Consistently Good Not Occasionally Great - Nick Bare

Nick Bare is the founder of Bare Performance Nutrition, an endurance racer, YouTuber and a podcaster. Being consistently good will beat being occasionally great. But consistency is hard to find when life throws setbacks, business failures, injuries and babies at you. However, Nick has found a way to balance everything and today we get to discover how. Expect to learn why doubters shouldn't affect your performance, why Go One More is a useful rule for everything in life, how Nick avoids burnout when juggling lots of projects, where the drive to get up at 5am every day comes from, how gut instinct can beat brain-power and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Upgraded Formulas Test Kit at https://upgradedformulas.com/ (use code: MW15) Extra Stuff: Subscribe to Nick's Channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbVEx9qG_hLrb6FrWQJz_Tg Follow Nick on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/nickbarefitness/ Check out Nick's supplements - https://www.bareperformancenutrition.com/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #fitness #endurance #business - 00:00 Intro 00:43 Nick’s Marathon Progress 08:46 Preparations for Fatherhood 14:04 Choose What to Suck At 18:29 How to Avoid Burnout 22:18 Hiring the Right People 34:15 Framework for Being Consistent 41:04 Modern Definition of Success 49:16 Consistency in Hard Times 1:02:40 Define Personal Success 1:08:14 Moving Towards Intentional Parenting 1:18:18 The Price Paid for Success 1:23:41 Where to Find Nick - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Life is this massive endurance event where if you try to be occasionally great all the time, you're going to burn out. But if you keep going consistently good and you just keep moving forward, you know, there's going to be obstacles. There's going to be speed bumps. There's going to be resistance. There's going to be hills, but just keep driving through it consistently. It's not always going to be fun. It's going to suck. It's going to hurt, but that builds endurance. And when you look back over a period of time, you think, I actually made some progress through this because I was consistently good rather than trying to be or look occasionally great.

• 0:30Chris Williamson?

  Nick Baer, welcome to the show.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me in the Bear Performance Podcast.

• 0:36Chris Williamson?

  Thank you for having me here.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  It good, dude. It good. It goes both ways right now.

• 0:43Chris Williamson?

  How did you get on with your recent marathon?

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Oh dude, it was great. I ran a 248 11, two hours, 48 minutes, 11 seconds. The goal was to run sub 250. That's coming off of, so to get some context, my first marathon was in 2018. This was a three hour, 57 minute marathon, full suffer fest. My second marathon a year later was four hours, 15 minutes. I got worse. And I told people, I'm just not a runner. It's never going to happen. And then I finally committed to and stopped believing that. And after an Ironman, I said, I want to run my first sub three hour marathon. And I went, I went through the process and journey

• 1:25Speaker 00

  and trained for it. And I failed. I ran three hours, 24 minutes. I realized it was a lot harder than I thought. I wasn't respecting that time. I went back into another prep and I ran a two hour, 56 minute, 27 second marathon. This was last January. And then I realized, what's holding me back? The only thing that's holding me back is me. So I said, I'm going to run a sub 250. And we did it. We prepped, we went through the process, went through the journey, stacked the bricks, did the workouts, showed up to Buffalo, New York with all the confidence in the world and crossed that finish line, two hours, 48 minutes, 11 seconds.

• 2:05Chris Williamson?

  How did it feel?

• 2:07Speaker 00

  It felt, it's one of those things like you.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  I interviewed Matthew McConaughey a few months ago and he said, nothing is unbelievable. He hates the word unbelievable.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Unbelievable. It happened. It happens. It's going to happen. So whenever I cross like a finish line, this can be a finish line that's actually physically there or you know, a goal that I've set. When you cross it,

• 2:37Speaker 00

  looking back, when you set that goal or that objective and you go through the process, if you have the confidence knowing you're going to do it, you're going to do it. You just need to put in the work now. So when I crossed the finish line, I wasn't like, holy crap, sub 250. It was, no, I knew after mile three, I was going to do it. You know how you're feeling that early on in the race. So it was, it felt really good because there was a lot of weight on the shoulders because I shared my goals with the entire world or my audience for whoever's watching. I gotta tell people months before it happens, this is what I'm going to do. Now I'm going to document and show you how I'm going to get there. So then when it's finally time for me to be tested, yeah, there's a lot of weight on my shoulder that I carry.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  But I think that pressure also provides some power in

• 3:29Speaker 00

  how I'm going to perform race day.

• 3:33Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting thinking about what happens when people set themselves targets and they, they slowly build up success over time. Because you're right, saying that something is unbelievable or you can't believe that something happened when that was the outcome that you were working toward. That, that's actually what you meant to have happen. And it's the same thing with the podcast or with the supplement company or with whatever it is that you're doing.

• 3:57Chris Williamson?

  The growth, the increase in sales, the increase in subscribers, the impact that you have, that's the thing that you were working toward. That shouldn't be unbelievable. I think you're right and words have power. I, I just think it's mindless. Sometimes people say that it's unbelievable. What they actually mean is it's impressive or that's something that's, that's Sizable accomplishment. They don't mean that it's unbelievable. Maybe unbelievable for them in their position at the moment. But yeah, I mean, it was unbelievable or at least unlikely for you in 2018. When you ran one hour slower than you did only a few years later.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  Well, one of the things I like to say is it's around the word doubt. I think the word doubt is a very powerful word because doubt is only dangerous. When you start doubting yourself, my entire life, like people have doubted me as they should. There's nothing, there was nothing, there is nothing special about me. When I started my business in 2012. People made fun of me. They would laugh and joke about like, oh, here's Nick with his BPN supplement company. And they would laugh and joke and they all doubted me. My mentors, professors. People I worked for, like my bosses, all doubted me.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  And doubt is okay. Like anyone can doubt you. But until you start believing that doubt, when you start doubting yourself, that's when it's dangerous.

• 5:23Chris Williamson?

  Did you end up with a chip on your shoulder because of that?

• 5:25Speaker 00

  No.

• 5:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's that. I thought that that would be your answer and it seems surprising. So in the UK, that would be the sort of narrative where a lot of people, certainly some of my friends.

• 5:36Chris Williamson?

  That would be something they'd remember for a long time. You know, the crossing the finish line would be this is a middle finger to all of the people that doubted me or moving into a new office for the supplement company or whatever, hitting a new milestone with subscribers. That would be there. And I always wonder about the usefulness of retribution as a motivating force because it can power you to do a lot of pretty impressive things. But I'm not convinced it's the healthiest way to to move forward.

• 6:04Speaker 00

  I think sometimes people just say that too. Like they say they have a chip on the shoulder and that's why they do the things they do because they actually don't look.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  They don't take inventory and stock of of what they're actually feeling and experiencing and why they're doing something. Is it because you have so much passion and purpose behind what you're doing? Because for me, whether people are cheering me on or not, I'm gonna keep doing exactly what I'm doing because I love it. Like I have passion and purpose behind it. And I see there's people that are benefiting from it and it's impacting other people's lives. Maybe those people are, you know, watching the YouTube videos or following the brand, or maybe they're employees here where they're actually working in the HQ, or maybe it's the sons and daughters of employees or significant others of employees that are impacted by the things that we do. So, yeah, like a chip on the shoulder is

• 6:58Speaker 00

  never, that's never been my oomph. It's never been my, my reason why. It's because I'm doing something that I love doing with people that I love being surrounded by. That's my goal in life. Like, man, if I can do this the rest of my life, that's pretty fricking cool. Like, I get to do what I love to do with people I love doing it with. Sign me up.

• 7:20Chris Williamson?

  And the marathon is the last big thing before dad life, right?

• 7:23Speaker 00

  That is the last race on the horizon. And I had to convince my wife to let me do that one because we knew, we found out that we were pregnant when I was prepping for Rocky Raccoon, which is a hundred mile ultra marathon that we did in February. And I knew I wanted to run a sub 250 marathon. And my goal with it was I wanted to document the whole journey. And through the series, the goal was that someone should be able to watch our marathon prep series, and they should be able to PR their next race. Like, we wanted to provide them the tools, knowledge, and resources to PR their next race, whether that's their first race ever, or their 10th marathon. And we felt a responsibility and obligation

• 8:07Speaker 00

  to do that through the series. So I thought to my wife and I said, I gotta do one more race. We gotta do this series. And she said, as long as it's before June, that's fine. So I found a race on May 29th, Buffalo, New York. I told my coach, Jeff Cunningham, I said, we need to find a race that has a flat and fast course profile before June. Let's do it. He said Buffalo, New York. So knocked that out and I have, I mean, as we're recording, this is June 9. Our babies due July 8th. So we're just about four weeks away. A baby girl, I cannot, I cannot wait.

• 8:46Chris Williamson?

  You've got this go one more ethos thing with the impending dad life coming up. You're going to have to make a lot of sacrifices in other areas of your life. And this is something I'm increasingly interested in as guys my age, I'm 34, you're

• 9:00Speaker 00

  31.

• 9:01Chris Williamson?

  31. You know, this is the period where you start to think about other people than yourself. And I'm fascinated by whether you've thought about some of the discomfort that you might go through in terms of having to make sacrifices or sucking at areas of your life that previously have been real sources of meaning or accomplishment or achievement for you. Are you ready for that? You ready for the fact that you're going to have to think about something else except for whatever's in front of you?

• 9:32Speaker 00

  I am ready for that chapter. I will say that probably a year and a half ago, I wasn't ready for that chapter. And it's one of those things like, uh, like, once it became real, once we got pregnant, once my wife, you know, became pregnant and we knew, all right, we're about nine months out. It wasn't like this flip switched in my mind, but the best way to describe it is I run in the morning, right? And those morning runs for me provide a lot of solitude. And it's that one time where I have an hour, hour and a half every day. It's dark out, it's quiet, I don't have my phone, there's no notifications, my mind is clear.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  It is some of the most powerful moments of my day and I need that more mentally than physically. And what used to happen during those morning runs is that solitude provided me

• 10:26Speaker 00

  ideas for where to take the business, how to grow the team, who needs hired, who needs fired? What can we do from a customer acquisition standpoint and strategy to, to scale and keep growing? And I, I was filled, my cup was filled during those morning runs on how to grow this business. And I am forever grateful for that. But what started happening once we got pregnant was Those moments of solitude in the morning started to evolve and transition. And what I used to start or what I started thinking of was, how do I want to raise my daughter? What values and morals I hope she gains from me? How am I going to do this? How do I set her up for success? And like, what does success look like? Is it independence? Is it being entrepreneurial?

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Is it being challenged and tested? How much do I let her fail? How much do I not let her fail? It's all these things I would ask myself in my morning runs. And that's where I started realizing, okay, my priorities are now shifting. My mindset was like molding on these morning runs of, I recognize and realize that this next chapter of life is real. It's coming, but my body and mind is almost prepared. It's like, it's preparing me for it. And I'm going into, I'm not nervous at all. Everyone asks, are you nervous? Are you scared? No, I'm, I'm, I'm super excited. I know it's going to be super challenging. I know it's going to be hard. But selfishly, I also know I'm going to grow so much through this experience that

• 11:54Speaker 00

  I expect and anticipate it's going to make me a better business owner. It's going to make me a better leader. It's going to make me a better friend, better husband. Like it should only improve all aspects of my life.

• 12:05Chris Williamson?

  Are you saying that having a child is a self-development strategy?

• 12:08Speaker 00

  You know what? It's hard to say right now because I still don't have a kid. I'm four weeks now. I'll let you know in a year.

• 12:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  I'll let you know. I could look back at this podcast and say, dude, I was wrong. But that's what I'm expecting.

• 12:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What do you think is going to be the biggest challenge that you've got?

• 12:26Speaker 00

  The biggest challenge?

• 12:30Speaker 00

  I think it's going to be balancing right now. I've become really good over the last 10 years of adding more onto my plate, being able to delegate some of that, but also absorb a lot. I'm the type of person that I will absorb a lot of responsibilities and obligations to keep things moving forward. I will hire people to help me achieve some of these things, but as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, you learn how to juggle and handle a lot of things. Right? I think one of the biggest challenges for me, and I've told my wife this already.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  I recorded a podcast with Steve Weatherford last week and he told me in life, you gotta make sure your priorities align with your calendar. So it's one thing to say, I'm a family man. I care about my wife. I care about my, my daughter. I care about my business. I care about my employees. But look at your calendar. Does your calendar reflect what your priorities say? Are they aligned? And what's gonna be hard for me, and I'll navigate it somehow, but I'm gonna say my priorities are my wife, my daughter, my business, my fitness. But if I look at my calendar, will it reflect that?

• 13:45Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  And that's what's gonna be challenging. I know it's going to. Because like I said, I've become really good at adding more things on to my life and absorbing them rather than eliminating some that aren't as important and focusing and hyper focusing on on those select few.

• 14:02Chris Williamson?

  There's a book called 4000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman, and it's about time management and productivity and stuff like that. And he's got a concept in that. You'd love the book. I think it would be a great thing for you to read as you go through this little difficult period. And he's got an idea that you need to decide in advance what you're going to suck at when you undertake a particular project. Having a baby is an 18 year project-ish. And I really like the idea of that because especially if you're a go-getter, a lot of the time when you start to feel things that you used to value in yourself drop away,

• 14:37Chris Williamson?

  the pain of that happening can take your focus away from the thing that you said was the priority right now. So I like the idea of deciding in advance that fitness, maybe condition's going to drop a little bit. I'm probably not going to be able to run as fast. I'm not going to be as mobile or as strong or as lean or as whatever. But that's what I've decided I'm going to suck at in order to look after wife, look after baby, ensure that business and employees and everything else is sorted. And then if there's time for fitness, fitness can come in. And

• 15:08Chris Williamson?

  A lot of the time when it looks at planning forward, I think people struggle with realizing that it's just for now, it's not for forever. So you know, powerlifters and bodybuilders understand the concept of periodizing your training. Right? I have a very specific goal that I'm trying to achieve over the next however long, and I'm going to adapt everything that I do to facilitate that one thing. But when it comes to doing our yearly plan, unless you're very, very intentional about what you've got coming up, you just think that this routine is going to be your routine forever. And looking at something like this and going, okay, I know that sleep's going to suffer, diet's going to suffer, maybe going to be some stress interpersonally between me and my friend. I'm not going to be as social like at all. I'm going to have time to see friends as much, all that stuff. Those

• 15:51Chris Williamson?

  are the things that you're going to suck at. This period of, that doesn't mean that I'm not going to have friends for the rest of my life. That doesn't mean that I can never get back into fitness. But it does, the idea of sucking, choosing something that you're going to suck at means that at least for the next acute period of time, when that arises, when the inevitable discomfort of seeing condition drop off or fitness drop off, you go, yeah, this is a sign that I'm doing the thing that I'm supposed to be doing in a way. Like I knew that this was the entry price that I had to pay to be able to do this.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  I do like that where it's, it is, it is now, it is not forever. Cause I see this question, this response all the time in regards to this hybrid athlete training and adding in races. So like for me, when I started getting into fitness, it was putting on size and strength. And me and my brother and my dad, my dad, we put on size and strength pretty well. We're built for it. So I got strong, I got big. And then I started running and I started losing some of this size. And the responses I was getting from people were, aren't you afraid to lose size and strength? And in the beginning I was, I was trying to avoid it. But then when you realize, well, in order for me to run this race or

• 17:05Speaker 00

  this marathon at a certain time or pace or a distance, something has to give, right? Something, something has to give. And it goes back to keep, when you keep adding things on to your life, when you look at almost like this, this tower, and like if I keep adding things on to my life, and they're not really stuck, they're just, you're just stacking them on top of each other. Eventually, something has to give. And when it gives, that whole tower falls. So like, that's kind of how I've navigated this whole fitness space too is, you know, there are seasons in life where I'm putting emphasis and priority on certain things. Right now, I want to focus on this race. With that will come a decrease in size and strength. That is okay. It is this temporary feeling for now, but it is not forever.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  It doesn't have to be forever. So I really like that concept and I, I think more people, if they got used to that and comfortable with that, they could be a much more efficient at their goals in the present.

• 18:04Chris Williamson?

  Well, remember as well that the goal is to be an effective, fit, healthy human with a good, robust social network and a job you care about in 30 years' time. Like, that's the goal. What you're doing right now is supposed to facilitate that overall, and that means that you're going to go through these ebbs and flows. I mean, I'm screaming this to myself, right? This is a lesson that I very much need to learn.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  I think, I think we all are.

• 18:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, which is why it resonated so much. Talking about the hybrid athlete, hybrid CEO, future dad thing at the moment. How do you avoid burnout? So you've spoken about the fact that you take on a lot of responsibility. You were somebody that started the company on your own, and if you needed to learn how to program because you couldn't afford a developer, you'd go and do that. And if you needed to do an all-nighter to pack supplements, you'd do that. How is it that you've transitioned from a period where you just continue to add more and more on top to one where there's more balance and where you're prepared to delegate control and to relinquish and to bring in other people and talent and stuff like that? Because it's your baby, right? It's your baby and you're having to let that go.

• 19:10Chris Williamson?

  You're having to watch other people fuck about with your baby.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  I mean, it has to be very intentional. Like with BPN, I bootstrapped this thing.

• 19:20Chris Williamson?

  Do you ever take outside funding?

• 19:22Speaker 00

  For the first time, we wrapped up a seed round investment about three weeks ago. That was the first time we ever.

• 19:29Chris Williamson?

  After nearly a decade.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  After a decade, you know, and up until a decade, no debt on the business. We never touched a line of credit. It was just, we kept, we kept investing back into the brand. I didn't take any money out of the business for the first five years. Didn't put myself on payroll until 2017. Started the business 2012.

• 19:48Chris Williamson?

  That ad sense money, baby.

• 19:51Chris Williamson?

  That sense of money YouTube, you gotta keep me going.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Hey, man, that's, that's what I did like from, from, from social media and making money on social media and YouTube. I took all that money and invested it back into the business to keep it afloat. Building a product based business and managing cash flow. That is tough. It ain't easy. So, um, yeah, boots, bootstrap the business and I have reached. I will be honest, I have reached many times throughout the last 10 years.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  In a period of burnout. I, I, and.

• 20:22Chris Williamson?

  What does, how does that manifest for you?

• 20:24Speaker 00

  Um, extreme fatigue, stress, exhausted.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  The team can feel like creatively, I can't, I can't think, I can't breathe like. And when I say burnout, maybe burnout isn't the best term or, or word to use.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  I reached, I reached periods where I, I can feel that I've, I've done too much. I've taken on too much and I can pull back a little bit and, and kind of refine, reassess, make a better plan, but. You know, it was me, my brother, uh, my brother now is our COO. Joe, who you met, our director of operations and John Byers, who's our warehouse manager now. It was us up until 2018. Because I had to be very intentional with hiring. And I had to save a lot of that cash and cash flow for inventory. 2019, I had the first opportunity to hire a media director, Jordan Utter. And I learned a lot through Jordan because when I hired Jordan, I realized.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  I could offload and delegate a lot of my responsibilities, tasks and duties. And when I offloaded that, it allowed me to work on the business rather in the business for a lot of things. So I learned a lot by hiring Jordan.

• 21:41Chris Williamson?

  How did you know that he was the first person you needed to hire?

• 21:44Speaker 00

  I tested, I knew I needed to hire a videographer and someone to handle media. And I tested about 10 other people. I would meet them on social media or online. I'd, I'd interview them, I'd fly them down, I'd test them for a video or two. They would stay with me in my house and then.

• 22:03Chris Williamson?

  You did that with 10 people?

• 22:04Speaker 00

  For 10 people for about a year and a half. I was very intentional with it. I believe in the term. Hire slow, fire fast. And I finally found Jordan and he just got it. I could tell by the look and the feel of the video. He understood me. We shared the same values, morals, principles. We could connect. He knew storytelling. He wasn't just trying to recreate what everyone else was recreating and doing as a creative. He wanted to do his own thing and put his own spin on it. And I respected that a lot. So Jordan joined the team. I offered him a full-time job.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  And for me, that was scary. You know, it's like this guy was moving from Ohio to Texas. I was taking a chance on Jordan, but he was taking a chance on me as well. And I learned and realized the power of being able to delegate and hand off some of my Legos, if you will. And then after Jordan, it was, okay, I see the power in that and what it's doing to build the brand. So I hired someone else for the creative space, Trey. Trey Freeman is now our VP of Marketing. When I hired Trey, I realized, all right, now I'm building this marketing and media team. And I can now focus on building the business in other areas. This is giving me a lot more time to actually think and not do.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  And from there, it was just intentionally adding more members onto the team. And the thing is, like, when we hire, I'm not hiring based off of where you went to college or university or what your GPA was or what tests and certifications you had.

• 23:44Chris Williamson?

  Deadlift. Max deadlift number.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  It was not a fitness thing. You had to like fitness, but it was more so like if I met you and you were a good person, you could hold a conversation, you knew how to maintain relationships. You just were a good person in the beginning of building the business. I wanted you on a team. I didn't know what you were gonna do, but I knew you had to be on a team. I want to build this with people like you.

• 24:12Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's a lot easier to teach skills than it is to teach traits, right? Somebody comes in with the correct traits and attributes. They have humor. They're good as a part of a team. They're resilient. They've got a growth mindset. They're psychologically stable. Try and teach somebody those things. Really, really difficult. Try and teach somebody. You taught yourself everything that you now need the people to come in and do. So you know that it's possible to teach that. But yeah, I mean, the Navy SEAL that had done the show not long ago. This guy was talking about how you, for the most part, companies hire on skills, but fire on attributes. So when they're looking to bring somebody in, they do the credentialism. They look at the CV and where did you go to school and what can you program in and such like that? But when they get released, it's because they didn't work well as a part of a team or because they're humorless

• 24:57Chris Williamson?

  or because they're unable to go above and beyond or whatever it might be. You're okay. So why don't flip that on its head? Why don't presume that somebody that has the right traits and attributes will be able to acquire the skills that they need to be able to do the job? And instead, but what the reason for that is because HR departments, for the most part, are kind of just procedural, operational, like churn machines, right? It's like the fulfillment department that we just saw in your factory. It's like, what is it that needs to go into this box? What's the easiest way to systematize that going into this box? Whereas if you've got something that you're building bit by bit, you can actually do it based on attributes.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  It's culture. You're building culture. Me and some of the team here recently finished a book. It was called No Rules Rule. And it's by the CEO of Netflix. And it's all about building culture within your organization. Now Netflix has gone to some extremes, right? They hire based off of talent density. And they believe that if you hire based off of talent density, meaning. You're hiring very talented people and when you bring very talented people into an organization together and that talent is dense, they're going to feed and grow off of each other. I mean, they're going to create systems and infrastructure and ideas that are unimaginable,

• 26:17Speaker 00

  right? Like it's, it's this powerful force that is moving forward. And when you hire talent density and you have talent density in your organization, you can pull back on some of the controls. So at Netflix, they didn't have a PTO policy. It was unlimited PTO, paid time off.

• 26:33Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  So they could take two months off if they wanted or expense reporting. There was no really any expense reporting or guidelines. It was spend the company money how you would spend yours.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  And obviously it bit them in the ass a few times and right? It failed the model, but overall, when you bring in talented people with the right traits.

• 26:58Chris Williamson?

  Good intentions.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  Good intentions. You don't have to control them. You don't have to micromanage them. And you have this amazing culture that builds.

• 27:06Chris Williamson?

  Well, think about how much more scalable that is, right? You know, if you want to rote create a, uh, this is how to be a Netflix employee doc. And people have to read that and imbibe it and it's sort of this very bureaucratic, top-down dictatorial thing as opposed to it being social, cultural enforcement that you see from the people that are around you. Well, this is just the way that things are done here. This is the way, and obviously this can happen in toxic workplaces as well on the reverse. You have somebody that comes in who's really, really growth-minded and great, and everybody else is dragging their feet. So it can work both for and against you. But if you're intentional with it, it's so much more scalable because you don't need to constantly be watching everyone over the shoulder. You don't need to have as many rules and procedures. What a procedure and like an operational report is, is basically an

• 27:51Chris Williamson?

  external constraint to try and limit people that don't get it just innately. What you're doing is you're just, you're trying to create this set of guidelines and rules and restrictions so that even an idiot can do this. So me and my business partner, I run nightclubs. I've done for a long time. We would operationalize everything. But this is because we were working with 18 year olds. They were children one year ago, right? You know, they were in school, not even in what we would call college or like high school two years ago. So it's the first time they've been in a business like this. They needed everything laying out for them. And over time, you'd see these, you know, 18 year old party boys come in and they become managers. And by the time they got to 21, 22, maybe they'd done a placement year with us, maybe we'd had them on full time. You'd just be completely hands off.

• 28:36Chris Williamson?

  You'd say, look, he's a problem. Just go, you, you, you know, the sort of solution that we're looking for. You understand what it is that we're trying to do. But especially when you've got a company that you're hiring individually, slowly for a very specific intentional purpose, I think that you can afford. I found out that for the first, I want to say it's for the first, like 200 hires at SpaceX, Elon Musk dealt with them personally.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  I feel, I feel like I heard he say, he said he still hires a lot of them.

• 29:09Chris Williamson?

  That wouldn't surprise me.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  Interviews and hires.

• 29:11Chris Williamson?

  Tyler Cowen just wrote a book called Talent. And in that he, he uses this example, the fact that Elon, richest man on the planet, was involved personally in the hiring of most of the people for the first half decade or more of the business and very much maybe still be now as well.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  I mean, I think it's smart. Here's a, here's a clear example of where we found some struggles in that. I mean, I will say scaling a business is hard. And, and why it's so hard, it's not necessarily hard because you're trying to acquire new customers or figuring out where to spend your marketing dollars. It is hiring the right people and bringing the right people on the team. And going back to controls. So a few months ago, you know, we're growing, we're adding people into the team and we have this company vehicle, this company car. It's called the BPN truck. It's wrapped in BPN logos and it looks pretty cool. And someone on the team took this truck out for a weekend to use for an event and they

• 30:12Speaker 00

  brought it back and I went to get in it Monday and it was a mess. They were empty cans all over the place, wrappers, camera equipment was still in there, it wasn't cleaned out. And I got pretty angry. So I created this new system and this new doc where if you wanted to use the VPN truck, you had to sign it out, you had to do this checklist of checking for all these pieces. Almost like if you go to enterprise and you run a vehicle, you go through the checklist. It was like that. And then it got to a point where no one wanted to even use the vehicle anymore because it was a pain in the ass.

• 30:46Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  So I got rid of that. And I was like, well, looking back, what was I thinking? I was, I took a situation where I could have used that as a learning experience and development. And I added these constraints to micromanage people who I empower do and make big decisions in the business.

• 31:05Chris Williamson?

  You don't trust them to bring a truck back in a not shit state.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  It's ridiculous, right? It's like.

• 31:12Chris Williamson?

  I understand the compulsion though, you know, it's the reason for all of this bureaucracy. It's why people in companies like to do this. You know, I mean, on the flip side of that as well, there are certain principles, I think, especially in our personal lives. It doesn't seem very romantic or very natural to kind of implement that. But Ben Bergeron, the guy from CFNE, he's got this rule, I think it's 5pm. 5pm, he leaves his gym. It doesn't matter what's happening. Apparently consistently, they're in a really important meeting. Sometimes with people from outside of the company and they're all sat around a table and it's 4:58 and Ben starts packing his stuff up. And the people that work for Ben know what's going on, but everybody else sort of doesn't. And Ben's laptop's away and he's putting it in the back and he's still talking, you know, moving away. And

• 31:57Chris Williamson?

  then it's 4:59 and Ben's, right, guys, I'm off. Even if it's in the middle of the most important meeting. So there's certain things, certain principles, I think. That you can implement in that way that provide very good guardrails. But I think that it's when you begin to create an entire enterprise style check in checkout system that that stops being a principle that is scalable and that people understand. It's like bring the truck back in a good state. Right. Make sure that there's always gas in the tank. Like, don't be an idiot with it. That's a good principle. The entire checklist that takes people 30 minutes to fill in is somehow different.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  I had the opportunity to sit down with Ben Francis.

• 32:39Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 32:39Speaker 00

  A few weeks ago, Jim Shark CEO. And he came into Austin for a weekend and was able to just talk to him. And I learned more from Ben, spending a few hours from him than I've learned in a long time. And what he said a few really good things, but one of the things he said was, you know, there are one of three things is going to hold your business back from growing. It might be one thing, it might be two, it might be all three. If it's all three, you're shit out of luck.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  It's product, brand and people. If you have a crap product, you're only going to sell so much of it. You're never going to sell enough to be an impactful company. Brand, if your brand just isn't there, if you don't have a mission, a story, if there's no depth to that brand, it is shallow, it will die off, it'll fizzle out. But what holds most businesses and brands and companies back is the people. Because as you grow and evolve, you're always hiring, right? And if you don't develop those people, I mean, that is a responsibility of the business owner, entrepreneur, managers and leaders. You have to be developing your team constantly.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  Because as soon as you stop developing them and helping them grow in their role and onto the next role, they're stagnant, they die. And what happens when they're stagnant and they die? The business is stagnant and it dies. So there's those three things to always be assessing a business by if you want to keep pushing forward and growing. If you want to be an industry leader, you gotta be good at all three of those.

• 34:15Chris Williamson?

  Going back to how you're operating personally, one of your coaches says it's better to be consistently good than occasionally great. And it seems like consistency is one of the things that you probably excel at. What are the frameworks or supporting structures that you have that help you to maintain consistency?

• 34:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I never really realized that consistency was

• 34:43Speaker 00

  a quality trait of mine up until maybe a year and a half ago. And it was Jordan Utter, our media director, that said to me, Nick, you're one of the most consistent people I've ever met. It made me think, yeah, I guess I guess I am like pretty consistent. That is my competitive advantage. That is what I I excel in. If I look back, I'll take you back to to high school and then going into college. I was never this stud athlete. I was never this stud student. I was very average, very average. You know, when I was playing sports in in middle school and high school, I was never starting. I didn't make varsity in multiple

• 35:26Speaker 00

  of those sports. I wanted to play collegiate baseball. I wanted to go to the pros. That just wasn't in my deck of cards. My brother, who's three years younger than me, he was a stud. But I always showed up. I always showed up, put in the work, did what I had to do. And for me, I just couldn't get good enough in those two years that I needed to to excel to go to that next level. And then when I got to college, I joined the Army ROTC program. I knew I was going to go into the Army. My plan after the Army was actually to be a chicken farmer in central Pennsylvania. That's where I thought I would be at 31 years old. Didn't think I'd be here. And joined the Army, started my business. And when I

• 36:11Speaker 00

  started the business in 2012, it was never, I need to make this much money. I need to get the business to this level by this time. It was just this very patient approach of, I'm just gonna do this until it turns into something. I'm just gonna show up every single day, day after day, brick by brick. And I really didn't see much traction. I mean, I saw these small wins, but when I got to South Korea with the army on a nine-month rotation, what happened was I told myself, I want to make $10,000 a month in revenue. By the time I leave South Korea, I'm gonna give myself nine months to do this. When I got there, we were doing $2,000 a month in revenue. So we were doing about

• 36:57Speaker 00

  25, between 20 and $25,000 a year in revenue with BPN. This was 2016. And my approach was, I'm going to try to learn at least one new thing every single day. If I learn at least one new thing every single day, by the time I leave South Korea and come back to the States, I'm going to have this toolbox of new things that I learned. So that's what I did. I didn't watch any TV, didn't watch any movies, didn't do any socializing. The military was my priority job, but when I got off of work, it was teaching myself how to develop websites, how to design labels, how to use Photoshop, how to edit videos, how to tell stories, how to, how to build a brand.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  What is a brand? All these aspects of building a business. And within 90 days of being in South Korea, we went from $2,000 a month in revenue to $10,000 a month in revenue.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  And what I realized then was it was almost like this snowball was slowly picking up. My consistency from the years leading up to that point had finally compounded. It's like investing in the stock market or a business. Like you invest at a certain point and that money just slowly starts to compound over time and it grows and grows and grows. And you don't see it day after day. You don't look back and say like, holy crap, look what I made yesterday or today or tomorrow. It is, look what I made over the last five, six, seven, 10 years. And that's where I realized that all I gotta do is just keep showing up and chipping away. I'm not gonna change the world. I'm not gonna change my business. I'm not gonna change my life overnight.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  But I bet you in 10, 15, 20 years, I can be somewhere where I'm really happy and proud to be. And that just became a part of my life. Consistency has just been part of my life since then. I'm, I'm, I'm very disciplined. I know what I need to do. And I think most people do. Most people know what they need to do from the time they wake up to the time, the time they go to sleep. What do they need to do every single day to get to where they want to be?

• 39:04Chris Williamson?

  You think that's true?

• 39:05Speaker 00

  I, I think, I think people, if they really take inventory of, of their thoughts and priorities, they know what they have to do. But what people end up doing, and I'll tell you a story about this. What people end up doing is they look for the shortcuts. I know what I have to do, but it's going to take me 10 years. How can I find a shortcut? When I was in college, here's my story. I wanted to make money. Right? I wanted to make money because I was tired of overdrafting my bank account. I was tired of having no money for supplements. Like, I was tired of being broke in college. So what I did is I would email all of these companies, these brands, these companies, these marketing agencies in central Pennsylvania and out near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  And I would say, hey, I will, I will paint your logo and I will wrap my car in, in your branding and I will drive around all over this college if you pay me a hundred bucks a month.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  I knew that wasn't the answer to get rich and make money. I knew that wasn't the answer to, to be successful, but I wanted a quick buck. I could have invested that time into studying or, or getting a job somewhere else or doing anything. But I was like, how do I make the fastest dollar, easiest of something I'm already doing?

• 40:22Speaker 00

  And I think a lot of people apply that mindset to everything they do in life. They know what it's going to take to train for this marathon. They know what it's going to take to get stronger in the gym. They know what it's going to take to get this next job promotion or build this business. I tell people on social media, I tell people through storytelling, I don't sugarcoat it. Like, this is what it took for me to get from point A to point B. It was really fucking hard. Like, to get to this point in business, it was really hard. But I didn't do anything extra special out of the ordinary. I don't have a secret key that unlocked some door that has all the secrets of building a business. I was just very consistent, day in, day out.

• 41:02Chris Williamson?

  I think that's the problem with the narrative that we've got around success at the moment, especially reality TV where people just get plucked out of obscurity and then thrown to the top of a mountain where two million people know them and they've got a fast fashion deal for a couple of million bucks a year. What it teaches young people about what success consists of is not that you're supposed to do something consistently for a very, very long time that adds value until you eventually reach success. It's that you're supposed to be part of this like Hunger Games style lottery where you get picked out of nowhere and then gifted acclaim for no real reason. You know, previously, success used to mean a thing,

• 41:42Chris Williamson?

  an accolade and acclaim and admiration and fame. All of that, it existed as a byproduct of somebody doing something that was worthy of fame and accolade and success and admiration. But we've decoupled fame from that now. You can get fame purely for its own sake. People desire fame for the fact that they want to be famous and well-known, not because it's a signal that you have done something worthy of being famous, right? Like, how many people, there's people that eat tons of food on YouTube and that's the way that they've managed to get themselves into some like super, super, super well-known position. Now, entertainment's entertainment and if they've managed to find a niche, then, you know, more fool those of

• 42:26Chris Williamson?

  us that haven't decided to do 10,000 calorie challenges every day. But you can't say that that person adds the same sort of value as an inventor or an artist or a musician or somebody that is building something slowly and consistently over time. And take that to the nth degree, Love Island is just starting in the UK, the new season of that. And that is literally people being pulled out of obscurity. And by the time that they come out, they will be the best-known, most talked about people in the entire country. But six weeks ago, they were just some hairdresser from the middle of Manchester. So what's changed? Okay, they were in the right place at the right time. So what's the lesson that you take from that? Not that you're supposed to do something very hard for a long period of time, that success is this.

• 43:13Chris Williamson?

  Dice roll that happens to select few people and has basically no correlation with hard work. It's simply about being in the right place at the right time.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  I also think it comes down to, I mean, to each their own, but it's like, how do you define success?

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Do you define?

• 43:31Chris Williamson?

  What do you want to be well known for?

• 43:33Speaker 00

  I wanna, I wanna leave a legacy. I want my, my daughter in 10 years to say, this is who my dad was. This is what he did. This is how he changed lives. This is, this is my dad. And, you know, I spent some time with some of the, the guys that were on, um, The Bachelor, that whole series. And I had some good conversations with some of those guys and they told me that, you know, they went on the show and it changed their life overnight. They were famous. People wanted to know who they were dating, what they were doing, where they were eating, all this stuff about them.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  But he, some of them told me that the best way to describe it was it was monopoly money. They, they had built this, this following overnight. They had this exposure. They had this fame, but they couldn't monetize it. It wasn't success. It was fame. Again, everyone defines success differently. But like for me, it's, it's legacy.

• 44:35Chris Williamson?

  It's very fragile, that sort of fame. So I'm, I was the first person through the door of season one of Love Island in the UK. So I'd know the process from that. And you come off and people are interested in surface level stuff. But the difference between, and the show is significantly bigger now. There is a caveat that, you know, now it, it really does propel you to sort of superstardom. But the difference between the sort of following and interest that I had, coming off the back of that reality TV show and being on TV an hour a night for a month.

• 45:08Chris Williamson?

  And where I've got to now with the show, which has been nearly 500 episodes over four years, is night and day. And even if you were to say, well, you could go on Love Island Now, give up the show, go on Love Island Now, win it, get all of the accolade, it's still more fragile. That person is still in a worse place than somebody that has built something. And the other thing as well is strange about consistency. Far more people are talented or enthusiastic about something than they are consistent. I see people that take up a new pursuit or sport and they find I've got, I'm pretty adept at this in the early stages, or that they've got tons and tons of motivation because it's new and

• 45:50Chris Williamson?

  there's novelty. But what about 18 months from now, when you've done this a million times and your talent's been competed away by all of the other people who were just as talented as you and are now 18 months deep? Well, that's where consistency comes in. And the weird thing is that if you see the world as lacking consistency, that has to be the thing, that has to be the point of highest leverage, because that's the weakness that most people don't have. It's like, look, you can separate yourself from the pack so much more easily by being consistent than by being talented or enthusiastic. There's this stat I love about podcasts. 90% of podcasts don't make it past episode three.

• 46:29Chris Williamson?

  And of the 90% that do, 90% don't make it past episode 20. So by making 21 podcast episodes, you're in the top percent of all podcasters ever in history. Consistency beats talent and enthusiasm.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  I like tying the word endurance with consistency. You can apply this to anything. This is not just endurance through, through training and sports, but if you look at it, like, how did I get to a 248 marathon?

• 46:59Speaker 00

  I ran a lot of slow miles. You know, in order to run faster, you have to run slower. You have to build your aerobic base and foundation that is running below your max aerobic heart rate. These runs are pretty boring, right? Like you're, you're putting out this low effort because you're trying to train aerobically. So your body can utilize oxygen efficiently. And you have to run a lot of miles below your max aerobic heart rate. Be very consistent and disciplined in this, in this space and it builds endurance over time. It allows you to run faster and run longer. There's no shortcut to it. You have to log the miles. It might take months. In my case, it took years. Years of running slow miles consistently day in, day out in order to build endurance.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  And endurance is also applied to, to life. Right? Like as you're going through life, what is going to happen? You're going to have obstacles, you're going to have speed bumps. There's going to be resistance. I look at it almost in terms of going up hills like when, when I'm riding a bike or I'm running. It always feels like I'm either going up a hill or I'm running or riding into a headwind. There are headwinds, headwinds in hills everywhere. That's good. That's a resistance. It's pushing back on you. It's telling you you're alive. Keep pushing through. Those obstacles should be there. Life is this massive endurance event where as you start going, this goes back to consistently good rather than occasionally great. If you try to be occasionally great all the time, you're going to, you're going to burn out.

• 48:29Speaker 00

  You're going to bonk. You're just going to stop. You're going to have to sit there for 10 minutes, get your shit back together and then pick up and keep going. But if you keep going consistently good and you just keep trucking along, keep moving forward. And you know, there's going to be obstacles. There's going to be speed bumps. There's going to be resistance. There's going to be hills. And there's going to be headwinds all the time. But just keep driving through it consistently. It's not always going to be fun. It's going to suck. You're going to fail. It's going to hurt. It's probably pretty uncomfortable majority of the time. You're probably going to get some chafage between your legs. That's just going to happen. But that builds endurance. And when you look back over a period of time, you think, huh? I actually made some progress through this because I was consistently good rather than trying

• 49:14Speaker 00

  to be or look occasionally great.

• 49:17Chris Williamson?

  How do you deal with when the suck comes then? Not in physical training, I'm talking about in life with consistency. You get up at 5am pretty much every single day.

• 49:31Chris Williamson?

  When you've got business stress, YouTube stress, family stress, new baby on the way, competing for this time, the internet's watching you and every runner on the planet hates you. Why is it or what is it that you do?

• 49:46Chris Williamson?

  Where do you go to on the days when you wake up and it really, really is difficult when the suck comes?

• 49:53Speaker 00

  I'm gonna ask the question, if not me, then then who? Like I am, I am in complete control of where my life is going and ends up. We all are. And as soon as you accept that, that no one else is, no one else cares as much about your goals than you do. And if someone cares more about your goals for you than you do, you're probably doing it for the wrong reason or you don't care enough. So from the time I wake up to the time I go to sleep, I think no one wants what I want as much as I do and no one ever will. And that's how it should be. And I am directly responsible for what I accomplish and don't accomplish. If I don't accomplish it, I have to take responsibility. I'm accountable.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  And that means I failed my employees. It means I failed my, my wife, my family. I failed and that comes down to me. So it's constantly realizing that I'm responsible, taking that responsibility, owning that responsibility. I don't think enough people do.

• 50:59Chris Williamson?

  That can add a lot of pressure on though. You know, that can feel overwhelming. This is on my shoulders. The successes are mine to bear, the failures are mine to bear. Does that not sometimes make you feel overwhelmed?

• 51:12Speaker 00

  All the time.

• 51:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so how do you deal with the overwhelm?

• 51:19Speaker 00

  A lot of it is,

• 51:23Speaker 00

  to be honest, it's talking it out loud. Sitting down with my wife and like explaining. And it's not venting. Venting and complaining is a lot different from just communicating. Sometimes like it typically happens at dinner or after dinner. I let my wife know like what I'm experiencing, what I'm going through like.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  How can we find solutions for this? And I honestly have a really solid team here at VPN. And sometimes I'll sit down with my VP of Marketing, Media Director, Kat, my brother, like anyone here in the business. And I just kind of say, this is what's happening right now. I need some help. And they are always very quick to jump in and offer solutions and help.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  I realized I am in a very, I have a very amazing opportunity with amazing people surrounding me. And a few months ago, we recorded this documentary called More Than the Miles. Our team went out to Leadville, Colorado. We did Leadville 100. It was a 100 mile ultra marathon. And we completed it as a team. And the one thing we kept saying out there was you can go really fast alone. But you can go so much further together. So even though I feel that responsibility, I'm overwhelmed. I'm stressed for what I feel like is on my shoulders. And I want to make this very evident. The reality is it's not all on my shoulders.

• 52:56Speaker 00

  Because my team, my family, my wife, they are bought in as much as I'm bought in. They weigh that burden of responsibility almost as much as I do. And I don't ask them to. I never do. But when you surround yourself and you bring really good people into your team and in your life, they will take that responsibility and accountability. And they will hold some of that so that you don't have to hold it all. Even though you feel like you are,

• 53:24Speaker 00

  they help out so much.

• 53:25Chris Williamson?

  This is the interesting point, right? So this is precisely where I think a lot of people get stuck. You spend a lot of time crafting a life built around your ability to get things done. As you progress through life, you start to need the assistance of other people and other people just gravitate toward the stuff that you're doing. Then as the stakes become higher, you have to realize that you need to rely on other people. But that's not what got you here. What got you here was relying on yourself. So now you need a new skill set. You can't continue to leverage your time. You have to outsource, you have to delegate, you have to ask for help, you have to relinquish control.

• 54:09Chris Williamson?

  And it's that, that exact point, I think, that is what's very interesting. How do people let go of a strategy that they know was effective for them in the past? They know that they were a solo ranger that was able to get things done simply by the sweat of their brow. And now the stakes are so high that they can't continue to do that. And if they try, it's going to be, they're going to get burned out. How is it that they get from solo ranger to somebody that now can allow other people in, that can open up, that can be vulnerable, that can show weakness, that can ask for help? That, that I think is one of the most important elements.

• 54:51Chris Williamson?

  And I think it's one of the ceiling caps that a lot of people get to when it comes to their growth, whether it be personally in business, emotionally, spiritually as well, that the tools that got them here are not the same ones that are going to get you there. The things that you did that got you from nought to 75 are not what's going to get you from 75 to 90 or from 90 to 95.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  You have to invite that in. There's a book called What Got You Here Won't Get You There. And we say it here all the time. Once you finally invite that in and recognize it.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  And it's, it's, it's really hard to invite in because you're saying.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  What took you from zero to 75 was great. It was fun. I'm pretty comfortable with it. I enjoy being in here and operating there. We could operate here the rest of our life and do really well. But we're just gonna stay right there. Or do we want to go all in, put all of our chips and risk it all and bet on ourself? And do we want to kind of, I don't want to say forget what we did from zero to 75, but we now need to establish a new plan to get from 75 to 100. And once you invite that in and recognize that, that's where we're at with BPN right now. We say it all the time. We can't keep looking back on what we did in the past. We need to look at what we're gonna do in the future.

• 56:21Speaker 00

  Jesse Itzler says this one thing. He says, "He doesn't hang his hat on any of his previous accomplishments. Any of the businesses that he's sold, which he sold for a lot of money, the books he's read, the things he's done, you will never find him talking about that where he's hung his hat on that. "Well, back in the day, I sold this business for this much money and that's who I am." No, he's talking about what he's doing this year and what he's doing in the future. Because what got him to this point was great. But what gets him to phase two won't work the same way. In business or in life, we all have an edge. That edge is what makes us us. Like BPN has an edge. I have an edge. You gotta know your edge.

• 57:05Speaker 00

  And that edge will be with you from the time you are born to the time you die. Maintain that edge. Keep that edge moving forward. Cause that, that's what makes you you. That's what makes your brand your brand. That's why people followed you in the first place. That edge has to maintain. But something else has to change to get from 75 to 100. The hardest part in life is That usually comes down to people. Are the right people in your life? That you need to be surrounding yourself with? Sometimes people will hold you back. Are you, are you? Are you selecting people to be in your life as your friends, as your employees, as your coworkers, as your mentors? That are helping you and allowing you to grow and develop?

• 57:50Speaker 00

  Or are they keeping you at 75? And 75 is stuck?

• 57:55Chris Williamson?

  Or are you keeping yourself at 75 by not letting anybody else in? I think that I see this a lot on the internet, especially with guys, right? You know, we've got a very individualistic, atomized meritocracy as a society at the moment. You know, and there is a little bit of romanticism around the monk mode solo ranger going and getting after it himself or herself. But

• 58:19Chris Williamson?

  I, I do think that there are far more people than admitted to themselves that are scared. They're scared of the fact that if they open this up, this is uncharted territory for them, that they need to have faith in other people and that there is something safe, familiar, reassuring about just doing it yourself and about not, not relying too much on other people. You, you'd spoke there about, you know, betting on yourself and, and trusting your gut, which I think is the intuition thing is a big part of how you make decisions. Where's that bravery come from? Is that just something that's innate in you? Do you ever have self doubt? Because a lot of people, smart people that like to read and sort of cerebral and cognitively

• 59:03Chris Williamson?

  minded, they can talk themselves out of something that every fiber of their being is screaming at them to do.

• 59:09Speaker 00

  I think it comes from experience. There's been a lot of times where I haven't trusted my gut and I've tried to resort to something I've read or heard someone else say or do. And I think as much as my gut is telling me to choose option A.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  All of my experience from other people, this guy that I know, this girl that I've come across, this podcast I listen to, it's telling me to choose option B. And as soon as I commit to option B, it fails. And I think, ah, should have listened to my gut. Over time, it comes with reps. You just need to get more reps in. It's okay, like fail your entire life at things. Failing is getting reps in. Sometimes you're gonna make the right choice, sometimes you're gonna make the wrong choice. It happens. But the more reps you get, the more comfortable knowing, just based off your gut feeling, intuition, what should I be doing? And a lot of that time, it comes down to making decisions based off your foundational values and principles. I've learned over time

• 1:00:11Speaker 00

  that if I make decisions based off of my values and principles and morals, that is my compass that will always point me in the right direction. And I know what that looks like, I know what that feels like. I think it's a bigger question and debate to open up of, a lot of people have never built their life on a foundation of values, principles, and morals. And if you don't have that foundation built, what are you building off of? You gotta build off of something that is solid. And if it's not solid, it's just gonna crumble.

• 1:00:47Chris Williamson?

  What are the values and principles that you rely on?

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  Integrity, transparency with my team, having strong faith, being dependable, selfless service. Some of those are just some of the values. Some of those I learned in the military. A lot of those I learned from family, growing up, my mom. A lot of them I've learned through being an entrepreneur and a business owner, and being responsible for other people.

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  And you learn through that.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  When you're put in a leadership position, or you experience good and bad leadership, you realize what people are looking for. What helps people move forward? How, how, how does it help people in the mission, the organization overall, accomplish something together?

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  I think that that foundation is absolutely essential. And it's one of those things like, you can't build your foundation off of your mentors, or whoever you follow on social media, or your favorite person. It's gotta be a really honest conversation with yourself of taking inventory and stock. What are your priorities? What do you truly value? Like, what does your life look like in five to 10 years as success? How do you define success? You know, like, I think that's one thing that a lot of people misunderstand is like, success doesn't, it's not this one area of life. Like, you define success however you want. Maybe you don't care about money,

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  and you wanna have a really strong family and relationship. Maybe you do care about money. Maybe you wanna build a business. Maybe you, maybe you just wanna be loyal to the people that are in your life. Like, success means something different to everyone. But you have to define it for yourself, because if you don't, you're not living for yourself. That's scary.

• 1:02:39Chris Williamson?

  Does this, I think it's Aristotle who says, "If a man knows not where he goes, no wind is favorable." And the point of that is, if you don't work out what success by your own definition, you can choose. You can decide whatever it is that you want success to mean. But you have to choose, right? And if you don't, what you're doing is you're retrofitting other people's society's norms, or the paths of least resistance, or the weird ways that you've dealt with your previous traumas. That's what's defining the direction that you go in, in terms of success. This question I kept on asking people when lockdown started in the UK was, what would have had to have happened by the end of lockdown for you to look back on lockdown and consider it a success?

• 1:03:24Chris Williamson?

  You can have anything, right? Everybody's locked in the house. Yeah, you can't fly around the world and stuff, but you've got, we didn't know how long, but you ended up with like six months. Pick something. What would it be? Do you want to learn to handstand? Do you want to develop a relationship with your mum? Do you want to build a new skill? What is it? Pick anything. And I think that looking at retrofitting your view of success based on what you want success to be in your life, that's the, it really is the only way to ensure that you're doing the right thing. Because i- if you don't, then you're going to end up at a place in life, not only that you don't want to be, but you didn't even mean to get to.

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  Success also changes and evolves over a lifetime. If I look back at what for me was defined as success three years ago,

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  is now very different for, for my life right now and what I'm planning for in the future. Like a successful life for me now is,

• 1:04:27Speaker 00

  I'm, I'm very happy that I, I decided to start building my business when I did. And so in the last 10 years of just hammering down to build this thing, because what I realized that's allowed me to do is, I can now be super present for my family and my kids in the future. Success for me, like if I had to paint you a picture of what success looks like for me in, in 10 years from now, and my daughter's 10 years old, maybe we have some more kids. We are on 20 to 50 acres. We're on a big property with these big oak trees. We have this long driveway and we have animals on our property.

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  We have gardens, we have produce, we have chicken houses and.

• 1:05:16Chris Williamson?

  You did end up becoming a chicken farmer.

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  We'll see. Give me 10 years. Give me 10 years. And I'm still working to build something, whether that's BPN or another business, where I'm investing in businesses and I'm, I'm challenged every day in some sort of business environment. But I'm not working a lot. Like I'm choosing my hours of when I, I work.

• 1:05:38Chris Williamson?

  Do you want to dial that back? Having spent 10 years of real nose against grindstone stuff, is that something that over the next 10 years that you're wanting to spend less time on?

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Because.

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  With my kids and my family being built out, I like for success for me, I want to be a very present father. I want to be actively involved. I don't want to be a helicopter parent, but I want to be facilitating challenges and growth and opportunities for my kids. And you know, I had someone on the podcast last week, Matt Burdell, and he's a founder of Acton Academy Placer Schools. And he comes in and helps people build out these private schools that are very

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  unconventional. They're very entrepreneurial, growth driven. The curriculum is kind of guided by asking questions.

• 1:06:39Chris Williamson?

  This is some Tim Kennedy shit, isn't it?

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  So Matt worked with Tim to open the school here in Cedar Park.

• 1:06:46Chris Williamson?

  Of course he did.

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  Matt and Tim are really good friends.

• 1:06:48Chris Williamson?

  You're gonna send your kids to Tim's school, come back and they're gonna be putting you in rear naked chokes and stuff at six years old?

• 1:06:54Speaker 00

  I want to open my own school. I want to open one of the Acton schools because I see that's where I can give back. That's where I can impact. All that being said, that's where I, success for me is I'm helping people grow and develop in their life. And they're building the life they want. And that's from time kids are going to school, maybe they're older, but just getting really involved in the community that I'm surrounded by and always being present there for my, for my kids. And what makes me say that is there's a few months ago, it might have been a year ago, I was listening to this podcast. And there's this guy telling the story, and he spent 25 years building this business. And finally, he sold that business. He sold

• 1:07:39Speaker 00

  that business for hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think he was like 55 years old, something like that. And when he sold the business, he went to his family, he said, "All right, guys, I'm done working. We made it. We're gonna travel the world." And all of this kid looked at him and said, "We don't want to travel with you. We don't even know you. You've been gone for the last 25 years of our life. The last thing we want to do is spend time with you." That for me is failure. That's what the opposite of success looks like. That is ultimate failure.

• 1:08:14Chris Williamson?

  How brilliant is it that this period that we're in now, I'm not a dad yet, not as far as I'm aware, but I can't wait to be one. I really, really can't wait to be a dad. And when I look back at, you know, my dad and how hard he had to work to support me and my mom as we were growing up.

• 1:08:36Chris Williamson?

  It was so restrictive compared with the options that we have now. And that's not to say, you know, two parent incomes and real living wages and stuff, they are difficult. But every time that I speak to another guy who's about my age, who is family oriented, all of us are thinking the same thing. It's like, I can't wait to be there for my kids. I want to use all of the very nerdy hours that I've spent on my own, stretching and listening to podcasts or going on walks and hearing audiobooks or reading or doing whatever. And I want to synthesize all of this, especially if you're a creator, right? You know, thousands of hours that you've spent planning, scripting, recording, editing, uploading, promoting

• 1:09:19Chris Williamson?

  videos. And that's been for people that you care about, right? But they're not your genetic lineage. Right. They're not, they're not that sense of you. They're not pure legacy.

• 1:09:30Chris Williamson?

  And now we have this, everybody that I speak to about this has the same approach. Everyone. David Perel, one of my buddies who's in Austin, he said the other day, as he imagines more and more about becoming a father, which he isn't yet, but is, can't wait to be, as he imagines more and more about it, he realizes that a lot of what he did in his twenties and his early thirties was building a life that allowed him to become the father that he wants to be, even though that wasn't the goal, right? But by working hard, by giving himself freedom, by making smart choices, he's positioned himself in the place to become the sort of father that he wants to be. And that's, it seems like a very different.

• 1:10:12Chris Williamson?

  A much more intentional and deliberate form of parenting than pretty much anything that I've heard before. Certainly, you know, if I was to ask my dad about the way that he planned his life, it was very much just do what you can, right, to provide for the family. It didn't have this same degree of intentionality to it, because I don't think that maybe the information was there quite so much. I also think that parents having kids earlier doesn't allow them to perhaps build, you know, parents are having kids when they not long ago were still kids. If you're a 20 year old parent, well, think about all of the stuff that you've, almost everything that you value in yourself in terms of the insights you're going to pass on to your children has been

• 1:10:53Chris Williamson?

  developed over the last 11 years. So I just think it's really cool. It's a really, really awesome time to think about families moving forward and what it's going to facilitate in kids and what it means for parenting.

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I look back at, you know, when I was little, my mom was a school teacher. My mom knew she was going to be teaching in the school until she retired. There was no early retirement, right? So it's, I think we now have, it's more accessible. We have more opportunities to set ourselves up for success early on in life. If you make that decision and choice in your twenties and thirties, and that's the exact, exact way I see it. Like, I now have built this career, I've built this business, I've built this life that allows me, because the work that I put in allows

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  me to be the father and husband I am in the future. I think of all the things I've done,

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  failed at, accomplished, wins, losses, highs, lows, over the course of my life, if there's one thing I'm very proud of, it is that. And I say that now, but

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  When I look back, I'm very thankful and grateful that I started when I did, like I said a few minutes ago, because I know what that's going to allow me to do in five, six, seven years from now.

• 1:12:20Chris Williamson?

  That's a really important lesson. There's no one that I speak to that's doing something that's started a blog or a Substack or a YouTube channel or anything, right? A business

• 1:12:30Chris Williamson?

  that says, I wish I'd started later. And that doesn't matter how late they started, right? Every single person is happy that they started then, or perhaps that they could have done it earlier. So that's a lesson to anybody that hasn't yet, or is vacillating, or sat on the fence about whether it is that they should or shouldn't do that. Every single person that I've spoken to about this is happy that they started when they did or earlier.

• 1:12:54Speaker 00

  Well, I think one of my greatest traits in 2012 was that I was honestly stupid. I was ignorant to the risks that I was taking. And while everyone else around me had paralysis by analysis, I mean, I graduated with some kids who were geniuses. They were smart. They went to Ivy League schools. I was not getting into an Ivy League school. I couldn't even get into Penn State University. I went to Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Western Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. I was not like this genius dude. So I think that because I was so ignorant to the risks that I was taking in 2012, when I thought, I'm going to start this supplement company all by myself, and we're going to see where it gets to, I

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  didn't know what could happen. I didn't know how much money it was going to cost to get started. I didn't know how much money it was going to take to maintain, sustain. I didn't know cash flow. I didn't understand finances, marketing, branding, nothing. But I knew what I wanted to do. I knew what I loved. I was ignorant to everything else. That's what allowed me to get started. And sometimes it's all you need is everyone's waiting for the right time, the right place, the right money. I'm gonna, I'm gonna start training for this next, next year. I'm gonna build this business in like, in like three years from now, so that when, you know, the time is right, I can build this business and make a lot of money in six months.

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  Good luck with that plan. Just get started. Just establish the foothold in there and slowly start building off of it. Once you establish that foothold, you can, you can build. This is the best way to describe it. So like, I talk about this dream in the, in the future of this property on 20 to 50 acres, having this, this farm with my kids and all this kind of stuff. And I'm not the type of person who's gonna wait 10 years from now to go, to go buy that property. I'm actively right now looking for property.

• 1:14:49Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's because you know that you live in Austin, so the property is gonna be five times as expensive in 10 years.

• 1:14:53Speaker 00

  Truth, truth. But I wanna buy that property now and I wanna start, you know, changing and I wanna add some train features in.

• 1:15:02Chris Williamson?

  Do you know Mike Kazu from Working Against Gravity?

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:15:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so him and a D have just got something, uh, two hours west, two hours east, sorry, of Austin. Dude, it's so nice. It's so gorgeous. Similar to what you're talking about. And it's, oh man, I went up there. It's got its own little lake, so you can go out boating and him and his little boy go out and they fish off this little, like a little, like old wooden, oh dude, it's spectacular. They had a festival up there a couple of weeks ago. It's outstanding. Like it's so perfect, so beautiful. And you just think, well, why wouldn't you do that? And why, if that's the sort of thing that you want to, that you want to be able to provide to your family, like, why wouldn't you do that? And you're right, apart from the insane property prices in Austin.

• 1:15:52Speaker 00

  Have you ever read the book, Deep Work by Cal Newport?

• 1:15:54Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:15:56Speaker 00

  So, this is like, this is a clear example of, uh,

• 1:16:02Speaker 00

  A lot of times we want to be busier. We want to be doing more. I think hustle culture is like it's evil. What can I constantly be doing to gain the edge or get to the next level? When it's not necessarily productive, it's just busy. I think Deep Work by Callum Newport is a very interesting read because it almost forces you to find opportunities in areas of solitude and presence and quietness and eliminate distractions and just stop being busy. Just be present because when you are, you're going to make up so much ground in that time. Your mind is clear.

• 1:16:46Speaker 00

  It is thinking, it is firing, it is optimized. Again, that's why I like running. But I know that in the future, when I am less busy, I'm more productive. That's when all my wisdom is going to kind of start unfolding. You can be present, you can think, you can, you can go deep. Depth is something that we lack a lot of the times. And I always say like you can, you can judge someone's depth. If you go to convert, if you go to dinner with someone, say you go to dinner with someone for the first time ever. And the conversation is probably going to go one of two ways. One, it's all shallow, it's all surface level. How about that weather here? Like, um, how about that coronavirus stuff?

• 1:17:31Speaker 00

  You know, you're just talking bullshit.

• 1:17:32Chris Williamson?

  Every Uber conversation you've ever had.

• 1:17:34Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh. Where should I eat around here? What do you recommend? Some conversations stay there. They stay shallow and it's just boring. It's just boring. Or you can go to dinner with someone for the first time in your life and you're talking about some deep shit. Like you are reaching depth in that conversation. Those are the conversations I don't want to end. I want to have that dinner a million times over again with that person because we're actually getting somewhere. And sometimes people have never actually had a deep conversation in their life. They live in the shallow. They live in just like the the shortness. That's boring. I want to go deep.

• 1:18:18Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that I think about when looking at the business and the channel and stuff that you've built is that it probably inspires a lot of people. You know, you think CEO, supplement company, massive growth, YouTube channel, hybrid athlete, following of fans that genuinely seem to connect with you and care with you, care about what it is that you do. It's a very

• 1:18:43Chris Williamson?

  envious lifestyle. But with a lot of people that are in positions like that, I think there's prices that they pay that very few other people see. So what's the price that you pay for being you?

• 1:18:58Speaker 00

  The the price that I'm currently paying right now. I mean, sometimes that that sacrifice and that that price changes. I would say right now, the price that I'm paying, I had this conversation with my wife last night. I feel like I haven't been present lately. Because you go from, I mean, the the list of things to do or think about or or meetings to have.

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  They never end, right? There's always something you can be working on. And as your team grows, there's more people to be working with and helping them. And I'd say that the one thing that I struggle with right now is from 5am until 11pm. That is a jam packed day. There's no let up. It's, you know, we're either creating and filming content. I mean, I'm training, I'm I'm meeting with the team. We're trying to get in some wholesale retail accounts right now. We just wrapped up the seed round investment a few weeks ago. I think a lot of people think that my full time job is to train. But I train like everyone else.

• 1:20:04Speaker 00

  I train at 6am before going into work and getting the office at 8am. Or I train after work at 5, 6pm. That's when I train. When I'm at work, I'm working. The one thing that I can confidently say right now is I struggle with being present. It's something that I'm working to solve and fix. And building out systems and plans to alleviate that, hopefully before the baby gets here. But uh, I also believe that sometimes in life, there are necessary sprints. Sometimes you have to sprint through periods of time to get a lot of stuff done. As long as that sprint has, you know, time that where it opens up and you can kind of decompress and all right, that was a tough sprint.

• 1:20:49Speaker 00

  This is what we accomplished. This is where we're going to sustain, is how we're going to improve, but sprints are going to happen in life and business. You can't avoid it sometimes, but I think consciously being able to recognize and tell yourself what your weaknesses are or what you're struggling with at the moment. It'd be a bigger issue if I was going nonstop through this sprint. And I didn't recognize that I wasn't present all the time. But when my wife can either call me out on it, or I can tell my wife, like, I know I'm not present right now and I don't really like that. I'm not really proud of that right now. But I gotta get through this moment.

• 1:21:32Chris Williamson?

  I think it's, it's very strange when you've got the outcomes that occur due to you being the hustle and grind, getting worked on person, right? From the outside, that's fantastic. But it can embed a habit where in very subtle ways, even when you think that you're being present, you're always sort of just looking over the current moment's shoulder to what's coming next. And one of the big things that's come up throughout this conversation is periodizing, right? Knowing that there's, there's an end date to this. And a big part of that is just being able to take stock. Okay. What happened? What was good? Wasn't good. Uh, and another big part of the themes that's come up is having people around you that you can actually have that conversation with.

• 1:22:15Chris Williamson?

  Because trying to continuously, continuously just bootstrap your own introspection and reflection and growth.

• 1:22:24Chris Williamson?

  It's very, very difficult. Like you're not going to be able to call yourself out on your own bullshit and your own blind spots anywhere near as well as somebody else that's going along with you. So yeah, man, I uh, I'm really excited to see what comes next for you.

• 1:22:38Speaker 00

  You know, one of the best things I've learned how to do, and I recommend listeners uh, do to kind of alleviate some of these issues, surround yourself with people who are smarter than you in certain areas of your life. Hire people who are smarter and more experienced than you. It will quickly humble you. Like the, the last couple of people I've hired for the BPN team, they have more experience. They're smarter than me in certain areas of the business, but they have helped me grow so much. If you can find mentors, if you can find friends or people in your life, whether hiring them into your business or just, you know, running with them

• 1:23:22Speaker 00

  on a weekend, surrounding yourself with people who have been there and done it, who, who might be able to provide you some valuable information and mentor you. That helps you grow so much, and that has been super beneficial in terms of building a business, building a team in the hiring process.

• 1:23:41Chris Williamson?

  Nick Bear, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with what it is that you're doing, where should they go?

• 1:23:46Speaker 00

  Instagram is Nick Bear Fitness. YouTube, just type in Nick Bear. I have almost 800 videos on there. Most of them with my shirt off. You're bound to see me. And then uh, the podcast is the Bear Performance Podcast.

• 1:24:00Chris Williamson?

  I appreciate you. Thanks, man.

• 1:24:02Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company formed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the revenant.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You start, you freeze to death. That's what.

• 1:24:23Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:24:26Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 minutes without parent.