Optimizing what you can control can protect you from what you can’t. Your life is a series of interconnected systems that connect with other larger systems, which connect with even larger global systems. The farther away from you these systems are, the less ability you have to control them. However, by optimizing the systems you have the most control over, you can lessen the effect of those larger, uncontrollable systems on your life. Rob breaks these systems down into 3 orders: First Order syst...
Apr 10, 2023•24 min•Ep 94•Transcript available on Metacast Are you overwhelmed, or are you out of capacity? It’s time to change the way you think about being overwhelmed. No matter how much you have going on around you, it comes down to the amount of things you can handle at once. That is the limit of your capacity. When you run over your capacity, your mind essentially breaks. It drives you, without your consent, into irrational thought, poor decision making, and overreactions to stimuli. You try to do too much, you end up in a worse place, not a bette...
Apr 03, 2023•24 min•Ep 93•Transcript available on Metacast If you haven’t experienced Part 1, go back and check that out first. Rob is slinging completely unrelatable levels of optimization detail (unless you are an ultra-high performer!) for a second straight week. This episode is the continuation of a deep dive into his process, thinking, and output of an extreme level of living. We’re talking about an almost unimaginable quality of life. We’re talking quantified joy. We’re talking about an extraordinary pace of measured evolution as a human being. La...
Mar 27, 2023•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast *Unless you already consider yourself an ultra-high performer In the first episode of a two-part deep dive into Rob’s otherworldly personal optimization, he implores you not to listen to this unless you are an ultra-high performer ready to take the next steps toward true greatness. The information contained herein is so detailed, so next level, only those who are prepared to take this leap will enjoy it. That said, if you are prepared to do what it takes to perpetually evolve, quantify your exis...
Mar 20, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast The more you understand about your goals, the faster you can realize them. There is a very direct correlation between the holistic understanding of your goals and the speed at which they can be achieved. The more you know about every aspect of your goals, the more likely you are to bring them to life. An issue that many people run into is setting a plan to achieving a goal without full knowledge of the challenges that lie ahead, and only understand the faults in that plan when it becomes clear i...
Mar 13, 2023•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rob’s taking a break from dishing out his philosophy on creating a high quality, harmonious existence to talk with fellow Ohio native and fellow human optimizer, Lewis Howes. Lewis is, of course, a New York Times bestselling author and extremely popular podcaster ( The School of Greatness ). His new book, The Greatness Mindset: Unlock the Power of Your Mind and Live Your Best Life Today provides lessons and strategies to shape the life you want to lead. This is a fascinating conversation between...
Mar 06, 2023•50 min•Ep 89•Transcript available on Metacast That’s right. You are a system of systems that ultimately make up your entire existence. And with that realization comes enormous power and control over the way this machine operates. You have the ability to determine the design and function of the machine. You get to upgrade and optimize it over time until it works the way you want it to. At that point, you’re living the highest quality version of your life. Unfortunately, you didn’t come with an instruction manual, but in this episode Rob prov...
Feb 27, 2023•24 min•Ep 88•Transcript available on Metacast It is possible. And the keys to unlock this state are discipline, consistency and commitment to life mastery. To be clear, this is not something that will be achieved overnight. It requires a great deal of conscious effort to get to a place where your days are optimized to provide energy and your evenings are dialed in to provide a proper wind down and prepare you for yet another extraordinary day. Rob’s approach includes a super clean diet, devoid of alcohol, sugar and snacks, only lean protein...
Feb 20, 2023•24 min•Ep 87•Transcript available on Metacast Happiness is a hard thing to define historically. But Rob defines it as experiencing joy in the present moment on a consistent basis. Then you have a happy life. And it sounds simple, but a lot goes into achieving this much sought after state of being. Living a life with intention, ensuring you define your time to allow room to do things that bring you feelings of joy, creating a balanced and harmonious existence. The default way we tend to get in a rhythm tends to cram all of our joyful moments...
Feb 13, 2023•23 min•Ep 86•Transcript available on Metacast Goals can be boring and rigid and overly tactical. The constant pursuit of goals can become monotonous or downright mind numbing at times. In this episode, Rob shares his technique for taking all those goals and aggregating them under a common theme. He applies themes to years, and even decades to encapsulate those goals in something larger and more exciting. Even when goals are specifically linked to different aspects of your life such as family, health and work, they can still be tied together...
Feb 06, 2023•29 min•Ep 85•Transcript available on Metacast Make no mistake, it is truly a decision. It’s you drawing a line in the sand and deciding that from now on, your primary purpose will be to take control of every aspect of your life and drive them all toward your ultimate self. Mastering your own reality, your own being. Controlling your own wants, your needs and your actions. Rob is here in this episode to tell you the cold hard fact that no one else is going to save you. No one is ever going to take an action or give you information that will ...
Jan 30, 2023•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast We all know the feeling of friction, or resistance in our life. It’s those things or people that grate on us over and over. Recurring events or ongoing relationships in our personal lives or work that continuously drain our energy. We start to dread those things, and that has an emotional and energetic effect on the quality of our entire existence. The first step is to become attuned to the aspects of your life that are causing the friction, and try to work out why. Then figure out how you can a...
Jan 23, 2023•25 min•Ep 83•Transcript available on Metacast Changing with intention is all about taking control of inevitable change, doing so actively with a goal in mind, as opposed to waiting until it’s too late and change is forced upon you. Forced change is typically unexpected, and that puts you in a state of being reactive, which, depending on the scale of the change, can be incredibly disruptive to your life. If you can assess your life and decide where to make proactive changes, you maintain control and can guide that change into contributing to...
Jan 16, 2023•21 min•Ep 82•Transcript available on Metacast Habits get a bad rap. They’re often seen and expressed in terms of things you do on an ongoing basis that you shouldn’t. But Rob is here to tell you that we need to rebrand habits into things you do as an initial stepping stone to a much more profound way of living. The definition of a habit is: a regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up. If those habits are additive to your life and overall goals, and they’re hard to give up because they give you energy or improve yo...
Jan 09, 2023•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode, Rob explores an important thesis with respect to the mind. Our entire existence is both experienced and controlled by the mind. And he believes that the mind operates on 4 different levels, which determine our experience in the world. The present state of your mind on this spectrum affects your decision-making, your reaction to outside stimuli, your discipline, and many other factors. Level 1 - The Reactive Mind: The state of only dealing with what comes at you, trying to get th...
Dec 18, 2022•28 min•Ep 80•Transcript available on Metacast Being ultra present is not just about being in the moment. It’s about developing the skill to step way back and feeling every aspect of that moment. How does one experience the world in a deeper and more vibrant way? Rob really started thinking about this concept after he read The Greatest Secret book by Rhonda Byrne, which he distilled down to the idea that awareness is everything. When you shift your perpetual state from trying to think about all the things going on around you, and instead foc...
Dec 12, 2022•22 min•Ep 79•Transcript available on Metacast Personal capacity is both mental and physical. There are limits to both, and those limits are unique to every individual. The more you are able to understand what those limitations are for you, the better you can stay within your capacity and avoid feelings of being overwhelmed or exhausted or burned out. When we get overwhelmed, we question our decisions, we become erratic, we don’t think things through as well, and that can compound quickly. But when you operate within your capacity, you can r...
Dec 05, 2022•23 min•Ep 78•Transcript available on Metacast You can be wealthy and still not have financial harmony. This was the situation Rob found himself in, where he made money, but also spent money and felt the pressure of needing to continue to grind to continuously make more and more. It was when he designed and implemented the financial system he still operates on today that that pressure was relieved and he was truly able to work smarter rather than harder. Financial freedom comes back to security. The security of not having to work anymore if ...
Nov 28, 2022•27 min•Ep 77•Transcript available on Metacast But wait, how can a goal be a living thing? A goal has a lifespan, it evolves and changes, and it requires nurturing and care in order to make into the best version of itself. Just like us. Your goals are always shifting and moving based on new information and external factors beyond your control. Even the simplest goals can face unexpected complications, and the more ambitious goals can become exponentially more complex. That’s why being flexible and treating your goals not as a black and white...
Nov 21, 2022•25 min•Ep 76•Transcript available on Metacast Swinging back and forth from savor to sacrifice can be inescapable for people who are hard workers. When your personal identity is connected to your work ethic and output, and you are driven by success, you know sacrifice. Then, of course, when you have time to relax, it’s only natural to go to the other extreme. In either case, work or play, when you go too hard into one end of the spectrum, the inertia to move back to the other can take a lot of energy. It is balance and harmony that allows on...
Nov 14, 2022•23 min•Ep 75•Transcript available on Metacast We all know that we change over time, usually at an imperceptible pace, only noticing when we look back at who we were many years prior and see a stark contrast. We react to changes in external factors and that naturally shapes who we are over time. And it may seem that we don’t have any control over this process, but Rob is here to tell you that you absolutely do. Not only that, taking control over your own evolution is the key to becoming who you ultimately want to be. It is about getting your...
Nov 07, 2022•23 min•Ep 74•Transcript available on Metacast You can call him “Robstradamus.” Not because he is a seer or a prophet, but because he plans his life in a way that allows him to increase the probability of his desired outcomes. Predicting the future with relative certainty is all about designing elements of your life that are in your control in a way that mitigates the effects of the things you cannot control. Building in that future flexibility so that when things inevitably occur that are truly unpredictable, your plan can remain on course ...
Oct 31, 2022•22 min•Ep 73•Transcript available on Metacast Designing your time is not a one and done process. You continue to evolve, the world around you continues to evolve, and thus your time design must also evolve with it. One might think you get to a certain level and it’s all clear. However, the higher you go, the more opportunity you see and the more you are motivated to optimize your systems in order to maximize your energy. In this episode, Rob goes deep on his process for designing and redesigning his time to decrease friction, create optimal...
Oct 24, 2022•24 min•Ep 72•Transcript available on Metacast In order to build the life that you ultimately want to live, you must create a plan, write it down, and then set out on that journey. You achieve and evolve along the way as you make progress. But before you can write down a plan, there are many things you need to understand first, that can only be achieved by deep, honest introspection. You need to understand what motivates you and what brings you joy. You need to understand what you are truly capable of and be as objective as possible about wh...
Oct 17, 2022•23 min•Ep 71•Transcript available on Metacast Every decision, every action compounds and builds into a moment we call the present. In fact, the only part of time we can actively experience. While we cannot change the past, we can set ourselves up to experience increasingly better future present moments. But what good is the present if you’re not experiencing it to its fullest because you’re too focused on what’s next? In this episode Rob explores the ways in which you can live fully in the present while building the future toward more optim...
Oct 10, 2022•24 min•Ep 70•Transcript available on Metacast Just like a relationship, you understand more about where it’s going the farther you get into it. Everything is shiny and fun and optimistic until reality eventually sets in and unforeseen challenges reveal themselves. The true nature of the relationship then begins to reveal itself to you, and you better understand the long term implications of remaining in it, as well as the sacrifices and pivots you must make along the way. Only then do you know if it will actually fit into the life you want ...
Oct 03, 2022•20 min•Ep 69•Transcript available on Metacast You may or may not believe in the power of manifestation. You may or may not meditate. But Rob is here to show you living proof of the success he’s had and goals he’s achieved in the past four years since he began meditating and actively honing his manifestation skills. He believes you can have anything you want in life, but it begins with developing the skills that provide the power to manifest your reality. It’s not about saying you want a thing all the time, or wishing or hoping for something...
Sep 26, 2022•25 min•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast Your goals should not be too complex. The process of clarifying the path to achieve your vision and breaking it down into realistic major milestones is key to understanding how to get there, building belief as you check them off, and ultimately achieving the goal. This applies to anything you want to pursue in life or in business. Understanding that if you don’t hit the next milestone, there is no next one, and thus no finish line, allows you to focus on the immediate with clear intention. You c...
Sep 19, 2022•23 min•Ep 67•Transcript available on Metacast Measurement is a crucial tool on your way to success in any aspect of your life or business. But it’s equally important to measure what is important, not simply what is easiest to measure. Choosing the right aspects of something to measure and track provides a pathway to improving those aspects. Without proper measurement, it’s far more difficult to understand what needs improvement in order to help you reach your goal. Measurement is also a way to see clear progress over time, and progress is t...
Sep 12, 2022•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast How many times have you either said or heard “I can’t believe it’s already August!” or “Where did the year go?” Time has a way of passing so rapidly we don’t even notice until we look back and wonder where it all could have gone. What did we actually DO this whole time? Well, Rob knows EXACTLY what he did this year and EXACTLY where the time went. When it was used to be productive and push his goals forward when it was spent with his family, and even when it was wasted. And he’s never surprised ...
Aug 29, 2022•21 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast 
