The Resilient Mind - 2025 Is Your Breakthrough Year: Leave Mediocrity Behind for Good - Tom Bilyeu

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

Tom Bilyeu is a highly influential entrepreneur, speaker, and thought leader renowned for his expertise in personal development, mindset mastery, and health optimization. He co-founded Quest Nutrition, one of the fastest-growing food companies in America, celebrated for its focus on healthy living and innovative approaches to nutrition. After selling Quest for a reported $1 billion, Tom shifted his focus to helping others unlock their potential through his media company, Impact Theory.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠This video was created in partnership with Tom Bilyeu. Subscribe to Tom Bilyeu’s channel for more inspiring speeches:https://www.youtube.com/c/TomBilyeu Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to, 2025 is your breakthrough year. Leave mediocrity behind for good with Tom Bill You. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. In your pursuit of a goal that you care about, you are going to end up getting in a rut.

In that moment, most people give up. I'm going to tell you what you need to do if you want to be part of the 8% that actually sees their goals through. If you struggle getting up and getting your day started early, even though you want to and know that you should be doing it, this comes down to two things. One, it's all mechanism all the time. What are you doing with your night routine to make sure that you're getting to bed on time? Because the reality is if you're tired, you're not going to want to get up.

The reason so many people lack motivation is because of, as Vince Lombardi said, fatigue makes cowards of us all. If you're tired, you just don't have what you need to face the day. Life is hard. Being a human is difficult. Life is going to kick you in the face. The second law of thermodynamics makes abundantly clear that life moves inextricably towards one thing. Chaos. And the only way to tame the chaos and create order in your life is by pouring energy into the system.

To pour that energy into the system, you need energy at two levels. At the cellular level and psychological energy. Now, it's easy enough to get yourself pumped up psychologically, but to get yourself pumped up at a cellular level, you have to make sure that you are getting to bed on time, getting plenty of sleep, eating right, and getting exercise and meditating. If you're not doing those things, then you're not going to be primed at a cellular level. Now, to get the psychological energy, we get to the second thing. You just don't want it badly enough. Most people don't want the thing that they're pursuing in their life.

For two reasons. Reason number one, you don't realize that desire is a process. You build desire for things. You are not born with some intense, sensational desire. You do have imperatives that evolution has given us, but you don't have these intense desires other than like hunger, thirst, sexual drive. But you certainly don't have a drive to go to the gym. You don't have a drive to be more successful at work. that's actually only minorly true. Certainly for guys, you probably do have a pretty strong imperative to gain access to resources, but it will not direct you towards the thing that you're specifically going to pursue.

So you'll have a vague sense of, I want to do more, I want to be more, I want to be admired, I want to be at the top. But the top of what? That's where people get themselves into trouble because they lack that clarity. They lack that clarity because they don't realize that you just have to pick something that you already respond positively to naturally. You encountered it. It gave you more energy than it took. You're naturally drawn to that thing you want to do it. Okay. But it's not going to be like, oh my God, I need to dedicate the rest of my life to this. I spring out of bed in the morning because

I'm so excited about this thing. That is not how it works. You'll just be like, oh, that's cool. I dig that thing. Now, if you go put time and energy into building desire, which is, basically the process of explaining to yourself why that thing matters to you. And as you repeat that in an embodied way, meaning you embody the enthusiasm for that thing that you want to feel and you loop around it and you actually go and get better at that and do it in the world and people are like, oh man, that's so cool. I love that you can do that thing and you get that positive feedback and it was already energizing to you and you loop around why it matters. Why am I investing in this so much? and you do that over and over in an embodied way,

now all of a sudden, six months later or a year later, it really is this raging inferno at the center of your soul, something that you care about and want incredibly deeply. But you have to go down that process of gaining mastery, of really pushing yourself around why you're going to love this thing so much. And then it actually becomes real. You become what you repeat. So if you're repeating that you're an idiot, that you don't love yourself,

that will become true. Now, self-worth is a very important. very complicated topic that is beyond the scope of this conversation, but just know that you do become what you repeat. So be very thoughtful. All right, those really are the two reasons that people are going to struggle. So you have to focus on making sure that you're getting yourself energized for this thing that you're pursuing. And then you have to make sure that mechanistically you're doing the things that you need to do. So you're not tired all the time. But most people fail to get. get enough sleep, they go to bed with such wild swings that it's like having jet lag.

Like everybody goes, oh yeah, if I traveled to the East Coast from the West Coast and I three hours of jet leg, of course I'm going to be tired. Well, what do you think happens when your bedtime swings by an hour, two hours, three hours, you're going to experience that same kind of disruption in your sleep cycle. Also, people do a lot of things to have poor sleep hygiene from breathing through their mouth, taking in blue light, go going to bed at different times, watching TV right before they go to bed, checking their text messages, reading emails, working on stressful things. All of this stuff are things that are going to disrupt your sleep. And, and, and the biggest one, which we haven't even talked about,

how close to your bedtime do you eat food? I have roughly seven hours between my last meal and my bedtime. And it's amazing. And I have found that if I even eat within, you know, in three hours of going to bed, I can feel the difference. Now, three hours is, I would say good. If you got three hours of distance between the last moment you were chewing, so not when you start the meal, the last moment you were chewing and when you go to bed, you're in pretty good shape. I think you will find that you sleep better, the longer that you stretch that period out. There's, of course, also a lot of individual variability. I've heard some very interesting information around carbohydrates, and if you have your last meal has a fair amount of carbohydrates,

that you will sleep better. Now, I find for me that that actually is true. If I have carbohydrates, but they're not high sugar, wear a glucose monitor, it's very enlightening. But if I have something that doesn't spike my glucose massively, so think about doing a lot of greens, things like that, leafy greens, that I actually will sleep better, but I need to have a pretty big distance still between my last meal and when I go to bed. You can have to experiment with the stuff. When it comes to diet, there is so much individual variability. It's absolutely terrifying. So try it. Run that. But I find that most people eat within an hour, maybe 90 minutes before they go to bed. That's going to disrupt your sleep massively. So be very thoughtful about trying

that and experimenting. Once you get all of that down and you hold yourself accountable to doing all of this stuff, then I think you're going to find getting up is very easy. But if you don't address how badly you want the thing that you're getting out of bed for and your physiology, it's going to be a struggle forever. And last but not least, I'll throw in a little bonus here. And that is, you have to have standards. I'm angry with myself if I don't get out of bed in 10 minutes. so less. I'm angry at myself if I don't go to bed on time because I really want the things that I'm pursuing. So be really thoughtful about that. Don't do it because you ought to find a way to get excited about it, then build rules in your life around that. And so you're doing it because

it's what you want for yourself. And so the reason that you're upset with yourself when you don't do it isn't because you're worried about disappointing other people. It's because you really want it and you're not acting in accordance with that. That's it. Get after it. If you have a goal to get early and you find that you don't and you're feeling badly about yourself, you have to be very thoughtful about how you react in that moment. I'm a big fan of rewarding and punishing yourself, but you have to be very good at how you go about that. So when you do what you're supposed to do, of course you want to pat yourself on the back, you want to give yourself that emotional uplift of recognizing a job well done. And when you don't, you definitely want to

face square on you said you were going to do it and you didn't do it. it and that is a black mark on your day. Now the problem is that when you continue to beat yourself up, now you're going to begin to diminish your sense of self. I advise you never do anything that diminishes your sense of self. You want to hold yourself accountable. You want to have a standard. You want to live up to it. I think that's incredibly important. And I think so many people fail to get where they want to go in life because they fail to hold themselves accountable. So you want to set a standard. You want to hold yourself accountable to that standard. But you also want to make sure that you only do and believe that which moves you towards your goals.

I have a rule in my life that I only do that. I'm not trying to live in a post-truth world. This isn't me just deciding that I'm going to believe in whatever I want to believe in. In fact, I define truth as the thing that most efficiently moves you towards your goal. I think that you're most closely aligned to what is true when you're able to predict the outcome of your behaviors. And when you're able to predict the outcome of your behaviors, I think you're on to what is true. So we're not going to sit there and belittle ourselves and tear ourselves apart. We're going to acknowledge that what we did, it breaks our rule, that we had that rule in the first place

because it is the set of behaviors that most effectively moves us towards our goal. So we want to get back on track because we actually care about our goal and we want to do the thing that's moving us towards our goal. We're not going to get back on track because we think we're a bad person or we're worried what the world is going to think. this all needs to be intrinsic motivation. You need to care. You need to have some reason why you want this thing so badly that you've put all these rules around yourself in the first place. All the rules that I have, the amount of work that I do, how hardcore I am, the standard that I hold myself to,

rewarding myself, punishing myself, it's all in service of what I want. So make sure that you want something that is legitimately exciting to you, make sure that you've spent the time to build that desire in yourself, and then make sure that you recognize that the most important thing that you can do to bounce back is to bounce back right away, to not beat yourself up any more than is useful to bouncing back, to getting back on track. And then when you get back on track and you say, okay, cool, this happens to me all the time. I have a rule. I get out of bed in 10 minutes or less. And sometimes, my feet will hit the floor right as it clicks over into the 11th minute. Now, I never miss it by much, but when I'm due, one, I confess, I tell my wife, I'll go on camera,

I'll tell people, ah, I didn't make it today. I like to hold myself accountable. And I feel good when I hold myself accountable because I'm willing to stare nakedly at my inadequacies. I didn't do it today. I said I was going to and I didn't. But my willingness to own that, to admit it, to not lie to myself, to not lie to other people, to say, hey, I didn't do it. it today. That act makes me feel good because I know how effective it is. I know how much I've gotten out of my life by being honest when I don't do the things that I wanted to do, by reminding myself why I want to do them, by reminding myself why I have these rules in place, and then living in accordance with that. And when I don't, to give myself that reminder that, hey, you said you

were going to do it and you didn't, not making excuses, owning everything completely, and reminding myself that my life is an exact reflection of my choices and that I made my day a little bit worse by not doing what I said I was going to do. But at the same time that if I just sat there and beat myself up and what a loser I am, that I'm not going to get done the things that I need to get done in order to make meaningful progress towards my goals. So I do it just enough to kick myself in the ass, and then I stop, I get back on track, I reward myself for getting back on track, and boom, it's all systems go. The most important thing that you can do to wake up early, is to get your night routine on point.

My night routine really begins at 2 p.m. This is all true. So what I found was the number one thing that disrupted my sleep was I would wake up in the middle of the night to pee and then my mind would start worrying around all the problems that I have to solve and I would be up for two, two and a half hours

in the middle of the night every single night. And so I was like, okay, what would I need to do in order to make sure that I never wake up to pee? And at first I thought, well, if I just stopped drinking, water in the late afternoons or the evening, I should be fine. That didn't work. And then I realized, ah, this is a food problem. If I stop eating food earlier, then I can kill two birds with one stone.

One, I can elongate my intermittent fasting window, which is already incredibly powerful. But two, I'm also not going to have a bunch of water being extracted from the food as I lead up to bedtime. So what I do is I have my last meal. I start eating at about 115. I'm usually done. chewing by about 2 o'clock. Then by the time I go to bed at 9 p.m. I've had seven hours without eating. And I also, I don't drink. I have one sort of final sip right at right before I go to bed at, call it 850, 855. But from 2 to then, I don't have any water. So I'm able to sleep through the night perfectly well. I'm able to drink as much water as I need during, because I wake up, it's a 3.30 to 4.30 somewhere in there. So I'm able to get a ton of water in my system before 2 p.m.

And so everything works perfectly. So that's the first thing that I start doing. The next thing I do is going to the food thing. I want to make sure that I have a minimum of three hours of not eating before I go to bed for reasons of digestion. So even if I didn't have the water problem, not eating, not having food in my digestion is hugely important. Now, the reason that I know that this actually makes a difference is if on the weekend I'm having a cheap meal, I can actually drink water. I don't have to stop drinking water because the carbohydrate intake will cause me to retain water, so I'm not going to have that problem, even if I eat close to bedtime and keep drinking throughout the day. It's actually wonderful. I love it. I can pound water right before I go

to bed. Something about water at night. Taste so good. I don't have to worry about that if I've had a high carbohydrate meal. So what I found, though, is that even by eating, let's say three hours before I go to bed, I can still tell the difference in my sleep. But three hours is sort of that maximum where it's not truly disruptive. So no matter what, whether you have trouble with peeing at night or not, you want to make sure that starting three hours before you go to bed, you've finished all of your food intake. That's really important. Also, three hours before I go to bed, I will avoid blue light. So I wear blue blocking glasses and I make sure that my computer shifts over into night mode so that it actually turns the screen, warmer colors. I dim the lights. I try not to get bright lights in my eyes.

All of this stuff makes a really big difference. Also, I don't do any stressful work at least an hour before I go to bed. So even though I'll keep working up until I go to bed at nine, as I get later into the evening, I do things that are far more predictable and less stressful. So, for instance, I have an episode to prepare for today. And so tonight, as I start getting ready for bed, that will be one of the last things that I do, literally right up until I go to bed, because it's something that isn't about problem solving. It's not stressful. I'm not going to be surprised by some problem that exists in the business. Right as I'm about to go to bed, I realize, you know, a huge spike of adrenaline and cortisol because, oh, my God, I just realized we have some problem that needs to be solved. So it's something that's based around learning.

It's usually exciting. It puts my brain in a different mode. And so that is really useful to helping me begin to move my brain at a problem-solving mode and get into a mode that's going to allow me to fall asleep. Also, I tend to 30 to 40 minutes before I fall asleep. I'll get into bed. Now, I know a lot of people say don't take work to bed with you. I have not found that to be problematic at all, as long as it's a certain type of work,

like doing research is my go to for being in bed so I can really begin to relax and calm down. I will also, if I've had a particularly stressful day in that last hour, I might do some meditation to really make sure that I'm calming myself down. And then, right as I'm about to lay in bed, and this is the one thing that I'm conflicted about recommending to people is I put headphones in and I'd be. begin reading a book right as I go to bed. So as I lay down and fall asleep, I put headphones in and I put a book on. I've used fiction in the past. I'm using nonfiction currently, but it's a certain type of book. One, it's a very long book. So often biographies about a

moment in time or a given person, I guess technically a biography is about a person or a moment in time. and the books often are like 20 hours, 30 hours. So you know that you're not going to get woken up in the middle of the night by the book ending, which has happened to me, unfortunately, with shorter books. And so I will listen to those books. They're not where I'm trying to learn something. So it's just something that's interesting. And that puts my brain into a certain zone, and I tend to fall asleep very quickly.

I'm talking like five minutes quickly or less. I'll wake up in the middle of the night and I'll rewind the book back to a part that makes sense but because it's such a big topic, it tends to be something where, whether I get exactly to where I was or not, I can still get the gist. It's not like a story where, man,

if you miss anything, you're going to be completely lost. What happened? It's disorienting. So that has been really, really useful. And then the last thing that I do is I tape my mouth closed because if you breathe through your nose,

it can actually dry out your throat, disrupt your sleep. There's a whole book on this called breathe by James Nestor, if I'm remembering correctly. And it's really been transformative to my sleep because I used to wake up with a dry throat and it would pull me out of sleep and, you know, your lip smacking, you need like something to drink. It's terrible. So by taping my mouth, I'm able to sleep through the night much better. It really was a game changer. I highly recommend that you guys try not only that, but all of the things that I just talked about. I think that they will

radically improve your sleep hygiene, which will allow you to sleep much better. You will be far more rested and able to get to the Holy Grail, which is not setting an alarm. So you wake up naturally right at the perfect part of your sleep cycle, having gotten as much sleep as your body needs. If you find that despite having really good sleep hygiene, that you're still getting tired later in the day, a lot of people wonder if they can take a nap or if they should avoid it. And to be honest, I think that it's completely up to the person. There are some times where I'm so tired that if I don't allow myself to at least completely let go, meaning I lay down, I close my eyes and I give myself permission to sleep, I just, I can't focus, I can't concentrate. And I have found that

sometimes, even just letting myself go like that, even though I don't fall asleep for 10 or 50 minutes, can be extremely rejuvenating. Other times, I find that falling asleep for 10 or 50 minutes is completely rejuvenating. And other times, I have no idea why I feel super groggy. And even sleeping for an hour may make me feel worse than just staying awake. That's always super bizarre. Where you lay down, you don't set an alarm, you just give yourself permission to sleep as long as you need. You wake up. One would think that you got a full sleep cycle. But for whatever reason, man, when I wake up, I'm like, God, I just feel awful. I feel sluggish. I have a little bit of a headache. just the whole rest of the day I feel off. So to be honest, it's pretty rare that I take a nap,

even times where, because if I get five hours of sleep, that, I hate that. I can get by if it's one day, but I really, really, really don't like doing it. I would much rather get six hours. Six hours is magical. Seven is unbeatable. So if I've gotten five, I will give myself the chance to lay down and take a nap. But I often find that it's like, man, the whole rest of the day just never feels like I quite get back on. And if I've gotten five hours of sleep, the only time I will give myself a chance to take a nap is before 7 a.m. So that I'm still getting that sleep early. The sun typically for most of the year is still down. And so I'm able to sleep while it's still dark. Because remember, if I only got five hours of sleep, chances are I woke up around 2.30-ish.

So I can, by that point, I have gone, worked out. I've started working for a few hours. And then I find that just wave of fatigue really hitting me, then I will lay down. But if the sun is up and my day is going, the odds of me taking a nap are virtually zero. Again, there's a lot of self-experimentation that you should do, figure out what works for you, learning those rhythms, figuring out what are the times, like, can you notice a pattern when you end up getting sleepy and are unable to bounce back? For me, it's like if the day is really going and the sun is up and if I've had caffeine or anything like that, the odds of me feeling better after I take a nap are very, very low. But this really is something that you should experiment with because there are going to be times where you may have gotten so little

sleep that the only way to function is to get that rest is to allow yourself to lay down and take a nap. So I certainly don't have any moral judgments on taking a nap. I think some people do. I don't. Like for one, if I'm flying, there's something about flying. If I'm flying and I'm just like, I cannot keep my eyes open. I'm like, I'll take a nap. I've heard people like, oh my God, like I've never take a nap. That's crazy to me. You want to cognitively optimize. You want to make sure that you are performing at your best. And if taking a nap is going to be the thing that lets you perform at your best, then take the nap. You're far better to, if you let's say you're going to work for three hours, you're far better, or you have three hours to work, I should say.

You're far better napping for an hour and a half and being really sharp, that last hour and a half, then you are just like struggling through not being at your best and trying to get something done. Now, everything is on balance. I work so hard. I leave everything out on the field. I just don't think twice about taking a nap

if that's what I need because I know that I'm not doing it out of laziness and I think that's where a lot of people get conflicted is they know that taking the nap is something that they do as a way to avoid doing the work and that they do that kind of thing a lot and that they probably were feeling tired because they stayed up too late watching something on Netflix or playing video games or hanging out whatever

or they had a few too many drinks. They've done something dumb that is counter to the goals. If those things are your goals, by all means do them. I don't pass any moral judgment on watching Netflix, playing video games, get as drunk as you want if that's your goal. But if it's not your goal and you did those things, something tells me that now you're beating yourself up over being lazy. And part of the reason that you don't want to take the nap is because you feel guilt. If you play all out all the time and you know that you've earned that respect with yourself, then taking a nap is a no-brainer if that's going to be the thing that cognitively optimizes you.

Just a reminder, PSA, enjoy your life. And if taking a nap is going to let you enjoy it, do it. If it doesn't and it's going to mess up your rhythm, then don't. Just grind it out. If you let me control your life for the next seven days, here is exactly what I would have you do. I'm actually thinking about turning this into a challenge because I think that this would be amazingly impactful for people and it goes like this. Our goal is to get up early and really attack the day so that we can get a lot of momentum going

so that we can outperform other people. Remember, I am super competitive when it comes to doing the things that I most want life. Now I do that from a place of joy in abundance. Think everybody can have what they want. But it's actually fun to go hard to compete against other people and really see how far you can push your life. All right, it goes like this. This is the ultimate life routine.

Number one, we're going to go to bed at 9 p.m. like it's a religion. No if, ends or butts. And we're going to, as you see, as we go through the day when we wake up, we're going to do a lot of things to make sure that we are ready for bed at 9 p.m. But we go to bed at 9 p.m. like it's a religion. We do not set an alarm clock. You can have an emergency alarm clock if you've got a meeting or a flight to catch or something like that. so that you just don't have it on your mind,

because I know some people are so paranoid they're going to oversleep, it actually interrupts their sleep. By all means, set an emergency alarm. But the goal would be to have at least nine hours before our emergency alarm would have to go off. Most people are not going to sleep for nine hours unless they've been chronically sleep deprived.

So no alarm. Go to bed at nine or eight if you have kids or seven if you have kids, whatever. But we're going to go to bed early enough that we don't need to set an alarm. For me, that's nine. You're going to go to bed early enough. to bed at that time. You're going to wake up when you wake up. You get out of bed in 10 minutes or

less. Your feet are on the floor. Next to your bed is your gym clothes. You're going to put your gym clothes on immediately. You don't have to go to the gym. You can work out at home. I don't care. We can do all body weight workouts or we can go to the gym and go ham. Whatever works for you, but we are going to work out. We are going to get our blood pumping. No one, and I mean no one, hates going to the gym more than me. I don't, whatever the endorphin rush is that other people get, I don't get. But it does allow me to cognitively optimize. If you haven't read the book Spark, read it. Studies show that if you have a hard problem to solve, you want to tackle that hard problem immediately after working out. They did all these crazy studies where they had kids

go in and do like these incredibly hard workouts where your grade was based on your heart rate. So it was like you didn't have to run a mile in under six minutes, but you had to get your heart rate up to whatever, 14, 150, and maintain that for, I forget how long, let's call it 15, 20 minutes. And then, if they had their hardest class immediately following that, so for me, it would have been like calculus. If I had had that immediately following gym class where I got my heart rate up into that ideal zone, I would perform better there because you're cognitively optimizing. So I'm going to work out, I'm going to get my heart rate up. That is key. I'm also going to be intermittent fasting. So we're going to get to when I clock that change, but I'm not going to

eat before I work out. So I'm going to work out fast. Then I'm going to go and I'm going to meditate. By the way, I work out for about 30 to 45 minutes. By all means, work out longer. I wouldn't work out a lot shorter. I'm going to sit down and I'm going to meditate. I'm going to meditate for about 20 minutes. I'm trying to get myself into a place where I'm completely relaxed. No stress, no anxiety. It is very possible, no matter what is going on in your life, to get to the point where you have no stress, no anxiety. Now, if you're really going through something and you, the thought of trying to sit down and meditate is just unbelievably torturous. Give yourself seven minutes of doom-scrolling cats. It will put your brain in a certain place. It's very interesting. It is the art of distraction.

There is a reason from an evolutionary standpoint that distraction exists. Go for it. Seven minutes only. at the end of the seven minutes, then we're going to go into meditation. And you're going to meditate if you did seven minutes of doom scrolling cats and you just don't have extra time, fine, 13 minutes of meditation. So be it. But I think you're better off making it 27 minutes, seven minutes doom scrolling cats, and then 20 minutes of meditation. The goal of meditation is to just breathe. You're not trying to have any grand epiphanies. You're just trying to breathe. Your mind is going to wander like crazy and it's going to happen a lot to the point where it's going to distress you and you're going to think you're doing something wrong. You are not. The whole point is to just come back to the breath. Come back to the breath.

Back to the breath. Back to the breath. Getting yourself in that calm creative state, no stress, no anxiety, lengthening the period of time where you can focus on the breath. Incredibly powerful. Now, if you haven't done this for an extended period of time yet, the next thing I want you to do is take a cold shower. We're doing all of this to accomplish two goals. You can reboot your life, your health, even your career, anything you want. All you need is discipline. I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through. Whether you want better health, stronger relationships, a more successful career, any of that is possible.

with the mindset and business programs and Impact Theory University. Join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things. Tap now for a free trial and get started today. Toughen up, Buttercup, and cognitively optimize. So working out as much as it's good for the brain,

it's also to show you that you can do hard things because in your life, you need to be doing hard things. The other hard thing that you're going to do that's also good for your brain and good for a whole host of other things, including anti-inflammatory, getting all the effects of longevity that come from cold exposure, you're going to get in the cold shower. Now, the amount of time you need to stay in the cold shower is going to depend on the time of year and where you live. Because let me tell you,

Minnesota in February is very different than L.A. in August. The cold temperature in L.A. in August, not that cold. So, and compared to, and I've actually done this, was it? in Minnesota, no, Chicago. I did Chicago in the winter. I can't remember exactly what month. And the water hitting my forehead gave me a headache. I was like, damn, this is a whole other level of cold. So doing that versus in L.A. was a world of difference. But in L.A., I would keep myself in the shower. I think my record was like, oh God, it was somewhere between 12 and 17 minutes. I can't remember. But for, uh, what was it? 13 months. I did this every single shower. Weekend, no Actually, that might be a lie.

Every shower Monday through Friday, that's correct. I think on the weekends I allowed myself a warm shower. Don't hold me to that. I can't remember. But for 13 months, I took so many cold showers. It was horrifying. In fact, I stopped. I promised myself I'd do it for 30 days.

I did it for 13 months. I began to resent my shower. But it is extremely powerful for doing things that are difficult. So we're going to do the cold challenge. Expose yourself for the cold as long as you can possibly bear extend that period of time. You should be shivering before you get out of the shower. Like uncontrollably shivering. That is a good way of knowing if you've been in long enough. Now again, Minnesota, in February, it's going to happen a lot faster than a warm climate later in the year. But get cold exposure.

After that, we're going to go to our important things list and we're going to work our way down the most important things that we can be doing in order to make meaningful progress towards our goal. goals. Once we finish all of that, I know you're going to have to do a lot of work to pay bills and all the good stuff. Fair enough. Go do your job, crush it. Then we're going to get into the intermittent fasting zone. So there are two ways to handle this. Way number one is that you can stop eating really early and then you're going to eat breakfast or you can stop eating a little bit later, call it five, six o'clock at night, but then you can't have your first meal until much later in the next, much later the next day. The rule of thumb is 16 hours of fasting is about

right. I try to push that to on average about 17, 17 and a half hours when averaged over a full week. But during the week, that tends to mean that I'm not having a meal for about 18 to 19 hours. And then on the weekend, it's closer to 15, 16 hours. So I track that. over a year and a half, and that's what it came out to be on average. If you do all of those things, your life will be unrecognizable. And I hope that if you do that for seven days, that you're not going to want to quit because it really will transform your entire life. Once you get initially started in the pursuit of your goal of trying to improve yourself and become something more, something better, the key is consistency and follow-through.

consistency and follow-through. You become what you repeat. The reason that anybody successful becomes successful is because, to quote Winston Churchill, they can go from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. The problem is the human animal has chosen a tactic of using culture in order to have generational progress. So a horse will come out doing all the things that a horse can do in 20 minutes, but horse culture doesn't progress because they come hardwired with everything and they have for thousands of years and they make no progress. Whereas humans, a generation 10,000 years ago, invented the wheel and we're all still using it now. But in taking that strategy, what ends up happening is that you really do become the thing

that you repeat, the thing that you do consistently. And if you begin slacking off of that, then you don't end up making that progress, you certainly can't maintain that progress. So you have to be very, very thoughtful about what you repeat because it is going to have a profound impact on your life. Now, the vast majority of people end up just breaking. They end up quitting. The reason that I've had the kind of success that I've had in my life is simply because I understand that iteration is how we make cultural progress. It's what I call the physics of progress. Most people, when they're running the physics of progress, when they get to the point where they have to evaluate their results, they end up lying to themselves and making it

somebody else's fault. Now, the physics of progress are really simple. It's the scientific method re-contextualized for whatever goal you're trying to achieve. And it goes like this. You come up with a hypothesis. If you have information that can inform that hypothesis, that is much better. But if you don't when you're beginning, call it your best guess. You're taking your best guess is how you go from where you are to achieving your goal. There is inevitably going to be an obstacle in your way, and your best guess is about what do I need to do to overcome that obstacle to make meaningful progress towards my goal. Then you're going to turn that hypothesis into something that you can actually do. Then you're going to turn that, you're going to actually go do that thing, and then you're

going to get a result from that thing. It is almost certainly going to fail to some extent, which is fine because failure is the most information-rich data stream on planet Earth, but you have to learn from the failure. To learn from the failure, you have to be willing to admit that you made one. Most people will not admit that they made a mistake, and so they get stuck at that level. And in that moment, they say, it was the world. It's because I was born in the wrong time. My parents were dumb. The world doesn't want somebody who looks like me to succeed. Whatever excuse they use to make it somebody else's fault. Now, remember, the most terrifying thing about excuses is that they are valid. I'm not saying that those things aren't real.

I'm not saying that the world isn't trying to hold some people back. I'm just saying it doesn't matter. You have to overcome it no matter what. So in the moment where you tried this thing and it didn't work, don't spend your time and energy focusing on how something else stopped you. Even though I will grant you, it's true, the world is trying to stop everybody from doing everything. It just is the reality. Accomplishing something meaningful is freakishly difficult. So don't focus on that it's more difficult for you. It just doesn't matter. You're just going to have to work harder. You either want to accomplish that thing in your life or you don't and you're going to give up. That's the reality. The people that get

what they want are the people that absolutely demand that they're going to keep going until they get that thing. So in that moment, when you're very tempted to focus on how other things have stopped you, you're not going to. What you need to do is be consistent. So in that moment, you're going to say, what could I have done differently to get a better result? And that's when the physics of progress loops. Now you come up with a more informed hypothesis. You learned your lesson. You figure out what you need to do that's going to be a little bit better than last time. You turn that into a thing that you can do. You do that thing. It will fail to some extent. You stare nakedly at your inadequacies. You figure out what you need to do to make it a little bit better. And the process

begins again. That is why you have to be consistent. But the reality is that most people break. Most people cannot go from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. They end up breaking. They end up thinking that either there's something wrong with them or that the world is against them and because they don't want to deal with the pain and suffering of having to face their own inadequacies or they give up because they just think the world is against them. They don't make progress because you have to be able to fail a lot to learn from those failures. If I'm right that humans as a species have chosen culture as the learning mechanism,

then you have to run the loop that culture demands, which is to try something. It fails, you iterate and you get better. That works at the societal level over millennia, and it works at the individual level in an acute thing where you just have to figure out why didn't that work and keep going. But the truth is difficulty, boredom, struggle, pain breaks almost everyone. that it touches. And I will remind us all, 92% of people fail to achieve the goal they set for themselves. And the reason is that all of that difficulty just stops people because they don't have the right mindset. They don't realize that they need to fail. They don't realize that failure

does not make them a failure. So you're going to have a ton of failure in your life. You have to contextualize it as the most advantageous thing that could happen to you. So when I fail, it stings, it sucks, I hate it, I want everything that I do to work the first time, and I want to make maximum progress as fast as humanly possible. But once I realize that just isn't the way that things work, and even people like Elon Musk, who I think are abnormally intelligent, they realize, oh, I have to fail a lot. I have to try things and see what works and what didn't. There is no way around being in the messy middle. There's no way to think or hypothesize your way to what's going to work the best. You have to get in there and try things. Even somebody that's thinking philosophically

has to be able to get in there and battle their ideas and take their ideas out to other people. Even Einstein went out and made sure that his ideas were battle tested not only through experimental physicists, but also just his friends that were other people that were able to beat up his ideas and poke holes in them. And if you're not willing to put your ideas to the test, If you're not willing to try things and see what fails, then you will forever be stuck thinking and not making any progress. You really want to be doing, be a doing machine, somebody that's out there trying. But that means you have to risk embarrassment. An embarrassment is one of the things that destroys so many goals because people don't want to admit that they were struggling. People don't

want to admit that they were having a hard time. And so they either don't tell people about the goal, which is a huge mistake. You want to tell as many people as you can. It's part of the process of building desire, you want to tell people, I'm going to do this thing and it really matters to me. And I'm going to accomplish it by this date. Now, all eyes are on you. But that's one of the ways you're going to stick to what you're doing. And if the whole point is that you have to repeat, repeat, repeat, be resilient, be gritty, stick with it. Try, fail, try, fail over and over and over as you get better at overcoming those obstacles, then you have to be willing to push through all of that difficult.

to know why you're doing the things you're doing and to understand that that's just the process. So guys, I'm telling you, if you really want to achieve something absolutely powerful in your life, you've got to be persistent. If you haven't already, be sure to read the book Grit by Angela Duckworth. It's an amazing expose on how to be gritty if you're not already. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.