Craig Ballantyne: Systems Over Willpower, Focused Growth & The Dark Side of Discipline | Ep37

Craig Ballantyne is known as the "World’s Most Disciplined Man" and is the author of The Dark Side of Discipline, as well as The Perfect Day Formula. He was also the creator of the Turbulence Training fitness system and owns EarlyToRise.com.

In this episode of the Successful Spiritual Entrepreneur Podcast, Christian sits down with Craig Ballantyne—author of The Dark Side of Discipline and The Perfect Day Formula, and creator of the Effortless Discipline System.

Known as the “world’s most disciplined man,” Craig shares a surprising truth: discipline isn’t about willpower—it’s about systems. He unpacks why most people sabotage their purpose by doing too many “good” things and how to escape the burnout cycle by designing a life around what truly matters.

Craig breaks down his simple 3-part framework—Eliminate, Prepare, Connect—and explains how entrepreneurs can stop chasing validation, start saying no, and realign with the vision that called them to lead in the first place. You’ll also hear his take on clarity, the dangers of reactive productivity, and why “running your own race” is the most spiritual act of all.

Whether you’re early in your journey or entering a new season of leadership, this episode delivers grounded strategy, soul-level truth, and a practical path to discipline without destruction.

Connect with Craig Ballantyne:

Get the Book The Dark Side of Discipline on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQB1FY7N

Visit Craig’s website: earlytorise.com

Follow on Instagram: @realcraigballantyne

Connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/craigballantyne

Core Themes

• What discipline really is—and what it’s not
• Craig’s 3-part Effortless Discipline System
• Why chasing “good” can sabotage your great work
• Creating a specific 3-year vision and reverse-engineering success
• How to stop relying on willpower and start building systems
• The power of saying no and setting boundaries
• Running your own race in a noisy, distracted world
• Personal advice for entrepreneurs at every stage of life

Connect with Christian

Instagram:
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/christianmauerer/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@chrismauerer

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/chrismauerer

Business Inquiries:
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠info@lovepixelagency.com

👉 Listen to all Successful Spiritualpreneur Podcast episodes here:
https://open.spotify.com/show/5ryYCcW1SltPKhi9RRdk01

☎️ Book a call for a FREE 15min Brand Consult/Funnel Mapping Session
https://calendly.com/lovepixel/15min-consult

🍵 What about a cup of tea
https://besttealeaves.com/

🚀 Are you ready to launch your website?
https://lovepixelagency.com/

Transcript

Christian
What is up beautiful people? This is Christian from the Successful Spiritualpreneur Podcast. And today I'm super stoked to have Craig Ballantyne on the podcast. He's known as the world's most disciplined man. He's the author of the dark side of discipline as well as the perfect day formula. He was also the creator of the turbulence training fitness system and owns early to rise.com. Welcome to the show, Craig.

Craig Ballantyne
Thank you, Christian. This is gonna be lot of fun.

Christian
I know, I'm excited. as you know, this podcast is all about spirituality and entrepreneurship. I think discipline is such an important value for in either of those disciplines, whether it's a spiritual discipline or an entrepreneur discipline. So what advice can you leave us with or give us in terms of, hey, if you want to be successful at this, put in this amount of that.

Craig Ballantyne
Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. And I think one of the most important things for everybody listening is that your traditional idea of discipline is this hard thing that there's a lot of suffering involved and that it's uncomfortable. It's not enjoyable. And it's really a lot of willpower, but that's the wrong approach to it because discipline is actually a, you know, successful discipline is about setting up systems that make the right actions automatic and that don't

cause you to be stressed out by thinking about all the things you have to do. For example, I was talking to one of my coaching clients today and she was talking about how she needs to have more discipline at the end of the day to do her planning for tomorrow because we talk about planning and so much of the stuff that I teach as I'm sure you do too because planning is really the genius behind success. And I said to her, you don't need more discipline. It's not like you need more willpower or to remember to do the thing. Instead, what you need are the systems.

And I created something Christian called the effortless discipline systems. And there's just three simple steps to it. Elimination, preparation and connection. And when you have elimination, preparation and connection systems for any habit change, whether it's a good habit that you want to add or whether it's a bad habit you want to get rid of, those things make it effortless almost because we're making the right actions automatic and making the wrong thing hard to do. So back to the client real quick is that

Instead of saying, you know, at 4.30, I need to have the discipline to do my planning. No, what you need is elimination. 4.30, you need elimination of all distractions. So if somebody's addicted to their phone, we tell people to use something called the Opal app, O-P-A-L. It's very popular app for iPhones. It has a 4.8 star review, four million users, and it blocks you from whatever you want to be blocked from. So if you want to be blocked from text, phone calls, social media, it will block you from accessing it for a certain amount of time.

which means you have gotten rid of the biggest distractions in your life. So then that's the first step, eliminate, make it harder to do the bad thing. Second thing is preparation. So we have an alarm that would go off at 4.30 for my client reminding her to do her planning and preparation and she might have a routine for it where she has a notebook, schedules out her next day, her next action step for the morning. Great, now she's all planned and prepared. She's eliminated the bad habit. And then finally the last thing is connection.

We need accountability and that's what the word we use for accountability is connection. need either someone we deeply do not want to disappoint. We need to say, hey, I'm going to check in every single day at 4 45 and tell you I did my planning and I'm not going to show up and say, no, I didn't do it because I deeply do not want to disappoint you. Or we use public accountability through social media where we say on our Facebook page, our Instagram or our LinkedIn or whatever it is that we use, say.

Every single day at 4.30 I do my planning. And when you say that, if you're a person of integrity, you're gonna fall through. So it's not about cold plunging to get disciplined, it's about setting up simple systems so that you make things automatic and you actually make it easy and effortless.

Christian
Beautiful. I love that. And also, you know, the practical steps of people, of how to get people there, especially with an app like OPAW, I think is super helpful. And I noticed the same thing. If I don't look at my phone in the morning until like nine o'clock, it's a whole different day than if I whip it out at 730. So yeah. Tell us about your book, The Dark Side of Discipline.

Craig Ballantyne
Definitely. Absolutely.

Yeah. So the dark side of discipline, I wrote that, you you mentioned at the start of the introduction, Craig's known as the world's most disciplined man, a little backstory on that because I'm not by classic definition, the world's most disciplined man, but I've owned a lot of businesses in the past and I've pumped out a lot of content, a lot of courses, a lot of stuff. And people say, you are very productive. Therefore, if you are productive, you must be by the traditional sense, disciplined. And so

somebody called me the world's most productive man, then another friend of his said, you're the world's most disciplined man. It kind of took off from there, but I don't run ultra marathons. don't do cold plunging every morning at five o'clock. I don't do crazy stuff to me anyways. And that's not disciplined to me because that can actually be a dark side. And so I opened the book with a story about one of my very close friends who

did these discipline challenges that you see online, know, like do these 10 things for the next 50 days or do a hundred pushups in a hundred days. And he did a couple of them and all these people on the internet who he had never met and never will meet, you know, said, you're the best, you're so disciplined. And then after he finished going through round two of this, his wife walked out on him with the kids. And I was stunned because I looked up to this guy. I thought their marriage was amazing. They had beautiful kids. They, they, had everything, right? He had six pack abs. He was a

fitness model. There was no area of his life in which he was not disciplined. He went to church every Sunday. And so he had been convinced that he wasn't disciplined because he hadn't done some random set of stuff on the internet. And that bothers me so much because he threw away the greatest thing in order to do a bunch of little good things. And that's the big message of the book. Do not sacrifice the great for good. Because a lot of these good things

I call them perverse forms of procrastination. So if you have a three hour morning routine, but you really want to write a book and you were put here to write a book, you have a powerful message, a spiritual message that's going to save people's lives, change people's lives, but you're too busy doing your morning routine to finish your book and it's been 18 months, you're sacrificing the great in order to do the good. Now you're not sacrificing the great because you binge watch Netflix. You're not doing bad things. You're doing good things.

But they're sacrificing the great and that's why it's a perverse form of procrastination because you're doing good things. And it drives me nuts because listen, I'm much older than you. I've been doing this for 25 years. I'm nearly 50 years old. I have coached thousands of people from the fitness industry to construction company owners. I've seen everything. And the number one thing that stops people from getting ahead is that they're doing too many things. They need to say no. you know, they're opening up their Instagram.

whether it's, you know, at seven 30 or nine 30, they're opening up eventually and they're finding a new thing to chase down, whether it's to get into a fitness competition or to do cold plunging every day or to, you know, run ultra marathons or even read a book a week. Sure. Those are good things, but they're just jumping into doing those things and not focusing on what they were put here to do on this earth. And, that really breaks my heart because

Christian
Yeah.

Craig Ballantyne
First of all, it can lead to absolute destruction like it did for my friend, or it can simply just hold you back from getting something important done, which then causes a lot of stress in your life, which then bleeds into your relationships and so many other things. So I wrote this book, which is kind of a controversial approach to discipline. And I've got a lot of experience, man. I've screwed up a lot in my life by chasing the wrong things. And I just want to make sure other people don't do the same.

Christian
Yeah, I love that. I run a digital agency. I run a tea business because I love tea and I have this podcast. These are like three focuses. And then I think what's important to know is like, why are you doing these things? Like why tea? Why website? Like I think, do you have for somebody who's maybe lacking that clarity of like, well, yeah, there's all these cool things to pick from.

Craig Ballantyne
Very cool.

Christian
Do you have a framework, an approach, or just a thoughtful question that helps them to say, you should do this because this is what your heart burns for kind of thing?

Craig Ballantyne
Yeah, I mean, that's probably the best question that anybody could ask me because without that idea of what matters, we can get sucked into a lot of dangerous detours. And when you know what matters, you can stay focused. we step back. I have a thinking person's approach, a thinking woman's, a thinking man's approach to discipline instead of, again, the person who opens up their phone and sees a challenge and jumps into it. That's a reactive approach. We want to be a proactive person.

So there's three steps to it. First of all, we identify our big why. What are we doing this for? What are we doing this for? Maybe it's because I believe I was put on this earth to help people with X, Y, Z, or, you know, for me, I'm a family man. So I do everything for my family. I set up my days, I set up my schedule. Everything that I do and everything I don't do is all because I want my family to have the best. So it's for my wife, it's for my three kids. And so that's the most important thing to me, which then gives me a filter.

into which I can make my decisions. So if someone says to me, like, you know, some big podcaster comes along and says, hey, let's do a podcast at seven o'clock at night. I can go, I can't do it. I'd love to do it, but I cannot do it because my family is in the middle of family time, near the end of family time for us at seven o'clock at night. I simply cannot do it. And I'm not going to make the exception because I'm not missing putting my kids to bed. I don't care how big your audience is. I'm just not doing it. So I can run every decision through my filters.

Christian
Hmm.

Craig Ballantyne
So that's the first thing, my big why. What is your big why? And have that core value as the anchor of every decision that you make. Every yes or no runs through it. The second thing, the second part of this is that I need to know what your vision for your life is. Once we have the vision for your life, that's the north star. That gives us a straight line to success. And when you have a straight line to success, can stop you from taking dangerous detours. And I use this example because

I made this mistake years ago. So I knew what I sort of wanted to do with my business and I knew what family life I wanted to have, but I didn't have that clarity. And because I didn't have that clarity, when my friends would come along and say, Hey, let's go to Vegas for bachelor party. would say yes to it, even though it didn't serve me. It was, you I was too old for, know, 28, 29, 30, you know, it's too old for that. That's that stuff. If you have a very clear purpose in life and a very clear path.

Christian
Hmm

Craig Ballantyne
And so I wasted a lot of time going around, traveling the world and saying yes to all these opportunities that didn't serve my ultimate purpose. And so I have a very thorough way of helping somebody create their vision for their life. But just to break it down, it's what I want you to do, Christian, is I want you to paint the picture of what your life is going to look like in three years from now, where you're going to live, your relationship, you know, if you have kids, what your kids do, what the kids don't do.

the core values of your home, your fitness routine, your work routine, where you live, what street you live on, what cars are in the garage, everything. I want to know that. I want to watch the movie of your life. Because if I know that with such clarity and specificity, then we can go and start building the roadmap to get you there. But if we don't know that, then that's why, like if we aren't clear about the future, that's why we say yes to so many things that are distractions.

And being able to have the discipline, I'll use the word discipline, to say no is one of the greatest superpowers in life. so everybody listening, if you think about anyone that you respect, anybody that's created greatness, the music aside, let's not critique her music, but Taylor Swift, right? So Taylor Swift, imagine the number of times she has to say no in a day. She's saying yes to this tour that she did, but

Christian
Mm-hmm.

Craig Ballantyne
Imagine how many interview requests you get. Imagine how many fans want a minute of her time. Could she say yes to all those things and still do what she did? No. Does it break her heart sometimes to say no? Probably does, you know? Just like it's going to break your heart when somebody says, hey, can you give me five minutes of your time? And you're speaking in front of a couple hundred people at some event that you probably will be in the future. And if you gave every single one of those people five minutes of your time, you'd be there for three days. So you can't.

So you do have to say no and set boundaries because saying no is a superpower because otherwise you let the good get in the way of the great. So that's important to understand. And then finally, the third thing is that we break it down. say just, you know, short term focusing on one thing. What's your specific definition of success? So if someone comes to you and says they want to have impact, Christian, you'd be like, I get it. But how can I coach you to have impact when we haven't specifically defined what impact means to you?

Because impact to somebody might be, want to have a podcast with a million downloads. Whereas another person might be, I want to have 10 coaching clients. But if a thousand people said to you that they wanted to have impact, there's a thousand different definitions for that general term. And so when someone comes to me and says, I want to be more disciplined, I have to unpack that with them and go, I mean, I could give you plenty of discipline, discipline routines, but

If I don't know exactly what you're aiming for, like maybe you're aiming to stop using your phone more than four hours a day. Maybe somebody who uses is on their phone all day and they got to have discipline on that. Well, that's going to be a different program than the person who drinks two or three glasses of wine per night and needs to stop that. So we need your specific definition of success. And so you see the trail that runs through it all is specificity. Because without specificity, you say yes to everything because it might help you.

But if you have specificity and you know exactly what you want, it's clear there's only a small number of things that are gonna help you. Just like when you're a kid and we played around with treasure maps, right? X marks the spot on the treasure map. That's your specific goal and therefore you can draw those little dotted lines specifically to get you there. But if you don't know where the treasure is on there, you can go in any direction and you're get lost in most cases and that's the difficulty.

Christian
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, how do you deal? Thanks for that. That was really great. I love it. And are you drinking tea by the way?

Craig Ballantyne
No, I'm

drinking water out of a child's cup, unfortunately.

Christian
Okay, because sometimes the teacups have no handles.

Craig Ballantyne
My wife loves tea, so we can talk about tea later on, there's quite a bit tea in our house.

Christian
Good, that's good. Yeah, he's very special So a question I had about the specificity of the vision. How do you deal with when people? Because life is ever evolving right? Like how do you deal with people like just like changing and shifting like, you know, this is my three year vision with things you say It's not enough time for me or my family or my car that you know how you just like change it midway through or I guess

Craig Ballantyne
What I recommend is that somebody is looking at this every six months. Now, here's the thing. If you get it right, and this is not something you do in a minute, you need to take some time to do it. so usually what I do is I go through workshops with people where we develop this over the course of four to five hours. Because in most cases, if someone just sets about and does it the first time, they're going to have a lot of stuff on there. And, you know, it's like when you go to a buffet, your plates,

Christian
Mm.

Craig Ballantyne
X, you know this size, but for some reason we cram like, you know, three plates worth of food on it and we don't eat it all because we can't eat it all. And it's the same with the vision for our life. In most cases, people are going to think that they need to do 10 times more stuff than they really do. So I take, you know, first of all, I help people kind of establish what they want to accomplish in 10 years. Then we actually move back to the three year vision and it's kind of like an upside down triangle. We start with a lot of stuff.

And we narrow it down. And then after that, what I do is I help somebody build a one year blueprint. So in exactly one year from today, what has to happen in order for you to call it a success. And then from there, we break it down into a 90 day plan so that the 90 day plan leads to accomplishing the one year plan. The one year plan leads to accomplishing the three year plan.

But we need, we need to put some real good effort and thinking into the three year plan. And that's the hardest, most disciplined thing to do is think, which again, people don't think they see something on Instagram, they chase it. And we call in the book, we call chasing another person's definition of discipline or another person's dream is the most undisciplined thing you can do because you haven't thought about what you want. so step back, do a lot of thinking.

Christian
Hmm.

Craig Ballantyne
In this day and age, most people, they're always listening to an audio book. They're always listening to a podcast. They're always listening to music. They never actually have silence in their head and they're never thinking and it's uncomfortable. But if you want to win, that's what you actually have to do. So if you do that right, your three year vision, yeah, it'll change more or less. You might accomplish something in a year that you thought was going to take three years. You might in a year from now have something major happen in your life, which will dramatically change your vision.

Christian
Hmm.

Craig Ballantyne
But in most cases, 90 % of that should not change. And it's remarkable. how quickly something will happen. So you might go two and a half years without making much progress on one of your big goals and your vision. And then all of a sudden, maybe even two years and 10 months, and then in the final 60 days, everything comes together. For example, in one of my books, I wrote a five-year vision about me getting married and having kids.

Christian
Yeah.

Craig Ballantyne
And for four years, nothing happened. Nothing significant happened. And then I built a 90 day plan. I shared it with friends, a 90 day plan, a real true life 90 day fiance. And I met my wife in 35 days and I decided to move out in 60 days from Toronto to Vancouver. And it was four years of kind of straight line of nothing. And then boom, everything all at once, success of the five year vision. And then our first child.

just outside of that five year vision. And I've had that happen to me multiple times where it's, man, I know where I want to be in five years and I don't feel like I'm getting there. And then all of a sudden, all the work leads to like what I call a whoosh effect, which is, know, cause I used to be in the fitness industry and we'd have people go four weeks with no weight loss. And then all of sudden, you know, six pounds in one week. And we'd call that the whoosh effect. And that type of thing happens, whether you're a spiritual entrepreneur, regular entrepreneur, a person losing weight, a person trying to find the love of their life.

Christian
you

Craig Ballantyne
You just have to stay on the path and it's very hard because you get discouraged by it. Not seeing the progress, which is another dark side of discipline because if you are on the path to trying to accomplish something very difficult and you're not seeing progress and you see all your friends joining challenges or doing things that are like three weeks long or six weeks long and they're having a good time.

it's so tempted to go and join something or start something new, even if somebody like, for example, an entrepreneur who's, you know, growing an email list and, you know, selling courses or, or whatever. And they know that's the way for them. And they see a friend start a podcast and they're like, man, I hate doing podcasts, but my friend started a podcast. Maybe I should go start a podcast and it's easy to start a podcast and you know, get your first episode up and you got to win and you got a dopamine hit, but it actually takes you away from the path.

where you maybe you were two weeks away from having your email list double because of a certain promotion or something. So all of this stuff is to get people to commit to that path and just trust the process.

Christian
So you've done this for a big number of years now.

Craig Ballantyne
Yeah,

probably longer than some of your listeners have been alive.

Christian
I know, it's crazy. So it's such an honor to have you on, all that wisdom and how can we, like let's say somebody's in their early 20s, early 30s and early 40s, is there any advice you can give for certain specific stages of their life that you could say, well, pay attention to this or do this when you're like, and then, or like when you have a family, something like that. Like, do you have some sort of tips approach for different stages of one's life?

Craig Ballantyne
Yeah, I mean, listen, I'll give some specific advice to me. So if I could go back in time, because people often ask this, you if you go back in time, tell your 20 year old self or 25 year old self, you know, what would you do? I would tell myself to stop drinking alcohol. Definitely stop drinking alcohol to the point of getting drunk. I did that for way too long and I understand the appeal to it. And I can't imagine your audience is too into it, but don't get caught up in the partying and, you know, running around the world, that sort of stuff.

You know, do a little bit of that, but stay focused on your mission. Figure yourself out in as early as possible in life. there's a phrase when I was a personal trainer, when I was younger, there was this, I had a really successful, lawyer, CEO client and his brother was a lawyer. And this is like around 2000. So before people like bike to work and thought it was cool. And so his brother was a very successful lawyer on Canada's version of wall street in downtown Toronto. And he biked to work.

And everybody thought he was a lunatic, right? Because he's rich man living in a rich neighborhood biking, you know, about a good 45 minutes to work, but he, was comfortable in his own skin. And so that's the advice, maybe even more than the don't drink alcohol is learn to be comfortable in your own skin. And what that means is you have found the finish line for your goals and dreams and you're running your own race. And that's another message that we put in the book. Learn to run your own race. Even if everybody else is running in the opposite direction.

Run your own race. And if you have the courage to run your own race, which I did not when I was younger, and I wish I did. And I think I would have, if I had stepped back and done more reflection, found stoicism earlier, which was kind of my jam for avoiding stress and anxiety, run your own race, be comfortable in your own skin. That's like the most important thing. And then tactically, I wish I had leaned into the resistance and studied face-to-face, nose-to-nose,

toes to toes selling. So basically got a job selling face to face. So whether it's, you know, selling from stage. So if somebody out here is like, man, I can get people in a room for my spiritual events, learn to sell those things. Try it. You're going to fail the first time, get some feedback on it, you know, study some of the greats that are out there. There are a lot of people that do it. It's very formulaic, but you can have your own way of doing it. And that's true to yourself, but learn to sell.

Because selling is persuasion. And persuasion, whether it's getting a three-year-old to brush your teeth or whether it's getting somebody to fall in love with you or whether it is getting somebody to give you a $50,000 wire transfer for a year of coaching with you, you have to learn how to do this if you want to make a change in somebody's life. So that's the second thing that I would say. So as early as possible, do that. The other thing that I often tell people to do is really counterintuitive and people don't like this advice, but

I think it is very valuable for somebody who's in their early 20s to go and work for a very successful entrepreneur. So for example, everybody on here probably doing some digital marketing and has their own coaching or course creation. You would learn so much if you said, I'm going to put this on hold for 18 months and I'm going to go and work for, you know,

the spiritual version of Alex Hermosy, I'm going to go work for Mindvalley, I'm going to go work for Brene Brown, I'm going to go work for one of these companies that is doing, Mel Robbins, know, that is doing digital marketing at the highest level. And you, if you do that for 18 months and then you say, okay, great, I've learned a lot here, I'm going to go back to my thing, your business would be further ahead in two years if you did that than if you did two years of what you're doing right now, which is trying to figure it out yourself.

Christian
Hmm.

Craig Ballantyne
So that nobody will actually do what I just said because they don't want to, but that is the best advice that I could give somebody who wants to accelerate their learning. So that's another thing that I would do. then I would say that if you're, you know, so then you get in your late twenties and stuff, and then you need to become a leader. Right. So then you need to do a deep dive into how to lead other people.

because you're going to get to a point, you'll be able to build a million dollar business with a very small team and a personal brand. But then you're going to get to the point where you have to manage people, lead people. You have to learn how to delegate. You can't do everything in the business. Otherwise you're going to be working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. And it's really going to cut into your spiritual time and it's going to be hard on you. So you have to do that part. So that'll be another phase for you to start learning as quickly as possible, which you would learn if you worked for another company.

So I think those are the main things right now. then along the way, just grow your network as large as possible. So get to meet as many other good people as you can. Because I have a little phrase in life, Christian, that says, everything in life is easier when you know more good people. Everything in life is easier. So how did I meet my wife? I asked another girl who knew a lot of women for an introduction to someone who was awesome. Boom. How did I get?

in great shape and how to get really strong. I found a training partner who was really good and we trained together four times per week for a long time. Boom. How did I make 90 % of the money that I've ever made in my life? It was through going to events, finding business partners, not actual business partners, but like joint venture partners, affiliate partners, people who would recommend my stuff and I'd recommend their stuff. How did I write my books and how did I write good books? By getting other people involved.

And so, you know, this is more on the male side, but I see a lot of people, like a lot of male influencers say, you know, go, go dark for six months. Don't hang around anybody. Cut your social circle. That's a garbage, the most garbage advice that I've ever seen on the internet because humans are meant to be social. And if you knew a thousand good people, everything in your life would be easier. Like even like if you want to go on a trip, you'd have a thousand good people to ask, Hey, have you been to this hotel in this area? Can you give me any recommendations?

But if you only know 10 good people, you're get way less information. So know a lot of good people along the way.

Christian
Yeah, I love that. I think it's so powerful, you know, and obviously, know, the, you know, the, the same, you know, your, your, your network is your network. So yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. So with your book coming out, what, like how let's, mean, I want to look a little bit behind the scenes, like what was your vision and idea of coming out with another book and why, and how do you want to, I guess, reposition and use that for your own?

Craig Ballantyne
Absolutely, I truly believe that.

Yeah, it's a good question. So I wrote my first book, Perfect Day Formula in 2015. Then I wrote a book called Unstoppable. I had severe anxiety attacks and unstoppable is the step-by-step method to never have anxiety again. And then I wrote a book called Perfect Week Formula in 2019, which is the ultimate time management book. So every entrepreneur, if you want to get more done, you got to read that book. And that has been six years since I wrote my book because

I didn't have much more to say on the time management stuff. There's probably maybe five or 10 more pages I could put in the perfect week formula with some slight things that have come up, but I didn't really have anything to say for six years that was new and novel. Anybody out there is thinking of writing a book. think most people write a book too soon. You've only lived six chapters of your book.

and you don't know how to market the book properly. And so if you go and write the book too soon, you're going to be very disappointed with the results. So take your time on the books is another thing that I see as a common mistake of younger entrepreneurs, because there's a great quote that says, in order to write the book, you have to live the book. And most people haven't fully lived the book. They've gotten into the problem. Every book has to have a problem, like a hero's journey, but they haven't fully gotten out and to the climax of the book where they're the

the guru. So I just spent all this time watching in the last couple of years, watching people really destroy themselves one way or another by chasing other people's definitions of discipline. And over the years, I had been helping people with those effortless discipline systems. sell courses on it. We sell boot camps on it. We coach entrepreneurs at very high level to use this every day. But I didn't really have like, it was not

full book. It's only one third of the new book, Effortless Discipline Systems. So it takes a while for you to get the right complete package. And so now having the complete package, the idea of the book is to really save people from making mistakes. And it's also a good way for me to start growing my network of good people again. And then obviously we use it to get people to buy

the video courses of the same content, and then also to learn more about our higher level coaching and our higher level masterminds.

Christian
Beautiful. And with the Perfect Day formula, can you give us a little breakdown of what your day looks like?

Craig Ballantyne
Yeah, absolutely. So my day I get up at about four o'clock in the morning and I have for about 10 years now, maybe, maybe 12 years now. I'm introverted by nature. I've introverted tendencies. I'm not an introvert. I don't like to label myself, but I've introverted tendencies and I love the morning and I want to get everything done in the morning and I don't like the afternoons. I want to get my workout done. want to get a lot of work done. I want to do all this stuff in the morning. So I get up at four and I work from four until six.

We have three kids under the age of three. They get up at about six in the morning and then from six in the morning till eight, you know, today we had a bath. We played downstairs. We read a couple of books, fed them some breakfast. And then at eight in the morning, we have two nannies that show up because it's pretty chaotic in the house and I work from home. My wife works from home. So we have two nannies to show up. And so I work from eight till 11. I go to the gym. I come back. I do a lot of shows like this in the afternoon. I'm done work at four o'clock and from four o'clock until eight o'clock.

I'm in the house with the kids, reading books, making dinner, cleaning the house up. You know, we might go to a bookstore or something and then we go to bed really early, like 730, eight o'clock at night and that's it. Yeah, it's good life. It's a great life.

Christian
Beautiful. I love that.

I know. It's good to hear, you know, because when you notice that somebody is like in balance in their own life, like no matter how that balance point looks, you know, for you or for whoever person, yeah, you just know that that person is living their Dharma in their center, you know.

Craig Ballantyne
Yeah, it's really about, you know, I think one last lesson for everybody is that eventually at some point you have to get to the realization that everything you're doing is not for yourself, right? It's not so that you can make more money and, you know, be a digital nomad or, you know, live here or have this car or, you know, whatever. None of this stuff is for you. It's actually you're here to serve others. And if you

Do everything with a outlook of how can I help other people here? How can I show up and deliver value? Life becomes so much easier and so much more fun.

Christian
Yeah, beautiful. Well, we're coming towards the end of the episode and I just wanted to ask you some more personal questions. And with that, I'm wondering like what is currently inspiring, you know, you and your entrepreneurial and maybe even spiritual journey. mentioned Stoicism is definitely one of them.

Craig Ballantyne
Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, you

know, I'm, I'm on a Joe dispense a kick right now. You know, I've known about them for a long time. kind of gone in and out with him. My wife is really into them. And I just, I listened to him all day long while I work. just listened to Joe dispense a YouTube, you know, like there's this one on that says, you know, from 3am to 5am the prayer. And then there's this, you know, vision and people like, you listen to that while you work. I'm like, yeah, that's, that's all I listened to all day long. It's Joe dispenses, you know, kind of hypnotic voice in the background.

So that's really inspiring to me. And then right now I'm just all about this book. So I'm promoting it and I'm catching up with so many people that I know I'm doing so many shows. love talking to people. I love talking to younger audiences as well because man, I just wish I would have made a whole lot of different decisions when I was younger. I mean, think younger audiences are more energetic and more open. So I'm always doing that. And I'm...

I'm already thinking about my next book, which is on a completely different topic, but it's another area that I'm pretty passionate about.

Christian
Beautiful. Yeah, I think it's always interesting how to see even in the online world, there's this like segmentation, right? Like we don't really listen to like people who have gone through the stuff. You know, we always listen to the person that's like, of like me, maybe five years ahead, you know, versus like, tell me like the high level, you know? So that's really cool. And another question I have for you is, let's say, you know, like,

Craig Ballantyne
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Christian
you leave this physical plane at some point, I'm sure you will. And what are three words you'd want people to know you for?

Craig Ballantyne
you know, great husband and father. That's, that's all that really matters to me. It's like, Hey, nice, you know, read my books and stuff, but, I just want, you know, I, it's, all about my wife and kids to me. And, know, so I'm super old school, like a black and white TV show dad, you know, from the 1950s. And, and I just want to make sure that I protected my children from harm and, given them an environment in which they can flourish, which is, you know, if even if you're never parent that

Christian
then.

Craig Ballantyne
that line should, if you're a business owner and you have team members, that's what you wanna do. You wanna give them an environment in which they can flourish. Your customers, give them an environment in which they can flourish and provide it and that's what you're here to do. that's way that I approach things.

Christian
Beautiful. what is next question would be like, what is your vision of the new earth? However you envision, you know, the world working and evolving, know, however you define that.

Craig Ballantyne
So for me, I would love if people would be able to shut out the noise. I, so I used to be a news junkie. I used to read the news all the time. And when I gave up the news, it was one of the best things that I ever did because now people are asking me about all types of stuff that's going on. And, and none of it really matters. You know, what this guy's saying about this country and this guy, you know, like

It doesn't matter because it doesn't affect you. 99 % of the stuff doesn't affect you on a day to day basis. You control your future. You control your thoughts, words and your deeds. That's all you control. And whether, you know, Joe Blow is saying this or, you know, Mary is saying this, they're going to do what they're going to do. And you can't stop them. And you can't complain your way into stopping somebody. And, you know, my family is...

You know, they're, always mouthing somebody off and I'm like, what's, what is the actual, you know, what's this person actually had done? Well, they said they're going to do this. And well, it's like, they haven't done anything. So just, you know, mind your own business and get back to it. And so, you know, I'd love for there to be a day when people are just going in the opposite. problem is we're all going in the direction of listening to other people more than ourselves. I'd love for people to get back to listening to this themselves and being comfortable in their own skin.

Christian
Hmm, beautiful. And with that, we're coming to a close of the show. So any last words you have for the audience and then of course where people can find you.

Craig Ballantyne
Yeah, you know, at the end of the day, at the end of your life, it's all about the people and experiences. It's not about the money and stuff. So it's everything that really matters in life is about the people that you spend your time with and the experiences that you have. And in most cases, it's often the simple experiences with the closest people to you that are going to, you know, leave the greatest mark on your soul. So that's what I encourage people to understand and therefore live the best way for them. And so if to find me,

Most important thing, everybody just check out Amazon and go and get Dark Side of Discipline. I'd love for you to check that out. And if anybody has any follow-up questions, just send me a message on Instagram. I check that thing every day and I respond to all my DMs. Real Craig Ballantyne. I appreciate it.

Christian
Thanks for being on the show.