What’s your hard? We discuss how facing your “hard” every day not only sets you up for success throughout the day, but also helps you to build emotional resilience for the surprise challenges that pop up throughout life. Whether it’s a physical feat or a mental exercise, overcoming these challenges regularly helps you build emotional resilience. We break down how to choose your hard, why I actually choose physicality over meditation, and what the future of work (or our new “hard”) might look like.

Read full show notes here.

00:02 - Adam (Host)

Welcome to the 200% live podcast with Adam Hergenrother. And Welcome to the 200% live podcast with Adam Hergenrother. And Welcome to the 200% live podcast with Adam Hergenrother. And Welcome to the 200% live podcast with Adam Hergenrother. And Welcome to the 200% live podcast with Adam. Welcome to the 200% live podcast with Adam Welcome to the 200% live podcast with Adam.

01:59

Welcome to the 200% live podcast with Adam. Welcome to the 200% live podcast with Adam. Welcome to the 200% live podcast with Adam. Welcome to the 200% live podcast with. Welcome to the 200% live podcast with. Welcome to the 200%.

04:54 - Caitlin (Host)

Live podcast with.

05:24 - Adam (Host)

Welcome to the 200% live podcast with. Welcome to the 200% live podcast with. Welcome to the 200% live podcast with Welcome to the 200% live podcast. With Welcome to the 200% live podcast, with why I choose physicality over meditation and what really the future of work will be. And I sprinkle in some stories of my kids, of them choosing hards and also getting real feedback in life from business and personal life.

07:30 - Caitlin (Host)

So within the organization you have encouraged people to choose something physically hard as almost like a training ground for some of the larger challenges that are facing the industry as a whole right now.

07:42 - Adam (Host)

Yeah, I mean. I mean, whether you're a vertebrae, you're an insect, you're a creature, you're a human sapien, like every single species on this planet faces adversity. I mean, luckily we're not like the lizards. I gave this example. I always watch that discovery show. You've seen that before. Yeah, You've seen that one where it's like really all the lizards hatch and they have like four and a half seconds to make it to the ocean or make it above this rock before 6,000 snakes eats them.

08:07 - Caitlin (Host)

Yes, yes, I mean, it's wild. Have you seen the one with the birds, where? They have to jump off. They hatch from their nest on a cliff and then they have to jump off the cliff and learn how to fly. And not all the birds make it, but that's like their first day or first week of life.

08:22 - Adam (Host)

Congratulations. Here you are, and then there's the other birds. I figure what they are. They actually live like 50 or 60 years. Do you remember what they're called? Part of their show notes. But they are a special bird that has to sit on an island for six months and it can't fly because it's so heavy. I think it's around six months, and basically they have to wait for their parents to bring them food so they can get strong enough, and then it takes about approximately six months. They have to withstand predators, they have to be able to withstand the environment. They have to, by the way, their parents have to come back and make sure they feed them. For what it is, anyways, it's six months of just relying on that. And so, again, life is not supposed to just wake up and go. Caitlin, what do you want for life? And I'm gonna make this as easy as possible for you.

09:05

It just, that's not what life does, but that's so. Many of us suffer because, in general right, I'm generalizing this but we wake up and we want life to be a certain way. I need to make a certain amount of money, I want a certain job, I want people to behave a certain way, I want my kids to act a certain way, I want them to be popular, but not too popular, right? I mean, we have all these conditions, right, that we've set for how life should be, and the reality is is life doesn't care about any of that and, in fact, it wants you. It goes.

09:30

If you're gonna do that, I'm gonna give you more adversity, and which is just. You wanna call them problems, you wanna call them challenges. Whatever they are, they're just adversity, it's just challenges that are in life. Again, you can call it a problem, it doesn't matter to me, it is a problem. Okay, great, then this is wonderful. But every time you solve the problem when was there never not another problem? Every time you hit a certain goal or got rid of something that was a challenge, and you're going man, I really just need to get through this one set of things. And then we buy into this foolishness that somehow, when we get through this, that I'm then gonna be okay. Remember, there's nothing wrong with setting out a goal and saying, okay, here's a set of challenges or a set of adversity that we have to get through right. There's nothing wrong with in fact, that's a wonderful strategy to do of how you're gonna come up with a strategy and get through it. But just don't ever in the back of your mind or buy into this story that your mind's telling you that once they get through this, then we're gonna be okay. That's the difference, because once you get through it, you go there might be a bigger one, it might be right, there, me coming a year, me coming a day, me coming during while I'm doing this. Right, I mean it, just it's you don't know, right, I mean it's all of these challenges that are there.

10:42

So one of the things that I think Navy SEALs have kind of taught us, which is you always fall back to the highest level of training that you have Rarely do people rise up in an occasion. That's a fallacy, actually. Most people say, oh, you rise up in training or you rise up in a sport, and it's only because they prepared themselves to rise up. When I was doing half Ironman's and Ironman's. You know, one of the things that my coach would always tell me is you will, you already, you're not gonna go be some magical dude out there or a dude-ess when you go out there and have your run right. You are gonna go out there and you are gonna. You're gonna fall back to your highest level of baseline training Basically.

11:21

That's why they can predict with data now where you're pretty much as long as everything goes relatively okay, you're going to have a here's your time, that's gonna be on your Ironman, right, and they're within like 15 minutes of it. Because there's just not really it'd be like you're not gonna. If you're running eight minute miles in training, you're not gonna go run a six minute mile, right. If you're running nine minute miles in training, you may, in a race, run 830, 840, but you're not gonna all of a sudden go to eight minutes for the entire time. It just doesn't happen that way. So that's why the Navy SEALs or any type of training like this you always fall back to your highest level of training and within business, sure, we can train through those things, but why not set yourself up or set up situations each day where you're working on your inner strength and your emotional resilience.

12:08

So then, when the inevitable shows up problem, adversity, challenge when it shows up in life personal business, it's just life right. When it shows up there, you're ready for it, and I'm not saying you're gonna feel great about it, but you're at least ready for it. And then you can see clearly how you can actually handle this. And so that's why I when you made that comment is I like to challenge people in their own personal lives to find something physically hard. I just think it's the easiest place to start. Right. I mean, business is gonna happen, but when you can do it in your physical life and again, you don't need to train all day for this, you don't need to set up a hell week like you go through Navy SEALs, it's just as I haven't exercised for three years Great. Tomorrow morning getting up a half an hour early and walking a mile will be hard. It just will be hard for you. Or getting up 15 minutes early and doing 50 pushups and 50 situps is gonna be hard. And the thing is, if you can just keep looking at like I got an email back from somebody that was doing this and they said I've always been doing 50 pushups for the last awhile and then when I got your challenge, I said I'm gonna do 300. And they go, I didn't. I couldn't remember. They said I couldn't quite get 300, but I got really close to it and then maybe finished them throughout the day. And I go. And what his response was I never know why I just kept stuck on 50. It would just became easy for me. And he goes thank you for challenging me. From there I go. Yeah, it's all mental, because the next day he was able to just go out there and do 200, whatever it was way more than he's been doing only because he decided to. And this is where the benefit of.

13:41

I firmly believe that the 80% of success that we see in our outward life or even in our inner life all comes down to our psychology of how we approach this. And this is why deep spiritual teachers really always reference the most important thing that matters the most is your intent. It's like do you want to go through this personal growth right? Or spiritual growth? Do you want to? Do you want to learn emotional resilience or there? Because if you do, the answers always show up right. They really do, and that's why your intent has to be there Doesn't mean everything's gonna be perfect, it doesn't mean it's gonna be the way you want it to, but the intent is there. I think it's the same thing if you wanna build emotional resilience in your life and you have to have the intent that like, yes, I wanna set up some things in my life to do it, which is, I think, the best way. If you look at most strategist or people that have succeeded at least in the outward world right, cause we're talking about that, cause you can bring that in there have mornings where they set up challenging things in their life.

14:40

Again, some form of exercise, meditation I mean. Again, it's not always easy when you have a hundred things going on, to sit down and meditate. Is it Right? Like you, it's easy to meditate, I get it. But it's the fact of choosing to meditate when you've got kids yelling, somebody's already late, like I've got a hundred things to do in there, to actually stop. I used to tell people used to say, like the first part of meditation is just to recognize the voice inside your head. They go, I can't meditate as a voice, it's on my head. I actually think it's before that. To me, it's actually the meditation is the fact of you recognize. I'm gonna pause right now and even though there's a thousand things, challenges, all these things going on, I'm actually gonna stop and meditate. To me, that is the first sign of meditation.

15:22 - Caitlin (Host)

Showing up is the hardest part.

15:23 - Adam (Host)

Yes.

15:23 - Caitlin (Host)

Really yeah. So it almost sounds like, too. It's so easy to push these things aside or say, oh, I'm just gonna stick with the 50 pushups because I can do it, and then I'm gonna go on with my day. And the day is calling with long to-do lists, people to take care of, people to serve whatever role you're in, and. But this moment sounds like it's almost would you say it's the most important. I mean it's because it's kind of the precursor for everything that falls in a day, like if you're building emotional resilience with your one hard thing that you're doing, or whatever that is, it's then going to have that domino effect that affects everything else.

16:01 - Adam (Host)

Yeah, to me personally, and then again, this is just my personal opinion on this even before meditation, for me, physicality is the most important thing for my day. Really, yeah, absolutely, because I can work on releasing throughout the rest of the day. I think meditation's great and, by the way, I still do it 99% of the time twice a day. But if I had to choose let's just give you this example of this If I'm like flying out at four in the morning, I will choose physicality first before I choose meditation. And that's for me because, for one, it calms. Like if I don't exercise I can feel the anxiety build up in me, like it builds up and it's harder for me to stay centered. So, in terms of, for me, what's the one thing that I can do is always physicality, of getting that out there I feel more prepared, and then I can always like then usually when I get on a plane, I can meditate. So that's like one thing I can. I can just kind of reverse the order that I do it. Typically, when I wake up in the morning, 99% of my days I meditate first, I journal and then I exercise. But if I'm faced with making a decision, it's physicality first. And again, it's because if you're choosing that horror, you're choosing. It's not easy to just get up and then start moving your body when it's cold, when it's dark, it's like those type of things. It's when it's convenient to exercise. To me it's just, you're just interested in it, and when it's I think Keith Blanchard said this quote when it's convenient, it's like an interest. And then when you basically do it I forget the way he's described it it's like you've made a decision to do it and so it's easy. When it's Sunday, on a Sunday afternoon, and you've got three hours lying around to go for a jog, but what about Monday morning, when it's 430 in the morning and it's raining, that's your decision and just doing it. Forget about the outcome of, like how fast you run it or what you do. It's getting out there and doing it. And once I've never really unless you're sick or something I've never had a situation where after I've exercised I felt worse. I actually always feel better. It just it calms my body and then it gives me that ability, which is why I've always pushed physicality, because for me it's always worked. And again, I think it works for 80, 85, 90% of the world.

18:11

That's out there that if you exercise first or exercise part of your general weekly routine, I think it's important to do something weekly, even like active recovery can be a walk, active recovery can be a very light spin on your bike, it can be a stretching class, it can be a yoga class or whatever it is for you. You can do some form of active recovery. And some people like having a day off. Anyways, I'm not gonna get the physical routines, but it's choosing something Like people get so complacent and I don't mean complacent a bad way, it's just they're choosing mediocrity. And you can also break this and expand it down to your relationships with your significant other, like do I? Where are we at with that? How have I advanced this? Where's my thinking flawed in what it is right now? Just like the example that I gave you early on with Asher, I was like give me the feedback. And so when's the last time you went to your stiffening other and you chose a hard which was tell me something wrong with me. I actually wanna know what's wrong with me.

19:13

The other example of this is my daughter. My oldest daughter is like kind of like. She is very, she loves being like just spontaneous and she's not a super competitive, and so she always struggles in the area that we're in to like find her niche within her friend group, like. She's always kind of chasing them right, like, and nobody really like really includes her into a lot of things and it kind of breaks your heart sometimes as like an adult, but she's always tries to find her way to get in these different things and she's pretty much good with when she's not. And I just kind of have these conversations with her. I'm like one you don't need to, you don't need to change of who you are and as you are kind of building your you, first of all, you kind of explain in larger scale that a lot of the things that are happening don't really matter later on in life, right, and you get to choose your heart of being who you are, which is going to create short-term pain but long-term gonna give you progress in your life.

20:10

And there's a really interesting study I don't know if we can find it again, but it talked about how, like I think it was like 80 or 83 or 84% of people that are what we would know for us we call them successful, like in our lives, like even people that are not even like people that have like also were like spiritual leaders, like at Eckhart-Tolley or different examples like this none of them actually had any friends in school Like. The greatest example you give from like kids aren't always used for kids is like Taylor Swift Like she was, she talks about openly how she had no friends. She was a dork, she was really weird. Like she's open about it and she literally had. She had nothing Like. She didn't have a friend group and she felt like alienated from the whole thing. And of course, you know she's successful, whether that's Elon Musk, mark Zuckerberg, bill Gates you've heard them all tell their stories about, even me personally. Right, that was the same way. I was never really kind of in that group and I think a lot of it is, and I was explaining this to my daughter.

21:06

The point in the story I was sharing with this is part of and this is what the article cites is that a lot of times, people that are really popular or they have it easier and so there's no adversity, and so they don't actually grow during the school ages and so, therefore, and then they also conform and so they've kind of fallen in line with like dogma, right and like they, and then they never really really grab for themselves.

21:36

And sure, there's there should be examples of people that have been successful and done that, but the majority of people and so I always explain it to her I'm like, look, you don't want to fall into a way of other people's thinking, you don't want to just bend for somebody else, you want to be you. And then if that creates some initial adversity, that's wonderful, because you're going to need to learn this skill in your entire life, and so it's kind of like choosing your heart. And that's where the point of I always explain I'm like you can either accept what it is with your, with your friend group you can change your friend group, you can just and or you can just interact with it and knowing that it's going to be like this, that's fascinating.

22:07 - Caitlin (Host)

We're right now like choosing, looking at what schools to send our oldest two and everything, and just thinking about that really shifts the perspective around. Like it's not, and I know we don't want our kids to face adversity, but those are some really great examples of like how something that we, even as parents, we can shy away from and be like. I don't want my kid to experience this pain, but choosing your heart at an earlier age can be more beneficial.

22:33 - Adam (Host)

Yeah, and you actually actually bring that conversation to them.

22:36 - Caitlin (Host)

Yeah.

22:36 - Adam (Host)

Starting early. Like I know, there's some parents in mind. They're wonderful friends, they love their kids to death but they try to create scenarios where their kids that were faced adversity and they will go to great lengths because they experienced adversity in their life and they don't, or they're bullied at some level and bullying is different. I'm not talking about, like actual bullying, the definition of bullying. That's a whole other concept that should be stopped.

22:58

I'm talking about like different level, like those kind of examples that I gave you and, and part of the conversation is like look like you're making it too easy for your kids and or and again. I'm not going to get into a parenting thing here. The point of sharing that story is like, even though it hurts your heart as a parent, kids need to go through that. They need to me anyways, they need to go through. That's also why I love sports and I'm so involved with teaching and coaching sports, because you get a lot of adversity in sports and that's one flavor of it. But I also think you know you got to bring that over in other aspects of your life.

23:33 - Caitlin (Host)

for whatever it is, To backtrack a little bit here too, talking about how it's like there's this complacency, like I think there is almost like an egoic trap where we can be like, oh, I wake up and I do my meditation every morning, and I mean I'm speaking for myself here, and like little pat on the back and I go on with my day, but the hard thing would actually be choosing to get up and do pushups or whatnot, and so it's like at one point the hard thing was the meditation, but it's not the hard thing anymore.

24:03

So questioning and asking yourself am I doing something hard? And I guess it has to be a recurring question that you're asking yourself routinely.

24:13 - Adam (Host)

Well, it's like it's again imagine if you learn two plus two and then never learn multiplication. I mean it's really like okay, I'm in second grade, I learned second grade and it was hard. Now I'm in fifth grade but I want to do second grade math and I just see, I just I use kids as an example because I just live it every day and this is what it's almost like. They're like oh, now I have to do this in math, right, and it's like yeah, because you already know that they go yes, I know that I don't need to use that, I go. It doesn't matter whether you ever gonna use this algebraic form, and I get it. Maybe there should be some structure down, but for now, when you're not doing it, you're now facing a new challenge and new way of thinking, and can you bring that in there? Forget about the answer whether they're gonna use the fact that you have to do a derivative. Sure, you probably will use a calculator, but there's better benefits that you're missing out on this, which is you're now learning something new, but you're also working through it. I give you this.

25:00

Another great example of this is I always wanted to learn more about 3D printing, because it's just been something fascinating, I think it's. I just saw that they just completed their first ever subdivision in Austin Texas using nothing but 3D printing, which is wild. You can go look it up, google it, you can see it. In there in Austin Texas, they had their first ever built residence division, which I think 3D printing again. This is my long-term theory or view on this is that things themselves, anything that we have, you know, houses, cars, boats, planes, literally at some point we'll get so efficient that you can have any of them you want you, literally, if you want a Ferrari, you want a boat, you want a bigger house, you'll be able to have it.

25:41

Land, I don't know yet because land's one of the things that, like, do we create land in different categories At some point? Maybe right, are we? You know, whatever that is, but until foreseeable future, I think the things that most of us work for to try to get to have to pay for our house, pay for these different things, will be so cheap that we won't really need to work, which is why I think that jobs this generation call it a hundreds of years, whatever you want to refer to it, as they'll look back at this in maybe a hundred years, 150, maybe 200, maybe 50, I don't know, maybe 30, in go. Do you remember all the? Imagine having the work, imagine, could you imagine having the work? And they'll be like, I don't know how people lived.

26:23

I'm serious, like because you know, and I, I, I actually just read this thing in morning, brother, a day where they're talking about the, you know the founders of open AI and Elon Musk, and all of them actually share the same sentiment, even to the point where you know Bernie Sanders, who happens to be in Vermont, is trying to promote a 32 hour work week. Whether you like it or not, that's not the point. But what he's exciting is that AI is making everything so efficient that people can actually get everything they need to be done, and changing the standard work week from 40 to 32. And basically you could do it in three 12 hour days. You could do it in four days and give more people ever does different opinion on that, and that's I bring it up purely because you're now seeing it brought into legislature of saying AI is so efficient. And then they cite the guys that are working on open AI and different things, saying at some point in the really near future, people won't have to work because everything will be so efficient and you'll be able to have everything.

27:15

So, anyways, we have this 3D printer and it's wild. First of all, I had to set it up and it was frustrating because I'm not really good at setting those things up, but I sat there and did it and got it working. It's I don't know, have you ever used one before? You take like a filament and like you can change the colors out, you can change it and you put it in there and like you put it through a computer program and it basically just builds it Like you could build this cup.

27:38 - Caitlin (Host)

How does it get the material?

27:40 - Adam (Host)

It's called a filament and it's like a hard, durable plastic and they can change different material. You can get different filament.

27:46 - Caitlin (Host)

So you couldn't make like a ceramic mug, but you couldn't make a mug out of.

27:50 - Adam (Host)

There's probably a filament that is very similar to ceramic, maybe not ceramic, but just like you can make that plastic, you can make that steel right. It's just actually I don't know about steel, but like you can make things that basically can be heated up. Can't steel be heated up right and like and then transform is not what they do with rod iron. So I mean, it's like 220 degrees when it comes out and it's so hot and it shapes it into whatever it is and it's in 40 minutes you can have a ski like, a little like a foot long ski with a boot on it and it moves. That's it. It just does the whole thing for you. Wow, and you're seeing that and you're going dude, this was, this was $500.

28:28 - Caitlin (Host)

Is there like, is there fabric in the boot Like, or is it like the shell of the boot? And then you would need to do something like yeah.

28:35 - Adam (Host)

Yeah, I think you would use the shell of the boot, but it's just, you know this. This thing is $500 and it's making pretty much anything you like. My son made these watch holders for iPads and it would look like you would bottom in a store. Wow, like if somebody had came down and said I bought this on Amazon, I would have thinking differently. And if you're getting, if you're using a 3D printer, you understand what I'm saying. And then they just get bigger and bigger and bigger, right, as this technology becomes cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, everyone will have one like in their garage and like. You're like, oh, you want a new lacrosse stick, great boom. Like this is going to print it out. And like, because that's all plastic, right. And then like, oh, you want a 3D printing for a string and they're going to have a string 3D printer, right, so you're just going to have all these things. It's going to be so efficient, right, and even if you had to buy some of these other items or somebody gives you, they'll be so cheap because they can make them for nothing as the. That's again the point of like you're seeing it as legislature. You're seeing it with open AI, people seeing this that are much, much smarter beyond mean smarter than I am in terms of in that world of 3D printing and open AI and how intelligent it is.

29:33

I don't know. Did you see that new one that got released called Devin? No, there's a new open AI. I think it's. I could be wrong. I think it's Microsoft's. Devin is what they're calling it DEVIN and it's basically a open AI that then trains other open AIs inside. So it's basically training, training of the open AI's trainer, and it knows whether or not you're asking a fake question or a full question, and now it's building like a whole repertoire of like people, basically, and it's now coaching those people and then it's building more people.

30:08 - Caitlin (Host)

AI intelligence.

30:09 - Adam (Host)

Yes. Like not real people, yeah, yeah, like, actual, like it's building the bots and then managing the bots to fulfill the jobs. I mean it's like and it's forget that they were saying how much more effective it was than like it was some astronomical number of how much more it could produce than like a human being working a 40 hour work week.

30:34 - Caitlin (Host)

Or training AI, for that matter too. Exactly that's accurate.

30:37 - Adam (Host)

So again, like we can, we can move away from the depth of AI. My only point of saying that is the world will look back a century generation so and say do you remember when you had the work?

30:45 - Caitlin (Host)

Yeah, when you said 30 years I was like no. But I mean when you combined 3D printing and AI and yeah.

30:54 - Adam (Host)

You think about just the last 20 years where we've come?

30:56 - Caitlin (Host)

It makes me think about Amazon as a business model, because obviously Jeff Bezos is very smart in looking at this, but Amazon is totally built on yes. And people's need to buy items.

31:07 - Adam (Host)

Yes, and maybe people still buy it. I get it. I think people are sort of the buy things, but I think it's just produced so cheaply. That's the difference right, it's like do you remember when TVs at one point were like 20 grand for a 75 inch screen TV?

31:20

I mean literally they were what 25, 30,000? Maybe I could be wrong, it could be. When they first came out there were some astronomical number for a 75 inch screen TV and now you have curved LCD highest pictures pictures that you can have and they're like $300. I mean the cost of them maybe about 300, but you can buy a 75 inch screen TV for under $500 now and they're so cheap and they're better than the highest quality one that was ever there. The speed at which these things and how it's just again like how cheaper things are getting, so I think that's just the direction of what we are, but so yeah, we digressed, yeah.

31:59 - Caitlin (Host)

so the fact that choose your heart, yeah.

32:01 - Adam (Host)

So again. So the purpose of this is so, and one of the things here's what I take away right From, like your inner takeaways from this, which is, you know, there's outward gain that you get from using physicality. I think there's an inner gain that you get from physicality. For me, the inner gain is it settles me down, to allow myself to stay more centered, to do more relaxing and releasing or kind of, you know, allowing the emotion to come through, versus if I don't exercise, it's harder for me to stay centered. So it's benefit then from the physicality standpoint. You obviously get physical benefits. You get drips of endopamine, you get smarter in your choosing your heart.

32:39

You're finding something harder, and I thought you brought up a really good point, which is nobody listening to this.

32:43

No matter what you're doing, you may have the perfect routine, you may have not even started, but one thing you can do is you can add something that's harder today and you can do it at the same time.

32:52

So maybe your workout is 30 minutes and you've been on the treadmill doing the same thing for the last two years, why don't you go out there today? And maybe you don't run, but maybe you put the incline to 11 for five minutes, right. Maybe you go and you, between your runs, you get off it and you do 100 pushups and get back on a run, or maybe you run at two miles per hour more, or point two miles per hour faster. Everyone can just elevate their heart. It doesn't have to be more time, it just means that you're constantly putting yourself in a situation where it forces you to choose to increase your emotional fitness, which, again, no matter where the world goes and whatever happens in your business and personal life, the more emotional fitness you can have, the inner strength you can have, the better you'll be able to solve problems and handle reality and just be a better human being.

33:40 - Caitlin (Host)

So inner takeaway today is ask yourself, where can I add something hard into my life? And outer is execute on it.

33:47 - Adam (Host)

Perfect love it