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For the first time ever, I am thrilled to say we have an official sponsor for the Dirt Talk podcast, and that's Ariat. I've worn Ariat boots on every job site I've visited over the years, traveling in them across five continents. More importantly, I have yet to find a single project where working folks, unlike me, are not wearing Ariat boots and workwear in every condition imaginable. And there's really good reason for that, and that's because it's phenomenal stuff. And the more I've learned about Ariat and the company, the more I've loved their brand. So with this, Ariat is offering any dirt talk listener 10% off their next Ariat order at ariat.com dirt talk that's 10% off boots, jeans and workwear@arianiat.com dirt talk or at the link in this episode's description. With that, let's get to the show. I am asked how I do what I do a lot because of my schedule. I think for the most part I bounce around a lot. Got back from Japan last night and here we are at work. I'm not exactly dialed in. I'm not 100% right now, but I'm good to go. I'm good enough to be here with you all and do my day. That I need to do, do the things I need to do. Despite the travel. And the answer to how I do what I do and keep up with the schedule that I keep up with is rooted entirely in habits. I've developed habits over probably the past 10 years, very carefully. I have built one after another. I have honed each, I have added some, and it's got me to a really, really good place. Right now I think I'm as good as I ever have been, which is super exciting. So this episode is not dedicated to telling you what to do. This is purely based on what has worked for me and how I've got there. So that's all we're gonna talk about today, is the habits that have worked really, really well for me. To begin, I growing up and into high school and into college. Early, early into college, I will say I always dabbled with exercise, with reading, with eating well. And this is because I was building upon a pretty solid foundation. I grew up going to a private school called Phoenix Country Day School, kindergarten to eighth grade. Then I went to public school for high school. But kindergarten, eighth grade, my parents put me in the school to get the best education possible and to be around high achieving people. I didn't really understand it at the time I thought like any kid, I thought the world I was in was just reality. Which was, was not at all the case as I've become older. But because it was a private school, everybody's parents were a pretty big deal. All the dads were really high, high accomplished individuals. And so when I'd be over at my friends houses, I'd be around these, these really high level people. And my parents also did very well as well. So I got to unknowingly see how high achieving people live and doing what children do. I somewhat emulated that as I grew up and became a young adult. So I saw exercise was very important with those I was around. So exercise became important for me. You eating pretty well? I, I didn't eat super great in high school, early in college, but I ate well enough not to extraordinary excess. Reading books were always all over the place. So I, I did a lot of reading and I had a really nice foundation from a habit standpoint. I wasn't rocking and rolling, but I was building upon when I got into college a foundation that most, most people don't have. And I didn't totally appreciate that at the time. I definitely did not appreciate it when I was a child, but now I appreciate it more than ever. I was given an extraordinary head start. And I always have the rough phrase, it's a little bit, it's translated a little bit differently. But the phrase that's always in my head is to whom much is given, much is required. I was given a lot growing up and so I better do something with it or else shame on me. So that's a little bit to preface how I got into thinking about habits, building upon them to start. But then in 2019, I got really serious about habits. This was a few years into graduating college and this is when I started something called 75 Hard, published by Andy Frisella. I started following Andy in 2015 when he had the MF CEO Project, a podcast, his original podcast. I had found him because I had followed some car pages and they first form his company was a sponsor of this car rally, the Gold Rush rally. And I think he even drove maybe a Lamborghini in one of the rallies. So I start following this guy, he has a bunch of cool cars, he's posting a bunch of car content. And for me as a young male, it's like a drug. I couldn't get enough of it. I'm so. I've always been a big fan of cars growing up. I love cars. So anybody within the car game is Is is awesome to me. So I started following this guy. He has this business podcast. I start listening to the business podcast. I start learning a ton. And as I went through college again, I was pretty consistent with exercise. I was exercising every week while in college. I was pretty consistent with diet. It ebbed and flowed. I didn't drink my first few years of college, which was pretty unique. I was the only person within my world that didn't do that. I'm sure there were others, but I. I didn't see a whole lot of it, which was unique. I did a lot of reading while I was in school. And so again, I had this base that I started to build upon within college as I became more of an adult. But 75 hard in 2019 really started to cement the value of doing little things every day. I didn't totally understand the value of it until the 75 hard program. Once I did that, I was like, all right, cool. I totally understand the value of building these little. Putting these little blocks on top of one another every single day. It's not about grand slams. It's about incremental progress. It's about just swinging, getting on base. If you do that every day and you string those weeks together, you string those months together, you string those years together, you start to build something very extraordinary. And I bought into this very quickly because that's how I saw it play out for everybody accomplished that I had ever met. I was not under the impression that these accomplished people were geniuses. I was not under the impression that these accomplished people had had one lucky break and they got to where they were because they. They hit a home run. It was purely because they had done the little things for long enough to build extraordinary results that thanks to compound interest. So I subscribed to this wholeheartedly in 2019. And from there, I started to dial everything in. And I think I started to dial everything in at this point as well, because it gave me a higher reason to be disciplined. I assigned a why to all of this. Like, why? What is the point of doing the little things every day? What am I working towards? And this was a year into starting the business. So I was a year into build with. And I knew, hey, if I want to go accomplish what I want to accomplish with this business, I want to go help build the dirt world's next generation. I'm serious about this. I want to build a serious organization that creates some change in the world. I need to be serious. I need to be worthwhile. I need. I need to be a Worthy leader. And so I better get disciplined, I better build some serious habits or else it's not going to happen for me. And that is why. So the healthier I am, the better I am, the more experience I can have, the more effective I'll be within the company and the better off the company will be, the better off our team will be, the industry will be, I will be. So first and foremost, I learned that you have to assign a why. You have to assign a why to doing these things, to getting healthier, to eating better, to exercising when you don't want to, to reading, to whatever it is. Because a lot of days you're not gonna wanna do it. A lot of days it's gonna be really hard. Last night I got home after traveling for 20 hours from halfway around the world from Japan. And the first thing I did was exercise because I hadn't exercised. I exercised before I started traveling and then right after, I didn't want to, but I knew I needed to get my body right last night to feel a little bit better so that I would perform better today. I'd be able to record something like this today. So first and foremost, if you don't have a why, it's really hard to have a significant sense of discipline. I found my why has been building a great business and team that helps change and affect an industry I really love. That's very important to the world. Your why is probably completely different. It could be your family, your career, your, your sport. I don't know what it is. But having that is, is absolutely essential because you can then lean on that in those days or times where you don't really want to do things, because those times are inevitable. It's also important to say, before I dive into the specifics, that I've not done all of this at once. I think that's a huge mistake people make as well. They want to go make a change, so they try to change way too much. Like January 1st, I'm going to do XYZ and then ABC and then 1, 2, 3. It's just too much. And most of the time they don't fall flat on just some of those things. They fall flat on all of those things. And so I have added habits one at a time, very carefully. And I've honed habits one at a time very carefully. And this has been probably about a 10 year process. I got serious in 2019, but I was dilating it before that. So I'd say for about 10 years now I've been working on this Very incrementally. And that's why I am where I am. Start somewhere, don't start building a bunch all at once. It just doesn't work that way. And some people might be further along than others. That's okay. It just matters where you're at personally, it doesn't matter where other people are at. But this is not something I've done overnight. This has been a 10 year process that's got me here. And I could not be more excited about the next 10 years because if I'm here right now, the next 10 are gonna be pretty damn fun. So jack it off to get into it. Starting with exercise. I work out every single day. I exercise every single day, seven days a week. There is not a single excuse regarding location, weather, my schedule, it has to happen. And honestly, making it non negotiable in a weird way makes it easier because there's never a day that I have to decide to exercise. I've removed the decision making from the equation which makes it, I think, a lot easier. I don't have to decide if I'm going to exercise today, I don't have to decide when my rest days are going to be. I know I'm exercising today. All that I have to decide is when I'm going to make it happen and how I'm going to make it happen. Which again I think is a lot easier than trying to play mind tricks. So that's what's been best for me. I exercise every day. It's non negotiable. I've done it every single day since 2019. I have not missed a single day. I will not miss a single day. It's just not gonna happen. I always, almost always work out first thing in the morning. Like I said earlier, I worked out last night, but I worked out in the morning before I left as well. Almost always I'm working out in the morning. There's some mornings though where we have to get up at like 2 or 3 and get a move on to where we're going. And so sometimes I'll prioritize my sleep over exercise because I'm just not getting enough sleep. And when that happens I'll do it later in the day, but it's gonna happen at some point within that 24 hour period. It's a non negotiable. It's almost always in the morning. It just works best for me. I wake up and within 15 minutes of waking up I am either at the gym, I'm on the bike, I'm exercising, I'M running, I just get it done with right away. The benefit for me doing it first thing is I view it like wringing out the rag. It gives me a lot of energy and it helps me be a lot more even for the rest of the day. I think naturally I'm a very calm and level headed person, but exercising first thing in the morning just gets that last bit of unease of human nature out of me in a way so that I can be as cool as a cucumber for the day. That's not to say I don't have my moments. I get worked up still, I get pissed off still, I get anxious still. But I would say it's a lot less than if I was not working out. And so when someone says they're feeling anxious or they're having these overwhelming feelings, the first thing I want to ask is what do you do for exercise? Are you getting it out of your system? Because we were wired to work hard physically. That's how the human body developed. Now in this world we live in, it's very comfortable, it's very sedentary. So you have to create that hard work through, through exercise. And if you're not, I think a lot of things go haywire within your body. So it's almost always first thing in the morning for me. Typically right now it's between a four to six mile run. When I'm traveling, my, my average is about 4 miles. This past week in Japan, I was doing about five miles a day. When I'm here in Nashville, especially on the weekends, I'll do longer runs, you know, between 6 and 12 and longer depending on my, my regimen. But typically it's only a four mile run. About 30, 35 minutes is, is all I'll do. I'm, I'm not going crazy here. I'm just working out. Even if it's just a few miles, it's either running 45 minutes of high intensity strength, which is what I did this morning in the gym, especially when I'm home, or longer swims and bike rides because I am in triathlon world right now. So it's a lot of running, it's a lot of strength, it's a lot of swimming, it's a lot of cycling. And I think that's important too is I'm doing stuff I really enjoy. I love going to the gym. Now. I typically love running. Not always. I've really loved riding the bike. Getting into cycling, I fucking dread going to the pool. But once I do it, I feel like a million Bucks. And so I'm doing what, what I enjoy doing from an exercise standpoint. And I also wanna point out it's not me just constantly abusing myself if I'm sick or if I only have a few hours sleep, or if I'm just really sore, or if I'm injured, which I have been. It could be a walk, and it has been a walk a lot of times. Or if it's snowing, I'll just go for a walk in the snow. Or if I'm traveling all day, I'll go for a walk in the airport for 30 minutes, 45 minutes. Or burpees on hotel room floors or, you know, 45 minutes of deliberate stretching. And so I'm not always doing something super high intensity every day. The most important thing for me is moving my body. And so sometimes my body needs slow movement. It needs 45 minutes of stretching. That's great. That's great. I will do that. I will listen to my body, but I'm always doing something. I'm a big believer in active recovery. So it's walking, it's stretching, it's stuff that's a little lower impact that can make a big difference too. But it's seven days a week. It's non negotiable. It's what works for me. So that is exercise. I start with that one because it is so damn important, so damn important. And I could not imagine my life without it right now. So exercise, non negotiable every day. It's what I love to do. Reading. Next up, like I said, I was always doing reading, but then 75 hard. A big piece of it is reading 10 pages a day. And so I developed the habit of reading 10 pages every day. I think a big mistake people make is, especially with New Year's resolutions, is that, hey, I'm gonna read 15 books this year. If I looked at a stack of 15 books on my desk, it would be extremely intimidating. I wouldn't know how to do it. It doesn't give me a plan. Maybe that works for you. It doesn't work for me. What is so much easier is so much simpler and faster to break down is 10 pages every day. If I read 10 pages every day this year, it's probably going to add up to about 15 to 20 books. And when you look back on the stack of books at the end of the year, you're like, holy smokes. I read a lot, but I didn't think about how many books I was reading. All I had to focus on was just Today, have I read my 10 pages again? It's non negotiable. It's seven days a week for this one. I typically read in the evenings before bed. Uh, but if I'm traveling, I'll read on the plane. If I know I'm gonna be busy in the evening, I'll read in the morning. I'll get up a little earlier and get my, get my reading done ahead of time, which is what I was doing last week while I was in Japan. I knew I had dinners in the evening and I knew I was gonna be tired when I got back from the dinner. So in the morning, when I was more awake and active, I got my, my reading done. I say ten pages a day. Then I read Ed mylett's power of one more. So then I made it 12 pages a day. So technically I'm reading 10, but I'm always going to 12 or a little bit more. Every once in a while when I'm just really slogging, really tired, I'll do just the 10. But typically it's between 12 and 14, 16. Sometimes it'll be 50 on a weekend if I have more time. I always read books I find interesting. There's too many books out there and if a book sucks, I'll stop midway through. I have no problem doing that now. And I don't read just for the sake of reading. I read to again learn about what I want to learn about. So last book I read was about US history. It was like 700 pages on US history starting from World War I and ending in the Iraq War. Before that, it was a guy that has studied mega projects and why they fail and why they go over budget all the time and what he's learned as a result. Right now I'm reading about the most important materials in the world and how supply chains work. So it's, it's always non fiction for me. I just want to learn. I don't know if, if, if it really matters what you read. I just think reading is, is good thing to do. It makes you a better communicator. It gives you more words to use. It allows you to spell more effectively. It allows your mind to wander a little bit. I think to be a little bit more imaginative, to be a little bit more, well read is a pretty good thing. And I'm always buying books just as people recommend them. As I find stuff that, ooh, that's interesting, or as I'm reading, they reference another book within the book. I'll always just actively buy books so Whenever I finish a book, I just go to my bookshelf and pick another book I want to read. I don't have to ever go to the bookstore. I always have. I mean, I have a mountain of books that I own that I haven't read yet, that I'm excited to read. And I like the process too, of like perusing my little library to see what I'm going to read next. But 10 pages a day, non negotiable stuff I find interesting. I've done it for years. And if you do it for years, you read a lot of books. So that's reading. Next one is writing. I carry a small lined notebook everywhere I go. And every day my rule is writing one page. It can be on anything. I can write anything on that page. Typically I write about what I did that day, what went well that day, what didn't go well that day, how I felt that day, who I talked to, maybe the exercise I did, where I traveled. It just programs into the day, five to ten minutes of time to reflect, which I think is super, super valuable. A lot of people just let life happen to them. I'm guilty of that as well. And so I've developed this habit, the system that even as life is going fast and happening to me, I can slow down and have five minutes, 10 minutes to the day. It takes really five minutes to just take a brief inventory as far as what the heck is happening. And this allows me to do better, learn faster, rather than just a bunch of life happening to me all the time. And sitting down on December 31, like what happened this year, I can break it down and I think I can be more effective. And by analyzing briefly each day, I can then do tomorrow a little bit better, the next day a little bit better, next week a little bit better, next month a little bit better. And I think I'm improving faster and I'm just being more thoughtful. And later in life I'll have a written record of my life, every day of my life, which I think is pretty damn cool. I haven't really leveraged it now because I'm still pretty young, 30 years old. But later in life I think I'll be really thankful for the boxes of notebooks that I will eventually have. So that is writing. So exercise, reading, and then writing one page every day. Next up, planning my days the night before. Every night before, I write out what I have to do the next day, I make a list. So Sunday night, last night, Monday, I. I look at my calendar. All right, here's what I have scheduled. I write it down on my notebook. And then I also question, hey, what are the critical tasks as well that I need to get done tomorrow to then push things a little bit forward? This has also been learned from Andy Frisello with his power list. And so Monday morning comes around and I got to the office this morning. I don't have to sit there and guess what I'm doing today. I have a plan. I open up my notebook, I look at my list, I execute the plan. I execute the list. I'm not winging it. I don't wing my days. I plan my days out. I review the week before the week happens. I review the day before the day happens. I write out what the heck needs to happen today. And I just cross one after the next, after the next off the list. If I get to the end of the day, everything's crossed off the list. I've won that day. Let's go. I'm on to the next day. This is so important. So important. I was winging my days until I started to very deliberately write down everything I need to do in the day. And now I've been able to accomplish so much more because I'm planning each day and this takes five minutes, if that just a few minutes put in the night before allows me to be so much more effective with my time. So after I've done with this podcast, I go to my notebook. I cross off this podcast. This is one of the critical things I needed to do today. There's no winning, winning, winning, winging things. So planning my days, huge. Getting next to eating. I eat very well. I view myself as an athlete. And that's because the traveling and the schedule I keep is extremely harsh. It's really harsh. And I'm not saying I work harder than anybody in the trades. I think everybody in the trades works way harder than I do. But I would also like to see some of the people that have given me shit, which I'm fine. Like, I deserve the shit. I'm sitting in an office all day today. Like, I don't work all that hard, but I would like to see those people try to keep up for a week when we're on the road. Because it's fucking brutal. It is so brutal. And so I better give myself every advantage possible so that I can perform as well as possible. And eating is one of those easy things. If I'm not eating well, I. I am really screwing myself. So I better eat top notch so that I can perform in a top notch manner. So I view myself as an athlete and I'm not going out onto the field to perform against another team as a football player, but I am going onto my field every week to perform. I better perform. And I have all of these obligations now, even from a sickness standpoint, like, I can't necessarily afford to get sick as much now, so I better. And yeah, do I get sick? I do get sick because I'm coming into contact with all kinds of weird shit. I have shitty night's sleep. I'm not always eating perfect. I'm exercising a lot, which. Which sometimes brings my immune system down. But I better again give myself every advantage possible so that I'm. I'm. I'm not sick more than I should be, which. Which actually works out quite nicely. So food is my fuel and this isn't perfect, but a majority of my diet is protein, which is mostly right now, beef, fish, and elk, which is awesome if you have extra elk. I'm always looking for elk. Send it my way, please. Fruits, vegetables, a lot of rice. This morning I made protein pancakes with banana, egg, a little bit of buckwheat flour and a little bit of whole milk. A lot of like, whey protein as well. And then I almost always drink water. I never drink soda, I never really drink juice. Every once in a while I will, but I get my energy from other things like honey, like rice, fruit, etc. No processed food, very little processed food. And then when I'm traveling, it's harder, but it's very possible. And so maybe it's a little processed, like the, you know, fairlife core power, protein drinks from the gas station or beef jerky or a quest bar. It's not. It's not ideal, but it's the best decision I can make within that context. And it doesn't necessarily get me further, but it helps me to somewhat maintain where I'm at. But food is really important for me, and the further I've gotten, the more disciplined I've become with food, which is a great thing. And now over the past three, four or five months, I've been tracking everything every day with the first form app, which has been great, highly recommend it. And it's helped me understand how much my body needs, how much I'm getting, where I'm getting too much, where I'm not getting enough. It's been a great educational process tracking my food. And with that, I cook every meal as well. So when I'm home, breakfast, lunch and dinner, I cook at home. I know exactly what I'm Eating. I don't go out to eat because I enjoy cooking. I enjoy knowing exactly what I'm eating. And so that's helped me really lean into cooking at home instead of eating out. And I just do my best tracking when I'm eating out, when I travel. Last week in Japan, I was eating all kinds of weird stuff. I wasn't tracking food because it was just a little too cumbersome. But today, yesterday, tracking again, leaning back into it. Here we go. So that's food eating. It's huge. Then we get to alcohol. January 1, 2024, I stopped drinking entirely. I have not had a drink since. So it's been now 14 months, which has been great before that. Honestly, I didn't drink very much before maybe once a week, maybe once every few weeks, maybe once a month. I started to dial it back before I cut it off completely at the end of college, into the first years of business. I drank quite a bit. Definitely drank to excess, excess plenty of times. Like anybody else slept in the yard. I mean, it's just all kinds of dumb shit. But as my body started to feel better and better, I started to notice the effects of alcohol on my body, on my mind. And it was frustrating to me that I was intentionally making myself feel worse. And the question was then posed in my mind, why am I intentionally making myself feel worse? Is this worth it? For me personally, it wasn't. I also grew up around alcoholism. I've had a complicated relationship with alcohol. I'm not an alcoholic. I can pretty confidently say that I've never had an issue with alcohol. I've before gone a long time without drinking. I wouldn't ever drink every day. I've never drank consistently. But just because of that complicated relationship with alcohol as well, it was easy for me to say, you know what, I'm going to just rule this out. And it's been great. I don't for a moment regret it. It's made me feel a lot better. And I haven't really struggled socially with it, with the lifestyle of so no alcohol, and couldn't be happier about it. And we'll keep it going from. From here on. Making my bed is the next one. This is stupid. Simple. I just talked about this with the team last week. I heard William, Admiral William McRaven talk about this to Texas A and M years ago. You've probably seen a version of the speech. If you haven't, you've maybe heard about him talking about the importance of making your bed. And he basically says something along the lines of hey, if you want to change the world, start out by making your bed. And Jordan Peterson's also said something along these same lines, like, hey, all right, cool. You want to go change the world, you want to go enact, change, whatever you want to do. But you have dishes in your sink at home. Probably start first with the dishes in your sink. Start with your home before you tell other people how to live or you try to do other things, which is they're not the ones to figure this out. This has been pretty conventional wisdom throughout the history of humanity, but once I heard that explanation about making your bed, it made perfect sense to me and I started making my bed. So I started that in college. I wasn't always super consistent, but again, over the past five years, been very consistent. I made my bed this morning. I don't always make it honestly when I'm traveling, because I don't know why. I guess it's an excuse, but every bed's a little different, and I just don't get around to it. But when I'm home, I religiously make it every single morning. And it's just a little thing. It's. It's cool to have something accomplished first thing in the morning. And then when you get home, I mean, it could be a shit day, but you do feel better looking at a bed that's made and getting into a bed that's made rather than getting into a bed that looks like shit. So, big fan about making. Making my bed. I make it every day. It's. It's those little things that add up big time. On top of that, I keep things tidy. I keep my house tidy. I don't have dishes, I don't have laundry sitting around. Stuff's not out of place. I'm always picking up after myself. My desk here at work, it has a lot of knickknacks on it, but it's not dirty, it's not untidy. It's always tidy. Because I know this is, again, these. This is a little thing that adds up to a big thing in the grand scheme of things. And. And I have not. I have not come across very highly accomplished people that are a complete mess. They have their. They have their together. They're not living amongst chaos. They control what they can. And so you can't control life. A lot of times you can't control the world, you can't control the government, you can't control your neighborhood, but you can control clothes on the floor, dishes in the sink, your bed being made, and just reining in some of that chaos has allowed me to be more effective and has reduced some of the noise in my life, which. Which has just helped me to be better. So I'm very religious about keeping things tidy. Next, good sleep. This is very important. On average, I'm between seven and eight hours a night. I'm almost always between seven and eight hours. So people will say, wow, you must not sleep. It's like, no. I actually sleep quite a bit because I need to sleep to perform at the level that I do, and I view it extremely important. Now I don't have a wife and kids at home. I have way more control over my sleep than I probably will for the rest of my life. I'm trying to take advantage of that now, but sleep is the foundation again. Diet, exercise, sleep. If you don't have those things dialed in, I don't. Again, I don't know where I would be if I didn't have those things dialed in. So I'm religious about my sleep. I have a lot to recover from, and that's my recovery time. So I keep it cold, I keep it quiet, I keep it dark. And I've really dialed in my house to give me the best quality sleep possible. So it's really cold, it's really dark, it's really quiet. I love it. I sleep very well. I've been tracking my sleep. It's really, really great. Last night I slept great. So good sleep. I don't always have good sleep. When I travel, my sleep gets messed up all the time. Japan, 15 hours ahead, different time change. But I do what I can. And when I'm traveling, it's important to When I am traveling somewhere with a different time zone. When I start traveling, I transition to that time zone as quickly as possible. So if I'm supposed to be sleeping somewhere, I'll try to sleep on the plane. If I'm not supposed to be sleeping somewhere that I'm going, I'm not sleeping. I'm staying up so that I can. I can give myself the best shot of adjusting as quickly as possible. So when I was traveling here, I only slept on the plane when I was supposed to be sleeping in Tennessee last night. I got a full night's sleep when I was supposed to, woke up when I was supposed to, and it still will take me another day or two to really get dialed in. But I'm gonna give myself the best chance possible to get back on the sleep schedule I usually keep. Next is living below my means. This has been very important as a young person. I've never made a success. A significant salary at Buildwit, and I'd say my salary is not bad. Right now it's at $100,000, which is the most I've ever made here by a. By. By a substantial amount. I might actually gone. I might have gone over a little bit to like 105, 110, maybe even 115 for a year. Then I dialed it back. So the first few years I didn't pay myself. Then I started paying myself, I think around 50. Then I went up to 60, then 70, 75. And then maybe two years ago, went up to three years ago, two years ago, went up to 100, a little over, then dialed it back, and it's been at 100 since. It's been. It's been really good. I'm on a different program than most people. The more I take out of the business, the less there is to invest. All my eggs are in this basket, and I'm fine with that. It's a calculated risk I'm making. I like being all in. It's key to, to me making some of the decisions I've made along the way. But I live below my means. I live above somebody's garage. Right now. It's just a small studio apartment. I have gone beyond my means in the past. I've talked about it online. I felt guilty about it. I've dialed it back. Um, will I live more lavishly one day? Yeah, I probably will. I don't want to be living above somebody's garage for the rest of my life, especially when I have a family. But I know it's best for me right now to live this way, to then give myself the best possible future. Um, I live a really good life, but where I can reduce expenses, I do. And for me, if I can reduce my living expenses and have a little bit more to invest in my health, like better food, better supplements, you know, have a nicer bike for, for triathlons, etc. I'm going to spend the money there rather than on where I'm living or buying dumb shit. So that's been a big habit. Is spending and living below my means? I would not be where I am if I had been living pretty lavishly. And I wouldn't have been able to start the company as well, because in college, I worked all the way through college while I was in school and in the summers, so I was able with that to save up a lot of money. I wasn't spending a lot of while I was in school and Because I had that savings and because I had invested quite a bit and because I had invested some of the money my dad gave me for school, because I had scholarships, I then had a fair bit of money. I've talked about this at length on other episodes. A fair bit of money to start the company, which is then why I didn't have to pay myself for the first few years of business. I was able to live on savings and allow the money the company was making to stay within the company, to eventually hire people to grow the business, so on and so forth. So living below my means is big. Finally, we have what I consume, podcasts, social media, television. I watch like anybody else sometimes. I love watching, but I do my best to limit my intake. I'd say I try to be careful with what I consume. Again, I watch the same dog memes that a lot of people watch. Last night I was watching Penguin, which is a great show by the way, to just zone out after traveling for so long. But most of the time I'm listening to long form interview style podcasts or news style podcasts. So on the podcast front, my favorite right now is Breaking Points. It's great. It's just a great news podcast from both sides. Real AF with Andy Frisella, lots of Joe Rogan, lots of Tucker Carlson, and then a bunch of other stuff sprinkled in as well to try to give myself just as much context as possible. Like the other day I listened to the full interview with Trump and Zelensky in the White House. Rather than taking the sound bites and reacting, I wanted to listen to the entire hour of interviews so that I have, I had more context. And I don't do that with everything. But I was like, well, this is pretty important. I want the full context so that I can arrive at my own conclusions. And I listened to the full hour which, which was very, very helpful. And I think a lot of people I don't know would, would be feeling differently if they just listened to it at length without the additional commentary. But tv, you know, sometimes, a lot of times I'll listen to watch documentaries, like sports documentaries. I love, love, love, love sports shows. They just fire me up. Really motivated social media. I try not to follow a bunch of bullshit. I use the mute feature a lot and it's not against anybody. It's just to, to keep my, to keep me from scrolling. I'm not too good to scroll. I love scrolling. And so I've, I've, I've muted a lot of people to just limit what's on my feed to begin with to just protect myself. I don't dive into comments a lot on my posts. I dive into comments on other people's posts cause I think they're sometimes hilarious. But on my stuff, I stay away from that. Um, so I'm just. I'm limiting how much bullshit I'm consuming. On podcast social tv, you are what you consume. And I try to consume stuff that's gonna help me, that's gonna motivate me, that's gonna further where I wanna be, rather than just take or consume time for no benefit. So that's on the consumption front. And then finally, I think this year has been interesting because the. The habit that I've added this year is reading a little bit of the Bible every day. I have never been all that religious. I grew up going to church, got away from it pretty quickly as a young adult. I've never gone back to it, going to church, just. I'm not a fan of it. I haven't found the right one. I'm not a fan of just being around a bunch of other people singing the same tune. It's just. It's not for me. But the cool thing is you don't need to do any of that. I'm just wanting to learn and understand the. The Bible more. This year I've never actually read it. So this year I've been reading a little bit of it every day, which I've also enjoyed as well. I don't quite know what my takeaways are yet. I don't quite know where I sit on it right now, honestly. But I'm curious and it's provided a lot of context on some things and it's already helped me understand life and historical stories a lot better. So I've enjoyed that as well. That's been a newer habit. I added that at the beginning of this year. So I've been reading every day, just a little bit, five and 10 minutes. I've been using an app. It's like the Bible app. Chemo. My friend gave me the Bible app. And it just gives you, you know, a few verses every day to look through. And I'm doing the Old Testament right now. And it's been a journey, to say the least. So that is that those are my habits. Exercise, eating well, planning my days, sleeping, no alcohol, keeping things tidy, living below my means, being mindful of what I consume, writing every day, reading every day. If I. If I didn't say that, and I could not imagine my life without doing these things, it's been an incremental process. It's been a 10 year process to get here. But by making these little things non negotiable, I have made so much more progress over the past few years than I would have otherwise. And this is what has worked best for me. So I'm gonna keep doing it. Hopefully, maybe you have something to take away from this. If not, oh well. But hopefully you can learn something. Hopefully I was able to give you something to think about. But like I said, regardless, I'm gonna keep doing what I'm doing because it's working great for me. So with that, thank you for listening. If you have questions, if you have topics for consideration on future episodes, you can always write us dirt talkillwood.com we would love to hear from you. Please share the show if you're enjoying it and we will see you on the next one.