How To Build Your Perfect Week And Live The Life Of Your Dreams With Craig Ballantyne

Welcome to the Next Level Income show, where it's our goal to take your income, your investments, and your life to the next level. I'm your host, Chris Larsen. You can get a free copy of our book@nextlevelincome.com just click on the book link, put your address in, and we'll send you a copy. On today's show, we have Craig Ballantyne. Craig is known by his clients as the most disciplined man in the world. But Craig was not born that way. He was born lazy and introverted and also suffered crippling anxiety attacks. He talks about that in today's episode. He spent years inventing systems to help make success automatic for anyone. He also built his Turbulence training fitness franchise to over 151,000 customers and 15 million YouTube views. He also owns earlytorise.com, which is how I first got to know Craig. His first book, the Perfect Day Formula, has helped over 35,000 high performers own their day and take back control of their lives. Today, Craig coaches entrepreneurs to make more money and work less using the techniques in his Wall Street Journal bestseller, Unstoppable. And today, Craig's going to talk how you can get a free copy of his new book, the Perfect Week formula. So stay tuned. Today's show is sponsored by Money Insights and their investment optimizer strategy. In my book, I share how I use the same strategy starting over a decade ago to invest my money in two places at one time. This strategy has been used by the wealthiest for generations for estate planning, minimizing taxes, preserving wealth, and increasing stability for their investments. And now you can do the same thing. In addition, you can build a plan to build an emergency fund, pay for college, fund a business plan for retirement, and ultimately optimize your total financial picture. To find out more information, check us out at the banking link@nextlevelincome.com Craig, welcome back to the show.

Hey, this is going to be a lot of fun, my man.

Yeah. So, as I said in the intro, Craig, you were the first guest on the Next Level Income show for a reason. Because of the inspiration you provided me to help me write the book, to start this podcast for my original partner, Caleb, who's now our marketing lead as well. And we're having you back on the show to help talk about some of the things that you've refined over the past two years. And to think back, that was two years ago. Now it seems like it was just two weeks ago.

Yeah, it's been a great journey for you. It's been awesome to see what you've been up to. And now I'm getting your advice on my own money matters. It's really been in full circle.

Yeah. So no, it's a blast. I get to work with you one on one. For those of you that don't know, Craig is now one of my coaches here and it's been wonderful as we launch our new coaching program within the next level income. But for those that maybe haven't listened to that first episode yet, Craig, maybe you could share a little bit more about your story and how you've come to have the business that you do today.

Yeah, absolutely. So I started off in the fitness industry. I was a personal trainer. Then I went and started selling my own products online, kind of like Tony Horton and P90X which follow along workouts. I spent over a dozen years in that fitness industry doing that. Really enjoyed it, helped a lot of people, but I always knew that I wanted to do more. So I bought a business called early to Rise and you're been a subscriber for a long time now. Bought it from my mentor, Mark Ford, who wrote a lot of books like Ready, Fire, Aim. And when I did that, I started writing books of my own and I wrote the Perfect Day formula. I wrote a book called Unstoppable, which chronicled my journey of overcoming entrepreneurial anxiety and my anxiety attacks that sent me to the emergency room a couple of times. And then my most recent book is Perfect Week Formula, which helps people build their business around their life and not their life around their business. And I mean, it also applies to anybody working in the corporate world too.

I absolutely love that. And I love how, you know, you kind of make the analogy with, you know, making the time for those things that are most important to you and putting those things first. My parents came from farmers, so my mother's parents were vegetable farmers. My father's parents in Denmark, Wisconsin were dairy farmers. And you talk about something in the Perfect week formula called the Farm Boy morning routine. And this is a lot different than these morning routines you hear out there on social media and other places. What is the Farm Boy morning routine?

Yeah, yeah. We sell a very popular course called the Millionaire morning routine, which is based on the farm boy morning routine, which I learned from my father. You know, I grew up on a farm and, you know, he imperfect by any means, but he got up early in the morning every single morning, 365 days of the year because he had to feed the cows. And, you know, cows don't take a day off not on Christmas or New Year's or anything. And so I learned like, oh, you get up and you go to work, and that's a way to be productive. A lot of people, these morning routines where they get up and they do yoga and meditation, gratitude, journaling, and they do affirmations and then they do an exercise session, and the next thing you know, it's 8:30, 9:00', clock, 9:30. I had new coaching client the other day saying, man, sometimes my morning routine takes me until 9:30 before I sit down and start doing anything. And he's been up since 6 or 30 in the morning. And that's just not a productive way. Now, I believe that meditation and journaling are very helpful activities, but, you know, when you do 19 of those things, there's a lot of diminishing returns. And also, those things don't necessarily have to be done first thing in the morning. They can be done anytime. But the problem is we all have priorities that we need to accomplish in our businesses and in our careers, the hard work. And if we don't do that hard work first thing in the morning, the chances of us putting it off and procrastinating on it rises with every hour that we're up. Because the longer we're up, the lower our willpower is. And we have the greatest willpower, discipline, attention, first thing in the morning. So as Mark Twain said, if your job is to eat frog, best thing to do is eat that frog first thing in the morning. If your job is to eat two frogs, the best thing to do is eat the biggest frog first. And that's what we teach is in the farm boy morning routine, is to get up and do the work at the end of the day. Well, at the start of the day, but at the end of the day, that's the message.

Yeah. And it really was neat about a lot of the lessons you teach. And by the way, if you're listening to this, Craig, the amount that people pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to work directly one on one with Craig, he's giving away these pearls of wisdom. And stay tuned to the end of the show to learn how you can get a copy of his book free, sent to you today. But going back to that Craig, I knew this myself. So I was a cyclist. I didn't quite make it to a professional level, but I raced at a pro level as an amateur. And when I got a job when I was a professional and I was working every day in the or as a spine rep, as a medical device rep, I started racing again and I had to train at 5 o' clock in the morning. And to me that was one of the most important things I did outside of my career before I had a family. So I get up and I train from 5:30 to 6:30 every morning and I would do intervals which suck. So if anybody's out there and you know what a VO2 interval, you know. So when I read this in the perfect day formula, initially I cut out the training and I brought in doing the most important thing to me and I actually wrote my book from your strategy from 5:30 in the morning to 7:00 clock in the morning. And this was about three years ago. So I use these specific strategies in my life to make that happen. Craig, if you could tell the audience like what's your morning routine look like? How do you apply this in your own life?

Yeah, it's a great question. And so, you know, when I say what time I get up, people probably say, oh, I don't want to get up that early. I'm going to discount this message and say first that it's not about the hour that you get up, it's about what you do with the hours that you are up. So I tend to naturally wake up around 4 o' clock in the morning. I my computer and start working by about 4:15. I work for an hour and a half. I take a break for coffee and hang out with my dog and my girlfriend for a little bit. We have coffee together, Michelle and I, and I take the dog out and then I go back and do another 90 minute block. Then we do a trip to the dog park. I have breakfast before that second 90 minute block around 6 o' clock in the morning, sometimes 6:30. And then I'm back in for another 90 minute block from 9 until 10:30. And then around this time, you know, it's 11 o' clock my time. Right now I either do a podcast or film something or I'll go to the gym and then lunch and then in the afternoon I do a couple of calls in the afternoon. So that's the way that my day works. It's almost the same every single day, except for Fridays. I do any calls or meetings. And so what I do there is a little bit more thinking on the business as much as possible. So every entrepreneur has heard the old phrase, you got to work on the business, not in the business. And I try and put as much of Friday into working on the business as possible.

Yeah, again that's a terrific story in the way you Talk about it in the book is filling up those big rocks first in your life. As your father's friend talked about putting the big rocks in the jar, then the smaller rocks, the pebbles and the sand. And unfortunately, in life, a lot of us get up, we watch the news, we read the news, we surf social media and we fritter away those super productive hours. And I think it is true that the early bird gets the worm that's out there. Yeah.

And the way that we want to look at things I mentioned earlier, since around your life and not your life around your business, is we think about. Okay, we gotta. Yeah. You could fill your entire calendar in weeks with meetings and learning and all this stuff. But you got to put time for yourself, your workouts, your family time on the calendar first, your date nights. Otherwise you don't find time, you only make time. So make time at the start, we tell people, do there's Sunday morning planning for the week ahead. Make sure that what really goes on the calendar and then it forces you to be a better entrepreneur, more productive person. Because instead of allowing yourself to work 55 hours in a week, what if you forced yourself to work 35 hours a week? It would force you into some difficult but important and beneficial decisions that would help you live a better life.

Yeah. And that brings a lot of the entrepreneurs to you, Craig, is what I found. They are looking for their life back. They're not only looking for how to grow their business, but this is the other thing I took from your book. When you say the most important thing, that may be something like a date night that you plan or time with your children. And it's easy for us professionals to go out and work 16 hours a day. Sometimes it's hard to spend that time and make that time.

Yeah. Because I was just working with a new client. He's watching three hours of YouTube videos at night because he's like, just one more YouTube video. One more YouTube video and that one more. Or in the workday where you say, I will do it myself and you don't date. That just kills you. And it'll steal all the time from your family and your relationships, but also from your health. We all know people that, sure, they built a business and they have a great family, but they're 40 pounds overweight and they're pre diabetic at 50. And especially with what's going on in the world right now, you can't afford to be unhealthy in any way because that puts you at great risk these days. So if you're stealing time from your health to go and make money. Well, we need to fix your calendar and your schedule and it's all within our control. You know, we got 168 hours in the week and we all know people who do it all. And we might not be able to achieve what the greatest and most productive people in the world can do, but we can all do better. And that's what I help you with today.

Yes. And one of the tools you use to help people do that better is one of the things that I used when I was training reps, which is the, some of you call it the Eisenhower matrix. You mind sharing how you help people use that to define what's important and ultimately how to build out their schedule?

Yeah. So it's basically you have urgent and important, non urgent and important, urgent, non important and non urgent, non important. Obviously you don't want to spend any time in non urgent, non important activities. But that stuff, that is stuff like watching videos on YouTube that people do spend a lot of time on or dog videos or whatever it is. And you must avoid that. That's, you know, in 50 years from now or 30 years or 70 years when you're sitting in your artificially intelligence powered rocking chair, you're not going to look back and go, wow, I'm really proud of all the cat videos I watched on the Internet. So you don't want to spend time there and obviously you don't want to spend time in urgent, non important stuff, which is basically checking to see if the Lakers won last night. Yeah, like, obviously if you like sports, you kind of want to check the scores in the morning. But again, it doesn't matter. Like, the older I got, the more I realized I didn't even remember who won the super bowl last year. So why am I following sports with such fervor? It was a waste of my time and I got away from it and I'm so glad. Or watching the news about a hurricane halfway across the world. Like, none of that matters. So even though it's timely, just stop spending time in it. Which leaves us with urgent and important and non urgent and important. And the urgent and important is stuff that you will deal with. Like, for example, I own a gym in Charleston, South Carolina, and almost every other year the air conditioning breaks. Now that's urgent and important.

It's hot down there. I worked out down there.

We love that it is like from April to October, you just don't want to be out air conditioning. And so that is something that must be Dealt with. Now, fortunately, I have a team that can deal with it, but that's an urgent, important thing. Now other people will say, my email is urgent and important. I got to go and check my email first thing. But understand your email has been sitting there for 8, 10, 12 hours. Wait another 90 minutes while you go and do something from your non urgent important block, which is, you know, you've written a book and I've written a book. Like, if you don't write the entire book today, you'll be okay. If you don't start today, you can also be okay in three years from now. After you said, I'll start tomorrow, all of a sudden you're now suffering the consequences. I never got around to writing that book. I didn't expand my reach, I didn't start podcasts, I didn't grow my coaching business, I didn't invest in this property. I didn't make the time to talk with the tax advisors and here I am and I got so much better. All because you got caught up in the emails of the day to day, or worse, those other two boxes that we said should take none of your time. So when you separate the stuff like that, it really, really, really is so helpful and gives you so much clarity about what matters. And here's a real life example of this. Like, I actually started reading a book about Eisenhower a couple years ago. It was huge, long book. I was very fascinated by, like, how on earth could somebody have planned D Day? And I learned, you know, they were very much like entrepreneurs. They failed at launch attacking North Africa. And they failed, not failed, but they had some attacking Italy, which then allowed them to fortunately pull off D Day. Now they did a lot of things wrong. And it's fascinating. It's his life story. And I got two thirds of the way through it. And then I got busy with life. And actually that's when I met Michelle and I had no time to read this Eisenhower book. And so I said, okay, I'm going to quit it because it's not urgent and it's not that important. And so I just had to take that book, which was interesting to me, and shift it down into that box of the Eisenhower matrix and just, I haven't picked it up again. I think I actually got rid of it.

Yeah, well, and look, if you're listening and you're like, wait a minute, I didn't follow all that. We're going to have these tools in the show notes for you as well, so you can figure out how to do that. And I Know, a lot of people are listening, Craig, and they're like, wow, this is like, how do you do this? People call you the most disciplined man in the world, but you weren't always like this. And I grew up in an environment around alcoholism and different challenges with that, with substances, with different emotional issues. You talk about your anxiety attacks. You talk about yourself dealing with alcohol as well. Can you talk about.

Yeah, binge for sure. Classic frat boy.

Yeah. Like, how did you get from there to where you are today?

Well, like most hero journey stories, you have to go pretty low. And my lowest was self induced in that I drank too much. I ended up having anxiety attacks and I went to the emergency room thinking I was having a heart attack. You know, it's definitely not woe is me. Like, I wasn't hit by a drunk driver or anything. I was a stupid young kid. And I stayed a stupid young kid until I was an older adult when I should have known better. And so I made those mistakes. And I also, when I had my anxiety attacks, I think this is very important to note, is that I was in the best shape of my life. And you're stud.

I've seen the pictures.

Yeah. I was making more money than ever. And so being in great shape doesn't mean you can't have anxiety or stress or even depression, of course. So what I was doing was I had no structure in my. I was working all the time, I was going out all the time. And it caught up to me. And one of the things that I was doing, Chris, was I was waking up at 7:30 in the morning. And I'm a natural morning person. I love doing everything in the morning. I want to go to the gym, I want to have a coffee break. I want to do a lot of work. I want to do some reading. I want to do 12 hours of stuff before noon. Now, obviously you can't. And certainly getting up at 7:30 in the morning will put you behind eight balls. So I was getting up at a time where I knew it was too late for me, naturally, mentally and physically. And then the first thing that I was doing was I was rolling over in bed and checking. So two of the worst things you can do.

Yeah. But I'm sure almost everyone on here.

Thinks, yeah, okay, yeah, I've done that. I'm doing that today right now, as I listen to this podcast. Yeah, I understand. But the thing is, we also know intuitively that there's gotta be a better way. And so it's right around when I had the anxiety attacks. And I realized, you know what? I need to put more structure into my life. Because structure actually brings you true freedom. Or as the author Paolo says more eloquently, discipline and freedom are not mutually exclusive, but mutually dependent. Because without discipline you sink into chaos. Which happened to me. So one day I just sat there, I just sat there and I said, I don't like this anymore. So I decided the next day I was going to get up five minutes earlier and wait five minutes long before checking my email. And I did that for a week. And then the week after that I went five minutes earlier and five minutes longer. And within a few months I was getting up at 5:30 in the morning, which felt right. And I was not checking my email until 9:30 in the morning. And that's when I started writing my books. And that's when I started being able to do more revenue generating activities earlier in the day. And I just had greater control over my life now. It's a huge breakthrough for me.

No, I love that I went through something similar, not with the anxiety attacks, but in the process of optimizing my day. And my thing was I'd lay on the couch after the kids went to bed five, seven, eight years ago and I watched the news and I thought, oh, I'm being educated, I know what I can talk about.

But it's just, you're being brainwashed.

I was being brainwashed and every 24 hours it was something new. So I thought to myself I was this massive information, but really it was just inconsequential. And when I canceled cable, what I realized was I didn't get anything done in that last hour of my day. So I thought, well, what if I get up 30 minutes early and do that? And that started the process for me and it's amazing. So if you're listening, I would say that's one thing you can do today. Just think about what if I was able to eliminate something that's useless at the end of the day and get up a little bit earlier in the beginning of the day.

And there's a double bonus to that because the watching of TV and all this stuff, it stimulates the mind which then impairs your sleep. And if you impair your sleep, then you wake up groggy and you wake up late the next morning and you have a bad day, then in pairs the next day. And it's just this vicious cycle that's almost impossible to get out of. So that's why I teach people you gotta turn off the TV for At least an hour before bed. Because if you don't, you'll be wound up and wired. You'll be won't sleep well and in the next morning, you might wake up in a dark mood as well. So you gotta be very careful about what goes into your mind. You know, it's like, treat your mind like a garden and plant good things only.

I love that. And you have a system you call your 10, 3, 2, 1 system to help people do that?

Yeah, absolutely. So 10 hours before bed, you stop your pain intake. Three hours before bed, you cut off the alcohol and heavy meals. Two hours, cut off all work. An hour before bed, cut off all the electronics. And don't hit the snooze button in the morning.

I love it. Yeah, I left out the zero. So I'm guilty of that. When my dog jumps back in bed with me sometimes I hit that snooze for five minutes. I think about Uncle Craig looking over my shoulder saying, what are you doing, dude?

Well, I mean, that's the same thing with me. Like, I have my friend Bedros and you know, there was a while late last year where I was just, I wanted to sleep in a couple days and I thought, you know, what would be like. Bedros has a good line. There's two reasons why you shouldn't snooze. Okay, first reason is my boring reason, which is physiologically, when you snooze, when you hit the snooze button, you go back into really poor quality sleep. And 10 minutes later, you're no further ahead, you're actually more tired. That doesn't hit people hard enough. But Bedros has this line that if you hit snooze, you're telling your hopes and dreams that they can wait. And that should be unacceptable to anybody who is listening to this show for sure. So next time you're tempted, just go, you know what? Wait a minute. Am I serious about achieving these dreams about generating passive income, about financial freedom, time freedom? If I am, I got to get my butt out of bed and I need to go and do what I promised myself the night before. Which is actually the third reason. Hit snooze. Because really great line here from Bedros. If you want to build self confidence, the best way to build self confidence is to make a promise to yourself and keep that promise. Telling yourself by setting your alarm for 6 o' clock in the morning, it's telling yourself you want to get up at 6. And if you don't follow through on that promise, then your mind probably thinks, well, what am I serious about? Maybe I'm just a joker and I'm not successful. And you can really go down a rabbit hole of low self confidence when you don't keep the promises to yourself.

No, it's, I mean, that's the line that goes through my head now. And Craig, I mean, we could talk for hours about all the information that you've packed in your book. So I encourage you, if you're listening, get a free copy. Send us an email, say, just send me an email@chrisnextlevelincome.com and say free book in the subject. And we'll make sure that you get that if you include your address in there as well. But one thing I want to hit on Craig. You went back and you talked about happiness and how you were in the best shape of your life, you're making as much money. And I read this book called the Happiness Advantage by, I think his name was Anchor. And this was several years ago. And what stands out is the curve that he paints in there. And it talks about how there's this natural curve where we have this peak of happiness, like in our early 20s when we're coming out of college for most people, and then it drops into your late 40s, early 50s, maybe around 50. And then it starts to pick up again. A lot of people don't know about this, but one of the things that kind of coincides with that, that you talk about in the book is the strength of your relationships and the health of your relationships at age 50 are what ultimately make you healthy at age 80.

Wow, that's powerful. I mean, being around the right people, positive people, first of all, who have positive habits and positive activities certainly are going to be that way. And then also that are positive people in general and uplift you. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much like so important is that you become like the people you spend your time with. So that is so essential.

I mean, that is the amazing thing. All these techniques that you teach, not only can they help you build more wealth, be more successful, but ultimately be happier and potentially live longer. And I think if you asked anybody, hey, is this worth it? If you're 80 years old, then that's what people want, is more relationships. Yeah.

If you go to a book, there's a book called the Five Regrets of Buying By, I Can't Remember, it's a very nice woman who wrote it. And one of the things is just about they wish they would have done certain things differently. They wish they would have spent more time with Loved ones just also basic and as successful as, you know, the doctors and lawyers and people are that are on here. Like do you want to be in 30 years or 50 years sitting there going, I wish I would have done more of this. Like I had a client the other day who went on a hike with his daughter and he has three older daughters and he was very regretful in his email he said, and I wish I would have known you 10 years ago when, you know, my teenage daughters were this age, you know, because I missed out on so much stuff with them and I don't want people to have regrets like that. Like I'm building my life and I'm impressed by the way you built your life, spend time with your boys. I'm building my life to spend time with my kids because that stuff is going on the calendar first. I'm building my business around my life and not my life around my business.

I love that. And look, it's been a lot of work for me and I'll share this story. So I was coming back from Salt Lake City on an impromptu ski trip with my older son and it really made me make some choices here recently. And he looked at me and he said, dad, I love you. I had such a great time. I want to do more of this. And I was fortunate that I've had the tools that you've given me, Craig, and the accountability that you've provided to help me me have the ability to now spend more time with my kids and know how important it is to do that because I lost my father at age 5 and life is precious. We don't know how much time it's going to be left on this earth. So I'm going to make listeners go back to that first episode and listen to the advice that you gave to your 25 year old self in that episode. And again, that was our first episode. Check it out at nextlevelincome.com Craig if you had to go back to your 35 year old self, I'm not going to tell the audience, although you can how old you are today. But what advice would you. Yeah, so right on 10. So maybe we'll have you back on and you can go back another 10 years.

Yeah, there you go.

At age 35, what would you show up and tell yourself?

Well, I think that's where I really had to step into being a better leader but also letting my ego go and ask for more help in the business. I wanted to do everything myself. I thought it was smarter than everybody else. Even when People started passing me that were kind of my peers. Some of them did, some didn't, but some of them did. And I didn't say, well, what are you doing right here? Or even fixing the five finances and stuff. Like, I'm not. I haven't done a poor job, but I haven't done the best job of being a steward with the money that I've earned. And this would have asked for help in certain areas sooner. So there are certain things that I wish I would have done earlier and then eventually I did them and everything, of course, got better. So I did a lot of things right along the way. I'll give myself a little pat on the back, but those are a couple areas where I could have better is in the leadership and asking for help.

Well, thank you so much for being on there. Sharing everything that you've done in your book here with the audience today, Craig. But you also have a special offer for anybody listening today. Do you mind sharing that with the audience?

What is that one, actually? What are we going to do there?

So for the first hundred people that email me with Free book in the subject line with your address, we're going to send you a free copy of Craig's book today.

Yeah, absolutely. I want to get this book in the hands of as many people as possible.

Awesome. Surprise.

Well, I knew we were doing it. I just wasn't sure how we were doing it.

Perfect. Well, yeah. So again, if you want to get a free copy of Craig's, email me at chrisextlevelincome.com, put free book in the subject line, include your address, and we'll make sure that we get you a copy of Craig's Perfect Week formula sent out today. Craig, thanks again for being with the audience today.

Absolutely amazing, Chris.

Hey, Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now, I have one more gift for you. If you haven't gotten my book Next Level Income yet and would like me to send it to you in the mail for free, then go to nextlevelincome.com and click on the book tab. If you fill out the form in that page, I will send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for being a podcast listener. Also, please like share and take 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.