Fit Rich Life | Justin David Carl | Episode 520

28:28So I like to say that up until about 31, 32, I was kind of fit, kind of fat. So like no one would say I was overweight or anything, but I, you know, I had enough fluff that the abs were not showing. And I was one of those people who tried every diet, tried every workout, you know, took all the supplements. Like, you know, I was working out seven days a week for two to three hours a day. And I was like, still not achieving the level of fitness that I wanted to achieve. And so as kind of a last ditch effort, I was like, well, let me try working with a fitness coach. And basically, I hired an online coach and working with him in six months, I dropped 30 pounds of body fat and went from around 18 % body fat to like sub 10 % in six months.

29:18And I was like, what the heck? Like, I've been working on this for like 15 plus years. Like, why did I wait so long to work with a fitness coach? So that was like my fitness transformation. You know, I'd always been active and working out, but I didn't get to the level that I've been at for the last 10 years up until working with a coach. And I know you guys say it on the show, but like, you don't know what you don't know until you know it. Right. And it's like, there's just these little pieces in the fitness journey. You know, one of the things I have, like kind of in how fitness and money and wealth are related, is most people radically underestimate how much they eat.

30:01And they've done studies on this by 50%. 50? 5-0. They've done tons of double-blind studies on this. People literally underestimate by 50%. And people also underestimate how much they're spending. So this is why most people... I think the average savings rate in America is like 5%. But then there's a huge percentage of people that are in massive debt, myself included, at one point in my life. So we underestimate our spending, underestimate our eating, and the two of those have huge impacts on our fitness and our money. So as I discovered financial independence, what I started with my fitness is my fitness coach, he had me start to track my nutrition in addition to my workouts.

30:53And what we discovered, and I mentioned this earlier in the podcast, is I would eat perfectly awesome six days a week, dead serious, like chicken and broccoli for every meal. And then I'd have this cheat meal, or excuse me, cheat day on Sunday. And when I tracked it, I was eating anywhere between 5 ,000 and 10 ,000 calories a day. So no wonder I wasn't getting the abs that I want because I was putting myself in a caloric surplus. You have to put yourself in a caloric deficit to lose body fat. So each year, that's why I was getting a little bit fatter. I was trying to outwork my diet, but I couldn't.

31:33So then pairing this with my financial independence journey, as I discovered Choose FI, Mr. Money Mustache, I started tracking my spending and my earning. So just like I was tracking my food, I was tracking my expenses and my earning. And so then I started to realize, wait a minute, if I can get my savings rate up to like 80 % or 90%, I can totally turn my entire life around because it's just like math. Okay, cool. Well, and this is where the growth mindset ties in. I was like, I'm going to have as much fun and feel as free as possible while going down this FI journey. I'm just going to make it a big game and I'm going to have a ton of fun.

32:24And I had so much fun on my FI journey getting to financial independence. And so basically, as I started tracking that golden metric of the savings rate. So for me, that was my golden metric because I knew the higher I got that, the faster I was moving towards financial independence. And in my fitness, what I learned is in order to get the body physique, the look that I wanted, I had to get my body fat percentage to a certain number. And so my body fat percentage became my golden metric for my fitness journey. And the savings rate became my golden metric for my money journey. And so I think of them as the inverse of each other.

33:09So the higher your savings rate, the more financially jacked you're getting. And the lower your body fat, the more physically jacked you look. Within reason, you got to actually build some muscle, of course, too, but that's a nuance. So, you know, as I was tracking my expenses, tracking my nutrition, these happen at two different periods. So I did the fitness thing around 31, 32. And then I did the money thing around 34, 35. And so I literally, in two years, went from$80 ,000 in debt to becoming a millionaire in two years. And then by year three, I was a multimillionaire because I got my savings rate up to like 90 % plus.

33:50And I kept it there for like two to three years. Wow. Oh my God. So, okay. Yeah. There's a ton there. Clearly you were making a significant income. Obviously nobody can just turn to a millionaire from negative 80 K in two years, but let's be clear. And I don't want, I think a lot of times another limiting belief in life is, oh, that's easy for them, right? Like dot, dot, dot. And I hate that mindset. And I think it's just so destructive in general, like, oh, because of this, whatever it is, you can fill in any blank. It was easier for them. Well, Justin just spent the last 40 minutes talking about everything he overcame and the periods of darkness and the addiction.

34:34Just because you're making a lot of money does not mean your life is unicorns and rainbows. Let's be clear. Now, that said, once you get on track, it is a whole hell of a lot easier, right? Neither of us would deny that. It is clearly easier. But very clearly, you were making a lot of money prior to this awakening, and you were spending more than all of it since you were in debt. So I just fear that people hear that and say, oh, this was easy for him and turn off the episode. That's not the takeaway. The takeaway is sometimes that awakening is essential. And like you said, the biggest takeaway is the tracking.

35:12And I mean, Justin, I've found this in the last year and change of my own fitness journey. I'm still working my way down in body fat and I'm not like fanatical about it, but I am definitely working down to a point where I'll probably touch sub 10 % in the, maybe the next three to four months or thereabouts. I feel like the tracking, it's not that that in and of itself is like the Shangri-La and that's like, I'm going to consider myself super fit just because I hit some random number, but it's the tracking. And it's for me, it's proving to myself that I can do it. I think to be perfectly honest, like that's, there's a big part of that, but I mean, I can corroborate that 50 % over or thereabouts.

35:55Like I got to tell you, like my biggest thing was something that was ostensibly a health food or people delude you into believing as a health food was peanut butter. Dude, I must've eaten a thousand calories a day of peanut butter, just like grazing a spoonful here and there, thinking that it was high protein food. And like, you're laughing uncontrollably, because you know exactly what I'm talking about. Like, peanut butter is probably the worst bang for the buck in terms of protein. What do you think I was eating on my cheat day? I would eat an entire like bottle of almond butter. You know, they had that one that was like hazelnut chocolate, and I would like eat the whole thing.

36:31And that's like three, 4000 calories right there. Yeah, yeah. But it's good protein is what people think. Yeah, but I want to... There's a couple of things I just want to help pull out for the audience. So in my first year or two of Hollywood Nightlife, I wasn't making that much money. But later, I started to make somewhere between called$150 ,000 and$300 ,000. But I was driving the Range Rover and eating out every day and living in the fancy condo. So I was spending 110 % to 130 % of the money that I was making. And when I transitioned, went back to Stanford, I ended up actually becoming a founding team member of a startup.

37:11And I got into enterprise B2B sales. And you can make a lot of money in enterprise B2B sales. But in the beginning, I wasn't making that much. I was making somewhere between the first two, three years, call it 75 to 150, depending of depending on the commissions. But I ended up working with some career coaches. And again, it's like, you don't know what's possible. And you don't know how to get there until like, either you luckily figure it out or someone shows you the way. So my fitness coach, he showed me like, dude, track your nutrition, follow an actual workout program, hit these macros, get this much protein, take advantage of progressive overload.

37:57and he gave me that plan. And in six months, I was like, whoa, I've never been so jacked in my life. And then when I was working with these career coaches, at the beginning of my FI journey, they're like, Justin, in the Bay Area and enterprise sales, you can make$500 to a million a year. And I was like, at the time, making$100,$150. And I was like, what? You can? And they're like, absolutely. You know what I mean? That's what I made. I have a bunch of friends who make that, da-da-da. And they're like, you have the skill set, you have the charisma, you have the experience, you can do this, Justin.

38:33And we'll show you how. We'll show you how to negotiate your employee agreement to make sure that you're getting commissions that will be uncapped so that you can get to this rate. And basically, after working with them, I went from 150 ,000 a year, then making over 400 ,000 a year to then making over 700 ,000 a year, then to like my peak year, I made almost$900 ,000 in a year. And this coincided, those three years coincided with my discovery of financial independence. So that Range Rover that I had, even though I was making more and more money, I was like, I did analysis, realized that I'd spent$7 ,200 on repairs and maintenance in two years on that Range Rover.

39:17And I was like, screw this. And I sold it, got a Prius. And instead of moving into the fancy home, I stayed in the crappy two-bedroom house that I was renting as a student who was returning to finish up at Stanford. So I stayed there for an additional, call it three to five years after discovering financial independence so that I could keep my costs as low as possible. So I'd optimized my housing, I'd optimized my car expense. And then I also decided I'm just not going to eat out anymore for the foreseeable future. So I literally didn't go out or pay for a restaurant meal for two years. And this is when I'm making multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars.

40:01I was like, no, my highest excitement is my savings rate and investing like a beast. And so that's why I think it's so important to have mentors, coaches, people who can show you what's possible. And like my kind of current thing for myself, this is like my rule is if I've been talking about something, thinking about something or saying I'm going to do something or trying something for like three to six months, and I haven't got traction, the problem is me. And that's when I need to hire a professional to help me get out of that. So I actually did that with my podcast, I talked about having a podcast for literally probably 8 to 10 years.

40:46And I'm a smart person. I can figure out how to do podcasts. But there was something holding me back. And I worked with this EFT coach, which is emotional freedom technique. It's a type of somatic therapy. And I hired him to literally just hold me accountable to working through whatever was holding me back from launching my own podcast. And part of EFT is releasing childhood trauma. And so my parents separated because of money. We were kind of like lower middle income. I was on the free lunch program. And basically, working with him, I uncovered this subconscious limiting belief that I was completely unaware of.

41:28And that subconscious limiting belief, it sounds crazy when I say it out loud because it doesn't make any sense. But most subconscious living beliefs, when you say them out loud, they actually don't make any sense at this point in your life. But that subconscious belief that I discovered was if I start a podcast where I talk about my success and I talk about financial independence and money and stuff, my parents won't love me because I am so much more successful than them, which is crazy. And maybe some people have parents to like, if you become more successful, they won't love you. But like, with that coach, I was like, Oh, my God, I even know that was there.

42:07So I was scared. There was something inside of me that I was unaware of that was holding me back from actually following through on getting this podcast out in the world. And then basically, I went, I had a very like, awesome healing conversation with both my parents. And they're like, we want you to like, share your success with the world. We want you to empower other people on their money journey, on their fitness journey, like go do it. And removing that limiting belief was like what I had to remove in order to take that next step in my life. And so the point that I'm making is if you're not getting traction in a certain area of your life, and you've been talking about it, thinking about it, maybe even taking action, but not getting any traction for three to six months, then get help.

42:51Whether it's a coach, a mentor, some sort of outside thing that's going to hold you accountable to like stepping up and through to that next iteration, the next evolution that's going to empower you to do whatever inner work healing that you need to do to get out of your own way. Like, please do that. And there's no right or wrong way to do it. Some people can read a book and have a transformation. But like, I know tons of people who read lots of books, and they're in the same exact place that they were two, three, four, five, 10 years ago. Yeah, that's for damn sure. And yeah, I mean, that's why I focus so specifically on this podcast on actionable takeaways, right?

43:28Because I don't want people passively taking this in. We're all wasting our time, us creating this and you listening to this, if you're not taking something away from it and implementing it in your life, right? And one of the interesting through lines of your story is this hiring coaches. I think, frankly, a lot of people in the FI community, and I hate painting these broad brushes, but I feel like this is fair. We're DIYers. We pride ourselves on being DIYers. And I think it's just like, in a lot of cases, it's just like the epitome of Pennywise pound foolish. I can figure this out myself. There's YouTube and there's podcasts and I can figure it out.

44:10But that's all well and good. I mean, you probably can. You know, let's be clear. You probably can. But Justin, like you said, maybe three to six months that's a pretty good back of the envelope of like, hey, if you've been talking about something for that long and you actually want to do it because you need to be honest with yourself, right? Like there's a lot of ways that we can delude ourselves. But if you genuinely want something and there's just something, some little block holding you back, maybe it is time to start investigating hiring someone. And Justin, like you said, there are coaches of all stripes and sizes and types and costs and whatever, right?

44:47Yep. A hundred percent. And that's why I think three to six months is a good rule of thumb because it's like, yeah, try to do it on your own. A hundred percent. Like it's awesome to figure out things on your own. And like many of the people listening to this, you have made significant progress on your financial independence journey. But what about another part of your life? Maybe that's your relationship. Maybe that's your fitness. Maybe that's, I don't know, the side hustle that you want to start because you hate your job, but it's powering you to financial independence. So it doesn't matter.

45:19Me and my wife has worked with relationship coaches. Literally, part of our vows, this is how committed we are to transformation, is that we're always doing the work individually and collectively. So that means that we are either getting coaching, getting therapy, or taking a course, or doing some sort of thing that's growing us in the areas that we need to grow, whether that's our relationship, whether that's our mental health, whether that's our physical health. And so just having that commitment to growth, and this is like kind of the part of the theme of this episode, is that growth mindset is committing to the growth journey.

45:57and I'm all for do it yourself, like DIY. But like, if you're not getting that traction, right? Because the thing to me is at the end of your life, if you're like, oh, what if I'd actually done that thing that I had been talking about and thinking about for decades? Would I have been like at the end of my life so much happier with my life versus I never really tried to do what I wanted. And like, therefore, I have some regrets at the end of my life. Yeah, that's a good way of framing a lot of these decisions that we make, right? It's like, I think you really focus on what's important in life when you actually do that.

46:38I mean, that's an interesting exercise that I think a lot of people might be a little scared of, right? It's like that deathbed test. But that can be really powerful, like incredibly, incredibly powerful. And Justin, I wanted to just kind of pivot back just real quick to the fitness side. So I want everybody to be clear that we're not talking about like being crazy hardcore and starving yourself and just worried about numbers. Like that is not what either of us believe or espouse in any way, shape or form. I think fitness and certainly body weight can be fraught with peril sometimes. So we are not talking as medical advisors here in any way, shape or form, but just two guys who have kind of really been on a journey.

47:20And I think it is very fair to say that in my own experience, tracking is everything in three different ways. So it's tracking my workouts because otherwise you just show up and you just do random stuff and it's suboptimal and you just kind of leave before you get a decent workout in. It's tracking my calories and my protein. So that's kind of the second leg of the stool. and tracking my steps, which is really, frankly, just a proxy for movement. There's nothing inherent about walking per se. It's just, if we're honest with ourselves, I think most people, most Americans, if I had to hazard a guess, take well less than 4 ,000 steps a day.

48:07I think without going out of your way, that's kind of like a natural cap for most people, just being around the house. And I know it sounds like a crazy low number, but I mean, I tracked it for a while and I'm like, I consider myself a really active and fit guy. And without taking concerted walks, I was under definitely under 5 ,000 steps almost every single day. I mean, Justin, I kid you not every single day. So there's nothing magical about 10 ,000 steps per se. You'll hear that number thrown around a lot, but it's directionally accurate for, oh man, I had to go from my normal three to 5 ,000 steps today to 10 ,000.

48:48That means I had to take a 45 minute walk or two 25 minute walks, whatever it is. I had to actually get out and do that, put on my shoes and go take a 25 minute walk in the morning and in the afternoon. That's a big deal. And when you do that day after day, week after week, year after year, good things are going to happen. 100%. So two things. One, what gets measured gets managed, empowered and manifested. So I'm a firm believer in like, if you want to make a transformation in a particular area of your life, track it. You can't track everything in life. I mean, we're getting more and more tools.

49:24Like I wear multiple trackers and I track a lot of things. But like, you can't track everything in your life. But for the areas of your life that you want to transform, you have to start to track like the golden metrics, you know, the activities and the results that are going to move you towards your goals. And this is like circling back to the whole idea of like systems. So like, what is the system and what are the activities or things that you need to track to achieve that goal? And you build that system. And so with fitness, like everyone here who's on the financial independence journey without a doubt, almost every single person who achieves financial independence, they tracked their money.

50:05There are some lucky people win the lotto or they just earn so much freaking money and they are naturally frugal that they don't track. But I would argue 95 % of people who achieve financial independence did it through tracking their expenses and their income. And so if you want to move the needle in your fitness, you got to track something. Like Brad said, track your nutrition, track your macros, track your workouts. So Brad, you're 100 % right. I've done research on this. The average American takes 3 ,000 to 4 ,000 steps a day, 3 ,000 to 4 ,000, which is like... I nailed that. Yeah, you totally nailed it.

50:45And so one of my secret strategies is I get 10 ,000 to 20 ,000 steps a day, and I often average 15 ,000 to 20 ,000. But I do that because I've intentionally set a goal of getting 10 to 20 ,000. And I have built these little systems into my life. So for example, I have an adjustable desk and I have a bike chair. So I literally take my tracker off my wrist and I put it on my ankle and I track my steps. And so I can just get an extra 5 to 10 ,000 steps while I'm working on emails, working on work, doing whatever. it's just an easy way for me to be significantly more fit than the average person because I've built these little systems into my life including like also going for like you know short walks like throughout the day and so I just think you know it's so powerful to track things and just pick an area your life that you want to improve figure out what are the like metrics that you should be tracking and so for me like one of my long-term goals was to like have that physique that six pack, etc.

51:53That's why I started tracking my body fat. So I use a withing scale. It's just like an at home scale cost like 70 to 100 bucks on Amazon, depending on if it's on sale or not. And it can give you a body fat reading. Now, the accuracy of it is different for everybody, because you have different physiology. But I've compared it, I've gone and got a DEXA scan, which is very accurate. And for me, a withing scale is within 1 % of my true body fat, according to a DEXA. So for me, I don't really care what the withing scale says, as long as I'm trending in the direction that I want to go. And that feedback loop of stepping on the scale each day, seeing what my body fat is, is like, okay, cool.

52:36Am I trending over 10 % and I need to dial my nutrition back in? Or am I like trending in the direction that I want to go? So like, cool, keep doing what you're doing. Keep getting the 10 to 20 ,000 steps. Keep hitting your macros. You're going good. And it's that system that keeps me like super fit year round and has for the last 10 years. Yeah, the system, right? Like it is all about that system. And again, what's cool about this is, Justin, there are probably those crazy people who are like, oh, being on that bike, that's not a real step. But that is missing the whole freaking point. 100%. So it radically increases my NEAT, non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

53:19So like maybe it doesn't burn quite as much calories as like physically walking. But if my NEAT is call it like 30, 50 % higher because I spent 90 minutes pedaling, on average, I'm going to be significantly more fit than other people just because my NEAT NEAT is so much higher. And as a fitness coach, all the people I know who are super fit, they just move so much more than normal people. They literally all get 10 ,000 to 20 ,000 steps without a doubt. They just do stuff. They live a lifestyle of fitness, right? And so I think just like you live a lifestyle of financial independence, you can also live a lifestyle of fitness.

54:02And the two can go together beautifully because as we've talked throughout the show, the principles translate so easily. like if you've mastered your money or you're on an incredible upward journey of getting to financial independence, just take those same principles of tracking your expenses, tracking your income, targeting that good savings rate, and then start tracking your nutrition, tracking your workouts, tracking your body fat. And like, I'm so passionate about this stuff. Like I have a free four day workout program. So like, if you're not actually following a workout program, like you need to follow an actual workout program or you're just going to look exactly the same or worse like a year from now.

54:41So you can go to fitrichlifecoaching.com slash workout to get that. And then the other thing, because it was such a huge critical part of my money journey was tracking my savings rate. So I have a free savings rate money tracker that you can download at fitrichlifecoaching.com slash tracker. And like, if you need some systems, boom, two free systems you can implement to start to radically transform your fitness and your wealth. Yeah, Justin, that's awesome. We will definitely put those two links in our show notes. So if anybody wants, obviously, it's funny, I listen so avidly to podcasts, Justin, as you certainly do.

55:20And I realized that a lot of people don't check the show notes or don't even realize they can find them in their podcast player. They don't have to like go to our website. Like, yeah, that's an easy way to do it. But like, it's just on your podcast player. So whenever you hear somebody talk about it, go to the show notes. It actually really does help because you don't have to remember that URL. You can just click on the link. So that's just my podcasting public service announcement of the day. But that kind of feels like a really good spot to end this. But I'd love to hear, do you have any final thoughts, any way to encapsulate this?

55:52A hundred percent. To kind of illustrate the theme of this podcast episode, which has really been about this growth mindset. I have these three principles for continuous growth. And it's just something I keep in my mind. And if you reflect on kind of the journey that I've shared with you, you'll be like, oh, this makes so much sense. And if you just listen to it and think about it, you're like, oh, of course. And some of these, you know, but the first principle is you are the average of the five to 10, 20 people you spend the most time and energy with. And these people, you can spend time with them.

56:25Like me and Brad are connecting right now, like virtually, you don't have to be in person with them, but do you interact with them, you know, through social media, through phone calls, through DMS, et cetera. So that's principle one. The second principle is your product of your environment. So this includes where you spend your time physically, you know, your workplace, where you live, offline communities, as well as online communities. So this is why like in order to transform my life and create growth, I got out of Hollywood and I went back to Stanford. And that like was a radical transformation.

57:00But like you don't have to like leave a city. You could literally like change jobs. You could join a CrossFit gym. Like you could literally just change your environment in so many different ways. So you are a product of your environment is the second principle. And the third principle is you are what you consume. And this includes not only food, but as well as information, social media, podcasts, books, television, movies, music, etc. So if you take those three principles, you are the average, call it the five people you spend the most time and energy with. You are a product of your environment and you are what you consume.

57:35And you optimize those for growth. You can't help but go through exponential growth in your own life. That is the perfect way to leave this, Justin. I absolutely love it. Like you said, you have those two resources. We'll link that up in the show notes. People can find you both through fitrichlifecoaching.com and also you have fitrichlife.com where people can find your podcast and newsletter. The podcast is great. It's just no surprise called Fit Rich Life. And yeah, anywhere else you want to send people or is that pretty sufficient? Yeah, most active on Instagram. So at Justin David Carl on Instagram.

58:12But really, like I'm on all the socials. It's Justin David Carl everywhere. Twitter, X, threads, etc. etc. So yeah, thank you so much, Brad, for having me on the show. Truly, this show has been a fundamental piece of my Phi awakening and Phi journey. So it's truly been an honor to be here with you today. Yeah, that's amazing. And thanks for obviously you being part of our community. I know you were extremely integral in the Choose a Phi Stanford slash Bay Area group. And yeah, that is what this is all about, right? It's about us listening. It's about us taking this in. It's about us taking action and being part of the community.

58:50So a big thank you. Thank you for listening to today's show and for being part of the Chooseify community. If you haven't already, the best ways to get involved are first subscribe to the podcast. So you're listening to this on a podcast player and just hit subscribe and then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. I actually sit down every Monday and write this by hand and I send it out Tuesday morning. So just head over to choosefi.com slash subscribe. And it's really, really easy to get on the newsletter list right there. And I would greatly appreciate it. It's the best way to get in touch with me.

59:24You can actually just hit reply to any of those emails and it comes directly to my inbox. So that's the way that I keep a pulse of the community and how we keep this the ultimate crowdsource personal finance show. And finally, if you're looking to join an in real life community. We have Chooseify local groups in 300 plus cities all around the world. So head to chooseify.com slash local, and you'll find a list of all of those cities in 20 plus countries all across the world. And if you're just getting started with FI, or you have a family member or friend who you think would be interested, two easy ways.

59:58Chooseify episode 100 is kind of our welcome to the FI community. And even though it's a couple years old at this point, it still stands up and it's a really great just starting point to get an understanding of what is financial independence what are we doing here why are we looking to live a more intentional life where we save money and use it as a springboard to live a better life and then choose if i created a financial independence 101 course that's entirely free just head to choose if i.com fi 101 and again thanks for listening

1:00:36Thank you.