Bumpers: How to Achieve Maximum Productivity, Profit, and Quality of Life with Nic Peterson - I Love Marketing Episode #456

How many days should I work out? Should I have a YouTube channel? What coin should I buy? Should I be in crypto? I don't know. I don't know. It depends on where you're at, where you want to be in the timeline in which you want to accomplish it. The fundamental of it is I feel behind. I need more. Because somewhere along the line I decided more would solve this problem, right? Like I need tools to build this house. Somewhere along the line, we started obsessing over the tools and we forgot about the most efficient way to build the house.

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What I really would like Nick to kind of share is he wrote this book called Bumpers and it is a little tiny book you can get on Amazon. The damn concept is really great. The platform he created is now worth over $100 million. He's made people a lot of money. Smart dude. And he did that in the fitness and gym business. Sold that for, I think, quite a bit of money. You can talk about money as much as you want. The money st sounds cool because it gives maybe some little level of credentialization of business success. But the bigger thing that I want you to get from Nick, not about.

Money, is what is your goals?

Like how do you decide what you actually want out of your life? What do you want your life to look like? And how do you use vehicles like crypto to do it? And if your goals don't require that, don't do it. There's other ways to do it. And that's some of the stuff that he can speak about. And I often hear ideas that are ideas that have been around forever, cloaked and packaged in a different way. And the whole concept of result leader, not thought leader. I make this joke about how any idiot could come up with a thought. You can steal other people's thoughts and call yourself a thought leader. But a result leader is the ability to produce a result. And this dude is in a short period of time. I've seen him produce crazy ass results. Even the cleader nft that we have, we wouldn't have been able to do it without Nick.

How many people are here or do other things to have more, more money, make more money? How many feel a little bit left behind? Like you're a little bit behind where you should be? Those two things are gonna wreck you. And when I say wreck you and I'll circle Back with some fundamental concepts, some assumptions that when I talk to people, they've already. They're aware of the assumptions that I'm making. So I'll share those with you shortly. When I say wreck you, I'm gonna say it a lot. You're gon get wrecked. Wreck yourself, yada, yada yada. It's a crypto term. What I mean is behaving in a way that is getting you further away from your espoused values, the things that you say that you want. I want to spend more time with my kids.

In order to spend more time with my kids. If I had more money, then I could take them on a vacation. So you spend all day at the office and you are getting further away from spending time with your kids. It's very simple stuff like that, I'm assuming. So the assumptions I'm making are one, that you're human and you're aware that you're human. A lot of people, I would say anybody over 50, all of my best friends are over 50. They go, wow, this makes a lot of sense. Damn it, I wish I knew this sooner. Anybody under like 25 goes, that's the dumbest shit I've ever heard.

So most of this room probably has more experience to relate because.

It'S really about not getting further away from what you want, not blowing yourself up. Right. Another assumption is that you are purpose driven. There's something that you're trying to accomplish. So how many days should I work out? Should I have a YouTube channel? What coin should I buy? Should I be in crypto? I don't know. I don't know. It depends on where you're at, where you want to be, and the timeline in which you want to accomplish it, what you have, resources you have right now, what you need in order to fund your dream life, and the timeline that you deem appropriate. Meaning, worst case scenario, I'd be okay with this. How can you possibly inform your behavior on whether or not you should do a thing? That's my question. Just think about it. Third assumption is that you're okay with open loops.

That means I might say something, or anybody here might say something that removes a belief or challenges a belief that you have. And since we're human and we know we are human, we don't like this space and we will do anything to fill it. How do you know? Proof? Did you go home last night and google anything? Or did you google anything while you're sitting here? Anything make you a little uncertain and you're like, I Need to know about that right now. The risk is we got a little space. It's very uncomfortable, and we're trying to fill it. And we will fill it with anything that just kind of fits that space, whether or not it actually serves us or not, relative to where we're at, where we want to be in the timeline that is appropriate. Does that make sense? Trying to think foundational stuff. Bumpers. Bumpers is. It starts with, I sat down, I wrote bumpers in like three and a half, four hours. People said, how do you have so much success in so many different industries? How do you do so many different things? And I couldn't articulate that. I didn't do so many different things. It's the same thing. It looks different. You all have different names. It's the same shit over and over and over. And the fundamental is. The fundamental of it is I feel behind. I need more because somewhere along the line, I decided more would solve this problem, right? Like I need tools to build this house. Somewhere along the line, we started obsessing over the tools and we forgot about the most efficient way to build the house. You feel behind, you're rushing, you're pushing. You're doing more and more and more stuff, right? Stuff. More stuff means more resources. You're using more resources. Now you're pushing harder on the gas, like, trying to find the nos button, you know, like, where's the nitrous oxide here? And you still got the E brake on all bumpers. Is and was and still is. Is removing the E brake. All right, let's take the E brake off. Because we know, given our trajectory, if we don't blow ourselves up, we're probably going to do pretty okay, especially if we're sitting in this room, right? We were here, now we're here. As long as we don't, like, keel over and die or have something tragic happen, we're probably going to be okay.

Keys of bumpers. First one is what I call the intention intervention gap. It's the first thing I see in people. It pisses them off. It drives them nuts. It is the gap between what you say you value and what your behaviors suggest that you value.

People get really triggered because you hold up a mirror and they don't want to accept it's them. They think it's a window. They think you're an a hole. So we got to be aware of the attention intervention gap. I say I want this. What are the things that I am doing I am actually doing? Not that I think that I'm Doing that is getting me further away from closing this gap. You call it a cap gap. Anybody familiar with the cap gap? Capgap K A P Knowledge, attitude, practice. It's when you go to events and you go to Tony Robbins and you read all these books and your knowledge about a thing starts to change. It expands your attitude towards that thing. Changes and expands. The practice of that thing stays exactly the same. You go to more and more events, that gap gets wider and wider. All these things you know you should be doing, but you're not doing. That's called anxiety.

And anxiety is powerlessness multiplied by.

Uncertainty.

Right. The wider that gap gets, the more you feel powerless over the fact that you can get there and uncertain about how to do it. I'm throwing like. This is like 21 hours of content that I'm just throwing out there. That makes sense. Cool. So to drive anxiety down, what do we do? Drive power over the outcome up and drive uncertainty down or certainty up. So my primary company is not actually about crypto. It's certainty. How do we make sure everybody gets what they actually want?

All make sense. Cool. Step one is define what you want. Let me tell you why. Most people in rooms like this, it sounds like a lot of you have don't do that because you're high achievers, you're successful. There's a really good. I also drop a lot of resources, so you write them down. Or I can give Joe a list. There is an article by Harvard Business Review called Teaching Smart People how to Learn. It is a deep dive into why, into how the smarter somebody perceives themselves or others perceive them, the less likely they are to learn because it challenges their smartness. They like to close loops quickly so they sound smart. They don't like to sit with uncertainty because they have an identity of being smart and successful. Right. Big reason. People don't define what success actually is to them. For example, I don't have kids, but I use this example. As long as my kids are in the house before they go to school, I need to be home and have dinner with them. That's how I know I'm successful.

Now, you can't hide behind your 2 comma Club Award and your Lamborghini because if you're not home by 5pm you're not successful. It really challenges that identity to define this is what actually makes me happy. Does that make sense? So that's step one. I think Dean Jackson and Joe have a What does success look like? I know I'm successful when.

So it's called Bumpers because the first step, it's like bumpers in a bowling alley. I just sat down and wrote it, typos and all. I didn't really put much thought into it. So bumpers in a bowling alley stay out of the gutter. That's step one. Whether it be the way you look or your body weight.

The number in your bank account right now.

Where your business is at, obviously there's some stuff involved, right? Like Covid happened. We have no control over that. But by and large, those are byproducts. It's an average of everything you've done from the day you were born until right now. Can we agree? You spend a lot of money, and then you lose a lot of money, and then you make a lot of money. And it's an average of how much you've made, how much you've spent or lost. Your body weight is an average, a rolling average over time of how much you've gained and how much you've lost. Our human nature likes to pretend like New Year's Eve. Reset. Yeah, there's no reset button.

And the human part of us, the human mindset. I'm sure you've read Daniel Kahneman, System 1, System 2. System 1 is really the human mindset. The impulsive. It says more is the answer. More is the answer. I did $50,000 this month. I got to do 55 the next month, and then 60 and then 70. And what we're doing is we're pushing on the gas with the E brake on. What happens? The engine explodes.

We also know that on either side of a valley is a peak. So we gotta be very careful about pushing for higher valleys all the time. The core of bumpers is to raise the floor.

Raise the floor. Doing better than your best, by definition, is nearly impossible for you. If it weren't, your best would be better than it is. Right. It's gonna take a lot of resources. It takes a lot. Have you run marathons or anything or lift weights? It takes a lot to beat your previous best.

It doesn't really take that much, as I said yesterday, to do better than your worst. And if we know how averages work and we can agree that the outcome that what we are right now is an average of our bests and our worsts, then it makes a whole lot of sense that from a resource allocation standpoint, raising the floor will put you in a much better position, much faster.

Make sense. So we're thinking of rolling averages. I'll give you some quick examples.

There's this weird thing that Humans do where we self sabotage as well. We vacillate between chaos and rigidity. So the more rigid, the stricter your diet, the more you want to blow it up.

So the more you push to see a new number on that scale, the more likely you are to have something catastrophic happen. Chaos and rigidity. That's what we do. We just vacillate.

So in pursuit of more, we typically become too rigid and it leads to chaos. Counterintuitively, sometimes the way that we improve the average is not being more rigid. Right. It's actually being less rigid on our best days, so we're not so chaotic on our worst days. Does that all make sense? Okay, so this is the process of building bumpers. I'll just throw it at you guys real quick. One and bumpers turn into something else. I'll share and then I'll tie it into crypto. Avoid bad things. Simple enough. It's way harder than anybody thinks because as many of you know, if it. Has anybody, have anybody been through addiction recovery or lost a bunch of weight, any of that stuff, right? When you have a family member that successfully goes through a 12 step program, we celebrate them rightfully. So.

What message does that tell all the siblings that never did drugs in the first place or had addiction in the first place? We're human. We acknowledge we're human. We know that if we're not very, very careful, we will lean towards dopamine. In fact.

If I dig myself a hole right now and then dig myself out and share it with you guys, you're gonna celebrate me. That's a lot of resources that wouldn't go into ended up in the same place. So learning how to appreciate when bad things don't happen is the, is the fundamental skill.

And it's very difficult. We can all say, oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. It's very difficult when people are getting celebrated for fucking up and then making it right.

So that said, learn how to appreciate when bad things don't happen. And maybe for the people around you that you care about, express appreciation to them when bad things aren't happening to them. Because we seek that.

Right. System one. We don't plan on it. But that human mindset, that System one mind is. It's tricky. Here's how we really think about bumpers 1 in the context of what you want and talk about boundaries. What are your non negotiables? What are your non negotiables? Mine are in the book. I have one that is I will not start something I am not willing to do forever. That stresses people out. They hate that one. I will not start something I'm not willing to do forever. Why?

Because I bias resource allocation and reliability. So if I say, you know, I'm going to go on a meat free diet, I'm not going to eat meat for 90 days, is that something I might be willing to do forever? No. Which means any benefits that come from it are likely temporary. That does not give me any power over the outcome in the long term. It does not drive certainty up over any appreciable amount of time. And all we're trying to do is get power for the outcome and drive up certainty. That's it. Reliability, okay. The reliability of a system, it's multiplicative. It's a product of the components of the system. So a few things happen with our brain, especially when we know it's multiplicative, we do the math wrong. If I flip this light switch at 5am every day, 90% of the time Joe's pay the electric bill and 90% of the time the lights actually work, 81% of the time will I get the outcome I expect 90% times 90% is 81%. Now, if 90% of the time I actually flip the light switch on, and the rest times I forget, Joe will get the outcome he expects 72.9% of the time. 0.9 times 0.9 times 0.9. Make sense? Every component you add to the system drives down reliability. It could drive up the potential upside, but it drives down reliability. I bias reliability. As long as I have control, I know I'm going to get there. So the argument, that's the math. Now what people do is they think it's multiplicative. So in their brains, like if I add more things, everything will grow exponentially. But because nothing is perfect, nothing's 100% perfect. Do we agree then? We're dealing in percentages, we're dealing in fractions. It's 99%, 99.999%. Regardless, every component you add drives down reliability. And what do you think? In today's age, where the light almost always turns on, the computer almost always works, what is the least reliable component in every single system?

Human behavior. So if I only actually behave the way that I espouse, that I behave 60% of the time, at best, regardless of the reliability of the program I'm on, the marketing I'm doing, the diet I'm on, I can at best expect less than 60%. There's a less than 60% probability I get the Outcome I expect. Right. We're just engineering. So what are we engineering? Okay, so one non negotiables. Figure out what they are. There's your boundaries to system reliability. Simplify it if you want control, if you want reliability. I much rather know if I do this, this is going to happen.

I'll tie that into crypto in a minute. Because what messes people up is, yeah, but I could get a better result if I also add this thing. And I don't play in the land of hope and pray.

That's not my world. That's your world. That's fine. Here's why. Because I discovered almost anybody with like any level of competence.

Like can engineer what they want. They can engineer what they want. Step one, avoid bad things. That's what bumpers is about. Let's learn to avoid bad things and the worst thing in every system ever. Follow a diet. But this diet doesn't work. This diet doesn't work. This marketing plan doesn't work. I promise, if we just put the camera on you, you're flipping through these diets. Your behavior is not changing. You're not gauging the efficacy of this diet or this marketing plan or this crypto plan.

You're just blaming it because you don't want to look in the mirror. So this is really getting a handle on. Here's how you build your bumpers. We use the science of hindsight. I don't say, hey, how do you spend your week typically? I would say track your week. How do you actually spend it?

We did this in nutrition, we do this in business. We do this in crypto. What is your actual behavior? Because we're going to modify it from there. Not how do you think you act. So I would track a person's week. I don't do this anymore, but we would track a person's week. Where are you spending your time? It's all over the place, right? You watch more TV on the weekends and yada, yada, yada. And then if we can agree that maybe we should watch the rolling average over time because it's very volatile. There's industry rhythms. Accountants are always going to have a better month before tax season. Gym owners are always going to have better month because of New Year's resolutions. Right? That's an industry rhythm. So we have to account for that. We have business rhythm. Some people collect payment all up front, some collect payment plans. So obviously you should expect if you collect everything up front, then you may not just be able to extrapolate that out over the year. So these are rhythms. There's personal rhythms. Some people just make really bad decisions around Christmas because they hate the fucking holiday. We have to know this about ourselves and the way to protect ourselves. Get a rolling average over time. It accounts for these rhythms. So if we agree we're going to look, let's say at weekly rhythms, we should probably modify our weekly activity.

Right? So if you spend what I would do typically is okay, you spend.

Keep the math easy, 35 hours a week with your family. But it's all scattered. You know, you fit in here, fit it in here, even it out. Five hours a day, seven days a week, just even it out. We want to redistribute this in a way that we can get control.

You can see it.

I have an image in my book. Does that make sense?

Then we go, how many sleeping? Keep that the same. How many hours working? How many? This all your activity. And as much as possible, the things that we can, we even it out.

It removes some of the volatility. It helps us get control. We have a feedback loop now and it's much easier to modify over time. It's much easier to go, you know what, let's go five and a half hours a week. Much easier to add 30 hours a day than try to find these random spots in time. And then, yeah, I think I'm spending more time with my family. I'm not really sure.

Make sense. It's amazing what happens. Two things happen. One, people tend to be happier. I'll use the nutrition example. One, people tend to lose weight. When you say eat the way you've always eaten and just track it. And they come back like, you're a fucking genius. I'm eating everything I want and I'm losing weight. You don't realize how much you were just mindlessly eating. And once you have to actually track it, you're like, oh, you know, I'm actually not hungry. But you don't even realize that when you're tracking. So one people think you're a genius because I'm still eating cupcakes, I'm losing weight.

That's every time. So same thing, you start going, huh, well shit, if I have to track this, I don't actually want to do it. Well, then why are we doing it in the first place? So even it out. And then over time, when we start, we just make one adjustment a week. One adjustment a week.

Here's what happens.

Spend 30, 30 more minutes a day with your family, right? They come back, alright, I'm ready for the next Step. Because that's what we do. We just want more. Give us more shit to do. Did you do it? Well, yeah, every day except for Saturday, but I'm ready. Nope, do it again.

You repeat it until your behavior matches the plan. Now we're gauging the efficacy of the plan. Only when that gap is so small that our behavior matches the plan are we gauging the efficacy of the plan that we have.

Make sense? Okay, so that's where Bumper started. I wrote it, my business partner found it, gave it out, listed on Amazon, typos and all. And then eventually Joe found it. What has happened since it was like five years ago, what has happened since is we've developed this methodology and this is where crypto fits in. Is I do not believe data driven. People are data driven. I believe they are impulsive and emotional and they look at data to justify their behavior. In fact, the only reason I can think of to look at data, frequency of exposure, expose yourself to data frequently, is to inform behavior.

So another foundational principle of mine is I don't do anything unless the asymmetry is to the upside. I don't take even bets. I don't take shitty bets. Asymmetry's got to be upside. If I look at data with no intent of modifying my behavior, the asymmetry is to the downside. I can only incur negative emotion. And I've already decided I'm not going to change my behavior. So I'm just going to sit feeling shitty. For example, are you going to change your diet and exercise? No, I'm way too busy. Well then don't step on the fucking scale.

Zero benefit. Because we're not changing behavior, incurring emotional damage. Do that enough times, you start acting really goofy. So when you throw up your hands and quit, right? It's yo, yo dieting in every area of life. So I don't. Look, I track everything. Because when I do want to modify my behavior, I want a trend line. I don't want a data point or line. I want a trend Attract everything. But I do not expose myself to it unless I am willing and ready to modify my behavior around it.

Makes sense. Okay, so develop this methodology. It's called certainty. How do you get what you actually want? And this is where crypto fits in. So this is the question people ask me. Should I be in crypto? No. For what? What problem are we solving? That is where we come down to when we call it a solvable problem. So we take this. I need more. I need to be happy. I want time with my kids. Okay, let's assign numbers to it. Because the multivariable equation. And if you know math, like fourth grade math, you can't solve for the variable. And in this case, the variable is your behavior. If you haven't defined the other variables, right, because you change this one and then this one changes. And that's what most entrepreneurs are doing. That's what most people are doing. Oh, I'll just change this. Oh, shit. Well, now this changed. Well, now this. They're just chasing shit around all the time. We want to turn it into like, look, given where I'm at, where I want to be, I'll tell you what mine was. I won't tell you, you know, it's for this reason, this reason, this reason I needed $15 million extra on top of what I reliably expect to get by my 40th birthday. Because I just wanted to never have to work again on my 40th birthday. So if somebody comes and says, you know, you should do, and you know, my partner Dan is the finance guy, I just throw out things that he, you know, I think he said, you know, people like, oh, you should really get a huge real estate portfolio. Real estate's great.

I'm not going to realize that. Profit by my 40th birthday. So that's probably not good for me and my solvable problem. Nothing wrong with real estate, right? Oh, you should do self directed IRA and like, cool. When can I access it? I don't know. When you're 52 or 55 or whatever. Directing resources to something I can't access until I'm 50. Something is not going to help me solve the thing that I say is most important to me. That's I have a framework called Dala D A L A direction or don't act like an asshole or directions for acting like an adult. If that better, you know, fits your sensibilities.

Acting like an adult or not acting like an asshole is do not say this is the most important thing to me and then behave in a way that is not aligned with it.

I don't care what your priorities are. Right? Me being an asshole might not be you being an asshole. You do the same behavior. Makes perfect sense for you. So the solvable problem is, I need this in this timeline. And we break it down into and this is where we're getting to crypto. And then I'll just answer questions, if it's helpful, is where am I at? I got real estate, cash, business, I expect this much income. Where am I At get really clear on that. And these are things I want to accomplish. And this is a timeline. And of course there's some things that are dependent, like I can't do this thing until I do this thing. And there's some things that are urgent. We got to work through all that. But we get to a number where we say, okay, I need 40 million by 2032.

And I typically say, what is the worst case scenario you would be okay with? Worst case scenario, I know all your brains go, but I want best case scenario. Worst case scenario you would be okay with. Because if we could lock that in, boom, locked it in. There's your 40 million. We can then collapse time with higher risk things after we've locked in the thing that's the most important because people talk about risk. Reward the biggest risk. I will argue with anybody. The biggest risk risk for you is different than risk for me. The biggest risk is that you don't get the things that make you happy, period.

So somebody might go, that's too risky. Well, if it is based on the logic, reasoning, evidence that I have, if this is the most reliable way for me to get what I want, then it's actually risky for me to not do just guarantees that I have no path to get what I want. Whereas you may already have what you want. So exposing yourself to the same risk that I do, that's a huge risk for you. Now we can say, okay, you're here and you want to be here. Given what you have, you're already on track. Or you need 3% a year to get where where you want to be. Cool. Stock market will probably deliver that, right? We don't take any more risk than is necessary to lock in the thing that matters most. But what if I miss this huge crypto wave? Who fucking cares? If you have all the things you want in life, we know that a loss feels worse than an equivalent gain feels good. You just touched on it. We know that. So frequency of exposure, it goes up 50%, down 50% all day long you just watch it. Even at a break, even, you've incurred a massive emotional loss. But it's not about pick a coin. That's the worst way to trade. Pick a coin like, good luck.

But if you know over 10 years, you need.

16%. How many people are familiar with anchor protocol? Yeah, drop it in anchor protocol and be done. You know, that's how we decide what we get exposed to. The solvable problem informs behavior. So if we don't blow ourselves up and we can not have fomo, not chase and use. We have our bumpers up and we use our solvable problem to inform behavior. We have the highest probability of getting the things that we actually want. And that's all I care about. I don't care if your business is bigger. I don't care about any of that stuff. I'm not a crypto maxi. I'm not a ad maxi, marketing maxi. I'm like a how the hell do we get you with things that make you happy maxi. And that's a combination of many things. So I hope that was valuable.

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