Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / The Most CRITICAL Meta-Skill for Fitness Consistency (Alan Lazaros) | Ep 397

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The Most CRITICAL Meta-Skill for Fitness Consistency (Alan Lazaros) | Ep 397 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:01
  Philip Pape: If you know exactly what to do for your fitness, you understand progressive overload, you know your macros, you dialed in your sleep, but you still can't maintain consistency for more than a few months.
• 0:11
  Philip Pape: And when life throws you a curveball, whether that's travel, work stress, or just the mundane chaos of daily existence, your entire system collapses.
• 0:20
  Philip Pape: Then this episode is for you because today I am talking with Alan Lazarus, CEO and co-host of Next Level University, about something that most fitness content tends to ignore.
• 0:32
  Philip Pape: The meta architecture underneath your execution.
• 0:36
  Philip Pape: What do I mean?
• 0:37
  Philip Pape: Not another habit framework, not for motivation, but the engineering principles that determine whether your fitness survives contact with reality.
• 0:46
  Philip Pape: You'll learn why the gap between knowing and sustaining exists, how to build buffer into your system so life's demands don't derail everything, and the specific meta skills that separate people who stay consistent for decades from those who restart every new year.
• 1:05
  Philip Pape: And today we're going to look at why most people fail at fitness consistency despite having all the right information.
• 1:25
  Philip Pape: My guest is Alan Lazarus.
• 1:27
  Philip Pape: He is the CEO and co-host of Next Level University, a top 100 daily podcast with over 2,200 episodes now, reaching 175 countries.
• 1:38
  Philip Pape: And what I genuinely respect about this man is he also thinks like an engineer like I do.
• 1:44
  Philip Pape: He applies that mindset to human behavior.
• 1:47
  Philip Pape: And if you look at his history, at 26, he had a near fatal car crash.
• 1:51
  Philip Pape: It forced him to rebuild his approach to performance, to identity, to sustainable achievement.
• 1:57
  Philip Pape: We love that word here, sustainable, the long-term results.
• 2:00
  Philip Pape: And he's since built a multi-six-figure business helping high performers create what he calls meta systems or meta systems, however you want to pronounce it.
• 2:09
  Philip Pape: And that is the architecture underneath the habits, the motivation, the willpower that determine long-term consistency.
• 2:16
  Philip Pape: So today you're going to discover why such wide gaps often exist between knowing, doing, and sustaining your results, the specific components of a consistency architecture that hopefully can survive the messiness of real life and the meta skills that give you the highest leverage for long-term, lifelong results.
• 2:36
  Philip Pape: Alan, thank you, man, for coming on the show and doing this with me.
• 2:39
  Alan Lazaros: Philip, gratitude first.
• 2:41
  Alan Lazaros: Thank you for having me.
• 2:42
  Alan Lazaros: I respect you and the work that you do in the world deeply.
• 2:46
  Alan Lazaros: And you very much take your platform very, very seriously, which I appreciate.
• 2:50
  Philip Pape: Thank you so much for saying that because I think professionalism is really important.
• 2:54
  Philip Pape: And hopefully we all feed off of each other as we surround ourselves with the best and try to be the best.
• 3:00
  Philip Pape: And today I kind of want to talk about that for the user or the user.
• 3:04
  Philip Pape: Here I am thinking like an engineer, you and I talk about users for the listener and having this sort of system of meta skills.
• 3:10
  Philip Pape: I think you and your partner, uh Kevin, who's part of the podcast production team behind me as well, just want to give him a shout-out, Kevin Palmeri, on next level university.
• 3:18
  Philip Pape: You guys talk about meta skills and having a meta system.
• 3:23
  Philip Pape: And my engineering brain immediately thinks the higher order skills that drive consistency across a domain.
• 3:30
  Philip Pape: Maybe that's fitness, like we care about here.
• 3:32
  Philip Pape: Maybe that's business, relationships.
• 3:34
  Philip Pape: And I think of systems as opposed to specific methods, just like I think of principles as opposed to methods.
• 3:41
  Philip Pape: What do you mean when you talk about meta skills?
• 3:43
  Philip Pape: And then we're going to go from there.
• 3:45
  Alan Lazaros: Okay.
• 3:45
  Alan Lazaros: So there's a challenge skills sweet spot that have you ever read the book, The Art of Impossible, by Stephen Cotler?
• 3:53
  Alan Lazaros: Yes, I have.
• 3:53
  Alan Lazaros: Yes.
• 3:54
  Alan Lazaros: Okay.
• 3:54
  Alan Lazaros: Awesome.
• 3:55
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah.
• 3:55
  Alan Lazaros: So it's Stephen Cotler is one of the top researchers of flow and getting in the zone, which obviously is critical for fitness.
• 4:02
  Alan Lazaros: And he talks about the challenge skills sweet spot, how you can't get in the zone until you're in the challenge skills sweet spot, which basically means it needs to be outside your comfort zone and challenging and exciting enough to be outside your skills, but also within your comfort zone enough to where you're not.
• 4:16
  Alan Lazaros: Basically, stretch yourself as much as possible without snapping.
• 4:19
  Alan Lazaros: I think of skills as if skills are in the center, there are sub-skills underneath.
• 4:25
  Alan Lazaros: So, for example, effective communication is a skill, a sub-skill underneath that would be storytelling.
• 4:31
  Alan Lazaros: A meta skill would be thinking about how you're telling a story and the understanding the hero's journey architecture of a story.
• 4:40
  Alan Lazaros: So meta-skills are very cognitive.
• 4:43
  Alan Lazaros: Skills are something that you do in practice, deep practice.
• 4:46
  Alan Lazaros: I know you've talked about that on your show.
• 4:48
  Alan Lazaros: And then subskills are the little nuance things that you practice underneath a skill.
• 4:53
  Alan Lazaros: So I think of it from bottom to top.
• 4:55
  Alan Lazaros: It would be sub-skills, skills, meta skills.
• 4:58
  Alan Lazaros: And one of the things that I've found is when you see someone's career and their career is what you try to do, or what I try to do, there's a book called Decoding Greatness.
• 5:07
  Alan Lazaros: What I try to do is reverse engineer sort of their journey.
• 5:10
  Alan Lazaros: I think of it like a graph.
• 5:11
  Alan Lazaros: Okay, where did they start?
• 5:12
  Alan Lazaros: Where are they now?
• 5:13
  Alan Lazaros: And where are they headed?
• 5:14
  Alan Lazaros: And the sort of overnight success thing of when you see a physique, it didn't fall out of the sky.
• 5:19
  Alan Lazaros: There are certain supplements they're taking, they're sleeping a certain way, they're hydrating a certain way.
• 5:23
  Alan Lazaros: Everything that they're doing behind the scenes, you almost have to deduce.
• 5:27
  Alan Lazaros: And there's meta-skills, skills, and subskills that they have that you might not have yet.
• 5:32
  Alan Lazaros: Some of them came naturally, and in some cases, they don't even know that they have them.
• 5:36
  Alan Lazaros: Um, and in some cases, they had to develop them consciously over time.
• 5:39
  Alan Lazaros: So to me, that's a very simple way to explain something that's extremely complicated is what are the subskills, skills, and meta-skills that you need to achieve a specific outcome in terms of physique, is what we're talking about now.
• 5:54
  Alan Lazaros: But that works for business, that works for success, that works for goals, that works for relationships, all that.
• 5:59
  Philip Pape: Yeah, and I appreciate frameworks and hierarchies like that.
• 6:02
  Philip Pape: I think it's also helpful because sometimes I think people get stuck if they're focused on building a skill and something is not working.
• 6:09
  Philip Pape: It could be that the meta skill needs more support.
• 6:11
  Philip Pape: Or I suppose it could be that they're not breaking it down to the proper level of process-related goals that get them to the skill.
• 6:17
  Philip Pape: So you mentioned the challenge skills sweet spot, and I think of, again, a spectrum from um, you know, I think I think I think of a spectrum when you talk about flow, where like, is playing video games on a couch flow because you're, you know, absorbed in it and time is flying by, but yet it's not challenging to develop skills.
• 6:37
  Philip Pape: Now, assume somebody could argue against that.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: Um and conversely, it's something that is so hard that you cannot even improve because it's so beyond your level, you know, the opposite end of that, right?
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 6:50
  Philip Pape: And that's kind of what I think about.
• 6:51
  Philip Pape: The first place I learned about flow, and I think the book you mentioned was uh a positive psychology, the idea being that flow is one of those elements of the good life of having, you know, meaning and purpose, yes, right, that you can find flow in something.
• 7:03
  Philip Pape: So now people are listening, like, okay, where are these guys going with this?
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 7:06
  Philip Pape: I want to kind of tie that to fitness.
• 7:08
  Philip Pape: You say you've reverse engineer somebody's journey.
• 7:11
  Philip Pape: Take something very simple, take strength training, you know, training consistency, which is a big holdup for a lot of folks.
• 7:17
  Philip Pape: Where would someone think about the mental framework with the skills, the meta skills, and the subskills for that?
• 7:25
  Alan Lazaros: You know, it's interesting because when it comes to fitness, a lot of this I haven't teased out.
• 7:30
  Alan Lazaros: A lot of this is in my subconscious and unconscious, and I'm glad we're talking about it.
• 7:32
  Alan Lazaros: Let's do it.
• 7:34
  Alan Lazaros: The best way.
• 7:35
  Alan Lazaros: So you talked about video games and video games, you do develop skills, hand-eye coordination.
• 7:41
  Alan Lazaros: There's something called a RTS, a real-time strategy game, where you have to think in time and all that kind of stuff.
• 7:47
  Philip Pape: So I tell my wife that all the time, by the way.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: Okay, nice.
• 7:49
  Philip Pape: Yes, yeah, developing skills.
• 7:51
  Alan Lazaros: So here's the thing, right?
• 7:53
  Alan Lazaros: So a great film like Avatar, for example, gets you into flow.
• 7:57
  Alan Lazaros: Time slips away, you're fully immersed, and all of a sudden you're immersed in a new world, you get all the neurochemistry, which is what flow basically people who have the most flow in their life, they've done studies, they are the most fulfilled and the most meaning and the most purpose.
• 8:10
  Alan Lazaros: You already mentioned that.
• 8:11
  Alan Lazaros: The problem is after you watch a great show or a great film, you're the same.
• 8:17
  Alan Lazaros: The hero that you watched in the film, you were simulating the emotions and the flow of being immersed in that world.
• 8:24
  Alan Lazaros: But when you get off the couch having watched Avatar, you're not any stronger.
• 8:27
  Alan Lazaros: Maybe you're a little smarter because you can learn from film, but you're not, you didn't actually develop any tangible skills that you can now go use.
• 8:35
  Alan Lazaros: And so to go back to your original point, though, when it comes to fitness, I think that fitness, whatever your modality, you can you can talk CrossFit, you can talk bodybuilding, you can talk strength training, which is what we're gonna get to.
• 8:48
  Alan Lazaros: But any modality of fitness that you pick, it should be, in my opinion, optimized around something that you, even if it's painful, you are always glad you did it.
• 8:59
  Alan Lazaros: I don't want to say you would love to do it because a lot of times that trips people up.
• 9:03
  Alan Lazaros: I I always say you don't know you love something because you always want to do it.
• 9:06
  Alan Lazaros: You know you love something because you're always glad you did.
• 9:09
  Philip Pape: Yes.
• 9:09
  Alan Lazaros: That makes total sense.
• 9:10
  Alan Lazaros: Right.
• 9:12
  Alan Lazaros: I don't always want to weight train, but I'm always glad I did.
• 9:14
  Alan Lazaros: Yep.
• 9:15
  Alan Lazaros: And so pick something that creates a lot of flow because that flow has shown two or three hours after that, the runner's high, the zone, after a great workout, you're gonna feel accomplished.
• 9:27
  Alan Lazaros: You're also gonna be stronger andor better cardiovascular health.
• 9:30
  Alan Lazaros: And so back to the skills piece.
• 9:32
  Alan Lazaros: Strength training, the meta skills for strength training is consistency.
• 9:37
  Alan Lazaros: Another meta skill for strength training is tracking.
• 9:40
  Alan Lazaros: So you know how much you bench press, so do I.
• 9:43
  Alan Lazaros: You know how much you squat, so do I.
• 9:45
  Alan Lazaros: You know how much when you go into the gym, you my goal in that every workout is how do I get a little bit better this time than last time?
• 9:54
  Alan Lazaros: Sometimes I accomplish it, sometimes I don't.
• 9:57
  Alan Lazaros: And Phil, I think that uh you'll probably geek out with me a little bit on this.
• 10:01
  Alan Lazaros: And I don't know if you've heard me say this on the podcast, but I researched this, and this is something that I think your listeners will be fascinated by.
• 10:08
  Alan Lazaros: So you've heard of the aggregation of marginal gains, James Clear, Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg, all that kind of stuff.
• 10:14
  Alan Lazaros: Okay, so for those of you out there who haven't read Atomic Habits Yet, I highly recommend that you do.
• 10:19
  Alan Lazaros: It's a very, very great book.
• 10:20
  Alan Lazaros: But ultimately, I created my own sort of flavor of this, which is I I put a dollar in a financial calculator and I grew it by 0.1% every day for 50 years.
• 10:32
  Alan Lazaros: Now, when you do this, it becomes almost 84 million dollars.
• 10:38
  Alan Lazaros: Now, the kicker, and this is the meta skill of consistency, this is the reason why to do it.
• 10:44
  Alan Lazaros: I do this with all my clients.
• 10:46
  Alan Lazaros: I pull up the financial calculator, put a dollar in, I put a 50 years, which is 18,000 something days.
• 10:52
  Alan Lazaros: I do 365 times 50.
• 10:54
  Alan Lazaros: And then it shows 84 million dollars, almost 83, I round it up.
• 10:57
  Alan Lazaros: And I said, What happens if I take weekends off?
• 11:00
  Alan Lazaros: So there's 52 weeks a year.
• 11:02
  Alan Lazaros: If you take weekends off, it comes to $439,000.
• 11:08
  Alan Lazaros: So you let's say that you don't take weekends off and you get a little better each day, every day, seven days a week, and I only do it five days a week, you have 191 times the outcome that I do.
• 11:21
  Alan Lazaros: And that's the that's an example of a meta skill, like thinking about your thinking and thinking about because everyone knows you should work out, but if you don't have enough why, enough reasons why, if you don't understand the mathematics, mathematics is a meta skill, cognitive skill underneath fitness.
• 11:40
  Alan Lazaros: That's why we're talking about the engineering thing.
• 11:42
  Alan Lazaros: And so I know some people who have the subskills and the skills, but not the meta-skills, so they don't leverage the compound effect.
• 11:48
  Alan Lazaros: And then I know some people who know the math but don't execute.
• 11:51
  Alan Lazaros: And so that's kind of my long-winded answer to your question.
• 11:55
  Alan Lazaros: But if you want to go through the meta skills, skills, and subskills of fitness and how to succeed in fitness, I do think that would probably be of value.
• 12:04
  Philip Pape: Yeah, before we do that, I want to poke on this consistency piece because first I want to define what we mean at Egan's Nebulous for a lot of folks, what consistency even means.
• 12:12
  Philip Pape: Um, you gave uh an example I can take away from the financial example where seven days versus five days, some might argue five days is super consistent for something, right?
• 12:22
  Philip Pape: Like you're doing it X percent of the time, all the time, forever, and therefore you're consistent, even though the output's different.
• 12:27
  Philip Pape: So is one person more consistent, right?
• 12:30
  Philip Pape: That's the first question.
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: And then I want to play devil's advocate and ask why is consistency a meta-skill versus an outcome of other skills or meta skills?
• 12:41
  Alan Lazaros: Um, I think I consider consistency a meta-skill, because if you don't have the cognitive understanding of why it matters, you kind of just won't do it.
• 12:53
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 12:53
  Alan Lazaros: And and so here's here's some examples.
• 12:55
  Alan Lazaros: So if you understand the science of habits, if you understand the science of the compound effect and the aggregation of marginal gains, and you understand the science of how to actually sustain something long-term in terms of longevity, but also not burn out.
• 13:12
  Alan Lazaros: Learning how to not burn out is another in order to it's it's really easy to say you should exercise every day for the rest of your life.
• 13:18
  Alan Lazaros: The truth is, I actually believe that.
• 13:20
  Alan Lazaros: It doesn't mean you should run a marathon every day.
• 13:23
  Alan Lazaros: I've exercised with my beautiful girlfriend March 1st of 2022.
• 13:27
  Alan Lazaros: We I I came to her and I said, Sweetheart, I want to beat my old best.
• 13:32
  Alan Lazaros: And she said, Well, what do you mean?
• 13:34
  Alan Lazaros: And I said, Well, the the most I've ever worked out consistently, exercised consistently is three and a half months.
• 13:39
  Alan Lazaros: I was during my master's program, I had nothing going on.
• 13:42
  Alan Lazaros: To me, I went from engineer engineering to an MBA, which compared to engineering, getting your master's in business is a joke.
• 13:50
  Alan Lazaros: And then everything, yeah, everything compared to engineering is a joke.
• 13:54
  Alan Lazaros: Um, honestly.
• 13:55
  Alan Lazaros: One of the hardest things I've ever done was engineering.
• 13:57
  Alan Lazaros: But that said, I basically exercised every day for three and a half months.
• 14:02
  Alan Lazaros: And March 1st of 2022, now, which is wild to think about, I said, I want to beat my old best.
• 14:07
  Alan Lazaros: I'm going for four months.
• 14:08
  Alan Lazaros: I need to go 120 days straight.
• 14:10
  Alan Lazaros: And she's like, I'll do it with you.
• 14:12
  Alan Lazaros: We did that, and then we surpassed the 120 days, and I said, We did it.
• 14:16
  Alan Lazaros: Awesome.
• 14:16
  Alan Lazaros: And then she said, Let's go for a year.
• 14:17
  Alan Lazaros: And then I I'll never forget this pony of the garage.
• 14:20
  Alan Lazaros: We hit 365 days because I'm big on tracking.
• 14:22
  Alan Lazaros: I have Google Sheets and I track all my metrics.
• 14:25
  Alan Lazaros: And I said, We did it.
• 14:26
  Alan Lazaros: She said, Did what?
• 14:27
  Alan Lazaros: And I said, We did a year.
• 14:28
  Alan Lazaros: And she turned to me, no hesitation.
• 14:30
  Alan Lazaros: She said, Let's do this for the rest of our life.
• 14:32
  Alan Lazaros: And I had a mini panic attack.
• 14:35
  Alan Lazaros: Uh, because I was like, I can't make this promise to you or to myself unless I actually do it.
• 14:41
  Alan Lazaros: This is a side tangent, but if you break the promises you make to yourself, you're basically gonna have no self-esteem and no self-respect, and you're not gonna build belief and self-worth.
• 14:52
  Alan Lazaros: And so for me, I do not break promises to myself.
• 14:55
  Alan Lazaros: I I okay, sometimes I do.
• 14:58
  Alan Lazaros: I try really hard not to.
• 15:00
  Alan Lazaros: I try really hard not to, because it's just a little a dollar in the bank account of your self-worth.
• 15:04
  Alan Lazaros: Dollar in the bank account.
• 15:05
  Alan Lazaros: Say you go to the gym, go to the gym, keep the promise.
• 15:07
  Alan Lazaros: That's just how you invest in yourself.
• 15:09
  Alan Lazaros: So I said, I can't do this unless you're serious.
• 15:12
  Alan Lazaros: Like for the rest of our life, that's that's a big commitment.
• 15:15
  Alan Lazaros: Now, I want to make this very clear jogging counts, swimming counts, walking my dog counts.
• 15:21
  Alan Lazaros: The minimum is a half an hour, 30 minutes a day, every day, steady state cardio, hit training, weight training, it all counts.
• 15:30
  Alan Lazaros: And we've been doing that now since March 1st of 2022, which I did yesterday, I crunched my numbers, is 3.6 years ago.
• 15:40
  Alan Lazaros: Now we've bumped it from 30 to 35, 35 to 40, went back to 30, then we got it to 45, then we got it to an hour.
• 15:47
  Alan Lazaros: So now we're doing an hour.
• 15:48
  Alan Lazaros: That is kind of crazy.
• 15:49
  Alan Lazaros: It's been very hard to sustain, honestly.
• 15:51
  Alan Lazaros: That said, I believe in consistency very, very deeply.
• 15:54
  Alan Lazaros: But what I've come to realize, and I have 20 clients, so I'm not just talking.
• 15:58
  Alan Lazaros: I did fitness coaching for a long time.
• 16:00
  Alan Lazaros: I said, anyone can teach you how to lose weight, but almost no one can get you to actually do it.
• 16:08
  Alan Lazaros: Getting you to actually do it means you have to understand yourself, self-awareness, you have to understand the human condition, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and you have to understand how to poke your own buttons.
• 16:18
  Alan Lazaros: I am infinitely more likely to exercise consistently, and uh this is the humble pie piece.
• 16:25
  Alan Lazaros: There's no way I would have exercised every day for 3.6 years without Emilia.
• 16:30
  Alan Lazaros: No way.
• 16:30
  Alan Lazaros: The accountability that you have from not wanting to let her down, and then once you get a streak, the psychology underneath that.
• 16:38
  Alan Lazaros: I mean, what are the chances I'm not going to exercise tonight?
• 16:41
  Alan Lazaros: Oh, I went for 3.6 years and then I canned it.
• 16:45
  Alan Lazaros: It gets once you have a streak going, you ha you hang on so deeply to that streak and it holds you accountable.
• 16:51
  Alan Lazaros: A lot of people think I'm out of my mind.
• 16:52
  Alan Lazaros: I understand that.
• 16:53
  Alan Lazaros: You don't have to do what I'm doing.
• 16:54
  Alan Lazaros: But what I will say is that I consider consistency a meta skill because there's so much thinking.
• 17:00
  Alan Lazaros: Not to mention, you also have to design and optimize your entire life around that.
• 17:06
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah.
• 17:06
  Alan Lazaros: Which is lifestyle design.
• 17:08
  Alan Lazaros: So if you think you're just gonna exercise every day for the rest of your life and then just kind of wing it, you there's no way.
• 17:13
  Alan Lazaros: We just traveled last week.
• 17:15
  Alan Lazaros: We were on a road trip from Massachusetts to South Carolina and back in one week, and exercise was infinitely more difficult.
• 17:22
  Alan Lazaros: I mean, we were walking around the Tesla chargers, right?
• 17:26
  Alan Lazaros: And and so you the meta, I call it meta because you have to think about your thinking constantly.
• 17:33
  Alan Lazaros: You have to be thinking about yourself and what motivates you because you have to be able to poke your own buttons, basically.
• 17:37
  Alan Lazaros: You have to be able to coach yourself in real time.
• 17:39
  Philip Pape: Yeah, I was thinking about a conversation I recently had with Adam Schaefer of Mind Pump before he's I think his episode's coming out right before yours.
• 17:46
  Philip Pape: So no pressure, you know, follow him, right?
• 17:48
  Philip Pape: Oh shit.
• 17:50
  Philip Pape: And he's talking about how um he, you know, at his current phase of life where his six-year-old kid is one of the most important things right now, scaling his business.
• 17:59
  Philip Pape: He's already built plenty of muscle, he's been shredded multiple times in his life.
• 18:03
  Philip Pape: All he cares about is maintaining his fitness right now, and it doesn't take much to do that.
• 18:07
  Philip Pape: Yeah, you know, for him, his system of consistency is always there and it might ebb and flow with like the priorities and it might get applied to a different outcome and he might require less effort, right?
• 18:17
  Philip Pape: Because we know the compounding effect of habits often uh feeds into itself and does make these things almost, I'll say, inevitable.
• 18:24
  Philip Pape: Even with your car trip, it's like even if you went the whole trip and didn't do that every day, you'd get right back to it.
• 18:29
  Philip Pape: And that's kind of like that rubber band kind of hardly been stretched, is the is my thought uh for that.
• 18:35
  Philip Pape: I don't know if that makes sense, but you did mention not burning out, and I think then sustainability and not burning out and having a system where it's the minimum effective dose is the minimum, and then not having such a high standard for yourself on a daily basis that's impossible to, you know, keep.
• 18:53
  Philip Pape: And it's like somewhere in there, right?
• 18:55
  Philip Pape: Like I imagine it it can shift.
• 18:58
  Philip Pape: Like, does your minimum half hour or hour a day ever change during a specific phase, or is it always that?
• 19:05
  Alan Lazaros: It it did change.
• 19:06
  Alan Lazaros: So we started out with 30 minutes, and I'll tell you right now, if we had started out with an hour and a half or something, there's no way.
• 19:13
  Alan Lazaros: There's just no way.
• 19:14
  Alan Lazaros: We run three businesses between the two of us.
• 19:16
  Alan Lazaros: So the minimum viable product in business is is we call it a minimum viable habit, which is MVH.
• 19:24
  Alan Lazaros: So for us, it was 30 minutes a day because I knew we could sustain that to start.
• 19:28
  Alan Lazaros: And you know what's really kind of wild about this?
• 19:31
  Alan Lazaros: I used to do fitness competitions, I've got these sort of trophies behind me, blah, blah, blah.
• 19:35
  Alan Lazaros: But Kevin and I let it go for a while.
• 19:37
  Alan Lazaros: We and I I don't want to say we let it go.
• 19:39
  Alan Lazaros: We weren't out of shape, but we weren't competitor level freaks of nature like we once were.
• 19:44
  Alan Lazaros: When I first met Kev, this dude was an animal fill.
• 19:47
  Alan Lazaros: I mean, this, I mean, it's unbelievable.
• 19:50
  Alan Lazaros: And I playfully joked with him.
• 19:52
  Alan Lazaros: I said, Kevin, this is next level university, not dad bod university.
• 19:55
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 19:57
  Alan Lazaros: Because him and I lost it after COVID.
• 20:00
  Alan Lazaros: He didn't work out for like three or four months.
• 20:01
  Alan Lazaros: And I was I went from basically in a gym that was bodybuilder gym.
• 20:06
  Alan Lazaros: It's called Impact Fitness in Massachusetts.
• 20:08
  Alan Lazaros: And this is like, I mean, you go there and you're gonna get eaten.
• 20:10
  Alan Lazaros: It's it's great, it's awesome.
• 20:12
  Alan Lazaros: And I was overhead pressing 225.
• 20:16
  Alan Lazaros: Like for bodybuilders, it it was like I was on it.
• 20:18
  Alan Lazaros: And then I was out of the gym for three and a half months during COVID.
• 20:22
  Alan Lazaros: I could not go to the gym.
• 20:23
  Alan Lazaros: I'm working out in my closet doing chin-ups.
• 20:25
  Alan Lazaros: I'm trying to I'm I only have 35-pound dumbbells, so I can't when you build a physique on certain equipment and then that equipment gets taken.
• 20:32
  Alan Lazaros: I'm not one for excuses, but it's very hard to you can't squat 250 pounds when you don't have the equipment.
• 20:40
  Alan Lazaros: And I couldn't go to the gym.
• 20:41
  Alan Lazaros: So the gym's opened.
• 20:42
  Alan Lazaros: I cry on my way to the gym, happy tears, happy tears.
• 20:46
  Alan Lazaros: And I I blew my groin.
• 20:48
  Alan Lazaros: I tried to get right back to where I was, I got injured, I was outside the challenge skill suite spot to your point.
• 20:54
  Alan Lazaros: But back to the minimum viable habit.
• 20:56
  Alan Lazaros: One of the things that's been really fascinating is I am just now, and I know this sounds crazy, three and a half years into consistent daily exercise.
• 21:04
  Alan Lazaros: I'm just now feeling the benefits of it.
• 21:08
  Alan Lazaros: Like there have been a few videos I've posted on my Instagram recently where it's like, wow, I actually feel like an athlete again.
• 21:13
  Alan Lazaros: Because one of the things people don't tell you when you compete in fitness is you peak early.
• 21:18
  Alan Lazaros: I was 27, 28 years old, in optimal conditioning.
• 21:23
  Alan Lazaros: My whole world was fitness, no household, no three businesses.
• 21:27
  Alan Lazaros: You know, my whole I was a fitness model, fitness competitor, fitness coach, 43 photo shoots, like my whole world was fitness back then.
• 21:35
  Alan Lazaros: And then you grow these companies and you have a 19-person team, and all of a sudden fitness takes a back seat.
• 21:41
  Alan Lazaros: And so, back to your original question though, you have to have a minimum that you hit no matter what, and then you can slowly ramp that up.
• 21:51
  Alan Lazaros: We tried to go from 30 to 45, we had to go back to 30.
• 21:55
  Alan Lazaros: And now we've been able to sustain the hour for probably the last like four months, which has been really good.
• 22:01
  Alan Lazaros: It's not been easy.
• 22:02
  Alan Lazaros: So, yesterday I'll give an example.
• 22:03
  Alan Lazaros: We we went to the gym, we both woke up a little bit late.
• 22:06
  Alan Lazaros: We had our first calls at 11 a.m.
• 22:08
  Alan Lazaros: And we got to the gym and we were sitting there in the car going, There's no way.
• 22:12
  Alan Lazaros: We're not gonna make our first meeting.
• 22:14
  Alan Lazaros: I said, We gotta do 35.
• 22:17
  Alan Lazaros: So we did 35 weights and then we did 25 walking in the evening.
• 22:21
  Alan Lazaros: So we still got the hour in, but we broke it into two.
• 22:24
  Alan Lazaros: So you don't have to be perfect, you just have to have a minimum that you always hit.
• 22:28
  Alan Lazaros: Our new minimum is an hour.
• 22:30
  Alan Lazaros: And I told Amelia, I said, listen, we are not going more than that.
• 22:33
  Alan Lazaros: If I'm exercising every day for the rest of my life, I'm not doing more than an hour.
• 22:37
  Alan Lazaros: And if you want to start out, and this is what people do in New Year's resolutions, they say I want to do, you know, five days a week, three hours.
• 22:43
  Alan Lazaros: No, start small and ramp up.
• 22:45
  Alan Lazaros: Start small, actually hit and ramp up.
• 22:48
  Alan Lazaros: Not everybody can be Kobe Bryant level four a days.
• 22:51
  Alan Lazaros: And he didn't start there either.
• 22:53
  Alan Lazaros: He was he was doing, you know, one a days, then it was two a days, then it was three a days, then it was four a days, from 13 years old all the way to, you know, when he was 38 or whatever it was.
• 23:01
  Alan Lazaros: So at the end of the day, you got to start small and build.
• 23:03
  Alan Lazaros: And I would much rather this is why humility is so important.
• 23:06
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah.
• 23:07
  Alan Lazaros: I think self-belief is I know I can do this.
• 23:10
  Alan Lazaros: I think humility is I know I'm not gonna do this unless I stay humble enough to make it feasible.
• 23:18
  Alan Lazaros: And I think self-belief and humility rare rarely go hand in hand.
• 23:22
  Alan Lazaros: Usually someone has a lot of humility and low self-belief and they're kind of self-deprecating, or they have a ton of self-belief that they're sort of delusional and they can never stay consistent because they they are you know overly optimistic.
• 23:33
  Philip Pape: Yeah, and these are the kind of concepts you guys talk about on your show all the time.
• 23:36
  Philip Pape: That's why I encourage the listener to check it out.
• 23:38
  Philip Pape: Um, you specifically are a numbers guy, uh, and and that goes through my mind.
• 23:42
  Philip Pape: Just real quick, uh, Kevin said he didn't know another engineer.
• 23:45
  Philip Pape: You need to correct that.
• 23:46
  Philip Pape: I went to RPI, I know you went to WPI.
• 23:48
  Philip Pape: Nice.
• 23:48
  Philip Pape: Somehow he doesn't know this, so I need to educate him.
• 23:51
  Philip Pape: Yeah, you do.
• 23:52
  Philip Pape: He does.
• 23:52
  Philip Pape: He says, I've I don't even know any other engineers.
• 23:54
  Alan Lazaros: I'm like, oh my god, how many engineers do you know?
• 23:56
  Alan Lazaros: Just real quick.
• 23:57
  Alan Lazaros: 50 of them at least.
• 23:58
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah, well, I know hundreds, right?
• 23:59
  Alan Lazaros: Because I'm in the space.
• 24:00
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 24:01
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah.
• 24:02
  Alan Lazaros: So when he said that, that blew my mind.
• 24:04
  Alan Lazaros: I was like, wait, what?
• 24:05
  Alan Lazaros: My whole world has been engineers, you know.
• 24:07
  Alan Lazaros: It's funny, it's funny.
• 24:09
  Philip Pape: Engineers are definitely a specific breed.
• 24:10
  Philip Pape: My wife and I joke all the time about it because she was a teacher and comparing our two worlds when she was, but now she's a stay-at-home mom, but it was pretty funny.
• 24:17
  Philip Pape: Um, nice.
• 24:18
  Philip Pape: I love engineers, though.
• 24:20
  Philip Pape: But so, and the listener really understands when we get into this stuff that I am a big fan of tracking in numbers and everything, but there's there's a reason for it.
• 24:27
  Philip Pape: I think it's very efficient, and math is like a beautiful universal language of abstraction to something that is atomic almost, right?
• 24:35
  Philip Pape: It's like simple to represent something with math.
• 24:38
  Philip Pape: You don't have to know calculus, you don't have to know differential equations, just very simple, you know, numbers.
• 24:44
  Philip Pape: And so when you say something like the five versus seven day example, you know, I think uh of some of the counterintuitive findings in nutrition science, like there was a study that compared five to seven days of weighing yourself, not zero versus five or seven, but five versus seven.
• 25:01
  Philip Pape: Exactly.
• 25:01
  Philip Pape: And found that seven days led to better long-term outcomes.
• 25:04
  Philip Pape: And you're like, well, that's interesting.
• 25:06
  Philip Pape: That two-day difference of consistency made a huge difference.
• 25:10
  Philip Pape: So, my question then for you is you have this daily practice, this daily minimum.
• 25:15
  Philip Pape: I think of fitness as different pillars that we kind of have to all put together, right?
• 25:20
  Philip Pape: You've got training, you've got, I put movement in a separate bucket, but could argue that nutrition, right?
• 25:26
  Philip Pape: Sleep, stress.
• 25:28
  Philip Pape: There's like these big buckets.
• 25:29
  Philip Pape: But when we talk about the fitness side of it, the different modalities and burnout and stimulus versus fatigue, you know, we we pretty well understand that you can't push it too hard on, say, the lifting weights piece before you go into that uh unrecovered regime, which gets even worse when you're in a fat loss phase and you don't have the energy for it.
• 25:49
  Philip Pape: So if you're running like a three-day-a-week program, would you say to someone, the other four days have have a substitute activity that's like equivalent?
• 26:00
  Philip Pape: Is that how we do it for that to kind of keep it linear?
• 26:03
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah, people don't like me for this, but I'm not here to be liked, I'm here to I'm here to add value.
• 26:09
  Alan Lazaros: Uh fitness is a full-time job.
• 26:11
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 26:12
  Alan Lazaros: And and there should be something that you're doing every day for your physique.
• 26:16
  Alan Lazaros: I I do build the self, build the family, build the business every day.
• 26:20
  Alan Lazaros: Every day.
• 26:21
  Alan Lazaros: You move the needle every day.
• 26:22
  Alan Lazaros: So so I have a pyramid, and you're a systems guy, and I agree with you on the mathematics.
• 26:26
  Alan Lazaros: I say without mathematics, take away this TV, take away Restream, take away this microphone, take away iPhone, yeah, take away everything.
• 26:33
  Alan Lazaros: Listen, math is the epicenter of all great creations.
• 26:37
  Alan Lazaros: And if you don't know mathematics, you don't need, like you said, you don't need to know calculus, but you do, there is benefits to calculus, rate of change over time.
• 26:45
  Alan Lazaros: If you don't like math, I would say you're leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.
• 26:50
  Alan Lazaros: You don't have to be an engineer, but you have to learn some math.
• 26:52
  Alan Lazaros: And and one of the things I wanted to be a math teacher when I was a kid, and now I joke, I say, now I teach math to business owners.
• 26:58
  Alan Lazaros: And when I was a kid, I said um I wanted to be a math teacher so desperately, and I said, well, they don't make enough money, unfortunately.
• 27:04
  Alan Lazaros: Unfortunately.
• 27:05
  Alan Lazaros: And now I teach math to business owners.
• 27:07
  Alan Lazaros: It's fascinating.
• 27:08
  Alan Lazaros: But back to the framework here, I agree with you on the buckets.
• 27:12
  Alan Lazaros: So I have a pyramid of fitness that I created back in my fitness coaching days.
• 27:17
  Alan Lazaros: Now, the cool thing about a pyramid in geometry is that in order for it to climb higher, it has to have a stronger foundation.
• 27:23
  Alan Lazaros: And you mentioned we talk about burnout.
• 27:26
  Alan Lazaros: One of the things that I think, you know, if I were to just come on here and and and just arrogantly say, hey, I haven't, I haven't missed a day of exercise in 3.6 years, that doesn't do it justice because the only reason I can do that is because of the other things you're not seeing me do.
• 27:40
  Alan Lazaros: That's one component of the ladder, the pyramid.
• 27:45
  Alan Lazaros: Training is one seventh of the equation, uh, in my opinion, from my perspective.
• 27:52
  Alan Lazaros: So the bottom is sleep.
• 27:53
  Alan Lazaros: I track my sleep every single day.
• 27:55
  Alan Lazaros: I'm sure that you do.
• 27:56
  Alan Lazaros: Aura is unbelievable.
• 27:58
  Alan Lazaros: Do whatever you gotta do, track your sleep, even if you do it manually.
• 28:00
  Alan Lazaros: So sleep is the foundation.
• 28:02
  Alan Lazaros: When I get bad sleep, I feel like the sky is falling.
• 28:05
  Alan Lazaros: So I got an 83 sleep score last night, so I'm in a good place.
• 28:09
  Alan Lazaros: I feel good.
• 28:09
  Alan Lazaros: When I don't get good sleep, I was on the road last week.
• 28:13
  Alan Lazaros: It was very hard to perform.
• 28:15
  Alan Lazaros: It was very hard to come here and add value.
• 28:18
  Alan Lazaros: It was very hard to get all my work done and to have the willpower necessary to do what I gotta do.
• 28:22
  Alan Lazaros: So sleep is the bottom of the pyramid.
• 28:24
  Alan Lazaros: And the better you get sleep, the better all the rest go.
• 28:26
  Alan Lazaros: And if you're arrogant enough to think you're gonna exercise every day and get crappy sleep, I I just you need some humble pie.
• 28:34
  Alan Lazaros: So sleep is the bottom.
• 28:36
  Alan Lazaros: So I do I'll give them all and then I'll go through them.
• 28:38
  Alan Lazaros: So sleep, hydration, nutrition, training, mobility, breath work, and supplementation.
• 28:44
  Alan Lazaros: Those are my seven.
• 28:45
  Alan Lazaros: And supplementation is the top of it, meaning the importance of it is the least.
• 28:51
  Alan Lazaros: The fitness industry, which what what do they sell?
• 28:56
  Alan Lazaros: Supplements.
• 28:57
  Alan Lazaros: So obviously, everyone is gonna overemphasize the importance of supplements until you're sleeping well, hydrating, until you're doing the other pillars, supplementation is exactly that.
• 29:06
  Alan Lazaros: It's supposed to be a supplement, but most people overly focus on that.
• 29:09
  Alan Lazaros: Hey, what's your stack?
• 29:09
  Alan Lazaros: And are you taking creatine and all this stuff?
• 29:11
  Alan Lazaros: To me, it's it's about sleep first, hydration second.
• 29:16
  Alan Lazaros: I've got my Vita Coca water right here.
• 29:18
  Alan Lazaros: Boom.
• 29:18
  Alan Lazaros: Not a plug.
• 29:19
  Alan Lazaros: I do not get paid by Vita Coca, I just love them.
• 29:22
  Alan Lazaros: Okay, sleep, hydration, nutrition, which is calories, micros, macros.
• 29:27
  Alan Lazaros: Sleep, hydration, nutrition, training.
• 29:29
  Alan Lazaros: Training is any form of movement.
• 29:31
  Alan Lazaros: You mentioned movement.
• 29:32
  Alan Lazaros: I I call it training, which I think is intentional movement.
• 29:35
  Alan Lazaros: Sleep, hydration, nutrition, training, mobility.
• 29:38
  Alan Lazaros: That's the one I struggle with most.
• 29:40
  Alan Lazaros: I can I cannot be consistent limiting belief.
• 29:45
  Alan Lazaros: I struggle to be consistent with mobility.
• 29:48
  Alan Lazaros: That's been the hardest for me.
• 29:50
  Alan Lazaros: Everyone I've ever coached, in fitness or otherwise, struggles with one of these seven really bad.
• 29:57
  Philip Pape: Let me guess.
• 29:57
  Philip Pape: You've a waste of time or Not a big fan of it or whatever.
• 30:01
  Philip Pape: Or does it work done not helping or whatever.
• 30:03
  Philip Pape: Not a fan.
• 30:04
  Philip Pape: It definitely helps.
• 30:05
  Philip Pape: I'm not deluding myself.
• 30:07
  Alan Lazaros: There's a reason somebody tends to be less consistent.
• 30:09
  Alan Lazaros: You know what it what it is?
• 30:10
  Alan Lazaros: I won't do it unless I'm learning.
• 30:12
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 30:13
  Alan Lazaros: I need to do it while learning.
• 30:14
  Alan Lazaros: But foam rolling, stretching, bands, that whole nine.
• 30:18
  Alan Lazaros: So sleep, hydration, nutrition, training, mobility, breath work.
• 30:21
  Alan Lazaros: This is one that I didn't have until way later.
• 30:24
  Alan Lazaros: And I don't know how familiar you are with breath work.
• 30:26
  Philip Pape: I mean box breathing and all the different techniques.
• 30:28
  Philip Pape: Yeah, sure.
• 30:29
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah, exactly.
• 30:30
  Alan Lazaros: So breathing properly.
• 30:31
  Alan Lazaros: And then supplementation is last.
• 30:32
  Alan Lazaros: So I don't, I don't, I do creatine, I do magnesium and melatonin before bed.
• 30:37
  Alan Lazaros: I I do of multivitamin.
• 30:39
  Alan Lazaros: That's pretty much my supplementation.
• 30:41
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah, exactly.
• 30:42
  Alan Lazaros: So but to me, those are the seven that matter.
• 30:46
  Alan Lazaros: And in order to do all seven consistently, it is a full-time job.
• 30:52
  Alan Lazaros: Don't get it twisted.
• 30:53
  Alan Lazaros: Most people are not healthy.
• 30:55
  Alan Lazaros: And I wasn't either in the past.
• 30:57
  Alan Lazaros: So I'm I get it.
• 30:58
  Alan Lazaros: You know, back in my engineering days in corporate, I was I was drinking too much and too often, and I was 160 pounds, skinny fat, not healthy.
• 31:06
  Alan Lazaros: And I'll never go back.
• 31:08
  Alan Lazaros: But if you sit there and say, I want to be healthy, I want to be fit, I want to build my physique, you basically have to make it think of it like a full-time job.
• 31:18
  Alan Lazaros: You know, every single day you should be moving the needle on something for sure.
• 31:22
  Philip Pape: Unfortunately, sleep should slot in for a third of that day no matter what, right?
• 31:26
  Philip Pape: And the right and then the rest of the waking hours have the rest.
• 31:28
  Philip Pape: At least a third, yeah.
• 31:29
  Philip Pape: But it's an interesting list.
• 31:30
  Philip Pape: I've heard you talk about it before, and we don't have to like argue over what should be in the list because everybody might have their own little different things.
• 31:37
  Philip Pape: What I find interesting, and you can help me understand this, is let's put this in the context of skills, of subskills, skills, and meta skills.
• 31:44
  Philip Pape: When I think um nutrition, to me, that's like a massive bucket, a massive pillar that encompasses so many things.
• 31:52
  Philip Pape: Um I mean, it's everything you eat, right?
• 31:54
  Philip Pape: But it's all the things tied to that, corollary to that.
• 31:56
  Philip Pape: When I think of breath work, to me, that's a very specific application of, let's say, mindfulness or relaxation or stress management.
• 32:04
  Philip Pape: And I would almost say, like, oh, which of these do not belong, right?
• 32:06
  Philip Pape: Like on the IQ test where you look at how they all compare, and I'd say, well, I might actually want stress management as a higher level than breath work, kind of like sleep.
• 32:14
  Philip Pape: You don't talk about the sleep hacks and such.
• 32:17
  Philip Pape: Nice.
• 32:17
  Philip Pape: Where does your mind go with that?
• 32:19
  Philip Pape: And then we can talk about the meta skills and skills.
• 32:22
  Alan Lazaros: Well, the breath work, I think, is also while you're training, how you're breathing while you're training, the certain way you breathe while you run, the certain way you breathe while you do uh strength training.
• 32:32
  Alan Lazaros: But I do like the stress management piece.
• 32:35
  Alan Lazaros: And the other piece of this too, and I had, you know, I've had a lot of really smart people in my life, so they've they've always came with different it's like minerals, no.
• 32:43
  Alan Lazaros: Uh I like your stress, also hormones.
• 32:47
  Alan Lazaros: So some one person came to me, Amy.
• 32:50
  Alan Lazaros: I don't know if you know Amy Lenny, she's on our team, uh, but she said, Alan, you forgot hormones.
• 32:55
  Alan Lazaros: And I said, Well, yes and no.
• 32:57
  Alan Lazaros: And again, there's a lot of nuances to this, but if you do sleep, hydration, nutrition, training, mobility, breath work, and supplementation well, obviously hormones are a byproduct.
• 33:05
  Alan Lazaros: So, and then obviously, you know, a lot of athletes unfortunately do steroids.
• 33:11
  Alan Lazaros: And we're not gonna have that conversation, I don't think.
• 33:13
  Alan Lazaros: I'm I'm a natural athlete, I've never personally done steroids, I never intend on it.
• 33:16
  Alan Lazaros: I used to compete with people who did, which was very unfair, um, which is one of the reasons I lost two of my three shows.
• 33:23
  Alan Lazaros: But it's like, well, there's a there's a drug test.
• 33:26
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah, well, they I didn't say they were running a cycle right now, but they definitely were three months ago, that I promise you.
• 33:32
  Alan Lazaros: But anyways, so at the end of the day, I like the stress management.
• 33:36
  Alan Lazaros: I think that if I were to replace breath work, I would probably go with that.
• 33:41
  Alan Lazaros: Oh, because I think that's a very that's very important because as an athlete, you kind of have to not let anxiety take you.
• 33:49
  Alan Lazaros: Because you're you know as well as I do, like when anxiety spikes and cortisol spikes, your test levels plummet.
• 33:55
  Alan Lazaros: So you gotta be very mindful of how stress stressed out you get.
• 34:02
  Alan Lazaros: One of the problems with meta skills being an engineer is engineers are thinking all the time.
• 34:08
  Alan Lazaros: Always 24-7-365, right?
• 34:11
  Alan Lazaros: It's always going.
• 34:12
  Alan Lazaros: So it's very hard for there aren't a lot of like really in shape engineers.
• 34:16
  Alan Lazaros: I'm not trying to be mean, there just aren't.
• 34:17
  Alan Lazaros: And one of the reasons why is because we're so we think about the past and the future so often.
• 34:23
  Alan Lazaros: And uh high IQ is very rarely correlated with low stress levels.
• 34:28
  Philip Pape: Yeah, it's true.
• 34:29
  Philip Pape: Um, you know, which I guess this whole discussion about this pyramid, honestly, it could be its own podcast when we talk about these different levels, right?
• 34:37
  Philip Pape: Because now you got me thinking about mindfulness in general permeating all of this, the sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous system being so crucial to your health.
• 34:46
  Philip Pape: And then you mentioned hormones, and my mind goes to blood work and how your biomarkers are a reflection of your hydration and nutrition, and how supplementation is potentially a subset of nutrition, right?
• 34:57
  Philip Pape: So anyway, we don't want to go.
• 34:58
  Philip Pape: This is the thinking.
• 34:59
  Philip Pape: I love this.
• 34:59
  Philip Pape: This is the overthink RPI versus WPI.
• 35:01
  Alan Lazaros: By the way, I'm totally curious.
• 35:03
  Alan Lazaros: And you don't mind if I call you Phil?
• 35:04
  Alan Lazaros: Is it Philip?
• 35:05
  Alan Lazaros: It's Philip.
• 35:05
  Alan Lazaros: Philip.
• 35:06
  Alan Lazaros: Okay, Philip.
• 35:06
  Alan Lazaros: Sorry about that.
• 35:07
  Alan Lazaros: It's not going to be Philip.
• 35:08
  Alan Lazaros: I'm sure I'm not the only one who made that mistake, right?
• 35:10
  Alan Lazaros: Uh, did you end up applying to because I applied to RPI, WPI, and MIT.
• 35:14
  Alan Lazaros: I didn't I didn't apply to MIT.
• 35:16
  Alan Lazaros: I wish that I did.
• 35:17
  Alan Lazaros: Did you end up applying to WPI?
• 35:19
  Philip Pape: No, I didn't.
• 35:19
  Philip Pape: I was from Florida, so I wasn't actually even familiar with a lot of the schools up here.
• 35:23
  Philip Pape: So it was like RPI, Cornell, MIT.
• 35:25
  Philip Pape: Where are you?
• 35:26
  Alan Lazaros: Where are you hailing now?
• 35:27
  Alan Lazaros: Sorry, I'm not sure.
• 35:28
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 35:28
  Philip Pape: Okay, so I stayed up here.
• 35:30
  Philip Pape: I mean from Florida.
• 35:30
  Philip Pape: I stayed in New York.
• 35:31
  Alan Lazaros: I stayed in New England.
• 35:32
  Alan Lazaros: So we near each other.
• 35:33
  Alan Lazaros: I'm a huge fan of New England, man.
• 35:35
  Alan Lazaros: I just drove from Mass to South Carolina, as I mentioned, and uh I I missed home.
• 35:40
  Alan Lazaros: I missed New England's great.
• 35:42
  Alan Lazaros: New England's great.
• 35:42
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah, three months out of the year suck, but the rest are awesome.
• 35:45
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah, you know, the contrast is nice.
• 35:47
  Philip Pape: Like that's I um there's a concept in Finland.
• 35:49
  Philip Pape: I think it's Finland.
• 35:50
  Philip Pape: Uh there's a Den Denmark called uh Higa, H Y G G E.
• 35:54
  Philip Pape: Familiar with this concept?
• 35:55
  Philip Pape: It'd be a cool I think that'd be a cool episode for you guys to talk about actually.
• 35:59
  Philip Pape: Higa is the idea of embracing the weather no matter what it is, with with positivity and like embracing it to its fullest.
• 36:07
  Philip Pape: So when it's really cold, that means blankets and fire and dressing up really warmly and saying, like, yeah, no excuses.
• 36:13
  Philip Pape: It's kind of a no excuses mentality, but not from a die hard, you know, mentality.
• 36:17
  Philip Pape: But hey, this is the world, this is the planet Earth.
• 36:20
  Philip Pape: Um, so okay, so circling some of this in, because we mentioned the engineering.
• 36:25
  Philip Pape: Uh, where was I gonna go with this?
• 36:26
  Philip Pape: Engineers being out of shape.
• 36:28
  Philip Pape: Um, yeah, I see it every day.
• 36:29
  Philip Pape: It's yeah, it's the thinking, it's also the lifestyle, it's also, you know, I mean, there's a lot of sedentary professions as well that correlate with or I also think some of it's cultural.
• 36:41
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah.
• 36:41
  Alan Lazaros: Because if you get your value from being smart, which most engineers do, you don't need to be, you know, jacked or whatever it is.
• 36:48
  Alan Lazaros: I it always bothered me how people are so one-dimensional.
• 36:53
  Alan Lazaros: And again, I don't mean people in general, not everyone is, but I I I hated how you had to be smart or athletic.
• 37:00
  Alan Lazaros: Yes.
• 37:00
  Alan Lazaros: Or you had to be like good looking or intelligent.
• 37:03
  Alan Lazaros: You can't be both.
• 37:04
  Alan Lazaros: And and for me, I I used I was gonna write a book called The Best of Both Worlds, and my whole I didn't want to just be one-dimensional.
• 37:12
  Alan Lazaros: I wanted to be healthy, wealthy, and in love.
• 37:14
  Alan Lazaros: I I didn't want to just be because I have a bunch of millionaire friends, as you do from college, that it's like, what are you doing, brother?
• 37:21
  Alan Lazaros: Like, why why don't you it's you obviously have the time and money.
• 37:25
  Alan Lazaros: So, like, what's the what's the disconnect here, right?
• 37:27
  Alan Lazaros: It and and it does, it frustrates me because I don't want to see them suffer, and their potential is so much greater than that.
• 37:33
  Alan Lazaros: These people are brilliant.
• 37:34
  Alan Lazaros: And why aren't you applying your brilliance to your health?
• 37:38
  Philip Pape: Yeah, I I think that applies even I think that applies to multiple skills that are outside what your domain is, and and what I mean by that is I so I've seen engineers who get in shape, myself among them, right?
• 37:50
  Philip Pape: Where there is an advantage to that for sure.
• 37:53
  Philip Pape: You would think there's not, but there is because people start treating you differently.
• 37:56
  Philip Pape: You get a little bit more respect, you have more energy, you could you show up more in a different way.
• 38:00
  Philip Pape: Now, maybe if you take it too far and get too jacked, maybe people be like you're a meathead now.
• 38:04
  Philip Pape: And and you see plenty of CEOs and vice presidents who are overweight and it doesn't obviously hold them back necessarily uh until they have that heart attack or you know, their work life is cut short.
• 38:15
  Philip Pape: But I think there's even other domains like public speaking.
• 38:18
  Philip Pape: Engineers don't dive into that because they feel like it's not a skill that they need until they need it, you know.
• 38:24
  Philip Pape: And there's skills like music, you know, creativity, create creative uh endeavors, whether it's music or something else.
• 38:30
  Philip Pape: I I played jazz in in high school, I was at uh arts high school, which again is weird being an engineer, but there's a lot of overlap between music and math and engineering.
• 38:40
  Philip Pape: And it just opens up the creative mind.
• 38:42
  Philip Pape: So sorry, you get me thinking about all of these things.
• 38:45
  Philip Pape: I love it, man.
• 38:46
  Alan Lazaros: And one of the reasons I think engineers don't typically become public speakers is because math modalities of thinking have a really hard time communicating effectively.
• 38:54
  Alan Lazaros: I this will be a very side quick side tangent, but I I don't know if you've heard ever heard me talk about the four modalities of thinking.
• 39:00
  Philip Pape: Probably.
• 39:00
  Philip Pape: I've heard hundreds of your episodes, so okay.
• 39:03
  Alan Lazaros: I appreciate you.
• 39:03
  Alan Lazaros: You probably heard it, but basically the the rarest one is math, statistics, probabilities, equations, formulas.
• 39:11
  Alan Lazaros: The most common one is words, conversations, and concepts.
• 39:15
  Alan Lazaros: Then there's vision, pictures, and images, and then there's the second rarest, which is energy, intuition, and vibe.
• 39:22
  Alan Lazaros: And women tend to be better at that one.
• 39:24
  Alan Lazaros: So we all have all four, but we we have a really good one and a really bad one.
• 39:27
  Alan Lazaros: My really good one is mathematics.
• 39:29
  Alan Lazaros: My really bad one was energy.
• 39:30
  Alan Lazaros: I just wasn't reading the vibe.
• 39:32
  Alan Lazaros: I didn't, you know, I grew up in a very low vibe environment and I didn't understand.
• 39:36
  Alan Lazaros: So Amelia fortunately has helped me with that, and I've helped her on the math side.
• 39:40
  Alan Lazaros: But engineers struggle to communicate.
• 39:43
  Alan Lazaros: I mean, even in this episode, I know I I seem like maybe a strong communicator, but I want to be honest with all of you.
• 39:49
  Alan Lazaros: It is very hard for me to get what my engineering brain thinks to be said.
• 39:55
  Alan Lazaros: It's it's insane.
• 39:56
  Alan Lazaros: Like I can relate, man.
• 39:58
  Alan Lazaros: I think in the the X, Y, and Z axis.
• 40:01
  Alan Lazaros: Like everything's a graph for me.
• 40:03
  Alan Lazaros: So it's very hard to articulate it.
• 40:05
  Alan Lazaros: And and then here's the biggest problem.
• 40:07
  Alan Lazaros: And this has been really hard for me in business because I'm a business coach.
• 40:11
  Alan Lazaros: For people who don't think in mathematics, it's very hard.
• 40:15
  Alan Lazaros: I have this remarkable, so I I I pull this up and I can draw it out.
• 40:19
  Alan Lazaros: It's been unbelievable the unlocks because these engineering concepts are unbelievably valuable in business.
• 40:27
  Alan Lazaros: And if you don't understand numbers and exponential growth, like think about it just for a second.
• 40:30
  Alan Lazaros: Imagine, Philip, if you didn't know what exponential growth actually meant, you couldn't possibly understand the economy.
• 40:36
  Alan Lazaros: Everything's exponential, that nothing grows linearly.
• 40:39
  Alan Lazaros: So it's either an exponential decay or exponential increase.
• 40:42
  Alan Lazaros: And and I've come to realize through coaching so many people that we are so missing that.
• 40:49
  Alan Lazaros: We're missing the mathematic understanding of a penny that doubles every day for 31 days, halfway in it's five bucks, and it's it ends up being 10.3 million dollars.
• 40:58
  Alan Lazaros: So nobody, even even the 84 million, one dollar becomes 84 million in 50 years.
• 41:03
  Alan Lazaros: In 10 years, it's only 38 bucks or whatever.
• 41:06
  Alan Lazaros: So I don't think anyone taught us this stuff, and it bothers me so much because us engineers have it.
• 41:12
  Alan Lazaros: We know it, we understand it, yeah, but but we aren't able to communicate it, and including myself.
• 41:17
  Alan Lazaros: I mean, it's brutal.
• 41:18
  Max: Shout out to Philippe.
• 41:19
  Max: I know Philly for a long time, and I know how passionate he is about healthy eating and body strength, and that's why I choose him to be my coach.
• 41:27
  Max: I was no stranger to dieting and body training, but I always struggled to do it sustainably.
• 41:33
  Max: Philip helped me prioritize my goals with evidence-based recommendations on not overstressing my body and not feeling like I'm starving.
• 41:42
  Max: In six months, I lost 45 pounds without drastically changing the foods I enjoy.
• 41:48
  Max: But now I have a more balanced diet.
• 41:50
  Max: I weight train consistently, but most importantly, I do it suspendingly.
• 41:54
  Max: If a scientifically sound, healthy diet and a link, strong body is what you're looking for, uh Philip Pape is your guide.
• 42:03
  Philip Pape: Yeah, I totally agree with that.
• 42:04
  Philip Pape: Um, it's an ongoing skill of trying to tell that story.
• 42:07
  Philip Pape: It's effectively a story we're trying to tell is convert what's in our brain into something you understand over there, you know, in your brain.
• 42:13
  Philip Pape: It's like telepathy spoken out loud, and now you're trying to make it work.
• 42:17
  Philip Pape: Uh so what is your concept?
• 42:19
  Philip Pape: Are you familiar with the dichotomy of intuitive eating versus like tracking your macros?
• 42:23
  Philip Pape: Those kinds of concepts always pop in my head because, first of all, they're camps that don't necessarily need to exist here because there's so much overlap.
• 42:33
  Philip Pape: But secondly, I can't ever grasp why somebody would want to flail around and try to figure things out, quote unquote, intuitively without having developed some skill.
• 42:45
  Philip Pape: And I think intuition is a just a highly tuned sense of skill that now you need, don't need the training wheels anymore, or something to that effect.
• 42:53
  Philip Pape: Does that resonate with you?
• 42:54
  Philip Pape: Well said.
• 42:55
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah.
• 42:55
  Alan Lazaros: People say, well, just trust your gut.
• 42:57
  Alan Lazaros: Well, what if your gut is conditioned horribly wrong?
• 42:59
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah.
• 43:00
  Alan Lazaros: Like, okay, so I'll give you an example.
• 43:02
  Alan Lazaros: I had a stepfather, and he and I didn't get along well.
• 43:05
  Alan Lazaros: And I was interviewing uh someone, or I was being interviewed by someone.
• 43:08
  Alan Lazaros: His name's Tim Malansen.
• 43:10
  Alan Lazaros: He has a podcast called the Work at Home Rock Star.
• 43:12
  Alan Lazaros: He was a client of mine.
• 43:14
  Alan Lazaros: I coached him for a while, and I had to work through this.
• 43:16
  Alan Lazaros: He looks just like my stepdad.
• 43:17
  Alan Lazaros: He's got the beard and everything.
• 43:19
  Alan Lazaros: And I remember being like, what am I?
• 43:21
  Alan Lazaros: I'm so triggered by this guy.
• 43:23
  Alan Lazaros: Tim is the nicest guy ever.
• 43:25
  Alan Lazaros: And it was like, so my intuition was saying, run.
• 43:28
  Alan Lazaros: This is not good.
• 43:30
  Alan Lazaros: You know, it reminds me of all the pain from my childhood.
• 43:33
  Alan Lazaros: And that's not accurate.
• 43:35
  Alan Lazaros: I had to work through that.
• 43:38
  Alan Lazaros: So a lot of people say, well, oh, I just intuitively eat, or I just, I just go with my gut.
• 43:42
  Alan Lazaros: I think that that's very, yeah, maybe that works if your gut is honed and if you've developed that skill over time.
• 43:48
  Alan Lazaros: So for example, I intuitively eat now, but I don't really.
• 43:51
  Alan Lazaros: I tracked macros and calories to the grain of rice for three years, and I have a mathematic modality of thinking.
• 43:59
  Alan Lazaros: You know, a banana has 120 calories, an apple has 90.
• 44:02
  Alan Lazaros: Like I'm not just winging it.
• 44:04
  Alan Lazaros: And and so you see people with results who say they're intuitively eating, and then you apply that and go, oh, well, if that person doesn't have to track, then I certainly don't.
• 44:13
  Alan Lazaros: When in reality, that person probably tracked for three or four years and now can intuitively do it because their intuition is honed, because they've developed a subskill, a skill, and a meta skill that's and I think that that's one thing I'll make very clear too.
• 44:26
  Alan Lazaros: You know, there's a lot of wonderful people out there, but the success is a byproduct of skill development.
• 44:33
  Alan Lazaros: It's not like I can't even tell you how many wonderful human beings I've met that are wildly unsuccessful, not just in fitness, but in life.
• 44:39
  Alan Lazaros: And it and it hurts me.
• 44:40
  Alan Lazaros: It hurts me.
• 44:41
  Alan Lazaros: They could be so amazing, but they don't have the skills, sub skills, and meta skills necessary to actually win.
• 44:47
  Alan Lazaros: And that's actually what my whole coaching practice is built around now is how do you give other people skills?
• 44:52
  Alan Lazaros: You don't.
• 44:53
  Alan Lazaros: Kevin is a great example.
• 44:54
  Alan Lazaros: I've been coaching him for eight years.
• 44:55
  Alan Lazaros: That dude is a machine now.
• 44:57
  Alan Lazaros: I mean, when I first met him, his intuition would have drove him off a cliff.
• 45:01
  Alan Lazaros: And now he just he's a machine.
• 45:03
  Alan Lazaros: It's unbelievable what people are capable of, but it takes constant deep practice and training and checking in and measuring and metrics and all that kind of stuff.
• 45:11
  Alan Lazaros: So it's really, I think it's hard when I go on the internet and I hear like self-discipline doesn't work and you just go with the flow.
• 45:17
  Alan Lazaros: It's it's no, that's no.
• 45:19
  Alan Lazaros: Imagine if Apple was like, Yeah, we don't really track anything, we just go with the flow.
• 45:22
  Alan Lazaros: It's it Michael Phelps' coach, yeah, just swim around, you know.
• 45:28
  Philip Pape: So what's what's above meta?
• 45:29
  Philip Pape: Uber?
• 45:30
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 45:31
  Philip Pape: Because what comes to mind here is we need we need almost talk about the Uber skill of developing meta skills as the principal uh here rather than the specific skills.
• 45:42
  Philip Pape: We'll we'll get to that, but before before, um Philip, Philip, you would, you would only engineers can complicate this.
• 45:50
  Philip Pape: Exactly.
• 45:52
  Philip Pape: Um, I think of two past guests that I've had uh recently.
• 45:55
  Philip Pape: Well, one, he's been on three times, Dr.
• 45:57
  Philip Pape: Eric Helms, uh WNBF Pro.
• 45:59
  Philip Pape: Love the guy.
• 46:00
  Philip Pape: Yeah, he and I actually just recorded an episode on epistemology, and and I honestly felt talk about humility.
• 46:05
  Philip Pape: Like, I don't even know how it's gonna come out, but I don't care because I learned a ton from him.
• 46:10
  Philip Pape: But nice he he for I think his second appearance on my show talked about how he's gone through how many preps, right?
• 46:17
  Philip Pape: He's gone through dozens of preps in his career.
• 46:20
  Philip Pape: And only now, and now as in like a year ago, when he's a pro, has he finally did he finally try not to tracking?
• 46:27
  Philip Pape: And he said, and it's he he said it only took year, it took years of doing it many different ways and honing the skill.
• 46:32
  Philip Pape: It's exactly that.
• 46:34
  Philip Pape: And then another guest I had on Dr.
• 46:35
  Philip Pape: Mickey Willadin, she has the podcast Wikipedia.
• 46:38
  Philip Pape: Love talking to her because her mindset is always about the skill and not about the thing or the result or like even what the skill is per se.
• 46:47
  Philip Pape: And it, you know, just the fact that you need to develop skills and get into that mindset.
• 46:51
  Philip Pape: Love it.
• 46:52
  Philip Pape: So, having said all that, let's do that here from a fitness perspective.
• 46:56
  Philip Pape: You know, not hey, what program do you do for your training?
• 46:59
  Philip Pape: But what are the meta skills and how do we develop those meta skills?
• 47:03
  Alan Lazaros: Challenge accepted.
• 47:04
  Alan Lazaros: Yes.
• 47:04
  Alan Lazaros: So not an easy feat, too.
• 47:06
  Alan Lazaros: And for anyone out there listening, just bear with us, take notes if you can, if you're not driving.
• 47:11
  Alan Lazaros: Uh, one of the skills that needs to be honed is focus.
• 47:17
  Alan Lazaros: If I, and again, I I've been coaching for 10 years, I have it tracked 11,478 hours of coaching, training, and podcasting.
• 47:24
  Alan Lazaros: I'm not saying that to flex, I'm saying that so you know I'm not some young kid just talking.
• 47:28
  Alan Lazaros: I'm 36 years old, I look 12, I know.
• 47:30
  Alan Lazaros: What I want you to know is I I this is all I do.
• 47:34
  Alan Lazaros: Right?
• 47:34
  Alan Lazaros: Like helping people achieve their goals is all I do.
• 47:37
  Alan Lazaros: And fitness coaching was the first three years of that.
• 47:39
  Alan Lazaros: So focus, if I watch you for a day, if I could have a camera on you for a day without it getting creepy, I could tell how success I could predict your success based on how well you control your focus.
• 47:55
  Alan Lazaros: You want to talk about a meta-skill, scale and subskill, depending on how you look at it.
• 48:02
  Alan Lazaros: Learning to control your focus is probably where I would start.
• 48:09
  Alan Lazaros: If you can't stay focused, I have a hat on in the gym that's always black.
• 48:14
  Alan Lazaros: I hate the ones with the underbrim that's not.
• 48:16
  Alan Lazaros: I have a focus cap.
• 48:17
  Alan Lazaros: Have you ever seen the focus caps that are like this?
• 48:19
  Alan Lazaros: Oh yeah.
• 48:20
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah, I have one of those.
• 48:22
  Alan Lazaros: I was I was wearing it earlier today.
• 48:23
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah, um my uh I have air pods that are noise canceling.
• 48:28
  Alan Lazaros: I actually used to not wear contacts on purpose because I didn't want to see facial expressions in the gym.
• 48:34
  Alan Lazaros: Now I know I'm out of my mind with all this, but I'm telling you, when I'm in the gym, I go to war.
• 48:40
  Alan Lazaros: I go to war with my lesser self.
• 48:42
  Alan Lazaros: Do not talk to me, do not look at me, do not come near me.
• 48:45
  Alan Lazaros: Emilia and I go to the gym every day, every other day.
• 48:48
  Alan Lazaros: We we exercise together every day, but we gym every other day.
• 48:51
  Alan Lazaros: We don't we have sign language.
• 48:53
  Alan Lazaros: People probably think we're deaf.
• 48:55
  Alan Lazaros: We never talk.
• 48:56
  Alan Lazaros: This means I need a spot, this means I hit a PR.
• 49:00
  Alan Lazaros: But we have a bunch of others.
• 49:02
  Philip Pape: And we need headphones or no, music or no?
• 49:05
  Philip Pape: Music, for sure.
• 49:06
  Alan Lazaros: So you do have music.
• 49:07
  Alan Lazaros: Okay.
• 49:07
  Alan Lazaros: We do have music, noise canceling, airpods.
• 49:09
  Alan Lazaros: But with music, not silence.
• 49:11
  Alan Lazaros: With music, not silence, yeah.
• 49:12
  Alan Lazaros: Absolutely.
• 49:13
  Alan Lazaros: Specific playlists, sometimes we jam together on Spotify, you can do a jam, sometimes we don't.
• 49:17
  Alan Lazaros: But specific playlists that that for me, everything's fit for purpose.
• 49:22
  Alan Lazaros: So, for example, after the gym, the the song by Green Day 21 Guns came on, and she's like, Hey, can we change this?
• 49:29
  Alan Lazaros: This is too sad.
• 49:30
  Alan Lazaros: We gotta I gotta be on a call in five minutes.
• 49:31
  Alan Lazaros: I was like, Yeah, fair.
• 49:32
  Alan Lazaros: So everything's fit for purpose for us.
• 49:34
  Alan Lazaros: And so I always pick the workout, you know, carb up in the morning, pre-workout, perfectly timed, boom, get into the gym, awesome flow, hat down, no one talk to me.
• 49:44
  Alan Lazaros: Like, let's get in the zone.
• 49:46
  Alan Lazaros: I I also do the hoodie thing with the hoodie up to start, and then as you get warmer and warmer and warmer, you basically you basically strip the whole time because you're first it's a hoodie, then it's a shirt, then it's a it's a it's like a it's like a sacred practice, but focus back to the skill.
• 50:01
  Alan Lazaros: That's where I would start.
• 50:02
  Alan Lazaros: If you can't stay focused, you can't you can't build a great physique or a great company, you just can't.
• 50:08
  Philip Pape: Yeah, so it's great that you mentioned focus because I feel like that ties back to the mindfulness and the flow that we were talking about earlier as well.
• 50:17
  Philip Pape: And I know we don't have a lot of time left to get into what some of the other skills are, but I'm glad that you dropped like this is the thing to start from because now I'm reflecting on my day.
• 50:25
  Philip Pape: If you were creepily watching me with a camera, uh I do pride myself on being able to really focus, but at the same time with social media, with the world today, with phones and notifications.
• 50:37
  Philip Pape: And I'm often working from home with my family there, although they're super respectful and my kids are great.
• 50:43
  Philip Pape: There's so many distractions and things like that.
• 50:45
  Philip Pape: So I think that could be a whole other discussion about okay, the listener takes this knowledge and says, you know, what can I learn about being focused, knowing that that meta skill can translate into all the other things I'm trying to do with tracking my nutrition, with lifting weights, with having a plan, with sitting down and thinking about my future and all of those things, where would they start?
• 51:07
  Alan Lazaros: So designing your environment for focus and then also talking to your peers.
• 51:11
  Alan Lazaros: So Emilia and I don't have kids yet.
• 51:13
  Alan Lazaros: We have a dog and two cats, and I know that that's not the same, but that's not what I'm saying.
• 51:17
  Alan Lazaros: Everyone has distractions.
• 51:19
  Alan Lazaros: Also, my phone, and and Philip, by the way, if you ever want to go deeper on this stuff, I'm happy to come back.
• 51:23
  Alan Lazaros: This has been awesome.
• 51:24
  Alan Lazaros: Okay.
• 51:25
  Alan Lazaros: But for now, you can see there's no notifications on my phone.
• 51:27
  Alan Lazaros: If you're on YouTube, you can see.
• 51:29
  Alan Lazaros: Not a single badge notification, nothing.
• 51:31
  Alan Lazaros: This phone will only ring for two humans.
• 51:33
  Alan Lazaros: One is Kevin Palmeri, my business partner, who you know.
• 51:36
  Alan Lazaros: The other one is Amelia Smith, my partner.
• 51:39
  Alan Lazaros: Intimate partner.
• 51:40
  Alan Lazaros: I live with her.
• 51:41
  Alan Lazaros: No one right now, there's six calls that I've gotten.
• 51:46
  Alan Lazaros: Half of them are probably telemarketers or something crap.
• 51:48
  Alan Lazaros: So when I said there's no notifications, there's a badge notification for calls down here.
• 51:52
  Alan Lazaros: I just realized that now.
• 51:53
  Alan Lazaros: Um, but I'm gonna block most of those people.
• 51:55
  Alan Lazaros: And first I'm gonna check my voicemail and see if any of those are legit.
• 51:58
  Alan Lazaros: They're probably trying to lend me money.
• 52:00
  Alan Lazaros: Um, because our company's doing very well, which I'm very grateful for.
• 52:03
  Alan Lazaros: But my point is, and I know I gotta go quick here, you need to design your digital and physical environments for flow.
• 52:10
  Alan Lazaros: You have to design your digital and physical environments for focus.
• 52:13
  Alan Lazaros: You'll notice I got calls.
• 52:15
  Alan Lazaros: Watch this.
• 52:16
  Alan Lazaros: I got 218, 218, 213 yesterday, yesterday.
• 52:21
  Alan Lazaros: Apparently, I got those calls yesterday.
• 52:23
  Alan Lazaros: But I've had a call at 218, it's 258 now.
• 52:26
  Alan Lazaros: I got I got three calls in the middle of this podcast and nothing rang.
• 52:30
  Alan Lazaros: Now, there's something called emergency bypass on your iPhone.
• 52:34
  Alan Lazaros: I don't have an Android, so you have to figure this out if you have an Android.
• 52:37
  Alan Lazaros: You can make it so certain people can get through and other people can't.
• 52:40
  Alan Lazaros: There is nothing so urgent unless it's Kevin or Amelia, because if something's burning down in the business, I need to know, and if if Amelia needs me, I need to know.
• 52:48
  Alan Lazaros: But other than that, no one can get a hold of me.
• 52:50
  Alan Lazaros: And now I know I'm extreme with that.
• 52:52
  Alan Lazaros: I know a lot of people don't like that.
• 52:54
  Alan Lazaros: Also, we have a closed door policy.
• 52:57
  Alan Lazaros: So my office right now is the door is closed.
• 53:00
  Alan Lazaros: Stephen Cotler says, if you can't put a sign on your door that says F off, I'm flowing, then you have a problem.
• 53:07
  Alan Lazaros: Emily and I basically have house rules that say if my door is closed, it means I'm flowing.
• 53:14
  Alan Lazaros: Unless it's an absolute emergency, please do not disrupt me.
• 53:17
  Alan Lazaros: And then when we have children, we're gonna have to have a whole new set of house rules, which is which is a whole nother thing.
• 53:21
  Alan Lazaros: But ultimately, if you design your phone and your physical environment for flow and for focus, you're gonna be far better off.
• 53:28
  Alan Lazaros: And also at your gym, and this is gonna sound cruel, I know, but this is this is peak performance.
• 53:34
  Alan Lazaros: Don't make friends at your gym.
• 53:36
  Alan Lazaros: Don't make friends at your gym.
• 53:38
  Alan Lazaros: I don't have any friends at my gym, and that's on purpose.
• 53:41
  Alan Lazaros: It's by design because I don't want I'm there to work out, and I make it very clear in my energy I'm there to work out.
• 53:46
  Alan Lazaros: I'm not here to talk, I am not here to socialize, I don't have a lot of time.
• 53:50
  Alan Lazaros: Time is my most valuable asset.
• 53:52
  Alan Lazaros: I have three businesses I have to take care of.
• 53:54
  Alan Lazaros: So at the end of the day, and by the way, when I have kids, it's gonna be even worse.
• 53:58
  Alan Lazaros: So at the end of the day, try your best to stay focused.
• 54:01
  Alan Lazaros: There's only a few things in life that really, really, really, really, really matter a lot.
• 54:06
  Alan Lazaros: And most of the rest is just superfluous stuff.
• 54:08
  Alan Lazaros: Fitness is one of the things that really matter.
• 54:10
  Alan Lazaros: And if you don't focus and design your life for focus, you're in some trouble.
• 54:13
  Alan Lazaros: And um, I can't I say that hardcore because I care.
• 54:16
  Alan Lazaros: Yeah.
• 54:17
  Alan Lazaros: Because you're not gonna be in shape without that.
• 54:18
  Alan Lazaros: You just need, yeah, you might not be in shape even with that.
• 54:21
  Alan Lazaros: It's it's it's very challenging.
• 54:22
  Alan Lazaros: Like I think it takes humility to say, I need to focus.
• 54:26
  Alan Lazaros: I think it's arrogant to think you're gonna wing it and be in great shape.
• 54:29
  Philip Pape: Sure.
• 54:30
  Philip Pape: That's a great meta skill.
• 54:31
  Philip Pape: And I think we're just scratching the surface on this.
• 54:33
  Philip Pape: Honestly, I want people to reach out to you.
• 54:35
  Philip Pape: We're gonna share your contact info.
• 54:37
  Philip Pape: And if you're listening to this, you're like, I've got to hear the rest of this potential conversation that we haven't yet agreed on having.
• 54:43
  Philip Pape: And you want to hear the other meta skills that direct directly relate to fitness.
• 54:47
  Philip Pape: And I know there's a list that we didn't even get to Alan.
• 54:49
  Philip Pape: I want you guys to reach out to Alan.
• 54:51
  Philip Pape: If you're comfortable reaching out to me and just saying, bring Alan back on for that, do that as well.
• 54:54
  Philip Pape: We want to test this out and talk about following up with the rest of these because it's an important conversation.
• 55:00
  Philip Pape: And a lot of people think too much at a low level.
• 55:02
  Philip Pape: And I think you've brought it up to that crucial level of the meta skills.
• 55:05
  Philip Pape: So, with that, Alan, where can folks reach out to you?
• 55:09
  Alan Lazaros: So we have a website called nextleveluniverse.com.
• 55:13
  Alan Lazaros: We've got a book club, I do masterclasses every month for free.
• 55:16
  Alan Lazaros: We got all kinds, we got a group coaching program, we got all kinds of cool stuff.
• 55:20
  Alan Lazaros: The podcast is Next Level University.
• 55:22
  Alan Lazaros: It's 1% improvement in your pocket from anywhere on the planet completely free.
• 55:27
  Alan Lazaros: And that's Kevin and I just talking about success and personal development every single day, 2,200 episodes.
• 55:33
  Alan Lazaros: And really what it is is we're a coach in your pocket to keep you on point.
• 55:37
  Alan Lazaros: Health, wealth, and love.
• 55:38
  Alan Lazaros: And uh my Instagram is the best place to reach me.
• 55:41
  Alan Lazaros: You and I have been talking on there.
• 55:42
  Alan Lazaros: If you DM me on Instagram, that's gonna be me, not an AI bot, not an EA, like actually me.
• 55:48
  Alan Lazaros: And uh please reach out.
• 55:50
  Alan Lazaros: I check it every single day.
• 55:51
  Alan Lazaros: I do Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
• 55:52
  Alan Lazaros: If you DM me on any one of those, Instagram's best, Facebook's next, and LinkedIn is third.
• 55:56
  Alan Lazaros: I will get back to you eventually.
• 55:58
  Alan Lazaros: Just LinkedIn expect a little delay.
• 56:00
  Philip Pape: We're gonna keep it simple for folks, keep the IG in there.
• 56:03
  Philip Pape: Yeah.
• 56:03
  Philip Pape: Um, NLU Podcast, nextleveluniverse.com.
• 56:06
  Philip Pape: My brother, it's been a pleasure.
• 56:07
  Philip Pape: Dear listener, reach out to Alan.
• 56:09
  Philip Pape: He's a great guy.
• 56:10
  Philip Pape: Check out their podcast, tune in for the potential upcoming episode where we do another one of these.
• 56:15
  Philip Pape: And uh have a great weekend, my friend.
• 56:17
  Philip Pape: Thank you, Philip.
• 56:18
  Philip Pape: Thank you for having me.
• 56:18
  Philip Pape: It's been awesome.