Being Better Everyday!

Joe Templin, financial planner, founder, reformed physicist, ultra-marathoner, and autodidactic polymath that has invested the past two and a half decades to help others reach their financial potential. And now he's written a book that was meant to be read one page a day. Making us all take pause and focus on one thing per day. Think of it as your daily multivitamin for life.
  

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Transcript

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Triple Bottom Line | Episode 18 | Being Better Every Day |

[Upbeat theme music plays] 
Female Voice Over 
[00:01] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today's business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin.

Taylor Martin 
[00:17] And welcome, everybody. [laughs] Today we're going to try something a little bit different. We focus on the triple bottom line, people, planet, profit, but sometimes we have to recharge our energy banks. I came across this book, and I thought, this is exactly what I'm talking about. I am here with Joe Templin. He is an author of a book called Every Day Excellence: A Daily Guide to Growing. And when I say daily, I mean daily. He is also an ultra-marathoner. He's a special needs parent. He's a former international Taekwondo champion and an unrepentant geek. So with all that being said into one person, Joe, tell us how you got to be all those things and so much more.

Joe Templin
[00:57] Well, I'm basically a human Swiss army knife. I think part of the way that I got that mindset is I'm ADHD. I wasn't diagnosed until I was an adult. When we were kids, we were just called crazy or high energy.

Taylor Martin 
[01:13] Hyper, yeah.

Joe Templin 
[01:13] So that's a good thing that they didn't turn around and drug me up. And thank you for asking me to close all the tabs that I had open in my internet browser, because I counted them and there were 22, including one playing circus music someplace. I'm not sure where that came from. 

Taylor Martin 
[Laughs]

Joe Templin 
[01:28] So that, you know, sums up, in a lot of ways, how I became like this. But my mom was a nun and a college educator. My dad was Army turned consultant. Grew up in a farm family, so hard work, but highly encouraged education. And so I was probably eight years old when I told my mom that I wanted to learn everything there was to learn. And she looked at me and said, "Well, you better get to work."

Taylor Martin 
[01:52] Nice.

Joe Templin 
[01:54] So that's the sort of attitude. And one of the things that I talk about, especially when I'm talking with people younger than me, people in their 20s and 30s, is that if you look at our life, in a lot of ways it is a giant video game. So I'm not getting older. I'm leveling up. And the goal in the games is to get to the castle, save the princess, get all the gold and all that. And to do that, you have to overcome the boss and all these other things. But along the way, you have all these side quests. And you go into the tavern, and there's the weird old man. You have to get a potion or learn something or get a new tool or rest and recover. And our lives are like that in a lot of ways. We have this big goal that we're working towards, but we have all these side quests where we're collecting resources, where we're getting new contacts. We're getting new skills. We are resting our spirit and body so that we can get back onto the main journey.

To your younger listeners, that's one of the ways to look at things. And as my friend Atheno always reminds me, I'm no good to other people if I'm broken. So we have to take that time to heal ourselves as need be along this journey, especially if you're pushing yourself hard, so that you can then get back towards your mission, whether it's saving the planet, helping other people, building your empire. All of those are often interrelated in a lot of ways. So to have a sustainable business, you have to be a sustainable person.

Taylor Martin 
[03:33] I can't agree with you more there, man, as that quote was – I think about – I can't be a provider of others if I'm not healthy, same thing.

Joe Templin 
[03:44] Right, so like on the airplane.

Taylor Martin 
[03:46] Exactly. [Laughs]

Joe Templin 
[03:48] You know, it comes on down. Take care of yourself. Then you can take care of the other people.

Taylor Martin 
[03:53] Right. When you and I were spoke, I guess it was a week ago or so, you were talking about pearls of excellence and everyday excellence. Can you expand on what you were talking about? Because I felt like there was a lot to dig in there.

Joe Templin 
[04:06] Sure. So the whole idea of pearls of excellence and pearls of wisdom is something that my father taught me years ago. And he told me in any class that I took, in any convention I attended, any seminar, any book, always look to see what you can pull out of it to find that one pearl of wisdom or excellence that you can turn around and apply immediately. Don't try and apply everything, because you'll get overwhelmed. Find that one real pearl, because that is the value. And if you string enough pearls together, you end up building something that is very beautiful and worthy. And that is our business, our life, everything else.

Taylor Martin 
[04:52] Yeah, I always think of it as like golden nugget.

Joe Templin 
[04:54] Well, there's an old Chinese saying that pearls lie not on the seashore. If thou desires it, you must dive deep for it. And the other thing is, very often the pearl is what comes out of adversity. The oyster gets a sand grate in them, it bothers them. And so they excrete the material around it and build it up into this beautiful, perfectly round, colored object of great value. And so we all have those negative experiences on a regular basis. Are we going to be traumatized by them or are we going to do what Dombrowski talked about and have post-traumatic growth? And the pearls very often come from those traumas or micro traumas that we experience.

Taylor Martin 
[05:41] Post-traumatic growth, first time I ever heard that phrase before. I love it. [Laughs] That's awesome. I told you I was going to do something a little bit different. I was going to throw some curve-balls at you. So I want everybody to understand that this book, titled again, Every Day Excellence: A Daily Guide to Growing, it's not just a book that you read from beginning to end. It's a book that you put on your coffee table or next to your computer. And every day you open up to a new page, because it's 365 pages, plus introduction stuff. But every day is a different page to read and to find your own pearls so that you can work on them, a daily routine. There's just so many. There's 365, right, so there's so many pages. So I – 

Joe Templin 
[06:25] Three hundred and sixty-six because I included Leap Day.

Taylor Martin 
[06:27] Of course you did, overachiever you are. They all start with a quote. So I'm going to tell you a few. I'm going to tell you a quote and see if Joe here can tell me who the person it's from.

Joe Templin 
[06:37] Oh, geez.

Taylor Martin 
[Laughs]

Joe Templin 
[06:39] If I'd known I was going to have curve-balls, I should've sacrificed to Jobu. Major League reference there, sorry.

Taylor Martin
[06:47] This one, I read this and I was like, wow, that's pretty heavy. And then I saw who wrote it, and I was like, wow, didn't see that. Okay, "The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image but giving them the opportunity to create themselves."

Joe Templin 
[07:01] I have no clue on that one. I want to say that it's got to be somebody from the business world, maybe Henry Ford or Steve Jobs.

Taylor Martin 
[07:14] Steven Spielberg.

Joe Templin 
[07:16] Okay, I'm oh for one.

Taylor Martin 
[07:18] [Laughs] Okay, well, the reason why I like that one so much is because I think it just brings people into context that, you know, when you're mentoring somebody, try not to sculpt them into your own way of doing things. They might have a different way of doing it. It might be better, or it might just be better for them. And it's about supporting people. 

Joe Templin 
[07:37] It's about making them the best version of themselves, because as I was told in my martial arts career, I'm not Bill Durkee. Bill Durkee was 6-foot-3 and a total badass. I'm not Master Grant. Master Grant was 5 foot 5, and a couple of months ago, at 77 years old, bench-pressed 500 pounds. I'm neither of them. I needed to be the best Joe Templin that I could be. And by being so and understanding that, it allows me to have my own unique style that suits my body, my mind, my training style. And that evolves over time. But also, the situations are different. If I were to be mentoring a 25-year-old today, the world that they are trying to build in is very different than the world that I grew up in. The tax world's different. The regulatory world's different. Ten years ago, people weren't using Zoom. It's not about making them a clone of ourselves. It's making them the best version of themselves, ready to go on out and compete in the current and future world, not the old one.

Taylor Martin
[08:45] Yeah, that's well put. Just to geek out a little moment on what your analogy was Bruce Lee had one foot that was slightly shorter – one leg, I'm sorry, that was shorter than the other. And it allowed him to do a special type of karate kick that he couldn't do otherwise.

Joe Templin 
[09:01] It allowed him to do the spinning kicks that he did all the time. That's actually in the book.

Taylor Martin
[09:05] You're kidding me. [Laughs]

Joe Templin 
[09:07] That is one of my favorite analogies. And to take it a step further, in The Chinese Connection when he's like being the telephone repair guy, he's got the huge, thick Coke bottles – 

Taylor Martin 
[09:15] Yeah.

Joe Templin 
[09:16] Those were his glasses. He could barely see, which is one of the reasons why he did Wing Chun, because it's an in-close art. If he tried to do Taekwondo and standing out at social distancing sort of distance, he wouldn't have even been able to see his opponent.

Taylor Martin 
[09:30] Okay, now that's crazy. And we can go down the rabbit hole in that conversation. But I want to draw you back. I want to get back to this quizzing thing I got set up for you here.

Joe Templin 
[09:39] Okay.

Taylor Martin
[09:40] All right. "Leadership is an action, not a position."

Joe Templin 
[09:45] Okay, that's not Simon Sinek.

Taylor Martin 
[09:48] Nope. "Leadership is an action, not a position."

Joe Templin 
[09:51] John Maxwell.

Taylor Martin 
[09:52] Donald McGannon.

Joe Templin 
[09:54] Aw, over two. I'm going to strike out here. 

Taylor Martin 
[09:57] [Laughs] Okay, here's what I know you're going to know. But again, this is one of the ones when I read it, I was like, oh, this is so funny. "Who's more foolish, the fool or the fool that follows him?"

Joe Templin 
[10:08] Well, that's Obi-Wan Kenobi. I know.

Taylor Martin 
[Laughs]

Joe Templin 
[10:10] That is actually March the 5th because it's between Star Wars Day and the quote from Yoda and Revenge of the Sith or the Sith Day, May 6th, and the quote from Darth Vader. So I know that one. [Laughs]

Taylor Martin 
[10:26] So you – okay, so you're one for two, man.

Joe Templin 
[10:29] I'm – hey, you know what? I was oh for two, and I hit it out of the park, so.

Taylor Martin 
[10:35] Yes, you did.

Joe Templin 
[10:36] That's pretty good. So here's a side thing, by the way. Ewan McGregor, his brother is in the Royal Air Force, and his call sign is Obi two.

Taylor Martin
[10:47] Oh, that's so cool. [Laughs] That's cool.

Joe Templin 
[10:51] See, ADHD comes in handy sometimes.

Taylor Martin 
[10:54] It's kind of interesting, you know, the quote, you know, "Who's more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?" Sometimes I feel like we as a society are the fool that's following some of the, what was taught to us, you know, in terms of not being sustainable and not thinking about the planet and not thinking about how we're wrecking our climate, you know. I just – that one just stuck out at me.

Joe Templin 
[11:16] I grew up on a farm, so I'm not what you would call crunchy granola, but I grew up in a world where you have to make things sustainable. So you don't destroy the soil, because you need it next year and 10 years from now. With farms, they're supposed to pass down generation to generation. So you learn best practices. The people who care the most about the environment are actually people who utilize it and want it to be there for their children and the generation afterwards. So people don't realize that hunting licenses in New York state, hunting and fishing licenses, go to the Department of Environmental Conservation, all the funds. And so they are some of the biggest conservation efforts. You know, Teddy Roosevelt was a huge hunter and created our National Park system so that those gems could be preserved for future generations. And it's a hundred years later. And if he hadn't have done that, we would not have some of these green spaces that we do.

Taylor Martin 
[12:18] Amen to that, brother.

Joe Templin 
[12:19] So it's not just putting it up there on the shelf and looking at it and not touching it. It's being able to enjoy it. And when you get out into nature and you can feel it and touch and feel the wind in your hair and smell it and value it, you're going to protect it that much more.

Taylor Martin 
[12:37] Yeah. You know, I think we just all need to – we all need to hear that. We all need to have that Obi-Wan voice in our ear now and then. And again, the book is daily. You just open and flip a page and read, and you hear the quote. You have information about it. Then you have an action item at the bottom of the page. 

Joe Templin 
[12:54] The action items actually are one of the most fun parts, because it forces you to do something. And as opposed to being the pen-and-ink philosophers that the Stoics talked about, where you're like, oh, that's nice, that's wonderful, and blah blah blah blah blah, it actually connects it. And it's a lot of little things. Most of the action items take essentially no time. There's a couple of more difficult ones like doing a SWOT analysis on yourself and your business spending a couple of minutes writing down who you're angry with and why and forgiving them, because anger is a poison that you drink yourself. But a lot of them are very easy. Like my favorite one I talk about all the time actually is smile at 10 people today, because when you smile, it actually decreases the cortisol levels in your system, which reduces your stress, which is going to improve your health. When you smile, it also increases your intelligence for about five minutes. And if I smile at you, you're naturally inclined to smile back at me.

Taylor Martin 
[13:55] Mm-hmm.

Joe Templin 
[13:55] Because it activates the mirror neurons in the neocortex. Now, I have just given you a gift of a moment of happiness. I have increased your happiness hormones and decreased your stress. So you are now better physically than you were a couple moments ago. And you're also slightly more confident and more productive. So if you go through the day and you smile at 10 random people, and you can get them to smile back, you have just created these micro nodes of happiness out there on the planet. You don't know how when that person smiles at somebody else now, it's going to have impact like butterfly's wings.

Taylor Martin 
[14:37] Yeah, micro nodes. I was just going to say something like that, micro moments. I – yeah, I totally see that. 

Joe Templin 
[14:43] I'm all about the little things, the micro decisions that we make, the micro changes, the little things, because as Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, said, "Well-being is made of little things but is no small thing itself."

Taylor Martin 
[15:03] I like that. You know, just to kind of click back into that Obi-Wan Kenobi, let's go into that action item. The action item for that one is, "Look at people you spend time with. Are any trying to lead you on the wrong path? Maybe it's time for addition by subtraction." You know, I think that's simple in terms of what it says. Maybe not simple to implement, but definitely worth thinking about because sometimes we just don't think about things like that. We just take all the people that are coming at us and just go with the flow, not thinking about how they – what's the word? How they might bend or change the direction of where we're – 

Joe Templin 
[15:39] Lead us astray?

Taylor Martin 
[15:40] Yeah, lead us astray, that's a good way of saying it. Okay, I'm going to have another one for you.

Joe Templin 
[15:44] All right.

Taylor Martin 
[15:45] And this is one I feel like we all have to is, "Change before you have to."

Joe Templin 
[15:50] Jack Welsh.

Taylor Martin 
[15:52] You got it. Boom, two for two!

Joe Templin 
[15:54] Whoa!

Taylor Martin 
[15:56] [Laughs] So let's go ahead, let's read a little bit about this one here. "The best time to polish your resume is when you love your current job and have no plans on leaving, just in case." That's interesting. That's interesting.

Joe Templin 
[16:10] Best time to borrow money is when you don't need it. Best time to build a relationship is with a professional is before you need their services. Best time to practice is before the event. 

Taylor Martin 
[16:24] Mm-hmm. So your action item is, "Take a minute and think about the last time you were embarrassed because you were not up to speed. How'd it feel? Now, what is something you see coming at work that you should prepare for?" You know, forward thinking and forecasting in different business models and different business segments, different business markets, verticals, that is something that I think we all are doing, but this really makes you kind of stop and put it like pen to paper, if you will.

Joe Templin 
[16:53] Well, this actually – there's a derivative of this, as a special needs parent. Children with autism tend to have a checklist in their head of how things go, which is part of the reason why they are overrepresented among engineers, by the way, and physicists. With my son, he did not want to read fiction, because plot twists and things like that just threw him for a complete and total loop. He wanted this, then this, then this. And they built their life around these stories. So we're going to go to dinner. I'm going to go here. I'm going to have this to eat. And this is the way my day's going to go. And that's how a lot of autistic minds function.
[17:36] So one of the things that we do, because there's things that are beyond our control, is we play the what if game, in a lot of ways. And this is called – story setting is the technical term. But okay, buddy, we want to go to Sunset for your birthday, because it's your favorite place, and you want to have nachos, correct? Yes. All right. So if we go to Sunset, and they're closed tonight, as happens sometimes, what is the backup plan? What would you be comfortable with? And at this point he's like, "Oh, we'll go to Henry's across the street." All right, good. Now, if we go to Sunset and they are open but they don't have nachos, are you going to get upset about that? I'll be upset for a minute, but I'll get over it, because I'll have X instead. Okay, so now we've got some alternative paths in case something beyond our control moves the preferred outcome.

Taylor Martin 
[18:35] Mm-hmm.

Joe Templin 
[18:36] And doing this, playing the what if game, allows him to be able to now see the couple of different outcomes and be comfortable with each one of them. As business owners, we should be playing this also. What if? What if I take this action? What could come from this? Think of it almost like a chess grandmaster will say. Okay, if I make this move, they can make this one, and then here. And they're thinking multiple steps ahead. I do this with my businesses all the time. I train my coaching clients around it. Okay, if you do this, what are the potential responses? What are the potential outcomes? If they say X, how do you respond to that? If they say Y, how do you respond to that? And so you can look several steps ahead in – of the game.

[19:23] And an analogy is when I was trying to teach my 17-year-old nephew to drive, a lot of 17-year-olds look just beyond the edge of the car. And it doesn't give them time to react. And we need to teach them to look 6 to 10 car lengths out so that they have time on their side instead of it being too late to make decisions. And so being able to see the potential alternatives and to have time to switch to plan B or plan C is one of the things that makes us more successful but also allows us to, in a business, hey, if we do this, then what's the next step? What's the consequence? What's the consequence of that? What's the consequence of that? Oh, we end up dumping 500 tons of sludge into the river. That's not good. All right, so how do we prevent that by making changes here early on so that we don't have that severe negative outcome?

Taylor Martin 
[20:15] I think a lot of people would – well, a lot of people should be doing more of this nowadays, especially with COVID, because it forced us to have to sit there and figure things out. Okay, this is going sideways. What's another solution for this? And if that solution doesn't work, then what about this solution? You know, I feel like we were all under the stress gun, if you will, for the last two years. 

Joe Templin 
[20:35] And part of the problem is that decisions were too easy. There were no short-term negative consequences, just long-term ones. You know, when gas was a $1.99, people could drive all over the place. With gas at four and a half dollars, people actually consider, and they do things like batching their trips. So that's more efficient, which is better for the planet, by the way, and saves gas, saves money, all these different things. So like growing up out in the middle of nowhere, we had to – we couldn't just run into town for a tomato. Okay, you would run into town, and it would be three hours worth of doing the errands, because that was how you had to do it in terms of efficiency and having all the kids, getting the time to do it. So it's doing these things that allow you to not only see the consequences down the road, but to try and make your choices more efficient and effective. This is a skill that business owners and parents need to develop, because it helps improve outcomes on lots of different metrics. 

Taylor Martin 
[21:46] Speaking to that from experience, I had a bunch of different types of jobs growing up, and I always just tried to be the best at whatever it was that I was doing, whether I was making food or delivering pizzas or whatever it was, waiting tables, busing tables. I always tried to do the best job I could. And it's just in my innate being to do that. But what I didn't realize is looking back on my life, all these things that I've learned that got fused into other areas of my life that have no connection with one another and has I think ultimately made me a better person professionally and personally. 

Joe Templin 
[22:23] Well, that's some of the side quests that I talked about. But also, it's the having professional pride in terms of what you're doing. We live in a highly disposable world. You know, computer code, it can be upgraded in 10 minutes, so it doesn't matter if it's not fully functional, as opposed to 25 years ago when they'd ship a video game. I had a lot of clients that made video games. You know, it had to be functional, or else you had to mail out a disk, a patch after you fixed it, as opposed to just updating it constantly. So there was this more in-depth planning associated with it. 

[23:00] If you were building something that it was meant to last 20 years on the farm or wherever, it was not a throwaway thing. You couldn't just go buy a new one from China for 2.99 and destroy the environment by throwing it into a landfill. It was something that – you repaired things. You had quality. You didn't replace things constantly. So I still don't have nearly as many clothes as my kids do, because their mother buys them new clothes all the time. And it's like, oh, I still have my 20-year-old T-shirt. I still love it. You know, the band's on tour again, so. 

Taylor Martin 
[Laughs]

Joe Templin 
[23:37] It's coming back into fashion. Pretty soon, we'll all be wearing parachute pants.

Taylor Martin 
[23:42] Oh my God. 

Joe Templin 
[23:43] So [laughs] having this long-term focus on what you're doing translates into other areas of our life, whether it's how we take care of our stuff, whether it's how we interact with people, because we don't look at them as disposable relationships either. We look at them as long-term things that need to be cultivated and worked on over an extended period. And so having this sort of attitude allows us to be able to have deeper and richer connections and is a reflection of what the Greeks call arete, which is excellence in all things. And so if you develop discipline, if you develop personal pride and professional pride, it carries over into these other aspects of your life and makes everything better.

Taylor Martin 
[24:35] Yep, totally agree. I mean, I would say I'm living proof of that model. So Joe, I have one last one. You're two for two.

Joe Templin 
[24:43] All right.

Taylor Martin 
[24:44] So are you ready for this one?

Joe Templin
[24:46] No, but you're going to give it to me anyway.

Taylor Martin 
[24:47] [Laughs] Okay. "Values are like fingerprints. Nobody's are the same, but you leave them all over everything you do."

Joe Templin 
[24:58] Oh, you're talking about Elvis there, man. 

Taylor Martin 
[Laughs]

Joe Templin 
[25:01] Thank you. Thank you very much.

Taylor Martin 
[25:04] I thought you might get that one. When I saw his name, I was like, aw man, I love Elvis just for a whole bunch of reasons. I've been to Graceland a couple times. I've always enjoyed Elvis just as a person. He just – what he went through, just the limelight he had cast on his life was just extraordinary – and how it can affect a human being. No one had ever had it like that.

Joe Templin 
[25:29] No. 

Taylor Martin 
[25:30] And then seeing his home, where he lived, and what he liked to eat – there's this crazy peanut butter, honey, something sandwich that he liked.

Joe Templin 
[25:38] Oh, peanut butter and – Fluffernutter sandwiches.

Taylor Martin 
[25:41] Then I go through his house, which is also turned into a museum, of course. And you go into his like studio that they transformed into just a gallery holding all the insane amount of platinum, gold records and awards. It was like endless. And then you go into another building, and there's more. You know, it was just – 

Joe Templin 
[26:01] There's a reason why he's the king of rock-and-roll.

Taylor Martin 
[26:03] I have to have a lot of respect for the guy.

Joe Templin 
[26:05] They have a copy of 30 number 1s, the CD that came on out in the '90s. Okay, and they released the bonus track of Viva Las Vegas. That was redone, which was awesome, by the way. But here's the thing. In the book one day, I actually do a talk about Johnny Cash for a day.

Taylor Martin 
[26:26] Oh, now you're really getting close to my heart.

Joe Templin 
[26:28] Because Johnny Cash grew up very similar to Elvis. It was hardscrabble, dirt poor. They sang for entertainment, okay. The loss of a brother early on, these things – served in the military, which is where they got their exposure to other people and other ideas, which in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s and early '60s, that's how people got off the farm or out of the small, rural town and got to meet other people and see the bigger world and get some of these influences that they combined with their gospel or other backgrounds that they grew up with to synthesize a new type of music. And with the great wealth that they ended up getting, because they had had so much tragedy that they hadn't necessarily healed from, they were very vulnerable. And that's where their drug addiction and all that came from.

[27:23] But with Elvis, we never truly got the redemption story that we got with Johnny Cash when he got through the drug addictions and all that and came back and ultimately made the American 1 through 6, some of the awesome, awesome albums. I mean, he took Hurt by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and completely redid it and made it his own. That is the second greatest of all time cover for a song.

Taylor Martin 
[27:52] I have to agree. That song, when I first heard it, I had to stop what I was doing and just say repeat. I want to hear that again and again and again. 

Joe Templin 
[28:01] And the video is just spectacular. So it's only number two because Jimi Hendrix All Along the Watchtower, which is a remake of Bob Dylan, is actually the number one. 

Taylor Martin 
[28:11] I can tell you, we can go on and on about this particular conversation right here. I'll tell you that for sure. So Joe, tell us a little bit. Like how did you come up with the idea to write this book so that people can just turn a page every day and start working on themselves and try to find that one pearl of the day to be better?

Joe Templin 
[28:31] When people ask me how long it took me to write the book or to have the idea for the book, I joke that was 30 years and 30 seconds, because my mind's being ADHD sort of like a super saturated solution. So I'm constantly learning, putting things into my head and all that. I remember it was my friend's birthday. I was down in the weight room throwing around kettlebell. I was listening to Jocko Willink talking on one of my devices and blasting some Black Sabbath on the other. Yes, highly eclectic background. I was thinking about excellence. And it hit me excellence is not or winning is not a sometimes thing, it's an everyday thing. Excellence is an everyday thing. Everyday excellence. 

[29:15] I literally put the kettlebell down, ran upstairs, and brain barfed out the title Every Day Excellence and the structure of how the book would be. Literally, it came to me in a thunderbolt of quote from somebody, discussion, and then action item. And it literally came to me almost like a vision, or like sometimes poems come to me, almost fully formed. And so I sat down, barfed that out, and then came the hard part of actually researching quotes and writing it and all that. And then the actual writing took about a thousand hours over the next six months.

Taylor Martin 
[29:48] Yeah, it looks like it. Pretty amazing work. And again, I just love it because it's a daily routine. I'm always about routines and changing up one's routine to improve oneself and the actions and destinies that we want to accomplish.

Joe Templin
[30:03] When I was writing the book, I actually wrote every single morning. I'd get up, I would read my Daily Stoic at that point, work out for 20 minutes, sit down, write at least 2 days every single day. And that's how I got to writing the book at that point. At this stage in the game, what I do is I get up, I have my cup of coffee, I read The Daily Laws by Robert Greene, and then I sit down and I read my day in the book, that particular day, and I do that action item. So how could I ask other people to do things that I'm not willing to do myself, make themselves better? So I go through every single day and use this book just like anybody else. And as I said, it takes two to four minutes every single morning. And that's how I start my day.

Taylor Martin 
[30:48] You know, I would just like to add that something, a book like this, you could go through all the days and then just start all over again, because you're kind of a new person by that time, and you're going to have new conflicts or roadblocks in front of you to overcome. So I think it's like something you could always keep doing because they're just – it's a broad, broad spectrum of things to work on.

Joe Templin 
[31:09] I actually talk about that in the afterword. And there's an old Stoic saying that no man can walk through the same river twice, because the river is different and the person's different. And so when you go back through 12 months from now and read the same passages, you're a different person. You have grown. You have evolved. You have changed. The universe is different. And so you take out of that day different things at that point in your life than you would've 12 months earlier. And so in a lot of ways, it's like the Oracle of Delphi in that you're going to get out of it what you are looking for at that point without realizing it.

Taylor Martin 
[31:52] Oh, definitely. I mean, I think about the internet that way. You're going to find whatever the hell you're looking for. If you're looking for something negative, you're going to find it. If you're looking for something positive, you're going to find it. And it's just anything you want if it's out there. Well, I hope that people read the book and they do the daily routine into their schedule, into their routine, and they actually do improve themselves. And hopefully, we can all start improving the planet in our decision makings, so that we have more of a circular economy for our future, for our children, and our children's children. The name of the book again, everybody, is Every Day Excellence: A Daily Guide to Growing from Joe Templin. Joe, thank you so much for being on today's show. I have really enjoyed this conversation. [Laughs]

Joe Templin 
[32:33] This was an absolute blast. Thank you for bringing me on. Be excellent and grow today.

Taylor Martin 
[32:38] I will. And you were three for two, so you win. You're a winner today. Check that box. [Laughs] He's giving me the field goal sign. Excellent. All right. Over and out, everybody. 

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[50:14] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today's podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.