Next Level University

#1580 - An Answer We ALL Know But Hate To Hear

• Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros

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Picture the unassuming caterpillar, enduring its time in a cocoon before emerging as a butterfly. That's a journey of transformation that echoes the themes of our latest discussion, where we dissect the fundamental truth behind achieving success—it's a marathon, not a sprint. In this episode, hosts Kevin Palmieri and Alan Lazaros peel back the layers of time's role in personal growth, relationship building, and wealth accretion. The accumulation of time, experiences, and consistent effort shapes the fulfilling future we all strive for.

Links mentioned:
Next Level Nation - https://www.facebook.com/groups/459320958216700
Next Level U Book Club -  Email 💬 Alan@nextleveluniverse.com

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Alan: https://www.instagram.com/alazaros88/   

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Alan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanlazarosllc/   

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Alan@nextleveluniverse.com

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Show notes:
(1:43) Embracing time
(4:16) Long-term success and compound effect
(6:43) All things in life are accumulative
(11:16) Chad shares how Next Level Podcast Solutions transformed his podcast and provided invaluable assistance along the way.
(11:57) Overnight awareness
(15:28) Underestimated
(20:45) Outro

Send a text to Kevin and Alan!

Kevin:

Next Level Nation. Welcome back to another episode of Next Level University where we help you level up your life, your love, your health and your wealth. We hope you enjoyed yesterday's episode, episode number 1579, a dangerous cycle for your relationships slash relationship. Today. For episode number 1580, an answer we all know but hate to hear so I mentioned this in yesterday's episode that coaching has gotten a lot easier in many ways for Alan and I, but it has also gotten more challenging in, I guess, several ways, but the way we're really going to talk about today.

Kevin:

I've struggled working with certain people because certain people think that I'm a miracle worker, for lack of better phrasing, and they assume that when you work with me you're going to accomplish all your goals immediately and it's going to be much easier. The truth of the matter is that is true, you will accomplish your goals much faster and much easier, but it's not overnight and it's not in a week and it's not, most likely, in a year. An answer we all know but we hate to hear. The most important thing is never going to be a hack, it's never going to be a tip, it's never going to be a trick. Most likely, it's most likely going to be time. If you think of a successful relationship, a relationship that has had the opportunity to grow over 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, yeah, they can teach you some stuff and they can kind of save you some time and maybe give you some shortcuts, but can you really ever expect to get to the level of that relationship without the same amount of time? One of my favorite quotes say this on podcasts all the time, because it would definitely have resonated with me in the beginning.

Kevin:

I think most of us have the misconception that where we are today is where we're going to be forever, and where somebody else is today is where they've been forever. Here's the thing. Yes, you can help someone get to where you are, but if you've been doing it for 10 years, it's going to take. It might not take 10 years, but it's going to take three years. It's going to take a percentage of the amount of time that it took you. So that's what I want to talk about today.

Kevin:

Yeah, there's a lot of different strategies and there's a lot of different tips and tricks, and there's calendars and there's journals and there's habit trackers and there's productivity things and there's there's so many different things you can use, but at the end of the day, the understanding that we have to have is the biggest differentiator between where you are today and where you want to be eventually is time. You can do all the right things for a week. You can do all the right things for a month, but you're most likely not gonna see any difference. But if you understand that this is a long game all of this in five years you're gonna end up somewhere. So you might as well try to do your best for the next five years and I understand five years is a long-ass time. So that is my thought for this episode.

Alan:

So my goal on this episode is to try not to math all over everybody, but I think it's gonna be important. And, kev, do you remember? Did I ever send you that graphic? There are these infographics that I'll get. Every now and then when I open my Google Chrome, there'll be certain things I'll get. They somehow know what I'm interested in. They there's infographics about the economy. There's always movie stuff, so they know, they know the kid, they know what I like, and there was this infographic about the US economy and it was basically breaking down the different wealths of every generation and the baby boomer generation, which is, I think, anywhere from 60 to 80 I'm not really sure of the exact dates, to be honest but the baby boomers hold a large percentage, a very, very large percentage, even though there's less of them. So there are a lot of baby boomers but but millennials are by far the biggest generation. So you can Google this, you can say how many millennials are there, you know, versus baby boomers. There's like almost twice as many millennials as there are baby boomers, but the wealth is held by mostly baby boomers, and it's not because the baby boomers are better, it's just because of time. It's because of time and so I have a roster of clients.

Alan:

You know, sometimes clients come and go, sometimes they come back. Some. Some have come and go gone several times, but overall I have some clients that have been coaching me for years. I mean, it's been really cool to do an analysis and see that some people have been with me for years and naturally, I look at my roster and I and I at the end of 2023, I like to review the year and I looked at my roster and I saw like okay, who was doing really well, who is not doing so well, who is working really well, who's not? You know who's getting the results they want, who's not. And and it was really cool to kind of see the people who are with me the longest have the biggest results, and there really isn't an exception to that.

Alan:

I was on a call earlier which actually made me a little bit late to this recording. I apologize, kevin, are you good? But he's been with me for years and the the compound effect of the results that he's getting is this was one of my favorite coaching calls I've ever done, which is saying a lot because I've been doing this for now for seven years, coming up on seven years and and over 5,000 sessions. And it was one of my coolest calls because of the compound effect, because we've been working on this stuff for years and and there's that analogy of the diamond cutter who's just you're just hacking away at this diamond and eventually it splits open and there's a breakthrough.

Alan:

Breakthroughs happen. Yeah, on a 30-minute breakthrough session you can have a breakthrough, but the breakthroughs get bigger and better over time. I mean, some of the stuff we talked about today on that coaching session never could have happened in two calls, never could have happened in five calls. The relationship him and I have built, the things I can say to him without it triggering him, the, the things that I've taught him. It's an accumulation and the best way that I can describe it. I said I wouldn't math all everybody, but I'll go quick with this. You can't just go to calculus class and do well. All things in life are cumulative. In other words, you can't just suddenly take AP calculus and do a good job. You have to start with algebra one, before that pre-algebra, then algebra one, then algebra two, then geometry, then trigonometry, then pre-calc, then calc one.

Alan:

So you have to work your way up over time, and this is why I think young people struggle so much with self-worth. I've come to understand one of the reasons why that is, and I did too, and Kevin definitely did too. It's like if you talked to Kevin, his 20, whatever two-year-old self at the gas station. How old were you when you were working at the gas station?

Kevin:

Senior in high school to probably I don't know. I was probably there until I was like 19 or 20.

Alan:

Okay, so 20-year-old Kev working at the gas station for minimum wage, if you had said hey, brother, one day you're going to have a company that one day is going to change hundreds of thousands of people's lives all over the world. You're going to have a podcast one day that will be heard in 170 countries.

Kevin:

You would have been like what? Yeah, no way.

Alan:

No way, no chance. And we've met some of our heroes. We both used to listen to the Hillman Morning Show when we were young and Danielle Mer is a close friend of ours and actually was a client of mine for a solid year there and she's a public figure and we used to listen to her in our early 20s, late teens and it was really just little things like that. That could never have happened overnight. You never could have told me when I was listening to Danielle Mer working at Sinsada Technologies, hungover, miserable, hating my life, walking into work, getting breakfast, trying to get through the day and then drinking again later that night. Just a miserable human being, shell of myself. And listening to Danielle thinking she's so articulate and she's so intelligent and she's so educated and she's so philosophical, philosophical.

Kevin:

She would laugh. She sounds like a dinosaur.

Alan:

Danielle, if you're listening, my bad for butchering this, but I remember thinking, oh, imagine if I could be articulate like that one day, and not only 10 years later from that time. That's the point of this. Not only would she be someone we interviewed several times, someone that we're friends with, but also someone that I actually coach. I mean whoa. But that could never have happened in a week, that could never have happened in a month, that could never even have happened in one year. And so this unsexy, somewhat frustrating, annoying truth is that pretty much everything of real value whether it's a marriage, a relationship, a friendship, a business partnership it requires this thing called time.

Alan:

And on the day to day basis, I do think that it might feel like you're losing, and a lot of times it does. But when you look back to when you were a teenager, or you look back to when you were in your early 20s, or you look back to when you're in your early 30s, if you're older, you just see so much of a drastic change, a drastic transformation. And if you don't, if you don't, it means that you probably weren't growing a ton during that time. But now you can flip that script. You can flip that script and you can start today, but it's not gonna happen overnight, never has, never will. And shooting for something to happen overnight is just gonna crush your self-esteem anyway.

Kevin:

We talked about this in the past. I don't think there's any. There's no such thing as overnight success. There's overnight awareness. So I used to listen to a band, well, I guess an artist, called Macklemore, and this was long before most people. Again, I don't know if it was long before, but this was a minute ago.

Alan:

This was before 15 years before anyone else yeah, I knew well, think of it.

Kevin:

We all have that person, that artist, that movie, that actor, whatever it is, that musician that we knew before everyone else did. We just had awareness faster than everybody else did. That's all it is. When, in reality, the person's been doing the thing for so long behind the scenes, it's so hard to contextualize that. It's hard enough to maintain perspective in your own life, Never mind maintain the perspective that someone who is 50 years old and has been doing something for 30 years If you're only 30 years old, they've been doing that for the entirety of your life. That is a long time.

Kevin:

And it's really really, really hard to contextualize all the stuff that can happen in those years. I use the video game analogy all the time. If you're on level one, the stuff that you're learning on level one will come into effect on level 10, only if you get to level 10. But if you don't get to level 10, you lose all the opportunity to learn or to use what you learned in level one, two, three, four, five. You lose the opportunity up until the point that you've worked to get results with that later. And that's just another important perspective.

Kevin:

When it comes to time, a lot of the stuff we do on the day-to-day basis today we learned in year one, maybe setting up equipment and all that stuff. We know how to do it. That was year one. Then eventually people paid us to do that for them. Okay, that was year three. That never would have happened in year one. It can't. It can't happen in year one.

Kevin:

Nice Good idea. It's kind of to your point. It's kind of like a pyramid. The year one is just the basics. It is the ground foundation and as you do more and more you can stack more on top of that. But I'm telling you right now it's easier to get results seven years in than it was one year in. Somebody one of our amazing clients referred me to someone today and I remember at the beginning I would have cried over that and now it was just like awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. I'm grateful that we're able to provide a service that you find so beneficial. I appreciate the kind words, but that's happened so many times now. It's just somewhat normal. Can't lose sight of that, obviously, and that's a different episode.

Alan:

But yeah, I love talking.

Kevin:

That's an episode on humility and gratitude I love talking about this because I think it's very, very challenging. We hear, well, this person's been doing it for 25 years, but it's so hard to contextualize what that actually means Because, yeah, they've been doing it, they've been practicing it, physically doing it for that long, but we don't understand how many lessons, how many experiences, how many failures, how many wins they've had that have just compounded over time. So that would be my next level. My next level nugget would be that when you hear about how long somebody has been doing something, try to zoom out a little bit. It's not just the amount of time, it's the amount of lessons, losses, wins, connections, opportunities, the confidence that's built, the self-worth that's built all of that stuff, the skills, all of that.

Alan:

Last story that I think will articulate this. I know we got to jump, all right so last night. So Emilia and I have been using this new app I don't know the name of it, I wish that I did, but it's been really cool. So she said I want to learn more about fitness. You've been leading, I appreciate it, but I want to learn more, and she loves data. So this is one of those apps that essentially what you do is you put in the muscle groups and it spits out a work guys, and I liked it, yeah, it's really good and you put in the amount of time. So we want to work out for 30 minutes with five minutes on the treadmill and we want to do these muscle groups. Okay, boom, boom, boom, it spits it out. Great, then you can edit it and I'm always trying to do the edits.

Alan:

Based on my awareness and I've been working out now consistently for nine years and when I say consistently, I mean you know I've probably missed maybe once a week for the, for the last, I mean I haven't missed at all in the last couple of years, but before that it was at least six days a week, and so, anyways, my awareness is way higher than Emilia's because of time, not because I'm more capable, not because I'm special, but because of just time, just time. And so, anyways, there was. It wanted us to do a couple different workouts that I knew was gonna be in the section that was gonna be crowded. I knew the time of day, I know that gym, I've been going to that gym for years and I know that that's gonna be taken. And so I was like, can we not do those? Can we switch that, switch that? And then, sure enough, we didn't switch it. And then, sure enough, that whole section was completely taken and we had to derail our workout. And I just remember having this moment in the gym last night going. I knew, I knew. And then I had this other moment, which was how did I know? You've just done this so many times, you know the pulley system is always crowded, right. And so I ended up doing different ab workouts instead of the ones that they wanted us to do rope pulls or whatever.

Alan:

But at the end of the day, you are unbelievably good at some stuff. Think about it, whatever it is, you're unbelievably good at, if you're honest. You've been doing it for five, 10, 15 years. There's no exception to this rule. I've been snowboarding since I was a little kid. I'm good at snowboarding, that's just. That's what it is Now. Does that mean you're gonna be the best in the world and time is all that matters? No, improvement matters too, but time is a huge component that people drastically underestimate, and I understand why. It's very difficult to understand the compound effect. I think it's one of the hardest things in the world to really grasp.

Kevin:

I would agree. I would agree and this ties nicely to the episode we did recently about intuition the more time you have, same I go to the gym. If I look and it's like three o'clock in the afternoon, I'm not going to the gym, it's just not. I've done it enough times to realize it's probably gonna be mayhem, especially if it's break and all the college kids are off and-.

Kevin:

January too, yeah, so the longer you do something. If you commute, you probably know 315,. Yeah, it's probably gonna be mayhem. I should probably wait or I'll just stay at the office a little bit longer and get some work done. You just kind of know. If you work in a certain industry like say, you work in the restaurant industry, maybe you know certain days and certain times that are busy than others. I probably wouldn't know that to the degree you do. I just wouldn't because I've never experienced it. So that's another connection to the intuition episode. Next level nation. If you are looking for a group of amazing, heart-driven humans who are working on getting to their own unique next level, please join our private Facebook group Next Level Nation. Link will be in the show notes. Amy is leading that group and she posts in there every single day. But you will see many members of the team post in there as well, alan and myself included. I've been jeffing because I've been overwhelmed and now I have shingles. So it's a whole thing, but I will get back in there for sure.

Alan:

Also, we have a book club and every single Saturday, 12, 30 PM Eastern Standard Time. I actually had someone reach out to me earlier about how someone wants to join book club, so I love it. It is catching fire. It's catching fire and by catching fire there's probably like 20 of us that consistently come. But you can pop in and out. You can pop in and out. High performance habits by Brenner Burchard is currently what we are reading. Email me, alan at nextleveluniversecom. Say hey, I want in on book club. Just put your name and email and I will sign you up and it's a Zoom registration. I'll register for you, you'll get an email, add it to your calendar and then boom, boom, boom. We'll see you on Saturday.

Kevin:

Right on Tomorrow for episode number 1,581,. Beep it up on 1600, we're gonna do something special for 1600, probably not, right.

Alan:

It's up to you, brother.

Kevin:

you're the producer, We'll see, maybe we'll give away $160 million, something like that, maybe around number Tomorrow for episode number 1,581, what do your expectations say about you? On the meetup we had recently, we were talking all about goal setting and how confidence and self-worth affect our goals and somebody asked a really good question that you and I kind of freestyled on live about your expectations and the confidence around them, the self-worth around them. So I figured we'd do an episode on that. So that is what we'll do tomorrow. As always, we love you, we appreciate you, grateful for each and every one of you, and at NLU we do not have fans, we have family. We'll talk to you all tomorrow.

Alan:

Keep playing the long game next up on Nation.

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Alan Lazaros

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Kevin Palmieri

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