[00:00:00] That’s it’s all BS, right? Because what you’re doing when you do something like that, like, well, I’ll just use that example. Like when you if you do say, “Oh, I’m mad because this guy cut me off,” like that’s why I’m angry. What you’re doing is you are giving your power to somebody else. You are giving your power of your mental state. So your ability to regulate your own emotions, you have now given that power to something outside of you. So by saying, I’m mad, this guy cut me off your — that guy has power over your inner world. And we don’t realize that we want to blame some. And it’s just it’s a blame mentality. So I think first, people need to understand, like, what happened has no meaning. A car moved in front of another car going different miles an hour.
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Jesse: [00:01:31] Welcome to the Smart Athlete Podcast. I’m your host Jesse Funk. My guest today is a former Division II baseball player, so maybe we’ll talk baseball and he can teach me about why I should be watching or playing baseball since it was never really my sport but did belong to both my father, nephew, and brother. So clearly I’m missing something. He’s the founder of PER Wellness, which is peak performance and health optimization coaching for Men. You can find him on Instagram @per.wellness. If you’re on the YouTube version, we’ve got a link down in the description. You can find him on YouTube or you can find him on LinkedIn. Welcome to the show, Tim Perreira.
Tim: [00:02:14] And thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to get into it today.
Jesse: [00:02:20] Thanks for coming back. Well, I guess coming back we talked the other day when we talk for like a half hour, we’re just chatting. So sorry to tell you those you missed on that interesting conversation. It’s interesting, I guess, to me, we talked a lot of like small business stuff.
[00:02:38] So I guess I’ll start off with kind of what I was asking about or talking about in the intro. What am I missing with baseball? I’ve always felt like maybe I just don’t understand. I kind of think of it like, not quite, but almost like 12-tone music, which is atonal music if you’re not familiar, basically there’s like no sense of melody or key or […]. I always just say, maybe I’m just not mature enough to understand 12-tone music.
[00:03:08] So I kind of think baseball at the same way. Like clearly tons of people watch baseball. There’s a lot of interest in it. I haven’t ever, like, found my footing. Help me out, Tim. From the inside out. Help me out. Figure out. What are you watching for?
Tim: [00:03:25] Let me start with this. First thing is it’s totally okay to not be into certain sports. There are certain sports I watch where I was like, it’s just not for me. And there’s other ones where I love them and I dig them. So we’re saying that, and I do think it’s worth addressing the current challenges that baseball is up against moving forward with the current culture we live in. I mean, where everything is instant gratification, people are sitting on their phones or getting dings.
[00:03:51] And everything in baseball traditionally has been a slow sport. And there’s a lot more chest to it. There’s less offense, you know, there’s not a ton of action. There’s a lot more strategy. There’s strategy in every sport, obviously, but it takes a while to play out. And so I think what baseball is doing is trying to react to that or keep up with the times. And so I’m super interested this upcoming year they’ve made changes to hopefully help pace of play to hopefully help increase offensive production within the game.
[00:04:28] Obviously, things like to prevent injuries, which you’ve seen a lot of sports do recently, you know, basketball has done it. Whether they’re changing how fouls are called, football has done it. So you’re seeing healthier players, you’re seeing more offense. Those sports don’t necessarily have a rate of play or pace of play challenge, but we’ve even seen it internationally with cricket and they’ve done some things to pick up the pace a little bit.
[00:04:54] So pitch clock, inning clock with baseball limiting shifts to wear, defensive shifts to essentially make it so you can’t stack one side of the field for hitters that have tendency to hit there. And so just some minor changes, I think that will make the game a little bit more entertaining for the lay person.
[00:05:15] And what I also noticed, I was just at a Padres game this last week. I was in attendance because there was a major milestone being approached by one of the opposing players going to hit 700 home runs where it’s an exclusive club, I think of only three other players. So would have just been a massive, massive day, you know, to be able to see that.
[00:05:33] And — but I noticed they were playing music between pitches through the loudspeakers and it reminded me of basketball, NBA games when like the guys dribbling up and they’re playing music to engage the crowd. And I was like, “Oh man!” I’m like, I’m kind of like, it gets me like, more into the game a little bit, so we’ll see. So what you’re missing?
[00:05:53] And, you know, I mean, there’s a lot of strategy involved behind the game. There’s a lot of intricacies. There’s a lot of unwritten rules. So it can be — I say this when I when I would go to games with some of my friends born in other countries and trying to explain to them just some of the basics and the chess pieces being moved around. So I don’t know, there’s a lot of flash and other sports that you’re getting. So it’s I don’t know if I could convince somebody to go from not liking baseball to liking it.
Jesse: [00:06:23] You know, I’m not — The thing is that, like I think it’s fair to say you said, you know, you don’t have to like all sports. Some sports you would watch, you don’t like. I can watch a distance race on the track and be interested because there’s things going on within that pack that people aren’t necessarily paying attention to or pacing strategies and all these kind of things. It comes with kind of an intimate knowledge of the sport, whereas most people are like, This is boring as hell. We’re just watching people run around an oval.
Tim: [00:06:52] Yeah.
Jesse: [00:06:53] So I think that’s what I’m more after is like, What am I missing there? I’m glad you mentioned cricket because that reminded me of I spoke with two cricketers from South Africa Mangaliso Mosehle and Lwandiswa Zuma on various episodes. I don’t know off the top of my head what their episode numbers were. So if you’re interested in cricket in the faster version T20, the changes and what they’re trying to do, go back and listen to those episodes in my catalog.
[00:07:22] But that’s definitely like a consideration, right? Is just understanding your audience and I think this is one of the conversations I had with them is like. Test cricket versus T20 classic cricket versus new found cricket or whatever. There’s I know there’s going to be some people that always go like. The old version’s the better version.
Tim: [00:07:51] Sure.
Jesse: [00:07:52] Right? There’s there’s history. There’s all these kind of things. And I think it’s a little difficult to argue against that in some sense because. We’re especially stat driven in the US right where we go, like especially baseball. Very stat driven. And when you start tweaking things, how relevant are those stats to like pre tweak any more and then you get arguments in there and maybe that’s what makes the sports more fun for some people that are really into that stuff.
Tim: [00:08:29] Yeah.
Jesse: [00:08:31] But yeah, trying to cater to your audience, I think is definitely a challenge for sports because you still have to, like, keep the game fair and keep it interesting. I mean. Yeah. I just it’s a tough challenge for sure. I feel like I thought for a long time, like you say, baseball is America’s pastime. I’m like, I think football is America’s pastime, like. It just seems like it gets more hype.
[00:09:02] But I don’t know if it’s because baseball has so many more games than football that like the excitement gets compacted or what it is, but it’ll be interesting to see the changes. I know they were discussing some of the changes to baseball on the radio the other morning. I only kind of half listened to since I don’t have that much of that history. Yeah, but I think maybe this is incorrect. I think they’re saying something about like changing the size of the bases for, like, player safety or something like that.
Tim: [00:09:33] Yeah, three-inch increase.
Jesse: [00:09:34] Yeah. So one of the critiques they had was something about like home plate’s not actually changing size yet. That’s like where most collisions occur. So are you actually increasing player safety? I don’t know. So just using this as an opportunity to ask somebody who knows more than me like your opinion, I guess.
Tim: [00:09:57] With the home plate thing in particular, it’s definitely interesting. I think what baseball is doing now is they’re open to other things. So if the bases, the enlarge bases seem to work and it’s received well, then they’re going to consider what’s up with the plate. You know, they’re going to see what’s going on. They’ve done some things in the past. They change the rules about where the catcher can be collecting a ball to get them out of the lane, because before they used to be able to block the plate and that’s when those runners were able to railroad the catchers and whatever.
[00:10:26] I think something to think about too, for the people that don’t like change or think it’s better one way like this guy goes down to or comes back to like our wiring and our biology of our mind. I mean, people love to or one, we hate uncertainty, you know, at a core fundamental level like our minds want to predict and protect. And then also our ego loves to be right.
[00:10:48] And so the idea that, for one, we don’t know what’s going to happen with rule changes, we don’t like the idea of uncertainty. We’re like, no, but I know baseball how it is. And so what we don’t do and this is the case for everything in life but is like we don’t allow ourselves the opportunity to pause, recognize that that’s really a limiting belief, but also be like, “Okay, well, how could it be better with these rule changes, for one?” Right.
[00:11:13] So the uncertainty there and then we want to be right like we love baseball, how it is, let’s say, in this example, this person. And it’s scary for us. And again, at a really core, this isn’t happening at a conscious level, but it’s scary for us to perhaps be wrong about it, perhaps be wrong that maybe baseball is actually better off with these changes. You know, same thing happened with the three point line. In the NBA rules that have changed in the NFL.
[00:11:41] I mean, there’s been rules in every sport that have changed in every single time. It’s the same, you know, same people that want things a certain way or want to keep it. But it’s so great how it is. And obviously a lot of those changes have made the respective sports awesome. So just knowing that we’re people to like man, we don’t like uncertainty and we want to feed our ego and feed our mind that, you know, it’s right about what its current beliefs are.
Jesse: [00:12:04] Well, I mean, that kind of touches on what you do every day. I think a little bit is like helping people figure out how to be better. And then that. That uncertainty is such a driver that we’re like, I used to have this theory that like people were driven more by fear than by reward. And I don’t know how accurate that is, but just more of a I’d rather avoid that thing we’re afraid of than do something and go towards the thing that I want, like avoiding pain versus seeking pleasure. And another way to kind of phrase that and that almost seems like like a microcosm of, of that, where it’s like. You already enjoy this thing. Right? Baseball in this case?
Tim: [00:12:57] Yeah.
Jesse: [00:12:57] You already enjoy the thing. You have this modicum of pleasure. You can turn on the game, you watch it, you’ve got your little time slot. You know, win or lose, you find some enjoyment out of it. And then, “oh, we’re changing it.” It may take it away from you that now it pushes you towards that fear or discomfort side, and you go like, I already like this now. I don’t want anything else. But as you said, what if you could enjoy it even more versus just trying to avoid the like this imaginary fear, at least, at least imaginary, until the changes actually occur. And you see what happens. It’s an anticipated imaginary fear.
Tim: [00:13:47] Yeah. All fears are imaginary. Right? The future’s not real. We’re just we’re not scared of events happening in the future. We’re scared of our imagination. That’s projecting things in the future. And I think to your point about, are people motivated by fear of reward, I actually think it comes down to the same fundamental thing.
[00:14:02] Because if you’re motivated by fear, you know, you’re scared of something happening. And ultimately that is a result of a belief or oftentimes a feeling of lack or a void. And if people are motivated by reward and they put what I think of like when you’re striving for something or you’re going for an outcome where people really get it wrong, I think a lot of the times or where are they? What causes suffering, I should say — and I really think there’s right and wrong — is they’re putting their well-being, their mental state, how they feel, the ability to celebrate, the ability to be bummed in an external outcome.
[00:14:38] And so if they’re seeking a reward, they’re saying, like, “Hey, once I get this reward, then I’ll be happy, you know, then I’ll be excited.” So for one and oftentimes what happens is when you’re seeking a reward, when you’re motivated by reward, what that is really telling you at a core fundamental level is that you don’t feel enough where you are and who you are in the current moment. So even still, the reward, the purpose of seeking that reward is to fill a void that is probably layers and layers and layers deep and it doesn’t seem like that. Right?
[00:15:12] So it’s just interesting that I don’t know, I thought it was an interesting point that that was one of the first things you brought up. But that’s at least how I see it and I see it in a lot of the guys that we work with or that I work with. And it’s, yeah, it’s always interesting to kind of get, you know, get to the root of where that is actually coming from.
Jesse: [00:15:31] Why? This is a theme I talked about and I use myself as an example, my own punching bag, so to speak, because you know I’ve definitely struggled with that over time. Or it’s like, I mean, even recently, it’s just like I’ve got these goals and I want to work hard and try to achieve them. And I think by getting there like that will bring happiness or whatever, whatever thing I’ve contrived in my mind living in the future instead of living in the present.
[00:15:58] And then just in the last few weeks, I’ve really kind of stepped back and like you know this isn’t working. What I’m doing right now isn’t working. Let’s restructure and try to figure out how more balanced I don’t know if is the right word, but just figure out a way to find some contentment now while you continue to seek the thing. Otherwise, I mean, you may spend the entirety of your life discontented trying to go after the thing that you may or may not get.
Tim: [00:16:30] Right.
Jesse: [00:16:32] And this comes up in kind of entrepreneurial circles a lot, but I think is applicable to anybody like that if you aren’t able to find some contentment or fulfillment or happiness, however you want a bit of joy, whatever it is where you are now, likely you’re still going to be discontented when you get to wherever you’re going because you don’t appreciate the things you already have.
[00:17:06] You’ll likely adapt. I mean, it’s an entrepreneur circles. Talk about the hedonic treadmill. So people increase their wealth, they’re making more money, they buy more things. They adapt to that new level of wealth and buying, and thus they need more to keep feeding this. Rat race mentality of more and more consumption. And that’s where the happiness comes from. So.
Tim: [00:17:35] Yeah. If you think about it this way, makes a really simple being content is a state of mind. It’s not a result of achieving outcomes. We’re getting more things or getting a better job or increasing or income to X. Then once I do that, then I’ll be content. The problem with that we’re saying earlier is when you place your contentment, your happiness, whatever, into an external event happening in which you don’t have any control over, you’re robbing yourself of feeling that way presently.
[00:18:08] And so if you’re saying, yeah, okay, once I get my business to 10 million, then I’ll be man then I’ll have made it right. Never happens. Ask any business, anybody who has set that kind of goal, they get there in a week later. They’re like, “Okay, well, that was rad. But yeah, I’m still feeling how I feel.” So just understanding that feeling content, being happy is a state of mind and it’s not a result of what you’ve accumulated or what you’ve accomplished in life.
[00:18:34] And one of the cool, if you talk about goal setting and whatnot, one of the simple exercises to think through that can be tough for people is how do you define success? And you can’t use your one rule. You’re not allowed to use outcomes. You’re not allowed to say “success would be once I hit $5 million a year in my business” or “once I get find, find my dream spouse” or “once I have”, you know, whatever. So. So define success. Work to define success for your day, your life, your week, whatever it is, and do it without using any outcomes or results.
Jesse: [00:19:17] So walk us through that. And I guess, what does that look like for you? Because when we talked before the recording last time, we were talking about kind of the way you started with the business and the pivot. And I think you’re in a happier, more contented situation now. So, you know, if you’re doing that exercise for yourself, how does that work out?
Tim: [00:19:43] Yeah. So I’ll rewind to me just a couple of years ago when I was struggling. So what happened? I was in tech sales a long time. I went through a lot of the things you see people and not just tech sales, a lot of jobs. But this is just what I speak about a lot because it’s the only thing I’m really familiar with.
[00:19:58] But the burnout, the endless spinning of wheels on or spinning of tires or the hamster wheel, whatever you want to call it, and chasing certain benchmarks or checking boxes. So whether it’s getting promoted or getting a nicer apartment or finally buying the car that your coworkers have or getting again, getting a title or making a certain amount of money, getting stock options, whatever it is. And it becomes this endless cycle of. Basically saying to ourselves, we may not articulate it this way, but this is how it feels where we go, okay, once I write, I got this promotion. Once I get the next one, then I’ll be, then I’ll be good.
[00:20:40] So that was how I define success for a long time, I was trying to buy a place in San Francisco. I was trying to become VP of Sales. I had just bought a new forerunner, so that box was checked and ultimately what it led to was again, burnout. I went through four years of depression. I moved cities four times in four years with — I moved total 17 times in 12 years. You know, again, changing jobs and just more and more becoming unhappy, even though I was making good money. So I knew clearly money wasn’t the thing.
[00:21:12] And I essentially had a wake up. I ended up getting fired from my job a couple of months into the pandemic just for not really performing well. And I saw it coming. I just wasn’t motivated. I wasn’t fired up. I wasn’t I had no purpose. I definitely wasn’t fulfilled, certainly wasn’t happy. I mean, I was depressed. And so what it forced me to do was reevaluate the situation. And I had this idea, I was like, man, I heard this quote.
[00:21:38] This was kind of my epiphany when I heard this quote, “Everything in our lives is just objectively neutral.” When you look at it from a factual standpoint, all meaning comes from our own mind, and it was just a wake up call for me to be like, Okay, man, all the moves I did, all the positions I was in, all the scenarios I put myself in, my challenges with bosses or customers or sales orgs or whatever I was the constant. And, and so it didn’t change overnight. But essentially what it did is it gave me a path forward where I said, in order for me to get out of this big rut, rut is probably under describing it.
[00:22:17] But the rut I was in, I was like, I need to fundamentally change my beliefs, how I view the world, how I view myself, my expectations for myself and have a better relationship with myself, etc. So I had to scrape everything clean, right? And so I worked on man, how am I thinking now? What are thoughts that keep popping up, that aren’t serving me, aren’t helping me feel happy throughout the day? And one of those is like, I’m not going to feel enough. I’m not going to feel like I’m worthy of being in a room of peers until I get this promotion, until I make more than my friends, until I’m able to buy a house like all my friends have.
[00:22:54] And it’s an endless game. And it’s, it’s really sad at a core level. I know a lot of people have really, really similar fears or thoughts that go on. And so what it came back to was how can I start to shift and focus on I think of happiness and to two things as one, aligning yourself with a with a much greater purpose in having a vision for your life and working for that every day and having something you really believe in.
[00:23:22] And that could show up in your career. It could show up in hobbies. It could show up in conversations. It could just show up and how you parent your kids. And the second one is, is finding little tasks during the day to, again, either bring happiness or define success. So I bring up happiness because for me, happiness had been very elusive the last four years. So part of me determining what success meant for me was, let’s get back to doing things that cultivate happiness. I know I — money, is not it? I’ve made plenty of money last few years, certainly enough to warrant a level of happiness and it didn’t bring it.
[00:23:59] And how can I also start aligning myself with that greater vision? What I always wanted to do is start my own company. I’ve been obsessed with health and wellness ever since I was 14 years old, started training for baseball. I, you know, I became obsessed with nutrition after finishing playing college baseball because I put on some weight, drink and pizza and beer, going to happy hours for the first time and whatnot. So I just had been obsessed with it. So I was like, I would love to help people with this and help guys with this because I know it well.
[00:24:26] And I just it’s a big passion, so how can I start creating something in my life that aligns with that? And so to finally get to your question is like, how do I define success for myself? It takes a heck of a lot of awareness on examining what it is I truly want, examining my limiting beliefs and what’s getting in my way of allowing myself to be happy and trying to catch myself when I’m like, okay, man, if I only had new shoes like that guy, I would feel confident walking around. And believe it or not, like, those are real thoughts that come up that people have that we may not catch in real-time.
[00:25:01] But so really trying to catch myself and question motives around when I say I want something, okay, why do I want that? What’s important to me? What’s it going to bring me? “Oh, what I’m really saying is that’s going to make me feel better about myself.” And so what I need to work on is my relationship with myself, which all comes back to our unconscious and subconscious conditioning and all these stories we’ve been telling ourselves our whole life that aren’t necessary or aren’t true. And so ultimately learn to define success by little things that I want to do every day that make me happy in the moment.
[00:25:35] Waking up early. Making a pour over coffee with fresh ground beans from my favorite roastery. Little things reading every morning for 60 minutes, taking a cold shower because it makes me feel like I’m shot out of a cannon. While it might be uncomfortable in the moment, it’s like, no, now I can go work on something, starting to write more, reach out to people, have conversations about mental health and physical health.
[00:25:58] So those are little things I just set up and I was like, okay, if I can do three things on this list every single day. That’s an incredible day. And then I started. Then I won’t go into these yet. I’ll pause, but creating benchmarks for how I want to feel every day, how I want to treat others, how I want to treat myself like do I want inner peace or patience? It was a big theme of mine that came up. So setting those little intentions to be like, man, if I make it through the day and I am just patient and I didn’t react to things how I used to react to things two months ago, that’s a win. And then as a result, what ends up happening is you just kind of naturally have the old outcomes or success that we use to define.
Jesse: [00:26:43] Lots to take in. No, it’s fine. It’s just like several different thoughts. And I’m like, how do I leave them all in? I guess I’ll make one comment and then ask a question. I. I know. I guess for myself it’s so easy to get distracted. Like I always mention. Like I have shiny object syndrome pretty bad. I always have to like, come back in and focus like this is what we’re doing. Like stop doing all these things.
[00:27:14] And I think that’s easy to go to have shiny object syndrome especially when our like consumers culture with what is happiness and how do we find it or how do we find contentment? What are the kind of core tenets? I guess for me, maybe not for everybody, although I in some ways I think it is a relatively universal theme is that the basics of a happy life start with, to me, the three F’s. Friends, family and food. And they often go together like it’s you can really tie that together as saying it’s a social thing. Like you have connections that you can rely on.
[00:27:57] I include food because like I mean, if you think like anthropologically food brings us together, we share a meal, whether it’s with our family or with our friends. Holiday, like. You know, there’s also you can also make an argument for drinking culture, but that’s a little different. But you could group it in food, I guess. So that kind of brings it together. So I guess maybe comment that. But I did also want to ask you if you have read the book or heard of the concept of Ikigai, which is like trying to align on all four principles about what you’re good at, what you can get paid for. I’m not going to remember all four of them, but —
Tim: [00:28:44] What you’re passionate about.
Jesse: [00:28:45] What you’re passionate about. And you’re right. It’s like there’s four corners of things in the center of that Venn diagram is like, this is the thing that what makes you maybe what makes you happy is maybe I have to look it up, but really great book. Anyway, I was just curious. Clearly you’ve heard about it, but just your approach is seems whole person. Like that. So that’s always curious.
Tim: [00:29:13] Yeah. The first thing on food, I think it’s big, right? If there’s something called the self-realization theory or — yeah, self-realization theory and it was Sebastian Junger talked about it in his book Tribe, and it talks about the three things that humans need to be content. And the first one was to feel competent in your work. So to feel actually feel like you are good and like you’re an expert at your job, like you are good at your role and you feel like you know what the heck you’re doing and people can rely on you and you do a great job.
[00:29:48] The second one is to is essentially community to feel part of something bigger and the connectedness that comes with that, which I think a lot of us felt the effects of not having that with COVID, of course. Right? And even we’re seeing it, I think it’s going to be something that’ll play out over a handful of years. But with so much remote work, I love remote work and I think the benefits of it are not to go down this tangent, but our people get autonomy and choice finally with their day and how they spend their time. And it should be like, “Man, let me do my job. Let me crush it. And then give me freedom”, which is great, but I still think there are effects of not engaging with coworkers and building that bond. But anyway.
[00:30:26] And then the third one in the theory is to live an authentic life. And I think that one is ambiguous for a lot of people. People haven’t taken the time to figure out and introspect or start to build awareness about what makes them or brings them enthusiasm, what fires them up. We know what we’re interested in usually. But you know, really what we you know, it’s quote by Gandhi, essentially to paraphrase. But it’s like suffering happens when what we want and what we do are not aligned.
[00:31:00] And that’s how I think of living an authentic life. You know, we check all these boxes, we do all these things that we’ve kind of been told or it’s been implied to us. If we do that, we’ll be successful. And then success breeds happiness. And I think a lot of people learn the hard way. That’s not actually what happens. You know, and then the last, yeah, I think I hadn’t I haven’t read the book, but I’ve definitely seen kind of the. I think it makes sense. Yeah. And I think also though —
Jesse: [00:31:32] It’s a very short like small page 100 like a tiny book and it’s like 100 pages. It’s a very, very quickly, but I would recommend it.
Tim: [00:31:41] Yeah. You know, I think it’s great. And I what I will also say to people is. It’s not 100% necessary in a way to have to find something that you do for your career that is like your ultimate, ultimate passion project. I think now we can figure out things like if you are set on your purpose and really get to know yourself and identify your core values as a human being, you know exactly what your non-negotiable boundaries are and where you don’t have any slack and you know you know how to stay in your lanes.
[00:32:15] And what those things do is they make each decision extremely simple and fall into two buckets, either aligned with the life I want, not aligned. And it becomes very easy and simple to make a decision. But the hard work is figuring that out ahead of time. But once you figure that out, you can also see where your current career potentially, or where a career fits into that life that you want for yourself. And it just gives you much more of a blueprint to how to structure your life or get things in your life that you are really passionate about, things you’re good at, things you can get paid for.
[00:32:47] It may not all fall on what I do for my career. You know, specifically, but there are other ways I just say that because it’s not like, “hey, you need to go quit your job and start making candles for a living tomorrow because that’s your center point.” It’s like, okay, well, there’s some gray area. We can also we can still create a life we’re excited to wake up for every day and not have to have to do that.
Jesse: [00:33:11] Yeah. And I don’t want to make the whole concept like a pressure point of like. Say for me, like I’ve produced products in-house here for Solpri for a number of years and kind of thought about bringing more stuff in-house and kind of tested some of that stuff out. And me personally, like doing repetitive work like that, I absolutely hate like it’s just, it’s just not engaging.
[00:33:45] So say that’s — but for say for some reason, that is what I can make the most money in. Like maybe there’s a possibility of that’s OK, you know, you punch the clock, you know, fill in bottles of shampoo all day or whatever, you know, whatever product it is that needs to be done. And then like I have other passions, I play in a local symphony. Like there are other things that can breed fulfillment.
[00:34:17] And it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to do like, like I’m never going to be a professional violin player. Like, it’s just I could put in hours, I could put in tons of hours. Just my fingers just aren’t going to do it like I’m proficient. But there’s a different level. So if I was trying to seek like that, I think sometimes that is misguided in losing the reality of your ability, which isn’t to try to push people away from following their dreams. Because I think you should do that, which is sometimes like, again, as myself an example, would it be pro athlete and what I went after that I knew from the get-go I was never going to really earn money doing it.
[00:35:02] Hence I started this company, you know, to fund the lifestyle and it’s turned into more than that. But just like. Being aware of your situation and balancing. Chasing the thing with like. I’ll say realistic. And I think often when people say be realistic, they’re being downers and I don’t want to do that.
Tim: [00:35:31] It’s often self-projection.
Jesse: [00:35:32] Right! So it’s like I’m limited. I’m limited by myself. Thus I’m going to limit you. And I don’t I do not mean that because I think people should.
Tim: [00:35:41] Yeah. We ain’t got time for that.
Jesse: [00:35:42] Yeah. Like it would be like. Yeah, maybe like saying to Tim. What you’re consulting people like you’re just a guy with a mustache and a hat. What are you talking about? You know what I mean? It’s that it would just be like this weird projection on him. Like, I don’t know what he’s capable of. He can figure out what he’s capable of, and clearly he’s doing fine.
[00:36:04] So it’s like I think it’s easy for people to project. So why say being realistic, I mean. Taking good self-inventory of what are your skills, what are your opportunities, what are your steps to get there? Because sometimes it’s not a straight jump. So I guess I’ll use myself again. If I wanted to be a professional violin player, I know right now I could take up paid gigs, like playing for weddings and small stuff, but like I’m not going to be in the New York Symphony, so maybe I teach violin lessons and I take private playing gigs, and maybe I figure out that people need violin player for their short films and like you can find different avenues to maybe yeah go after those things is getting stuck on one thing.
Tim: [00:36:57] Well, it might help for people to think about it this way too. If you think about a dream, what’s it the core of, let’s say following your dream is the foundation of it is a purpose. And you hear this a lot with founders that start companies and that make successful pivots or stay in business a long time. And there, you know, people are like,”Oh, man, how did you come up with this idea to change from selling baked goods to the pandemic hit and now you send like baking kits to people to make it home” or whatever.
[00:37:27] And they go, “Well, it was actually really easy because we are stubborn with our mission. We have a way to help people”, but the means in which we do it, that doesn’t really matter much. So I would say, you know, what I would ask is like, okay, if your dream is to play in the New York Symphony, we can look at, okay, well, what is the purpose? It’s more important. My point is, it’s more important to figure out what the purpose is specifically driving that.
[00:37:53] So is your purpose, man. I love I am someone that loves playing music to entertain people. That is a much different compass than being like, I want to play in the New York Symphony.
Jesse: [00:38:06] Right.
Tim: [00:38:07] Because now you’re the means in which you follow. That purpose can change. No problem. You don’t have a problem with it. Okay. Yeah, you can. You can still set your sights and have targets and work together and do everything you can. But at the same time, you’re like, I’m staying on track because this is what I love doing and I’m not going to change my purpose just to or be disappointed if I don’t reach a certain outcome. Because, no, I’m staying really true to myself. And that’s what I think going back to living an authentic life is being able to identify that and get everything going on the same, same track.
[00:38:42] So it’s more important to think what’s at the root of those dreams that you have. Like for me, yeah, I wanted to be a pro baseball player, but here I am talking to you, you know, which I think is a great consolation. But, you know, so anyway, just how I yeah, I kind of think about dreams and if people get discouraged by them, it’s like, let’s just keep digging.
[00:39:04] What’s under there? There’s something there, there’s passion there. There’s, you know, there’s a fire inside, which is what you want to follow. Like the fire inside isn’t the New York Symphony. The fire inside is to play music and entertain people and feel like that’s your calling. That’s what you need to pay attention to.
Jesse: [00:39:20] Well, I guess I want to touch on two points with getting to the root. We’ll get to I’m going to ask you about how to get to the root here in a second. But I like I think about this concept sometimes when it’s like. So if we’re talking about money, like, oh, I want to, you know, because I live in the entrepreneurial circle, so that’s just how my brain frames things. So like, say, a person wants to pivot out of their traditional 9 to 5 career and they want to be an entrepreneur and they go, Oh, I want to earn six figures or whatever. Now let’s ignore for the moment why they want to earn that. Because that’s a whole other can of worms.
Tim: [00:40:02] Sure, sure.
Jesse: [00:40:03] But they’ll say, I will earn six figures and see. I guess I use the example of a person I met who was very stuck on like. I want to teach meditation and earn six figures. That may or may not like a certain avenue like meditation may or may not be a potentially legitimate avenue to reach that end goal. So, like, in your case, you’re talking about find the root of your desire, in this case, entertaining people with music.
[00:40:43] So, like, even though the New York Symphony may be an avenue, it is not the only avenue to reach your goal or with my case, like getting to six figures, maybe meditation can get you there, but like selling meditation mats or something good. It’s adjacent. It still gets you to your goal, but you’re not stuck on like this is the only way I’m going to do it. Or for you, like, want to play pro baseball? Why? You know maybe that personally fulfilling you can find something else that’s also personally fulfilling.
[00:41:20] But if you were stuck on pro baseball and you’re just going to be sad for the rest of your life because you never played pro baseball, then it’s kind of a wasted life. So I want to ask you a little bit about like how to get to the core of the thing, because, again, I kind of go back to like the shiny object syndrome a little bit. It’s like that the ego, the stuff on the top, on the surface that sits there that we go, “Oh, that’s it.” When really, that’s just like the layers covering the thing. That’s it. It’s just like when we get down, how do we get down into it?
Tim: [00:41:53] Yeah, a lot of questions I would say, and it can be a lot of the same question, right? So if somebody says I want to make six figures. Like to me. I hear that and I go, “No, you don’t.” You want whatever that brings. So how do we find that? So you say, okay, why? What does six figures bring you? And obviously, that could fork off into a lot of different answers.
[00:42:15] And then, well, what does that bring? Why is that important to you? So you just keep asking more and more questions until you get to the point. Honestly, a lot of it comes down to a very, very primal need. So whether it’s love, acceptance to be seen, heard to — Yeah. Be accepted by the community or whatever it is. I mean even things like, well, I want to appear successful, I want to feel like I made it. I want to make my parents proud. I want to be able to afford a nice house. I want to be able to buy a car. I want to be able to send my kids to college, you know, whatever it is. You can still dive in layers and layers further than that.
[00:42:59] So if somebody is wondering like, yeah, why is this number keep coming up in my head? Yeah, you could say, okay, what’s, why do I want that? What does that bring me? Okay, what’s important about that? And then just don’t stop. What’s important about that? What’s important about that? And you know, this crazy thing happens when you ask your mind questions like that. It’ll work to come up with answers. You know, it’ll really try and solve the riddle. You’re presenting it with.
[00:43:26] And it may take a while, may take may take some time. And honestly, some people need to work with somebody who’s done it before, like a coach or whatnot to really get to the root. But yeah, it’s going to be different for everybody. But a lot of questions, you know?
Jesse: [00:43:43] I think one of the things I’m going to ask you that I’m cynical about is when you ask that question, do you accept the first answer that your mind gives you?
Tim: [00:43:58] Me? Well, most people probably do. I don’t know or don’t ask it at all. And they just and then they, you know, like thoughts in the mind are just untethered. And so what happens is, especially if we don’t verbalize or articulate or write them down, we they just, like bridge the gaps with themselves. So things seem to make sense. Yeah, $100,000 because, you know, it’s just like thoughts going around and it makes sense to us.
[00:44:23] But until you start to again, you ask the question, you force yourself to articulate it in complete sentences. Then you start to see all the gaps and you go, “Oh, wait, I maybe I don’t really know why that number is important to me.” What does that bring me? What? When I close my eyes and think about life with $100,000, what do I feel? Tap into feelings. What does it feel? Do I feel okay? I feel like I made it. I feel like I’m not stressed anymore. Okay. What? What’s causing the stress? Where does that coming from?
[00:44:53] Well, I’m worried about, you know, having to live in an apartment and not making enough money. Okay. Well, what’s challenging with that? Why, you know, I have friends that already have houses and I see them. They’ve already bought and they have some new cars. And so I just I don’t know if I’m if I’m ever going to get that. Okay.
[00:45:12] Well. But what’s important about that? What does that saying about you? You know, and so anyway, you can kind of see how like the answers, the first answer that you get, of course, is not the real answer. It’s always going to come down to some ultra, ultra primal need. That’s why we do anything.
Jesse: [00:45:31] Well, that’s kind of the reason I ask that, because I know, again, this could just be a matter of me projecting, but I always feel like when I ask the questions initially, I’ll get some kind of snap bullshit answer out of my brain. Yeah, it’s because of this thing. Like, no, it’s not like, keep taking it, you know? And I, I preface that or add a caveat to that with the sense that the more you practice, I think the quicker you get there.
[00:46:03] So it’s not like you will always get like the BS right off the bat. Sometimes it’ll be like. No, like, like without going into a long diatribe. Like, I get angry sometimes and that’s a challenge I have that stems back to childhood and blah, blah, blah. But just. It. It’s easy for me to go like, why are you angry? It’s almost always, I’m fearful. You’re not really angry. Like I’m fearful about something or I’m anxious about something. What are you afraid of? I’m afraid of losing this thing or whatever.
[00:46:41] What does that mean? Like you work your way down that chain a little bit quicker instead of just going, like, “Oh, I’m angry because a guy cut me off in traffic.” It’s like, well, no, you’re probably not angry because the guy put you in traffic. You’re angry because the guy cuts you off and maybe you thought that that was going to crash in your car and you were going to be injured and then you were going to lose your life and then you weren’t going be able to love your spouse anymore. Like you get down to the root a little bit quicker the more you practice. But that initial like because I’m mad because he’s dumb. That’s not the real answer, at least for me.
Tim: [00:47:17] Right. And ultimately, that’s it’s all BS, right? Because what you’re doing when you do something like that, like, well, I’ll just use that example. Like when you if you do say, “Oh, I’m mad because this guy cut me off”, like, that’s why I’m angry. What you’re doing is you are giving your power to somebody else. You are giving your power of your mental state. So your ability to regulate your own emotions, you have now given that power to something outside of. So by saying I’m mad, this guy cut me off, your — that guy has power over your inner world.
[00:47:51] And we don’t realize that we want to blame some. And it’s just a it’s a blame mentality. So I think first, people need to understand, like, what happened has no meaning. A car moved in front of another car going different miles an hour. So just to show somebody like if you get cut off and it makes you angry, that’s not making me angry. I don’t care if you. I don’t care about that situation.
[00:48:14] So understand the meaning is coming from inside your own world, in your own mind. And that, again, that is an example of what my epiphany was, where I’m like, “Holy crap, I’m doing this to myself.” And so how can I figure out a way to be like, okay, that just happened? What is it? Is it worth getting angry about this? What does that do for me? What am I getting from this reaction? Like, what is that doing for my work? Do I feel right? Do I say, “Oh, he shouldn’t do that?” I don’t believe that someone should cut someone else off and I’m going to get mad and like flip them off when I drive by and I showed him.
[00:48:52] Okay. What did that do for your day? And so, like you, you cool? You proved your ego, right? But what has it done for your well-being in your mental state? So understanding that the only thing you control is that inner world you’re not going to be able to control and people cut you off and know that all meaning comes from within you. And it’s, it’s, it can be scary for some people. Like people still want to blame and that’s fine.
[00:49:18] But ultimately it should be freeing and it should allow people to be like, “Holy crap, I need to, I need to take responsibility for all of my thoughts, all of my feelings, how I’m reacting to everything in my life.” And ultimately it’s incredibly empowering. You know, again, this is stuff that it doesn’t happen in a flip of a switch. You’re human, your natural reaction against the anger. But over time, the more you’re aware of what happens.
[00:49:43] So a real-life example would be like next time that you get cut off, Jesse, it happens. You get pissed off in the moment and then 10 minutes later you go, “Wait a sec. Why did I just let that guy rile me up?” I was like, something just. I also don’t know what happened. He could have not seen me. He could have. He could be in a hurry. He could have not slept last night because his baby kept him up. And he just wasn’t as sharp as normal.
[00:50:05] Maybe know whatever. He’s probably not like, “Oh, there’s Jesse. I’m going to piss him off right now.” That’s probably the last thing that is going on. And so so the event happens. And then what happens is you reflect on it and maybe you reflect on it a day later when you calm down and you go and it really wasn’t worth it. I spent the last 12 hours boiling. I need to be better next time. And then the next time, maybe 8 hours go by and you go, “Oh, I did it again.” But you know what? You’re making progress. And the next time, maybe and then ultimately what happens is it happens in the present moment and you’re like, You know what? I’m not going to let this dude affect my day.
[00:50:38] It’s just not worth it. I had a great start to the day. I’m happy and like. What am I going to get angry about this? You know, like, what is how is this benefiting me? And then a question that I also like to pose is to ask yourself, what if I just throw the question out there? Like, what if I was able to let go of feeling this way when something happened?
[00:51:02] So what if I was able to not be angry? How would that feel? What would happen? You know, and that might be something you have to ask over and over and over until you start to be like, “Oh, man, actually, imagine, just close your eyes. And imagine if I was cut off and I still could keep a smile on my face.” And I’m just like, you know, whatever. Guy’s, probably in a hurry, like. That would help the rest of my day. I’m like, that’s the kind of state I want to be in. So going back to your initial question, how do I define success moments like that? If I can have that kind of mentality throughout the day, regardless of what happens to me, that success.
Jesse: [00:51:39] This is a good point to start winding down and to bounce off of. So for our final question, I ask every guest for the same year the same question. And I think yours will be particularly interesting because we talked about how you define success or wins. And this year’s question for all my guests is, how do you celebrate your wins?
Tim: [00:52:05] Yeah, I think. What I try and do every day and what I’ve learned in the last two years is I work to build every day and live it how I want to live it. So that includes waking up early. And reading it includes doing something hard, challenging for my body, usually a workout, usually a jiu-jitsu training. That also includes going to the beach as much as I can. So usually that’s probably like four days a week.
[00:52:35] And so that, I think allows me to celebrate every day. That’s how I define it and that’s how I do it every day. Those are things where I’m like, Man, if I do those things, it’s amazing. And so I also do definitely set targets, at least for projects I’m working on, let’s say, for work or if I’m training for Jiu-Jitsu Tournament or if I just want to my game.
[00:52:56] And I think. What I — so my point is what I’ve started to do is more place the celebration within each day and not so much set a target and then celebrate if I hit it. You know, I think the celebration has come more just from the creation of life and or of particular day and the particular life I want to live. And honestly, like, if I reach a milestone with work or if I, I set a target to put out a certain number of videos during a certain month. “Hey, I am focusing on video creation this month. I need to create 100 videos.” I don’t know what it is.
[00:53:32] I’d probably reward myself with one of those three things. I’d spend an extra hour at the beach. I would go train an extra hour jiu-jitsu. Like, I have just gotten very particular and specific on what I value and what I need in my week, in my day, to just feel my best. And I’ve really tried to strip it down and simplify it. So there’s not a ton of extra crazy, wild things that I do only when I reach a particular outcome or goal.
Jesse: [00:54:00] I think that’s fair and probably a pretty healthy way to go about it. Tim, if people want to get in touch with you, check out what you’re up to, any of that kind of stuff. Where can they find you?
Tim: [00:54:12] Yeah. So my LinkedIn definitely most active posts on there every day, Tim Perreira, you could shoot me a note, I’ll respond. And then you mentioned early in the intro, but doing a lot on our PER @per.wellness is our Instagram. Do that and then we’re launching a in the next couple of months. We’re recording now at the end of September, so early winter of 2022, launching our online academy for the Peak Performance and Health Optimization Academy, where all to be community-based and also kind of self-guided materials and videos with group, you know, like I think biweekly or monthly accountability and mastermind calls. So if any of that’s interest to you. I also do coaching with guys directly so but LinkedIn, reach out I’ll respond if you guys want to connect.
Jesse: [00:55:02] Awesome. Tim, thanks for hanging out with me today.
Tim: [00:55:04] Yeah, thanks, Jesse. It was awesome.