Life-Changing Books Episode 61. Nick Shaw: Author of Fit for Success

Mr. Nick Shaw, welcome to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. How are you doing today, man?

I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me on, man. It's an honor to be here. I know you have on a lot of big authors, many of them that I'm huge fans of. So it's really cool to be here and maybe share a little insight.

Well, I'm excited for today's conversation about your book, Fit for Success. And as I was reading it, I did realize we have so much in common. So I'm really excited for today's conversation. For those that are not familiar with you, can you please introduce yourself to everybody in the Book Thinkers family and tell them a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, so I co-founded a company called Renaissance Periodization, really long name, just go by RP Strength, just a little bit easier. And we've been in the fitness space for about a decade now. And sort of what made us become well known was we sort of took the one-on-one coaching model and we basically figured out a way to scale that. So instead of working with, you know, maybe a few hundred clients one-on-one, Now we can help hundreds of thousands of people all around the world, which is pretty cool. And so that's really my background is really in fitness, nutrition, training, all that good stuff. And yeah, I'm just, I love to learn. I love to get better. And so kind of over the years, that lets me reading a lot of books and, you know, eventually led to writing my own book.

What originally interested you about the fitness industry and what were those early steps like? Because you're running a very successful business. You're very humble when you talk about it, but it's a big business now and you're very successful. with it. So let's talk a little bit about those early days. What was it like for you and how did you originally become interested?

The very first time I ever lifted weights was in my parents' basement with those really old, like, sandy, you know, weights that you could kind of hear them sloshing around and all that. So my brother is 4 years older than me. He's training for sports in high school. And so naturally, you know, what I want to do, I want to be like my older brother. So I started lifting with him. And very early on in high school, I realized this. I think I put it in the book even. I wasn't very talented in terms of being an athlete, but the one thing that I had going for me, and I realized this pretty early on luckily, was that if I just worked harder and did the things that other people weren't willing to do, I could maybe keep up with those other people that whatever, maybe were a little bit more talented, whatever that was. And the thing that really stood out to me was I went from being like not even in the top 7 of a team of 9 people Right, only 9 people. I wasn't even in the top 7, so I wasn't varsity my freshman year as a runner. To my sophomore year, our coach told us, hey, summer's here, you guys have to run 100 miles. You have to do this. This is what you should be doing to train for the summer. And then he just was like, all right, I'll see you guys in August. And so, I mean, me being me, I'm told something to do, like, of course I'm gonna go do it. And I basically came back and I was like the only person on my team that had actually done the work. And the first day of practice, I'm up running with the top guys from last year. And I started thinking, I'm like, what's going on here? This doesn't make any sense. And then it kind of hit me because I would hear the other guys talking and they're like, oh yeah, you know, we probably slacked off a little bit in the summer. And I go, ah, light bulb moment number one in my life early on. So it was a good thing that I learned that early on.

Yeah, I love that. I just muted my mic as you were talking because I have a fly that's flying around this room and I want to make sure it doesn't get in the mic too much, but I've told you many times that I think we're cut from the same cloth, and I have a very similar story that I'll tell. So when I was in 7th grade, I decided to play Pop Warner football, and I wanted to play with all my friends. That's why I originally started playing, but they were all playing on the B-level team, and I didn't weigh enough to make the B-level team. I was on the C-level team. And so I was right on that brink though, and I decided to eat as much as possible, get kind of bumped up, but I was the worst player on the team. I got the minimum number of plays that you had to put, you know, the coach had to put you in. And I had a miserable time getting hit by kids that were much bigger than me. But the same kind of thing, the season ended and the coaches said, you need to go work out, you need to gain weight, you need to get bigger. And I remember hearing some lesson, I think it was about Muhammad Ali, that he didn't start counting his crunches or his push-ups until it started to hurt. So, I had that same mentality. I had a bed that basically bordered the floor. And every single night before I went to sleep, I did crunches until I physically couldn't do them anymore and push-ups and everything else. And then I And I came back the next year, which was the A year, 8th grade football, and I started. And then rolled into freshman football and high school football, and I started. And it was because hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. I love that little aphorism. So we're kind of cut from the same cloth there.

Totally. I remember days early on, you know, maybe my friends would be out, you know, we're high school kids, but they'd be out, you know, partying and stuff. I don't know, I was never really into that, but I'd be the kid at home, like, yeah, like you said, doing sit-ups, doing push-ups. I just, I don't know, I just, I know that's kind of weird, but I loved it and I wouldn't have it any other way. I just love pushing myself. I really, the thing that drew me to fitness was, you know, kind of that whole mentality of you can always get better. Like, you can essentially, the more you can do, there are certain limits to that, of course, but the more you can do, the better off you're going to be. And so I just, I realized that early on and that kind of led me to getting into, you know, like bodybuilding and powerlifting, which really was the start of RP. And, you know, here we are over a decade later from when I met my colleague that started RP with me. And it was really from mutual interests of loving to lift weights.

And then now you've got Fit for Success, this awesome book. So I'm really happy that I went through it and I took a ton of notes. I'm excited for today's conversation about it. I want to start in 2018. You're going through a little rough patch in life. You decide to start listening to audiobooks. What is the first book that you started with?

So I look back in retrospect, and because we were so busy at RP, I slacked off on sort of personal growth, personal self-growth, all that stuff, because I just felt like I was so busy that if I ever had any downtime, I just wanted to relax. And looking back, I'm like, the was like the biggest mistake I could have made. And so, things started to get a little bit better. But yeah, I was recovering from hernia surgery. I couldn't lift weights. I couldn't do anything. The only thing I could do was walk. So, I started listening to audiobooks and I thought, what's like a good book that I remember early on? And it was Rich Dad Poor Dad. I remembered reading that in high school. Of course, in high school, it didn't mean anything to me, but I started listening to it. And of course, you know, he has a bunch of other books. And so, naturally, I started getting into some of those and other recommendations. And again, it was like this other light bulb started to go off is, why haven't I been doing this? Why haven't I been learning and educating myself? Because you can, it's just like fitness. There's so much more you can do. You can always be learning more. There's always something better out there to learn and understand and grasp. And I was just like, this is mind-blowing. I don't know why I haven't been doing this my entire life. So that was a start of just, and every, every day I was just doing something to learn more, to get better, just like in fitness.

And it, I mean, it's clearly snowballed and now you're an author, you're a published author. But before we go into the target reader, why you wrote the book, I just wanted to mention that Rich Dad Poor Dad was my first read. And funny enough, today I posted something on Instagram about 5 books I wish I read when I was younger. And just like you just referenced, a few people commented and reminded me that, hey, wait a second, if you read those when you were younger, you probably wouldn't have been ready and you might've missed the opportunity to get excited about this beautiful industry. So you read them at the right time. And I think the same thing is true in your story. You read Rich Dad Poor Dad in high school, didn't hit. You read it a few years later and it really resonated with you, started to snowball. So now we'll go into the fact that you've got this book, Fit for Success. How'd you come up with the title? Why'd you write the book? Who's the target reader? Yeah.

So my colleague actually came up with the title because I was thinking of some things and he said, well, what about Really, I wanted the book to be about success and whether it's fitness, whether it's business, whether it's overcoming adversity and obstacles, successful people tend to do these handful of same things. And so that really started to interest me. I'm just kind of fascinated by what, what is it? What are the things that successful people do that make them stand out? Because success typically leaves some clues. And so I started in like that personal finance space. And then I would start reading some books on leadership and business and all this stuff. I kept like kind of realizing some of these nuggets really overlapped, and I kind of started referencing different books in my own notes. And I was like, wow, this seems to kind of tie in together here. And it was really mind-blowing to me because with my background in fitness, I'm lucky enough, super fortunate to coach like world-class athletes. And I would talk to them and I would hear what they had to say. And I was like, man, this sounds really similar to this one book that I read. And I started putting the pieces together. I just— I was so fascinated by it. I was like, I— There's nothing really kind of new in the book. And like, I think a lot of authors would say that, like, there's nothing really new. Here we are in 2021. But sometimes it's like you said with the Rich Dad Poor Dad, sometimes you just have to be in the right mindset because you can hear the same thing a couple times. And it might just take that 3rd or 4th time to really hit and resonate with you. And for me, I kind of realized that along the way of like, I sort of knew some of this stuff maybe, but hearing it again and then reading it and seeing it in a couple different places by different, you know, whether it was business or whether it was fitness, I was like, wow, these things really tie together. So that's what really drew me to it. And then, so my 2020 was maybe not so great. 5 days before my son's 8th birthday, My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. And it's one thing to have all these thoughts in your head and kind of think about them a lot, which is great, don't get me wrong. But pretty much overnight, we had to kind of go from, oh yeah, these are some kind of cool ideas, to now we were living them every single day. Like, what, what are the successful things? What do we need to do as a family to get through this? Because what happens, like, 2 months after that, My wife starts chemo and the pandemic hits. And it's just like, it could have been this just disastrous time for our entire family. But really just kind of going back and sort of grounding myself on all these principles, I think we ended up having a pretty good 2020 year. And for me personally, I was like, I need to get this book out, need to get it out in 2020 because everyone was impacted from the pandemic.

I love it. And so this book is a good fit for anybody who's looking to improve in life. And there's nothing wrong with writing a book that has nothing new. I think what, what was new was your story, the style and the flavor that you add in there. It's going to resonate with certain people. And reading the same subjects over and over has been really important for me. That's why I'm not a fan of those summary applications that summarize a book in 5 minutes, because sometimes even within just one book, you'll read the same concept 3, 4, 5 times. Maybe it's that 5th or that 10th impression that really makes an impact on you, ingrains that concept in your subconscious, rewires your neural pathways, and gives you the opportunity to apply it in your life. And so it's important to refresh the fundamentals. It's also important to read somebody else's application of a book like whatever, Rich Dad Poor Dad as an example. So I'm happy that you wrote it, but there was— now, you know, I've said this to you too, I've read hundreds of books in this space. There were concepts that I hadn't read about much. One of them was the internal locus of control. It's one of your favorite subjects. Now it's one of mine. So I'd love to have you talk about that for a couple of minutes.

Yeah. So here's the thing. Everyone knows about the concept, but they've never really heard that phrase before. And it's just something that I kept coming back to. For example, a good book that I like to recommend to people is Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. And you think about that, what is— yeah, yeah, it's right there. Yeah, somewhere in there. Totally. So it's a really great book. And what's kind of at the core of it? Well, extreme ownership, that you own everything. It's really things are in your control. If your company makes a mistake, yeah, you know, maybe whatever, you didn't necessarily do it, but things come up the ladder as they should. And well, it's like, well, now it's on me because I should have done something to maybe show or train someone, then they should have known this. And so I just kept coming back to all these core ideas, right? And the internal locus of control kept standing out to me as like, wow, this is really, really important. And so for me, the idea of internal locus of control is, do things happen to you or do you have a say over what happens in your life? And it's a big fundamental mindset shift there. when you start to view things as, oh, things aren't happening to me necessarily, but I actually can sort of think and I don't have to react immediately. It's kind of the whole idea of stoicism too, if we want to, you know, go into that. But again, like, that was another thing that stood out to me. I'm like, this is literally the fundamental concept of stoicism. So it's like, things happen, okay, good, bad, whatever, but you don't have to react emotionally right away. You kind of have that second where you can process it and think about it a little bit, and then you ultimately get to choose how you respond to things. And when you start viewing things like that, I think a couple things happen. You tend to be a little bit more optimistic or tend to be a little bit more hopeful because you know that the things you do are going to matter. And then because you have that belief, right, kind of builds that self-belief and that self-confidence, you're more likely to take action. And at the bottom of the pyramid in my book Well, work ethic, and we talked about this a little bit, but if you believe the things that you do matter, you're going to take more action, right? Like, if you have an idea, you're less likely to just sit on it, you're more likely to take some action. So that's kind of how I came about— that seems like a pretty important concept to talk about.

And it does roll right into a couple of the other subjects that I wrote down to talk about. One of them was positive mindset. Fixed versus growth, Carol Dweck. It's a great concept to understand. So could you tell everybody a little bit about the differences between a fixed and a growth mindset?

Yeah, so this is, I think, a really important concept. Fixed mindset, you're just less likely to take action because you're like, oh, I can't do that. I'm just, I'm not good enough, or I'm not talented enough. I don't view things that way. I'm like, no, There's something more I can learn. Now, I'm not saying I can do anything. There's limits to that, of course. But it's that mindset of there's something I can do. I don't know what it is. I can learn more. I can work harder. I can work smarter. I can bring in different people to give me their— you know, there's a bunch of different things. But what matters is you're going to do something because you believe that you can get better over time. So that's a really big one because If you didn't believe you could get better, what are you going to do? You're going to be scared of taking risks, approaching obstacles. You're just not going to do as much. But successful people just tend to not think that way. And again, the whole mindset thing goes back to the idea of— there's actually a really interesting book called Learned Hopefulness, right? So learned helplessness was a term coined by Martin Seligman and positive psychology thing, kind of Big on that in the '60s and '70s. But on the flip side, there is that learned hopefulness. And again, when you are hopeful, right, you have that belief, you have that confidence, you are going to take more action. It is kind of like everything just ties together pretty naturally.

Yeah, it has been really important for me. I think when I first discovered the differences between a fixed versus growth mindset, I did a little self-reflection and realized that I had a fixed mindset in certain areas of my life. and in others I didn't. And so I really needed to unpack why I had a fixed mindset in certain areas of life and start to apply deliberate practice to getting rid of that, to expanding my mind, to thinking bigger. I'm wearing a Think Big shirt right now, and that's helped me a lot. And I originally discovered that concept on a podcast, which came right before Rich Dad Poor Dad for me. I started listening to a few podcasts, and I'll never forget that moment. So it was really big for me. And You talk a little bit before Stoic philosophy in the book, you talk a little bit about discipline. And so I think this is a good time to bring up what we talked about before the podcast, uh, I started recording, which is that in the fitness industry and in the personal finance industry, you see a lot of crossover. So there's long-term thinking, there's deliberate practice, there's that growth mindset. I'd love to have you talk about that too.

So I've been on a big kick the last couple months reading a lot of personal finance books, literally the last 2, 3 months, something like that. It started with the Warren Buffett book. It was like 850 pages. And it just, you know, naturally leads you to reading other books along that topic. And I just really started thinking to myself, there's so much overlap between personal finance and fitness. And I'm like, well, fitness, I know fitness very well. What are we always battling at RP? We're an evidence-based company. We're always battling people that want that quick fix. And there's people out there promoting all that stuff, the skinny teas and the fads and the gimmicks and whatever it is, the belly wraps. People want that overnight success. They want to get rich quick, basically. They want the 6-pack abs overnight. And I kept thinking like, well, what do people want when it comes to personal finances above almost everything else? Everyone wants to get rich. They want to be successful overnight. And so that's why you see people, you know, making really risky investments, or, you know, they'll get that, you know, stock tip from their neighbor who probably doesn't know anything, but it's that allure of the quick fix. And for me, and again, you know, I wrote this book over 6 months ago, and I've just been thinking so much ever since. And I talked about this a little bit in the book, but I think one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle that I could possibly recommend for anyone out there is if you take your, your time horizon and you start to extend it to a longer-term time horizon, you're going to be more successful in pretty much every single endeavor you could possibly think of— fitness, business, you know, personal finances, whatever it is. But so many people, they don't want that. They want it, they want it now. And it's like, yes, we all want things now, but is that how the world works? Not really, and unfortunately. So for me, that's just always kind of stood out and stands out even more after, you know, really diving into personal finances. And actually, can I give one more quick example?

Oh, of course.

Yeah. So, you know, people want the six-pack abs overnight, right? That's kind of the fitness side. On the personal finance side— yeah, yeah, yeah, I see it. Um, so it's like, you know, what's the latest craze when it comes to personal finances? People are willing to do some kind of crazy things But it's like on the fitness side, what works? What's going to get you results in the long run? Just sticking to the basics, being consistent over months and years. And then it's like, well, what works in personal finances and investing? For the most part, it's the boring stuff. It's the low-cost index funds that you just kind of put some money in, dollar-cost averaging, and then you just let it sit. And it's like, it's just the basics over time. And if the more people could realize that in fitness and finances, I think we'd be so much better off.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I read in Money: Master the Game by Tony Robbins that 96% of actively managed mutual funds fail to beat the S&P 500. When you start going 10, 15, 20, 30 years, the, the percentage gets even smaller— I mean, oh, even larger. In my example, 96, 97, 98 failed to beat the S&P 500. And, uh, I also— have you read the book The Psychology of Money? I think that's the title that I'm reading right now.

Oh yeah.

So I'm reading that for the first time right now. And, and in chapter 2, the author talks about, well, be careful looking up to individuals who are successful because for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. For everybody that did really well being this risky, there's somebody who didn't do really well being that risky. So look for the slow Positive compounding. Don't look for the overnight success as your benchmark because you're just setting yourself up for failure in that sense.

And it's— listen, it's a tough pill to swallow. It is a tough pill to swallow. We're all human. We all have those wants and needs and emotion gets into things. I totally get it. But I think the biggest thing for me ever since I really started getting into the reading and all this stuff and You know, my buddy recently just paid me a really big compliment. He's like, you know, you used to kind of be one of these people that would almost kind of fly off the hinges here and there, like if something upset me. He's like, it's a pretty big change. And I said, dude, that's the biggest compliment you could give me because it's something I've been working on really, really hard for the last couple years. And for me, it's, you know, practicing some mindfulness, but just being more self-aware. I read these things literally almost on a daily basis. And so, it's just kind of ingrained in me now. And then I'll see some things and I go, oh, well, I probably don't want to do that and I should be doing this. I'm not saying I'm perfect, of course, because I'm far from that, but it's just being self-aware. It's just picking up on these things more and more and more to like now, it's just kind of, I've literally fundamentally changed myself over the last couple of years, which I think is the coolest thing in the world.

Dude, me too. I have the same story. When I was in college, I would react emotionally. I would let an input cause a reaction almost immediately. not always the best reactions. And so I met up with a friend recently, a year or so ago, and he said, total 180. He called me, I think, a monk. He's like, you just are like a Zen Buddhist monk nowadays compared to how you would react to the same inputs a few years ago. And the process was the same for me. It was reading this information daily, practicing mindfulness and gratitude and Stoic philosophy. So that's a good transition into Stoic philosophy. I love the concept of amor fati, the love of one's fate, and that the outside world is not positive or negative. It's neutral. It is what it is. So your reaction is what's positive or negative. And that's been life-changing for me.

And it's something that— it seems so basic, but at the same time, it's really hard to actually make that shift. And it's something that— and again, I think it goes back to that longer-term time horizon. You read this and then you're like, oh yes, I need to make this shift overnight. Well, it's not going to happen overnight, but you just keep working on it and slowly, little bit by little bit over time, you make these big changes. So you might not notice it in a week or a month, but maybe you'll notice some little improvements. But you might look back over a couple years and just think, wow, like, I can't believe that, you know, I used to act like X, Y, or Z. And again, it's just being more self-aware and just building, growing, keep learning and practicing these things every day.

Yeah, very similar to the locus of control. I think it was Marcus, but it might not have been Marcus Aurelius, but one of the Stoic philosophers talks about the sphere of control, kind of internal sphere of control. And anything that's not in your direct control, you shouldn't react to it immediately. You should give it a little bit of time. You know, if, if a tsunami wipes out an entire community, And you have family in that community, you couldn't have controlled that. So don't let it ruin everything in your life. You know, take it as it is. It's not negative. It just is what it is. And now let's move forward in life. Let's be proactive. Stoic philosophy is a very actionable philosophy. That's one of my favorite things about it. It deals with modern day-to-day problems, just as it did with modern day-to-day problems 2,000 years ago.

Well, and here's the other thing. So what happens if something like that— and the example you use is like, it's a pretty big one, that's probably most people would consider pretty bad— but what happens if you do react emotionally? And you go sprinting in as fast as you can? Well, that might not be the best course of action because, you know, who knows, maybe there's like a second wave or something coming. Now again, we can always say, well, you know, you want to get in there and save your family, of course, like there is that. Human elements that, yes, we want to do that. But I'm just saying, typically, if you react too emotionally, you're not making the best decisions. Whereas it's like, if you just give yourself a slight pause, you go, oh, okay, well, now actually, maybe instead of running in this way, which might lead to my own demise, I go, oh, I'm gonna go around the other, you know, something like that. Of course, we're just giving some crazy examples.

Yeah.

But still, yeah.

Yeah, that was a dramatic example, which sometimes I tend to do, but it helps cement the point. You're right, there could be a second wave and you always want to put your mask on first before you help the passenger next to you in an airplane for a reason. It's so that you can continue to help them and be a better version of yourself. And I think it applies to a lot of different situations.

Absolutely.

Speaking about kind of modern-day events, I think, and personal investing, It is, it is a tough pill to swallow that you need to play the long game. I think recently there were a lot of people that became rich overnight in the crypto space, and I had, I had invested in Bitcoin specifically a few years ago, and I got out and I made a little bit of money, not much money. And so I thought to myself, oh, only if I would have kept my money in there, or only if I got re-engaged with it when my friends told me to get re-engaged with it. maybe a year ago or so. But I'm happy that I didn't, because a lot of people made a lot of money, and then a lot of people lost a lot of money. And so I'm happy that I stuck to my S&P 500 low-cost index funds. And I'm also happy that I stuck to my 30-year real estate investments instead of pulling my money out and dumping it in crypto, which a lot of people did. So, uh, yeah, that stuff's important to think about, especially as technology gets applied to personal finance and investing, and things just get Crazy swinging up and down.

Yeah, and everyone tends to hear those really big success stories too, and we like to focus on those because they stand out, right? We're a little biased because, you know, it stands out in our heads. But we don't usually hear about the, you know, maybe hundreds if not thousands of people that, you know, probably didn't make any money or lost money, something like that. And I'm sure there's people listening, they're like, ah, crypto is the greatest thing in the world. Uh, listen here, it could be. I But again, it's so new. It's kind of like if we go back to the fitness example, that's what I know best. There might be this like one study that comes out and promises like the best stuff in the world. You can— but it's like, well, that's just one thing. Maybe we sit back and give it some time. And now if a couple years later there's now 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 studies that all kind of point in this direction, like, hey, this new thing's probably pretty good. Well, being evidence-based, we go, ah, okay, now there's more evidence around it. Because if there's only one thing, maybe it's the best thing in the world, maybe it's complete garbage. We don't really know. So again, that's the more evidence-based approach and what I think some of the pretty cool similarities are. So, and it almost goes back to, well, let's not react immediately. Let's give it some thought. Let's see what happens. And if it does turn out to be pretty cool, right, now we start recommending more people to it because now there's more evidence behind it.

You mentioned practicing mindfulness as one way to cultivate more of that awareness and patience. Is there a specific form of mindfulness or meditation that you've been practicing or that you found to be the most useful in your life?

Um, yeah, I just use an app. Uh, shoot, what is it? Um, I can't even think of the name of the app right now.

Headspace, Calm?

Yeah, yes, yes, yes, Headspace. Yep, yep. Um, you know, honestly, I've Just kind of played around with a few different things in there for a while. But for me, it's just like, I'm just going to take 10-15 minutes a day and just kind of sit and just like relax. Is that maybe the right way? I don't know. I'm not an expert in that space. But again, for me, it's just practicing it every day. Just being able to kind of like slow things down a little bit, just think a little bit more, or just focus right on my breathing. So I just— I'm basically training myself a little bit. day by day by day. And like now, I mean, say— I don't want to say it's easy, but it's— I just, I do it every day and it's just part of my routine. It's just on my checklist of things that I'm going to do. And honestly, my wife might disagree, of course. Maybe she thinks I still have a little bit of a temper here and there, but I just feel like I'm, I'm just much more calm. Like something happens, I'm like, all right, now what? And I just, I think some of it is just being more self-aware and just practicing that literally every single day.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I think my girlfriend would say sometimes I still have a little bit of a temper, sometimes too, but compared to where I used to be, right, that's the right comparison to make. If we're making progress, we're making progress. And if that calm mentality compounds over the next 20 or 30 years of us seeking enlightenment and growing businesses and having fun, then it's the right, it's the right direction to be working in. Chapter 6 in Fit for Success is all about failure. And so I thought it was funny that you started off that chapter saying, isn't it a little ironic in a book about success, I'm talking about failure, but I think it's very important to address. So what does failure mean to you? And why is it important to embrace it and even journal about it?

So here's the thing. Everyone fails, everyone makes mistakes, everyone messes up. I don't care who you are. And in fact, a lot of really successful people probably fail even more than other people. Because here's the thing that I really started to think about, and I've seen this in my own life. But you'll see a lot of people afraid to take action, to even get started, because they're afraid of failing. And it's like, I think that's the wrong mindset to have. It kind of goes back to that fixed mindset we talked about earlier. But when you know, I don't care who you are, everyone fails, everyone messes up. So when you know that, it sort of empowers you because you're like, all right, well, I know I'm going to mess up a little bit here and there. It's not the end of the world. Am I learning from it? Am I not repeating it? Am I getting better from it? Because those are the big takeaways. And then you take— when you have those, well, great. So you hit some obstacles or you fail, you mess up, you're like, all right, I'm not going to do that again. Now I'm going to course correct. Whoop, now I'm going this way. And that's just the right— that's the better approach to have about things because literally everyone fails. I don't care who you are.

Did you have a chance to listen to or read Matthew McConaughey's new book, Greenlights?

It's on my Audible device. I have not listened to it yet, though.

He's just got a great metaphor around those lights. He just says, for every red light or yellow light that you experience in your life, you can turn it into a green light. And oftentimes it's a way to course correct or give you sort of a pause to think about what, what you're experiencing, but you can still progress forward. And then I read another book recently that had a good line, which said that the roads to success and failure are not different roads. They're the same road. And the people that fail are the people that didn't go far enough. They turned back 3 feet from gold kind of mentality. And I think that about failure too. I fail fast and I fail hard, but then I course correct fast and I course correct hard. And it's been a beautiful thing Book Thinkers. I mean, hey, we've pivoted so many times as far as what our core offering is and what we're developing behind the scenes, but it's led to a pretty cool business. And I'm happy that I went through those bad experiences. They've taught me a lot.

Well, it's the same with RP. In 2015, we came out with these things called diet templates. They'd never been created before by anyone. And it sort of took— like, if you were to hire me to be your nutrition coach, there's sort of this step of processes that I'm going to go through. And my buddy essentially created them down into Excel spreadsheets. And these were not very pretty looking products, but they didn't take, you know, very much— they really didn't take any money to create. We were like, hey, we got to get it, get this out there. We need feedback. We need to prove the idea, the concept. And people loved them. So then what'd we do? Again, we kept iterating. We get that feedback, we iterate. Put something new out there, right? Just get a little bit better, right? A little bit better over time. What's that sound like? Literally what we've been talking about all day long. So you can approach business the same way as you approach your, you know, your own personal growth.

Before we wrap up and talk about some recommended reading, I'd love to have you tell everybody a little bit more about your business and, and kind of who's a good target user for your products, your app, the different programs that you offer.

Yeah. So if we go back to the iteration process, we started with these really ugly Excel files, but we proved the concept, people loved them. And here's the thing, they were a lot cheaper than one-on-one coaching. And that sort of opened the doors to more people. We can now help more people, which at the end of the day, that's the goal. So then we iterated them over time, went to slightly less ugly Excel files. Iteration 3 was, oh, now we have pretty PDFs to eventually we knew we wanted to do an app. And, you know, kind of everything's moving towards technology, so we knew we always wanted to do an app. But apps take a really long time and they take a lot of money, so we couldn't have done that early on because we're completely bootstrapped, always have been. But again, it proved the concept. We just kept improving a little bit over time until we had an app. Now we fundamentally do the same things. It's just we, we put updates out there, our customers, our clients give feedback, and then we take that and then we keep improving. But eventually, at the end of the day, so if you wanted to use RP, I would say if you're already into fitness, if you're familiar with kind of counting or tracking macros, it's probably a good thing to use the RP Diet Coach app. Because essentially what we do is like, instead of you paying me to be your personal nutrition coach, you enter all these same inputs into our app. And then you're like, hey, I want to lose 10 pounds in 10 weeks. And so it says, all right, cool, here's how much food you need to eat at every single meal, and then you'll pick the foods that you like. You know, we're not going to say, hey, you have to eat chicken, broccoli, and rice. Like, no, there's— you can have some flexibility and all that. And then you just go out and execute. And if you're someone that can plan and execute, you're going to be successful. On the flip side, I would just say if someone's like super new to fitness or counting macros, we have some simpler products kind of to ease into. I wouldn't dive right into the app, right? That would be like me in 2018 having read like one book trying to write my own book. Like, that would have been a disaster. So again, let's take that same mindset. Well, let's meet people where they're at, right? And let's sort of ease them into it, get them more familiar with things. And now, so we have some simple products that people can start with, and then you start to kind of build and grow from there.

Well, one more time for anybody that's watching or listening, I do recommend Fit for Success. It's a fantastic book. But Nick has also read a lot of other cool books. So let's go into some recommended reading. The list at the end of your book is very long, and I've read a lot of them, but there are also some that I haven't read. So I'm excited to hear what are some of your favorite books, what books have had the biggest impact on your life.

I think number one, and it's actually not even mentioned in the book because I didn't read it until after I'd already written and gotten it to the editor, probably my favorite book of all time, and I've only read it once. I want to go back and reread it again, but, uh, Summer of 2020, I read it for the first time. It's called Slight Edge by Jeff Olson.

Yeah, I've read it. It's a good one.

Yeah, I'll dig it out here. Here we go. It's, it's so basic, but at the same time, if you really stop and think about this process, I read it and I was like, I wanted to stand up and applaud the guy. I want to be like, Jeff, you are the man. Thank you for putting this into writing because it's so basic, but if more people did these things, everyone would be so much better off. So in my own head, I like reading books, of course, but I don't want to just read them and just, it kind of goes in one ear and out the other. I kind of try to think of like, all right, what's the main thing? What's like one big takeaway I can have from each and every single book? And I create notes on these, like in my phone. So what I did I started making that daily checklist. Now he says, I think, read like 10 pages a day. I think that's awesome, but I don't know, I'm— I can't do average. I hate the idea of that.

Yeah.

So I'm like, all right, I'm gonna do 50 pages a day. And originally I kind of had like, all right, I want to read 100 books in a year. But then I thought to myself, that's an outcome goal, that's not really a behavior-based goal. I don't think that's a good one because I'm like, what if I want to read Warren Buffett's book and then I want to read other long books? Like, that's never going to happen. So I was like, all right, 50 pages a day. That's all I want to do. And 99.9% of the days since last summer, here we are about a year later, I've done that every single day. I love it. Bingo.

I love it. Yeah, The Slight Edge is amazing. So for me, uh, in a similar vein, I read The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy very early on. And so these books about small changes, small steps in the right direction, The Compound Effect, Atomic Habits is another one of them. They're, they're all talking about those small steps in the right direction over a long period of time, the power of momentum, the power of the compound effect. And it's been, I mean, it's been life-changing for me. So I'm happy that you brought this up. I think out of those 3 books, The Compound Effect, Atomic Habits, and The Slight Edge, which are all sort of in the same space, this one gets talked about the least, but it's very— I think it came out The earliest. So it was original at its time and a fantastic book. What else? What else do you have for us?

I was just gonna say, ironically, I read Compound Effect right before I read Slight Edge. So it was like, it was basically back-to-back books and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is the greatest thing in the world. So that's one, highly, highly recommend that one. Number 2, we mentioned this earlier, I would say Extreme Ownership. Because when you start to apply this concept to your life, you're like, well, I'm not going to blame other people. I'm not going to, you know, do all these things. Like, no, like, I own it. I have control over it. I think it makes a real big difference in your life because, you know, let's just say you have an argument with your significant other. Maybe it's their fault, maybe it's not, who cares? But it's like you kind of step back and you go, all right, well, this happened. What could I have done differently? What could I do to get a little bit better? How can I avoid this or prevent this in the future? All right, well, you know, what did I do to help cause this? All right, well, let's kind of rethink. Maybe we don't do some of these things. So, I love that one. And then, of course, you know, Jocko is huge on discipline, and your discipline, you're going to be more successful. So, I love his podcast as well.

Yeah, Jocko is a cool guy. I've only read Extreme Ownership. I know now he has a couple other books out there. Like, I think there is one now, Discipline Equals Freedom, and there's a couple others. But Jocko's a cool guy. My biggest takeaway from Extreme Ownership was probably that there's really only one factor that matters when you're a leader. Were you successful? And if not, why not? And so I really love that mentality. Leading up the chain was also really important for me. Jocko's the coolest guy ever. And I love the early wake-ups, the pictures on Instagram. He's just got such a cool brand. I hope to have him on the show sometime soon.

That'd be great. I would love to listen to that. I actually started training jiu-jitsu because of him as well.

Oh really? Yeah, that's great. All right, let's do— oh, go ahead.

Oh, I was just gonna say, you want to talk about a little ego thing? You start training jiu-jitsu, you'll quickly kick your ego right out the door.

Yeah, I was a wrestler in high school, and when I finished up wrestling, I took some Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes and It was tough. There were people that submitted me in the silliest of ways instantly that were half my size and twice my age, and it was a very humbling experience.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Yeah, that's fun. All right, we'll do one more recommendation.

Um, all right, let's go with something— I mean, we didn't mention this specifically, we talked a little bit about obstacles and adversity, you can say Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday. That's a really good one. And actually, before I read that book, I heard a quote from one of my friends. He was giving a— he's a Navy SEAL, taught at the Naval Academy. He was giving a lecture there and he said essentially, obstacles are opportunities. And I heard that and it just always kind of kept with me. This has been a couple of years since I heard it, but it's really the same idea as obstacles Yeah, it is.

We've had Ryan on this podcast, and I've been such a big fan of Ryan Holiday's work. He introduced me to Stoicism, and somebody helped read— I'm actually in the process of writing my first book too, and I wanted to make sure that I wasn't just regurgitating information, that I had some of my own style and flavor in there, because I've read so many of these books, and, and I want to condense a lot of what I've learned into an introduction to personal development. And I was talking to this other author and he told me, listen, if you're reading Ryan Holiday, you're really just reading 200 Stoic philosophers. He's just applying his own flavor and thoughts to it. And that's what Obstacle Is the Way is. If you're reading Robert Greene, he read 4,000 books in order to put together The 48 Laws of Power. So look in the bibliography. You could go read those 2,000 books But you like Robert Greene because of his flavor, his style, his delivery. That's what's unique. And so I think that's what's unique about your book as well. And I think it's what'll end up becoming unique about my book. That's why we're reading these books. And that's why guys like Ryan have done really, really well introducing Stoic philosophy to people in the 2000s. So yeah, big fan of— big fan of his work too. Totally.

Yeah, those are 3 great books. Would highly recommend all of Yeah.

Well, hey, thank you so much for coming on the show. For people who want to learn a little bit more about you and a little bit more about your book, where should they go? What should they do?

Yeah, you can just grab Fit for Success on Amazon. So it's also an Audible version, uh, just Fit for Success on Amazon. You can grab it there. If you want to follow me personally, @nick.shaw.rp on Instagram. Or if you're into fitness, want to learn a little bit more, maybe be a little motivated from time to time, there's some cool before and afters @rpstrength on Instagram.

Yeah, link to everything in the show notes. You guys have a big community, so it'll be fun for everybody to check out the Instagram pages. Well, one more time, thank you so much for coming on the show, and I look forward to working with you again soon.

Well, thanks so much for having me on, man. Like I said, it's a really big honor. A lot of the authors you've had on, I've read and learned a lot from, so it's really cool to be here.

Thank you.