The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Quantifying Yourself to Change Yourself with Ari Meisel

In 2006 Ari Meisel was diagnosed with Crohns disease. Through a combination of yoga, nutrition, natural supplements and rigorous exercise he was able to fight back the symptoms of Crohn’s until he was finally able to suspend my medication. He leveraged self tracking and self exploration to develop an awareness the led breakthroughs in human performance.

Starting as an Entrepreneur at the age of 15
Why you must learn how to do every job in your business
How Ari used self tracking and self experimentation to cure Crohns
What we can teach our kids about entrepreneurship and creativity
The difference between starting a company and owning your own job
How the Montessori school system has resulted in top business executives
Lessons from world of building and construction that apply to business
Why you must always be a sponge of knowledge
How being “head down” does not make for a better offering to the world
Dealing with an illness that has no cure and the mindset required
The role that chronic inflammation plays in everybody’s life
Why you must learn to check in with yourself
How taking care of your body transforms the results of your business
Why we tend to reward good behavior with something bad
The external brain and how we can leverage it to be more productive
How conquering email can lead to significant gains in efficiency
Creating The Manual of You to optimize your day to day workflow

Ari Meisel turned a hobby of productivity into a popular framework and consulting service for optimizing, automating and outsourcing of of life’s tasks. Less Doing, More Living continues to grow in popularity and has become a platform for general efficiency consulting to businesses, entrepreneurs and everyone else who could use a little more time in their life

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Duration:: 1h 4m
Broadcast on:: 16 Apr 2014
Audio Format:: other

As you probably noticed this month, we're bringing you our "Life of Purpose" series and revisiting some of our most transformative episodes, tune in to explore expert insights and practical strategies on help, performance, and community well-being, all aimed at helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll not only get recaps of the key ideas in each interview, but at the end of the series, you'll receive our free "Life of Purpose" ebook. What you have to do is go to unmistakablecreative.com/lifepurpose. I'm Srinney Rau, and this is the Unmistakable Creative Podcast, where I speak with creative entrepreneurs, artists, and other insanely interesting people to hear their stories, learn about their molding moments, tipping points, and spectacular takeoffs. Expand the way you work and think with Claude by Anthropic. Whether brainstorming solo or working with a team, Claude is AI built for you. 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In 2006, Ari Maisel was diagnosed with Crohn's disease through a combination of yoga, nutrition, natural supplements and rigorous exercise. He was able to fight back the symptoms of Crohn's until he was finally able to suspend his medication. He leveraged self-tracking and self-exploration to develop an awareness that led to the breakthroughs in human performance that we discussed in this episode. Ari, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thank you for having me. Yeah thanks so much for taking the time to join us. So you and I connected by way of our mutual friend Clay Hebert, and he's at this point got a track record for referring phenomenal people to me. So I want to ask you my very first question, and then as can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background and how that has brought you to the work that you're doing today? Sure, so I've been an entrepreneur my whole life, mostly in tech stuff starting when I was 12 with a website design company and after college I started working in construction. I was in upstate New York and in Binghamton, New York and I started developing these old lots, well these old cigar warehouses actually into lots, and I basically said that anybody who worked on the job had to teach me their trade. So I spent the next three years learning and doing every construction trade there is and really learned how to become a builder and a real estate developer, which is what I am today basically as a real estate developer. But about eight years ago I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, which is a chronic inflammatory condition that affects the digestive tract, it's very, very painful and not very well understood and considered to be incurable. So I was taking about 16 pills a day and getting pretty much sicker every day and got to a very low point in that my journey where I was in the hospital and really didn't think I was going to make it out alive. So after that I went on this long journey of self-tracking and self-experimentation and got up my meds after four months and then went on to compete in my first triathlon about two months later. So that was in a way the end of the journey but it was really the start of the journey because what I realized while I was then training for Ironman France was that I had figured out the nutrition, I had figured out the supplements and I had figured out the fitness aspects of what was going on with my illness. But there was still this big element of stress and stress was affecting my life and my illness and I know it was affecting a lot of people as well. So my response to that was oddly enough was to create a system of productivity which I called less doing as in less doing more living to help people optimize, automate and outsource everything in their lives including their health in order to reclaim their minds, do the things that they actually wanted to and be more effective and less doing was born out of that and now in addition to being a real estate developer I have online courses and I have my book just came out recently on the less doing book and I've been coaching some really incredible individuals on improving human performance basically ever since. Alright so there's a ton of stuff here and I want to go back and kind of tear it all apart and dig deeper into it. You know it's funny because you mentioned that you've been an entrepreneur since you were twelve years old and you know part of me always wonders if certain people are born with that and if it's just what's meant to be you know I've had a lot of people here who've said at a very early age they had sort of inklings of what their life was going to look like or the premonition that they were meant to be an entrepreneur and I'm really curious if you know in your own experience you think that is something that can be cultivated or is that something that you're just naturally born with and if it is something that can be cultivated how do you do it like what are the key characteristics of that? Yes it's a really good question and I actually have pretty recently kind of changed my feeling on it so I believe that there isn't any sort of inborn ability to be an entrepreneur but honestly I think that part of that is just being a risk taker in some ways and then the rest of it really does have to be cultivated and trained to some extent but what I say that I recently sort of changed my mind on that a little bit is that I've come to realize especially nowadays with technology and startups and app building and the way that people sort of do business there's a big difference between starting a company and owning your own job and in a lot of ways I feel like what I've done in my you know six or seven companies is really owning my own job so I don't know if I could consider myself like a really successful entrepreneur per se I believe that I've been successful in the things that I've done but you know if someone were to ask me to like take over this company and take it to a hundred million dollar exit I don't know if I'd have the faintest idea how to do that whereas I've always just felt like owning my own job not having a boss and sort of doing what I do really really well is what's made me what I am today and to that extent my first company was an accident I was designing websites I was playing around with I was 12 years old playing around with HTML designed a website for my father's art gallery and one of his colleagues came in one day and my dad was showing off his new website which was you know a kind of a cool thing back then I guess you know it's 19 years ago and the guy said you know I'd love I'd love to do that too would you do it for me for $500 and I said yes and that was the first of 150 websites but again did I have a company I mean I had a couple friends who ended up working for me doing coding and stuff like that but I don't think that I built some empire I think that I was really owning my own job so there's a sort of like a roundabout way of answering your questions yeah absolutely actually you know I want to dig deeper into something you know this was when you were really young when you're 12 years old and I'm really curious especially in terms of sort of child development around this because you know we have so many parents who listen to our show there's a couple of questions that come from me this one is kind of how your view on all this has been shaped based on the fact that you have been an entrepreneur since you're really a teenager which is is actually not normal I think that that that you're an anomaly but I think we're seeing more and more of that given the the interesting gap between technology and creativity that's being narrowed and the reason this is fresh on my mind is I just spent two days with a cousin and it was really interesting to hear her kids have this very clear vision of what they want to do one of them said I want to be a video game developer the other said I want to be an animator and I asked him is like so have you made your first video game and he said no I said why not he said I don't know how I said so Google it and I'm really curious kind of you know what your thoughts are on you know parenting and entrepreneurship and how we encourage it and how we cultivate it in our children and kind of how that has shaped your entire view on all this so I there's a statistic that I love that I'm I'm remiss to find the source for and I think it might be from nifty the you know the national foundation for teaching entrepreneurship but when I was 15 I think I saw this quote and basically what it said was that 75 percent of young entrepreneurs come from a household where the mother is overbearing and the father is physically or emotionally absent so that sounds very very negative and I grew up in a household where I wouldn't say that it fit quite in those criteria but I have a Jewish mother so there's there's something to that and my father who is a great entrepreneur in his own right was fair I mean was very physically present but he was very emotionally absent so does that mean that I was trying to get out from under the control of my mother and trying to impress my father probably and there's probably a psychological element to that and on the face of it that sounds like a really weird way to raise a kid right if you were trying to do that but I mean I think I turned out okay and I have a really good relationship with my parents still and they're very much part of our lives so I don't know if it's something that you can necessarily forcibly cultivate I think what's the most like honestly and I have three young children very very young children so they're not at this point yet but I think that the best thing that we can do is to foster creativity and creativity in my mind is the thing that makes it so somebody doesn't say this can't be done because there's maybe there's another way it's also the person who says doesn't say I can't do it because maybe there's another way and they are the ones who come up with those great ideas and run with them so they say that you cannot train creativity I don't believe that's true and I think that there's some studies in some researchers that are showing that they that actually may not be true but oddly enough the the Montessori school system which is for you know three and four year olds and maybe five year olds now which is known for really fostering creativity because it's very child led and they kind of like decide what they want to do for a certain amount of time and whatnot the Montessori and this is again this is three and four year olds for the most part has produced a very very large percentage of some of the top executives in the current business world including both founders of Google a lot of the top guys at Apple like there's all these people who are really successful and they're showing a link back to their ability to have had their creativity fostered so again that's that's my thing and if that makes my kids into artists or financial analysts maybe I hope not though or entrepreneurs like that's that's the best thing that I think that we can do is to foster that creativity yeah well I mean the whole whole debate of how you do that in education I mean we could probably have about a two-hour conversation just about that you don't want to get me started in an education rant yeah I would be right there with you well let me ask you this you know one of the things that you brought up earlier is that you worked in construction you're really a builder and you know I think that building is really a profound metaphor for anything that we're doing in the world today whether we're artists we're whether we're creatives and you know I jokingly say that you know I've learned more about construction and building than I ever wanted to in my life after we just finished our last conference because of the fact that I've made numerous home depot visits and I felt like an idiot in that place but there were a couple of things you said about that that really kind of intrigued me one is you know you kind of see the world through the eyes of a builder but the other thing is that you went and you basically made it a point to learn every job and I'm really curious how that's all played itself out in the way you build companies in the way you manage people and and what are the takeaways for us for those of us who are listening. So that was my number one piece of advice when I was younger and I was mentoring or coaching or offering advice to other entrepreneurs or young entrepreneurs was that you need to learn and have had an experience with every job required to run your company from the bottom to the top and there's a number of reasons for that. When I was so I started this project in Binghamton when I was 20 years old okay so I didn't know anything about construction by the way this is like talking about being thrown off a cliff like to see if you could fly I graduated from warden you know the number one business school in the world I barely graduated although I did it a year early and I had a double major and a double minor but I was not a good student by any means and I majored in real estate and I took a real estate development class that doesn't mean anything when it comes to putting a hammer to a nail or arguing with somebody about how long it's actually going to take to dry wall a room or re-pipe you know a building any of that stuff is something that you can only learn by doing and more importantly I had at least some foresight to realize that I had guys working for me who had been you know third generation masons who were in their sixties and they weren't going to take any crap from me so the only way that I was going to a learn and be get any respect at all and not be totally taken advantage of was to have them teach me something so I've always I've always been a sponge for knowledge and I think that one of the you know you want to talk about an education rant I can go on a rant with you if you want about this whole head down thing that people think it's like a badge of honor to be like I can't deal with it right now I'm just total I'm head down I'm head down like they have their head in their computer whether it's programming or researching or doing whatever the hell they think they're doing it's not sustainable it doesn't make you a good person it doesn't make you a good business person it's ridiculous there's nothing to be proud of about spending 80 hours a week with your head buried in a computer I'm sorry it doesn't make for it doesn't make for a better offering to the world so you need to learn all the time that's all we can do is learn everything everywhere and constantly be improving ourselves you know I love what you said about you know knowing how to do every single job that's required to run your company and it's funny because you know we live in a world where there are people constantly telling you to outsource everything which is really you know it's kind of an interesting contradiction but you know one of the things that my my friend you know who told who was here told me you know we were making these chalkboard sandwich signs in our garage for our for our event and he said you know he said I know this is a huge hassle and you're not good at any of this but he said think about it this way he said when you're running a team of people and you've done this on the budget that you've done it and somebody comes to you and tells you that they can't do it you can say that's BS because I know it can be done like it gives you a certain knowledge of what's possible that wouldn't exist if you didn't do all those jobs absolutely and I you know so I had a very like Howard Rourke moment you know from from the fountainhead where I was in a suit and I walked on to a job site I by the way I can count on one hand how many times a year I wear a suit but I was wearing a suit and I happen to go on to a job site that we were doing a renovation on it somebody was saying that they couldn't do something that had to do with getting a pipe basically it was literally like right out of fountainhead they had to get this pipe through this particular space and they couldn't do it and I took the welding torch out of the guy's hand and did it in a suit so it's like you know absolutely you have to you have to know this stuff because whether people want to or not everyone not I'm sorry not everyone but there's always going to be people that are looking to take advantage or more likely cut corners and there's no way for you to know unless you've done it or been done or seen it yeah no doubt I mean and I guess there's one other thing I did that you know throughout the process of doing one of the hardest projects I've ever done every time I ran up against a wall and felt like I couldn't do it my business partner Greg Hartle would just reply and say figure it out and it's amazing kind of how you think you've run against up against a wall and somehow you still figure out solutions yeah you know and so this is interesting that you sort of frame it that way because I the overarching framework for my productivity system for less doing is to optimize automate and outsource and it's in that order because what I tell people is if you just outsource something that's inefficient it doesn't make it more efficient at all so you have to start by optimizing it and then you can look at automation and then if there's anything left that's when you can look at outsourcing so I have never outsourced something that I haven't done myself first yeah I think that's a that's a wise observation so I think that makes actually a perfect transition well let's get into really what kind of intrigued me about your story and what landed you here at the unmistakable creative you know Clay told me that you had managed to cure Crohn's but I want to talk to you kind of about the experience of going through Crohn's I mean as somebody who was diagnosed with IBS in my 20s I can I can definitely relate that was the other thing that intrigued me I was like okay well if you can cure Crohn's I'm very curious what happened here I mean it seems to me that this was really sort of a molding moment in your life and it's clear that you're a very ambitious person and you know what I'm very curious about first is sort of the mental capacity and the mental battle that goes on when you're diagnosed with an illness like that because I think for me that the biggest frustration and it's something I'm sure you've experienced is when the doctors just put you on a bunch of pills and say hey by the way there's no cure you just have to live with this and you know the reason I'm asking this question is that often when we when we get to these moments they can become catalyst to either bring about positive change or they can lead us into a downward spiral so I'm curious I mean how you manage to one turn it into something positive and to how other people can think about moments like this in their lives well you know the unfortunate answer is that a lot of times you have to get to that low point before you can do it and I've seen this in so many people now I replicated my results by the way in 15 people now with Crohn's and I've worked with people with IBS and colitis and even diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis and all these other inflammatory conditions now but inflammation is a part of everybody's life and unfortunately for a lot of reasons in our current society you're having to do a stress and food chronic inflammation is becoming a really really major thing so that mindset you know unfortunately a lot of times you really do have to get to that low low low point where you say to yourself you know maybe you say to yourself I'm gonna die if I don't do something and it takes those wake-up calls a lot of times honestly so I've heard so many stories of people with like Lyme disease for instance which has neurological effects so I have a friend Ben who had Lyme so bad in his brain actually that he said he couldn't tie his shoes you know and and to me that is you know I yes I I've overcome Crohn's disease but to me that's like how did you get out of that hole you couldn't tie your shoes but you figured out a plan to get yourself clear of Lyme which he did by the way so you have to A if you're not sick realize that you have to take care of yourself and that not only would you be taking care of yourself but you'll actually be making yourself perform better which again some people don't place a huge importance on that some people do when you realize what you are capable of when you take care of yourself and do the best you can for yourself it's pretty amazing so yes this is the big problem with Crohn's is that it's a young person's disease so it hits people at a really crappy part of their lives when they don't want to be dealing with having to go to the bathroom you know 14 times a day or being in pain and they certainly don't want to discuss it with anybody so it is really tough you know and I don't have like a really I don't have a great answer for you except that learning to check in with yourself and be resilient and training your your nervous system and your stress response is something that and people should start when they're kids honestly learning how to breathe properly learning how to just take a moment and think about what's actually going on and try to see it from a different perspective just just giving yourself the space for a second to be able to you know put your hand out and say I just need like a second just to take a minute because we don't stop people don't stop and that's where I hear every day that people are overwhelmed yeah you know it's interesting you talk about taking care of yourself you know I was talking to my friend Meg Wharton who we've had here and you know her talk at our event was around this but but it wasn't focused specifically on nutrition a lot of it was around the mental aspect she said you know I don't need to give you 10 tips on what to eat she's like you guys know what to eat but we were talking and I told her I said you know it was interesting the month before our event I told her I said I decided to give up alcohol because I wanted to show up at the event with every bit of energy I had and every ounce of you know passion I had for this this project and she said look what you accomplished without drinking for a month and she told me she said every time she is lacking new clients or every time something is not going well in her business she stops drinking and I never thought about the sort of profound impact of something that simple and how it would you know play out in so much of my life and I thought well maybe I should make this a once a week practice and only limit myself to want you know once a week drinking and see what happens to the business I just you know when she put it that way suddenly it's something a light bulb went off when I said wow you're right look what I accomplished after not drinking for a month yeah you know people have this problem it's a willpower thing honestly where we tend to reward good behavior with something bad you know like having having a piece of pizza not that I mean I kind of love pizza but not not that having I mean but like having a piece of pizza after a long run you know so it's it's it's sort of like a it's a paradox of the future self and the current self and and the way that we justify that is really weird and we have a lot of leftover problems in our brains that made a lot of sense when we were running around like cavemen and women but really don't make a lot of sense now and we and we can control those things and learn to control them and and we really have to so the drinking one is really interesting I when I got sick right before I got sick I was about 40 pounds heavier than I am now I was smoking a pack a day I was eating fast food twice a day and I was drinking a lot because I would basically I'd go out with my crew after work every day and drink and I was 20 years old and I mean you know I'd just come out of college but I still I wasn't like in I wasn't that kind of person and I just sort of fell into this lifestyle and then of course I got really sick so when you see and quite frankly things were not going great business wise until I got out of the place that I was in physically and mentally and then they really started to take off and less doing came out of me it was like a spark you know and it just created this whole movement and this and a book and all this stuff that I do now out of being it's I see the most direct relationship because everything that I do now is because I'm healthy you know it's it's not even like oh I was able to do this because I'm healthy it's literally because I'm healthy I'm doing this stuff that's what I came out of so that's it's really powerful mm-hmm yeah no doubt I mean I think it's the foundational piece of everything that you know we do it's funny to listen to you tell this story it's almost like we've lived parallel lives because you know mine was a story of IBS and then discovering surfing and that did wonders for the IBS but the reason I always say that surfing is the foundation for everything I do is because it made me healthy it made me take how I feel so much more seriously and that started to play itself out and in the work that I do today well yeah of course and you know it's just like taking care of your instrument in a way you're not going to be able to play violin with a broken string you're not going to be able to write with a pen with no ink you know so why should our bodies work with no energy and no focus and and broken 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Hey there it's Greenie and Humber and we are back and better than ever got your answers is for sale and if you are interested in winning every sports debate you have for the rest of your life this is the book for you we take the one hundred biggest sports debates and answer them settle them once and for all meanwhile well what's your favorite part of the one hundred sneaky have no trivia all that in a whole lot more it's called not your answers it's available anywhere you get your books right now discover hydro the best kept secret in fitness hydro is the state of the art at home rower that engages 86% of your muscles delivering the ultimate full body workout in just 20 minutes from advanced to beginner hydro has over 500 classes shot worldwide and taught by Olympians and world class athletes for a 30 day risk free trial go to hydro.com and use code row 450 to save four hundred and fifty dollars on a hydro pro rower that's h y d r o w dot com code row four hundred fifty well I think that that that makes a perfect transition to talking about what I think everybody is probably very curious about this point in our conversation which is you know be going from where you are out with crones to all of this self tracking and all the self exploration and kind of how that leads to the art of less doing so how we bring all these principles into our lives so that we can optimize automate and start outsource things I'd love to really get into quite a bit of depth around this and how it applies to our lives on a day to day basis. Sure okay well so there are nine fundamentals to the system and as I said that sort of overarching framework is to optimize automated outsource so the first two are the more the I guess the mediest parts of less doing and they really set the stage for the other stuff which is honestly there's a lot of technology and things that come later but as I said you have to start from a point of being more efficient so the first part the first fundamental is the eighty twenty rule which is obviously not mine and a lot of people have a reaction when they see that and I don't use anything in general I tend to use principles and theories in ways that they were not originally intended so eighty twenty rule everyone knows it from Tim Ferriss and you know if you're a student of history then you know that it's from a hundred and seven year old principal parade those principles or parade those law from Italy it's about resource allocation but for me it is a constant reminder to always be self tracking so for instance do you remember really quick you know tell me if you can remember you don't tell me what it is just remember what do you have for breakfast this morning do you remember okay do you know how many emails you sent last Tuesday no I have no idea okay good every now and then very rarely but every now and then someone has that answer which is open to present so every time I give a talk I ask those questions and you know if I give a talk to a hundred people in a room ninety five of those people will raise their hand about the breakfast question and none usually you know I've had out of a thousand people two thousand people I think I've had two people know about the the email but most people don't know that so then it's like okay well what's the point well the truth is is that it's so easy now to track all this stuff that we do that why not because even if you're not a data scientist which I am certainly not but I used my data to overcome an incurable illness if you collect enough data something will pop you know and something is basic as rescue time so you are you familiar with rescue time yes I am okay so for those or not rescue time is an app that runs on your computer and it just sits there and it will document sort of how you spend your time and you look at it after a week and it's going to tell you you spent seven hours on email and you spent three hours on Facebook you know maybe and you know seventeen hours on Excel or whatever you're doing but it will also tell you Tuesday was your most productive day and Wednesday was released productive day which you know may or may not be a surprise to some people but that's usable information because we can start to not only bring that awareness back to ourselves but maybe mold our weeks around that and the things that we do you know I've learned some amazing things about myself such as I can only write creatively after nine o'clock at night I don't like making phone calls before noon you know we're speaking here you're my first phone call the day we started at noon I don't I don't know why actually I just know that I'm not myself before noon on the phone I'm shorter with people I'm not as like interactive I just don't get the same results so as much as I can I try to push off all my calls till afternoon I do other work in the morning and on a very basic level that's great information you know you can track the work the steps that you've taken the food you've eaten the sleep that you've had the sex that you've had you can track you can track anything you can track your blood you know with inside tracker or wellness effects so all this stuff nowadays can be tracked and that's your data and people are just so blissfully unaware and because of all the stuff that's going on in our lives we lose that self-awareness and if you don't have self-awareness you don't have cause and effect you don't know why you're feeling crappy at two o'clock in the afternoon and it could have been because you had a bad meeting it could have been because you didn't sleep well it could have been because you ate something you shouldn't have you don't know why you're being so aggressive in the car in the morning you don't you just don't know this stuff and that's that's too bad because it's really great information so you can start to call that awareness with the tracking information but then what that allows you to do on a better level on a higher level is to do something I call creating the manual of view and this is one of the biggest things that I push with people this and the external brain which I'll also talk about but creating the manual view was an amazing discovery for me every one of us every one of you every one of us goes through a process on a daily basis usually and if not daily then weekly or monthly but there are processes that you do all the time and we have these things in our brains called heuristics which is basically our brains shortcuts and it's the way that our brains can be lazy and not use as much energy as it doesn't want to it's it tries to be efficient even though our brains use about 20% of the energy in our bodies so we have these heuristics so my favorite example which affects almost everybody is pay a bill so if I had a bill in my hands right now and I would say to you pay this bill you would have absolutely no idea I hope how to do that for me and I wouldn't have any idea how to do that for you so the first time I looked at and by the way when I pay a bill you know I go in online and I do it and I could probably be listening to music or talking on the phone and just do it and takes me seven eight minutes each time whatever it is and it just happens and that's the problem is that people are watching their lives or not even less they're just along for the ride and they're not in it so I stopped and I looked at the process required to pay a bill on a very granular level and the first time I did it it was twenty seven steps so that's not a crazy number because a lot of times I see that with people and that twenty seven steps included go to the banking website log in with this news and then pass forward go to the pay section do this or this and then with the physical bill scan scan it and put it into a drop box and then send it to my accountant and then turn it into a PDF all this stuff twenty seven steps and again maybe that took me seven minutes but it's twenty seven steps so I wrote those down I looked at it and right away I could say okay these two steps are redundant this step doesn't really need to happen there's a hole between thirteen to fourteen that I got to make sense of and okay so I got it down to twenty steps or something and then I was able to look at that and say oh well you know if I use WAP wolf I can put the full I can scan it to Dropbox and then it will automatically convert it to PDF put it in Evernote and send it to my accountant so there's three steps I don't have to deal with and so on and so forth I got to fourteen steps so if I had done nothing else that's amazing I went for I basically cut the process in half and made it more efficient but those fourteen steps I then sent to a virtual assistant and the virtual assistant doesn't know who I am you know in my case I use an on-demand service which I can tell you more about if you want and they they they don't know me they don't know how I'd like to do things they just got a fourteen step process a checklist and they did it but they couldn't they wrote back to me and said I'm really sorry sir but I couldn't understand how you got from step seven to step eight and of course I look at that and I'm like oh well I you know that was just a shortcut my brain of course why would I have to explain that so yes I have to explain that now and after a couple of iterations that that process of paying a bill is now nine steps and it's so perfect and so efficient and so well explained that I have had it executed by over three hundred different assistants with no experience with me and no errors and it's something now that all I have to do is take a picture of a bill when it comes in and throw it out so that's incredible you know and that applies to so many things in my life I have fifty seven of those processes now written down in Evernote everything from how I edit a podcast to transcribing it to doing video work and social media and I even want I used to live in New York City paying a parking ticket that was a process that was able to be done by a virtual system so. Hey I'm Ryan Reynolds at mid mobile we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does they charge you a lot we charge you a little so naturally when they announce they'd be raising their prices due to inflation we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you that's right we're cutting the price of mint unlimited from thirty dollars a month to just fifteen dollars a month give it a try at mint mobile dot com slash switch forty five dollars up from payment equivalent to fifteen dollars per month new customers on first three month plan only taxes and fees extra speeds lower above forty gigabyte ctales expand the way you work and think with Claude by anthropic whether brainstorming solo or working with the team Claude is AI built for you it's perfect for analyzing images and graphs generating code processing multiple languages and solving complex problems plus Claude is incredibly secure trustworthy and reliable so you can focus on what matters curious visit Claude dot AI and see how Claude can elevate your work hey there it's grandi and himbo and we are back and better than ever got your answers is for sale and if you are interested in winning every sports debate you have for the rest of your life this is the book for you we take the one hundred biggest sports debates and answer them settle them once and for all meanwhile himbo what's your favorite part of the book 100 sneaky himbo tribute all that and a whole lot more it's called got your answers it's available anywhere you get your books right now discover hydro the best kept secret in fitness hydro is the state of the art at home rower that engages eighty six percent of your muscles delivering the ultimate full body workout in just twenty minutes from advanced to beginner hydro has over five hundred classes shot worldwide and taught by Olympians and world class athletes for a thirty day risk free trial go to hydro dot com and use code row four hundred fifty to save four hundred and fifty dollars on a hydro pro rower that's h y d r o w dot com code row four hundred fifty it really frees up you know and makes you realize that ninety five percent of the things that you do want to daily basis can be done by other people or other things and it's that five percent that is your individual genius that you should be able to make your hundred percent and you know offer to the world wow that's uh that's really some mind blowing stuff you know it's interesting uh to to hear you describe it the some somebody told me once you know one of the things that we do so much of the work that we do on a daily basis is really repetitive you know you mentioned editing podcasts and you know we've done four hundred plus episodes in five years and one of the things that I realized is that even though it's the same process over and over again when I go through this checklist that I have an Evernote it's a thousand times more efficient even though I've done it a hundred times but if I if I look at it and I know the steps it's just you know step by step when I do that everything goes a lot more smoothly and I notice when I don't follow it I'm not nearly as efficient and somebody told me once they said that it seems really simple but the thing is that you're actually using brain power that could be used for something creative when you're wasting you know when you waste it on something like that you do on a repeat you know you do repetitively I mean absolutely and you know surgeons and commercial airline pilots use checklists so they're around me a thousand times a hundred use checklists mm-hmm yeah I mean I I you know I read about that in a tool Go Andi's book the checklist manifesto and it was mind-blowing and that really kind of changed my my entire perspective on this so you know one thing I want to go back to you know you mentioned self-tracking and you mentioned a few apps and services and I'm sure the question is hey well what are those you mentioned rescue time wellness effects I'm curious you know what what are the other sort of tools that that help you to to quantify this and then you know I think it's one thing to collect all this data but you know for some people they're gonna be like okay great I'm collecting all this data what do I do with it how do I how do I use it you know and really cultivate awareness of it to make real change that is lasting and impactful well okay so the the not the other thing that I had mentioned the big the other big thing which I'm I push a lot is what I call creating the external brain mm-hmm so the idea here is that the human brain is really good at coming up with ideas but it's terrible at holding on to them and at that point it's pretty bad at executing upon them so you need to get ideas out of your head as quickly as possible without any judgment or hesitation or bias and get them out of your head and the best thing that I recommend for people that works generally is Evernote you know so I know that your listeners and I know you know Evernote everyone knows Evernote pretty much at this point and it's wonderful Evernote is great it's free syncs across every platform you can you can take notes in the form of text or pictures or web clippings or you know pretty much anything so ideas need flow and I love to give this example that there was an episode of the Simpsons where Mr. Burns was diagnosed with everything and the he was at the Mayo Clinic and the doctor had this little doorway and all the little fuzzy animals that represented various bacteria and viruses and they couldn't get through the door which is why it wasn't getting sick ideas are very similar if you have an idea on your head get it out of your head because for every nine you know quote unquote bad ideas that you put down there the tenth one might be a great one either because those nine ideas added up to the good one or because they simply got out of the way of that good idea and yes it does work that way so Evernote is really great for this because it's searchable which is a very nice thing it's safe and archive so you can have sort of a little bit of peace of mind and that the thing is is that you don't have to know if it's a good or bad idea and you can't possibly know if it's a relevant idea because you just they don't have the possible crystal ball to know that so where Evernote really shines is if you are using Google or well of course if you're using Google but if you're using Chrome or Firefox or any of those those browsers and you have the Google I'm sorry the Evernote Web Clipper so that makes it so that you can just click one button and capture the video you're looking at or the article or the podcast wherever it might be as you begin to use it and over use it which I recommend because it's a free service it'll start to show you relevant notes from your Evernote and this is where the aha moments come out every day for me because like for instance I just saw an article on something with well you having had IBS you'll appreciate it so the the new hot thing in digestive disorders is FMTs which stands for fecal microbiota transplants you know anything about them no I don't okay so it is literally taking the healthy poop from somebody and putting it into somebody who's unhealthy so that you repopulate their microbiome and they're seeing results in hours it's unbelievable how simple and cheap and quick and effective it is to do this but so there's a lot there's been a lot of research lately so I clip to something the other day and an article popped up that I clipped four months ago and another one from two years ago that neither one of them mentioned fecal microbiota transplants but they were related to something in the article and suddenly it was as if I had pulled this information from the depths of my mind in a way that you really neurologically couldn't do even some of the best memory people in the world couldn't do that and it wouldn't be an efficient use of the brains anyway but now I have this like amazing amount of information right in front of me right there right what I was looking for when I wanted it and you know maybe I had this idea then and I didn't know why but I wrote it down or I captured it because it was interesting and now all of a sudden it's here and it just kind of works that way because it's true there's a lot of stuff in our brains that we don't ever need or won't ever need you know this is a really really efficient way to do it and it's just a peace of mind that you can have these ideas out there when I was in college when I was in high school actually I was getting a new business idea every week and I'd say most of them were pretty terrible but I wrote them down you know and I have this composition notebook the black and white ones and has all these ideas in it incidentally yeah I had the idea I think I had the idea first to put a disposable clear plastic protector on the bottoms of CDs so that if you scratch it you just peeled it off and the CD was fine and I got the idea for that one day I was writing on my dirt bike and they have those peel off things on the dirt bike goggles in case you get mud so you just peel it off and keep going but anyway that was one of my ideas and Nito ended up doing that and you know nobody uses CDs now anyway so it doesn't matter but in college as ideas came less frequently like once a month and then after college they literally just stopped and I kind of accepted that I was like out of creativity or out of imagination but of course I was just working my ass off and not giving myself the chance to breathe much less think of new ideas so some really amazing things can open up to you if you start to take advantage of this external brain and this is just the base layer of it wow really really I love it I mean this is this is just pure gold you know it's interesting one of the questions I have for you around sort of using Evernote you know because I do a bit of both you know I went back to pen and paper oddly enough for a while and I still do I I do all my writing and my moleskin first and I transfer it to to some sort of you know it could be Evernote it could be Mac Journal whatever it is and and part of the reason I did that was because I felt that we lived in such a hyper connected world that it wasn't giving my mind time to slow down I'm really curious to hear your perspective on this given that you're such a huge fan of Evernote the as far as like the virtues of using pen and paper and going analog in a digital world so okay well it kind of depends on the person right so you know Evernote's on everywhere it's everywhere it's on on your computer it's on the web it's on your phone it's it's everywhere but you know it's not everywhere everywhere because there are certain situations where it's not appropriate to necessarily whip out your phone and take notes and something of course some people are somewhere old school like that or they just like the ephemeral feel of using pen and paper and that's totally fine it works for some people but you don't get that searchability you don't get that right aspect but again I'd rather people get the ideas out than not so if you just simply wrote down the ideas you had a little notebook with you and you wrote down ideas as you came to them that would be great and I would be very happy with that fortunately there's some really really easy ways now to deal with that one of which is that you know Evernote has a whole series of the the moleskin molly skinny whatever notebooks that you can write in and then scan with your phone or tag them but there's actually a really cool company now called mod I think it's called mod notebooks and you fill it out with whatever you want doodles writing whatever and it has the postage right on the back of it so you once you're done you just mail it to them and then they scan it all and upload it to Evernote I think I said I read about that on fast company yeah but and then even beyond that I mean I I practice what I preach I have something in my shower called aqua notes mm-hmm I've heard of that yes as the waterproof post is bad and people get great ideas in the shower they actually funded a study at Stanford to prove that which I think is insane but you you know you get good ideas when you're in a warm and comfortable place of course if you're physically naked you tend to be more emotionally uninhibited so that might help as well but I've written down some really cool ideas in the shower and if you don't not only you know to everyone's how they experience where they had a great idea they repeated it four or five times and as soon as they open the door to the shower the idea is gone and that's frustrating because A you might have lost a good idea but B it's just frustrating to lose ideas like it you know you feel like you're being an idiot or something right you know what's even even more interesting to me about this than the technology is kind of how you have these these dots connect in a way that you you couldn't have predicted from all these things and you may have read this article Stephen Johnson wrote this on medium called the spark file and and he said he can trace he always writes down everything he could trace back every creative project everything he'd ever done to random ideas that he jotted down and you know I shared this example with some of you listening who are at our event the instigator experience you know I went back it was really weird because we were on stage and you know we're I think we're on the second day of the event and I opened up my my Instagram and 44 weeks ago there was on in writing a note from my notebook that I took a picture of said location ideas for the instigator experience and here we were at the actual thing I was just envisioning on a piece of paper 44 weeks ago yeah that's pretty cool it really you know and so I think there's so much power in in kind of what you're talking about so let me ask you this I mean I think that you know one of the things that people are going to sit here and listen they're going to hear all this valuable information and and you know they're going to think their lives are going to change overnight possibly by listening to this but I know that there is an entire journey here of struggle and challenges what I'm really curious about are sort of the tipping points the things where things really the moments when things really started to change and the moments that you felt were sort of fundamental ones throughout this process of leading you to where you're at today. Well you know it sounds superficial in some ways but email is an incredible thing for people to conquer and it's it's weird because so for me I am like straight up in box zero all the time I have some processes in place so that no matter what happens no matter if I went into a coma for a year I would never have more than 10 emails in my inbox doesn't mean I'm not going to get thousands of emails but I would never have more than 10 in my inbox in the inbox is a place of action and Zen is it should be so email is one of the most incredible free accessible tools for productivity that exists on the planet today and the problem is that a lot of people have a very adversarial relationship with email and either they get to a point where there's you know 3000 emails in their inbox and they basically give up and then that's just the way it is or they are just constantly stressed about did I contact this person did they get back to me did I get back to them like it just it's a really it's one of those things that it's the the razor's edge it can be the worst thing or the best thing so for me if you can tackle your email and get that into a place where it's productive then you can start routing a lot more stuff through your email which is great because email is searchable it's written you can archive things the way you want you can forward things to people who can handle them you can do a lot of things within email once you get into a good place basically so I am a really big proponent of starting there you know I route as much as I possibly can through my email now whether it's voicemails scheduling requests reading things looking at you know as much as I can do in email it makes it so that you're not actually multitasking because email becomes the task email becomes a thing that you get good at and then you can really accomplish a lot more from a lot of different places that's interesting I think that's the first time I've ever heard anybody have such a sort of positive take on your inbox yeah really cool well let me ask you this mean so out of all of this I know there have been some external byproducts I mean you've mentioned a book I know that your speaker at TED you know that's how Clay kind of you know referred me to you talk to me about some of the external byproducts of doing all of this work and what it's led to in your life well so I've become a teacher that I never thought I'd be I it's so weird how circular things can become I originally wanted to teach a class through Skillshare which you know used to be in-person classes primarily and I wanted to teach a class to hone the content of what's doing because I felt like I wanted to write a book and this was you know four years ago or something when we were just I was just starting out and I hadn't even created all nine fundamentals I had like two but of course I'm like I'm gonna write a book so I did my first class and it went well but it's funny looking back it was something completely different than what it is now and I got great feedback and I worked on it and then I started teaching more and really enjoying it and really developing the content more and better as people were giving me their feedback and I ended up teaching the classes like 40 something times and becoming one of the Skillshare's top New York City teachers which is something I never expected then I took the courses online to Udemy so now I have three courses on you have the less doing course I have the Gmail IFTTT and virtual assistant course and then I also have a biohacking course so once it got online like that then it was scalable you know then I was waking up in the morning and you know 15 people took my class last night and it was amazing and that led to a whole bunch of other things so I was doing other teaching other speaking engagements I was able to say to people you know check out the course and you're kind of get what it's about and then I started doing the podcast and trying to get more and more content out there and really experimenting every day I'm experimenting in fact I have two articles ready that I need to write about something that I just came to me and that actually honestly came to me in the bathtub yesterday and oddly enough I don't have aquanotes in the bathtub so it was one of those rare situations where I was like repeating it out loud and I actually made a song so that I can remember what I was thinking of I have the aquanotes in the shower of another bathtub so the thing about the course that's so great for me is that that was really the basis for the book because in all the outsourcing I've ever done which is hundreds or you know thousands of things of outsourced the two times that I had really bad experiences were when I tried to have a ghost writer put together an ebook on less doing so the first two times they did it and the first one was just really not very good quality and the second time was was I believe the person outsourced it even further and it was just not what I would ask asking for but I firmly believe and this is why I try to teach the skill to people I believe that if you give something to a competent outsourced provider and they make a mistake that is usually your fault because you didn't accurately describe task or provide the information and that's that's really the skill that I try to get people to learn so I believe that in that case so I but I kind of let it go and then I took another approach because the first time what I said was like read these nine blog posts that I wrote and this article that I wrote for Mashable and listen to these three podcasts that I did and put together something cohesive you know which is not great honestly so the last time I got somebody and I said take my online course and write a cohesive ebook based on that and that ebook was the manuscript that became the basis for me to then write the actual book because she nailed it the first time she got it right and I realized that I had just framed it incorrectly because because in the course I'm it's a video of me talking the way that I talk and the way that I teach and the way that I want to get this information out and from that she was able to really see the passion I guess and see what I was trying to do and write something that actually made sense and then that gave me an actual framework in an outline because I don't consider myself to be a particularly good writer it's really hard for me to write so having this like really good outline and this really good perspective from someone else made it so that I can actually write the book really really mind blowing stuff well alright this is this is actually been amazing I mean I've learned so much talking to you in just an hour and I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of this that I'm gonna be putting into to action myself and I'm guessing our listeners are gonna probably be doing the same so I'm gonna close with my final question and this is something that I've asked a lot of people that you know we live in a very very noisy world which I think is funny since you're talking about the art of less doing and you know the question I always close with you know our show is called the unmistakable creative and in a world of this much noise how do you become unmistakable so when I work with people on goals and goal setting everybody sets goals that are too big and usually unrealistic and usually making no sense my favorite one is when somebody tells me that they want to sell their company for X amount of dollars in X number of years because sure maybe you'll get there but if you exceed that that's in a way something got messed up along the way I believe you know it's not simply that you just got lucky and did better something did not go according to plan so that's a stupid plan basically my definition of success is that if I'm better today in any way than I was yesterday that then I'm successful so rather than setting these huge goals and these long-term ways of achieving things just be better in every way you possibly can right now be present do the things that you want to do and that you can do and that you are good at and do those really really really well and magic comes out awesome well alright like I said I have learned so much talking to you this has been a really eye opening conversation and I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share some of your insights with our listeners here at the unmistakable creative well thank you that was honestly one of the most fun conversations I've had very long time awesome and for those of you guys listening we'll wrap the show with that you've been listening to the unmistakable creative podcast and visit our website at unmistakablecreative.com and get access to over 400 interviews in our archives expand the way you work and think with Claude by anthropic whether brainstorming solo or working with the team Claude is AI built for you it's perfect for analyzing images and graphs generating code processing multiple languages and solving complex problems plus Claude is incredibly secure trustworthy and reliable so you can focus on what matters curious visit claud.ai and see how Claude can elevate your work all that a whole lot more it's called got your answers it's available anywhere you get your books right now discover hydro the best kept secret in fitness hydro is the state of the art at home rower that engages 86 percent of your muscles delivering the ultimate full body workout in just 20 minutes from advanced to beginner hydro has over 500 classes shot worldwide and taught by Olympians and world class athletes for a 30 day risk free trial go to hydro.com and use code row 450 to save $450 on a hydro pro rower that's h y d r o w.com code row 450 have you ever felt a twinge of worry about AI taking over your job or diluting your creativity well what if you could turn that fear into creative fuel we've just published an amazing new book called the four keys to success in an AI world and this is more than just a guide it's a deep exploration into the human skills that I can't touch the skills that are essential for standing out and thriving no matter how much technology evolved we're talking about real differentiators here like creativity emotional intelligence critical thinking and much more inside you'll find actionable insights and strategies to develop these skills whether you're a creative person a business person or just simply someone who loves personal develop this isn't a story about tech taking over it's a story of human creativity thriving alongside AI picture this AI as your creative co-pilot not just as a tool but a collaborator that enhances your unique human skills the four keys ebook will show you exactly how to do that and view AI in a new way that empowers you instead of overshadows you transform your creative potential today head over to unmistakablecreative.com/four keys use the number four K E Y S that's unmistakable creative.com/four keys and download your free copy. 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Starting as an Entrepreneur at the age of 15
Why you must learn how to do every job in your business
How Ari used self tracking and self experimentation to cure Crohns
What we can teach our kids about entrepreneurship and creativity
The difference between starting a company and owning your own job
How the Montessori school system has resulted in top business executives
Lessons from world of building and construction that apply to business
Why you must always be a sponge of knowledge
How being “head down” does not make for a better offering to the world
Dealing with an illness that has no cure and the mindset required
The role that chronic inflammation plays in everybody’s life
Why you must learn to check in with yourself
How taking care of your body transforms the results of your business
Why we tend to reward good behavior with something bad
The external brain and how we can leverage it to be more productive
How conquering email can lead to significant gains in efficiency
Creating The Manual of You to optimize your day to day workflow

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