[Transcript] – Part 1: 67 Steps to Getting Anything You Want Out of Life Health, Wealth, Love, & Happiness with Tai Lopez

Affiliate Disclosure

Transcripts

Podcast from:  https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/lifestyle-podcasts/part-1-67-steps/

[00:00] Introduction

[06:04] Ben's Biggest Weak Link

[14:58] What Causes Our Brains Not To Focus

[23:47] Claiming Your Heritage

[29:34] Make Haste Slowly

[33:07] Loving The Grind

[40:41] End of Podcast

Ben:  Hey, folks.  It's Ben Greenfield, and I want to welcome you to this special episode of The Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast and you're going to get to hear a few episodes just like this one going forward.  A couple of months ago I had a guy named Tai Lopez on the call and we talked all about getting tough, how to make yourself more tough and do the hard things in life.  And Tai is a guy who has worked with many, many people, to not just help get them more tough and be able to jump into icy cold water, but also be able to achieve quite a bit from a personal achievement standpoint and a business achievement standpoint.  And Tai is on the call with me right now because in this special series of podcast episodes, we're going to talk about how Tai takes what he calls “The 67 Steps” and applies them into people's lives to get them successful.

And what you're going to hear is Tai basically breaking me down, hopefully not beating me up too bad, but kind of giving me a little bit of coaching.  And you get to sit back and watch, and listen, and kind of see how this works and how these 67 Steps, which you can go to now and read if you want to, they're at bengreenfieldfitness.com/67steps.  But you're going to get to see how these actually apply to your life.  And the reason I'm doing this is because frankly Tai episode was one of the most popular episodes we ever had.  So I know that you guys really hopefully like Tai and you certainly appreciated his message then, so I want to bring you more of him.  So Tai, thanks for joining.

Tai:  Thank you, man.  And yeah, thanks also for opening up.  Me and you've been working together a while on business coaching stuff, me helping you.  Of course, I see you as a health coach for me.  I loved your book and I've been passing on the message.  I actually was just recording one of the 67 Steps, you're in quite a few of them.  I talk about beyond endurance and I talk about how I've learned things with you kind of as my health mentor.  So I guess our mentorship kind of goes back and forth.  I help with a little bit with business and you help me a lot with health.  I'm probably getting the better end of this deal.

Ben:  For any of you who are concerned, I haven't yet convinced Tai to put on a Speedo and ride a triathlon bike down the highway or anything like that.

Tai:  You wouldn't want to see that.  We'll keep that for pretty boys like you.  You look better in Speedos.

Ben:  Well Tai, like you said, you've helped me out quite a bit, coaching me, giving me advice.  I mean I've been down to your place down there in Hollywood Hills and kind of sat on your back porch with you and talked a lot about life and business, and you're full of great advice and I just really want to share that with the folks who are listening in.  So where do we start?

Tai:  Well since it's a public call, the stuff that I do, I usually keep confidential.  But you've been gracious enough to open up.  So I wanted to just, as you and I have done privately, show some of this stuff on this call.  So the way I usually start out, in 2001, I used to work for GE Capital, spun off a company with a business partner doing financial planning.  And during that time, I've been doing that for, now it's been over a decade, and worked with a lot of people, about 6,000 people one-on-one, and then whatever, a million people follow, about 1.4 million people follow in 40 countries.  And doing that, I don't say that as numbers to brag because the interesting thing about it is not the number.  It's that I've seen consistent patterns like me and you talked about.  So the first one I always say, I developed this concept of “weak link training”, which really is relevant to, I was just rereading Arnold Schwarzenegger's “Total Recall” and there's a chapter where he talked about his calves and how when he met Reg Park, one of his mentors, he was like, “Man, this guy had calves and mine looked so weak relative to the rest of my body.”

Ben:  Classic bodybuilder statement, right?

Tai:  But he said, Reg Park said, “I got a solution.”  He said I was doing 250 pound calf raises and Reg Park threw 500 pounds on there and he was like, “I'm going to rip my Achilles.”  And then Reg Park threw a thousand pounds and he started doing these reps and he got to, I don't know, they grew two inches.  And he said people started me of accusing of having calve implants.  So from that, from the old story of Achilles in mythology, I came up with his weak link training.  So my first question to you is if you had to break it all down, nobody can fix everything in their business, but what do you think is the biggest weak link?  If we can start there, we can make big impact with relatively little change or trauma.

Ben:  Yeah.  My biggest weak link is that I love to start things.  I love to come up with ideas in my head about solutions that I want to solve for people, and start into solving those solutions, and write the first chapter of a book.  Or start into a program to help people train for a triathlon, or a half-marathon, or something like that.  But a lot of times, I'll commit and then I'll wind up committing again, and committing again, and it seems like all of a sudden I'm spinning a bunch of plates and nothing's getting done very well.  Everything's kind of sort of getting done very slowly not very well, but there's not like one thing that I'm laser focused on.  It's like I'm always jumping all over the place, starting new projects, and painting myself into a corner from almost a busy work standpoint.

Tai:  Right.  Yeah.  I talk about this in 67 Steps.  I'm like, “Avoid flurries of activity.”  And by the way, what you're saying is the classic entrepreneur issue, myself included.  I think some of us, we read Richard Branson's book, “Screw It, Let's Do It”, which is one of the recommended books I tell people to read.  And we were like, “Man, this guy had a record label, he went to build a company to create space travel, ships, rocket ships.  And he did Virgin Trains.  And if he can do it, surely I can do it.”  But the truth is when you look at the timeline that Richard Branson did this stuff, he stuck with things.  He started with a magazine and stuck for a long time.  So the entrepreneur fallacy is that, for myself, I don't know what it is that a root for you, I think it's a little mix of different things.  Some of it's innocent ADD that we have in business.

But some of it's ego where we go, “Yeah, I know there's 7 billion people in the world trying to make money and acquire,” I never use the word money.  I call it scarce resources 'cause it's really what it represents.  We've got 7 billion people trying to acquire scarce resources and I can beat them on 10 different war fronts.  And if you look at wars, the guys who lose wars are the ones fighting two or three front wars at the same time.  So I think once you acknowledge it, like you said, and then you really start looking at the pattern, that's why I'm so big on reading biographies.  I just finished Jeff Bezos' “The Everything Store: The Story of Jeff Bezos”.  And one of the lines in there I liked the most, talking about how Jeff Bezos was from a little kid, they said he was excruciatingly focused.  To the point when he was in first grade or kindergarten, he went to a Montessori school, and they said that he would sit in the chair and when he was focused and it was his turn to rotate to another chair, he was so focused they would have to pick up the chair and move him.  He would be zoned out as a first grader.

And they said, “We knew this kid was either going to be handicapped or something special.”  And it turned out he built a 38 billion dollar company that's going to maybe be one of the first trillion dollar, thousand billion dollars in revenue.  So that's really the pattern, man.  Over and over.  So start when you are approaching projects, go, “I'm Ben Greenfield.  I'm a smart dude.  But I'm not smarter than 7 billion people that I'm competing with.”  And like Charlie Munger says, “If you're lucky, you can be good at one or two things at life and you can leave an impact around those.”

Ben:  Yeah.  It's kind of weird because I always was really good at, like when I would read books as a kid, I could sit in the living room and we'd have company, we'd have three families over, and I would sit there and I wouldn't look up for like six hours.  I would just read and be completely focused.  I did watercolor paintings, and played the violin, and I'd grab a bucket of tennis balls and serve for three hours in a row.  And I'm still the same way.  Like even on these projects that I start, I'll work all day on a project, but it's kind of weird.  Then sometimes I'll just drop it for like three weeks, I'll want to do a bunch of other stuff, and then come back to it.  When I'm there, I'm there.  But it's kind of weird.  It's like once I get drawn away from it, that focus just kind of disappears.

Tai:  I was just reading this, Dr. Moalem's Inheritance Book, or I was talking to him on the phone, and everything is now flexible genetics, epigenetics.  So what's really happening is you are at every moment and every action that you take, you're retraining your genes, the sequencing, not the sequencing, the enzymes.  It's really everything he says, Dr. Moalem told me.  If you haven't read that book, by the way, anyone listening…

Ben:  What's it's called again?

Tai:  Inheritance”, by Dr. Sharon Moalem.  He's a top geneticist.  It's mind-blowing.  And it's right up the alley, what we talked about, toughening up.  He basically says, and Richard Dawkins, I was reading “The Selfish Gene” again, and he says it's genetic whether somebody will jump into a river if a kid is drowning, which people, which men or women will stand up.  That courage gene, it's literally genetic.  And what Dr. Moalem says is this used to be thought of as a fixed, rigid, you're-born-brave, you're-born-this, but he says we know that that's not true now.  We know that these genes, and everything he says happens at an enzyme level.  And he says what happens with our enzymes is that our body wants to conserve them because enzymes are one of the most “expensive” processes and substances to build.  So your body constantly is trying to turn off enzymes.  He says it's use it or lose it.  So this ability to focus beyond one day on a project is literally, the stakes are high I guess, Ben for you.  The inability to do this will continually rewire your brain deeper and deeper even now at a gene level, we understand, to where you will become less and less focused.  So you have to nip it in the bud.

When I work with people, I'm a tough love guy.  I'm like, “Think of it,” and when I talk to people like this, it oftentimes snaps people out of bad habits.  It does it for me, and I've seen it over and over.  Once you realize you literally are an open book of rewiring and that, you have children, you're setting an example because there's something called memes, which are not physical genes, but they're social-based genes.  Everything like that affects not only you potentially permanently.  Because even though your genes, and you can change over time, it becomes harder the longer things get set in stone.  The more out of shape somebody is, the harder it is to fix.  So for you, you have to see it in terms of “I'm getting mentally overweight”.

I was talking to somebody and they were just talking about a six-pack.  And I'm like, “What about the six-pack of the brain, man?”  I'm like,
“What would be more powerful?”  I'm all for having a physical six pack, but I'm like, “The brain is a physical part of your body.”  So you need to have a physical six-pack in the sense that it is honed and it is conforming to your will.  Just like you push your will doing this Ironman stuff, you have to be able to push your will because the reward is high and the consequences unfortunately are also steep, and you will pass on that trait to your children.  If you're listening and you have kids, they will pick up on your habits.

Ben:  In your readings and what you've found about epigenetics and things of that nature, have you come across some of the habits that people have in this day and age that tend to cause them to become chronic multi-taskers, or tend to rewire their brains?  The reason I ask that is I read something a couple years ago that showed that there was pretty strong evidence that you could actually change the way that your brain fires by working on five small things I want like five small things at once, like texting, and e-mailing, et cetera, and that that was one where you could change your brain.  But in terms of for both myself and the people listening in, what do you think are the biggest culprits that teach our brains not to focus?

Tai:  Well, I'll tell you an interesting story, and that's a great question, about the Amish.  So there's a book, by the way, called “The Shallows”.  You might be referring to that book.  I forget the author right now, but it's a book, I'm not sure if it made the cut.  I read a book a day, but they don't all make the cut in my top recommended.  But it probably should make the cut down there at number 100 or 200.  And it talks about how physically, our brains are being rewired to be more shallow primarily through technology.

Ben:  Oh, yeah.  “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains”?  That one?

Tai:  Yes.  So try not to think of it as good or bad.  So this is a very big thing that I talk about a lot in 67 Steps.  Don't think with the 500 year old archaic, outdated mind.  500 years ago, if you thought the world was flat, I mean round, they were going to burn you at the state.  Or if you thought the Earth was at the center of the universe, you didn't think that it was at the center of universe, you might be burned at the stake as a heretic.  There's no longer in those type of things.  I do believe in some moral right or wrong.  You shouldn't kill and kind of like the Ten Commandment-type morality.  But in terms of whether it's good or bad, what's happening to our brain, I'm not going to say that it's not that black and white.  What it is Newton's third law: for every action, there's an opposite and equal reaction.

So if your brain becomes more shallow in terms of it's really good at multi-tasking a thousand things, not good at focusing on one, in certain situations that will be advantageous.  For example, if you're coming across a book, I find people that are too focused on a book that's not worthy of focus.  A book that I know should be skimmed in 20 minutes, I find some people reading, in fact a friend of mine, we were just on a trip and they were reading this book that literally merits a 10-minute skim.  For the whole week we were gone, and I was thinking, “That's where you want to have the ability to go shallow.”  So what you really want is kind of like the ultimate athlete.  When they need to run long distance, they can.  When they need to run a sprint, they can.  Not to say you don't have your specialty, 'cause certain body types obviously specialize and act certain health activities, but you get the gist.  You need to be a crosstrainer mentally.

So my personal story, I lived with the Amish in my early 20's for two and a half years just as an experiment somewhat in what it's like to be tough and live before modern convenience.  And I remember when I was there, very easy to be there.  I was in my early 20's, we know that your brain is still very malleable until about 24, 25.  And I went back a decade later, and I visited on and off, but about it a decade later when I'm 30, I went back, and I could not kind of just relax.  My body was literally like looking down at my hand for a phone.  It was literally looking for the stimulation.  I realized, “Man, we are chronically over stimulated.”

Ben:  You feel the ghost vibration of your phone against your thigh.

Tai:  It was weird.  It was actually a kind of horrifying experience, and I was like, “Tai, this is what you've become?”  As Wendell Berry, if you ever heard of a guy named Wendell Berry, he writes a lot about it.  He's kind of what they call a Luddite in a sense, which is anti-technology.  It's not totally anti-technology.  But he says technology is always supposed to be the servant.  And he says almost always it becomes the master.  And I realized at that moment there, I was like, “Wait a sec.  Am I the master of my cellphone?  Or is my cellphone haunting me?”  So my advice to you Ben is, and you ask specifically what are the biggest things.  There is some technology things.  I saw in your e-mail where you say I only check e-mail three times a day, you might want to try a couple days a week where you only check it one time.  I actually have times when I take zero.  I'm a busy businessman like you are, and you know what?  The world acclimates to you.  People stop e-mailing you so much.

Ben:  It's already happened since I switched to three times a day and you get rid of the boomerang effect.  I'm kind of scared to switch to one-a-day or none-a-day, but yeah.  I see what you're saying.

Tai:  Try a zero-a-day one time.  I tell people, one of things I've talked to you about it and I'm huge when I do this business coaching, the 67 Steps.  By the way, the 67 Steps is to get whatever you want.  But people often use it that are entrepreneurs, you can use it for health or whatever.  It's pretty multi-purpose.  But in this context, we're talking about 67 Steps to grow a business and make impact with the business.  Don't get guided by fear.  Don't say, “I'm not going to do once a day because I'm afraid I'm going to miss something.”  In that sense, I think fear serves a purpose.  But for most of us, it's like Alexander the Great said, “There's only two types of people in the world.  One, who conquer fear, and the second who doesn't conquer it and suffers or dies.

So you conquer the fear by saying it's an experiment.  Try it for a day.  If disastrous things happen, you go, “I can't do it zero times a day.”  But if you never experiment, they've actually done studies on napping.  I can't remember the book, it might be Dr. Ian Robertson's book.  It was another book which says people who do a ton of experiments generally have more dopamine and happiness.  So just make your business like this huge experiment.  You've gone to three times a day, that was an experiment.  Push the envelope, man.  Go once a day.  Go like Richard Branson.  I read in “Screw It, Let's Do It”, he went to South America, sorry, went to Africa, had bought a big ranch or something, and he just picked up the phone once a week, once a day in the morning, and he had his officers of his company call him.  No e-mail.  Just his notepad.  And he's Richard Branson.  I'm not saying you can do that.  I am saying you can experiment with anything as long as you keep your eye on the ball, you know?

Ben:  Gotcha.  So when it comes to spinning lots of plates and starting too many tasks in your business or in life, basically what you're saying is that a big part of this, whether how well you're able to focus when you were a kid, or when you were younger, or at an earlier time in your life, a big part of this is that your genes have been reprogrammed by things like technology, e-mail, texting, et cetera, and that one of the ways to get yourself from constantly juggling too many plates is to start with the small things, kind of begin to make the habits there, and reprogram your brain using that type of strategy?

Tai:  Absolutely.  Get tough, man.  Just see it exactly like you see all the physical, I mean physical and business-slash-mental are so closely correlated.  Every analogy, every metaphor is there.  Sometimes you physically push your body to whatever, 90% max respiration or whatever.  You see that when you're talking about different heart rates when you're running.  Sometimes it's like you push it to the max.  And it's the same with the body.  When you're in business, it's like sometimes it's like, “I'm going to go week without checking my phone just to burn out any weakness in me.”  And maybe you give your phone to your wife, in your case, and you go, “I'm not going to check my phone today.  Or my e-mail.”

Ben:  I've done that before on dates.  I've turned it off and put it in her purse.  I said, “Keep this.”

Tai:  Yeah.  But I'm saying maybe give it to her for a day and you go, “Look.  Just alert me if there's an absolute,” I understand, I mean realistically if you live in a world where there can be emergencies.  But man, come on.  I remember in 2001, Ben, I traveled around the world, no cell phone, and was all none the wiser for it.  I didn't realize it, and I was fine.  I remember I got a calling card from New Zealand.  I called back to America once every two weeks.  I remember I was visiting different farms.  I would call them up on the phone, I would then go write down the directions.  We're so far from that.  Right now without a GPS, we think we're going to die.  I was like, “I traveled to 51 countries basically in my life with no internet, no phone.”  It's kind of like becoming an athlete and you're starting to get fat, and you look back at the good old days.  Recreate the good old days!  Good news for you, and it's probably why you've been so successful in the things you've done is you probably had a little headstart when you were younger.  You said you're naturally very focused.  It's probably you have some natural hardwiring.  So go back to it.  Claim it as your heritage.  That's what I tell people.  The good things in your life, man.

If I had done this, this is not just business, but my dad for example, my real dad, I didn't really grow up with him.  My mom got divorced before I remember being alive.  My dad, as we talked about, was one of the top bodybuilders, one of the first bodybuilders in the world.  You would think, right, I'm growing up, and I used to idolize my dad even though I didn't see him 'cause I had all these pictures where he had big muscles, 20-inch biceps, and all this stuff.  And I would tell kids that that's my dad.  My dad could beat up your dad.  But what nobody forgot to tell me is, “Tai, claim your heritage, man.  Get out there and start lifting weights.”  And I was always in decent shape, and I played sports a lot, and I did lift weights, but I should have gone crazy and claimed my heritage and built better than my dad.  But oftentimes, it's just like this spoiled rich kid, I got these things naturally.  I have decent genes, I don't really get fat, you know.  But instead of going further than my dad, I underperformed my dad.  And my dad was born with scarlet fever, all the heart problems in the world.  Doctors say he'd be dead.

My dad fell in love with fitness because it saved his life, and I was born like the spoiled kid with good genes that I didn't claim my heritage.  So mentally it sounds like you have this ability to focus on business and you've maybe coasted along a little bit too much on it.  And even though you've done well, it's like now's time to claim to your heritage.  No, man.  I was like Jeff Bezos.  I had that, let me bring that, there's no reason that I can do that now.

Ben:  Maybe I need to just start watercolor painting again.  That was one of the things I would sit and do literally for hours was just watercolor paint.

Tai:  Man, one of my mentors, Allan Nation, said, “Tai, people,” number one, I get now thousands of e-mails at a time.  Sometimes in a day.  And the number one question is, “What's my business destiny?”  Because I talk about this business destiny.  And people are like, even the entrepreneurs, even the people making million bucks a week, they're still like, “I'm not sure I'm doing the right thing.”  And doing the wrong thing, as Pablo Picasso says, “Avoid the dichotomy of doing what you don't like so that you can have fun in your spare time.”  He said, “Find a way to make your spare time the same as your work, your enjoyment.”  And so they ask me, “Tai, what should I be doing?”  And Allan Nation told me when I was a teenager, my second mentor, he said, “Tai, look back when you were between 14 or 16.  So whatever you wanted to be then, 14 to 16,” Allan Nation said, “That's when you had clarity of mind.  You had less fear, you had less peer pressure.”  At 14 to 16, for most people, was kind of “you're old enough to think”.

In fact, I'm in Mensa.  In Mensa, I was reading the Mensa IQ bulletins and it says your IQ, in many functions or many tests, peaks around 14.  So do not be afraid.  I just spoke in Vegas and I talked to a guy, I said, “What'd you want to be 14 to 16?”  He said, “Tennis player.”  I said, “What are you doing now?”  He said, “I'm in sales.”  I said, “What do you sell?”  He said, “Shoes at Nordstrom.”  I said, “Man, maybe you couldn't have been a pro tennis player,” but I said, “why don't you sell tennis equipment like you wanted to at 14 to 16?”  Like a lightbulb hit him.  He was like, “Wow!  That's such a good idea.”  And he said, “You know, I'm single and I want a girlfriend.  What advice do you give me on social stuff, interaction?”  And I said, “Do you play tennis?”  He's like, “No.  I gave it up.  I read somewhere weightlifting was better and I started lifting weights.”  And I said, “Well, you know you can lift weights a little bit.  But if you like tennis, you can get in great shape.”  So I said, “Why don't you go play tennis, join a tennis club, you'll probably meet a potential wife or girlfriend there.”  And then I said to him, he was just like, “Wow.  How do I get to that?”  And I said, “Clarity of mind.  You probably knew what you should do when you were younger.”  So for you, if you like water painting, I don't know that that means always exactly, but there are clues there for you.  Maybe you have a creative streak that needs to be let out a little bit more.

Ben:  Oh, I definitely have a creative streak.  My outlet right now for that is playing the guitar.  I think probably for me, it's more an act of omission, beginning to maybe even check in on the phone less, check e-mail less, check Facebook less, and just start with those small wins to take a little bit of a step towards the bigger wins of just multi-tasking less with the bigger projects.

Tai:  Yeah.  What about this?  Take the 10 minutes you use to check e-mail, put a watercolor board somewhere, maybe not even watercolor, draw yourself a logo for your website.  Just engage because, Dr. Moalem's research is correct.  You're exactly right.  It's just what Warren Buffett in Jay Z told Steve Forbes in that YouTube interview.  Your audience might want to check that out.  Warren Buffett said, “Benjamin Graham, my mentor, told me – What you want to do is not make any big mistakes.  But you don't have to hit home runs.”  He said, “If you hit a lot of base hits, one base at a time.  First base, second base, third base, you end up over your lifetime making a lot of runs, scoring a lot of points.”  So for you, definitely make haste slowly as Joel Salatin used to always tell me.  Make haste slowly.  It means immediately start on this concept of I'm-not-going-to-multitask-quite-as-much-as-I-did; I'm not going to be the slave of technology.  And also, if I can give you homework, Ben, and anybody listening in, even homework for myself to reread, there's a book on my, if you know my website, I've got these listing of books.  And in my top 10, it's by Gary Keller.  It's called “The One Thing”.  Have you read that one?

Ben:  No.

Tai:  Read this thing.  It's going to blow your mind.  He built one of the second largest real estate brokerage or agency in the United States…

Ben:  “The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results”.

Tai:  It's amazing.  I'll give you one thing, I won't do a spoiler, obviously the one thing is staying focus on one thing at a time.  But the second thing is the key that I got from that book.  He says you must be willing to embrace the chaos to do this.  So basically you're going to have two types of chaos in your life.  You can have the chaos of trying to do everything and really not getting that much done.  Or you have the chaos of focus on one thing and let some things fall by the wayside.  I just read Hillary Clinton's autobiography, “Hard Choices”.  Now I'm not political, I'm not really Republican or Democratic.  For whatever reason, I never got super excited about politics.  But I read the book from the standpoint of, Hillary Clinton was a very busy woman.  She traveled a million miles.  She went to 121 countries.  She starts her day at four in the morning, is in the office at seven, works 'til 11 at night doing hot, very powerful things like solving world crises and stuff as she was Secretary of State.

So whether you agree with Hillary Clinton and her policy, that's irrelevant.  I didn't read the book trying to figure out if she's politically correct for me.  What I was blown away by is she balances very well.  And the president has to do the same thing of letting some things be chaotic, not handling some things.  And at that level you're talking about, “Oh, there was a crisis in Honduras,” and the President's like, “Well, I'm dealing with one thing here so he embraces the chaos of missing some things.”  And if those presidents can do it on world affairs, I'm sure you and I can let a few things that we thought were so important, let them just fall by the wayside.  Let them be a little chaotic.

Ben:  It's so annoying though, huh?  To think about in the back of your head all those things you might be missing.  Like that's the hard part.

Tai:  But Gary Keller says, he's like, “Next time, reframe that in your mind.  That's the feeling of success, knowing some things are being left behind.”  Sherlock Holmes said in one of his books, of course he's not a real character but he said, “The mind's like an attic.  It gets full, man.  So be careful what you put in there.”  So I tell people, it's like, “In your tasks of things to do, it's like an attic.  You will get full.”  We know on a physical basis willpower, it talks about this in that book, but I've read this before, willpower is a finite thing some people have more genetically than others, some people have built it up just like stamina, but there's nobody who can run 10,000 miles without stopping.  At some point, stamina is finite.  So when it comes to the things you do, just realize you're not superhuman.  You can push the limits.

But like you said, some things you're going to have to go, John Calipari, the University Kentucky Basketball coach that won a championship, he says grinding it out.  That's what he talks about, like Ray Kroc.  He said, “You better learn to love the grind.”  The grind is that friction that you feel in life, like in this case, “Oh, I’m missing,” 'cause it goes life is the grind.  So if you don't love the grind, you don't love life.  So every time I feel chaos, I go, “Tai, you smell that?  That's being alive.”  There will be a day one day, hopefully not too soon, Ben, for you or I, there'll be a day when we'll be 95.  Maybe if we're lucky, we'll be older, maybe fate takes us quicker.  But if you are that age, there'll be a day when you can't handle all this at all.  And so now while you can, learn to love a little bit of that grind because that makes alive, man.  The day that we don't have that feeling, like maybe something's incomplete it means, we're on our way out of this planet.  So while you have it, use it to feel alive.

Ben:  Yeah.  I like it man.  Cool.  Embrace the chaos.  Obviously if you're listening, I think that's a great challenge for you.  And a challenge I'm going to give myself this week is to just pick one day, embrace the chaos, ignore e-mail, ignore the phone, and just go do something that takes a great deal of focus and apply myself to it.  And I would challenge the listeners, if you're listening in, try that out.  Pick a day, do the same, be okay with the chaos.  And also, if you do that, I would also like to hear how it went for you.  And what I will do is put up a link over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/tai1.  By the way, bengreenfieldfitness.com/tai1 is the first ever podcast we did with Tai.  So if you want to listen to that out for more background of who Tai is, go check that out.  But if you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/tai1, I'm going to give you a link to all the books that Tai and I just talked about as well as Tai's online video series.

But I'd also love to hear you give your feedback on whether you've dealt with the same problem that I have to deal with in terms of multitasking and how you plan on reprogramming your genetics, checking your e-mail less, checking your phone less.  And if you try this little challenge of going a day without it, how that went for you and what you accomplished.  So head over to bengreenfieldfitness.com/tai1 to check that out.  And if it turns out that you actually go over there and leave a comment, and enough of you do and you actually liked this, then Tai and I are going to keep cracking away.  And we'll come at you with another coaching session very soon.  But show us that you're actually listening in by heading over there to leave your comment and visit the show notes.  So, Tai, thanks, man!

Tai:  Yeah, man!  And one other thing that I'll tell you.  The 67 Steps, by the way, the reason I did that 67, it's one a day for 67 days, as University College London research said this whole thing about 21 days or 28 days to rewire brain is probably not true.  Their research showed about 66 days.  I added one more for good luck, 67.  And I tell people when they start it, it's free.  I decided I was going to charge a lot of money, but I decided, and I send a book with it.  I bought a whole bunch of books called, I bought a few different ones depending on when I run out of one, and I send that to people free along with The 67 Steps.  You will have to pay the shipping.  I think it's 4.95.  I don't keep a penny of that.  It goes to FedEx or whatever.  I actually lose a couple bucks, but I don't care.  I bought a whole bunch of this book.  So if they go over there and the first video they get in the welcome, pay attention to it 'cause it's relevant to this point.

I say this is a test for yourself.  Can you stick to something for 67 days.  Even though I hope my content is helpful, it's also helpful to literally create the discipline to stick through it.  It's about 30 to 45 minutes, sometimes an hour a day.  You can do audio while you're jogging or whatever for 67 days.  Just the fact of doing that, you're rewiring your brain to be a lot of focus down.  You want to feel like I felt at the Amish.  By the way, little practical tip.  Once a year I've been advising this, I advise for you too, Ben.  Find a farmer somewhere in the middle of America and be like him.  And farmers are always chronically overworked and under helped.  Be like, “Can I come for a weekend with my family.  We'll get a hotel near you,” or all alone, “and just help you on the farm.”  And it's a great way, you return, man, nothing teaches you more about life biology than putting your fingers in the dirt and getting away from technology.  If you can find an old school farmer, buck some hay, feeds some cows, it's a grounding effect.  And every time I do it, I'm like, “Why don't I do this more often?”  So that's another great one.

But do the 67 Steps.  That uses technology obviously 'cause you can, but you can listen into it.  But it's important.  I don't say that 'cause it's mine, it's one of them things I'm most proud that I've ever done 'cause I see it really working.  But my main thing is even if you don't do the 67 Steps, fine one thing, like Gary Keller talks about it, and commit to do it.  Or trying new benchmark.  Peter Drucker says when you get your timeframes wrong, that's when you fail.  So many people have, “Lose 10 pounds in 10 days.”  I'm like, “That's not enough!”  The time frames I think are most important are 67 days from research, University College London.  And then Peter F. Drucker, who's done almost more research than anyone on business when he was alive, 18 months.  Those are your two time frames.  So 67 days, reformulate, rewire.  And then 18 months, reap the benefits of the rewiring.  But it takes that long, at least 67 days.  So that's my thoughts on that.

Ben:  Okay.  Cool.  Got it.  Well the 67 Steps, there's a bunch of more information on it.  Again, just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/67steps.  Or if you want to leave your thoughts about today, go over to bengreenfieldfitness.com/tai1.  There's not very many people actually that I really have as a mentor that I've used as a coach or whose advice I actually sit down and listen to, but Tai is one of them.  So I recommend that you check out the stuff.  So Tai, thanks for coming on, man.

Tai:  Thank you, man.  I appreciate all you do too.  So thanks so much.

Ben:  Alright, folks.  This is Ben Greenfield and Tai Lopez signing out from bengreenfieldfitness.com.

 

 

Welcome to Part 1 of this special podcast series, in which you get to sit in and listen to Tai Lopez coach Ben Greenfield (and you!) using the strategies from Tai’s online video series “67 Steps to Getting Anything You Want Out of Life Health, Wealth, Love, & Happiness.

In this episode, Ben and Tai talk about multi-tasking, reprogramming your genetics and checking your e-mail less.

Resources Tai and Ben discuss in this podcast:

Book: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Book: Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives–and Our Lives Change Our Genes

Book: The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

Tai’s online video series: 67 Steps to Getting Anything You Want Out of Life, Health, Wealth, Love, & Happiness

 

Ask Ben a Podcast Question

One thought on “[Transcript] – Part 1: 67 Steps to Getting Anything You Want Out of Life Health, Wealth, Love, & Happiness with Tai Lopez

  1. Wayne flores says:

    Lol Amazing, Tai Lopez gets so much hate but i still think he tells ussome really cool stuff.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *