Another banger training session with @hubermanlab and The Shadow. I love seeing these two get together. I’ve been using a lot of Yates-style, low-volume/high-effort accessory work in my garage programming and these videos are always a good reality check. It’s easy to write “to failure” in a program. It’s another thing to watch what Dorian actually means by it. I usually think I’m training pretty hard. Then I watch one of these and realize there’s probably another gear I’m not consistently getting to. Andrew Huberman Trains Legs With 6x Mr Olympia Dorian Yates youtu.be/zLwJBUSJxCU?si=nYdA… via @YouTube

Great article, and a good reminder. BJJ has probably been one of the best ways for me to understand this idea of unclenching. As a white belt, everything is stiff. You’re gripping too hard, forcing positions, trying to hold onto everything. As you get better, you start realizing how much easier things work when you relax, move, and adapt. Bruce Lee had it right: be water.

I can’t have the perfect training program. I have too many other things going on. I want to lift heavy, do some bodybuilding I actually enjoy, stay athletic, and be done in 30–45 minutes. Probably suboptimal for something. But I’m okay with that. If I optimize completely for strength, size, endurance, or anything else, something has to get sacrificed. Rather be well rounded than perfectly optimized.

25 years later, this place carries a lot of history for my family. My grandfather worked down here, my father worked in the towers, I’ve worked in several buildings around the site, and now I’m a block from One World Trade. Grateful to be an American, grateful for the people who ran toward danger that day, and thinking of every family still carrying the loss. #911Remembrance

The question I want to ask more business owners: what did your first customers do before you existed? Pay someone else? Build a workaround? Just put up with it? I’m trying to get better at spotting a problem people actually care enough to solve.

One takeaway from @GeorgesStPierre podcast with John Danaher: (Even though I came away with another page of notes) In a complicated system, the useful question isn’t ‘How do I understand everything?’ It’s ‘What stays true?’ Get good at the constants first

One thing I wish I learned earlier: ask for help sooner. A lot of problems drag on way longer than they need to because admitting you need help feels worse than carrying the problem. Pride can make a fixable problem last way longer than it should.

A rule I’ve started using when I’m short on time: Don’t shorten every part of the workout. Delete things. Keep the main lift exactly as planned. Keep the hardest accessory work. Start cutting from the bottom of the list. A 30-minute workout shouldn’t feel like the rushed version of a 60-minute workout. It should feel finished at 30.

If work/kids blow up your week and you only have 30 minutes to train, don’t invent a new workout. Keep the priority and cut the extras. 5 min warm-up 15 min main lift 10 min on 2 accessory movements, 1–2 hard sets each Shorter session. Same goal.

One thing BJJ beats out of me is the need to look impressive. The guy doing the same three things is usually a much bigger problem than the guy hunting highlight reel shit. Life appears to have copied the curriculum.

I think a lot of fitness advice is written for people who have made fitness their main hobby. Which is fine. I’ve basically been that guy before. But now I’m more interested in how strong and capable you can stay while also having a business, kids, travel, dinners, missed workouts and an actual life. That seems like the harder problem.

Building a product is the fun part. Figuring out how anyone is going to find it is usually the part that matters more. Easy to confuse inventory, packaging and manufacturing with progress because you can physically see them. Build the product, obviously. But “we made it” and “people want it” are two very different milestones.

I keep coming back to that line: you don’t rise to the occasion, you fall to your training. Its true beyond fighting. If the first time you deal with real pressure is when shit actually matters, you’re basically hoping adrenaline has a plan. Better to practice being uncomfortable before life makes it mandatory.

It’s crazy how clear my head gets on vacation. A few days without the commute, constant inputs and daily bullshit and suddenly I can see the Matrix. Then normal life comes back and starts installing fog. Now the trick is keeping some of that clarity now that real life turns the noise back on.

Two weeks in Greece. Swimming every day, coffee, beers at lunch. Excellent protocol if the goal is to quietly donate muscle mass. Back to the garage. Same photo in a month.

I’m less interested in finding a business that can work than finding one that’s worth giving years of my life to. Good economics matter. So does actually giving a shit about the problem. Still looking for where those two overlap.

Been sitting here with my wife and kids thinking how insanely lucky I am to have this life and be able to give them experiences like this. And somehow, at the exact same time, I still feel that constant pull for more. Maybe the goal isn’t to kill that hunger. It’s to make sure you can want more without becoming blind to what you already have.

Drove Athens to Sounio. Unfinished buildings almost the whole way. As someone who keeps Greece very close to my heart, it’s hard to see. Greece needs to build and improve, not just preserve what it has but with quality and in a way that still feels Greek. Same goes for tavernas, hotels, all of it. Build better. Grow. Keep Greece Greece.