Todd Polke trained four hours daily as an elite judo athlete and army member, destroying his health and relationships while going broke. Hard work alone leads to burnout and failure. He advocates for smarter, balanced approaches to building wealth.
Now, nothing wrong with hard work. Don't get me wrong, I'm a massive fan of hard work. But if it's your only strategy, where does it lead? Right, burnout. How you break yourself. So here I was, you know, I was, uh, training heavily at the time. I was in the army, I was playing judo for Australia at that point in time. Like, I was training a lot, but I wasn't sleeping. Who did the math on how many hours I was doing? 4 hours if you're lucky, right? And so here I was, personal trainer, getting sick all the time. 3 weeks later, I was laid up in hospital, had surgery on both my legs. Great personal trainer, can't walk. Congratulations, you're winning the game of life, Todd. How do you think my personal life was? What personal life, right? Like, what did I have? You know, I broke my relationship, I broke my body, I broke my health, and the one area where I thought it was supposed to be working based on how many hours I was putting in Being money. Well, at the end of the year, I was broke financially as well.
