Zombie Musicals, Quitting Your Job & Living An Extraordinary Life with Stever Robbins.

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. And I took a risk today. I actually decided to talk about business and lifestyle and self improvement with my guest. There's a reason for that and I'm going to tell you why in the intro to today's episode. But be forewarned, we're not going to be talking about crunches or sipping green smoothies the first 15 minutes or so. This episode we had some audio difficulties, but it gets better as we, as we go along. Trust me. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Show, a lot of people focus on the times they hear no. And they go, I can't ask that person that. And what I would say is, you know what? Even if only 1% of the people say yes to the request that you're making, all that means is, is that you need to get through those 99 no's as quickly as you can to get to the one yes. The advice we're giving each other when we say maybe you just need to work harder, what we're saying is maybe you need to just do a few more hours of things that you're good at and you really don't enjoy, and then you'll have the life you want.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And last month I was driving to play tennis at the club. I played tennis on Wednesday nights in the men's league. And while I was driving to tennis, I plugged in this audio episode that I had downloaded to my MP3 players called Living an Extraordinary Life. And I will admit I'm not really a voracious, like, self improvement consumer. And this type of thing doesn't actually happen very often when I'm listening to podcasts or audiobooks or audio lectures. But I actually found myself multiple times stopping to, like, pump my fists and verbally, like, shout in agreement and furiously take notes on my phone. Not that I would ever hold my phone while driving, but I'm just saying it was, it was quite an experience. And the actual program I was listening to was called Living an Extraordinary Life. And it was recorded by, by my friend and also a fellow podcaster named Steve E.R. robbins. So if you've ever been over to the website quickanddirtytips.com or iTunes, you may know that I have this podcast called the Get Fit Guy podcast. And there's another podcast put out by the same folks called the Get It Done Guy podcast. And Stever is the Get It Done guy and he's basically more or less a life hacker. He's got a ton of business experience. His company is called Ideas Unleashed. But he has a ton of experience primarily in business. He co founded an early Internet success story called FTP software. He was CEO of a company called Building Blocks Interactive, CEO of jobtacto.com he's been a team member of 10 different startups, four IPOs, three different acquisitions, project manager at Intuit, he's been a business plan judge over at the Harvard Business School. And his, his podcast, I mentioned, the Get It Done Guy podcast. It has spent weeks and weeks as number one in the iTunes business category. It's been downloaded over 23 million times and he's seen all over the place. CNN, entrepreneurs living the American dream, New York Times, Fox News, MSNBC. Steva is a rock star in the whole business self improvement world and now we get to speak with him. Most lately Stever actually co wrote a musical and the musical is called Work Less and Do the Zombie Musical. Yes, a zombie musical. So Stever, that's my first question for you actually man. What is a zombie musical?

Well, that was quite an introduction. Thank you for having me. A zombie musical is a musical about zombies. This was started as a joke. I wrote the Get It Done Guy book based on my podcast which is called the get it Done nine Steps to Work Less and Do More. And I was talking to a friend of mine and I for some reason had just acquired an interest in theater. I had never acted, I had never sung, I had never danced, but I was interested and I was talking to a friend and I said, you know, I'm doing this book on personal productivity, but I really want to be doing theater right now. And wouldn't it be funny if I had a one man show that I could perform that was somehow based on my book and could be part of the book promotion. And my friend just looked at me and he said, you do know what I do for a living, right? And I said, sure, you're a journalist. Because I thought he was a journalist and he was not. It turns out, unbeknownst to me, he teaches at musical theater composition at nyu. So he has written several musicals that have been on off Broadway and things like that. And I approached him a couple days later and I said, you know that thing I was joking about, you want to actually do it? And what it is, it's a musical. It's intended to be done as a business keynote. So it's 45 minutes long. The original version was an hour. We cut it down so that it would be doable as a lunch keynote. Right. It is so dramatic that people cry and it is so information packed that people take notes.

Where does the zombie part come in?

Well, where the zombie part comes in is that there is a hypothetical person named Steve Robbins who is a graduate of Harvard Business School. But the kids at Harvard Business School ostracized him and never invited him to their parties where they had Oreo ice cream cake. So after he graduated, he decided to get revenge by raising a zombie army and taking over the world and cornering the world supply of Oreo ice cream cake. So that way if they ever had parties going forward, they would have to invite him.

Oh, wow.

And the audience is the zombies. And this is the orientation lecture. And tomorrow is the day that we're going to march on Washington and take over the world. And so the theme of the show is is welcome zombies. This is your orientation lecture. And he gets a little ways into it. And then let's just say that the unexpected happens and it takes you on a journey of discovery, both personal and self discovery, but also discovery of things like how to deal with your inbox better. And in fact, anyone who'd like to watch, we did a five minute promo video and had two professional musical theater actors from New York perform it. So it's just top notch skill level. And if you go to work less and do more, all one word, workless and do more. Com. The first link on the page is a video. Click it and you can watch a little five minute promo where you can hear the songs and you will actually get three of the tips from my book in that promo.

I love it.

And you know, honestly, it's one of the things I am proudest of in my entire life.

That's crazy. And I know you've got a little bit of a backstory about how more about like how you got involved in a musical. But I will link to that in the show notes. Any of you listening in the show notes for this episode are going to be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com extraordinary. It's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Extraordinary. If you have difficult spelling extraordinary, just Google that. So anyway, Steve, or you moved away from home when you were 15 years old. That to me seems like a pretty early age. And I was homeschooled. I graduated high school when I was 15 and started university when I was 16. But I was living with my parents at the time. I did not actually move away from home because I liked the free food. But you moved away from home when you were 15. Why did you do that and what led up to that?

Well, you know, I would love to tell you some dramatic story about I was going to be the next Elon Musk or a horrible tragedy about drug abuse. None of those are true. The truth is quite simple. I was living with my mother and stepfather and in Allentown, Pennsylvania. And I, let's just say, was not a big fan of living with my mother and stepfather. So when I went out to visit my father for the summer, I simply informed him that I was going to stay. My stepmother took. As soon as we informed my stepmother, she then informed me back that she had no intention of being in the position of a mother. That wasn't what she had signed up for. And she refused to have me live with them. So they lived in a tiny apartment complex. And the solution that we ended up with is renting a studio apartment about 100ft from their back door. And I moved into the studio apartment, and then they announced that they were going to be moving away. And did I want to go with them. And I had. I. This is the first time in my life that I had ever had friends. That's a long story. I grew up in a traveling new age commune. So all of the neighborhood kids were always warned about the kids across the track, the kids on the other side of the tracks. Well, that was usually. So I grew up never really having any friends. I had friends for the first time. I was going to a magnet school that specialized in math, science and computers. And when they said, you can come with us or you can stay here in San Diego, I said, you know what? I'm staying in San Diego. So they moved away and I stayed. And the funny part is, at the time, when I look back on it, I think really, really 15 years old. And I just stayed. When they moved away, I became an emancipated minor legally so that I could take care of my own affairs and stuff. But, you know, at the time, it didn't seem unusual. It was the only next step that I could possibly take to get what I wanted the hardest part of the whole process was that when I went down to the courthouse to get my emancipation papers ratified, or whatever they call it by a judge, I went up to the courtroom that they had assigned me, and the courtroom had a big sign that said, no minors allowed. So I was sitting there thinking, well, what can I do? Because until I've had the papers signed, I'm a minor. And just sheer stroke of serendipity. At that moment, my best friend's mother, who was a lawyer, happened to be walking down the hall on her way back from a case. Oh, wow. She saw me and she's like, what are you doing here? And I said, I need to get my papers signed so that I can be an adult, even though I'm just 15. And she said, absolutely. And she went in, argued my case for me, got the papers signed, and delivered them to me.

Holy cow. Geez. There are so many little backstories there, especially like what a New age commune is that I. That I would love to delve into. But perhaps I'll have to pick your brain at another time about that, because what I actually wanted to get you onto the podcast to talk about was what got me pumping my fist in the car that day, and that is this. Living an extraordinary life. And for those of you listening in, I'll link to the full audio of what I was listening to Stever talk about. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com extraordinary, I'll link to that. But Stever, you start that entire conversation off by saying, the journey is the reward. What do you mean by that?

What I mean by this. And this has been something that has taken me so long to notice. It was in front of my face the whole time. And yeah, and I never noticed it. What I mean by that is that. And this is going to be heresy for those people who are into personal productivity, but I truly believe this. Goals. Reaching your goals don't matter. When you ask somebody about something they're proud of, generally what they're proud of is the experience that it took to reach the goal, not the actual reaching of the goal itself. When I strive for something, right? I went to Harvard Business School in mit, and interestingly enough, in neither case was I going because I knew it was a big name school. The circumstances surrounding my getting into both of those were very unusual. And it was never like, oh my God, I want an MIT degree. It just happened to be the school that I was going to for completely different reasons. And when I graduated, it was like, okay, Yay. Now I have an MIT degree. But when people say, what was it like? I don't say, oh, well, you know, it was great. The piece of paper felt so good. And I feel like such an awesome person because I have a degree. What I talk about instead is, no, here's what the experience was like. Here's the things I liked about it, here's the things I didn't. Here's the way it changed me. I talk about virtually everything except the actual reaching of the goal itself, which is the least important part.

Interesting. So when this comes to something like, you know, for me, I know this was the case when I was training for an ironman, for example, like my first ironman, I remember thinking when I was at the starting line of that race, that was all about the finish line. And then I crossed the finish line and started telling stories with all of my friends and started thinking back to all those hours spent, like riding through the forested mountains of Coeur d' Alene on my bike and swimming in the ocean over and over again and learning how to do open water swimming and just all these little things that led up to the actual finish line. That whole phrase of the journey is the reward. Really struck a chord with me because in fitness, especially for a lot of the people who are listening in, who are getting ready for a 5K or a triathlon or a marathon or a Spartan race or whatever, sometimes, frankly, the event is either a letdown or it's not quite as good as what you thought it might be, or just as good as you thought it might be. But the journey is even better.

Absolutely. Well, as somebody who is not naturally inclined towards fitness and exercise, who lives entirely in my head, as you know, I actually work out seven days a week. Well, I work out six days a week and rest one day. And I have a trainer. So I'm making sure that I'm always doing everything well, balanced and getting results. But the thing that keeps me going back to the gym, and I am super aware of this, in fact, I did a series of get it done guy episodes about my motivation for how do I keep myself going, since the activity itself doesn't intrinsically motivate me. But what I've discovered is by going every day at the same time and always showing up, I've met all of the other people who go at the same time and they always show up. And so we formed a little community. And it just so happens that what we have in common is that we all work out. So we're always talking about our workouts. We're always trading tips. We're always spotting each other, but we're not doing it well, actually, I don't know why the other people are doing it. I'm not doing it because I'm inherently interested in fitness. I'm doing it because I'm inherently interested in having a community and having friends who I see on a regular basis. And it just so happened that I was able to evolve this at the gym. So for me, yes, I love the way I look, I love the way I feel. I love the fact that I am in unbelievably good health for someone of my age, et cetera, et cetera. However, the journey is the part that motivates me to get to the gym, and the journey is I get to hang out with my friends.

Yeah. So there were three questions, and each of the three questions are kind of involved, but there's three questions that. That you ask yourself or that you decided to ask yourself. Can you go into why you came up with three questions to ask yourself about your life and how it was that you discovered those questions?

Absolutely. They came to me in a dream. I'm not a particularly religious person, but I dreamt I was talking to God, and God offered to give me the final exam of life. And these are the questions that if I pass them, I will have passed, and I get to go on to do the next thing.

They came to you in a dream?

They literally came to me in a dream.

Were you doing any of these, like, lucid dreaming, smart drugs or anything like that, or they just came to you in a dream?

They just came to me in a dream. But I do want to point out that I was raised in a traveling new age commune.

I was gonna say you were raised in traveling New age communes that might have something, maybe some psilocybin left over in the bloodstream or something?

Oh, well, yeah, there is that part. Once you reach certain levels, it just. You think that way.

Right. Okay. So you discover these in Adrian, and how do they go?

So the question number one is, did you make the most of this one extraordinary life that I gave you, or actually, did you make the most of the. Did you make the most of your one life and make it extraordinary, whatever that means to you? And that part's important because different people have different ideas of what they want to get out of life. Question number two is, were you a good steward for the planet because you have 7 billion other people who you have to share it with and trillions of plants and animals and all of them need to use it. So have you been a good steward for the planet that is here for you to live your extraordinary life? And then question number three is, did you do your best to help everyone around you do the same, to live their own extraordinary life and to be a good steward for the planet?

Got it. Okay. So did you live an extraordinary life? Were you a good steward of the planet? And what was the third one again?

Did you help everyone around you live their extraordinary lives and be good stewards for the planet?

Okay, gotcha. Let's delve into each of those questions. Is there one that's more important than the others?

Well, certainly the one that's most selfishly important is question number one, which is, did you live your extraordinary life? I would say that the one that is the most important from that, if I were to say what's most important for the species and what's most important for the world, it would be question number three, which is, did you help everyone around you?

Okay, gotcha, gotcha. So what did you do after this dream? How did you act on these questions?

Well, first I answered them and I said, basically, am I living an extraordinary life? Maybe not sure. Question two, am I a good steward for the planet? That one's easy. The answer is no. Being an American, no amount of recycling is going to possibly begin to make up for my carbon footprint and the level of waste that goes into giving me the standard of living that I enjoy. Do I do the same? Do I help others do the same? That one was pretty easy because my profession for the last 16 years has been primarily executive coaching and life coaching of some sort. So most of my job and most of my interaction with people is all around helping them live whatever they consider an extraordinary life. Whether I call it that or not, that's ultimately what goes into it. And since I work with business people, it generally has a big business component of how do they start and run businesses. But what motivates me in that is really helping people live their dreams. And I just happen to work with people whose dreams are typically business related. So three was a yes, question two was a no, and question one was a maybe, which means the place. I just don't imagine myself being able to be a good steward for the planet. Even if I personally do everything I can in my little area, my ability to have a major impact there is just slim. So I put my attention on question one, which is, am I living my own extraordinary life? And that was what led to the whole extraordinary life presentation that you Saw.

Okay, so after you asked yourself that question, like, am I living an extraordinary life? What happened? Like, what was the answer?

The answer was no. Okay, what did you do to take any thought? What I did? Well, boy, you know, it's interesting because the order that I present things in, in the presentation is not actual, doesn't correspond step by step to exactly what happened. I take several things that, that only in retrospect did I see that there was a thread. What I actually did next is I got out a notebook and started writing down. What the hell do I even mean when I say I'm not living an extraordinary life? What is it that I would rather be doing? What is it that is working, that isn't working? I divided the piece of paper into three columns. And in the first column, the title of that column was Things that really nurture me and Things that are Extraordinary. The second column is Things that are neutral. And the third column is these are things that actively drain my life energy. And what I did is go through my calendar and I said, in terms of the number of hours per week, what are the activities that I spend my time doing? Which columns do they fall into? And how much of my time is being spent in which column? And what I discovered is probably 70% of my time was being spent in the column of things that drain my energy. And about 10% of my time was being spent in the column of what are the things that really are giving me an extraordinary life. And about 20% of my life was being spent in the neutral column. And I said, you know what? This is not the way my life should be. I shouldn't just be spending 10% of it doing the things that give me joy and they give me an extraordinary life. That should be the 70% column. And the stuff I don't like should be the 10% column. So I knew it was time for a change.

And what did you do at that point?

Well, what I did was go help. I don't know what to do. And I hired a coach, a man by the name of Michael Neal, who is a pretty exceptional self help person in his own right. He's been a friend of mine for gosh, like 26, 27 years at this point, something like that. And I've always admired the kinds of results that he gets with people. So I hired him and I said, help me figure out what the hell's going on, because my life needs a major overhaul. And what we discovered is that we discovered that I wasn't allowing myself to move out of my Comfort zone. Because the dominant question in my entire life, and anyone who's listening to this, who's gone to business school, will understand where this comes from. The dominant question was always, what's the payback period for any major investment that I make? And is it less than three months? I don't know where my brain came up with three months, but basically I wasn't allowing myself to explore anything that I didn't think would pay back within three months. And when I say payback, I literally mean that in terms of dollars. So I was in a job where the bulk of the work that I did I wasn't enjoying. But it was very hard for me to change jobs because I would do something else or think about doing something else. And if it didn't seem like it would be something that could pay off handsomely in three months, I wouldn't do it. So I kept myself constrained to a narrower and narrower set of things. And Michael pointed this out. He saw it from the outside. And that was when we decided that I should do some kind of experiment of explicitly going way outside my comfort zone and finding out what happened. And that's what led to the three year experiment that I talk about in the presentation.

So let's delve into this three year experiment. Did you more or less just like quit your job or what'd you do?

Well, I was self employed, so quitting my job is a. I'm not completely sure what that means in that context. What I did do is I stopped promoting myself the way that I was promoting and I stopped actively looking for clients and I started seeking out what are the things that I would consider extraordinary. And I would love to say that there was a rigorous way of doing that, but the way that I did it was by going upstairs and sitting down in my, I call it my Stever space. It's a room in my house that has a big papasan chair and nice light. And I sat there and just relaxed and didn't do anything unless I felt like I wanted to do it. So the rule was I had to be called to get up out of my papasan chair and go do something. Now as you know, papasan chairs are very comfortable. So the call had to be a pretty strong one to get me out of chair.

I've actually never been in a papasan chair. I don't, I don't think, ah, don't.

Start because they're just way too comfortable.

What exactly is a papasan chair?

It looks like a giant candy dish.

Okay. I think I do Know what you're talking about?

Yeah. And you can kind of curl up in them. You can curl up in one, and they're comfortable, and if they're in a nice room, it's just sort of a cozy, you know, very cozy little thing. I've had one ever since college because as a college student, it was all I could afford.

Okay, gotcha.

And so I waited for something to strike. And while I was waiting, I just noticed, what are the things that give me joy and what are the ones that aren't? One of the first things that happened during that three years is that I was listening to a podcast. Podcasting was quite new at the time. And there was this wonderful woman whose name I had, who I didn't know all that I knew her by was Grammar Girl. And she had a podcast, and I loved her podcast. And she somehow managed to take Grammar, which, although, weirdly, I am kind of a grammar geek, but I knew that most people aren't. She took this topic that most people were not super interested in and would consider a dry, boring topic, and she made it really fun. And I listened to her podcast, and I thought, wow, she's fun. And I had my own podcast at the time, I only had about 10 episodes of it, and it was about business, but it was kind of boring. And so I wrote her a fan letter, and I said, dear Grammar Girl, if you ever decide you would like to have a business podcaster, I would love to be that person because I have a nice voice. I've been doing my own podcast, and I know an awful lot about business, but, gee, you're having way more fun than I am, so I want to come be part of your party. And I sent her the fan letter, and it got to her. She had just sold her little podcast network that at the time had five hosts, and she had just sold it to macmillan Publishing, and they were having their first meeting to decide who their next podcaster should be. The very first podcaster not from their original group. My email happened to get to her that same day, and I sent her an audition audio. And long story short, she listened to it, said, we'd like to have you. And that was, in fact, how the Get It Done Guy podcast started. It started because I was sitting in a chair, I listened to something I liked, and I just said, you know what? I'm just going to pursue that just for the heck of it. Who knows what's going to come of it? And in fact, as you have seen, a tremendous amount of stuff has grown out of that.

Yeah, that's amazing. That's very similar to cut to. Kind of like how I launched the Get Vic I podcast. I had discovered the Quick and Dirty Tips Network and absolutely loved it and wondered why in the heck they did not have Quick and Dirty fitness tips each week. And so I literally found the phone number for the company who was putting out these podcasts, and I called them up and asked them if they'd like me to send them over an audio sample of what I think would make a really good short weekly fitness podcast. And so it really is interesting, once you find these things that you dig and that you're passionate about, how it can be easier than you think to make them a part of your life or to even get involved with doing them. But that's funny. That's very, very similar to how I got started in the podcasting world with Quick and Dirty Tips. Go ahead.

I was gonna say, I think you just hit on something that's surprisingly profound. And it's not profound in the philosophical sense, but it's profound in a behavioral sense, which is there is so much in life that if you show up and ask, people will say no to, and you know what? You're just screwed. But there's an awful lot in life that if you show up and ask, people will say yes to. And a lot of people focus on the times they hear no, and they go, ugh, I can't ask that person that. And what I would say is, you know what? Even if only 1% of the people say yes to the request that you're making, all that means is, is that you need to get through those 99 no's as quickly as you can to get to the one yes. And most people instead give up after the fifth or sixth no.

You know, one of the things that really leapt out to me during your presentation was how to know what the extraordinary life for you is. And you talk about how you were immersed in something that you didn't even realize you were that passionate about until you started asking yourself this question. And I believe it was theater or musicals or something like that where you. You were emotionally moved. Can you get into how that ties into living an extraordinary life?

Oh, my God. So, okay, so it's entirely possible that I may tear up as I tell the story, because that's what happens sometimes.

That's fine. People cry all the time on this show. No, not really.

But you'll be one of the first. I also may not, but it's funny, because when I did, when I think about it, I do tear up. So this was during the three year experiment. I started the podcast in the first year. In the second year, the podcast was doing so well that macmillan approached me and said, would you like to write a book? I wrote a book. And when the book was being edited, some friends of mine said, hey, let's go see a show. And they took me to go see a student production of a musical here at a local. I live in Boston, it was at mit, and we went to MIT and watched this show. And, you know, it was a nice show. It was a definitely not a cheerful show. It was kind of a dark in its own way. But we watched it and we walked out from the show. And as we walked out, I suddenly burst into tears and didn't really stop.

And.

I got home and I was still really upset by this. I wasn't quite sure why. So, I mean, it clearly had something to do with the show and slept on it. Woke up the next day, nothing had changed. I was still feeling this overwhelming sense of emotion and sadness and all kinds of stuff. So I figured, oh, I'm gonna get rid of this by desensitizing myself to it. So I bought the soundtrack to the show and listened to it a hundred times. Yeah. Not only did it not desensitize it, not only did it not desensitize me to it, but in fact, if anything, it increased the angst. And it took me a month to figure out what was going on. And what happened was that I spent this entire month in this state of just feeling like everything was falling apart. And about a month into it, I was pacing back and forth in my office in the basement, and I turned to the wall and out loud I said, goddammit, what the hell is my mind trying to tell me that I should be doing musical theater or something? And the instant those words left my mouth, I felt great. And I was like, no, no musical.

Theater, which is so different than what you were doing at the time, which was basically like business development.

Correct. I had never been on a stage. I had never even seen. Actually, I had been on a stage, like in college. I was in the orientation show. But that was it. That was like, one thing I had ever done. And I might add, I hurt my back so badly that to this day, I have lower back problems. But I had zero experience.

I can help you with that. Let's talk after the show.

All right. I had zero experience of any sort doing anything theater related. I knew that theater existed, and that was about the extent of it. So, and what I did next, which you will recognize from our conversation a second ago, is I said, well, if I'm interested in theater, I should learn about it because I know nothing about it. And I picked up the phone and I went down to New York and I started meeting producers. And it turns out that if you call a Broadway producer and say, I want to meet you, they will almost always say yes, because they think you want to meet them so that you can invest in their show. Which I, I didn't know that at the time. But it turns out that the thing about theater, which is very different from film, is that theater is an extremely poverty stricken business. It's not a very rich business. And people in theater are only in theater because they love it. No one's in it to get rich. Everyone hopes they will. And occasionally it does happen. I mean, the writer of Hamilton is never going to have to work again. But everyone was willing to meet me. And what I started to discover is there was this amazing industry full of really interesting, dramatic, emotional people which couldn't be further from me because I'm not that dramatic and I'm not that emotional. And they were all welcoming me with open arms. And everyone I met I just loved and had a great time with and quickly determined that from a business perspective, it wasn't a business to be in, but it really opened my eyes. I've invested in a couple of shows and discovered that you can lose all of your money investing in shows. I have also invested in one show that made it to the Tonys. And being an investor, I got the opportunity to get a ticket to the Tonys, which at the time was being held in the Beacon Theater, which was too small. You actually needed some sort of inn to get a ticket and got to go in person and meet all these fabulous theater people. And it was a great time. It was one of the funnest nights of my life to date. And none of this would have happened if I hadn't seen this show at MIT and just randomly burst into tears and then spent the month that it took to really get to the point where my mouth was willing to say what my mind was not yet willing to think.

This is so interesting because I've run into this before. Many, many times I've talked to other people run into this too. Like, for example, I can watch a football game on TV and feel just fine sitting there watching the game, totally fulfilled. If I watch a tennis match, I'm annoyed the whole time because I want to be on the court playing the same thing has happened to me with fiction, for example, which. And a lot of our podcast listeners know that I'm writing fiction now. When I read a fantasy fiction book like, say, Game of Thrones, I actually don't enjoy it that much because as I read it, I'm wanting to change up the story. I don't think a name fits. I want to change the way that a scene is described. Like, I want to actually be producing that, not necessarily consuming that. And I have, like, this strong emotional tie to the fiction or to the tennis game. And what I've realized is that that strong emotional tie can, as you allude to it, can almost be like a signal that maybe that's something, something that you should actually go out of your way to be immersed in from more than just like a content consumer type of standpoint.

Well, I would go far enough to say drop the maybe. That's precisely at the heart of really, the conclusions that I have come to with the living extraordinary life thing. And I hesitate to call it conclusions because at this point I'm saying, you know what? I won't know what the conclusions are until I'm on my deathbed, because Lord knows how many times I may change my mind over the course of my life. But my basic thesis is that the foundation of an extraordinary life is pay attention to your emotions. Your emotions will tell you the direction to go in. They won't tell you specifically what to do, but they'll tell you the broad direction. And where your analytical and thinking brain comes in is in figuring out how to make that direction viable for yourself. So rather than saying, oh, I'm going to do this sensible thing and become a management consultant for 15 years, and then I'll have enough money to retire and do the thing. I love a strategy that has worked for an extremely small number of people, but that mostly just results in people being miserable and finally quitting their job in disgust without a good alternative to move to. So instead of saying, I'm going to put the money thing first and then hope that I get to the point where I can pursue the things that really drive the emotional spark, let your brain say, oh, you know what, Stever, you want to do theater. Sorry, let the emotions say that. And then what my brain's job is, is to figure out what is it about theater that is floating my boat? And how can I get that either through theater or some other way and still survive at the same time? Because theater, you know, being an actor is not the way to do it, for example.

So let's say that somebody begins to identify these things that that might be the things that they actually need in their life to live that extraordinary life. What are some of the, like the myths that we live every day that might get in the way? Because you talk about some of these myths in your audio and I want to delve into these a little bit.

Oh yeah, the myths are really important because a lot of them are conventional wisdom that we give each other. And I just don't believe them. So one of the big ones is the myth of hard work. And everyone says if you're not getting what you want, everyone says, maybe you just need to work harder. And when we have kids and the kids aren't getting what they want, what we say is, you know, well, next time you just need to work a little harder. And the problem is that we always say that, but no one has ever stopped to say, what the hell does that mean? What is hard work? So I started asking people, every time I gave a presentation, I would just ask people, please write down your definition of hard work. And now let's read them out. I had people write them down for us so they wouldn't be biased by hearing what other people had said. And I would say the vast, vast majority of people, this is not universal, but the vast majority of people said by definition what hard work is. It's work that I'm not very good at, that I don't enjoy, that I work long hours at. So the advice we're giving each other when we say maybe you just need to work harder, what we're saying is maybe you need to just do a few more hours of things that you're not good at and you really don't enjoy, and then you'll have the life you want. And I realized, wait a minute, at least me and 90% of the world, 90% of the audiences I've spoken to, are really miscalibrated on what the hell hard work means. Because people who work a lot of hours at stuff they enjoy don't really think of it as hard work. They think of it as energizing or as challenging or maybe as a lot of effort. But very few of them say, oh God, I have to work so hard.

You know, it's almost like the Tim Ferriss four hour workweek thing. Like a lot of people think that, for example, Tim. And not to put words in his mouth, but they think that Tim says you're only supposed to work for four hours a week. But in fact, the title of that book should have Been only spend four hours a week doing the things that you detest doing. And then, you know, or the things that you consider to be hard, annoying work and spend the other hours doing the things that you love to do.

Exactly. And so hard work, in my mind, is one of the biggest myths. And the other thing too, frankly. Boy. So I went to MIT and Harvard Business School and I have all these friends from Harvard Business School and I've seen where they have ended up in their careers and I know where they came from. And this is perhaps, this is hopefully not as big a secret as I think it is, but there's an awful lot of people who get very, very rich and they don't work very hard by any definition of hard work. They get themselves in a position where they simply get a percentage of the deal flow that someone else gets, they land a couple of big deals and that's it. Their entire career is made on the basis of having brokered a deal that took them three months to broker and they ended up with millions and millions of dollars in the bank and done. Or they inherited. Or their good friend from school gave them a lucrative consulting contract and then the other good friend let them invest in their super secret hedge fund and that was it. And we don't acknowledge those things. We close our eyes and we pretend that that doesn't exist. But when people say, oh, well, luck is important. But of course, the way that you get lucky is you work hard. And I'm like, well, maybe. But you know what, There's a lot of people who just period, plain get lucky. And you know, and to try to soften that by saying, well, you know, but they got lucky and worked hard. No, they didn't. So I look at it and I say, I know a lot of people who work very hard and are not don't have the life they want. And I know a lot of people who do have the life they want and they didn't work very hard to get it. So while there is a relationship between hard work and the life that you end up living, and there's definitely a relationship between laziness and not getting what you want. While I don't think hard work is a guarantee, laziness is almost certainly a guarantee that you won't end up with an extraordinary life.

Yeah, okay.

I don't think that's not the part worth obsessing about, the hard work part, despite the fact.

So hard work is a myth. What else is a myth?

Another thing that's a myth is the myth of goals. And by goals here, I mean life goals. I don't mean intermediate goals, but the idea that you should decide at the age of 25, I want to be the best XYZ in the world, or I want to build a gigantic company by the time that I'm 40 or whatever. And there's a number of reasons why goals aren't great. Again, life goals, shorter term goals can be very motivating and can help you set direction. And I'm all about shorter term goals. But in terms of shaping the arc of your life, people are very, very bad at predicting what's going to satisfy them and make them happy. And very bad at predicting what they're going to want 10 or 15 years in the future. When you're 25, you haven't yet had the experience of really learning how much your priorities change as you get older.

That's interesting. So when we have college students, for example, sit down and create 10 year plans for their lives, we're actually setting them up potentially for making mistakes.

Yeah, because what a 20 year old thinks is a good 10 year goal to reach is not necessarily at all any place where a 30 year old wants to be.

What should people be doing instead?

What they should be doing instead is. Well, is what we talked about before noticing what is the thing that really draws you. And go and get involved in it. And when I say get involved in it, I mean go. First of all, develop skill. Because no matter what you do in your life, unless you are the recipient of some really incredible luck and, or privilege and, or inheritance, generally speaking, you need to be able to bring something to the party, whatever party you end up in. And that's where skill comes in. But if you go and pursue the things that your brain is really calling to, number one, find where you can develop skills somewhere in that area. And two, start to get known, meet people. And I hate to use the word network because most people think of networking as going and forming insincere relationships. Screw that definition. Create a network of friends and people who really like you and you really like them and they respect you and you respect them. And you know what, I don't know what you're going to need the network for. But here's the way that I think about having a strong network is that if you want to get from point A to point B and it's over a chasm, you could build a bridge and a bridge goes straight there. The problem with a bridge is all you need is one plank in the bridge to fall out. And now you can't get across the bridge anymore. Right. The other thing you can do is you can string a net. Now, I don't know if you have ever tried to walk on a net, but one of the things about walking on a net is number one, you're not going to go straight across the ravine. You're going to bounce around a whole bunch and go left and then right, but you can eventually make it across. Number two is that if you have enough threads in the net, any particular thread can break and the rest of the net will still support you. You're not going to fall through. Number three is that you never know in advance which threads you're going to bounce on. If you walk across a net, you only ever put your weight on a very small number of the total places there are to put your weight. So you can't predict in advance which threads are the important ones. You just have to build a net and see where it takes you.

This, this reminds me a ton of this book. Have you ever heard of the book Just Enough?

Just Enough? Is that the book by Howard Stevenson?

Yeah. Who I believe was a Harvard professor.

Howard Stevenson is one of my friends and a man that I admire tremendously in life and he was one of my professors.

Yeah. Because he goes into in that book about how you have to strike a balance between having a little bit of a plan, but also looking at life as a series of moving targets that are constantly changing and fluctuating. And your role is to simply take care of yourself, continually, continually learn, immerse yourself in the things that you're passionate about and then just stay open to those targets that are moving through your life. And I think that's an incredibly fun and adventurous and fulfilling and as you might say, extraordinary way to live your life versus making a 10 year plan and simply putting your nose to the grindstone and sticking to it.

Yeah. And the other thing, by the way, and this is part of the myth of planning, the other thing about the myth of planning is that just because you've made a 10 year plan doesn't mean your plan will actually get to where you think it's going to take you. Life is not like building a bridge. Building a bridge. We know what all the pieces are, where they need to go, but with life. In fact, a lot of this thinking was sparked because I used to do volunteer work at Harvard Business School. I would come in a day, a month and I would do coaching of outgoing students as a way of getting back involved with the community. It wasn't strictly Volunteer. They paid me something, but it was 10 cents on the dollar compared to what I usually got and what I kept hearing. And by the time I was in my early 30s, I was already starting to recognize that there was something weird going on, is people would come into my office and I would say, what do you want to do? And they would say, oh, I want to be an entrepreneur. And I would say, great, how are you planning on doing that? And they would say, well, first I'm going to go become a management consultant. And I'd be like, what? What does being a management consultant have to do with being an entrepreneur? I wouldn't say that out loud. I would very respectfully say, oh, you know, and then what? And we would walk through it. But essentially what I discovered is, and these were people who weren't in their early 20s. These were all people who were 27, 28 years old, which is the graduation age from Harvard Business School. And what I started to discover was that people's ideas of the way the world work and the way the careers worked just had no connection with reality. They didn't have enough experience to know how to get to the places they wanted in their career. So they basically made up plans and then followed them. The problem with making up plans and following them is that if you don't have the knowledge to make up a plan that's going to work, then you can still go ahead and follow it. And if you do get to where you think you want to go, it's going to be coincidental at best. I want to say one more thing about what you were just mentioning about Howard and having a series of goals and being on the lookout for opportunity. I'm in the middle of putting together an outline for a curriculum that at some point I plan to offer as an online course, or maybe an in person online combination course, which takes a lot of these concepts and makes them very, very tactical. And one of the things that I have certainly discovered in the coaching that I do with people, one on one, is that people don't know how to look for opportunity. And when they spot it, they don't know how to take advantage of it. And they say, be on the lookout for opportunity. I'm like, well, how do you do that? How do you determine if something is an opportunity or just an attractive diversion? And then let's say it is a real opportunity. If you get involved in an opportunity, how do you make sure that you're going to actually be able to share in the success? Because there's a lot of people out there who do things, who jump on opportunities and do them, and then suddenly discover that everyone in the groom got rich except them because they didn't understand enough about how to structure deals or they didn't know how to negotiate. And in my mind, there's an entire curriculum here which, as far as I know, no existing school teaches, which is not in a specific field. But overall, how do you recognize opportunity? How do you structure deals? How do you make sure that you have something to bring to the table so you have negotiating leverage when you want to get in on those deals? And then where do you go to start to find the opportunities? What kind of environments can you place yourself in? What kind of relationships do you need to develop in order for a lot of luck to be present in your environment so that when something does pop by, that seems like a good thing for you. You can jump on it and take advantage of it. And it really, you know, it doesn't require going to an Ivy League school. Although let me be blunt, going to Harvard Business school, even though I didn't go for that reason, is. Is not a bad place to go in terms of meeting people who are later going to be influential. But when I want to get into a new field or do something else, I just pick up the phone and like I said, five phone calls into my discussions, five phone calls into my Broadway producer investigation, and I was already talking at producers of multiple. I was already talking to producers of multiple Tony award winning shows. And that had nothing to do with where I went to school. That was entirely. I was just willing to pick up my phone and talk to them. And I knew how to approach people in such a way that they were interested in talking to me.

So, you know, so hard work is a myth. Setting goals is a myth. What was the last myth?

Planning is a myth.

Okay, so planning was that last myth that you were talking about.

And there's a fourth one.

Really?

Oh, yeah. The fourth one is the myth of marshmallows. And if you want to hear why it's called that one, you'll have to listen to the presentation. But it's the myth of deferred gratification. And a lot of people choose their career path based on the logic we talked about earlier. Let me go get rich now, and then once I'm rich, I'll do what I really want to do. And that's deferred gratification. That says, don't worry about being rewarded now. You'll be rewarded in the after career. And for right now, Just put your nose to the grindstone and work. And there's a whole bunch of problems with that one. And again, I'm talking about deferred gratification on a life level. I once had a coaching client who was in his mid-40s and he said to me, he said, I'm amazingly good at deferred gratification. I have the deferred part absolutely down solid. Now I'm just starting to work on the gratification part. And the problem is that he could get hit by a bus tomorrow and then he would have been all deferred and no gratification. So the myth of deferred gratification really says you need to learn to strike a good balance between what you're going to defer and what you're going to insist on now. And I know that in my life I have had other people use the idea of deferred gratification as a way to exploit me. They've said, oh, come in and do all this hard work and once you've proven yourself, then we will give you whatever the reward is every single time. I have been promised that, without exception, I have fulfilled my part of the deal and they have not fulfilled theirs.

Makes sense. And I'm all about deferred gratification when it comes to nutrition and exercise and stuff like that. Like, for example, one of the things that we say a lot on the show is save all your carbohydrates for the end of the day until after you've done a hard workout. Because what's gonna happen is those carbohydrates are gonna get shoved into muscle tissue rather than getting converted into fat. So rather than hanging around your bloodstream for a long time as blood glucose. And so you avoid the dark chocolate and the sugar filled kombuchas and the sweet potato fries and everything else until the very end of the day. And even that is after you've done a hard workout. But at the same time, I'm a huge fan of these concepts of like mini vacations. Right. And not having a retirement account, instead spending that money early on investments and businesses and things that are going to allow you to not have to wait until you do, you know, as you say, get hit by a bus at the end of your life. Having not really had a chance to enjoy life.

Oh yeah, yeah. Well, the other thing too is if you wait, you never build a foundation from which to enjoy life. If I had gotten involved in theater in my 20s, well, I didn't actually know I wanted to, but let's say I had known that I wanted to and I had gotten involved in it in my 20s. Even if it was just on the side, I would still have been building a portfolio. I would have been building a network so that, let's say I suddenly made a bunch of money and could do it full time by that time, not only would I be able to do it full time, but I would have all the resources and the skills and the contacts. However, if I start from ground zero at the age of 45 or whatever, then it's much, much harder to get started at that age because you're competing against people who have put in. You're competing against people 10 years younger than you, who have 10 years more experience than you do.

It makes perfect sense. And that's why I started writing fiction. I Write now for 15 minutes a day because I got advice from a couple of people to continue to build been Greenfield fitness and eventually sell it or back out and then merge into a new chapter of my life, pun intended, writing fiction. But then I got advice from other people to just start writing fiction and just start doing so. Now I'm 60,000 words into a book that I probably wouldn't have started until I was 40 years old unless I had decided to take that advice of not waiting to do that thing that I was passionate about instead just diving right in.

Yeah. And certainly for stuff like that, there's a perfectionist thing that I've noticed a lot of people have, which is they say, oh, but I don't want to start writing a book until I have the time to take classes and learn how to do it right. And I'm like, you know what? In the time that it will take you to take classes and learn how to do it right, you could write four crappy books, learn each time, and by the time you finish your fifth book, you'll actually be pretty good at it. And people forget that it's only in recent history that we've gone to school for everything. You know, most of, through most of human history, people mainly learned by trial and error. And yeah, the problem with trial and error is that you make a lot of errors as you're doing those trials, but eventually you get good at stuff, especially if you seek out feedback and are willing to listen to honest criticism from people and even dishonest criticism. And you're always free to ignore whatever you want. But we really, really underrate the value of doing a poor job, because you can just do a poor job. Great, now you're done. Now do another poor job, but this one's a little better than the one previously. I have two different coaching clients who both have been doing the same thing, like writing a book. And in one case, he's been working on it for five years. Wow. And I asked him why he doesn't, you know, why it's been so long, and he says, well, because he wants it to be perfect. I was like, dude, you could simply, you know, you could simply sit down and write stream of consciousness and come up with one and then spend like one week editing it and then it's done. Now do it again, same story, but start again and in the same amount of time writing the same number of total words, he would almost certainly have gotten to a much better book by now, rather than never letting himself try to create one coherent thing and have it be bad.

Oh, sure, that concept of two crappy pages a day, and that's the way that I write now, is I dictate much of my work. It is fraught with errors, it is fraught with edits and the words and the thoughts that are there on the page. Once they're on the page. It's pretty dang easy, even if you're tired at the end of the day to go in and edit spelling mistakes and change up sentence structure and stuff like that. But yeah, I mean, you have to simply be willing to, I guess as Seth Godin, another guy who I follow and I love his blog and his writing, you know, he says just, just ship the darn thing, you know, just, just get it out there and you know, don't wait for it to be perfect. Or as there's, there's another saying that, that, that is a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. And I'm all about simply starting right, like, like beginning the work. Stever, we, we only like scratch the surface of this entire talk that you gave called living an extraordinary life because you, you quit your job for three years, you self funded this three year experiment where you just basically followed your dreams and your passions, living this extraordinary life. You created a lot of magic for yourself. And I found it to be incredibly inspiring. What I'm going to do for folks listening in is first of all put a link where you can just go get all this stuff for free. Stever's talk, the slides that went along with it, the version that he gave to Harvard Business School, the version that I listen to in the car, because I think that you need to listen to that to fully wrap your head around a little bit. More detail on these myths and this concept of the journey being the reward. And Stevr's crazy journey leading up to all this, I'll also put a link to his really cool weekly podcast, that tiny little short one I talked about, the get it Done guy podcast. His work lesson, do more website, that book that I mentioned called Just Enough and much more. Stever, thanks for coming on and sharing this stuff with us.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me. And also, if I can point out to people they can text the word extraordinary to 33444 and it will send them back a link to the page where they can hear the full audio.

Fancy text the word extraordinary extraordinary to 33444.

Cool.

I like it. I like it. Technology, baby. So, BenGreenfieldFitness.com extraordinary or text the word.

Extraordinary to 33444 and in the spirit of full disclosure, that also does sign you up for my newsletter, which you can unsubscribe to with one click anytime.

I want to be clear about the wonders of technology.

Exactly.

Roped into hearing more from Stever, which I don't think would be a bad thing. Stevr, thanks for coming on the show. What you've done is incredibly inspiring and I am honored to have had the chance to introduce people to something that I found to be very, very inspiring in my own life. So thank you.

My pleasure. And thank you for giving me the opportunity to share it with more people.

All right, folks, well, this is Ben Greenfield and Steve Robbins, the get it done guy, signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness pod. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.