How to Re-Write Your Future: The Only Strategy That Actually Works
A 96-minute mashup of Ed Mylett solo teaching, a remote interview with James Clear, and an in-person interview with Jesse Itzler — all circling one thesis: the gap between where you are and where you want to be is not a knowledge problem, it is a reps and standards problem.
Posted
3 months ago
Duration
Format
Interview
sincere
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19K
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Your current results are a 90-day-old newspaper — the real question is what you are printing today, because success comes from invisible reps done before anyone is watching, not from talent or motivation on game day.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You have momentum in at least one area of life but feel like you are plateauing and cannot identify why.
You set ambitious goals but tend to abandon them within weeks because results are not arriving on the timeline you expected.
You are an early-stage entrepreneur who has an idea but keeps waiting until you feel 'ready' before executing.
You have read Atomic Habits and want a deeper, story-driven application of its core concepts across business and fitness.
You are drawn to high-achiever biographies and want tactical frameworks for daily discipline, not just inspiration.
SKIP IF…
You are already operating at extreme deliberate practice levels and want new research — this covers foundational principles, not cutting-edge performance science.
You prefer single-host podcasts with deep dives on one topic — this episode jumps across three distinct guests and settings.
You want tactical business advice with specific numbers and frameworks — the Jesse Itzler segment is storytelling-heavy, not step-by-step.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Success operates on a delay. The behaviors you do today will not show up as results for 60 to 120 days on the downside and six months to five years on the upside — which is why most people quit just before the payoff. James Clear argues that the real power of habits is not productivity but identity: every small action is a vote for the person you are becoming. Jesse Itzler adds a complementary thread: entering markets with zero experience is a feature, not a bug, because ignorance forces innovation. The through-line across all three blocks is that the separation between winners and everyone else happens before the moment of performance — in the reps, the deadlines, and the daily standards no one else can see.
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Ed Mylett solo monologue. Negative behaviors produce consequences in 90–120 days; positive results are delayed 6 months to 5 years. Your current life reflects past decisions, not present ones. Plant seeds, expect a delayed harvest.
09:48 – 17:00
02 · James Clear: 1% Better and the British Cycling Team
Ed introduces James Clear (Atomic Habits). Clear explains the aggregation of marginal gains via the British cycling turnaround — from no Tour de France wins in 110 years to winning 5 of the next 6 after committing to 1% improvements across every variable.
17:00 – 25:00
03 · Identity-Based Habits: Voting for Who You Become
James Clear argues the deeper reason habits matter is identity formation, not productivity. Every habit is a vote for a version of yourself. The two-minute rule: reduce any new behavior to its smallest possible version to master showing up before optimizing.
25:00 – 33:00
04 · Eric Thomas: Acting From What You Know, Not How You Feel
Ed speaks with Eric Thomas (ET the Hip Hop Preacher, referred to as 'Dirty'). Eric describes his discipline origin story — recognizing family patterns of laziness and self-indulgence, choosing to get up at 3am, going vegan for longevity. The pivot: act from what you know you should do, not from how you feel.
33:00 – 48:00
05 · Reps: The Invisible Work That Creates Visible Excellence
Ed solo in his professional studio. Steph Curry (500 shots/day, ~2.8M career practice shots), Tiger Woods (1,000 balls/day, 10-hour practice sessions), Adele (2,400 hours rehearsed before first Vegas show). Three stages of skill: awkward, mechanical, natural. Reflection after every performance is what converts reps into mastery.
48:00 – 55:00
06 · Deadlines: Enrolling Your Unconscious Mind
The outdoor ocean clip. Deadlines do not just create urgency — they move a goal into the active processing queue of the subconscious and unconscious mind. Without a deadline, the brain conserves energy by ignoring the goal. With one, it begins working on it even when you are not consciously focused on it.
55:00 – 1:05:00
07 · Subconscious vs. Unconscious: Why Deadlines Unlock Both
Ed extends the deadline concept with a distinction between subconscious (operating-system-like background processing) and unconscious (deeper memories, desires, and automatic responses). Both require a deadline to engage with a future goal. Studio segment with 'The Power of One More' book visible.
1:05:00 – 1:15:00
08 · Jesse Itzler: The Wall of Fear and Going In Unprepared
Ed introduces Jesse Itzler (Marquis Jet → sold to Berkshire/NetJets; ZICO coconut water → sold to Coca-Cola; married to Sara Blakely). Jesse describes his breakthrough pattern: break dancing in DC at 14, starting a jet company knowing nothing about jets. Inexperience forces innovation because you cannot default to the existing playbook.
1:15:00 – 1:25:00
09 · Jesse Itzler: The Muffin Strategy and Shock-and-Awe Service
Jesse's TED conference muffin story — buying every muffin in Monterrey, CA to create forced conversations and land Marquis Jet's first client. His retention strategy: shock-and-awe service that goes so far beyond the core product that clients become referral engines. 'Would I recommend myself?'
1:25:00 – 1:36:04
10 · Daily Habits as the Foundation of Every Win
Jesse and Ed close the in-person interview. Jesse notes that all his exits (Marquis Jet, ZICO) took years and the foundation under all of them was daily habits, winning routines, and a winning mindset. Ed frames social media followership of high achievers as the modern equivalent of what Jesse got by flying 4,000 CEOs and athletes.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Your life today is a 90-day-old newspaper — you are reading headlines that were written by your behavior three months ago.
Negative consequences arrive in 90 to 120 days; positive payoffs from good habits are often delayed by one to five years — this asymmetry is why most people quit.
A habit must be established before it can be improved — mastering the art of showing up at 20% capacity beats perfecting a plan you never start.
Every small action is a vote for the type of person you are becoming — identity is built from evidence, not affirmations.
The difference between 1% better each day and 1% worse each day is 37x versus near-zero over a single year.
Steph Curry takes 500 practice shots per day and has made roughly 2.8 million practice shots in his career — and he is already considered the greatest shooter ever.
Adele and her team logged over 2,400 hours of rehearsal before the first show of her Vegas residency — the performance is the smallest part of the work.
The three stages of any skill are awkward, mechanical, and natural — most people stop at mechanical and mistake the discomfort for a ceiling.
Deadlines do not just create urgency — they enroll your subconscious and unconscious mind, which will not engage with open-ended goals.
The separation is in the preparation: winners do not separate themselves on stage, in the meeting, or on the court — they separate themselves in the invisible hours before.
Experience is overrated at the start of a venture — ignorance of the existing playbook is what creates the space for real innovation.
The question that replaces most performance reviews: would I recommend myself as a boss, a partner, a parent, a coach?
Acting from what you know you should do rather than how you feel is the single pivot point between average performance and consistent excellence.
Rigging small wins you can control — laying out clothes the night before, making the bed, keeping the 6am alarm — rebuilds the internal reputation that makes larger commitments believable.
Takeaway
Small bets, delayed payoffs, and the invisible work that compounds.
WHAT TO LEARN
Every major result in your life — body, bank account, relationships — is a delayed readout of decisions you made months or years ago, which means the work you do invisibly today is more predictive of your future than any single visible moment of performance.
Your life is a 90-day-old newspaper: negative consequences from poor habits show up in 90 to 120 days, but the returns from good habits are often delayed by a year or more — knowing this asymmetry is what keeps you from quitting just before the payoff.
A habit must be established before it can be improved: starting with a two-minute version of any new behavior is not a trick — it is the only reliable way to build the identity of someone who shows up consistently, which is the prerequisite for any further optimization.
Every small action is a vote for the type of person you are becoming: identity shifts happen through accumulated evidence, not through affirmations — doing one push-up is not about fitness, it is about proving to yourself that you do not miss workouts.
The best performers in any field do exponentially more reps than the competition, then reflect after each one: Steph Curry's 500 daily practice shots, Adele's 2,400 rehearsal hours before Vegas, Tiger Woods' 10-hour range sessions — volume combined with reflection is the formula, not volume alone.
Deadlines engage mental resources that open-ended goals do not: attaching a specific date and time to any goal moves it into the active processing queue of your subconscious, which begins working on it even when you are not consciously focused on it.
Acting from what you know you should do, rather than how you feel, is the single behavioral pivot that separates consistent performers from everyone else — motivation follows action, not the other way around.
Inexperience at the start of a venture is a competitive advantage when you treat it as permission to ignore the existing playbook and build from first principles around what the customer actually needs.
Success is not winning in one bucket: being financially successful while failing as a parent, partner, or friend is just wealth — real success requires filling all the buckets, and momentum in one area genuinely transfers to the others.
The invisible hours — the preparation before the stage, the practice before the game, the service details before the sale — are where separation happens, not in the visible performance moment.
Rigging early wins you can fully control (making your bed, keeping a 6am alarm, keeping small promises to yourself) rebuilds internal credibility after a losing streak, and that credibility is what makes larger commitments believable to your own brain.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Echoes of life
The principle that all behaviors produce delayed consequences — negative outcomes typically surface 90 to 120 days after the behavior, while positive returns from good habits are often delayed six months to five years.
Aggregation of marginal gains
A performance philosophy introduced by cycling coach Dave Brailsford: systematically improving every component of a system by 1%, with the compounded result producing dramatic overall performance gains.
Identity-based habits
James Clear's framework arguing that durable behavior change comes from shifting your self-concept first — each small action is evidence of the person you are becoming, not just a step toward a goal.
The two-minute rule
A habit-formation technique where you reduce any new behavior to a version that takes two minutes or less — not as the end goal, but to lower the barrier to establishing the habit at all.
The wall of fear
Jesse Itzler's term for the resistance that appears before entering any genuinely new domain — the observation that every major win in his career required going through the wall rather than around it.
Jet card (25-hour card)
The product Marquis Jet created: a prepaid block of 25 flight hours on NetJets' fleet, making private aviation accessible without the cost or complexity of aircraft ownership.
“Your current conditions, your current life does not dictate your future. Your past does not equal your future. What equals your future are those deposits and investments you're making now.”
Complete thought, zero setup needed, hits the emotional core of the episode→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
15:00
“Every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”
James Clear's most quotable line — already widely shared but lands differently in conversation context→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
30:00
“The heaviest weight at the gym is the front door.”
Tight punchline attributed to Ed Latimore — no setup needed→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
41:00
“The separation is in the preparation. I don't separate myself when I get on stage. I separated myself before I ever got there.”
Pairs an aphorism with a personal example in two sentences→ Newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
52:00
“If you do the right things when nobody is watching, you will shine when everybody is watching. That's the irony.”
Self-contained paradox with a kicker — works well as a standalone clip→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
1:13:00
“I had no prior experience in anything that I did. And for me, that was the greatest blessing. Because it meant: rip up the playbook.”
Counterintuitive claim from someone with multiple major exits — highly shareable→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
09:48 – 25:00denseHabit formation and 1% improvement
25:00 – 33:00steadyIdentity and discipline under discomfort
33:00 – 55:00denseDeliberate practice and rep volume
55:00 – 1:05:00denseDeadlines and the subconscious mind
1:05:00 – 1:25:00denseEntrepreneurial risk and inexperience as asset
1:25:00 – 1:36:04steadyService, referrals, and success across buckets
The Script
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Hey, everyone. Welcome to my weekend special. I hope you enjoy the show.
Hit that like button, and be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel so you never miss my show. Whether it's Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday, now on with the show. Welcome back to Max Out, everybody.
I'm Ed Mylett. Today, we're gonna talk about the echo of life or the echoes in life. And what I mean by that is, you know, that when you hear an echo, you've said something, but there's a delayed response until you hear it coming back at you, and then you experience the result.
And that's how life works. See, today, one of the reasons so many people are confused about their lack of success is because we live in a very immediate gratification type society.
Meaning, expect results to happen instantaneously because we can get access to information instantaneously. We can get on social media.
We can get music. We can get a movie. We can get a Google search.
We can get a book. We can get anything we want instantaneously. But what you can't get instantaneously is success in life.
And we've been raised in a generation now, many of us, even older guys like me, we're programmed to get things right now. And this hurts us in life because we don't realize the echoes of life. See, for me, for example, when I'm having a difficult time in my life in one area or another, all I have to really do is look back sixty to ninety days, and it's the behaviors I had sixty to ninety days ago that are causing the results I get negatively right now.
And so, like, for example, when I'm not really, you know, progressing in my career or in my financial situation, if I look back sixty to ninety days prior, I stopped reading the books, listening to the audios, doing the things that grow my identity, and I pay the price sixty to ninety days later. In my body, my body isn't looking like I want it to.
If I look back sixty to ninety, a hundred and twenty days, that's when my diet got weaker. That's when my workouts weren't quite as intense as they were previously, and I pay the price three to four months later. This is true in every area of our life.
Our lives are almost like reading a newspaper today, but we're reading the headlines from ninety days ago. And so that's what confuses people.
They see the external results of their life, but but if you did, if you read the newspaper from ninety to a hundred and twenty days ago, that's where the news was made, not today. And so in every area of your life, you gotta go in right now. You gotta fuel the fire.
If you've got your business going, your finances going, your relationship going, your faith going where you want it to, you have to continue to do the activities that got you here in the first place because ninety days from now, you're gonna read today's news. That's how it works. If today's news is you stop telling the person you're with, you're loving them.
If you stop dating them like you did in the beginning, you stop treating them a particular way, you're gonna pay the price for it in a ninety to a hundred and twenty days. If you're not eating the way you want to, when you eat a piece of cake, you don't see the fat deposit the next day.
There's a delay. And so what happens is we do these negative behaviors, and because we don't see an instant pain or an instant consequence for it, we don't think the consequence is coming, but the consequences always come. There's a delayed consequence for everything we do.
And so today, you're getting the external results of ninety days ago's headlines of what you were doing. And the mistake most people make is they get things going in their life, they get their business going, and they stop the very things that got them there because they believe today is the headlines.
But you're gonna read it in ninety to a hundred and twenty days. You're gonna pay the price. And so in every area, pour the flames on, pour the fuel on, do the things that got you there, but do more of it because there's an echo for today's behavior.
The reverse is also true, and this is why most people give up on their dreams. Success, the echo is longer.
In success, see the negative comes ninety to a hundred and twenty days, but the benefit, the gain, the increase, the result of doing the right things is often delayed by six months, a year, eighteen months, two years, sometimes five years. And so what happens is most people make these investments. They do all of the work.
It's almost like a bank account. They make the deposit. They make the deposit.
They make the deposit, and then they quit before they get to make the withdrawal because they don't see the results. In success, remember this, you're making these deposits.
You're doing all the right things. It's not ninety days later you get the result often. Sometimes it's not one twenty.
Sometimes it's not six months. Sometimes it's not a year. Sometimes it's two years, and most people can't wait to make the withdrawal because they don't see the immediate result or they they go, well, wait a minute.
When I do things wrong, I pay the price in ninety days. If I eat poorly, ninety days later, my body doesn't look good. If I don't perform right in my business, my business goes down ninety to a hundred and twenty days later.
If I don't read my personal development or listen to the podcast I'm supposed to, my identity shrinks ninety to a hundred and twenty days. How come when I do the good things, the results don't come in ninety to a hundred and twenty days? Sometimes they will, but oftentimes the delayed gratification, the delayed benefit is way off into the future.
The people that win in life accept both echoes. I accept in my life.
I know it's a law of the universe. I know it's a life law that if I don't do the right things, ninety to a hundred and twenty days, I'm gonna pay the price. I also know the other law is if I'm doing the right things, the benefit, the body changing, the finances changing, the life changing, the relationship changing might be delayed by six months, not ninety days, might be a year, might be two, might be five years in some areas, but I accept that there's always a payoff.
Remember this, there's always an echo. There's always a consequence.
If you do the wrong things, no matter how good your business is right now, listen to me. You think you got it going, and you're sloughing off a little bit.
You're not quite in the office as early as you used to be. You're not making quite as many contacts as you once were. You're not quite as focused as you once were because you think you got it because you're reading three months ago's headlines or six months ago's headlines, but I promise you, ninety to a hundred and twenty days from now, you're gonna read today's headlines.
Make sure that you continue to do the right things. I've also though come to believe and know in my own life because my life is evidence of it, that there's an echo for the positives too. I don't know when that one's coming back, but I know it comes back.
I know for a fact that if I do the right things in my diet and my nutrition, my body and my workouts, my body eventually gives me the result. I know in my finances, if I do the right things, eventually, there's an echo that comes back.
I'll eventually read today's headlines of my life and celebrate them. I know in my relationships, if I invest and do the right things, the loving, the caring, the believing, the actions required, that at some point there's an echo that comes back and that relationship blossoms and flourishes.
I know it in my identity. I know it in my self confidence. If I do the right things, the echo comes back eventually.
The thing to accept is it's going to come back. And if you know this, you begin to win. If you know this, you don't look at today's life and believe you've got it wired.
You don't look at today's life and believe you're relegated to these results forever. You know there's a negative, which is ninety to a hundred and twenty days, and you know that there's a positive, which that echo comes back longer. And the winners keep making the deposits, keep making the investments because they know for a fact for a fact that eventually there's a withdrawal.
One of my favorite parables in the Bible, and I'll probably mess this up because I do that all the time, but I mean this with the right intention, is the parable of the sower, which basically says that if you keep planting seeds, that eventually God will provide a harvest. I've begun to know that that's one of the laws of life, one of the echoes of life is that there's a harvest, but those seeds that you're planting are those phone calls, that diet, that workout, those things you do in your relationship, the investments you make in yourself and your identity.
That if you keep planting those seeds, I e making those deposits, those investments, that eventually God will provide a harvest in your life. But not all the seeds reap a harvest. Sometimes you're gonna plant seeds that don't have great soil or there's thorny soil and the seeds don't grow.
The wind can get it. The rain can get it. The birds could take seeds.
Whatever can take the seeds. But eventually, if you keep planting the seeds, that there's a harvest that you will be rewarded with. And this is a life law.
It's true in every area. There's also a negative harvest. The chickens do come home to roost in every area in our lives, but the negatives come home to roost much sooner than the positives do.
And this is why most people are confused in their lives. They say to me, Ed, I've been doing all the right things in my nutrition and my workout. Why isn't my body better?
Or I've been working on myself for a while now. I'm reading the books. I'm listening to your podcast, and I don't see the results just yet in my life.
And it's confusing because you say to yourself, I'm doing the right things in the moment. But you're still reading yesterday's headlines. And sometimes the positive headlines can be, like I said, a year, eighteen months, two years.
But I promise you, the headlines change eventually. Don't be confused by your current conditions. Remember this.
Your current conditions, your current life does not dictate your future. Your past does not equal your future. Your present does not equal your future.
What equals your future are those deposits and those investments you're making now. There will be an echo. There'll be a harvest.
There is a consequence for every behavior in life. We need to accept this. There's negative consequences if we do the wrong things no matter how good it looks right now, no matter how good your business, your finances, your relationship, your faith, your body looks right now, there are consequences if you slow down.
There are consequences if you're not doing the right things. You are not immune to this. I've done a lot of podcasts on or programs here on ego.
If you begin to believe that you are immune from the echoes of life, you are immune from the positive and negative harvest, that's your ego speaking to you. Yes, miss CEO. Yes, miss perfect.
Yes, mister successful financially right now. Yes, the guy with the high self confidence. Even you will suffer from the echoes and the consequences of life.
The good news is you control that. And if you'll do the right things on a habitual and regular basis, you're assured long term of a positive harvest, of a positive result in your life.
And so I wanna remind you today that you're in control of this. If you're a person of faith like I am, you and your God praying, you planting the seeds and him eventually blessing with the harvest. If you believe in plugging into the quantum field, and and I believe in both of those things, by the way, and getting the energy from the universe that can drive you.
I promise you there's a consequence, and there's a reaction for every action. Just sometimes it comes in a delayed fashion. There will be an echo in your life.
And my final question to you today is this, all of our actions echo into eternity. Long after we're gone, our lives also have an echo.
Listen to me. Your life matters. What you do in your life matters.
You were born to do something great with your life. You were put here for a reason, which is to make a difference in the world, which is to change your own family's tree, which is to do something great with your life. I promise you, you were put here for that in little ways and in big ways.
And there will be an echo for your life. The actions of your life will echo into eternity. The question is, will that echo for you be a whisper into eternity or a roar?
And you get to decide based on the actions you take every day in your life whether the life of you, whether it had a big meaning and it roars into eternity, or whether you play small and you just whisper into eternity.
You get to choose that. I know you were born to have a roaring echo in this world long after you're here. The investments you make in your children and grandchildren into other people, that's part of the roar of your life.
Maybe it's not a jet or a beach house, but it's the good things you do. It's the seeds you sow of goodness and the contributions you make for others, that ripple into other people over and over again.
Far beyond what you could even imagine. That's your legacy. That's your life roaring its echo into eternity.
But if you shrink, if you play small, if you don't take risks, if you don't take those actions, if you don't keep improving, you don't keep growing, then your life will just whisper into eternity and you weren't put here to be a whisper.
You were put here to be a roar into eternity. I know that for you. I'm 100% convinced of what I'm telling you here today.
I believe in you. I love you, and I know you've got what it takes. Just remember this.
Make the deposits. Make the investments. Plant the seeds.
There'll be a harvest that just is gonna be delayed in god's time or in delayed time. Welcome back to the show, everybody. Excited to talk to this gentleman today because his work's fascinated me for a long time.
The reason his work has fascinated me for so long, I went through the string for a while where so many, what I call high performing successful friends of mine, would say, have you read Atomic Habits?
Have you read Atomic Habits? I'm talking about athletes, business people, entertainers, and I'm like, the heck is Atomic Habits? And I finally find out there's this guy, James Clear.
Turns out he's written this book. Like, 5,000,000 people have bought it. And I'm like, well, why have 5,000,000 people read this book on habits?
Because, you know, you're supposed to have them. And then I read it. I'm like, ah, it's not one of these, like, have a habit book.
It's like how your brain works, how to create habits, how to eliminate bad ones, and physically why in your brain you can do these things and why it's so necessary. So I've wanted James on for a long time.
We finally put it together. I'm so grateful to share him with all of you today. So James Clear, welcome to the show, brother.
Hey. Thanks for having me on. Great to talk to you.
Yeah. And don't wanna just talk habits today. I'm gonna talk about some of your productivity hacks as well.
Sure. Your work, Rose, is I I think I'd call it groundbreaking because I don't think anybody's really approached habits the way that you have.
But let's let's back up a little bit just for a second because I I think it's important for people to understand this concept you teach that, you know, everyone's always talking about taking massive action. You take massive action towards what you want. You're like, yeah.
You should do that. But your concept of getting 1% better is much more believable for most people.
And so just address that for a second. Why why 1% better every day, and how does a habit do that? Sure.
So
first of all, I think there's no reason that you can't be really ambitious. Right? Like, I consider myself to be a very ambitious person.
I think it's just that you're oscillating or switching between these two modes. You know? Like, when you're in planning mode, when you're in strategy mode, sure, you can be very ambitious and be very aggressive and, you know, stretching yourself and reaching.
But when it comes time to take action and execute, you have to scale it down to something that you can achieve that day. You know?
Like, the in in one sense, the biggest unit of time you could ever do something is about a single day because then you gotta go to sleep, you know, and then you have to wake up again and do it the next day. So unless you're playing you know, at some point, there's a limit. You can only stay up for forty eight hours or seventy two hours, like, know, and then you break.
So that's the largest possible unit that you could ever do a single thing in. And I think more realistically, most of the time, the truth is, you know, you got about an hour or maybe you got two hours to work on this, and then you got to go move on to something else.
So we don't have big chunks chunks of time available to us. We need to scale things down into pieces that we can actually work on and execute. So the way that I think about it is when making plans, think big.
When making progress, think small. And getting 1% better each day is a way to encourage that. The story that I like to tell, and this is something that I kinda kick atomic habits off with, is the story of the British cycling team.
And, you know, for many years, British cycling was very mediocre. They had never won a Tour de France, which is the premier race in cycling. They had won a single gold medal over, like, a hundred year span, and they brought this new performance coach in named Dave Brailsford, and he had this concept that he called the aggregation of marginal gains, the aggregation of marginal gains.
And the way that he described it was the 1% improvement in nearly everything that we do related to cycling. So they started looking at a bunch of things you would expect a cycling team to focus on. Like, they put slightly lighter tires on the bike or they designed, like, an ergonomic seat for the riders.
They had the riders wear a little feedback sensor, little chip to see how each individual responded to training, then they would adjust the practice schedule. But then they started doing, like, these little 1% changes, these small improvements that nobody else was really thinking about. Like, they hired a surgeon to come in and teach the riders how to wash their hands to reduce the risk of catching a cold or getting the flu.
They have this big trailer, like a semi trailer that carries a lot of bikes in it to major events, and they painted the inside of that truck trailer white so that they could spot little bits of dirt and dust that might get in the gears and degrade the performance of the bikes. They had two different types of fabrics. They've got, like, indoor racing suits and outdoor racing suits.
And, uh, they tested those fabrics in a wind tunnel, and they found out that the indoor fabric was lighter and more aerodynamic. So they asked all of their riders to wear that fabric. They even had all their, uh, different riders test, you know, like a bunch of like, maybe a dozen different types of pillows, and then they see which one led to the best night's sleep for each person.
And then once they figured that out, they brought that on the road with them to hotels for the Tour de France and so on. And, you know, Brailsford said something like, if we can actually do this, right, if we actually make all these 1% improvements related to cycling, then I think we can win a Tour de France within five years.
He ended up being wrong. Uh, they won the Tour de France in three years, and then they repeated again the fourth year with a different rider. And then after one year break, they won three more in a row.
So after having never won for, like, a hundred and ten years, you know, they win five of the next six. And I like to use that story as an introduction to this idea of getting a little bit better, making these 1% improvements for a couple reasons.
The first is it shows you that excellence a lot of the time, maybe we could even say most of the time, is not actually about radical change. It's about a commitment to accruing small improvements day in and day out.
Secondly, and I think this is also crucial, it encourages you to focus on trajectory rather than position. Right?
There's a lot of discussion about position in life. How much money is in the bank account? What is the number on the scale?
What is the current stock price? What are the quarterly earnings? There's all this measurement around our current position.
But what getting 1% better each day encourages is to focus on your trajectory instead. Am I getting better?
Is it the arrow pointed up into the right, or have we flatlined? Am I getting one percent better or 1% worse? Because if you're on a good trajectory, all you need is time.
Right? If you have good habits, time becomes your ally. You just need to let time work for you.
But if you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy. And every day that clicks by, you kinda dig the hole a little bit deeper. And so it's very much at the core.
It's about encouraging you to focus on trajectory rather than position. How did you get the 37.78 times better?
Like, where'd that ratio number come from? Yeah. Yeah.
It's just it's just math. Right? So if you get 1% better each day for a year, so 1.01 to the three hundred and sixty fifth power, then it gets 37 times better by the end of the year.
If you get one percent worse, point nine nine to the three hundred and sixty fifth power, then you drive yourself almost all the way down to zero. Zero.
Now, you know, look, real life is not exactly like a mathematical equation. Right?
Your habits are not exactly like this this formula, but I do think that it highlights an important concept, which is the difference between making a choice that's 1% better or 1% worse on any given day is relatively insignificant.
Like, it's very easy to dismiss, and this is, think, one of the things that makes it underappreciated or underestimated. You know, like, what is the difference between eating a burger and fries for lunch today or eating a salad or, you know, going to the gym for thirty minutes or not?
Well, on any given day, not a whole lot. You know? Your body looks the same in the mirror at the end of the night.
Scale hasn't really changed. It's only two or five or ten years later that you turn around, and you're like, oh, you know, those daily choices really do add up. And I think you see this pattern again and again throughout life.
Like take knowledge, for example. The person who always reads for an extra ten minutes each day.
Well, look, reading for ten minutes a day does not make you a genius. Right? It's very easy to dismiss.
But the person who always does that over five or ten or twenty years, yeah, really meaningful difference in wisdom and insight. Productivity is the same way. You know, like the person who gets one extra task done each day.
Doing one extra thing does not make you an all star, but again, over a ten or twenty or thirty year career, that can be a really meaningful difference in output. So this pattern shows up again and again. What starts out small, relatively easy to dismiss,
compounds or turns into something much more significant over time. The biggest word, bro. I don't think most people take into account you and I are both college baseball players, good ones, but neither one of us were, you know, surefire first round draft pick Major League players.
And I think most people don't take into account in their life, the compound effect. I don't think they understand it in money. I don't think they understand it in their bodies Mhmm.
Both positive and negative. I don't think they understand their identity or in just in inhabits. The compound effect in life of allowing small things to stack up over time has a multiplier effect.
And one of the things that I feel like in your work and by the way, your work is I'm all we're we're a few minutes in here, and I'm like, this is so good. And the reason is is, one, I believe most people believe they can get 1% better every day. I don't think most people believe that they can completely transform everything in one big leap.
I think there's a multiplier, though. Do you agree that between doing the right things 1% or just better habitually every single day, not only you actually making deposits of doing things correctly or better, but there's a part of your identity that starts to change over time about how you view yourself that I am that guy who doesn't eat the hamburger and fries when he can choose to eat the other one.
And you stack those
choices and behaviors up over time, and you start sort of believing maybe you deserve something that you didn't deserve prior. Isn't there a factor of that, don't you think as well? This is a a huge part of kind of my philosophy in book, this idea of what I call identity based habits.
But, essentially, the concept is and this I think this is the real reason that habits matter. The the surface level reason that habits matter is they help you be more productive. They help you make more money.
They help you lose weight and get fit. And look. Habits can do all those things, and that's great.
But I think the deeper reason that they matter is that every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. And so when you perform these small habits, when you take these little actions, you're casting votes for a certain aspect of your story or a certain element of your identity.
In a sense, every time you perform a habit, that's how you, like, embody that aspect of your identity. So, you know, when you make your bed in the morning, you embody the identity of someone who's clean and organized. Or if you write one sentence, you embody the identity of someone who is a writer.
And this is why it can be valuable, you know, even to, like, do one push up. It's like, no, that does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And eventually, as you build up evidence of that story, as you start to cast more votes for that identity, you have, like, actual proof to believe this.
Right? This is I think this is a little bit different than you'll often hear something like fake it till you make it. And I don't necessarily have anything wrong with fake it till you make it.
It's asking you to believe something positive about yourself, but it's asking you to believe something positive without having evidence for it. And we have a word for beliefs that don't have evidence.
We call that delusion. Right? Like, at some point, your brain doesn't like this mismatch between what you say you are and what you're actually doing.
And so my argument is to let the behavior lead the way, to start by meditating for one minute or doing one push up or writing one sentence and letting that be undeniable proof that in that moment you were a meditator or an athlete or a writer or whatever it is. And, ultimately,
I think this is the real value that habits provide, which is they reinforce your desired identity. Boy, this is so good, brother. So good.
I don't know why I'm just meeting you now because our our overall belief system about change is is so very, very similar. And, you know, I wanna we're gonna talk a bit about how to actually begin to establish habits.
But before we do that, I wanna talk about the concept of establishing one because you said something about the one push up. Reading or listening to something you're talking about about the guy who would go to the gym for just five minutes and work out and leave. And the you said something about this casting the vote for who you wanna be or who you're going to be.
That was powerful. Right? But you're saying before a habit can be and I don't wanna quote you incorrectly, but I want you to elaborate on it.
Because this is profound to me. I mean, it's obvious, but if you if you don't step back and get away from it and look at it, you just really don't realize the truth of it. Before a habit can be improved, it has to actually be established.
Mhmm. And I think what happens is you tell me what you think. Beginning of the year, I'm gonna lose 50 pounds.
I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna eat five minutes. It's I'm gonna I'm gonna starve myself to 500 calories.
So it's not a 1% improvement. Or I wanna get up earlier. I'm gonna get up two hours earlier starting tomorrow instead of get up fifteen minutes earlier.
Mhmm. Right? Get get up a minute earlier.
So talk about it from a just the the concept for one to just they can take control of their life right now by just the establishment of a habit.
Right or or right?
Yeah. Definitely right. I so one of the concepts I talk about in the book is this, uh, one of the strategies is this idea of what I call the two minute rule, where I encourage people to build a habit that takes two minutes or less to do.
So you take whatever you're trying to do, read 30 books a year, becomes read one page, or do yoga four days a week, becomes take out my yoga mat. And sometimes when I mention that idea, people resist a little bit because they're like, okay, buddy. You know, I know the real goal isn't just to take my yoga mat out.
I know I'm actually trying to do the workout. So if this is some kind of mental trick, then, like, why would I fall for it, basically? Well, I tell the story of of this guy, Mitch, that you mentioned.
This guy who I met I talk about him in Atomic Habits. He went to the gym. He's lost over a 100 pounds, kept it off for more than a decade.
And when he first started going to the gym, he wouldn't stay for five longer than five minutes. He had this little rule. He had to leave after five minutes.
So he'd get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, drive home. And it sounds ridiculous. Right?
It sounds silly. You're like, obviously, he's not gonna get the guy the results that he wants. But if you take a step back, you realize that he was mastering the art of showing up.
Right? He was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week even if it was only for five minutes. And this gets us to that deeper truth about habits that you just mentioned, this idea that a habit must be established before it can be improved.
It has to become the standard in your life before you can optimize it and scale it up into something more. And, you know, I don't know why we do this. Like, we get very all or nothing about our habits.
We're like, we're so focused on finding the perfect business idea or the best workout program or the ideal diet plan that we spend all our time theorizing and researching and looking for a better way. And instead, if we could just master the art of showing up, even if in the beginning it was less than what you had hoped to do, you're establishing a foothold.
You're building some small progress that you can advance off of. And it reminds me of Ed Latimore has that great quote where he says, the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door. And, man, there are a lot of things in life that are like that.
You know? Like, the the hardest part is getting started. The hardest part is establishing the routine even if it's a lower level baseline than what you ultimately hope to achieve.
But the reality is if you can't become the type of person who masters the art of showing up, even if it's just for five minutes,
then it doesn't matter how good the plan is. It doesn't matter how great your theory is. And so I think the two minute rule pushes back on that perfectionist tendency a little bit and just encourages you to master the art of showing up.
One of the things that popped up when you were talking earlier is that low point in your life, I I feel like people can talk to you until they're blue in the face, like, get up, get going, do the thing that you want, you know, make you know, do the thing that you need to do. Yeah.
What did you find in you that actually brought you out of that? Right? Because I I mean, I may be wrong, but I don't think it was the people talking to you, was it?
No. It was it was just starting to take the steps. It was like and this whole thing about one more is a real thing.
It was just like, look, here's what I'm gonna do. In spite of how I feel, I'm gonna operate out of what I know I'm supposed to do, not how I feel.
I'm gonna finally here's where I was. I was a very average person. Here's why I was average.
How I felt is how I acted. That's how most people are. They feel great.
They do great. They feel bad. They lay around.
And in that moment, I'm like, I don't feel good. I've had a pattern of not feeling good. If I'm gonna wait around till I feel good to take some steps, this ain't gonna happen.
But what if maybe if I take these steps, then I'll feel good. And so slowly but surely, I'm like, I'm just gonna make these contacts. I'm gonna make these calls.
I'm gonna go see these people. And I just started taking steps. It's not always what you do on the days you're motivated that separates you, because everyone does well today.
It's what do you do on the days you're not motivated. And so for me, it was like, I'm going to take steps towards my potential even though I don't feel like it every day.
You go, well, that's easy to say. Not hard to do. Actually, it's not that hard to do.
You just have to do it. You have to actually get up, get dressed, put your clothes on, and take steps towards it. And then what I would do is I'd like little promises.
So I was just a mess. Like, I had no self confidence because I had a reputation with me of not doing stuff I said I was gonna do. So I started to be, what how can I rig the game so I do what I say?
This sounds really stupid. I'm gonna tell you what I did. I'm go take you back to when I'm 23 years old.
I'm gonna set my clothes out the night before for the next day. Simple thing I don't have to think about in the morning, something I can control doing. I'm going to make my bed in the morning.
I'm going to get up at 6AM. I'm going to do some meditation and prayer when I wake up, and I'm going to go to the gym. And I actually started setting my clothes up, getting up at 6AM, stuff I could do.
I said my prayers and my meditation. Right? I did the things I said I was going to do.
And all of a sudden, now when I said I'm gonna make 10 calls, I'm like, I could do that. Then when I said, I'm gonna make a thousand bucks this week, I could do that. $10,000 this week, $10,000 this day.
So it started with small stuff when I didn't feel like it, and I rigged the game on stuff I could completely control.
Yeah. I that's amazing because it's a lot of people think it's, you know, things turn on immediately for them. You know, they see you who you are today, not not the I laid my clothes out guy.
Oh, yeah. And I see you as the guy that you are today, which is which is the hard part for most people to see because they It's inspiring. It's the before and after.
I'll tell you one more thing. We can go a couple more minutes. I'll you the the one thing.
I have a you don't know this story, but, like, I wanted to look rich when I wasn't.
And so I wanted I thought no one's gonna take me seriously. This is a true story, brother.
K? They're gonna laugh already, My family.
I wanted to drive a Mercedes. I thought no one's gonna take me serious in my business so I'm not driving a Benz. So there was this thing called a penny saver back in the day.
It'll be like a glorified Craigslist now. And I'm looking for convertible Mercedes. So true, dude.
You don't even believe this. And you know what this is, but all of a sudden, it's $60, $60, $60. It says Mercedes 600 SL, parentheses, kinda.
I'm like, tell me more. And what it was was a Chrysler LeBaron Oh, hell yeah.
Kit car with a Mercedes body on it. So kit cars have welded other car bodies. This thing was two feet too long.
Interior was a LeBaron. You know, Eric, the heat blew constantly. This gets way better.
I drive down to Dana Point. I meet this lady, and I say, tell me about this kid car.
She's like, look. It's $5,000, and it's wonderful.
Only about half the people won't know it's real. And I'm like, I'll give you $4. She goes, I'll take it.
So she takes the $4 from me, and she goes, there's one catch I didn't tell you. I swear to you, brother, this is true. She goes, um, it's actually not welded on there.
I said, what do you mean? She goes I said, how's the kit on the car? She goes, it's, uh, Velcroed.
And I go, what did you just say? Say that again because it's already got my she goes, it's Velcroed on there, but most of the car stays together pretty good. I said, the machine I'm gonna drive 60 miles an hour is Velcroed together.
She goes, you don't have to worry when you're driving fast. She goes, but when you drive up to a stoplight, don't stop too suddenly because the front left headlight will fly out into the intersection.
And, dude, more than a I have a good social media following. If there was social back in the day, I would be the most viral MFer of all time because more than a 100 times in my life, in this dude's life, that headlight went out in the intersection. I had to get out of that car, stop the four way traffic, grab my headlight.
You mentioned people watching. What the hell is this dude doing? He's a Velcro.
Would grab my the Velcro's hanging out. I would go grab my headlight, run back to my car, Velcro that sucker back on, and jump back in the car. But about 30 of the times, I was so rattled, I shut the door too hard, and it would fall off.
And people are honking, trying to make their left turn. I'm trying to put my door back on the car. Dude, I swear to god, and I drove that car for four years.
I made $770,000 one year driving that car. I swear to you.
And it got stolen the fourth year. It got stolen. And the dude that stole the car got one block from our house and just left the car with the keys in it because I didn't know what it was.
I swear to you. I got pulled over in that car by the cops because they thought it was stolen and let's all because it was, like, wrong license plates. So I went from a Velcroed Mercedes Dude.
To a Global Express jet in a number of a a decade or two doing the stuff that's in my book. I swear to you, that is a 100 babe, is that a 100% true?
Yeah. Yeah. She's like, yeah.
She had to drive That might be one of the most incredible. Yeah. Oh, you said the wife was a good wife to go get the damn deal.
And then at the same time, man, we were so broke. We were so broke. I bought her a Mustang when her other car got repossessed, and the doors didn't work.
So she had to get go through her trunk to get to the front seat. So here's this power couple you see on Instagram. I'm driving a Velcroed car.
Her car, everywhere she goes, she has to climb through the trunk and crawl into the driver's seat.
Is that awesome? Dude, that is so awesome. That's the truth.
See, this is what we're here for, guys. This is the real Ed Mylett. This the real story.
This is this is this helps everybody understand that, look. Doesn't matter where you're at right now. Go buy a Velcro Mercedes because that's a starting point.
It doesn't matter.
For someone listening to this, talk about routine because if you want everyone wants to be free. Yeah. One of the challenges, they act free before they are.
Yeah. You know I mean? Like, you you there's a certain amount of disciplines and routine and habits and rituals you gotta have that could get you free at one point.
Talk about that for a second. Yeah. I'm gonna say honestly, man, you know, I I came to the realization one day, and again, love my biological father, you know, much respect much respect for the person that raised me.
But I realized at some point, when I looked at my family's history, I was like, some things I don't want.
There's some things I want, but there's some things I don't want. And then I I remember having to say one day to myself, like, yo, you are your father's child. Like, yo, even though you didn't he didn't raise you, even though in the beginning you guys had, you know, whatever little stuff y'all need to get through, eat.
Don't lie. You are lazy at times.
You know what I'm saying? Like, eat, you are super social, and you'd rather talk than work.
You know what I'm saying? I just had to grow up one day and just be real with myself, and just say, eat. The only way you're gonna be successful is you gotta discipline yourself.
Yeah. You know, when you look at when you look at a horse, I'm talking about a thoroughbred, it still needs that what is that thing called that they put on it?
I'm talking about it. It it still need he needs that without the you know, you can't you you you gotta control him. You know, he got a lot of juice, got a lot of energy he can go for, but you you gotta you gotta hone that.
Yeah. And so I realized, like, yo, E, you'd sleep in. You'd play video game.
Don't lie to yourself. You you are powerful. Yeah.
But you have some vices. Yes. And you have some vices that'll take you down a crazy road.
Like, you are your father. You are your grandfather. You are your mother.
You are your grandmother. Like, it's real. And so I started saying, okay, E, you gotta discipline yourself.
And this is for me. This ain't for everybody. I started getting up at 03:00 in the morning.
It was like, yo, you're have to get up a little bit earlier because you didn't finish school. You didn't take care of your business. So you can't get up the same time another man who gets up, who handle his business.
So you need to get up at three. If you're gonna catch the grates, you gotta get up at three. You gotta go to bed earlier.
This is why I said, I never drank or smoked because the men in my life who did it were extremists. I had an uncle who died cirrhosis of the liver.
You know, I had other uncles who drank, and and my father, bless his heart, but he was strung out on drugs for about fourteen years. And I was just like, yo, eat. You can see that they don't know how to do it casually.
Like, they ain't social drinkers. Like, they ain't social on something. They taking it to a whole another level.
And so for me, it was like, E, you gotta discipline yourself. You're not gonna die if you never know what alcohol tastes like, but if you taste it, you might have the same experience they had. So you just gotta discipline yourself.
You know, I do vegan most of the time. You know what I'm saying? And I tell people all the time, I love fried chicken.
I love macaroni and cheese. I love a lot of dessert. But in my family, it's diabetes.
So it's like, yo, Eve, if you do what they do, then you're get the results they got. So you yeah. Chicken is good, and macaroni cheese, the way my grandma make it is great.
And, yes, the pound cake is phenomenal, but if you wanna be with Dee Dee for the next thirty, forty years, you wanna be able to walk, know what I'm saying? You don't wanna be on the cruise.
I was just on a cruise, and they a couple people, you know, was on the motor scooter, you know what I'm saying? People with the canes and the walkers, and I'm not mad at them, but I'm like, I don't want that. I wanna be able to walk at 60 Yes.
At 70. I wanna be independent at 80 if I can be, so I'm gonna have to make some sacrifices now for
the long run. I would drink pop every day if I could. But Is everybody hearing this, though?
Like, I mean, listen. All of us that wanna win. Like, Dirty said, like, I gotta get up at 03:00 in morning if I'm gonna catch the greats because I started with some deficiency.
Absolutely. Successful people are very self aware.
Yep. Like, they don't BS themselves. Yep.
Right? Like, I have laziness too. Absolutely.
I love laying around. Yep. I love sleep.
Yeah. I No. But before I wouldn't have got to sleep here if I if I was just me.
I had to get these rituals and habits and disciplines, and people think sometimes they listen to me, they were so intense. These these dudes are freaks.
Yeah. I'm not a freak. No.
I I don't But you know why they say that? Because it makes it easier for them to say, I I can't do it if they freaks, then I can't do it. That's their out.
You're exactly right. And I'm not gonna give you that out. Neither are you.
Like, I'm lazy. I gotta get up early. I gotta get up because if I don't get up by, like I get up at 04:35, but if I don't get up by then, I will be in bed at 08:00.
I have to get up. I have to move my body. So I'm with you a 100%.
Alright. Welcome back to the show, everybody. So grateful you decided to join me again here this week, and I have some special stuff for you.
I, um, I've been asked a lot. What are some of the things on peak performance when you work with, you know, elite performers? I've been blessed that over the last thirty years, I've worked with some of the top athletes in the world, CEOs, political figures, and and entertainers as well.
And what are some of the things that you work with with them that you could teach us on the show and also that you've learned from them through, you know, friendships and coaching them. So I'm gonna just share two this week with you because I think they're major.
And even if you think you're familiar with these two topics, hang in there with me this week because I'm gonna reinforce it on a much deeper level and explain to you that there's levels to this game of success and frankly of life. So the two things we're gonna cover this week is repetitions, doing more repetitions.
Okay? And number two seems uncorrelated, but we're actually gonna talk about deadlines and having deadlines in your life.
It's two of the biggest things that I work on with the top performers, um, behind the scenes that I coach. And so we're gonna get out of week.
Before I do it, my team keeps telling me to remind you all of this, that to get on my email list, if you go to edmylett.com, and I think it says join here, just put your email in there. I have nothing to sell you.
There's not gonna be a funnel you're gonna fall into. I just wanna be able to communicate with you regularly. We're gonna start sending out a newsletter about the shows that come out before they come out, and you'll get early access.
So go to edmylett.com and submit your email there, and you'll be grateful that you did. Okay.
Now let's get into it. So this whole success thing. The difference between winning and losing is so small, it's almost too scary to talk about.
It truly is. And the reason that people don't talk about it too much is they don't really know what it is. There's a lot of people, unfortunately, that are now in the the coaching business or personal development that have really never won themselves outside of telling you how to win.
And so a lot of their information, um, when I listen to it or the successful people that I coach listen to are like, what are they talking about? And so I wanna give you two things that I know definitively work, and and this is from my own life and from the lives of the people that I work with. And in a minute, I'm gonna give you a treat.
This has been such a passionate topic for me and so fresh on my mind. As I was preparing for today's show yesterday, I was working doing some other recording for something else working, and this concept came up to me and I recorded it out in my backyard looking at the ocean, and I'm going to throw to that clip in a minute, it's about seven minutes long, because as I was doing it in the moment, you're at that moment, you're like, hey.
I'm gonna do this right now because I know later it won't be as good or as fresh. And so I recorded something for all of you yesterday that's gonna be a part of today's podcast. And so if you're on YouTube, it'd be cool.
You'll get a chance to see a different view. There's an ocean in the background. If you're on audio, that's okay too.
It's gonna be still the same information that the people on YouTube are gonna get. And but here we go.
So number one thing is repetitions. I think most people don't really have a concept of how many practice repetitions it takes to get great at something. And in the clip I'm gonna show you in a minute, you're gonna understand exactly what I'm talking about, why reps matter, and there are levels to this stuff.
Let me give you an example of things that would probably blow your mind. I think you all probably know who Steph Curry is. Steph is gonna be a hall of fame, probably top 10 NBA player of all time.
Some people think he's the best player of all time, but he's certainly known as the best shooter of all time in the history of the NBA. Went to Davidson College. This is not a guy that went to a big time school.
He was not heavily recruited. And even out of college, he was small, so a lot of people wasn't sure whether or not he was gonna make a great NBA player. And his dad, Dell Curry, was an NBA player.
And even with having that pedigree, people doubted this kid. Now he's the greatest shooter, and it's not even arguable, of all time in the history of the NBA. But why is that?
Because a lot of guys in the NBA are great shooters. A lot of them have a talent for it. A lot of them practice a lot too.
Right? Practice and doing repetitions. You don't get to the NBA with a lot of repetitions.
But even in the NBA, there are levels to this game. Listen to this. To this day, Steph Curry takes 500 practice shots a day.
500. That's 3,500 a week, 14,000 a month, a 168,000 practice shots a year, and now it's almost 2,800,000 practice shots in his career.
Think about that just for a second. Now wouldn't it be easy for Steph Curry to go, I already know how to shoot.
I've already made a lot of shots in my life. What's the point of me doing more and more of this? It's monotonous.
I'm already good at it. It's just routine. And that's what you think with your sales presentation.
That's what you think with your phone calls. That's what you think about everything in your life. And too many of you have set a standard for yourself that's just as good as you already are.
But Steph Curry knows that the more and more he does this reflexively, then he can operate under pressure. Then he can operate when he's fatigued. It's one thing to shoot shots.
I was listening to his video of another great shooter named Ray Allen, and he said, man, I didn't just jump and shoot, because in a normal game I'm running up and down the floor.
He goes, I watch a lot of guys do practice shots, they barely get their feet off the floor an inch or two. I take a full shot jump just as high on my practice shot as I do on a game shot, because I'm gonna be that much higher off the ground when I shoot. So a lot of guys practice.
They make their 100 practice shots, but it's not at full speed. It's not under the same amount of pressure. Steph Curry does 500 a day, and he's already the greatest.
He's already made millions of shots, and he keeps doing more of it, because there's levels to greatness. Just get this straight.
Greatness always rises to the top. If you feel under recognized right now, underappreciated at your job, just realize this. If you're great, they eventually find you.
Success eventually finds you. If you wanna be a millionaire in whatever your business is, you have to be outstanding at it. You can't be just the best person in your office or in your town.
You've got to be the best in the industry. And the best is not more talented. The best does more reps, repetitions.
Tiger Woods was known to hit around 1,000 golf balls per day in his prime. He was obsessed with practicing.
Would He practice over ten hours a day on the practice range. He would practice up to ten hours a day, and he was already Tiger Woods. Think about this just for a second.
A thousand shots a day. He'd say a thousand contacts a day. He was already Tiger Woods.
He'd already won all these golf tournaments. He was already known as the one or two best players in the world, but there's levels to this game. That's how he dominated.
See, it's one thing to win for a year or two years, but to dominate for a decade. Do you know that I know a lot of people that were successful in business for a year or two or three that are now broke, or that used to be wealthy and not anymore?
Because when they got to a decent level, they stopped refining their game. They stopped doing the reps. Listen to me, please.
Most of you that even have some momentum right now, you take for granted the game. Do you know how many reps and hours I put in to do a podcast like this? I'm gonna talk about it when the when the video comes back to me.
I've done thousands of hours on camera, thousands of hours on stage, and I still practice and practice and practice because I know there's levels to this game. Let me tell you a fascinating story. About four years ago, a very I'll just tell you, Adele bought a home where I lived, and she lived kind of across the fairway at this golf course from me.
And I didn't know that she had bought the house. And I woke up one night, it was like 02:00 in the morning, and I'm hearing all this music. It was blaring across the fairway into my backyard, and I was really upset.
I'm like, I gotta sleep. Right? So I go into the backyard, and I listen for a few minutes and then it was not great music.
It was karaoke. And I'm like, I'm not gonna listen to this for the next two or three hours. I gotta sleep.
And so I actually got dressed and I started to drive over to her house, not knowing that it was her house yet because she had just moved in. In fact, it was her birthday. And all of a sudden, the music changed.
And, like, a voice of an angel started singing. I mean, like, of an angel, and it was Adele.
And I start listening to this and I stop. I go, I'm about to get a 30 concert from Adele in my own backyard. It was the coolest thing ever.
And I just listened to this beautiful voice, and I was so glad I didn't go over and ask him to stop. And the next morning at breakfast, I saw her there, and I said, I just gotta tell you something. I was almost in your backyard.
She goes, well, actually, one of the other neighbors did come over. And I said, it was just so great to hear your voice. And I said, I'm just curious, like, how often do you practice?
Let me tell you what she told me. I wanted to make sure I wrote this down. She said, well, I'm about to do a Vegas residency soon, and me and my team will put in over twenty four hundred hours of reps and practice before we have the first show.
And she said, I I'll probably sing the average song there. I wrote it down here. At least a hundred hours each probably.
She's already Adele. She's already refining her craft because she knows under pressure when the crowd's big or she's not feeling well or she's tired, she still wants to be at her best.
See, most people just have a standard of I wanna get pretty good, and then on their good day, they're good. But how are you on your bad day? How are you when you're sick?
How are you when you're tired? How are you when you're stressed? How are you when you've had a fight with your spouse?
How are you when it's a really big appointment or an important one? And so I don't know. Tiger Woods does it.
Steph Curry does it. Adele does it. You could argue these are three of the GOATs of all time in their industry, and I could keep naming people for you if you want.
But hopefully, sets the stage for repetitions. Whatever you think is enough, it's not. You gotta do more.
And I address more in this video. I'm a throw it to the video in my backyard I recorded yesterday because I can't do it this well again. So here we go.
Listen to this. So this week, we're gonna talk about two things, repetition and deadlines.
And these have been two things in, you know, in my career that have become benchmarks of success that are kinda secrets. I was speaking this weekend in in Dallas for a friend of mine, Kent Clothier.
And in the green room, there were several people in there, very complimentary that, you know, I was their, you know, best speaker they've seen in their life and nice things. And the guy said to me, he said, hey, man. Like, you know, and I've watched you I've come to this group, this particular group that I spoke to.
I've spoken to them about every three years. He brings me in and it's a different message over the three years.
Actually, completely different. Six years ago, three years ago, and then this year. And he said, like, he goes, like, yeah.
I just feel like you're getting better and better, which is a great compliment to hear. I was you know, love hearing that. I don't know if it's true or not, but I love hearing it.
And I said, one of the things, man, is I'm crazy about getting my rep my reps in my repetition. One of the reasons I do speak so much is it keeps me sharp and I keep getting better. You do something enough times over and over and over again.
If you're smart, you're learning from each experience. You're taking notes, what worked, what didn't, what setup didn't work, what conclusion didn't, how can I tie it down different?
Maybe it's the sequencing. Maybe something I think is gonna work on stage doesn't work at all. But I said, I only know this because I've done hundreds, if not thousands of reps on stage.
And the reason that I still speak, people say to me often, like, why do you still travel so much and speak? I'm paid when I do it, but it's certainly not something that I need to be doing. I really do it, a, because I it's not work to me and I feel like I'm making a difference when I do it, and I'm having a sense of contribution.
The second reason is, and I talk oftentimes about this with a lot of my comedian friends, I don't wanna lose my edge. I wanna keep expanding and keep growing. And the more speaking I do, the better I get as long as I'm taking lessons every time I do it.
Well, this is true for you in your craft. You've gotta do more reps, not only because you're gonna have a higher propensity of getting more accounts, more clients, more whatever, but you're going to get better.
Most people aren't doing enough reps at whatever their chosen craft is. My son asked me all the time in golf, dad, what do you think I'm not doing that I need to? More reps.
More reps. More reps. And I know people will tell you often in personal development, well, more isn't always better.
Well, that's probably true to some extent in some things, but overall, more is better. And it's not just better because you're putting more out there with more chances to win, but you are getting better.
And anybody that you've ever seen in your life, if you watch them over one year, three years, five years, they get better. You gotta get great. The people that get wealthy in this world, they get great at what they do.
Whatever they do, they're great. And so you gotta do more reps. I wanna challenge you this week.
More contacts, more calls, more Zooms, more whatever it is that you do, and then from each experience, deduce what worked, what didn't, and expand and improve from it.
This is really important. Like, I think many of you have seen me speak on stage, for example, and you think, man, this is like, you know, if you think I'm decent at it, my gosh, like, he just walks out there and does it. Well, I don't.
I've just walked out there and done it thousands of times. And when I do it, I am I reflect afterwards. I have some introspection.
What what did I enjoy about it? What didn't I enjoy? There are things that I regularly think, oh, the crowd's gonna love this one, and then they don't, or it doesn't hit or the sequence is wrong.
My stand up friends, when you watch a stand up special on, Netflix, for example, or, you know, Amazon, My friends have put those specials on whether it's Sebastian Maniscalco or Jeff Foxworthy or Nikki Glaser or Whitney Cummings or whatever, Nate Bergazzi, whatever comedian you see. You understand they've been doing that routine for several years before they film the special.
Oftentimes, it's usually about two years in between specials and they start with new content. Two years, they've told every one of those jokes with a different pause, a different nuance, a different setup to get it so dialed in.
And these are the best in the world, and they won't record it for two years. Sometime Rogan just went, I think, four years in between specials, and that and it's only for an hour of content.
They wanna get the reps in, the reps in, the reps in under different conditions, different circumstances, circumstances, like small crowds, big crowds, and in your case, friendly clients, not so friendly clients. Like, over and over and over, then you get great.
Then it's almost automatic, and then you become more impactful. So more reps at whatever you do. The second thing is deadlines.
I'm kind of a psycho about it. And not enough people have deadlines on what they wanna get done. For example, I'm you many of you know I'm developing the houses on my island.
And one of the mistakes I made is I did not give them a deadline when they were gonna be finished. So they're just getting done whenever they do. And not only is it taking longer than it needs to take, they're missing the rhythm of success.
Successful people have a pace, an urgency, a speed to them that's unnoticed by the naked eye, but it's critical. And the only way that you find that pace is if everything has a deadline.
So if you're gonna make 10 contacts today, by what time? Not just 10 contacts. Don't lollygag the 10 throughout the day.
By what time? If you've got a money goal for the month, by what date? If you've got a weight loss goal, by what date?
What specific amount of weight. About everything I have has a deadline to it. This video that I'm recording right now, I had a deadline set for when it had to be recorded by for me, and it's moved me toward you know what started to happen?
I knew the deadline was coming. My mind started working on what I wanted to say. I started processing the information sooner.
I knew it was coming, and so I've worked on this, like, three or four times over the last three or four days as opposed to, oh, I'll just wing it. Let me knock out a video. So deadlines create urgency.
They create the right pace, but they also trigger your subconscious mind, particularly your unconscious mind, starts to go to work on whatever it is you're going to do when a deadline's attached to it, and it doesn't do that if there's no deadline. So let's just say, for example, I had a presentation I wanted to have completed by.
If I don't set a deadline to it, my it does not go to the unconscious file to start working on it. But when I go, have to have that presentation ready by Thursday at 3PM. This clock starts ticking in your unconscious and now you begin to create all and pull from all the resources of your unconscious and subconscious mind to start working on that presentation even though you may not have consciously started working on it.
Because there's a deadline attached, the big parts of your brain go to work on something. Isn't that powerful?
Lot of data tells us this lately. By simply attaching a deadline, your subconscious and unconscious mind starts to go to work on making that thing great even though you haven't consciously worked on it.
And you rob yourself from all the benefits of memory, of cadence, of pulling those files up, of references, all the power of your spirit and your being. You rob yourself of all of that simply because there's no deadline attached because it doesn't move the file up in your subconscious mind to go to work on it.
I don't exactly understand how that works, but I know that it does. You know that it does too. You ever have to get up really early in the morning beyond your normal time?
You even realize that how isn't it more difficult to sleep those nights because your mind's like, gotta get up at four. I gotta get up at four. It's going to work on getting up, which isn't good for your sleep because there's a deadline set on it.
The deadline makes you more productive, gives you the speed and urgency that you need to get something done. So now you're in the rhythm and pace of success, but that's the that's the other part.
The invisible part is your mind's going to work on making it great even though you consciously have them. Alright, everybody. Repetitions and deadline this week.
Alright. So there you have it. So listen, I wanted to play that for you because I wanted you to have some understanding.
And the other thing about repetitions, and then I'm gonna talk about the mind because I use some terms there, subconscious and unconscious mind, and I wanna make some distinctions for you about those two things because they are slightly different in my opinion. But one thing about reps, just like for this podcast, for example, you guys, you know, I could mail in these podcasts when I do them.
And I think my producer will tell you that, you know, most people have a producer that writes everything for them, and I write every one of these shows. All of the content you're seeing here today did not come from a producer, came from me. Um, I don't have somebody write my scripts.
Um, when I have someone come on the podcast, I do have a producer do a cursory review, but I try my best every time to put two to three hours into every single podcast, sometimes five and seven hours when I'm interviewing somebody.
I'll watch other interviews of theirs. I'll read the book if I have the time to do it. You know, I've been a guest on hundreds of podcasts and it's blown me away over the years, the discrepancy in preparation level.
And so I think when you see somebody do something, whether they're speaking on stage or they're great at sales or they close, well, you know, they're persuasive or a podcast like this, you think, well, they're probably pretty natural at it. Well, yeah, there's three stages of progress in life.
I've covered this on a podcast a long time ago. But the three stages are the awkward stage. Awkward is where you just knew at something and you're terrible at it.
Right? You're just not any good at it because you're new at it. And when you do enough repetitions, you move from awkward to what I call mechanical.
And it's kind of where you kind of know the words, you know the structure, it's pretty darn good, but it's still kind of, you know, hit and miss. It looks a little machinist.
It looks a little rehearsed. It doesn't seem what is step three?
The natural stage. And the natural stage is it just looks like these people were born to do it. It's easy for them.
They roll out of bed and it's a cakewalk. And then there's levels to natural. See, a great high school shooter looks pretty natural when you go to high school and go, well, that kid's the best kid.
Then when you go to division one college, that's the best kid. And then when you go to the NBA, they can all have a natural shot, and then there's Steph Curry. And I know from golf, having a son who's a professional golfer, know, you go to an average golf tournament, you can find the two or three kids who look a little bit awkward.
Or maybe they have a mechanical golf swing. And then there's the two or three that are natural. And you go, that's a natural.
Well, I you just got more reps and more productive reps, more correct reps. And then even from there, then there's Tiger Woods. And that's a whole different level from the best of all time.
And so these reps matter. I just wanna challenge you to be doing more of it. By the way, it makes you more comfortable.
It takes away your nervousness. You operate well under pressure. We always operate reflexively to our habits under pressure.
And if you haven't practiced, I what's incredible to me is that people just lose the stomach for it. And here's why. It's boring.
It's monotonous unless you're trying to learn. When I get off stage, you guys, anytime you see me speak, one thing I won't that you wouldn't see is I immediately go through it's borderline self loathing.
I've had other speakers, even pastors and I, discuss this. But, like, when I get off the stage, my mind immediately goes into what could I have done better? What worked?
What didn't work? What did I forget to say? How did I miss that moment?
Man, I talked right over the applause, or I hesitated there. And I go into this mode where most speakers, just so you know, when they walk off stage, if you wonder what they're actually doing, they're asking the mic they're asking the AV people, did I do okay? When they go back to the green room, did I do alright?
When a singer walks off stage and they seem so confident they kill them, was I okay tonight? They immediately become insecure. My stand up comedian friends, almost every single one them when they're bro, I messed the third joke up.
Can you believe man, was it alright? Did they catch it? So everyone looks confident up there.
Right when they get back, the great ones are in self reflection. They're in awareness. They audit the performance.
They learn from it. They get better. I'm so addicted to that that I've been speaking on stage for thirty years.
I've been fortunate that I've been picked the number one speaker in the world now three of the last four years, and I don't that's all a matter of opinion. It's nice to be acknowledged for it, but I certainly don't feel like it.
If you knew how much beating of myself up I do, when every podcast is done, the first thing I say to my producer is, was that okay? And he's nodding and laughing right now, guarantee you.
Right? Because it's the first thing I say. And then I'll go through for hours afterwards in my mind what I could have done better, how I should have said this.
Oh my gosh. I hesitated there. You think, is it that important?
Yeah. Because it's my craft. It's my form of expression.
I think if you started to look at your career, whether you're a custodian, a janitor, a flight attendant, an entrepreneur, a school teacher, a police officer, you play the piano, whatever it is, what if you started to look at your career like you were an NBA athlete, like you were Tiger Woods, like you were an artist like Adele, that it's your form of expression?
Steph Curry's form of expression is basketball. Tiger Woods' way of expressing his genius and his greatness was in his golf. Adele's greatness and genius is through her music.
Well, in my way, it's my speaking. It's my content. It's my work.
Have you ever been on a flight with like an exceptional flight attendant? Like an exceptional one. They bring a joy, an effort, a professionalism, an attention to detail.
A standard that's meticulous, and you notice it. I always tell them.
Or a server in a restaurant. You've had hundreds of servers, haven't you? Then there's those two or three special ones.
Have you ever had anybody do any work on your home? You know, a lot of people do work on your home, and then there's the one, and they just take pride in it, and they're good at it. And they've got this mix of confidence and humility.
They're confident they're really good, but humility that they wanna get better. That's the nuance of success. And I don't want you to miss this.
You've got to be great. Don't let everybody out there tell you you're awesome as you are. Would you say that to your kids if they were bringing home d's and they could get a's?
You would never say that to them. And by the way, you don't even believe it anyway because you know you were born to do something great.
I look at you I look at my friends like, I believe in you so much. I see the best version of you, not the current one. Now I love the current one, but I know there's another version, And I don't accept the one in front of me if there's one that could be better.
I don't accept an eight out of 10 speech from me if a 10 was my capacity. That's the point. I guarantee you those thousand shots that Tiger Woods hit were with focus, were with reflection, were with adjustments afterwards.
That's what makes it worth it. Every shot's different that Steph Curry takes. Every note's different for Adele.
Every time she's learning more about her voice and her nuances. She's also told me that sometimes when she's singing a particular song, lyrics for another one come to her. So how why is that?
Well, now we're gonna talk about something that I covered in the video there. What is the difference, by the way? Because it's conflated stuff, and there's even a debate that they even exist, by the way, the subconscious and unconscious mind.
But is there a difference? Because Freud actually, for a long time, Freud thought they were the same thing.
And then he kind of evolved his thinking. And to me, there's a little bit of a difference in the subconscious and the unconscious. We don't know what the conscious mind is.
We all know what that is. But the subconscious, when we talk about the idea of deadlines now as we shift into that concept, what the subconscious does is it has automatic actions like breathing and heart rate.
It does that for you. It regulates your daily life. It can be identified when you're introspective.
It stores memories, beliefs, experiences. It can be identified through introspection, as I've said, but it can also protect you from sensory overload. It's almost like the subconscious mind is almost like an operating system running in the background.
And when you have a deadline you set on something, which was part two, it enrolls a part of your mind that's not enrolled when there's no deadline. And that's why, like, when like I said, when you gotta get up early in the morning or even right now, if you have something major coming up or you have before, like you have a due date and you're pregnant, What it does is it starts to cause you to flash forward to that day and the aftermath and the preparation for it.
Getting the room ready for the baby, having a stroller in place. You start to do things when there's a deadline or a due date. If you've got a big presentation coming up in the next few weeks, your mind thinks about it and starts to work on it, doesn't it?
Or you got a party you're planning or you ever have before. Your mind's working on it even when you're not. That's what the subconscious mind does, and you only enroll that part of your brain when you put a deadline on something.
That's why repetitions and deadlines matter. The unconscious mind includes thoughts, memories, desires that aren't consciously known.
And when you set a deadline for something, you begin to pull from thoughts that you don't have consciously, memories of previous successes or failures that serve you in the new one with the new deadline, and new dreams and desires that could be somehow correlated as a vertical or something connected to this thing you've got that a deadline's on.
You can also have socially unacceptable ideas, wishes and desires that are just there in your unconscious. Your unconscious also has traumatic memories and painful emotions. The unconscious mind has automatic responses and reflexes like breathing indigestion in it.
And it's not something you can just summon on cue, but when you put a deadline to it, you can. The reason that this matters is your brain is constantly trying to conserve energy.
So when you come up with a goal or an idea or a to do list of things you need to do, your brain immediately does not want you to put a deadline on it because then if you put a deadline on it, it can't save energy. It's constantly trying to get you to avoid deadlines. I'll get around to it.
It doesn't matter. As long as I get all 10 done today, who cares by when? Doesn't matter if I do my homework as long as, you know, I get it done.
But when you put a deadline, your brain tries to resist it because your brain's like, ah, now I can't hide from you. And then you flipped on your subconscious and unconscious mind, and now it's taking energy. That brain of yours is constantly trying to avoid you, and to get you to avoid deadlines because it doesn't want to enroll the part of the mind that then requires energy from it.
It's an energy saver. It's so lazy, it's crazy. And so that's why there's such massive power to deadlines beyond you'll hurry up, beyond the pace that I said, the rhythm and pace of success.
Beyond that, you've enrolled and enlisted a part of your brain that isn't enrolled if there's no deadline attached to it.
Does that make sense to everybody? And so if that does make sense to you, here's the key benefits of some deadlines. Okay?
Number one, the pressure of an approaching deadline can push you to work harder and faster to achieve the goal. By the way, what's great about that is then you've knocked that out.
You can be on to the next thing. I think when I said earlier there's levels to this thing with the repetition, there's also levels to the pace. They're just levels of the pace.
There is typically an impatience to most successful people. And I know patience is a virtue, and I'd even in my life like to have more of it, but I have to be really candid with you.
The standard for speed with the ultra successful is different than the other people that don't win.
It's invisible. You probably wouldn't know it, but when you were around them, they even seem a little pushy. Some people would call them demanding.
And this is why as a leader, if you're leading people, you gotta have deadlines, and you gotta focus on the reps, and you gotta focus on speed.
The key benefits of this is it does put some pressure on people. Pressure is good. Pressure is a privilege.
Remember this, the separation is in the preparation. I don't separate myself when I get on stage. I separated myself before I ever got there.
I don't separate myself doing a podcast like this. I separate myself before I ever got there. Tiger Woods didn't separate himself necessarily on the golf course.
It was before he got there. Adele doesn't separate herself on stage. It's before she gets there.
Steph Curry, before he takes the court. For you, it's the before. And this is the stuff that you'll never see on Instagram.
It's not sexy. It's not beautiful. It's what you do when nobody's watching that matters the most, not when they are watching.
If you do the right things when nobody is watching, you will shine when everybody is watching. That's the irony. Deadlines help with prioritization, getting things in sequence.
Sometimes stuff needs to move in front of other things sequentially, and when you have a deadline, it puts in priority the sequence of things. It can help people identify the most important tasks.
In your company, you don't have enough deadlines. I'm not talking about month long. I'm talking about hours long.
Hey, 10 contacts by noon, five of these by then, three Zooms by this. Right?
Like, deadlines. I know this isn't, like, glamorous. It's not the same as when I'm talking about breathing or walking on the beach.
You know, people love those, but when it comes to the work in life, most people start to this is low vibration, man. I don't know if I want to know all this, but yet you want to be a millionaire, yet you want to win.
Do you want me to talk to you as a friend? Do you want me to give you the real stuff? Because you can just come to my content every week, and I can just make you feel good.
And I do that a lot because I think life is about that. But then there's times where we have to look at each other, friend to friend here, mentor to mentee, and say, hey, let's go.
Let's get this together, man. There's another level, my friend. Sister, you know there's another level.
You can feel it. Improved planning happens when you set deadlines. Deadlines force individuals to think through steps they need to complete in a task and use their time effectively.
Deadlines create accountability, both for who you are working with and for yourself. When a deadline is set, people are held accountable for meeting their commitments, and this shifts the company.
When you want to shift the energy of your church, your Boy Scout troop, your Girl Scout troop, or the Scouts, whatever they're called now, a business, a family, you put deadlines on things.
Right? Hey, we're going take a family vacation this summer. Hey, mom, dad, when's it going to be planned by?
Where are we going? What are the dates? It also facilitates collaboration.
Deadlines can help teams stay aligned and work together towards a common goal. It also does something that I call early issue identification. By setting deadlines, potential issues, challenges, and problems get identified sooner in the process, which allows you to make adjustments that don't happen when there's no deadline.
Then you get caught last minute, Oh my gosh, this happened. Oh my gosh, that. I'll give you an example.
Today, today, I was supposed to do another podcast with a guest today.
They were gonna be in their home. There's an issue with their roof, and they can't do it because of the noise going on. But because I have deadlines on how many shows I have to get in by when, we're okay with that.
But can you imagine if this if there was no deadline, and that podcast I needed to be released next week to 10,000,000 people like we do every week, and there was no deadline on the other ones, then this problem comes up, we'd be in big trouble. But right now, we're good because we've identified the potential problem well in advance, rescheduled it.
That's because there was a deadline. And so this is because it forces the brain, as I've said, to use energy immediately, so your brain's going to resist this stuff. So you gotta resist all of it.
So listen to me. Last thing I'll tell you. You deserve to win.
You do. And I think you're much closer than it might seem.
For most of you, it's not a major overhaul in your life or your approach to your business or your life that's required. It's a simple, small, fine tuning, like a little carburetor adjustment on an old car.
See, the world would convince you you're either on it all the way or you're miles away. I don't think you're miles away.
In fact, know you're not. You wouldn't be listening to me today or watching me today if you were miles off. You're not miles off.
That's the enemy trying to get you to believe that. The truth is, and I've said this many times in my book, The Power of One More, which is sitting right here. Now it's up straight.
You're one decision away or one new action, one new adjustment, one new contact, one new relationship, one new thought, one new idea, one new deadline away.
You know what happens when you shoot all those reps, all those shots? When you're in a slump, you find the adjustment. You go, my elbow was too far out.
I got it. Because not only are you doing the reps, you're evaluating it and making adjustments as you go. You're much closer than you think.
Trust me. I know it seems miles away. I know it seems like it's never gonna happen for someone like you.
Let me let you know something on the inside. I thought the same thing about my life. Most of the people you admire went through that same self doubt, went through that same idea of, man, this is not me.
This happens to other people. I keep doing this and it's not happening. I'm telling you that if you'll begin to do the two things we talked about today, it may be for you the one thing you need to change.
And what I'm gonna do every single week on this show is I'm gonna keep bringing you ideas that work, strategies that work, inspiration that moves you every single week on the show. And the reason that I do it, I have to oftentimes reflect on.
And the reason that I do it is I so deeply believe the world needs you. I don't believe the world is gonna change because of a political movement.
I believe the world changes from a grassroots revolution of good people making a difference in other people's lives in their core genius way. If that's a great flight attendant, a great astronaut, a great scientist, a great doctor, a great teacher, a great salesperson, a great mom, a great business leader, a great singer.
I just believe the world's better when people are at the highest expression of themselves and expanding all the time in their life.
Big believer in you, my brother or sister. Big believer in you.
If today helped you, set a deadline of the next two minutes to share this episode with somebody. And maybe you need to listen to or watch it twice.
That would be the repetitions that might serve you. Welcome back to Max Out, everybody. I'm Ed Mylett.
Today's show is gonna be ballistic. So I am I'm sitting next to the real life Doseckis man, one of the most interesting people I have ever met in my life.
This man has a resume that is too long to even start the introduction with today, and we're gonna talk about that today, like life resumes. But to start put it mildly, this is someone who started the company Marquis Jet. He ends up selling that to Warren Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway.
Started a water company that he sold to Coca Cola. He's run a 100 miles in one day before. He's a father of four.
He's married to one of the most successful female entrepreneurs in the country and Sarah Blakely, the founder of Spanx. And most importantly for me, he is one of the most giving and generous people with his time, his information and his energy that I have ever met in my life. I I'm literally look at this.
I'm getting goosebumps because I've been really looking forward to the day. So everybody, this is Jesse Itzler. Jesse, thanks Hey, for being guys.
Thank you so much, man. I appreciate it. Have we had good conversations off camera or what?
Yes. It's so good. I wish we were recording the whole time.
So, you know, the other thing I didn't say too is I also think you're one of the greatest speakers in the world too from the stage as well. So any of you looking for speakers, this is a guy that you ought to be talking to. So you're gonna get a flavor for that today.
So let's help let's help some people. Let's do it. Let's do it.
So we can go all the way back to the beginning. I want people to know a little bit about your background because I think one of the things that fascinates me the most about you is your willingness to do things that you're not prepared for.
I think like going into the unknown, it seems to be one of these things that about you that's very unique, but also is a trait that I see in people that win at really high levels. So talk a little bit about we could start with any of the businesses you've had, but did your upbringing at all prep you into being this sort of type of person you are?
When you grew up, did you know you were going to turn out this way or no? Not at all. I always
was dancing to my own drum. My parents gave me a really long leash, which is a great gift for me growing up. They let me do whatever I wanted to do within reason.
Yeah. And I always, you know, all of us, we always come against this wall of fear, You know, this crazy wall of fear. And you can either go to the wall and turn around, you can go through the fucking wall.
Yes. And I was, I always, every time I went around, turned around and went back home because I was too scared, I had crazy resentment. Or crazy guilt that I wasn't able to do it.
Regret, not resentment. Yeah. Regret.
Yeah. And every time I went through the wall and got to the other side, it was so addicting.
And I was so proud of myself. So, let just give you a quick example.
When I was growing up, I grew up in New York City Yeah. Or in Long Island in the eighties when break dancing and rap and all this stuff was happening. Yep.
And I was really into break dancing. I don't know. I don't look like it, Ed.
But, you know, get some cardboard out here, man. We need do that. Mike, get some cardboard.
Okay.
And I decided that I could make more money probably if I went to Washington DC, because the kids in Washington DC couldn't be as good as the kids in New York.
We invented this whole genre. So I got my friend Myron, who's my partner. My sister just got her driver's license, I and convinced her to drive us to Washington DC.
And the whole drive down, I was having all that self doubt. Yeah.
You know, at a young age, 14, 15 years old, like, what if the kids are better? What if no one shows up? What if we get booed?
What if, you know, what if we go there and I I stink? Yeah. And so I was almost talking myself out.
I was building the wall of doubt up brick by brick in my own head. Yeah. And when we got there, we went to a little bank in Georgetown, and we set up a boombox in a parking lot of a bank.
And we hit play, and my friend started spitting on his head, and he passed it to me. And the crowd gathered around. And ultimately, after I did my thing, more people came.
I took my hat, and I passed it around. And we made about $200. I paid my sister for the gas money.
And then Myron and I split $82, $41 each.
And this guy, you know, he's counting up the money. And he's counting up the money, and he gets all the money. And then he sprints over to me, and he gives me a bear hug.
And he goes, Jess, we're fucking rich. And what what the reason why we were rich is because on that particular trip, despite all the fear, this young little kid that was so scared, I went around that wall, and I realized I could be rewarded.
And I was like, I want more of that. I was writing sports songs after the Knicks song with my partner.
We set up a company to write theme songs for professional sports teams. And I did that for a year and a half, we sold that company to a public company called SFX.
You did? And it was the gentleman that owned SFX that had a time share on a jet that invited us as guests, and that's how we got exposed to the world of private aviation. So you're flying on this jet.
Was it the first flight private jet you'd been on? Oh, yeah. So you're on a private jet, and you take this flight.
Rather than just enjoying the flight, you get off the flight and go, what? What No. First, I walked on the plane, and it was like the scene in The Wizard of Oz when everything goes from black and white to color.
I was like, People fly like this? We wanna fly like this.
We literally were like, Let's start a private jet company so we can fly privately because we definitely can't afford it. That's crazy.
We were like Did you know anything about jets? Did you own a jet? No.
Nothing.
So you knew nothing about jets. You didn't own a jet. You never But I knew knew that if we wanted to take two or three trips a year to go skiing with our friends or take a college, our college friends on a trip or my partner had a family and he wanted to go away for Thanksgiving.
We knew that if we had a need for, not for hundreds of hours, but for maybe twenty five hours, there's gotta be a lot of people like us. And that's really where the idea started from.
It's like, how can we make flying privately a little bit more affordable, more to the masses, and how can we solve the problem?
How can we eliminate all the pain points of owning your own private plane,
the pilots, the scheduling, the maintenance, all that and provide all the benefits. And that's what we created this twenty five hour jet card called, which ultimately is called Marquee Jet. Okay.
So let's talk about this for minute. So here comes the note taking time, all you entrepreneurs out there because there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there that have these ideas. So that's great that you have the idea and brilliant, but idea to execution to business to profitability to selling it is a completely different idea altogether.
How in the world do you get you end up somehow getting net jets to allow you to use their jets somehow to do this card.
The hell did that happen? Well, of all, we thought about what's the fastest way to get from point A to point B. Okay.
Okay, that was the starting point. Okay. And we realized that we needed airplanes, obviously.
You can't have a private jet company Be hard. Without And for us, there were only a couple of there was only two games in town or one game in town.
It was NetJets owned by Warren Buffett. They had six fifty planes in the fleet. So we were able to get a meeting through a couple of phone calls.
And in the meeting, we got thrown out of the first meeting in twelve minutes. The CEO was like, there's no way we're giving two kids access
to our airplane. You got thrown out of the first meeting? You got thrown out.
They literally said, there's no way we're giving two kids. He said, they probably didn't break a thousand on their SAT, which we talked about, which pissed me off. I got a nine eighty.
You got a nine eighty. Just so you know, in the history of interviews,
so he's he's nine this is so wonderful. So you end up being on the same label as young MC.
I end up being a paid for free backup dancer for a few weeks for him. People are laughing their asses off.
Know right now, rolling their eyes. He gets a nine eighty on his SATs. I'm in the high sevens.
I'm a seven eighty SAT, and we've both ended up becoming, you know, very successful entrepreneurs. This should give everybody out there hope who thinks their prior resume somehow dictates their future resume, and that's not the case whatsoever.
And so you get kicked out. He literally quotes your SAT score I'm back to not giving you guys 20 28 twenty nine years old access to my airplanes. Right.
And our starting point is we have to convince them. We have to have a lot of conviction. We're the business plan.
They're betting on us. Yes. And the question we asked ourself, I think the starting point for any entrepreneur when you're going to give a pitch, what's in it for them?
What's in it? What are we gonna say to convince them that they wanna do business with us? And for us, it was like we can they were catering to a much older demo.
And we were 28, 29 years old. In my music business, I had access to athletes and entertainers just from the videos and just being in the scene. I lived in New York.
I was connected to that world. That was my demo and age group.
So we offered the ability to attract much younger athletes, entertainers that we said, look, if these guys are introduced to your fleet, they're going to be customers for the next fifty years. And think about the lifetime value of that customer.
Give us a shot. If it doesn't work, there's no harm, no foul.
And they said, You know what? We'll give you guys a shot. So the second meeting, they say, We'll give you a shot.
Put up your own money. Okay. You guys will give you guys a shot.
Okay. And now, this is one of my favorite stories of all time, literally of all time. So now, you get a yes, which is just incredible.
The idea
to get in there to pitch, to get kicked out, to come back in, you get a yes. Now, the issue is though, you have no clients. So that theory sounded great.
By the way, a lot of people, entrepreneurs listen to this. They got kicked out. They got rejected the first time.
They've got an idea. Now, they're in business, but they got no clients. And by the way, we really didn't have a business plan because we didn't know anything about the space.
And to present a business plan, they could have been like, well, we're not looking for that. We were the business plan. Yeah.
It was like, we are gonna make this look me in the eye, Ed. I'm telling you, we will make this happen. We give us a shot.
I mean, those weren't the exact words, but that was the spirit of it. Let's stay on that for a second because I think this is huge, man. People buy into people.
They buy into stories That's right. And people. They don't buy into PowerPoints.
PowerPoints are just words. And we had a passion and a conviction
around the idea because we knew we can make it work. We knew if we had the chance that no matter what, we were gonna work twenty one hour days, we're gonna make it work. You and I are both involved in business together that we'll talk about at the end, and that's exactly what we both did in this case.
We bought into the people. It's like so super true. But you have this thing that I think I think to the extent that someone has this thing I'm gonna ask you about before we get into how you end up getting your first client, which is the best story of all time.
But but I think all successful people on some level and to the extent you are successful is the extent you have this thing, which is that you're willing to step into spaces you are ill prepared for. So it seems to me like you're willing to you kind of think like if I get my foot in the door, then I'll figure this stuff out, right?
Yes. Whereas what most people do, and this is killing you by the way, I won't step into the door until I'm completely prepared, which is a total fallacy anyways as an entrepreneur for sure, or wanting to become a rapper or have a music career or an artist or anything great.
If you're waiting for a threshold of, I need to be totally prepared, then I'll step in the door, you will be on the other side of the door the rest of your life. So talk about that. You have this sort of thing about you.
You'll figure it out once you get in there. Yeah. Well, first of nothing happens if you don't get into the door.
You to
figure out how to get in the door. Right. I've always trusted the process that I'd be able to figure it out.
But the common thread throughout my journey as an entrepreneur in everything is I had no prior experience in anything that I did. And for me, that was the greatest blessing.
Because for me, it meant rip up the playbook. No one taught me how to do it. So the whole industry was operating the same way.
And I always say to my employees, Sarah, my wife does the same thing. If no one taught you how to do your job, how would you do it? If you ripped up the playbook, and you said, how would I treat my customer?
How would I go after and pitch this? That's where innovation comes from. That's where innovation comes from.
Everybody else in the space, they were doing the same playbook. All the brochures looked the same, and we didn't know anything. We didn't know anything.
So for us, it was the greatest blessing. So I think experience is overrated. It's important, but it takes so damn long.
Yes. You know? And, like, if I if we would have waited to get three years on on the front on the line and this there would have been four other jet companies, and we would have never have done So Wow.
That's so true. Mean You gotta start the process. Mhmm.
As an entrepreneur, I think, like, the number one thing is start you never have it all figured out. Yeah. It's never the right time.
Mhmm. You never have enough experience. Yeah.
But if you let that slow you down until you have it's the right time and the right experience,
come on, man. The world's like the world's so fast. So you're telling me you did not know a lot about the rap game before you got in.
You didn't know a lot about the writing
lyrics game before that. You didn't know a lot. Just listen to this everybody.
You didn't know a lot about the coconut water business before you got in it, the jet business before you got in it, or the NBA before you got in it. I would say nothing. Literally I wouldn't say not a lot.
I would say nothing. It's incredible. Yeah.
And look, you know, I was fortunate. You know? I we were able to as soon as we were able to afford to bring in people that knew more, we were able to scale it.
Yep. You know? But we started everything very small.
Mhmm. You know? We always thought really big.
Mhmm. And once we got momentum, we were able to ramp it up super fast. The only way that I could really find know, I I had to go where wealthy people were.
And I heard about this conference called TED in Monterrey, California when they were first starting out that was attracting all these tech guys and well off folks, etcetera. So my partner's like, you've got to go to the TED conference in Monterrey, California.
So I had I think I connected through Chicago into LA. It's a five hour car ride to Monterrey, California. It was a sixteen hour journey.
And I get there. And as soon as I get there, everybody it's like Fort Knox. I didn't have a credential to get in.
No way. So they don't you couldn't go anywhere near the conference. So I'm like, man, I just flew sixteen hours.
I can't go in. I'm so frustrated. But it smelled like there was a sale there somewhere.
So I was like, let me go into the little coffee shop over here and try to, like, figure this out. And I'm sitting in the coffee shop, and about twenty minutes into my sitting there kind of thinking, god, how am I gonna do this? A wave of people with credentials come in, and they're ordering lattes and muffins.
Okay. And I realized that they must be on coffee break from in between speakers at the tech conference. So they're all in lattes and muffins, lattes and latte and muffins.
So the next morning, I show up at 05:00, first one there as soon as they open, and I buy every single muffin. I control all the muffin inventory in Monterrey, California.
I bought every muffin. And when the first wave of folks come in, they're like, come up, what, have a latte and a muffin? Like, you can have a latte, but we're all out of muffins.
And as they would walk out, I would say, excuse me. I over actually, I have the muffin with my office here. We have all the muffins.
And would you like a muffin? No. No.
No. Yeah. What do you do?
Next thing you know, I'm in a conversation with somebody. He's like and he said he asked me what I did. And I said, I have a private jet company called Marquis Jet.
And a guy who just sold this company called half.com to eBay.
Okay. And he said, Well, I'm actually interested in a private jet. Awesome.
Would you mind if I a sit down and talk to you about it? And I was like, Gosh.
I'm like, Please sit down. You can have two muffins. And we started talking, and here's what's interesting.
And here's how I built my career. He ended up being my first customer. Unbelievable.
But he was the key because I serviced the hell out of him. Mhmm. Anything he wanted.
Carried his bags. If he was going to Mexico, shock and awe. Here's a book of places.
Here's a reservation. Here's where you can snorkel. Like, that's not the business I'm in.
Yes. I provide time on jets. No.
That's what everybody else was doing. Wow. This is what we're gonna do.
Here I heard so your family's going. Here's a a floaty thing for your two year old. And they would get that.
And I just serviced them. How was the trip? Can I help you?
Here are your bags. And he was my source of referrals. There you go.
And then the next guy came in. Same system. Same thing.
Same thing. Same thing. And what was interesting about Marquee Jet Wow.
You know, it wasn't that we built this amazing company. You know, we it was an amazingly successful venture.
Clearly. And but that's that wasn't the goal for me.
The goal for me were the people that we flew because we flew we flew 4,000 of the who's who of entrepreneurs, CEOs, athletes, entertainers, and I was like, wow.
Here I am. I'm 30 years old. I was obsessed with meeting these people and learning about their daily routines.
So what I would do is, I would say like every conversation was like, what time do you get up? What do you eat? How do you spend your time?
How do you live rich? How do you do this? What's a vacation look like?
And I would take all these habits from these winners at the highest level and start to incorporate them in my life.
And the things that worked stuck. And the things that didn't, I got rid of them. And over time, built this system.
You mentioned in the beginning, like your life resume, built this system that works for me. And as I've evolved, now I have four kids, my system evolves.
Because I can't have the same system as single Jesse, 40 years old and no kids, where I have I can I have the freedom to do what I want? Yeah. Now, have way more responsibilities,
you know, with my family. So the system evolves. So that that was the gift.
Wow. What's this see for me, for someone listening to this and I already know what they're thinking. This is literally like an inside peek to like an absolute master class of how to do these things right here, everybody.
And I just want to illustrate two points you made and I want to make sure that I say them correctly. The first thing is is that all of the most successful entrepreneurs I know, and obviously, you're at the top of that list because there's been multiple wins. What I well, the reason I want you all listening to what Jesse covers in his social media and his content is because he's he's not only is he a mega successful entrepreneur and also successful as a father, successful as an athlete of sorts, successful as an author.
He's also had multiple wins. In other words, it wasn't a one hit business wonder. This is a formula that has worked for him that he's replicated into many different business ventures and you said something brilliant.
The unique thing for the ones I see is they create an experience for their customers that is completely different than everybody else. I don't care if you're a personal trainer at a gym, you own a dry cleaners, brand.
It's the experience because if they don't enjoy the experience, it's not mind blowing. They're not going to refer you to anybody and your business can't go viral. Can't multiply, correct?
Always ask myself this one question. Would I recommend myself as fill in the blank? Would I recommend myself as a dad?
Would I recommend myself as a business partner? Would I recommend myself as a coach? Would I recommend myself as a boss?
And if the answer's no, why? Like, why?
Why aren't I rec why wouldn't I recommend myself? And I always tell people, like, you know, like, the people call up, like, my kids are going to their first job. What would be the one piece of advice?
Make yourself irreplaceable. Make yourself irreplaceable. If you have that relationship with the customer, with if you're so important, you're incredibly valuable.
Wow. That's brilliant. And and but it's but it's true.
Yeah. And, you know, I ask myself a lot of questions. I ask myself a lot of questions.
And that's one thing I always ask myself. Like, if I go let's say I go sideways with someone for some reason. I'm just I don't very often.
Right. But if I do, would I recommend myself?
What did I do? Yeah. And very often, it's I could I can I'm okay with it.
And if it's something that I did, then I wanna get in front of it and apologize or address it internally so it doesn't happen again. You mentioned something about success. And everybody has multiple definitions of success.
If you ask 100 people, you might get 100 answers. But you touched on something I think is important to the listeners. And to me, I have a lot of different definitions.
Success isn't being good in one bucket. It's not about, like, I made all this money. And I know, oh, it's easy for you to say.
No. Success is not about being good in one bucket.
It's about being good in all the buckets. All the buckets.
It's about being a good dad. It's about being good to your employees.
It's about giving back in the charity bucket. It's about doing the right thing when you do it. It's about standing up for something that you see is wrong.
Mhmm. That's success. When I see people that are mega wealthy, they're just fucking wealthy.
Yes. No. They're just wealthy.
Yeah. That's not what it looks like. And it's and you don't have to be wealthy.
If you're struggling in one area, you can still be good in all the other areas. So true, man.
You can't spiral down because success,
the way you look at it, isn't happening. Well then, go be successful in the other buckets and fill up your plate. And then, it does too, by the way, I could feel you coming at me with that because you feel so strong about it.
Your physiology changed too, but what also happens is when you and you talk a lot about this, but when you get wins in other areas, you get life momentum. People just I did a training on this the other day, but like you're to me, I look at you. I go, Okay.
Look. The thing you said about associating with these people and their habits, I didn't have a jet card company, but I joined a club where I could meet these kinds of guys. What is your schedule?
What's your workout routine? How do you eat? What do you think about?
How do you talk? I'm sorry to interrupt you. The habits, you're getting me all fired up.
Everything
comes around your day. We're talking about all these successes. They took years.
Years. Yes. I remember walking into the president of Coca Cola about the Zico thing.
He's like, it takes eight years to build a brand in this country. Of course, there's get rich quick things, and now it's a little faster, but it takes time. But the foundation of that is your daily habits.
It's creating winning habits, winning routines, and a winning mindset.
That's the formula. It is.
There's no way around it. It is. It doesn't happen without
that. One of the unique things for me, because I completely agree.
One the things that's unique about you and I is we both will be creating this content for a while and then when we looked at each other stuff, we're like, my God. We so believe the same things. We say it a little bit differently, we so believe the same things.
One of the unbelievable things about social media or podcast like this is that you kind of can peek into what you had at Marquis Jets doing this.
If someone follows you on Instagram or follows myself, you get access nowadays to something you and I never had. You can get access daily to some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world or fitness people or parents or people of faith or whatever your area is through digital connection now.
It's not the same as live, but it's incredible, the information you can tap into now. You are my virtual mentor.
No, you are. I mean, I'm in tune to what you say. It resonates deeply with me.
Thank you. You're in it for the right reasons. Like, there's a lot of reasons why the things you say really have stickiness with me.
But you are you're to millions of people, you're a virtual mentor, and that's exactly your point. Yeah. And we didn't have that growing up.
No. We Our mentor was my like, my dad and anyone in my small town. Yeah, me too.
Don't you think don't you think part of your life, Jesse, that you got some life momentum going though, right? I mean, the journey is I think it's the most I mean, you're a young man and I but I I think it's I think it's the most remarkable journey that I've of anybody I've talked to because of the breadth of different areas.
It's just bananas to me.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
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Stage hypnotist Marshall Sylver walks Ed Mylett through certainty installation, embedded commands, and the four-step path to total enlightenment — in 39 minutes.
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