← The Martell Method w/ Dan Martell
The Martell Method w/ Dan Martell
How to actually be consistent and do hard things (just copy me)
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Being consistent and doing hard things is actually pretty easy. And I'm not going to tell you to just be more disciplined. That actually doesn't work. It's about following a simple formula that makes you more consistent. I've built and sold three companies, scaled past a hundred million in revenue and completed a half dozen Ironman races. None of that happens without being super freaking consistent. And the first step to do that is deciding who you are. Welcome to the Martell Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a hundred million dollar empire and being a Wall Street Journal bestsel. This podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate. And make sure you don't miss anything by subscribing to my newsletter@martell method.com. You don't have a consistency problem, you have an identity problem. Ask yourself this question. Who do I need to become to achieve that body weight? Who do I need to become to be successful? Who do I need to be? See, once you've identified that, then you'll know what to do and what to avoid. Most people say I want to lose weight versus who do I need to become to lose 50 pounds. Or in my world I would say release 50 pounds. When I decided to get visible abs, I had to ask myself that question. Who is that? How do they act? How do they show up? How consistent are they? What are their habits? How do they eat when they go to a restaurant, when they travel? So you almost have to act like the person who's got the results before the results ever show up. I used to go to the gym. Cool. But I wasn't working out the right way because I didn't have the identity of the kind of person that would do that. And it's more than that. It's the self belief, it's the feeling worthy. And until you flip the identity of the kind of person who would feel like they deserve, who would feel like they're worth, who would feel almost entitled to that goal. It's hard to achieve it. And I use the 300% rule, essentially is have 100% clarity of the identity of what you want. Have 100% belief that you can do it right because you have to believe it. And then 100% of the time you got to hold that belief with that clarity. If you can do that, you will become that person. So never forget this. You don't get what you want, you get who you are. If who you are isn't getting the results, it's time for an upgrade. Now, once you decide your identity, we need to build on that. Because telling yourself, I am this, I am that won't get you anywhere if you don't make some real changes to your life. And to do that, we need to design our environment. Your environment is either working for you or against you. It's either supporting your dreams or making it really hard to win. We want to design things to make it easy for us to do the right thing and make it feel absolutely inconvenient and hard to do the wrong thing. So, for example, putting your clothes out to go to the gym the night before next to your bed with everything ready to go with the car and the alarm and everything set up where you just like, stumble out of your bed and and end up in the gym is a good move. Taking all the snacks that you would normally eat when you're just feeling tired or you want to relax and putting them in the basement so you have to, like, go into some weird little crawl space to grab those snacks that are in your house. That makes it hard. Better yet, how about you don't buy them? At one point, I wanted to read more. I knew that the problem was is that sometimes I didn't have a book that was interesting or I had the book that I bought and it wasn't with me. So I made a simple decision. I made an investment to make it wildly easy. I bought three Kindles. And I know some of you guys are thinking that's a bit much. What happened is I put one next to my bed, one downstairs in my morning chair, and then I put one in my travel bag. That way I always had a digital Kindle that was synced up that I could never forget so that I was always one step away. My environment made it easy for me to read more. A long time ago, my friend Scott said this to me. He said, it's easier to avoid the dragon than to slay it. A lot of decisions. I don't want to make blue shirts. Guess what? Never have to make that decision. Let's not make the requirement that we're in a good headspace to make a good decision. Let's just avoid the dragon. So here's how you design your environment in three quick steps. First, go grab your phone, open your notes app. Really simple, and just write down the last habit that you were trying to build and why you stopped. Just one sentence. Two, look at what you wrote and ask yourself what made it hard. Now remove that friction to make it easy. Maybe you want to go to the gym More. So get your clothes ready. Maybe you want to commit to somebody else so you have somebody that's they're waiting for you. If you're spending too much time on your phone, maybe you put your phone in a different room so it makes it hard to go grab in the morning. Or you install an app that blocks you off of your social apps in the first place. That'll make it really hard. Maybe you want to eat better. So you decide to get meal prep. So you invest in having somebody cook for you. Pay, you're going to pay attention. Maybe you take your snacks and you put them in another room or you give it to your neighbor, you know, and now you got to go to your neighbor's house and ask them for your fricking snack. Eight o' clock at night when you shouldn't be eating anymore. Make it hard, make it embarrassing. Make it tough on you. Essentially, you want to make it so easy it's hard not to, and so hard you feel stupid for doing it. And then number three, open your calendar and block the exact time you're going to do this tomorrow. What are you going to do? What are the decisions? Put it in your calendar and just show up and commit to it. That's it. When there's nothing to decide anymore, there's nothing to quit. You just commit to it. Now you know it's in your calendar and you make it happen. Before we get back to the episode. If you want to jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martel Method newsletter. It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness and business in less than five minutes a week. Find it@martell method.com all right, so we got your identity defined. You've set up your environment to work for you, not against you. Now how do you actually stick to it? Now, it might feel a little scary, but. But you have to make it public. The truth is, nobody would notice if you just quit tomorrow. If you didn't tell anybody. Once real people are in the picture and you tell them, everything changes. There's nothing that people want to avoid more than being seen to fail in other people's eyes. A public commitment turns a wish into a debt. You owe somebody something else. This story is kind of crazy, but it happened. So I've got Jen on my team who decides she doesn't like the way she looks. Her words, not mine. So she comes to the team and she says, I want to change my life. I want some accountability. So My goal is to lose 20% body fat within five months. Now, if I do it, I'm going to give myself the gift of going to Bali. It's a country I've always wanted to go for. If I don't, I need you guys to hold me accountable, and I have to get fired. She put her job on the line. Real stakes. Do you think she missed the workout? No. Do you think she didn't do meal prep, went and got a DEXA scan? Like, really went all in? No, because she knew if she didn't hit it, she wouldn't be able to work at the place she loved. And if you look at the gen that came to us with that idea back then to how she looks now, she's a completely different person that enjoyed her time in Bali. Another way to think about it is the more you share your goals, the more you enroll other people to see them happen. So it's yes, it's about public accountability, but it's also that you communicate your future. Everybody knows that Gary Vee wants to buy the New York Jazz. Will he do it? He actually doesn't care. He. He just wants to hold that as a potential truth. And I guarantee every day he gets asked 17 times a day, how close are you? How close are you? How close are you? That level of accountability is key. See, the truth is, most people aren't consistent because the only person who would care if they stopped is themselves. We'll always do more for other people if we make commitments to them to stay consistent than we'll ever do for ourselves. So telling people actually makes it really powerful. So here's how to keep yourself accountable in three steps. Don't run away. We're going to do this together. 1. Pick a big reward. I'm talking a trip, a purchase, something you've always wanted but you would not give yourself permission to get. Okay. Something real. If you hit your goal, you get it. No guilt, and you're allowed to dream big. Number two. Now pick a big, just as big consequence. Just like Jen saying, I can't work here and I really don't want to get fired. She put it on the line for me. When I decided to get visible abs, I decided to make the consequence that I had to enter in a fitness competition, as is on the date, if I didn't hit my goal, I'm talking speedo on stage to have those photos captured for the rest of my life. Nobody wants to visualize that. A simpler example is Maybe you give 500 bucks to a friend or a Thousand dollars to a friend, or 5,000, whatever would be meaningful to you. And if you quit, they get to keep it. Maybe you give it to a person you don't even like. That would probably sting more. And number three, tell someone today, like right now, if you have a decision to make a goal. Text one person right now and say, I'm doing this thing for this long. If you want to level it up, post it on your socials, post it on Facebook, tell your community any story, any video, whatever it is. Once people know, then quitting actually costs you something. But don't just tell them the goal. Tell them the reward and the consequence, because then they'll get enrolled with you. You might inspire other people to do the same thing. That's been my experience. Now, look, you can do everything we talked about, define who you are, design your environment, tell everyone in the world about your goals and still give up. Because most people forget about this last concept. And it's to let time do the work. Let me explain. It's not about doing more. It's about doing it for longer periods of time. See, most often we compare ourselves to other people. We compare our chapter one to their chapter 13. They've just been doing it longer. The people crushing it aren't doing 10x more. They're maybe doing 10% more. For example, you might be 80% consistent with your meals. If you get to 90%, all of a sudden now you get results. Another example is 1% better every day. Now, it doesn't sound like much, just 1% better every day. But that's a 37x growth in a year. The question isn't, can I do this? It's can I do this long enough? One of the guys I look up to, Naval Ravikant, has this incredible quote, and he just says, be patient with results and impatient with actions. Move with a sense of urgency. But at the same time, allow yourself to breathe. That things are just going to take time. When I started shooting YouTube videos, I made a commitment to myself to do it for 10 years. When people heard that, they're like, that's wild. And guess what? I have never missed a week. Now it's on year 11. I found some steam, I found some momentum. So when people see my numbers and they're like, oh, my gosh, two and a half million followers, that's crazy. You didn't see what I did. You just see what I've got. Some ideas need time to work, but you need to be doing the work in the time. It's like when People meet me and they're like, oh, my gosh, where do I find a Sam? My creative director? So he might seem young. He's 24 now, but he started when he was 14, editing videos, showing up every day, getting a little bit better, learning iterating, exposing himself, getting around other people that are going to share big ideas with him. Some people think it's a linear thing, but it's not. Over time, if you're consistent and you show up, it eventually goes exponential. One time I was talking to one of my friends, John Maxwell, the leadership goat, and I was asking him about his bestselling book. He wrote 21 irrefutable laws of leadership. It was his 13th book. He's 73 now. He's written 92 books. And I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, what a legacy. And he's like, I just did one thing for 52 years. It's actually not that special. He's just a guy that picked a thing and showed up and never stopped. When you see these people and you hear my story or other people and you think they. They must have a special gift or they must be a genius. No, they're not. I mean, for me, when I heard that, that's when I realized the people I admire most aren't more talented. They just didn't quit before compounding did the work. So there's four things you need to do to make sure you never quit again. Number one, write that one thing that if you did it, every single day, would make everything else in your life easier. Is it waking up early? Is it working out consistently? Is it being on time? Is it writing down your task for the day? Just decide a habit that you can commit to for the rest of your life. I know it sounds like a big question. You can do it. Two, underneath it, right today's date, that's day one, because you're going to do it today. The third step is just one simple rule. Never miss two days in a row. You can miss one day. Look, we're all human. That's fine. Ms. Two days. Now that's a bad streak. That's my only rule. I've never missed more than two days in a row of not going to the gym. Two days of not eating clean, Two days of not being grateful, sharing ideas, the things and the habits that have stacked in my life. I've just made a commitment that I'm allowed to miss something, but to do it two, I start a downward spiral. Most people, when they realize they put on 30 pounds, it's not like they woke up and they just put on 30 pounds. That spiral started a long time ago. They just didn't have a rule in their life that stopped them from starting the downward spiral. And number four, break it into chapters. So for me, day one to 90, that's milestone number one. And that's just survival. We're going to do it ugly, we're going to do it hard. We're going to just do it draft. We're just going to get it done. Okay? It doesn't have to be pretty. Just show up in the gym. If you walk in the door and walk back out, I'm still giving you a high five. Day 91 to 365, that's milestone number two. That's about building momentum. Now, we've been consistent for a year now we're going, now we're feeling this right? Day 365 to a thousand. I call that milestone number three, which is compounding. That's where you start to get the exponential growth out of that habit. And the trick is celebrate each milestone like it's a big moment. Like, I need you to be like, I did it for 90 days. I did it for 3 65, I did it for a thousand. Like, if you don't post it and tag me in that and let me know, I'll be very upset. I want to celebrate you. So now you have the formula. You know who you are, you know your environment does the work for you. You have people watching you and you've got the mindset to stick with it. The only question left is, will you actually do it? Like, there's only four things, and I know most people will just watch this and do nothing, but let's not be most people. So leave a comment below and let me know what's that one thing that you're committed to today, the thing you wrote down with today's date posted below. Thanks for listening to Martel Method. If you like this episode, could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review? This helps us get the podcast more ears and helps more people get unstuck, reclaim their freedom and build their empire.