#159 Birthday Episode! Consistency, Leverage, and Intentionality: Key Principles for an Extraordinary Life

On the occasion of my 28th birthday, I found myself reflecting on the road that led me here. During this period of introspection, I rediscovered the undeniable power of consistency, leverage, and intentionality. These three core principles have become the pillars upon which I construct my life and my goals. Consistency, as I learned from the challenges of 75 hard and running a marathon, is the key to cultivating habits and achieving the goals we set. 

But consistency is just one part of the equation. I found that leverage, the ally of efficiency, plays a significant role in goal attainment. It's about using the resources at hand to amplify your efforts and results. Further, nothing in life is incidental - from vacations to ordinary work weeks, intentionality is crucial. And as I share my journey, the reason behind this podcast and my life lessons, I hope to inspire you to find your consistency, leverage, and intentionality. As we step into another holiday season, let's commit to making our stories, and lives, extraordinary!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:00

Hey, what's going on? Guys Got a special, special episode today. This is going to be the birthday episode. My birthday comes out, comes today, I'm turning 28 years old. This is Jordan, with Edwards Insulting, and I wanted to do this podcast today because it was a time to reflect. And as I was looking back over the past year, I realized that twofold One, my biggest month of podcast downloads came when I did solo episodes, so you will see me seeing more solo episodes because we have to learn from our past. Second, when I start getting texts, I will send out this podcast because I want you guys to know what's going on with me and it's important, and these are my lessons.

Speaker 1: 1:54

And so today we're going to cover three things. We're going to cover, one, the importance of consistency. Two, what is leverage and the power of it. And then three, the importance of attentionality. And these are lessons that I've really taken seriously as I'm winding down your 27 of my life. These are things that I've found super important to me. We'll dive into consistency what is that? Why consistency? What does that mean?

Speaker 1: 2:28

So a previous thought I used to have was that when you're on vacation, that you shouldn't work at all, you shouldn't do anything, and the reason I thought that is because I thought you were supposed to immerse yourself in the vacation and go about it that way. Currently, at this point in time in my life, it's not just vacations, but it's in 2020, I did 75 hard. In 2021, I ran the New York City Marathon, and the thing I would find is that when I would do these activities? So let's go back to 2019. I ran the Lake Tahoe Marathon and it was an incredible experience. However, a lot of people deal with this after you run a marathon, you're like what's next? Because, think about it. You've literally been training so hard and you're so focused on this activity that you start to think to yourself what's the next level, what's the next step? And is it to run more marathons? Is it to run a 100 mile race? Is it to go about your life differently? What is it for you? And for me, it was realizing that, no matter what I do whether it's the 75 hard I did in 2020, where you're working out twice a day, shout out to Franz Bernard, did it with Franz, and it's kind of what started this podcast You're working out twice a day, one inside, one outside, reading 10 pages of personal development book and you're eating clean no desserts, no alcohol all for 75 and drink a gallon of water all for 75 days and you think about this concept. It's incredible because it gets you hyper aware to how you're supposed to operate. However, after the 75 days, what does one do? So there's phase one, phase two, phase three, and I understand that. But it's what works for Jordan Edwards, what works for me.

Speaker 1: 4:29

And so at the beginning of this year, I set the goal for myself to do 300 workouts. And when I set that goal, it was because I realized that what the marathon did and what the 75 hard did were they helped me along the way, but they were short term sprints what is a manageable lifestyle? So I started to question it and it's what is the lifestyle that I want to create and what is manageable to do on a weekly, daily, monthly basis? And what came to that was that I said to myself the reason I like the marathon is because it's not just the 26.2 mile race, it's the 20 mile running, it's the 19 mile running, it's the 18, 17, 16. So I thought what could be a good way to go about that for myself? And what came up with that was 300 workouts this year. And now I want to add a little caveat. Shout out to Dylan Decker for making me think about this.

Speaker 1: 5:29

In the beginning of the year, me and Dylan were talking and he was explaining to me how he wanted to do 75 hard but just for a week each month and with that ended up becoming for me I started to do with my fiance, madison. What that became was two workouts a day. One might have been walking for a week straight and then no alcohol, which ended up being 84 days of doing this, because we did it every single month, which is one of the things I'm really proud about, and it got us in shape because it's a great way to keep you accountable. It also builds on the 300 workouts, and what happened there is that I end up I mean working out like 420 right now and we just continue to compound and grow and grow and grow. So the thing that I think is super important going into next year and like just me realizing about my birthday in general is that if you're going to go on vacation, continue your regimen.

Speaker 1: 6:31

Chris Crone, who was on my podcast, he stated that that he's like dude I always do my morning routine. It's automatic. It's what I do. I'm traveling. Good, let's do it. And that's kind of the premise that you need to create, which is mine, is stay committed no matter what. So that means on vacation, work out. That means on vacation, work, but then that also means during the week when you're not on vacation, make a vacation, make a Saturday night, a Wednesday night. You know what I mean. Have a fun time throughout the week. Make the most of your time, but stay consistent, because habits are built. Takes 21 days to build a habit. Takes three days to end one, meaning that if you stop your consistency, it will stop building the habit. So it's hard with these five day work weeks, two days off weeks. The concept doesn't always lie where it makes sense, because by if you miss Monday, say you're off Saturday Sunday don't do anything. Then Monday comes around. Now it's what do I do now? Because you're losing your habit of what you got into. So consistency is something that I've really gotten into, and that's just on the physical front. And then also this year is I'm guessing.

Speaker 1: 7:51

If you're listening to this, you might see some of my content out there. It's creating the clips and it's doing that myself, clipping up the content and then putting it out to all the different platforms to share the positive message. Because for me, I think the content that I'm putting out there is informative, it's different, it's by experts and it's a truly unique perspective from what most people are hearing and most people are seeing, because there's a lot of negativity out there and it's how do you find the positive, how do you find the gratitude, how do you find what you're excited about? So I try to help with that and that's my way of giving back and seeing where that goes. The second thing that I want to discuss on this birthday episode is the power of leverage. So from one podcast and this is really where I learned it from one podcast I've been able to create different clips, create a newsletter, put it out all this different content and reach people, even posting one time.

Speaker 1: 8:56

Do you guys realize how many people see your videos or see your posts? Like it's so incredible. I posted one podcast right now with Jim Dowd and we're posting and it's going a little viral. So it's literally you can post something on one platform and it will get like five views, and you can post the seems act thing and it can get 5,000 views or 25,000 or 100,000 views, but it's really good to get the perspective of like on Instagram. Most of the time it's like between three to 700 views, then some things will break a thousand and then some things will break 2,500, at 5,000, whatever it is. But it's important to realize who you like, what you're trying to do, because if I can post the same clip in all the different areas, that is leverage, that is building. So then you start to think in your life, where else can I get leverage?

Speaker 1: 9:51

And this year, one of the big things I learned was the power of AI, mostly through my podcast. So I have a hosting platform and that's called Buzzsprout, which is basically where I load my podcast in, and then I used to have to come up with the description. I used to come up. I never did a newsletter actually, so the newsletter's new. Essentially, what ended up happening is Buzzsprout had this new feature update where it would write out your entire description for the podcast, which is fantastic. It looks 100 times better. And then the second thing it does is it creates a newsletter. So I'd copy and paste this newsletter, put it onto my email list and I'd send it out there, and the reason for this is because it's a leverage. It gets more people knowing about my podcast, it helps my podcast grow and it helps me be more consistent. So it connects back to point one, but it's also point two of it's important to find out ways to save money and be more operationally lean. We're heading into what some people are saying a recession, some people saying we're at a recession. So it's just important to see how you can expand your horizons without additional work but lower cost items. So there's just different ways of growing your leverage.

Speaker 1: 11:15

Leverage can also be if you do the same task over and over and over again. For example, a lot of people go food shopping. Some do meal prep. Meal prep would be a higher leverage activity because you don't have to spend your time going get the food, all of that. But if you wanna go food shopping, you could do something like Instacart. The cool thing about Instacart is that it saves your orders. So if you eat the same thing over and over and over again each week, you can replace that order. So you don't have to spend the time looking through all of the food store finding that specific item.

Speaker 1: 11:51

Because we know that some people really don't enjoy that, like myself. That is not one of my favorite things to do. So there's just different ways that we can elevate ourselves and find better leverage opportunities. This can also relate to different businesses or different jobs or friend groups or different ways of viewing the world. Like, for example, a higher leverage activity to make yourself feel good in that regard would be talking with somebody that you like, maybe being outside, getting sunlight on a walk and then maybe listening to good music in the background. So it's figuring out these things of what are the formulas that work and create positive leverage for you as an individual, for you to show up the best and be your best self, because that's all we really want in this world. We don't want people to be negative. I know the world might push that and the narrative that they might push that, but I don't want that. I want everyone to be as happy as they can, living their best life, enjoying their experience on this earth, because we only get one, so why should it be a bad one? Let's make it a good one and let's make the most of it.

Speaker 1: 13:05

The third thing I want to touch on is the importance of intentionality. Now, this year, I've expanded my coaching business, I've taken on more clients, and the thing I've realized is that 90% of people I would say even maybe 98, 99% of people don't get intentional on what they want their life to be. They just say, hey, I want a promotion. Fantastic, you know what I mean? That's great. However, are you gonna be happier with that promotion? Like what is the type of life you wanna build? Like? And once you understand that, then you can work towards and build on that Like.

Speaker 1: 13:44

For myself, one of the things that's important to me is I really enjoy traveling. I enjoy the flexibility meaning that a lot of the stuff I need to be building needs to be remote work. It needs to be because otherwise I'm gonna be desk bound and have to stay in different areas, and that's the way I need to create my life, because that's something I want to do. But the other thing I've realized with people and even myself is it's the directional awareness, meaning that if we're going in the proper direction, we will feel better about ourselves. It's when we don't know the direction we're going in. So figure out your direction and even if you make a little step, like everyone says, it's one step at a time and that's how you accomplish anything and we know that. So why not know what the steps are and then work towards those steps? You know what I mean, because it's super important for us to realize that we're not gonna accomplish our goals every year, we're not gonna get everything we want, but we can try and we can work towards that and that is the important part being in the process, not just waiting for the dopamine hit of oh my God, this big thing happened and it's so like whoa. No, it's working towards it each and every day and it's taking those inventory of yourself and seeing where are you at, what are you doing, and like another practice. Like I said in the beginning, it's three things this year that were big for me, it's consistency, leverage and intentionality of knowing the direction you wanna go in. So the intentionality component and all three of these topics could be their own podcast.

Speaker 1: 15:34

Let me know if you actually, guys, want more or more content like this where I can break down each of these subjects, because the thing is that we do our best, we're trying to make life on our terms, but what ends up happening is, as little kids, we're all excited and we see a world of possibility, and as we become adults, we lose that inner child. So my ask for my birthday is for you, the listener of this podcast, not lose their childish instincts. It's okay, climb the tree, it's okay. Do the fun activity, do whatever makes you happy. Do something crazy in a good way, not a bad way, but do the things that make you happy, whether that's rollerblading, whether that's, I don't know, riding your motorcycle, whatever the activity is, find out what it is, because a lot of the time, we put ourselves in the back burner. I have so much going on, I have a life, I have this blah, blah, blah and we don't prioritize ourselves. So I'm saying figure out who you are, figure out what you wanna do and do your fun. Find your fun, and that's something that I think is super important because, yes, I do love working hard, I do love putting it in and making it happen.

Speaker 1: 16:58

However, I realize that a lot of people need to figure out what makes them happy. We spend way too much time just consuming, whether it's social media or TV, et cetera, et cetera, and it's like go out and do the activity you wanna do. Go out and be the person you wanna be. There's no constraints, there's nothing holding you back. You can do this and let's make 2024 the best year yet For you not for your parents, not for anybody else, but for you.

Speaker 1: 17:32

And the major thing I wanna leave you guys with is that figure out something that you can be consistent with every single day and not be upset about. For me, that's posts in the podcast weekly, that's my coaching group, that's my working out daily, that's my posting content. These are the consistencies in my life that keep me grounded. Then we gotta find the power of leverage. Are there activities that you are doing over and over again, as there may be a software that can make this a lot easier for you, as it's helped me with my podcast journey and my businesses as well. And then, are you heading in the right direction? Are you heading in the direction you want to be heading in, which is the most important? So find out where your direction is and get working on the path, because that's the best way to do it, and take action today on whatever that is. And the last thing is, I appreciate each and every one of you and I want you guys to go out there and be, to do and make whatever makes you happy, and I appreciate all the happy birthday wishes and I'm hoping for an amazing year 28. And yeah, guys, I couldn't be more grateful for these podcasts.

Speaker 1: 18:54

I wanted to share this one because it's a unique perspective. I don't share a lot of my stuff. Usually it's me interviewing other people and this is part of my journey, which is sharing my experiences, and that's one of the reasons I really wanted to start the podcast, because it's so important to capture your journey and capture who you are. So I hope you guys all have an amazing holiday season. If that's when you're listening to this, If you're in the future, make sure to get consistent, understand your awareness and understand the importance of leverage. So go out there, have an amazing day, keep clocking in, and I can't wait for you guys to check out the next episode.