On practicing everyday excellence with Joe Templin

Or a provider goes out business or what have you with these disruptions, and we can get really frustrated. But if we have our eyes on this mission as so much bigger than us, then it draws us and we figure out a way. As the great general Hannibal, not from the A Team, the original General Hannibal said, I will find a way or make away. And that's one of the things about the entrepreneurial journey is very much what Nche said. If a man has a strong enough why, he'll be able to overcome any how.

And there are all sorts of, impediments on the journey.

And when Toyota came to the United States shores in the late sixties, early seventies, their cars were absolute dog crap. They were the worst pos's out there. Horrible quality. they broke down constantly. They were not really sexy looking or anything, but they also imported.

The concept of kaizen: of this continuous improvement were anybody, whether it was the person sweeping the floors or the CEO or an individual on the line could make a micro change and do literally almost like an AV test from the computer world to see, Hey, can we get a little bit better with this? And by adopting that mindset, they were able to create these very short feedback loops where they were getting continuous improvement. And by the 1980s, they had put most Detroit out of business.

So the concept of Kaizen was then adopted by every single manufacturer, whether it was Westinghouse, general Electric, the big three automakers, everybody was using this.

And then those grow over to software, really in the concept of lead manufac, lean, but we've never applied it to the most important resource in the organization, which is the human being . And so we've got all these different components of our life, physical health, our mental health, our spiritual health, our nutrition, our education, our communication, whether it's within work or within the family, and. Life's chaotic.

when you have kids, when you have aging parents, when you have business, all this stuff's going on and so things slip through the cracks. We don't pay attention to stuff cause our focus is more on the business than our health this month, or sick kids. So work takes a back seat for a couple of days and. We, if we can apply a little bit more focus to these different areas, we can start getting some incremental gains.

And if you have tiny little improvements, even if they're almost negligible, They compound in the app and that's part of the reason for the cover of the book. I've got this really cool logarithmic growth curve. You can't see the little bumps up and down all along it, but you can see the long range trend, which is if you can get 1% better per day at the end of your year, you're 37 times better. that's probably unsustainable cause there's a lot more hanging food.

If you can get 1% better per week, at the end of two years, you're three times as good. So we can all squeeze on out and have this continuous improvement or this human kaizen and ultimately end up in a much better place by making tiny better choices.

so taking that little bit of me time, people are like, oh, I can't do that. If you take a 15 minute power nap in the early afternoon and get up in your twice as product, Then within 15 minutes you've made up that lost time and at the end of an hour you're actually well ahead of the curve. So taking the moment to step back and reevaluate and invest in what you need to is basically a little bit of a J curve where you're, yeah, you slow down a little bit so that you can go faster and harder.

That is when you can be the most productive and you can literally set the backdrop for the entire day. So I get up, I brain dump anything that was in my head. I read for a couple of minutes every single morning. I then I go and I work. Because working out in the morning will help rush stuff outta your system. You've literally been laying down for five hours, six hours, eight hours, however long you sleep.

And so your brain is, even though you've been producing theta waves, when you've been passing it out asleep, you process stuff, you need to basically wake it back up and engage it. So exercise is one of the best ways to do that. if you look at an EEG of somebody after they exercise the whole thing, absolutely awesome, and there's a reason why Sir Richard Branson says that the number one productivity tool is exercise. So you go work out for 20 ish minutes to everything lit up.

Then I sit down and I write, I do some of my social media type stuff. Then I go and I work out again. For another half hour because I'm a endurance athlete. And then I'll write some more, and then I'll get ready for the rest of my day. So I get up typically at four 30 by six o'clock in the morning. I've already accomplished more than most people during the day, and then when I'm rolling into the office, it's like boom, I'm already ahead of the curve.

So instead of me playing catch up and trying to catch other people, I'm the lead and people are trying to catch up to me, and so it puts you in a very different state. You can achieve the state of flow much easier simply because the stress level's down, because you already know that you would accomplish more than what most people have, and it just pushes you to go further and harder.

Sometimes I get stuck in the how versus the why, and at the end of that 90 minutes, I realize I was working on something that probably I could have outsourced to somebody else, my team members or virtual assistant. and I shouldn't have been doing it, but it's sometimes so fun to do. before we started recording, we were talking about how you and I are both geeks in that sense, like technology.

So sometimes it gets stuck in doing these things that I enjoy doing, but I know I shouldn't be doing cuz I should be focusing on the why. And that's actually the hardest part is when you actually enjoy it. Yeah. But it's not the highest and best use of your. When somebody else can do it, 95% as well, or even 90% as well, they should be doing it.

I am telling everybody that I work with say no more often because focus is saying no to things that you can be good at so that you can have the additional bandwidth to be exceptional at certain things.

So I did the Warren Buffet exercise, it's where you sit down, you write the 25 most important things that you really wanna accomplish, and then you need to go through and choose the top five and all the others you need to get off your plate because they are just interesting enough or exciting enough or fun enough to distract you. And the good is the enemy of the great. And you can be good at those. But it's not gonna be great.

So I've got a saying, one minute planning prevents an hour worth of work before I start my day. Like I'll take care of that basic, writing and some social media stuff cause that needs to be done every day. But before I jump into the real day, I look at the schedule for that day, the coming week, and anything that's up and coming. To see what's most important, and then I will take a couple of minutes and I will write down on an index card.

This is how I manage my day, actually, for the most part, not my big projects, but my day. I write down the three to five most important things that I need to get done that day. And it might be like, write this proposal. It might be follow up with this individual. It might be, write one thing . So whatever it is, and as I'm going through 'em, I cross off and then I go and David Larner throw it in the corner.

But it allows me to be making sure that I'm not just busy, I'm productive, I'm focused on the right things. And once I get through that list, technically I have achieved everything that I'm supposed to that day I'm in the bonus round. And so if depending on when, during the day it is, I will take the time and reevaluate. Okay, what are the next. And by doing this, do you get everything done? No. I mean like my house is a mess at times and stuff like that.

But I'm getting the most important things done and I'm always looking with the Tim Ferris idea, my word for the year, cause I chose a word for the year, is deal. Just cuz I need to deal with all sorts of chaos and all that. But as Tim Ferris talks about and where I work with DEAL: delegate, eliminate, automate, locations. Delegate, okay? I've turned things over to people in my organization. I've hired outside people to take care of it.

Cuz even if I have to pay somebody, a thousand dollars a month to do something, but frees up 30 hours of my time, that is completely worth it. Okay. Delegate, eliminate, do I need to be doing this? Do I need buffet exercise that I talk about? Automate? Okay. My one coaching program where people get an email every single day that's built out to be completely automated. I had to create what is sent, but I don't need to sit there and, type out a hundred emails every single day.

If you send this thing out, it's built out. So again, a J curve there, take a couple hours to build out the system. That then saves you a half hour every single day. That's a tremendous savings of time.

My location being able to do things is to be able to respond to an email on a boy Scouts weekend or when I'm at the lake house for the weekend, be able to respond cuz I've got the constraints of. Aging parent kids in, junior high and high school and these other things. So to me, I don't wanna go and be staying, in Europe someplace to be responding because quite frankly, the needs of my kids, my family are greater at this point down the road, yeah, I can be completely bohemian.

But if you do the first three, the delegate, the eliminate, and the automate, then you can choose your location. Right now my location happens to be my office because know what, I have no problem with it.

Writing my book, the way that I got the idea for, I was, literally down in my weight room tossing around at Kyle Bell, listening to Jocko Willik talk and listening to some Black Sabbath on the other thing. Cause I multitask like that. and Jocko made a comment that, excellence is a habit. I'm like, oh, habits need to be practiced every single day. I stopped mid swing. Everyday excellence. And I had the story moment of the vision.

I put down the bell, ran upstairs, brain dumped out, for about 15 minutes how I saw the book, playing out with a quote, discussion and analysis around it, and then an action for every single day of the year, and then intro after all that sort of stuff. Then went back down and fished my workout. But since I had this vision, I'm like, What do I need to do in using a habit stack from James Clear, every single morning after I did my brain dump, I'd do my first workout.

I would sit down and I would write two days of the book. So I'd write January 27th and January 28th. Then I'd go do my own workout. And so it wasn't a BHAG in that it was this monster life-changing type thing, like running my ultramarathons war gang mc or whatever championship or anything like that. It was more like, okay, this is a process. This is something I just have to sit down and do this every single day and I'll get through it in a reasonable time.

And that's how I was able to write a 700 plus page book in six months.

And so if you wanna be CEO of a Fortune 1000 company, okay, that's a B-HAG and that's gonna be a 30 year sort of thing. What do you need be doing so that when you're 45, you're, in the vice presidential position, so that by the time you're in your early fifties, you're in the C-suite so that you can get into the CEO position. What does it take? What do you need to sacrifice? What do you need to learn? What sort of investments do you make? What sort of, allies do you need to get?

What sort of mentors, who do you need to be mentoring all these things and. . It basically involves reevaluating everything and saying, okay, I can't do this yet. Let me figure out what I need to do that, and what I just said, I can't do this yet. That's part of being able to harness the full power of your brain because when people say, I can't do this, that is literally embedding in the subconscious. Nope. Brick wall. Versus, I can't do this yet.

When you have a subconscious, which is really the vast majority of your processing power coming into play saying, all right, there's a way to get on the other side, I'm gonna figure it out. And so being able to harness that by simply adding yet. On the end allows you to, even when I'm running a, 5K or if I'm down in the weight room, or if I'm playing with the kids doing something else, my subconscious is working on solving those problems to be able to get to set B-HAG.

I go for a run and my old business partner used to make fun of me cause I'd literally run around the block. I'd come back in, start writing on the whiteboard. I'd go out and I'd run around the block maybe one or two more times. I'd come in, I'd run on the whiteboard again, and I'd be able to go and run for my, actual run and come back in and immediately go to the whiteboard. Because one of the things is that when you're working out a problem, you're figuring it out.

but the solution gets lost in the noise. And so when you're engaged in something else that's not playing with a problem, whether it's listening to music, doing martial arts, running, meditating, playing with kids, leaving, what happens is that the neuroactivity around those connections actually reduces. so those loosely connected neurons with the solution, you can actually hear it finally.. You can find the signal in the noise because you've damped down the noise overall.

So instead of focusing and you get yourself all anxious and revved up, slow down. And so there's an old, Pennsylvania, Dutch saying, the hurrier I go, the slower I am. Whereas they say in the military, slow is fast. Fast is depth.

I don't know if you've ever experienced that. It's,

and we listen to electronic music and there's all these little knobs and turntables and the idea that you talk about where you turn down the signal, it's the same in DJing. When you bring two songs together, it's the same key. It's the same beat, but they're different songs. And so you're actually dampening the high frequencies on one song as you increase the high frequency or the mids or the lows, and you bring it together and there's this harmony.

And so that is one of the things of having differential ideas, different things going on, is that it ends up can possibly creating synthetic knowledge from it where you've got these two or three different concepts coming together and producing something new off of it.

And how we, interact. They are all different components of trying to answer even the big question.

But if you go down to the quantum level and you start to look at things as energy waves rather than solid objects, physical objects, our brain thinks the same way. So I'm curious to get your insight on how your thoughts influence your environment.

This is the reason why people who are serial entrepreneurs will build a company, sell it, go on out, stay on the beach for two days and then they, they'll have an idea because they see a problem and they go build another company to solve this, and they just keep doing this. So people who are great. poets do this. They get inspiration from anything, whether it's this coffee cup or a, or an interaction with a pretty lady or what have you.

They take that and they turn that into verse as a way of explaining some of the concepts of the universe. So we see the world not as it is, but as we are. And so as we evolve and change and, alter what we're looking. Then how we see the world alters too. Back in the old days when we were wandering around, there were saber tooth tigers that we had to worry about eating us. a wrestling lead was like, it's that danger.

And that's where our fight, our flight, response comes from in long ways and then involved because we notice different things. Because of that. So we can train our brain to be able to notice ideas or concepts. So like I would use to, I used to train clients, Hey, this is person that I'm working for. if you're a programmer, you notice a certain pattern like, oh, that's gonna not fit in the whole thing.

That's gonna be bug my friends who are intelligence officers, they can, they say that, they can spot a lie because there's a pattern and then there's a change in the pattern. and so we program our brains in certain ways to notice certain things. That's why people, as they get experienced in a position or a mindset, they become better and better with it. You went to engineering school.

What was your brain like at 18 when you started, when you just had your sheer raw power versus what was it like as when you hit your senior year when you had learned how to think like an engineer? what's it like down the road?

If you don't have that basis, you can't reach those higher levels worth of thinking. A man can't stand, he can't fight, can't fly.

I've won titles, you can see one of my trophies back there and all this sort of stuff. But it's a constant process of trying to improve, of trying to get better, of trying to understand more. And as a scientist, the more you know, the more you don't know. Because the area of our uncertainty on the edge of our knowledge continues to expand.

And so being comfortable with that and yet at the same time being fascinated and pushing and growing the same way that a little kid is exploring in the world, if you can maintain that, you're gonna be really happy with. Are there frustrating months? Absolutely. Oh, this program's not working. that thing did go out to the clients. my kids spill stuff all over the place. My ex-wife's did this. my ankle's messed up so I can't run, but those go again.

If you have a strong enough why you can overcome it. How, if those are all just, okay, this isn't just something else for us to figure out and get through in the overall process. And then as Richard Frankl talked about in Search for Meaning, you know that moment when the rainbow is crossed the sky and you're like, and so if you're chasing happiness, it's always gonna be just beyond your grasp.

But if you're loving what you're doing, you're going to find that happiness actually is threaded through everything that you're doing. , Amin Ahmed: have you always been this optimistic? For the most part, yeah. I mean I've had obviously had some, not great periods like during my divorce or recovering from injury or like when my mom was sick and dying from cancer. Cause that stuff sucks But you have to basically embrace the Stockdale parallels, which as Jim Collins talks about, is life suck.

We can get through it. It's a very Irish sort of thing. you know what? We might die tomorrow, but we'll be able to enjoy it. It's not fatal. It's fixable. that chunk of code got deleted. it's a chance to make it better. Oh, I can't find this. You know what? We'll solve it. Oh, the computer's not working quite right. All right, so we'll do an audio call instead of a video call. So it's having that resiliency in just being able to know, all right, doesn't matter. We're gonna get through it.

During that time, I'm newlywed. I'm home, I'm studying for exams, and I ended up having, because of law damage that I had accumulated over time with martial arts and all that. I ended up having this as gross, a, testicular contortion and basically spun around and choked itself off and died. I had to drive myself to the hospital to have surgery.

And when I woke up the next day and they're talking to me, they basically told me I had a choice between having kids or my dream of fighting in the Olympics. And so at that point it's no. All right, there's no real choice. And I've got three kids, my hooligans and I sometimes, when they're really under my skin, it's you know what? I could trade you for a gold medal

Having the kids was more important, so it because they were not close in terms of the value, because being a good father was so much more important to me. I just made that decision. And so a lot of the other things I've had to do, I have two special needs kids. My oldest and my youngest. Are both on the autism spectrum. My youngest is adhd, my oldest is bipolar, so I've had to deal with all these sort of things for roughly the past 13 years on top of everything else.

And so I literally, my goal be a good dad. Who before, COVID hit and everything and divorce my life was get up at four o'clock in the morning. I wasn't training at that point. Really. I could get 15 minutes of training in, cause I had to work until I had to get the first kids up, get 'em off to school, then get the second one up because they were on different school schedules and so 8:40 he'd get on the. I could start working, then I'd have to be done with work by 2:45 when the kids got home.

I'd be in full bed mode from then until 8:30 when they went to bed. I had to have kids three different places every single day, plus make the food, supervise the homework and all that. Cause my wife was traveling everywhere at that point. And then I could get back the work mode. So I'd work from 8:30 till midnight to get at four o'clock in the morning to repeat. Why did I do that? Because what was the most important thing?

Being a good dad, being a successful business owner was important, but not quite as important. So I did what I had to do for that because that's where my priorities lie. At that point. Now your priorities will shift. My kids are now older, so they don't need me quite as much and all that, so I can work more. I've got the opportunity to be more flexible with things. So you do the best that you can at that point with the overall goals in mind.

So that's stuff that I enjoy. And so it's one of these things that helps create that balance overall.

None of us are perfect, but we need to work on polishing those different aspects of ourselves. To be able to present the full beauty, the full, jewel to the universe, and all too often people are just working on one or two of those faces as opposed to trying to work on many of them, which makes you that much better and makes you that much more brilliant and valuable.

There's all these negative pressures. So if I can, through my writing, through being on, discussions like this with you, Amin, radio programs, people buy my books, coaching, whatever, be able to reach out and positively impact a hundred million people, then what that does is that creates a hundred million little nodes of positivity. And we all know about the butterfly flatnet swings and creating a hurricane someplace else in the world. Or if we create a hundred million positive.

Of goodness, of positivity, of people helping other individuals out. If we could do that, then we can literally bend the curve of what's going on in societies today and make the world a much better place. And it's not through these huge movements, as Gandalf says, it's through the quiet actions of everyday people. So the little things, so one of the things I want your listeners to do, go smile at five people. The reason why is when you smile, it decreases the cortisol in your own system.

And it increases your dopamine, makes you happier, makes you slightly more intelligent. But because of mirror neurons in the brain, what happens is if I smile at you or if I laugh and get you to laugh, then suddenly you've gotten that gift also, you're healthier, you're happier because of something that I did, and it cost me nothing other than a couple of seconds. And if it's going something that's just happening in the normal course of affairs, it's not even costing me part of my life.

It's additive because when you laugh. You slow down the aging process, so every time you laugh, you basically add on that much time to your life. And so I've helped give you that gift. And if you can now give that gift to half dozen other people, what's that gonna do? I don't know. We can't necessarily measure it, but we can feel it.

For people to be able to help themselves out, and I recently launched a 28 day coaching program where every single day it's a little bit of reinforcement and guidance and some accountability around it to make sure that you're growing and developing, and people who are going through that program are doing things like.

Giving up smoking and finishing projects that they had put on the shelf for six months or a year and spending a little bit more time with their kids and working out a little bit more. So it's micro improvements that ultimately help change the curve of their life to a much better place.