Utilising technology to streamline your success - Watch This! | High Performance Podcast

[Music] we're absolutely delighted to welcome to high performance the founder of the wearable tech brand whoop they've been previous partners with us on high performance it was amazing actually we spoke about them and hundreds of people went out and bought them and then got in touch to tell us they loved it so it's only right that we should talk to will about how it was all created and where he's at today will thank you so much for joining us from the united states jake damien thank you guys for having me so listen we always start our interviews in exactly the same way in your mind what is high performance i think high performance is exceptional output delivered consistently you know i think at various points in my life when i was thinking about high performance personally i would view it as sort of a singular thing like you have a a great result or uh you know you win the game or you score well on a test and it's sort of a it's an individual performance right a singular moment and the more time that i've spelled spent building a business as an entrepreneur who's trying to perform at a high level and then also because whoop works with many of the best athletes in the world being around really great athletes the more i've appreciated that high performance is also uh consistency day in day out wow tell us where that originally came from then because i think if i asked the 18 year old you what is high performance it would have been different can you remember when you first started that journey to learning it's about being relentless but it's about being consistently relentless well i was always into sports and exercise growing up you know i i probably played a dozen different sports as a young athlete i went on to play squash while i was at harvard and so i was a competitive college athlete and i would say that my perspective on performance as say you know 20 and younger was always uh okay i've got a you know an upcoming match an upcoming game like i'm going to try to win that and it was less about where i am today and in this moment more about uh can i win that thing coming up and it didn't really matter to me if i sort of ran myself into the ground along the way or uh you know uh wasn't necessarily optimal in other aspects of my life as a college athlete i was someone who struggled with over training which is you know a phenomenon many listeners are probably familiar with where you get fitter and fitter and fair then you sort of fall off a cliff in an unexpected way and i know you guys are quite familiar with that phenomenon i was also surrounded by other athletes who you know i felt like under-trained or misinterpreted fitness peaks or didn't necessarily understand the importance of recovery they got injured and so at at that point in time i became very personally interested in what did it mean to actually be optimal what did it mean to train effectively and this led me down a physiology path that led me to doing a lot of physiology research while i was in school i was technically studying government and economics while i was at harvard and i ended up spending a lot of time in the science department which was unfamiliar territory and i would say that whole process of of learning and and researching and and really recognizing my own limitations as an athlete or an individual uh got me interested in this idea of consistency and and from a whoop standpoint this idea of of recovery so will i'm fascinated by the idea that you started your business then that by identifying a problem you know in your case it was burning out having over trained and then the curiosity to go and look for a solution so can you explain why you think that's so important for any business to identify a problem and then look for the solution well i meet a lot of entrepreneurs founders ceos now at my stage in building a company and i'm always i always find it's it's uh it's easier to build a business if you're obsessed with the problem more so than the upside of building a company i do meet young people who say you know i want to start a company what should i start or how can i start something and in my case i became so obsessed with this problem that starting a company was like the last step in that in that evolution i i became an entrepreneur well before i even knew what an entrepreneur was and so i i tend to find that that if you become really obsessed with the problem that's what will pull you through in the end and it'll help you overcome enormous challenges along the way it'll help you really define what it is that you're after it'll help you uh you know create a culture that's around solving that problem being very mission driven versus say uh you know i want to make a big buck and uh and so i like to gravitate towards entrepreneurs who are uh focused on solving a specific problem so can you tell us about what some of those problems that you experienced were well over training was probably the main lens that i was looking at it from you know why is it that some days uh i felt like i could just keep training and training and training and then some days somewhat randomly it seemed like you know it'd be hard to play a single game and uh and why did it also seem somewhat random how i felt on the day of matches which is of course when you wanted to feel your peak and so that just got me sort of interested in a very specific question which is how could i know how hard i should train before i trained and why wasn't that something that was sort of commonly recognized as important the the thing that was confusing in all this is when i would talk to other athletes about it or even talk to coaches and i'd say you know if you could have technology you could have tools to better help you understand training or performance what would you want athletes especially coaches too we're hyper focused on how they could get more information about exercise specifically oh we want sweat analysis we want better video analysis we want better positional analysis we want more stats about the performance itself and yet when i asked them well what problems are you facing they often were reciting things back to me that i felt as a you know personally as an athlete oh well we deal with injuries we deal with player availability we deal with athletes not training properly on the right days and so i thought there was a real mismatch between what the market so to speak at the time was saying and the problems that they were actually facing and this is a good lesson i think for entrepreneurs too which is customers are much better at describing their problems than giving you the solutions to those problems sure and if you're an entrepreneur you want to really listen closely to what the problem actually is and then in turn do your very best to create the appropriate solution to that problem so i thought the problem to over training was actually understanding everything outside of exercise two what are you doing the other 20 hours of the day how are you sleeping how are you recovering and it turned out that was also going to be a really good way to continuously understand the body and to be able to understand all sorts of things as it relates to health let's just make it clear for people will you know what we're talking about here which is whoop which is wearable tech that you created um damian and i've been lucky enough to use them ourselves and the feedback is amazing so if you listen to this and you're not aware of woop yet um obviously you can find all the information online but basically you wear it and it tells you your hrv which is effectively how well you're recovering um so how hard you can train and then when you do trade it lets you know whether you've trained enough or not trained enough it measures your sleep not just how much but exactly how you're sleeping the type of sleep you're having and i remember once i was feeling a bit under the weather um and it came up with four percent recovery will so i woke up and i was due to go to the gym after the school run at 9am look at your eyes widened you know four percent how ill were you there you go i was like i don't feel great but i just checked my you know obviously you go on your phone and you check you your the feedback from the whoop band and four percent recovery and i was on the phone to my pt he said not today because i just need a rest day so you were a focused driven athlete with grand ambitions i'm sure for a successful sports career like lots of college athletes have when you got the answer that doing less was the answer how did you cope with that because i think that is an issue that so many people have not just people in sport but people in business people in life people who are parenting they feel like they're not going at 100 100 of the time then they're letting themselves and others around them down well i think it's a challenge for a lot of hard driving people you know hard driving people have a mindset that allows them to push much further than their bodies capable of and often that's a great asset but it also is in turn what can cause over training fatigue burnout if you're an executive and at least for me personally becoming fascinated by sleep and recovery was a real uh a mindset shift you know less it's not necessarily do less when it comes to exercise or strain or even stress that you're trying to take on i mean in many ways i think success is overcoming a level of stress that would break most people so in order to take that stress on you need to be really well recovered and in in a way it got me to think about what are all the ways that i can be better recovered how can i get more sleep how can i be more calm in these pressure moments and that translated much better to a business career than than anything else so what sort of tips then will did you pick up then on on how you could maximize that respect those rest periods well we could go down quite a rabbit hole here the first thing i'll say for your audience is that um sleep is fairly misunderstood people who have never measured their sleep if you ask them how much sleep they got last night they'll say well i went to bed at 11 and i woke up at six so i got seven hours of sleep that's pretty good right in reality they spent seven hours in bed right and as you guys know from wearing if you spend seven hours in bed that's going to consist of four different periods it's going to consist of the time that you're awake it's going to consist of time that you're in light sleep going to consist of time that you're in rem sleep and slow wave sleep those are the four different periods now rem sleep and slow wave sleep are where all the magic happens awake and light sleep you don't really get much credit from those from a physiological standpoint right rem sleep is when your mind is repairing so that's cognitive repair it's also when you're in a deep dream state so any high performing executive anyone who's got to do uh you know real cognitive work which is really every human in my opinion needs to get rem sleep uh slow wave sleep deep sleep that's when your body produces about 95 percent of its human growth hormone and uh and so there's this sort of misconception that you know you're getting stronger in the gym or you're getting stronger during practice for the most part you're breaking muscles down that then repair during slow wave sleep so let's now go back to this person who spent seven hours in bed that person could have spent a total of 30 minutes in rem and slow wave sleep or that person could have spent five and a half hours in rem and slow wave sleep now that's a world of difference right the person who's getting 30 minutes versus five and a half hours is living a completely different life i mean it's so hard to understate the the profound difference in those in those people's lives and the way that their bodies recovering and their their bodies sort of resilience to just take on the world and a lot of what i've done as an entrepreneur but also a lot of what whoop does as a product is it tries to help you figure out what are all the different things it could be lifestyle decisions could be diet could be mindset it could be training whatever that help you optimize the more p time that you spend in rem and slow wave because again we didn't talk about spending more time in bed even we just said of the time you're going to spend in bed how do you make it more productive and i think that's a real key for people it's not always or just do more of something or do less of something sometimes it's taking what you're already doing and making it better and for sleep that was that's been a big focus of mine and and it's something that we work with a lot of high performing executives on and athletes on it's foreign for our listeners then who want more time in those sleeps that are really good for them what from what you've learned from you and all of your woop customers what are the things that they need to be doing okay so the first one which is a general one that applies to everyone is the more consistently you can sleep the better so sleep consistency is this notion of going to bed and waking up at the same time so going to bed at 11 pm and waking up at 6am and doing that almost every day or close to it you your body gets a physiological boost when you go to bed and wake up at the same time so even if you're spending less hours in bed as long as you consistently do them at the same time you have a positive physiological response this gets more complicated if you travel a lot we can get into that sort of nuance so sleep consistency is really important as a general rule being more hydrated and not eating within three hours of bedtime that tends to help from a diet standpoint this is this is a little bit personal that some people can get away with eating pretty close to bed but for the most part i would guess about 90 percent of people uh eating within three hours of bedtime tends to disrupt your sleep uh alcohol unfortunately is just not good so the less alcohol you can drink the better if you're gonna drink alcohol uh it's sort of crescendo it goes wine and then clear liquors tend to be better than dark lickers so so there you have it on alcohol as you get closer to bed having less blue light so you know within say 30 minutes of of going to bed ideally you're not being exposed to a lot of different screens cell phone television laptop as an entrepreneur i'm actually someone who's constantly looking at my phone and what i do to get away with that is i wear blue light blocking glasses before i go to bed so those make a big difference uh you generally want to sleep in a cold room a dark room uh have high quality air if you can you want the room to not be noisy uh those are those are sort of all you know generally positive things and then you know mindset helps a lot so making sure that you're not you know getting in some kind of a verbal outbreak with your partner or reading the wrong thing right before you close your eyes those tend to not help your your overall sleep quality uh supplements varies by person i i like taking a lot of magnesium before i go to bed and on i would say a few nights a week i take a little bit of melatonin brilliant so and how much of this is consistent with you mentioned earlier around some of the elite athletes that you're fortunate enough to work with that also use the boot brand what ideas and techniques have you picked up off them that that you could share with our listeners in terms of driving for this high performance well i i mean there's a lot of a lot of things come to mind i think the thing that i've taken most um from from the world's best athletes personally is is just the general mindset that they have towards greatness they they do a phenomenal job um staying present uh in the sense that they are hyper focused in the moment on being great and they don't spend a lot of time really reflecting from a nostalgist standpoint and in a way it seems they're almost driven to a fault and the ones who tend to be happiest in being driven to a fault also have some form of gratitude that they bring into their life so they're simultaneously hungry and they're on that you know dopamine train of i need to win the next thing while also being grateful for their success and it's actually a hard combination i think many high-performing athletes and high-performing even entrepreneurs uh struggle with being grateful in a sense that it would somehow make them complacent and that in a way it would make them less hard charging so that that general mindset i would say is one of the biggest things i've picked up from from professional athletes and particularly the world's best i would say that also they they are incredibly focused on uh recovery and you know there's this sort of over focus i think from from a fan standpoint of what athletes are doing during games and i think there's an under focus on what they're doing in the other 20 hours and uh and the world's best athletes are competing every minute of the day they treat themselves like professional athletes when they wake up in the morning when they go to a restaurant when they go to a bar when they're hanging out with people right they keep thinking about themselves as professional athletes and i think that that's a bit of a misconception uh for for uh people who are earlier in their careers or or maybe not quite as successful as as they want to be as pro athletes so can i ask you then will in terms of how how much of this transfers into your own practice now as a as an entrepreneur so we're talking about those those sort of elite athletes in a competitive domain but how much of it does it transfer to you as a entrepreneur into your life i mean look it's it's it's helped enormously i i also host the podcast so i get to interview them and and and you know have conversations like the one we're having right now where you spend a lot of time hopefully listening and and sort of generally curious so that that's that that's helped me absorb a lot of the information that you otherwise you know may less let drift past you i i think uh i got very focused on this need for for being more grateful in my life you know and and really emphasizing that i also uh in for the last seven years have have meditated every single day when i was about 24 years old i think i kind of felt like i had reached a moment of crisis in running the company i was a 24 year old ceo i had maybe 25 people working for me i had raised about 10 million dollars from investors and all of that felt completely overwhelming and i felt like i was failing as a uh as an entrepreneur and as a leader and and i just was overwhelmed with stress i was drinking too much like i just did i wasn't i wasn't in sync you know i didn't feel like my my body was well balanced and my mind was was where it needed to be and that led me to to meditation where i you know really developed a a daily practice and it it really transformed uh my life in a lot of ways positively and it helped me uh i think be more present it helps me be more grateful and then you know in the years to come as we've got more and more successful you know going from the business being worth hundreds of millions of dollars to now uh 3.6 billion dollars you know just being able to to appreciate that while also still staying motivated to keep charging and uh and i think that sort of sense of balance came in large part from from learning to meditate and and uh and being a little bit more uh present i i really want people listening to this will to understand the possibilities that are out there for them because i think it's easy for some of them to be driving to work you know it might be they're listening to this in a country where the you know the rain is coming down and they're doing a job they don't necessarily love and they hear this and they think great you hang out with these elite athletes you've built a business worth over three billion and you find time to meditate every day that's not my life do you really believe that anyone can be as successful as you that they can build a business based really on passion which is what you've created do you think that's there for anyone i do i think you have to be obsessed with the problem i think you have to be willing to sacrifice an enormous amount i think you have to be willing to overcome an incredible degree of of pain and sort of personal uh anxiety along the way but look you know you can you can build your your dream job you know i think i think building a business is much harder than you think it will be but it's not nearly as hard as what everyone will tell you it is which is to say that it's impossible i remember when i was starting woop it was everyone telling me i was gonna fail and it was impossible and frankly it was a really hard it was just really hard dealing with that like i put up a real wall to that feedback and uh and the truth is it was just a lot harder but it wasn't impossible so i want to pick up on a few things there the first one is you mentioned about anxiety what created that and for our listeners perhaps more importantly what did you do to overcome it well you know i want to be careful not to mix these words too much there's sort of some combination of anxiety or stress or feeling down on yourself there's a mixture of that and even nerves you could argue you know standing in front of 20 people or 50 people or 600 people who now work for you and they've left jobs elsewhere to come beyond this mission with you right uh how do you cope with that how do you manage that and for me uh it was staying very mission driven it was being very honest with myself about what i thought i was excelling at were areas that i needed to bring in business partners or complementary points of view i was trying to stay humble about the success that we had had along the way and and then i go back to you know so the whole notion of of treating yourself as a professional athlete being well rested meditating exercising every day uh you know having good relationships in your personal life these things all all matter in my opinion for how you perform as a leader and those people that were telling you in the early days that this isn't going to happen you know the odds of creating a successful business out of this is is negligible you know the text really hard to create everyone's tried it two things i suppose number one how did you learn to not listen to those but also like why do we talk to each other like that what is the benefit of telling anyone at any point that their dream and their great ambition is not gonna is not gonna be a success it's like it doesn't solve any problems for you and i don't think it does much for them either you know yeah you know i think a lot of it came in the form of what people thought was helpful advice um but yes you know and therein lies the challenge for young people too is is they're kind of at a vulnerable stage in their early 20s or even mid or late 20s when they're still thinking about what they want to do with their career and they're going around asking people for perspectives in my case i was also raising capital so it becomes a little bit more of a transactional relationship which is why i think many people told me so bluntly they thought i was going to fail um to answer your question i you know one thing that was uh that just became a coping mechanism was effectively just putting up a wall to this negative feedback and that uh there was really two reasons for that one is that if i actually listened to all that feedback i don't think i would have been able to get out of bed in the morning because it just would have been overwhelmingly negative but two and this took longer to unravel you know i i at that early stage in building whoop really tied my own individual performance to that of the company's performance if if woop was doing well i was doing well if woop was doing poorly i was doing poorly if whoop was failing i was failing as an entrepreneur and that's a that's a super unhealthy uh relationship to creating your mind i don't know if it was in part because i was um a young entrepreneur and this was really the first thing i had done in my career was my first job if you will or if that's something that most entrepreneurs face when they're building a company because they've become so obsessed with it but it was certainly the case for me and uh and the thing that it takes a long time to realize and it took me doing work on myself to realize is that those are really two independent things there can be all sorts of reasons why your business is succeeding or failing and if you actually just focus on your own individual performance and just keep thinking about how can i get a little better every single day you know independent from what the outcomes of the company uh one you're in a much better head space and and uh you know two you wake up ten years later and you're actually now in a position to be running a company of hundreds of people managing hundreds of millions of dollars and this and that whereas at an earlier stage you felt like you couldn't even manage you know 10 or 20 people so tell us how do you stay humble when you're so successful as as you are now and how do you stay optimistic when things weren't so good what were what were some of the specific techniques you use well one very key uh technique was just visualizing what i expected the business to do or to grow to in in a lot of cases especially with the product uh building the technology for people aren't familiar was very hard and a lot of what we were we were doing or did had never been done before so there was an existential question of can we actually build this and that for an entrepreneur is scary and and you also have to manage a team around overcoming challenges and you have to have this sort of mindset that there's there's no such thing as a failure along the way you're sort of just finding new ways that it didn't quite work the way you expected right you're constantly reframing things in your mind towards what that that end goal is that you're visualizing towards and i recognized and recognized now looking back on this some of this came somewhat naturally to me and and it was just sort of my coping mechanism for moving forwards uh despite uh feeling pressure or feeling overwhelmed i think it also helps a lot to have uh you know a team around you that that you believe in and consequently they believe in you and building that camaraderie because of course it's easier to take on challenges with the team or together if you will than it is to take them on alone and certainly the success of woop is the success of of many people working very hard together let's talk then about building a team there are many people that listen to this from head teachers of schools to people that run businesses with one or two members of staff uh we have a lot of sports teams and sports franchises that share this in the dressing rooms and in the training facilities to build a team is what they're all trying to do how do you do it well i i i realized along the way that i i looked for a very specific type of person uh to bring onto my team uh and that was uh someone who embodied high humility and high intensity uh you know high intensity will start there is being hard driving uh having a maybe a deep expertise in a particular area and and uh sort of a relentlessness if you will to want to explore that and uh and better at that high humility is recognizing that in that pursuit you don't necessarily have all the answers and uh when you're building an ambitious company that's that's operating across a lot of different disciplines what often happens is you'll have one individual representing an entire department so let's take a specific example okay the whoop strap how does it send data from the loop strap to your iphone okay well that meeting is going to include a hardware engineer a signal processing engineer an ios engineer a product manager a designer and maybe someone from marketing okay that group of people is going to decide how it sends data and guess what they're all going to come in with their own point of view on it and there's going to be this natural collision right and that's that's sort of the beauty of of a high-intensity place where people are really passionate but what happens often if everyone also brings a level of humility to that conversation is that you know everyone gets focused on figuring out what's the best solution for the company not i came up with it and uh and so i've i found that that having people who are high intensity and high humility uh you know were the best problem solvers for our organization and what in turn that also helped us develop was a was a culture that's uh more of an idea meritocracy because when you enter a workplace or a culture where you feel like you can challenge anyone and you can confront anyone and and it's ultimately about coming up with the the best ideas it allows you to to operate at this real freedom and for the organization's benefit it means that your best ideas might come from a vp or they might come from an intern and we've had both and that's that's pretty exciting and that's pretty exciting for anyone in the org to feel and uh and so you know as a consequence of this um you know high-intensity high humility group of people we've also been able to build a culture that i think is a high um an idea of meritocracy so that sounds like i've heard a great quote from you when you were talking about your parents and you said that line about your mother was book smart but your dad was street smart which taps into that idea of real cognitive diversity people coming at a problem from different angles and different solutions can you break down though for as well for people listening to this what are the kind of rules of debating or the rules of coming together for a meeting that anyone could take and get the best out of all those different perspectives that you use in uh in your own culture well i don't know if i've ever defined rules in in that sense but i'll try to think about them uh here with you guys in real time you know what one general theme i would say is you want to embrace chaos but you don't you don't want any sense of drama so i'm pro chaos i hate drama and that's one very key point of view i think if you're going to have a debate culture which is that you're going to allow people to be bouncing off each other you're going to allow there to be this collision but it's not going to get personal and it's not going to be about the politics of an organization or who's going to get promoted or who feels this way or that it's really going to be about the topic at hand i think that's probably one of the most key things i think you also want to make sure that you have an environment in which it's clear people are actually listening to each other and they're prepared you know if there's a a draft document for a business proposal you know everyone should have read the business proposal before they show up to the meeting if someone's giving a an explanation for something over zoom hopefully the three people listening aren't also on you know uh slack messaging other people but they're actually paying attention so those are some of the quick things that come to mind and then i think you know the last point which is maybe lost the most in all of this is once you do come to a solution you have to agree to commit to it uh and and in some cases there may still be individuals who slightly disagree or strongly disagree with the decision that's made and you still have to you know agree to that you have to sort of agree to disagree and move forwards and and that i think is another key attribute and how are you with creating a vulnerable culture because it it struck me that when you were talking about you know a conversation about getting the info from the strap to the iphone right there's people in that room that know things and i hope i'm not being rude here will they know things you're probably never gonna know so you're sitting there thinking okay there's lots of knowledge and lots of learning in the room you can't possibly know everything so how are you with making sure that people are vulnerable that people could admit they don't know certain things to admit to their mistakes because i think creating a vulnerable workplace is as important as creating a successful one i agree with that look you want to be very intellectually honest about what you think you know and why and you also want people to be able to push up against that and and question why you feel so strongly you know something i think vulnerability often starts at the top i mean it's no secret that uh i'm a 31 year old uh ceo this isn't just the first company i started it's my first job uh we're operating at the intersection of technology and medicine and research and i'm you know i i didn't study engineering or computer science i'm not a doctor i'm not technically a researcher by trade so i'm operating in fields that uh i have to rely on on the people around me and embrace the people around me and and hopefully empower the people around me i think if there's one thing i've i've done well it's fine exceptional people and empower them to tell us what to do so how do you manage then in terms of the nature of the product that that whoop is will how do you manage intensity in your staff without them risking burnout and some of those other um consequences of that that we often associate with with that term burnout well you build it into the culture i mean whoop for example has a sleep bonus if you get over 85 percent of your sleep performance in a month you get a bonus every month on your page we actually we actually pay you to sleep if you have a red recovery uh and this was especially effective during the sort of the height of covet we ask that you don't come into the office and you work from home uh people people have read recoveries they either may be getting sick or they may be at greater risk to get sick so it's you know in their advantage and others to stay home we have uh all kinds of fitness classes that we do together we're on whoop teams together where we're looking at each other's data it's it's sort of out there in the open brilliant in a healthy way we were joined on the podcast wheel by a lady called susie ma who was uh an entrepreneur that created a skincare brand called tropic and she said that one of her defining things is to have the infinite purpose for her life and for her for her business and we've created one for high performance we have an infinite purpose so it has no end and it's it's what we're all about how would you describe the infinite purpose of whoop i think it's to improve health i mean you put you put on a whoop and within a year you're sleeping longer you're sleeping more consistently you have a lower resting heart rate you have a higher heart rate variability and you've probably made at least three meaningful lifestyle shifts whether that's drinking a little less alcohol or finding the right diet for you or introducing something like mindfulness and i get to hear from group members every single day who the product has meaningfully changed their behavior and improve their health so that's that's an enormously rewarding feeling and to your point about infinite possibility it doesn't feel like that's ever not going to be a good cause to fight for so what's the future looking like then of tracking technology because i think it's in a really interesting place now it's already helping people to live that more optimal life what do what does it look like in 20 or 30 years well i don't even know if you have to look that far out i think most people are grossly underestimating the degree to which wearable technology is going to change health care and dramatically improve health broadly because v1 of wearables to put it politely was kind of underwhelming you had these sort of step step counters that you know vaguely told you information that you needed to know but didn't really action on any of it and you know v2 of wearable technology which i like to think woop is is out in front of is now able to tell you exactly what to do tell you how to recover tell you how to train tell you one to go to bed it's much more actionable and it's even on that cusp of telling you really interesting things you don't know at all you know for example tens of thousands of people on whoop discovered they had coveted 19 through their own whoop data you know before they actually got tested right that's a pretty profound recognition we've had people on whoop realize they had different diseases because their data was so off that they want to go see a doctor we've had people on whoop literally go to the er because they realized they were having a heart attack because of their work data now if you think about what that could demonstrate for going forwards i think our technology will have the ability to predict disease states predict you're gonna have a heart attack you know forget going to see a doctor on a random day of the year for an annual checkup how about you need to go see a doctor in the next 15 minutes right like how game changing would that be uh for you and also for the health care system i mean a health care system especially in the united states is totally screwed up and it's screwed up because it's really uh curative cost versus preventative costs and when you can shift curative costs to being preventative costs the whole system changes and i think wearable technology and and i expect whoop uh will play a big role in that shift so when jake and i have interviewed other entrepreneurs similar to yourself then will like one of the things we we notice is that they always have an organization that complies with what we call the t-shirt law the idea that they communicate what their business does on the front of a t-shirt so everyone can understand it and buy into it so what's the t-shirt law for whoop then that that that you can get this out to even more people and understand those benefits you've just shared with us well our mission at woop is to unlock human performance so pretty pretty straight to the point especially for this podcast you know uh what that also means is you know how do you change your behavior to improve your performance how do you make just true health improvement part of your performance but ultimately human performance in that context is living a healthier and longer life you know we're going to move on in a minute we'll on to our um our quick fire questions at the end but i just keep coming back to the same thing while we're talking which is i really want people listening to this to understand that they might have this great desire to run a business be an entrepreneur be better at the job they have be better parents whatever it is and it's almost like from what you've learned from the athletes you hang out with to creating tech like this adopting the habits now for living where you want to be in six months or six years is the most important thing rather than kind of waiting until that success comes and then go right now i'm gonna live like a successful person now i'm gonna put my body and my mind at the forefront of my thinking it's the total opposite isn't it yeah that's such a good point you know it goes back to the beginning of the conversation where we talked a little bit about consistency making a slight shift and then doing it consistently consistently for a long period of time has unbelievable compounding benefits i mean for me just meditating 20 minutes a day but doing that every single day for seven years it completely changed my disposition and my attitude as a leader and the way i thought about my own life and that's just 20 minutes a day of doing something versus nothing right and it's helped me grow into uh being a successful uh business leader being able to be a successful business leader i think there's so many great examples of that you know um we talked a little bit about how you can do that with sleep what are a few very simple things you can change i mean maybe just make your room colder you know maybe put your phone down five minutes before bed versus looking at it up into the last second maybe we're in blue light blocking classes like people need to be willing to experiment a little more with their with their their lives and their bodies and their attitudes and and be willing to see where that takes them uh at least for me that's been an enormously important uh piece of my growth is uh being experimental and and seeing where that takes me that's a good point just actually while we're talking about just think how many people we know that are living the same life now that they were living five years ago i had a conversation with someone about this last week i was like you're in the same place without ex without exploring without experimenting it doesn't happen it's true so what is the one thing that you would recommend for our listeners right now from all those changes all that exploring and experimenting that you've done where should they begin what's the one thing well i think a lot of this this whole discussion comes back to what do you want you know i think people often are frustrated that they're not getting what they want without actually having clearly defined what it is that they want and if you just sort of think about a simple method in your mind ask yourself what do you really want in life and then come up with a process for achieving it and without the first step it's hard to come up with the second or assess the second as as obvious and simple as that sounds i experience this a lot with uh entrepreneurs who come to me saying you know we're frustrated about this this and this and we're trying to build this business i said well what do you actually want for the business right now what are the three things that you want and if that's not well articulated in your mind it's a little bit harder i think to to find a process if you said look i want to lose 20 pounds i want that okay boom let's come up with a process for that right uh so i think that that that having a clear definition in in in the moment for what you want is is uh is core because there's a lot of sacrifices that may also come from that one that one thought or that one that one need i i think i read somewhere uh a desire is a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you get with what you want something like that that's that's a little depressing but it's it's a helpful lens to think about how many deci desires you actually want to have at one time yeah you know the more singular they are the easier it is to achieve them for the last 10 years i've been incredibly focused on building this company i have not had a lot of other you know wants in my life it's really been this and in some ways that's helped build the company so one of the things that um i've heard you speak about as well then will is the idea of of focusing on stopping doing things almost having to stop doing list as much as i start doing this then that fits in with this idea of a singular focus so how important is it that you regularly sort of clear the clutter from your life and how do you go about doing that i think it's critically important i mean a lot of destructive behaviors you'd hope you could stop uh you know people who maybe have trouble with binge drinking or smoking or overeating etc right like if you can remove some of those uh just as a baseline obviously you're in a better place some people may be at a stage in their life where they say i just want to have the most fun possible that's what i want and okay like you know then then you may not view those as destructive behaviors you may be in a different place in life uh but for people who are listening to this we're really focused on high performance it'd be worth listing out all the things that you think may undermine your high performance and look some of those might be relationships you know so this you kind of have to have some hard conversations with yourself if you're going to go through that exercise but uh i think you make a great point uh damian is a critical it's a critical list to be considering and just before we hit our quick five questions i want to come back to your quote about desire as a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want i've always believed that desire is everything that you need to be successful the desire comes before the success no well i i think i'm i'm more inclined to to take your quote actually i i i mostly was i was making a bit of a stubborn point which is that you want to be very decisive about the things in your life that you're you're orienting yourself towards yeah and i think for the most part desires can be highly motivating they can be very clarifying it's just you want to be mindful of how many of them at the same time are you after and how are those pulling at each other it's all about i guess we could reframe it as something like desire with no steps towards achieving that aim is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy because it's all the desire is fine as long as you make the effort right to achieve them i think that's right interesting so we could go into a quick fight round then we'll normally finish our interviews with a series of quickfire questions so the first one is can you list the three non-negotiable behaviors that you and the people around you must buy into well we talked about high intensity i think that's critical you know being hard driving relentless we talked about high humility the you know the recognition that you you you don't have all the answers and i i think i would add from a team standpoint uh you know a sense of loyalty a commitment to one another that you're in it together and uh and you're gonna persevere together nice well if you could go back to one period in your life where would you go and why i would say right here now you know the big focus in the last 10 years for me has been on being present and the importance of being present and i think the more present you get the more fulfilling your life feels and the better you perform so right here right now how important is legacy to you legacy in the sense that i've helped build products or teams that live on well past me i would say quite important you know i like the idea of of being able to create things uh from scratch and have those things be contributing value uh well beyond my existence legacy from the sense of uh who was will ahmed i i don't know i haven't i haven't thought enough about that but i guess i like the trajectory that i'm on and and i'm mostly focused on and kind of keep going the last hour has been full of brilliant takeaways and lessons for our listeners if you could recommend though one book or maybe another podcast series apart from your own obviously which you're welcome to plug again or a tv series something that you've absorbed that made a difference to you that you'd love to pass on to our listeners well i'd love to plug the podcast for a second you know the the one thing i'll say about having done a podcast and i'm curious if it's like the same for you guys is the process of of actually interviewing people for an hour is a really important process for learning how to listen you know you have to be incredibly present as you guys have been and you have to really listen and uh and so for me personally having done having gone through that exercise of doing a podcast i you know i said we'll do 10 and see how it goes and now we're on i don't know 130 or something and uh but just having gone through that process of of having to really listen to people and think about what they've said and ask follow-up questions and ask follow-up questions because as you guys know depth is kind of the where all the magic happens uh and that's been an incredibly useful process for me personally and so this is a slightly different answer to your question but i would encourage people to think about ways in their life that they are forced to listen to people really deeply and to uh to ask questions and follow up on them and think about them yeah i think the thing for us with creating high performance is you realize everyone has got something of value for somebody else and i think we all just live in this world don't we where we float past everyone and actually if you stop and engage them and really as you say get to the deep stuff really understand what motivates them it's magic magic for so many people 100 so the final question then will is what's your one golden rule for our listeners to live a high performance life i think it's combining uh purpose with consistency you know back to your original point of what is high performance i think it's exceptional output delivered consistently over time a lot of my life has been learning that and wrestling with that and especially as an entrepreneur being someone who has the same consistent performance every day and being a predictable outcome as a result for the rest of my team and my investors and my shareholders and our customers you know maintaining that that consistency i think is so key it's brilliant um thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us i'm always very aware aware when we have these conversations with someone like you that has built a business valued at over three billion dollars that it's very easy for people to listen and think well you know that is so far away from where i am in my life um and i don't want people to think we're having this conversation because anyone can then just go and do that although you know the possibility is there i think that's the lesson here for people is that it's not about that end goal and that big moment it's about the everyday tiny small details the little processes if you can get those right you might build a three billion dollar company but you might just be happier or healthier or able to run after your kids a bit longer in the park and that in itself is well worth doing you know well yeah and to to your point that those numbers are also a little misleading in the sense that i was struggling more with with running a 10 million dollar company than i am now with struggle you know with managing a a multi-billion dollar company and i think a lot of the theme today was what are the little things that you're doing to grow into a larger role or to become a slightly better version of yourself and so for me it was putting a lot of those practices in play and then the business in a way actually followed but it's not don't feel like because you're having a hard time running your two-person company that you have no chance of being able to build a big business a lot of it is getting comfortable in that moment so that you can then grow into it there you go everything you now find easy you once sound hard right for sure will thank you so much thank you will that's been incredible please hit subscribe hit the notification bell give us a thumbs up leave a review but somehow get involved with the high performance podcast and become part of our growing community you

2021-10-26 19:44

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