WS1264: How to Live A Balanced, Productive Life as an Entrepreneur | Dr. Richard Shuster

EPISODE 1264

[INTRODUCTION]

0:00:00.0 

Dr. Richard Shuster (RS): If you don’t spend the time refreshing your brain, relaxing, enjoying yourself, you’re actually gonna be a less productive, less efficient person in your business. By spending time on yourself, you’re gonna be more productive, you’ll generate more profit in your business, you’re certainly gonna have a better relationship with your significant other and if you have kids, you’re gonna be a more present parent.

0:00:27.4 

Whitney Sewell (WS): This is your daily Real Estate Syndication Show. I’m your host, Whitney Sewell. Today our guest is Dr. Richard Schuster. We are at GoBundance, and he was recording a podcast next to mine, where I was recording. At the end of the day, he just came over and sat down where I was recording and after I was done, we just got to talking.  He started sharing his story, and I said, hey, let’s just start this back over and pick the mic up and let’s record an interview. Just an amazing story. Not every day do I get to interview a neuropsychologist, just a very smart man and a very interesting conversation. Some of the things he has done, some of the things that have happened to him that have shaped who he is in his business, and this should be very eye-opening for all of us as entrepreneurs. The hours that we put in every week and the toll it takes on our bodies. I don’t want to spoil it for you. You’re gonna learn a lot. I hope that you leave from this interview thinking – is it worth me spending that 80 to a hundred hours a week on the business? Because you’re gonna hear about what that did to him and how it nearly killed him. But the changes he made after that. All of us can make now that we don’t have to go through the near-death experience to make that happen in our family.

0:01:55.1 

WS: Dr. Richard, he’s a clinical psychologist, he’s a TEDx speaker, CEO of Your Success Insights, which helps individuals, corporations, and athletes achieve balance and peak performance. He’s also the host of “The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster: Food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life”, which is regularly downloaded in over 150 countries. He’s a clinical expert and his podcast have been featured in such publications as The Huffington Post, NBCNews.com, Men’s Health, Cosmopolitan, and others. He’s also the president of Every Kid Rocks Inc., a 501c3, which helps schools provide therapy services to children. So I just enjoyed meeting Dr. Richard, and hearing about who he is in the story of his just near-death experience and how that shaped him moving forward and for his family. You’re gonna learn a lot, and again, I hope that it helps you to think about all the time that you’re putting in right now. But you’re also gonna learn some ways that he got very efficient with his time and what that did, and you’re gonna learn about “Do, Delegate, Delay or Drop” – these Ds that he lives by in his business. Again, we’re at GoBundance, and I hope that you learn a lot from Dr. Richard, today.

[INTERVIEW]

0:03:12.0 

WS: I’m excited to be at GoBundance. I’ve met so many incredible people here. In the last two days, I have met so many people who create goals that are so big for themselves. They’re achieving such big things. I’ve been so encouraged, I’ve been pushed in ways, I’ve been held accountable in lots of great things. I hope that you, as a listener, are considering some type of mastermind. Some type of way that you can keep pushing yourself, learning from others, something like GoBundance. However, that same thing can get you in a lot of trouble, right? That same drive. And I was just speaking to another podcast host. He was sharing a story and I said, hey, we should be recording this because I think a lot of our listeners, now you, you’ll learn a lot and you’re gonna be able to relate to his story. And I hope that you’ll listen ’cause it’s an incredible story…like five minutes on, my God, this is…we gotta record it.

So Dr. Richard, thank you for coming over here, sitting down and asking about my show, so I could also ask you about yours. And just hearing a little bit about your story, I knew that you’re gonna be a great guest. But give the listeners a little more about who you are, a little bit of your background ’cause I want them to understand who you are so you can help them.

0:04:21.2 

RS: Absolutely, Whitney. So, by my training, I’m a neuropsychologist, and that’s a big fancy word. I thought that’s what I always wanted to do. I went to school, I spent the seven years, the student loans, got the degree, took the boards, everything. I was living the life. I had a private practice and I was doing good work. I worked principally with sexually-abused kids. The courts would ask me to evaluate these children and create the road map essentially to put them back together, to bring them back whole, which was heavy and a great responsibility. I would see about 300 patients a year, but I felt there was more, like I could have had a larger impact and I didn’t know what that was. 

And then I just got the itch and went on Amazon, I bought a microphone and a pair of headphones and wanted to see what would happen. So, I started the show called The Daily Helping, and the longer tag is  – food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life. I was kind of sneaky with a bit of neuroscience in the show. The show’s mission is to help you become the best version of yourself, to be better than you are the day before. Although that’s aspirational, right. I’m not sending you a certificate next Tuesday to say – congratulations, you are the best version of yourself. We are always striving to be better. But I wanted something tangible that I could do that I could get the audience excited about. I knew because my background and my dissertation actually was on the impact that technology, like social media, has on personality functioning. And I’ll give you a quick spoiler alert. It’s bad news, right? 

And so we, as a society, are so focused on this. Our cell phones and selfies and Snapchat, all these things. But, here’s the secret about human beings, we are neurobiologically predisposed to feel good when we help other people. And so, if I took any two people and put them in a room and hooked up real nerdy, real-time diagnostic imaging of their brains, and person A gave somebody $1,000 and person B received $1,000, and I took a look at what part of their brains are lighting up? It’s the same part. Yeah. I won’t bore you guys with neuroanatomy, but it’s this ancient, million pathway called the mesolimbic system.

0:06:24.2 

WS: Oh, I’ve heard of that. Come on. 

0:06:27 

RS: Right, of course, you’re Whitney, right? Of course, you have. And so what I did with my show is we have the show’s movement, it’s called the My Daily Helping movement. And it’s to get a million people every day to commit acts of kindness and post on their social media feeds using hashtag #MyDailyHelping. Because I know from a habit-forming standpoint and creating new neuro-pathways that if people are doing this every day, they’re gonna feel good about themselves, it’s gonna increase their happiness in general, and happy people pursue more goals and are healthier. And we’re kind of a rising tide raises a lot of ships ride and we as a society get better. So that’s what I did with the podcast and eventually got really lucky. 

One day, NBC got a hold of me and asked me to collaborate with them in a couple of articles – what happens with your brain when you watch football and some other things like that – which was really cool. Thankfully, I told them my podcast website, TheDailyHelping.com, and they linked to it. It was mostly my friends and family listening to my show in the very beginning. Literally overnight, there were people in 150 countries pulling me down. And guys whose books were on my shelves, like Jack Canfield and some of these other luminaries that we all put on pedestals as entrepreneurs were reaching out to me and saying, “Can I come on your show?”. Now outside, I was saying, “Well, what led you to me?” Inside, I’m saying, “What in God’s name would Jack Canfield want to come on my show?” And what they all started telling me as well, because you’re one of the foremost influencers in personal development. 

So, when I got over the impostor syndrome associated with that, I said – Okay, if I’ve got a platform, I need to leverage that platform in a way to help as many people as I can. And so the way that I knew how to do that because of my background in the corporate world first and then as a psychologist, second was in the assessment space. And I wanted to create assessments. I hate the assessment industry, incredibly greedy. It really is pejorative. They nickel-and-dimed people to death, and I wanted to be disruptive if I wanted to be the Michael Dalby of the  assessment industry. 

So I created an assessment company. We’re in a lot of different spots. We’re in trauma for veterans, first responders. We’re the only guys in the world that have an addiction and recovery tool that addresses the impact, operation, discrimination, and identifies resiliency factors that will help people who have been struggling with addiction remain sober, as well as identify those things that might make them fall off the wagon. We were in the corporate space with retention, we moved into athletics which was really cool ’cause I love sports, and so it was neat to start collaborating with athletes and doing these things. And the podcast gave me the clout and the relationship access to build and scale this company and ultimately exit from my work as a psychologist. That’s really what happened, and I was living the dream, excited about the impact I was having, but there was a cost.

0:09:06.6 

WS: I would say after 1200-1300 interviews, you’re the first neuropsychologist I’ve interviewed. It’s incredible to me. Yes, there was a cost. You pushed really hard. You’re really good at what you do, obviously, or what you did, and that cost is what I want the listeners to hear about. I want to hear the change that happened because of this cost. And because I know that they’ll all relate to that whether they’re passive investors and their grinding every day in that W2 position or even in their business, or if they’re an active investor operator. If you’re a GP, you’re pushing hard, typically. You have those big goals like we’ve talked about. You’re 10X-ing that goal. You’re trying to push harder. And so there’s a cost. Share with us about this cost, and so the listener can resonate with your story.

0:09:50.4 

RS: I think as entrepreneurs, a couple of things happen when you make the decision that you’re gonna build a business. If you’re successful at doing it, you’ve got a “why”. And whatever the “why” is, whether it’s to have the private jet in the yard, whether the “why” is to provide stability for your family or do good in the world or create a legacy, whatever it is, we can very easily romanticize these crusades, and use them as a justification point to say, “No, no, I’m gonna work 17 hours today” because the hustle is for the cause. And then the other amplifying aspect of that is, you just use the term 10X, and so if you’re in this space, you’re probably also in the personal development space, and you’re consuming in a Grant Cardone, and you’re consuming Tony Robbins, and all these people who basically tell you to run through brick walls like the Kool-Aid man, right?

0:10:43.6 

RS: And so there is going to be, no matter how old you are, whether you’re 25 or whether you’re 55, eventually, there’s going to be a cost. And so for me, I was invincible, right? So I’m gonna bring us back and get in the time machine and take us back to May, June of 2020. And so we’re peak Covid, I just had the two consecutive best quarters of my life. I pivoted very quickly. I had a digital technology business, so part of what we’re selling is helping corporation save money by identifying employees that are struggling. Well, everybody was struggling with Covid. We were doing it very, very well. Just did my first TED Talk, I was crushing it. And I was having a blast. It wasn’t like I hated my life or I hated my job but I was just burning the candle at both ends. I would start my day at 4:30, 5:30 in the morning with my morning routine, and it wasn’t like I was doing lines of coke at 4:30 in the morning either. I was exercising, I was visualizing, I’m journaling, I have my gratitude practice. I would be meditating or Qigong or something else that was really good. And then I would just roll into the day like an animal, and I’d stop, pop my head up to have dinner with my kids and we do family dinner. Then like the roadrunner, like as fast as I could be, I was back on my laptop till 11:30, 12 o’clock at night. 

And again, I just kept telling myself, if you’re doing it for your family, you’re building a legacy. Everything’s cool. And so this one night, in particular, it was June 30th, 2020, I got off my last call – it was somebody who was in the Pacific time zone – so I got off this call and it was 11 o’clock at night and I’m like, “I crushed it. That’s awesome!” And we were gonna do a joint venture, and I was so excited, I come upstairs, a little stuffy, I popped a few Benadryl and I went to bed. Two hours later, I wake up and I felt off. Instinctively, I grabbed my wife’s pillow and I yanked it out from under her head. She’s a southern girl, Charleston, and she loves her sleep. And what she said to me in that moment – I won’t say it on air because I don’t want to have to put the expletive label on this podcast episode for you – in that moment, what I should have said was, “something is wrong, I need help”.

0:12:55.0 

RS: What I said was, “I’m sorry”. And she rolled her eyes and said something under her breath and went back to sleep. I went back to sleep knowing something was wrong, which was the stupidest thing I could have done. What ultimately saved my life was three hours later was our puppy – our covid puppy that we just bought and we’re training and doing a terrible job at that by the way – he started crying and it was my shift. So, I get up and I still didn’t feel right, a little groggy, a little unsteady. In my mind, I’m thinking, okay, I took a Benadryl x number of hours ago, trying to calculate the half-life of the drug. And I said, okay, and I get downstairs and the dog had chosen to relieve himself in the cage, which was a mess and it’s a two-person job. So kinda get back up the stairs, and I tell my wife what happened and she sits up immediately, “you’re slurring your words”. I’m still thinking, okay, Benadryl, can do that. So, we get downstairs, get the dog from the cage at the front of the house, and I’m gonna take them outside.

0:13:47.8 

RS: And I grab my cell phone and I don’t know how to use it at all. I just wanted to get the flashlight, I don’t know how to do that. And like in the sixth sense, in that moment, oh my God, I’ve had a stroke. And then the horror set in that I realized that my brain has been bleeding since 2,  2:30 in the morning, and I went back to bed. Now panic is setting in. So, we grab the kids, we go to the hospital. My wife’s crying, and I’m telling her, “I got this, it’s gonna be okay”. And she can’t even come with me. She drops me off at the front door of the hospital, and there’s this plastic tent with somebody in a hazmat suit where you really have to sell yourself on why you need to be in a hospital. And I say, “I’ve had a stroke” and they’re like, “Have you?” I was like, “yeah, I think so. I’m experiencing x, y, and z. They admit me first, like this kind of sectioned-off covid area where they do the swab and I didn’t have covid so then I can come into the regular hospital and the ER doctor says, “You know what’s wrong with you?” And I said, “I’ve had a stroke.” He’s looking at me and he’s hearing me speak, and he said, “I do not really think so. But we’ll do a CT scan.” Cool, no problem. So I do the CT scan, comes back maybe an hour later, and he said, “You didn’t have a stroke. Great news, I’m sending you home.” 

And I know I had a stroke. I’m pretty easy to get along with, and I don’t usually get into people’s faces, but I pointed at this guy, and I said to him very plainly. I said, “You listen to me, and you to listen to me now.” I said, “I’ve trained at the Cleveland Clinic. I know more about stroke than any person in this room right now, and you know that an ischemic stroke might not show on a CT, only anabolic stroke. I need an MRI and a blood thinner and you’re gonna give it to me right now.” And I remember when I had my first job out of college was a sales job. And my mentor, my boss told me If you make an offer, an ultimatum to a prospect, you look them in the eyes and you don’t say anything because whoever talks first gives in and I just stared at this doctor, it was like this kind of old west showdown, right?

0:15:42.8 

RS: And so he relented, he gave me the MRI eventually. And then sure enough, there it was. Actually a part of my brain – and I promise you guys no neuroanatomy. I swear to God, this is the last part of this. So there was a part of my brain called the basal ganglia, which is where you see patients with Parkinson’s, speech and motor movement, that’s the basal ganglia. That’s that area of the brain that gets really affected. I missed it by a millimeter. Literally, it was so close, and that’s the difference between me being here and not. And even so, by the time they got me the blood thinners, my speech was severely impacted. My phone couldn’t understand me. I did remember that I could use my thumbprint to get into the phone but my thumbs would not let me text. I knew in my mind the letters I was trying to type the word stroke to send to my brother who was a physician. It took me 40 minutes to write that text of three words. I had a big facial droop. I was pretty bad off and they did get me the blood thinners. That night, I remember, just I was too afraid to go to sleep. I was just clutching this picture, I’d brought from my phone of my wife and my kids and our dog and I was just saying to myself to “stay alive, stay alive, stay alive”. Surprise! Spoiler alert, I’m alive. I recovered. 

And when a guy with my lifestyle, the no drugs, no drinking, the eating right, I was 46. So partially because they want to know and partially because of risk management, they sent me to everything, every specialist you can imagine. So, oncology to see if I have cancer, endocrinology, every “ology” right? I saw those guys and there was nothing. And so ultimately, when I met my neurologist, and he’s reviewing the results and he’s telling, he’s asking me, “Let me ask you something. How many hours do you work?” And I’m like, “Doc, let me tell you. I don’t work. I love what I do, it’s not work.” And he got really irritated with me and he scrunched up his face, “Richard, how many hours a week do you love what you do?” And I looked at him and I said, “Around 80.” He was like, “I’m gonna tell you something. You have a choice to make. If you don’t dial that back and change your lifestyle, something like this is gonna happen again.” And my wife puts her head in her hands and starts crying. “He’ll never stop working. He’s an animal.”

0:17:47.0 

RS: So, I committed at that moment, I said, “Okay” – and I don’t know where I got this number from, it just kinda downloaded into my brain – I said, “25 hours a week for the rest of my life. I’ll never work more than that.” It all sounded good, but then when I got home and I rejoined the work – not the workforce – but when I started working again, I realized, how in the world am I gonna do this? Because I was a LinkedIn animal. I would have meetings with whoever where there was an opportunity. I had my own team. I had my podcast and all these things I was doing, to say nothing of speaking engagements and the book I’m writing, and all of that stuff. So I had to, out of necessity, create systems that allowed me to be as productive as I was before and make as much money as I did before while working much less. Would you mind if I share a few of those things?

0:18:36.6 

WS: I’m sure the listeners would love to know what those systems were because we all want to work that 25 hours, right? But I also want to highlight this, I mean, none of us want to be at that point, right? I want to highlight, you seem to be doing all the right things. You weren’t that old, you were eating organic, you weren’t doing drugs, you weren’t smoking, you were that person that anybody would say that a stroke is not gonna happen to him. 

0:18:57.1 

RS: It was unbelievable to me. It couldn’t have happened to me. I mean, even though the signs were all there, and this is my clinical background. I went to school for seven years to learn about this. It didn’t resonate with me. It didn’t make sense until I knew I couldn’t use my cellphone and I was like, oh God. But yeah, and I was invincible. I felt I was invincible because I had a morning routine and I did all this stuff.

0:19:16

WS: But completely stress-related, is that what you’re thinking?

0:19:20 

RS: 100% stress-related. Listen, if you hate what you do and you have relationships that caused you emotional distress, that’s worse. But work is work whether you love it or you hate it, work is work and it will take a toll. So, that was the realization for me and I hope and it’s something that I talk about often, that I can be the cautionary example. I can be the lesson so that everybody listening to the show, you don’t have to go through what I went through because the likelihood, for most people who have a stroke, is they don’t recover all the way. I did. Most people don’t. There is going to be, wherever it hits you in the brain, you’re likely to have some sort of prolonged lasting impact, and so it’s just not worth it.

0:20:02.4 

WS: What a blessing that you’re here with us and able to show this story too. I know it is impacting thousands now just as you and I have talked about, and I know the listeners want to know how you’re able to be as productive in 25 hours versus 80. I know they’re wanting to do the same thing.

0:20:16.2 

RS: Yeah, so the first thing that you need to do is you need to think about, there’s a number, and that number is for you, like how much money do you want or need? What does that number actually equate to from a value and a purpose standpoint? So, everybody’s number is different. But if you know how much money you need to make in a given week, month or year, anything beyond that, and this is an investing show principally, so we’re supposed to be taking the extra money and putting in places. So, I’m not telling you not to earn more, but be mindful of when you cross that threshold of having hit that number. How much additional work do you need to do to keep multiplying that? And what do you give up? What do you give up in terms of – Do you miss that opportunity to exercise on that particular day? Do you miss that thing that you were gonna do with your kids? Because you’ll never get that time back. And so be mindful. So that’s your framework, just kind of have that in the back of your mind in terms of actionable things.

0:21:16.3 

RS: So, I’ve created a filter. What I mean by this is, I have this kind of three-tiered checklist that I put people through to get on my calendar. Here’s how it goes for me. Number one – Is the person sitting across from me who potentially wants to have a Zoom call or whatever it is, do they care more about helping people than they care about just profit? That matters to me, and it’s central to everything that I’m doing. Everybody’s filter is different, so you kind of customize how you want. The number two is – I think it’s a real important one – can their offering plus my offering be better than they are by themselves? Are they the chocolate to my peanut butter? Number three, the combined efforts of our working together generate a number. Can it help me hit that number that I need to hit? Will it generate just as much revenue for the other person as it will for me? You may be the coolest person in the world, and you might hit two of the three, you can watch a football game with me, there’s no universe where you’re getting on my work schedule. And by being very, very targeted and specific about that, what it’s done is reduced the amount of appointments on my calendar exponentially. I used to meet with anybody, anybody if I thought it was a business opportunity. Now it has to meet those very three specific criteria.

0:22:35.6 

WS: That alone is so valuable. That’s amazing. How fast my calendar is, it’s just madness, right? So many people are reaching out all the time – hey, I’d love to talk to you and for the first number of years, yeah, okay, I’ll make a way to make it happen. And I’m missing that time with the wife and kids because I’m taking all these calls with random people. And I want to add value to them. I want to help them. But I think it’s easy to get distracted from really the people you want to help the most and love the most in those relationships. Those are most crucial. 

0:23:03

RS: The next thing is, there is an opportunity, then I put it through these what I call my 4Ds. So, the first D is “Do”. And so, the question that I ask myself is, if there’s something that I want to do, is it a “hell yes” or “hell no”? Because if it’s not a “hell yes”, I’m not doing it. And then that thing, it may still be important to me in some way, but it doesn’t mean that I have to do it. So, the next D is “Delegate”. If it’s something that’s kind of mission-critical, but somebody else on my team or somebody on Fiverr or somebody else can do it, I delegate it. So, we got Do, Delegate, and the next D is “Delay”. Is it something that has to happen now? Or can it be put off a week, a month, six months, a year, whatever it is? And the final D is “Drop”. If it’s not going to add value to what I’m trying to do, either from a revenue standpoint or from a value standpoint, it’s gone.

0:24:09 

RS: And so the filter plus those four Ds make me even more focused on activities I’m gonna specifically do or not do. And for me, I’m almost obsessive about time. If you go into a grocery store and you’re tasked with buying onions. You see a bag of onions for $3 or one half of a diced onion for $2. What’s the smart buy? Like most people say, I can tell you, the value is you get the bag of onions right? No. You get the diced onion because now you do not have to spend the time dicing them and even though that just saves you five minutes. I’m always looking for these hacks throughout my day. How can I combine two activities like an audiobook while I’m on a bike or something. It’s all about this game of maximizing on your time, because what I do with that extra time, just like you will take your extra money and you’re gonna put it in syndication or whatever else you’re doing, I will take that extra time and I dedicate it to self-care. That’s a term that we clinically use self-care.

0:25:09.9 

RS: Self-care for me is watching sports or calling a friend or – I’m a barbecue fanatic, I actually have a team and I do it competitively – working out a recipe or something like that, or watching a movie in Netflix that my wife doesn’t want to watch. I get really selfish with this bonus time that I have for myself, and I stop working just to give myself just a little bit every day. It’s like if you have reading as part of your morning routine and maybe you only read 20 minutes a day, but the cumulative effect of reading books seven days a week, 20 minutes a day over the course of a year, you’ve taken in a lot of knowledge. And so I have found that by just adding a little bit of fun time into my day and scheduling the fun time, put it on your calendar, now, the cumulative effect of doing that five days a week means that I don’t really feel this itch like after I’ve done my work week over a weekend to want to do that stuff. So, what it’s actually made me is a more present dad and a better husband because now I’ve got more time to spend what does my wife want to do?

0:26:11.4 

RS: We’ll do it. And it’s not like, oh jeez, I’ve really wanted to watch this thing on Netflix or whatever it is. It’s like, “What does she want to do?” And we could spend more meaningful time together. I mean, Stephen Covey said this in ‘sharpening the saw’ in Seven Habits, you need to spend time. And this is, I think the piece that so many entrepreneurs miss is that if you don’t spend the time refreshing your brain relaxing, enjoying yourself, you’re actually gonna be a less productive and less efficient person in your business. And so, by spending this time on yourself, you’re gonna be more productive. You’re gonna generate more profit in your business. You’re certainly gonna have a better relationship with your significant other, and if you have kids, you’re gonna be a more present parent.

0:26:56.0 

WS: I just think it’s an incredible story. It’s an incredible piece of advice, some of the most important as an entrepreneur.  It’s interesting that the numerous guests I have interviewed at Gobundance, different coaches, different people, even an Olympic athlete that I just talked to, one of the talking points that he had, discussion points, was how to have an incredible marriage. And it’s like, I love the focus that’s back on what’s most important, and you are a living testimony of what happens when you’re pushing, pushing, pushing, and not focused on some things that are most important. I love how you talk about a time filter, is what I hear. It’s like you’re filtering your time, what is the highest and best use of each moment of your day? You’re getting the diced onion so you don’t have to dice some. You can spend that time doing something else, right. And that’s just one small example, but you’re applying that to numerous aspects of your life. I love the Do Delegate Delay or Drop it, and even how you take appointments. I’m gonna share that with my assistant as well, ’cause that’s difficult right? So many people are trying to take my time and it’s just take, take, take. And so more and more, now I’ve had to encourage her, I’m sorry, you gotta be the bad guy, and just say, no.

0:28:10.7 

RS: That’s hard. We don’t like to say no to people. We are wired to generally not like to confront people. And so, I had to get really good at that because I like people and I don’t like letting people down. I don’t like hurting people’s feelings. And so, I created a series of scripts around saying “No”. Certainly the filter will disqualify people, but there might be somebody who would get through the filter but I’ve just got other projects I’m working on. So, I will say something like, “I really love what you’re doing, and I have X, Y, and Z on my schedule right now. I want to talk to you and I want to take a deeper dive in this but let’s put this off a quarter, and let’s set up a Zoom call eight weeks, 12 weeks from now. Because I want to be 100% present with you and give you my all and my attention just like I owe my current clients to do the same thing.” Then it’s not them, “it’s not you it’s me kind of a thing”, but it allows you to kick the can down the road and perhaps not lose out on that engagement while still being able to keep your plate not for overflowing

0:29:20.6 

RS: We all know what our capacities are, and there are certainly ways – look, if your business is scaling like crazy, you implement systems, you bring in people who can deal with that. But at the end of the day, you’re driving the boat, and so you need to be a captain in terms of what you’re gonna allow on, like who’s coming on your boat. And for me, I know I only take on so many clients at a time, or we only take on some of these massive things at a time because I don’t want to have to do all of these things because whatever you say “yes” to, you’re saying “no” to something else, and I don’t want the “no” to ever again be my wife or my kid.

0:30:01.9 

WS: I love that. I don’t want the “no” to be my wife and my kids. And I think that’s even a good…I haven’t thought about it like that. But when you’re saying yes instead of saying no to this person, ’cause you don’t want to say no, you are saying no to your wife and your kids, to the time you could be spending with them. I know somebody, the listeners can relate to your story, and I hope they’re not near a stroke, but man, you didn’t ever imagine. And I feel like even now, I think the word you survived, but now it has transformed all this time that you’re getting with your wife and kids now. I don’t know if they’re thankful you had a stroke or not but maybe in some ways that you’re more available now. And so, any other actionable steps so that you filter your time that helps you even be as productive in your business? And anything else that would be helpful to the listener, those things just don’t apply to me, I’m already doing those things with my time or those limiting beliefs, right? But anything else that helps you to think through this?

0:30:56.9 

RS: So one thing is – you guys might hear this and might say it’s not true, the science on this is very clear, and if you’re here and you disagree, I would be able to show you voluminous amounts of data that says this is the truth – multitasking is a myth and focused attention is also like gasoline into tank. Whatever your most complex tasks are that are going to involve the greatest amount of mental energy, you tackle them first thing. Start your day with your hardest activity and know yourself in terms of pacing. I will schedule little breaks in the day, sometimes there’s just five or 10 minutes but they’re helpful because the data’s also clear that people cannot just sit. There’s diminishing returns. The longer you’re looking at a screen, the longer you’re doing something without taking a break. Don’t just pause whatever you’re doing, and then just open up a web browser and check your stocks or whatever else. Literally get up from your desk, go do something else, go for a walk. You know another thing I do is I am vigilant about hydration. Hydration is very important. Sleep is essential. 

0:32:01.0 

RS: So, some things that you can do, I know you guys are not gonna like this but I don’t sleep with my phone. In my room, I have a cheap $10 alarm clock that I got at Target. But with the phone in another room for a couple of reasons. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I want to just turn back over to go back to sleep. I don’t want to see, well, how did the Braves do today? I don’t want that distraction. And the other thing, and well, to a degree, Apple and Google have addressed this a bit, is that the light of our phone, the frequency, the spectrum of blue light, in particular, is something that signals your brain to start producing neurotransmitters and chemicals telling you, hey, guess what, it may be three in the morning, it’s telling your brain, it’s time to wake up. And so there are these different stages of sleep, and if we don’t get quality deep sleep, which is involved in physical restoration, our health, in terms of – if we have an injury or if we just need to rest our bodies, and particularly in a covid world – physical restoration is huge. You need deep sleep. 

0:33:01

RS: And then the REM sleep is where we do something called consolidation, where, believe it or not, this happens kind of at a subconscious level, if there are challenges or things you’re trying to work out, a lot of that happens at night. I’m sure you’ve all kind of experienced this where I’m gonna sleep on it, and then you wake up the next morning and you’re like, yeah, I think I know what to do. That’s the consolidation process, where your brain is actually the hamster in the wheel is doing its thing while you’re sleeping. So sleep is critical. 

0:33:30

WS: Is there a way that you measure the quality of your sleep?

0:33:33

RS: So, you can do it with any type of Fitbit or your Apple Watch or your Android watch, whatever it is. Those things, look, they’re not really scientific, medical-grade device. The only true way to measure that is with an EEG to monitor your brain waves to see what level of sleep you’re in, and some sort of a device to track respiratory function or distress. So for most people, your Fitbit is gonna do just fine. You’ll see patterns. If you like a beer, try not to drink a bunch of them. If you like caffeine, try not to have it after 2:00 PM. Those are things that are gonna keep you awake. If you are a person who tends to shower at night, be mindful not to take a steaming hot shower because you’re gonna sleep better if you don’t have a super hot shower. And so, just little things. But sleep, sleep is essential. 

I have a pretty rigid morning routine, and you should have some form of anaerobic exercise everyday. Tone and Tighten is one of my favorite books, and that was for me, one thing that was very present for almost every successful person ever interviewed was some sort of anaerobic exercise. A gratitude practice is huge. I combine visualization/meditation/gratitude things all in one but I do it every day. And no matter how challenging your life is, you can always find things you’re grateful for. You’re alive, you have a wife, you have friends, you have a roof over your head. You have food to eat. So, it’s just really the combination of doing all of these things. And I did a lot of those things before the stroke. It was the time piece that helped me a lot. I used to stay up on my phone for hours creating what recruits my team was after something like that so I don’t do anything. 

0:35:31

WS: I didn’t even know we were gonna talk about sleep but it’s something my wife and I talk about often, and we’ve changed, tried to do a lot better about sleep over the last couple of years. We even have a sleep app that we use that shows, monitors, that listen to how you breathe, if you’re rolling around the bed, some of those things. But is there an amount? Our listeners probably think, why, I’m good on six hours, I’m good on five hours.

0:35:54.6 

RS: Some people are, I will say, for those of you who are getting jacked up about polyphasic sleep and thinking you can do two to three hours a night, you can’t. The science says, you’re in for a bad end if you consistently do that. As we get older, and when I say older, I mean from 40 to getting into being elderly, we do need less deep sleep. So, somebody who’s in their 60s might only get 30 minutes of deep sleep whereas somebody who’s 35 might get two hours of deep sleep. It changes. The amount of deep sleep you’re gonna get is also gonna be dependent on how much physical exertion that you’re going to put on in a given day. With your GoBundance buddies climb up one of these mountains up here in Park City, you’re gonna get more deep sleep than if you did nothing but to play video games the day before, right? So that varies. There’s really no set number. Most adults circa 6 to 8 and a half hours is generally enough.

0:37:01.1 

WS: What about, have you seen wake-up times affect someone? I’ve heard different people say, well, if I can wake up in the top of my sleep cycle or like, waking up at 4:20, I was a better, I just felt so much better than if I didn’t wake up till five. 

0:36:17

RS: So, the thing with that really, over the course of a day, it doesn’t really matter much if you wake up depending on what the cycle you’re in. So, if you’re in deep sleep and somebody wakes you up, you are gonna feel like you’re drunk and you’re gonna feel really groggy and you’re gonna feel like crap. And that’ll pass but it’s just because of what brain state you’re in at the time versus light sleep. So, what a lot of these sleep apps are doing, once they start to learn your rhythm, it is a rhythm, and if you go to bed at the same time, you’re generally gonna wake up at the same time, save for dogs barking, your children or whatever else. And so the me apps can kind of figure out, okay, so Whitney’s in light sleep at 5:40, but you might be in deep sleep at 6:20, so I’m gonna wake him over at 5:45. And so, a lot of the apps, the Oura Ring can do that. And the Apple Watch, I think, can do that. I’ve got a Samsung one. So that’s what that’s about. If it’s derailing your whole day, that’s just mental it. It’s really not true but yes, you will wake up feeling more rested if you wake on the right cycle.

0:38:28.2 

WS: No, I appreciate that. My wife and I have discussions about sleep and times of getting up. Anyway, I’ve just enjoyed the conversation so much, Richard. Just being transparent about what happened to you, and I know you’re helping thousands now. One final question before we have to wrap up, how do you like to give back?

0:38:46

RS: Everything that I do has a giving back component. My wife and I have a charity called Every Kid Rocks which provides therapy services for kids. And then with everything that we’re doing with my tech company, Your Success Insights, we have a giving back component. So for example, our trauma tool for first responders will give 10% of all of the proceeds from that to a non-profit up north which provides college scholarships to the children of fallen first responders. So, giving back is central to everything that I do, and there are a lot of different ways I do but that’s just a couple of examples.

0:39:22.0 

WS: Dr. Richard, I’m so grateful you came over here and sat down and we got to have a conversation and were able to record it at the same time. Absolute pleasure to meet you and have you on the show, and get to do it in person which I don’t get to do often enough. So honored to meet you. How can the listeners get in touch with you or learn more about you?  They may not get to have a meeting with you but where can they learn more about you?

0:39:44.5 

RS: So, the mothership for me is DrRichardShuster dot com and about every possible domain spelling of this, so I challenge you to try and spell it wrong but It’s actually DrRichardShuster.com. Now, if you want to check out the show, that is TheDailyHelping dot com.

0:40:01.2 

WS: Doctor, it’s our pleasure to have you on the show. I hope you have a blessed day. 

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[OUTRO]

0:40:04

WS:  Thank you for being a loyal listener to the Real Estate Syndication Show. Please subscribe and like the show. Share it with your friends so we can help them as well. Don’t forget, go to the www.LifeBridgeCapital.com where you can sign up and start investing in real estate today, Have a blessed day!

[END]