The Art of Manliness - Undoing Urgency — How to Stop Drowning in Tasks and Start Living With Purpose

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.420 Feeling overwhelmed by an endless to-do list, like you're constantly putting out fires but

00:00:15.400 never getting ahead? You're not alone. Many people today feel like they're drowning in urgency,

00:00:20.800 filling every minute with tasks that feel critical in the moment but may not truly matter in the long

00:00:24.960 run. Here to help us understand how to escape this cycle is Matt Reynolds, a strength coach,

00:00:29.320 business owner, and the author of Undoing Urgency, How to Focus on What Matters Most.

00:00:35.060 Today on the show, Matt explains what creates that feeling of being overwhelmed by urgency,

00:00:38.860 how to distinguish between status and true value, and why you can only effectively pursue two to

00:00:43.040 three major goals at once. We discuss using the Eisenhower Decision Matrix to identify what tasks

00:00:47.480 truly matter, how to apply the concept of minimum effective dose beyond just fitness, and why

00:00:52.360 sometimes the pursuit of a goal matters more than achieving it. After the show's over, check out

00:00:56.100 our show notes at awim.is slash urgency.

00:00:59.320 All right, Matt Reynolds, welcome back to the show.

00:01:13.640 Hey, man, thanks for having me. It's been a while.

00:01:15.080 It's been a while. I was looking back. It was August 2022, the last time you were on the show.

00:01:19.020 Oh, man. That's, yeah. Mind how time flies?

00:01:21.340 Time flies. So yeah, you are my friend. You're my barbell coach, and we've had you on talking about

00:01:26.600 strength training. Bringing you back on, you've got a new book out called Undoing Urgency, where you take

00:01:32.140 readers through the lessons you've learned as a business owner of Barbell Logic, a father. You're

00:01:38.540 also a church leader, so you're a busy guy. And it's about how people can reduce the amount of urgency

00:01:44.240 in their life. So let's, before we get into the nitty gritty of this, let's talk about definitions.

00:01:49.040 What do you mean by urgency? Yeah. So first off, honored, as always, to do the podcast. Thanks for

00:01:54.000 having me. You know, when I started to write this book, I started to think about, if somebody asked

00:01:58.840 when I was a kid, my dad, or probably your dad, like, how's it going? Like, that's a question that's

00:02:02.800 the kind of standard greeting. Like, hey, how's it going? Hey, Brett, how's it going? You know,

00:02:06.120 when we were kids, everybody said, good, or fine, or whatever. And now everyone says, busy. How's it

00:02:13.160 going? Oh, it's busy. So busy. Holiday season, busy. It's all, it's also busy. And I've started

00:02:18.120 to realize that we're all just drowning in urgency, right? And so the concept here is that we filled

00:02:22.720 our calendars at this point to the absolute max depth, most of which are filled by urgent things,

00:02:28.860 things that feel like they're hanging over us and have to be accomplished right now. But ultimately,

00:02:32.480 if we think about it, they're not really that important. And what often happens is that urgent

00:02:36.980 crowds out the importance. And so that those important things that really matter, that's what

00:02:42.040 we want to be able to spend our time on. But instead, what we end up doing is we have all this anxiety

00:02:45.840 inducing urgency in our life, like we have to get this done, and we have to get this done.

00:02:49.820 And so we have this never ending task list, this must be done. And we feel like the only person who can

00:02:56.740 do it is us. That's urgency. And that's a problem. And so I think one of the big focus there

00:03:01.520 is we have to figure out how to undo that urgency, how to deprioritize at some point.

00:03:05.640 Okay, so we'll talk about how to do that. Let's talk about your personal story,

00:03:08.100 because you weave in your personal story into this book a lot. You described this point you

00:03:12.280 reached about 2009, where you just felt like you were drowning in urgency. What was going on that

00:03:18.740 made you feel like that? Yeah, so I can look back at several times in my life, and probably 2009 to 2012

00:03:24.260 were the hardest years of my life. I was a public school teacher, I was a football coach,

00:03:29.240 I was a strength coach. I was completing my master's to be a high school principal. I was

00:03:33.840 running Strong Gym, my first business, I had started that. My marriage was on the rocks, and

00:03:38.180 thanks to God, it's been completely redeemed. But all of those things were going on, and I was just

00:03:43.040 drowning in this, drowning in urgency. I couldn't get it all complete. And so I would wake up at night

00:03:48.500 having nightmares or night terrors. Anxiety is not a strong enough word. I just couldn't get it all

00:03:56.620 done. I couldn't get it all accomplished. And there were all these problems to solve.

00:04:00.200 And it was all too much. And so I knew at some point, I had to pull the plug on some of those

00:04:04.400 things. Now, again, lucky for me, I started to look at these things that were and weighed out what

00:04:09.800 were the most important things in my life. And it was my family at the time, my faith, my Strong Gym,

00:04:14.860 the business. And luckily, we had been blessed enough that Strong Gym was making enough money that I

00:04:18.860 could walk away from the public school system, which I'm thankful that I did, didn't have to be a

00:04:22.620 teacher anymore, didn't have to be the strength coach, didn't have to be the football coach. Those

00:04:26.420 things cleaned up. And immediately, I started to notice like, oh, when I focus on the important

00:04:30.060 things, they go better for me. But that's not the only time in my life I've had that. And so I think

00:04:35.220 in 2009 to 2012, it was really of my own doing. So there was this piece of me that continued to

00:04:41.500 pursue the things that I thought would make me happy. And then you realize that happiness is fleeting and

00:04:48.260 doesn't really last. And it didn't ever bring joy. And so I was doing all these and even stuff that

00:04:53.460 I think I talk about in the book, like I was playing fantasy football, and I was playing poker

00:04:57.340 all the time. Like, it was just I would just take on so much stuff. And I don't know if it was I was

00:05:02.900 doing that because I was masking or trying to even anesthetize myself to the fact that I was

00:05:07.100 drowning in urgency wasn't happy with my life wasn't happy with my job, career, marriage, etc. And at some

00:05:13.860 point, I just had to pull the plug on a bunch of that stuff and focus on the things that really

00:05:17.240 mattered. Well, and then you also talk about even when you, you know, you quit public school

00:05:21.760 teaching, your marriage got better, and you threw everything into strong gym, things got better. But

00:05:27.440 the thing also the urgency, other stuff filled up again, right? Yeah. And you were even doing that

00:05:34.680 you had all these like systems in place, like standard operating procedures, and you're still

00:05:38.760 feeling overwhelmed. Yeah. So the interesting thing is, if I go back to that very first time that 2009

00:05:42.960 2012, you know, I was in some self destructive behavior in those days. And then as I pushed

00:05:48.860 forward into strong gym and really invested in the things that I thought were very important in my

00:05:52.260 life, again, family, and the business and my faith and my health and my strength and all those sort of

00:05:57.080 things, everything was fine for a while. And then I realized if I were going if the gym were going to

00:06:02.520 grow, we had to have systems and standard operating procedures. And so I had checklists and, you know,

00:06:06.800 all the plans for all the things. Except the problem was that I was the guy doing all the things.

00:06:11.300 And so pretty quick, I'm realizing like, oh, I've got to train 10 clients today or 12 clients today

00:06:16.300 and clean the bathrooms and be the front desk staff and give the tours and sell the memberships and

00:06:21.580 these three credit cards bounced. And like, even I can feel my blood pressure going up as I'm talking

00:06:26.120 about it right now, because I can remember what that feeling was like. And all of a sudden,

00:06:29.820 now it wasn't because I was in self destructive, you know, or even immoral behavior, it was that

00:06:33.940 I thought I was doing the right thing, but it was still too much. And so now you still end up in this

00:06:38.100 place of drowning in urgency. And so that's when it finally hit me that I had to figure out how to

00:06:42.640 delegate a lot of these things. I had to figure out how to figure out I didn't trust my staff. And I

00:06:46.660 had a great staff of guys that worked for me that were excellent. I just didn't trust them enough.

00:06:50.900 And so I was going to micromanage everything because I felt like I had this superhero complex

00:06:55.660 as a business owner. I think a lot of people do. And you think you can do things better than

00:06:59.720 anybody else can. And when you realize that if you can hire somebody that does it at 80%

00:07:04.500 as good as you can, you can train them to eventually be better at you than it. And

00:07:09.740 that's what we've been able to do it at Barbell Logic. Almost every staff member I have is now

00:07:12.960 better at their job than I was when I was doing their job in the early days as an employee of one

00:07:18.120 in a business. And so yeah, you can get caught up in this and whether it's life stuff or just taking

00:07:23.740 on, you know, self destructive behavior or unurgent, unimportant things, or even just over focusing

00:07:29.180 and spending too much time on urgent and important things like these things are just,

00:07:32.940 we allow our calendar to fill up, you know, you've, I'm sure you've seen the video and

00:07:36.700 your listeners have seen the video of the professor in the classroom and he's got the jar and he

00:07:41.900 puts like some rocks and the big rocks, yeah. And he says, you know, is it full? And the class

00:07:47.680 like, yeah, it's full. And then he puts pebbles in and he says, is it full now? And they say,

00:07:51.400 yeah. And then he puts sand in and he says, is it full now? And then he pours a bunch of water

00:07:55.020 in and fills up. Is it full now? And then they're like, okay, now it's full. And so the point

00:08:00.160 he's making is like, you know, you've still got your big rocks and you've got your smaller things,

00:08:03.140 your smaller things and your smaller things. I'm arguing you should break the jar, big rocks only.

00:08:09.380 Like there are times in your life, you've got to get rid of the water and the sand and the pebbles.

00:08:13.140 You've got to absolutely focus on the things that truly matter. And if you don't do that,

00:08:16.920 what you end up doing is filling every minute of every day on your calendar. Your calendar is a

00:08:21.180 truth teller. I live by my Google calendar. I don't know if you do the same thing on your phone,

00:08:24.220 but your calendar is the truth teller. And if I open up a day, if I wake up early in the morning,

00:08:28.340 and I open up and go, okay, what's going on Monday morning? You're like, wow, there's no

00:08:31.860 blank spaces. Every single hour is full. Then I start to think to myself, oh, I'm a fraud. This

00:08:37.120 is what I wrote about. And yet I'm doing the same thing. So I have to come back. I have to pull back

00:08:41.520 and go, okay, nope, this comes off. This comes off. This comes off so that I can focus on the big

00:08:46.420 rocks. Yeah. I think one of the issues too, when people feel overwhelmed, they'll go to a system to get

00:08:52.020 more efficient. But the problem, one of the sneaky problems with that is that you get really good at

00:08:56.660 doing stuff. And so it just fills up even more, right? So you get really good at doing urgent

00:09:00.840 stuff. And that probably happened to you. You had these like SOPs, checklists, and all it did,

00:09:05.720 yeah, you got stuff done, but it allowed you to do more stuff, right? Ultimately, the goal would be

00:09:10.120 to get the work done more efficiently so you can focus on the important stuff. So instead of filling

00:09:15.780 your calendar with more stuff, you fill your calendar with important stuff. Again, family, faith,

00:09:20.880 fitness, whatever that thing is. You mentioned earlier that when you were in this period,

00:09:25.740 2009, 2012, and even after 2012, you had this drive, this ambition to be awesome, like have a

00:09:33.940 great successful business, et cetera. I mean, you talk about in the book that one of the key takeaways

00:09:38.980 or one of the shifts you had to make in your life was understanding the distinction between

00:09:43.520 status and value. Walk us through that. Yeah. I think you've probably even seen this shift in me

00:09:49.040 over the years is that there was a time when status was important to me. And I think the problem

00:09:54.680 with status is that it's all based on perception. It's perception of yourself, by yourself. It's

00:09:59.800 perception of how others perceive you, how you perceive others. And all of that can just be

00:10:04.320 founded or unfounded. It can be arbitrary. Totally arbitrary. It's subjective, right? And I had to

00:10:11.340 change and decide like, wait, this doesn't matter. Again, this doesn't bring joy. And I shifted from a

00:10:16.700 focus on status to a focus on value. Where, where are my values? And, and I think coming out of that

00:10:21.840 time, when you come out of these dark kind of valley periods in your life, it really forces you to think

00:10:25.460 about what are the things that really matter to me? Who am I really not? Who am I when everyone's

00:10:29.500 looking, but who am I, am I when people aren't looking or even more so like, who do I really want

00:10:33.580 to be? So status is different than legacy, right? So when I think about legacy or reputation long-term,

00:10:39.540 I'm thinking about what's the value I've brought to other people in my life or the values that I've been

00:10:44.220 able to give to others. Whereas status is like how I'm remembered and like, you know,

00:10:48.900 how big did I build the company and how strong did I get and strong man. And then you start to

00:10:53.040 realize like nobody actually cares long-term. And so the thing that's going to last, and I think

00:10:56.840 another shift with that status versus value is that I started playing the long game. It was less about

00:11:02.020 making money today or being famous today or whatever the status was or having that respect

00:11:06.400 of other people today. And it started being like, oh, I'm thinking about my kids and my grandkids

00:11:10.060 and my great grandkids. And if I do this really well, like maybe even my great grandkids who I may

00:11:14.940 never know, and maybe they don't remember any or know anything about me specifically. But if I build

00:11:19.500 that value system in my family and in my community, that can get passed down from generation to

00:11:23.800 generation. That's completely different than personal status for personal gain. And it has brought

00:11:30.680 about a tremendous amount of joy that even in times since then that are very difficult, very hard,

00:11:36.220 very overworked. I can still do all of those things or even in times when people have been sick

00:11:40.720 or there's been tragedy. I lost my dad a couple of years ago. Like that, you can still have joy

00:11:45.320 because what you're doing is pursuing value, not status. And so status sometimes brings you some

00:11:51.740 happiness for a time, but again, it's fleeting. I don't care about that. I want joy long-term,

00:11:56.540 long game. This reminds me of David Brooks. He makes the distinction between

00:12:01.100 eulogy virtues and resume virtues. So the eulogy virtues are the things you want to be remembered

00:12:09.140 for. Like what do you want people to say about you at your funeral? Resume virtues are like the

00:12:15.900 things you put on your CV. That's exactly right. Yep. And which one matters more? This is a very,

00:12:21.140 we're both middle-aged now. Yeah. Like this is a middle-aged man conversation. I mean, I think when

00:12:26.320 you're young, you have that drive, that thumos where you want status. Actually, I think that's

00:12:31.200 healthy. Yeah, for sure. I don't think that's wrong for a 21-year-old to have that. But I think at a

00:12:36.000 certain point, it just starts feeling like a grind and you feel like you're ready for a new phase and

00:12:42.120 you start thinking, I've got to start shifting to those eulogy virtues. Yeah. Yeah. Couldn't agree

00:12:47.200 more. Like absolutely. That you start to just, again, and it's what you value. And also, like you said,

00:12:52.220 for young men, especially those who aren't married, don't have kids, they don't have that

00:12:56.280 generation to generation legacy that they're passing down yet. There is something that actually

00:13:00.100 happens to us, I think, biologically. When you get married, you build a life together, you have a

00:13:04.500 family, and then eventually, you know, all of these roots that you put down, again, you can't take the

00:13:09.900 house with you. You can't take the money with you. But what you can do is you can pass down the values.

00:13:14.840 And so there is clearly a shift that occurs between that status and value at some point for most of us as

00:13:19.180 we hit those middle-aged years. So yeah, one thing you do to start undoing urgency in your life,

00:13:22.980 shift from that status mentality to that value mentality. Another thing you talk about,

00:13:27.020 one of the steps you got to do to undo urgency is deprioritize it. Yeah. But to do that, you have

00:13:32.660 to figure out what is the urgent stuff in your life. Yeah. And you use something that we've written

00:13:37.120 about. Yeah. And you were kind enough to give me a name check. Yeah. In the book. And in the book

00:13:41.740 about the Eisenhower decision matrix. That's something we've written about. For those who aren't

00:13:45.220 familiar with the Eisenhower decision matrix, can you walk us through it? Sure. Yeah.

00:13:49.080 President Eisenhower, he said, I have two types of problems that I have to deal with on a daily

00:13:53.100 basis. Those that are urgent, which are almost never important. And those things that are

00:13:57.040 important, which are almost never urgent. And I think Stephen Covey talks about this and seven

00:14:00.640 habits of highly effective people you've written about it. And so I really started looking at that.

00:14:05.020 You can, if everything is some combination of urgent and important, then it puts all tasks in one of

00:14:11.460 four quadrants. You have things that are not urgent, not important. And those are things like when I

00:14:15.860 think about not urgent, not important, I think of things like binge watching TV, doom scrolling,

00:14:20.200 social media, video games. It doesn't all have to be technology, but just things are just time

00:14:24.240 wasters, right? For those of us who are actually trying to accomplish something, especially if you're

00:14:29.880 drowning in urgency, the very first thing you do, I mean, no brainer is you eliminate non-urgent,

00:14:35.440 non-important things. And then you have the things that are urgent and not important. And these are

00:14:41.620 often things I think about, like, I live in a neighborhood with an HOA. If I don't mow

00:14:46.040 my lawn, I'm going to get a letter from the HOA. So the lawn needs to be mowed, but do I have to

00:14:49.680 mow it? Right? That's urgent. Or grocery shopping, or house work, or just very monotonous daily work

00:14:55.900 tasks, things like that.

00:14:56.960 Meetings.

00:14:57.540 Yes. Phone calls that come in from out of nowhere.

00:15:00.300 Interruptions, yeah.

00:15:01.280 Can't stand those, right? Those interruptions. So what we want to do then is we want to automate

00:15:05.880 or delegate those things. We want to give those away as much as we can. And I get it. For some

00:15:09.760 listeners, it's not always possible to hire somebody to mow your lawn or to go get you. But

00:15:14.020 groceries are an easy one, right? So now anybody can have their groceries delivered for almost

00:15:17.820 nothing. Like you're talking about $10 a month or for an extremely nominal fee, especially when you

00:15:22.300 compare it to the amount of time it's going to take you to drive to the grocery store, buy the

00:15:26.420 groceries. And so for me, I don't go to the grocery store anymore. You know, and I've got a

00:15:31.060 teenage daughter who fills my truck up with gas. Like I pay her, that's one of her chores. So I pay for

00:15:35.460 the gas, obviously. And then she goes and takes it. And when they're new drivers, they're often

00:15:38.800 excited to go put gas in the car and take it up the road. So we delegate or automate those things

00:15:43.360 that are, that are urgent, but not important. And then that takes us to the quadrant that is the

00:15:47.580 urgent and important things. And for business owners and busy people, executives, upper management

00:15:53.600 sort of people, you often, this is really where you drown. It's in this stuff that really does have

00:15:59.040 to get done. It's important work. It's urgent. It's deadlines. These are, for me, it's online

00:16:03.880 coaching. I'm still an online coach. I wake up every morning. I do online coaching. I answer emails.

00:16:08.240 There are decisions I have to make in the business every day as a CEO that if I don't make that

00:16:12.120 decision, the business stops in that sector. And so I have to make those decisions, project

00:16:16.760 management, all those sorts of things. I'm all of those things. I can batch answer emails

00:16:22.180 and texts and phone calls and things like that. The key to those urgent and important things

00:16:26.980 is total efficiency, undistracted efficiency, because what I'm trying to do is I do have to

00:16:32.820 do that work, but I want to do that work well and quick and not make it take all day.

00:16:37.380 And I don't want to get bogged down with distractions. So I turn off all the notifications

00:16:40.580 on my phone, all the notifications on my computer. If I do those things well, if I eliminate the

00:16:45.740 non-urgent, non-important, if I delegate and automate the things that are urgent and not

00:16:50.180 important, and if I work very efficiently at the things that are urgent and important, it

00:16:54.520 opens up my schedule. It opens up the bandwidth in my life to focus on the things that are the

00:16:59.480 most important, but almost never actually urgent. So your own health and fitness, your relationship

00:17:05.780 with your family, relationship with good friends, your spiritual disciplines, you're like whatever

00:17:10.040 those things are that are the most important thing. And the most important things to me may

00:17:13.580 not be the most important things to you or to your listeners, but once you've identified those

00:17:17.320 things, I want to spend my life doing as much of that as I possibly can, not being bogged down in the

00:17:22.940 other three quadrants. And so that's the Eisenhower matrix, and that's how we start. So we

00:17:26.680 deprioritize those things that are unimportant so we can focus on the things that are more important.

00:17:30.940 Yeah, and that takes like, you have to be brutally honest with yourself when you're trying to figure

00:17:34.980 this stuff out. You might think, oh, well, this is important. Well, maybe not. Right. Yeah, that could

00:17:39.860 be hard. Any advice there in figuring that out? So the very first thing I do, and we talk about in the

00:17:44.040 book, and it's sometimes it's a painful exercise, is to just make one big master list of all the tasks

00:17:50.660 you have to do on a daily or weekly basis. And that thing may be a hundred things long. And then you need

00:17:55.980 to take a few minutes, and you only have to do this once. Take a few minutes, and you assign each

00:18:00.100 one of those things to a category. Like, is this urgent, important, like non-urgent, important,

00:18:05.180 whatever the thing is. Then once you do that, you take all the things that are not urgent,

00:18:09.220 not important, and you get them off the list, and you stop doing it. And you take all the things that

00:18:13.160 are urgent but not important, and you figure out how to delegate those things, right? And you just go

00:18:17.540 down the list. And so then you go, now how do I focus on these things and get the most done in the

00:18:21.720 least amount of time? And so that's the focus on the urgent and the important. And then

00:18:25.720 it will become very clear to you when you start to look at the things that are the most important

00:18:29.260 things, that often it'll come with a sense of guilt a little bit and go like, oh, I'm not spending the

00:18:33.960 time that I should on these things. And that is often a great way to start. And those most important

00:18:39.100 things have to constantly tie back to value, to the values that we talked about earlier, to your own

00:18:43.520 personal core values, which again, can be different for different people. But ultimately, those important

00:18:48.160 things have to tie back to the things that are most important to you, where your core values lie.

00:18:52.040 Yeah. Our mutual friend, Scott Hambrick and your former podcast host, he has an interesting tactic

00:18:57.700 to help you figure this stuff out. It's just like, don't do anything on your business for like two

00:19:02.740 weeks and then see what breaks. And if nothing breaks when you stop doing it, like, oh, maybe I

00:19:08.820 don't need to do that. I think a lot of stuff we think we have to do it probably don't have to do it.

00:19:13.540 Yeah. So another thing I learned from Scott, another shout out to Scott was that,

00:19:16.660 so I do a daily task list every day. I get up, I do it on my notepad on my phone,

00:19:21.840 you know, you can actually add little check boxes. So when I do it, it checks it and moves it to the

00:19:25.540 bottom. And so I have this checklist. And at the end of the day, whatever wasn't done, I just copy

00:19:30.500 and paste that in for tomorrow's checklist. And Scott says, if you go two weeks or three weeks,

00:19:35.480 and the things that you thought you needed to do, keep getting pushed to the bottom and never get

00:19:39.560 done, maybe they should get pulled off the list entirely. You don't got to do it. Maybe they're not

00:19:42.700 really that important. Right. They're not that important. At least not right now. So yeah, I think the

00:19:46.380 Eisenhower decision matrix is a very powerful tool to help you figure out what stuff you can drop,

00:19:50.980 what stuff you could delegate and what stuff you need to focus on. One of your core principles in

00:19:55.300 your weight training philosophy, we've talked about this a lot in your coaching of me, but also your

00:20:00.600 business philosophy and just personal philosophy is this idea of voluntary hardship. How do you define

00:20:06.100 voluntary hardship and how is it different from like needless self-flagellation? Yeah, I like that.

00:20:13.040 Voluntary hardship is just the process of choosing hard things that no one else is going to make you

00:20:18.020 do. Like you're choosing the thing. That's what makes it voluntary, right? But it also has to be

00:20:23.620 choosing hard things that bring you value. And this is where the self-flagellation thing, like,

00:20:28.360 you know, if I'm Luther and I'm literally beating my body with the belt, you know,

00:20:32.400 aren't you Lutheran? You're just, I'm reformed, but, and I do love Luther, but I'm not going to hit

00:20:37.360 myself with a belt or a whip. I mean, it's right. So there are things we can do that just bring about

00:20:41.580 more suffering and pain, which is sort of ridiculous. That's why I think we want to make

00:20:45.520 sure that there's value always to those things. And I think Luther would probably argue that he

00:20:48.620 thought that there was some sort of value there in beating his body into submission.

00:20:51.540 For me, the voluntary hardship, the key there is about voluntary hardship is when we choose hard

00:20:55.660 things for value. It is a refining process to us. It makes us better people. It makes us better men.

00:21:02.300 It makes me a better business owner, husband, father, like everything gets better when I do

00:21:06.880 these things. And here's why, because involuntary hardship is not guaranteed to refine. And we know

00:21:13.800 that we're going to have to face involuntary hardship. How do we know that it's not guaranteed

00:21:16.820 to refine? Well, because guys go to prison and most of the time they don't come out better.

00:21:20.900 Sometimes they do, but most of the time they don't, right? Sometimes people get cancer and they get

00:21:25.360 jaded. Sometimes they get cancer and they beat it and they come out stronger and more healthy and,

00:21:29.940 you know, more mentally tough. When we choose a voluntary hardship, what we're doing is we're

00:21:33.860 better preparing our bodies, our minds, our souls, our social skills, our emotions to handle things

00:21:40.400 that are hard. Nobody's going to make you put a bar on your back and squat heavyweight. You have to

00:21:44.840 choose that for yourself. Even if you have a coach, I can't make you do that. You're in Tulsa, I'm in

00:21:49.340 Springfield, but you have to walk out there and do it on your own. And that there is something that's

00:21:54.020 like feels very accomplished about that. And of course, there's all sorts of benefits that we've

00:21:57.920 talked about in previous podcasts of strength training that you'll get this physical benefit

00:22:02.400 from. You'll become more resilient and less vulnerable to injury and things. But I would argue that the

00:22:06.900 actual hardship of squatting actually makes you tougher mentally, emotionally, socially. For me, when

00:22:11.940 I don't train, I am not as nice of a friend. I'm not as good of a boss. I'm not as great of a dad. And so

00:22:18.640 like there's a tremendous stress reliever for me when I train. But training isn't the only thing that's

00:22:22.800 voluntary hardship. Sometimes, and I think often like, you know, I would guess that a big percentage

00:22:27.500 of your listeners train and do some sort of physical hardship, whether that's squatting or

00:22:31.540 running or mud runs or whatever the thing is. You know what's a lot harder a lot of times for us is

00:22:36.920 having the hard conversation you don't want to have. But you know you need to have it with a family

00:22:41.740 member, with a friend, with a church member, with an employee, with a boss. And that's just another

00:22:46.360 thing that we have to choose that. And often people will go their whole life running away from that

00:22:50.940 thing that is hard that they let fear like I'm too scared to put a bar on my back and squat. I'm too

00:22:56.000 scared to have that really hard conversation. But those are the things that every time I have that

00:23:00.060 awkward conversation, or I squat that new PR, I'm a little better apt to handle the next hard

00:23:06.320 conversation. Or the next time I put heavy weight on a bar, I go like, okay, I've trained myself to

00:23:11.600 know what this feels like to put this heavy weight on my back, or to put this heavy weight on my soul on my

00:23:16.300 emotions to have to have a hard conversation I don't really want to have. But I'm going to have it

00:23:20.420 because I know it's good. I know it'll bring value. Then when you get hit with the sickness,

00:23:25.560 with the cancer, with the job loss, with the lawsuit, with whatever, you're better apt to

00:23:30.080 handle it because you've trained your body up and it understands how to do hard things in general

00:23:33.960 because you've done them voluntarily. Yeah. And it sounds like important things are often hard

00:23:37.760 things. Most important things. Yeah, really hard. And I think oftentimes urgency can become an

00:23:43.960 addiction because it's often really easy to knock that stuff out. I know it's when I want to

00:23:47.820 procrastinate. It's the procrastination effect. I just start going to email and I just kind of look

00:23:51.640 at my task list. What's an easy thing that I can do? And then I put off that room. I should clean

00:23:55.620 my office right now. That's exactly what we do. Yeah. Because it's easy, right? And so we want

00:24:01.640 simple, hard, effective. You've heard that term a million times in the business, but it doesn't just

00:24:06.640 apply to fitness or to strength training. I think it applies to life. We actually want to choose

00:24:10.780 things that are simple, not complex. We want simplicity over complexity. And we want hard over easy

00:24:17.340 because easy doesn't work. Easy doesn't bring about things of value. Anything that's valuable

00:24:21.240 was hard to attain. Yeah. And the thing that makes it valuable and unique is that it takes a unique

00:24:26.980 amount of hard work to get it. And so that's what we're after. Like whether that's in the weight room

00:24:31.260 or whether that's in life or, you know, working on marriage is hard. Working on being a father or a

00:24:36.440 parent is difficult. Those are difficult things. Working on being a great boss or even a great employee.

00:24:40.560 Those are difficult tasks to handle. And a lot of people just go about even their whole life and never

00:24:45.260 really consider. Like, am I really trying to be the best boss I can or the best employee I can? And I

00:24:49.580 think those are things that we should be thinking about. We should be pursuing. We're going to take

00:24:53.840 a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Another one of your core

00:25:00.800 principles that you apply to your life, and this comes from strength training. One of the things I

00:25:05.280 love about strength training, barbell training, is how viscerally it teaches you a lot of these

00:25:10.520 principles you talk about. And one of those principles is minimum effective dose. So what is

00:25:15.840 minimum effective dose and where did it come from? And then how did you apply this to your sort of

00:25:20.340 life philosophy? So obviously a minimum effective dose, most people have thought about this from just

00:25:23.880 a medicine standpoint. If I have a headache and one ibuprofen will knock it out, I don't need to take

00:25:28.740 five. And if it doesn't, if one doesn't knock it out, then maybe I need to take two. But so the goal

00:25:34.040 there is that we want to take the minimum effective dose. So it's minimum dose, but it also has to be

00:25:39.460 effective, right? And what we did, so back to Scott Hamburg and I, we started thinking about the way

00:25:44.380 we were programming in strength training. And we recognized that what we were really doing. So in

00:25:48.720 the beginning, when most people start strength training, they do what's called linear progression.

00:25:51.880 They just literally do the exact same lifts three or four times a week, adding like five pounds to the

00:25:57.540 bar every single time. So the only variable that changes is the weight on the bar. We don't change

00:26:02.500 the sets and reps. We don't change the frequency. All that stuff stays the same. And all we do is

00:26:07.120 change the weight on the bar. That is nothing more than the scientific method, changing one variable

00:26:11.760 at a time, testing the hypothesis. If I'm able to keep putting five pounds on the bar, then I know

00:26:16.320 I'm making progress. And then at some point you can't put weight on the bar anymore, or we'd all

00:26:21.020 squat a thousand pounds. At that point, another variable has to change. And so we recognize that

00:26:25.460 what we were doing over time with clients, and certainly you were one of those clients, was

00:26:29.540 after linear progression, what's the next change that I make? Do I add a little volume? Do I add a

00:26:34.620 little frequency? Do I take people from sets of five to sets of three? But I don't do all three

00:26:38.880 of those things at the same time. I still just do one. So then as I got into the business and the

00:26:42.940 business continued to expand and grow, you start to realize, oh, hold on, same thing. What I'm looking

00:26:47.580 to do in business, and this is actually very, talk about visceral, this is actually visceral to me

00:26:51.380 right now. We have some challenges in the business we're trying to solve right now. And I'm thinking to

00:26:55.760 myself, I'm leveraging this minimum effective dose concept to say, okay, what are the things that we can do

00:27:01.760 that take the least amount of work, effort, friction, etc., for the most ROI? That's what I want to do.

00:27:09.780 And so that's the concept of a minimum effective dose. And here's what happens when you don't do this

00:27:13.440 well. Often people, when they're trying to change a habit, and we can use fitness again. So I want to

00:27:17.720 get strong and look great and put on muscle and lose fat, all these things. And so they throw the

00:27:22.520 kitchen sink at it, right? So I'm going to train six days a week, and I'm going to run two miles every

00:27:26.580 day, and I'm going to eat carnivore. I'm only going to eat protein and no carbs because I have to lose

00:27:30.600 the fat. And I'm going to like, it's completely unsustainable. Now, here's this is really important

00:27:35.840 too, because you wrote an article years ago on the relationship between motivation and discipline,

00:27:40.740 right? And I talked about this in the book as well, because I really took learned a lesson from this

00:27:44.920 is that white knuckle discipline, I think is often required to start a process, but it is completely

00:27:50.720 unsustainable long term. If you want to get in shape, and you start doing fitness, and it might take

00:27:56.460 some white knuckle discipline to get up and go to the gym the first couple days, the first couple weeks.

00:27:59.800 If after two months or six weeks, you still hate every second of going to the gym, it is not going

00:28:05.880 to last. What will tend to happen is if you take white knuckle discipline, some sort of discipline,

00:28:10.720 and you're doing the thing for value, for good, for what you would consider a virtuous reason,

00:28:15.960 what I've found almost always is that discipline turns into motivation. You start to enjoy the workouts,

00:28:21.920 you start to enjoy the eating habits of healthy, you lose the taste of sugar, you lose like whatever

00:28:27.460 that thing is. And all of a sudden, it doesn't feel like discipline anymore, because you're

00:28:31.340 motivated. If you continue to ride that, that motivation actually just turns into habit. And

00:28:36.900 you're neither disciplined nor motivated. It just is what you do. It's the same thing as putting on

00:28:41.360 your shoes in the morning. It's the same thing as brushing your teeth every day. You get up, you train,

00:28:45.500 you get up. And so I wake up every morning at 330 or four every single morning, I don't set an alarm.

00:28:50.360 Let me be clear. I really probably wish I didn't wake up that early, except deep down inside. So

00:28:55.900 okay, I don't take a picture of my watch at 335 in the morning. It just is who I am. I just get up

00:29:03.020 and work. And that work that I get done from say 4am in the morning to 7am every morning before my

00:29:07.340 family, when my family wakes up at seven, are the best hours of the day of work that I get. That's the

00:29:12.960 best urgent and important work that I can possibly do. I knock that stuff out usually in an hour,

00:29:18.340 and I get to focus on what I get excited about is when the urgent work is no longer hanging over

00:29:23.220 me, which I can often get off my plate in an hour or so. And I just get to focus on the important

00:29:27.300 work. And that is how we address this concept of motive of discipline, motivation, and habit.

00:29:33.700 And minimum effective dose is the way we get there one little step at a time. So that one step at a

00:29:38.320 time is again, simplicity over complexity, simple, not easy, right? So we change one variable at a time,

00:29:43.940 and that's fitness, life, et cetera, economy over excess. There's no reason to make it cost more,

00:29:50.760 use more variables, you know, money, effort, time. Thank you. I know I was missing one. Yeah. The

00:29:56.140 most important one, the one that nobody can actually increase, right? And then effort over easy. So the

00:30:00.600 interesting thing is you have simple, which isn't easy. So simple is not easy. It's simple. And you have

00:30:05.680 economy over excess, which also is sort of a simplicity piece. But then you have the effort over easy.

00:30:10.380 So you cannot do simple economy and easy because then we don't have the return on investment. Minimum

00:30:16.880 effective dose for maximum return on investment in life and fitness and health, et cetera.

00:30:22.980 Yeah. I've, uh, the minimum effective dose. Once I grasped that concept, I was able to do a lot of,

00:30:29.820 you still coach me, you still do programming for me, but I'm able to kind of take the reins of my

00:30:34.320 own program in a way. Cause now I know which variables I can pull to have progress. So, you know,

00:30:39.700 sometimes it's weight and if weight's not going up, well, I'll stay at this weight and then I'll

00:30:43.800 increase a rep. That's right. Yeah. Go volume, but you don't do all three. You don't do like,

00:30:48.140 I'm going to go up weight and volume and I'm going to train two more days a week. Right. And the same

00:30:51.800 thing when I, I, so last year I lost like 30 pounds and it was just minimum effective dose.

00:30:56.560 Like I didn't cut calories dramatically. I just reduced calories by 200 each week. Yep. And then if the

00:31:02.640 scale was going down, well, I just stayed at that. That's right. I didn't, I didn't manipulate it.

00:31:06.180 There's no reason. There's no reason to, but as soon as it stopped,

00:31:08.380 I would probably maybe just hang there for another week because you know, sometimes your

00:31:12.100 body's weird and you water or whatever. Yeah. But if it, if the second week it didn't go down,

00:31:16.380 okay, now it's time to reduce calories and then drastically changed my diet. I was still eating

00:31:20.140 pizza and hamburgers or whatever. Probably never felt deprived, never felt deprived. And then it's,

00:31:24.980 it's been sustainable, right? It's lasted. Right. So again, everybody's done the crash diet thing.

00:31:29.120 I'm going to, okay, we're going to the beach in a month and I'm going to lose as much weight as

00:31:32.680 possible. And you can, you can, yeah, but then it's, it's going to balloon back. Right. So that's the key is we

00:31:37.600 want sustainable effort. And that comes from that minimum effective dose. Yeah. It took me like

00:31:42.700 six or seven months to lose 30 pounds, but now I'm gaining weight again. I'm just reverse. I'm

00:31:46.320 now I'm increasing the calories, but you're not getting fat. I'm not getting fat. I'm just

00:31:50.120 gaining muscle and trying to gain muscle majority of. So, I mean, it's easy with weightlifting to

00:31:54.060 figure out these variables to manipulate. How do you figure out the variables to manipulate in like

00:31:57.980 family life, et cetera? Yeah. So it's, it's comes back again. It's in weightlifting. It's load or like

00:32:04.120 heaviness, intensity, intensity, volume, frequency. There's a few others you could throw in there

00:32:08.740 in life. It comes back to what we taught. It's time, effort, money. Right. And so you start to

00:32:13.380 look at and you go, okay, like what levers can I pull? And this will depend on this again, where I

00:32:18.000 think it, some of it will change based on where you are in the course of your life. So when you're

00:32:21.580 19 and you're broke, you don't have any money, right? But you got plenty of time and lots of effort.

00:32:27.080 Yeah. Lots of energy. Lots of effort. And as you get older and maybe you have less energy and at

00:32:33.660 least in the grand life scheme of clock, you have less time. Yeah. Or you would consider your time

00:32:38.980 more valuable and maybe your time actually is more valuable from a dollar per hour. You know,

00:32:42.560 19 years old, you're making 12 bucks an hour. And when you're 45 years old, you might be making

00:32:46.160 $200 an hour. Right. Well, at that point, then it's a no brainer to hire the person to mow you on.

00:32:51.420 Then it's no brainer to hire the housekeeper to come in and do the floors once a week or once every

00:32:55.160 two weeks. Like that's, so that's what we do. We look at these three primary resources of time,

00:33:00.380 effort, money, and we figure out how to leverage those resources in a minimum effective dose way

00:33:05.100 that is based on one, what resources I have available and which ones I'm willing to give

00:33:10.420 up and spend. And then I lay that out one piece at a time. So in the same way that you might add

00:33:14.800 a little bit of weight, a little bit of intensity, a little bit of load to a barbell,

00:33:19.460 you might decide to spend a little more money on a thing in order to gain back some effort.

00:33:25.160 To have to put in less effort, I can delegate out the thing. It always works that way. So it's

00:33:30.100 exactly the same thing with life as it is in the weight room. Yeah, I like that. So over the years,

00:33:35.180 you developed a system to manage your business in life and you call it the game plan in the book.

00:33:40.560 You got an acronym. I know, right? If you have a business book, you got to have an acronym.

00:33:45.440 That's right. That's right. It's the game plan. G-A-M-E is an acronym for goals, actions,

00:33:50.460 metrics, and execution. So let's talk about the goals part of this first. What's your approach to

00:33:54.640 goal setting in life? And maybe talk about how has barbell training influenced your approach to

00:33:59.360 goals?

00:33:59.580 Yeah. Thank you. So first off, I won't tell the whole story for lack of time, but this was originally

00:34:04.280 kind of built off of another business concept called OKRs, objectives and key results, which

00:34:09.020 sounds even worse and more businessy and more gross. And so my team, while the concept was excellent,

00:34:15.460 my team didn't pick it up very well. And when we moved, we started to realize that what we're doing

00:34:19.840 is we're trying to set these goals in the business and accomplish these goals, perform the actions

00:34:24.700 that will help us complete the goals, have measuring sticks to measure whether we're actually moving the

00:34:29.160 right direction. And then are we executing on that on a day to day basis for goal setting? It all comes

00:34:34.300 back to values. Now, here's the problem. People want to set too many goals. You can really only work

00:34:39.820 on two or three major goals at any given season of life. You can't do 20. This is where you have to

00:34:46.280 understand the concept of deprioritizing. Yes, everybody wants to get rich, famous, strong, lean, jacked,

00:34:54.000 incredible family. Pick two in any given time because you just can't. You can't give up all of yourself

00:35:00.500 to be able to do that. Then you drown in urgency. It's unsustainable and you end up in burnout. And so

00:35:04.740 for us, we look at in my life, like we often sit down, even as a family, fairly often, my wife and I do

00:35:10.860 this at least once every three or four weeks. And we sit down and get like, OK, what are the next several

00:35:14.460 months look like? What do we want them to look like? What are the most important things we

00:35:17.500 accomplish as a family? What are the things that we're doing in our church? What are we doing in

00:35:21.580 our health and fitness? Like what are the plans for meals and cooking? Who do we want to have over?

00:35:26.560 What guests do we want to have over? Do we want to take any vacations? We look at those things and

00:35:30.060 then we pick the two or three things that are most important. And we set those goals. OK, we're going

00:35:34.100 to work towards this thing or we're going to work towards going on a vacation to Mexico or something.

00:35:37.800 And we work towards that goal. Once you identify what those most important things are,

00:35:41.680 and you can relate this back to strength training, you can't get stronger and put on a whole bunch

00:35:46.680 of muscle and lose a whole bunch of fat and get really lean and do a bodybuilding show all at

00:35:50.980 the same time. And run endurance. Right. Absolutely not. And so you have to pick things that are going

00:35:56.180 to support each other. So you could say, well, I want to increase my strength by 10 percent over the

00:36:01.860 next three months. And I want to increase my muscle mass by five percent over the next three months.

00:36:06.000 That's doable. You can do that. But to say, I want to increase my strength by 25 percent. And often we pick

00:36:10.480 goals that are just ridiculous while also losing 20 percent body fat. Like that's just not going to

00:36:15.140 happen. So what I'm trying to do is pick the goals that are the most important to me. And it forces

00:36:18.780 you to choose both at the goal level and then moving on to the action level. Once I know what my goals

00:36:25.400 are, I have to choose on average three actions that are output actions that will support that goal.

00:36:32.160 And what I mean by output actions is it can't just be a task. It has to be at the end of the time

00:36:38.000 period of the month. You should be able to ask yourself, did I or did I not complete this thing?

00:36:42.580 And you should be able to answer yes or no. And if you have three actions that support each goal

00:36:46.740 and you've planned this well, then you can pretty much guarantee that if you complete all three

00:36:51.420 actions, you will have met the goal at the end of that time period. That's the idea. Right.

00:36:55.700 And so then you can go from there and go, well, now what are the most important things to measure?

00:36:59.260 So for you, when you were losing weight, did you look at just body weight on the scale? Did you look

00:37:03.120 a scale and waist? Yeah, I did. I weighed myself and did some like body fat percentage measurements.

00:37:08.120 Right. Yeah. And what we'll often do is we'll look at performance. So if for, let's say for body fat

00:37:13.520 or body composition, we'll look at the scale weight, we'll look at waist measurement. If we've

00:37:18.740 got a good access to actually measuring body fat, certainly we can do that as well, but we also want

00:37:22.980 to look at performance. And so for us, can you lose weight too fast? Of course you just sit like you

00:37:27.660 can and it's unsustainable. If you lose weight too fast, guess what happens to performance?

00:37:31.140 Goes down. It crashes. Well, for almost everybody that's hired us, they want performance matters.

00:37:35.620 Like, so they know they're probably not going to set any massive PRs while they're losing a bunch

00:37:39.460 of weight, but they also don't want to cut their strength in half. Right. Yeah. So that's how we

00:37:43.360 leverage the metrics to support the actions that support the goals. Gotcha. This is going back to

00:37:49.060 goals and goal selection. I think this requires, you kind of alluded to it a bit, knowing what you

00:37:54.220 really value. That's right. I think a lot of people, they set goals because they think they should set

00:37:58.300 those goals, but they actually don't want those goals. And if you don't want the goal,

00:38:02.520 no amount of systemizing or whatever is going to help you accomplish that goal. That's right.

00:38:08.520 You have to want it. These are back to the, it's the big rocks. Yeah. And are they real? Are they

00:38:15.300 the actual thing that you want? And by the way, think how many times in our life that we've thought

00:38:20.020 we've wanted a thing that we've pleaded and prayed for a thing like, oh, you know, just give me

00:38:25.100 that job or, or let me land that big contract or do the, and then you realize like, oh, I actually

00:38:30.520 wouldn't have wanted that. Yeah. That would have been worse for me. Right. And so, because you're

00:38:34.860 probably paying attention to status. You're like, oh, wow. Absolutely. Because it becomes a status

00:38:38.420 symbol. It's more money. It's more status. It's more whatever. And, and so, yeah, you've got to sit

00:38:43.340 down and decide. There are always 25 or 30 things I would love to be doing in my life, but I have to focus

00:38:49.380 on the two or three that actually matter to me right now. And as I get those things into a good

00:38:54.540 balance point, like you're lean and you're pretty strong right now, your primary goal right now is

00:39:00.180 probably not getting lean because you've kind of already accomplished getting lean. Yeah. And now

00:39:03.940 it's just kind of a, you're, you're just maintaining that because you hit the goal. Right. So now you

00:39:07.980 get to focus on the next thing, which, you know, maybe it's getting stronger or maybe it's more

00:39:11.580 conditioning. It doesn't, whatever is important to you is the thing. Same as in life, right? We look

00:39:15.740 at, okay, what are, what's the major goal we need to have as a family? Do I need to take my wife

00:39:19.960 out on a date night once a week? Do I need to spend more quality time with her? Do I need to spend more

00:39:23.540 quality time with the kids? Do we need to spend less time at all the ball games every single

00:39:27.940 week? Like, do I need to, you know, make my kids choose one sport at a time instead of six sports

00:39:32.580 at a time or whatever the thing is, you start to identify like, what are the things that we need

00:39:36.660 to do to make our family healthy, to make myself actually healthy fitness, like to improve my

00:39:42.520 spiritual disciplines to like what, or, or for me, a lot of times just to improve the business as a CEO,

00:39:47.460 not as an in the trenches, just getting daily monotonous tasks done, but what are the big rocks that we

00:39:52.120 have to focus on? All right. So that's goals. You mentioned action. So that's figuring out

00:39:56.040 exactly what you need to do. Like those, is that like kind of figuring out what the variables are

00:39:59.260 to like? Yeah, so exactly. Yep. So, so you can, again, you can look at, let's use a fitness one

00:40:04.780 because we'll stay on track of that. So for you, if you wanted to lose 30 pounds, what are the actions

00:40:10.160 that you have to take to do that? Well, do you probably have to eat a certain level of calories,

00:40:15.340 right? So our macros, how are we going to increase energy expenditure, even though your body wants to

00:40:20.480 decrease energy? And so how are, how are you going to do that? Steps and like getting steps. So then

00:40:24.600 I would, so the action item would be, you know, 10,000 steps a day, 25 out of 30 days this month.

00:40:29.820 Yeah. Okay. And then at the end of the month, you can say, did you do that or not? Yes. Okay. Well,

00:40:34.200 if you did that, then great. And did you consistently eat this number of calories or this

00:40:38.740 number of macros until the weight plateaued? And then when it plateaued, you dropped it 200 every time.

00:40:42.380 Did you, or did you not do that? And did you get out and actually weight train two times a week or

00:40:46.100 something? Maybe it's less when you're trying to, did you do those things? If you did those things,

00:40:49.680 you should be able to look back at the end of the month or whatever the time period is and go like,

00:40:52.900 okay, I'm that for sure. Move me closer to the goal or I accomplished the goal. And sometimes those

00:40:57.140 goals are, we have to set, there are times where we know we have long-term goals. There's goals that

00:41:01.180 like, if you want to bench press 400 pounds, what's your best bench press? 320. Okay. So you're not

00:41:07.220 going to get there in two months. Like maybe never, but I'm never going to get it. I know I get it,

00:41:11.680 but let's pretend it's 22 year old. Okay. Yeah. You're going to set the long-term goal of 400 pounds.

00:41:17.800 You bench press 320. Now you then also then have to set short-term goals under the long-term goals to

00:41:22.600 go, okay, but what can I do in the next one to three months, right? When one to three months,

00:41:26.780 you can probably increase your bench press 15 pounds or maybe even 20 pounds, but probably not

00:41:31.040 60 or 80 pounds. Right. And so the goal there is to make sure those goals are manageable and they're

00:41:36.180 time constrained. They're testable. They're quantifiable. They're objective. All of those things

00:41:40.580 need to be done for the goal. And then the actions are just basic output. It just says, did you do this?

00:41:46.200 Did you complete the action or did you not? If the answer is yes to all, you should have completed

00:41:50.860 the goal. If you didn't complete the goal, it's still just an exercise in the scientific method.

00:41:55.580 You go, I see now that I should have also done this. I'm going to have to bring in this variable

00:42:00.020 next time in order to meet that goal. Now, the other thing with actions that people want to do is they

00:42:05.200 want to give, okay, in order to lose 30 pounds, here are the 20 actions that I need to do. No, no,

00:42:10.540 no, no. This comes back to the deep prioritize. Simple economy over excess. Like these things

00:42:16.220 matter, but hard, not easy. And that's what we often don't want to. Simple is sometimes it feels

00:42:22.960 too simple, but when you really pick correctly and you pick simple and hard, that's when we get

00:42:28.220 effective. And so that's how we pick our actions. Let's talk about metrics a little bit. You mentioned

00:42:31.780 this a little bit. So how do you figure out the metrics you should be measuring? Cause you have like,

00:42:35.480 there's so like one metric to be like weight loss or like if, say, if you're trying to get your

00:42:40.180 financial house in order, you know, debt paid down. But I mean, sometimes it can be hard to

00:42:44.940 figure out what metrics you actually be paying attention to because they can distract you from

00:42:48.840 actually accomplishing what you're trying to accomplish. Yeah. So the first thing you have

00:42:52.840 is you have your goal metrics. So again, the 400 pound bench press or the, you know, I want my net worth

00:42:57.740 to be $500,000 or whatever the thing is. But if you cannot reach that goal in a short term period,

00:43:05.120 then that becomes a target to improve. Like the metric often is the goal. I want to get to this

00:43:11.580 body weight. I want to get to this strength piece. I want to have this much money. I want to look,

00:43:15.760 whatever the thing is, that's a target to improve. The metrics then that we use as a measuring guide

00:43:20.600 are a snapshot picture. So you want to lose 30 pounds. Losing 30 pounds is the target to improve

00:43:25.700 each week. You can look and say, Oh, I've lost two pounds. I lost one pound this week. And now I've

00:43:32.040 lost collectively seven pounds. So you can see that you're consistently moving towards the goal. Now,

00:43:36.780 if you want to lose 30 pounds, two weeks in a row, you lose zero pounds, you gain one or two,

00:43:41.160 like, okay, we're going the wrong. We have to change something about the actions because the

00:43:45.200 metrics just tell us if the actions are working or not. So this is where I don't actually have to wait

00:43:50.500 until the actions are completed to find out if I reached the goal. I can actually along the process

00:43:54.500 go like, if I'm doing all the things I say I'm going to do and the metrics are not moving the right

00:43:58.760 way, then I have the wrong roadmap. I have a roadmap that is taking me to Indianapolis. But

00:44:04.040 what I really want to do is go to Denver. And I'm like, Oh, I'm going, I've got to change the path.

00:44:08.780 The path is wrong. How do you figure out metrics for like more kind of squidgy things? Like, you

00:44:13.740 know, he's talking about, you know, an important thing in your life can be spirituality, spiritual

00:44:17.180 disciplines. Like, how do you figure out metrics for that? Like, how do you know? Like, it's not like

00:44:20.820 a data you could check. Oh, yes, I am closer to God. I'm closer to God. And I'm about to have the

00:44:25.040 beatific vision right now or whatever. So how do you figure that out? That's a great question. This

00:44:29.240 is this is the place where I think it can be dangerous to pursue the metrics for the sake

00:44:33.660 of the metrics, right? And this is where I think a lot of people fall into, you don't want to use

00:44:37.660 the metrics just to be something that checks the box. So if it's a spiritual discipline, and you want

00:44:42.240 to progress in your in your relationship with God, or whatever the thing is, like, you could say,

00:44:47.080 well, I'm going to read my Bible every single day for 20 minutes every single morning, and I'm going to

00:44:50.340 pray and and once a week, I'm going to fast and, and those are all good things. And there's

00:44:54.540 we do this all the time, we take good things, and we put them up on a pedestal, and then we

00:44:58.660 miss the forest through the trees. And you realize like, Oh, wait, I didn't improve my relationship

00:45:02.840 with God, or I didn't improve my relationship with my wife, even though I bought her flowers

00:45:07.060 twice a week, that doesn't guarantee. So you have to be careful with the metrics, you have to make sure

00:45:12.700 that the things that you're doing are, again, coming back to value for the right reasons, the big rocks,

00:45:17.260 the things that you actually want to accomplish. And it can't be about this is a real type A

00:45:21.360 problem that I can get into, because I'm a type A guy. It can't be about checking things off the

00:45:25.620 list. Yep, read my Bible today. Yep, you know, had my protein shake this morning. Yep, finished my

00:45:29.600 workout, did my cold plunge, all this stuff. And in the end, you're like, I'm miserable. Yeah,

00:45:33.760 and I'm still drowning in urgency, because what I ended up doing was setting a checklist up of a

00:45:37.600 million things to do. And the only way I can get some tiny little dopamine hit is if I get all of

00:45:41.700 them done. Only what ends up happening is you don't get all of them done. And then you feel like a

00:45:45.260 failure. Now you're not closer to God, you're not in better, better health. And you feel you're like,

00:45:50.380 I'm not focused on the right, most important things. I'm just checking the boxes. So the goal

00:45:55.340 there with the metrics is that they have to be an accurate measuring tool for what you're trying to

00:46:00.200 do. And obviously, emotional, social, spiritual, those things are far harder to test, right? But

00:46:06.040 you can still create habits. Like, you know, there's habits you can do that you can create that you know

00:46:10.900 shouldn't move you in the wrong direction for that. Yeah. And then the key, I think, is just to be

00:46:15.340 authentic. Like, don't just do it to do it. Don't just do it because you think you should.

00:46:19.880 But do it because you authentically care. Like, do you really want to get healthier?

00:46:24.960 Do you really want to grow closer to God? Do you really want to get closer to your wife or children?

00:46:29.060 Like, do you really want to be a better boss? Like, okay, well, then what are the things you

00:46:32.020 need to put in place? Or do you just think you should? Or you hear you should? Or people like,

00:46:36.860 I think you're not that great of a boss. And you're like, oh, man, I should maybe ask.

00:46:40.080 Like, if you don't really care, you're not going to accomplish the goal.

00:46:42.340 Okay. Let's talk about the E for execution. What's that all about?

00:46:45.340 Yeah. The E for execution is just the simple daily tasks that you do that make up. So where

00:46:51.480 you've got two to three major goals, three actions that support each one of those goals, and then,

00:46:56.640 you know, a metric attached to each action or each major goal. The execution list is the daily task

00:47:02.240 list that moves you closer to completing each action. And the thing that is important about that,

00:47:07.400 and this depends on what genre we're in, I don't want to delegate out my family life. I don't want to

00:47:12.460 delegate out my spiritual life. But there's a lot of stuff in business and housework and keeping up

00:47:17.480 with the house and the, you know, all the stuff that we have to do, the oil changes in the car,

00:47:21.960 the things like that, that stuff can be delegated. If I do this, well, I can actually write those

00:47:25.960 systems and standard operating procedures. In a business, often when someone starts a business,

00:47:30.660 you are employee of one, you have one person that works for the business, it's you, which means you

00:47:34.720 do everything. You're the owner, you're the manager, you're the technician, you have to do every

00:47:38.640 system. But what will end up happening is that most business owners never write that system down.

00:47:44.500 They never write that SOP, that standard operating procedure out. Therefore, they can never give it

00:47:49.460 away. So they get stuck working in their business and not on their business. If you focus on the right

00:47:54.800 execution tasks that will get you to completing an action, that'll get you to completing the goal,

00:48:01.720 then you can take those things and you can decide, what are the most important things that only I can do?

00:48:07.620 What are the urgent and important things that I should be doing, but I need to do really efficiently?

00:48:12.560 And what are the things that still need to be done, but I don't have to do and I could delegate

00:48:16.340 and I can give that plan away? And so this is the thing like, you know, the housework, like we have

00:48:21.340 a system for how we clean the house. I don't have to be the one that cleans house. I can. It's not that

00:48:26.280 I'm too good to clean the house, but I can also, I've got two teenage daughters. We've got a housekeeper.

00:48:30.560 I've got people I can hire. You can delegate that stuff out. I can delegate the grocery shopping. I can

00:48:35.420 delegate the putting gas in the car or the oil change. So that's how we end up using the execution

00:48:39.880 list. And then that gives us accountability on a day by day and week by week basis to make sure

00:48:44.440 we're moving in the right direction. So you mentioned earlier too, that you can do this stuff.

00:48:49.580 You can execute, you know, give flowers to your wife, you know, take back your spending so you

00:48:54.760 reduce debt. But sometimes you can do these things and you're going to have failures. You're going to

00:48:59.120 have setbacks. Any advice for guys? I know that can be really frustrating for

00:49:03.100 guys who are trying to improve themselves and like, I'm doing everything I'm supposed to be

00:49:07.100 doing. And like, I'm not getting the results I want. Yeah. What do you think is going on there?

00:49:10.700 Like any advice for that? Yeah. So I talk about this a lot. One of the most frustrating things for

00:49:15.760 me on a day to day basis is when I've worked really, really hard all day and accomplished nothing.

00:49:21.740 Yeah. That's so frustrating. And what I found is that if I'm having a day like that, I was telling you,

00:49:26.860 it's certainly did not intend to tell the story on the podcast, but our basement flooded yesterday

00:49:31.420 and it's never flooded. And I'd come home from a business trip. I literally walked in the door

00:49:35.960 and our basement was flooded and all these like, like decorations and pictures, family pictures and

00:49:40.640 things that couldn't really be replaced, not just material things were ruined. And my wife was very

00:49:45.200 upset. She was crying and we're trying to figure out where did the leak come from and all this sort

00:49:48.760 of stuff. And then we took all the wet stuff, you know, there's comforters and sleep and we took

00:49:53.300 and put it in the washing machine and the washing machine broke. I'm like, you gotta be kidding me.

00:49:57.660 And so, and I had a ton of work. I needed, I needed to sit down and do business work, but I couldn't

00:50:01.340 because this stuff is urgent and important stuff right now. Right. Right. This is, it's like, yes,

00:50:06.320 you've got a leak. That's a very urgent, very important. We got to get this figured out. We

00:50:09.760 got to get the stuff picked up out of the water. It's a great example. And so, all right. So the

00:50:13.600 business work's going to have to be put to the side for a second. Okay. So then what do I do? So now

00:50:17.500 I've got, I'm like, I'm stressed and I'm kind of anxious and I'm trying to get all this stuff cleaned up.

00:50:21.400 So I could have just ended the day that way. But what I did was after I finally calmed down, I got

00:50:27.200 this stuff taken care of. I sat down for five or 10 minutes in my chair. I did nothing. I just sat

00:50:32.520 there and breathe. And I'm not a super like Wim Hof sort of like I wasn't super mindful, meditating,

00:50:37.520 breathing. I was just trying to catch my breath and relax and get my heart rate to come down.

00:50:40.860 And it's actually, I was just looking at my heart rate on my Apple watch and trying to get my heart

00:50:44.160 rate to come down. Once it came down, I was like, okay, I can get a couple of small wins. And so what I did

00:50:49.300 is I went to my task list and I said, what are the things I can knock out in five or 10 minutes?

00:50:54.340 And I knocked out about four of those things. And so at the end of the day, while I didn't get any of

00:50:58.100 the big rocks taken care of yesterday, because I certainly didn't know that the basement was going

00:51:01.680 to flood or that the washing machine was going to quit working or whatever, I still got to end the day

00:51:06.020 on small wins. So the first thing I would say is like, it's really important to try to end the day

00:51:09.860 on some small wins if you weren't able to accomplish some things. And this happens all the time in

00:51:14.100 business or major challenges. You come up against these roadblocks that you don't know are going to

00:51:18.500 happen. It's massive speed bumps. You run your head into the wall over and over and over again

00:51:22.320 and have to overcome that challenge. And then it presents another challenge and that domino falls

00:51:26.900 on another challenge. That can be very, very frustrating. But if you're pursuing this stuff

00:51:31.440 for the right reasons, if you're pursuing this stuff because of value, this is, I think, the most

00:51:36.840 important lesson I've learned in writing the book and understanding what is behind the book is that

00:51:42.320 we have to enjoy the pursuit of the goal as much or more as we enjoy the accomplishment or achieving

00:51:49.420 the goal itself. I think it's wildly important. There is something incredibly beautiful about the

00:51:55.080 pursuit of the goal. We knew the goal was going to be hard. We've already talked about that. If it

00:52:00.220 were easy, it wouldn't be valuable. So if it's valuable and it's important, it's going to be hard.

00:52:05.400 And if it's going to be hard, then there's going to be times we're going to run up against

00:52:07.900 some involuntary hardship that's going to be attached to those things. I want to fall in

00:52:12.500 love with the pursuit. This is what I love about Kobe Bryant versus Michael Jordan. Kobe Bryant loved

00:52:17.480 the work. He just loved the work. Did he want to win? Of course he wanted to win. Did he enjoy the

00:52:22.180 championships? Of course he did. Michael Jordan, who had an incredible work ethic, I don't really

00:52:28.040 think he liked the work that much. I think what he really liked was the wins. He liked the

00:52:32.100 championship. The problem with that is, is that once you win the championship, how long do you

00:52:36.960 revel in that? A day or two, a week? And then what do you do? He just focused on having to win the

00:52:41.680 next championship. But if you enjoy the pursuit of the goal, you enjoy the actual pursuit of that

00:52:46.800 thing, the wins, the losses, the struggles, the hardships, you let that refine you throughout.

00:52:52.820 Then you start to realize like, man, this is actually what the beauty of life is. Is this the

00:52:56.640 beauty of like the pursuit of these goals that we may not ever attain? I would love to be,

00:53:01.820 you know, the jacked, wise old grandpa when I'm 80. I don't know if I'll get there. I don't know

00:53:07.440 if I'll make it to 80. I don't think there's all sorts of variables that could change. But

00:53:10.620 the pursuit of that goal is where the beauty is. It's not in hitting it at 80. It's in the 60 years

00:53:16.500 before that. That's the value is the path, right? It's not the snap in your fingers. And how much would

00:53:22.800 you enjoy anyway, being the jacked, wise old grandpa, if you never had to work and you didn't toil,

00:53:28.140 you know, and thorns and thistles didn't grow up around you. Like all of those things that are part

00:53:32.160 of just being human in a broken world, like that's where it's at. And so all of these things, I don't

00:53:37.800 want the book to just be a tactic or a hack, a productivity hack, but it's understanding the

00:53:43.480 value of working for what's important and not spend your life and waste your life on drowning in

00:53:49.580 urgency when there are so many wonderful, important things that you could be focused on and enjoying the

00:53:53.740 pursuit of those things, knowing that you're not going to get wins every single day.

00:53:56.760 I love that. Well, Matt, if there's one thing someone can start doing today,

00:54:01.120 besides buying your book, what can they start doing today to start undoing urgency in their lives?

00:54:06.160 I would say, start with that Eisenhower matrix, man, and start to identify the things in your life

00:54:10.720 that you need to purge. If you're binge watching Netflix or video games or addicted to porn or like

00:54:15.780 whatever those things, get that out of your life, like get that out first and then figure out

00:54:20.080 how to turn off those distractions. Everyone is in competition for our attention.

00:54:24.440 Learn how to focus your attention. You can actually work that brain muscle to have focused energy on

00:54:31.120 the stuff that is urgent and important and identify your core values. So you really understand what are

00:54:36.360 the most important things in your life. Once you're able to do that, you can be very mindful about

00:54:41.040 making sure you spend the bulk of your time on the important things and not the urgent things.

00:54:45.580 I love it. Well, Matt, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

00:54:47.520 You can go to RyanMattReynolds.com. I don't, I've joked, I don't know if I joked with you that

00:54:52.180 I had to be Ryan Matt Reynolds because

00:54:54.200 Why? I was wondering about it. I've been noticing that.

00:54:56.460 Yeah. So, well, Ryan Reynolds is a famous actor and Matt Reynolds is a center fielder,

00:55:01.540 I think for the Cincinnati Reds or an infielder for the Cincinnati Reds.

00:55:04.060 And so I had to use the full name to really own the URL. So RyanMattReynolds.com. You can read

00:55:09.820 it all about me. You can get the book there. It's already for pre-sale on Amazon. It'll be

00:55:13.380 launching December 10th, which I'm super excited about. And yeah, you always reach out and say,

00:55:17.940 Hey, I'm happy to shoot an email back to you. You can contact me there. There's lots of blog posts

00:55:21.600 and videos and fun stuff on the website. Fantastic. Well, Ryan Matt Reynolds,

00:55:25.080 thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Bartholomew.

00:55:28.920 My guest today was Matt Reynolds. He's the author of the book Undoing Urgency. It's

00:55:32.000 available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information

00:55:35.000 about his work at his website, RyanMattReynolds.com. Also check out our show notes at

00:55:38.840 aom.is slash urgency. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

00:55:50.200 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website

00:55:53.920 at artofmanless.com where you find our podcast archives. And while you're there, sign up for

00:55:57.580 our newsletter. We got a daily option and a weekly option. They're both free. It's the best way to stay

00:56:01.740 on top of what's going on at AOM. And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if

00:56:05.020 you take one minute to give us a review on the podcast or Spotify. It helps that a lot. And if

00:56:08.200 you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or

00:56:11.340 fan member who you think gets something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support

00:56:14.840 and 10 likes times. Brett McKay. Reminding time to listen to anyone podcast, but put what you've

00:56:18.740 heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - December 09, 2024

Undoing Urgency — How to Stop Drowning in Tasks and Start Living With Purpose

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