How to Achieve Longevity as a Creator and Entrepreneur with Abel James

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire! Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like I Digress. Today, we'll be breaking down how to achieve longevity as a creator and entrepreneur. To drop these value bombs, I brought Abel James and the EO Fire Studios. Abel is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning podcasting, musician, and top virtual reality creator. In today's foundation, we'll talk about change being all around us, how to remain nimble, how to balance performance with longevity, about choosing where you live and the word enough, and so much more.

0:42And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Abel and our sponsors. DTC Pod, hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. DTC Pod is a podcast about all things direct to consumer. Ramon and Blaine cover everything from starting, growing, and optimizing e-commerce stores in DTC brands. If you're interested in the stories behind your favorite consumer brands, this podcast is for you. One recent episode on how the best brands are built is a must listen. Listen to DTC pod wherever you get your podcasts.

1:18Abel, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Man, thanks so much for having me first off. And I would say the thing that this is a bit of a tricky question, as you well know, but I would say my definition of success in in a large way is waking up without an alarm. And we've been able to do that as entrepreneurs most days for a decade and change now. And certainly you can work really, really hard and get a lot of things done. But if your definition of success also includes kicking back, as I know yours does, then it's important to also take that time for yourself as well as with your loved ones from time to time.

2:00I do love me some kicking back. And I can tell you Puerto Rico Island living, the Caribbean lifestyle definitely is a good place to do just that. But if I want to do it for a long time, I need to know how to achieve longevity as a creator, as an entrepreneur, of which I'm both and of which my listeners here, Fire Nation, definitely identify as. So let's start by just calling a spade a spade. I mean, change is all around us. And I see people getting squashed like little bugs by this change every single day. So Abel, how can we stay nimble amidst all this technological change? Looking at the past few years, we both have been at this podcasting game and the world of entrepreneurship for a minute now.

2:48And one thing that I've learned as we've scaled up our teams and scaled up our projects over the years is that it's pretty easy to get entrenched in the wrong business accidentally, you know, kind of growing in the wrong way or growing too quickly. And once you have that sort of overhead, then it can be difficult to navigate your way through this era of technological change and cultural change, social change. And so it's really important to be able to say no at the right time, even to your own projects that you love dearly and understand that most of these business ventures are there for a season or a period of time.

3:28It's not necessarily going to be your forever house or your forever business. And it's important to double down on the things that are working and also take a step back from those things that might be a bit, dare I say, outdated. We're certainly guilty of this when it comes to building websites and patterns of posting to social media, you really have to keep up with the times. You really do, Fire Nation, because otherwise you'll look up in a year, five years, seven years from this point and be like, wow, like what happened while my head was down in the stands? And one thing that I think is pretty interesting, Abel, is that you actually believe that tapping the brakes is essential for progress, which at first glance might seem and sound counterintuitive.

4:13So tell us more. It's really important to harness that energy when you can. The way I like to think about it is kind of planning for the future to not just slog along and keep working and keeping your head down, but try to identify the things that you're extremely excited about, that your business is well-suited to pursue. Once you do that, it's a lot easier to work hard and not feel like you're working that hard, if that makes sense. That energy becomes more and more free, the better aligned it is with your talents and your unique gifts as well as that of your team. So in order to kind of plan for that process, it's important to on a regular basis, whether it's, you know, every few weeks or once a quarter or certainly once a year, take a good look at everything that you're doing and try to whittle down the things that just don't work that well anymore.

5:10Because otherwise you're going to be spinning your wheels and spinning your wheels and you might not be getting that far. Whereas if you work on the right things, then you can achieve whatever you set your mind to. Now, one thing that I've always admired about you is that you've really been able to stay in great shape and really focus on nutrition, health, wellness, exercise, all those great things, as well as having a business that succeeds and thrives and changes with the times. So help Fire Nation understand the way to balance both performance with longevity in business. Yeah. So this is something that I see a lot.

5:48Having worked as a coach with a lot of high performers, it's easy to segment certain parts of your life away from each other. And so if you're succeeding in business and crushing it and making a bunch of money, then you might double down on that for a while and realize after a few months or a few years, you're a little soft in the middle or you're not quite in the same shape that you used to be. And if you want to achieve longevity, not just in business, but in life, it's important to keep your eye on the ball as it relates to where your body's at, where your health is at. So prioritizing things like sleep to bring us back to that first part, or, you know, I try not to, on a regular basis, sacrifice my sleep for the sake of performance.

6:30And I've made that mistake in the past, and a lot of people can. You can do it for a while. You might even be rewarded for it, but you don't want to cut your life short. You want to spend quality time with those you love. You want to be there so that your business can continue its mission as long as possible. And a big part of that is doing the simple things like it doesn't have to be going and crushing it in the gym for three hours. You don't have to be some sort of gym rat. It's more about waking up, going out in the sunshine, going for a nice little walk, trying to do that every day and being physically active in a small way throughout the day, as opposed to these punishing workouts that sometimes you see, you know, on TikTok reels or Instagram.

7:10You don't have to be an extremist about it. You can work it holistically into your regular life, and you'll probably have a lot more fun if you do it that way, too. I love the phrase, everything in moderation, even moderation. And so you need to think about that, Fire Nation, because it is interesting where you become that gym rat for three hours a day that Abel's talking about. Listen, that's only sustainable for so long. You're going to be sacrificing things along the way and potentially burning yourself out, but then you're a gym rat for zero minutes a day for a year straight, you're on the other side of the spectrum, you're going to suffer as well.

7:44So what is that moderation? What works for you? And it's taken me a long time to be honest. I mean, I'm 44 years old right now and I'm still figuring things out. But I mean, I've had a virtual trainer now for eight years where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I'm on Zoom in my gym with him, Jeff, and we're working out, doing weight training for 30 minutes. I'm up every day at 6 a.m. and I'm walking my dog for three miles every day around 4 to 5 p.m. depending on how the day's going. I'm taking my dog out for another three-mile walk. That's my 10 ,000 steps for the day. And I like to intermix that with some hikes and, you know, if I can, you know, mix in a little sprinting from time to time to get that fast twitch going as well.

8:24And, you know, with nutrition as well. I mean, it's just I've done it all. And I've made mistakes. I mean, I did a 10 day water fast. That was amazing. I loved it. Water only for 10 days. But then guess what? I took that too far. And then I was like, well, I can do this on my own now because that was supervised. And I started doing these like five day water fasts on my own. And then before I knew it, I mean, I'm 5 '10", pretty athletically built. I mean, I'm not like a skinny lean guy. I was down to 147 pounds. Like that's not a healthy weight for me at my body type and my height. It wasn't at all.

8:58And I suffered because my body was actually suffering. And I had some really negative things to happen. I had to recover from because of that. Because I, again, went to the other end of that spectrum. And, you know, I, like, you know, Abel talked about sleep. I was in the military for eight years. I mean, man, I went through some times with some massive sleep deprivation. And luckily, I was at a young enough age where I learned like, hey, this is just not healthy. This is not sustainable. So I've always tried to prioritize sleep since then. And it's so important, so key. But again, it's always evolving, always adjusting.

9:30My nutrition, not perfect. I'm still evolving and adjusting and trying new things and seeing, hey, what, you know, and variety of spice to life at the same time as Wellfire Nation. So it's never going to, and this is actually something that we're going to be talking about at the very end here, which I really love your whole philosophy around the fact that we never actually arrive. You know, we're always on this journey, this path that is changing, that's evolving. And that's part of the beautiful things of life, Fire Nation. So we will be talking about that and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

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10:34HubSpot's breeze helps you instantly remix your content, gives you lead scoring to shine a light on your best potential customers, and an AI-curated analytics suite for reports and KPIs. Add this to co-pilots and agents to automate your tasks, and you've got yourself one powerful platform, making your life easier, getting your results faster, and better connecting you to all your data all in one place. Stop spreading yourself thin and start making major moves with HubSpot. Visit hubspot.com slash marketers to learn more. Now, Abel, we were talking pre-interview and I mentioned that I've now been in Puerto Rico for eight years.

11:10You went to the mountains of Colorado from Texas. Now you're back in Texas and you've traveled the world and you've done a lot of things. And you personally believe that choosing where you live can dramatically improve your longevity. And I'll tell you, I chose Puerto Rico eight years ago and I truly believe it has helped on that front. I mean, time will tell, you never know, but I believe that that is the case. Talk to us about that. I think you're right. When you look at longevity, especially these days, there are a lot of buzzwords about it. But we've already talked about kind of the physical aspect, which is relatively simple.

11:50The nutrition aspect is all about really trying to eat real foods and whole foods as much as possible and avoid the newfangled stuff. When it comes to longevity from a lifestyle perspective, it's really all about connecting with those people who you love. The social connections are really the thread that runs through these populations that tend to live for a long time. They tend to, like I said before, walk a lot, eat a lot of real whole foods and stay away from the newfangled stuff and spend a lot of time with their friends and family. So, so many of us, you know, have been kind of whisked away to another part of the country or another part of the world away from our friends and family from time to time.

12:33And that can be great for a season or two. I'll be the first to admit that. And it's great to explore the world. But one of the things that is so important about maintaining your health and happiness is prioritizing spending kind of like time time with your friends and family where it doesn't seem like you're even doing that much. You're not necessarily achieving something. You're not working really hard together. You're just sharing physical presence and you're sharing, you know, the lessons learned from life and you're keeping in touch. These relationships and friendships are so nourishing to our mind, body, and soul.

13:10And you can track this if you're wearing an aura ring or a watch that helps you keep track of where your physiology and nervous system is at. You can see what's happening. And so if there's any way that you and your family can prioritize your favorite place to live, maybe not forever, but for the next few months, for the next few years, or take that vacation. and take that road trip with your kids so you can introduce them to things that you love around the country or the world. That is so worth it. And the tendency is to just kind of stay in our little box and not take those adventures and let time pass by.

13:42So let it be known that it is certainly worth it to take that adventure as often as you can. And time passes quickly, more quickly than many of us would like. Oh yeah, I mean that quote that, you know, the days may sometimes feel slow, but the years are fast. I mean, now that I have a six-month-old child, I can tell you that that has been so true because I look at every day today and I'm like, oh, my God, this day feels like it's never going to end. But then I kind of blink my eyes and I'm like, oh, my God, like Bo is six months old. That is absolutely crazy. So think about that, Fire Nation. Abel, enough.

14:21It's one of my favorite words. I mean, people have always asked me, John, it feels like entrepreneurs on fire has financially plateaued at a couple million dollars a year. for over a decade now, because we have. And a lot of times for businesses, when you plateau, you're dying, because if you're not growing, you're dying. But we have a very lean business, a very small team. We're very profitable. So for us, we really decided what our enough was. And we're like, this is a business that is kicking off a ton of profits. We're in Puerto Rico, so we're essentially paying no tax and no capital gains.

14:56I mean, life is good. We have enough. Let's not put more on our plate, just to put more on our plate, just because we want to quote unquote grow. So can you share why it's important to define our own idea of enough? Absolutely. And John, I think you're a great example of that. You know, if you look around and you play in the entrepreneurship game for a while, you meet people who have achieved extreme success, you know, making tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, But I don't know if you've noticed this. I think you have. It doesn't always correspond to how happy and fulfilled they are in their own lives or that meaning and the purpose that all of us desperately need doesn't always correlate perfectly to that kind of definition of success.

15:44And so it's all about making enough to get by, whatever that is for you and your family and to plan for the future. And the rest of that on top is gravy. And, you know, we've made the mistake of scaling up a little bit too big over the years with a few different projects. And like I was saying before, if you find yourself doing accounting and managing teams, but you're built to be an entrepreneur and you want to spend your time not as an operator, but planning the vision and the strategy for your company, it's really easy to get bogged down with too much. And the numbers may be good, you know, like you might be making a huge profit.

16:23But I mean, if you're already making hundreds of thousands or certainly millions of dollars, you have the option of saying, well, what can we cut out to take a little bit more time to spend time as a soul on this earth? You know, like to kind of reevaluate why we're doing all this. And I know my wife and I around 2016, 2017, I was on a TV show on ABC and it was pretty high profile. So I had a hard time even walking around Austin with a dog not being recognized. And it became like a little bit intrusive in our own private lives. So escaping to the mountains was not a prudent business decision, but that wasn't the point.

17:02We wanted some time to relax in the mountains and go hiking and not have to go to all of these business events and all these conferences or whatever that we'd been hitting hard for a long time. I was so happy to spend quality time with my wife, Allison, our families, and really kind of take that mini sabbatical for a while there. It kept us sane and helped us reevaluate what we wanted to get into in the future, which was, you know, in many ways radically different than what came before. Switching from podcasting to making virtual reality and nature videos and wildlife stuff was something we always wanted to do, and we got to do it.

17:37I love that. And you believe no matter how much we achieve, we actually never arrive. And this is something that we touched upon before the break because I think it's such a key thing for people to understand that like, wow, so many people have this finish line of like, once I achieve this goal, I'll be happy 24 hours a day. Everything will be great and sunshine and rainbows. And I remember so clearly because the first 2000 interviews of Entrepreneurs on Fire, So the first eight years of me running this podcast, one of my questions I always ask, one of the six questions was, what is your worst entrepreneurial moment?

18:14And of course, not everybody, but a lot of people answer that question by saying, the day I sold my business, which was so counterintuitive because so many people were like, isn't that the best day of your life, the best day of your journey? And they realized that, man, it was the worst and they got into reasons why. And of course, for some people, it was an amazing day. I'm not going to lie. Like some people, it was the best thing in the world. But for so many people, enough for me to really raise my eyebrows, they were saying that was the worst day of my life, the worst entrepreneurial moment of my life.

18:46So talk to us about this, about how we never actually arrive and how can we handle this reality? Yeah, to your point, you sell your business, even if it's for a big exit, you're kind of out of the game. And sometimes in that contract, you're definitely out of the game. You can't even like play in a related field for a while, although that's getting a little bit better. But when you go around and you meet a lot of uber successful people, you know, there's that quote, never meet your heroes. I don't necessarily agree with that. I've been very fortunate to meet a lot of my heroes and hope to meet many more.

19:21But you quickly realize that they don't consider themselves as arriving anywhere. They're still at it or they're still frustrated about the the business losses that were minuscule compared to the wins that you see from the outside in. And so it's very advantageous for anyone who is trying to achieve something to realize that no matter how far you get and what you achieve, it is always going to serve you to be processed based or process based practice based. Right. Where you're not focused necessarily on just achieving that goal, assuming that everything will work itself out. In fact, when you pursue some goals too hard, you could be sacrificing other parts of your business, of your life, your business, your health, your relationships.

20:06And so it's really important to look at all of this holistically and try to instead of, you know, focusing just on those goals, I think it's it's worth people spending the time sketching out what is your perfect day. If you didn't have to worry about money, if you didn't have to worry about working so hard on your business sometime in the future, what would you do with your time? What would a typical week or a typical month look like? Where would you go? Who would you spend time with? And that and looking forward to that part of the process can be really instructive because you realize you can do a lot of those things right now.

20:40You don't have to wait until you make$100 million or a billion dollars to achieve a lot of these things that show up as meaning and purpose and success in your own personal life. You can do a lot of that right now. So Abel, you've shared a lot of awesome with us today. I like to call them value bombs. You know, about how change is essential. You know, tapping the brakes needs to happen. We talked about enough and a lot more. So if you just could have Fire Nation walk away from our conversation with one key takeaway, what would that be? No matter what happens, keep going. You're always going to have to keep going.

21:18And you might need to find a different reason why. And there's nothing wrong with changing your strategy and pursuing a different thing, especially in this time of rapid change. The rate of change is increasing. A lot of us as humans are worried about the developments in AI that are kind of replacing a lot of the parts of our humanity. So keep in mind that you always get to define what your purpose is, why you're here and what matters most to you. So take the time to do that, plan for it and spend your time really doing what you love and building what you love as well. And if Fire Nation wanted to connect with you, learn more, what is your call to action for our listeners today?

22:00Look me up under Abel James. I just launched a new substack, so abeljames.substack.com. And if you want to find my podcast, that's under Abel James or Fat-Burning Man. Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with AJ and JLD today. So keep up that heat. For everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Abel in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. And you know what else will pop right up? the episode that he did over 11 years ago on this show. So that might be a fun listen. Abel, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation.

22:36For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flippity flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Abel for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation. Successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals, which is why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in 100 days. And we're talking step-by-step. visit thefreedomjournal.com and I will catch you there or on the flippity flip side.

23:25on how the best brands are built is a must listen. Listen to DTC Pod wherever you get your podcasts.