Matt Gottesman, a Digital Marketing Machine, discusses accomplishments and what we need to have to do the things we want to do.
Matt Gottesman, founder of Systems Over Hustle, joins us on the podcast this week. What do you want to have said you've done at the end of your life? What are your goals? Aspirations? Accomplishments? This is the question Matt Gottesman and I discuss and go over today as we talk about what we ultimately want to do with our lives. We talk health, importance of sleep, and other priorities we need to have to be able to do all the things we want to do.
Matt is a multidisciplinary creative, 2x founder, podcaster, writer and Web 3.0 enthusiast. He's also an agile digital marketer and strategist by trade, with a background in helping some of the world’s most iconic brands (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy) realize their potential online. Nearly a decade ago he decided to scale his audience on the Internet to create, build and publish to the world through his own brands, as well as communicate to the masses at the intersection of culture, creativity, spirituality and entrepreneurship. He loves business, spirituality and exploring personal development and human optimization because he believe all of these help us become better people creating more intentional impact in the world.
MATT'S SOCIALS
LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattgottesman/
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/hdfmagazine
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/mattgottesman/
MATT'S PODCASTS
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What do you want to have said you've done at the end of your life? What are your goals? Aspirations? Accomplishments? This is the question Matt Gottesman and I discussed today. We discussed what we ultimately want to do with our lives. We talk about health, the importance of sleep, and other priorities we need to have to do the things we want to do.
I am looking forward to this episode. I got Matt Gottesman with me. Before I talk about Matt, go over to IronDeep.com. Check us out, guys. Check out our blogs and videos. You can also go to our YouTube channel, Iron Deep YouTube channel. We got new videos coming out each and every week, including this episode. If you’re interested in the Iron Deep Retreats, go over to IronDeep.com and click on Retreats. Check out our next retreats coming up.
I got Matt Gottesman on this episode with me. Matt is a multidisciplinary creative. He’s a two times founder, business owner, and podcaster. He’s a writer and a Web 3.0 enthusiast. He has spent many years on the Internet. If you go over to Matt’s website, you would definitely tell he is a digital marketing machine. He is a creative individual. He has a new podcast and a series of books that are coming out. He loves impacting people’s lives.
This show dives into the inner soul to the inner being. He dives into his routines and habits. He dives into his father that had passed away in 2019. He talks about his journey in the last three years of health and how it all starts with our health to be better men, women, and operators. He talks a lot about health and time. You guys are going to check this episode. Here he is, Matt Gottesman.
Brett, thank you for having me on the show. I’m really excited to be here.
Thank you so much for joining us. If you guys haven’t heard of Matt, I tell you guys, he is a creative individual. I was looking at your website and I’m like, “This guy is so fascinating and very creative.” You’ve been in the internet space for a long time creating internet marketing and working with some highly recognized brands. You have your own website, MattGottesman.com. You’re a writer, have your own magazine and a podcaster. Now you’re here. That’s a little bit of your highlights but give us a little taste of who is Matt Gottesman.
It’s all interwoven. On the professional side, I started with the internet when I was young in ‘95, AOL, online internet. I was an athlete and I loved the internet. It was two very distinctly different worlds. It stuck with me. I knew it was the future when everybody was like, “What is this thing?” It was interesting because when you’re in college, they’re like, “What do you want to do?” I’m like, “Something with the internet.” I was in international business where all of my degrees were. They’re like, “We can’t help you.” I’m like, “The internet connects us globally.” I get it. It was just new and they didn’t know how to help. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. I’m like, “I’m going to have to swim out in the waters on my own and figure this out,” and I did.
My journey has been for many years of figuring out the internet, watching its evolution, and seeing how it was going to affect the good and bad in a lot of different areas. That led me to my first startup in my 20s on the internet and it was very early. Code was very difficult then. It’s not the way it is now. I learned very valuable lessons and losses. That gave me the rest of my start in understanding how the internet on the backend works and on the front end. I ended up consulting with big brands like Louis Vuitton, Moet Hennessy in New York, Krug Champagne, Dom Pѐrignon, Veuve Clicquot, and Ruinart to the World Trade Center. These were cool brands. The business world was starting to understand digital was a big deal.
Drastic life change from 2012 to 2014. It was a two-year shift. From a personal level, I was burned out. I took major hits in my professional and personal life and had your quintessential, “Everything is removed, start from scratch.” I was 34 or 35. We got this idea in society that we’re going to have it all as men who are driven. You think you’re going to have a lot figured out by 35. You’ve got your things going and everything is all checked off your list. My list got thrown out the window immediately. I was like, “All right.”
I learned some great things from my father who was my best friend and mentor for many years before he passed. He was like, “You’re going to have to make a run for you, do things differently, own that, and embrace being different.” I admired him for that. It’s the short version of that story. It was a gut check when he was like, “You’re out of time. You’re at an age where I think you need to start worrying about the run you’re going to make for yourself.”
I took the Internet in 2014 for myself for the first time. Imagine, I’d done it for so many people but I wasn’t doing it for myself. I wanted to have very real conversations online about entrepreneurship without glamorizing it the way it is often made. I wanted to have conversations around mental health, relationships, spirituality, and who are we really. I did use some of that strategy side of me. I’ll be real about that. I’m always transparent. I knew from a standpoint of, “Let me have my own conversation. Let me build my own distribution and have my own audience,” because I knew where we were heading. You could not see it. If I’m preaching it to everybody else, but I’m not doing it myself, then I’m not leading by example.
I took the internet. I had a bunch of different channels online and they started to take off organically. The podcast came in with other endeavors. That obviously led to newer opportunities for consulting and digital. I was like, “I need to start shifting my thinking about the scalability of who I am and my time.” Fast forward a few years to 2019, my father was in the hospital. It looked like he wasn’t going to make it and he didn’t. It got me thinking. I was turning 40 and I’m like, “This man worked until his death.” There’s nothing wrong because he was very purpose-driven.
Something in me got about health and time. That hit me very hard about how are we taking care of the body that is housing our soul. How are we treating our body so that way, we’re not only reliable but others who rely on us as well don’t have to worry so much?” Time is the most valuable currency more than money. If you master time, you can master money. That’s when I started to think about time as a means to owning end-to-end control of it. Naval Ravikant talks a lot about owning end-to-end control of the time, which causes you a lot more discernment, clarity, key decision-making, intentionality, and scheduling.
I’m like, “What am I doing with my time? How am I spending it? Who am I spending it with? What am I doing in the hours that I am of my work, my body of work, and my purpose? What am I doing when I’m not in that?” How we manage time will definitely create the life that we’re trying to create. I don’t want to make it so that it’s so easy. It’s a process. I learned about life design from it because I had to observe myself in how I’m living day-to-day. When people start to do that, you’re going to find it both fascinating and terrifying at the same time. I urge everybody that says, “I have no time.” I’m like, “Yes, you do. I will guarantee you do.” That’s the high-level overview.
Thanks for sharing. Thanks for digging into your story. I was reading about your dad. Sorry for his passing in 2019. Going through this transition, there’s so much to unpack here. I listened to a couple of your podcast episodes. You preach and embrace being different. You talked about it to your audience that we are different. We’re creators. You talked that you don’t glamorize success. Can you unpack that a little bit? In your own personal life, how are you different than our culture?
In every way. I didn’t take not one conventional route. That’s not entirely true. School’s fairly conventional. Even then, I threw the playbook out the window. We’re all here with very unique gifts. First of all, I was raised with very independent-thinking parents. I’ll probably back up to that, which was, “Question everything, discover who you are, and don’t follow the crowd.” They didn’t mean it in terms of anything other than the fastest way to yourself is through you like a mantra. Always ask questions, be curious, and jump in. If you can, make some calculated decisions, of course, but go discover.
My father never wanted me to follow his route. He was a good lawyer and a businessman. He wanted me to follow his route from business but not so much as a lawyer. He was just like, “I can’t tell you what to do and I wouldn’t dare tell you what to do because then any decision you make if it’s based on me and it doesn’t go right, you’ll blame me.” He was 100% right. He was very much like, “You have to figure out what makes you tick and I want you to.” In some ways, he did because there were some dreams of his that he wanted to do that he couldn’t because of being a family man very early on. He was doing some things. He had a very supportive wife in my mother.
I was doing some self-observation and thinking about all the things that happened when I was about 11 to about 21. Soulfully, spiritually, and intuitively, every single person is doing things that are easy for themselves. Their gifts and talents are very noticeable. It’s joy and things that they like to do. I understand the constructs of society and school. It’s like, “Pick a direction, and here are your options. In each of these options, here’s the blueprint.” I fundamentally disagree with that. That’s like saying, “I want a few million of you to go in this bucket and a few million of you to go in that bucket.” There are no two paths alike. We know this. You can go scientifically or spiritually.
How do we create this blueprint that’s like, “You’re going to follow this and this is how it’ll be.” Maybe that’s a little rigid because I’m sure that they’re like, “No, this is what you needed to do to become a lawyer or a doctor,” and I get that. For the most part, I think that if we connect to ourselves early on and allow ourselves to stay in that connection and not allow others to talk us out of that, we got a good shot of mastering some of these things earlier on and carrying that throughout our life’s purpose. I know a lot of times people are like, “Find your passion, purpose, and all these other things.” All of it is work. You just have to determine what work you want to do in life. Do you want to do the work that drains your soul or do you want to do the work that ignites it and brings more of your contributions to the world?
There’s a great book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. He talks about the idea of, “Can you get rid of the trivial many to focus on the vital few to bring out your highest point of contribution?” If you tap in as a creator, and we’re all creators, how do we bring more of that of what we’re here to do to the world and in the day and age of the internet? We now can combine this idea of managing our creativity like a business in scale to world audiences. There’s great responsibility and purpose in that when the Internet is used for good.
Obviously, we’ve taken in a lot of different directions. We’ll keep that to that. I try to constantly preach, “It’s a beautiful tool that we can now affect others in a lot of great ways.” The excuses are now minimum and the output is now maximum. There’s so much leverage with the internet. You have to have a relationship with yourself, your creativity, and the people you’re going to serve.
Thanks again for sharing your reflection and journey. When you say a lot of people take the easy route, it’s all work. What type of work did you do to find your mission, purpose, and connection? What did that look like for you? Tell us about that.
The word failure gets thrown out there a lot. I don’t know what to say about that. I failed a lot. I learned a lot of lessons from taking a lot of chances. When I was curious about something, I would dive in and want to learn it. It didn’t always work out, or did it? It’s hard to say when you look at the bigger picture. I have this ideology of, “We can get out of our overthinking mind if we get into the garage and start building.”
Let’s say you got a Ferrari and you are going to build it from scratch. It allows you to get out of your head and into the garage and start like, “I guess I’m going to work under the hood now. I’m going to work on the engine or the chassis.” You start putting the pieces together and it gets you out of your head more. I always preach, “Get into movement as fast as possible because if we sit, plan, and think too much, we don’t get in the game.” The game is where the signals come from and the signals tell us what to do next.
Now to get clear, I had to experiment a lot. Around that time in 2013 and 2014, I got very heavily into spirituality and wanted to learn more about my culture. I’m originally coming from Judaism. Religion is a funny thing for me so I don’t play in the constructs of religion. I respect the heck out of all religions. I love learning how to have more of a connection to myself and God. It was interesting in learning to have this practice of listening to myself and understanding more of what’s happening internally. What do I really feel?
I met from rabbis to shamans, pastors, and healers. All kinds of different people over time. Constantly, I find my way back to myself. It was between spirituality, reading, and integrating everything I learned. The hardest part is you get a lot of people who want to learn and get advice from everybody. Anything you read or learn, you have to practice it.
That’s how I started to get clear. I started to look at my life as a whole puzzle. In taking different aspects of my life, I have to be innately curious. When you start putting yourself first, your health, your understanding of what makes you tick, experimenting with creative outlets, understanding money, and understanding what goes in the body, all these things were helping me get clearer on a direction. It’s funny we want to always put the work external and rely on the external and I’ll do this job and I’ll get this result. I get that.
It’s a funny thing when you start putting yourself first because you start managing your time differently, then your choices change. Your energy goes changes and then you have time for changes. All these things start to affect every other thing in your life that all of a sudden you know what to do, when to do, and why you’re doing it because you force yourself into making all these decisions by putting yourself first and your health. Clarity came from auditing my time. This is a great hack for anybody. I had mentors for years tell me like, “You should audit a week. Journal all day what you are doing.” I said yes but it took me two years to listen. As people, we have to listen.
You heard it but you didn’t execute it? You don’t practice it.
If we ask for help from mentors, professionals, God, wherever, everything gets delivered to us. Are you seeing the sign enough to be like, “Should I be listening?” You should be listening. It took me two years to audit my schedule. What I did is I would journal throughout the day for seven days what I was doing in any given timeframe.
What did you find?
I was all over the place. Calls I didn’t need. Meetings that I didn’t need. I wasn’t honoring my skillset, which was writing and building with the internet and tech and stuff like that, even with my podcasting and speaking. I found that I wasn’t consistent when I was eating, waking up, with any activities that were good for my health, and with my sleep. I didn’t always have enough extracurricular activities because I thought I didn’t have enough time. I found all the holes in my life in a healthy way. I don’t mean to alarm anybody. It’s a great exercise. It won’t panic you or anything like that. If anything, it’s a sigh of relief.
Most things are only up here messing with us until you rip the Band-Aid off and be like, “Let me try to understand what’s bothering me, money, my body, and time.” When you start to do these things, the fear goes away because it was all made up in your head. You were sitting thinking about it. If you could remove the fear and be like, “Is this what I’m doing with my time?” It forced me to think about, “What do I want to do with my time and why?” If you fundamentally start asking yourself these questions, you’re going to get clear. You’re forced into clarity in a lot of ways. What do you want for your life? What would that feel like?
A woman I had dated for a while who’s an absolute great friend had talked to me about this idea of your average perfect day. It’s a 25 to 27-question format that you have to answer and you go in depth. You don’t just answer. It takes a few days. You’re talking 30 to 40 pages of writing. It’s a very interesting thing. It’s an intuitive writing process. You are thinking about a full day in the future that is designed by you in a multitude of different ways. It plays to your olfactory, your smell, it plays to your sight, vision, feelings, and all these different things. It was a beautiful exercise. The reason why you do it is because then you reverse engineer your day. Where are you at now? How are you starting to create your days now that are in alignment with where you can see yourself heading, you can feel yourself heading?
You’re now the painter. You’re the creator of your life. It started to bring a lot more clarity and direction. I became obsessed with my calendar, which by the way, as a creative, nobody does. Systems thinking, time, and all this stuff changed me. Most creative people don’t want to do those things. At least from my observation and myself, it was like, “I don’t want to impede on the creative process. I wanted to flow out anyway.” Until I realized systems and time are creative. You get to create the way in which you honor and respect your work at scale. It changed my whole way of being.
Systems and time gave me clarity. It was so wild to me because it’s the least place you expect to look bringing you everything you need. When I started calendaring, I started thinking about my day from the time I woke up to the time I go to sleep. It was a process. It took me a little while because you’re figuring out what works for you and what doesn’t and you want to be flexible to like, “That felt good.” Even the schedule s getting less about what I’m doing and when I’m doing it that I have more time than I’ve ever had before, which is ironic. I was like, “How was I filling it?” That relationship with calendaring and auditing the schedule every Sunday changed my life about how am I living this upcoming week, what am I doing in the times when I’m doing my work, and what am I doing in the times when I’m not.
I definitely need to do that. I’ve done the exercise of the perfect day. That’s an awesome exercise. If you guys haven’t heard of that, it’s doing the average perfect day. Before the episode, Matt, you talked a lot about health. I know that this is something that you’ve been diving into for the last few years. You have a couple of personal trainers in nutrition. This is something I’m diving into. This is mostly a business show. We talk a lot about business but I want to dig into the connection between your health, energy levels, vitality, and everything else.
How has that been so impactful for you when you started to think about your health? Obviously, it happened when your dad passed. When someone passes away, you’re like, “Life is temporary. I need to focus on my health to be around for my loved ones.” Your stress, anxiety, mental health, and energy levels, how has this been impactful for you to be investing in your health so much for the past few years?
You said it all. Interestingly, as entrepreneurs, we often put our health last and you always hear to put it first. Once I put it first, everything changed. You become quite more, whatever that word is for each person, “successful within your business” because of putting your health first. That’s a very tough thing for most driven people who want to run. They want to build, do business, and make money. I totally get it because it’s a game. It’s part of the game of life. Once I started putting health first, I was like, “This optimizes the entire game and it changed everything.”
As an entrepreneur, a lot of times, we learn things for whatever business we go and the route that we go in. How much extra time do we have when we talk about time and what we do? In that extra time, are we learning? We have to choose what we’re learning. When it came to health and wellness, I knew that fundamentally, I was going to have to go to experts. It’s like we all say, “You have to go to mentors or coaches. You have to pay whatever for the people who are in their lane doing their thing if you don’t have the time to figure it out yourself.” Health is one of them. As an entrepreneur, I’m like, “I don’t have time to look up everything online about what should I pair what foods with. What should I be eating and why? What is muscle building?” All of these things.
The first thing I did is I went to a trainer. I have 2 different trainers for 2 different reasons. One of the trainers was like, “What are your 90-day goals?” I’m like, “No.” They were like, “What do you mean?” I was like, “I’m in it for life so let it run.” They were like, “Okay.” I said, “I don’t have time to figure it out, but I do know I want to make it a lifestyle. What I want is for you to observe my body and what I’m needing in shaping it and help me with nutrition. As an entrepreneur, I’m going to do the work. Tell me what to do.” This is where humility is so important for people. “Tell me what to do and I will execute.” That’s it. When you’re going at it from a lifestyle, instead of a 90-day, you wake up three years later and you naturally know, “I can go to the gym by myself and train by myself if I want to.”
I still have my trainers because I like the accountability. I’m constantly cooking everything. I never thought I’d be wondering about seed oils, importing meat from certain farms, and doing all this stuff because of quality, what’s going on in the body, and learning about the gut. We need good gut health. It’s going to affect our creativity, output, and emotions. We need good sleep. They’ll say 7 to 8 hours. I do eight hours. Why do we need good sleep? What does it do for us in our creativity, output, and emotions? All of these things I started learning.
Also, building muscle. I had a very minor form of psoriasis. It’s disappearing because inflammation in the body is going away. There’s more muscle in me now than there’s ever been before. Psoriasis can flare up from stress and emotion. You start learning all these things about your body and you’re like, “That’s fueling my business, relationships, money, and everything.” It’s funny because the ultimate business hack is your health. As a business person, you don’t think about it that way until you’re like, “Wait a minute.”
I’ll give you some of the things that I do. Of course, as you’re putting yourself first, that in itself creates the discernment for how am I spending other times. I’ve got this going on at that time. I train about 4 to 5 days a week with a trainer. It’s usually four days and maybe a hike with my mentor. It’s not so much about working out. As every athletic person will say 80% is nutrition and it really is. I got very consistent in eating great foods. By the way, it’s so funny because society or convenience culture makes us think that these foods over here that are bad for you are the only ones that taste good. It’s actually the opposite.
In fact, once you start eating so clean and I mean clean versions of this stuff over here, when you taste that, you’re like, “I was hypnotized. That wasn’t even that good.” You realize there were chemicals in it that were messing with you because my body will throw it out. It will digest it. It’s like “No.” My body can self-regulate in less than a day. It doesn’t feel lethargic for weeks like it used to. It’s a combination. For me, it’s sleep for eight hours. I never thought I’d be a person that’s in bed by 8:39 to wake up at 4:30 and 5:00. 4:35 is not a problem, but 8:30 and 9:00 at night.
I absolutely love it. I’m like, “This is a good day. I know what I’m doing.” Sleep and the 4 to 5 days a week with the training. I eat a lot of high proteins and fats because it works for my body. It’s different for every person. Sometimes the carbs when needed for training and stuff like that. I also started getting into infrared saunas and ice baths. The whole Joe Rogan, Tim Ferris route eventually caught up to me. I’m like, “What are these guys doing over here?” The ice baths, I’ll sit in for 5 to 6 minutes, which they think I’m crazy at the place where like, “Serious?” You learn breathwork. I’ll do heart coherence breathwork every morning. It’s 5 seconds through the nose and 5 seconds out of the mouth for 5 minutes.
It connects your heart and mind. You’re making more keen decisions and see how that could affect your business. From Dr. Joe Dispenza, I learned years ago why is getting up early so important. This is very key and it’s still very applicable. Most people will do the 7:00 or 8:00 thing. They jump up and into their day. How does their day end up working out for them? It’s using muscle memory. Everything it knows from previous years, days, months beforehand. It’s only using what it already knew because you are functioning on memory. If you get up earlier, like 4:30 or 5:00, and you give yourself that 2 to 3-hour window to reflect, read, think, plan, make intentions, and all these things, what’s starting to happen is you’re now forward-thinking your future pacing brought present.
I’m thinking through what are my top priorities. What do I want right now? Where do I need to go? What are some answers I need? What do you think is going to happen when throughout the day, things come at me and it’s like, “Matt, can you do this?” “No.” “Matt, here’s this.” I’m like, “That was the answer I was looking for.” Had I known it was the answer I was looking for? I asked the question earlier in the morning. You’re creating your outcomes more and not living in a repeated cycle of patterns from previous days, every single day.
That was a big game-changer too. All these things of taking time in the morning for journaling, reflection, meditation, and breathwork. They don’t have to be an hour. It could literally be 15 to 20 minutes for everything. Again, people I think have this warped sense of like, “I don’t have time for that.” You do. It doesn’t have to be a definitive amount of time. Again, back to the whole every path is unique. Do five minutes.
When you’re describing that, a lot of entrepreneurs would say, “That sounds like a lot of time.” You have to make your food and nutrition. You’re meeting the trainers, doing breathwork, and all the stuff. However, you said you have so much more creativity and energy to put into your business and entrepreneurship. You have more time than you ever had and you’re in the best shape of your life.
It’s so wild. I know everybody always says that once they get there, they start to preach it back to other people. Trust me, I am your quintessential. I am you wherever you are at that hasn’t done it yet. I know everybody always says that. From my heart, please understand.” From a lifestyle, you do wake up in the middle, and years later, you’re like, “How did all that happen?” I did a Substack article on systems. It was on time systems, money systems, and health systems. It was so interesting when I was thinking about the health systems. I’m like, “There’s no way. How do I do all this? When did that happen?” The funny thing is it takes no time. I was blown away by them. When you do have a relationship with yourself and a little bit of your time, you start working some things in.
A nutritionist, many years ago, made a great point to me. This is when I first started dabbling with nutrition. She was like, “Add one thing each week and remove one thing each week. Do that for twelve weeks. You’ve added 12 things and you’ve removed 12 things. Welcome to your new life.” It’s so simple. I remember she made me go to my refrigerator. She’s like, “You see that coffee creamer that you’re using?” I was like, “Yes.” She’s like, “Pull that out real quick.” This was through a Zoom call. I pull it out and she goes, “Read me those ingredients.” I was reading the ingredients and she goes, “You see that one right there?” I’m like, “Yes.” She’s like, “That’s in paint thinner.” I dropped it into the trashcan.
I’m like, “Noted.” She’s like, “That, you just got rid of. Congratulations. Drink a gallon a day of water.” I was like, “Cool.” She’s like, “Done. We’ll talk next week.” I tell people the goal is simple. Make things simple, not complex. You’re trying to simplify things. With the internet and digital marketing, one less click. Make things easier for the people you serve. In health, one less thing that affects your body. Add one thing that improves it. I firmly believe in the 1% compound effect in everything. We get so caught up in our head about, “That’s a lot of stuff.” Looking back on that list, I was like, “That’s a lot of stuff.” It isn’t, now that I’m doing it. I get how that got worked over time.
First, it was a trainer two times a week and then that trainer was like, “Do you need help with nutrition?” I’m like, “I do.” I did the work. Everything was listed off like, “Here are the recipes. Here’s this. Here’s the shopping list. Go do it.” I was like, “Cool.” Now I’m shopping. I worked that in. I’m cooking it. The recipes weren’t that hard. It didn’t take that long. I know you can meal prep but that I still don’t do. I liked cooking as a way to break up the pattern of my work sprints. It’s funny when I say this stuff out loud because it was never me. I’m having these conversations and it’s so wild. You’re reminding me to even take that and have more grace when all of a sudden you wake up in it and you’re doing it.
This probably will be our last question then I’m going to ask about what you’re doing and a couple of other cool things I want to tell our audience about. Let’s look at the eight hours of sleep. What happens when it hits 8:30 or 9:00 that’s typically, “I’m getting ready to go to bed, but I didn’t get that and this done. I still got stuff to do?” What do you do? What goes through your mind during that time? How do you handle that?
Our minds are always racing. Now it’s a lot more controlled from a few habits I worked in there. I might make a couple of notes so I don’t forget them. I then put the phone away because I don’t want the phone and the blue screen near me before sleep. I’m still working on that one. I’m human. What I started doing is at the end of the day, I try to shut off when I’m using computer screens by about 7:00 or 7:30.
A way to combat that is I’ll take the notes and put them into, “Tomorrow during this work sprint, this is where I’ll take care of that.” That’s what was happening. Before then, it was like, “It’s coming into my head. Let me take the notes down now.” I eventually started training myself to get those earlier so that way I can have time to unwind and I’m not thinking about those things, but it still happens. We’re human. I don’t jump out of bed and I don’t go to try to take care of it unless it’s an absolute emergency. Otherwise, I say, “Noted for tomorrow.”
The moment I wake up, let’s make sure that that’s worked into wherever it needs to get worked into so that way it can get taken care of. I’m not stressing about it, but I’m at least cognizant of it and tomorrow is a new day. I don’t want to compromise sleep. It’s like you’re training for the Olympics. You don’t want to all of a sudden eat something that can mess with your performance. It’s like, “Don’t do that work right then that’s going to get in the way of the sleep, which is going to help take care of that thing even faster tomorrow.”
I love what you’re talking about. You’re talking about some big things like training for the Olympics and your performance for the day. You know that it’s a vicious cycle, especially as entrepreneurs. That’s the cycle that we get into. We do take care of that thing. We get a lack of sleep, which turns into we’re not prepared for the day, which turns into we eat something we shouldn’t eat. It goes and then we fall off the wagon. That’s what I see so much. I feel like your why is so deep. It’s not like, “I want to look good.” You’re not saying, “I want to have big muscles.” It’s so much deeper than that. You want to perform and be the best version of yourself so that you can lead and impact people’s lives and if you eat that donut, you can’t do that.
I tell people, too. There are meals here and there that they’re completely off the charts. I finally understood a few of my friends that are in the health and wellness industry and talking about this sustainability of lifestyle eating. I mounted half a pizza because it felt so good. It didn’t matter. The next day, my body was back to normal. I digest it out. I’m like, “Cool.” I tell people, “Take the pressure off.” If you are consistently all week, every week for many weeks, what happens is the body can regulate better now when you do have something that’s out of the things that you would normally eat. It doesn’t even matter at this point because the things I normally eat, are a lot of the same things, better prepared or ingredients.
I tell people not to worry. I’m like, “I’ll have a donut here and there.” That’s rare because I’m not a donut person. I’ll be out to dinner with friends on occasion and the desserts come out. I’m like, “Cool.” I’m sharing it with them. It doesn’t cause me grief or pain, which also I learned from a muscle memory standpoint. You don’t want to feel guilt when eating something wrong because that too can affect you internally. That’s for the health and wellness folks. There’s a whole psychological and how the gut processes and the muscle memory. I’m like, “That’s pretty awesome how the body works.”
Matt, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s awesome material, guys. I know that Matt, you have some cool things. You’re writing a book and a series of books coming out. How can someone get plugged into everything that you’re doing?
Thank you so much for asking. You mentioned the website, MattGottesman.com. That leads to everything else. Also, MattGottesman.Substack.com. The Substack is called Permissionless for a lot of reasons. You all do not need any permission, especially to build whatever you want in this new world that we live in. I was seeing the word come up both in the crypto blockchain world where I like to play sometimes for the last couple of years, and then also in general. Permissionless is no validation or entry needed from anybody else than getting in the game. I talk about a lot of contrarian thinking ideas there on wealth, health, and happiness.
@MattGottesman on Instagram. I answer every person that comes on there through the DM, text, and all of it. I always tell people it’s very community-driven and I love it. Sure enough, people will always text me. They’re like, “You said you answered your DMs.” I’m like, “Here I am.” If people want to text me and get on, I do weekly texts through my community app, (480) 530-7352. That list is growing. Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays, I send out messages.
People are like, “Why are you in my head?” I say like, “I’m you. We’re all going through the same things.” If anybody follows those accounts, the book is coming out in Quarters 1 or 2 of 2023. The podcast will proceed it, which is about two weeks. I do have a podcast called The Hustle Sold Separately. This will be my second podcast launch. You guys can reach out at Matt@MattGottessman.com.
That’s a wrap. Matt, I appreciate you.
Thank you for having me on.
