The Perfect Day Formula with Craig Ballantyne

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So today's guest is Craig Ballantyne. He's a fitness and personal development guru from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. And he's the author of the Perfect Day formula, how to own the day and control your life. I'm going to get into that quite a bit because he sent me this and I'm blown away by it. So I definitely want to you to pay attention to what we're going to talk about with this whole concept of a perfect day because Craig has also been a contributor to Men's health magazine since 2000 and his articles have appeared in everywhere from Women's Health to Oxygen, gq, Maxim, National Geographic, Men's Fitness, and more. The guy is prolific. In 2001, he created a very popular home workout program that you may have either heard about or taken called Turbulence Training. And his online success has led him to create books and coaching program to show other gurus how to take their ideas and expertise and help thousands of people. Craig has had so many obstacles to overcome along his way. In his toughest battle, he tells me, was spending six months suffering from crippling anxiety attacks until he finally discovered how to beat them with his five pillars of transformation. Craig is also the co owner of the Success Newsletter earlytorise.com I've been familiar with early to Rise for years and you may have as well. It's where you'll find his daily essays on success, productivity, time management, fitness, weight loss, and self improvement. Things that business owners and entrepreneurs like you and me deal with constantly.

Okay. Craig, are you on the line, brother?

Yes, sir.

Cool. Well man, it's great to have you on the show today. This is going to be fun.

I really love the concept of the Perfect day formula and it's something that I've been toying around with for years and I want to dive into that. I want the listeners to.

Be really patient for a second because I want to go back into the backstory before we dive into what the perfect day is, why it's so important, and some strategies to get it, especially some of the misconceptions on what a perfect day is. But I want to talk a little bit more about Your. Your background, because, man, you've been. You've been at this world of, you know, entrepreneurship and personal development and all this for a long time. And I'm sure you got some cool stories, but how did you, you know, how did you get to this point?

Yeah, so I was doing a master's degree in exercise physiology back in the late 90s, and I started my own email newsletter because I saw some other companies doing it. I thought, hey, I can do this too. And so I was doing it by Hotmail. I had no idea what I was doing. I had 3,000 people on my email list at one point, but you can only put 50 addresses in the BCC.

Line. And so I was sending this out, like, 60 emails at a time. It was ridiculous.

No way. Couple years later, no way. And through Hotmail, through bcc. That's awesome.

Yeah. Seriously. Seriously. So a couple years later, I finally learned a little bit and started selling products through PayPal and got one of these websites that pretty much automated everything for you. And over the years, I learned how to do email marketing and sales writing and that sort of thing. I learned a lot from Dan Kennedy. And in 2006, I hired my first business coach, and he showed me how to really do things right using clickbank. So that's where I sold thousands and thousands of copies of my turbulence training program. But the biggest mistake that I made over those years, those, you know, six or seven years from 99 to 2006, was I didn't hire a mentor soon enough. So I just can't emphasize that enough to people listening. Get a mentor. Get a business coach that has been there and done that, and they will guide you to success. They will just show you how to accelerate your success and, you know, cut years off the learning curve.

So after that, I just want to interject. I just want to interject to hammer that point home, because people ask me all the time, what would I do if I started back all over again? And, you know, I wasn't completely broke when I. When I started off in this world of entrepreneurship, but I didn't have. I have a lot of money, but I just figured, okay, I just got to figure it out. There's books out there. There's stuff like that, and I. Man, if I could go back, the shortcuts that are available by using the right mentors are. You know, there's nothing to compare to it. So I just. I always try to hammer that home on the podcast as well. So if there's a mentor out there, whether they're hiring or whether they have a funnel out there and you can buy from them or they don't, and you just force yourself upon them and force money in their pocket to get a mentor. Sorry, I just love hammering that point home.

Yeah, absolutely. I was just too cheap. I'm half Scottish and half German, so I blame my parents for. It's too cheap to get a mentor. And when I finally did, it was worth everything I invested in 100 times more. So that was a big thing. And then I started moving into the personal development side of things. Actually, the very first question my mentor asked me on our first call was, what do you want your business to look like in five years from now? And I was just running my fitness business back then, and I said, I want to have a business like earlytorise.com, which is a newsletter started by Michael Masterson, who is one of my mentors, whose real name is Mark Ford, and he started back in 2000. So early to Rise has been around for over 15 years now. And I said that in 2006 on a coaching call, and I bought the company five years later in 2011 from Mark. That had to be really a surreal mod.

Yeah.

My own personal Law of Attraction story. I call it the Law of Action Attraction because I did so much work in between 2006-2011, joining mastermind groups, networking, writing, becoming a better writer, creating products, helping people. And eventually it led to my success. I just wasn't sitting around in a chair hoping and dreaming. But you can have a real strong vision, which is one of the components of the Perfect Day formula. And you can achieve it almost right down to the exact thing that you want. That was another big lesson for me. And then we had some more success in the fitness business. We started having some success with Facebook advertising. We do a lot of content marketing right now, which is a big driver of sales. We've done product launches, we've done affiliate stuff. I still do stuff for the magazines. I was doing something for Men's Health earlier today. And then. So my business is half the fitness business and then half the personal development stuff. And the personal development stuff is really about the Perfect Day formula, which evolved from my personal discipline over the years. My journey from being like everybody else who, you know, like to sleep as late as possible, but that just leaves you trying to catch up to the world. And so I realized I had to design my life so that it was more productive and more controlled by me. So I use the term proactive as opposed to most people that go through life are reactive, and they never get everything done on their to do list, and they're always working late, and they never have the time. They want to be present for their families.

And so that's why we put together Perfect day. Yeah, sorry to interrupt there. I was just going to say that's one of my struggles that I have found over the years. And I try to be proactive in being proactive because I find myself, and we all do, because it's way easier to respond. Something out there that. That needs your attention, because there's always something that needs your attention. Some of it's important, some of it's not. And I've really noticed that it's. It's one of the. I think the most important skills to master is to be proactive with your time instead of reactive. And how big is your. How big is your team? What are you. What are you working with over there right now? Is it just you or have you got a big team?

And we have 12 people in an office. My office is actually in Denver. I'm Canadian. I live in Canada, but my business partner lives in Denver. And so we built the office here in Denver. We have 12 people here, and then we have almost the same number. Virtual, but a lot of that is customer service and some overseas stuff. So we've built that. Again, it's really two businesses in one. It's the fitness side and the personal development side. So that's how it's come together. And it's a really, really great office. And the team is amazing. And I love every single one of them.

Like, that's so cool to have that and know that you've built that and it's not just you in your living room or bedroom anymore. What's your favorite part of the business and what's your least favorite part of it? Because I think you probably down now where you've really probably analyzed your day and the activities that are the highest value, but also the most enjoyable. And we all have this stuff we hate, obviously. We hate spreadsheets and books and stuff like the accounting, because we're entrepreneurs. Right. But what's the stuff that you really love to do business, and what's the stuff that you just got to grind it out and hate it?

Well, the thing that I love is the team that we've built. And I'm an introvert, so it was difficult for me to overcome some of the personality characteristics I've had. But since I've been able to do so, I'm really working more in person with the team. It's just been so rewarding. I was telling a friend of mine who emailed me recently and said, hey, I'm trying to take a six figure business to seven figures. What's the number one piece of advice you can give me? And I said, at this point, you need to start working on your business so that you are the dumbest person in the business. Once you hire smarter people and you have smarter people in marketing and smarter people buying your Facebook traffic and smarter people even in your customer service about how to deal with people and serve them, that's when your business takes off. So you hear all these really wealthy entrepreneurs, they always say, I just want to hire smarter people than me and hire giants. And you need to find the giants that are out there that enjoy working a job and don't have any entrepreneurial desires and get them on your team. And it's all about letting go of your ego.

Every day. I actually send out this coaching lesson to about 100 people who have been clients of mine and who are friends of mine who are business owners. And today's lesson was.

An ancient philosophical quote. And I'm just going to find it here because it's really worth sharing. And it's from Lao Tzu, who I think is the Tao Te Ching author.

Wait, wasn't he Art of War?

Sun Tzu is Art of War. I think Lao Tzu is Sun Tzu.

Yeah, yeah, you're right.

Anyways, you're right. The quote is, a leader is best when people barely knows he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, we did it ourselves. And so that's really about setting aside your ego. And it's not all about top down decisions and you making all the decisions and you getting all the glory. It's really about finding and building this team that can go and do it themselves because they're really smart people and you've empowered them and let them go and do it. And that way, going back to your original question, what's the worst part of the business? The worst part of the business is that it's never done right? You find an article about, oh, well, these guys are using YouTube this way. And the next thing you know, you've read two articles in three hours about YouTube and you know, you watch some videos and like, oh, we got to find a way to get YouTube into our business. We got to find a way to get Instagram, Snapchat, and it's like it's never done. And so unless you set boundaries on your life, you are going to be just, you know, chained to your desk. So at some point you have to say no. And you know, there's a lot of stories about Warren Buffett saying no. You know, he says, you know, take the list of the 25 things you want to do and then cut the, cut the bottom 20 and never look at them again. And a lot of people have written books about saying no. And even Leah Dunham, the famous actress last year, she said it was the year of saying no. And so you just get so many opportunities and you have to have the boundaries.

Yeah, I love that. That's actually going to tie really well into the perfect day. But I just wanted to tie that up with a concept. When you were talking about, you know, kind of the organization and being a leader. And I heard it said this a long time ago like this before. Where most companies are run with a top down organizational structure, you know, you got the chairman of the CEO up on top and then under him, and that's how we all draw our companies. And that's how a lot of us act as if, listen, I'm the boss and these people work for me. But I forget what book it was. He was talking about how when you flip it upside down so that you start at the bottom and then the person up into the left is maybe your cfo, and then the person to the right is your coo, and then up at the very, very, very top, or maybe your lowest level employees, but really.

By doing that, you realize that you're there supporting everybody else. Your job as the leader, as the CEO is to support all the people who make this happen. And obviously when all that gravity is coming down on you, yeah, it's stressful. You've got all the weight of your entire company on you, but at the end of the day, you're there to support them because if you know they're the ones closest to the customers, they're the ones making it happen. And it kind of puts you more in that servant role as opposed to the. Yeah, I'm the king of the castle and I like that concept and it's something I struggle with as well when I'm always trying to hire better people than me. And it's not the easiest thing in the world.

Yeah, especially when you're going from that solopreneur thing into trying to build a team. I mean, you can get so far and you can have a great lifestyle and have more money than you really need. Just being a one man shop with maybe a web Designer outsourced and some customer service outsourced. And there's nothing wrong with that. But if you do want to build something bigger, then you have to change your mindset about where you stand on the totem pole.

Yeah, it's a struggle that I've dealt with. I'm in that position right now with my company where I've got a couple people and now it's time to start expanding, etc. And had to shift my mind just a rabbit trail for a second. I read a great book by Roger Hamilton. I don't know if you've heard of him or it. He wrote a book called the Millionaire Master Plan. And although I really don't like the name of it, it sounds kind of a generic self help book or success book. What he talks about is when you are leveling up from going from the worker to the self employed, the self employed to the business owner, the business owner to the guess, the multiple business owner. Like in kind of like those rich dad quadrants, like, you know, you really have to, you have to sacrifice the freedom that was so important to you and the criteria that were so important to you when you left your job to be your own boss. And to have that freedom in order to get to the next level, you have to give that up. Because now it's about building the team, the structures, and you have to, you know, put less freedom for yourself. You can't just do everything. You have to build that structure. And it was. But then to get to the next level, you get that free. I don't know, I could talk about that for a little while. But this is really. I want to get into the perfect day and get into about you. Because I first, I first discovered the concept of the perfect day when Frank Kern did a video on it years ago. He was like, yeah, describe your average perfect day. You know, what's that look like? And I had never really heard that concept before, although it seemed elementary. And.

I know I've struggled with it. Other people have. And then you sent me your, your package with all of the, you know, your book and the tools and the workbooks. I was like, I immediately realized how just really badass this thing is. So let's talk about what is a perfect day. What are some of the ways that people mess this up when they're planning out their lives or their day and what's the right way to do it?

Okay, yeah, good question. So as you mentioned, we put together a kit that walks people through asking these really important questions because to skip Ahead to the second question that you had there. Where do people mess it up? It's that they don't know what matters. And I find that I get that a lot from people. And when you do know what matters, as you probably do in your own life, Brad, it's. It's a little bit weird to hear that question because they're like, what do you mean you don't know what matters? But a lot of people just haven't observed their life objectively from outside of themselves. I always try to explain it to people. Listen. To find your perfect day and to find what matters to you, look at as if you're watching a movie of your life and what you do each day and what matters and who you want to spend more time with and where you want to get to in your life and what legacy you want to leave. And all those types of questions then allow you to think, oh, okay, I see what I really want, short term and long term. And here are the ways that I need to act. Here are the decisions that I need to make now. Here are the things I need to do and put on a not to do list. And then that way I can start controlling more of my time and spending it on what matters. And so your perfect day is really, what's the best way to spend my time? Now, assuming you, you had plenty of money and you didn't need to work, but you still were going to be productive and add value to the world, what would you want to do with your time? And if you're working right now, how do you spend your best days? One of you had a great day and gotten home from work and go, wow, I got so much done. And I was ahead of the curve.

That's amazing.

Yeah. Even though there was all this stuff that came up, I still was able to leave on time and I was able to get home and concentrate on what counts. And so the book is actually based on Stoic philosophy and a particular philosopher named Epictetus. And he taught us that we should control what we can, cope with what we can't, and concentrate on what counts. And then so I took those. The 3C formula is what I call it, Control, cope, and concentrate. And I modified that so that it fits all three parts of the day. So you control your mornings. When you control your mornings, you're going to have control over your time. You're going to get your number one priority worked on early in the morning. You're going to get ahead in life, you're going to get ahead of everyone. Else and they're going to be playing catch up to you instead of you playing catch up to them. And then you use what I call the five pillars of success that we can talk about to concentrate to cope with the chaos of the afternoon. Because everybody's going to have chaos coming into the world from people they work with, from their families, from traffic, all that sort of stuff is going to come into their world. And you have to have systems in place to cope with it. And you also have to understand that you can only control your actions and your thoughts. You can't control other people. So you can't control if your boss is going to be angry that day. You can't control if you have lousy co workers. You can't control the, the traffic that is around you. You just have to have strategies for coping with it. And then the most important part really is concentrating on what counts at night. And that means everything that you do sets you up for freedom at night. And there's a paradox in the book that I tell people that the more structure you have in your days, the more freedom you have at night. And most people are really adverse to structure. They don't want more rules and discipline in their lives, but they have to have the discipline in order to have the freedom. It's kind of like the army. You have to have the discipline of the army in order to have the freedom of the country. That's what it's all about. Discipline during your day means freedom at night. So you spend time with your family and you're not working or so that you can actually have time for your health and your hobbies and you can actually get to bed at a reasonable hour. And so you have good energy. So it really is about controlling your days so that you own your life.

Cool. So. And I could not agree more on that. I'm exactly that type of person too, who I hate structure and rules. And I do, I hate it. But I also don't function well without it. So when I, you know, all of a sudden when I introduce structure and routine and things like that into my life, I am happier and I make more money. But even when it sucks. And I was like, okay, I got to go to the gym today, because it's one of the things that I told myself every day, no matter what I'm going to do, I hate it. But yeah, I find myself getting in shape. Weird how that works.

So the concept though, of the perfect day, I found that a lot of people, and when I say a lot of people, I Mean, me, especially in the past, have had a trouble with. Is the first thing that comes to mind. You touched on this. But it's like that perfect day is okay, I wake up, I take a bath in $100 bills, I go get on my yacht, drink champagne with a bunch of pretty ladies, party all night. Right? It's not the perfect day. Like, if you had one last day on earth, what would you be doing? But it's that perfect day, like you mentioned of. Listen, you spent yourself, you gave value, you created, you did something, you know, where you just felt like you were on and you were in that flow. And it's. Sometimes it's like almost like that perfect average day. What would it look like if just every day you had to repeat it over and over and you knew you were pushing forward to success? So that sounds like, okay, just write this down and, you know, write down what you wanted to happen and go for it. I mean, obviously, it's not that simple. Otherwise we would all be living the perfect days. So explain to me your framework and how you help people and how your program even helps people to.

Kind of clear out the path to that. And, you know, I just started to go through it, so I'm. Although I'm a little bit familiar with what's in the box. Tell me a little bit more about what the whole process looks like.

Sure. So it really starts with creating the rules for your life. And, oh, man, I can hear the people groaning right now. Rules for. For my life. I don't want rules for my life. But if you follow the Ten Commandments and you stop at red lights, you already have plenty of rules in your life. And so what this is all about. There's another philosopher, a guy named Emmanuel Kant, back in the 17th century. 18th century, I can't remember which. He said, everyone should have a set of maxims for their life, which is the rules that dictate how they operate by. And so what I teach people to do is I ask them all these questions, like, what is your life philosophy? What matters to you most in terms of family, friends, health, wealth, career? And what are your big goals and dreams? And what do you believe about yourself?

What do you believe you can accomplish? And what do you believe you were put here? For what reason? Depending on your spiritual beliefs, it doesn't really matter, I suppose. But what legacy are you here to create and to leave when you're gone? And are you acting in accordance with all these things? And most people aren't, at the end of the day, their big Goals and dreams are kind of known to them. Maybe even they've written down goals, but they don't act in accordance and congruent with their goals. And so what we do is then we ask them, what do you aspire to be and who do you want to emulate in life? Who are your role models? And then we get into, okay, what behaviors and rituals do you need to change? And that really gets them on track to, okay, this is where I want to be in life. Let's say I want to be someone like.

Tony Hsieh, who runs Zappos. I want to be like the Tony Hsieh of my industry. Well, if I'm being a really bossy boss, I'm not being like Tony Hsieh. If I'm not treating my customers like gold, I'm not being like Tony Hsieh from Zappos. So I'm not congruent with my actions and with my goals. So you need to, again, observe yourself objectively. Are you acting in accordance with what you want to achieve? And then once you've figured out how you're acting and where you want to get to, you can set up a structure, a set of rules, which then allow you to reduce the amount of willpower that you have to have. So, going back to your example of working out, Brad, you said, it's my rule. I go to the gym, I'm going to get in shape. Now, if you didn't have that rule and you just woke up and you said, well, you know, I probably should go to the gym today, but we'll see how I feel then, you know that there's no way in heck you're going to go. You're just going to find a reason not to. But if you wake up and the rule is.

I go to the gym every day before I do anything else, and you've laid out your workout clothes or maybe even slept in your clean workout clothes, and you just got up and you went right to the gym and worked out, you'd get that done. You get closer to your goals, and you'd be acting incongruent with your big goals and dreams. And so that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to align people with what I call personal commandments or personal philosophies for life, the rules for their life. Because you might have heard that you.

Said something in the book which I thought was awesome. You're like vegans, they're like, the rule is, I don't eat meat. You know, it's kind of like that. Like, what if you were a vegan, you just have a rule, I don't eat meat. And it's. I love that because it's like, yeah, it can be that simple. So maybe it's just like, I just don't eat sugar or I just go to the gym, or I just don't do xyz. But I wanted to bring that up because when I was reading through that, I was like, yeah, that's brilliant.

Yeah, that's the best analogy for it. We can all set these rules for ourselves. And I think that people should have a rule for their general bedtime and what time they get up every day. And just like, I go to bed at 10 o' clock every night with the exception of Friday night or Saturday night. And that way that means, like, I'm kind of tempted to watch that show on HBO at 10 o' clock tonight, but I know that'll make me tired tomorrow. But if my rule is I get to sleep by 10 o' clock every night, then there's less temptation to do it. And there's plenty of research that shows that willpower is a diminishing energy level. I suppose it's like energy, it diminishes over the course of the day. And so that's why we often eat too much chocolate cake at dinnertime when we're able to avoid it at lunchtime, because we've exhausted our willpower through all these other decisions we make over the course of the day. But the more of these guidelines you have in place that make the decisions for you, the more willpower you're actually able to serve, to save and conserve for difficult decisions.

Yeah, that makes just a ton of sense. You know, it's kind of funny speaking about rules. So there's things with, you know, rules for your business, rules for your personal life, I'm sure. Right. There's rules for all the various things. And these rules can be, like you said, liberating. So before we, before I read your book, before I. We even booked this podcast together, I keep a little journal and occasionally I write some things in it. And I realized in my business that I don't always follow what I know is best. And I wrote down. And this is going to be like, I don't know, a month ago I wrote down, these are my rules for business, and it's for. And I'll read them off real quickly. But it was just to kind of remind myself that, yeah, do it like this. So number one was that relationships and connections are Powerful and I nurture them, period. Like that's just my rule. Another one, I'm not going to read all of them, but reverse engineer and work backwards. One of my mentors told me this and it makes the biggest difference. And then I find myself not doing it and I over complicate things as opposed to just look, you will reverse engineer everything. Another rule is find your market before you find your product. Sell it before you develop it. Systems create equity. Another rule is.

Big time, don't fall in love with tactics. Because I'll go down the rabbit hole of tactics and tools. I've got about 10 other ones on there. But those are my rules that I have pulled out. It's on my desk. So as I start going down another path, I try to use that as a reminder. And that's one of the things, dude, I loved about what you included in your perfect day formula is you have what, I don't know if it's a sticker or it's like a short list. You can just put it anywhere you find. It's like my rules for life.

Yeah. Just before I talk about that, I really like your sell it before you create it rule, which is one that I try and teach people all the time. Because too many people go and try and force the square peg and round hole with their product idea on the market. Never works. You got to go the other way around.

But by the way, I just broke that rule with my newest business. So I just totally broke that rule. The exact opposite.

Sometimes the rules are made to be broken and I'm sure that you'll pull that one off because you have a pretty good idea there. But the.

So we help people create their rules and then yeah, we have. You know, people have always said, you know, you got to carry your goals around with you all the time. And so we created this little rule sheet that you put in this little plastic card holder and you have your rules with you all the time. So it's a reminder of how you act in certain situations or the decisions that you make regarding your health or how you treat others or whatever it is. It's just a reminder that this is the type of person that I am and this is the type of person that I'm going to be and I'm going to live up to my standards.

Yeah, that's just the concept of using standards.

I heard a speech given by, I think it was a speech or a quote, something by Vander Holyfield years ago. And he was talking about.

Why are you so much better than other people. Why are you a champion? He's like, I have higher standards for myself than most people have. And they kind of explained that a little bit more, But I never really thought about what are your standards for yourself? Because we hold other people to certain standards. Your husband, your wife, your. Your friends, your kids, whatever. Like, listen, I've set certain standards, and if you're. If you're not living up to my standards, I'm not, you know, I'm not business partners with you. I'm not friends with you, you know, if you're going to do that. But we don't do that to ourselves most of the time. We don't have.

Yeah, but I love that. So if people. If this is starting to resonate with people and they're like, dude, I like this, and I see the importance of it. So you've got a bunch of different resources for folks. So, for instance, the perfect day formula box that you sent me.

Can I give people a link to where they can go? See that? Can we send them to baconratbusiness.com PerfectDay?

Yeah, that'd be great.

Cool. Now, what else. What else is it you offer? You offer, dude, a lot. From anything from fitness coaching and things like that to awesome newsletters. But what are you doing with perfect Day formulas? People realize that, okay, they've had enough not living up to their potential, and they want to explore this even more. What will they find when they. When they go to baconrapbusiness.com perfectday.

So.

There'S a cool little video on it that actually unboxes everything that's in the kit. So you get a copy of the book, of course, you get a copy of our gratitude journal, which is something that I took up as a habit years ago. And it's really made a difference because growing up, I was a pretty skeptical guy, and it actually served me well when I was doing my master's degree in science. But once you get out of science, you really don't need to be that skeptical of other people's ideas so much. And so I needed to change my mindset in the gratitude Journal. Being appreciative of all the little things in life and all the people around you really helped me make some breakthrough there. So we have the gratitude Journal in there for everybody, and then we have a section that helps people create their rules. And then we also have 100 perfect day work pad sheets, which allows them to schedule their day and time block it out. It has something called magic time. And magic time is something that everybody has in their life. It doesn't matter if you are a night owl or if you are a morning person like me, or if you have high energy in the afternoon. But everybody has a certain hour or two in their day when they're three times as productive as they are at any other time of the day. So for me, it's around writing at 6 in the morning. I can write 1,000 words in 30 minutes that are actually really good words, not incoherent mumbo jumbo. But I could not do that at 2 o' clock in the afternoon or 8pm at night. But I can really crank out the words as a writer early in the morning. So I called that magic time. And this little worksheet helps you figure out yours and schedule yours. And then a really important exercise that everybody should put in their life, whether they're an employee or whether they are a business owner or whether they're a stay at home parent. The brain dump. And the brain dump is like a lifesaver for people and especially for business owners. So entrepreneurs that have young kids and families that they want to get home to and spend time with. The brain dump allows you to leave work at work and go home and be present at home and not be thinking about work. It's really just an area on these work pads where you scribble all the crazy thoughts that are running through your head and then you put it aside and you just leave it there. And you've left those thoughts that you can come back to tomorrow, but you've dumped all the contents out of your brain on that. And you go home and you be present with your family. And so you don't have to worry about checking email or writing down ideas. You just stay focused on your family. And even if you don't have a lot of time with them, being present is really going to make a big difference. So that's the worksheet pad that we give people. And then the next thing that I really want to talk about, Brad, is the five pillars of success that people will find in the transformation change manual worksheet that they get. And this applies for anything that you want to change in life. So if you want to find the love of your life, you want to lose weight, you want to get out of debt, you want to start a business, you want to transform anything in your life, the five pillars are mandatory for people to have. And the five pillars go like this. And I discovered them actually through all of my before and after body transformation. So, you know, you see the before and after pictures all the time in ads and Body for Life, the old book by Bill Phillips. Oh, yeah. I run those types of contests in my fitness business. And I noticed after we've run 25 of them now, but I noticed after two or three contests, the winners always had these five pillars in place for their life. And so they are better planning and preparation. And it's really important that it's better planning and preparation than you've ever done before. You might plan, you might set some goals, but you don't really set the process goals to get you there. You don't really sit down and plan out the next two weeks to get you on that fast track to success. So you have to have better planning and preparation. Then you have to have professional accountability, and that's your coach or your mentor. And research from Stanford found that when people were losing weight, if they were accountable to a professional, like a doctor or a nurse, they got better results when they were just accountable to a friend. So it needs to be professional accountability. Someone who's going to call you out if you're not doing things right, who's going to be able to coach you through the difficult parts. That's what the second pillar is. The third pillar is social support. And those are your cheerleaders. They're not necessarily going to call you out if you're having a bad day or doing something wrong, but they're always going to be there encouraging you. So those can be friends in person or online. There's plenty of. I mean, there's thousands and millions of online groups that are all positive and supporting one another. And there are really good people out there. So if your real life is surrounded by negative people, don't think that there's only negative people out there in the world. There really is plenty of good people online and even in person in your community that want to see you succeed. So you share your goals with positive people and get them on your social support. That's pillar number three. Then the fourth pillar is a meaningful incentive. You must have a meaningful incentive for what you're choosing to do. And the word meaningful is really important there because you can say, well, if I lose weight, I'll buy myself a nice pair of jeans. And that might be meaningful to some people who want to look good for the opposite sex or who really just like shopping and buying nice jeans. But for some people, that's not meaningful enough. And so you have to dig deep. Like, what's really meaningful? Why do you really want to change and lose £20? And so I want to lose £20 so that I have the energy to keep up with my kids. Because otherwise I might die an early death and not be able to see my kids grow up. That's a meaningful incentive. And so you need a meaningful incentive in your life. And then the fifth pillar is the big deadline. There has to be a deadline on this as opposed to just, you know, I'm going to try and lose £20. I don't know when. You know, it doesn't matter if it's 3 months or 12 months. No, it needs to have a deadline. Otherwise, you know. Going back to Tim Ferriss great book, the Four Hour Workweek, he references something called Parkinson's law. And in Parkinson's loss, work expands to meet the deadline that you give it. If you say, well, I'm going to lose £20 in three years, well, you might do it in three years. But if you say £20 in three months, then there you have a better deadline. So those are the five pillars. And again, I've seen them work for everything. They got me out of my anxiety attacks. They helped me stop swearing in six days. I mean, they can, they can support you through everything.

Well, shit, that's awesome. To help you stop swearing. Sorry I had to throw that in there.

That is so cool. And you know, it's funny because I was actually this morning, during my morning ritual, I was going through your book and doing that and one of the other things it reminded me of that I only time I've had success is when I've done this. And the only time in the meantime, every time I haven't done it, I've been frustrated is setting deadlines. So I started, I wrote in my journal today I set some macro and micro deadlines. So for my business, I'm like, okay, here are some bigger projects that I need done. So I want, you know, the next 30 days, next 60 days, these will happen. And by the end of the day, those are the micro deadlines. By the end of the day, these things will happen. And just by putting them on there, like I've been knocking them off, I'm like, it's amazing what your brain does when you give yourself deadlines. It's just really, really cool. Dude, I got to tell you, I think you've done something really, really cool with this. And what's neat about it is it's simple. When people get the book and all the cool accompanying, I guess, manuals, workbooks or whatever, it's not highly complex. The best things are pretty simple. And you go through it. I was flipping through it, going, okay, cool. I'm actually looking forward to sitting down and, and answering a handful of these questions and unpacking my brain so that, you know, in a way that it just starts to clear the cobwebs. And that's why I was really excited to have you on the call today because I see a lot of personal development, self help BS out there that is just, you know, it's just created to, hey, we're going to create a new gimmick. We're going to create something else that makes people want to buy from us. And I can tell that this isn't. That this is like distilling years of trial, error, wisdom and action into something that just looks like it will work for most people if they just, you know, take a, take a little bit of time to themselves and do it. But I can't encourage my listeners enough to go check out baconwrappedbusiness.com perfectday and pay more attention to you.

That being said, dude, is there anything out there besides just getting the word out there and helping people to, you know, live their perfect day? Is there any nut you're trying to crack in your business right now? Is there? Whether it's a resource you're looking to get, a person you're looking to hire is a skill you're looking to learn. Just anything out there that you're trying to crack maybe myself or my listeners have the answer for.

Yeah, it's a great question. I appreciate you asking. We just hired somebody in a CMO role, so that was a great challenge. And so what now we're focusing on is the content marketing. We're doing well with it on Facebook, so we're driving a lot of traffic and sales from that. But there's that native advertising. There's stuff like Outbrain and Taboola and all those ad networks out there. And we just haven't been able to figure out how to take what's working in our Facebook advertising campaigns and make them work on that larger scale. So that's something that we're working on all the time, is trying to expand our media channels for mostly our fitness offers. We have yoga and cookbooks and exercise videos that do really well. So that's been. That's our Fun challenge for 2016.

Nice. Really dialing that in. Yeah, nice. If there's anything I can. Yeah, I was going to say if there's anything I can do to help or if there's any listeners out there who are like, man, this is my Jam right here. This is exactly what I do all the time. Or this is like, I've got some great resources.

Is there an email Twitter? Is there a good way for people to follow up with you on that?

Yeah, I'm on Twitter at Craig Valentine, and if they want to email me, they can email me@craigodfather.com.

Wait, you don't own godfather.com?

I don't personally. My business partner does. He used to buy and sell domain names.

He has Godfather.com.

And that's all he does with it, is use it for email.

That is so cool. It's funny because I was watching rewatching for like the 18th time, the Godfather on HBO last night. That's awesome. Cool. Craig, man, I really appreciate your time on the show today, brother. It's been a lot of fun and it's an awesome reminder to myself and other people that sometimes you gotta zoom out, take a look at your life a little bit different than just responding to the activities and reacting to every email that comes in and everything on your to do list and plan it out in a. In a way. I mean, we plan our. Try to plan our businesses. We oftentimes neglect our lives, but that's so important. Everybody else, I've mentioned this before. Go to baconratbusiness.com perfectday and you'll see a lot more on Craig. And if you have any strategies that you use, like, tell me, I want to know what does your morning ritual look like? What is. What is a personal development strategy that you've used? What's a rule? Actually, this would be great. Send me your top five rules for your life. Whether you just created them or whether you've already got them. Send them to ask bradakenrapbusiness.com I'll check them out. I'm dying for this. We'll maybe even do another show on it. But if you aren't a subscriber to the show, you can do that on itunes. You can also go join my newsletter@baconratbusiness.com but I really do. Send me your rules for your business to ask bradakenratbusiness.com and then go check out baconratbusiness.com perfectday. Craig, anything else you want to add?

I just think that was really cool how you allowed me to ask for help from your listeners. I do a lot of interviews and a lot of podcasts, and I know that everybody is giving great information in the podcast, but you just really went the extra step and. And giving back to me and giving back to your listeners. So you know the rule of adding value to the world and how much it attracts success to you. So kudos to you, Brad. Thank you.

Well, I appreciate it. You've let me pick your brain. I figured let you pick mine. And those are my listeners. So I appreciate that. All right, buddy. Well, I look forward to keeping in contact with you. And next time maybe we're at an event together, maybe we'll see each other and go shake each other's hand. It's a pretty small industry we're in, so good chance that will happen for everybody else. Thanks for listening to Bacon Wrap business. Tell your friends about it, share it on social media and tune in, subscribe on itunes, because we've got some other really good ones coming up. So talk to you guys real soon.