#168: Building Resilience: Rise Up From The Worst With Sam Bakhtiar

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate that.

What's not written in a part of that bio that you would love for people to know about you?

King of failure.

Oh, that's BS, man. You're not the king of failure.

I think failure is the prerequisite to success. So the more you fail, the more resilient you become, the more you learn if you actually do learn from them. So the reason I'm here and I'm experiencing somewhat of a success is because I failed over and over because I wasn't afraid to try. I'm never afraid to try. I'll try. I try. If I eat dirt, I get back up and try again and eat dirt. I have a 7-month-old. Actually, he's 8 now. Pretty soon he's going to start walking. He's going to fall like 1,000 times before he starts walking. He's going to take a little step and fall, a little step and fall. And but no kid ever said, you know what, eff it, I don't want to walk no more, this is it, I'm just going to lay down. But somehow as adults, every time we fail, or if we fail, we just want to give up. We just want to be like, okay, this sucks, and blame all the circumstances and everybody else and coronavirus and the economy and whatever it is you want to call it. I mean, we never want to take personal responsibilities. You know, we are here because of some of the decisions we've made here in life so far.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Yeah, I mean, you said so much there, Sam. It's interesting you use the analogy of the kids when they were little. I love that one personally because just having 4 kids of our own and having seen them go through that stage of crawling to standing to knocking shit over all over the house and having to childproof the house and they eat dirt again and again and again and yet You said it, that the kid doesn't think, geez, I'll never walk, but there's another piece of that, which is the parents.

Yeah.

The parents, the worst of the parents, you know, we know some parents that maybe shouldn't have— should have gotten a license before they had a kid. But even those folks never look at their kid and say, oh, you know what, that kid will never walk. I mean, they crawl, they stand, they fall down, you know they're going to walk. You have that faith. Like you said, that's one of your Fs is faith. faith that they will walk, and if it takes eating dirt, to use your words, 100 times, 500 times, at some point that kid's going to walk, right? I mean, why is it any different when that little kid turns 30 years old or turns 40 or 50?

Because people just kept telling you, you can't do it. You started paying attention to what other people think and people's opinion. A kid is not paying attention to anybody else's opinion. A kid has one thing on his mind. I want to get up and I want to walk because I want to get that toy over there. I want to walk to that thing over there. As an adult, we forget, we lose focus on what we really want and we start paying attention to what everybody else is saying, what everybody else is doing, what everybody else is telling us. And that's why it's our biggest downfall as adults versus when we were kids.

So we could talk about one of those dark failure times for you. Maybe it's helpful to do that just to give a little context for it. But If you can remember what your mindset was like, like, so for example, I'll tell you, I pivoted out of being a lawyer. I was a lawyer for 18 years, very, very successful, couple of offices, more money than I'd ever dreamed I'd make, certainly many times more than my parents made. I typically make more in a day, in a week easily than my parents made in an entire year, and that I would do that all the time, but I was miserable. So I had to get out of there because it was just destroying me. My insights. And then I move into something else, rise to the top of that particular thing, become very successful in that arena, and then business partners and I don't see eye to eye. We have a falling out. They don't believe in my vision any longer, and I'm out. So, I have to pivot this time now, not because I decide that I'm going to get out, but because somebody else says, you got to get out. And I remember that time caught me more off guard than the first time when I was the miserable one and making the changes. This time, It was something that I didn't necessarily see coming. Could have. In hindsight, it's always easy to see the writing on the wall. We know that. So I look back, I can see it, but then I was caught off guard. And I remember what I was doing and where my head was at and what I was more intentionally looking to focus on at that time, which helped me to get out of that and create what we've been doing ever since, which we've absolutely loved. So now we've got a disruption with this thing, this virus thing, which we'll get to in a minute. But Take us back to that time, and it could be you coming to a new country, it could be the ending of your marriage, whatever was going on. And if you can remember what it was like in that moment, what was happening for you? What was going on in your head? What was the worst sort of thoughts you were entertaining at the time?

The time that I came to America?

Well, I'm saying in your bio, it says refugee turned divorcee on the verge of bankruptcy. Probably condensing that a bit, but yeah.

So there was— I had many dark times in my life. You know, I remember it all started, you know, my dad left us when I was 3. Never saw him again. You know, then our country went to the war and we got bombed on every night and we had to go under the stairs and in the basement every time we heard sirens. I came to America expecting I'm going to go to Beverly Hills because that's what I saw on TV. We went to the worst neighborhood I've ever seen to this day, where outside there was drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and people were getting shot outside of my uncle's store. Then coming to America, my favorite sport I played all my life in Iran was soccer, and they didn't have a soccer team. I got cut from the basketball team. I got ridiculed. I got beat up. I got bullied. I got name-called because I wasn't— I was the only minority in school. Then starting and going through chiropractic school and college because my mom said, become a doctor. I became a doctor because of my mom. And started my first business. Then the recession hit. Recession hit worst times when my ex-wife was pregnant with our first child, and I was minus $314 in the bank account. Then I concentrated to try to get the business back in. So from 2008 to 2013, I was broke. And 2014, I was broke. I was trying to make ends meet. Finally, I started turning things around, and then I got served with divorce papers. And we still to this day, As we're talking about, even off camera when you saw me picking up the phone, I'm still— even though that I got remarried, I'm still having issues to this day with my ex-wife and co-parenting and all that kind of stuff. So just because you see the house, the mansions, and all this kind of stuff, that doesn't mean that you don't have adversity in life. In life, you're either in a problem, headed towards a problem, or just left one. You know what I mean? So there's always going to be something. And I wholeheartedly believe that God puts adversity in front of you to test you to see if you're worthy of his blessing.

Yeah, I definitely don't think there's anything that's going on for any of us that we're not capable of. I absolutely believe in a loving, kind universe. And sometimes kindness comes in funny ways because something that helps you to grow is really a kind thing. It's a beautiful thing. It doesn't necessarily feel that way in the moment.

You gotta approach it that way. You know, I always say this analogy, what I love. If you ever watch MMA or boxing, and sometimes when you see somebody get punched straight in the face, they get punched and they shake it off and laugh and let the opponent know, yep, you hit me. That was a good one. You got me good on that one. And to me, the more you get punched, the more you're used to it, the more you're able to maneuver through adversity.

Mm-hmm.

And in life, man, it's the same thing, just like boxing. The first time that guy got punched straight in the face, he wasn't laughing. I guarantee you that. The first 100 times he got punched in the face, he wasn't laughing. I guarantee you that. But he got punched so many times, he understood that being punched was a part of the game. And if you're playing this game called life, adversity is going to be part of the game. So embrace it, smile at it, look at it and say, hey, what am I going to learn about this? How am I going to maneuver it? And what's the other blessing that's going to be on the other side? Every time I've gone through some kind of a huge adversity, every single time when I thought my life was over, I became better at the end. But have I given up? Have I just thrown in the towel? I wouldn't have gotten to where I am right now.

Just in that genre, I grew up watching Muhammad Ali, maybe a couple of years your senior. And I remember Muhammad Ali, I mean, I'm not old enough to remember when he didn't accept his— wasn't willing to go fight in Vietnam. And for religious reasons, as well as other reasons, he said, hey, I'm just a conscientious objector here. And that was tough. I mean, he was— death threats and every other kind of thing was thrown his way. And then, of course, missing time, missing a good part of the prime of his career, coming back and standing in that ring with the likes of Joe Frazier, Joe Foreman— George Foreman, sorry. And in the ring, he would smile at guys who punched him square in the head. I mean, you know, he could take a punch. And he also had that little move that he would do where it's sort of like he would Aikido the punch, you know? He called it the rope-a-dope. Oh. He'd get on the ropes, right? And he'd kind of move his head back and forth and guys would sort of be hitting him but not quite hitting him and it's like he was absorbing the blow. I mean, the guy was just a genius. He was a genius in and out of the ring. And there's something to the fact that all of us have to do that. I mean, obviously, you know, with Ali, you could call it a shame, but it's also just a part of life. The man ends up with Parkinson's and— This great big hulk of a guy, this champion, and this guy who could speak like nobody's business. I mean, this consummate showman, and then he can't really communicate. It's like his communication left him as well. So I think there's an element of all of us having to just sort of learn how to roll with the punches. I mean, I'm just going to go with that analogy. I mean, that's really what we're talking about here, right, Sam? You can't really take it on the face too much because Rocky, Rocky, I guess, maybe is an example of both because in the first movie, as far as I'm concerned, the only Rocky, 1976, Rocky and Apollo Creed, and the guy gets knocked down and knocked down and knocked down every single time. He just gets back up, smiles, shakes it off, says, that's good, but it's not good enough. It's not going to knock me out. And he wins our hearts, but he loses the fight. He loses the fight in the end. So I'm not certain that we want to have people leaning into the punch, but to be able to roll with those punches. You gotta be smart about it too, right?

You know, nobody leans into a punch, you know, on purpose anyway. You know, you obviously want to avoid punches, but you also understand if you're going to play the game, you are going to get hit. Floyd Mayweather, the best defensive fighter of all time, he got hit. Yeah, he got hit, and you're going to get hit, and everybody else is going to get hit. And nobody has gone through life not getting hit. I can guarantee you that. And if there was some day, for whatever reason, some kind of a trust fund baby who just got billions of dollars and all he did was just eat pineapples and be by the swimming pool, I guarantee you he'll be the most depressed person in the world. Because what is life without adversity? What is life without overcoming? What is life without learning? What is life if you're not playing life?

Yeah. I feel like you're describing resilience. How do you define resilience, Sam?

Resilience for me is Somebody who doesn't let outside forces bother them. They have a goal and they're willing to do whatever it takes to go through to get to that goal. They don't care about the past. All they care about is where they need to go and they're willing to pay the price to get there, any price to get there. That to me is resilience, my definition of resilience.

What are you excited about these days? I know you and I had talked right before we hit the record button that there's some opportunities out there and that might be part of your excitement, but what's really got you jazzed up right now?

Honestly, man, fatherhood. Yeah. Fatherhood.

Being a daddy, huh?

Well, like, you know, I mean, yeah, there's opportunities out there and I'm all about it and I will jump on those opportunities. You know, don't get me wrong. But my main focus is quality time with the family, spend time with the family, be with the family. That's what my main focus is right now.

Yeah. You can't get those days back. I think I'd said this to you also just a little bit ago that our kids have left the nest. So my wife and I, Randy and I, we are, we are empty nesters. And enjoying that. It's like I'm supposed to feel guilty, I think, but I feel like this is a wonderful time to see our little chicks fly on their own. We had a meeting last night, actually gathered our crew together for a family meeting to just talk about this coronavirus because it's got a lot of people in fear. It's got, I mean, our kids, we got 2 in college, 2 that are out, 2 that are in, and they've just moved, the entire UC system has moved to online classes now. So you got kids living on campus who are now not attending classes on campus. They're attending them through their computer. It's a big change, man. I asked you before, but I want to get you on now to talk about this. What do you make what we're seeing with the response to the virus? And I don't mean like the CDC response. I mean, the response of everyday people to it.

To me, I think these days everybody is so influenced by the social media. And we talked about it, the walking example with everyone, what everybody else is doing. And again, that's why I created my 1% Brand. 1% Brand is all about seeing what the masses are doing and doing the opposite and doing your own thing, do your own thing, not being a sheep and being a lion, making your own decision and making your own paths. Warren Buffett said that if you want to be successful, look at what the masses do and do the opposite. And it's so true. Never been more true than that. So today is a great day, great time right now to be aware, to be able to just think clearly, do your own research, come to your own conclusion. If somebody came and told me, man, don't do an interview with Adam, that guy's a jerk, I'm not going to take that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make my own research. I want to come to my own conclusion about who Adam is and what he does and all that kind of stuff, you know. And most— so many people are just jumping ships, you know, especially with the wild, you know, spread of social media and everything that's happening right now, you know. Everybody's I want to panic. There's no toilet paper. There's no water.

Yeah, no hand sanitizer. People buying hand sanitizer for $100. I mean, what on earth?

We went to get diapers for our 7-month-old, you know, and then it was like we had to go to 3 different Targets to find diapers. I'm going like, wow, okay. But guess what? The toilet paper companies are happy, you know. Diapers, toilet paper, water paper.

3M is happy.

You know, yeah, exactly. So that's how millions are made and millions are lost. But you have to be able to understand it, look at it and see what— how to react. If you look at a pack of Lysol, for many years it says coronavirus on it. Coronavirus has been around forever. This might be like a little stronger thing, but the people who are really going to pass away from coronavirus are people who are immune systems compromised, older people who are going to die from influenza. You know, people are going to, you know, and influenza virus, the flu virus kills more people than coronavirus ever did. 10 times more. Nobody talks about obesity, how much obesity kills in America, but yet we come up with a new flavor of Doritos, a new flavor of, you know, uh, you know, Cheez Whips, and, you know, and all that kind of stuff, you know. So it's time, it's a good time to be awake, a good time to make your own decision and not follow just the masses and the media that is just making everybody panic, you know. There's no channels out there, no news out there That says, oh, we'll tell you what's all the good things that's happening. There's no news, good news news, because you know what? Nobody would watch it.

Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Yeah. So interesting, Sam. I really want to invite people to repeat the words that Sam just said, which is, it's a good day to be awake. It's a good time to be awake. I mean, if there's only one thing you take out of this discussion, That would be it for me. It's a good time to be awake, to be aware, to see what's going on. And it's rare that you get to see the herd all in one direction. You know, like if you watch a herd or you watch a documentary where you see fish swimming in schools under the water, it's rare that you can see so many people going in the same direction globally. Mm-hmm. Sometimes you see it in your own market, that's where you live, etc. But we're seeing a global herd moving in a certain direction. You see it in the stock market, you see it in other places. This is a great time to be a contrarian. So that concept of 1%, be that 1% that just decides, I'm going to swim upstream today and just look and see, what do I notice? What can I be aware of? What opportunities are out there?

100%.

Sam, so tell us a little bit about the Camp Transformation Centers and what was the inspiration for starting that business and where's that at today?

Everything that I've done that was a success, it all started because it was a failure first. So it wasn't like this genius idea I came with. No, it was really out of desperation. I started my personal training business on February 15th, 2000, and I started doing good by my standards, which is very low. I come from a very low-income area called Sharon, Pennsylvania, where you made $2,000 a month, you were really doing good. So I started my business and I started making $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 a month. I thought I was Bill Gates. And I was making more money in a month than a lot of people were making a whole year back home, but I didn't know anything about investing or doing money correctly and saving up or anything like that. I bought a house, I bought cars, stupid shit a lot of people do when they don't know how to really manage money and delay gratification. So in 2008, the recession hit. Nobody could afford personal one-on-one training, and my business started tanking, and I didn't know what to do. So I had to come up with creative ideas to be able to retain my clients because nobody could afford a $600 or $800 a month bill no more. So I came up, after 2 years, 2 and a half years, 3 years of failing at so many different programs, I created a group training concept where we could have one trainer with as many as 20 to 30 clients and train them. Now we lower the cost for the clients so they don't have to pay $800 a month no more, $600 a month. They pay $100 a month. They can afford that. But we also— what we did was also lower the cost for the company because with one-on-one training, every time we had a client, you had to have a trainer. So when our revenue went up, our payroll chased it. But the biggest thing that we discovered, because I come from an old-school bodybuilding background that you have to have one trainer with one client and you've got to lift heavy weights and all that kind of stuff, is the fact that after that, we actually got better results for our clients. Clients stayed longer because they were working out with their friends. And it was a much better vibe than the one-on-one training because one-on-one training became a therapy session after a while when you and the trainer kept talking. All it was did more talking and less lifting. And that was stumbled by accident. And that's when we find the magic because we failed. The recession, out of desperation comes inspiration and creativity. When you're doing good and this and that, you don't want to be creative because you're comfortable. Out of desperation is when you have to get creative and you have to try to make things work. And that's when genius ideas really come up.

Necessity is the mother of invention. It's old statements like that exist for a reason. And the 5 Fs, this is a part of the philosophy that you share with kids: faith, family, fitness, finance, and fun. This is an important thing to you. I get that. You spend a lot of time working with kids. That's a part of the model.

To me, man, I work with everyone, kids, adults, and really let them understand what game are they really playing. See, a lot of people are just playing the wrong game. They think they want money, but that's not what they really want. They want freedom. They think they want more money, but they want more time with their kids. All that's available now, but you have to make sure you're aware of it. Again, I'm going back, we're going to go back to the same thing over and over, awareness, awareness. Most people are just walking around, just not aware of what they're eating, what they're drinking, What they're doing to their body, their finances—they're just walking around, just existing without really honing in on particulars. And so when I sat down, I'm like, okay, what areas of life somebody needs to be to become fulfilled? That's the sixth F that I never talk about because at the end of the day, all of us want happiness and fulfillment. Everything that we do in life, we're going towards happiness and fulfillment. So faith, okay. Now I don't care how what religion you are. I don't none of my business. But you have to understand that there's a higher power and you're. You're here for a reason greater than for yourself, for you to eat, shit, and sleep and repeat. God has put you here for a reason. If you don't believe in God, you have to believe in a higher power. That's your business. I'm not going to get into religion for you, but there's got to be a higher power that you believe in, something greater than yourself. 2, family. Okay, we all want better relationships with people who brought us in this world, to be able to be around them. People that brought us in this world are relatives, our family, and some of them is not even our family. Someone can be friends that are closer than families. I have some friends that are a lot closer than some of my family members. Basically, our personal relationships, family and our personal relationships, are very important. And to this day, I don't care if you own an online business, I don't care if you have a brick-and-mortar business, I don't care what kind of business you are. In this day and age, you will not survive without relationships. And relationships are going to be your biggest advantage over anyone. So thirdly, fitness. Okay, now you've got to be able to be at your top state. You have to be able to function optimally for you to be able to do— to bring the finances and be with your family and do everything else. If you're not taking care of your fitness and your health, then everything else is going to fall apart. And last but not least, fun. You got to have fun. You got to stop and smell the roses. You have to be able to say, hey man, you know, what am I doing all this for? If life is not fun, then what are we going to do?

Indeed, brother. Indeed. This all, again, filters back to me almost like a recipe for creating resilience. And the thing about resilience is the time to create it is before you need it. And right now, when we were talking about resilience a year ago, 2 years ago, that would have been a better time to be working on your resilience than when the coronavirus has stopped— changed things for you, changed the landscape. But the time is here. And now is the moment where you get to, as you say, be more aware, And I would say be more aware of what it is that you're doing to be the best you can be. Take care of yourself now so that not just that you can thrive again or survive what's going on now, but you've created a new trajectory for yourself, a new path. Because as you said, Sam, this is not the last adversity you're going to face. Right. In fact, this won't be anything like what you might be in your worst moment of what-if-ing. It will not turn out to be that anyway. But rest assured, there'll be another something that challenges your comfort zone a month, a year, 10 years from now, whenever it is. So, Sam, what's one thing that you do on a ritual basis to produce greater resilience for yourself?

I like to just put myself in uncomfortable positions. I like to take the hard way. I like difficult. I don't like easy. Easy is not fun to me. I like to take the stairs. I like to do things that I'm uncomfortable with. Recently, I started yoga. And I'm a bodybuilder. I'm a short dude with muscle mass that has zero flexibility.

Yeah.

I go in there and I'm just humbled. I'm by far the worst in class.

You

know, I like to put myself in stuff and things that I don't like to do because that's how you build resiliency. I would like to get myself out of my comfort zone. It's weird now, over the years I've learned that when I'm uncomfortable, I'm happy. And when I'm too comfortable, I'm not happy. I'm sitting home on the couch and just sipping on wine and watching Netflix. I was like, I'm like, oh, I feel like I need to read a book. I need to go exercise. I need to go jog and go listen to music. I need to do something. For me, that's not happiness. For me, discipline equals happiness. And I just learned that that's who I am. It's weird. You know, it's—

I think you put your finger on it, Sam. It's who you are. We all get there's no recipe for us, for all of us. Our recipe is the thing that we discover about ourselves through that awareness you're speaking about.

I'm uncomfortable when I'm comfortable. It's weird. It's weird.

I feel the same way. I mean, I know what you're talking about. Sitting around when things are good, I'm never keen to sit around too long. I want to read a book. I want to get out and get to the gym, walk, swim, do something that puts me on my growth edge a bit. And maybe that's one good takeaway from this is that folks, wherever you're at right now, We're all at someplace at this moment, be it on our growth edge, in a more comfortable position. All roads will lead back to what works for you. What works for you? I mean, what works for Sam isn't going to work for you necessarily, or what works for me. You've got to find your own path. And that's what that awareness is so good for. To be awake means you're not going to follow somebody else's path. You're not comparing yourself to other people based on what you're seeing on Instagram or some other social platform. Or what you're hearing from the media. This is about you make your own path. What else have you got at the end of the day anyway, right, Sam? We're all going to get to the end of our days. It's either, did you live your life or did you live someone else's?

Yeah, 100%. Couldn't agree with you more.

Good stuff. Good stuff, brother. Well, it's a good place to end, I think, and also to remind everybody to create a ritual for yourself in the morning. Sam, I don't know if you agree with this or not, but to me, the beginning of the day is a very powerful catalyst for what that day is going to look like. There you go. What'd you just hold up? Because I know not everybody's gonna look at this on YouTube.

I just hold up my schedule that I print out on a nightly basis. So for me, the day— my day starts the night before. So what I do is I don't even have my schedule on my phone. I print it out because I don't want to be on my phone getting distracted. So I print out exactly what I'm doing, what time I'm doing it, what needs to be done, and I have it very detailed out. So if you want to be productive, if you want to get somewhere in life, you can't just get up and say, well, what am I going to do today? I wonder what I need to do. You have to be intentional about your day. You have to be intentional about every minute that you spend. Again, I've said this many times on many different podcasts. Everyone agrees that time is so much more precious than money, but we never see someone drive around the neighborhood just throwing money out the window. We never do that. We keep money and we are more careful with money, but we're more careful with money than our time.

Yeah.

We're wasting time all the time. I see inefficiencies in people's day all the time. We're just wasting time. And if you are wasting time, that means that you might as well just throw money out the window. That's cheaper than you wasting time, cheaper than you just sitting and not doing anything and not having a plan. If you don't have a plan, then one is going to be given to you, one that you're not going to like.

Yeah. I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy, of Change Proof. It's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. It's A Day by Design or A Day by Default. Interesting, right? I picked up my phone just when you said places we waste our time, and I picked it up just to show you this because it's kind of an interesting thing. I turned my phone to grayscale about 2 months ago and it was after watching a documentary about this thing and how this thing is addicting our kids. Forget about us, right? We're adults. We get personal freedom. We make our personal choices. If I'm addicted, I'm addicted. That's my issue. But it really started to strike me about not just my kids but now thinking about even our grandkids and the fact that there are kids that you see sometimes at the airport. I've seen this a couple of times. Mm-hmm. Where people have their kid in a little carrier and sitting, I mean, like 6-month, 7-month-old child with a little device sitting right in front of them, a little iPad or iPhone or Android or whatever it is with some app that the kid is looking at. So I mean, it's my personal experiment that turning it to grayscale, I touch it about a third of the time. I think what you just showed people, which is a piece of paper, an old-school piece of paper, Just something as simple as planning your day is— I want to use your words. I start my day the night before. My day starts the night before.

I get up at 3 o'clock in the morning because I don't want to work out when— I want to work out when my family's sleeping. I don't want to come home from my office and then take time away from the family and go to the gym. That's not what I want to do. I'm crystal clear on what I want out of life and how I want to spend my time. My number one priority in life, other than serving humanity and faith and all that, my number one priority in life is to spend as much time with my family. Number 2 is to provide for my family. And number 3, stay healthy so I can do 1 and 2.

Yeah.

And so once you're crystal clear on your mission, decision-making becomes really easy. Then you know exactly what you're going to do and more importantly, exactly what you're not going to do.

Yeah, they become non-negotiables.

Yes, it's non-negotiable. So, you know, and that's why, you know, I do so at 3 o'clock in the morning when I get up. Guess what I don't want to do? I don't want to figure out what am I doing today. What am I supposed to do? That's not what I want to do. I already know the night before what I'm supposed to do. Guess what else I don't want to do at 3 o'clock in the morning? I don't want to get up at 3 o'clock in the morning, what am I going to wear to the gym? No, my clothes are already set out. My planner's already set out. I'm getting dressed, you know, my clothes are set out, looking at my planner, I'm reading my goals, then I'm headed to the gym.

Hmm.

I have what I call a perfect day formula routine for me to be able to be at peak state.

It is about exactly peak state. Yeah, I sometimes ask this when I keynote a corporate conference. I'll ask the people, what if every day that you went to work, every day you were a manager, picked up your responsibilities as an executive, as a leader, what if every day somebody's life depended on you being at your best? Meaning, it's an Olympic gold medal performance that's required from you every day that you get into the office. Because I was a lifeguard long ago, not so long ago, but when I was 19 years old, about 7 summers I worked at a beach, very active beach in New York. Hundreds of thousands of people on a Saturday or Sunday would gather on that beach, thousands of people in the water.

You're young, you're 18.

We had crazy rip currents. This was no Baywatch thing. This was literally— we had our down days, we had our moments when the water was calm, it was like a lake and all that kind of thing, and midweek was always fun. But on those days, man, we rock and rolled like nobody's business and you couldn't be distracted from your goal. You weren't allowed— you didn't have the margin for error to be distracted or to be tired

or

hungover or any of that other bullshit because people's lives depended on you being in that stand and at your best. And that's what you're describing. It's like, what if you treated your business, what if you treated the things you say are important to you degree of sanctity, what would it look like for you?

And it does. And for me, it does. I mean, somebody's life— I need to perform because somebody's life depends on me. Who depends on me? My wife, my children. I got to be able to be that superpower. I got to be able to provide for them. I got to be able to lead the family. Their life depends on it. It doesn't need to be a matter of life and death. But if I don't perform, their life goes down. I'm not going to be able to provide for them. I'm not going to be able to be a role model for them. That to me is just as important as somebody dying because that's a slow death if I'm not being able to be a leader in my house and be able to be respected for what I do. I don't want to be like, oh, my dad was a deadbeat. All he did was smoke weed and watch TV and he never provided for us. Is that what I want my legacy, my children to say about me? Or that's what I think about.

Yeah.

There's more than that. What kind of example am I setting for my family and the next generation?

I feel that, brother, and I know everybody who's listening to this can feel it. And hopefully, it's a good moment for everybody to take a nice collective deep breath. Just be a bit more present in the moment, a little more awake and aware, and then let's go from there. No answers. I'm not going to pretend to give you something to do other than what maybe you've been inspired from this conversation to think a little bit about. So, Sam, it's been a pleasure. Really appreciate your presence today.

Well, it's an honor, Adam. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, a blast. Everybody, wake up tomorrow, have a plan for your day. I know my plan every day I put my feet on the floor is to thank God and to say these words out loud, I love my life.

Yes.

Ciao for now, everybody.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com. For more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love, join our Pivot Community on Facebook at pivotfb.com.