Searching for Mana with Lloyd Wahed

Pick Your Battles: Cool, Calm, Collected Someone in the All In conference Matt, Niki, Andrew, & Josh recently attended said "that's below my line." What does this mean? It means certain things should be below "your line" that stirs up your anger. Of course, anger is an emotion, and emotions arise sometimes whether you want them to or not. That being said, you should avoid outrage culture, and...

Client to Coach: Fitness to Strength Barbell Logic has identified a somewhat typical progression among a cohort of its clientele. These folks go from fan to strength client to Academy client to coach using TurnKey Coach. Micaela Bickel followed this path. She began more in the fitness space, programming circuits and endurance. Barbells were sprinkled in. Despite her skepticism and fears, training...

Burnout: Definition & Identification This is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion. It comes from doing too much for too long, especially too many urgent things. Some people have performed some great feats of endurance in their lives, but they often focus on the important, not the urgent. You will experience a lack of desire to work, even with things that used to motivated and...

When to Break the Rules: Increase Speed & Decrease Costs In many industries and organizations, there are general guidelines, rules, or ways of doing things. You may learn, early on, that generally, for example, employees should have one manager only or that you should never divide your forces in the face of a larger force. Great victories and advantages, however, lie in consciously not followi...

Leverage Education: Put Insights Into Action As a Content Consumer You almost certainly consume content in some form. Free or cheap content abounds: podcasts, social media, YouTube, reels, articles, books, audiobooks. You should be consuming and encountering meaningful, challenging, useful content. You should constantly be learning. That being said, too many people do not put lessons learn into ac...

Strength Training at West Point: Simple, Hard, Effective Greg Hess is an instructor and athletic trainer at West Point. In this role, he has a host of responsibilities, including immediate treatment of injuries, overseeing mandatory physical training of all cadets during their cadet basic training, and leading an elective course on compound barbell lifts. Really, what he is doing, in his roles, is...

Not All Metrics Are Created Equal: TTIs & KPIs Two main categories of metrics exist to help measure progress toward strategic goals and gauge the health of the company: targets to improve (TTIs) and key performance indicators (KPIs). TTIs are your top set of metrics, which have to directly impact your strategic priorities. Your strategic priorities need to align with your tenets and core value...

Struggling to Identify Your Core Values!? Matt has heard that, despite his discuss on developing and defining your core values , and its importance, many are still struggling on how to actually get this done. Matt was working with leadership at Barbell Logic years back on a business trip, and he and the team identified that they needed to work to identify 5-year strategic priorities. They had extr...

Prioritize Thinking: The Importance of Thinking Taking time out to think matters. Why? As Matt has discussed in recent podcasts, and his his upcoming book Undoing Urgency, we need to set up habits and systems in our life that help us actually spend time with the most important things in our life. How do we spend time with these most important things? Thinking helps ideas arise, whether they be thi...

When to Embrace Urgency: The Occasional, Short-Term Galvanizing Power of Urgency Woah, I thought we were about Undoing Urgency!? Well, typically, yes. This is one of those rules that serves you well most of the time. You want to avoid useless or counterproductive urgency. If you fail to get out of the knife fight of the urgent, you cannot take care of the artillery battle of the important. Let's d...

When Important Becomes Urgent: Faith, Family, Fitness Those things that are important but not urgent, such as family, health, and religion, can become urgent when unattended to (or minimally attended to) long enough. You find yourself bickering with your spouse or family more than normal, clothes unable to fit and feeling physically and mentally worse, and falling short of the standard your faith...

Extreme Gratitude Matt goes through and thanks many of the people that have helped bring him and Barbell Logic to the point it is today. Having just submitted the book to Forbes, about to go on vacation, and halfway through the year, Matt takes time to thank the people who matter to him. He recommends doing this if you have not. We want to appreciate the pursuit, not the outcome, and taking time t...

How to Write a Book: Tips & Tricks for the Process Matt has been writing a book for Forbes with Nick as the editor. This process has worked especially well, as it has allowed Matt to do what he does best: verbally process ideas and tell stories. Nick has been able to use his strength, of writing and editing to ensure not just correctness of grammar, syntax, and language but clarity of thought....

Transition to TurnKey Coach: In-Person to Online Anthony Diehl is a highly successful coach, who provides both strength & conditioning coaching as well as nutrition coaching for clients. As with most coaches, he began fully in-person and began to experiment with online coaching. Online coaching, however, comes with many frustrations and inefficiencies if done poorly. 2020 and the Covid lockdow...

The Flywheel Not the Funnel for Marketing Success Matt discusses two different analogies when it comes to marketing and acquiring clients. The traditional paradigm is the funnel. This idea is not wrong, but fails to emphasize certain aspects of successful marketing. Generally, you create a funnel to capture as many leads as you can, they build trust over time with you and eventually become clients...

Road Trip Analogy Matt shares an analogy he picked up from Niki Sims regarding how long-term goal achievement is like a road trip. Your destination is the desired end state. You envision where you want to go first. Before you set out or plan your route, you must know where you are going. You next decide on your route. Maybe you want to get there as quickly as possible, so you plan the shortest rou...

Introduction to Undoing Urgency Ryan Matt Reynolds reads the introduction to his forthcoming book Undoing Urgency, which will be available for pre-sale on Amazon in August 2024. Forbes is publishing this book. Nick Soleyn , Barbell Logic's editor-in-chief, has been critical to the writing and editing of this book, making Matt's ideas and thoughts more clear and beautiful on the written page. Undoi...

When to Hire Out: The Eisenhower Matrix The Eisenhower Matrix groups tasks into 4 categories: Not urgent and not important Urgent, not important Not urgent, important Urgent and important Urgency deals with a close due date. These tend to be someone else's priority (bills, taxes, work tasks, household chores). Important tasks are important to you. Tasks can overlap in terms of urgency and importan...

Take a Sabbath! Rest, Recharge, Refresh If you are like Matt, someone who works long days, enjoys work, and can tend to overdo work and grind yourself away, you need to take a day off. This does not necessarily mean you do nothing. If your job involves mental work, you might do some manual labor and turn off your phone. If you read, you might read fiction. If your job primarily involves manual lab...

Swing for the Fences! – Aggressively Pursue the Urgent & Important A single decision or event can change the course of your life. Regardless of life, philosophy, or religion, this is true. When presented with a big opportunity, you need to swing for the fences. Hyperfocus your life and efforts on this. This is when urgent and important overlap. This is when you put your sleep, family life, and...

Enjoy the Pursuit Not the Outcome We find joy in the pursuit of hard things. The process of doing hard things refines us, not the outcomes. Jasen Huang shares how he would not do it again if he could do it again. He did not know how hard it would be but often asks, "How hard can it be?" Andrew Schulz discusses with Joe Rogan how Joe enjoys hard things. You have to come to love the hardship and pur...

Uniquely Hard, Uniquely Successful If you set challenging goals, expect (and demand) hard efforts. Alex Hormozi said on the Modern Wisdom podcast , the following: When things get hard, this is where most people stop. And this is why they don't win. And hard feels shitty. This is what hard feels like. And this is why most people can't do it. People who succeed work hard. And, guess what, in those r...

Applying MED to Coaching Beyond Programming (Some Principles) Matt and Scott developed the principles of MED programming, which approached programming by keeping as many variables constant as possible. Change as little as possible. This does not mean easy. Simple and hard is wildly ineffective. The approach focuses on intelligent resource allocation. For example, if you can get stronger and add mu...

When Should I Leave My "Safe" Job? – There Is No Safe Job Totally safe, secure jobs do not exist. If you're an employee, whether it be at a small or big company, you could lose your job for countless reasons outside your control. If you work in the government, a shutdown or change in law could spell the end of your job. Furthermore, even if you have a job that has a lower chance of loss, what is i...

Online Coaching Success Story: Before Coaching Adam Skillin worked various jobs, including banking, but always knew he did not want to go down the typical 9-5 path. Adam lives and grew up in New Jersey. He worked in the banking industry and also did various jobs including bartending. More than once he picked a job that did not align with good macroeconomic timing. He became interested in BJJ and M...