Transformation Tuesday: Discipline is Destiny

On this episode of the podcast we have our Transformation Tuesday webinar.
  
 This week, we talked about how to build discipline and the best diet to increase longevity.

For more information, and to sign up for our private coaching, visit tesh.com

Our Hosts:
John Tesh: Instagram: @johntesh_ifyl facebook.com/JohnTesh
Gib Gerard: Instagram: @GibGerard facebook.com/GibGerard X: @GibGerard

Transcript

Unknown: 0:07

Gib, hello and welcome to another episode of the podcast. I'm Gib Gerard here with one of my favorite things that we do, which is transformation Tuesday. Now this is part of our weekly transformation Tuesday call that we do. If you'd like to sign up for that, you can check that out@tesh.com it's where John and I sit with people you could be a part of this. And we present stuff that basically brings to bear decades of working on intelligence for your life. We take the experts that we quote and we show you clips from them. We bring them in sometimes. That is what transformation Tuesday is all about. It's about getting from the place you are to the place you want to be, using the years of research that we've that we've compiled, doing intelligence for your life. So again, if that interests you, check it out@tesh.com to watch us do it live. But for everybody else, you get the benefit right here. Here is a previous transformation Tuesday broadcast. So without further ado, here's me and John Tesh. Welcome to welcome to transformation Tuesday. This is the stuff that we just love, nerding out on on stuff, because it's what we do and and we are surrounded, as you know, we're surrounded by a tremendous amount of information, and which has made us curators, because it's okay. What so what is? What information is good? What information works for you? Have you? Have you? Have you experienced anything this week that's new for you, that I'll share, that is has enhanced your life or caused you to set more goals or cause you to think differently about about your life. I have been more disciplined in my journaling this week, so I had a couple of nights where I wrote quite a bit in my journals, and that that was really helpful. And I am reminded when I do that. You know, it's something that we talk about a lot, is that that process of writing stuff out is really good for your brain. It's really good for your emotional health, but it's also really good for you to be able to outline your goals and to set things right and to really help you understand your life. One of my favorite authors writes a journal, and then he has published a couple of them. So I read those books. I read his one of his more recent books, which was just him. Who is that? David Sedaris, oh yeah, sure, yeah. He's got a big podcast. I don't know that he has a podcast, television show, something his his sister has a television show. He's on NPR. He's on NPR. Got it, and he and he, he also tours the country, reading from his books. His books are huge, but he tours the world. I should say he and his sister is a comedian, Amy Sedaris, but anyway, Oh, that's right, he writes in his journal every day, and the mundane stuff that he turns into a fun story kind of inspired me to make sure that I was doing my journaling. Awesome, very, very cool. Well, we're going to be talking about the three things, the five things you, that you, that all of us need to stop doing today. We'll talk about the cost of wasting time from Jim Rome. It's a very old video, and it still works today. Probably more important, yeah, we'll talk about how discipline is freedom, and the four foods that you should you should never bring into your home, not just not eat, but you should never bring it, love it into your home either the Don't you ever worry, somebody's gonna pick up your journal and read it. I so I have a paper journal, right? And I've done that when I was younger, and I use that to jot down notes, but I have a fingerprint, password protected journal on my computer. You go, that's what you need. So one of the things that that I'm approaching July 9, I'm approaching my 73rd year, and we just got back from MD Anderson Cancer Center and got a good, a good, a good report of health. And yeah, they finished all these scans, right? And they said, It's good news, John. And I said, What is it? And they said, your cancer is stable. Wait a second. What you want to what I was waiting for? Your cancer is gone. No, your cancer is stable. And what that, what that actually means is that it hasn't it's behaving. It's behaving normally. It's behaving right, but which means that there's a little bit here and there all throughout my thorax, because I had a very rare form of cancer that I was diagnosed with 10 years ago, and it's and it's under control. And I was looking back on that. This is what I learned looking back on that. I realized that there were times, and you were with me during one of these times when they, they said, You need to go get radiation right now. You got to do it. You have to like, like, today. You need to go today. Yeah, exactly. And, and I have these, you know, people, because we're so public about about my journey. Right? A lot of people are not. But I enjoy doing it because we have, if we draw people to us, there are people who are just today, a guy reached out and said, You know, I've got this problem, that problem, or whatever. And we talk on the Thursday's call calls too. We also talk about, you know, how to combine visualization with the Word of God, with with modern, excuse me, with modern, modern medicine. But what I learned was you really need to have not just not just family, but you also need to have advocates. You need to have people who have been through it before, because when somebody says you got cancer in your body, and these are two prostate people get prostate diagnoses recently and they say, I just want it out. I just want it out. Like, wait a second, that's a huge operation. They make six incisions in your in your in your thorax, and, yeah, you got cameras in there, and they pull it out, and their nerves are flying around and all this stuff. Maybe that's not the thing to do. So looking back, and I realized that with you helping me, with and with mom helping me, and then and then getting different opinions. I mean, like six different doctors, you know, I think, I think we also watched our friend Connie Freiburg, who we just lost, yeah, you know, go through this where she didn't want to offend the doctor, so she wouldn't get a second opinion, so that now and then Connie is going and getting a second opinion for her. So I look back at I said, Man, I could have made some really bad decisions. And so it's really, I mean, this is part of the stoic philosophy we talk about a lot, too. Your decisions need to be well considered. Yes, and I get and do not to circle back to make this about me, but that's one of the things I find is so helpful with journaling, right? It forces you to Yeah, forces you to consider what it is that's on your mind. And you just start writing, and it comes out, I think, yeah, yeah, especially if you, if you look back even just a year ago, you know, a lot of times you can look at pictures and just say, oh, you know, I remember I was going through with this, but my app on my phone says it's time to journal. I'm like, don't, don't tell me what to do. So let's start off with stop doing these five things, and then we'll discuss bestow it. Say you need to stop doing these five things. Don't suffer imagined troubles. Sanka says he who suffers before is necessary suffers more than is necessary. Number Two, don't have an opinion about everything we can ignore it. Don't have to have an opinion. We don't have to make judgments about everything we see and hear. Just let things be. Don't complain. Marcus Aurelius writes in meditations again, not thinking anyone would read it. He says, Never be overheard complaining, not even to yourself. If you have fewer opinions, if you just accept things as they are you have less to complain about. Number four, Mark surrealist was a busy guy. He's the emperor of millions of people. He has his philosophical work he's trying to do, but he says, Don't be all about business. Mark cerulus says, step by step, action by action, no one can stop you from that focus on the part of this thing that is up to you and trust. If you follow the process at more times than not, you'll get the outcome you want. Now that last part follow the process. We talked about that quite a bit when we talk about setting goals and stuff is is fall in love with, oh yeah, the process. I you know, it's taken me decades to to understand this and fully realize it. And you can do it when you, if you set a big goal, and you bite it off, you know, in little pieces, and you fall in love. If you, if you want to learn how to play the piano, for example, you shouldn't think about just like, I gotta, I have to learn this song. You have a song in front of you, but the process is just, is just amazing. A lot of times when that process, when you're working on a team, it's the same thing, you have that feeling of just, you know, the accomplishment is shared as as a team, and it's easier to see what that process is. And then you can also look when you're trying to do something new, when you're trying to improve your life. I do this all the time is I find, I find people. You can find them on YouTube, you can read their books, whatever, who have done the thing that you want to do, right? And you look at their process. So when I first saw Hamilton, the musical, and I saw it off Broadway before it even got on Broadway, obviously, and I looked at that and I said, I want to do that. And that was a really bad decision, because I proceeded to watch the process that Lin Manuel, Miranda and Alex lakimore, the musician, were were going through to do it. I said, I think I do something else that seems a little more involved. Well, what's so crazy? I mean, you know, haven't you when you were talking to Lin Manuel, and obviously, and Alex and all that is you find out that Lin Manuel likes the process so much that Alex lackmore is music director who has to turn all of what Lin Manuel creates into, you know, stuff for the orchestra to play, and all that he at a certain point, he goes, Hey, you. You have to stop. Oh, I need to, actually, we actually need to turn this into something you can't keep just, you can't just keep writing good he loved the process so much that almost never finished. Hamilton, we almost never got to the end of it, because he just wanted to keep working on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's that, you know, that's a form of procrastination, by the way. Yes, where, I mean, if you because we, we study a lot of these self help people, people have been, been successful and and one of their big pieces of advice is, you have to turn it in. You have to turn something in. And so I'm on it was actually a week we were celebrating prima's birthday the other day, and her boyfriend really doesn't know me well, but he knows that I'm a musician and and he asked this question. He goes, he goes, When do you notice stop? And I thought that's probably the best question you could possibly ask, because that if once you get that, then you really start becoming successful, you know. And I was just telling Gib I woke up at three o'clock this morning because I needed to finish some sweetening and some and add some musical stuff to a piece that I've been working on for a very long time. And I gave myself a deadline. I just said, Okay, Gabe, the guy who's gonna be mixing, right? I said, I'm gonna hand this in at 730 this morning, and then you can, you can mix it and and make it whole. And there it is, you know, behind me, but it was, but it was, it was really intricate stuff. And I kept, I kept making it more intricate. I think because I was just enjoying the process and I wanted it to continue. But if you don't turn it in, you just end up messing with it and you never finish anything. Yes, yes. But I would, I would say, I would say that before, that's where you need people in your life that can help it, can help structure it for you. That's why you need deadlines. But you do still need to fall like the if you what you're hearing are people who have released a lot of things successfully, who are in love with the process so much that they have to stop. They have to have somebody tell them when to stop sometimes, so that that process is is something that you do need to fall in love with, and you don't need to have an opinion about everything you don't you shouldn't be complaining, you know, you, you all of the thing, all of these stoic elements where you need to divorce yourself from the outcome. You need to be focused on, on what it is that that is going to help other people, is going to bring joy to you, that's going to keep you moving forward. And you fall in love with that process and that when you get when you get there, you can always put your head down and do the thing and and then, and the chips fall where they met. I mean, even, you know, even some of the biggest success stories in your career were surprises that you'd already moved on from, but you were just because you were in the process. And so all of a sudden, you know, 10 years later, that that that theme comes back and it's important, or you win an Emmy a year and a half later that you didn't know it was even that good of a theme. Yeah. And that's really a good, a good point where it's like, be willing to iterate. Be willing to say, Okay, this is not this is not working. Let me set it aside for a second and try something else. You don't beat you don't beat it to death. Don't give up, right? But you don't beat it at that depth. A different way for that's really good Gib, a different way for me, for me to do this. You know, there's a guy named Jim Rome who I, who I follow. I read many of his books and and he's basically a productivity experts, personal development guy. And I dug out an old video that I want to share with you guys, which is the cost of of wasting time. What is the cost of of wasting time? And it's interesting, because on Broadway right now, like CNN, just broadcast it live, George Clooney, and then and one of your friends, two of my friends, are in the show. That friend is too, are in good night and good luck, and good night and good luck. Was that what just like Walter Cronkite was, and that's the way it is. I'm Walter Cronkite. Good night, comma and good luck, which is the way he said it, Edward R Murrow. Edward R Murrow was really he was the he was the guy that everybody looked, looked up to, including me, when I was just starting out in broadcasting. He was the quintessential broadcaster and and and interviewer. So he did the news, but he also did person to person, which was one of the first interview shows, and it was remote back in the 1950s you know, they found a way to do it remotely as well interview the guests in their homes, and they're all, they're smoking constantly, yeah, but he, but he, but in the apparently, in the play, which I haven't seen, but I remember he did this having read his book. He he did this often, even on the air where he warned people against the television. He said he warned them. He said, You know, this is if it you can use it for good, but it can trivialize your life. And so that's a lot of what Rome is talking about here. Here we go. Years and years ago, I asked a young man one time, because I knew he watched television a lot. I said, How much did your television cost? And he said,$400 and I said, Well, you really miscalculated. He said, No, it costs $400 i. Said, that's to buy it. How much do you think it costs to watch it? Because I knew he had some skills that really wasn't employing and was letting it all slide. I said, in my personal opinion, because the average American now watches television six, seven hours a day. I said, in my personal opinion, this television is costing you about$40,000 a year not to own it, but to watch it. And I said, That's too much to pay maybe 4000 but not right. Pay the 4000 and throw it away and go, you'll still be ahead of the game. So sometimes all it takes is a revolutionary idea like that. Somebody says, I think Jim rohn's Right. This television is costing me too much money to watch it, because if I would use that same time, employing myself, finding ways to make a profit, whatever. No telling what would happen. So you could tell this was years ago. Yeah, right. He didn't know that the internet was coming. He didn't know your internet was coming. The iPad was coming. He didn't know that we're going to be standing in line watching movies. Yeah. I mean, look, we talk first and foremost. We talk a lot about the lost time of boredom. Like everything is so convenient. Kids are not bored enough. As adults, we're not bored enough. We don't spend enough time just being like, oh, right, I need to your brain. Your brain needs to just be bored. But I stimulate myself every time I should be bored. If I'm waiting in line, I'm checking I'm on my phone. If I'm wandering around somewhere, I'm on my phone. It's so nice to go someplace where there is no cell phone coverage, and you're sort of forced to not look at your phone for a little while. And it's amazing how much your brain changes, even in a short amount of time. You know, Karl Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses. Oh, and then, and then Watterson. Bill Waterson wrote the comic of Calvin and Hobbes where Hobbs asked, or somebody Calvin asked Hobbs religions opening the masses, what does that mean? And then the next panel is Calvin sitting in front of the TV and Hobbs saying, it means we ain't seen nothing yet, basically meaning that we have, we have, we are, we are mollified. We completely numb our brains with with distraction, whether that is the television or whether that's the internet. And we tell ourselves, we tell ourselves that this is a productive space, because you can use the internet for productivity. You can use the television to be informed and to be transported and and watch nature documentaries and see the world in a new light. Yes, you can. We don't always do that, and we oftentimes, and we're not always using it in a lean forward way. We're oftentimes using it to numb our brains from the realities that we have that we struggle to process, and by not being bored, and by not allowing ourselves to just noodle on problems, we take away one of our key adaptations, one of our key ways that we move ourselves forward and we just numb ourselves into oblivion. It's alcohol, it's television, it's the internet, it's, you know, it's, it's all kinds of drugs, and you see it in communities that have been devastated by, you know, factories leaving and poverty and hopelessness, and then immediately following that, drugs come in. And you see, you see the opioid epidemic take over those communities first. And a big reason for that is, what do you have? You need? You need to numb the pain of trying to figure out the next step. And what Rome Roane is talking about there is, is that that's a, that's a, there's a cost there that goes beyond the cost of the actual item that you're using to distract yourself. Yeah, that's good. One of the things I've started doing when I when I find myself, if I'm if I'm exhausted, or if I just want to take a break from this, this, this room where I do the radio show, and also, you know what we do here, and music is, I'll, I'll just go down to the kitchen and I'll have a snack, and I'll and, and I catch myself sometimes watching YouTube videos and or even, you know, Instagram stuff. And I realized that what I need to be doing is what these guys that I follow, like Ryan Holiday even Buffett, who's part of what's his first name, Warren, or Warren Buffett, Warren part of Berkshire, created Berkshire Hathaway. What they do is they just read, you know, all the time. So what I've started doing now is, is I make sure that this app there, the Kindle app is always open, and so I pick up this book. I pick up this book a lot, even though I've read it a couple of times, and it's Ryan Holiday's discipline is destiny. And the cool thing about this book is that there are all kinds of examples. He's not just doing the thing like, it's like, here's what you should do, but he tells you, you know how the stoics behaved back in the day. And he mentioned Marcus Aurelius earlier, and also how people like Lou Gerard, for example, how he played baseball with a broken finger. He played, you know, he even, even, even, you know, months into fractured skull. Fractured skull. Yeah. He. He just refused to stop. And he was and even, even when, even in the throes of ALS early on, he just, he wouldn't, he wouldn't back down. He just nobody even knew that he was, that he was six and sick of Florence Nightingales, for example, who, who basically invented nursing, and she her whole family, you know, she was in the nouveau riche, and they were old money, actually, and her whole family was saying, you can't do this, and they were against her, and they disowned her, and all of that. And she just realized that fighting through with that, with with discipline, was going to make her happy. And so here is, here's, here's why discipline will produce freedom. And if you get nothing else from this half hour transformation Tuesday, get this, if you are disciplined, you will have an enormous amount of freedom in all areas of your life. But just the idea you write that discipline is freedom. We're like led to believe the person who indulges in everything. That's who's having a good time. That's the happiest guy, the disciplined guy. He must be bored and miserable that he's going to bed at nine or whatever, and getting up and doing His work the way that you write it, it lights you up. And you go, Oh, right. Truly, the free one is the guy who actually adheres to his routine and his schedule. That really is a big concept to embrace. Yeah. I mean, it's not just like, hey, if you work really hard, then one day you'll have financial freedom and security to do whatever you want, although that's also true, it's more that I think people think routine structure limits. They think that that's limiting or constraining, but it's actually that that gives you the creative freedom around and experiment and take risks. Yeah, if your life is a mess, you don't have the ability to be creative and chaotic in the work the way that you think that you do. Obviously, I didn't get that far into this video. I'm terribly sorry, and Ryan, you should not be cursing anyway. It's amazing how how powerful discipline is, yes, well, so a couple things if you if you master your routines, your brain actually uses less energy to do the things that move you forward. So if you, if you make it a routine that you get up and go for a run every morning, before long, that run actually takes less mental energy to prepare for. It's no longer a daunting task. It's just a part of what you do. If you it's the same way that brushing your teeth for most of us, I'm hoping all of us is a habit that we just naturally do before we go to bed, right? You brush your teeth in the morning, you brush your teeth at night, you brush your teeth after a meal, if you if you need to, but that process doesn't require additional mental energy. And to Ryan's point, to holidays point When, when, when you have that framework in place, that's where the creative freedom begins to thrive. If you know that you have to sit and write for 30 minutes, you know, or two hours every single day. Just give yourself two hours and you're gonna sit and write. You know, you have to put pen to paper. That's where the creativity will happen. In fact, you know, you you'll see this in I do, we do shows. We do, we do live performances and and I do a lot of live performances on my own, and we do them together, and and the more structured the show is, the more you can be loose. Because if you're not quite sure what's going to happen next, and you kind of don't know where you have to get to, the show falls apart, and the audience doesn't have a good time. But if you know where you have to get to, and that this is like, career enthusiasm is so good, good. Yeah, you just know what you have to get to. Then the process of just messing around to edit Mr. Holiday, the parts of just messing around actually has more freedom to it, because you, you you can play a little bit more, because you have to worry about where you're going, you just end up there. Yeah, that's really good. Okay, so one more thing, as promised, someone once said, years ago, and they were so right. And then we had the guy from the food in Cornell, the Cornell food and brands lab, say this. He said, You know, it is a fact. We've studied this. We've studied it. We studied every year, if you bring it into your house, you're going to eat it. Oh, 100% so here are the four foods, ladies and gentlemen, that should never enter your home. Let me tell you the four things you should never bring into your house. I don't care if you go out once in a while and treat yourself, but the four things that should never enter the front door of your house. Number one, processed meats. We know that they are associated with cancer. Number two, sugar sweetened beverages like fruit juices and Coca Colas and Mountain Dews, number one source of refined sugar in the American diet. Third thing you should never have in your house, salty snacks. We know that they're most associated with obesity. And the final thing is packaged sweets, also highly associated with obesity. If you want to enjoy these things, go out and get them, just don't have them tempting you all the time in your house, and we'll see you when you're 100 See you when you're 100. I ate one of each of those yesterday. Well, because we had this, we had this birthday party, right, right? And they had all the, they had all the snacks out there, and then, and the guest didn't eat all the snacks. So guess who eats the snacks now? Yeah, it's so true. If you have it in your pantry, and that's the. The problem with but we love Costco, but you have it for six months? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, it's, it's true. Look, you want to make that stuff harder to get to. You want to make it expensive, right? So, you know, my wife doesn't like to spend the money on the candy at the at the at the movie theater. She likes to smuggle it in. And I'm like, You know what we're going to we're not going to have the candy in the house and smuggle it in. We're going to gonna buy the candy there, and it's gonna be expensive. We're gonna just get less of it, because you're gonna go $7 you're gonna share the dots, right, right? $7 oh my gosh, $7 for this. Make any sense? And this goes back to the kind of rule. Everything he mentioned there follows the rule of thumb that we've talked about multiple times, which is shelf stable food that that doesn't, that you don't, who doesn't have those items in your house, well, you shouldn't have those items in your house or PAL. Shelf stable food that does not have to be cooked is and will last for a long time. So cured meats, sweets, salty snacks, sugar, beverages, all of that stuff can sit on the shelf. That is the stuff that is not good for you, that is the stuff that will eventually lead you to metabolic death. So you need the whole foods, the stuff that you that you have that you have to cook in order to process, in order to eat, or the stuff that will only last for under a week. And that is, that is the key. And again, to his point, you don't have to cut that stuff out. You just have to, it has to be an event. It can't just be in your home. Yeah, yeah. And I, and you're right, who doesn't have those things I know in your house, but you know, certain point you got to make that decision. And I'm it's, it's, it's tough. The reason I use that that last video is that that is almost exclusively the kind of stuff that we talk about on the on the Thursday call we talk at this call the healing workshop. And if you're not in there, we'd love to see you there. It's Thursday at the same time, let's bring in Chrissy Whalen, who is our community manager, among other things. Chrissy, have you got other stuff that that you need to share to get through just want to welcome new members. We have new members this week, and I wanted to make sure they know that our replays are on the Facebook and if you guys are interested in joining the Thursday program, I'm going to send everybody a link in the email this week with the replay. And one thing that I've done, I credit Gib, is every 45 minutes, I'm doing 10 squats, and I 10 squats. Yeah, I wanted to tell Gib that, because I he said it a couple weeks ago. I was like, You know what? I'm just gonna do that. I load the Facebook page up with all the social media, and then I stand up and I do the 10 squats, and then I go back and do something else. That's great. That's great. It's funny, because I was, I was here putting together the technology for this thing while Gib was waiting. And I looked over, and I couldn't, I couldn't find him. And then I looked down, I saw he was in a plank. He does the same thing, the same thing. Why not? Why waste time standing around? Yeah, I need to get desk. But I loved the squats I did that. Chrissy, I did that at the at the airport, we had a flight that was there was like two hours late, and every, just every sitting down, you know? And so I went over to the wall, and I just got into a wall sit. And his husband and wife came over and joined me and and after a while, people like, what is going on, you know, but, but I had never seen anybody do I was a little self conscious, because I'd never seen anybody at the airport go up against the wall. I see people sitting on the floor against the wall, but, yeah, so I'm right there with you. I didn't last very long, but I did it. That's awesome, because it's the worst when you have to sit for a long time on an airplane. Your blood goes all to your ankles and everything. That's fantastic. By the way, we have a wall sits video that I repost all the time on Facebook where Gib is demonstrating that, so I will also share that in the Facebook group. That's great. Great. Chrissy, thank you. Thank you guys. All right, we'll see you next week. That's it for the show today. Thank you guys. So much for listening. If you like the show, please rate comment and subscribe on Apple podcast. Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. It helps us out a lot. When you do that, we also try to respond to every mention the show, every DM about the show. You can tell us what you think about it, because ultimately, we do the show for you guys. So thank you so much for listening. You