Why I quit my 750k Job to become a coach | Episode 19 - Bryan Sagray

[0:00]  all right guys welcome back to another episode of the heart and hustle podcast I have a very special guest with me today me and this individual connected very early on in our LinkedIn days and I've watched his explosive growth we've got Dr Brian segr with us today he has over 21,000 which is pretty crazy followers on LinkedIn he has an extensive history from being a foot and ankle surgeon from being the general manager of a family Plumbing business from being a board member of the here Brotherhood also a community mentor and performance coach but more importantly the founder of performance coach of Dr uh Brian SRA and one-on-one mental health mindset performance coaching Brian thank you so much for being here with me today man I really appreciate it I'm so excited to

[0:47]  be here Keenan it's uh it's crazy how far back our journey goes but how far we've both come since you know we got here I mean you've moved back to the contiguous United States from Hawaii um and I've made a actually I think maybe two career pivots since then and yeah it's just awesome to finally connect with you on here and just get this out to anybody that wants to hear it and that can benefit from it absolutely man well I'm super excited to kind of introduce the audience to you you know one of the things that I absolutely love about you Brian is your approach to storytelling and everything that you do from a Content creation perspective I think is absolutely phenomenal and so I want to dive a little bit deeper into that but more importantly why don't you give everybody a better understanding of kind of where Brian came from and a little bit about your background as well cool yeah so um basically I'll I'll give

[1:36]  you the the short story of the long version um I started out originally you know back this was like After High School I didn't really know what I wanted to do and I was an artist right so that was like my first real job I guess you could say was I was drawing and painting personally and then I started drawing for uh Anatomy textbooks right like very peculiar you know transition uh but then I told myself one day hey maybe instead of just drawing this stuff maybe I could like do do this stuff right maybe I could be a doctor or something which for me for my family coming from a mom and a dad you know with no formal education at all growing up on a ranch you know owning a plumbing company my dad was like yeah okay whatever just follow your dreams and we'll support you so I went into art and then I decided hey I'm going to go to

[2:24]  college I went to Texas A&M was an athlete um after school then I thought I was going to be a professional athlete like a lot of silly people do at one point and I chased that dream for a while made some money doing it had a lot of fun got to travel a lot you know got a few sponsorships and then just burnt out that was like the first time I burnt out in my life um as an athlete and it was very it was a more of a physical burnout than a mental burnout but I think there was probably a component of both and that really is what propelled me then into medicine because I told myself okay finally go back back to where you started go go into medicine that was maybe what your original calling was so I did I poured everything I had into that medical school residency you know double Fellowship trained became the residency director Professor

[3:12]  everything everything I thought I wanted success by Society standards but then realized that I wasn't really fulfilled um and at the same time that this is all transpiring personally in my mind unfortunately I lost my dad to his second fight of lung cancer right at the time that I was at that Pinnacle but I was also kind of questioning is this what I want to do which for a lot of people may seem crazy right like you can imagine literally multiple six figures in debt of medical school loans uh living in you know Georgetown very expensive my wife God bless her working two jobs to help pay to literally put food on the table and um i' go through all that then dad passes away and I said hey what the heck we just bought a

[4:00]  $800,000 house and put 20% down no big deal I'll just walk away from everything and I'll go back and and I'll go back to Texas and I will go from medicine which I always joke around and tell people is fluid running through pipes and I'll go into Plumbing which is fluid running through pipes and I'll take over the you know almost 50y old family business because Mom and Dad were high school sweethearts and when he died she was broken and she could barely function much less keep this big business going and so I walked away and um stepped in as the as the you know owner and and CEO of the plumbing business and grew that and we sold it and then basically after six months that's when I came to LinkedIn and we met that was about you know two years three years ago uh two and a half years ago and after about six

[4:47]  months of being quote retired my wife said get out of the house or find something to do right you got it you got to stop this and so um I went back and uh kind of got into the med device industry for a little bit did some writing and Publishing still wasn't really fulfilled and one day I had a deep conversation with a really close friend of mine and he said bro listen you've been throughout your life being coached by people and as The Residency director you've been coaching people pretty much your whole life for free why don't you see what this feels like to to help people and to help other people achieve you know and and maybe make a living out of it too and so about five months ago I guess now I went out on my own right as a as an entrepreneur and launch this business and man it's been awesome you know it's uh that's where we

[5:35]  are now I know you have a similar Journey with Francis and you and your sister and doing what you guys are doing and man the fear of the unknown is is an incredible incredibly scary thing but it is a fantastic inspiration motivator too I think that's a great place for us to kind of start today is around the topic of fear so I want to kind of reverse into your story a little bit so I saw a post of yours on LinkedIn in where you were talking about making hundreds of thousands of dollars you had the GT3 you had all of the stuff but then you found yourself completely unfulfilled and you needed to make a pivot so what were some of those early experiences that you had from a fear perspective and being like man did I just work all this time to get all the stuff and then it's not fulfilling me that the same way that I

[6:23]  thought it was what was that like yeah it's incredible I think this is something that you know I think a lot of people can actually relate to this um I think some people may say oh yeah it's easy for him to say that right because he's already done it but I will tell you that yeah it was it was awesome I mean you know I grew up you know racing motorcycles and I've always been a big car guy my dad raced Open Wheel cars professionally you know and and so I I was always a car guy and when I started being successful financially I mean business was good right and I had you know the GT3 RS right I had the you know Italian cars I had the vacation houses we traveled wherever we wanted to go but what was amazing is every time you want more um you know the mountain gets taller the car gets more expensive you know the the the wife's purse gets more

[7:10]  expensive you know the ring gets bigger but what happens is the more and more that you do that for me at least the more I found myself really like living someone else's life because that's not at least for me how I was brought up I mean I was literally brought up on a ranch feeding cows fixing fences and I had deviated so far from that that I think once I experienced it um it was a lot of fun but I'll tell you what it came with it so much unnecessary responsibility and so what happened was um I realized in that moment it was literally a Sunday night I know exactly what post you're talking about it it went crazy and I remember telling my wife literally I'd just been on call for a week I had done like 27 surgeries in a week I was coming off call all the patients were taking care of and I my

[7:56]  wife is like what are you doing I'm like I'm packing up all my stuff I quit she goes what do you mean you quit she goes you never give up I said I didn't say I'm giving up I said I quit I quit on my terms I'm not giving up I choose to carry on but I'm carrying on on my terms there is no give up this is quitting to serve a better purpose and I walked in the next day I mean I you know I in the in the first four or five years that I'd been practicing that was about five or six years in I mean we had cleared like three or4 million doar paid my student loans off and I just walked away because I was miserable you know I come home every night and first thing I did was pour a drink right like that's no way to live I had stress I had no real internal Joy the only way I could find Joy was by buying more stuff or going on vacation or having a cocktail and I just knew it

[8:45]  wasn't sustainable so I packed it up and at that point what I thought was missing in my life was serving educating and teaching I thought that was what I was missing so that was when I left and took the role on to be the resident and fellowship director which that actually was very fulfilling um and I think that if I wouldn't have lost my dad I think I would Pro and I feel like I'm still educating and serving now in a capacity yeah and so I I feel like if he wouldn't have passed away I would have come back to Texas at some point anyways but I think that was a true inflection point to me where I felt compelled to come home and help Mom um but yeah up until that it really was everything that I was doing in life was externally driven

[9:32]  right like chasing happiness but not really having Joy which for me now I realize comes from inside not outside um and that was motivated by fear right like I was fearful that I wasn't successful enough you know that a doctor had a nicer car than me he he went here it's like more and more and more and it was very fear-driven and then when I flipped it and I came from a place of serving it just changed my life man that's so powerful because you know being 32 years old and being an entrepreneur especially in this world of social media I feel like we are consistently comparing ourselves to a global community and that's not something that we had to experience years ago and so I now I see so many people who are motivated by the idea of wanting to raise the bar to be ahead of

[10:19]  other people so let's talk a little bit about something that kind of caught my attention there was did you ever find yourself subconsciously or consciously competing with the other doctors to be able to kind of tally up the things to be able to pull up in the GT3 RS the looks that you got that day what was that like 100% I mean I think it's like uh I think at at first at least for me I think it's probably being done subconsciously at least that's what I think like I don't think I was aware that I was doing that right like the way I was raised was you know I always you know when I was younger it was tough but I was always a truck guy right I was a Jeep Rubicon guy I was getting dirty play in the mud right Hunting Fishing and so when I got out to California I remember you know I had this big signing bonus this sixf figureure signing bonus

[11:07]  that I got out there and we used that signing bonus to pay the rest of my loans off and I was still driving my Jeep Rubicon with big tires and scratches all down the side and then I'd pull up to work and it was like I just didn't feel like I fit in um and so for me it started with like trying to fit in it was like I pulled in and it was BMW Mercedes Porsche Lexus Mercedes you know everything and I was like okay like I wasn't thinking about it from a money standpoint but I was like I'm getting out of this Jeep with mud on it wearing cowboy boots and blue jeans and these guys are getting out of their you know their European cars wearing their scrubs maybe I'm doing something wrong here right and so subconsciously I just wanted to emulate those people that were around me instead of one of the convictions that I live by now which is

[11:55]  if you truly believe in something like sometimes you have to stand alone loone right and and that's okay and I just wish I would have kept that jeep you know cuz I I had some good times in that jeep but yeah it was and then it became conscious right then it started subconscious and then it became conscious where you know the one guy gets the the Five series BMW and I'm like yeah that's cool but I'm gonna get an M5 you know what I mean and so then it's like then it was like strategically trying to outdo someone with material things which never is going to end well right not not not not to be funny but my wife who is super Frugal and so understanding of how I was would never get upset but she knew I would eventually figure it out on my own um but I just wish she would have told me earlier because she's always right anyways but yeah it it was Keenan it was it started out subconscious and then it

[12:43]  became conscious until I finally real and then it went the other way right then I realized like okay wait a minute this is me actively doing this but I'm not actually wanting to yeah I mean there's been a couple moments in my life where I have put a ton of external value on the outside thing the car the accomplishment the yada yada and one of the scariest moments because we're talking about fear for me is when you accomplish those things you recognize that you tried to fill this hole inside you with this item and it just disappears like a black hole like that is one of the scariest things that I've come across and it's really been a sobering moment for me many times because I recognize that I've been approaching these things all wrong and I'm not getting the Fulfillment based on

[13:31]  what everybody else is prescribing for me yeah it's true I think uh I think yeah I mean it's so true like it's I still felt lost and empty and like alone when those times would happen and then what would happen is you would get to the top of this mountain or this sports car or this vacation you know or whatever it was and you would get there and you would think this object is going to be super shiny and you're like hm this is not what I thought it was going to be and wait a minute now this stupid car that I bought the tires are $800 a piece and the oil change and the oil change cost five grand like what was I thinking like how is it possible that I'll never forget the first time I took that car in for service and I was like assuming oh yeah it's got to be all maintenances included when you're dropping multiple six figures on a car and I get the bill and I'm like H how is

[14:19]  it like five figures and you had the car for like a day right and so yeah it was it was you just keep chasing it and I think it's almost like the you know like the Greyhounds that chase the fake rabbit at the track they're never going to catch it and that's the same thing with happiness like you're never going to catch it if you're trying to chase it you just have to you know learn how to learn how to create it you know and and uh and you're right just to just to go back to it real quick with social media one thing that I've learned is you know I can't imagine because there is a lot of highlight reels on social media there is a lot of people that are being things that they're not and it's it's like the person who has you know a a relationship on the side or who's living a double life it is hard enough for me to show up

[15:06]  to LinkedIn every day and create the content that I create same thing for you right so I I speak the full truth and I tell people I can't imagine how hard it would be to show up here and be someone that I'm not that would take so much more effort to write a fake story to tell something that's untrue to post a photo that's been like photoshopped like that's got to take so much mental brain power for people to be something that they're not when it's so much easier just be who you are and then you never have to you don't leave any cookie crumbs you're not telling White Lies you don't have to keep your story straight you know so I just wanted to touch on that because I think the generation that we live in now social media has really been what really threw a wrench into everything I mean we just we spend so much time curating these versions of ourselves for other people's consumption

[15:54]  and 99% of the time those people aren't even thinking about us do you know what I mean very interesting when I look at social media I see people putting out pictures with filters on and it's like that was interesting but when I think about it from my personal perspective I am so consumed with what I am thinking about all the time that most of those posts are white noise right right and it's like how much effort do we spend putting effort in time into curating those things when nobody's really paying attention to them yeah that's so true I mean I think like for me it it's the exact same way and I think there's so much on social media I'm on LinkedIn but there's so much on social media and this content always does so well and it's funny to me on how to do LinkedIn how to write on LinkedIn how to create content how to write a hook and I'm like like why are people doing that just tell your

[16:43]  story I mean sometimes I'll just open up my phone and swipe through old pictures and a memory will come to my mind right or I'll be chilling at home and it's a Friday night and a certain Tom Petty song comes on it reminds me the first concert I ever went to with my dad and then that's a post it's like the best best content that you'll ever put on social media is content you get from living your life oh man or you know what I mean or from memories of your life not from other people's lives from your own you know I was actually so at the time of recording this this last weekend Alex Heros who is blowing up on social media as well released a100 million do leads book and part of his content strategy which he released which I was super excited for he's like for the first time I'm going to lift up the skirt and you guys are going to see behind the curtain about the more the uh the Alex Hermos content schedule and what I do and I

[17:32]  consumed his information thinking that it was going to be like the hacks and the tips but he echoed exactly what you just said he's like the only time that you can post content is based on what you've actually done and that was a light that went off in my head I was like oh wow but it echoes what you're talking about and talking about your own story because so many people like I've seen many influencers on LinkedIn spend so much time talking about tips ands tricks and hooks and how to copy people's structure and the stories that they tell but often we dilute all of our unique value by trying to duplicate or copy and paste other people's versions of themselves which aren't in alignment with us right yeah no I agree and I was watching a podcast of the day that was brilliant it was with I'm sure you know him Ed milet and of course John C

[18:19]  Maxwell right everybody knows John C Maxwell and it was one of the most phenomenal podcasts I had ever watched so many amazing tips in there and one of the most amazing things that Ed mlet said and his content is incredible I mean he's a machine and his stuff he does all of his own stuff and one of the things he said that was so moving to me is if you want to do really well on social media you want to tell a me story with a you meaning in other words like if you look at my content or Alex's content I will tell a story about me but then I'll say something about like you know I went through this struggle and here's how you can avoid it right or here's how you can change your life today and not make the mistake I did so you're still talking about yourself but I think success in life comes when you

[19:07]  talk about me but significance impact and value comes when you talk about them you know what I'm saying and so it's like that's when I really shifted I watched Alex's uh his live also and I was cracking up and he was talking about taking the kimono off and you know I'm yeah but it was so true though you thought it was going to be some big you know like algorithm or protocol and plug this in here and he was literally like I just talked about when my business failed when my gym almost went under when when we grew during covid like and that's what he shares or he talks about his wife and and I think that if you can find a way to tell your story but in a way that teaches someone something or it gives them value or it helps them avoid a mistake that you made that's the goal right there I mean you just do such an amazing job in telling the stories but

[19:56]  like you just articulated the way in in which you connect it back to a version that is valuable to others I think is so awesome because you're always coming from like a serving attitude to be able to serve your network and I think one of the biggest problems that people have today is I'm going to post content and it's all about me me me right rather than trying to serve the people that I can connect with because one of the things that I often talk about is especially when we talk about like mental health everybody has their own version of mental health but when people open up about their experiences often we've been through those same experiences and we see ourselves in that as well which is so powerful exactly yeah and I think it's always very similar too like it's you know if you want to impress people you typically talk about your successes but if you want to impact them you talk about your vulnerabilities your failures your

[20:44]  struggles and those types of things and I think it's exactly like you said it's like I I laugh sometimes when I see these posts that are like here's how I made $180,000 in three days or whatever and I'm like that's great and and and it it's grabby but tell me like how I can do it right or relate it to something about you know a way that can impact me now it changes it helps me make a decision that changes my my world view or changes my practice and I think the only way you really can be an influencer it's not by talking about your successes it's sharing like what you did wrong and how you came back from that because if people are succeeding in doing well they're not looking for for answers people that are on social media they're

[21:31]  looking for answers it's because they have questions they need answered or they're struggling for something right right so they don't care they don't care all the successes that you had they want to see your comeback story because they're stuck where you were stuck so show them how to get over that don't just tell them about your your success show them how you got there after you tripped you know what I mean 100% I completely agree with that I mean it's like I would I would love to consume everybody else's like Hero Stories and the the stories of their success but those don't help me get any closer to where I'm going and so I want to use that topic to kind of transition here so one of my favorite quotes is you make drastic change when the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of different right and so when you've made a couple of your pivots from a professional perspective what were you going through

[22:19]  tactically to kind of fortify yourself to be able to make the pivots that you were looking to make towards aligning towards like your true happiness yeah that's that's huge I will tell you that the it's amazing so you would think it would be like learning a new skill right or getting another certification or getting more letters behind your name but honestly it was it was another post that I shared a couple weeks back and what kind of led up to when I made my first big pivot was coming from an athletic background right I always kept myself in really good physical shape which for me when I was in really good physical shape you know as an athlete you're in great shape yourself I mean you know that when you're in the gym and you're moving heavy weight and you're doing a lot of stuff like I get more

[23:06]  from lifting and I get more from heavy physical exertion mentally than I do physically right and so every time I've made one of those big pivots the only way that I was able to get myself in the process to be able to do that is I leaned into building my mind and my body I mean literally every time I've made a big pivot for one industry to another it wasn't taking a course and boning up or studying up it was literally getting back into the gym getting more sleep right I I tell people the two biggest performance-enhancing drugs in the world are the bedroom and the kitchen and it's like it sounds really corny but every single time that I had to make a big career pivot I literally trained my mind and my body and it all started with

[23:53]  physical work but then the more I physically got back into shape the more it started making me mentally tough right and that's what it was all about for me and and the way I was able to do that and this is I think the big take home is I started documenting my life right so journaling I know it sounds super hokey but what I was able to do is I've been doing it for about seven years now and I started going back through my journals and looking through my journals and there were patterns in there there were periods in my life where I was winning and I would look back and I'd be like oh I wasn't drinking as much I was sleeping more was getting up and going for a run in the morning I was hanging out with this set of friends and then I would have these periods in my journals where I was really down and life was life was not good and I was writing everything down and I was like I was

[24:40]  stopping for fast food I wasn't going to church I wasn't hanging out with my family and so I went back through and found these patterns and just replicated them and for me that was what always gave me the strength to Pivot in life was I started taking care of of of myself physically and mentally and then I was able to move forward man I can't tell you how instrumental the gym has been in my life I've built a habit of going to the gym every single day and when I don't do that I feel so out of whack because I haven't exerted myself physically and whenever I think think about mental health in general I know Joe Rogan has a clip that's floating around the internet right now where he talks about scientists have found that one of the best treatments for depression is exercise it is so difficult for you to be depressed when

[25:29]  you are actively moving and getting about being outside and lifting weights and running and jumping and just being active and I just think that more people need to make the connection between the mind and the body as being two whole things because I know even in the world of medicine right there's always been an approach that these two things are separate and they're not connected and I think that that is just a a lesson that we are slowly learning but I wish we would have learned it quicker yeah it's a bad way to approach it to have them split like that I mean I will say that I know exactly what you're talking about and even as far back as like Dale Carnegie I mean Dale Carnegie had this quote where he talked about if you want to get over depression and fear and worry get outside and move right like not necessarily just like anything physical but go be social go to dinner with your friends right go serve the

[26:16]  community go to a canned food drive if you isolate and you stay at home or you stay by yourself you you are going to self-medicate and that's either going to be with social media with alcohol it's going to be with something other than what's going to what's going to feed you and move you forward with a purpose right and so I will tell you that physical exercis and especially for me like in the gym it it there is not anything else for me that that works that well and I think part of it goes back to the the like you said habits right or discipline right it's like you you will fail in life based on your systems and your routines and your habits that is going to be what makes or breaks you right motiv ation is not going to be what wins it's going to be what you do daily the things that you do

[27:04]  every day are the things that build you or break you those habits right and so if you can physically take care of your body right I'm not saying you need to be like shredded or whatever but if you physically can take care of your body and maintain your health which takes hard work then you probably are successful in other areas of your life and that's not me poking fun at any one certain person or group of people it's just true it's like if I pick you up at the airport and I jump into your car and we've never met and your car is a total wreck your desk is probably a total wreck right that doesn't mean that you're a bad person it just means if someone has the dedication to eat well take care of their body you know maintain their well-being uh keep themselves in a good state of mind they're probably doing other things in

[27:52]  their life well also so start with yourself first and then see what happens I think this is a perfect opportunity because I want to take a a little bit of a deeper dive into habits so I was on social media there other day and I saw a clip um have you ever seen the movie um Limitless uh yes okay so they were talking about what happened when he first took his Limitless pill they're like he didn't go out and start making a ton of money he didn't go out and start trading stocks he went home and cleaned his home first because clutter has dramatic effects on how we perceive the world and how we navigate just as human beings in general and so one of the things that I think about is the habits that we build are very interesting but going back to your point about being physically active and seeing somebody who's in shape what you're recognizing

[28:40]  is a lagging indicator of work that these guys have done over a long time Horizon that is compounded into the version that you see in front of them and I love the topic of lagging indicators because in the world of social media of dopamine hits of things that we get so quick I do not think people put enough emphasis on the the process of delayed gratification that leads to the results that we're looking for yeah this is so good because I think when people think about habits delay gratification detaching from outcomes all of those things which is so important people and James Clear talks about this people talk about building habits right but one of the best ways to build a habit or one of the best types of habits to have is to remove obstacles right or to make things easier for yourself so to build a good habit if you want to go to the gym in the morning or

[29:29]  you want to start eating a good breakfast in the morning before you go to bed tonight take the frying pan out right like prep some of the food slice up the vegetables right or put your gym bag next to the door you know what I mean get the coffee ready to go so in the morning you just have to push the button you know what I mean it's like you you building good habits and getting good results isn't just a question of adding something else most of the time you'll get there by removing a lot of stuff and I think that we we focus so much of our time we focus on things that we can't control and things that are non-essential but if you focus on really what's essential and you remove like you said or you delay gratification you train yourself to understand that right this stuff doesn't happen overnight it compounds and you you can't and and one

[30:18]  of the best ways to compound interest right it's like just like with the stock market is you make these small changes over time and I remember I had a math professor one time in when I was in grad and he told us something about like would you be a janitor for your for for the next year right would you be a janitor for the next year if when the first day you showed up to work I paid you a dollar and the second day I doubled it and then I doubled it every day after that and everyone's like no I wouldn't be a janitor for a dollar a day well what you don't realize is like by you know 30 40 days in you're making like a couple hundred thousand dollars a I mean you're making crazy money right just by compounded interest and it works the same way in your life I mean you don't have to make really big changes to get big outcomes in fact the smaller changes that you make over a longer period of time that's where the big

[31:06]  reward comes from right because you don't burn out if you take like not to hate on David Goggins right the only reason I bring up David gogins is because there's been scientific studies that show that what he's been able to accomplish which is phenomenal he's in 3% of the population that has that kind of a mindset where they can push through anything and that's the guy that I want is my special forces I get it but but when he talks about taking Massive Action to get massive results the other 97% of the population is going to get massive burnout and so then they're goingon to they're going to do something and they're going to lose 30 pounds and they're going to succeed then they're going to gain 50 then they're going to start a new job and they're going to hit their quota and then they're going to burn out and so I think the answer is not taking Massive Action the the answer

[31:54]  is taking consistent Purpose Driven intentional action that creates momentum and then you use leverage and that's how you get massive results but you start small you don't take Massive Action because then you just you're done you'll I've been there and I think so many people have been there and even me personally today so last couple days I've been going super hard on all of the Alex Heron Moy trainings and I've found myself working from like when I wake up at 5:00 a.m. I take a break during the midafternoon to hit the gym I come back home and I work right and I was having this conscious conversation with myself last night I'm like I wonder how long you can continue to do this and then I woke up this morning after not getting the best amount of sleep and naturally I was like man I am really dragg in here and this makes it so much more possible

[32:42]  for me to give up on the work that I've been doing because the Massive Action climb when you get to the top you're often tired as can be and then there's nothing but to do but then to relax but then that obviously kind of puts us back at the place where we were and then if we feel like we have that internal comparison of not being able to take Massive Action maybe we start that internal voice that says like dude we're doing it again and Y yada if that makes sense that's ex I think that's exactly how it happens I think that's why now it doesn't mean that there's not times in your life where we all have to Sprint right like we know that like there's going to be period no matter what kind of career you have what kind of Lifestyle you have there's always going to be periods in this ultramarathon of life where you have to Sprint but you're absolutely right and I feel it too I mean since launching my business I've neglected a lot of stuff the one thing I

[33:29]  haven't neglected is me personally but there's been days where I used to be really good with like in the morning I would wake up and I always had this practice of like sending a message a voice message to a close friend like starting off with some gratitude or something in the morning you know and I found myself not doing that anymore um I'm back at it now but it was it was just like it was with you I was pushing so hard and then I went to wake up one morning and I noticed that I had no energy and then even the small things that I wanted to do it wasn't that I didn't want to do them I like physically was like brain fog I couldn't do them and I told myself you see what happens like but but see for me because I've built these systems like you talked about these habits I have the past documentation so I have these guard

[34:16]  rails and so like you can self- coach right you can I can catch myself now when I know that I'm slipping um and so I think that's what's important too but you get there with mindfulness with personal development it doesn't mean that you and I are perfect it means that I know when I'm slipping up and then I can autoc correct you know what I mean yeah um yeah and yeah so I mean you're a living example of it I mean it's you're trying to do something good you know that that's great information that he put out there and you leaned into it really hard and then you realized o maybe I should have blocked an hour a day for this only you know what I mean yeah I mean one of the biggest things that maybe my like reticular activating system has been picking up on recently was the only objective of Entrepreneurship in general is to not quit in the game and I think that's an

[35:05]  interesting analogy because when we talk about building habits as an example we think that we want to take Massive Action to build these things but we often end up dropping them because we overexert ourselves and we don't have the consistency over a long enough time Horizon to actually see the fruit start to grow on the seeds that we have planted and I think that's really interesting because so many people I mean one of the great examples that I love to kind of refer to is like new years's when everybody has like that Fresh Start effect in their mind and everybody's like I'm going to get fit and I'm going to do it and then it's like I always at that time kind of lean back to the thing of like all right let's see where everybody's at in March because I guarantee you people aren't going to be coming to the gym still and it's like I even create that analogy from Fitness but it it goes across everything that we kind of try to approach in life in general it does it really does and I think that's why uh

[35:53]  sometimes if you think about life right and the world in general ener like there's Seasons right like everybody knows there's fall winter spring summer things in life in your life and in the world they happen in Seasons right and so I think like right now the pandemic after the pandemic all the wacky stuff going on in the world people dividing each other I think we're in a winter right now right and so what people I think what you just spoke to about planting seeds and then you know you're the fruit that you grow is always the sweetest what people don't realize is that if you know anything about you know farming right when you're planting you're planting in one season so that in the later season you can reap what you sewed right and so when you're on the down slope of your life we're talking about entrepreneurship when you're on

[36:40]  the down slope of your life you want to be harvesting you don't want to be 60 years old or 70 years old and be in the middle of a winter or still be planting right you want to be harvesting at that point and the way you do that is you prolong the that growing season that planting season by planting and doing that process very precisely very slowly very meticulously and you get that process just right so that then later on in life when everybody else is still figuring out how to plant you're just out there picking fruit all day long you know what I mean and so as an entrepreneur that's a great thing to really learn early on is it's not about winning it's not about how fast you can get to where you're going it's literally about can I keep going and the only way

[37:29]  you can keep going is if you literally go slow you can't you can't run the for you can't run the Formula 1 race car all day long it'll it'll break right you have to bring it in from the track and let it rest I mean I think the Perfect Analogy that I know everybody can connect with here is we were told a childhood story right the tortoise and the hair the hair sprinting off he's doing all this different kind of stuff and by the time he gets to the Finish Line he's absolutely exhausted Ed but guess what the tortoise comes creeping past him because he's been chilling the entire time planting those seeds along the way pacing himself and doesn't actually get burnt out so I think that's an absolutely amazing analogy um one thing that I want to Pivot to really quick is kind of the idea of habits making our life boring so one thing that

[38:18]  I hear a lot of people talk about is you know habits in themselves sound great but I don't want to be stuck in the same type of routine all the time I want to have the the spontaneity of life I want to have the excitement I want to have those different moments and if my life is so routine I'm never going to have that so it's not something that I want so what is your perspective on that and is there an actual truth inverse to that yeah this is great so actually it's so funny so I I posted today on um that in life you don't become a master or an expert you pursue becoming a master or an expert and what I talked about actually in that post was and a lot of people have talked about this at Tomic cabis James Clear talks about this the way you separate good from great is and it goes back to Athletics is where I

[39:04]  learned it people that are really really really good at something they love the mundane and the boring I'm telling you right now I don't care what anybody says you do not get great at anything in life if you don't love the mundane and the boring and people say well yeah I don't believe that I tell them do you think when I was a professional athlete that I wanted to count my calories that I wanted to lift weights every day that I wanted to run 120 miles every week that I no of course i' go to the sauna go to the ice therapy go to the no I did not want to do that every day but I did it and I learned over time that if I could tolerate the mundane and the boring and someone else couldn't I was going to beat them now that didn't mean that you can't throw some uncertainty and some

[39:52]  variety and some spice into your life it just means that I hate to break it to people and I'm not trying to like you know make anybody go oh my God I'm giving up wave the White Flag but honestly you and it doesn't some people will say embrace the suck that I don't agree with but you you have to get really good at the mundane and boring I mean if you want to be a good writer you have to write a lot right Michelangelo famously said right if people knew how long I've worked to get to where I am they would not think I was a genius at all right I mean these people work hundreds of thousands tens of thousands of hours to get to where they do but all we see is is the Masterpiece and we think that they're talented and they're born with that type of talent no no they're not he would sit and draw and paint endlessly right and you think that

[40:41]  every single time that Michelangelo picked up a paintbrush or a chisel and a hammer that he was excited about doing that no he was not but he knew that if he wanted to be one of the best that ever lived he would tolerate that and the other guy wouldn't right so I really do think that those people that can tolerate consistent maybe not their favorite thing to do every day they are going to go far if you can tolerate that boredom and that mundane it doesn't mean though that you don't build in some fun but learn to tolerate boredom that's the best advice I can give yeah I mean I can I could couldn't wholeheartedly agree with that more um one of the things that I've learned from Alex rosi was a great analogy that he gave about entrepreneurship so he talks about the lifetime story of somebody who was

[41:29]  working a day job right a regular 9 to-5 in their career and then made a switch to entrepreneurship and he talks about how some of our early behaviors and the rewards that we were given were anchored in the wrong places give you an example when you're an entrepreneur you're starting your business you are always looking for how to move forward and then often what you're working on isn't working so you pivot to something else and then something starts to work and then naturally our brains create create this idea that the change and the switch of what we're doing is what gives us the reward and so so many entrepreneurs out here today are obviously consistently switching between tasks and doing different stuff because we have an anchored experience that we are rewarded for doing things differently which is wild now I'm going to go back to Alex Rose's training one more time so one of

[42:16]  the things that he talks about in the process of scaling so in the last couple years he sold a majority of his big business called gym launch and in the trending that I was watching this morning he was like it's interesting because the company who now owns gym launch they've grown 42% over the last year and let me tell you what they haven't done anything new they've done more of the same so they were like what is working how can we do more of this and then if you don't have more of it then you do what you're doing better and the last thing that we attempt is doing something new and hearing that perspective was just like eye openening to me because it's like the road map to success is in front of of You by doing more of what you're already doing but it might be mundane like you're talking about but then beyond that it's doing

[43:03]  more of that stuff better and then the last thing that you want to do is actually pivot and if hear the successful people talk about this stuff it's like obviously success leaves Clues but everybody is just so concerned about like what can I do quickly to Pivot directions and is that going to bring me the result I want once again kind of tying it back to that experience that we had that we're rewarded for changing things up which is so dangerous yes no it is I mean saw there was literally a post yesterday that went viral with someone saying the exact opposite of what you said was I didn't even comment on it and I wanted to they were talking about like how good leaders and successful companies they're that way because you know and they put it in quotes we don't just do it the same way we've always done it because that way works right they want to change it and pivot it and I think that that's really really really bad advice to give because

[43:51]  look at Warren Buffett look at look at these people that have literally that guy has he will tell you that all the money that he's made have literally been in like the same 10 companies that he invested in at the very beginning and he just keeps milking that cow okay and so if something in life is working and it's working really really well why would you change that why would you not find a way to make that system maybe even a little bit better look at what we've done with the internal combustion engine right it's still very very inefficient but look at where it came from and where it's come to now and then people to talk about climate change which I'm not saying is not important but take something that already works and make it better and get every single thing you can out of it cars used to get three miles to the gallon now some get like 60

[44:38]  right and so it's like take it as far as you can and then when you start to get a diminishing return Then pivot right but if every single time something goes wrong or you fail or you go from making 180,000 a month to 160 that doesn't mean Rebrand change everything that just means that maybe the systems you have in place just need to be tuned up a little bit right and so I I think that yeah I mean I just laugh every time I hear people talk about how the best leaders the best companies are constantly changing constantly evolving they're changing and evolving but they're changing and evolving the systems that are already working they're making those processes better and they're spinning off things that have already worked they're not changing right they're evolving and iterating there's a big

[45:25]  difference I mean there's a gigantic difference in that and that's been a huge maturation process for me is recognizing that change is not always good but the right types of change in small incremental increments is something that will take you to the next level I mean because if you're like if you have a business let's say that you're closing 20% of the people who come through the door and now you start closing 25% of the people who come through the door that might seem like a tiny change but when you look over a long enough time Horizon like you said it's that compounding factor which makes the biggest difference but often we're just not patient enough to be able to kind of execute on that Vision yeah and I think too that there's a lot of learning and humility I'm not saying that you want to go down with the ship right but there is a lot to be learned where if you're doing something that is working really well but it's happening

[46:13]  really slowly um give it a little bit of time first like you said because it will start to incrementally you know it'll exponentially build on itself but if when one thing goes wrong you change immediately that is really going to that that's you're never going to find success that way I remember hearing uh I don't remember who it was that said it I think it was the CEO um the CEO of Microsoft um and he said I was watching a podcast that he said that one of the biggest like you know success stories for entrepreneurs and really successful companies he used this phrasing being able to see around a corner and what he was talking talking about was knowing like you said exactly when the time is to actually make the

[47:01]  pivotal change where you say I'm not going to go down with the ship we have to completely rechange and you see that okay this we have to go with Automation and AI That's not going to be a trend that's going to be the new way right the internet is not going to be a fad the internet's not going away and so it's like these companies that are able to make a huge pivot right those companies do really well but the ones that pivoting they're they're you're never going to those big corporations that really blow up and do successful if you go back and look at certain times it's usually going back to the winter almost every successful company has made a big pivot during the depression during a recession they make a pivot during a winter when you know they have the ability to buy when the Market's down or

[47:49]  they have the ability to influx Cash When the Market's down and shift into a new industry that's when you make a big change change in a big pivot not when your company's doing really well and you have a bad month don't change then that happens to companies all the time right exactly I mean you've just been dropping so much gold here um which I think is just so phenomenal and so thank you so much for bringing so much value in some of these conversations that we've been having the next topic that I want to talk about was kind of something that I saw on social media and I didn't I saw the post going voter V or viral again it was on Tik Tok but then I saw it also reposted on LinkedIn as well which I thought was interesting it was talking about the idea of self-improvement and self-development as being something that we've been sold and that people shouldn't buy into this idea because as you are right now it's good enough and

[48:38]  naturally when I saw that post I was like this is so interesting to me because so many people have ingrained habits that are not serving them and there are so many opportunities for you to continue and grow and change and even from a genetic and atomic perspective you know I heard somebody one time saying you can confirm this for me or not but they were talking about like every seven years your body replaces every single cell in itself so technically if you are 21 years old you are three different humans at that point in time if your body is always growing and changing and developing why should we not as people continue to grow and develop as well yeah it's it's a that's another one of those ones it's like a trigger for me when I see the post and they always do so well that they're like today is going to be your day you are

[49:25]  good enough right it's like I'm not saying to not think that where I am today is not a good place to be right because you do want to be content where you are while you pursue what you want that that has to be an underlying theme but I will tell you one of the biggest ways to stay humble right one of the biggest ways to continue to succeed in life is the doer is the one that learns right that if you want to stay humble you have to accept accept that you have more to learn right so if you be a student of life that doesn't mean like just reading books that means you know if yesterday you walk 10,000 steps maybe today you walk 10,500 and then tomorrow you walk 9,800 whatever but to constantly think that you are good

[50:12]  enough you that is I think really not good advice to give I I think the other side of the coin is get 1% better every day that also I think is silly because if you could get 1% better every day then 100 days I would be perfect so I I I never really like that adage either I think get 1% better every day is also like the other side of the coin but I think that whether you watch a 20-minute podcast whether you take the dog for an extra walk whether you eat one less bean burrito that day whatever it is like yeah I mean I really do think that every day you should try to be better than the day before in some form or fashion and I it's not going to happen every day but you're me mentality every day should be I want to and it's not you're not

[50:59]  competing with anybody else but you should you should find a way to where you could wake up every day and tell yourself today is going to be better than yesterday And even if it's not as soon as you think that you're good enough then I mean how where's the joy in that where's the fun in that like when does anybody have it all figured out the the success of life is in becoming and the only way you become is to continually learn right and it doesn't mean inside the four walls of a classroom it means by living life by experiencing things by Taking Chances by trying something new right like it could be you've never had sushi before so you you try sushi today give it a try right maybe that's something it doesn't have to be like you take another online

[51:46]  course it could be something very simple but I don't ever feel like I'm good enough I feel like I am very good at what I do I feel like I'm happy with where I am and I'm content but I'm hungry to be a better version of me tomorrow every day and I completely agree with that and I think you know where this resonates with me personally is coming from a biracial background my great-grandfather was a sharecropper my grandfather was born in 1930 was spit on in the streets that he lived in my father was the first entrepreneur and if I take that 10 Generations beyond the people who I just named imagine the sacrifices that people have gone through and the hardship that they've gone through so you can sit here and not continue to progress and push yourself to be the best version of your lineage

[52:33]  like I think about my responsibility now is to carry forward all of the missed opportunities and really try and be as pivotal as possible and taking advantage of the opportunities that I'm given that will push my lineage forward and so when i r those messages I'm like man dude like just the society that we live in today is feeding us so many poor messages and if we listen to what everybody else is doing you're going to be like everybody else you you are and I think a great way to look at this too is and that's something people can relate to right because so many people follow you know Hollywood and the famous people and this and that I think a great way to look at it is there's a lot of people in Hollywood that have a lot of money tons of of societal what we look at as wealth and success and this is not to be mean but they commit suicide they get

[53:21]  addicted to drugs they have infidelity they they lose custody of their children they get addicted to alcohol and crash their car into someone else's house right there's all these things that happen and it's because they have everything that they want money is no issue for them they can have whatever they want and so they get complacent in their life and they stop improving themselves they stay at home they isolate they buy things they have nothing else to do right nothing is motivating them because they have access to everything but then you have someone who is on the complete opposite Spectrum where you know it could still be someone who's financially successful but every day they're trying to improve their life right and it could be something very very simple but if you're constantly trying to improve and you're not constantly trying to just sit back and

[54:09]  just enjoy the ride because if you sit back and enjoy the ride right when you get a flat tire it's like already too late but if you've got if you know how to change the flat and you've got the spare tire right and you've got friends that you can call on to come and you've got AAA and you've got all these other things ready to go then you can fix the car and get back on the road right you're not going to be left on the side of the road and so I think that you're absolutely right I've never understood the you're good enough I I I understand where they're coming from but I do think it is bad advice and I always think it's amazing how that stuff does so well I mean I think it's just uh you know I know I'm not trying to say this in a negative way whatsoever but I feel like people are looking for validation that that gives them the internal excuse of I

[54:58]  know I'm not applying myself to my fullest capability and this is something that kind of resignates with me and this person on social media who I'll never even meet is validating the lack of effort that I'm putting into performing as my best self right and that's just super tough for me it is yeah yeah it is I think that and honestly too like that mindset I think is what gets people into um I think that mindset is what gets people into mental you know you're big in the mental space and I think that that can really get you into some bad places if you think that you're good enough or you think that you've already gotten to where you're supposed to be or you know uh that this is as good as it's going to get I think that that can really take a toll on your mind because it tricks you

[55:47]  into thinking I can take my foot off the gas right it's not that you always have to be going Full Throttle but you certainly don't want to you know when when there's an uphill or there's a challenge in life that's not the time to let off the gas right when there's a downhill you can be a little bit more relaxed right and those are the times when you can kind of stop and look around and embrace the embrace the little bit of success celebrate the small wins right but but don't get stuck there you know what I mean don't don't don't sit there too long yeah I mean that complacency is something that will come back to bite you every single time yep you know one of the things that I know that you'll kind of resonate with this my girlfriend right now is going through PA School to become a physician's assistant and one of the things that I've seen her friends struggle with is because they performed at such a high level in the framework of

[56:35]  Academia their entire life now they're getting into a new challenging environment and they're having a really tough time adjusting when they're not performing at that same level that they've established as an expectation for themselves and so one of the things that I continue to talk about whenever I'm around their friends is the idea of a growth mindset and the idea of continuously progressing and getting better at what we're applying oursel to and that in itself really is the mission and we've really talked about that as like an overarching umbrella here today but one of the things that I continue to come back to is when you're in the medical field you are practicing medicine it's not M it's not Mastery of surgery right you are practicing in that space and I think that that is just so important that more people should recognize is not only in medicine but in

[57:23]  life in general we are in the process of practicing best practices here and they're always changing and adapting and we need to be able to kind of be fluid like water through the pipes like you were talking about to be able to fit and form and adapt to these new environments and challenges that we come across yeah it's so true and that's why I think that you know the growth mindset or whatever you want to call you know a student for life it's like there's this old saying that the doer learnthe to learn or grow or move forward is literally by doing and so I think that the medical field the law field right you practice law you practice medicine right there's lots of you practice veterinarian there's and it's it's not practicing like experimenting it's practicing like I'm practicing or like athletes are constantly practicing right and I really think that that's the

[58:11]  approach people should take to life because as soon as you think that you're a professional right as soon as you think that you've achieved expert status then that means that you've reached some sort of destination right and then where do you go from there the only place you can go from there I'm I hate to say it is down yeah right what once you put yourself at a destination most people see a destination as a hill and so once you get to the top of a hill you can only go down the hill that's that's it and so if you look at life as a constant right like very almost like an EKG in the sense that there's going to be periods like this but almost like the stock market if you look at the stock market there's big dips but over time it still slowly is always going up and so that's how people people should look at their life is a constant Hill where there's going to be a lot of valleys you

[58:59]  have to go through there's going to be a lot of big and small hills but there is no yeah there there's really no destination it's just a journey and I think that's that's the secret man is to just know that there's no pot of gold right that the pot of gold is in the is in the journey absolutely well Brian this has been an absolute pleasure today and I think that's a great place for us to kind of wrap it up I want to use the last couple seconds here for you to let people know how they can get in contact with you how they can find you on LinkedIn or any other space of your website why don't you spend the last couple seconds here kind of giving yourself a little time in the spotlight yeah yeah thank you Kenan again for having me on this was this was amazing um you know same goes to you if you guys don't know him or don't follow him you have to he brings so much value in a space that is so needed right now uh if you're looking to connect with me I'm on LinkedIn you can uh reach out to me send

[59:47]  me a connection request follow me go to my profile there's a link to my landing page where you can book a free Discovery call um and yeah let's let's get together and let's find a way to get you unstuck or overcome those limiting beliefs and just become more of who you already are absolutely man well guys that's been another episode of the heart and hustle podcast I think Brian's done an absolutely amazing job of talking about the heart and talking about all the elements of hustle that kind of really exemplified this podcast in general so I want to thank you guys for tuning in once again really appreciate it thanks guys