For me, running represents my cardiovascular capability. I enjoy running. When I’m in terrible shape I can run two miles in about 20 minutes. My goal typically is to be able to run two miles in 16 minutes or less. That puts a 7-something pace on a mile. Every single person who’s done any running knows that’s never gonna win any kind of race. Being able to run allows me to get up just about any flight of stairs without being out of breath at the top of them. I can go on any kind of a hike or a walk that I want. I have the ability to carry on a conversation while I am moving up a mountain or flight of stairs. I will not struggle physically throughout the course of my day in any kind of capacity that I’m called to operate.
Therefore, my suggestion for you is to set the benchmark. Go for a run. Two miles is enough of a distance that when you’re on the run you will be to the point where you have high levels of discomfort. You will feel discomfort especially if you’re pushing yourself to set up what I would call your qualifying time. Once you get there, look at your individual miles and set a forward looking goal of thirty seconds less than both of those. Ninety days is plenty of time to take thirty seconds off of each mile. So if your first mile is a nine minute and fifteen second mile and your second mile is a ten minute and twenty second mile, then you’ve gathered the data to set your ninety day goals. In ninety days you’re next mile set should be eight minutes and forty five seconds and nine minutes and fifty seconds respectively. Will it happen without hard work and discomfort? No, you have to put in the work and be willing to be uncomfortable while you are retraining your mind and body to push through the run.
Next, I want to make sure that I’m physically strong. I want to feel like I’m in power. You can set across from someone negotiating at a table and feel like you’re pudgy. This happens to many entrepreneurs that are just getting started because in today’s entrepreneurial climate a lot of people really grasp the physicality side. Being fit is becoming more and more a part of the entrepreneurs culture. The people who are performing at high levels recognize that this is something that you have to do. So lots of time you’ll sit at a conference table with physical specimens of extreme fitness levels. The very last thing you want is a tinge in the back of your mind, a question about your physicality.
It doesn’t matter exactly where you are physically, as long as you are continuously improving. It’s much more important that you be in a place where you’re in power. This doesn’t work for everyone but for me this is where I choose to be. I have definitive goals. When I meet them, I will set new goals. I always need to be pushing for more.
These numbers shift and grow as I shift and grow. Take wherever you are and create a benchmark. Then push yourself to a 15% increase beyond where you are currently. That will be your next target. Give yourself ninety days to six months to push as hard as you can towards that target. You will make forward strides. Some days it will not feel like you are making progress. Continue pushing toward your goal anyway. As you change your benchmarks to improve your physical body, this will cause you to have a mental breakthrough in the gym. If you’re happy where you are physically strength wise, then your next push is cardio. Wherever you are currently, the point is simple, destroy your body physically in the gym so that you can breakthrough that bridge or mindset of mental failure when you’re tracking ahead inside of business. Savvy?
Routine is King
A story that I told myself when I was younger, was that I was hyperactive. This was confirmed not just by my own mind, but also by the adults around me. My mother and other people who were around would say, “Oh, Michael’s hyperactive. Michael has the inability to focus for very long, to pay attention to what’s going on around him. Michael isn’t a good listener. Micheal isn’t a good student, Michael this, Michael that.”
It was a continuous onslaught of speaking this disease, this plethora of negativity over top of me. To the point that I just believed them. I’m hyperactive; I don’t have to sit still very long. Oh Michael, you can put him in a corner, and he’ll find a piece of dirt to play with. Next time I’m put in a corner, I’m playing with a piece of dirt, because that’s what was spoken over me. I had risen to the level of expectation and fulfilled the words spoken over me.
At least that is who I was during the week. The young man I was during the week was entirely different from who I was on the weekends. Like I’ve mentioned already, I would get off the bus sometime around 3:30. Between 3:30 and 4:00, my grandfather would be parked in front of my house ready to pick me up, whisk me off, and take me to some level of normalcy. For me, grandpa’s house was the perfect environment that would allow me to be the best version of myself through routine and through systematic controls.
For example, my grandfather didn’t have TV in his home. Therefore, I wasn’t filling my mind or my time with a void of nonsensical television. I didn’t need the TV to survive. I found out that reading was something that I enjoy doing very much inside of grandpa’s home. I also found out that silence wasn’t the worst thing in the world. In fact, silence allowed me to flex my imagination. A skill that serves me still today. I found out that just sitting at a dinner table and eating with your family will instill values into your life that you can’t teach or preach into life.
I learned that taking the actions and going through the motions are some of the only ways to accomplish the goals that you have. For my grandfather, he had aggressive goals inside of his career and inside of businesses. He had a job. He got up early every morning. He began hustling long before he had to leave for work. Once he got home, he would carve out a little bit of free time. He would have some dinner, maybe go do a little bit of fishing, but there was always an area inside of his evening where he implemented a routine. Whether he would go work in the hog lot, go mow a cemetery, or cut wood, Grandpa was always systematically carving time out to be productive in all areas of his life.
It was his responsibility. However, it wasn’t work, it was the routine; it was just what he did. He had to go through the motions of doing the things that were put in front of him as a responsibility. Grandpa was the most dependable man in my world.
Sharing with you the alternative life I was exposed to at my moms house is something that I think is so critical. I need you to recognize that chaos begets chaos and routine begets success. Let me map out a day in the life of Michael as a young child in my mothers home. I’m going to show you how drastically small shifts can influence a young person. It will definitely shine a light on the end result for you. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking, “Sure but Michael I’m an adult, it’s not the same.” Actually it is exactly the same. Children will show us how we are influenced emotionally by external factors. Maybe slightly more subtly but the same on some level.
Let’s use Saturday as an example. Inside of a home with five brothers and sisters, a home with two parents, a home with a lot of chaos, a home without a lot of recreational things to do. This would be a typical Saturday, that for some reason, I was unable to spend the weekend with my Grandpa.
I found myself impacted by a number of outside influences. First and foremost what time did I wake up at home? Normally for me, I would wake up anytime between 7 AM and 10 AM. There wasn’t a set time that you get out of bed, and there was no reason to get out of bed early. Typically, I was getting out of bed whenever I was being bothered by a family member, or whenever one of my brothers or sisters wanted me to come play, or I would hear a noise from another part of the house. An example of this is someone would turn on the TV, and it would be up too loud.
I would typically crawl out of bed. There wasn’t a routine of go right to the bathroom and brush my teeth, get cleaned up, and start my day. That just wasn’t the culture inside of my home. It wasn’t something that was taught to the children inside of that environment. It was typically come downstairs, see what’s happening, and pick the most fun thing to do. Breakfast typically involved some sort of a cereal, or something that was pretty easy. Then on into the living room to watch cartoons as late a
s the kids were allowed.
Maybe 11:00-11:30 A.M., I would quit watching cartoons, and now it’s time to eat lunch. Lunch would typically be prepared for us, five kids on a pretty modest income. Hot dogs and mac & cheese were a staple in our home. We would go outside to play for the afternoon. We had a little above ground pool in our backyard, and a fenced in area. We all had bicycles, and so riding bikes was a big past time. Often I would spend my time jumping on my bike and going for a ride.
Life was mindless. There was no thought process to why or what was happening around us. It was whimsical. What do I want to do next? Where do I want to go next? What’s the next thing that I want to do? It was all based around this, whatever is whatever, concept. Throughout my day I would just bounce from one to the next to the next to the next. Typically, by about 6 o’clock at night, I would have climbed trees, ridden bikes, played with my brothers and sisters, and naturally gotten in some sort of trouble almost every day.
There just was not much structure. When I was asked to sit down and fall into a structured place, I was fidgety. You’ve trained me that in this environment, I don’t have to do anything in any type of an order until you decide, as a parent, that you want something done.
I want you to sit down. I want you to be quiet. I want you to eat. I want you to do this, or I want you to do that. My mother and step father’s parenting style was similar to prison. Either go in the yard and play or fall into a very small confined box whimsically defined by us.
My grandfather had a different approach. Our Saturdays typically began Friday night. Grandpa, at dinner would say, “Lad, Here’s what we’re doing in the morning. We’re going to go work the hogs. We’ve got a couple sows that are going to be butchered. I will wake you up between 6:00 and 6:30 in the morning.”
He was wise enough to add, ”When we’re done choring at the hog lot, we’re gonna be mowing, so we’re going to load up the lawnmower sand the weed eaters. I will need your help to make sure everything has plenty of gas and oil.” He always made me feel like part of the team. We had jobs to do.
Once he described the routine, he would foreshadow what we were going to go do later on that was fun. We would often swim in the ponds. Grandpa would regularly have people over to the house for get togethers. We would have some sort of a fish fry or we would find a pond bank. Fishing was a favorite pastime of my grandfather, and it evolved around one of his side hustles.
“If we’re going to do all of those things tomorrow, you’re going to need to be laying down in bed by about 9 o’clock.” Grandpa’s house and his curfew versus midnight at my home with my brothers and sisters was quite contrasting. My parents required no consistent bedtime. My parents went to bed with the final words being, “Love you kids, don’t make too much noise, we’re going to sleep.” They probably felt that it was a privilege not telling children to go to bed. Smart, but the downside to that, was that we lost structure. Sure enough at 5:30 A.M. Grandpa would begin stirring around the house and within an hour we were on our way.
Never getting onto me, only waking me up with a gentle word, “Lad, it’s time to go. Let’s get ready.” I would wake right up, He would head into the bathroom, and I would follow suit. We’d go, I’d brush my teeth right along next to grandpa. He would shave, and I would go through my routine. I would get dressed, and we would sit down to have breakfast which grandma had made whenever we sat at the table. No blaring radio, no obnoxious TV, no Saturday morning cartoons, but great conversations about the day to come.
“Here’s what the days gonna look like,” Grandpa would explain. He would describe the work that had to be done. I didn’t feel as though we were working though. The way he talked about the tasks at hand made it sound like an adventure.
Grandpa actually built a bait farm. He had fifteen different ponds in approximately a thirty acre piece of ground surrounding his old barn style home. He sold different types of minnows, goldfish, and worms to other people who went fishing in the area. It was a great deal for Grandpa, because selling bait was his side hustle, at least it was one of them. He chose to open the bait farm, because we also enjoyed fishing. We spent a lot of time in that environment. Consequently, we would load up the fishing equipment preparing for a large catch, and we would spend several hours on the side of a pond fishing. More wisdom than I could ever buy was given to me on the edge of those small country ponds from my greatest role model.
At the end of the day, we would walk back into the house. Usually it would be about 6:30, 7:00, 7:30 at night, and as a family we would make dinner. Grandpa wasn’t a ‘wife you need to have dinner ready’ kind of a guy. He was a, hey, we caught some fish. I’m going to clean them, if you want to get everything ready, we’ll fry the fish together. The meal was completed by picking some vegetables out of the garden. We would cut those up, and that was dinner.
My grandma and grandpa would have thawed out some of the pork or beef out of the freezer from the farm in case the fish were not biting that day. Dinner was always a family affair. Like clockwork we would finish dinner, and out of the freezer would come a little bit of ice cream. Grandpa nearly always had his on the exact same plate, not in a bowl, on a plate. He would scoop it nearly the exact same way every single time.
Then the evening would draw to a close with playing cards, checkers, chess, or an old midwestern game called Mill. If it was a game of chance, Grandpa would inevitably say, “This is not a game of skill, this is a game of chance.” Normally he would say that after he just lost! Grandpa liked to win!
This is the magnified difference between a weekend at home and a weekend at Grandpa’s house. A weekend with five brothers and sisters, five different personalities pulling me in five different directions, two parents who had their own individual agendas outside of the agendas of their children pushing me in another direction. Alternatively, a weekend at Grandpa’s house where the entire weekend was orchestrated and executed like a machine, every single time.
As a small child, the responses are similar to the symptoms and responses of a rat in a caged medical study. The responses are magnified. Most people never recognize the power of routine, and what it has as an impact on their lives. There is a percentage of the population that recognizes that routine dictates success, and that is an advantage of the rich.
The rich recognize the power of giving their children routines. They recognize the power of having a routine themselves. They recognize that their routine isn’t just a routine of bliss, a lot of times they’ll put things in the routines that are intentionally hard. Rich people do things that are uncomfortable, and that they don’t want to do. Through the rest of this chapter, I’m going to share with you my routine. Because I, like most people in my situation in life, have built a routine that puts me in as much power as I possibly can. The idea is that whenever I step into my day, I’m equipped to crush it! Instead of the alternative, instead of whimsically caving to the internal weak voice in your mind that says, “Oh, I want to do this, and now I want to do that, and ooh, that looks like fun.”
It’s time to ask yourself, “Am I like a cat swatting at a ball of yarn? Do I find myself in the position of an unprofitable day?” Get real with yourself. Be honest and reflect. Do you ever finish your day without accomplish anything?
Possibly you wake up within five minutes of the exact same time every single day. Perhaps you meditate, or you think about your day. You may even think about your accomplishments yesterday. Perchance, you think about what needs to be accomplished today. You pray; you listen for that voice inside to speak wisdom into your world. From there you might go to the gym. You go through a routine of speaking positivity over someone in your life every single day. These activities will set you up to conquer your day.
You need to get yourself to a place that allows you to succeed. You need to roll into your business, or your job, or your career, or your school, wherever your focus is in a level of power, knowing that you’ve accomplished more by 9 AM than most of them will accomplish all day long.
You should roll out of bed before anyone else in your house. You may go to bed after everyone else in your house. To live in a place of power, your day should be systematically programmed to give you the most results.
Systematic programming is what the rich do that the poor do not. That’s what grandpa understood about success in his world. He wasn’t pursuing mega wealth. He was pursuing a good life, a sustainable life. A life where he never wanted for money. A life where he was able to live debt-free. A life where he could go fishing when he wanted. He could have a fish fry and have people over to his house. He could go to the local carnival, festival, or to the livestock sale, but it was what he wanted to do inside of his own terms. He did not allow his circumstances to be drug around by the world, but instead architecting the perfect world for him.
In the exact opposite, I watched my mother, her husband, as well as nearly every brother and sister that was raised inside of that house, flail aimlessly. Their goals were shortsighted. “Can we afford this?” was a common question. It was ‘If this, then that’ living. If I can afford this payment, then we can have that car. If I can afford that on a credit card, then we can have that pool. We want to build a deck, so they navigate a way to do that with short term results. They might take the last little bit of disposable income that they had this month, and go buy the materials to put a deck in the backyard.
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