Pay Now, Love It Later: Why I Work Out at 4 AM & The Mindset That Wins The Long Game

A solo riff today. No guest. Let's get into it. Today's conversation is about intentional living in a reactive world—the 4 AM routine, the creative power of constraints, and why mood follows action. Plus, the spirit animal I'd argue we'd all be better off adopting: the tortoise. I close with the story of an old teammate who broke a record at 50 that had stood for nearly a decade and what he understood that most of us forget. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Birch: For 27% off ALL mattresses👉🏼https://www. BirchLiving.com/richroll Plant Power Meal Planner: Get $20 off an annual subscription with code PLANTPOWER20👉🏼https://meals.richroll.com Momentous: High-caliber human performance products for sleep, focus, longevity, and more. For listeners of the show, Momentous is offering up to 35% off your first order👉🏼livemomentous.com/richroll Noble Mobile: The first phone carrier that pays you to use your phone less. Try it for just $10 with code RICHROLL👉🏼https://www.noblemobile.com/richroll Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF your first order👉🏼https://www.seed.com/RichRoll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another solo episode of the podcast. It seems that all of you are enjoying this. I'm enjoying it, so we're gonna do it again. And we're gonna kick this one off with a question that I have been getting a lot of lately, which is, Rich, what's the deal with you getting up so early in the morning, 4

• 1:24Rich Roll?

  o'clock in the morning, and sharing photos and videos of you in your home gym? What's the story there? Well, the story's pretty basic, actually. I wake up early in the morning, and I work out in the morning. And as I shared in the earlier solo episode, I have this renewed commitment to my fitness and well-being now that I am basically somewhat recovered from my spinal fusion surgery. And I've made this commitment to myself that I'm gonna work out every single morning. And by sharing photos and videos of that experience on the daily, it basically just creates a degree of public accountability that makes it more likely that I'm not gonna flake out.

• 2:10Rich Roll?

  Now, do people really care if I skip a day or I don't show photos? Of course not, but I care. And so it's just that little nudge that gets me in there. Uh, when I wake up on days when I don't feel like doing it. It helps me create consistency. Consistency builds momentum and momentum is like this incredible, beautiful, invisible source of energy that turns hard things into second nature. When you have momentum, you want to do everything in your power to protect it. Once it gets interrupted, it's hard to recreate it. And it is something that's sort of sacred.

• 2:52Rich Roll?

  And so by just committing to sharing these photos and these videos every single day, I am basically taking an insurance policy out on ensuring that I am consistent in my workouts and that I'm working towards building that momentum. And now I have momentum and it's easy for me to get up early and get into the gym. It's also been this really cool sort of dual experience. On the one hand, physical exercise, yes, but it's also been a creative exercise. The commitment that I made to myself was that I was going to take a photograph of the digital LED clock that I have in my personal gym at home, which is in a shipping

• 3:33Rich Roll?

  container and that every single day that photo had to be different than the day before. I couldn't repeat the same photo. So that created this sort of creative challenge of how do I do that? Uh, a constraint, if you will. I'm going to get to that in a minute. For now, let me just say the 4:00 AM thing. This is when I wake up early in the morning. People are like, why so early? Aren't you all about sleep hygiene? Yes, I am. I go to bed at like eight o'clock. So most nights I'm getting about seven to eight hours of sleep. Uh, and I wake up without an alarm. So when I get up.

• 4:14Rich Roll?

  I make some coffee and I go right into the gym. What people don't know is that plenty of times I actually wake up at like 3 o'clock in the morning. I go in, I make coffee, I take my supplements, I do a load of laundry. There's like 45 minutes of like mishegoss before I even actually get into the gym, but it would be insane or kind of too much maybe to take a photograph of that clock when it was still in the threes. So usually it's in the fours, but I get up early, I get in there right away. And then this taking of the photograph aspect of it has turned into something I didn't expect, uh, which is almost like

• 4:58Rich Roll?

  a chapter out of Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, where she advocates for going on an artist's date once a week. Uh, this commitment to taking a photograph of the clock has turned into this beautiful creative exercise where I've gotten better as a photographer as a result. And it's almost like this artistic experience of blending my fitness routine into like this artist endeavor of like how to create something cool visually out of this experience that really isn't about me. It's about like finding the light and seeing how the light bounces off the windows and the headlights of my car and the moon and all this

• 5:42Rich Roll?

  sort of thing, which is almost like a page right out of David Epstein's new book, Inside the Box. In that book, if you remember this podcast that I did recently with David, or you've had a chance to read his book already, he argues that constraints drive creativity. It's the limitations that open the door to possibility. And it's sort of counterintuitive. We like to complain, oh, if I just had this resource, or if I had the opportunity to access this person, et cetera, then I could do X, Y, or Z. But in truth, and as he proves out through

• 6:24Rich Roll?

  Talking to tons of people and mining the social science research. It turns out that when you have these constraints, it actually pushes you to find solutions that are better than what you might have previously imagined. And I'm proof of this. If you've seen any of these photos, they are starting to get better. I thought I was going to run out of options, but instead I just find new and interesting ways to take these photographs every day. And sharing them has become a very fulfilling exercise for me. And David, God bless him, always sends me DMs or texts after I post them. And he's like, "You should put a book out. These are amazing photographs."

• 7:09Rich Roll?

  And so I might do that. I might self-publish a book of photographs from this experience, which obviously wasn't even on my mind at all when I began this exercise, you know, I don't know, a handful of months ago. So that's a really cool byproduct of doing this. But back to the accountability piece and what am I doing every day? Essentially, this is just, again, an added layer of accountability to making sure that I live up to and fulfill this commitment that I've made to myself to honor my fitness. And even on days when I'm very time pressed, I'm only in there for a half an hour, at least I did it and I didn't shirk it off.

• 7:52Rich Roll?

  Again, nobody cares whether I post these photos or not, but I care. And it's been just a little added layer of motivation to make sure that I'm honoring those commitments to myself. Another reason why I've been sharing these photographs and videos every single day is because I am attempting to model what living an intentional life looks like, a life in which you are committed to certain goals and aspirations that you set for yourself. Because I think that we are in this late-stage capitalism consumerist society that we're all living in, what we're seeing, especially with younger generations, is... People who are living their lives reactively.

• 8:37Rich Roll?

  It's just too easy to be distracted by our devices, these highly addictive supercomputers that we're all carrying around in our pockets. And so now, this notion of the human being as consumer is now at an exponential level, where we're seeing people who are just consuming all day long, consuming content from their mobile devices, spending all day on screens, living their lives completely reactively, without any room or conscious awareness or commitment to doing anything intentional. Young people aren't reading books. It's just too easy to tune out,

• 9:20Rich Roll?

  to, you know, use your device for distraction, gambling, porn, you know, crypto, doom scrolling, you name it. And this is not good, obviously. Now, by dint of these devices, we have to really go out of our way to live intentionally. There's no more room for boredom. And checking out has just become a way of life. So me taking a picture of my clock when it's four o'clock in the morning is my way of saying, you guys, you gotta be more intentional about your life. Like, I'm not expecting other people to commit at that level, but hopefully it motivates people

• 10:03Rich Roll?

  to rethink the reactive way in which they're living their lives. Because we all have agency over our time. We're all living life 24 hours a day. And even the most time-crunched people can find opportunities and moments throughout the day to, whether it's fitness or, you know, the pursuit of some other meaningful, purpose-driven goal in their life, to invest in those things. I'm a very busy person. That's one of the reasons why I get up so early. I have the podcast, which I think is a lot more work than people realize. I have a media company, Voicing Change. I've got four kids, I'm married, I travel a lot. I have commitments to the brands that make this show possible.

• 10:48Rich Roll?

  I have a very big and busy life. And if I'm going to honor this commitment to my fitness, to repairing my body, to getting fit again, then I'm going to have to find the time for that. And for me, that time is super early in the morning. And if I'm willing to do that, then hopefully that helps other people, you hopefully rethink your relationship with the 24 hours that you have within a given day. And maybe go into your settings in your phone and look at how much time you're spending on them every single day. It's quite shocking when you realize the extent to which you're face planning into your device. And let me point out a distinction with these highly addictive devices.

• 11:31Rich Roll?

  You can use them to consume, which is how most people use them, or you can use them to create. You can take photographs. You can use the Notes app to record ideas. You can edit video on them. You can write a book on them. So it's about the quality and the nature of that relationship with your device. It can be this incredibly powerful thing to help you actualize your dreams and your ambitions and your aspirations, or it can just suck the life out of you. You can watch, you know, an entire season of Star Trek on the couch vaping and ordering

• 12:14Rich Roll?

  Postmates through your phone, or you can get up at four o'clock in the morning and work out and take amazing photographs. It's up to you. So that's the idea behind that.

• 12:31Rich Roll?

  This taking the photograph of the clock is also an illustration of this idea that the little things are the big things. By committing to taking a single photograph, which let's face it, takes five seconds, I have then rooted myself in a daily practice.

• 12:49Rich Roll?

  And I raise that only to say that all of us can find five minutes, 10 minutes out of our day to commit to something, a tiny habit. It could be getting morning sunlight in your eyes every morning. It could be five minutes of journaling. It can be a meditation practice. It could be brushing your teeth if that's a foreign concept to you. The point is, what is it that you can commit to every single day? That is a tiny little thing that aggregated over an extended period of time would translate into moving you in a better direction in your life? We all have five minutes.

• 13:30Rich Roll?

  In fact, I would argue that we all have probably hours in our day that we're misallocating, that we're wasting on our devices or some other unfruitful activity. So I would encourage everybody to actually begin by tracking how you spend your time every single day. That might be an initial great and informative practice. Just write down what you do every 15 minutes from the moment you wake up until you go to bed. Just do it one day. I think you'll be shocked because it will give you a very objective perspective on how you're actually spending your time versus how you think you're spending your time. So for people who say, "I don't have time," I get it. Like I said, "I'm super busy."

• 14:15Rich Roll?

  You have two jobs and you're just trying to make ends meet. Like, I'm compassionate towards that. But that is still not an excuse to not objectively assess areas in your life, periods of the day, that could be allocated towards a more productive aspirant activity. And again, start with five minutes. That's all it takes. This goes back to the James Clear idea of atomic habits, this notion that the little things really are the big things. And mastering just one tiny, very doable, repeatable, sustainable task roots you in a new practice that then engenders over time an emotional connection to that practice, and then that practice expands.

• 14:59Rich Roll?

  Then you create consistency. Consistency builds momentum. And before you know it, your life is in a very different place than it was even a few weeks ago, if not a few months ago. And so the mantra that I always return to, especially on those days when I really don't want to do the thing that I committed to doing, is mood follows action. If you've listened to me or followed me for a while, you've probably heard me say it many times before. But let me take a few minutes to just illustrate what that mantra means and why it has been so vital in my life and why I think it'll be important or helpful to you in mastering a new habit.

• 15:38Rich Roll?

  Essentially, mood follows action means that instead of waiting to feel like doing the thing, you do the thing and the feeling that you were waiting for happens as a consequence of actually executing on the task. This is vetted by neuroscience. Dr. Andrew Huberman actually said that on my podcast. Behavior first, feelings and emotions follow. For some reason, we're hardwired to think that we have to feel like doing the thing in order to do it. Like, oh, I'll go on that run when I feel like it, or I'll call that guy back when I'm in the right mood. That mood never arrives.

• 16:21Rich Roll?

  That call gets pushed back, that run doesn't happen. But nobody gets back from a run wishing they hadn't gone. And they feel better, which illustrates the point, like mood follows action. So when you are in that situation where you really don't want to do the thing, if you can develop the reflex towards action, turning the brain off and just doing the thing, you will realize that You feel better in the aftermath because you've accomplished something. And that was the mood that you wanted to have in order to do the thing. But that mood is a product of doing the thing. So mood follows action. Say it out loud the next time you wake up and you really don't feel like doing the thing

• 17:06Rich Roll?

  that you said you were gonna do and just do it anyway. And miraculously, magically, you will feel better. You will inhabit that mood that you were chasing as a precondition for doing the thing, realizing that it's actually a consequence. I say all of this sensitive to the fact that some people are going through a lot emotionally. And if you are completely dysregulated emotionally, it can be very difficult to get out of that rut and take action. I've been in that place before. I know what it feels like. But I've also come to understand that emotions are just emotions.

• 17:49Rich Roll?

  Sometimes they feel like they're gonna kill you. They can be paralyzing, but they always change. If you can develop the willingness to sit in that discomfort, you will notice that they will morph over time. And even if they feel like they're gonna kill you, they're just feelings. And feelings always, always shift. And so the question then becomes, what can you do in that state? You can go to therapy and talk about your feelings. Sometimes that just reinforces the rut. And I've found that if you can find one action that you can take in the midst of having that experience, you will feel an emotional shift.

• 18:33Rich Roll?

  So ask yourself if you're in the midst of such an experience, like, are you getting enough sleep? Have you moved your body at all? Have you nourished your body with healthy foods? Or are you eating junk food, staying up all night, vaping, doom scrolling, whatever it is? Like, can you interrupt one of those patterns and take some kind of positive action that is esteemable?

• 19:00Rich Roll?

  That will help to shift you out of that state. It will help you claw your way out of that rut. Because esteemable acts are the foundation of building self-esteem. So if part of your emotional rut is not feeling good about yourself, can you find something that you can do that does value yourself? And that is an antagonist to the emotional state that is paralyzing you and that you are seeking to overcome. I should also point out that A, I'm not a mental health professional. And B, I'm super pro-therapy. I've been in therapy for decades. I'm still in therapy. I've gotten a lot out of therapy. I go to men's groups. I go to Alcoholics Anonymous.

• 19:45Rich Roll?

  Like, I am a super fan of all kinds of mental health modalities. The only point I'm trying to make is that you have to pair that with some kind of contrary action. So what is it that you are willing to do differently than you were the day before that can shift that energy and put whatever your therapist is telling you into some kind of tangible action? And as for action, start with physical movement. Go for a walk. Do a quick breath practice. Go outside and breathe fresh air and, you know, look at the sun. Get your morning sunlight in.

• 20:28Rich Roll?

  I'm talking about super, super basic things that every single person is capable of doing. To the extent that some of you might find what I'm sharing unrelatable. Rich, you're this successful podcaster. You have a media company. You've got a book deal. You have a healthy, happy family. You're super fit. You have a home gym. You have all of these resources that I don't have. Allow me to transport you back to me in my late 30s. Fast food addicted, 50 pounds overweight, in a career that I loathed.

• 21:08Rich Roll?

  Completely detached from any sense of what I wanted out of my life. Very unhealthy and really on the precipice of an existential crisis about what I was doing with my life. No relationship with physical movement at the time. No understanding of healthy nutrition, no interest in that whatsoever. If I was to transport myself back like a ghost of Christmas past to talk to that version of myself, I think that that version of me would have said those same things like, who are you? Like, you're not living my life. You don't understand the things that I'm going through. You don't understand my confusion.

• 21:52Rich Roll?

  My problems are unique to me and go away. And what I am saying is that if I was able to go from that guy into this person that I have become, this person who has gone on and done all kinds of feats in the ultra endurance world, has published books, has a successful podcast, has a healthy, happy marriage and is a fulfilled dad and has opportunities all over the place. You know, I'm living a life well beyond my wildest imagination. But it's only because I started doing these tiny little things on a consistent basis

• 22:36Rich Roll?

  that moved the needle, that don't translate on a day-to-day basis into anything recognizable, but over an extended period of time are actually the essential ingredients for change and transformation.

• 22:58Rich Roll?

  So it's not about what you could do or should do. It's about what you can do. What can you execute on today? Again, the little things are the big things. And these small, tiny, imperceptible daily commitments that we can make to ourselves are actually the engine of change and transformation. And this is a really great segue into me talking a little bit about my spirit animal. What is my spirit animal? Well, honestly, if I was to be reincarnated into the animal kingdom, I think I might opt for being a bottlenose porpoise. I think that they're probably smarter than humans. They seem to be having a good time. I think they have life figured out a little bit better than us.

• 23:43Rich Roll?

  That aside, that is not my spirit animal. My spirit animal is actually the tortoise. And I'm going to make the case for why the tortoise mindset is a mindset that we would all be better off adopting. The reason why the tortoise is my spirit animal and why the tortoise basically rules is because the tortoise is playing the long game, the long game of life. And to illustrate this concept, I'd like to take you back to 1987 and introduce you to my friend Hank Wise. Now Hank was a teammate of mine on the Stanford University swim team back in the day.

• 24:27Rich Roll?

  And Hank was sort of a court jester figure, kind of a Jeff Spicoli-esque character who had a very large personality. And I can tell you that on countless occasions, the team would be assembled on the pool deck, particularly during Christmas training, when it was very cold out. We're talking freezing temperatures, like 31 degrees Fahrenheit, contemplating the prospect of jumping into this swimming pool for another brutal, you know, 10,000 meter session when we were exhausted because we barely got enough sleep from... The evening workout the night before.

• 25:10Rich Roll?

  Nobody wants to jump in the pool at 5 o'clock in the morning when it's dark out and cold. And this would always be Hank's cue to burst out into song. And the song that he would sing in the voice of Morrissey, his favorite lyricist, was "Pay Now, Love It Later." He would like dance on the pool deck in his Speedo in the freezing dark cold and go, "Pay now, love it later, pay now, love it later." And everybody would crack up, it would break the tension. And suddenly, we would be snapped out of our daydream and everybody would jump in the pool. Pay Now, Love It Later basically just means we have to sacrifice instant gratification

• 25:53Rich Roll?

  for long-term satisfaction because long-term success depends upon present-day effort. We have to sublimate mood and develop this reflex towards action. We have to unclutch from our expectations around outcomes. And most importantly, we have to completely detach from our attachment to the calendar. Because humans have a very funny relationship with the calendar. We tend to wildly overestimate what we can accomplish in a month, a period of months,

• 26:31Rich Roll?

  or even a year, while simultaneously completely underestimating what we can achieve in a decade. In my experience, I've never been able to accomplish anything significant in less than a 10-year window. But we're just not wired to think in terms of decades. We see people accomplishing things on social media. We read about them, we watch documentaries. We're inspired by people who are successful out in the world, in the fields that we're interested in. And for some reason, we delude ourselves into thinking they're either naturally gifted or that this all unfolded naturally over a very short period of time. But nothing could be further from the case.

• 27:16Rich Roll?

  We need to start to acclimate our thinking around decades. And this is where the tortoise mindset comes in. The tortoise, which also happens to be a gold medal winning longevity decathlete, by the way, so for anybody interested in longevity or health span extension, I think it's wise to start thinking of yourself as a tortoise. The tortoise has this figured out. If and when we can cast our gaze much further out over the horizon, we begin to realize, see and understand that our attachment to outcomes in the short and intermediate term

• 27:55Rich Roll?

  over a period of months or even a year, this is why we abandon our goals too soon. It's why we give up on our New Year's resolutions. It's why we end up beating ourselves up. It's why we have such an unhealthy relationship with failure and why too many people end up abandoning their aspirations too soon because they opt out of the game before the game has barely even begun. Obviously, life is not a sprint. Life isn't even a marathon. It's an ultra marathon of the umpteenth degree. And similarly, we should talk about our goals and our aspirations

• 28:39Rich Roll?

  in the same context. Your goal should not be a sprint. Your goal should not be a marathon. Your goal really should be thought of in the context of an ultra marathon. Whether it's a goal, an aspiration, a dream, or just your life, these are ordeals of the ultra endurance variety. And when we think in this context, we realize that slow is actually fast and patience is paramount. Patience is actually a superpower. And this requires a little bit of counter programming because we live in a culture in which we incentivize and celebrate speed. But speed is not our concern because as my coach, Chris House,

• 29:24Rich Roll?

  used to always say to me, "The prize doesn't go to the fastest person. It goes to the person who slows down the least." Speed is irrelevant. It's constant forward motion in which even your pace really isn't an important variable. The key variable is persistence.

• 29:50Rich Roll?

  Patience and unrelenting commitment to constant, persistent forward motion. This, of course, conjures Aesop's famous fable about the tortoise and the hare. I don't know if most people realize this, but it's the tortoise that wins in the fable. And what's beautiful about this is the longer the game, the more irrelevant what anyone else is doing becomes. The tortoise is not concerned with what the hare is doing. The hare is bouncing around, rushing here and there, reacting to the world, almost like somebody from Gen Z looking at their phone, like living their life reactively,

• 30:31Rich Roll?

  who's being prodded and provoked to live their life in accordance with somebody else's program, chasing rather than coming from a place of integrity. The tortoise just does its thing, completely unconcerned with what anyone else is doing, and just stays the course. And when the game is long, it's this capacity to endure that matters the most. So these small, little habits that you're doing every day become critical because they're sustainable. When they're sustainable, that fuels the endurance to persist and to endure over a long period of time.

• 31:16Rich Roll?

  So in this game of transformation over a long window, speed is subservient to direction. What matters the most is just staying the course, and that is what the tortoise is excellent at. So let's let the hare, which, let's face it, is basically the average harried human. Imagine a young Gen X person, imagine yourself. Imagine somebody who is just living reactively, anxiety fueled, in our modern day world, bouncing from one thing to the next.

• 31:55Rich Roll?

  Basically being impulsed by the news cycle, or being overly caught up in what somebody else is doing, or investing themselves in some drama between other people that has nothing to do with their lives. That's the hare. We are not the hare. We are the tortoise. We are focused on our goal and our ambition. It doesn't matter how long it takes for us to get there, because we have a direction, and we have this series of very small daily habits that we practice relentlessly, that are propelling us forward persistently, undaunted, in the direction of the better version of ourself.

• 32:39Rich Roll?

  The tortoise is centered. The tortoise is equanimous. The tortoise is not riddled with anxiety or self doubt. The tortoise just takes one step and then another step, and just moves forward inch by inch by inch. The hare will mock the tortoise, making fun of the tortoise, how slow the tortoise is, how deliberate the tortoise is in its motions. The tortoise doesn't care, because the tortoise knows exactly who he or she is, and knows exactly where they're going. The longer the game, the more certain it is that the tortoise is gonna emerge victorious. So the point I'm trying to make

• 33:23Rich Roll?

  is that we live in an incredibly fast paced culture. And the incentive structure of our culture is such that we are being impulsed into sprinting all the time, from one thing to the next, by these addictive devices, by the news cycle, by consumerist culture, by the pressures of just trying to get through the day in a capitalist society. And that is leading to this reactive reflex, where we're not actually exerting agency over our lives, but we're very quick to come up with excuses why we're too busy to be more intentional,

• 34:07Rich Roll?

  to be more focused, to be more... Plotting and values-based and purpose-driven in our actions. So the message really is, slow down, take stock of your life, do an inventory on what's working and what's not working, and try to escape the vicissitudes of our fast-paced life, the daily ups and downs that pull us in one direction or another, recognizing that we have responsibilities and there are certain things that we have to do every single day, acknowledging that, but then being intentional about carving out time

• 34:51Rich Roll?

  for you to plot your tortoise course in the direction of the person you would like to become. Letting go of the timeline and just practicing that inch-by-inch forward motion without being attached to outcomes, without being captured by expectations of what it'll look like or how other people will perceive it, just being steady in your course, understanding that we're operating from a perspective of decades, not days, not months, not weeks. This idea that we're headed in the direction of a destination,

• 35:34Rich Roll?

  knowing at the same time that there also is no finish lines. What matters is the practice, your devotion to this practice that is in lockstep with the esteemable aspirations that you hold for yourself. Don't worry about what anyone else is doing. Be focused on your goals, inch yourself in the direction of them, knowing... At the same time, that this is an adventure, a journey without a destination. This reminds me of something Scott Harrison told me on the podcast many years ago. Some of you may know that Scott is the founder of Charity Water.

• 36:17Rich Roll?

  He was a former nightclub impresario who realized that his life lacked meaning and he took a complete U-turn and has now created this extraordinary nonprofit organization that is committed to solving the global clean water crisis. And what he said to me is, "Don't fear work that has no end." So while we can set goals and hold aspirations for ourselves, it's also not contradictory to understand that this journey that we are on towards greater self-actualization, towards greater authenticity, towards living a life of greater purpose and meaning, is by definition

• 37:01Rich Roll?

  a journey that lacks a destination. But that should never be an excuse to not pursue it. Because what gives it such richness and what makes that journey so worthy is the fact that it doesn't have a destination and that we commit ourselves towards it anyway, knowing that transformation is the prize for those who move towards it undeterred. All of which brings me back to Hank Wise. You remember Hank. What happened to Hank is 30 years later, this guy jumped into the ocean and swam from Catalina to Los Angeles and broke the record for the Catalina Channel Swim, a record that

• 37:46Rich Roll?

  had stood for nine years by 10 minutes. He did it at age 50. So this is a guy who thinks in terms of decades, who understands and practices his mantra of "Pay now, love it later," who had no care for the timelines, wasn't concerned about what anyone else was doing, and actually executed on an audacious dream, breaking this longstanding record so many years later. Because he wasn't concerned about short-term expectations. He just had his eyes set, worked very hard for a very long period of time, and it took a long time. But he achieved his goal.

• 38:30Rich Roll?

  So what I'm saying is just start, keep moving forward and be undeterred. Meanwhile, I'm going to keep getting up at four o'clock in the morning, getting into my home gym and taking those photographs.