459. Why Structured Systems Will Transform Your Life with Craig Ballantyne

(upbeat music) Most people get it wrong because they're not to-do list needs to have a hundred times more things on it than they're to-do list. That's Craig Balantine, entrepreneur, best-selling author, and often referred to as the world's most disciplined man. If you're trying to do a million things and catch up with 100 podcasts and read a whole bunch of books, you might lose everything because you're losing sight of what really matters. I'm Michael Mogel, founder and CEO of Crisp, the nation's number one law from growth company. I've built my business through practice, not theory. Crisp started which is $500 to my name and has grown to over eight figures in revenue over the last few years, earning a spot on the ink 500 lists of the fastest growing private companies in America. Our approach has been to take everything we've learned about generating massive growth within our own organization and help the country's most ambitious and committed law firm owners do the same for theirs. In each episode of this podcast, I sit down with innovative market leaders from the legal industry and beyond to learn from those who thrive in the face of adversity, challenge the status quo and define what it means to be a true game changer. I sat down with Craig to discuss why subtraction can be your greatest growth lever, how your identity dictates your success, and how to stay flexible or remaining disciplined. The most important thing that you need to do is subtract the things that stop you from being disciplined around whatever it is, and then you have to have a specific definition for what you want to accomplish and then you need a custom plan for achieving it because just because you do a cold plunge every morning doesn't mean you're disciplined. That's coming up on the Game Changing Attorney podcast. Before we begin today's episode, I want to remind you that we aren't gonna be holding to any sponsors or run any ads on this podcast. This allows us to present all of our episodes raw and unfiltered. I'm not gonna push any mate to order meal services on you or try to save you any money on your car insurance. That being said, I have one small request. If you receive any value from this podcast, please give it a five star review. Pay the fee so we can keep this podcast free. Craig, welcome to the podcast. Hey, this can be a lot of fun. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. So for anyone that's ever looked you up, first thing they'll see is that you are known as the world's most disciplined man. There's like David Goggins and Craig Boundtine. How did you get that moniker? And then I'm curious as to your thoughts briefly. I know you wrote a whole book on it on just what it means to be disciplined. Yeah, absolutely. And certainly when I let people call me that, I mean no disrespect to the people in the armed forces, the real discipline people and even David Goggins, the reason why people call me that is because I was once like everybody else. I was a little bit unmotivated, a little bit undisciplined, didn't want to be that way. I wanted to achieve great things. But part of me one will sit around and watch football and eat chocolate cake for breakfast. Then I realized I needed systems to be in place for my life that then made it look like I'm the most productive person in the world, which therefore people make that logical leap if you are productive, therefore you must be disciplined. And so I started my career in the fitness industry. I'm actually got a master's degree in exercise physiology. I wanted to be a strength and conditioning coach in the National Hockey League of all things. And I got a lucky break in 2000, started writing for Men's Health Magazine, which was the biggest magazine back when magazines were thing. And then I started an online business and I was in that space for 15 years, but bought another business along the way. And so I was cranking out a lot of content online and people said, you are the most productive person I've ever met. And again, therefore you must be disciplined and that's how it all started. I'm curious for the people listening, those that perhaps want to become more disciplined. How much of this do you feel is teachable and how much of it are you born with? Yeah, I believe everything's a learnable skill and definitely the discipline side of things. It certainly is. And I'm going to surprise people with the fastest, easiest way to do it in a second. But one of the most important things that people need to do when they are saying, I want to be more disciplined is to define that because what does that even mean? We could go around to a thousand lawyers and say, hey, what does it mean to be disciplined? And they would have their own personal take on it. So for some people, I want to stop eating at night. I want to get up on time. I want to exercise. I want to be on time with my legal briefings or whatever it is. And so everybody first has to have that specific definition of success because the path to become disciplined at that is different than the path becoming disciplined at ABC XYZ. And so when people think of discipline, if you were to like close your eyes and if you're driving, don't do it, unless you're in a Tesla or a Waymo or something, but you were to close your eyes and think of discipline, a lot of people would picture this viking, tattooed, bearded guy, frosting out of an ice bath with an axe in their hand, and that's discipline. He can do hard physical things. But we all know single moms with three kids who are disciplined in many, many ways. And so again, discipline is very different. And just because you do a cold plunge, just because you work out for two hours a day, it doesn't necessarily mean you are disciplined. It means you can do those things, but you might be born with the ability to tolerate a cold plunge. Like I can sit in a cold plunge forever. And my wife and I only do them on date days. You know, because it's to me they're fun. They're not something that I'd have to do to get more disciplined or anything. I can just naturally sit in a cold plunge for a long time. You put me in a sauna, coming out of there after about 10 minutes. So discipline is a different thing for everybody. And that's one of the most important things. Now the fun, easy, fast way to become more disciplined at everything is to subtract. And this is where we look at somebody who says, "I want to go to the gym more often. I want to exercise more regularly." Great. Well, let's just subtract the things that are stopping you from getting there. So first of all, if you have a 15 minute drive to get to the gym, I'm not even driving 15 minutes to the gym. There's no way I would do that. There's a couple of gyms I want to go to. I live here in Vancouver. I'm like, man, they're 15 minute drive or Uber ride. I'll never go in that gym. So what we want to do is subtract all the things that are in the way. So obviously a home gym with minimal equipment and you have workouts that fit that. That's going to be the easiest thing. We want to reduce the friction. And personally, I used to be a binge drinker back 20 years ago when I also had anxiety attacks. And we can talk about those in a second. But what I had to do was I had to remove myself from toxic environments. I had to remove certain toxic people from my life. And I had to shift other people from drinking buddy to hiking buddy, workout buddy. Now, we had some common interests, but we just did not spend time around alcohol. And by removing the temptation, I was able to become, now I'm a non-drinker. Like you can put all the drinks in the world in front of me. I just don't drink. And therefore, it's very easy. It requires no discipline for me to not drink alcohol. Because I removed it first. I was able to build in a different identity and eventually never drink again. So the most important thing that you need to do is subtract the things that stop you from being disciplined around whatever it is. And then you have to have a specific definition for what you want to accomplish. And then you need a custom plan for achieving it. Because just because you do a coal plunge every morning, doesn't mean you're disciplined. I'm curious, from your experience, how much of this is intrinsic versus extrinsic? When somebody wants to make a change from, the person that they are today, is the person they want to be. Like what do you find is really that defining factors? Is it one thing? Is it a series of things? Is it a forcing function? Is it a rock bottom moment? I'm always curious. But so what is that driver of change? Yeah, it's a great question. And so let's use an analogy there, but you can get it. So a lot of people in life, a lot of people you know, some people listening to this might have said this, "I can never be on time." Great, how many flights have you missed? Well, I certainly haven't missed any flights when I'm going on vacation. So you can be on time. So a lot of this is simply self-talk. It is self-talk and the identity in which you choose to view yourself. And so if you say I can never get up on time, I always hit the snooze button. I can never lose weight. I can never be on time. What are your odds of achieving that? And for those of us with kids, would we allow our children to walk around and talk to them in a negative voice? No, but we talk to ourselves a lot in the negative voice all the time and put the limitations on ourselves. So once someone is open to removing the limitations on themselves, to changing their self-talk, which then allows them to shift their identity, that is when you are going to be able to really make these changes and you're going to be able to make them stick in a way that it's almost effortless. It really truly is. It's almost effortless because this is a type of person who I am. And I'm the type of person who gets up at 4am. I love getting up at 4am. And most people will look at that and go, "Oh, you must be insane. Maybe I am. Maybe it's the Canadian in me, right?" And so I love getting up at 4am because I love that time to be productive to create stuff, whether it's books or whether it's stuff or a coaching program or whether it's YouTube scripts or whether it's just solving other people's problems. I love that time. And I have three kids on the day of 4. And the kids get up at 6 and then I have family time from 6 until 8 and then I go and I work from 8 till 11. I work out every day. It's part of my identity and I love working out. And then I come back, I've lunch with the kids and I do some of this stuff in the afternoon, like the podcast. And then I'm done by 3 30 or 4 and from 4 until, 7, 3 or 8 o'clock, it's family time again. And then we go to bed. My wife and I go to bed at 7, 3, 8 o'clock. Well now it's 8, 3 kids are staying up a little bit later, having a hard time getting them to sleep. But that is a system that I will operate. If I go on vacation, I generally operate on that same thing. Now we don't work, but I'm up, Michael for a walk in the morning. It's just ingrained in me and because it's who I see myself as and in one of my books I talk about the world's most disciplined man. It's not me. I said it was Charlie Munger when he lived. And Charlie Munger never, you know, he quit exercising as soon as he got out of the army. He ate a box of peanut brittle because that's what he liked. That's what he would snack on. He never worked out, never do a cold punch. But he achieved money, power, respect. Everything that a man generally wants, Charlie Munger had. And he didn't have to do all these magic tricks like cold plunging. I know I got now getting hate mail from all the cold plungers. They're listening to this. But if you think about it, Charlie knew what he wanted. He ran his own race. And that was his identity. And so for everybody who's listening to this, doesn't matter if you are again fighting to get up on time, go to bed on time, which is the reason you don't get up on time or to not watch as much TV or to not eat as much junk food as you want. You just have to get a very clear definition of who you are at your core, who you truly want to be in the future. And then you build that custom blueprint to achieve it. And you got to believe, you got to believe in yourself. The last thing I'll say, I tell one more quick story is that in 2011, I was running intervals in the woods near my house. And at the time I was doing a lot of speaking. And for some reason, this conversation in my mind went to you never swear on state. You've never sworn in front of your mother, but when you're around your friends, you swear like a trucker. And I don't like that. And I decided I was going to change that day. So the next day, I had an email list of 151,000 people in the fitness industry at that time. And I emailed my email list and I said, I'm never, I'm quitting swearing. And so that public accountability is another hack, secret to success. Like when you tell the world, you're going to do something. You don't want to look like a hypocrite because hypocrite is like lower than personature on the list of people that you want to be in life. Nobody wants to be a hypocrite. And so when you tell a group of people, whether it's a 5am club that you're all going to wake up at 5am or your exercise club, you don't want to disappoint them by not showing up or your church or whatever it is. Like if you commit to something, you're going to do it. And when you tell the world that get that public accountability, that's what held me accountable. And in four days, I stopped swearing. And so listen, I know that if I drop the netth bomb here and there, I get more laughs on the stage, but it cheapens it to me. And so it's, and it's a nice challenge. It's a nice challenge. And so as long as I don't see a giant bug, I will not swear. So I want to go back a little bit, Craig, and some of the things you share and it's interesting hearing your like wake up routine, bedtime routine. I'm very much the same way. We typically go to bed around 830 and I think the secret to waking up early is going to bed early and I'm the same way on weekends and I'm the same way we travel somewhere. And it requires almost, I feel like a degree of like insuseants to some extent because the people you're around, like most, I put in quotes like regular people will see these types of routines or habits as somewhat abnormal, right? Like most people don't wake up at 4am or 5am. My wife and I will go to dinner. I love the 4pm dinner. And it's like normal people don't go to dinner around that time. They go around like six or seven o'clock or whatever, right? I'm one of these people that stops eating at 5pm every day, right? I guess my question to you is that when did you become this human being and how are you before? Like what was like the, like was there something that led to this? Okay. So there was always like little bits of it. So I grew up on a farm. You just like you work hard on the farm. You know, I got my first job at age 12 off the farm for $2.85, dig in ditches. That's just normal to me. And I worked out, you know, I got the bit and buy the gym bug in high school. So that was normal to me. But there was a lot of components in my life that didn't add up. And so I started writing for men's health in 2000, but I was a binge drinker until 2006. And I had my lowest to the low moment January 1st, 2006. I had my first anxiety attack and felt like I was having a heart attack tight chest elevated heart rate tingling from the top of my head down in the end of my fingertips. There was a few reasons. One was because I was hypocritical. I was a good boy. I'm on day through Saturday morning as a personal trainer at the gym and writing for men's health magazine and then come four o'clock in the afternoon on a Saturday. My buddies and I would, you know, be at a sports event and then a nightclub and then, you know, four o'clock in the morning on Sunday. I'm done drinking. Your brain does not like that cognitive dissonance. And so combined with my introverted tendencies of keeping everything to myself and not having outlets like journaling or even meditation or learning how to breathe properly, all of it when you crush everything down, it explodes in your face eventually. And so that was a turning point for me. I slipped on my habits three months later and had another anxiety attack. This one lasted. I swear six weeks, six weeks, every single minute of the day, I thought I was having a heart attack. I could sleep about four hours a night and it was the lowest point in my life. And in both times, I went to the emergency room, walked in and said, I think I'm having a heart attack. And that's a hack for you. So if you ever spray in your ankle, playing softball in the emergency room is really busy, just walk up and say, I think I'm having a heart attack. They take you right to the back. You will get preferential treatment. You have to explain the lied later on. But both times, I realized something had to change. And when the doctor said to me, after my second anxiety attack, he said, there's nothing physically wrong with you. Then I was like, okay, so this is all on me. No one should feel bad for me. I brought all this on myself. And so I decided to change. And I realized at that time, my online business was taking off. And so I was getting up on some days when I didn't have to be in the gym at 730 in the morning. And I'd roll over. And this is dating myself here. I'd roll over and I'd check my blackberry for sales. And I'd also get refunds or angry people who couldn't download my program and stuff like that. And there was a moment, shortly after the second anxiety attack was like, this is part of the problem. And so I decided that the next day, I would get up five minutes earlier and I would not check my phone for five minutes. And I think there's a very important lesson in there because a lot of people who are getting up at 7am or 6.30am say, I'm going to join the 5am club tomorrow. And they do. And it works. And they're like, wow, this was amazing. I got a lot done. And then the next day, they get up at 5am. It's a little bit harder and they still get a lot done. But they're like, man, 5am club is awesome. And then the next day, they sleep till 8.15. They sleep through six alarms because they have social jet lag. And then they go, oh, this is getting up in the morning. It's ridiculous. And it is because you tried to go cold turkey on it. What you need to do is the slivers of time approach. So I did that 10 minute window for seven days in a row. And then I increased it five more minutes on both sides. So now I'm up. I was getting up at 7.30. Now I'm up at 7.20. And I'm not checking my phone till 7.40. And then the week after that, it was 7.15, 7.45. And eventually within a few months, I was getting up at 5.30am and not checking my phone till 9.30am. And you want to talk about getting worked on. You get a lot of work done when you have that block. And so whatever it is that people are trying to change, I am a big believer in small bits. Because what does that do? That gives you wins. That proves to yourself and to your inner critic that I could do this. I can do this. I am the type of person who gets up early and so on and so forth. And so I'm a natural morning person back to the original question. I love getting up in the morning. I always have even when I was a teenager, I have my part time job in the weekends. I loved the fact that nobody else was up and bothering me at 8 o'clock when I was working at the garden center where I worked. And so there was a lot of things that slightly came naturally to me. But I could just as easily be a 40 year alcoholic who worked at a factory because I worked in a factory in the summertime and all my uncles were truck drivers. I had cousins that went to college. It wasn't like I was the first kid that went to college at university. But I was that close probably with my binge drinking to becoming an alcoholic who probably would have been a client of many people listening to this for driving while impaired and all sorts of stuff. I did a lot of stupid stuff. And by the grace of God, I'm here, but it could have went the other way. That is something for everybody and I'm sure most lawyers who see people, you realize how razor thin close everybody is to that Michael Douglas moment in falling down where your life could just as easily have gone that way or you could be running a non-figure company. There are certain moments in life where if you don't define them properly, they will define you the wrong way. I want to get your thoughts. I know one of the first books you wrote that really took off, I think your gnome for is like the perfect day. And it's really talking about the concept of this repeatable intentional structure where you're very proactive rather than being reactive. I think most people go about their day and if they say they have a good day, it's kind of in spite of everything else that happened. Could you just speak to some of the habits or even some of the systems that make up for a perfect day? Yeah. And I think a lot of people will resonate with this that it's amazing how far people can go just by being a force of nature. And whether it's somebody who was like, yeah, that's me or who knows another attorney or a business owner who's like, they have no structure. They're all over the place. but they've really gotten far in life. My father-in-law, he has no structure, and he's super successful. But I'm like, you just have willed this into existence, but most people can't do that. Most people will be able to get so much further ahead in life when they have more structure in their days. And, you know, Jocco Willink's book, Extreme Ownership, came out almost the exact same time as perfect day formula. And sometimes ideas are just out there, and they're collected by people at the same time, because he wrote his book, and I never heard of him. And he had never heard of me, and he wrote in his book Discipline Equals Freedom. And I swear, a book came out the same year. In my book, it says Structure Equals Freedom. It is absolutely true because I'm forcing, I try and force people to have the most structured day they can. Why? So that they can get done on time. They can go home and do whatever they want with their kids and their wife and their husband or their family and their health and their hobbies, and you can have a life, right? Because otherwise, if you are reactive, and if you have no boundaries in life, you are working till 8, 9, 10, 11 o'clock at night, and you're missing out on your family. And I've met a lot of people in life who say, "Yep, yeah, a lot of entrepreneurs, specifically my core values are my family and freedom." And then they have put themselves into a golden handcuff prison, working all these hours. There's no time spent with their kids. I remember one of my workshops, this guy, he said, "Yeah, then the most important value in my life, because we do a values exercise is my family and raising well-adjusted kids." And he worked six days a week, 12 hours a day, with an hour commute. I don't know how well you're gonna be raising well-adjusted kids when you never see them. Yeah. It's unlikely. And so everybody will benefit from more structure in their day. And that just means, you said something very important earlier that you get up at the same time every day and you go to bed at the same time every day. And this, if you want to, if everybody listening wants to have more energy, if you simply get to bed at the same time, plus or minus like 15 minutes every night, and you get up at the same time every day. And you do the seven days a week, because if you sleep in on the weekends, you completely ruin it Sunday night, you can't get to sleep. Monday morning, you're tired. You can't do that. You have to do it. So the next time your social calendar is like super slow, do this experiment for 14 to 21 days, and you will be blown away. It's better than even eating better. It's better than exercising regularly. It's so important. And so that's structure. And that structure then, everything's a waterfall, right? So in order to get to bed on time, you have to have a routine that gets you to bed on time. Because that's where most people break down. I'm gonna watch one more Netflix show. I'm gonna read one more article. I'm gonna send one more email, and then you're down the rabbit hole. And all of a sudden it's like, oh, I was trying to go to bed 11 o'clock, and it's 11.30. Tomorrow I'm gonna go to bed at 10.30. And the next night it happens again. And that's why you don't get up on time. So, you know, we teach people something simple, like a reverse alarm. The most important alarm on your phone is not the alarm to get up. It's the alarm to go to bed. And when you have that in place, when you get to bed on time, by shutting off all your electronics at 10 p.m. and talking to your spouse, making your lunch, reading a book, you get to bed at 11 o'clock, which means you get up at 6.30 with your alarm and you don't hit snooze, which means you're like, I'm not gonna get stuck in traffic because I'm gonna get out of the house on time. I'm gonna get to the office 10 minutes early. I'm gonna be able to do something even for a few minutes at a time, working in the slivers of time to get ahead before somebody else takes my time. Man, I've won the day. And when you repeat that, 250, 300 times in a year, your life is gonna change. It's interesting, like the people that have these habits that are on the other side of this, like they know how good they feel. And I almost wonder sometimes that if you get into such a good routine that if for whatever reason, something goes off track, you don't seem sometimes more difficult to adjust to that than if you're just or consistently off routine. Yeah, so it's a great point. And this is where, and the seem to Leab's phrase, anti-fragile, comes into place because there's a dark side of discipline. That was my last book. And so I was once too disciplined. I was fragile that if I missed a workout, my mood would be affected. That if I didn't go to bed or if I didn't do this, or I would skip things that were beneficial to me in order to stay so rigid. And that cannot be done. So it sounds a little bit counterintuitive, or it sounds a little bit contradictory, is the word I'm looking for, that hey, you need to be flexible, but you also need to be very structured. You need to be mostly structured with a little bit of flexibility. Mentally, you need to be able to go, okay, I'm not gonna be able to have my 40 grams of protein at this meal. I gotta be okay with that. Because I come from the fitness world, I know people they won't go out to dinner with you, they won't do this with you. I actually have a client who's a competitive bodybuilder. And even though he's, you know, he body builds with his son who's like 18 and stuff like that. And he's a very successful real estate agent sells over $100 million of homes every year. And his son won a free cheeseburger. And he wouldn't go out with his son for the free cheeseburger because it was off the diet. And his core values are family and freedom. And this was the cheeseburger that broke the camel's back, because there was a few other incidences where he's like questioning himself. And then that he was like, what am I doing? What am I doing? And so you can go too far with things and you have to keep the pendulum in the healthy range. So there is a modicum of flexibility that you must have there because you cannot let anything derail you. You know, it's like being a lawyer and trial, you're gonna get surprises. You're gonna be like, oh man, nobody came up with that. Well, you can't just have a meltdown because maybe a junior lawyer didn't cover something in a deposition and now you're kind of like hung out to dry, you have to be professional. And you would expect, I always use this analogy that everybody listening, think about your favorite sports game and sports team and stuff like that. And you've got tickets, he spent 500 bucks and you take in your family, so you're all in, you're like three grand on the game. And you go and players like, well, you know, the trainer didn't fold my shirt the right way. So I'm gonna have a huffy puff and not play my best tonight. And you're like, what? I spent three grand on these tickets. You better play. You expect from a professional that no matter what, their anti-fragile and they're going to show up and be a professional. And that's the way that we must be. We must have structure, but we must have the flexibility to adapt in the face of challenges and actually become stronger. Because if you melt down in the face of a challenge of something goes wrong, if you, you know, you can't get your eight o'clock bedtime, Mr. Ballantine, if I melt down in that, I'm actually the least disciplined person. So I learned that the hard way because I did when I was younger, I swung the pendulum too far and I realized now, you know, what's more important. And then a lot of that comes down to your core values. I think you just, you just, I would answer the question I was about to ask because it's, how do you navigate, I guess the balance in that, in the sense of, you want to be locked in, but at the same time, you don't want to be so rigid that you're essentially, you know, compromising your values to stay committed to a certain goal, for example, meaning that you don't go out to dinner because you're going to be eating too late, you know, that's going to affect your sleep and that's going to affect the next day. I have something my, my coach, so when I do triathlon, my coach shared with me was that happy athletes are fast athletes. And what that means essentially is that those that are so protective over their entire routine that won't take days off, that won't go on date nights, that won't do any of those things. In her experience, perform worse in races than those that, you know, essentially allow a degree of balance to kind of enjoy the journey a bit more. Here's the challenge with this. I'm someone who's good at getting back on routine, whether it's on like Monday or Sunday and so on. But for some people, like you mentioned, like, let's say quitting drinking, for someone that one drink turns into two drinks and then kind of get some back off track. How do you find that balance there? Yeah, you know, it's another great question. And just in terms of this, I'll give a quick story. So, you know, right now, you know, I'm in my basement office and I have, I have three kids under four and I have a screaming toddler upstairs who fortunately has decided not to scream during this podcast. But, you know, I got home from the gym and I was like, I, you know, I need to get ready for this. But she's having a tough day. And so I was like in two years from now or in a month from, in two weeks from now, I'm going to look back and go, did I serve my child? Or did I rush and say, oh, you know, I don't have time for this because what really matters? And so I made time for it. We did a little yoga session, a little breathing session and got our kind of calm down because I'm a type of guy. I want to be doing this, listen to this. I have to remember what is all this for. And so when you ask, how do we get back on track? First of all, we have to forgive ourselves that if we do make a mistake because I was once that binge drinker who also was a binge eater after I'd been binge drinking. You know, so yeah, I wake up at a plenty of mornings where I woke up sweating, you know, by eat because I ate too much and hung over and it's like, okay, listen, I don't want to do that again. And so I just had a phrase in my head that every minute I'm awake is a minute. I'm away from my mistake. And so that was helpful to me because I was able to move forward instead of beating myself up, like what there's no good in beating yourself up. There's absolutely no good in regretting the past. You have to just simply learn from the past. So there, the lesson is, now we build this system. What got me into trouble? So my years ago it would be like, if I have three drinks, I'm gonna end up at 7/11 after dinner, buying a bag of chocolate-covered almonds. My business partner used to live in the four seasons in Denver, Colorado, and there was 7/11 across the street, and we would go to the edge steakhouse in the four seasons. Great steakhouse. He would start drinking, I'd start drinking the next thing in the one with seven women. And I was like, okay, I got to figure out how to stop this. So it's like, okay, maybe I'll just go to two drinks, and now the binge eating went down. And then down to one drink, binge eating went down. Zero drinks. I guess what? It went away. So self-reflection and introspection is actually a big part of the perfect day formula. A lot of it's based on stoicism and timeless principles. And so what most people do is they go through life without connecting dots. And they'll be like, "Hi, you know, every day at two o'clock, I'm really tired." Well, yeah, you go to Burger King every day at one o'clock. That's why you're tired. But most people will go through life without that connection. And so we have to use exercises like journaling, reviewing the day, reviewing the week, so that we can look for those areas in which we go, I did not perform well here. I did not perform well at this trial. I did not perform well with this client. I need to watch the game tape and figure out where things broke down. Because one of my favorite stories related to this is that you too, they used to watch the concert footage every day the next day. When they were the biggest band in the world, they're still watching the concert footage of the show last night to figure out how to make the next show better. And that's what we need to do in life. So when you get off track, don't self-flagulate yourself like the guy and the Da Vinci code. Instead go, okay, all right, made a mistake. Everybody's alive, everybody's okay. What do we do now? Because again, I'm speaking to the people who see people all the time, whether it's you're a divorce lawyer, whether you're a bad business partnership, you see all these people with regrets and you see how much energy they waste beating themselves up on a mistake. Oh, I never should have married her, never should have done this. You know, never should have got behind the wheel. Hey, listen, I get it. But you did. And now I gotta empathize with you a little bit. We gotta move on. So how do we make sure that never happens again? And we build the checklist for it. And that's what we do to get back on track. Now I'm hoping that you don't have to get back on track so many times that your checklist is amazing, but you're getting back on track. You have to do it all the time. We have to look to improve every single time that we do go off track. Forgive yourself and then follow the system because people will mess up, but systems rarely do. I'm curious as we've been having this conversation, just what about you wants to help other people? Meaning that once you figure this out for yourself, you built successful businesses, but now you're coaching others on how to have similar breakthroughs. And obviously there's gonna be some that take well to that and perform really well. And then others that essentially may not have those same outcomes. Like, why do you care? Why do you just focus on your family, your life and so on? Or is it just a part of us that just wants to help earlier versions of ourselves? So I would often ask myself, why do I care so much? But ever since I was young, you know, when I had that first job, you know, as 12 or 13, worked at a greenhouse, I'd sit around with regular folks, right? You know, really good, awesome people. Every January they'd be like, oh, you know, I'm gonna go on this cabbage soup diet or whatever it is. And I'd be like, you understand like how simple this is to actually lose weight is, you know, you can't do these extreme things. You gotta make it a life style. Like I'm a 12 years old and I know this stuff. And I felt bad for them because maybe they knew and just weren't gonna do it or whatever, but they were gonna be disappointed. And I actually will say, one of my first memories is me and, you know, I'm grown up in the late 70s. I'm four years old. I lived on a farm just outside of town. And I'm with my mom in this big green car. I'm in the front seat, no seat belt again. This is 1979. And this is like one of my first memories. And maybe this is the reason why. I've thought about this before. But I say to my mom, why are you crying? And she said, I just left weight watchers and I didn't lose any weight. And I'm like, oh man, when that's your second or third memory of your life, that your mom is so upset because she didn't get results. That could be it, man. I mean, maybe I need to go like a cyclotherapist or do some ayahuasca or something to figure out why, but I'm just driven to. And so whenever I hear somebody's problem, I really truly believe that a lot of solutions are very simple. Very simple. And as humans, we like to make things super complex. But I'll try if they're open to it to ask a few questions and try and get them to come to the answer themselves. Because that's one thing that I've learned over time is if you volunteer to somebody what's wrong with their life and hey, you need to fix this, not gonna be a lot of people taking you up on that. But if they complain and you start to ask some questions and pull the string and unravel it, you eventually get to the point where, and this might be like, you know, when you're interviewing people in a deposition, eventually you get them to see the answer. And when somebody has volunteered to do coaching with you and you do that with them and they see the answer, you have a pretty good chance of getting them to take action on it and to build a plan with you and allow you to hold them accountable. But I will also say, it's interesting that you asked this question. I rarely do sales calls in my business, but my main sales guy was away and, you know, we had so many sales calls booked, so I jumped on a couple. And this guy got to the end and he goes, when people hold me accountable, I get pretty angry. So I don't think that's gonna work. And I'm like, yeah, probably will not work. And, you know, he obviously has some emotional work to do on themselves and we're still chatting and he's kind of coming around. But there are people who, if you give them accountability, they will do the exact opposite of what you want them to do. And what is best for them, just because they got some, you know, healing to do of themselves. So I'm driven to do it because I find there's a simple solution and I want to help people that way. - That's it, man. That's probably that reason of going back to helping my mom. - I want to elaborate on that if you're open to it. When someone comes to you, are there specific traits or behaviors where you can tell early on that, okay, this person, they're gonna turn their life around, they're gonna accomplish what they're setting out to accomplish versus it's probably not gonna happen for them. There are some and one of them is if you get in a, when we get into the conversation with somebody and they are all over the place, we generally find that very hard to work with because we kind of name them as, oh, there's wild horses and you know, there's wild horses who have a lot going on. They want to do a lot of things, but you can have a conversation with them and kind of keep them corralled. But then there are some people who are just so all over the place that you can't get them to focus on something. And they're not gonna follow the instructions, they're not gonna have a good communication on the coaching calls and we generally don't have a good response with them. The other person is the person who has the ego in the way. And we were just chatting, we have a coaches meeting every Tuesday morning, we're just chatting about that this morning about why this one guy, we helped them get a record month and he had a record month and we helped them work less. And he's like, I'm not sure I'm gonna continue. And it's like, what? You know, like rationally, you're doing all the right things. We helped you do this and you're like, not sure if you're gonna continue as because he wants every idea to be his and so on and so forth. And so those are tough. Sometimes we can get those people to come around, but when you get on a call with somebody and it's like 40 minutes and they've talked 39 minutes and 50 seconds, we know that's gonna be a tough case. The other one is when people are really negative about themselves. The great thing is we have a team of coaches who kind of have some magic skills on that. But here's an exercise for everybody to do. The next time you have a conversation with somebody, just listen to how many times a person insults themselves. Oh, I suck at this or oh, I can never. Or this is always like, and you can just put like a negativity meter on somebody and the more negative they are, the harder it is to turn that ship around. It's possible. And so don't be that person. Look to every time, catch yourself every time you say something. And it's, you know, I say it sometimes too, oh, I'm in it, but catch yourself and then reframe it. And then look for evidence that the reframe is true. And that's how you build changes in yourself and that's how other people do too. Yeah. I've heard you say before that you can win in business and lose in life. I'd love for you to just tell elaborate on the, you know, outside of the business, this success and the financial success component because I mean, I too went down that path. For me, it was just everything was about winning and I grew up poor. So I wanted to be able to achieve financial freedom and succeed financially and so on. And it almost becomes like this defining function of your life that this is my identity that I am successful in this one area. But I see a lot of entrepreneurs that get that piece right at the cost of everything else. So that's why I wrote the Dark Side Discipline book. I had a friend who I've known for 20 years and he had it all. Like you look at the outside and it was like, man, you got all, you got this beautiful wife. You got three kids. You got the sports car. You got an amazing house. Like dude, you have it all. And he's like everybody else. He opens up his social media and he sees 75 hard. And he's like, you know, which is a fitness challenge program. And he does it and I'm like, okay. you guys. three kids, you got at least one, you had three businesses at the time. And I've been to his house sitting with him and his wife outlining how we're going to restructure his schedule. So he gets out of his basement office and actually makes it up for dinner. So that's like where he was before he decides to add a challenge, a workout challenge that takes about two hours a day. And I'm like, where are you getting this time? I'm watching this unfold on social media. And he finishes it. And he gets, you know, claps on the back from strangers on the internet. And then slow motion car wreck, he does it again. I'm like, this is not going to end well. And sure enough, the day he finishes it, the second time and everybody on the internet who he's never met, never will meet is clapping them on the back. And his wife says, leaving with the kids. And so his marriage is over. He gets to see his kids every other week, because he he lost sight of the game completely. And it broke my heart because again, I know this guy for a long time, I was at his wedding. It wasn't in his wedding, but it was at his wedding. I love his parents, you know, great family. And to watch that happen when at the time when that happened, I'm a late bloomer in marriage. I didn't get married to his 46. And I watched that unfold as I'm getting married. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is like the exact opposite of a fairy tale story. And another thing that has kind of formed to me is I grew up in a home where my parents did not get divorced. But there was no love. It was it was over, you know, by the time I was 10 years old. And I remember the first time that I ever saw adults hold hands was I was 11 years old. And I saw my friends parents hold hands. And I was like, what is happening here? Like I couldn't believe it. Yeah. And so, you know, I grew up watching growing pains and family ties. And I'm like, I want to have a life like that and to see somebody whose life looked like growing pains, a great relationship, you know, between, you know, wife and husband, to see it blow up, it really hurt. And so that's the type of thing that drives us. We don't work exclusively with families. We have some younger entrepreneurs. But we're, you know, we spent a lot of time on making sure that the family unit is good that people's health is good. You know, we've had clients lose 90 pounds. You know, they came to us to make more money, but they also lost 90 pounds because they needed it. And you know, we kind of have a background in that. But you can still get super rich. Don't get me wrong. You can still have a nine figure business. You know, one of my clients is he's going to be my first client to have a billion dollar business in the next two years that based on his growth right now. And he has time for his family. And he's 65 and still working hard. But he's in good shape. You look at me go man, I got has everything. And he's already sold a business for $100 million. But he's still like, you know, loves the game. So you can have it all. And it just requires a like a rejiggering of your schedule or some of your bound boundaries is a key. In fact, that was one last thing I'll say on this. You've been asked in such great questions. I've been, you know, it's talking a lot. But I was out for a walk right before this. And this is where I get a lot of the the ideas that come to my head. And as I was doing it, I realized that most people get it wrong because they're not to do list needs to have a hundred times more things on it than they're to do list. And so that's it. If you're trying to do a million things and catch up with a hundred podcasts and read a whole bunch of books, but you might lose everything because, you know, you've got like, oh, I got to read a book a week to read a book a week people. Then come on, you know, you're losing sight of what really matters. And so we do not let people do that. And neither do you. Actually, I wanted to ask you about that because a lot of people, they start with really defining what it is that somebody wants like kind of like creating and crafting that vision. But I believe a lot of what you focus on is really starting off by defining those standards, subtraction, like having that come first. Is that fair to say? Yeah, we started the 30,000 food. So I mean, I like a 90 day plan. We get there. But if you can imagine an upside down pyramid, the highest level is I need to know what are the values that you have today that you're going to have in 10 years from now for your family, your health, your wealth, and your personal enrichment. So you tell me what is your family going to look like in 10 years from now? Because that's going to be the thing that's going to allow me to say yes or no to the things that you want to do in the next 90 days. We're building this filter. So it's your your values first, then your five year vision. And every daily decision is made by your values and vision. Because a younger guy comes and says to me, Hey, listen, you know, I'm engaged in my fiancee Emily. And you know, we got this business. And in three years from now, we want to be married with our first kid. And we want to have multiple locations. And I go, great. And then he goes, Oh, you know, my friend said, Hey, let's go to he wants me to go to his bachelor party in Vegas this week. And I would say, let's look at this. Here's your north star. And here's this detour of going to Vegas. You know these guys, you know what happens in Vegas, you are willing to risk everything to go to Vegas and you're willing to risk your future. I can't let you do that type of thing. And so it's by. Understanding what really matters in the future to somebody that you can make the right decision today, which is again, going back to my kids matter the most to me. And so if I have to not eat before this podcast, I will sacrifice the meal, because I have to do this little yoga session with my four year old who's having a tough time in her toddler life right now. That's the decision that was driven by where I want to be in 10 years from now. And so we go values five year vision, one year blueprint. And then from the one year blueprint, I know exactly what we need to accomplish in the next 12 months. Now we can build the 90 day plan of here's your outcome goal, here you three process goals. And here's what you're going to do immediately after this first call. Here's what you can do in the next 24 hours 48 hours, seven days, 14 days, 21 days. Great. We're good. Now we just hold you accountable to doing that. And you can use that approach for everything you can build a 90 day plan to lose weight. I used a 90 day plan to find my wife. I swear to God, we have these 90 day blueprints. I built one out for how it was going to meet my wife. And I met her in 35 days. You can do it for anything because it's all knowing where you want to go. And then focusing on the things that are going to the 80 20, what are the the activities that are going to get you as close as possible to them and work your way up. Hello, man, as you're talking about this, I years ago, I gave this presentation called success is a science. And I kept thinking like as you were saying, the success really is a science. And it actually bogged my mind, like everything you described, it's dead on. And it surprises me that more people don't function that way. I'm sure those that don't have these types of like don't do the sort of planning and don't have these types of systems probably hear this and say, well, that sounds kind of ridiculous. But on the converse, I think the lack of those things is actually kind of ridiculous. Like the idea that you could get to somewhere that you haven't been before and not have any sort of proactive blueprint in order to do so. It's just I don't know, just puzzling to me. Yet that is how most people go about their day. Yeah, you know, two of my favorite quotes are what got you here won't get you there. And that's martial goldsmith's book. And then to get what you've never had, you must do what you've never done. Those two are kind of the same thing, but they're both true. And I will say the biggest problem. And a lot of people listening to this, they believe you, they believe me, they know what is right, they know that they want to do these things. And the biggest risk to all of this is being like that person at the beg of the Las Vegas buffet with, you know, you go up with the plate and the plates piled this high and it's hanging over the side. You're just putting too much on your plate. There's too many things in this day and age, it's so easy to chase so many things. You see, oh, this guy has 12 businesses and this person's reading a book a week and this person's had 75 hard. You know, you do try out the ones and you know, I do whatever I'm doing high rocks. So that's next to anybody. Yeah. So it's so easy to see a million people doing a million things. And you realize there's only three things that matter to you in your life, one being the best law firm in your city, county, whatever, two being an amazing husband or wife and three raising your kids, those are really the only three, well, and you know, making sure that you live a long healthy life, your faith. And so those, those are the only things that matter. And you know, this trip over here, going in the Maldives, whatever, like might be nice, but don't let it get distracted. Don't add it to your plate that already has egg sausage and toast. You don't need bacon and ham as well. And so that's the biggest risk to people. Craig, as we come to a close as being the the game changing attorney podcast, what does being a game changer mean to you? It means constantly evolving and constantly evolving. That's one thing that I have learned when I was in the fitness industry, you know, I started I sold this one program. I thought, oh my gosh, I'm making all this money. It's going to be easy for the rest of my life. And then all these competitors come along. And I actually start teaching people how to do it. And I was like, Oh, I'm not making as much money as I used to. And I grew up in the 90s, right? And Madonna had the reinvention to her. And I was like, what do you mean reinvent? She's Madonna. She doesn't need to really have and then I got it because the last album, nobody cares anymore, you know, they want the next album. And that's what everybody listening to this. If you want to be a game changer, you have to constantly evolve. And we didn't talk about AI, but that's the evolution. That's what we're talking about our business all the time. And that's the future. And that's, you know, something that you can't ignore, you got to be a game changer and evolve to include it in your business and in your systems, because that's that's what's required of you. I want to give a huge thank you to Craig for taking the time to join us on the Game Changing Attorney podcast. If you found this episode valuable, here are three free ways that I can help you grow your law firm. Number one, download the first chapter of my book absolutely free at GameChangingAttorney.com. Number two, you can shoot me a text at 404-531-7691, and I'll answer any question that you've got for me. And finally, number three, if you can lead this podcast a five-star review, it'll help us gain access to more influential thought leaders and bring their lessons learned here to you. For more information on our interview with Craig Valentine, see the show notes for this episode in your podcast app or visit legalpodcast.com.