Podcast #1,045: Undoing Urgency — How to Stop Drowning in Tasks and Start Living With Purpose

Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness

Feeling overwhelmed by an endless to-do list? Like you’re constantly putting out fires but never getting ahead? You’re not alone. Many people today feel like they’re drowning in urgency — filling every minute with tasks that feel critical in the moment but may not truly matter in the long run.

Here to help us understand how to escape this cycle is Matt Reynolds, a strength coach, business owner, and the author of Undoing Urgency: How to Focus on What Matters Most. Today on the show, Matt explains what creates that feeling of being overwhelmed by urgency, how to distinguish between status and true value, and why you can only effectively pursue 2-3 major goals at once. We discuss using the Eisenhower Decision Matrix to identify what tasks truly matter, how to apply the concept of “minimum effective dose” beyond just fitness, and why sometimes the pursuit of a goal matters more than achieving it. We end our conversation with concrete steps you can take today to start undoing urgency in your life.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Matt’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
  • Episode #826: From Novice to Advanced — The Weightlifter’s Journey
  • Episode #302: My Workout Routine & The Benefits of a Strength Coach
  • Episode #154: Strength Training for Everyone
• AoM Article: The Eisenhower Decision Matrix — How to Distinguish Between Urgent and Important Tasks and Make Real Progress in Your Life
• AoM Article: Motivation Over Discipline

Connect With Matt Reynolds

• Matt’s website
• Barbell Logic
• TurnKey Coach

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. Feeling overwhelmed by an endless to-do list, like you’re constantly putting out fires but never getting ahead? You’re not alone. Many people today feel like they’re drowning in urgency, filling every minute with tasks that feel critical in the moment but may not truly matter in the long run. Here to help us understand how to escape this cycle is Matt Reynolds, a strength coach, business owner, and the author of Undoing Urgency, How to Focus on What Matters Most.

Today on the show, Matt explains what creates that feeling of being overwhelmed by urgency, how to distinguish between status and true value, and why you can only effectively pursue two to three major goals at once. We discuss using the Eisenhower decision matrix to identify what tasks truly matter, how to apply the concept of minimum effective dose beyond just fitness, and why sometimes the pursuit of a goal matters more than achieving it. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/urgency.

All right, Matt Reynolds, welcome back to the show.

Matt Reynolds: Hey, man, thanks for having me. It’s been a while.

Brett McKay: It’s been a while. I was looking back. It was August 2022, the last time you were on the show.

Matt Reynolds: That’s yeah. Mind how time flies.

Brett McKay: Time flies. So yeah, you are my friend. You’re my barbell coach. And we’ve had you on talking about strength training. Bringing you back on, you’ve got a new book out called Undoing Urgency, where you take readers through the lessons you’ve learned as a business owner of Barbell Logic, a father, you’re also a church leader, so you’re a busy guy. And it’s about how people can reduce the amount of urgency in their life. So let’s, before we get into the nitty gritty of this, let’s talk about definitions. What do you mean by urgency?

Matt Reynolds: Yeah, so first off, honored as always to do the podcast. Thanks for having me. When I started to write this book, I started to think about if somebody asked when I was a kid, my dad or probably your dad, like how’s it going? That’s a question that’s the kind of standard greeting. Like, hey, how’s it going? Hey, Brett, how’s it going? When we were kids, everybody said good or fine or whatever. And now everyone says busy. How’s it going? Oh, it’s busy, so busy. Holiday season, busy, it’s also busy. And I’ve started to realize we’re all just drowning in urgency. And so the concept here is that we filled our calendars at this point to the absolute max depth, most of which are filled by urgent things, things that feel like they’re hanging over us and have to be accomplished right now. But ultimately, if we think about it, they’re not really that important.

And what often happens is that urgent crowds out the importance. And so those important things that really matter, that’s what we wanna be able to spend our time on. But instead what we end up doing is we have all this anxiety inducing urgency in our life. Like we have to get this done and we have to get this done. And so when you have this never ending task list, this must be done and we feel like the only person who can do it is us, that’s urgency. And that’s a problem. And so I think one of the big focus there is we have to figure out how to undo that urgency, how to deprioritize it at some point.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we’ll talk about how to do that. Let’s talk about your personal story, you weave in your personal story into this book a lot. You describe this point you reached about 2009, where you just felt like you were drowning in urgency. What was going on that made you feel like that?

Matt Reynolds: Yeah, so I can look back at several times in my life, and probably 2009 to 2012 were the hardest years of my life. I was a public school teacher, I was a football coach, I was a strength coach, I was completing my masters to be a high school principal. I was running Strong Gym, my first business, I had started that, my marriage was on the rocks and thanks to God, it’s been completely redeemed. But all of those things were going on and I was just drowning in this, drowning in urgency, I couldn’t get it all complete. And so I would wake up at night having nightmares or night terrors. Not just, anxiety is not a strong enough word. Like I just couldn’t get it all done. I couldn’t get it all accomplished. And there were all these problems to solve and it was all too much.

And so I knew at some point I had to pull the plug on some of those things. Now, again, lucky for me, I started to look at these things and weighed out what were the most important things in my life. It was my family at the time, my faith, my Strong Gym, the business. And luckily we had been blessed enough that Strong Gym was making enough money that I could walk away from the public school system, which I’m thankful that I did. Didn’t have to be a teacher anymore. Didn’t have to be the strength coach. Didn’t have to be the football coach, those things cleaned up and immediately I started to notice like, Oh, when I focus on the important things, they go better for me. But that’s not the only time in my life I’ve had that.

And so I think in 2009 to 2012, it was really of my own doing. So there was this piece of me that continued to pursue the things that I thought would make me happy. And then you realize that happiness is fleeting and doesn’t really last and that they didn’t ever bring joy. And so I was doing all these, and even stuff that I think I talk about in the book, I was playing fantasy football and I was playing poker all the time. Like it was just, I would just take on so much stuff and I don’t know if it was, I was doing that because I was masking or trying to even anesthetize myself to the fact that I was drowning in urgency, wasn’t happy with my life, wasn’t happy with my job, career, marriage, et cetera. And at some point I just had to pull the plug on a bunch of that stuff and focus on the things that really mattered.

Brett McKay: Well, and then you also talk about even when you quit public school teaching, your marriage got better, and you threw everything into Strong Gym, things got better, but also the urgency, other stuff.

Matt Reynolds: It reared itself again.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it filled up again, right, yeah. And you were even doing that, you had all these systems in place.

Matt Reynolds: That’s right.

Brett McKay: Standard operating procedures, and you were still feeling overwhelmed.

Matt Reynolds: Yeah, so the interesting thing is, if I go back to that very first time, that 2009 and 2012, I was in some self-destructive behavior in those days, and then as I pushed forward into Strong Gym and really invested in the things that I thought were very important in my life, again, family and the business and my faith and my health and my strength and all those sort of things. Everything was fine for a while. And then I realized if the gym were going to grow, we had to have systems and standard operating procedures. And so I had checklists and all the plans for all the things, except the problem was then, I was the guy doing all the things. And so pretty quick, I’m realizing like, oh, I’ve gotta train 10 clients today or 12 clients today and clean the bathrooms and be the front desk staff and give the tours and sell the memberships. And these three credit cards bounced.

Like even I can feel my blood pressure going up as I’m talking about it right now because I can remember what that feeling was like. And all of a sudden, now it wasn’t because I was in self-destructive or even immoral behavior. It was that I thought I was doing the right thing, but it was still too much. And so now you still end up in this place of drowning in urgency. And so that’s when it finally hit me that I had to figure out how to delegate a lot of these things. I had to figure out how to, I had to figure out, I didn’t trust my staff and I had a great staff of guys that worked for me, they were excellent.

I just didn’t trust them enough. And so I was gonna micromanage everything because I felt like I had this superhero complex as a business owner, I think a lot of people do. And you think you can do things better than anybody else can. And when you realize that if you can hire somebody that does it at 80% as good as you can, you can train them to eventually be better at you than it. And that’s what we’ve been able to do at Barber Logic. Almost every staff member I have is now better at their job, than I was when I was doing their job in the early days as an employee of one in a business.

And so, yeah, you can get caught up in this, and whether it’s life stuff or just taking on, self-destructive behavior or un-urgent, unimportant things, or even just over-focusing and spending too much time on urgent and important things. Like these things are just, we allow our calendar to fill up. I’m sure you’ve seen the video and your listeners have seen the video of the professor in the classroom and he’s got the jar and he puts some rocks in it.

Brett McKay: The big rocks, yeah, from Stephen Colby yeah.

Matt Reynolds: And he says it’s full. And then he puts pebbles in, and he says, is it full now? And they say, yeah, and then he puts sand in, and he says, is it full now? And then he pours a bunch of water in, and it fills up. Is it full now? And then they’re like, okay, now it’s full. And so the point he’s making is like you’ve still got your big rocks, and you’ve got your smaller things, your smaller things, and your smaller things. I’m arguing you should break the jar. Big rocks only. Like there are times in your life you’ve got to get rid of the water and the sand and the pebbles.

You’ve got to absolutely focus on the things that truly matter. And if you don’t do that, what you end up doing is filling every minute of every day on your calendar. Your calendar is a truth teller. I live by my Google calendar. I don’t know if you do the same thing on your phone, but your calendar is the truth teller. And if I open up a day, if I wake up early in the morning and I open up, okay, what’s going on Monday morning? You’re like, wow, there’s no blank spaces. Every single hour is full. Then I start to think to myself, oh, I’m a fraud. This is what I wrote about. And yet I’m doing the same thing. So I have to come back. I have to pull back and go, okay, nope, this comes off. This comes off. This comes off so that I can focus on the big rocks.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think one of the issues too, when people feel overwhelmed they’ll go to a system to get more efficient. But the problem, one of the sneaky problems with that is that you get really good at doing stuff. And so it just fills up even more. So you get really good at doing urgent stuff. Now it probably happened to you. You had these like SOPs, checklists.

Matt Reynolds: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: And all it did. Yeah, you got stuff done, but allowed you to do more of it.

Matt Reynolds: More stuff.

Brett McKay: More stuff, right.

Matt Reynolds: Ultimately, the goal would be to get the work done more efficiently so you can focus on the important stuff. So instead of filling your calendar with more stuff, you fill your calendar with important stuff. Again, family, faith, fitness, whatever that thing is.

Brett McKay: You mentioned earlier that when you were in this period, 2009, 2012, and even after 2012, you had this drive, this ambition to be awesome, like have a great successful business, et cetera. When you talk about in the book that one of the key takeaways or one of the shifts you had to make in your life was understanding the distinction between status and value. Walk us through that.

Matt Reynolds: Yeah, I think you’ve probably even seen this shift in me over the years is that there was a time when status was important to me. And I think the problem with status is that it’s all based on perception. It’s perception of yourself by yourself. It’s perception of how others perceive you, how you perceive others. And all of that can just be founded or unfounded, like there might not be.

Brett McKay: It could be arbitrary.

Matt Reynolds: Totally arbitrary, it’s subjective. And I had to change and decide like, wait, this doesn’t matter, again, this doesn’t bring joy. And I shifted from a focus on status to a focus on value. Where are my values? And I think coming out of that time, when you come out of these dark kind of valley periods in your life, it really forces you to think about what are the things that really matter to me? Who am I really? Not who am I when everyone’s looking, but who am I when people aren’t looking? Or even more so, like who do I really wanna be?

So status is different than legacy. So when I think about legacy or reputation long-term, I’m thinking about what’s the value I’ve brought to other people in my life or the values that I’ve been able to give to others. Whereas status is like how I’m remembered and like how big did I build the company and how strong did I get in Strong Man? And then you start to realize nobody actually cares long-term. And so the thing that’s gonna last and I think another shift with that status versus value is that I started playing the long game. It was less about making money today or being famous today or whatever that status was or having that respect of other people today. And it started being like, oh, I’m thinking about my kids and my grandkids and my great grandkids. And if I do this really well, maybe even my great great grandkids who I may never know, and maybe they don’t remember any or know anything about me specifically, but if I build that value system in my family and in my community, that can get passed down from generation to generation.

That’s completely different than personal status for personal gain. And it has brought about a tremendous amount of joy that even in times since then that are very difficult, very hard, very overworked, I can still do all of those things. Or even in times when people have been sick or there’s been tragedy, I lost my dad a couple years ago, you can still have joy because what you’re doing is pursuing value, not status. And so status sometimes brings you some happiness for a time, but again, it’s fleeting. I don’t care about that. I want joy, long-term, long game.

Brett McKay: This reminds me of a David Brooks. He makes the distinction between eulogy virtues and resume virtues. So the eulogy virtues are the things you want to be remembered for. Like, what do you want people to say about you at your funeral? Resume virtues are like the things you put on your CV.

Matt Reynolds: That’s exactly right. Yep. And which one matters more?

Brett McKay: This is very, we’re both middle aged now. This is a middle aged man conversation. I think when you’re young, you have that drive, that thumos where you want status.

Matt Reynolds: Actually, I think that’s healthy. For sure.

Brett McKay: I don’t think that’s wrong for a 21-year-old to have that. But I think at a certain point, it just starts feeling like a grind. And you feel like you’re ready for a new phase, and you start thinking, I’ve gotta start shifting to those eulogy virtues.

Matt Reynolds: Yeah, couldn’t agree more. Absolutely. That you start to just, again, and it’s what you value. And also, like you said, for young men, especially those who aren’t married, don’t have kids, They don’t have that generation to generation legacy that they’re passing down yet. There is something that actually happens to us, I think biologically, when you get married, you build a life together, you have a family, and then eventually, all of these roots that you put down, again, you can’t take the house with you, you can’t take the money with you, but what you can do is you can pass down the values. And so there is clearly a shift that occurs between that status and value at some point for most of us as we hit those middle-age years.

Brett McKay: So yeah, one thing you do to start undoing urgency in your life, shift from that status mentality to that value mentality. Another thing you talk about, one of the steps you gotta do to undo urgency is deprioritize it. But to do that, you have to figure out what is the urgent stuff in your life. And you use something that we’ve written about, and you were kind enough to give me a name check.

Matt Reynolds: Yeah, in it’s in the book.

Brett McKay: And in the book about the Eisenhower decision matrix. That’s something we’ve written about. For those who aren’t familiar with the Eisenhower decision matrix, can you walk us through it?

Matt Reynolds: Sure. Yeah, President Eisenhower, he said, I have two types of problems that I have to deal with on a daily basis. Those that are urgent, which are almost never important, and those things that are important, which are almost never urgent. And I think Stephen Covey talks about this in Seven Habits, and how they affect the People, you’ve written about it. And so I really started looking at that. If everything is some combination of urgent and important, then it puts all tasks in one of four quadrants. You have things that are not urgent, not important. And those are things like, when I think about not urgent, not important, I think of things like binge watching TV, doom-scrolling social media, video games, it doesn’t all have to be technology, but just things are just time wasters.

For those of us who are actually trying to accomplish something, especially if you’re drowning in urgency, the very first thing you do, I mean, no-brainer, is you eliminate non-urgent, non-important things. And then you have the things that are urgent and not important. And these are often things I think about like, I live in a neighborhood with an HOA. If I don’t mow my lawn, I’m gonna get a letter from the HOA. So the lawn needs to be mowed, but do I have to mow it? That’s urgent. Or grocery shopping or housework or just very monotonous daily work tasks, things like that.

Brett McKay: Meetings.

Matt Reynolds: Yes, phone calls that come in from out of nowhere.

Brett McKay: Interruptions, yeah.

Matt Reynolds: Can’t stand those. So those interruptions. So what we wanna do then is we wanna automate or delegate those things. We wanna give those away as much as we can. And I get it, for some listeners, it’s not always possible to hire somebody to mow your lawn or to go get your, but the groceries are an easy one. So now anybody can have their groceries delivered for almost nothing. Like you’re talking about $10 a month or for an extremely nominal fee, especially when you compare it to the amount of time it’s gonna take you to drive to the grocery store, buy the groceries. So for me, I don’t go to the grocery store anymore. And I’ve got a teenage daughter who fills my truck up with gas. I pay her, that’s one of her chores. So I pay for the gas, obviously, and then she goes and takes it. And when they’re new drivers, they’re often excited to go put gas in the car and take it up the road.

We delegate or automate those things that are urgent, but not important. And then that takes us to the quadrant that is the urgent and important things. And for business owners and busy people, executives, upper management sort of people, you often, this is really where you drown. It’s in this stuff that really does have to get done. It’s important work, it’s urgent, it’s deadlines. These are, for me, it’s online coaching. I’m still an online coach. I wake up every morning, I do online coaching. I answer emails. There are decisions I have to make in the business every day as a CEO. If I don’t make that decision, the business stops in that sector. And so I have to make those decisions.

Project management, all those sorts of things. All of those things, I can batch answer emails and texts and phone calls and things like that. The key to those urgent and important things is total efficiency, undistracted efficiency. Because what I’m trying to do is I do have to do that work, but I wanna do that work well and quick and not make it take all day. And I don’t wanna get bogged down with distraction so I turn off all the notifications on my phone or all the notifications on my computer.

If I do those things well if I eliminate the non-urgent non-important if I delegate and automate the things that are urgent and not Important and if I work very efficiently at the things that are urgent and important it opens up my schedule it opens up the bandwidth in my life to focus on the things that are the most important but almost never actually urgent so your own health and fitness your relationship with your family relationship with good friends your spiritual disciplines you’re like whatever those things are that are of the most important thing and the most important things to me may not be the most important things to you or to your listeners.

But once you’ve identified those things I want to spend my life doing as much of that as I possibly can. Not being bogged down in the other three quadrants and so that’s the Eisenhower matrix and that’s how we start so we deprioritize those things that are unimportant so we can focus on the things that are more important.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and that takes like you have to be brutally honest with yourself when you’re trying to figure this stuff out So you might think oh well, this is important. Well, maybe not. Yeah, that could be hard. Any advice there in figuring that out?

Matt Reynolds: So the very first thing I do, and we talk about in the book, and sometimes it’s a painful exercise, is to just make one big master list of all the tasks you have to do on a daily or weekly basis. And that thing may be a hundred things long. And then you need to take a few minutes, and you only have to do this once. Take a few minutes, and you assign each one of those things to a category. Like is this urgent, important, non-urgent, important, whatever the thing is, then once you do that, you take all the things that are not urgent, not important, and you get them off the list, and you stop doing it.

And you take all the things that are urgent, but not important, and you figure out how to delegate those things. And you just go down the list, and so then you go, now how do I focus on these things, and get the most done in the least amount of time? And so that’s the focus on the urgent and the important. And then it will become very clear to you when you start to look at the things that are the most important things, that often it’ll come with a sense of guilt a little bit and go like, oh, I’m not spending the time that I should on these things.

And that is often a great way to start. And those most important things have to constantly tie back to value. To the values that we talked about earlier, to your own personal core values, which again, could be different for different people. But ultimately those important things have to tie back to the things that are most important to you that where your core values lie.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Our mutual friend Scott Hambrick and your former podcast host. He has an interesting tactic to help you figure this stuff out. It’s just like, don’t do anything on your business for like two weeks and then see what breaks. And if nothing breaks when you stop doing, like, oh, maybe I don’t need to do that. So I think a lot of stuff we think we have to do it, probably don’t have to do it.

Matt Reynolds: Yeah. So another thing I learned from Scott, another shout out to Scott was that, so I do a daily task list every day. I get up, I do it on my notepad on my phone, you can actually add little check boxes. So when I do it, it checks it and moves it to the bottom. And so I have this checklist and at the end of the day, whatever wasn’t done, I just copy and paste that in for tomorrow’s checklist. And Scott says, if you go two weeks or three weeks and the things that you thought you needed to do, keep getting pushed to the bottom and never get done, maybe they should get pulled off the list entirely.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You don’t gotta do it.

Matt Reynolds: Maybe they’re not really that important.

Brett McKay: Right. They’re not that important.

Matt Reynolds: At least not right now. So, yeah.

Brett McKay: So yeah, I think the Eisenhower decision matrix is a very powerful tool to help you figure out what stuff you can drop, what stuff you could delegate, and what stuff you need to focus on. One of your core principles in your weight training philosophy, we’ve talked about this a lot in your coaching to me, but also your business philosophy and just personal philosophy is this idea of voluntary hardship. How do you define voluntary hardship and how is it different from needless self-flagellation?

Matt Reynolds: Yeah. No, I like that. Voluntary hardship is just the process of choosing hard things that no one else is gonna make you do. Like you’re choosing the thing. That’s what makes it voluntary. But it also has to be choosing hard things that bring you value. And this is where the self-flagellation thing, like if I’m Luther and I’m literally beating my body with the belt that’s.

Brett McKay: Aren’t you Lutheran?

Matt Reynolds: You’re just… I’m reformed, but, and I do love Luther, but I’m not gonna hit myself with a belt or a whip. I mean it’s right. So there are things we can do that just bring about more suffering and pain, which is sort of ridiculous. That’s why I think we wanna make sure that there’s value always to those things. And I think Luther would probably argue that he thought that there was some sort of value there and beating his body into submission. For me, the voluntary hardship, the key there is about voluntary hardship is when we choose hard things for value, it is a refining process to us. It makes us better people, it makes us better men, it makes me a better business owner, husband, father. Everything gets better when I do these things. And here’s why. Because involuntary hardship is not guaranteed to refine.

And we know that we’re gonna have to face involuntary hardship. How do we know that it’s not guaranteed to refine? Well, ’cause guys go to prison and most of the time they don’t come out better. Sometimes they do, but most of the time they don’t. Sometimes people get cancer and they get jaded. Sometimes they get cancer and they beat it and they come out stronger and more healthy and more mentally tough. When we choose a voluntary hardship, what we’re doing is we’re better preparing our bodies, our minds, our souls, our social skills, our emotions to handle things that are hard. Nobody’s gonna make you put a bar on your back and squat heavy weight. You have to choose that for yourself. Even if you have a coach, I can’t make you do that. You’re in Tulsa, I’m in Springfield. But you have to walk out there and do it on your own.

And there is something that’s like, feels very accomplished about that. And of course there’s all sorts of benefits that we’ve talked about in previous podcasts of strength training. That you’ll get this physical benefit from. You’ll become more resilient and less vulnerable to injury and things. But I would argue that the actual hardship of squatting actually makes you tougher mentally, emotionally, socially. For me, when I don’t train, I am not as nice of a friend. I’m not as good of a boss. I’m not as great of a dad. And so like, there’s a tremendous stress reliever for me when I train. But training isn’t the only thing that’s voluntary hardship sometimes. And I think often, like I would guess that a big percentage of your listeners train and do some sort of physical hardship, whether that’s squatting or running or mud runs or whatever the thing is.

You know what’s a lot harder a lot of times for us is having the hard conversation you don’t wanna have. But you know you need to have it. With a family member, with a friend, with a church member, with an employee, with a boss. And that that’s just another thing that we have to choose that. And often people will go their whole life running away from that thing that is hard that they let fear, like, I’m too scared to put a bar on my back in squat. I’m too scared to have that really hard conversation. But those are the things that every time I have that awkward conversation or I squat that new PR, I’m a little better apt to handle the next hard conversation.

Or the next time I put heavy weight on a bar, I go like, okay, I’ve trained myself to know what this feels like to put this heavy weight on my back. Or to put this heavy weight on my soul, on my emotions to have to have a hard conversation that I don’t really wanna have. But I’m gonna have it because I know it’s good and I know what’ll bring value. Then when you get hit with the sickness, with the cancer, with the job loss, with the lawsuit, with whatever, you’re better apt to handle it because you’ve trained your body up and it understands how to do hard things in general because you’ve done them voluntarily.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And it sounds like important things are often hard things.

Matt Reynolds: Most a lot of important things.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Really hard. And I think oftentimes urgency can become an addiction, ’cause it’s often really easy to knock that stuff out. I know this when I wanna procrastinate.

Matt Reynolds: It’s the procrastination effect.

Brett McKay: I just start going to email and I just kinda look at my task list, what’s an easy thing that I can do? And then I put off that ruling.

Matt Reynolds: I should clean my office right now. It’s like, that’s exactly what we do. ‘Cause it’s easy. And so we want simple, hard, effective. So you’ve heard that term a million times in the business, but it doesn’t just apply to fitness or to strength training. I think it applies to life. Like we actually wanna choose things that are simple, not complex. Like we want simplicity over complexity. And we want hard over easy because easy doesn’t work. Easy doesn’t bring about things of value. Anything that’s valuable was hard to attain. And the thing that makes it valuable and unique is that it takes a unique amount of hard work to get it.

And so that’s what we’re after. Like, whether that’s in the weight room or whether that’s in life or working on marriage is hard. Working on being a father or a parent is difficult. Those are difficult things. Working on being a great boss or even a great employee. Those are difficult tasks to handle. And a lot of people just go about even their whole life and never really consider like, am I really trying to be the best boss I can or the best employee I can? And I think those are things that we should be thinking about. We should be pursuing.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Another one of your core principles that you applied to your life. And this comes from strength training. One of the things I love about strength training, barbell training, is how viscerally it teaches you a lot of these principles you talk about. And one of those principles is minimum effective dose. So what is minimum effective dose and where did it come from? And then how did you apply this to your sort of life philosophy?

Matt Reynolds: Yeah. So obviously, minimum effective dose, most people have thought about this from just a medicine standpoint. If I have a headache and one ibuprofen will knock it out, I don’t need to take five. And if it doesn’t, if one doesn’t knock it out, then maybe I need to take two. But so the goal there is that we wanna take the minimum effective dose. So it’s minimum dose, but it also has to be effective. And what we did, so back to Scott Hamrick and I, we started thinking about the way we were programming in strength training. And we recognized that what we were really doing, so in the beginning when most people start strength training, they do what’s called linear progression. They just literally do the exact same lifts three or four times a week, adding like five pounds to the bar every single time.

So the only variable that changes is the weight on the bar. We don’t change the sets and reps, we don’t change the frequency. All that stuff stays the same. And all we do is change the weight on the bar. That is nothing more than the scientific method, changing one variable at a time. Testing the hypothesis. If I’m able to keep putting five pounds on the bar, then I know I’m making progress. And then at some point you can’t put weight on the bar anymore, or we’d all squat a thousand pounds. At that point, another variable has to change. And so we recognize that what we were doing over time with clients, and certainly you were one of those clients, was after linear progression, what’s the next change that I make? Do I add a little volume? Do I add a little frequency? Do I take people from sets of five to sets of three?

But I don’t do all three of those things at the same time. I still just do one. So then as I got into the business and the business continued to expand and grow, you start to realize, oh, hold on. Same thing. What I’m looking to do in business, and this is actually very… Talk about visceral. This is actually visceral to me right now. We have some challenges in the business we’re trying to solve right now. And I’m thinking to myself, I’m leveraging this minimum effective dose concept to say, okay, what are the things that we can do that take the least amount of work, effort, friction, et cetera, for the most ROI? That’s what I wanna do. And so that’s the concept of minimum effective dose. And here’s what happens when you don’t do this well. Often people when they’re trying to change a habit, and we can use fitness again, so I wanna get strong and look great and put on muscle and loose fat, all these things.

And so they throw the kitchen sink at it. So I’m gonna train six days a week and I’m gonna run two miles every day. And I’m gonna eat carnivore. I’m only gonna eat protein and no carbs, ’cause I have to lose the fat and I’m gonna do like, it’s completely unsustainable. Now here’s, this is really important too, because you wrote an article years ago on the relationship between motivation and discipline. And I talk about this in the book as well because I really took, learned a lesson from this is that white knuckle discipline, I think is often required to start a process, but it is completely unsustainable long term. If you want to get in shape and you start doing fitness, and it might take some white knuckle discipline to get up and go to the gym the first couple days, the first couple weeks, if after two months or six weeks you still hate every second of going to the gym, it is not going to last.

What will tend to happen is, if you take white knuckle discipline, some sort of discipline, and you’re doing the thing for value, for good, for a virtue, what you would consider a virtuous reason, what I’ve found almost always is that discipline turns into motivation. You start to enjoy the workouts. You start to enjoy the eating habits of healthy. You lose the taste of sugar, whatever that thing is. And all of a sudden it doesn’t feel like discipline anymore because you’re motivated. If you continue to ride that, that motivation actually just turns into habit and you’re neither disciplined nor motivated. It just is what you do. It’s the same thing as putting on your shoes in the morning. It’s the same thing as brushing your teeth every day. You get up, you train, you get up and… So I wake up every morning at 3:30 or 4:00, every single morning.

I don’t set an alarm. Let me be clear. I really probably wish I didn’t wake up that early, except deep down inside. So that, so okay, I don’t take a picture of my watch at 3:35 in the morning and put it Instagram. It just is who I am. I just get up and work. And that work that I get done from say 4:00 AM in the morning to 7:00 AM every morning before my family, when my family wakes up at 7:00, are the best hours of the day of work that I get. That’s the best urgent and important work that I can possibly do. I knock that stuff out usually in an hour and I get to focus on, what I get excited about is when the urgent work is no longer hanging over me, which I can often get off my plate an hour or so.

And I just get to focus on the important work. And that is how we address this concept of motive of discipline, motivation, and habit. And minimum effective dose is the way we get there. One little step at a time. So that one step at a time, it’s again, simplicity over complexity. Simple, not easy. So we change one variable at a time. And that’s fitness, life, et cetera. Economy over excess. There’s no reason to make it cost more, use more variables, money, effort.

Brett McKay: Time.

Matt Reynolds: Thank you. I know I was missing one. The most important one. The one that nobody can actually increase. And then effort over easy. So the interesting thing is you have simple, which isn’t easy. So simple is not easy, it’s simple. And you have economy over excess, which also is sort of a simplicity piece. But then you have the effort over easy. So you cannot do simple, economy and easy ’cause then we don’t have the return on investment. Minimum effective dose for maximum return on investment. In life, in fitness, in health, et cetera.

Brett McKay: Yeah. The minimum effective dose, once I grasped that concept, I was able to do a lot of, you still coach me, you still do programming for me. But I’m able to kind of take the reins of my own programming in a way ’cause now I know which variables I can pull to have progress. So sometimes it’s weight and if weight’s not going up well, I’ll stay at this weight and then I’ll increase a rep the next time.

Matt Reynolds: That’s right. Go volume.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Go with volume.

Matt Reynolds: But you don’t do all three. You don’t do like I’m gonna go up weight, rep and volume, and I’m gonna train two more days a week.

Brett McKay: Right. Right. And the same thing when I… So last year, I lost like 30 pounds and it was just minimum effective dose. Like I didn’t cut calories dramatically, I just reduced calories by 200 each week. And then if the scale was going down while I just stayed at that. I didn’t manipulate anything.

Matt Reynolds: There’s no reason to.

Brett McKay: There’s no reason to. But as soon as it stopped, I would probably maybe just hang there for another week because sometimes your body’s weird and you need.

Matt Reynolds: Water or whatever.

Brett McKay: Whatever. But if the second week it didn’t go down, okay, now it’s time to reduce calories. And I drastically changed my diet. I was still eating pizza and hamburgers or whatever.

Matt Reynolds: Probably never felt deprived.

Brett McKay: Never felt deprived.

Matt Reynolds: And then it’s been sustainable right? It’s lasted. So again, everybody’s done the crash diet thing. Okay. We’re going to the beach in a month and I’m gonna lose as much weight as possible. And you can.

Brett McKay: You can. Yeah. But then it’s.

Matt Reynolds: It’s gonna balloon back. So that’s the key. Is we want sustainable effort and that comes from that minimum effective dose.

Brett McKay: Yeah. It took me like six or seven months to lose 30 pounds. But now I’m gaining weight again. I’m just reverse… Now I’m increasing the calories slowly.

Matt Reynolds: But you’re not getting fat.

Brett McKay: I’m not getting fat. Oh, yeah.

Matt Reynolds: You’re just gaining muscle which is majority of.

Brett McKay: Just trying to gain muscle. So I mean, it’s easy with weightlifting to figure out these variables to manipulate. How do you figure out the variables to manipulate in family life, et cetera?

Matt Reynolds: Yeah. So it comes back again, it’s in weightlifting, it’s load or like heaviness.

Brett McKay: Intensity.

Matt Reynolds: Intensity volume, frequency. There’s a few others you could throw in there. In life, it comes back to what we taught. It’s time, effort, money. And so you start to look at it and you go, okay, like what levers can I pull? And this will depend on this again, where I think some of it will change based on where you are in the course of your life. So when you’re 19 and you’re broke, you don’t have any money. But you got plenty of time and lots of effort.

Brett McKay: Energy. Yeah. Lots of energy.

Matt Reynolds: Lots of effort. And as you get older and maybe you have less energy, and at least in the grand life scheme of clock, you have less time, or you would consider your time more valuable and maybe your time actually is more valuable from a dollar per hour. You are 19 years old, you’re making 12 bucks an hour, and when you’re 45 years old, you might be making $200 an hour. Well, at that point then it’s a no brainer to hire the person to mow your lawn. Then it’s a no brainer to hire the housekeeper to come in and do the floors once a week or once every two weeks. Like that’s… So that’s what we do.

We look at these three primary resources of time, effort, money, and we figure out how to leverage those resources in a minimum effective dose way that is based on, one, what resources I have available and which ones I’m willing to give up and spend. And then I lay that out one piece at a time. So in the same way that you might add a little bit of weight, a little bit of intensity, a little bit of load to a barbell, you might decide to spend a little more money on a thing in order to gain back some effort, to have to put in less effort. I can delegate out the thing. It always works that way. So it’s exactly the same thing with life as it is in the weight room.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I like that. So over the years, you developed a system to manage your business in life. And you call it the game plan in the book. You got an acronym. If you have a business book, you gotta have an acronym.

Matt Reynolds: That’s right. That’s right.

Brett McKay: It’s the game plan. GAME is an acronym for goals, actions, metrics, and execution. So let’s talk about the goals part of this first. What’s your approach to goal setting in life? And maybe talk about how has barbell training influenced your approach to goals?

Matt Reynolds: Yeah. Thank you. So first off, I won’t tell the whole story for lack of time, but this was originally kind of built off of a another business concept called OKRs, objectives and key results, which sounds even worse and more businessy and more gross. And so my team, while the concept was excellent, my team didn’t pick it up very well. And when we moved, we started to realize that what we’re doing is we’re trying to set these goals in the business and accomplish these goals, perform the actions that will help us complete the goals, have measuring sticks to measure whether we’re actually moving the right direction. And then are we executing on that on a day-to-day basis. For goal setting, it all comes back to values. Now here’s the problem. People wanna set too many goals. You can really only work on two or three major goals at any given season of life.

You can’t do 20. This is where you have to understand the concept of deprioritizing. Yes. Everybody wants to get rich, famous, strong, lean, jacked, incredible family like us. Pick two in any given time. Because you just can’t. You can’t give up all of yourself to be able to do that. Then you drown in urgency, it’s unsustainable, and you end up in burnout. And so for us, we look at, in my life, like we often sit down, even as a family fairly often, my wife and I do this at least once every three or four weeks. And we sit down and be like, okay, what are the next several months look like? What do we want them to look like? What are the most important things we accomplish as a family? What are the things that we’re doing in our church, what we’re doing in our health and fitness?

What are the plans for meals and cooking? Who do we wanna have over? What guests do we wanna have over? Do we wanna take any vacations? We look at those things and then we pick the two or three things that are the most important. And we set those goals, okay, we’re gonna work towards this thing, or we’re gonna work towards going on a vacation to Mexico or something. And we work towards that goal. Once you identify what those most important things are, and you can relate this back to strength training, you can’t get stronger and put on a whole bunch of muscle and lose a whole bunch of fat and get really lean and do a bodybuilding show all at the same time.

Brett McKay: And run an endurance event?

Matt Reynolds: Yeah. Oh, right. Absolutely not. And so you have to pick things that are going to support each other. So you could say, well, I want to increase my strength by 10% over the next three months, and I wanna increase my muscle mass by 5% over the next three months. That’s doable. You can do that. But to say, I wanna increase my strength by 25%, and often we pick goals that are just ridiculous, while also losing 20% body fat, like that’s just not gonna happen. So what I’m trying to do is pick the goals that are the most important to me and it forces you to choose both at the goal level. And then moving on to the action level. Once I know what my goals are, I have to choose on average three actions that are output actions that will support that goal.

And what I mean by output actions is it can’t just be a task, it has to be at the end of the time period of the month, you should be able to ask yourself, did I, or did I not complete this thing? And you should be able to answer yes or no. And if you have three actions that support each goal and you’ve planned this well, then you can pretty much guarantee that if you complete all three actions, you will have met the goal at the end of that time period. That’s the idea. And so then you can go from there and go, well, now what are the most important things to measure? So for you, when you were losing weight, did you look at just body weight on the scale? Did you look at scale and waist?

Brett McKay: Yeah, I did. I weighed myself and did some like body fat percentage measurements. Right. Yeah.

Matt Reynolds: Exactly And what we’ll often do is we’ll look at performance. So if for, let’s say for body fat or body composition, we’ll look at the scale weight. We’ll look at waist measurement. If we’ve got a good access to actually measuring body fat, certainly we can do that as well. But we also wanna look at performance. And so for us, can you lose weight too fast? Of course you just sit like you can and it’s unsustainable. If you lose weight too fast, guess what happens to performance? It crashes. Well, for almost everybody that’s hired us, they’d want performance matters. So they know they’re probably not gonna set any massive PRs while they’re losing a bunch of weight, but they also don’t wanna cut their strength in half. So that’s how we leverage the metrics to support the actions that support the goals.

Brett McKay: Gotcha, going back to goals and goal selection. I think this requires, you kind of alluded to it a bit, knowing what you really value.

Matt Reynolds: That’s right.

Brett McKay: I think a lot of people, they set goals ’cause they think they should set those goals, but they actually don’t want those goals. And if you don’t want the goal, no amount of systemizing or whatever is gonna help you accomplish that goal.

Matt Reynolds: That’s right.

Brett McKay: But you have to want it.

Matt Reynolds: These are back to the, it’s the big rocks.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Matt Reynolds: And are they real? Are they the actual thing that you want? And by the way, think how many times in our life that we’ve thought we’ve wanted to think that we’ve pleaded and prayed for a thing like, Oh just give me that job or let me land that big contract or do that… And then you realize like, Oh, I actually wouldn’t have wanted that. That would have been worse for me. And so.

Brett McKay: ’cause you’re probably paying attention to status. You’re like, Oh, well, that’s.

Matt Reynolds:Absolutely ’cause it becomes a status symbol. It’s more money. It’s more status. It’s more whatever. And so yeah, you’ve gotta sit down and decide, there are always 25 or 30 things I would love to be doing in my life, but I have to focus on the two or three that actually matter to me right now. And as I get those things into a good balance point, like you’re lean and you’re pretty strong right now. Your primary goal right now is probably not getting lean ’cause you’ve kind of already accomplished getting lean and now it’s just kind of a, you’re just maintaining that ’cause you hit the goal. So now you get to focus on the next thing, which maybe it’s getting stronger, or maybe it’s more conditioning and it doesn’t, whatever is important to you is the thing.

Same as in life. We look at, okay, what’s the major goal we need to have as a family? Do I need to take my wife out on a date night once a week? Do I need to spend more quality time with her? Do I need to spend more quality time with the kids? Do we need to spend less time at all the ball games every single week? Like, do I need to make my kids choose one sport at a time instead of six sports at a time, or whatever the thing is. You start to identify, like what are the things that we need to do to make our family healthy, to make myself actually healthy, fitness, to improve my spiritual disciplines, to like what, or for me, a lot of time, just to improve the business as a CEO, not as an in the trenches, just getting daily monotonous tasks done, but what are the big rocks that we have to focus on?

Brett McKay: All right, so that’s goals. You mentioned action. So that’s figuring out exactly what you need to do. Like those, is that like, kind of figuring out what the variables are or do like.

Matt Reynolds: Yeah. So exactly. Yeah. So, so you can, again, you can look at, let’s use a fitness one because we’ll stay on track of that. So for you, if you wanted to lose 30 pounds, what are the actions that you have to take to do that? Well, do you probably have to eat a certain level of calories?

Brett McKay: Reduce calories.

Matt Reynolds: Right. So we’re macros, however you’re gonna.

Brett McKay: Increase energy expenditure, even though your body wants to decrease energy.

Matt Reynolds: And so how are we gonna do that.

Brett McKay: Steps, like getting steps?

Matt Reynolds: So then I would, so the action item would be 10,000 steps a day, 25 out of 30 days this month.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay.

Matt Reynolds: And then at the end of the month, you can say, did you do that or not? Yes. Okay. Well, if you did that, then great. And did you consistently eat this number of calories or this number of macros until the weight plateaued. And then when it plateaued, you dropped it 200 every time. Did you, or did you not do that? And did you get out and actually weight train two times a week or something? Maybe it’s less when you’re trying to, did you do those things? If you do those things, you should be able to look back at the end of the month or whatever the time period is and go like, okay, that for sure made me closer to the goal or I accomplished the goal. And sometimes those goals are, we have to set, there are times where we know we have long-term goals or goals that like, if you want to bench press 400 pounds, what’s your best bench press?

Brett McKay: 320.

Matt Reynolds: Okay. So you’re not gonna get there in two months. And maybe never, [0:41:10.6] ____ Yeah. I know I get it, but let’s pretend it’s 22 year old.

Brett McKay: Okay. Yeah.

Matt Reynolds: You’re gonna set the long-term goal of 400 pounds. You bench press 320. Now you then also then have to set short-term goals under the long-term goals to go. Okay. But what can I do in the next one to three months? When one to three months, you can probably increase your bench press 15 pounds or maybe even 20 pounds, but probably not 60 or 80 pounds. And so the goal there is to make sure those goals are manageable and they’re time constrained, they’re testable, they’re quantifiable, they’re objective. All of those things need to be done for the goal. And then the actions are just basic output.

It just says, did you do this? Did you complete the action or did you not? If the answer is yes to all, you should have completed the goal. If you didn’t complete the goal, it’s still just an exercise in the scientific method. You go, Hmm, I see now that I should have also done this. I’m gonna have to bring in this variable next time in order to meet that goal. Now, the other thing with actions that people wanna do is they wanna give, okay, in order to lose 30 pounds, here are the 20 actions that I need to do No, no, no, This comes back to the deep.

Brett McKay: Simple.

Matt Reynolds: Simple economy over excess. Like these things matter, but hard, not easy. And that’s what we often don’t want it, simple is, sometimes it feels too simple, but when you really pick correctly and you pick simple and hard, that’s when we get effective. And so that’s how we pick our actions.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about metrics a little bit. You mentioned this a little bit. So how do you figure out the metrics you should be measuring? ‘Cause you have like, there’s, so like one metric could be like weight loss, or like if safe, you’re trying to get your financial house in order, debt paid down. But sometimes it can be hard to figure out what metrics you actually be paying attention to because they can distract you from actually accomplishing what you’re trying to accomplish.

Matt Reynolds: Yeah, so the first thing you have is you have your goal metrics. So again, the 400 pound bench press or the, I want my net worth to be $500,000 or whatever the thing is. But if you cannot reach that goal in a short term period, then that becomes a target to improve. The metric often is the goal. I wanna get to this body weight. I wanna get to this strength piece. I want to have this much money. I wanna look, whatever the thing is, that’s a target to improve. The metrics then that we use as a measuring guide are a snapshot picture. So you wanna lose 30 pounds. Losing 30 pounds is the target to improve. Each week you can look and say, oh, I’ve lost two pounds.

I lost one pound this week. And now I’ve lost collectively seven pounds. So you can see that you’re consistently moving towards the goal. Now, if you wanna lose 30 pounds, two weeks in a row, you lose zero pounds, you gain one or two, like, okay, we’re going the wrong, we have to change something about the actions because the metrics just tell us if the actions are working or not. So this is where I don’t actually have to wait until the actions are completed to find out if I reach the goal. I can actually, along the process, go like, if I’m doing all the things I say I’m going to do and the metrics are not moving the right way, then I have the wrong roadmap. I have a roadmap that is taking me to Indianapolis, but what I really wanna do is go to Denver. And I’m like, oh, I’ve gotta change the path. The path is wrong.

Brett McKay: How do you figure out metrics for like more kind of squidgy things? Like he’s talking about an important thing in your life can be spirituality, spirituality disciplines. How do you figure out metrics for that? Like, how do you know, like it’s not like a data you could check, oh, yes.

Matt Reynolds: I am closer to God today.

Brett McKay: I’m closer to God. And I’m about to have the beatific vision right now or whatever. So how do you figure that out?

Matt Reynolds: That’s a great question. This is the place where I think it can be dangerous to pursue the metrics for the sake of the metrics. And this is where I think a lot of people fall into, you don’t wanna use the metrics just to be something that checks the box. So if it’s a spiritual discipline and you want to progress in your relationship with God or whatever the thing is, like, you could say, well, I’m gonna read my Bible every single day for 20 minutes every single morning. And I’m gonna pray and once a week, I’m gonna fast. And those are all good things. And we do this all the time. We take good things and we put them up on a pedestal and then we miss the forest through the trees.

And you realize like, oh wait, I didn’t improve my relationship with God or I didn’t improve my relationship with my wife, even though I bought her flowers twice a week. That doesn’t guarantee that you’re gonna. So you have to be careful with the metrics. You have to make sure that the things that you’re doing are again, coming back to value for the right reasons, the big rocks, the things that you actually want to accomplish. And it can’t be about, this is a real type A problem that I can get into ’cause I’m a type A guy. It can’t be about checking things off the list. Yep, read my Bible today. Yep, had my protein shake this morning.

Yep, finished my workout, did my cold plunge, all this stuff. And in the end, you’re like, I’m miserable. And I’m still drowning in urgency, ’cause what I ended up doing was setting a checklist up of a million things to do. And the only way I can get some tiny little dopamine hit is if I get all of them done, only what ends up happening is you don’t get all of them done and then you feel like a failure. Now you’re not closer to God. You’re not in better health. And you feel you’re like, I’m not focused on the right, most important things. I’m just checking the boxes. So the goal there with the metrics is that they have to be an accurate measuring tool for what you’re trying to do.

And obviously, emotional, social, spiritual, those things are far harder to test. But you can still create habits. There’s habits you can do that you can create that you know shouldn’t move you in the wrong direction for that. And then the key I think is just to be authentic. Don’t just do it to do it. Don’t just do it ’cause you think you should, but do it because you authentically care. Do you really wanna get healthier? Do you really wanna grow closer to God? Do you really wanna get closer to your wife or children? And I’m like, do you really wanna be a better boss? Like, okay, well then what are the things you need to put in place? Or do you just think you should or you hear you should? Or people are like, I think you’re not that great of a boss. And you’re like, oh man, I should, maybe I should. Like if you don’t really care, you’re not gonna accomplish the goal.

Brett McKay: Okay, let’s talk about the E for execution. What’s that all about?

Matt Reynolds: The E for execution is just the simple daily tasks that you do that make up. So where you’ve got two to three major goals, three actions that support each one of those goals, and then a metric attached to each action or each major goal, the execution list is the daily task list that moves you closer to completing each action. And the thing that is important about that, and this depends on what genre we’re in, I don’t wanna delegate out my family life. I don’t wanna delegate out my spiritual life, but there’s a lot of stuff in business and housework and keeping up with the house and all this stuff that we have to do, the oil changes in the car, the things like that, that stuff can be delegated. If I do this well, I can actually write those systems and standard operating procedures in a business, often when someone starts a business, you are an employee of one. You have one person that works for the business.

It’s you, which means you do everything. You’re the owner, you’re the manager, you’re the technician. You have to do every system. But what will end up happening is that most business owners never write that system down. They never write that SOP, that standard operating procedure out. Therefore, they can never give it away. So they get stuck working in their business and not on their business. If you focus on the right execution tasks that will get you to completing an action, that will get you to completing the goal, then you can take those things and you can decide what are the most important things that only I can do?

What are the urgent and important things that I should be doing but I need to do really efficiently? And what are the things that still need to be done but I don’t have to do and I could delegate and I can give that plan away? And so this is the thing like the housework. Like we have a system for how we clean the house. I don’t have to be the one that cleans house. I can. It’s not that I’m too good to clean the house, but I can also, I’ve got two teenage daughters. We’ve got a housekeeper. I’ve got people I can hire. You can delegate that stuff out. I can delegate the grocery shopping. I can delegate the putting gas in the car or the oil change. So that’s how we end up using the execution list. And then that gives us accountability on a day by day and week by week basis to make sure we’re moving in the right direction.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned earlier too, that you can do this stuff. You can execute, give flowers to your wife, take back your spending so you reduce debt. But sometimes you can do these things and you’re gonna have failures. You’re gonna have setbacks. Any advice for guys? I know that can be really frustrating for guys who are trying to improve themselves. Like I’m doing everything I’m supposed to be doing and like I’m not getting the results I want. What do you think is going on there? Like any advice for that?

Matt Reynolds: Yeah, so I talk about this a lot. One of the most frustrating things for me on a day to day basis is when I’ve worked really, really hard all day and accomplished nothing. That’s so frustrating. And what I’ve found is that if I’m having a day like that, I was telling you, certainly did not intend to tell this story on the podcast, but our basement flooded yesterday and it’s never flooded. And I’d come home from a business trip. I literally walked in the door and our basement was flooded and all these decorations and pictures, family pictures and things that couldn’t really be replaced, not just material things were ruined.

And my wife was very upset. She was crying and we’re trying to figure out where did the leak come from and all this sort of stuff. And then we took all the wet stuff, there’s comforters and sleep and we put it in the washing machine and the washing machine broke. [laughter] I’m like, you gotta be kidding me. And so, and I had a ton of work on you. I needed to sit down and do business work, but I couldn’t because this stuff.

Brett McKay: This is urgent and important stuff right now.

Matt Reynolds: That’s exactly right. This is, it’s like, yes, you’ve got a leak. That’s a very urgent, very important. We gotta get this figured out. We gotta get the stuff picked up out of the water. It’s a great example. And so, all right. So the business works gotta have to be put to the side for a second. Okay, so then what do I do? So now I’ve got, I’m stressed and I’m kind of anxious and I’m trying to get all this stuff cleaned up. I could have just ended the day that way. But what I did was after I finally calmed down, I got this stuff taken care of. I sat down for five or 10 minutes in my chair. I did nothing. I just sat there and breathed and I’m not a super like Wim Hof, sort of like I wasn’t super mindful meditating breathing.

I was just trying to catch my breath and relax and get my heart rate to come down. And it’s actually, I was just looking at my heart rate on my Apple watch and trying to get my heart rate to come down. Once it came down, I was like, okay, I can get a couple of small wins. And so what I did is I went to my task list and I said, what are the things I can knock out in five or 10 minutes? And I knocked out about four of those things. And so at the end of the day, while I didn’t get any of the big rocks taken care of yesterday, ’cause I certainly didn’t know that the basement was gonna flood or that the washing machine was gonna quit working or whatever, I still got to end the day on small wins.

So the first thing I would say is it’s really important to try to end the day on some small wins if you weren’t able to accomplish some things. And this happens all the time in business or major challenges. You come up against these roadblocks that you don’t know are gonna happen. These massive speed bumps. You run your head into the wall over and over and over again and have to overcome that challenge. And then another challenge that presents another challenge and that domino falls on another challenge. That can be very, very frustrating. But if you’re pursuing this stuff for the right reasons, if you’re pursuing this stuff because of value, this is I think the most important lesson I’ve learned in writing the book and understanding what is behind the book is that we have to enjoy the pursuit of the goal as much or more as we enjoy the accomplishment or achieving the goal itself.

I think it’s wildly important. There is something incredibly beautiful about the pursuit of the goal. We knew the goal was gonna be hard. We’ve already talked about that. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be valuable. So if it’s valuable and it’s important, it’s going to be hard and if it’s gonna be hard, then there’s gonna be times we’re gonna run up against some involuntary hardship that’s gonna be attached to those things. I wanna fall in love with the pursuit. This is what I love about Kobe Bryant versus Michael Jordan. Kobe Bryant loved the work. He just loved the work. Did he wanna win? Of course he wanted to win. Did he enjoy the championships? Of course he did. Michael Jordan, who had an incredible work ethic. I don’t really think he liked the work that much. I think what he really liked was the wins. He liked the championship.

The problem with that is, is that once you win the championship, how long do you revel in that? A day or two, a week? And then what do you do? He just focused on having to win the next championship. But if you enjoy the pursuit of the goal, you enjoy the actual pursuit of that thing, the wins, the losses, the struggles, the hardships, you let that refine you throughout, then you start to realize like, man, this is actually what the beauty of life is. Is this the beauty of the pursuit of these goals that we may not ever attain? I would love to be the jacked, wise old grandpa when I’m 80. I don’t know if I’ll get there. I don’t know if I’ll make it to 80. There’s all sorts of variables that could change, but the pursuit of that goal is where the beauty is. It’s not hidden in the 80. It’s in the 60 years before that. That’s the value is the path. It’s not the snap in your fingers. And how much would you enjoy anyway, being the jacked, wise old grandpa? If you never had to work and you didn’t toil and thorns and thistles didn’t grow up around you.

All of those things that are part of just being human in a broken world, that’s where it’s at. And so all of these things, I don’t want the book to just be a tactic or a hack, a productivity hack, but it’s understanding the value of working for what’s important and not spend your life and waste your life on drowning in urgency when there are so many wonderful, important things that you could be focused on and enjoying the pursuit of those things, knowing that you’re not gonna get wins every single day.

Brett McKay: I love that. Well, Matt, if there’s one thing someone can start doing today, besides buying your book, what can they start doing today to start undoing urgency in their lives?

Matt Reynolds: I would say start with that Eisenhower matrix, man, and start to identify the things in your life that you need to purge. If you’re binge watching Netflix or video games or addicted to porn or whatever those things, get that out of your life, like get that out first and then figure out how to turn off those distractions. Everyone is in competition for our attention learn how to focus your intention. You can actually work that brain muscle to have focused energy on the stuff that is urgent and important and identify your core values so we really understand what are the most important things in your life. Once you’re able to do that, you can be very mindful about making sure you spend the bulk of your time on the important things and not the urgent things.

Brett McKay: I love it. Well, Matt, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Matt Reynolds: You can go to ryanmattreynolds.com. I don’t know if I joked with you that. I had to be Ryan Matt Reynolds because.

Brett McKay: Why I was wondering about it. I’ve been noticing that why.

Matt Reynolds: Well, Ryan Reynolds is the famous actor and Matt Reynolds is a center fielder, I think for the Cincinnati Reds or an infielder for the Cincinnati Reds And so I had to use the full name to really own the URL. So ryanmattreynolds.com. You can read all about me. You can get the book there. It’s already for pre-sale on Amazon. It’d be launching December 10th, which I’m super excited about. And yeah, we always reach out and say, hey, I’m happy to shoot an email back to you. You can contact me there. There’s lots of blog posts and videos and fun stuff on the website.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well Ryan Matt Reynolds. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Matt Reynolds: Thank you, Bartholomew.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Matt Reynolds. He’s the author of the book, Undoing Urgency. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, ryanmattreynolds.com. Also check out our show notes at awin.is/urgency. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. Where you will find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. We got a daily option, a weekly option. They’re both free it’s the best way is to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to get us reviewed on the podcast or Spotify. It helps that a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think gets something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay. Remind your time listening on the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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