Greetings, SuperFriends!

Today, we’re joined by Craig Ballantyne, a Productivity & Success Transformation Coach, online marketing guru, entrepreneur, and the author of The Perfect Day Formula: How to Own the Day and Control Your Life.

In 2001, Craig created the popular home workout program, Turbulence Training, and he’s also the founder of the Certified Turbulence Training Program, certifying trainers from all corners of the globe.

He built on that success, building and buying numerous wildly successful online businesses such as Early to Rise, ETR University, and Online Info Blueprint, and today is considered one of the biggest names in my industry, having impacted literally millions of people’s lives.

Craig’s online success has led him to create books and a coaching program to show other gurus how to take their ideas and help thousands of people. He holds seminars around the world, and he teaches at the annual SovereignAcademy.org camp every summer in Lithuania.

Craig has been a contributor to Men's Health magazine since 2000, and his articles have also appeared in Women’s Health, Oxygen, GQ, Maxim, National Geographic, Men’s Fitness and Muscle and Fitness Hers, amongst many others. His articles have also been featured on Inc.com, LifeHacker.com, and Telegraph.co.uk.

But, as we’ll learn in this episode, Craig has had to overcome many obstacles on his journey to success, and his toughest battle was fighting crippling anxiety attacks. He finally discovered how to beat them with his 5 Pillars of Transformation, and today Craig shows men and women how to use the 5 Pillars to get whatever it is that they want in life.

In this episode, we talk about a very wide range of things, from practical frameworks you can apply today, to recommended reading, to the most impactful daily habits, and overcoming anxiety. Craig is a true renaissance man with diverse interests and passions, and I just know you’re going to take away a TON of value from this episode.

This episode is brought to you by SuperLearner Academy – home of my exclusive masterclasses. Check out a free trial using the link above today!

In this episode, we discuss:

• How Craig Ballantyne and Chris Ashenden (from Athletic Greens) first met
• Who is Craig, what does he do, and how did he get there?
• The incredible story of what motivated Craig to get into the personal growth industry
• What big change has Craig Ballantyne advocated to “The Law of Attraction?”
• An explanation of Craig Ballantyne's “5-Pillar Personal Transformation Formula”
• What types of things can you use this formula for?
• Why are “mental models” so useful and so powerful?
• A discussion of chronic, severe anxiety, and how Craig used the framework to overcome it
• The story of the absolute lowest point of Craig Ballantyne's life
• A detailed walk-through of how the “5 pillars” system helped him bounce back
• A discussion on the power of breathing, and how most people actually do it wrong!
• What is the “3C” framework, and how was it derived from Stoic philosophy?
• What book does Craig believe should be mandatory reading in high schools?
• The idea that it's extremely important to learn things repeatedly – and from different sources
• What are some of Craig's daily habits, routines, and hacks that help him reach peak performance?
• A discussion of meditation, it's tremendous benefits, and how to get started
• What is Craig's biggest goal right now?
• What are his biggest superpowers?
• How about his biggest challenge right now?
• Why is it important to say “no” often?
• 2 great homework assignments from Craig Ballantyne
• What is Craig's (highly unusual) morning routine?
• Thoughts on why coaches should be hard on their coachees
• Where can you learn more about Craig and get a free video?

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Early to Rise
• Early to Rise University
• The Perfect Day Formula: How to Own the Day and Control Your Life
• Yanik Silver
• The Law of Attraction
• Our previous episode with Chris “The Kiwi” Ashenden
• Our previous episode with Gretchen Rubin
• Decision fatigue (psychological phenomenon)
• James Altucher's “10 Big Ideas” formula
• Discourses by Epictitus
• The Art of Living by Sharon Lebelle
• Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• Holosync
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• Our previous episode with Hal Elrod
• Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish
• The Entrepreneurs' Organization
• Joe Polish's 25K MasterMind
• PerfectDayFormula.com

Favorite Quotes from Craig Ballantyne:

Transcript:

Introduction: Welcome to the Becoming SuperHuman Podcast. Where we interview extraordinary people to bring you the skills and strategies to overcome the impossible. And now here's your host, Jonathan Levi.

Jonathan Levi: Greetings, SuperFriends and welcome to the show. Before we get started, you guys, I want to thank Interview Valet CF from the United States of America for his or her wonderful review entitled, “Inspires Me To be My SuperHuman Self”. They go on to say, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Jonathan's show. Especially with Eric, the trainer. Thank you for having guests on who remind us how to step into our extra ordinary selves and wow the world by what we can truly offer and become.

Thank you so much for leaving a review. And please guys, if you haven't already take a moment, leave us a review. It really, really brightens our day and it also helps us get the best guests out there.

Guests like Craig Ballantyne our guest on the show today, who is a Productivity & Success Transformation Coach, an online marketing guru on entrepreneur, and the author of the new book, The Perfect Day Formula: How to Own the Day and Control Your Life. Now, Craig started out in 2001 and he created the popular home workout program, Turbulence Training. He's also in that, right? The founder of the Certified Turbulence Training Program and he certifies trainers from all over the globe.

But what he did next is nothing short of amazing. He built on that success and built and bought various numerous, wildly successful online businesses that you might already know from Early to Rise, ETR University, and Online Info Blueprint, and so many more. And today you guys he's actually considered one of the biggest names in my industry and in the online marketing space, having literally impacted millions, millions of people's lives.

So Craig's online success has basically led him to create books and a coaching program that show other gurus how to take their ideas and help thousands if not, hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. So he holds seminars all over the world. He teaches at the Annual Sovereign Academy Camp in Lithuania and so much more. He's also been a contributor to Men's Health magazine since 2000. He's had articles in women's Women's Health, Oxygen, GQ, Maxim, National Geographic Men's Fitness.

So many, many more, I'm not going to list them all. You might've read his stuff on Huffington Post, Life Hacker, Telegraph but as we'll learn in this episode, you guys, Craig has had to overcome many obstacles on his journey to this success and his toughest battle, which he's going to tell you guys about was with crippling anxiety attacks.

Now he finally discovered how to beat them and he established the five pillars of transformation. And today he shows men and women how to use those things to get whatever it is that they want in life. So, throughout the episode, you guys, we're going to talk about a very wide range of things from practical frameworks that you can apply today to recommended reading to the most impactful daily habits that help people transform and even overcoming anxiety.

It's a great conversation. Craig's a true Renaissance man, with a diverse set of interests and passions. And I just know you guys are going to take away a ton of value from the episode. Now, by the way, if you guys are inspired by what Craig has been able to do, building an info products business, I want to recommend today's sponsor, which is the online course, Branding You by myself and Anthony Metivier.

Now, while Craig is the guru to go to with the online marketing and the copywriting and doing the advertising and growing of the business, Dr. Anthony Metivier and I, in this course help you explain how to get the products set up, how to build an ecosystem of online courses, how to take the stuff that you know, and you do know a lot of stuff. You have a lot of value to offer to the world, how to take that and put it into podcasts, put it into books, put it into online courses, and build a self-sustaining rapidly growing online info products ecosystem. So to check that out, visit jle.vi/brandingyou. No space just branding you.

So now, without any further ado, let me present to you guys, Mr. Craig Ballantyne.

Mr. Craig Ballantyne, thank you so much for joining us today. Welcome.

Craig Ballantyne: Well, thank you very much for having me. It's going to be a really great call.

Jonathan Levi: I'm really, really excited about it. I actually just spoke to one of my friends. I was like, Hey, I got to go. I'm interviewing Craig Ballantyne. He's like, Whoa. Heavy hitter. Congrats on landing that guy. I was like, yeah, very cool. Although I actually don't get to take credit for that because we were introduced by Chris Ashenden, Krista Kiwi from Athletic Greens.

How do you know Chris? By the way?

Craig Ballantyne:  I've known Chris, probably getting close to 10 years now. We first met when he was in Miami and yeah, and the funny thing is, I can't remember who introduced us, but somebody did.

And I was going down there with a bunch of friends from Toronto, where I was living at the time we went down to Miami, we met up with this crazy Kiwi guy. He took us out to Sushi Samba on Lincoln road. We had an amazing night with them. Then he went out with us the next couple of nights and it was really fantastic.

So that was my first introduction to the Kiwi and it's been, uh, many, many years of good friendships.

Jonathan Levi: That's awesome. And I'm also super impressed by the level of detail in your memory. We're going to have to touch in a little bit to kind of your memory tool kit as well throughout the call.

Craig Ballantyne: And my memory is like a steel trap.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, I can tell. So Craig first, I guess for audience sake, tell us who you are, what you do, how you got into it. I understand that you overcame some pretty challenging stuff. So give us a little bit of an overview of your kind of background in biography.

Craig Ballantyne: Sure so quickly, I was born in a little small town called Stratford, Ontario in Canada, which some people might know, perhaps the younger female listeners of your podcast are the hometown of Justin Bieber.

So I like to tell people that immediately get that out of the way that I'll never be the most famous person from my little hometown, but then I went to school near Toronto, grew up there, got into. The fitness industry started writing for Men's Health in 2000, started selling my own workouts online in 2001.

I continue to do that today, but in 2011, I bought another business called Early To Rise, which had been around since about 2000 and today we help people get more done, make more money and still get home on time for dinner with my Perfect Day Formula book and system.

Jonathan Levi: Amazing. All right. That was a really, really good condensation of that.

Craig Ballantyne: Actually. Now there you go, 20 years in a nutshell.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. Wow, impressive. I got to nail mine down a mind's always like, well, I do a little bit of this and I do a little bit of that. And then sometimes I also like to do that. That's awesome. Craig, tell me what caused you to, I mean, you had the successful fitness business.

What caused you to go into the wider area of personal growth? I feel like there might be a little bit of a story there of what motivated you to, to kind of aspire and do a more general broad approach?

Craig Ballantyne:  Oh, there actually is a great story of how I ended up here. And so it starts in 2006, so yeah. At the time I was a personal trainer and I was building my own online business.

And so in 2006, it was a pivotal year because that was the year that I went full-time online. So I'd been building it up for a couple years and I hired my first business coach that year, but I was also going through anxiety attacks at the same time. So again, it was, there was a whole lot going on, but on the very first coaching call that I had with my business coach, he said to me, Craig, what do you want your business to look like in five years from now?

And I said, Tom, I want to have a business-like Early To Rise because Early To Rise was this health, wealth, and success newsletter that I had been receiving for five years. It was written by a man named Michael Masterson whose real name is Mark Ford, but he wrote all his books and all these essays under Michael Masterson for Early to Rise.

And so I mentioned that to Tom, and then, you know, that was the end of that conversation we went on and he helped me launch turbulence, training my fitness program to a bigger audience. And then in the next year, I started going to internet marketing events like Yanik Silver's underground. I joined Yanik's mastermind group as well.

I met a good friend of mine named Matt Smith through Yanik mastermind a year after that in 2007, I had my first seminar of my own, where I started teaching fitness professionals, how to get started online. And big names that were there were included, um, Mike Geary and Vince Del Monte, my friends Fred Pylon.

I had, uh, you know, Alan Cosgrove, lots of people from the fitness world that have gone on to be very, very successful. I don't claim any credit for their success. They did all the hard work, but I taught them a little bit and started building a network of very smart people. And then I continued to do that.

So I started coaching, I built my own mastermind, Isabel de Los Rios, and Jeff Siegel joined it, who it might've been Jeff who introduced me to Kiwi now that I think of it. And then I continued to do that. I continued to get better as a writer. And then in 2010, I was on one of Yanik's, crazy Maverick business adventure trips in Arizona.

And Tim Ferriss was on the trip. And my friend, Matt Smith was on the trip. And on the way home, Matt said to me, Craig, I see you're in the fitness business. You're going really hard with that. What do you want to do in the future? And I said, I still want to have a business, like Early To Rise. And then a few months later, Matt was at a seminar with Mark Ford, the owner of Early To Rise.

Mark Ford said I'm done with Early To Rise. Matt said, I know, well, the guy who would buy it, and then we flew down to Miami and made the deal and it was five years, three months, and 17 days after I made that first proclamation to Tom, my first coach that I bought the business of my dreams. And so, you know, I love telling that story, Jonathan, because it shows you the power of having a very specific vision, which is part of my success formula that I teach people. And I really believe that you can have not just kind of what you want, but exactly what you want in life when you know exactly where you want to get to. And I was three months and 17 days late. But aside from that, I was pretty much on track with my goals.

Jonathan Levi: Incredible. I think that's a huge testament to this kind of law of attraction, or if you want to call it the secret, which I also definitely live by.

Craig Ballantyne: I actually wrote about that in my book, Jonathan, I changed the law of attraction by one word, and I called it the Law of Action-Attraction because you can't just sit there. As you know, Jonathan, you have to get out there and meet people. You have to do things to get you outside of your comfort zone. I'm a very introverted person, but I had to go and introduce myself to people at seminars and get connected and, you know, stand up on stage and speak, which I actually don't mind doing.

It's more than one-on-one stuff that I've always had trouble with and just get better every single day. And when you do that and you meet the right people, you do the right things. Whether you're trying to lose weight or whether you're trying to find the love of your life or whether you're trying to build the business of your dreams, it can all come together and you can have exactly what you want.

Jonathan Levi: Absolutely. Yeah. I really liked that addition because also one of my mentors, we always talk about the law of attraction and she always has this like asterisk, like, you know, it doesn't do all the work for you. You do have to put that work and that visualization in. So I really liked that. I think I'm going to borrow that from you.

Craig Ballantyne: I hope you do.

Jonathan Levi: So, Craig, you mentioned your book and you mentioned kind of this framework that you have. So in the process of all this growth, I understand that you came up with a five-pillar system. I really like frameworks. And so I think we're going to get along really, really well. Tell me about this five-pillar personal transformation formula.

Craig Ballantyne: Yeah. So I discovered this by accident. I started running a fitness transformation contest, you know, classic before and afters. I started doing this in late 2007, right after I had my first internet marketing seminar, which was called online super-profits. But anyways, in turbulence training, You know, we did the classic three months, 12-week transformation, men and women entered from all over the world.

We're running our 27th contest right now. So we run three a year. And you know, when people have their before and after photos and they submit that they also have to submit a little essay. And so I've read hundreds of essays from successful people who have won my contest. And I realized the people that won the contest had this, this, this, this, and this in place.

And it was these five pillars that I called them, better planning and preparation, professional accountability, positive, social support, a meaningful incentive, and the big deadline. And when you have these five things in place, Jonathan, you can change any aspect of your life. So I mentioned earlier that I went through anxiety issues.

I didn't know about these five pillars, but when I look back on it, because this was in 2006 before I even discovered them, I realized I followed the five pillars to get myself out of that situation. And then I've been on lots of interviews and I've shown people like, Hey, if you use these five pillars, you can have find the house of your dreams.

Here's how to do that. Here's how to find the love of your life with the five pillars. Here's how to get out of debt. Here's how to get rich. Here's how to do whatever you want. Using those five pillars.

Jonathan Levi: Wow. That's incredible. Fantastic. And obviously, you have been able to use these to become one of the most successful online marketers around right now and manage multiple businesses and so awesome.

All right. And what I really liked about that, Craig is, as you were speaking, I kind of had these neurons firing from so many of the other incredibly successful people that we've interviewed, and they all kind of touch on these different things. And it's, you know, it's a lot of that wisdom that so many people that are obviously mutual friends of yours and I share, but you've put it into this nice kind of very simple, easy-to-follow five-step framework.

Craig Ballantyne: Yeah. And know people like say, Oh, you can't do that. You can't do that with it. And then, you know, I walk them through an example and it's just, it's, you know, maybe you've heard of Robert Allen, have you ever heard of Robert Allen the get rich in real estate guy?

Jonathan Levi: No, I haven't.

Craig Ballantyne: Okay. So Robert Allen had this challenge that you could drop him into any city and he had nothing but his ID and he had no money and he could buy a house with no money down in 24 hours.

So that was like his amazing Kreskin. I can bend a spoon on TV. Challenge. And so for me, my challenge is you can get me anything that you want to change in your life, and I can plug it into these five things, pillars and show you how to do it. And so you're right. I mean, people talk about these five things all the time, but I think it was really neat to see that this was that actually working.

And again, I was taught it by my weight loss transformation clients. They were showing me how it was used. Then I realized I used it and then I started helping people use it in all these other ways. So yeah, everybody's on the same wavelength with the right steps to success.

Jonathan Levi: Absolutely. So that's a good point to touch on as well. Is what have people use this for? Obviously, we've touched a little bit of what you've used it for. What have you seen other people use these steps for?

Craig Ballantyne:  Mostly for building online businesses, which is what I coach people with quite a bit now. But also to become published authors. And I would say to improve any aspect of health, I've helped people not just lose weight, but, you know, improve their health, you know, improve like, you know, Kiwi was talking about on his interview with you, which is where I first heard about your show was, you know, his digestive health.

I mean, there's people that have used this to improve their digestive health. And it's really just, okay, now I know what goal I want to achieve. What are the pillars that I need to go out there and get, and how can I plug them into the system? So that almost, I wouldn't say it becomes an automatic success because again, there is a lot of work that needs to be done, but when you have these five things in place, it's very, very difficult for someone to fail.

Jonathan Levi: Wow. I really love that. Like I said, I'm a big fan of frameworks and systems. If you listen to kind of our episode with Gretchen Rubin, who like you and I is really big on these kinds of frameworks, I'm all about it. And I really think it, some people kind of are averse to these trendy like a systems that simplify they're like, well, it can't be that simple.

I think a lot of people when it's broken down for them in that way, like you said, it gives them so much more success and so much more applicability. Its kind of like Tony Robbins has this whole, you know, limiting belief and you can apply that template to anything. And once you have this handy little tool with a very convenient little handle on it, I think it becomes so much more effective.

Craig Ballantyne: Yeah, absolutely. All we're trying to do with these as simplifies. So many of the decisions that come over the course of the day, and I'm sure people listening to your show, Jonathan, I've heard about decision fatigue and willpower fatigue and how it's, you know, it's like a depletable resource. And if you try and rely on that stuff all day long, you're going to run out of it.

And eventually, you're gonna start making mistakes. But if you have these systems built-in right. Whether it's something like the five-minute journal or, you know, we have a gratitude journal that shows you how to do gratitude journaling over the course of the day. Like in a couple of minutes, you don't have to go and think for it, or even James Altucher's “10 Big Ideas” system is another way.

Something that I've used for a long time, just to get all of your great ideas down and then start getting some traction on them. And I think there's a lot of wisdom in these. Tools and systems and what Charlie Munger who's Warren Buffet's business partner would call mental models. And my business partner, Matt Smith loves that phrase mental models.

When people have mental models in place. It makes the right decisions easier and more automatic.

Jonathan Levi: Bingo, I love it perfectly stated. I wanted to ask you, you know, we talked a little bit about the Early To Rise, but what would you say either in your personal or professional life? The greatest thing that you can attribute to this framework is?

Craig Ballantyne:  I would say getting my book done was really, really big.

The framework helped me with, but also personally it was getting through the anxiety issues that I struggled with back in 2006, that were pretty intense.

Jonathan Levi: Tell us a little bit about that.

Craig Ballantyne: Yeah. I mean, I like to share this because having gone through it, Jonathan and knowing how difficult it is, first of all, to explain to anybody what you're going through, it's become a bit of a pet project of mine to share this story as often as I can, because I know that 5% of the population probably more now that it's becoming more acceptable to even admit that you have it.

So you're looking at five to 10% of the population goes through this. And so what I struggled with in 2006 was severe anxiety or severe panic attacks, whatever you want to call them. And it wasn't just at the end of the day, you know, at five o'clock thinking, Oh my goodness, I'm so stressed out. No, this was, uh, physical symptoms of felt like I was having a heart attack, six weeks straight, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Every single day, I'd wake up at like 3:30 in the morning, not voluntarily. And I'd only be able to get the sleep at like 11 o'clock at night because of this anxiety, you know, there's tingles from the top of my head. Down to the end of my fingers, tight chest, hard to breathe, elevated heart rate. And it was just, you know, that feeling that Oh my goodness.

What I learned of course in school was, Hey, you're having a heart attack if you have these four symptoms. So I actually went to the emergency room twice. I walked in, I said, I think I'm having a heart attack. They took me to the back. They ran tests on me and it was after the second time that I did it.

They sent me home and saying, you know, there's no physical symptoms. There's, you know, chest x-rays don't show anything, you know, heart rate monitor doesn't show anything for us to be concerned about. And through that six-week period, I was trying everything from meditation to QI gong, to yoga, everything I could possibly do.

I turned over every rock to get out of this situation. And eventually, I did. I was very fortunate to overcome this. And again, it is like a black box. Not only to the person going through it, they don't know what I mean. It's, there's something physically wrong with me. Is it all in my head? When a, why am I feeling like this?

And I couldn't explain it to anybody. And so Jonathan, the lowest point in my life was one morning. It was a beautiful sunny Monday morning in may of 2006. I'm training a client who was an overweight, stressed-out lawyer. And then I had to look at him and say, Richard, I need you to take me to the hospital.

Middle of his session. Beautiful day. I looked totally normal. And he's the guy that, you know, anybody would be worried about physically by looking at him compared to me a young man only 29 or 30 years old at the time. But I'd asked him to take me to the hospital and I couldn't explain to him why he didn't understand it.

Our relationship quite frankly, was never the same after, but it was that last visit to the hospital that was like the tipping point to get me out of my situation. And so that's what I went through and looking back now, Jonathan here, how I applied the five pillars by better planning and preparation.

You know, I was a young guy. I was living in Toronto. I was out, you know, very late at night. I was up really early in the morning. I was hustling in my business, but I was partying at night and chasing girls. I had to change that. So I had better planning and preparation in my personal life. I got professional accountability and all of those coaches for meditation Qigong, I had to show up and get their expert advice and they were holding me accountable to show up.

I had positive social support. The third pillar from my friends, some of my other friends who had gone through it. So on those dark days and tough times when I was like, man, this really sucks. I was able to call people and say, you know, can you just encourage me to, you know, to get through this? And then I also had a meaningful incentive and that was the, you know, just internally you got to get rid of this, you know, it wasn't like I'm going to buy myself a new pair of jeans.

So when I get out of anxiety, no, it was just, I got to get out of anxiety. Cause I got to get back to normal. And then my big deadline was actually combined with the business coaching that I mentioned earlier. And so I had a big product launch coming up in July. The anxiety started in March and in May, I knew I had to get rid of it.

So I started doing all of those things and fortunately, it all came together a couple of weeks before the big launch, before that big deadline and my business, I was able to get a hundred percent healthy. And that way, when the launch happened, I was able to deal with that stress. And not have it added to physical and mental stress of the panic attack.

So that's how I was able to use all of those five pillars and, you know, tie up everything into my own personal life. And that was another point where I realized, Oh my goodness. Look at, you know, when I look back on it, those five pillars were in place. It's proven that it works for so many things.

Jonathan Levi: Incredible, well Greg, I really want to thank you for sharing that. Cause I think, you know, in the personal growth space, we have this tendency to share solutions. And I think it's becoming more and more common to hear folks like yourself, folks like the Tim Ferriss and, and even people kind of on the periphery is, you know, the Shea Carl's and stuff like that, sharing these stories, because I think it's so important.

Like there is someone out in the audience or 5% out in the audience who are struggling with this and feel like, you know, They're the only person in the world. I think it's really important to hear folks like yourself say, dude, I've been there. I think it's a responsibility that we who have a platform kind of have to share the darker side of the story.

Not just because it's, you know, a great way to connect with people and build a marketing relationship, but also as a social responsibility, I think it's so important. So I really want to thank you for that.

Craig Ballantyne: Absolutely. No problem. And I mean, People hesitate to share this stuff because they think that other people are going to judge them or do whatever.

And maybe there are some people that think I'm a bit of a loser or whatever for it. But most people don't, most people don't care. Most people don't remember because they think, you know, mostly they're just thinking about themselves and they don't listen to what you say anyways. But most importantly, I heard from so many people, seven-figure earners, New York Times, bestselling authors.

When I told this story, I told it online. I've told him in other radio shows I've told on television. People would say to me privately, I went through that. I didn't know what I was going through. And thank you for sharing. And like you said, we do have a responsibility to those people because if someone, and it was a man I'm drawing a blank on his name right now, really great guy from Ireland, Barry McDonald, that's it.

Barry McDonald has a website called Panic Away and I bought his ebook Panic Away on ClickBank back in 2016. The day after I got home from that second visit to the emergency room, I read the first chapter and I read the first five words in the second chapter and he cured me. And if he didn't write that ebook, you know, if he wouldn't have shared his story, I don't know how soon I would have been cured from it.

And so I'm just paying it forward that this guy did that for me. And I'm going to do it for other people and show them like, here, here's what I did. Here's the system, you know, just go out there and start applying it, start taking those steps. And, and I didn't like Qigong. I didn't like meditation. I didn't like yoga.

I really hated QI gong. To be honest with you. I don't mind meditation yoga, but the other Qigong, which is standing Tai Chi meditation, I just hated it, but I did it. For many, many weeks, because you know, funny thing is, I didn't know how to breathe, Jonathan. I mean, you've probably talked about breathing on your show, but here I was, you know, 30 years old, I thought I was like a professional breather.

I was going to go on the senior's tour, professional breathing because, you know, I have three decades of experience and I didn't even know what I was doing. You know, I was breathing through my upper chest was short, shallow breasts. And what that does is increases your adrenaline and makes your anxiety worst.

And so I learned to breathe through my belly through all those, you know, therapies that I was going through, the yoga, the Qigong meditation. And now today, when I get stressed out by anything, I can do, you know, three to six belly breaths, four seconds in six seconds out. Nice and slow. Fill up the belly, not the upper chest.

And you activate your parasympathetic nervous system. You calm down and you can really, you know, people take nothing away from this call, but that little breathing exercise it'll make a world of difference when they have deadlines when they're in traffic, you know, when their significant other stresses them out when it's raining and they got to walk home. They'll just feel so much better with that little breathing exercise.

Jonathan Levi: Absolutely. I've learned that over the years, and recently I was sitting with my folks and kind of just like working and sitting on my laptop. And then my mother kind of looks over at me and she goes, you sigh a lot. What's wrong. I'm like, no, no, I'm just breathing properly. Like taking in breaths. I like you, you should really try it.

Craig Ballantyne: Yeah. I mean, it's just so really powerful to be able to do that. And it just switches your mind. Right. And you feel great. And it's just a nice little thing that you can share with the world to ease the stress, which is, you know, another thing that we could talk about for days.

Jonathan Levi: Totally. So I wanted to touch on, I know there's another framework as I was kind of digging into your work a little bit. Tell me a little bit about the 3C framework.

Craig Ballantyne: Right. So the 3C framework is something that I like Tim Ferriss and Ryan Holiday and my business partner, Matt Smith, those guys turned me on to stoic philosophy.

And one of the stoic philosophers that I've read is Epictetus. I really like his work. You'll find his work in the book, The Discourses, which one of his students put together. But then there's also this little book that I highly recommend to everybody. It's like my little horoscope and I read one page a day and it's called The Art Of Living. It is by a woman named Sharon LeBelle.

I've never been able to thank this woman. I would love to somehow get in touch with her and thank her for writing it. She took the big discourses book and made it into something that the layperson can easily consume again, one page a day. And so throughout that, they kept coming back to Epictetus teaching control, what you can cope with, what you can't, and concentrate on what counts.

And many people would hear echoes of that in the serenity prayer that you have at alcoholics anonymous. And really, it was so wonderful when I was kind of on that trip. And that lifestyle before I read it, but it was really well articulated and it just allowed me along with the breathing to let go of the external things you can't control.

Like, you know, if your neighbor gets a new Porsche or, you know, your friend gets a raise and you don't, or it's raining outside or you're stuck in traffic, you can't control any of that. And so the only thing you can control is how you react to it, your thoughts, words, and deeds to borrow a little phrase from the Bible.

And so there you are, you control what's going through your mind, you control what comes out of your mouth. And that means you control whether or not you get an argument with people. And that mindset really helped me eliminate a lot of stress. And so I took that control what you can, cope with what you can't, concentrate on, what counts.

And I applied that to the three parts of the day in my book, the perfect day formula. We control our morning. We control the time we get up, we control what we do first thing, we control what we eat for breakfast. We can really control whether we get to work on time or not. We control how much caffeine we have and how that sets us up for the rest of the day.

And we can really control our morning. Now once we get to work and once we get more people running into our lives, there's a lot of chaos that we have to cope with. And then using the systems in the book, you can. Conquer the chaos of the afternoon. So we took to cope with what you can't control and kind of twisted it into conquer the chaos by coping with what you can control.

So, you know, you know that someone's going to bring you an emergency. Now you can't stop them from bringing you in emergency at work, or you can't stop people from trying to get you into the gossip at work, but you can conquer that chaos by being prepared for it. And then finally the most important part of the book, the most important part of this system is concentrate on what counts.

Now we have a lot of rules and systems set up during the day so that you get more done, but it's so that you can get more done and get home on time for dinner. You can be present with your loved ones, whether you have kids or not, you can actually sit there and play with them and not be on your iPhone.

Playing with them and seeing them get dejected by the fact that you're splitting your attention, you can be there to give them a bath. You can be there to read to them before they go to bed and you can be present with them. And so that's everything that we set up in the book that sounds like work is done. So, in order to give you that freedom at night because you've worked so hard.

Jonathan Levi: Brilliant. I really love that. And I heard, you know, one of the things that I love so much in doing the show is a lot of the same themes come up and in a good way, a lot of people would say, Oh, well, you know, it's the same thing every week.

It's not it's. Everyone has a different way of explaining these age-old universal teachings, right? Whether it's the Buddha or Jesus or Victor Frankl. And I heard a lot of this kind of like the last great freedom that every human has is their thoughts. And I think that that's a really powerful message that comes up so many times that it bears repeating literally every week that you have this great, great power of the way that you frame things, the way that you look at things and, you know, Viktor Frankl said it and the Buddha said it, and Craig Ballantyne said it.

I think it's. Important to draw that out. You know, anytime you find something being repeated, pay special attention to it.

Craig Ballantyne: Absolutely you have, I have a huge smile on my face for all uses. So that's funny. Buddha, Viktor Frankl, Craig Ballantyne. Yeah.

 That used to be the number one book. I would recommend people is Man's Search For Meaning. In fact, I think it should be mandatory reading for high school students.

Jonathan Levi: Totally.

Craig Ballantyne: I wouldn't say it would change the world, but it would have a big impact on a lot of people's lives, a big impact on the way that they look at their circumstances. And so I highly recommend it. To everybody to read that book.

And then it is important to have the same message brought to you in so many ways. And so one of the things that I mentioned in the book is the power of going to bed and getting up at the same time every day. And I resisted this myself for seven years, but the thing is Mark Ford, the guy who owned Early To Rise, repeated it very often.

And we have to hear the messages repeated very often. From different people in different ways, with different stories in order for some things to click. Now, some people might take one thing away, like professional accountability from today's call and they might implement it right away. But then they might have a trouble, you know, with the big deadline and they have to, Oh yeah.

I've heard about that. That's important. You know, maybe I'll do it some other time. And then, you know, they hear it from your next guest and they heard it from maybe they heard it from Kiwi, Chris, and his call about, you know, how he runs things on a deadline. Then maybe they hear it outside. They hear it used in the context of a football game, you know, two-minute warning, it signifies the deadline and that's why we get so much done.

And then maybe they hear it. You know, someone who's going on holiday always gets the most work done the day before they go on holiday because of the deadline. And then all of a sudden it clicks because they heard it 10 different times, 10 different ways, and they realize the power of it and they go and implement it in their life.

And the next thing you know, and what they struggled with all of a sudden becomes easy. So that's why you need to keep doing this Jonathan having great storytellers on your show. And delivering the wisdom that they can. So that's really cool.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. We call it brute force learning. And Anthony says one is the most dangerous number that you'll ever know, because if you hear it from one person, the way that I explained, say memory techniques, I leave certain things out that I don't think are important, but for someone else, that is the most critical aspect of understanding it. And so that's why I always have quote-unquote competitors on the show because people will email me every time it'd be like, wow, they mentioned this thing that you've kind of brushed over in the past. And I think people can only stand to benefit from that.

Craig Ballantyne: Right. Absolutely. Well said.

Jonathan Levi:  I want to ask you, you mentioned chi gong and all that kind of stuff, kind of in the past tense, what are kind of some current daily habits, hacks, or routines that you feel help you perform a little bit better?

Or are you still doing that stuff? I have done meditation since Thursday, January 31st, 2013. I have not missed a day, but at least five minutes. And I average about 20 minutes. So I tried meditation in 2006 when I was going through the anxiety. And as soon as I got through the anxiety, I kind of gave up on it.

Then I tried again in 2009 and I couldn't make it work. Uh, you know, I tried this version where I lied down on the floor and, you know, surprisingly, you actually just fall asleep in five minutes, so that one didn't work out. But then in 2013, we were running a bigger transformation contest in our business where it wasn't just health and fitness, but it included, I guess you would call it mindset or mental transformation as well.

And I told our audience. That, you know what I'm going to learn, you know, for the mental transformation portion of this big transformation contest, I'm going to go and learn how to play chess. And I lasted about two YouTube videos of learning, how to just, you know because there was no meaningful incentive to me.

And, you know, I thought it's made would make me sound smart. I know that smart people play chess, but I didn't care. Yep. And so after two days, I quit and I realized, you know what? I still, once in a while, battle with anxiety, I can feel like this burning just under my left pack. You know, like the actual, which is what you would think is the symptom of a heart attack.

But I know that I'm healthy. And I know it's the anxiety and that's the first place I feel it. And so I continued to deal with it once every couple of months. And I said to myself, Craig, you know what the funny thing was is I was sending out some articles to our early to rise readers about the power of meditation.

And so here I am telling you, people, to meditate here. I am dealing with anxiety and I don't meditate. So let's do this once and for all. And so with all those now I had the five pillars in place. I had better planning and preparation. I was going to do it every morning. You know, I was just going to do, actually, it was just two minutes at a time at first and then three minutes and then four minutes and I was counting my breaths.

During the meditation. That's how I, you know, battled through those first couple of boring minutes and those first couple of boring sessions, and I had professional accountability. I had my chiropractor did meditation for years. You know, he's really into Buddhist teachings. My business partner, Matt Smith was giving me accountability and expert advice on how to do it better.

How to focus on my breathing. I had social support from friends because I was telling them that, Hey, I want to do this. And I'd like you to hold me accountable. And I had a meaningful incentive. Built-in which was getting over the anxiety. And I had the deadline. I, you know, I set myself a deadline in that transformation contest of making it a habit.

And again, the five pillars allowed me to take up meditation. And that is probably the number one tool that I still use in this day for holistic purposes. I mean, I exercise, I eat very, very well, and I'm always trying to improve myself in many different ways, but, you know, going to the habits that came out of that anxiety issue.

Definitely, the meditation is the one that I've stuck with. I do a little bit of yoga on my own, but it's not something that I've made a weekly habit.

Brilliant. That's another one that totally bears repeating. And I feel like comes up in so many episodes is spend the time people sit down meditate. You don't need to sit cross-legged, but you know, spend five minutes a day just focused on your breath.

Craig Ballantyne: It does a world of good for literally everybody. Yeah. And so, uh, just to add to that, Jonathan, I used to do the sitting cross-legged on the floor. Now I have to sit in a chair, but I mean, people can use something called a hollow sink, which is created by my friend, Bill Harris. He sold millions of copies around the world.

I don't use it, but I know people can, they can use guided meditations. I think what it really comes down to is slowing down. Both mentally and physically in terms of your breath and your thoughts. And I don't get too hung up on whether or not my mind is clear. I know that if I was supposed to be in a Zen, Buddhist monastery, I'd supposed to be clearing my mind.

But if something comes in, you know, what, I'll work through it. And then I actually had this little, uh, thing that I do in my head. And I don't know what a word would describe it, but when thoughts do come into my head, I picture it like my computer screen, dragging it to the trash bin and then I do it. And I hear that little sound in my mind.

And I that's how I clear the thoughts out of my head. So it's just, you know, funny little stuff like that that can help people to get focused. Again, focus on your breathing. And, you know, try and get the thoughts out of your mind, but they will come, they will go. Don't beat yourself up about it. Cause I think that's why people quit meditation.

It's hard. First of all, for those first two minutes before they get into the breathing rhythm, it's still even, you know, I have to slow because usually I'm coming from a bit of anxiety into, you know, or stress or thinking about a whole bunch of things and then trying to think about nothing. And so even for me, years later, those first couple minutes are tough, but then people get really hung up on, Oh, I just can't get rid of all the thoughts in my head. So I'm going to quit. It doesn't have to be that way.

Jonathan Levi: Exactly. And I heard Tony stumbled by and say something that I really liked, which is that's not failing and meditation. That is meditation. That action of thoughts will come up and learning just to notice that you're thinking to gain control of the mind and say, okay, hold on.

We're sitting, we're thinking about breathing right now. We're not thinking about our grocery list. Uh, that is the practice of meditation. Like if that's happening to you and you're noticing it, you're doing it right.

Craig Ballantyne: Yeah, absolutely. That's a really great way of looking at it.

Jonathan Levi: Greg, I want to ask you about a little bit of a tough question.

Well, I want to ask you a lot of tough questions, but let's start with this one. What is kind of your big, hairy, audacious goal? I think a lot of people would look at, you would look at your businesses, would look at your health and say like this guy set. Where do you go from here?

Craig Ballantyne: Well back in 2007, when I first started getting coaching from Yanik, I noticed that he would set these goals of, I want to do this by this year.

And he helped me set a goal of transforming a million lives by the year 2020.

Jonathan Levi: Oh, what? That's my same goal.

Craig Ballantyne: Oh, very cool. Very cool. And so I actually had to increase it to 10 million people because we had a big breakthrough in our fitness business and we ended up getting our programs in front of tens of thousands of people who bought it.

And we have a Facebook page of 250,000 people. And so I know that, and even some of my YouTube videos have been watched over a million times. And so I honestly can't accurately track how many people have had a transformation because you never going to hear from them all, but I know that we've impacted a million people at least.

And so I upgraded that to 10 million people. And so again, I don't know if I'll ever be able to quantify it, but that's our big thing here at Early To Rise is how can we help 10 million people? So how do we get out there and do that? And when I help somebody, whether it's, you know, in a conversation with Chris Ashenden, or my friends at Beyond Diet, or my friend, Joel Marion, and I help him and I give him a tip.

And he goes out to his audiences of, you know, they have millions of people on their customer base and they go out and help somebody. I look at it as like throwing a rock into a big rock, into a big lake and you just see those ripples go out. So I might not necessarily be helping a million people directly, but I'm helping millions of people indirectly when I work with people who are doing great things to a large number of people.

And so really what it comes down to Jonathan's because I'll never be able to quantify it. It's really just making lots of people's lives better every day through the systems, through the programs, videos, whatever it is, presentations on stage, you know, being interviewed by on great shows like this. And that's what I want to do.

Jonathan Levi: Fantastic. I love that. And I see the five pillars in there. I mean, you have the systematic approach where things are measured and goals are set in advance. I think you and I are very similar in that regard. I haven't yet gotten to the million though. So congratulations on that.

Craig Ballantyne: Thank you.

Jonathan Levi: What would you say, Craig is your superpower. That's going to enable you to get to that 10 million number.

Craig Ballantyne: So I have two superpowers. The first one has nothing to do with success at all, but I have the ability, Jonathan. And if you ever are in a car with me, you'll notice this, but I can fall asleep in a car so fast. So whenever I go for a drive with my business partner, Matt Smith, he goes, you're going to fall asleep.

Aren't you? And I go probably, but I can just fall asleep in cars really well. Now the second secret power that actually it has benefit to me. Is, I have the ability to see when I'm wrong and admit it and change things. And so I look at it as, um, you know, Epictetus talks about this as taking an objective, look at yourself and that's really what it is most people for.

I don't know whether it's because they don't want to set their ego aside or, you know, they just don't see when they've made a mistake. I just get this instant feeling of regret when I make a mistake. And so I notice it. And so I've been able to look at myself, see where I need to improve, and then make improvements myself or be willing to go to a coach and ask people for help in improving myself. And so that's my superpower is just realizing where I screw up.

Jonathan Levi: That's a fantastic superpower. I mean, it, you know, they say that all knowledge comes from knowledge of self and this kind of. The Apollo at Delphi, the most important thing you can know is to know yourself. I think that's also a really big takeaway or full of takeaways, man.

Just people that are watching with a notepad or listening with a notepad.

Craig Ballantyne: I love it. And then I love getting the show notes from guys. Like he was like, Oh, we talked about that there. Boom. I can just send that off to my readers, my listeners, like you got to go and listen to this point, you know, 41 minutes into the call where Jonathan asked me this, and this is your big takeaway. And so that's what I love about doing these.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. Fantastic. So I want to change gears a little bit, but first, before we do that, we've talked a lot about kind of the good stuff and the success story and how the five pillars have helped you so much. I want to ask. Can you share with us a major challenge that you're facing right now, and a little bit about how you're going to overcome it using the five pillars?

Craig Ballantyne: Yes. We had a bit of a business challenge this year. We decided to try and go and publish a bunch of other authors in areas that we weren't necessarily didn't have a lot of, you know, roots in. And so that was a struggle for us. So we definitely reached a lot of people. But we spent a lot of money doing it.

And so we're just trying to figure that out in our business, we still want to help a lot of people. And the thing is, is we've realized, aha, this is what we're best at. And now just in the last four weeks, since we've switched gears with it, we've had amazing success. So we're, you know, it's something that many people will deal with as they become more successful.

You're going to get more opportunities thrown your way. And it's very difficult to say no to things. It's very difficult to say no to these opportunities where you think you can have success, but then you dilute your efforts and intensity, and energy. And that is one of the things that can kill a business and also, you know, kill professional and personal relationships.

So you have to be careful about saying. Yes to too many things. As Warren Buffet says, the very successful people differ from successful people in the fact that very successful people say no to almost everything. And he's a great example. Apple is a great example. I mean, they could have been doing I watches 10 years ago, but they knew not to do that until they had all of these other things taking place.

I've, I've heard that Steve Jobs was as proud of what he didn't do as what he did do. And that may or may not be the case, but it is a really good framework at looking at all the opportunities that come your way. Don't dilute yourself, stay focused. Don't be a shotgun. Be a very high-powered rifle.

Jonathan Levi: Absolutely. And, uh, you know, memory guy that I am, I can tell you, actually, that is a quote from Steve Jobs. He said at Apple, we're just as proud of the things we say no to is the things that we say yes to. So excellent.

Craig Ballantyne: Thank you for backing me up.

Jonathan Levi:  Yeah, of course. Definitely. It's kind of that hedgehog concept. Uh, the Jim Collins, good to great. And I think it applies also in people's personal lives. So that's a huge one. I really appreciate you sharing that.

Craig Ballantyne: No problem.

Jonathan Levi:  To change gears here a little bit and get into a little bit of the practical, applicable takeaway stuff. We'd like to assign homework on the show. I'm a little bit evil in that way. It's kind of the online teacher in me. So is there any assignment or actions that, that you would like to give our audience that they can maybe sink their teeth into today?

Craig Ballantyne: Yeah, let's get him to the first one is just a quick review of what we've talked about a lot with the five pillars.

So first of all, identify what you want to change. And then go through the five pillars, better planning and preparation, professional accountability, positive, social support, meaningful incentive, and big deadline. Just write a line beside each and fill that in. Okay. You know, how am I going to better plan and prepare if I want to lose weight?

That means I'm going to do my grocery shopping on Sunday and cook my meals in advance. You know, if I want to write a book. I'm going to go and hire a book author expert who will help me write my book, or maybe I'm going to go to Tucker Max's book in a box company or whatever it is. And so you just fill in those pillars, you know, here's my deadline, here's my meaningful incentive.

So whatever it is, you want to change, do that. And then another one that I like to give everyone is I believe that you don't have to wake up at 5:00 AM. I'm not a huge fan of the 5:00 AM club. I don't think that it works for everybody's physiology and their schedule, but I do recommend that everybody gets up 15 minutes earlier than they currently do now.

So if you get up at seven, get up at six 45, make that your new wake-up time. Hopefully, it's before anybody else in your house is up and go down to your kitchen table. With pen and paper and work on your number one priority in life, whether it's an opportunity to take advantage of, or problem to solve and just sit there and think, and if you do that six days a week, Every day for the rest of the year, that is 90 minutes a week and 72 hours of clear thinking time on your number one priority in life.

And you will get so much further ahead because most people are reactive. They go through the day, reacting to everything and never get time to plan. And be proactive and proactive. People are more successful because they think, and they plan things out. So that's what I encourage people to do. Starting tomorrow.

Jonathan Levi: That's a really, really good one. And for all the kind of age-old wisdom, that's actually a new one that I haven't heard. I've heard all this 5AM miracle stuff. And you know how Elrod has been on the show talking about morning routines, but no one has laid it out. So simple, just like sit down and focus on one problem for 15 minutes.

I really, really love that.

Craig Ballantyne: Yeah. You know, I know so many people that love mornings, like I do, and, but you look at their morning routine. And actually, there was a pretty viral article that went around about, you know, the 14 things that successful people do before they go to work. Or before breakfast, it's like, You need four hours in your morning.

And I mean, I actually do need three hours in the morning before I get to work, but I'm okay. Okay with that. But most people aren't okay with that. You can't go and tell somebody who's never done any of this stuff to do 14 different, important functions before you go to work in the morning. It's just not acceptable to people.

They're not going to do it. They're going to drop out and they're going to say. This 5AM miracle stuff is bologna. And so you can't load somebody up like that. It's like taking somebody who's 300 pounds and eats pizza every night and potato chips and soda and saying, okay, tomorrow you're going to go paleo.

And you're going to do CrossFit four times a week. Like nobody's going to do that. And so you have to be easy on people and practically applicable. So what's the most important thing. I really believe. It's that 15 minutes, you give me 15 minutes, you're going to change your life. And then you're going to start to add in those, you know, 14 other things that, you know, successful people do before 8:00 AM.

And the next thing you know, you're going to be smart enough. Because as we talked about before and you know yourself, you know what works for you and you're going to put into place the best morning routine for you. And it doesn't matter if you get up at 5:00 AM or you get up at 9:00 AM. If you're a night owl, like my friend, Joel Marion, who's built a nine-figure supplement business working from 10:00 PM till 2:00 AM every day, you will live the right life for you. And that's what matters the most.

Jonathan Levi:  Fantastic. Absolutely. I want to ask though, what is the rest of the three hours in the morning for you?

Craig Ballantyne: I'd like to start writing at 4:00 AM. So the first thing that I do is I write for an hour. Then I do meditation for about 20 minutes. If I'm at home in Canada, I'm in Denver right now at our office, but I have a home in Canada with my dog.

Then I'll take my dog for a walk. Come back in. Eat breakfast and read a little bit. And by then I go back into my second bout of writing. So usually it's from like four until seven that I do all the writing meditation, dog-walking, and breakfast.

Jonathan Levi: Very impressive. Very, very impressive. Greg, we mentioned a bunch of different books, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to mention any other very influential books that you recommend or that have impacted you, which we didn't touch upon.

Craig Ballantyne:  Right? So the ones that we did touch upon, of course, my book, Perfect Day Formula, also The Art Of Living by Sharon Lebelle and then Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning. And then business-wise, I've really liked Verne Harnish's rock, The Secrets Of The Rockefeller Habits.

So that's when I highly recommend because we use that type of planning in our business here at Early To Rise, so I'm a big fan.

Jonathan Levi: Are you an EO guy?

Craig Ballantyne: I'm not an EO guy, but I stay in touch with Vern and I have gone to a Rockefeller's local event that they did, but I'm not an EO guy.

Jonathan Levi: Very cool. And for anyone in the audience, wondering EO is the entrepreneur's organization. It's a global network founded by Verne Harnish of just entrepreneurs, all running million-dollar-plus businesses. Coincidentally, I used to be the president of the Silicon Valley chapter for a short Oh, very cool. Yeah, totally random. All right. So. Another kind of practical question. Who do you look up to? Who's inspiring you right now. Whose work do you look at and say, wow?

Craig Ballantyne:  Uh, you know, I'm actually in Joe, Polish's 25K group, which is one of the organizations that I'm involved in. You know, it's like a mastermind group. And I look up to Joe as being, you know, he is the most connected person I know. And I really look up to him for that, for how he builds relationships.

You know, even if you're not paying the guy, a penny, even if you've never gone to a seminar or bought a book and you know him, he'll try and connect you with people. I mean, he just loves to help people out and make connections. So I learned a lot from him. And then, you know, three of my best friends and business partners are Joel Marion, Pedro's Julian, and Matt Smith.

And I look up to these guys. They are my professional accountability. They set the bar high for me. And the best part about my relationship with them is if I don't, you know, perform up to that bar, they hold me accountable. They give me dirty looks. They say, what are you doing? And they call me out on it.

And that has been. You know, having them do that has been the greatest thing in my life. I would say in the last 10 years, and for anybody that is a coach that's listening, you may want to be soft on people. You may want to give them a free pass, but I realized that. The harder you are on somebody, the higher you set the bar, and the harder you are in the accountability, it's the best thing for them.

And so you can't be afraid to hold them to the high bar because that's what they're paying you for. That's why they came to you. Not just for advice, but for someone to say, listen, you're not performing up to the standards that you can perform it. And I expect better from you because I know that there's a better person inside.

Have you so let's do better. And so having those guys do that for me has been huge.

Jonathan Levi:  Fantastic, and definitely some huge names in online marketing and otherwise they're Joe Polish, for anyone who doesn't know is probably, I would say one of the biggest and most respected names in online marketing and marketing in general right now.

So it serves to kind of repeat the adage. If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.

Craig Ballantyne: Yeah, absolutely. Another one, you know, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with bingo is absolutely true. I mean, it's proven by Harvard research. If someone hangs around people who smoke, they have a greater chance of becoming a smoker.

If they hang around, people who become overweight, they have a greater chance of gaining weight. So it is research-proven. It's not just a nice little saying it is true.

Jonathan Levi: Exactly. And these are words that I repeat almost every single day. So definitely wise. I know we're running towards the end here.

I want to give you an opportunity. If people want to learn more about you get in touch with you. You've got so many kinds of different businesses and websites and stuff like that. So let us know where we should be sending them.

Craig Ballantyne: I would love for people to watch a little video that I made at perfectdayformula.com about the book and the kit and the system.

I mean, we talked about the five pillars. There's also rules and creating the vision for your life and all this great stuff that has really been the secrets of my system for success. And so I'd love for people to check that out and then also to read our daily essays and wisdom@earlytorise.com, which is where we would love to stay in touch with everyone.

Jonathan Levi: Fantastic. And last question here, Craig, if people take away really just one message. If they don't have a memory as sharp as yours, and they carry that one message for the rest of their lives, what would you hope for that to be?

Craig Ballantyne:  Well, in addition to the five pillars it's to remember this, that life is about the people that you spend your time with and the experiences that you have.

It's not about money or stuff. It really is about creating memories with great people. And so you need to be reminded of that when you're. You know, sitting in traffic on your 90-minute commute to work, and you're working 12 hours a day, you have to be reminded, what am I doing all this for? And if I'm doing all of this for that, am I really enjoying this and taking time for this stuff that really matters in life.

So people and experiences are greater than money and stuff.

Jonathan Levi: Brilliant note to end on. Greg, I've really, really enjoyed chatting with you. I hope we'll get a chance to meet up. I actually want to pick your brain after we hang up here about any events or stuff that you're attending. And again, I just really want to thank you for sharing your story, both the good, the bad, the vulnerable, the exciting, and all your passion with our audience today.

I'm sure people got so much out of it. I

Craig Ballantyne:  love it. I always say Jonathan, the quality of the interview is based on the questions asked and you ask some good ones and unique ones. And so thank you very much for that.

Thank you. Thank you, Greg. All right, so that is all for today. Thank you guys for tuning in.

Jonathan Levi: All right, SuperFriends, that's it for this week's episode. We hope you really, really enjoyed it and learn a ton of applicable stuff that can help you go out there and overcome the impossible. If so, please do us a favor and leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher, or however you found this podcast. In addition to that, we are always looking for great guest posts on the blog or awesome guests right here on the podcast.

So if you know somebody or you are somebody, or you have thought of somebody who would be a great fit for the show or for our blog, please reach out to us either on Twitter or by email or email is info@becomingasuperhuman.com.

Thanks so much.

Closing: Thanks for tuning in to the becoming superhuman podcast for more great skills and strategies, or for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode, visit www.becomingasuperhuman.com/podcast. We'll see you next time.