those previous PRs, I'm going to be lucky to probably add, I don't know, 10 to 15 pounds probably per year to those lifts. eventually probably just grind to a halt because I'm not going to be willing to push myself as far as I'll need to go simply because the risk to reward no longer makes sense to me. The chances of getting hurt to try to get above those three, four, five numbers for me is just going to go up

because my body is not built to be big and strong. It's just not, I'm built to be an endurance dude. And I have decent muscle building genetics that have made up for some of that. Uh, but I have long legs, long femurs, long arms. Um, and in my body, uh, I've always had good cardio, but I've never been particularly strong. I have small bones. I mean, that's just it. I'm not made to be a strength guy, really. So that's just some context for progress and percentage-based training helps me just make sure, again, that I'm just inching the intensity. I'm making things just a little bit harder over time. And that's hard to do with double progression because what will happen is you'll feel really good one day and you'll go in there and you'll get your set of six or two sets of six or whatever. And you're like, great progress. And then the following week or the following workout, you add, even if it's just five pounds to the bar, let's say you first try to go for 10 and you get two or three. you first try to go for 10 and you get two or three and maybe you're not feeling too good that day either, or it's just an off day. It just is what it is, right? You get two or three and you're like, okay, you go, you take the fives off and you replace them with two and a halves, you get two or three and now you're back to your old weight. And it's very easy to get stuck in those ruts if you're just trying to stick with double progression forever. Right. Yeah. And I think like

you said about like in conjunction, I think they're good together as you get more advanced. Cause I've even had times where I actually have a video of me maxing out on back squats and it was like during my knee surgery recovery, like months and months after. And I walk away from the rack saying that was definitely an RPE nine, nine and a half. And I watched the video and I was like, that was like an RP seven. Like I had more in the tank. And I think as you get better, you can keep that form intention under heavier loads. And sometimes you can push past, you know, and if I was using more of a percentage based approach, I would have been able to say like, no, I can keep going.

But that's also the value of filming um your workouts but um all right few more that that that's a good point that that subjective element comes into it as well that's a very good point i didn't think of that but yeah when you see it on video and you look at the bar speed you're like it barely even slowed down that was not anywhere even close it just felt really hard because you know maybe i didn't sleep all that great the night before and once you're beyond what 80 everything feels fucking hard you know at a certain point um all right uh email marketing oh it is if if people anyone who thinks it's not amazing when done well underrated it's certainly not i have not seen it overrated and and the thing though is doing it well. And many companies do not do it well. Many people do not do it well. And for example, many companies,

you never hear from them unless they want to sell you something. That's not doing it well. And it can work. You can make money, but you're just going to have shitty lists. It's going to be low open rates, low click-through rates. You're going to have sending problems, deliverability problems, I guess would be the term, because you have this low engagement list or these low engagement lists. A lot of your shit's going to end up in spam. And so what makes email marketing work is really what makes any sort of content related marketing work. And that is giving a lot of good content and earning the permission to promote things. It's that kind

of permission marketing perspective that works really well. So if you give a lot and that means that, and people understand it, even if it's, they understand it implicitly, maybe they don't explicitly think like, oh, this person is spending a lot of his time just creating things to help me. But that's the effect because that is the truth. If you are putting a lot of your time into writing good articles or writing good emails, recording good podcasts, creating good videos, and you're promoting those, you're sending those regularly to your people and they get used to hearing from you and they see that it is good content and work clearly went into it, then they start to like you. They start to look forward to your emails. They start to open more and more of your emails,

or at least they look at the subject line. Is this something for them? If not, fine, they'll pass. And you have to get to that level with people to make email marketing work, to actually start converting a lot of those people into customers. And again, not to brag, but just to let people know, if they're thinking like, why should I care what Mike says about email marketing? So I have right now over 500,000 people on my lists. I clean those lists every, I believe you do it every three months. It may be six, but I think it's three once. Maybe actually, yeah, I believe it's every quarter. And what that means is if you clean your list, you take people that are not engaging at all. So I don't remember the exact parameters. I put it together originally and I think it's

been refined by the people who do it by now, but basically you want to take, uh, it's, it's usually kind of like the lowest quartile of your list in terms of engagement and send them an email basically saying, Hey, um, Oh, I think what's our email. The subject line is, was it something I said? And it's basically saying like, Hey, you don't really open anything. You don't click on anything. And if you don't want to hear from me, that's totally cool. Uh, but if I don't hear from you, I'm going to have to remove, remove you from my list. And I, it's a lot, it may say something totally different now, but that's kind of the gist of it. And it's not bullshit. Actually. The reason why I do that is not as a marketing gimmick to try to get people to buy something from me or whatever. It's actually because if I keep them on my list, then my deliverability rates go down. ISPs, that matters.

There is a relationship between the quality and the health of your list. And you can look at that in terms of engagement. That's what they look at. Open rates. In the highest quartile, our open rates on average are, and that's a lot of people, right? On a half a million person list or different lists, our average open rate is probably over 30%. That's really good. The highest. That's really good, right? Anything in the teens to 20 is good, right? You get into the mid-20s, you're getting real good. get to above that and that's really good. And that then has a rising tide effect because it allows more of my emails to land in inboxes and not spam. Right. And so, so that's a,

that's a half a million people and it continues to grow and it gets cleaned regularly. And, um, and so I send three to five emails a week. It's mostly content. Some of them are content in emails, shorter, just maybe 200, 300 words. You can read it, learn something, get some inspiration. Some of them, uh, that we have a newsletter that goes out every week, which is here's the new stuff over at the blog. Here's the new stuff on the podcast. Uh, and we have, let's see what else. Um, yeah,. Yeah. So it's just, it's a combination of those things really, but it's a lot of content. And so people there's often like after I've gone through a couple of weeks, there's usually something for a lot of people in there. Right. And then that

allows me to, I've earned the permission of many of my subscribers to promote aggressively when I have a sale, for example. So like if I have a big sale, I may email literally nine times in like five days. And sure, I get more unsubscribes and some people tell me to fuck off and die and stop emailing them and whatever, that's fine. But I don't get much of that. A lot of people are okay with it because there's enough value being on my list. And also a lot of people,

they're like, oh, cool. That's on sale. Great. Yeah. I want that. I wanted to get that anyway. And so as a result of what is a pretty simple system, I mean, Legion does millions of dollars a year in sales from email marketing. So that's where I'm coming from. My email marketing, of course, can be better, but we have pretty good systems in place. That would also include good autoresponders that share some of your best emails right up front. So things that people really have engaged well with. If we were starting from a simple, just kind of blank slate, get people on, have an introductory email, invite them to ask questions. That's one of the first things that the outer responder does. It's like, it's an email from my email address, just saying, Hey, do you have any questions? Hit reply. Let me know. You'll

hear back from me. You'll get an answer, right? That is tremendously powerful. Psychologically, it's very helpful. It also, by starting that discussion, by getting them to send me an email, now my deliverability with them skyrockets because now it's recognized like, oh, they're actually talking to this guy, right? So when an email comes from Mike at Muscle for Life or whatever, it's going to hit their inbox and there's value in that. And then building that AR out with, again, emails that have really done well. And there's some other strategic thoughts that go into building that out, but that's a very simple way to start building something that by the end of somebody hits your list and they're going to get, let's just say it's three emails. It's going to be every other day. And those emails

are an invitation to talk to you, ask you questions. So right away, you get them engaged. And then you have a couple of, let's say, really good content emails that you just know have performed really well. Really, you got a lot of good feedback and people are forwarding them around. Then if you just load those and front-end that, then you've just created a really good first impression with your subscribers. So there's so many things you can do with email marketing. And I don't think it's ever going to go away because email would have to go away. What's going to replace email? I don't know. Telepathy, brain chip. I don't know. Until there's that, but don't worry, that'll be a Facebook chip. And then the advertising is going to be, then you're, you're, the advertising is going to be, uh, resonating

in your skull. So, uh, I think that's, that's the perfect one to end on, but for people listening every, like that was probably the most valuable snippet of business information, this entire podcast, because I think email marketing is extremely underrated and no matter what scale your business at, you can value from what he just said and do it exactly how he does it. Cause my list is not nearly as big as yours. However, I do the same exact cleanup process. I do the same exact autoresponder process. I have the same exact philosophy of giving free value. And then when I have something to promote every single day, we're actually promoting it because people are willing to accept it. Cause I don't annoy them every single week year round. But,

um, and I I'm subscribed to you guys less. So I know that that's true. And I get those emails, but, um, no, that was, that was great, man. I think that's perfect info. And I think that, uh, I'm glad we went the route of business and stuff. Cause people don't hear you specifically talk about it enough. And it's always interesting to hear when we see big businesses, like what's going on in the person's head behind the scenes that doesn't do a lot of business coaching, masterminds, stuff like that in the person's head behind the scenes that doesn't do a lot of business coaching, mastermind, stuff like that in the backend. So, um, thank you for, for sharing all that, dude. And, uh, um, I mean, I have your guys' links all over my shit. Cause obviously I'm, I'm on the team, but if you want to share where to find everything you do that, this would be the time to plug it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Again, I appreciate the opportunity. It's, it's fun for me to talk about this stuff. It's sometimes can be more fun than recording a monologue podcast on something I've already, you know, I I'm doing it in service of my listenership. Cause I know it's a question that I should put this out there, but sometimes those are a bit of a slog, honestly, because I've already like written about it and I don't really care to go through a hole, but, but I do it anyway. So, um, legionathletics.com. And that's really where people can find.

I have books and the books are pretty comprehensive. And I update them regularly. I'm working on another round of updates, actually, to kind of my flagship books for men. When you're bigger, you're stronger. And thinner, you're stronger. And they're not expensive. I think the digitals are like $8 or something. And of course, there are supplements. You or something. And of course there are supplements.

You can find a lot of articles at the blog. I've written personally probably well over a thousand. And I have a couple of people now who write with me, not under my name, under their names, but we have like a, now it's a, it's a collective effort. So there's even more stuff going up on the blog. And if somebody has a question on, on pretty much anything, I'll bet you, if they just search it, they'll probably find something that one of us has written. The podcast, my own podcast, Muscle for Life. You can find that wherever you listen to podcasts or you can check it out on the website. And yeah, so that's kind of my online hub. Love it. I'll link all that in the show notes. Yeah, man. Once again, thank you for the time. Absolutely. I appreciate the opportunity.

Yeah, man. Once again, thank you for the time. Absolutely. I appreciate the opportunity. All right. Well, that's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don't mind doing me a favor, please do leave a quick review on iTunes or wherever you're listening to me from in whichever app you're listening to me in, because that not only convinces people that they should check out the show, it also increases search visibility. And thus, it helps more people find their way to me and learn how to get fitter, leaner, stronger, healthier, and happier as well. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live,

then simply subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any new stuff. And if you didn't like something about the show, please do shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com, just muscle, F-O-R, life.com, and share your thoughts on how I can do this better. I read everything myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback, even if it is criticism. I'm open to it. And of course, you can email me if you have positive feedback as well, or if you have questions really relating to anything that you think I could help you with, definitely send me an email. That is the best way to get ahold of me, mikeatmuscleforlife.com. And that's it. Thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.