How important are health and diet when you are committed to performance and being consistent? Let me rephrase that. Does applying violent discipline to all you do help you create a high-performance culture around you? Let’s find out what diet and exercise for high impact people can do.
Now the answer doesn’t look that puzzling anymore.
Over the years, I’ve always seen a connection between being in good shape and financial success. Do you know what most super successful entrepreneurs and CEOs have in common? The first answer is a background in the military. The second thing they almost all have in common is a background in martial arts.
Discipline and relentless focus build worlds.
When I had my most significant financial gains in business, my health and habits were dialed in. I believe that these habits matter a lot.
I also know people who meditate 20 hours a week and are still stressed. I don’t think stress is a factor of how much stuff you do. I think it’s more about what you know you should be doing but aren’t doing. More on this later. This post is about creating the hyper-successful person you want to be but being smart around it. Without further ado, here are “no fluff added” tips and techniques around diet and exercise for high impact people.
“Life Shrinks and Expands on the Proportion of Your Willingness to Take Risks and Try New Things.”
—Gary Vaynerchuk
A Tale of Success
“From one thing, know ten thousand things.”
—Miyamoto Musashi
Musashi was the best swordsman who ever lived. He entered 61 duels to death – next in line is Ito Ittosai, who regained sanity after 33 fights – and died of old age while peacefully drinking tea in his country house.
Play with that thought for a second, will you? That man entered 61 duels to the death. Sixty-one times he faced another elite swordsman hellbent on killing him. A man who certainly had studied his techniques and had trained consequently to defeat him. I don’t think any other man in recorded history ever represented as much mastery as Grandmaster Musashi—if anyone ever deserved to be called Grandmaster, it’s him.
Most people can imagine how nerve-wracking it is to face a man who has been training for weeks to fight you – think MMA. When you watch fights, you see how nervous the pugilists are. When you do it yourself, you feel it first-hand. Yet, I still can’t comprehend the level of composure a man needs to enter 61 death duels against professional samurais. It’s mind-boggling, really.
“From one thing, know ten thousand things.” I indeed agree with that thought. Mastering one thing makes you see parallels with so many other things. Even if skills were not transferable, the mindset to acquire them surely is. But there’s something more to it. I always tell people how important it is to deadlift 250 kg (551 lbs), even in the information age. If you remove the health benefits – you can’t be overall unhealthy while raising a quarter ton of steel and rage from the ground with your bare hands. That’s not the important part. The critical factor is the training, discipline, and rigor it takes to get to that point. It takes pushing through the pain for a significant amount of time. Tendons, bones, and cartilage need to get stronger, too; it’s not just muscle. That discipline, patience, and focus are all transferable to anything else.
Mastering something, mastering anything, is of paramount importance.
This is the takeaway insight I want to share with you: as you do one thing, so you do all the things.
Days Geared for Excellence
“Action is the real measure of intelligence.”
—Napoleon Hill Essay
So how does a high-impact person stack up all the cards in their sleeves to go on with their daily lives? It all starts with diet, exercise, and sleep. I’m barely touching sleep in this post. This will be discussed more in-depth later. I can give you the gist of it, though: sleep more. Interest will compound.
Here are actionable tips that are so impactful; I can’t emphasize them enough. Please try them for four weeks, and you’ll feel so much more powerful.
Bending Time
Do intermittent fasting in the morning up until the late afternoon for fantastic energy levels.
I usually eat my first meal around 4 pm. The first meal is about 500 calories and consists of high-protein whole foods. This way, I don’t get tired during the afternoon and early evening as I go into the last meetings. Five hundred calories are for me about ⅙ of daily calories. I’ve found that it works very well for me. You might want to adjust the numbers a bit. Yet, it’s crucial to be fasted for at least 20 hours to reap the health and energy benefits.
I usually work out in the morning for about 45 minutes. It’s incredibly light. Nowadays, I have a conference call while I walk 15 minutes to the lake, swim for 15 minutes, and have another short call on my way back from the lake. I recommend you do something similar. It doesn’t need to be long, but you need to get blood pumping so that you have more energy to apply relentless purpose to your to-do list.
Intense workouts are for the early evening after I have had my first meal. I do about 20-30 minutes of intense work with kettlebells, maces, or other weights. There’s a workout every day. This is key. It keeps your mind sharp. It keeps discipline high. The only choice I give myself is the instrument of destruction. Is it going to be kettlebells? Is it going to be maces?
Then at around 19:30. I have my second and last meal of the day–a big feast.
This works well for so many reasons. One of them is sleep quality. Intense workouts coupled with high caloric meals will put you in a soporific state where you just naturally fall asleep a couple of hours later, only to wake up the following day with a burning desire to get things done.
Last but not least, try to eat the same thing every day, so you don’t need to make decisions on what to eat. This saves a ton of mental energy and allows you to focus on working.
Hitting the Ground Running
Start your day with a ton of water with squeezed lemon juice and salt.
Ideally, squeeze the lemon juice into one or even 1.5 liters of water for antioxidants and electrolytes, and sprinkle 2-3 grams of sea salt in your water. Do you know what happens during the night? Every breath you exhale, you lose a bit of humidity. Hence why you feel so weak in the morning. Reload with salty water as soon as possible after waking up as this increases the hydration level of water, and you will feel better faster.
Mastering the Ice
Have a cold shower every morning for at least 3 minutes
Put the water as cold as you can and apply it to the top of your back and bottom of your neck. Stressing your body with cold water does this amazing thing. It makes your body more resistant to stress over time. This is technically called a hormetic response. It’s a bit like taking a small quantity of snake venom every day until you’re immune to it. It’s magical. I feel it washes the stress away. Not to even mention the amount of energy it gives you in the morning.
Bonus points: remember the water from above? If the water is called enough on an empty stomach, it will trigger a shivering effect lasting for 10 to 20 minutes. This is an easy way to multiply the benefits of cold water when coupled with the cold shower.
Mastering the Elements
Keep your caffeine below 200-300mg a day, so you are not all jittery. A day in the life of a high-impact person consists of continual activity. We don’t want to have ups and downs. We want serene focus, not agitated reaction. If you need to slay a dragon, go to its lair before it comes to your village, to freely quote Jordan B. Peterson.
Using expert combinations of nootropics will also give you the edge in this situation. A product like Maximum Mind, which combines the world’s finest ingredients with the right amount of ratios applied to it for maximum effect at minimum effective doses, will go a long way toward increasing your focus. It will also considerably help get you into flow states more easily, helping you tackle large brain-draining tasks, resolve complex problems with new creative solutions, and more. That’s why I make a point of continuously using it.