Relationships

A Fulfilling Life Will Never Come From Achieving Goals With Tim Reynolds

TWS 25 | Fulfilling Life

What are the things you need to do to live a fulfilling life? Does it come from achieving goals? Dr. Tim Reynolds, author and creator of Living Every Minute, doesn’t think that’s always the case, and in this interview with host Patrick Donohoe, we learn where fulfillment comes from. We listen to Tim’s recollections about family and a story about a medical emergency he had worked on that showed him why the goal isn’t all there is, and that sometimes, the journey is just as important. Be inspired by Tim’s words and be ready to live a greater life.

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A Fulfilling Life Will Never Come From Achieving Goals With Tim Reynolds

The following five episodes are with businessman, investor, doctor, and now author, Tim Reynolds. The interview was in-person in my office. If you’re reading the episodes and want to watch the videos, just go head over to TheWealthStandard.com, and it’ll have a link there. When the five segments are complete, we’re going to post the entire interview on our YouTube channel. Make sure you check that out.

A little bit about Tim. He is a former Green Beret in the Special Forces. He was a medic and also a battalion surgeon. He graduated from Texas A&M with his Medical degree and his specialization was Emergency Medicine. He was an emergency room doctor for several years, and then co-started a company called HealthCARE Express.

He has 15 or 16 locations throughout Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. He has his book. You can check it out on Amazon. It’s called Living Every Minute. It’s also on Audible. He reads the Audible audio book. Tim is an amazing guy. He is one of the first original platinum partners with Tony Robbins. He has love and zest for life. It’s throughout his book. It’s going to be throughout this interview.

You can imagine that in the roles that he’s played, he has experienced firsthand the fragility of life. He’s going to share some of those experiences throughout these five segments. I want to forewarn you. This is a PG thirteen-ish interview. There’s some colorful language. There are also some relatively graphic stories that Tim tells, but you are going to experience him, his heart, and his passion for life. You can check his website out. It’s LivingEveryMinute.com. He has some personal development programs, courses, and a lot of other resources that you want to check out. Go head over there. Without further delay, let’s start episode one with my dear friend, Tim Reynolds.

If you took the pillar of relationships in the book, we talked about the 30-second make-out session. I’ll give this as an example. I invented this thing called the 30-second make-out session. It’s a crazy, simple idea. If you’re the guy, you walk into your wife, she’s in the kitchen, or she’s at work, even better. Wherever you find her, you throw her up against the wall, make out, hair grab, and whatever it is that she likes like two rowdy kids. If you’ve been married for a long time, that doesn’t happen very often. What if you did that for 30 seconds and then you walk away? Don’t say a damn word, especially if you don’t tell her that you’ve read the book. You walk away.

What if she slaps you?

She would be like, “Wait.” I’ll grab her harder. She’d be like, “Wow.” It would make her all day. It would be like, she’d want more maybe, but you don’t give it to her and make her beg for it. You would walk away. What if you did that? It’s 30 seconds. For reasons we don’t, we create all these rules about why I wouldn’t do, she shouldn’t do. Fuck all that. Go do it.

If you did that once a day, it would change your entire marriage. That one thing. What I tried to do in the book is not just good philosophy. You go do this. I have five kids. They’ve very successful, great and wonderful. They’re not kids anymore. They’re all adults. Three doctors, one got a business degree, the other one got a brand-new degree. They’ll all come back to work in our companies.

We want the world better for our offspring than it was for us. We want to leave a better place. Share on X

People say, “How are your kids so successful?” I said, “We were blessed.” Obviously, we don’t take credit for all of it. Second thing is, every week, I interview them. They remember this. I would sit in my office and they would have to come in and they’d have to have an interview with Dad. I might’ve sat on the other side of the desk.

It was like a formal interview. “How’s school? How are your friends? What are you doing with so-and-so? What are you thinking about football next year?” We have this interview. I don’t know why I started doing it. I don’t remember. They still say, “I wish we still did those interviews. I love that time.” That’s in the book. Why wouldn’t you do that? Do that. That’s not hard. It’s very simple. They treasure that time. That’s what I’ll do.

Drive up the presence.

Knowing that dad was there. Now that they’re adults, they still want me to do it. I’ll give you one more example. You’ve read this, about the family mission statement. We do what we call the Reynolds family retreats. Once a year, we go somewhere. We went to South Africa. It’s been as simple as going to up to lake camping and it doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, it was. We were reading a book called The Traveler’s Gift. The book has an adult version and the kids’ version. The kids read the kid’s version, the adults read the adult version.

We’d sit around the table and I’d talk about the book. “What did you learn about it? What did you think about this?” I said, “What do you think our families should be about? What’s our family going to be about? What are our rules?” All the kids would comment. We’d write all these notes about what would make us feel special in our house. We wrote all of these things down. My daughter, Natalie, who’s now an emergency physician, took that. She was twelve at the time. She created a paragraph and we labeled it, The Reynolds Family Mission Statement. We blew it up, framed it, painted in our kitchen.

Every week when we’d have a family night and a game night, we’d stand up and we’d do like this pledge of allegiance, put our hands over our hearts. We would read the family mission statement. The kids are all 12 to 5, 9 to 14 at that time. They are now adults. Every one of my kids carries a laminated card of our family mission statement. That’s the power. Easy to do, easy not to do. That’s the difference between intentionally creating a life that’s worth creating spectacular for, or just letting the kids go to school and don’t do anything.

I want to put a stake in the ground here because there’s a couple of points in the book where it tugs on the heartstrings. What is about that guy that came into the emergency room who poured gasoline on himself to commit suicide? Wasn’t it because he was clinically depressed? Why don’t you tell that story? An unintentional life leads to this point.

They called in and said that they were bringing this guy into the hospital. I was the doctor that was on that day. He had sat in his car in a parking lot at a mall, poured a gallon of gasoline on himself and lit a match. He comes in and they had a hard time getting him out of the car. They called in and said he had 90% third-degree burns. Third-degree burns are full thickness.

The worst kind, looks like charcoal. He comes in. Weirdly, people with third-degree burns aren’t in pain. They burned through the pain receptors. They’re weirdly not look like they should be, but they’re not in much pain. That’s what his situation. The very unique situation of being an emergency physician with this guy is, after I examined him, I knew he was dead, but he didn’t know he was dead.

TWS 25 | Fulfilling Life

Fulfilling Life: The problem is that there are no rules. Somebody made that up for you. Somebody created all of that for you and then told you, that’s what it should be.

He was still awake and talking, but this is an unsurvivable injury. There’s no way you survive 90% surgery burns. I’d get to have a twenty-minute conversation with a guy who I knew was not going to survive. I asked him, “What caused this?” He said, “It’s just every day’s the same.” He had no history of depression. He wasn’t on antidepressants.

Yet, it got to the point where it was the zombie life. We talked about everything. He had a wife. They didn’t have a passionate relationship. He had some kids who didn’t have much to do with him. It wasn’t worth living anymore. It wasn’t worth doing it. People who commit suicide are always in a horrible situation. They can’t see the way to a great situation.

If you listen to the Audible part of that book. Billy and I talk about it. The thing that’s crazy about that is in order for him to get out of that situation, what do you have to do? You had to take tons of courage, more courage than I would have, because I couldn’t do that. I’d take massive action to do that. What if you use that same courage of massive action to fix his life?

That was the point. I didn’t even think about when I wrote the book and when Billy brought it up, he’s like, “What happened is this guy had a tremendous amount of courage and took massive action in order to kill himself.” If he had taken that same amount of courage, massive action, and done something different, how would things have turned out?

I often thought about society, in a sense, creates this unwritten checklist that we have to follow. You go to school, get good grades, get married, have kids, get a job, have a 401(k), and have health benefits. It’s like we’ve been programmed that if we check boxes, we’re going to have a fulfilling life. The same thing happens in religion where it’s like, “You got to do these things. Check these boxes.” Is there anything wrong with that philosophy?

The problem is that there are no rules. Somebody made that up for you. Somebody created all of that for you and then told you that’s what it should be, but they don’t know. They’re miserable. They’re beating their wife. They’re telling you what you should do. Meanwhile, they’re sitting at home addicted to porn or whatever the situation is. You have to be careful who you’re listening to. We all have faults. Be careful when you listen to me, everybody. If you think I’m perfect, you don’t know.

My wife’s right here, she can tell you. I’m open to that. I agree. This version two is going to be much better because I got a lot more mistakes to make. You don’t have to dig very deep to find some dirt on me, as the country song says. It’s true. This book says that. This isn’t coming from a guy who knows everything. This is coming from a guy who have been in a lot of weird situations. Sixty-five countries. The treatment to this whole thing that you talked about, about everybody sees the world like this, to fix that is travel. See what the rest of the world’s doing. Mark Twain said that, not Tim Reynolds, but he was right.

The more places you go, the more kinds of people you meet, the more people you live with, because when we go somewhere, we don’t like to stay in the American place. We like to be in the environment. Eat the food, do the things. We’ve been so blessed. We’ve been at the Achuar Indians in the rainforest in Ecuador, ten days from civilization. They’ve never seen civilization.

We’ve done things with them. Funny story in the book about that. We’ve been at the Achuar Indians in Africa. We’ve delved in the mosques in Egypt and Istanbul. We’ve been in almost every Buddhist temple in Thailand, funny story. In every place you go, people are the same. I feel like there’s this core base that our spirits are very similar.

It's not the goal. It's the living every minute. It's a journey to get to the goal. Share on X

Our energies are very similar. We want the world better for our offsprings than it was for us. We want to leave a better place. We want to have a spectacular life. For some reason, we started to put on all these layers of society, religion, whatever it is that take us away from this core base of who we are. If you can get rid of all that and get down to who we all are, it’s amazing how much more we’re alike than we’re different. We all have these kinds of conversations and sit around and have fulfilled lives. That’s the basis of the whole philosophy.

One of those checklists is you have these end points, where you accomplish this thing and that should be, “I graduated college. I’m good. I don’t have to read again and study. I got married. I don’t feel like dating again or take care of myself.” You need to manipulate your body.

Free sex thing. It can happen if you’re not married.

For long.

You’re going to have to work harder.

That’s the point in this life. Life isn’t these end points. Life is to continue a set of milestones. Once you achieve a certain level, the next level of weights, and there’s no end to those levels.

I was talking to John about this. He knows somebody who’s super successful, who he got within Hawaii. He didn’t tell me the guy’s name, but he said the guy on the boat was still with him. He says he’s somebody he’s always to looked up to. He said, “I feel like I’ve achieved everything. I don’t have anything else to look for.”

The problem with thinking that the goal is the thing, that’s the problem. It’s not the goal. It’s the living every minute to get to the goal. In fact, the goal sometimes is a disappointment, like, “This is it? I worked so hard to get here.” It’s because you fell in love with the goal instead of falling in love with the process that gets you there.

I’m in love with going to the gym. I have some goals. I want to bench press 400 pounds. Whatever my goals are for that year, but that’s not it. I’m in love with the gym. I like the smell of the iron, putting on the gloves, making my drink, and lifting those weights. I don’t need any goals. I’ll accomplish the goals because I fell in love with the process.

TWS 25 | Fulfilling Life

Living Every Minute: Dr. Tim’s Pillars for Creating a Spectacular Life

In my business, I’m in love with waking up every morning and going, “What problems have we got to solve today? What issues are they? What trainings are we going to do? Do we have some business goals?” Yes, but that’s not the important part. You can’t fall in love with that because it may or may not happen. What will happen is every day, we get to do this thing that we get to do. If you fall in love with that, fall in love with the right thing, you still set goals, but they have a different reason. They’d have a different thing.

You did an amazing job of setting the theory, setting some frameworks, but you also have some tools for execution. Obviously, you have the book, workbooks, some material online, then you have Gladiator, and you have some other things that you’re doing. Maybe speak to those as we conclude.

We’re putting this all together. We have the Living Every Minute book. We have Living Every MinuteWorkbook. Those are available LivingEveryMinute.com or on Amazon. It’s also on Audible. I finished it. It’s weird listening to yourself read a book.

It’s awesome. You make these little side comments and interviews.

We did the Audible. There’s that, the workbook. We have the journal planner. I talked about that. It’s on LivingEveryMinute.com, all this. Our blog is there as well. We started a course. These didn’t have anything to do with each other. This was happening. I started this course called Gladiator. It’s called Reclaim Your Gladiator. The reason it’s called Reclaim Your Gladiator is because it’s a men’s course and men are already gladiators, they just forgot. For three days, I remind them of who they are, what they were born to do, and what they’re here for. It came with this whole idea of toxic masculinity, this whole idea, this bullshit concept, that masculinity is toxic.

Masculinity is protective and helpful and all of the good things. What you see negative that men do is not masculinity. That’s called being an asshole. The sideways hat and the big truck are not masculinity. Don’t mistake the two things. That’s what I literally said in the back room and designed the course. Everything from Special Forces days to Tony, to Keith, everybody I’ve learned from and said, “How can we create this into a course?” We started running this gladiator course and it’s been amazing.

We’ve put 100 men through it. We only do 12 at a time. We only do it twice a year. It’s on my ranch in Texas. Three days. There’s a physical component to it, but it’s not about physical. It’s about mental spiritual. What happens in the classroom and in the conversations is way more important than the physical part. I knew for my Special Forces days, and you did a thing, so you appreciate this, men don’t open up without a physical component. You get them to be physical, get them tired. Now I can get them to open up and I can teach them. That’s why there’s a physical component, it’s part of it. It’s become awesome. That’s at the same website, there are videos and stuff. I did that for a few years.

Everybody said, “You need a woman’s course.” I said, “I don’t know how to do a women’s course. I was in Special Forces. There were no women.” No offense to women, but all my companies are run by women, but I don’t know how to train women. It’s not my thing. I have my wife do it. She’s like, “I’m not doing it. You’re the trainer guy.” We kept going back and forth. Finally, I said, “I’ll do it.” I sat for an entire summer and I planned out what would a woman’s course be. I want them to be just as bad-ass as Gladiators, but not turn them into men.

Part of our problem in our society is we’ve mistaken equality of pay and how we’re treated for sameness. We’re not the same. There are men and women. There’s feminine energy, masculine energy. They’re not the same. That has nothing to do with equality. Sometimes we confuse the two things. Inequality means sameness. I didn’t want to make them the same. I debated how to do it. I took the whole summer. The whole name Valkyrie, if you know what Valkyrie is, they come from the Viking days of Nordic people. I originally named the course, Ninja Princess Warrior.

I was told by the other women, “That would not be the name of the course. The name of the course would be Valkyrie.” We’ve done two. We got two coming up. It blew me away. It ended up being cooler than Gladiator. Women have this unique problem that men don’t have, that we don’t think about. Women have to do everything a man has to do. I’m thinking of a single mom. Go to work, provide, be all of the things that she has to be and then go in and take a shower, put on high heels and a dress and become super feminine. We don’t have to make that choice.

Part of our problem in our society is we've mistaken equality of pay and equality of how we're treated for sameness. Share on X

We just stay in that one state all the time. They have to do all the thing we have to do and then also be super feminine. The whole course is going back and forth to a masculine, feminine energy. Tony says, “How do you make your dog, your dog? You give it a name and you teach it to come on your call.” I said, “Which part of your personality do you need to teach?” You don’t talk to your child the same way you talk to your colleague, the same way you talk to your buddy at the bar.

You have to know which dog to bring to which bite. It’s about that. We ended up with Gladiator and Valkyrie and then that led into a couple’s courses. We have a couple of courses that we do. We talked about these, because it’s not Gladiator. It’s not a physical course, but it’s about strengthening people’s marriages. The 30-second make-out session, a bunch of other things we go into.

A few years into it, the Gladiators came to me and said, “What about advance? What’s the next thing? We want to advance Gladiators.” We’ve been 60 men or so at that time. I said, “You be careful what you ask for.” They’re like, “No, we want it.” I created advanced, which we call Ragtag Bastards. I created the Ragtag Bastards course, but that’s for people who’ve already done the first course. We hold that once a year. Now they’re talking to me about that Valkyrie.

We’ll see how that goes. One thing’s leading to another. Rather than me pushing what’s happening, I’m feeling the pull of what’s happening now. It’s fun. I like it. We have those tools that are available. We’re also going to do our first ever Living Every Minute Summit. We’re going to take probably three days and teach everything in the book over a three-day process and have a summit where people can come and learn.

Talk about the website.

LivingEveryMinute.com is where all this is housed. It’s where the events are. It’s where the book is. You can get books, workbooks, the planner. Everything’s on that site. That’s where we’ll announce when we go inside to do the summit where, and when that’s going to be. We’re talking about doing a podcast, we love the idea of doing it. We just haven’t got to that point yet, but eventually, we’ll do that. We’ll put all that on there as well.

Tim, it’s been awesome.

Let me put a plugin for you. I’ve been watching you over the last few years. As I’ve known you and watch you move from one office to the other, watch what you’re doing and your personal growth and path. I’ve been watching from a distance and through John and see what’s going on. I’m proud of where you are headed. This is awesome. Good job.

That means a lot. We’ve discovered similar principles. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. That’s what we have in common. The wheel has been invented. We just couldn’t figure it out and execute.

TWS 25 | Fulfilling Life

Fulfilling Life: Masculinity is protective and helpful and all of the good things. What you see negative that men do is not masculinity. That’s just called being an asshole.

Take what other people have taught and just execute it.

It’s a game where it’s not all success. You hit the nail on the head, 80% failure, 20% success. That 20%, it makes it like that. It’s totally worth all the 80% and maybe even a little bit more, honestly. I don’t think we value the success if we don’t get punched in the face every now and then.

If you are always successful, you wouldn’t know any different.

Tim, you’re awesome. Thank you. Everyone, thank you for reading. See you next time.

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About Dr. Tim Reynolds

Dr. Timothy Reynolds is the founder of Dr. Tim international Inc., a company he established in 2009 to allow him to share his passion for Living Every Minute™ with others. He dedicates countless hours each week to helping others transform their lives through mentoring, life building, inspirational talks, and writing his motivational blogs.

Dr. Tim was the first member of his family to graduate high school. He joined the military shortly after graduation and graduated from the Special Forces Q-course in July of 1982. He served as a Green Beret on an A-Team as the Battalion medic and eventually as a Special Forces Battalion Surgeon for the 19th Special Forces Group (Airborne). He served both enlisted and as an officer for 17 years.

After getting out of the military, Dr. Tim graduated college with honors. His passion for helping people inspired him to become a medical doctor, and in 1993 he graduated Summa Cum Laude with an MD degree from the University of Utah. He completed his Emergency Medicine residency at Texas A&M Scott and White in 1996 and is board certified in emergency medicine.

Dr. Tim is the managing partner for HealthCARE Express, a group of urgent care clinics rapidly expanding across the United States. Prior to starting HealthCARE Express in 2006, Dr. Tim held numerous positions in the medical field, including: medical director of the Wadley Regional Medical Center Emergency Department and level II trauma center; president of E-Med Services, LLP and of E-Med Billing Solutions, LLP; associate clinical professor for the Area Health Education Center at the University of Arkansas; and founding member of the Greater People’s Clinic of Texarkana Board of Directors.

Dr. Tim is also an entrepreneur and successful businessman. He is currently the chief executive officer of TL Reynolds Properties, LLP, a real estate investment company; and he is a managing partner of JJET Developments Ltd., a real estate development company.

Dr. Tim enjoys spending time on his Ranch in Atlanta, Texas, where he lives with his wife, Pam, and their five amazing children. He holds a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, is a SCUBA rescue diver, and a pilot. He also enjoys body building, golf, and hiking.

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Life Is On The Other Side Of Fear

TWS 18 | Other Side Of Fear

 

How many times has fear held us up? How many opportunities did we miss just because we were too afraid to try? It is time to overcome that and start living life. As Patrick Donohoe highlights in this episode, life is on the other side of fear. He further elaborates that by pushing our fear thresholds, we realize that we can do more. Life demands growth, and if we hold ourselves back, we can’t possibly get to the life we are meant to live. Join Patrick in today’s show, where he shares his own experiences and lessons learned that you could apply in every aspect of life.

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Life Is On The Other Side Of Fear

Everything you could possibly want out of life is on the other side of fear. I want to qualify that statement. I got some feedback that my head was in the cloud. I was not aware of what was going on in the world because of what I was choosing to focus the topics of this show on. I get it. I understand why someone would say something like that. There’s a lot going on. My intent is not to propagate ignorance. This show rarely, if ever, touches on circumstances and experiences that are outside of our control. In the Middle East, there’s always going to be conflict. There’s been for a long time. There are also things going on in government that are sad but that’s been the case for a long time. We don’t have control over monetary policy, fiscal policy, COVID. We don’t have control over policy.

We don’t have control over whether there’s quarantine or not. There are so many things that we think there’s a solution of control and influence and we get all worked up about it. I choose to focus on the things that I can’t control. The qualifier is everything that we could possibly want out of life is on the other side of the fear that we have control and influence over. In all aspects of life, there’s a gap between where we are now and where we want to be. Those are the two points. There’s a gap in between. That gap is laced, typically with some degree of fear. Fear of failure, success, pain, of what others will think of you if you succeed, of what others will think of you if you fail, and of what success or failure will mean to yourself image when you believe about yourself.

Life commands and demands growth. Share on X

The irony is that when we toe the line with this fear, there’s another fear that fills in the gap that takes its place. It’s a never-ending loop. An infinite loop. There are ways in which we can strategically push these thresholds. If we don’t, we are always going to come up against these thresholds because if you think about it, part of us tries to avoid fear and pain and rightfully so, at the same time, because life commands and demands growth. It will put things in our place over and over again, challenge, friction, pain, and problems so that we grow. Looking at what we can do to strategically position circumstances, experiences that will allow us to push those limits and thresholds, it could minimize or mitigate some of the challenges that often surprise us.

Early in my business career, I learned some invaluable lessons but it was at the cost of a lot of pain and failure I told you about. An investment failure that I had over ten years ago, but there were some relationship challenges that I had and they kept coming up over and over again. When I got out of the mess of 2008, 2009, 2010, I rebounded. I had a small team. I was doing pretty well, connected with the group and the group had another financial advisor that was working with them. I had a great relationship with this individual for a short period of time. Our wives are from the same country. We shared similar interests. We were very passionate about our principles, our values, and what we were doing financially.

We started working together and I saw some early signs. There were some red flags that came up regarding this individual’s desire to be independent beyond their own and not work with me in tandem. I did not feel the same way, but this individual did. I did not say anything. Red flags came up. I wanted to avoid conflict and build a relationship and it kept coming up over and over again. The final straw was this individual went to a group that we were working with and said, “I don’t think Patrick is necessary. I want to take over.” The group came to me and said, “This is what this person is saying. What do you think?” I was like, “I’m out.” It was too late. The relationship was ruined.

There were other circumstances after that with a team that I had built, at one point in 2014-ish, we had upwards of 70 employees. We were doing well and the wheels started to come off. There were people put in positions they shouldn’t have been in. There were those that had an illusion of experience and try to influence this area and that area. The conflict was a daily occurrence. I did not face that conflict. I did not know how to handle it. I kept pushing it off. What ended up happening is more of the same happened and ultimately, over the course of about twelve months, dozens of employees were either let go, fired or they’ve left on their own accord. It was insanely painful. I wanted to go back on my own. At the same time, I recognize the principle that life business was teaching me a lesson. I needed to learn that lesson.

What are the lessons you can gain from this? First off, again, nature is commanding growth in your life, your relationships, your finances, professionally, every area of your life. Physically, nature is compelling you to grow. Most people push off those signs. They don’t listen. They think that there’s an easier way, a shortcut and ultimately, what happens is a stronger experience then another strong experience. They keep stacking up until there’s a massive failure in pain. That’s when we decide to say, “This is a lesson. I need to make some changes. This is what I need to do.”

I’m going to go over two primary lessons you can take from this story. The first one is with regards to what I learned in any situation where another person is involved. I do not wait when a flag comes up. When a red flag occurs, I approach it head-on. Some of the things I say is I learned this from a therapist who specialized in businesspeople. I worked with her for over a year. She’s amazing. Karen Kindred, if you want to look her up, she has some podcast episodes and some interviews.

She taught me how to communicate with how I feel about certain things because you can’t argue with how somebody feels. It’s a way of feeling. I got to the point where these red flags came up. I said, “This is what is going on. This is how I feel. Please, help me understand your perspective.” That’s it. It’s very simple. You can use this in business and in your intimate relationships, your family relationships.

It helps you understand and share with and communicate with people at a deeper level. You either can gain perspective that you may not have had or their intention may be what you assumed and you know early on so you don’t have to prolong the inevitable, which will be even more painful if you continue to wait. I have an equation. When I feel something, see something that is irritating, that is frustrating, that borderline is like, “This is not right,” I approach it head-on. I share what I’m feeling. I share what my perspective is. In most circumstances, I’m not seeing things the same way as this other person. Them being able to express themselves helps resolve.

If the intention is what I assumed it was, I then escalate and say, “This is what I’m going to do next because this is how I feel. I don’t want it to go on any longer.” It points to a very quick conclusion that if a person does not want to essentially align with whatever the perspective and situation is, then there is a clear exit and it happens quickly. It’s so simple, but it’s been incredible. I’m going to give you the second lesson. I’m going to spend a little bit more time on this one, which is strategically designing a threshold by breaking through thresholds. Lesson two is you can strategically stretch yourself by pushing your own limits and learning to love challenges, friction, and conflict because you know that you can thrive because of being able to face it. Your psychological muscles continue to grow.

TWS 18 | Other Side Of Fear

Other Side Of Fear: Find something you can do once a year that pushes these physical and psychological thresholds and builds your muscles, which ultimately allow you to face whatever challenges.

 

I believe your income, your wealth, what you can manage, whether it’s people or money, are correlated with this ability to handle conflict, friction, and challenge. There are some invaluable lessons that you’ll receive in this. Self-respect and self-competence are scraping the surface. Plus, being able to strategically position yourself in these areas will also allow you to grow at a much quicker pace. A few years ago, I saw this crazy guy speak at a Tony Robbins business event. His name was Jesse Itzler and he has this thing called a Big Ass Calendar. He says in a nutshell, “To do at least one crazy physical thing every single year.” Jesse pushes this to the limit. I’m not going to talk much about it.

I mentioned on the show before, but he wrote a book called Living with a SEAL, which is when he invited a Navy SEAL that he had met to live with them for a couple of months because he was so impressed by this individual’s ability to live a lifestyle at this very heightened level from an accountability perspective. He also wrote a book called Living with the Monks, where he spent a good amount of time living in a Monastery in, I believe, Upstate New York, again, to experience a very simple, basic lifestyle.

Jesse has a myriad of programs that he advocates. He does this thing called Hell on the Hill. He has a house in Connecticut where they have this big hill and run up a hundred times. He has the event every single year. He also has this event called Everesting. It’s done at about a dozen places around the country where you essentially hike up and down typically ski resort hills, the equivalent of the elevation of Mount Everest. You hike up, take a gondola down or a chairlift down, hike up again, typically over 36 hours. It is significant as far as elevation ends up being 25 miles-ish.

He does these events because he has connected this idea of pushing your physical and also mental thresholds strategically. What it does, it’s not just the physical aspect, you learn what you’re capable of. You push yourself to those limits that help your body, mind, and you realize that it can do hard things. It transits and builds muscles. I’m going to come back to the Everesting. There are other events, too. I’ve mentioned the Tony Robbins events, which are very psychological in nature that push you to these thresholds. An old business colleague of mine, Garrett White, has a program called Wake Up Warrior, which is primarily designed for men but pushes you to these psychological as well as physical limitations. A guest that I’m going to have on soon, Tim Reynolds. He has a course called Reclaim your Gladiator, where he does something similar. Mostly physical in nature at his ranch in Texas.

If you keep pushing these challenges off, life is going to put them in your path regardless. Share on X

There are so many different events like this, but the idea is to find something you can do once a year that pushes these physical and psychological thresholds and builds your muscles, which ultimately allow you to face whether they are challenges in marriage or friction in business. It allows you to face those and grow quickly from them instead of doing what I did, pushing them off. You attack it head-on because you understand the nature of the challenge, friction, and growth. The fact that if you keep pushing them off, life is going to put them in your path regardless. What I’m going to do soon, as you guys are reading to this episode, I am going to be going up this ski resort at Snowbasin. It’s in Eden, Utah, about an hour North of where I am in Salt Lake City. I’m going to be doing Everesting.

I’m going to be going up and down about 13, 14 times and I’m going to document it. I’m not going to document it to signal anything other than wanting to have you guys there as my accountability partner. I’m doing this by myself. There’s obviously a group doing it, but I’m not doing it with a friend, family member, a busy business colleague. I’m doing it by myself. I’m essentially going to be recording my thoughts, my experience, especially in those times of pain and difficulty. You are my audience and family and I want you to hold me accountable. I believe that these physical circumstances allow growth, not just in that specific category but in a lot of other aspects of life. I’ve done a couple of Tough Mudder and Spartan events. There are lots of these mud races, obstacle races, workout routines that allow you again to strategically position conflict, challenge, and friction in your life so that you are constantly growing.

Thank you for reading. I hope you learned something. Go out there, face some challenges, toe the line. You’ll be glad you did. Email me at Hello@TheWealthStandard.com. Tell me what you’re up to. Tell me what challenge you’re willing to face. Tell me what challenge you have faced in the past. I’d love to hear from you. If you want to adopt this Big Ass Calendar philosophy, psychology, go check out Jesse Itzler. He has a brand called Build Your Life Resume. Thanks for reading. We’ll talk to you next time. See you.

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