Set Your House In Perfect Order Before You Judge The World | #WednesdayWithWyan

Hey, capitalists, it's time to crack open your favorite beverage. I like Zevia. This is Wednesday with Wyan on capitalism dot com.

Hey, hey, hey, everybody. Come on in, take a seat, get settled. Today I wanted to have a discussion on the topic of setting your house in perfect order before you judging the world. And the reason why we're talking about this is because yesterday I sent out an email to everyone who follows me and I was talking about the burnout that I experienced specifically throughout all of 2018, which culminated a little bit in one of the podcasts that I recorded called you'd are Enough, which was one of my most well received podcasts that I had ever done. Part two will be coming out here shortly. It's already recorded and it's in the queue, so be on the lookout. Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast over@capitalism.com if you want to see that. But specifically when I sent out that email, I actually did not think many people would read it. I put a PS at the end, said, hey, have you actually read this reply and let me know. And I have gotten, I got more replies from that email than I think anything that I have ever sent out. Hundreds of them. I was up a lot later than I wanted to be last night, replying to as many of them as I could get to. Hey, Inhal. What's up? Chris Van Loan. Hey, everybody, who's watching on the live. So the feedback that was received was that the idea of burnout in entrepreneurs very, very prevalent. And what I want to do today, I want to spend a couple minutes talking about setting your house in perfect order. And this is a quote from Jordan Peterson where he talks about before you go out and judge other people.

Before you take on the responsibility of judging other people. Like is so common in today's world where there's. We are so quick to judge. And I think the most popular example of this was the Covington High School.

Incident where the news was just judging the hell out of these kids. And people were so quick to just throw any judgment at this one kid specifically. Turns out he's actually the good person in the story. And that didn't come out until after his reputation was completely destroyed. But.

This was a piece of evidence of, I think, of a culture we have where we are so quick to judge one another. We are so quick to give our take on someone else's life before we have our own lives in order. I mean, realize for a second that everything we do is going to be like this video, this Podcast this live will be available for the world to see, maybe forever and ever, for kingdom come. That's your life today. So be careful what you say on the Internet. Anyway, all of this to say what I have discovered among entrepreneurs, and unfortunately for me, I would say I probably hang out with too many entrepreneurs. My life is too out of balance in the sense that most of my world is entrepreneurs. What I have discovered among that tribe, among that group of people, is that we create chaos, we create more noise in order to cover up the noise that we previously created. And the feedback that I received from this email that I sent out was that there was so much chaos, there's so much burnout as a result of that, that a lot of entrepreneurs can't even see the road back. They can't even see the road back to clarity, to focus. And it's not even in our nervous system to have clarity and focus. We are used to going and going and going and creating chaos and creating more and more and more on top of this. Now, part of this, I have said, has been my genius because I look for the new opportunity. I see squirrel. I want to go after squirrel. But when you get to a certain point, that becomes your downfall because you're constantly opening up new loops, constantly opening up new things, constantly opening up new ideas, pursuing new things which prevents you from ever scaling or building anything that is meaningful. And that's what we're going to correct today. What's up? Keith Walker. Hey. Deacon Bradley. Hi. Esther Del Valley. Good to see you. So the reason this is important among entrepreneurs is because we are constantly judging one another. We are constantly evaluating one another. We have a tendency to compare ourselves to other people. What this person is selling, what this person is doing, what this person's model is, how much this person is doing, what this person is creating without having our own house in order. And it's very hard, very hard to create anything that is meaningful, anything that is sustainable, anything that is profitable over the long term. If our own house is not in order, when we are responding to what other people are doing or saying or projecting, then we are living our lives based on other people's projections rather than our own house, our own vision. So that's what we're going to go into now. So first of all, I am drinking a very small cup of coffee in front of you.

And if you are drinking along with me, let's pause for a second. And in an homage to the good Scott Adams, one of my favorite thought leaders on the Internet, let's pause for the simultaneous sip. Raise your glass, your mug, your e coffee cup. Join me.

Now, this cup of coffee is significant to me today anyway, because today marks the end of a two week coffee fast for me. That actually matters in this conversation, and I'll tell you why.

About three weeks ago, someone challenged me to do a two week elimination diet that included no coffee. Now, the things that I experienced during that time were very interesting and I'll go into them in a second. But the way I got there, even to have the conversation about giving up coffee for a couple weeks started because at the end of a lot of a burnout, a lot of stress, I mean, if I was being really honest and kind to myself, I would look back at the last four years. I would look at the fact that I became a father. And that was a surprise. And that rearranged my life. Obviously, I.

Went through a really hard separation. I bought a business that has actually been really difficult and way more stressful than I imagined. I sold a business which was both a big win and a new area of life. I moved five times. So I have kind of gone through the wringer in terms of stress in the last four or five years. And I know plenty of people have it much worse than me. But in terms of stress and changes, I went through my fair share in the last few years. So during that time, one of the ways that I kept going, kept stimulating, kept processing was coffee, and lots of it, lots of stimulants. In fact, in the middle of that four year transition period that I'm just kind of at the tail end of, I had.

Really dialed in my fitness almost obsessively so got into the best shape of my life, but was working out two to two and a half hours a day, eating almost no food. And I got the result that I wanted. But in order to keep going, I stimulated that much more. I stimulated even more. That created an addiction to destruction. First there's all this stress happening. Then in order to stay stimulated, I keep stimulating. And it creates a bit of an addiction to more stimuli. Not just physical stimuli, but things like food. Not even because I enjoy it, but because it's a distraction. So even though I'm not hungry, my brain is hungry, my mind is hungry. I'm hungry for a distraction. I'm hungry for something else to give me a hit of dopamine or addicted to Facebook, addicted to email, addicted to anything that can change really, really quickly. This.

Is not just unique to me. This is common among entrepreneurs. This is common among young people because we have this constant stimuli that we are trying to fill in some way, whatever way shows itself. So what I decided to do was to spend 2019 recovering from all of that burnout, all of that stress, because my blood markers were awful, and I was tired, and I needed to get that in order. So I gave up coffee for two weeks as part of kind of a kickoff for this. And the reason I tell you that is because the crash that I experienced from no longer being stimulated from not just coffee, but also a lot of the foods that I used to distract myself were more than I could have imagined.

And the strange thing is, it also eliminated a lot of entrepreneurial decision fatigue that I experience on a daily basis.

By that, I mean, I no longer had to decide what am I going to distract myself with. Or you're just alone with your thoughts. You are just completely left with what shows up after the stimuli, after the distraction. If you don't have the distraction anymore and you're just left with yourself and you have to deal with that, that can either drive you crazy, because now you got to do whatever, you know, work on whatever it was that you're trying to avoid, or it gives you space. And for me, it gave me space, and it gave me the space to start setting the rest of my house in order. And I don't have my journal around me. It's over here. But I started making a list. What are the things that need to be put in order? So a lot of the feedback that I got from this email that I sent out earlier this week was, there's so much chaos in my life. I've got this business. I have this investment. I'm stressed about this. I have all of this going on. I'm not even sure how to go about the process of starting to set my house in perfect order. What I discovered for me was the first thing that needed to happen in order for me to have order in my life was to eliminate the distraction. Because we, as entrepreneurs, we're firefighters, we are opening up loops and pursuing new opportunities in order to get to where it is that we want to go. And we have to do that. It's part of what makes us great. It's part of what makes our genius. But at the same time, when we've got a challenge with a team member, we have a challenge with a business, or sales aren't where we need to be, Our natural instinct then, is to open up a new loop, and we reinforce that with a whole bunch of behaviors that we are doing in order to distract ourselves in order to create the next dopamine kick. One of my mentors, Dan Sullivan, will say, when entrepreneurs hit a low point in energy, our natural reaction is to start something new because that's where we get new energy from. So we have all of these half built bridges all over the place, all of these unfinished projects that we're actually using as a way to distract ourselves from the work that we don't to do and the things that we don't want to do or the thing that we are avoiding. The first thing we have to do is create space for us to identify what it is that we need to systemize or shore up. For example, for me, I just decided that this year, my focus, the thing that I was going to clean up was going to be my physical and mental health was going to be because nothing is valuable, nothing is fun. If you can't enjoy it and you're unhappy and you don't have energy, nothing is good. Absolutely nothing is worth it. No amount of money is worth it. No amount of anything is worth it. If you can't enjoy it, if you don't have the energy for it and if you're unhappy. And so for me, that was my one thing, like, let's dial in that piece. And it started with a bit of a coffee detox, if you will. It started with a food detox. It started with going and seeing a functional medicine doctor and deciding to really dial in this piece. Which leads me to the second thing. The way that we set our house in order is that we have to get a baseline of where the hell we are now. What I mean by this is in our businesses, to most entrepreneurs who are building companies, if you ask them what was your profit last month? They do not know. If you say, what were your expenses last month? They do not know. We don't want to know because the truth sometimes hurts with our physical being. When you say, how is your health? Most of us would say, pretty good, fine, but do you actually know the numbers of what's going on in your body? Now for me, just this week, I had a scan done to find out my muscle composition, my fat composition, simply because I wanted to see that baseline that I needed to get truthful about where I was. And I've been putting that off for months. And the reason for that is because I knew I wasn't going to like the numbers. I know I've regressed from where I like to be. And when, when you know that you tend to avoid it, you tend to resist it. It's why? When you have a hard thing to say to someone you love or to a team member, you're more likely to just keep it in because it's hard to say that. But by saying it or seeing it or doing it, that truth sets you free. That truth allows you to work on and address whatever it is that you're trying to address. So, for example, for me, me getting this scan done, I go, oh, okay. I knew I wasn't going to like it. And now I know exactly what I need to do. I know exactly what I need to prioritize in order to get the numbers to move where we want. The same thing is true in business or sales. Do you know what your sale. Do you know what your customers think? Do you have a truthful baseline for where you're at? And if not, then you need to go get it, because you don't even know what to work on. So you're going to be guessing, which is going to result in more chaos, which is going to result in more of the opening loops, more of the creation of new things, more just shooting from the hip, which is what got you into a murky situation in the first place. So the idea here, number one, is you have to eliminate some sort of distraction. And the way that I've done this recently is by cutting out choices in my diet. Cutting out choices like I moved out of downtown into the suburbs because I felt so distracted, because I felt so chaotic, because there was. Because that environment wasn't good for me to be focused on a regular basis. And by doing all of. By changing the environment and changing even the inputs into your body. Now, I know that if I go to the fridge, there's not all that much in there. There's not all that much to distract me constantly. And there are some entrepreneurs who just wear the same thing every day in order to eliminate some sort of decision fatigue. So they have fewer distractions that they have that ability to focus. And so if there are things that are constantly opening up loops for you, one of the things that you might want to consider is, do you have too many projects going on? Do you have other things that you can cut out in order to create space to think?

So in 2018, one of the things that I did was I just decided I would get real quiet. And when I would go real quiet, I would go internal and find out what I really want. Any situation from an employee, in a negotiation, in a relationship, and properly communicate that to the other person and say exactly what it is that I wanted. And that was the third thing that you do, which is finding that first piece, that first thing to, to clean up and using that as momentum in order to move forward. So we have to cut distraction out, cut out the things that are completely overwhelming us, and then to start to identify what those things are that those little pieces that need to be cleaned up after we find out exactly where we are. So for me, that that has been my health and now it is like the products, the foundation of the business, the communication I have with employees.

The way that I speak about what is going on. And when you do that, you start to stop creating more chaos, which gives you the freedom to be able to go in and start addressing those little pieces and start cleaning up all of the chaos that is constantly going on in our lives.

So we're gonna keep this short today. I just wanted to hang out and share that since it's on my mind and chat with you guys for a bit. My intent is to be going live more often in 2019 just because I enjoy it. So if you enjoyed this, stick around and I'll be doing these regularly for you. It's good to see you and I'll chat with you soon. Thanks for joining me for a word with Lion.

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