The Perfect Week for Dads (and Everyone Else) with Craig Ballantyne

Oh, I got to get 19 different streams of income. I got to have a vending machine. I got to have this, I got to have that. I got an Airbnb and I got it. And like, okay, you only look at the upside of it, but the opportunity cost alone when you have too many projects.

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 Larson. If you haven't yet, get a copy of our book for free at our website, nextlevelincome.com. that's www.nextlevelincome.com. just click on the book link and I'll even send you a copy if you put your address in. On today's show, we have Craig Valentine. Craig is known by his clients as the world's most disciplined man. He was born lazy and introverted and also suffered crippling anxiety attacks. He then spent years inventing systems to make success automatic for anyone. He built his Turbulence Training fitness business to over 150,000 customers and over 15 million YouTube views and and owns earlytorise.com. his first book, the Perfect Day Formula, has helped over 35,000 high performers, including myself, own the 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 the Perfect Week Formula. And today, he's going to teach you, a dad, and everybody else how to have their perfect week. Craig Ballantyne, welcome back to the show, my friend.

This is going to be a lot of fun. Chris, is this three times now?

Craig, you are the first guest to be the third time on the show.

Oh, nice.

Yes, absolutely. And we're going to keep this going. We want to have you back every year. So for those that don't know the show is going into its fourth year, we're going to go into our fourth year of this podcast. Craig was my first guest, was our first guest on the show, and for good reason, I think. Craig, I'm going to let you talk a little bit about your background, but I don't know if everybody knows this story, but you sent me, I got a copy of the Perfect Day formula several years ago, and I've been following you on early to Rise, which is. Is it earlytorise.net is that your website?

No.com.com.

I'M sorry, I don't know why. I was sick of dot net. Yeah. Earlytorise.com started to follow Craig Very shortly after you bought that. And I started to implement a lot of the things that you advocated in that book. And those lessons that I've learned from you, Craig, are what allowed me to write my book. They're what allowed me to start my business while I was working on call, you know, oftentimes six days a week. You know, I was on call for 12 years. A lot of people like, how on earth did you do that? It's because of your, your lesson. So I'd love to let you tell a little bit about your story. You know, we shared a little bit about your story in the intro here, but if you wouldn't mind telling a little bit about more about your story. And we're gonna, we're gonna tell people how they can get your new book at the end of the show.

Yeah. So, you know, it's funny, earlytorise.com has been around since, I think before Net even existed. So it was invented in 2000, I think is when it started online by my mentor. But back then when I started reading, it was around 2002 and I was a struggling personal trainer. I grew up on a farm in Canada, knew the definition of hard work, but I didn't know the definition of smart work, I guess until I started selling stuff on the Internet and everything started to make sense. And so I sold this fitness program, turbulence training for 15 years online and wrote for Men's Health magazine for a long time. Then kind of had the paradox of freedom, which is something that I describe as everybody thinks they want true freedom, but they actually need structure in their lives. You need structure in your deals, you need structure in your fitness program, you need structure in your life so that you are actually productive and have the best wellbeing for you. So I actually, when I was able to go from being a full time personal trainer to a full time online business expert or fitness expert, I had all this free time and I would work all the time and I'd go out and drink all the time and. And I was just doing all this stuff and actually led to crippling anxiety attacks, which I then had to kind of figure out how to solve. And I did that in a few months. And then I wrote some books about productivity and overcoming anxiety. And then the Perfect Week formula book, our latest book, which is really about helping people get shocking amounts of productivity done so that they have more free time. And it's been amazing to watch you use the formula to have weekends with the boys, surfing and taking them skiing and tell their bike and bike Races and, and lacrosse games and for you and Jessica to go on amazing vacations. So you are just one of the best students we have. And it's been awesome to watch your success.

Oh, well, well, I appreciate you saying that. And yeah, I mean, you know, there's, there's a lot of things that, you know, that we teach at next level income with respect to investments and money to do that. But the truth is, you know, and you said something here, you kind of alluded to it. I love the expression discipline equals freedom. You need, you need discipline. You need those guidelines. One of the lessons I've implemented here since working with you and Craig is my personal coach now, which has really helped me take my life, my business to the next level. And I started taking three day weekends every week, which I kind of felt like guilty in a sense in doing that, but I'm as if not more productive now doing that. And it's, it's, it's just been, it's amazing. It's almost, it's almost easy now that the structure's there. Cause I feel like I'm, I'm ahead of the ball.

Yeah. And one of the interesting things there is that we need to slow down to speed up. So a lot of people think that, you know, to be successful you have to add, add more stuff to the plate. But if you actually stop adding stuff to the plate and start giving yourself white space on your calendar to actually think, think through major problems. And for you to also start focusing and really applying your mental effort on just one big problem rather than trying to solve 10 problems or run four businesses, but instead just to focus on running one business at a world class level. Not everybody is Elon Musk, okay? And like, none of us are even close to Elon Musk, and none of us want to work as, as much as Elon Musk does, or maybe even have 10 kids like Elon Musk does.

But, but he's like 12 now. Is it. It's crazy.

I think it's 10. I think it's 10 depends on how many women have come forward and said that they've had kids with him. But if you, if you think about what your life looks like right now, you might use the analogy or your workload of the. Have you ever gone to Vegas and you've seen somebody pile food on a buffet plate? Right. There's not that much room in their stomach, but yet you go to a buffet and there's this paradox of choice. It's like the paradox of freedom. You know, I'M going to take some of that. I'm going to take some of this. It's like, but really, your favorite foods are pancakes and bacon, and yet you've taken waffles and you've taken muffins and you've taken all this stuff when all you really care about is pancakes and bacon. And it's the same analogy with our, with our business and our careers is that we, we think we have, our eyes are bigger than our plate and we take on all these projects, we say yes to everything because we don't want to miss out on something. It could be the next big deal or it could be the thing that makes me a millionaire. When in fact, if you just focused on that one thing that really provides you a great income and then, you know, the one good investment path, you're going to have much greater success because you're going to be a greater expert in that. You're going to be able to put more focus on it. I know Warren Buffett has this phrase that he believes like, you know, put all your eggs in one basket and then watch it intensely where everybody else thinks, oh, I got to get 19 different streams of income. I got to have a vending machine, I got to have this, I got to have that, I got to have Airbnb. And then I got, and it's like, okay, you only look at the upside of it, but the opportunity cost alone. When you have too many projects, you know, it's stealing stomach space and it's when you have too many things on your buffet plate and it's stealing brain space when you have too many projects. If you look at your mind as like a computer, you have, you know, your computer has cpu, computer processing units. And if your computer's slow, it's because there's too many programs open doing too many things. We need to shut those things down and focus so that we can get ahead.

Yeah. And I won't, I won't forget it. Like, you and I were going through my goals for the year this year, and you said one thing to me. You said, you have too many goals, Chris. Trim them down, figure out what's that one thing that's really going to move the needle and focus on that.

And, and I've had other coaching clients like you and, and you probably know who they are even in your space. And, you know, they even had like three trips and they had climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and getting six pack abs and it's like, okay, there's a season in your life. Yeah, There's a season in your life for these things. And when you want to raise a hundred million dollars for real estate deals, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, it does not belong in the same season of life is just too demanding. It's too taxing. Plus, you want to be a great husband and a great father to two kids. Whoa, slow down. Because something is going to break here and something's going to give, as the old saying goes. So it's okay to be in a season of life where your focus is only on your family and only on generating enough income to invest. And then as you get into the next season, all right, great. Got enough money to invest, I can start looking at deals. Great. And then you're going to put focus on that because you kind of went through the seasons of. Your main focus was generating income through your sales job and, you know, being married and raising your young kids. And you were learning this stuff on the investment, but you probably weren't, you know, jumping in without doing your due diligence. And it's just making sure that you have the focus on things because otherwise you get too distracted and it's death by a thousand cuts. There's death by a thousand cuts a lot of ways in productivity, having too many goals, you know, losing your focus, having too much transition every single day between, you know, I got a call here and then I'm in a meeting here, and then I'm gonna, you know, do 30 minutes of this. I'm gonna study 30 minutes. Like that's, that's the wrong way of doing it because there's transition costs in there. It's death by a thousand cuts. You're much better off to have four hour block once per week on studying or evaluating deals or, you know, doing your calls and your meetings. Block that time and you're going to be much, much more efficient.

I love that. There's, there's several things I, we, we get hit on there. But, you know, one of the, one of the big things, Craig, is you said you can't do it all, you know, and I've, you know, certainly, you know, I've said, okay, I'm going to prioritize my family on the weekends. And like, we go to lacrosse games and we go to cycling events or we, we, we travel and we do those things. I'm not, I'm not willing to compromise those.

There's a real, there's a good little cliche that I've seen recently is like, you can have anything, but you can't have everything.

Yeah.

And if you think about, okay, I mean, there's definitely limits on, on that, but if you look at it and you apply it practically to your life, listen, you can be, you can be a scratch golfer, you can have 6% body fat, you can do triathlons, you can bench press £300, you can be a millionaire, you can do, okay, you could do any of those things. Like with enough work and the right coach, you can do any of those things, but you can't do all of them. And so therefore you have to pick. And Chris, you've seen in my books, I have this phrase, your values and vision drive every decision. Because somebody's thinking, there's all these things I want to do.

Great.

What's the vision for your, your family and what are the values that your family lives by? And you run everything through that filter and then it should become very clear about what you really want. What you really want is generational wealth for your family. If somebody's listening to this, it's probably a good description. You want generational wealth for your family, you want a strong family unit where everyone is loved and you want time for your family and everything else is really a detour. You know, it's like I use this analogy of the 30 year old guy who wants to get married and have kids and he's engaged to this really amazing girl. And so that's his straight line to success is continue on, grow your wealth, build your relationship, get married, get that house, have that child. And then one of the buddies from college comes along and says, let's go to Vegas for a bachelor party. And that's a huge detour on life because one mistake on that weekend can blow up the entire straight line to success. And so if you have your values and vision, I mean, I'm not saying you can't go, but you need to go with the right behavioral parameters in place. But also, you're probably just better off not going at all. And so knowing your values and your vision and then having a very simple decision filter makes things very simple. And that's a structure equals freedom approach. Structure equals freedom. If you, a nutrition analogy is if you do intermittent fasting and you only eat between, you know, 10am and 6pm and somebody says, hey, let's go out for all. You can eat breakfast Saturday morning at 8, you're like, well, we can go, but I don't eat at 8 o', clock, I don't eat till 10 o'. Clock. Or you, you know, let's go to this place at you know, for an 8 o' clock dinner. No, I finished eating at 6. I can go, I can sit there, but I'm not eating. And it just makes things very simple because that structure gives you freedom in your life.

It really does. And even saying those things like, you know, I don't, you know, I don't drink after dinner. I don't eat before 11:00am you know, I, I don't, you know, I don't eat bread, whatever it may be for you. I don't drink beer. If you say those things out loud, you know them, you believe them, it leads to that. And for me, you know, one thing I learned from you is creating that vision, that life vision. And that became my filter. I was presented with an opportunity when I was still in my W2 role. And I looked at it as very enticing. It was a big promotion and it presented me with an opportunity for a lot of status. And when I, when I stopped and I thought about it, I looked at my vision. I thought, you know what? This is not, this is not what I see for myself three years from now. And I was able to avoid that distraction, avoid that shiny object because I had that filter. And what I find, Craig, is not a lot of people take the time to create that filter and that vision for their own lives.

No, it's, I don't know. Have you ever done the strength finders test?

Yes.

Right. So I think like strategic and I'm not sure if vision is on there, but there's like strategic and futuristic. Those are two of my biggest strategic.

Planner is my profile.

And, and so for me, like, I just naturally think about that stuff almost all the time. Like.

Right, yeah.

You know, I'm thinking about what I'm doing in January and you know, we're recording this in late October, but I'm literally thinking about my January calendar because I'm so futuristic. And I'm not saying that that's the right thing. Sometimes I can get a little bit ahead of myself, but that's the way that I think. And so naturally creating a vision for my life and knowing what I want, I don't understand when people don't know, but that's actually just a normal thing. Like people don't think into the future. And so years ago when I started doing my coaching, I actually had a bit of imposter syndrome because, like, why would anybody come to me for help? Why do people need help with this? Why can't they figure this out on their own? It's, it's so obvious. But the majority of people are not strategic, visionary, futuristic thinkers. And I developed a series of techniques that draws that out of their heads, that gets it down on paper in a very simple way, you know, like in an hour's time. And now they have basically the treasure map for their life. Because everybody, everybody in life is actually wandering around.

Treasure map for your life.

That's beautiful.

Yeah.

And everyone is wandering around looking for a treasure. But imagine you were on a desert island, you know, like the pirate movies always show. And okay, great, you're on a, you're on a desert island and there's a treasure here. Well, I mean, even if it was just a square couple square miles, like good luck. But if you have a treasure map with an X marks the spot, which is your straight line to success. Oh, okay. I know exactly how to go and find this treasure. Yeah, there might, there, there's good some pitfalls along the way and some difficulty to difficult terrain. But I at least know what direction I'm going in and that's the way I'm going to find my treasure. So I help people understand what their treasure is and then build that most efficient line to get there. Because otherwise, you know, everybody knows people that just wandered around in life, even if they have a high income job, who have no money, you know, maybe even in debt, they are on their third marriage. And it's like you're, you know, God bless you, you're just a lost soul and I feel bad for you and I don't ever want to be that person. And so I, I help the, I help people avoid that.

Now what I found is, you know, even my coaching clients, the ones with that vision, they are more productive just week to week. And you're thinking, well, wait a minute, this is such a far out vision. But you're not distracted by everything. And it's just amazing to see that. Right, right.

Because when you know what matters and I think that there's a couple levels, well, there's a few levels to it. It's like you got to know what matters. And then even when, like some people know what matters and they still make a lot of mistakes. So it's kind of this thing you refine over time. Like sometimes you need a reminder like, hey, you remember what matters, like yeah, yeah, yeah, Right, right, right. And then they need to build those parameters, which a lot of people don't have decision parameters. And you obviously use decision parameters when you're looking at a deal. And so this is a great example, like everybody listening to this in Some way, shape or form in your career, however you earn money, there is some definite decision trees that go into how you move forward. Whether you are in an operating room and there's a checklist, whether there's parameters around what you can say on a sales call because of SEC guidelines or FTC guidelines or medical industry guidelines. Like you've got these boundaries. And again, what do the boundaries give us? They give us freedom to perform at a high level. Because if you go outside the boundaries in any sport, you're penalized. And you go outside the boundaries in a sales pitch, you're penalized. And so you need those boundaries to stay on track. And it's the same thing with knowing what matters in our life. If we go outside the boundaries of it, we're going to get bit in the butt. And it can happen once, but if you're doing it multiple times, you got a problem and you need to get that fixed.

Absolutely. You know, as I, as we talk here, I glance over your shoulder, I see your beautiful family, which I've been fortunate enough to meet. And I think if we go back to that first episode, Craig, you, I don't think you, your wife were together at that point.

No, definitely not.

I think it's a lot easy. You know, people, you know may say, oh, Craig, you know, most disciplined men. Oh, it's easy, you know, no family, no kids to distract you. No worries here. But you know, this episode is the perfect week for dads. And you know, you and I are both dads now. What are some things that you've learned here since becoming a father? And, and has your, has your routine, have your boundaries changed at all?

Some of the things have changed, but only to make it easier for me to stick to those boundaries. And so, I mean, everybody who's a father, like the things that you learn when you have a child, I mean, it's just, it's more amazing than any person could describe to a new dad. So if there's any new dads or expectant dads out there, it's more unbelievable than you can ever possibly imagine. It's more unbelievable than any other other father could try and explain to you. And so from the baby giggles to the baby farts, it's hilarious when four month old little girl rips one in her sleep. That's amazing. I mean, how does it get any better than that? So fatherhood is amazing. It doesn't matter how patient you think you are now, it will make you even more patient. So patience was never a virtue of mine. It's becoming better. But in terms of the schedule, the foundational principles do not change, although the tactics and specifics might. The foundational principles don't change. And what are the foundational principles? 1. Better planning and preparation than ever before. It doesn't matter if you want to, you know, go back to all those goals we listed before, scratch golfer, triathlon, et cetera. If you're going to succeed in any of those physical goals, you need better planning and preparation than ever before. You want to lose 30 pounds and you never have. It's because you haven't done the planning and preparation, the level of planning and preparation that you need for your meals and your workouts and all the obstacles. So planning and preparation every week, every day, every month, well in advance of when our baby came along, you know, what are we going to do in this situation? What are we going to do in this situation? How are we going to be able to do this? And so on and so forth. A couple of the best pieces of advice that I received before I became a father was one from my friend Ed o'. Keefe. On his podcast, he said the best advice he ever got, he passed on to me. He said somebody said to him, listen, you can be tired and your wife can be tired, but you can't be tired at the same time. Because everybody who has been a father, a parent or mother, of course I know that. I'm sure there's mothers listening, too, and I don't want to single that out. But you know what fatigue does to you. And, you know, you love the person that you're with and you love your baby, but chronic fatigue can. Can make us turn into different people almost. And so that advice of you can be tired and your wife can be tired, but you can't be tired at the same time. Helped my wife work out some sleep schedules so that one of us was tired, which was fine, but both of us were not exhausted. So that was a big thing, the planning and preparation. You know, I'm. I'm just this type of person who's like, if we don't have three bottles loaded up with water and ready to go and. And maybe one in the fridge. And goose, we use formula because to feed our baby. Michelle didn't breastfeed. And so it's like, we've got all the formula bottles and they're ready to go and they're all cleaned and like, this just runs through my mind all the time. And here's the diaper thing is stacked and. And, you know, it's A diaper bag. Does it have redundancy built in? Because everybody's been out and like. Oh, like I think the other week I forgot. I either forgot formula in the bag or. And so I had to run out. We were at a restaurant and I had to run to a local pharmacy to buy formula because we had everything else. But for some reason the formula got left out. So you get in those situations. But now there's a can of formula and one of these little canisters that dispenses it. So we got. Yeah, we got redundancies and everything. Yeah. And so that level of planning and preparation, which is something that I always. A business and for my workouts as a single guy, now I've just applied it to being a father and then also asking for help. You know, it's a, it's a foundational principle that you do in your business, you do in your investing, you do in your workouts, you do when you're feeling down, you got to reach out for help. And so. Or whether you want to improve your golf score, your cycling scores, you reach out for help. And so we hired extra help. Would much rather we. I've always thought about buying back my time in terms of whether it's editing my videos or whether it is cutting my lawn or whether it is getting some assistance with the baby around the house. We're gonna buy back some of our time so that we can still do some of our things. Then in terms of the actual daily schedule, I get up at the same time, I get up at 4 o' clock in the morning. I'm, you know, in here. Here goes back to the sleep schedules. I'm on middle of the night feeding duty. If baby wakes up and you know, last night she slept 11 hours, but some nights she sleeps five hours. And then I feed her and then I go back to bed and she goes back to bed. And then once it gets to 4 o', clock, I tend. I don't use an alarm, but I get, I get up anywhere from quarter to four to 4:30 like normal and I go to work. And then my wife Michelle is on baby duty. So she puts her to bed at like 7 o' clock and sleep and gives her the last bottle and then everything after that until 4:30 or 5 in the morning is my duty. And then it becomes Michelle's duty again. So we have that planned out.

Yeah, yeah.

And clear. And I work from on a good day, 4 until 6, sometimes 6:30 if the baby sleeps longer. And then from 6 to 6:30 or starting at 6 or 6:30 until 8 in the morning. It's family time. And this includes, we take the dog out for a walk and it's all of us. We go for dog plus baby plus mom and me. We go for a walk, that's about 45 minutes. And we take Daisy, this little lake and she plays. Daisy's our yellow lab. And then 8 o' clock we get back and our nanny shows up. And then I work from eight until four with a one, sometimes two hour lunch break for a workout and lunch today I even had a massage. Great gym.

Great gym you go to by the way.

Well, I don't go there as much anymore because we move further away and so, so I'm in. So this is a great, this is a great season of life example though. All right, I'm a fitness guy. I love used to be a five minute drive to the gym. Now we move further away and there's construction on the road. So it would be a three, three hour round trip even if I only did a 45 minute workout. So I just don't go anymore. Fortunately we moved to a new place where there's a gym across the street. Now is it as good? Absolutely not. It's probably like five times bigger than your regular hotel gym and you know, the same kind of quality stuff you'd see in there, dumbbells and some cables and some machines. But that's, I'm not in the season of life of trying to be the strongest man in the gym or anything like I was when I was 30. So that's gotta go because all that matters to me is, you know, am I strong enough to hold up, you know, carry my baby without and, and pain free. Because when just before we had our baby, I had a real bad shoulder problem and I was like, what's more important to me is not working out but actually fixing my shoulder. So I kind of reduced my training, started taking massage seriously, which has been an incredible help once I found the right massage person and you know, not doing any stupid exercises. And so I just can't train four days per week anymore. But that's the season of life I'm in. And so then, you know, I usually from 11 to 1 I'm off and then in the afternoon I do calls like this and film videos. And then at 4 o' clock, hard stop for and, and that's another thing. A foundational principle you need is boundaries. You need boundaries and you need public accountability. And accountability is somebody you deeply not want, do not want to disappoint. So I say I have four o' clock boundaries on podcasts all the time because that is a support system for me to stick to it because I don't want to be seen as a hypocrite. So then from 4 o' clock till 8 o', clock, you know, we, we swim. Our baby is really good in the water at. She's almost eight months old. She takes swimming classes twice a week, which is like you pour water on the baby's head and you kind of have her kicking, float around. It's not very much, but she's very comfortable in the water, which we're very happy about. And so today we'll either do that lesson or we'll just do one in our. In our pool in the backyard. And then we will go for another walk, possibly we'll play in the little playpen she has and we'll have a good time as a family. We. We here. And another thing is systems, another foundational principle of systems. So in our previous house, we had a typical living room right beside the kitchen, big TV. And so we would watch about 20 or 30 minutes of Netflix almost every day. I put a hard cap on it, so I put a boundary on the amount of Netflix.

I think one episode. Is that what you said?

Sometimes we don't even get through an episode because I'm like, 20 minutes is up. Especially if it's an hour episode. It's like you don't get through one night. And so it's like. And my wife always bugs me. But I said just, we're not doing anymore. But to. But in this new house, just the way that it's set up, it's inconvenient to watch television in our house. You have to go upstairs. You have to. It's not a big room. We're never in that room. And so we don't watch television anymore, which means we have more time to focus on hanging out and planning trips and all that sort of stuff.

DJ Van Kern, it's good to see you. I look forward to talking about the Four Institute and your upcoming fall program. I'd love for you to just introduce yourself real quick and tell us a little bit about what it is.

Yeah, so DJ Van Kieran, and I'm the founder of the 4 Institute. And then I've also worked for a number of very prominent families on the real estate portfolios.

Yeah, we've had DJ on the podcast and DJ works with family offices that are typically, and correct me if I'm wrong, $250 million or more in net worth. And the Four Institute. I'm super excited for this program that I'm going to be attending. Typically this is information and access to typically only these family offices get but you're opening this to our investors as well.

So we actually it's an executive agency education program and in the program we've put together some of the most prominent professors around the country and industry experts. So we have professors from Wharton and Harvard and University of Denver, University of Chicago. We have family, office and real estate experts and we focus in on, you know, what it is to maintain and really generate significant growth through real estate. And it's in a format that's extremely valuable. And you know, on our front page at Ford Institute, not.com but.com institute you can even see videos of people and their experiences.

Awesome. And so I guess dj, what is someone going to learn that attends this class?

They're going to learn how to analyze opportunities. They're going to understand about market cycles, where are we in the market cycle and what to look like look for in the various property types. They're going to understand, you know, get into some of the issues about maintaining your wealth from a long term perspective. Tax strategies for your investments and really how to make better decisions on your real estate investing.

No, I think it's awesome. I think a lot of people have concerns about where we are right now in the economic cycle. What's going to happen to real estate? I follow you know, one of the faculty, Dr. Miller's quarterly reports to stay on top of these things. And I'll tell you what it makes, it makes me feel a lot more confident knowing this information, knowing historically what has happened and to have access to these faculty this information. I'm really excited about it. How can people find out more if they want to attend?

Yeah, so they go to Ford Institute, which is F O R E for family office real estate. So it's for.in dude it's not.com but it's.institute. so Ford Institute and you can click on there to receive a brochure and then sign up for the perfect and.

We'Ll have the links right here along with this short video. DJ it's great to see. I look forward to seeing you in person here later this month.

And then so important. Yeah. And then we get the baby to bed at seven and you know we're pretty much sometimes we go 7:30, 8:00 clock and well or 7:30, but almost always by 8:00 clock and then the last thing is we have date night tonight. It's. We moved our date nights to Wednesday.

Oh, nice.

And it's every Wednesday and it's. We start pretty early. You know, we will leave the house 4:30, 5:00 clock and try and be home by 7 or 7:30, usually after the baby, after the baby's been put to bed by a nanny. And then, you know, we still get to bed on time. So that's. And, and then weekends, I work a little bit on Saturday mornings, maybe a little bit Sunday after late Sunday afternoon to kind of tidy up for the week, but it's way less than I used to.

Yeah, that's fantastic. I've implemented a lot of those things. And the big thing that you mentioned, Craig, which is, you know, you can, you can focus on one thing at a time. Once you get that wheel rolling, you can outsource it. You can find somebody else to do it. You know, so buying back your time, as you mentioned, it doesn't just have to be your lawn or cleaning your house or doing your grocery shopping. It can also be an aspect of your business that maybe you shouldn't be doing. Like you were saying, outsourcing, podcast production or even writing a book, which, by the way, I have, I've got, I don't, I don't keep a lot of hard books. I have most of my stuff on Kindle, which, you know, one of our big rules in our family is no screens in bedrooms. So there's no TVs, no computers in bedrooms. We got two boys, soon to be teenage, and that's, that's super important. But I got your Perfect Day formula. I got Unstoppable, as you talked about on the first episode. But tell the audience how they can get a copy of your Perfect Week formula and learn how you can have a Perfect Week, even if you're a dad.

Yeah, absolutely. So this book is based on me working with probably about 1500 busy executive fathers, entrepreneur fathers, and I have time tested this in about 75 different workshops. And the Perfect Week forum will show you how to squeeze more juice out of every hour of life. So that, and that includes like, on the personal side and the Perfect Week formula. You can get a copy@perfectweekformula.com it's also on Amazon. And if, if you want the audiobook, you can just send me a message on Instagram at Real Craig Valentine.

Awesome. And for those that don't know, I got this hat in the mail. It says 11 out of 10 if you're listening. And Craig, maybe you can tell the audience, you know, this story kind of like I've heard it before. But what is 11 out of 10? What does that mean? Why is it on my head?

So, yeah, so coaching clients like Chris, every week they have to answer 10 questions in an accountability email to me. And one of the. The first question is, on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your week? And I've been doing this since about 2016 with hundreds of clients, so I've received, you know, tens of thousands of email replies. And I noticed a trend. I noticed that there were really three types of people. First of all, there were people like me and like you, Chris, where it's like, yeah, it's either an 8, 9, maybe it's a 10. You know, on a bad week, I might give it a seven. So that's kind of like the normal response. Then there was another type of person who, you know, one of my clients actually did this. The other week, an employee quit, and they gave it a 1 out of 10. And I had to stop because, listen, like, I would.

I think I could. I think I could. I could scratch out a 1. If I was on my deathbed, I'd be like, hey, send Craig this email. I know it's Saturday. I'm not going to make it till next Saturday. Tell me it's a one because it's. It's getting pretty bad, right?

And so. So I was like, whoa, wait a minute. And usually it's a young entrepreneur or a beginner entrepreneur. And I was like, understand that you can never have a one out of ten week. You know, your employee left. Like, and if you're. If one of your employees left or you got a big refund or a big client canceled or whatever, and you rank your week a 1 out of 10, what are you going to rank it and how are you going to respond when something really bad actually happens? Right? Because I have this little shtick where I say, as an entrepreneur, you have to be prepared to wake up on a morning where your dog has run away, your spouse is super angry at you threatening to leave, and you've been punched in the gut and your business is sucking. All four of those things could happen on a single day. And you have to wake up with a smile and go to the. Go to your business, and your employees cannot see that. You have to actually be at a greater attitude than every single one of your employees, even if all four of those things have happened. And so when people hit the panic button and hit a 1 out of 10, I get really really concerned that they might not have the fortitude to be an entrepreneur. Because an employee leaving is like two points off. Because that's going to happen all the time. You better get used to it. And this is, you know, some people are going to win the lottery and leave. Some people are going to have personal problems and leave. Some people are going to start off amazing and slowly, like the phrase is now quiet quitting. You know, they're going to quiet quit on you. Some people are going to loudly quit on you. We've had, we're, we're gym owners and we've had people trainers back when we were young and naive quit and the next day open a gym on the same street and take 30% of our clients. Like, okay, that's like a three point loss down, you know, but that's still not a one.

That's a, that's a kick. That's a, that's a kick in the gut.

So to know, like, and so, you know, we, we got this entrepreneur client of ours off the ledge and everything was okay. So there was that type of person, the person who hits the panic button way too soon. But then there was this, there was this third group, this third group of people who were even on their worst day, when they were on their deathbed, they were like, Yeah, I was 11 out of 10 this week. But, you know, normally I'm at 20 out of 10. And so. And I would get like, like there was this one guy where it just kept on going up every week and it was a 33 out of 10, and then it was a 52 out of 10 and it was like, okay, whatever. I was kind of rolling my eyes at first and. But then I noticed there was a group of people that did it.

Yeah.

And the commonality is that nothing bad could happen to them. And they always had this positive attitude. And so for me, like, I'm a skeptical person and I would never think outside the boundaries. Generally not think outside the boundaries of 7, 8, 9 or 10. You know, it's kind of like when you have those nine dots and you got to connect all nine dots using only straight lines. And yeah, most people are like, they don't leave the box, right? Oh, oh, it's obvious once you leave the box. And so this is out of the box thinking. And so the 11 out of 10, I realized I gave it a name. My grateful persistence that even in the face of your toughest week, you're always an 11 out of 10. You're always a positive person, you're always Optimistic, you're always in a great energetic mood. You're an 11 out of 10 because you are grateful that you have the opportunity to persist against any problems that.

Are coming your way.

And so your baseline thus needs to be an 11 out of 10. And I'm not going to lie and say every day I'm 11 out of 10. There's days where, you know, like at the end of yesterday I think I had six hours of calls, two hours of filming, some other frustrations and about six o' clock at night I was not looking like I was an 11 out of 10. And my tonality was probably not 11 out of 10. But I still was pretty grateful for all those problems I had. I have gratitude everything. That's the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning. I just lie in bed and, and say a few things I'm grateful for. Grateful like I just can't believe that, you know, I get paid to do what I do. Considering my first job, Chris was digging ditches for $2.85 an hour when I was 12 years old. And that was after working for years on the farm for free, right? Picking rocks and all this stuff. And so thinking to what I got paid for what I was doing back then compared to what I get paid to do today. But I solve bigger problems for very successful people. Therefore that's why I do get paid what I get paid. And so I'm just like, man, I am just such so grateful for this. And I'm grateful for so many things, the little things in life. You know. Right before this I saw a YouTube ad of a guy that I know who, whose business is probably like four times bigger than mine. And he was wearing these fancy sunglasses and leather jacket. I was like, that's cool, but you could probably get the same outfit for like 20 bucks at Target. And I'd be grateful for that. So, so I'm just grateful for the little things in life and most importantly my family. And so for everybody who is a family oriented person, I know that you'll have gotten a lot of ideas and values about the foundational principles. You could be an 11 o' clock in the morning wake up person, you could be an all nighter type person. But the foundational principles of better planning and preparation than ever before, systems, gratitude, all that sort of stuff that we talked about, boundaries, those things will, can be used whatever your 24 hour clock is, you can apply it and be successful.

I love it and I love the expression, you know, you said if you had, if you had 24 gold coins every day, you know, what would you, what would you do with each of those gold coins? Would you throw them away?

How are you spending that?

How would you spend them? So if you want to learn how to do it, the exact formula that I used, get a copy of Craig's book that you're seeing here on the screen. The Perfect Week formula. Perfectweekformula.com Craig, thank you so much for joining us again, my man.

This has been great. Chris got me all fired up.

Hey Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to give to you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs of. Thanks you for listening to the podcast. Also please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.