Start With A Win - Transform Overthinking From a Super Problem to a Superpower with Jon Acuff

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

In this episode of Start With A Win, Adam welcomes bestselling author and motivational speaker Jon Acuff. Adam and Jon dive into the topic of overthinking and how it can cripple us in so many areas of our lives. According to Jon, overthinking is when what you think gets in the way of what you want. Overthinking is the sneakiest form of fear that keeps us from achieving our goals, taking on new opportunities, or just getting through that tough meeting at work. That overthinking writes soundtracks in our minds—those repetitive thoughts that weigh us down.Jon breaks down his proven plan to change overthinking from a super problem into a superpower through The 3 Rs: Retire broken soundtracks, Replace them with new soundtracks, Repeat those new soundtracks.Jon is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books—his latest, Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinking, released April 2021 and is already a bestseller. He's an INC Magazine Top 100 Leadership speaker and has spoken to hundreds of thousands of people at conferences and companies around the world including FedEx, Nissan, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, Chick-fil-A, Nokia and Comedy Central. He lives outside of Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and two teenage daughters.Episode Links:All It Takes Is A Goal podcasthttps://acuff.me/podcast/Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinkinghttps://soundtracksbook.comConnect with Jon:https://www.facebook.com/authorjonacuffhttps://www.instagram.com/jonacuff/https://twitter.com/JonAcuffOrder your copy of Start With A Win: Tools and Lessons to Create Personal and Business Success:https://www.startwithawin.com/bookConnect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. And coming to you from top of the 12th floor, REMAX World Headquarters here in beautiful Denver, Colorado. It's Adam Canto, CEO of REMAX with Start With a Win. Producer Mark, how you doing, buddy? You know, I'm in REM, not the gym. How about you not steal my dope ideas? my dope ideas sorry internet so many people on the internet katie curic reposted something i wrote without credit i was like come on katie killing me

killing me i know okay so for context hey welcome to start with the wind john acuff we got here on the start with the wind podcast today we were all you know talking about times to get up in the morning and and we were talking that 245 is a limit. There's a limit to madness, and someone was saying 245, and John came up with this fantastic little meme. You should be in REM, R-E-M, not at the gym at 245. Oh, I wrote it down. I wrote it down on my notepad. I'm going to be saying that again. That's right. It's good. There you go. All right. So we got John Acuff.

If you don't know who John Acuff is, he is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books. His latest soundtracks, The Surprising Solution to Overthinking, released this April, is already a bestseller. He's an Inc. Magazine Top 100 leadership speaker and has spoken to hundreds of thousands of people at conferences and companies around the world, including FedEx, Nissan, Microsoft, Lockheed, Chick-fil-A, Nokia.

I don't see Remax on here. Maybe we got to get him. That's why I'm on this show. Okay, let's go. I hope this is going to be the doorway. This is a slippery slope, I hope. Right into John Town. Let's go. All right. Audition going on right now, John. He lives outside of Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and two teenage daughters. Oh, man. Two teenage daughters. You're in it. You're in the thick of it. I have an eight-year-old daughter, and I'm already feeling like, oh, my goodness.

Once you've got him to eight, the rest is super easy. Okay. It's fine. I don't know. I like when people have a one-year-old. No. No. I like when people have a one-year-old write a parenting book. Parenting is fun the whole time. I love't know. I like when people have a one-year-old. No, no. Adam's got two teenage daughters. I like when people have a one-year-old write a parenting book.

Like, parenting is fun the whole time. I love teenage daughters, so I'm completely cool with having teenagers. Mine's 19 and 21 are my daughters, so. Oh, nice. We're the same. We're the dads of daughters. Well, I have a son also, but, yeah, we're the dads of daughters. Empty nester.

You're almost an empty nester, man. I'm close. I'm close. Three years out. Oh, it's life-changing. You're like, what do you want to do this weekend? Let's go somewhere. All right. Who's going to watch the dog? That's all you got to worry about. So you're good. But cool. Well, John, welcome to Start With a Win. We've been looking forward to this. This is a lot of fun having great conversations with people who are very frank about leadership, personal development, business. I guess for the lack of a better term, some of the good stuff and some of the stupid stuff that people do. And when we hold up the mirror and we look at it and go, how do we make ourselves better? So I want to dig into your new book, though. Overthinking isn't a personality trait this is about this the book's

called soundtracks you can see it over john's shoulder there uh for those subtle i wanted a subtle banner you guys were able to see that from denver yeah we didn't miss that bright yellow nine feet tall good yeah it's uh we're gonna run some banners on the uh the youtube thing here i'll bring it when i come to your remax event. Okay, perfect. So you're talking about this being the sneakiest form of fear. And I mean, we've all been just, it's like a baseball bat in the face the past couple of years during COVID is fear. It's fear, fear, fear. Everybody's throwing it at everybody. It causes overthinking. I want to just start off with how does this prevent us from achieving our goals? Because we see everybody just put the brakes on instead of achieving anything

because they're sitting there processing too much. Yeah, so here's the thing. Overthinking, the way I define it, is when what you think gets in the way of what you want. So you have a goal. I want to be a real estate agent. I want to start a company. I want to start a podcast. I want to lose weight, whatever.

And then all these extra thoughts get in the way. And so when I started to go down this path, because there's three things that every great idea has in common, Adam. Three, whether it's starting a business, writing a book, doing a podcast. This is kind of the Venn diagram of, in my opinion, a best-selling idea. One is a personal connection. Am I personally connected to this idea? You're going to talk about it for years. You better have a personal connection. Two, the people need it. You know, when I'm at the neighborhood pool, when I'm talking to coworkers, when I'm speaking at events, the people need it. Third is, is there room in the marketplace? So when I started to think a couple of years ago about overthinking, changing the way I thought changed my life. In 2008, I decided I think I

can be a public speaker. I had no proof, no evidence. I think I could be an author. No proof, no evidence. I had a thought. I turned that thought into actions. I turned those actions into results. That's always how it goes. So I had a personal connection. The second thing was people needed it.

I commissioned a research study with a PhD named Mike Peasley. We asked 10,000 people if they struggle with overthinking and 99.5% of them said yes. And that was before 2020. We did that in 2019. 2020 was catnip for overthinking and 99.5% of them said yes. So, and that was before 2020. We did that in 2019. 2020 was catnip for overthinking because right now everything is a thing. The joke I've been doing is like the other day I met somebody new and they went to shake my hand and right before they did, I thought, should I refuse? Should I fist bump? Should I twist at the waist and give

them an elbow? Cause the hips don't lie. Should I shake their hand, but then put my entire arm into a vat of hand sanitizer as if to say, excuse me, while I scrub off this deadly pandemic you just tried to murder me and my grandparents with? And then I looked around the room and was like, are other people shaking their hands here? What does that say about us politically? Do you know what I thought about two years ago

when somebody tried to shake my hand? Nothing, I shook their hand. 99% of your life, Adam, you've never thought, which aisle do I walk down in which direction in a grocery store? But now everything has extra thought. And so that's when overthinking gets in the way. And then I went to the marketplace to check it and said, well, there's a lot of resources about overthinking, but most of them say, stop it, stop it, stop it. But why would I ever turn off this thinking machine? I'm good at thinking,

what if I thought good things, not bad things? Because you and I have the benefit of growing up in the age of neuroplasticity, which is the science that teaches us you can physically change your brain by changing your thoughts. So if we know that's true, it means if you can worry, you can wonder. If you can doubt, you can dominate. If you can spin, you can soar. What if you could turn overthinking from a super problem into a superpower? And once I had those three things in place, I knew, okay, I'm going to spend years of can soar. What if you could turn overthinking from a super problem into a superpower? And that's,

once I had those three things in place, I knew, okay, I'm going to spend years of my life exploring research and writing this idea. And then I'm going to spend years of my life talking about it. Oh, well, let's get into, how do you tap into the power of this then? How do you turn this into a superpower, John? Because ultimately everybody's sitting here going, yep, that's me. I'm part of that. I mean, 99.99. The other 5% are lying. The other half a percent are liars, and they wouldn't be fun at parties anyway. Well, if we can throw stats out there,

I'm going to say 110% of people are into overthinking. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that's the kind of math I can get behind. But so, okay, if the question is, what do I do with that? The book teaches three things. It teaches you how to retire your broken soundtracks. And a soundtrack is just my phrase for repetitive thought.

And I use that because a soundtrack is often in the background of the moment, but it can change the entire moment. So if you think about a movie, if they play an ominous song, even if it's a little white picket fence, beautiful house, it changes the moment. And so that's what a soundtrack does. And you have a soundtrack for your life. You have a soundtrack for your boss, for your job, for your hopes, for your dreams. So the first thing you do is you retire broken soundtracks, you replace them with new soundtracks, and you repeat the new ones. So often they become as automatic as the old ones. That's the process. It's pretty simple. It's retire, it's replace,

it's repeat. And now if somebody said, well, how do I know what a broken soundtrack is? Well, there's always easy examples. I mean, an example of overthinking is this. If you've ever read a sent email, a week later, a day later, a month later, you go to your sent email folder and you read an email you sent, that thing is gone. There's nothing you can do about it in that moment. That's overthinking. If you ever tell yourself an elaborate story about why somebody didn't text you back, you go, oh, could they have misinterpreted it? What did I say? Should I have used more exclamations so I seem light and breezy? That's overthinking. If you ever self-edit an idea before it even goes from your brain to a piece of paper, you tell yourself it's too dumb. Nobody would believe that. Somebody smarter has already done

that. Think of the works of art, the businesses, the sales, the cures for disease we've lost because somebody self-edited before they even put it on a piece of paper. So the first thing you do is you identify a broken soundtrack. Then the easiest way to do that, I'll give every listener a 30-second activity. Write down something you want to do. Write down a desire. Write down a goal. And then listen to your first thoughts. Listen to your reaction because every reaction is an education. And if your first thoughts are, I'm too old to do that. Who am I to do that? I can never do that. That's what's funny about fear. Fear argues both sides of the coin. Fear will tell you you're too old, but it also tell you you're too young. When you're in your twenties, fear goes, you don't have enough experience.

You can't do that. You're too young. And then you hit your thirties and fear goes, oh, you missed your chance. Like you missed, and you want to go fear. When was I the right age? And fear will never go. There were seven minutes when you were 31, it was a Tuesday. You should have done the thing. And so that's, you know, you identify some broken soundtracks and you figure out, okay, I'm going to retire these. That's the first part of the process. So, all right. I have a question about that then. Why do we rationalize this? Why do we put ourselves in those situations and then we look around and you also see others in society and you're going, that person's not putting themselves into this rut. They're moving

forward with it. What makes a difference between person A and person B when it comes to that? Well, a big part of why we do it is we're never taught to not do it. Like they don't teach you how to think when you're in the eighth grade. They don't teach you how to think when you're in high school. Like, and so what happens is most people don't even understand they get to choose their thoughts. Most people think thoughts just show up out of nowhere on their own. That's why we say things like she got carried away by her thoughts. She got lost in her thoughts. Most people don't know they have the power. So even my most type A friends,

we joked about what time people get up in the morning to work out. Even my most type A friends who lay out their clothes the night before they go to the gym because they know it'll ensure they go don't pick out their thoughts before a big meeting. They don't say, hey, I've got this big negotiation coming up on Thursday. And the last one kind of went south. And I know I picked up some broken soundtracks. So I'm going to be tempted to have clenched fists in that meeting. And I don't want that to prevent a really good meeting. So here's what I'm going to have on repeat. Here are the thoughts I'm rolling in there with.

And the reality is your thoughts come by one or two ways, choice or chance, choice or chance. Now, there will be thoughts that show up on their own, but you get the choice to entertain them and say, OK, this is a real thought. I'm going to let this drive the day. I mean, that's why when people go, you know, uh, the traffic ruined my day. You just gave the traffic, the power over your entire day. Like I lived in Atlanta. God forbid. I gave that city the power to ruin every day. Cause it would Denver you're in Denver, Dude, Denver traffic is terrible. Like so like I'm surprised California isn't empty at this point because they all move to Denver and Salt Lake City. And so the reason people have a hard time with it is they don't know they have

the permission and the power to choose what they think. And they think they become victims of their thoughts, not the kings or queens of their thoughts. Oh, wow. That's deep. I hope everybody's taking this in. Yeah, I'm just going to go. I'm going to fire hose today. This is fun to talk about. All right, let's move on to the second R.

Yeah. So the second R is replace. So you're going to think. That's why the idea of stop overthinking is ridiculous. You're a thinking machine. Thinking and Netflix separate us from the animals. the idea of stop overthinking is ridiculous. Like you're a thinking machine. Thinking is one of the, thinking and Netflix separate us from the animals. Like no cardinal has ever been like, I should be a better cardinal. Or I'm just, I'm really overthinking this situation. Or like,

why am I not a blue Jay? But as humans, we're going to think. So what if you could say, okay, I'm going to replace them. And that's where people get stuck. Cause I'll say to people, do you struggle with overthinking? Everyone says yes. But then I'll say, what would you like to think instead? They get kind of stuck. So that's a chance for you to go, okay, what would I want to be true? And the big thing is you don't have to sit down with a blank piece of paper. Like that's way too overwhelming to try to write your own soundtracks. The first thing I'd say is borrow some of the best, like just pay attention. Like life and other people are constantly, you know, giving you new soundtracks where you can go, wow, that's interesting.

So one of mine that I've used for years came from Dorothy Parker. She's a writer that passed away in the 1960s. And she said the definition of creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye. And I think that's amazing. That's an amazing soundtrack for me to use as a writer. Wild mind. I collect sources. How a menu was written. Something somebody said to me on an airplane. Something Adam mentioned on a podcast. It's wild. And then I have the discipline to see the connection between

them. So when I speak, for instance, I do a speech about empathy and how it applies to business. And I define empathy as understanding what someone needs and acting on it. Two parts. If you want to enrage a customer or client, understand what they need and then don't do anything about it. And so I tell this story about empathy and then I relate that to how do you have empathy? It's really simple. Read less minds, ask more questions. So I give you an action. The problem with most motivational content, especially overthinking, is it's holistic and fuzzy and you don't know what to do on a Tuesday with it. So then I relate to that. And then I tell a story that I learned when I was at Bose when I was at Bose we had this situation where we had a huge head start in the headphone consumer

headphones 20 years ago nobody was spending $300 $400 on consumer headphones but Bose had a brilliant idea they had a system for pilots and they said what if we adapted this into a system for consumers could we get consumers to spend $500 and it worked but then consumers started to change what they they had a system for pilots and they said, what if we adapted this into a system for consumers? Could we get consumers to spend $500? And it worked, but then consumers started to change what they wanted. They started to say, we want colors, we want designs and Bose only cared about the sound quality. So then I relate that to an audience. If you don't care about what your customers care about, they're not your customers for much longer. And I say, you know, who didn't ignore that? Dr. Dre and Beats. And then I, you know, and everybody in the room gets it. And then I say, we forgot the first rule of electronics. We forgot about Dre and that the room loses it.

And so all of those are me collecting ideas. Where did I get that soundtrack, which has guided a lot of my creative process from Dorothy Parker. So the first thing you do is you go, if I want to replace them, if I want some new ones, what are some ones that I see in life? What are some things that, and they don't have to be complicated. You eventually will write some. I'll show you one of mine. I'll just pull it off the wall. I have a note right here.

If you're not watching the video, it says, ask for more. I wrote that on August 27th, 2020. So it's been up in front of my laptop for more than a year. And I wrote that because I found myself undervaluing what I was doing in negotiations. And I needed a reminder. I just wasn't going to hope. Hope isn't a plan. I always tell people, fear comes free, hope takes work. Negativity will find you. You will be in the grocery store and a negative wave will punch you in the stomach out of nowhere and go, hey, remember three years ago when you did that thing?

Oh man, remember last month when you said that thing that was terrible? Hope takes work. Fear comes free. And so I needed a reminder every day, ask for more. When I'm in a negotiation, ask for more. When I'm presenting what I do as a speaker, ask for more as a reminder. That's not sexy. There's no one listening right now to go, well, I'm just not that creative. That is not creative.

But it doesn't have to be sexy or creative, artistic to be a soundtrack and you replace it. And then that gets to repeat too. I'm easy. It's easy for artistic to be a soundtrack, and you replace it. And then that gets to repeat, too. I'm easy. It's easy for me to repeat that. It's on my wall. I'm not just hoping that I remember that. Forget that.

You're going to have so many distractions during the day. I want it to be easy for me to succeed, not challenging. Awesome. So replace. I mean, it totally makes sense. Really, you're moving fear out of the way. Yeah, and I'm putting something better in its place. You don't want a void. You don't want an absence. You want to say, because your brain's going to go, okay, fine, fine, fine. What are

we going to think instead? What are we going to think instead? And you want to have an answer and go, oh, we're going to think this. We're going to think ask for more. We're going to think that. We're going to think that. We're going to think that. That's how it becomes a superpower. I mean, it's the same with me going, I think I can become a public speaker. I think I can become an author. And that thought will push you through challenging situations. I mean, I did a book signing event once with John Maxwell, leadership legend. And he had 200 people in his line, and I had zero.

And in moments like that, that's not encouraging. I don't know anyone on the planet that's like, I love to sit by my book and have nobody buy it. Like it's very humbling. But even in that moment, I was like, I'm going to work on this. Like I can figure this out. Like I'm going to be an author. I'm going to, you know, and somebody patted me on the back and said, 10 years, buddy, 10 years. I just started dying laughing. I was like, let's go. When you've got good soundtracks propelling you, it propels you through those disappointing moments. And I told John Maxwell that story 10 years later because we did another event together, and he just died laughing. And so for me, that's the power of turning an overthinking into something that pushes you forward, not something that pulls you back.

Awesome. All right. Move on to the third R here. Yeah. So you repeat them. Here's what's interesting. So about 48 hours after the book came out, came out in April, people would say to me, they DM me or email me and say, hey, John, my new soundtrack's not working, like it's not working. And I'd say, well, I know you've only had the book for 48 hours, so I know you. That's not something to be ashamed of. We all want fast results. Who wants a slow result? But what happens is I'll meet people that'll say, John, this exercise isn't working. I'll go, how long have you done it? They'll say, 10 days. And I'll say, how long did it take you to gain the weight? They'll say, 10 years.

So you gave the problem 10 years to develop and the solution 10 days. That's so unkind to yourself. That's so, and so I wrote a soundtrack for myself. My soundtrack, one of my soundtracks is don't give the problem a year and the solution a week. And it's same with switching software.

I mean, when I talk to corporate audiences, we got this big new software switch we're doing and the sales team is having a hard time with it. I'll go, how long did you use the last software? And they'll go five years. How long have you used the new one? Five weeks. Well, yeah, it should be tough.

Like it should be tough right now. You gave the other one half a decade. This one's only five weeks and you're hoping for the same results. So that's what replace is about. There are times in your life where you learn one new thing, one new truth, and it changes everything. For instance, I worked with somebody who was really difficult once. I mean, not once, many times I've worked with difficult people. The planet is crawling with them. And he was late on his projects. He would show up late to work. He was super belligerent. He was unprepared. And then I learned that his wife had cancer. And that sentence changed everything. There's times when that happens in your own life, when you learn something true that changes everything.

But there's other times where the soundtrack has been something you've believed for 10 years. Like a teacher told you when you were 23, you're not a good salesperson and you've been feeding that time and energy and creativity so that now when Adam, the CEO, you know, says, hey, we see this opportunity, you pull back because you've got this broken soundtrack that goes, I'm not a good leader, Adam. I can't do this. I can't handle this. And you self-sabotage. So there's times where you have to repeat the new one so that it has a chance to survive against this other one that's been doing push-ups in the prison gym yard for 10 years. And that's what it's about. I mean, it's so true.

It's amazing because you think about it. You know, it's been said we all revert to our set point like a thermostat in a room. And it's that set point that people have been ingrained into them. You know, I can only do 10 pushups or I, you know, I have to have so much to eat or I have to have my beer in the evening or, you know, I can only call 10 people a day for my sales process and only one's going to answer the phone. I mean, that's, do you think that's the hardest part of all this is breaking that, that opportunity or that desire to return to the set point? Or, I mean, what, um, because you, you look at retire,

replace, those are conscious acts. The we're, we're changing our subconscious with this repeat, aren't we? Or, or, yeah. And I mean, I think the, the, the challenge is giving yourself the time for it to work like anything else. You know, we tend to culturally, we celebrate the wrong parts of goals. So we say things like well begun is half done. The hardest part of any journey is the first step. And that feels so good on a mug or like a photo of a unicorn on Instagram. But like if you say well begun is half done, if a surgeon said to you, once I've made the

first incision, I'm like halfway done with your surgery, you would be like, where did where did you go to school? Like the hardest part of any journey is the first step. That's not even a little true. The middle is the hardest part. Like I've never had a manager say, hey, we're at the middle of the project. The worst part time for middle cake. We have launch parties.

We have kickoff parties. Where do people cheer at marathons at the beginning and at the end? The middle is lonely. And so for me, there might be kind of, you have to get over that initial hill at the beginning to do the thing, but there's this whole middle section that that's really challenging where the repeat and then making it easy.

Most people think a goal has to be difficult or miserable to count. So I'll meet people, they'll say, hey, I wanna get in shape. And I'll go, great, what are you going to do? And they'll say, I'm going to run. I'll go, oh, do you like running? They go, no, I hate it.

That's how I know it's good for me. I'm like, well, then I know you're not going to do it. Like, but like the same with me in cycling. I tried cycling for like six months. I hated it. I hate any sport that involves getting hit by cars fairly regularly. Like my friends who cycle don't even tell the story dramatically. My friend who lived in Denver got hit by three different cars, three different times. His parents eventually had a mountain

bike intervention or they're like, we think you should be in trails. They gave him a mountain bike to get him off the road. For me, cycling is not my thing, you know? And so I think though, that if your definition is, it has to be really hard, really difficult. It only makes it harder to actually do versus going, I'm going to have a note in front of me. I wrote three words on a note card. I taped it up and I'm going to remind myself and I'm going to use as many reminders as I can come up with to make it as easy as possible for this to actually work. Amazing, John. And I mean, I think everybody listening to this has gotten something incredible out of the three R's. So we have retire, we have replace, and we have repeat. And I think Remax, come on. There we go. And I'm not at an event talking about these things.

R4. It's crazy. The tie-in is so obvious. It's so obvious. So let's put a slash right after the R-E part. By the way, it's going to be expensive. I want to be real clear. I got to know, like, don't think this is, you heard the list that Mark Red drew. Like, I mean, pretty top end, top end. I love it. I love it. I love it. We'll have that conversation offline here, and then you can ask for more.

Sell some houses. You got to work it out. Yeah, let's go to the Broadmoor. Let's go. There we go. There we go. So, John, I have a question for you, because, I mean, this is a lot to take in.

Everybody that's listening, I have a question for you because, I mean, this is a lot to take in. Everybody that's listening, rewind on the other side of the door every day, and it doesn't have to be a door where there's a bad guy on the other side of it. It can just be waking up in the morning that everybody's afraid of and getting into business or talking to a client or whatever it is. But yeah, we've gone from subconscious to conscious animals again here, and we have to be in order to find a greater us. Otherwise, we fall into the rut and we have a terrible day ahead of us. So I want to talk about your day real quick. So John, I ask every one of our guests on the show here, how do they start their day with a win? And you've given us some great ways to pursue your day with a win, but how do you begin yours in order to set yourself up

for greater success? Get that mind right, get that body right, thinking straight. Sure. How do you start your day with women? I mean, for one, I put off the phone interaction

as long as possible. So I don't, you know, I do my bed, my phone sleeps in a different room. Like my phone doesn't, isn't invited to my bedroom. So it charges in a different room so that I'm not,

like why make it hard? If I know I'm going to touch it, if it's in a different room so that I'm not like, why make it hard? If I know I'm going to touch it, if it's next to me on a nightstand, why make it hard? Like I don't, I'm not going to lean over and touch my kitchen. My arms aren't that long. So I leave, you know, that's part of it is I try to delay the phone. And then I usually read 10 pages of something that's encouraging to me. And it can be a book about personal development. It can be a book about sales. It could be 10 pages of the Bible or a chapter or whatever. So I read. I also will write down a couple notes. And then depending on the day, three or four times a day, three or four times a week, I'll go run with a neighbor. So I've got a

neighbor across the street named Ruben, and we'll go for a 3.1 mile run, just a 5k, and we'll process a lot of life together. He's another dude in his 40s. And so I'll usually do a handful of those. I don't get to do every one. I think the thing you have to remember about your morning is that the more rigid you make the morning, the more inflexible it is and more likely you're going to break it. So if you say, I have to do this exactly this way, you've just made a really fragile goal with a lot of break points. It's kind of like, you know, if you've got a motor home and it's a single piece shell, you have less leaks where if you have rivets everywhere, that's what you're doing when you make your morning so complicated that like the second thing doesn't happen. Like you don't have the breakfast, you

don't have the protein shake, whatever the whole thing falls apart. So I try to be pretty flexible with my mornings, but have as many of those items in it as I can on any given day. Awesome. Thank you, John, for sharing that. I mean, words of wisdom there. John, where can we find you online? Where can our listeners find your book? And of course, everybody go place an order for this. Well, I've got a podcast called all it takes is a goal, which is a lot of fun where I talk about goal setting. And then if you want to read the first chapter of the book, it's soundtracksbook.com.

I'll send you a free copy of the first chapter. It's available everywhere. And then I'm on, you know, Twitter, Amazon, all the, all the social media stuff. Awesome. Thanks a lot, John. Thanks for being on start with a win. Thanks for having me. If you're ready to create personal and business success, subscribe to this podcast and head over to wherever you get your books and order Start With A Win, the book. Not only will you be helping yourself, but you'll also be helping children. All author proceeds go to Children's Miracle Network Hospitals, so you'll be helping others as well. Head over to startwithawin.com for more great content. And until next time, start with a win.