How To Turn ADHD Into Your Company's Biggest Asset (with Craig Ballantyne)

Presented by Understood.org

You build a new system, follow it for a few days, then quietly stop using it.

Craig Ballantyne has coached high performers across multiple industries and his approach focuses on building systems that survive real life, not perfect conditions.

This conversation looks at why most systems fail for ADHD brains. Craig explains how self-awareness, environment control, and honest constraints matter more than motivation.

You will leave with a different way to think about systems that actually hold when your brain resists structure.

What We Cover

• Why most systems fail when they rely on motivation
• How to design systems based on how you actually behave
• The role of environment in making systems stick
• Why honesty about how you learn changes everything
• How to remove friction instead of adding more structure

If you're enjoying ADHD Skills Lab, you may also enjoy Understood.org’s new podcast, Sorry, I Missed This.

Listen here: https://lnk.to/sorryimissedthisPS!theadhdskillslab

Connect with Craig:

Craig Ballantyne Coaching: https://craigballantyne.com/

Instagram: @ realcraigballantyne

 P.S. Losing work because the admin layer around your business can't keep up with you? Invisible Systems is a 90-day done-for-you sprint where I (Skye) extract the processes from your head, build the operating layer, and find the right person to run it. Six spots left at the founding price, book a call at invisiblesystem.co

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

You actually can have great hyper focus. And so I'm not naturally disciplined. I became disciplined by setting up systems in my life.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab brought to you by understood.org, the leading nonprofit helping millions of people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. Today I'm really excited to be joined by the wonderful Craig Ballantine. Craig is an entrepreneur, a Wall Street Journal, best-selling author, and a high performance coach, widely known as the world's most disciplined man. It's gonna be interesting to get into that. Craig is the founder and onum of Early to Rise, the author of several game-changing books, including Wall Street Journal Bestseller Unstoppable, and then his latest, The Dark Side of Discipline. In this book, he challenges the hustle at all cost mindset and shows ambitious entrepreneurs how to achieve more without unnecessary suffering. Craig, it is great to have you on the show.

SPEAKER_03 0:56

Yeah, this is gonna be a lot of fun. I'm really looking forward to this.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Yeah, me too. So tell me about when ADHD, as something you might struggle with, first crossed your path.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

I've never been diagnosed with ADHD, but I've realized over the years that nearly every single entrepreneur has ADHD. It's, you know, one thing if uh if someone wants to say, oh, you know, it holds me back, but the entrepreneurs that I've met that lean into it and turn the ADHD system into superpowers is what really allows to set them free. You know, so it's quick start, it's that tremendous amount of focus that you can have when you get into it. And so I once asked uh our head coach, not our head coach, but our main coach who who is an expert in ADHD, do I have ADHD? And he said, Well, you know, you you have some tendencies towards it, and you know, I'm very fixated on certain things and I can get very focused, and I do like to learn a lot of things at the same time. There's a few things that I feel like I don't have that you know, my my coach has, and and that he goes off and he can get lost in in some things from time to time. So my experience in general is most entrepreneurs have it, most high performers have some version of it, and I know that it's a big sliding scale. At the end of the day, if we have it, we need to figure out how we benefit from it, just like how we benefit from all the warts that anybody has in their life. You know, for me, I have much more experience with anxiety, but you can turn anxiety and the tools for dealing with anxiety into things that can help you out in the future.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Yeah, yeah, 100%. You would probably come under then, you know, what we'd consider subclinical ADHD, which still gets discussed in the research, you know, it's especially nowadays. And like you said, entrepreneurs so much more likely to have it. Once you understood that ADHD might be a part of your story, and actually a lot of people get ADHD anxiety kind of dual diagnoses that comes up a lot. Did it change anything like practically about how you lived your life?

SPEAKER_02 3:02

So it was just it was a recent conversation, and I think what it it gave me was like, okay, there are certain things that I do, particularly what uh my friend Gallel uh said to me, and I think that you might have uh been connected with some of Gallel's content on social media, is that he tends to, and some people with ADHD tend to blurt things out and say things, you know, quite quickly. And I found that in the past I have definitely been the type of person who does that. And sometimes I, you know, get a laugh from people when I do it, and sometimes I kick myself in the butt and say, I probably should have kept that one to myself. So I'm a little bit more patient with what I say and I'd count to three before I let, you know, try and let the little man in in uh my brain stop me from saying something that is not a good idea, you know. And it's just been, I think the biggest thing is that whenever you say ADHD to somebody in the general population, they think, oh, this person is just like beboping around like a pinball or a ping pong ball. And what I better understand about it now is that you actually can have great hyper focus. And so I've realized now that I can set myself up for even more hyper-focused. And this is where like the ADHD and the world's most disciplined man sort of thing overlap in that I'm not naturally disciplined. I became disciplined by setting up systems in my life. And so for all of us, you know, we all have these mental pathways, and you know, all of all of us have stupid human tricks like procrastination, that we have to have systems set up so that those things don't derail us. And therefore, one of the things that I teach and have been teaching to everybody, regardless of whether you have ADHD or not, is to simply have fewer distractions, physical distractions. And so I teach somebody, you know, just do this little helicopter exercise. You take your arms out to the side, it's kind of hard to see on this, but if you take your arms out to your side and you just rotate around your workspace, everything that you can grab is like a roadside bomb. It's gonna blow up in your face and distract you. And it doesn't matter if you have ADHD or not, you know, it's just the human tendency to when you are supposed to be working on something, you will find a reason to suddenly read that book that's been sitting on your shelf for, you know, three months or three years because you'd rather do anything than the task at hand. And so you have to remove those things and have a very boring workspace. And again, whether you have ADHD or whether you don't, that type of system, that type of preparation goes a long way in helping you stay on track. And so I keep, I think a little bit more about those things, like how can I continue to set myself up for success? Because that's what it's all about. Once we know ourselves, how can we set ourselves up for success regardless of what people have labeled us with or we have labeled ourselves with, or even if we have, you know, medical diagnosis? Like before we started recording, I said that my wife had gone to the Eamon Clinic in Seattle, was the one that she went to. Then they gave her a bunch of diagnoses. She's inattentive ADHD. Is that that one of them? Yeah. So she she's that one, you know, and then she's she said to me she has general anxiety. I'm like, who doesn't have general anxiety, right? You know, there's like probably everybody knows like the one or two people in their lives who just have no worries in the world, but generally everybody else has general anxiety. And so again, knowing that stuff is very helpful because we can set up systems for ourselves to be more successful. So at the end of the day, it's getting that information, doing the self-reflection and introspection to how can we use this information to set ourselves up for success, and then onward we go.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Can you take me through the last time you did something that was a struggle for you? And then take me through practically how you set yourself up for success in that moment.

SPEAKER_02 6:45

So we just did something very recently. So everybody's heard of the AI, and and if you're in the entrepreneurial world, you've probably heard of Cloud Code. Cloud Code is like a higher level, you know. So there's ChatGPT, which everybody uses, like Google, and then there's Claude, which is a better version of ChatGPT for a lot of things, and then there's something called Cloud Code, which is essentially like you having a programmer that you can tell to program anything. And I was like, I know I need to learn this, but I'm not gonna learn it. I'm not the type of person who's gonna go on YouTube and watch a bunch of 20-minute videos. And first of all, I was like, I don't even know how to install this thing on my computer. And you know, I make all these labels on upon myself. I'm you know a techno dunce and all this stuff. And so I've got this in my mind. I'm not gonna be able to do it. I was like, the only way that I can actually learn this is if I hire somebody in person and I'm forced to learn it by hiring them, by being them in the same room. So I'm the type of person who will learn by going to a seminar. Watching YouTube videos will never happen. I might possibly read a book on something, as I used to read a book on like copywriting and stuff, but reading a book on Clyde Code, I doubt I would do. So I had to force myself to go in the room. So I hired this guy. And then I tell my team, and the next thing I'm like, hey, can we come too? And so I ended up flying all of my team into Vancouver, all my coaching team into Vancouver, and we were in a room. In the room, you know, we did have obviously we had internet access, so we had some distractions, but we needed it for the Claude Code portion. But we all left at the end of the day so much further ahead than if we had dabbled 20 minutes here and 20 minutes there trying to learn it online. No, we just forced ourselves to go in and get blitzed and, you know, or like have a hackathon on it. And for me, that's the best way to approach many problems in life, whether you want to learn a new skill set or even like I was into BJJ for a while. I took it up a little bit too late, and my body's a little bit too old for it. But my instructor, my black belt instructor, what he would do is he learned it um when he lived in Belgium in the 90s, and it was very hard to find somebody good. So he would drive to France on the weekend and drive to Paris for two-day, eight-hour seminars. So he'd be doing in jujitsu. When you're 21, you can do it for eight hours in a row. But he would do that hardcore all at once. And I actually I make fun of the term getting 1% better every day. I know that's a popular phrase. Yeah, everybody's like, nobody gets one, like nobody good gets 1% better every day. Could you imagine like hiring a salesperson, like, hey, just get 1% better every day? Like you get no sales for the entire year until they got 300% better. So you have to go, like, you got to go to the sales training on the weekend and don't get 1% better over the three days at the event. No, you got to go in at certain points in your life and you have to get 80% better in a day. And that's uh that was one thing that set us up for success. And so it's immerse yourself. Like if you get the chance to be around an expert, spend four hours with them, eight hours with them. Um, you know, I coach uh people all over the world, and I have a uh client over in Australia who runs a solar company, and he has this problem in his invoicing and all this stuff, and they're learning Claude code. And I'm like, don't just do it 20 minutes a day. Get the entire team in a room, list all the problems on the board, and attack them in a six-hour session, and you will get so much further ahead. So that's the type of thing whereas like I was definitely struggling to take action on it because there were so many, you know, I created so many kind of speed bumps in my mind, like I don't know tech, I don't know code, all this stuff, I'm not gonna learn on YouTube. And it's just like I gotta, I gotta jump in the deep end. And I think that was a big thing for me.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

It sounds like from what you've said, it sounds like you're the kind of person who's really good at being really honest about how they're gonna do things and how they're not gonna do things, which is such a a valuable skill, not just for people who struggle with ADHD symptoms, but for everybody in terms of, you know, learning. I'm curious, has that always been the case? Because obviously, you know, school and places like that, you know, they're they're not so keen on just letting you do what makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 10:49

I I think some of it is the way I was wired, you know, from birth, uh, you know, thinking different. I've always wanted to play by my own rules rather than play by the world's rules. You know, I I was going through university, I I got a job out of university, but circumstances led me to, you know, I was starting a business on my while I was in university. I was in university when the internet, you know, came along, you know, the first year I went to university was the first year everybody had email addresses. And I saw websites and I was like, well, I can do that. If they can do that, I can do that. And so some of it was that way. One of the biggest shifts for me as I was older that accelerated this as well was learning about stoicism. So when I started reading Epictetus' teachings, probably when I was about 33, um, one of my friends introduced me to it. And that was right around when Ryan Holliday was starting to write about stoicism. What I uh learned is something that I write about in my first book, The Perfect Day Formula, is it really comes down to this control what you can, cope with what you can't control, and concentrate on what counts. And you can only do that by doing some self-reflection and introspection. And you need to do that, whether you do journaling, whether you do meditation, whether you go for long walks in nature, which you know, those three things I would force on almost everybody because everybody these days is walking around with something in their ears 24-7. Like they're going on dog walks with an audiobook, they're working out in the gym with Spotify, they're they're always collecting more information. And at some point, you got to draw the line and say, listen, I've got enough dots, I've I've collected enough dots. I need white space in my brain to connect the dots. And so when I was learning about stoicism, I was like, oh man, um, I need to just realize what's within my control because I was for on for uh a variety of reasons. One of them being that my father was an alcoholic, I became an angry young man in certain ways. And so I was always angry and cynical and skeptical and pessimistic. And that served me in a little bit of um, you know, because I got a master's degree in exercise physiology, and you're supposed to be very skeptical of other people's claims. And so that helped me a little bit until it didn't. And then when it didn't, and I had more of a pessimistic and not abundant and optimistic and grateful attitude, I suffered from anxiety attacks. And so to overcome those things, I learned about stoicism. Stoicism showed me like do some self-reflection, introspection, realize what you can control. And if it's raining, if there's traffic, if your boss is a jerk, if you know something's late, you can't control that. So putting pouring energy into those things, it's a losing cause. Therefore, let's take a look more at what you can control within yourself, about your skill sets, about your abilities, about figuring out how to set yourself up for success, which we've talked about many times. All those things. So there's a lot of stuff there to unpack, but all of those things have helped me, you know, navigate the world in a way that has given me a lot of freedom. Um, I still do certain things that uh I'd rather not, uh, you know, in the business. There's there is certain things I'd rather not be doing, um, but I do because I want to help a lot more people and still grow the income and impact and also figure out how to not do those things. Over the years, I've just figured myself out and we help people figure themselves out so they can kind of accelerate as well.

SPEAKER_01 14:18

We focus on productivity here at the ADHD Skills Lab, but our executive functioning challenges do not disappear at 5 p.m. In fact, they follow us home, affecting every aspect of our lives. That's why I'm recommending the podcast Sorry I Miss This from the team at understood.org. Hosted by Kate Osborne, it's a thoughtful look at life, love, and neurodiversity. Instead of masking, it looks at how to build a relationship and a life that actually works with your brain, not against it. I've been listening to Sorry I missed this and the discussion on decisions, decisions, ADHD, and the trap of analysis paralysis. This episode talked about how decision fatigue depletes our working memory, and by the end of the day, we can find ourselves really struggling to make decisions. This really resonated with me. I know so many of you guys talk to me all the time about decision making in ADHD, and it's something that I struggle with as well. Kate and Dr. Shrine provide a helpful perspective on how narrowing down your options can help protect your cognitive energy. To listen to sorry I missed this, search for sorry I missed this in your podcast app. That's sorry, I missed this. Well, let's talk about the business a little bit, you know, and this idea of what you can control what you can't control. When do you feel like, you know, if you could if I can take you back for a moment, was there a moment where you were like, right, I'm practicing this, I'm I'm focusing on the things I can do, I'm not letting, you know, excess consumption of things get in the way. Where would you say is kind of the biggest moment where you felt like this is working? And the biggest moment where you felt like a bit of maybe I'm wrong, maybe I need to do things differently.

SPEAKER_02 15:59

Yeah, it's a great question. And so if we go back to 2006, I was 30 years old, and that's when I had my first severe anxiety attack. I went to the emergency room twice with anxiety, and a lot of it was, you know, almost almost all of it, maybe all of it, was self-imposed. Uh, you know, I didn't use journaling meditation, I didn't do those things to get the thoughts out of my head. I was a binge drinker, I was hypocritical because I was a personal trainer and a men's health fitness expert during the week. And then on Saturday night, I was out drinking for 12 hours. You know, it's you know, it's very common in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada and the UK and America and all these places, right? And so I realized then I don't want to be in this situation. So the things that I did, you know, I had one anxiety attack that that lasted for six weeks straight. It's like I it was like having a heart attack, the symptoms of a heart attack for six weeks straight, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, tingling from the top of my head down to the end of my fingertips, tight chest, elevated heart rate, couldn't breathe, couldn't focus on anything. I was forced to turn over every rock that I possibly could. So I was controlling what I could. Hey, uh, you know, I'd asked my friend who was who worked at the desk, front desk at the gym, like, hey, I'm having these anxiety attacks, and he was into like martial arts and stuff. It's like, do you know anybody that you know does Tai Chi or you know yoga or anything? And so he introduced me to somebody that did that did Qi Gong. And so I did Qi Gong and meditation and yoga and Tai Chi, and I hated all of these things. They were so painful because I was, you know, go, go, go, go, go, and slowing down was something that I needed. But I turned over every rock to get out of a situation because it was a horrible situation. I would never, you know, there was never any extreme thoughts that I had in my head, you know, I was never gonna end my life. But I was, you know, there was moments where I was like, I would do anything to get rid of this. And so I did everything to get rid of it. And there was definitely times during during that, I was like, oh, you know, I know a friend, he's got some anti uh anxiety medication, I could just do it. And there was definitely moments of doubt in there. And uh I remember one, like one of my lowest points there was I was going for a walk at like five in the morning because I couldn't sleep. And and I was like, I'm just gonna grab a chocolate bar and come back. And I was living in this condo in downtown Toronto, and this guy gets this guy like gets in the elevator with me, goes, looks at my chocolate bar at like five in the morning, goes, Oh, breakfast at champions. And I was like, Man, what the dick? You know, but it was it was just this moment, it's just this moment where it's like, man, kicking me while I'm down. You're like, yeah, I know I'm eating a chocolate bar at five in the morning, but I'm like also having a heart attack that you can't see. And so I understand um, you know, anxiety and ADHD are not the same thing, but they're kind of like, you know, cousins from another mother sort of thing. And that oh yeah, ADHD, like it's not like you have a broken arm, right? Like if you have a broken arm, it's like everybody understands what happened, they may understand the pain, they can see the thing. But when you have anxiety, you you could like when I had anxiety, I looked like a cover model from Men's Health magazine. In fact, I have a picture of me that was used in GQ magazine from that time of my life. So I looked great. I was in the best shape of my life. I was making more money than I had ever made made in my life. But anxiety doesn't care about your six-pack abs, just like ADHD doesn't care about, you know, whatever you got. And so there's they're a little bit uh similar in that nobody can see them in you, and you have to go and deal with them, and you have to deal with a lot of people's misunderstandings of it, and so on and so forth. So that was the moment, you know, that was a very just a critical year-long period of my life where I was learning stoicism, I was learning to control what I could, I was learning to do journaling and meditation and get the junk out of my head because you know I'm very introverted by nature, so I kept up everything in my head and I just you know pushed it down. But everybody knows when you push something down, it explodes up in your face eventually. So all of those things, all of those things were a turning point for me. And then it all kind of clicked, and it was like, you know, I I like to say now that I could I could shotgun a monster energy and you could tell me the five worst things in my life, and I still wouldn't have anxiety because I have all these tools to deal with it, and stoicism being one of them, um, in addition to meditation, breathing, and all that sort of stuff. And so that's that again is parallel to the ADHD, which I'm not suffering severely from. However, it is all about the tools that will set you up for success, given the reality, and that's what it is. Here's the reality you gotta live your life, go and get the tools to do so, and and turn over every rock along the way.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

No, it's a great story. I appreciate you sharing that because you know it is true, you know, what they say about when you're healthy, you have a hundred problems, and when you're not healthy, your only problem is getting healthy.

SPEAKER_02 20:41

It's a cliche, right? Like that you just like, oh, when you're young, you laugh at it, but I lived that and it means a whole lot more to me now, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

I can I can a hundred percent imagine. So I want to jump in. I want to talk about level 10 problems, and I want to start by asking you what is your current level 10 problem?

SPEAKER_02 20:59

Well, I I'm I'm a parent of three children under the age of four. Same. So are you really? I'll confuse it.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Yeah, well, one of them is four, and then a three-month-old and a two-year-old.

SPEAKER_02 21:09

Yeah, one one of ours is four. We have a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and a one-year-old. It's about to be four three two uh in the summertime here in our uh up here in the uh northern hemisphere. And so, you know, it's the greatest thing in the world. And I don't say that because oh, I'm gonna complain about it, but it's like my number one focus. My wife and I, you know, we focus on on our children. And like, so our children are our level 10 opportunity/slash problem is are we providing the environment in which they can flourish? That that question comes into my mind every single day because you know, like one of the biggest lessons that I've learned is what you think your kids are going to turn out to be like is completely different from the way that they turn out. Like the genetic lottery. I don't know about your kids, but it's like how did that kid totally different? And how did that kid, and how did that kid like how? How? And and so you see a tiny bit of yourself in them, but they're also different. And um, you know, it's wonderful. What what split do you have? Girls, boys?

SPEAKER_01 22:11

So two older boys and one little girl.

SPEAKER_02 22:13

Okay, so we're the opposite of that. We're two older girls and one younger boy, and it's it is a wonderful mix. And we thought the two older girls were gonna be best friends, and they are dear friends, but the little girl and the little boy seem to have this connection that you know we never would have thought of. Um so, anyways, the level 10 problem in my life is making sure that the kids get the attention that they need, that they get the opportunities, you know. So we're gonna be a homeschool family. We actually moved from Canada to Mexico to have our kids. So they were all born in Mexico. So actually, I'm the I'm the uh father of three Mexicans, uh, even though I live in Canada. Uh they all speak Spanish uh because we have Mexican nannies, and you know, we're providing them this, but it's always like, is this right? Is this enough? Or did we do something wrong? And so we're always thinking about that. So it's a it's a first world level 10 problem, to be sure. And then in the business side of things, you know, it's it's uh just making sure that I'm keeping ahead of things because I'm quite worried. You know, one of the main reasons that I learned Cloud Code was because I'm quite worried for a lot of my coaching clients. We coach entrepreneurs of businesses doing, you know, about half a million to five million is kind of our sweet spot. And I'm quite worried that some of our clients have no idea what is coming for them in these white-collar jobs like accounting, bookkeeping firms. Like, if they don't stay on top of things, there's there's no reason that they can't be almost fully replaced, if not fully replaced, by AI tool sets in the near future. And I actually just wrote an article about this, like, because most people like still walk around and go, I'm uh, what's all this AI stuff? Like, I'm still, you know, walking around, I'm still going to work, I'm still driving. But it's just gonna be like this cliff in the next 18 months where all of a sudden life goes from huh, this is normal to like not normal. And we were even starting to see it with some of the massive layoffs in the in the large tech companies where they're not needing the large employees. So so that's a concern to me, you know, always staying ahead of it.

SPEAKER_01 24:21

I'm doing it with my clients as well. And the best way I've described it, because I've had really cool people like Carl Van Boris, people who've built entire tech companies on to talk about this, is it's that exoskeleton, right? It's like Tony Stark, and you've got the exoskeleton, and you want to be you want to be the guy with the exoskeleton at the end of the day. You don't want to be the guy who's like doesn't know how to use it.

SPEAKER_02 24:41

Absolutely. That's a great analogy. And so, you know, we have brought our team in. Some of our team is uh quite a few members of our team have taken to it better than I expected, and it's really fantastic. And now we're able to do it for some of our team members or our clients, and now they're starting to see it because they you really need to see it and then you believe it because once you play around with some of this stuff, you're like, oh, I get it now, and they start to use it. But I also know like I have clients that are doing over eight figures that had zero as of January, had zero AI in their business, so they weren't automating even invoices or anything like that. And it was quite unbelievable. Um, and you know, they're in construction and stuff like that, and so obviously, you know, the robots aren't here yet. They will be very, very soon. Yeah, I think I'll have a robot in my house next year, if not the year after that. And they will be here very soon too, and then things are going to change again. And so the level 10 problem is keeping up with things at the speed of which you have to keep up with things, and it's a little bit daunting, especially when you know I'm 50 and I'm like, man, shouldn't I just be able to like kind of take the foot off the gas right, you know, at this age? But no, it's it's not uh not even possible.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

It's the wrong, it's the wrong century for that.

SPEAKER_02 25:54

Yeah, absolutely. But but it but it's like it's like having three kids under the age of four. It's like this should this should be a problem that you are happy to have.

SPEAKER_01 26:01

A hundred percent. So tell me then, you know, you've got to honestly, you know, you said it's it's first world and and obviously that's true, but like I know a lot of entrepreneurs, you know, family and how to keep the business, you know, moving and and at that edge that we're looking for is a big struggle. So what would you say you're doing and you recommend other people do? You know, tell me about how you are actually staying focused on those problems.

SPEAKER_02 26:28

Yeah, so one of the things that, you know, going back to the concern that you have for your clients as well, is that we're just telling our clients hire somebody locally that knows how to do cloud code. And you don't even need somebody who's a super genius with it, you know, maybe like somebody who's used cloud code for 100 hours, have them come into your business, get everybody in the room, get cloud code installed on everybody's computer, and that person can show you the basics of how to use it. And then it is, you know, it's relatively like learn as you go and and then assign people like little uh, you know, I learned this from Dan Martell. Like I'm ripping this entire playbook off Dan Martell. Dan Martell shut down his big company, put all of his team, all of his team members into a Cloud Code uh hackathon over two days, and he put them in teams of three, and he and they had to come up with things to replace their workflows, and they did it. I was like, that's genius. Like that is, you know, solving your big problems. And so I'm encouraging my teams to do that and my our clients to do that as much as possible. And what the accelerant to this is continue to look for people who are further down the road because there's still not a lot of people in the world doing this. Like there's maybe five million people that use cloud code in the world, I think, is the last stat that I looked at, which is a tiny, tiny amount, but it's it's enough for them to be very dangerous to everybody's businesses. So the faster you get learning on this stuff, and you know, in a year from now, people might not even be using cloud code. There might be a million other things, right? Because this stuff is accelerating so fastly, uh, so quickly. But get people who are on the leading edge of things, continuing to come in, educate your company. You don't have to pay a lot of money for this. These people love to share the wisdom on it, and you can honestly probably go to like a local university. I was at an Easter thing on the weekend. Um I was like, gonna ask people if I'm insane for thinking this. But I was at the Easter bunny thing with my kids, and I was looking around at all the other men in the room, and all I could think was, I wonder if that guy uses Claude code. That was like, am I insane?

SPEAKER_01 28:35

Now that's a hyperfocus.

SPEAKER_02 28:37

Right. So and I was like, oh, that guy totally looks like he uses cloud code. Like right now, I'm a little bit loony about it, but but it's really like you're thinking about this stuff. And so we're doing that. One of the things that I do in my business is I try and give everybody an opportunity to raise up to the next level. Here's the thing with the level 10 problems the way that you solve a level 10 problem is that you have level 10 discussions. You have very, very difficult discussions. You have you have open discussions, you do not avoid the elephant in the room. You and this goes for your relationships, for your health, for this, that, or the other thing. Like, don't be the person who doesn't go to the doctor for 20 years. Don't be the person who's when their marriage goes cold that you ignore having the sit down and the conversation and fixing it. It's hard now. It's gonna be harder in six months, it's gonna be even harder in a year from now. So, you know, choose your hard. Do you want it this hard or do you want it harder? And so that's how you solve level 10 problems is you ask for help, you have the hard conversations, you do the preparation for both aspects of that, and and then you find another level 10 problem and you do the same for it. Because, you know, once one is gone, the next one pops up.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

I get the sense from what you're saying that you have, I wouldn't say white space, because obviously you've got little ones, so there's no such thing as that, but you have, you know, sort of space to think about these things. You know, a lot of entrepreneurs will say, Oh, well, I don't have a single second. And so I'm curious what you did to get that space to be able to have those kinds of problems.

SPEAKER_02 30:11

A lot of um my habits were built when I was younger. So I started working out in the 90s when, you know, it's kind of popular, but not super popular. And so I always made space for it. And when I work out, I don't listen to anything. You know, there might be music on in the gym or something, but I don't I don't plug more music or audiobooks into my head. I walk every day. I live in Vancouver, Canada, which is like one of the most beautiful places in the world. So even when it's raining and it doesn't rain that much, but it rains enough. And so I I go for a walk every day. I do like I probably do like 15,000 steps, and I force this on our clients. Like I say, well, like one of the most important things when it's it's like the person who says they're too busy for meditation is the person who needs meditation the most. The person who tells me I'm too busy to go for an hour walk once a week with no, you know, without any phone calls or podcasts, is the person who needs an hour-long walk once a week. As particularly if you can get into nature for it, your brain will work different. There's a reason why everybody, when they were a kid, probably saw a picture of Sir Isaac Newton under an apple tree with an apple tree falling on his head, and that's where he discovered gravity because he was out in nature. If you take a look at the biographies of the greatest composers and writers like Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin, all of those people from the 17th and 18th centuries, what did they do? They worked for a couple hours in the morning and they went for a couple hour long walk in the afternoon. It's nearly, it's nearly 100% of them. And why? Why? Well, obviously because they had nothing to do, but also because that's how they thought. And so we force this on people because to take an hour-long walk with no inputs and only to connect the dots and have outputs sounds like a luxury, but it is a luxury you cannot afford to not have in your life. Because, you know, one of my clients, uh, one of the guys with no AI in his business runs a property development company in the UK and they do like, you know, 20 million pounds or something. And sure enough, he spent all day on a job site, and then he said, I went home and took my dog for a 20-minute walk, and all of a sudden I had all my ideas. Yes, because your brain works differently when you are out in nature walking around than when you are sitting at your computer trying to figure things out. You'll never figure things out sitting in front of a computer. You're gonna figure things out in two places. One, when you're on a walk, or two, in the shower. And then you're gonna forget everything that you you thought about in the shower, unfortunately. There's slippery little fish that get away from you. But it but it's research proven that your frontal lobe operates different when you're in a novel environment. So that's why I know it sounds like, oh man, this guy's just walking around doing nothing all day. And that's what it looks like to a lot of people. But that is where I'm figuring things out. And then, you know, I do take my phone and I will voice note the things to my phone. And now, with you know, if you were we're gonna allow any technology into this, what you can do with whisper flow, uh, so whisper flow is a tool, like you can just dictate the heck out of things and it's gonna be very accurate. And you can dictate solutions and all this sort of stuff. And so I would force that on everybody listening that if you want your life to improve, start with a minimum of an hour-long walk in nature every week. You it will only do worlds of good for you. There's not a single negative thing that could possibly happen from having an extra hour-long walk in nature.

SPEAKER_01 33:41

And I'll back that up because when you look at the research into ADHD, like the research into emotional stability, executive functioning support, working memory support, like exercises kind of the gold standard, like you know, randomized control trials, you know, meta-analysis, everything you want to hear, it's saying movement is key. So yeah, totally agree.

SPEAKER_02 34:04

Yeah, so do that. And again, the other thing that people are gonna struggle with is like just me and my thoughts for an hour. That's that's very difficult. But you know, I would I don't drive uh very much, but even 15 years ago, I haven't had a car uh in 15 years. My my wife has one for the kids, but even when I did have one, I would drive for two hours with nothing on the radio. And I would just think, because like what good is a radio? Like it's just a bunch of people either talking and yammering about nothing helpful or it's music, which is nice, but but why not use that time to solve the problems, think about things and work through the problems, and you're gonna be much more productive that way. And if you take a look at, if you're really into entrepreneurship, if you want to take a look at a guy named Keith Cunningham, he wrote The Road Less Stupid, which is a great title for a book. Um he teaches at Tony Robbins business mastery events, and he's a very successful real estate guy. He talks about how he has a thinking chair in his house and he tries to spend two to three sessions per week of two to three hours with his leather-bound notebook making notes. And then there's a guy named Richard Koch who wrote the book called the 8020 principle, is his is one of his famous books. Also, the uh star principle, which my most successful client, my client, my first client who's gonna build a billion-dollar business, he's 65 years old and he's building a business that's AI heavy. And he's learning AI three hours a day, and he's 65. So you think, you know, I think I'm too old at 50. I mean, this guy's 65 and learning it. Anyways, his business is gonna hit a billion dollars, and his favorite book is The Star Principle by Richard Coke. And essentially, the the idea of that is there's like just a couple of things that are gonna make a star business, and it's a rising trend, it's high profits, and it's one other thing. And it's it's another good book. Anyways, Richard Coke has a goldfish pond that he goes and sits beside on his property two to three times per week for two to three hours. And this guy is a billionaire investor. What is it with these guys? And they're thinking, it's because that's where right, that's where the magic happens.

SPEAKER_01 36:03

And you know, maybe if you want to start off with just another thinking partner, but still no person, like that's an option as well. We've talked a little bit about the business side. Let's talk about the kids because you know, let's talk about how your routines have changed. Because I know from personal experience that it's almost like a constant change. Like you think you have a routine and then something happens and you've got a new one. Like it's very hard to manage with kids, but also a great proving ground for a lot of these systems.

SPEAKER_02 36:31

You might not like my answer because my routine has hardly changed. And so here's Okay, tell me about that. Yeah. So before I had kids, my routine was get up at four o'clock in the morning, work from four until six, spend from six until eight with my wife and my dog, eight till eleven working on my number one revenue generating activity, from eleven to one going to the gym and having lunch, from one until three or four. Well, back when I met my wife, it was from one and before I met my wife, it was from one until eight doing calls, podcasts, and all types of stuff. When I met my wife, I dialed it back to 6 p.m. And then when we have kids, uh, I've dialed it back to about three o'clock. So my my biggest change in my life has been the amount of time that I work in the afternoon and evenings, which is now pretty much zero, and it's all time with the kids. But for me, I had a very rigid, and this goes all the way back to the world's most disciplined man thing, is I've always been a very productive person. I've been getting up uh before four o'clock in the morning, probably for about 15 years now. And so I don't use an alarm clock. I mean, today I think I got up at 3:58. Uh, you know, no alarm clock is just that's the time I'm getting up. Uh, my body's so wired to do it. Through the self-reflection introspection, I realized that I'm just a machine from if I could go from four till eight, I could do three days of a normal person's work in those four hours. Because I believe there's a time of day when we're three times to five times more productive, creative, and energetic than any other time of the day. And everybody just needs to journal and find out that time and then not allow anybody in the world to take that time from them. And you spend all of that time working on your hardest mental task. If you can do that one thing, I don't so it's three steps. Identify the time of day when it is your magic time, the time of day when you're three times more creative, productive, and energetic. Block that time. Block that time like my Labrador retriever guards her dog bowl when you put food in it. Like, don't let anybody near it. Don't let anybody email you, don't let anybody call you, don't take any meetings in it. Block that time and then identify your hardest task that takes the most mental energy and do it in that time. And if you do those three things, you will increase the amount of work you get done without working more hours simply by better rearranging. You know, it's like feng shuiing your uh your work day. So, anyways, I realized that that four to six time is the most important time. If I didn't have a wife and kids, it'd be four to eight. So then at six o'clock, kids didn't get up today until about 20 after six. Uh, the first one got up, uh, second one got up 20 minutes later, and then our third one is is gonna be the teenager that sleeps till three o'clock. So she got up at about 7:30, and then I had my first call at about 7:30 as well. And then I was on on the day. And so I also buy back my time. So we have two nannies in the house every day during the week from 7 a.m. till two o'clock. And they they we just happen to have a very large, this is very surprising, but we have a very large population of Mexicans in Vancouver. So men come up to Vancouver from Mexico for construction, women come up for school, and you know, they're looking for for jobs as well as well. And so when we lived in Mexico, we had Spanish-speaking nannies. Now we're in Vancouver, we have Spanish-speaking nannies. So our kids are bilingual, it's amazing. I can't understand them, but they speak Spanish. And so the kids then at two o'clock, three o'clock, we take over from three until whatever time we can handcuff them and put them in bed.

SPEAKER_01 40:06

I love that. And I really think.

SPEAKER_02 40:08

That's the level 12 problem in my life right now. So is getting getting that that two-year-old to go to sleep is the hardest thing in my life.

SPEAKER_01 40:17

Yeah, my son's discovered uh no. The word no is a big, it's a big feature of his two-year-old life right now. So I I understand. So that's it.

SPEAKER_02 40:26

And and it's it's honestly, it's it's six days a week, six and a half, really, because my Sundays aren't too different. And on on the weekend we just have one person helping, and we go to the park a lot more and do some go to Paw Patrol and you know, whatever other shows coming in through town. And that's uh that's the way it's been for 15 years. And and I was like, oh, I'm not, I'm gonna figure out how to not let it change. I stopped wearing an aura ring for three years because I didn't need to be reminded that getting up at 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. is is not recommended for good sleep. So but we're through that stage now. It feels like nice that uh nice. We had a bit of a regression about three months ago, but now it feels like you know, from at least 8 30 to 8 30, yeah, eight 8 30 to 4, I can generally be asleep.

SPEAKER_01 41:15

That's amazing. That's that's the that's the key. That's the key there. And yeah, I I understand that. I think some research, I don't I can't remember where it was from, but they were like, if you think you've had a good night's sleep, then it's more likely you'll feel good during the day. So it's like, let's not have the aura ring reminder.

SPEAKER_03 41:31

That is a good point. Yeah, it's it's got some weird stuff on it.

SPEAKER_01 41:35

Great. Well, it's been great to have you. I have one question. If you had to pick, and obviously you've probably got a lot, a quote for your life, something that's really helped you at the moment, something you keep coming back to, what would that be?

SPEAKER_02 41:47

So it's a quote from me, and it goes like this. And I think you'll resonate well with this. Everything in your life is easier when you know more good people, and that's it. That's it. So let me tell you a funny story. I was 44 and single, and I didn't want to be 44 and single. I knew a guy named Joe Polish, who you might have heard his name. Joe Polish is a very well-connected entrepreneur in America, and he and I were chatting, and he said, Hey, let me introduce you to this woman named Carmelia. Carmelia is a matchmaker. I'm like, great, sure. Carmelia introduced me to a woman named Vanessa. Vanessa and I went out on a date, didn't hit it off that way, but we became friends. Vanessa runs the Toronto Ladies Business Community. And one day, a guy from New Zealand was at one of my events, a guy named Jamie McKean. He lives uh north of Auckland, I think. And yeah, he's a really nice guy. And and he was at one of my events, and I said, Hey, you know, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna meet um, I'm gonna ask my friend Vanessa to introduce me to some girls. And then I didn't do anything. Like the world's most disciplined man, I didn't do anything. So five days later, I was talking to him. He goes, Hey, how's that going? And I went, uh, and so I asked Vanessa, Vanessa, please introduce me to somebody. And so she sent me five Instagram profiles, and I went, Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm the most ungrateful person in the world. What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? And so I did what any normal person would do. I went through who my friend Vanessa followed on Instagram, and I looked at these tiny little circles and I scrolled through the first 30 of them and I went, oh, and I chose my wife, my future wife, from a tiny circle. So open up your your phone right now, look at Instagram, go to somebody and look at the look at the followers and look how small those circles are.

SPEAKER_01 43:31

This big, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:32

Right. And I said, Can you introduce me to her? And she said, Well, she doesn't live in Toronto anymore, because that's where I'm from. And uh, she lives in Vancouver, and I went, I'd still like to meet her. And so it was the and then it was the day after my second hair transplant. So this is this is uh transplanted hair, but it's working out pretty well for me. And I when you have a hair transplant, Skye, you've probably never had one. So you look like you got uh went through 10 rounds with Mike Tyson, like your head is swollen up and so. I made a joke that you know my head looks like I have Botox and my wife likes Botox. So she laughed at my joke and we hit it off. And the next thing you know, uh two years later we're married and we have a kid. And and so, so you you track that back that every almost every dollar I've made in my life, and even how I met my wife all came down to knowing good people. And so whether you have ADHD, whether you have anxiety, whether you're an entrepreneur or not an entrepreneur, everything in life, everything in life is easier when you know more good people.

SPEAKER_01 44:34

Well, it's been so great chatting with you, Craig. Please tell the people where they can find you and your book.

SPEAKER_02 44:40

Yeah, absolutely. So Instagram at realcraig Ballantine. That's where you can find me. Send me messages. And we have four books. Uh, The Perfect Day Formula is my first book. The best book, if you're a busy entrepreneur or parent, is the perfect week formula. That's my third book. Anybody who has anxiety should read Unstoppable. That gives you all the tools for overcoming anxiety. And anybody who's struggling with some level 10 problems in life, that's the Dark Side of Discipline book. That is my latest book. They're all on Amazon. Um, you can also go and download the first three for free, no opt-in required, at craigbalantine.com forward slash free books.

SPEAKER_01 45:17

Yeah, and they're great books. I've been reading through them in the last week or two. And yeah, I really appreciate that you give those ones away for free as well. That's really awesome.

SPEAKER_02 45:25

Well, if you ever write a book, you will know how much pain and suffering you go through to write it. And so all I want is people to read the darn book that I worked so hard on.

SPEAKER_00 45:36

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. If you liked it, leave us a five-star review. It helps other people learn more about us. And thank you so much to our wonderful team for making us sound good, look good, couldn't do it without you.