David speaks David speaks with entrepreneur and writer Jonathan Goodman. Jon built the Personal Trainer Development Center ($35M+ rev), hosts the Obvious Choice podcast, and is the author of several books, including Viralnomics, and his latest book, The Obvious Choice: Timeless Lessons on Success, Profit, and Finding Your Way.
They talked about:
💡 Standing out in a crowded industry
🔄 Developing leapfrog skills
⏳ Playing the long game in business and life
🎯 The power of focus and prioritisation
👨👩👦 How family amplifies success
💪 Building freedom through constraints
Listen to your favourite podcast player:
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📹 Watch on Youtube:
📄 Show notes:
[00:59] Standing Out in a Crowded Industry
[02:14] Leapfrog Skills for Success
[05:04] The Importance of Communication
[11:03] Playing the Long Game
[18:24] Freedom and Prioritisation
[25:04] How Children Impact Your Work
[30:19] The 8-4 Rule for Life Management
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
The Obvious Choice (Book) | https://amzn.to/3X3eQsT
Seneca | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger
Ergodicity (Concept) | https://theknowledge.io/lucadellanna/
Luca Dellanna | https://twitter.com/@DellAnnaLuca
Parkinson's Law | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law
ChatGPT | https://openai.com/chatgpt
Perplexity AI | https://www.perplexity.ai/
First Principles Thinking | https://fs.blog/first-principles/
Elon Musk | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
👤 Connect with Jonathan:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itscoachgoodman/?hl=en
Website: The PTDC | https://www.theptdc.com/
Weekly Newsletter: 5 Reps on Friday | https://www.theptdc.com/newsletter-subscribe
Latest Book: The Obvious Choice | https://amzn.to/42eJ7IG
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
🐣 Twitter: @Delikwu / @itstheknowledge
🌐 Website: https://www.davidelikwu.com
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🎙️ Podcast: http://plnk.to/theknowledge
📖 Free Book: https://pro.theknowledge.io/frames
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📜 Full transcript:
David Elikwu: How did you develop some of this in the beginning?
Leapfrog Skills for Success
David Elikwu: Because first of all, you mentioned, okay, you started personal training, then eventually, okay, you're making as much as you can make as a personal trainer. You write a book, it does incredibly well. You build up online business, you know, with information about personal training, et cetera. That does incredibly well.
Jonathan Goodman: I would say that things really took about three years to take off at the beginning. And then, you know, 2013 to 2019, we were doing pretty reliably a few million bucks in profit a year. But it
David Elikwu: I mean, a million, a couple of million bucks is not, you know, like ground zero. And also specifically like the space that you're in,
Jonathan Goodman: But I still worked full time as a personal trainer from 2011 to 2014. You know, like, this was like a side gig. Like, I didn't boat in the boats or whatever, you know.
David Elikwu: But I was going to say specifically in this niche, because it's [00:03:00] a unique space in that I think, you know, it's not necessarily like you're doing, I don't know, biology or something where you're discovering brand new groundbreaking things all the time.
There's lots of people that are doing personal training. There are gyms everywhere. All the gyms have personal trainers. There are a lot of people that might be trying to say different versions of, of a same thing, or I think also sometimes there's non consensus. So sometimes there's people that might say wacky stuff. There's people that might sell snake oil, you know, it's, it's a wild world out there.
So how do you specifically, and I know that you talk about some of this in the book, but how do you specifically stand out, differentiate yourself and be able to grow a platform in a world where not only are other people maybe doing something kind of similar, but they are not all even saying the right thing or the same thing.
Jonathan Goodman: Well, and I would argue to add to that. There is a serious rate of diminishing returns when it comes to industry specific knowledge that a lot of people don't appreciate in any career, personal training, I mean for sure, but in any career really like, what does somebody need to get in shape, you know.[00:04:00]
Measure your food, don't eat crap, eat more vegetables than anything else, have a lot of protein, maybe some fiber, eat good carbs around workouts. What's a workout? Jump up and down, give or take ten times, lose count at seven. When something becomes easy physically, like, make it harder or change to something else. I mean, that's fat loss, really, like, it's not, I mean, obviously I'm oversimplifying it, my kinesiology friends are going to have a kinepsia, but like, kinda that's all that you need to know. It's really not that complicated. Fitness is a mastery profession. It's, it's like the game of no limit hold and poker. Like you can figure out the rules and play good enough basically in a weekend, and then it takes a lifetime to master it, but most trainers have never mastered it and the benefits of mastering it, particularly along the path of mastery have serious diminishing returns.
And so, you know, success wise. In just about any career, if you think about industry specific knowledge, if that's all you do, continue to get better, it's actually, your success, it begins linear [00:05:00] and is going to start to taper off very, very quickly and other people are going to bypass you.
The Importance of Communication
Jonathan Goodman: And so, yeah, this is one of my favorite parts in the book, actually, where I talk about, I call it leapfrog skills and leapfrog learning. I'll get into it a little bit here.
I was a admittedly mediocre to just okay personal trainer. You know, I was fine. I had a kinesiology degree. I understood enough about physiology and biomechanics and motivational interviewing. You know, I was fine, right? But I was mediocre. It's just okay. And the reason why I was successful at a relatively early age is because I figured out, really now I'm post rationalizing, I'm creating a post narrative. I didn't know that I was doing this at the time, I was just following my interest. But I figured out that, hey, if I study communication and presentation skills, and if I study writing, and if I study behavioral psychology, 1 plus 1 no longer equals 2. 1 plus 1 plus 1 begins to equal 10. These skills start stacking on top of one [00:06:00] another in a compounding way when you combine them. Your value does not lie in individual industry expertise, but in range. And so over the years I started figuring that out, that actually what you need is a mediocre to decent knowledge of your own industry, combined with low to mediocre skill sets in a whole bunch of what I call leapfrog skills.
You know, when there are some key ones, so I mentioned a few behavioral psychology, I was a business writing, communication, presentation, wealth management, do you understand money and how money works? Do you understand how to make your money work for you? What you need to do over the course of your career is recognize the point of diminishing returns within your own industry. And begin going through these aggressive leapfrog learning, I call it 60 day bouts to gain basically an 80, 20 knowledge, you know, by definition, you only need a low level [00:07:00] knowledge and skill set of these other attributes, which is the beautiful part of it. So you've kind of got two choices for success, right?
Choice number one is to try to become truly the best in the world. And there are examples of people that are able to do that and able to break through. If you talk to them, they'll say there was probably decades where they felt like they were not respected. And then you don't have to look very far towards academics to meet people who don't feel like they are justifiably compensated in terms of money and prestige for the amount of expertise that they have.
And so there is potentially a path there. It's very difficult, but there's potentially path. The much easier path towards success is actually to say, I know enough about this thing. I'm going to go through 60 day periods systematically across these other leapfrog skills. And I'm going to obsess about learning and becoming a better writer, you know, business writing specifically, can you communicate simply? Can you tell stories? Can you pull out the learnings from those stories? You know, business writing basically is give a hook, tell a story, [00:08:00] tell the problem from the story, repeat the problem generally, give the steps to solving, get out of the story. Brick, mortar, brick, mortar, brick, mortar, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I mean, that's business writing, right? That's communication. Communication is emails, is text messages. How effective are you at that? It's not just social media, it's not just podcasting.
Being a better writer, of course, lends itself to being a better speaker and presenter and thinker. You know, with AI doing a lot of the writing for people these days and more and more and more, I feel like thinking clearly is probably going to kind of fall by the wayside. So there's going to be more value in that skill. And so over time, you do the 60 day obsession on this thing. And then the second part of leapfrog learning is at the end of the 60 days, you teach it. You teach it. Because the best way to learn is to teach. It forces us to do something in our brain that is very unnatural, which is get out of our own head with our own backgrounds and biases, and communicate something that we feel like we understand to people who we don't know what [00:09:00] they know yet. That's a very unnatural, difficult thing to do. So to give you an idea of like how this works, I wanted to really learn about what automation and AI, what impact that was going to have on redefinition of job roles. And what skills are going to be valuable particularly in the coaching industries moving forward.
And so over the course of 60 days, I read every book that I could find, it was seven, on job redefinitions and roles and skill sets. I dive deep across Reddit, across the internet, blog posts, and consume as much information as I possibly could over those 60 days. And then at the end of the 60 days, I wrote a white paper report. It's a Google Doc. It's like six pages long. And I sent it to five of my colleagues. And now I feel like I have a very good understanding of how to be more valuable in an age of computing and quantum computing and automation, where there's going to be a lot of jobs that are [00:10:00] eliminated, you see that a little bit in the obvious choice book, I talk about. What's valuable and what's not valuable.
But why do people not do this as much? I think it's because it's uncomfortable. Learning about things that we're already good at is fun, is easy. A lot of the time when people are doing what they call professional development, what they're actually doing is they're reading things or consuming information or listening to things or watching things that reinforce what they already know or bridge off of what they already know in very nuanced, almost inconsequential ways to their customers.
The challenging question that I'll ask you is, when you sit down to do your professional development, do you actually think that what you're studying is going to help your customers get better results or help you get more customers to get them better results? Or are you doing it because it is in some way pleasurable to you?
Neither is worse, but one is professional development, the other is pleasure. And you [00:11:00] just, you just have time for both. That's kind of all that there was to it.
Playing the Long Game
David Elikwu: One thing I wanted to ask you about was this idea of playing the long game and the extent to which you should try and balance that with things that you can do now, the things you can make immediate progress on. And I'll give you two examples which are both from your own life and things that you've talked about.
One, something you mentioned earlier, which is, okay, when you were developing this, this writing career, you didn't immediately burn the bridges. You still had the job, right? You were still working full time as a personal trainer. You were building up slowly over time. So it wasn't necessarily just something that was, Hey, let me look for a quick win, it was, I'm gonna, I mean, maybe not intentionally, but it's something that's going to build up over some time.
And then the other example is actually your, your relationship. You have a great. wonderful family and from my understanding, I think it took you like seven years to finally start dating your, your wife from when you first met.
And this idea that,
Jonathan Goodman: She took some work.
David Elikwu: Yeah. And so, I mean, you might not have probably didn't do it intentionally at all,
but it's a by [00:12:00] product of the fact that, Hey, during the time that you, you knew her you might have already liked her from when you first saw her, but you know, maybe she's dating someone else or whatever, but you during that time, you get to know her and you're actually kind of building things up so that when you are both available, there is something that you can capitalize on. And now you can have a wonderful family.
So I'm interested to know how you think about that. Maybe with a business lens of, there are some things where, you know, we talked about AI just now, there's probably a lot of things that people are just looking for, what can I switch on some AI or just do something so that something can happen really quickly right now.
Sometimes that can be useful. Like, so you can make some immediate progress on a new idea or on a new project, but there might also be some things that, Hey, it's probably worth taking the longer view and seeing how you can build up over time so that the the work that you put in now can reap bigger benefits down the line. [00:13:00]
Jonathan Goodman: I've never used AI. I've never logged into chat GPT in my life. I use perplexity a little bit. I found that it's quite useful if I'm looking for, you know, for example, if I'm writing and I want the cadence to be like, da da da, da da da, da da da, you know, I need a third point for something, for example. I found that it's quite useful for filling in the blanks, like, [00:14:00] hey, I have two points for this, here's what I'm trying to say, can you give me a third? I found that it's quite useful for those types of things, and so I'll use it for that, but I kind of like the fact that my work is really, really hard. I kind of like the fact that it takes a long time. I kind of like the fact that I struggle with it. I'm not saying that this is necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. It might just be that I'm old, and I'm stuck in my ways.
And so I don't have a need for chat GPT. I don't mind if my team uses it. I know that some of them do, you know, for some stuff. But I don't have any desire for it. I like that it forces me. I like that hard work and jobs that are hard that take a long time, force me to force me into absurd prioritization and focus. I by definition cannot do very much, so I better be damn sure about the thing that I'm doing and put my all into it.
On the cover of the book, you've got an origami whale made out of a hundred dollar bill and a bunch of pennies. That's [00:15:00] representative of my life and business philosophy, which I call whales and minnows, which is make it free or make it expensive. Show up or don't. Do the thing or don't do the thing. Just don't. Don't go anywhere in the middle. The middle is a dead zone. If you're going to do something, do it. Obsess over it. Take pride in it. It doesn't matter if it's the best thing in the world that you could possibly do or the best opportunity, right?
Something done really, really well, that you put your all into, appreciating that there are trade offs and there's other stuff you will not be able to do, kind of by definition you will have more success personally and professionally by doing that thing than if you tried to do so many other things.
The world that we live in is just too interconnected, there's just too much opportunity for people who do a legitimately good job these days, and there are too few people doing a legitimately good job these days. You know how many podcasts I've done for this tour? You're like number 50, David. [00:16:00] You know how many people have done anywhere close to the amount of research you've done? Like three, like three, and it's just, that's just the world that we live in, you know, you can show up and you can record and it goes to space and it's done, but you're going to increasingly break through if you keep doing what you're doing the way that you're doing it. And it's wonderful. And I'm enjoying myself very much. And I'm grateful to you for that. Many others won't. What's the failure rate of podcasts? Like 98. 8%, you know, there was a reason for that.
I've always just thought, Hey, figure out what your thing is. Make that decision, take whatever time you need to make that decision. But once you make that decision, that's your decision. That's what you do.
I mean, with Allison, I don't know if that's a good parallel. Yes, I knew her for a very, very long time. We met just after first year university. We were personal trainers at the gym together, but like, she had a boyfriend from 16 to 26, basically, and it was her [00:17:00] first boyfriend. Like I was the second person she kissed, you know, at like 26 years old. So it was her first boyfriend. And he was like, six foot two and black, and I'm like five foot four and white. And so she never thought that she would date a short guy or a white guy, you know? So, it just wasn't, it wasn't even a thought. I mean, yes, you know, she's Asian. I like Asians. She's a cheerleader. I like cheerleaders. Like she checked the boxes. You know what I'm saying? And I thought she was cute, but I didn't even think about that. It was just, she's cool to hang out with when I see her.
And then, you know, we were always kind of as the years went on and she was kind of in and out with this guy. He was Eritrean. And so there was a lot of pride with his family and being Eritrean because they had just, I mean, they didn't break off with Ethiopia that long ago. And so his family wanted him to only be with, like, marry an Eritrean girl to not, you know, they fought so hard for their independence and now you're just going to go and marry another culture and it's going to go. And so, they, you know, went in and out of their relationship a [00:18:00] lot and stuff. And he's a great guy. You know, we still talk to him sometimes, same as my high school student. Allison talks to her and I talk to her sometimes too and same type of thing. She was orthodox Jewish and I went the other direction. And so we still love each other as friends. But it just wasn't a thought with her. Once she split from him, we were together pretty soon afterwards. So I don't know if that's the best parallel.
With the work stuff.
Freedom and Prioritization
Jonathan Goodman: I think about freedom a lot. I think about the ability to move a lot and go all in on a project a lot and why most don't do that. And, you know, the sentence that I've been able to come up with is freedom is providing yourself the opportunity to fail. Freedom is providing yourself the opportunity to fail. My process of stepping away from personal training, full time to focus on this intranet stuff, which was like weird at the time. I mean, we're talking 2012. It was not common. I had checks sent to my parents that I was receiving for affiliates and book sales and stuff for the first couple of years, because they didn't believe me that I was making money. [00:19:00] It just like people just, it wasn't a thing. I kind of worked backwards.
One of my clients gave me this equation that I now call the freedom number equation because it's just a silly name, but it works, which is basically like, how much money do you need each month for your dependence for yourself you know, mortgage, food, whatever, independence, how much money you're already making through passive or through whatever you would continue to do until the day that you die, even if you didn't need to do it, if there was a number there, what's left over, right.
Freedom or fear is in a rational response to the unknown. We fear things because we don't understand them. And so it's a line from Seneca. Seneca once said that if you wish to stave off all fear, imagine that the worst that can happen most definitely will happen. And a lot of the time what stops us is actually irrational fear. We haven't defined the problem yet and so we're scared to move. We're scared to go all in, not because we can't, because we don't know whether we can or not.
And so my solution to this is actually to make it a binary decision. [00:20:00] Can you move? Can you not move? What's that freedom number? How much money do you need? What's your mortgage or rent? How much money do you need for food? Do you have any dependents you look after? What's that number? Okay, your only job now is to do whatever you can that makes the most amount of money possible, probably service based, probably not scaled, probably has nothing to do with content, because content is by definition a savings account, it's a long term gain. You look at it as a way to, you don't look at content as a way to generate interest short term, you invest into it when you've got excess time and capital, you hope it kicks off interest but you don't build a business that depends on it to fulfill your short term needs. It's a long term game.
And so short term coaching, consulting, service based stuff is going to get you the highest cash upfront. The fastest. And it's not scalable and I get that, but there's a lot of problems that you can solve when you have excess cash and there's very few when you don't. So you [00:21:00] have to start by getting excess cash and then maybe you can move to other stuff. And so what's that number? What's that freedom number for you? How can you get there as fast as possible on the side where you have the security? Once you get to that number, now you've defined that that's the number you have no fear left. Now you can step away from stuff. And so that was my process. You know, I was training 40 hours a week or so in the gym. I started to make a bit of money online. I went down to 25 hours a week. Now I have more time to focus on the online. I started to make a bit more than I went down to 15 hours a week. Then I started to make a bit more money online until the point where I could step away fully from the in person training and handed off my clients to other trainers and focused fully online. That to me is the process.
David Elikwu: So you had some of these businesses that you're working on, some of them, you know, relative to now, early year ish on, we're doing quite well. Was it always obvious to you to prioritize family? And I ask that specifically because I think that there's two ways this, this comes up. One is I was having a [00:22:00] conversation with Luca Dellanna who wrote a great book on Ergoticity. And it's this idea that the time series average is not the same as the ensemble average. And to explain what that means, okay. You could have 10 arguments with your wife, not you specifically, but you know, hypothetically
Jonathan Goodman: Sure. Whatever. I've been, I've been married for long enough. I've had 10 arguments with my wife, but
David Elikwu: Okay. So it could be case that you might think, oh, I can have 10 arguments with my wife before we get a divorce, right. And so you might plan in such a way that, oh, we, we could have all these arguments and then you get divorced. But the reality is, and if you had 10 different people and they all had that series of arguments. Then the average for them might be that, Oh, you could say it takes 10, 10 arguments to have to get a divorce, right? That might be something that you say.
But for each individual person, you might not actually get through all 10. So it's, it's a bit like Russian roulette, right? You have six chambers. There's one bullet. You could say on average, if you had six people, oh, the [00:23:00] odds are one in six and you have that one shot but the other five are empty, but actually. You could just get it on the first time, like the very first argument that you have, that could be the end, or the very first bullet, that could be it, be the end.
And I think with family and with work, a lot of that can be similar where you don't necessarily get to go back and have the benefits earlier on. If you your priorities differently from the beginning not everyone, even though that's the mentality that people have, and that's the way people think. People think, Oh, I can spend 20 years prioritizing just work and then come back and spend the last five and then prioritize my family. For some people, it doesn't actually work out that way. And, and if you've already put the priorities wrong from the beginning, you don't get to just go back and say, actually, I wanted to do it differently.
Jonathan Goodman: So first, what I'll say is, I built the majority of what I have before I had a family. By the time I had my first child, I was about 33 years old. I don't think I could have quite retired at that point, but like I was pretty close. Probably would have been fine. [00:24:00] And so that's very important context. And, you know, oftentimes when we're looking at what good information from one person, whether or not that's good advice for us, it's very important to invoke it and look at what's missing. A lot of the people giving advice these days that are very, very loud are also quite young and or without children even if they're not young.
There are a number of sort of, individuals or power couples out there that you see everywhere spouting advice, and it's not bad advice. But you're talking about what's, what's the term for dinks, double income, no kids. Like if you have three young children not to say that what they say does not have value, but it probably doesn't apply to you. It probably doesn't apply to you. And so I have a hard time, you know, somebody who's just getting started that has young children, for example, particularly mothers who often unfairly young perhaps take the majority of the workload, like even moms who are the primary breadwinners in the families still usually are the primary caregivers, not always, but usually. And so, you [00:25:00] know, for them to build a business, like you might have 30 minutes a day, that's kind of interrupted.
The Amplifying Effect of Children
Jonathan Goodman: What I realized is that children are amplifiers, They don't change anything that you do. They don't change you in any real way. They amplify what's already there. The same as money. Money is an amplifier. Everybody says that, Oh, when I make money, I'll become philanthropic. No, you won't. You're just going to become more greedy. If you're already greedy, if you already are philanthropic, if you already are a giving person, when you have money, you will become more philanthropic. If you are a greedy asshole, you will become more of a greedy asshole when you get more money. That's just how it works.
Children are amplifiers. They're amplifiers for relationships. Alison and I had little things that didn't bother us about each other that we knew about, but that didn't bother us. But when we had our first child, when we had Calvin. Yo, those fissures were broke wide open. We had to deal with it, you know, when there's a conflict, I need to be held. When there's a conflict, she needs her space. That's really [00:26:00] difficult. We did not know that about one another for the first six years of our relationship until we had a child. Well, we had to deal with that.
Now our relationship is stronger, you know, I always say to people, it's like, I didn't understand what the word love meant when I said, I love you to Alison. I didn't understood. I didn't understand what the word love meant when we got married. When we had our first child together, I think I'd begun to understand what the word love meant. Now that we have two children, and we've gone through eight miscarriages, and Allison's had cancer, and we've gone through all of the ups and downs of life, you know, I think now I'm starting to get what love really means. And it is so deep, and so profound, and so special. One of the phrases that I always like is, one of the most wonderful things that God ever did was he didn't let people who don't have children know what it's like to have children because they'll never know what they're missing. I really deeply believe that.
You can't explain it. You can't tell somebody what these feelings are. To watch the woman that you love [00:27:00] become a mother is the most special experience I've ever experienced. There's nothing that compares to it. It just amplifies every emotion the good and the bad as well, right?
And so professionally, what that did is, you know, I thought I was good at focus. You know, I thought I was good at prioritization. I was shit. I was shit. I've become so much better at business because I have those additional constraints of family, of children, of fitness. It's forced me to be better. And when you look at, look at a cross section of men and women who are in like the highest profile roles, the CEOs of the fortune 100 companies of not the loud people who post videos on social media. I mean, especially not the outwardly nihilistic ones who post dumb shit, like skip your friends weddings in order to work harder. Like, don't look at that stupid, idiotic rage bait. It's just dumb. [00:28:00] It's, it's rage bait. Whether they believe what they're saying or not, they understand the game that they're playing.
I hope that they will figure out how long I believe that they are. Maybe in their own mind, they really believe this. Maybe it's the best way for them to live. If that's the case, all the power to them. I wish them the best. I know that it's not for me. And so what I have found, and the patterns that I've discovered amongst people that I truly admire that are in this for the long term.
Just about all of them have families. Just about all of them have families. There's other ways to measure this. It's, it's like the stat of you know, most car accidents, 77 percent of car accidents happen within five miles of the person's home. And there's two reasons for that, of course, right? One of them is just, there's more miles driven closer to home, and so the average is, but the other one is we become comfortable in common confines. And so we let down our awareness and we get into more car accidents and they're both. So, you know, with this, it's like, well, a higher percentage of people have [00:29:00] kids that don't have kids in the world. Maybe that's changing. But so there's, you know, naturally going to be that. But I think the other part is, yes, you have less time, but children force you to grow as a person, children force you to build structure around yourself, black and white rules are framing around your life, your work, that you don't fall prey as much to Parkinson's principle, you know, time or the job expands to the time that we have to complete that job. And so you waste less time, you get better at choosing what you do.
And that's what happened. I mean, in preparation for having Calvin, that's when I hired my first assistant. I actually don't have an assistant now. Because I don't need one because I've gotten so damn good at what I do and what I don't do that I don't need an assistant to answer my emails.
And that's not an optimization strategy, right? It's just, I've just figured out what I like and what I don't like. And so, you know, in preparation for that, I started to give away things. I started to focus more. I started to take on [00:30:00] less. With Jade and with my next, it was the same. And it just, every year. It's the same. We nature abhors a vacuum. Humans naturally add. We don't subtract. We fill our time, but we don't think about things if we say yes to something, or if we add something into what we're doing a project, that's exciting to contact. Somebody invites us to do something. We don't think about what it's replacing.
The 8-4 Rule for Life Management
Jonathan Goodman: And so part of going away every year to bring this full circle to the beginning of the conversation is, I run my life based off of what I call the 8 4 rule. This is going to be in the next book, not The Obvious Choice book, but the 8 4 rule. I split my year into eight months and four months. You don't have to travel to do this, but a minimum of twice a year, when I leave to go away for the winter, and then when I leave to come back for the summer, I wipe my schedule clean, and I build it back up from first principles. I take everything off of my schedule, and I look at all of the things that I want to do, I look at all the things I was doing, and I reprioritize them, big rocks first, right, first principles, and I put them back in. Based off of that season of [00:31:00] my life, what's most important based off of the best times of the day.
And over the years, what's happened to me, and this is not everybody, but what's happened to me is I just do fewer and fewer things. I only, I record my podcast Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I book one call or one podcast interview either before or after those. And then I have one meeting for my mentorship every two weeks on Tuesdays after my podcast.
It's the only calls or meetings or anything booked in my schedule I have over the course of the week. If I'm not launching a book.
But that's what happens, right? You got to design into, I think, your life and your day this kind of first principle approach, where you wipe the slate clean, you clear the calculator using the cyber kinetics, you know, that the Maxwell Meltz thing, and build it back up using the Elon Musk first principles, like, I mean, nothing about this is new, we just don't do it naturally, because we're never forced to.
What I have found is that having somebody or something that you love in ways that you can never describe that makes you smile [00:32:00] a big smile with your whole face not just with your lips, when you think about them, having that forces you to do this in a way that I think would be very, very difficult otherwise.
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