Episode 186 | Life Hacks for Entrepreneurs

Startups For the Rest of Us

Episode 186 | Life Hacks for Entrepreneurs

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Show Notes

• SuperNBack – An implementation of the NBack brain training algorithm
• Sama Vritti Pranayama – Equal Breathing
• Greek Yogurt substitution chart
• PB2 – Peanut butter substitute

Transcript

[00:00] Mike: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Rob and I are going to be talking about life hacks for entrepreneurs. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 186.

[00:06] Music

[00:14] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.

[00:22] Rob: And I’m Rob.

[00:22] Mike: And we’re here to share experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we have made. What’s the word this week, Rob?

[00:26] Rob: Drip email automation is done.

[00:29] Mike: Oh, congratulations.

[00:30] Rob: Fantastic. Yeah, thank you. We have some early access folks in using it. I have to check a box in the admin console to give folks access to it but just trying to get some more feature requests and figure out what use cases we can and can’t implement at this point.

[00:44] But I’m currently in the process of basically building out Drips entire trial email sequence that I send out which is pretty complex. There’s a lot of dynamic fields. We’re building that out inside the drip email automation engine. It’s pretty interesting just to see this. I’ve never seen this done.

[00:59] Because it’s not just about moving people here and there based on behaviour but we actually have dynamic pieces inside each email. And since we use a Liquid templating engine I can write little snippets of code inside the emails and based on if this custom field is set then put this message. Otherwise, tell them they need to get on board with this other stuff.

[01:17] So it’s been really fun and interesting to dog food it ourselves and we’re just diving into that right now. It is a big weight off my shoulders. Drip email automation is finally done after literally months of toil and work. Now it’s just time to get some folks in using it and get the marketing ramped up for it.

[01:32] Mike: That’s always scary when you’re like manipulating stuff in that production environment and it could potentially impact the guys who are currently using it. Even just inside those emails and things.

[01:41] Rob: Yup.

[01:42] Mike: It’s just a little disconcerting.

[01:43] Rob: Well, and I think that, specifically with making dynamic stuff inside the email, there’s a lot of room for people to make mistakes so we kind of have to help folks out a lot. It’ll be increased support burden, right? There is just more complexity in this. It’s probably why more email providers like MailChimp or whatever wouldn’t allow people to do it.

[01:57] I think there’s a need for it. I think the direction that we’re all headed with email is that we’re becoming – it’s not one to many anymore. It’s like one to a few or one to one at this point and you really have to be customized and customizable based on the things that they do in order to really get impact from it. So that’s the goal with all this.

[02:13] So as I’ve said before, we’re kind of entering this market of on the lower end of Infusionsoft or Office Autopilot. It’s kind of exciting times. We have to do so much stuff though. All the marketing is now – it’s not completely non-usable but it really is a market that we’re entering into anew, so I have a lot of copy to write, trial emails will be new, onboarding has to be all redone because now there are different goals. So we still have a bunch of work ahead of us but it feels good to get the feature out there and have folks using it.

[02:39] Mike: I think that’s one of the hesitations that some people have for launchings. It’s just that they know that if they have to change stuff then they don’t want to have to do a lot of that marketing stuff over again. Especially when it comes to pivots, it’s like I don’t want to pivot because I’ve got all this stuff that I’ve done. I won’t throw it away.

[02:53] Rob: I have to admit it’s daunting to think of redoing stuff we just did six months ago. But what’s nice is the stuff we did six months ago worked well enough to get a critical mass and to get enough revenue to make it worth our while. I mean, it’s not like we’re at $500 a month in revenue and now we’re trying to pivot again. The revenue is coming in justified those initial effort so now it’s just time to kind of step up the game.

[3:12] Mike: Cool.

[3:13] Rob: How about you? What’s going on?

[03:14] Mike: Just wanted to make a couple of announcements here. If you’re a listener who was inspired to quit your job and you’re working full time on your own stuff, let us know. We’ve got a success stories area of the podcast website and we’d be happy to give you a mention and a link back to your site.

[03:28] Also, if you haven’t been to the website lately, our mailing list as well. So we haven’t sent too much to it yet but with the upcoming MicroConf in Europe and a few other things that we have in motion, that’s probably going to change pretty rapidly.

[03:38] Rob: Well, I have some exciting stuff coming down and of course you get to try out Drip if you use that because we are using Drip to collect the emails.

[03:43] Mike: The other thing I have is I unloaded a ton of computer equipment this weekend. Guess how many computers I offloaded out of my home office?

[03:49] Rob: First of all, when you say “unloaded,” do you mean trashed or sold?

[03:52] Mike: I recycled them.

[03:53] Rob: Okay.

[03:54] Mike: I still have some things left that I’m actually going to sell outright but there’s a bunch of stuff that I just took it to the recycling

[03:59] Rob: Yeah, and over under is at ten computers.

[04:03] Mike: Double that.

[04:03] Rob: No! Oh, my gosh! What are you? A pack rat? You had 20 computers?

[04:09] Mike: Yup. I have a server rack and there were all these servers in there and I’m just like there were ten servers in there I just did not need and then there’s all these old desktops and stuff that I’ve kind of gone through over the years and I just kind of left them around for parts and stuff. I got to the point where I’m just like I’m never going to do anything with any of these things. Let me just take it to the recycling, get rid of it all.

[04:27] Rob: Anyway, on to some podcast reviews. We have a bunch of new reviews. This is awesome. We have 217 reviews worldwide with a 4.9 star average. We have a review from Tyler Dow and he says “It’s a pivotal part of my week. Rob and Mike provide outstanding content each week and have found a way to become a regular part of my week. I can’t thank you enough for putting out the great work you do.”

[04:47] Next one is from Ryan Battle here in the U.S. He says, “informative, practical, and to the point. I’ve been listening to this podcast for several months now and it is one of the few that I consider a must listen. The length is perfect, and I love that Rob and Mike don’t waste any time getting to the point. It shows that they are organized and respect the time of their listeners.”

[05:04] And the last one I’ll read today is from our very own Patrick McKenzie, patio11, and he calls us, “one of the best SaaS-focused podcasts. Simply the best, most consistent podcast about running a software business. It’s focused on solopreneurs and folks just getting started in their businesses, but I regularly find things which are useful to me 8+ years in, and I’ve recommended individual episodes to senior folks at companies with tens of millions of dollars in revenue and up.” And then he includes a disclaimer. “I know Rob and Mike in real life, and would consider them friends.”

[05:31] So thanks to all of you for leaving us a review on iTunes. It definitely helps keep us motivated to continue doing the podcast, helps us build a listenership which means that we can just provide more value to everyone. If you haven’t left us a review that would be the best way to pay us the back if you can log in to iTunes and give us a five star.

[05:47] Music

[05:51] Mike: Well, today we’re going to be talking a little bit about life hacks for entrepreneurs. I thought we’d go through and take a look at some of the different things that could be useful to some of our listeners which are a little bit outside of the realm of technology and marketing and more applicable to life in general.

[06:04] The first one is a life hack for relieving stress and anxiety. It’s essentially a breathing exercise. I think that your wife, Sherry, had given a little bit of a brief demonstration about this at MicroConf which was really cool. There was a room of about 200 people who were doing this very thing. I went through it and I glanced up at the time to kind of look around to see who else was doing it and virtually the entire room was doing it.

[06:27] Afterwards, you do this breathing exercise and I really felt a lot calmer and a lot less anxious. It’s called Sama Vritti but essentially it means “equal breathing.” The basics of it are that you inhale for a count of four and then you exhale to a count of four all through your nose. While you’re doing this, you concentrate on paying attention to the motion of the air. You repeat this ten times.

[06:47] So as you’re breathing in, you concentrate on the air coming in, and then as you’re breathing out, you concentrate on the air that’s going out. And if you do this ten times, because you’re only counting to four, it’s about four seconds each way, it’s really less than a minute and a half. Afterwards, you feel much more at ease. Your stress levels seriously drop after doing this and you can really focus a lot more on the things that you’re doing.

[07:10] Rob: This is one of those things that I think you can hear and say, “Oh, what a bunch of crap.” People have mixed feelings about this stuff. In my experience of this kind of stuff, this breathing and exercise and yoga and all the stuff we’re going to talk about today is tremendously undervalued, like taking care of yourself. It has crazy long-term effects, not just healthwise but like on your motivation and it’s things that you don’t even notice until you get six or 12 months down the line and then you realize you’ve been driving yourself into the ground, eating fast food, not exercising, being stressed out.

[07:41] And so this kind of thing, like you said it, it’s 90 seconds. The one we did at MicroConf, I was actually particularly stressed out at the moment that Sherry said we should start doing it and it did have a noticeable impact. I felt my pulse go down. I felt my stress go away for the time being. If you haven’t heard of this or you haven’t taken this kind of thing seriously, I think this can really do well if you do have anxiety and/or stress going on in your life, to just take this breather and kind of reset everything for the moment and even if you have to do it every hour or every two hours to kind of get rid of that stress.

[08:10] Mike: What I find is that if you’re considering doing something like this and you’re using any sort of time tracking techniques, whether it’s Pomodoro or anything like that, if you set aside time explicitly to do this, either in between work sessions, it’s much more effective in helping you because it becomes something of a habit. You work for a little while and then you do this, your stress levels drop and you’re able to really focus on the things that you need to get done as opposed to worrying and stressing out about them impacting your productivity. So definitely try it out. Let us know how it goes for you.

[08:40] Our next one, it’s essentially a way to increase the amount of working memory that you have. There was a semi-famous blog post by Joel Spolsky where he said that he can only ever keep so many variables in his head at one time and if anything comes in and tries to take up more space, it rolls off the desk and gets eaten by the dust bunnies. Just the fact that you can only remember so many things and after that you really just have to start archiving them someplace.

[09:06] Well, there was a Wall Street Journal article that was coupled with a University of Michigan study that talked about this learning technique called SuperNBack. Essentially, what it is is it looks like a game. You can get various implementations of it. There is one that you can get at supernback.com. You download it. You put it on your Windows or OS X machine. You can run this program and you dedicate a little bit of time to it and you just do it a little bit each day.

[09:33] Essentially, what it does is it works on increasing the available working space that you are able to process and hold in your brain. So essentially what you’re doing is you’re trying to remember sequences of events that are going on on the screen. When you’re first doing it, you can only remember one or two or three.

[09:50] It gets real easy after you start to figure out what you’re supposed to do, but then you kind of top out at like three or four and it’s really hard to kind of break through that. You’ll look at it and you keep trying it and trying it and you can’t remember more than three or four of these sequences of events. Then you get to a point where your brain just kind of breaks through that and you’re able to remember so much more substantially faster. Like I said, this is all backed up by the University of Michigan study and there’s anecdotal evidence that it improves your IQ, improves your ability to process complex tasks.

[10:21] But it is something that you have to dedicate time to. It’s not something you can do a little bit of and then come back to it in three or four or five months or something like that. You really kind of have to keep on it. But once you’ve done that, after you’ve kind of made those breakthroughs, your brain will maintain the ability to remember all of these things in the future. So even if you stop for eight months and then come back to it, your brain will still be functioning at a very high level as opposed to where it was when you first started. A lot of the applications that you can use to take these measurements that you used to leverage the SuperNBack technique, it will show you your progress over time.

[10:53] Rob: Right, and all of us can use something like this but I think it becomes especially important as you age and your brain loses its elasticity. Typically, late 30s, as you move into your 40s you just start losing a little bit of an edge. It doesn’t happen by accident, right? It’s not people who sit around for ten years watching TV and then come back and try to do it. And so this type of stuff is what can keep you sharp.

[11:13] There’s another one called Fit Brains and it’s by Rosetta Stone and I’ve used it. What’s nice about it is it feels a little bit like a game so it does kind of take your mind away but the idea is that it’s supposed to be helping keep your brain fit and keep those elastic pieces moving around and I think as you get older that’s important.

[11:32] Mike: Yeah. I was going to say it’s kind of like exercises for your brain. Obviously, physical exercise helps your body but mental exercises will help to kind of keep your brain in shape. The other one that I’ve heard a lot about is called luminosity.com.

[11:44] So we’ve already talked a little bit about mental exercises but then we get into physical exercises so getting into exercise routines and general fitness. One thing that I found really helpful is to – if you hire a personal trainer and I know that personal trainers can be expensive but if you hire a personal trainer to essentially build a workout program for you and not necessarily go to the gym with you all the time. Because, really, the personal trainer is there to kind of help motivate you and correct your form and things like that but if you’re already comfortable with that stuff and you don’t necessarily need the motivation to go to the gym, what you really need is a workout program that works for you.

[12:17] When you’re first getting into fitness and trying to get your body in shape and you can work with a physical trainer and say, “Hey, I need an exercise program and I would like you to develop one for me,” so you can have, you know, if you’re going to go to the gym two or three days a week, you can have two or three different programs.

[12:31] I’m in the process of actually having five of them done right now so I can go to the gym five days a week. It’s working out pretty well for me. They’re pretty intense too. They don’t take a whole lot of time to do. I think that my first exercise program was about 20 minutes but it’s hardcore 20 minutes. It’s very exhausting to do. I need to take care of my body so I think that doing that upfront investment in something that you can kind of put into a process to move forward then that will really help you out.

[12:57] Rob: Yeah. If you’re like me, it’s not the exertion of the exercise. It’s the time that’s so hard to carve out. I grew up playing sports and lifting weights six days a week, and then I ran track for nine years. I played football. I mean, that’s what I did. It was a huge part of my identity was working out, being fit, and that kind of stuff.

[13:15] And then after college, I got a knee injury. I had surgery and then I just kind of stopped doing it. So after 20 years of a semi-sedentary lifestyle, it’s really interesting to try to get back to that. Every year, for the past several years when I go on a retreat, I will put down kind of a goal of start exercising again at all. I should try to do something. The time has been a challenge.

[13:35] So whats finally worked for me and I’ve been doing this for four or five months now. I decided not to try to do any type of stuff that I used to do because all the stuff I did was intense. I mean, I would do two hours a day six days a week. I just had the time. I started with, “I’m going to do 30 push-ups a day.” That was it. That’s all I was going to do and not in a row even. I would do as many as I could. And so the first day, I did five push-ups in one set, and then I did six sets of five push-ups.

[14:01] But over the course of even a week, I was able to do ten at a time, and now I’m able to do more than 30 at a time. So I’m going to start upping that. But what’s nice about that is for me it takes almost no time because I can fit it in around other things. Like if I’m going to think about a program in our marketing problem, I will just go on the floor and do enough push-ups. Do 20 or 30 push-ups. Crank them out.

[14:21] It’s crazy how quickly my body has adapted. It’s crazy how that little piece, that little in to that habit has started it so that the other night – this happens a couple of times a week – it’ll be 11 o’clock, I’m getting ready to go to bed, and I remember that I haven’t done the push-ups and I will just go down and do them right then just to get them done to make sure that I’ve done them every day.

[14:41] But what that’s led into is that I’ve started running on an elliptical and this is not something I’ve ever done. I’ve always been a runner. I’m actually running on ground and even if I only do 30 minutes, the great part is I’m motivated because I typically will watch a show that I’m drawn to doing that if I can multitask. I think not everyone’s like this but that’s how I am. I have such tight time frames that I’m the guy that double speeds podcasts and so for me to be on an elliptical for 30 minutes not working my mind somehow is too much of a time investment every day for me. But if I can somehow do something else at the same time, it has made it much more palatable and, for me, much more sustainable.

[15:21] I’m on this elliptical now I’d say about three days a week and it’s been consistent for several months. I know that I am on to something, at least kind of a regimen that works for me and if you’re similar to me, it might work for you.

[15:31] Mike: The other thing you can do when you’re on an elliptical is either listen to podcasts or you can also — if you have a Kindle, you can read books on a Kindle as well so you get two different things going at once so you’re kind of multitasking there to make good use of your time while you’re exercising.

[15:44] Next on our list is increasing the quality of your sleep. If you increase the quality of your sleep, it increases your overall wellness and you are able to think more clearly, you’re getting enough rest such that your brain is able to kind of put all the pieces in the right places while you’re in deep sleep and you’re able to remember things better and you generally feel better.

[16:01] If you look at general advice out there, they essentially consist of things like no caffeine after certain times of the day and no screens within a couple of hours of going to bed and things like that. What I found is that that “no screens” does not apply to my Kindle Paperwhite. And I think that’s because it doesn’t have an LCD screen. It has essentially a backlighting capability so it doesn’t really create the same effect in your eyes and it doesn’t cause your brain to kind of go haywire just before you’re going to bed.

[16:31] The other thing I do when I’m reading books at night is I avoid any kind of business or self-improvement books. I exclusively read science fiction or fantasy books to kind of get my mind away from the rest of the day. And I’ve really noticed some considerable improvements in my sleep quality when I’m doing that, especially if I’m doing it before bed.

[16:48] What I’ve started doing is making a habit out of going to bed at a certain time every night. I have found that by setting aside that half hour or 45 minutes for reading a book that has absolutely no relation to my life in general, it helps reduce the stress on my brain and it helps keep my mind off of the things that would otherwise keep me up at night because then I’m focused on this book which, as I said, has nothing to do with reality. I can just read the words and kind of pay attention to the characters and I don’t have to think about solving any particular problem that goes along with the content.

[17:19] Rob: I think the tip about not having screens, especially LCD screens in front of your eyes right before you go to bed is a big one. I don’t think a lot of people heed that. I know that when I work on my laptop and so right before I go to bed that I do have squirrely sleep patterns and that I wind up thinking about work. That’s a good tip.

[17:36] I think another one is called F.lux and it’s justgetflux.com. F.lux makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day so basically it’s warm at night and it’s like sunlight during the day. It’s a pretty interesting thing so as you move into the evening, it will lighten up.

[17:54] The thing I found myself doing for years is once the sun sets, I will actually walk around the house and dim all the overhead lights or turn them off. So I use uplights so that no overhead lights are kind of blaring down because we’re not doing task-based stuff anymore. So I found that that actually changes the mood and it kind of enters us into this cycle of the day that’s like, all right, you’re easing out of all your productivity and you’re kind of easing into an evening of relaxation. And so that’s another approach that I hadn’t even realized I did and then Sherry pointed this out to me.

[18:24] Mike: Yeah, I used to use a Zeo sleep tracker to help kind of monitor my sleep and I did find that, based on what the sleep tracker was telling me, if I read before I went to bed, I definitely got better sleep. I just felt better in general the next day as well but it gave me kind of a number to look at. That number, I kind of tested it over time and it seemed like it worked out pretty well. Unfortunately, they ended up going out of business so I’ve kind of been looking around for a new sleep tracker, kind of an updated one but I still have my Zeo around and it still works pretty well.

[18:51] The last hack that we have is around food and nutrition. There are several hacks that kind of fall into this category. The first one is to plan your meals and snacks so we can advance. What this does is it helps you to avoid having to make choices throughout the day.

[19:03] We’ve talked in previous episodes of this podcast about how, if you limit the number of choices that you have to make, then it helps you to increase your brain glucose levels during the day and helps maintain them at higher levels so that you’re not wasting valuable mental energy on certain things. For example, if you’re trying to get a lot of things done, don’t check your email first thing in the morning because then you’re using up valuable energy on that where you could be using that decision making power for things that are much more important like your marketing or your sales funnel and things like that. So if you plan things in advance during the day, you don’t have to make choices about that stuff. Your choice would actually be: do I follow the plan or not?

[19:42] Rob: Meal planning is something that I’ve found to be way more valuable than I thought it would be, to actually plan dinners and then have stuff thought in advance and have stuff kind of in mind. It’s crazy to not have to go into the kitchen, whether it’s breakfast or dinner, and look around and kind of salvage and put something together. It really has made a difference for me.

[20:03] Mike: Another one is that when you’re eating dinner, one of the things that a lot of people who are kind of leading a sedentary lifestyle like entrepreneurs are, especially software entrepreneurs, is that you tend to eat a lot and especially because you’re sitting down and you don’t really think about how much it is that you’re eating especially if you’re not tracking it which most people don’t track.

[20:21] There’s tons of apps out there that you can use to track. I would advice using one of them. I’ve tried Lose It before, and I’ve used Fitness Pal. Both of them are actually pretty comparable in my opinion. The real key here is if you’re not tracking those things, use smaller plate for dinner and for lunch.

[20:35] There’s actually been studies shown that people will eat nearly 50% less when they’re using nine-inch plates versus when they’re using 12-inch plates which is why, when you watch a dinner, people tend to eat a lot more than they otherwise would or should because at almost any restaurant I’ve ever been to, they tend to give you very, very large plates. Unfortunately, of course, that adds to the amount of calories that you’re intaking, especially if you’re not watching.

[20:55] Rob: Yeah, this is one that I had heard before and we started doing it about maybe a year ago and now I always default to the smaller plates and it totally works. I need to piggyback on this. Derek, who I work with, he is doing things where he’s like not eating out at restaurants as much because just restaurant food tends to – they tend to give you bigger portions and they tend to be higher in calories and fat and all that kind of stuff.

[21:19] Mike: Yeah. One thing that a lot of restaurants will do is, to help make their food better, they add fat to it. But aside from that, most of them add a significant amount of oil or butter to help increase the flavour and of course that adds calories and, as you pointed out, it just increases the portion size and increases the calories and you end up eating too much.

[21:38] So when you’re eating at home, one of the things that you can do is that – and I know not everybody’s a big fan of this but Greek yogurt can be used as a substitute for a lot of different things. You can substitute Greek yogurt for things like sour cream, oil, butter, mayonnaise, cream cheese, buttermilk. There’s a whole list of different things that you can use Greek yogurt for. So if you do like Greek yogurt, then you can use it to kind of increase your protein intake and decrease the amount of calories that you’re intaking because of using Greek yogurt as a substitute for some of the ingredients in the foods that you’re making for lunch or dinner.

[22:12] Another one that you can use as a food substitute is something called PB2 which is a little bit more expensive than peanut butter. It’s essentially a peanut butter substitute but it has about a quarter of the calories of real peanut butter. It comes in a powder. You have to make it yourself but you make it in these tiny little batches of a couple of tablespoons at a time, and it has about 50 calories instead of 200 calories for the same amount of peanut butter.

[22:35] Another one that you can use for substitute is, instead of using bread for sandwiches, you can use giant lettuce leaves. So if you’re making a wrap or a sandwich or something like that, use the lettuce itself as your bread for your sandwich instead of bread and that’ll help to cut down on the amount of calories.

[22:50] Rob: But what I found is for every ten of these life hacks that I hear, there’s about one or two that really resonates with that I’m like, “Huh, yeah, I don’t really mind it that much.” I like a good piece of French bread. I’ve started doing a lot of lettuce wrap hamburgers. I haven’t really gone back. On occasion, like a nice restaurant and there’s some place for some awesome gourmet burgers, I will have a burger with a full-on bun and it’s amazing. But when I’m cooking now, I’ll give our boys the regular buns if they want them and then Sherry and I typically do lettuce wrap burgers and it just goes along with the kind of cutting down on your carbs thing.

[23:21] I found that I personally haven’t missed it as much as I thought I would or as much as I did early on. You kind of get used to it, you know, weaning yourself off of things. I don’t eat ranch dressing anymore. I love ranch dressing but at one point I switched over to like an Italian or a light balsamic. The less I eat something, the less I really crave it.

[23:39] Mike: Another little trick that you can use is if you’re hungry because you are planning out your meals and maybe you’ve reduced the amount of food that you are eating and you find that you are hungry is that you can just drink water. And if you drink water and then wait 15 or 20 minutes, the feelings of hunger tend to go away. They tend to be reduced enough that you can essentially prevent yourself from going out and binging on that bag of potato chips especially if you still have those in the house.

[24:05] The last thing that I found – this is one of the things that I’ve had trouble with in the past which is snacking after dinner especially while I’m watching TV. For me, watching TV is sort of a conditioned response. It’s like if I’m sitting down, I’m going to watch TV, oh, I should get some popcorn and then of course I binge on popcorn and, depending on whether you got the microwave stuff which isn’t necessarily good for you, or the pre-popped stuff which who knows how that was made, the issue of course is that you’re eating a lot of things after dinner when you’re not necessarily hungry. You’re not eating it because you’re hungry; you’re eating it because you’re bored and you feel like you need something to do.

[24:40] So those are a couple of things that you kind of watch out for them and understand that your body is sort of conditioned to have this response to a certain stimulus which maybe it’s watching TV, you feel like you need to eat. Do you really need to? Probably not. But if you’re watching out for that stuff, it can really help with the calorie intake.

[24:57] Rob: See, this is what – remember how I said like out of every ten of them, there’s one or two that I adopt? This is one I had not adopted because nothing pleases me more than this: sit down to an episode of The Walking Dead with a bag of tortilla chips and some guacamole. Like that. That is it for me.

[25:10] Actually, to be honest, that’s why I finally decided I need to start exercising again because there are certain things that I don’t want to give up. One of them is having dessert. I love eating dessert. I love ice cream. And so I realized I either needed to cut those things out as I’m getting older or I need to start some exercise so that I can then not feel guilty or not feel bad about the times when I do indulge. And so I think it’s up to each person to decide for themselves.

[25:35] Mike: It’s interesting the way that you put that because you said that you want to be able to eat the chips and guacamole so you work out in order to do that. I’ve read some interesting quotes from athletes and the general gist of them is that they don’t necessarily work out so that they can eat more. They eat more so that they can work out. We want to be able to eat more because we have this more sedentary lifestyle so our rationale for doing it is a little different.

[26:03] Rob: Right, and back in the day when I ran track in college, I ate an enormous amount of calories. And you hear about these athletes, the swimmers who eat a dozen eggs for breakfast or whatever and it was that kind of stuff. I mean, the food bill was – I remember eating entire pizzas on my own. I mean, I think a lot of us did this and then burning it off the next day and still being very fit and everything. Those days, unfortunately for me, are now behind me.

[26:26] Mike: Just remember, Rob, every pizza is a personal pizza if you try hard enough and believe in yourself.

[26:30] Rob: There you go. If you have a question or a life hack for us, you should call it into our voicemail number. That’s 888-801-9690. And also email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. You can subscribe to us in iTunes or Stitcher or Downcast typically by searching for Startups. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt and that’s used under Creative Commons. Thanks for listening. See you next time.