Joe Templin is a human Kaizen expert. We had an amazing conversation about how to stay productive, building small success habits, and how our thoughts influence our environment.

There's so much gold packed away in this episode!

Hello and welcome back to the Be Well, Do Well podcast.

I'm excited today to have another conversation with a fascinating entrepreneur.

Joe Templin is a human Kaizen expert and is on a mission to influence a hundred million people to be better.

Wow.

I'm excited to be part of his journey.

Welcome to the show, Joe.

Thank you Amin.

And having a B-HAG, what Jim Collins called in the book, "Good to Great".

A big hairy audacious goal.

Something that huge is one of the things that can really motivate us because when we're trying to build something, We often get caught in the grind and it beats us down, especially if we're not making a lot of progress or, there's a coading error that delays things for a week, which we've all had happen.

Or a provider goes out business or what have you with these disruptions, and we can get really frustrated.

But if we have our eyes on this mission as so much bigger than us, then it draws us and we figure out a way.

As the great general Hannibal, not from the A Team, the original General Hannibal said, I will find a way or make away.

And that's one of the things about the entrepreneurial journey is very much what Nche said.

If a man has a strong enough why, he'll be able to overcome any how.

And there are all sorts of, impediments on the journey.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's fascinating.

big, hairy, audacious goal, there's so many things we can go within that

but before we jump into the details of bhag, which I really wanna talk about,

Tell us what a human Kaizen expert is.

Okay, so most people who are in manufacturing or engineering are familiar with the term Kaizen.

Kaizen is the Japanese concept of continuous improvement, and it was really implemented post World War II when everything was bombed out and they couldn't get new machinery.

They had to get two decade old machinery.

So they had to figure out how to do the best with what they.

And trying to squeeze more out of it.

And when Toyota came to the United States shores in the late sixties, early seventies, their cars were absolute dog crap.

They were the worst pos's out there.

Horrible quality.

they broke down constantly.

They were not really sexy looking or anything, but they also imported.

of this continuous improvement were anybody, whether it was the person sweeping the floors or the CEO or an individual on the line could make a micro change and do literally almost like an AV test from the computer world to see, Hey, can we get a little bit better with this?

And by adopting that mindset, they were able to create these very short feedback loops where they were getting continuous improvement.

And by the 1980s, they had put most Detroit out of business.

So the concept of Kaizen was then adopted by every single manufacturer, whether it was Westinghouse, general Electric, the big three automakers, everybody was using this.

And then those grow over to software, really in the concept of lead manufac, lean, but we've never applied it to the most important resource in the organization, which is the human being . And so we've got all these different components of our life, physical health, our

Life's chaotic.

when you have kids, when you have aging parents, when you have business, all this stuff's going on and so things slip through the cracks.

We don't pay attention to stuff cause our focus is more on the business than our health this month, or sick kids.

So work takes a back seat for a couple of days and.

We, if we can apply a little bit more focus to these different areas, we can start getting some incremental gains.

And if you have tiny little improvements, even if they're almost negligible, They compound in the app and that's part of the reason for the cover of the book.

I've got this really cool logarithmic growth curve.

You can't see the little bumps up and down all along it, but you can see the long range trend, which is if you can get 1% better per day at the end of your year, you're 37 times better.

that's probably unsustainable cause there's a lot more hanging food.

If you can get 1% better per week, at the end of two years, you're three times as good.

So we can all squeeze on out and have this continuous improvement or this human kaizen and ultimately end up in a much better place by making tiny better choices.

Oh, that's amazing.

the title of your book is called Everyday Excellence.

Yes.

. So I like that idea a lot because every single day, like you said, you can't do everything.

And I've said this over and over again is that I don't believe work life balance exists, but you can be well and you can do well.

If you're focused on the be well side of it first, then the do happens, naturally without as much effort.

It doesn't happen automatically, but without effort.

And it's one of those things like the, in the airplane, if the mask comes on down, you like take care of yourself before taking care of.

As my, friend in right arm, basically Athena reminds me I'm no good to anyone if I'm broken.

Yeah.

So I need to.

Remember, all right, I actually need to sleep occasionally.

I need to make sure that I'm eating well.

if I'm getting stressed out, I need to go for a run if my ankle can hold up cause it's messed up again.

so taking that little bit of me time, people are like, oh, I can't do that.

If you take a 15 minute power nap in the early afternoon and get up in your twice as product, Then within 15 minutes you've made up that lost time and at the end of an hour you're actually well ahead of the curve.

So taking the moment to step back and reevaluate and invest in what you need to is basically a little bit of a J curve where you're, yeah, you slow down a little bit so that you can go faster and harder.

and how do you make these little elements of excellence in your day?

How do you make those into a habit.

So habits, one way of getting 'em is to create a habit stack like James Clear talks about.

So we all get up in there, right?

You wake up, you get outta bed.

So that is the most critical time in the day because it sets the mood for everything.

And typically when we're getting up, there's less chaos than there is in the middle of the.

Kids aren't up, the phone's not ringing, you don't have to deal with all sorts of things.

So that first half hour to an hour is the golden time.

That is when you can be the most productive and you can literally set the backdrop for the entire day.

So I get up, I brain dump anything that was in my head.

I read for a couple of minutes every single morning.

I then I go and I work.

Because working out in the morning will help rush stuff outta your system.

You've literally been laying down for five hours, six hours, eight hours, however long you sleep.

And so your brain is, even though you've been producing theta waves, when you've been passing it out asleep, you process stuff, you need to basically wake it back up and engage it.

So exercise is one of the best ways to do that.

if you look at an EEG of somebody after they exercise the whole thing, absolutely awesome, and there's a reason why Sir Richard Branson says that the number one productivity tool is exercise.

So you go work out for 20 ish minutes to everything lit up.

Then I sit down and I write, I do some of my social media type stuff.

Then I go and I work out again.

For another half hour because I'm a endurance athlete.

And then I'll write some more, and then I'll get ready for the rest of my day.

So I get up typically at four 30 by six o'clock in the morning.

I've already accomplished more than most people during the day, and then when I'm rolling into the office, it's like boom, I'm already ahead of the curve.

So instead of me playing catch up and trying to catch other people, I'm the lead and people are trying to catch up to me, and so it puts you in a very different state.

You can achieve the state of flow much easier simply because the stress level's down, because you already know that you would accomplish more than what most people have, and it just pushes you to go further and harder.

I wake up at four, between four and four 30 as well.

and you're totally right that when it gets to about six o'clock, seven o'clock, you've already accomplished so much compared to, an average person going into a day job that doesn't enjoy what they do.

if you've got kids, then the kids are getting up and you're getting 'em ready for school and there's stuff all over the place.

if that's how you started your day, you'd be all upset because there's milk all over.

the table at this point.

But if you've already knocked off a bunch of good stuff, you've gotten that workout workouts actually reduce your stress levels and so you're able to handle the chaos much better.

Yeah.

Yeah.

true cuz you're not getting rid of the chaos, you're handling it, you're managing that chaos.

You're riding the wave essentially.

. Amin Ahmed: Yeah.

most important block, 90 minutes in the morning where I do something sometimes and I'm just looking for some feedback from you.

Sometimes I get stuck in the how versus the why, and at the end of that 90 minutes, I realize I was working on something that probably I could have outsourced to somebody else, my team members or virtual assistant.

and I shouldn't have been doing it, but it's sometimes so fun to do.

before we started recording, we were talking about how you and I are both geeks in that sense, like technology.

So sometimes it gets stuck in doing these things that I enjoy doing, but I know I shouldn't be doing cuz I should be focusing on the why.

And that's actually the hardest part is when you actually enjoy it.

Yeah.

But it's not the highest and best use of your.

When somebody else can do it, 95% as well, or even 90% as well, they should be doing it.

I am telling everybody that I work with say no more often because focus is saying no to things that you can be good at so that you can have the additional bandwidth to be exceptional at certain things.

So I did the Warren Buffet exercise, it's where you sit down, you write the 25 most important things that you really wanna accomplish, and then you need to go through and choose the top five and all the others you need to get off your plate because they are just interesting enough or exciting enough or fun enough to distract you.

And the good is the enemy of the great.

And you can be good at those.

But it's not gonna be great.

So I've got a saying, one minute planning prevents an hour worth of work before I start my day.

Like I'll take care of that basic, writing and some social media stuff cause that needs to be done every day.

But before I jump into the real day, I look at the schedule for that day, the coming week, and anything that's up and coming.

To see what's most important, and then I will take a couple of minutes and I will write down on an index card.

This is how I manage my day, actually, for the most part, not my big projects, but my day.

I write down the three to five most important things that I need to get done that day.

And it might be like, write this proposal.

It might be follow up with this individual.

It might be, write one thing . So whatever it is, and as I'm going through 'em, I cross off and then I go and David Larner throw it in the corner.

But it allows me to be making sure that I'm not just busy, I'm productive, I'm focused on the right things.

And once I get through that list, technically I have achieved everything that I'm supposed to that day I'm in the bonus round.

And so if depending on when, during the day it is, I will take the time and reevaluate.

Okay, what are the next.

And by doing this, do you get everything done?

No.

I mean like my house is a mess at times and stuff like that.

But I'm getting the most important things done and I'm always looking with the Tim Ferris idea, my word for the year, cause I chose a word for the year, is deal.

Just cuz I need to deal with all sorts of chaos and all that.

delegate, eliminate, automate, locations.

Delegate, okay?

I've turned things over to people in my organization.

I've hired outside people to take care of it.

Cuz even if I have to pay somebody, a thousand dollars a month to do something, but frees up 30 hours of my time, that is completely worth it.

Okay.

Delegate, eliminate, do I need to be doing this?

Do I need buffet exercise that I talk about?

Automate?

Okay.

My one coaching program where people get an email every single day that's built out to be completely automated.

I had to create what is sent, but I don't need to sit there and, type out a hundred emails every single day.

If you send this thing out, it's built out.

So again, a J curve there, take a couple hours to build out the system.

That then saves you a half hour every single day.

That's a tremendous savings of time.

And L for location, what is that?

So location like it for Tim Ferris.

It's be able to go and run your business from anywhere that you want.

And so like I've got a good friend, Ed Stern from Commit Club who we're doing some work together on things and I talked to him yesterday and the first question on my mouth is, where are you today?

because months ago he was in Bucharest, Romania, and then he was in Rome, and I think now he's in Spain.

So he can do that.

He's single, no kids and all that.

I can't do that.

My location being able to do things is to be able to respond to an email on a boy Scouts weekend or when I'm at the lake house for the weekend, be able to respond cuz I've got the constraints of.

Aging parent kids in, junior high and high school and these other things.

So to me, I don't wanna go and be staying, in Europe someplace to be responding because quite frankly, the needs of my kids, my family are greater at this point down the road, yeah, I can be completely bohemian.

But if you do the first three, the delegate, the eliminate, and the automate, then you can choose your location.

Right now my location happens to be my office because know what, I have no problem with it.

in the beginning we talked a little bit about B-HAG, big hairy, audacious goal.

your book, is it fair to say, was a B-HAG at some point for you?

actually it wasn't because, when I look at B-HAG, that's something that's gonna take years to accomplish potentially.

so like building a media empire, get my hundred million mission, things like that.

So that's where you're gonna have to make all sorts of changes.

You're gonna have to bring in resources that you don't have.

You're gonna have to change your thinking.

All that.

Writing my book, the way that I got the idea for, I was, literally down in my weight room tossing around at Kyle Bell, listening to Jocko Willik talk and listening to some Black Sabbath on the other thing.

Cause I multitask like that.

and Jocko made a comment that, excellence is a habit.

I'm like, oh, habits need to be practiced every single day.

I stopped mid swing.

Everyday excellence.

And I had the story moment of the vision.

I put down the bell, ran upstairs, brain dumped out, for about 15 minutes how I saw the book, playing out with a quote, discussion and analysis around it, and then an action for every single day of the year, and then intro after all that sort of stuff.

Then went back down and fished my workout.

But since I had this vision, I'm like, What do I need to do in using a habit stack from James Clear, every single morning after I did my brain dump, I'd do my first workout.

I would sit down and I would write two days of the book.

So I'd write January 27th and January 28th.

Then I'd go do my own workout.

And so it wasn't a BHAG in that it was this monster life-changing type thing, like running my ultramarathons war gang mc or whatever championship or anything like that.

It was more like, okay, this is a process.

This is something I just have to sit down and do this every single day and I'll get through it in a reasonable time.

And that's how I was able to write a 700 plus page book in six months.

Amazing.

So you answered my question without me asking it is when you have these big goals, how do you accomplish?

And so you're saying it's chunk by chunk, small.

just chip away at it every single day.

And that's where that becomes a habit of daily work on that one thing that you're trying to accomplish.

And if you have a plan that when you go through it is gonna reach it, that's great.

problem is if you've got a BHAG that is so huge, you don't know how you're gonna get it, that's when it's really exciting because you're like, How the hell am I gonna do this?

What new resources do I have?

What new thinking do I need?

Who do I need to talk to?

How am I gonna go about changing who and what I am to become worthy of achieving this?

And so if you wanna be CEO of a Fortune 1000 company, okay, that's a B-HAG and that's gonna be a 30 year sort of thing.

What do you need be doing so that when you're 45, you're, in the vice presidential position, so that by the time you're in your early fifties, you're in the C-suite so that you can get into the CEO position.

What does it take?

What do you need to sacrifice?

What do you need to learn?

What sort of investments do you make?

What sort of, allies do you need to get?

What sort of mentors, who do you need to be mentoring all these things and.

. It basically involves reevaluating everything and saying, okay, I can't do this yet.

Let me figure out what I need to do that, and what I just said, I can't do this yet.

That's part of being able to harness the full power of your brain because when people say, I can't do this, that is literally embedding in the subconscious.

Nope.

Brick wall.

Versus, I can't do this yet.

When you have a subconscious, which is really the vast majority of your processing power coming into play saying, all right, there's a way to get on the other side, I'm gonna figure it out.

And so being able to harness that by simply adding yet.

On the end allows you to, even when I'm running a, 5K or if I'm down in the weight room, or if I'm playing with the kids doing something else, my subconscious is working on solving those problems to be able to get to set B-HAG.

I love that the idea of the subconscious and almost tapping into these other things you mentioned, exercise, power, nap, subconscious, using that when you're sleeping now, do you have any hacks or, I don't know.

I really don't like the word hacks.

Do you have any advice or productivity tips for when people get stuck

walk away from the situation.

This is one thing that scientists and, artists of all forms have.

For all human history, if you're stuck on a problem, put it aside person, Ursula, and and a bunch of others used to put their manuscript in a drawer and close and lock it and literally walk away.

There's so many scientists that would go in Einstein, what would he do?

He'd go for out and go on his sailboat and focus on that as opposed to working on the.

I go for a run and my old business partner used to make fun of me cause I'd literally run around the block.

I'd come back in, start writing on the whiteboard.

I'd go out and I'd run around the block maybe one or two more times.

I'd come in, I'd run on the whiteboard again, and I'd be able to go and run for my, actual run and come back in and immediately go to the whiteboard.

Because one of the things is that when you're working out a problem, you're figuring it out.

but the solution gets lost in the noise.

And so when you're engaged in something else that's not playing with a problem, whether it's listening to music, doing martial arts, running, meditating, playing with kids, leaving, what happens is that the neuroactivity around those connections actually reduces.

so those loosely connected neurons with the solution, you can actually hear it finally..

You can find the signal in the noise because you've damped down the noise overall.

So instead of focusing and you get yourself all anxious and revved up, slow down.

And so there's an old, Pennsylvania, Dutch saying, the hurrier I go, the slower I am.

Whereas they say in the military, slow is fast.

Fast is depth.

that's very cool.

I've had so many insights when I go out for a walk in nature, like I live in Canada and it gets pretty cold sometimes where we are.

And I remember last year I had a problem, couldn't figure it out, and I said, you know what?

I'm just gonna go out for a walk now.

It was minus 30 degrees Celsius, which is the same in Fahrenheit at that point.

And I was bundled up.

I even literally actually put on my ski goggles because when I, when it's that cold, your eyelashes freeze together.

I don't know if you've ever experienced that.

It's,

oh, yeah.

I'm near the Canadian border in upstate New York, so we get down to, basically minus 20 on a room.

every single year.

Yeah.

So I've been there doing that.

It's painful, but at the same time, you get a lot of insights just being out there in nature, and I think you're trying to stay warm at that point, or you're just focused on, walking.

. And those insights do come to you.

I love your analogy of how you get rid of the noise and then you can hear the signal in there.

on a side note, I'm learning with my daughter who's eight years old, how to DJ.

and we listen to electronic music and there's all these little knobs and turntables and the idea that you talk about where you turn down the signal, it's the same in DJing.

When you bring two songs together, it's the same key.

It's the same beat, but they're different songs.

And so you're actually dampening the high frequencies on one song as you increase the high frequency or the mids or the lows, and you bring it together and there's this harmony.

one of the things is that with harmony, you have two different waves, equations going, being the physics nerd, and what ends up is that you hit a harmonic on that, so you hit a higher order.

and you now create something new from it.

And so that is one of the things of having differential ideas, different things going on, is that it ends up can possibly creating synthetic knowledge from it where you've got these two or three different concepts coming together and producing something new off of it.

You said something about physics right now.

do you have a background in physics?

Yeah.

My background is, I was an applied physicist, so I say I'm a reformed physicist.

Yeah.

but I still approach the world very much from that sort of mindset because physics is all, what we did is we learned how to ask why.

Yeah.

My engineering friends, they all learned to ask how, but physics and philosophy in the oldest days were.

Trying to explain the universe.

So physics, philosophy, poetry, and psychology are all aspects of trying to explain the world and humankind's place in it.

And how we, interact.

They are all different components of trying to answer even the big question.

this is so cool because I have read so many books about psychology, about physics, cuz I'm an engineer, but also about, Spirituality as well.

Now there's so much overlap between those and it's rare to find somebody that can geek out about physics and spirituality, or if you wanna think about like physics and law of attraction, because some people think it doesn't exist, it's not there.

But if you go down to the quantum level and you start to look at things as energy waves rather than solid objects, physical objects, our brain thinks the same way.

So I'm curious to get your insight on how your thoughts influence your environment.

So if we wanna go on the more psychology end of things, we have what's called the reticular activation system, which is the filter on our software.

It is how we program ourselves to look at the world and we as humans have neuroplasticity.

Our brain will rewire itself and we can rewire it.

So we are coding our own machine along the way.

. That's something that people need to remember.

You can code it to be negative or you can code it to be positive.

Look for opportunities.

This is the reason why people who are serial entrepreneurs will build a company, sell it, go on out, stay on the beach for two days and then they, they'll have an idea because they see a problem and they go build another company to solve this, and they just keep doing this.

So people who are great.

poets do this.

They get inspiration from anything, whether it's this coffee cup or a, or an interaction with a pretty lady or what have you.

They take that and they turn that into verse as a way of explaining some of the concepts of the universe.

So we see the world not as it is, but as we are.

And so as we evolve and change and, alter what we're looking.

Then how we see the world alters too.

Back in the old days when we were wandering around, there were saber tooth tigers that we had to worry about eating us.

a wrestling lead was like, it's that danger.

And that's where our fight, our flight, response comes from in long ways and then involved because we notice different things.

Because of that.

So we can train our brain to be able to notice ideas or concepts.

So like I would use to, I used to train clients, Hey, this is person that I'm working for.

if you're a programmer, you notice a certain pattern like, oh, that's gonna not fit in the whole thing.

That's gonna be bug my friends who are intelligence officers, they can, they say that, they can spot a lie because there's a pattern and then there's a change in the pattern.

and so we program our brains in certain ways to notice certain things.

That's why people, as they get experienced in a position or a mindset, they become better and better with it.

You went to engineering school.

What was your brain like at 18 when you started, when you just had your sheer raw power versus what was it like as when you hit your senior year when you had learned how to think like an engineer?

what's it like down the road?

Yeah, absolutely.

And I always tell people that, I don't use the engineering principles I learned, but university taught me how to think and I can't articulate that other than saying before I went to university, I was basic in my thinking.

And when I left, I was able to formulate thoughts based on lots of inputs in a correct and accurate way.

I was able to accurately think, really, if you think about it, that.

And you're able to look at all these different components, find the relevant variables, and be able to build some form of model of any scenario, whether it's something simple where it's a linear thing of I pour the milk, it spills on the floor, okay, X equals y.

Make a change there.

Versus a multivariable thing where it's okay, I'm doing this for work and this for this work.

We gotta tweak this.

How's this gonna affect this output and all that.

That's just a higher level of thinking.

If you don't have that basis, you can't reach those higher levels worth of thinking.

A man can't stand, he can't fight, can't fly.

I've had so many conversations with people about, entrepreneurial success and business, but one thing that keeps coming back over and over again is that those that accomplish a lot often end up feeling quite empty at the end.

I hear the statement, often that, did I work this hard just to work this hard?

Or did I come this far just to go this far?

in your opinion, what defines happiness?

Ooh.

So in my opinion, happiness is, An output of what you're doing as opposed to the goal.

So if you're chasing the butterfly of happiness, you're never gonna catch it.

Cause you always need the bigger car, the prettier wife, the newer trip, you're, it's the hedonic treadmill, so it's always chasing something as opposed to, I believe it's more of loving the process.

So it's an infinite.

for example, as a martial artist, I'm never gonna be perfect.

I know this.

I've won titles, you can see one of my trophies back there and all this sort of stuff.

But it's a constant process of trying to improve, of trying to get better, of trying to understand more.

And as a scientist, the more you know, the more you don't know.

Because the area of our uncertainty on the edge of our knowledge continues to expand.

And so being comfortable with that and yet at the same time being fascinated and pushing and growing the same way that a little kid is exploring in the world, if you can maintain that, you're gonna be really happy with.

Are there frustrating months?

Absolutely.

Oh, this program's not working.

that thing did go out to the clients.

my kids spill stuff all over the place.

My ex-wife's did this.

my ankle's messed up so I can't run, but those go again.

If you have a strong enough why you can overcome it.

How, if those are all just, okay, this isn't just something else for us to figure out and get through in the overall process.

And then as Richard Frankl talked about in Search for Meaning, you know that moment when the rainbow is crossed the sky and you're like, and so if you're chasing happiness, it's always gonna be just beyond your grasp.

But if you're loving what you're doing, you're going to find that happiness actually is threaded through everything that you're doing.

, Amin Ahmed: have you always been this optimistic?

For the most part, yeah.

I mean I've had obviously had some, not great periods like during my divorce or recovering from injury or like when my mom was sick and dying from cancer.

Cause that stuff sucks But you have to basically embrace the Stockdale parallels, which as Jim Collins talks about, is life suck.

We can get through it.

It's a very Irish sort of thing.

you know what?

We might die tomorrow, but we'll be able to enjoy it.

It's not fatal.

It's fixable.

that chunk of code got deleted.

it's a chance to make it better.

Oh, I can't find this.

You know what?

We'll solve it.

Oh, the computer's not working quite right.

All right, so we'll do an audio call instead of a video call.

So it's having that resiliency in just being able to know, all right, doesn't matter.

We're gonna get through it.

has there been a moment, and feel free to share, as much or a few details, but has there been a moment in your life that happened where you made that realization that, okay, it is what it is.

Let's just move on

Yeah, so when I got married 20 years ago, We went away on our honeymoon for a couple of weeks, came on back and my ex-wife traveled for General Electric.

A lot.

A lot.

So we literally came on back and two days later she was back on the road.

This time she wasn't just going on the road, she was going all the way to Australia.

So she flew from upstate New York to Hawaii.

Stayed with my sister for a day, then flew down to Australia, and she was there for two and a half.

During that time, I'm newlywed.

I'm home, I'm studying for exams, and I ended up having, because of law damage that I had accumulated over time with martial arts and all that.

I ended up having this as gross, a, testicular contortion and basically spun around and choked itself off and died.

I had to drive myself to the hospital to have surgery.

And when I woke up the next day and they're talking to me, they basically told me I had a choice between having kids or my dream of fighting in the Olympics.

And so at that point it's no.

All right, there's no real choice.

And I've got three kids, my hooligans and I sometimes, when they're really under my skin, it's you know what?

I could trade you for a gold medal

that's, thank you for sharing that with us.

That takes a lot.

And when you have to make those kinds of decisions, and I hope most people don't have to make big decisions like that, but inevitably

everybody's gonna have to make decisions like that.

So you the, as Walt Disney said, decades and decades ago, when values are clear, decisions are easy.

. So my goal would always to be, been to be a great fund.

Okay.

And yeah, it's spent, decade, more than a decade, training and, moving up the ranks and everything to be able to pursue that Olympic dream.

Having the kids was more important, so it because they were not close in terms of the value, because being a good father was so much more important to me.

I just made that decision.

And so a lot of the other things I've had to do, I have two special needs kids.

My oldest and my youngest.

Are both on the autism spectrum.

My youngest is adhd, my oldest is bipolar, so I've had to deal with all these sort of things for roughly the past 13 years on top of everything else.

And so I literally, my goal be a good dad.

Who before, COVID hit and everything and divorce my life was get up at four o'clock in the morning.

I wasn't training at that point.

Really.

I could get 15 minutes of training in, cause I had to work until I had to get the first kids up, get 'em off to school, then get the second one up because they were on different school schedules and so 8:40 he'd get on the.

I could start working, then I'd have to be done with work by 2:45 when the kids got home.

I'd be in full bed mode from then until 8:30 when they went to bed.

I had to have kids three different places every single day, plus make the food, supervise the homework and all that.

Cause my wife was traveling everywhere at that point.

And then I could get back the work mode.

So I'd work from 8:30 till midnight to get at four o'clock in the morning to repeat.

Why did I do that?

Because what was the most important thing?

Being a good dad, being a successful business owner was important, but not quite as important.

So I did what I had to do for that because that's where my priorities lie.

At that point.

Now your priorities will shift.

My kids are now older, so they don't need me quite as much and all that, so I can work more.

I've got the opportunity to be more flexible with things.

So you do the best that you can at that point with the overall goals in mind.

Yeah.

do the best that you can with what you have at the time.

I love that.

Yep.

Is there anything that your friends or people that know you would be something fun that they would be genuinely surprised to learn about you?

Oh, they know him pretty crazy.

people who just know me a little.

Actually don't realize that even though I'm like a badass martial artist, I come across really tough in all that in a lot of ways, and I'm, this big nerdy dork and all that.

I've got this love for poetry.

and writing and all that.

So whether it's music and I can't sing, so go and ask me to, but I appreciate music, I appreciate art.

Even though I can't draw a straight line without a ruler, I actually can write in some capacity.

So that's stuff that I enjoy.

And so it's one of these things that helps create that balance overall.

That's pretty cool.

I got a little bit of that when you mentioned Black Sabbath that the suit and tie Black Sabbath.

There was probably a different angle to this here as well.

So one of the things is that we are all really like diamonds.

and we have all these different facets.

And one of the things that you find out over time when as you get to know somebody better, is you can look at 'em from different perspectives.

, so you can see different aspects of them as a person.

And one of the things that we should be doing is making sure that we all have our flaws, we all have faults.

None of us are perfect, but we need to work on polishing those different aspects of ourselves.

To be able to present the full beauty, the full, jewel to the universe, and all too often people are just working on one or two of those faces as opposed to trying to work on many of them, which makes you that much better and makes you that much more brilliant and valuable.

That's a great analogy.

All of these little tidbits that you're giving here, I'm in my marketer's brain is thinking, man, that would make a really good blog post.

That would make a really good social media.

Go ahead and steal 'em.

Write 'em.

Write 'em off.

That's awesome.

I love your energy.

It's really fun.

And what's got you fired up right now that you're working on?

So what's got me fired up is I'm a man on mission and my mission is to reach and positively impact a hundred million.

By my birthday, which is in July.

So the goal, our deadline is just a dream.

I've got, the goal and I've got the deadline up.

Reach a hundred million people and positively impact them in some capacity during that time period.

Cause life sucks at times.

And we've had covid, we've got war, we've got recessions going on.

There's all this uncertainty.

People, are facing difficulty.

There's all these negative pressures.

So if I can, through my writing, through being on, discussions like this with you, Amin, radio programs, people buy my books, coaching, whatever, be able to reach out and positively impact a hundred million people, then what that does is that creates a hundred million little nodes of positivity.

And we all know about the butterfly flatnet swings and creating a hurricane someplace else in the world.

Or if we create a hundred million positive.

Of goodness, of positivity, of people helping other individuals out.

If we could do that, then we can literally bend the curve of what's going on in societies today and make the world a much better place.

And it's not through these huge movements, as Gandalf says, it's through the quiet actions of everyday people.

So the little things, so one of the things I want your listeners to do, go smile at five people.

The reason why is when you smile, it decreases the cortisol in your own system.

And it increases your dopamine, makes you happier, makes you slightly more intelligent.

But because of mirror neurons in the brain, what happens is if I smile at you or if I laugh and get you to laugh, then suddenly you've gotten that gift also, you're healthier, you're happier because of something that I did, and it cost me nothing other than a couple of seconds.

And if it's going something that's just happening in the normal course of affairs, it's not even costing me part of my life.

It's additive because when you laugh.

You slow down the aging process, so every time you laugh, you basically add on that much time to your life.

And so I've helped give you that gift.

And if you can now give that gift to half dozen other people, what's that gonna do?

I don't know.

We can't necessarily measure it, but we can feel it.

Awesome.

That's awesome.

That's a perfect note to end off on and those that are listening to the episode, I hope you can hear the smiles in our face when we're talking about this as well.

if somebody wanted to learn more about you and the amazing work you're doing, where can they find you?

maybe in the pub, but actually the best place to find me is if they go to my website, everyday-excellence.com.

That's everyday-excellence.com.

Every single day I put up a new blog post the podcast live there so they can find this one, a whole bunch of other ones.

There's gonna be links to the YouTube channel and TikTok.

So there's just all these resources there.

For people to be able to help themselves out, and I recently launched a 28 day coaching program where every single day it's a little bit of reinforcement and guidance and some accountability around it to make sure that you're growing and developing, and people who are going through that program are doing things like.

Giving up smoking and finishing projects that they had put on the shelf for six months or a year and spending a little bit more time with their kids and working out a little bit more.

So it's micro improvements that ultimately help change the curve of their life to a much better place.

Oh, that's awesome.

And that's a free program on your website, everyday-excellence.com.

That one is a paid one, but the three day one is completely free.

So there's hundreds of free resources there.

So paid ones that buys my beer.

I like my beer, obviously, I'm Irish, but there's all sorts of free ones.

Use whatever works for you.

This is all part of helping people out.

That's awesome.

I'll put those links down into the show notes for anybody listening.

Joe, I really appreciate your time today, your energy, your attention in what we've been talking about.

It's been really fun.

Thank you so much.

I really, I'm really grateful for having you on the show today,

Amin.

Thank you.

Be excellent and grow today.