World Champion BEARfoot Lifter’s Incredible Life Advice
Chris Duffin believes in living life at the extremes—extreme performance, extreme competence, and extreme achievement. A true-to-life mountain man with his story as a best-selling autobiography and upcoming documentary movie Chris has numerous accolades to list. From sitting on the board of OregonTech, where he received his engineering degree, to also on the board of the College of Functional Movement Clinicians. He holds awards and records for his inventions and unduplicated feats of strength.
Using his engineering degree and MBA, he spent nearly 20 years becoming a sought-after turnaround expert in the aerospace, automotive, and industrial equipment manufacturing sectors. But most people know him for his work after moving on from that career, founding his own Education and Manufacturing companies focused on biomechanics, human movement, and personal development. As an award-winning expert in these fields, he holds patents and has been recognized for scientific innovation, and is a desired keynote speaker.
In the sports performance world, Chris’s work is everywhere. His game-changing products are used in nearly every professional sports team in North America, all the big-name colleges and a thousand others, all military branches (white house included), and so many more. His concepts have changed the landscape of strength training in improving performance and the systemized approaches to assessing and correcting human movement dysfunctions.
With extremes again, Chris is not just a recognized thought leader but has held numerous all-time world records and become one of the strongest pound-for-pound powerlifters in the world. He holds the Guinness World Record for the heaviest sumo deadlift of all time, with 1001 pounds for almost three repetitions. He also completed the same feat with a 1001lbs squat making him the only human in history to have Squatted and Deadlifted 1000+lbs for reps. He used these feats of strength to raise money and awareness for charities related to his upbringing.
As for the true-to-life mountain man portion might be best left to his first book, “The Eagle & The Dragon.” Growing up homeless in the wilderness. He was raised in an abusive and chaotic household (tent, shack, tree fort at times) where his childhood was composed of skinning rattlesnakes, foraging for food, and protecting his sisters and mother. With stories of dealing with murderers, drug running and abuse, human trafficking, death, a serial killer, and extreme poverty. He could attend college as a star athlete and valedictorian after graduating high school. In college, he worked full-time to take custody of his three younger siblings and get them out of that toxic environment. It seems pointless even to add the part that he still graduated from college at the top of his class.
Today, Chris is an advisor and Chief Engineer/Visionary to Kabuki Strength & Bearfoot Shoes. He is focused on his passion for personal development with his philosophies and tools around mindset, goal setting, execution, and deep introspection.
He is the father of three wonderful children and husband to an amazing Canadian chef who appears in reality-TV cooking shows. If he’s not with his family, working on himself and his businesses, or remodeling his house, you can find him in his shop perfecting his Mad Max off-road war machines.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Chris Duffin who gives incredible life advice.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How life involves pain and difficulty, but people have the power to choose where to direct their efforts.
– Why it’s important to find your next challenge rather than settling for mediocrity.
– How parents should set good examples for their children so they can chase their own goals.
– Why children need a stable environment that allow them to experience failure and learn from it.
– How consistent success without failure can hinder the development of confidence.
Connect with Chris:
Guest Contact Info
Twitter
@ChrisDuffin
Instagram
@mad_scientist_duffin
Links Mentioned:
chrisduffin.com
Kabuki Edu+
Code: 2MOXERO4524
https://kabukistrength.com/pages/kabuki-edu-video-and-app-coaching
The Eagle and the Dragon
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Eagle-and-the-Dragon-Audiobook/B07W6ZCJMW?ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_160613_rh_us&source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-160613
Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Steven Sashen:
What do you do when you’re a world champion athlete and you’re not sure what to do next? Well, of course, you start a shoe company among other kinds of companies. Well, we’re going to find out about that and how that relates to you and your health, your wellness, your strength, your recovery, your performance. You name it.
On today’s episode of The MOVEMENT Movement podcast, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, starting feet first, those things that are the foundation of your body at the end of your legs, we’re also breaking down the propaganda, the mythology, and sometimes the flat-out lies you may have been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or lift or do CrossFit or yoga or anything you like to do, and to do that enjoyably, efficiently, effectively. Wait, did I say enjoyably? Trick question, you all know that because if you’re not having fun, you’re not going to keep doing it. So do something you enjoy.
I’m Steven Sashen, co-founder, co-CEO of Xero Shoes. Here’s the T-shirt to prove it. We call it The MOVEMENT Movement podcast because we, and that includes you, more about that in a second, are creating a movement about natural movement, having your body do what it’s made to do, not getting in the way of that. The way you can participate is really simple. Go to our website, feel free to go there, www.jointhemovementmovement.com. There’s nothing you need to do to join. You don’t need to pay anything, learn a secret handshake, or special song you sing every morning when you wake up.
That’s just where you can find all the previous episodes, all the ways you can find us on social media, and engage with us there. And you know what to do to help move this movement forward. Give us a thumbs up and a good review or hit the bell icon on YouTube, subscribe to hear about new episodes. You know the drill. If you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. All right, let’s jump in. Chris Duffin, welcome. Tell people who the hell you are and what you’re doing here.
Chris Duffin:
Yeah, what am I doing here? Why do you have just like some meathead guy on here talking about shoes or feet? It makes no sense, Steven.
Steven Sashen:
I’m here so you can prove that meatheads aren’t just meatheads. Go ahead.
Chris Duffin:
I open that way because oftentimes people have different perceptions based on how they’ve come to know who I am. So just like of a little background about myself, what I do now is going to lead into, I think, a longer story about how I got there to start with. But I am an award-winning engineer, designer with a specialty in biomechanics. And I also have lifted really heavy things. I was just a champion-
Steven Sashen:
Well, pause there. Yeah. You can’t just say you lifted really heavy things. I mean, here’s where you get to pat yourself on the back, because there’s a lot of people who know you from this part. So don’t be humble or coy.
Chris Duffin:
Yeah. As a powerlifter, I was ranked number one in the world for eight years straight in either the squat, the deadlift or the total. And then I quit doing that and chased just things that I wanted to do. And I became the first and only person that’s both squatted and deadlifted a thousand pounds for reps. There’s actually a movie, documentary movie, coming out about that. And it was really to showcase I’m not a specialist. Usually people are really good at one or the other, and I want to show the fundamentals. If we move properly, if we manage recovery appropriately, if we do these things, you can achieve phenomenal things.
And the other side of that was just like this inspirational. It’s like, “A thousand pounds. Well, why didn’t I go for 1,050? Why did I do reps?” It was grand. It was grand goals is what I was after. And that was really to create some inspiration. This over-the-top reaching thing of being able to do something that people don’t think is possible if you go for it. And for me, that’s a really important thing. I’ve been through much in my life to get to where I’m at. And it’s actually the foundation for a bestselling autobiography about… starting with this five-year-old kid living in a tree fork in the wilderness in Northern California, being taught how to capture and handle live rattlesnakes and run from bears. I freaking kid you not.
The name Bearfoot comes from that story, that background. And that’s why I’m so passionate about topics as it relates to resilience, as it relates to taking things and getting stronger, being able to take on more overtime as you learn those skills. So the quick elevator story, and it arrives back to why I have a shoe company now, is I took myself from that environment, grew up homeless about half the time, in and out of that, dealing with drug trafficking, drug running, murderers, serial killer that tracked the family, human trafficking that affected me and the family. I mean, just some really wild stuff.
And to get myself out of that environment, I had to excel. And so I ended up putting myself through a double engineering degree while working full-time on an academic scholarship. And in the process, I took custody of my three younger sisters, and I raised all of them while I got that and got my MBA and next thing you know I’m running companies. Well, that took 10 years, the process of like in my career to where I became a turnaround expert, and I was running automotive and aerospace manufacturing companies. And I’m just like, “Man, well, how’d this kid from the sticks end up in this place in my life?” And reflection on that cost me to quit my job.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, break that down. Slow that film down. So you come from literally living, I’d say, on the streets, except there was not a lot of streets in that neighborhood, but to… I mean, it sounds almost crazy when you describe your childhood to go for a double engineering degree, and then your MBA, and then that business. Was that a sort of come-to-Jesus moment or a slow burn to, “Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. I got to shift gears here”?
Chris Duffin:
It was a slow burn. So this is post-college. I’m working my career close to 20 years. I’m excelling. Next thing you know, I’m a corporate executive doing this stuff and sought after for it. And then I’m having kids and family, house with a white picket fence, like all this stuff. And I’m getting into my middle 30s, late 30s, and my kids are growing older, and they’re getting to be the same age that I was that I’m telling these stories about. And it really started hitting me, and I’m like, “There’s something missing from what I’m doing, and I know that I can do so much more.”
And the physical aspect has always been there. I started training as a… Well, it was very active, you could imagine growing up. We were mining. We were logging. I was there doing it. I was a very physical nerd. And so we lived in a very… environment where learning was really important. The only thing we had was a library card. And so absorbing books, having conversations by the fire by candle late in night on all sorts of stuff was just an interesting way I grew up, and it’s part of why I excelled in school, but I was also very physical. So I started lifting weights in 1988, and I started competing in 2000 as a powerlifter. And so on the side of all this stuff that I talked about, I actually owned a gym, became a 9,000-square-foot facility, and I was training at a world-class level, trying to be the strongest person in the world while trying to taking a struggling aerospace manufacturing company and turn it around and prep it and get it.
And so reflecting on this, I own the gym and I was also doing something kind of strange, which was I was taking clinical continuing education because I had a string of injuries and I was trying to discover what was going on. I couldn’t get answers from the doctors I was dealing with. And finally I found one and he started going, “I don’t have the answers. Let’s try to find this together,” and then started introducing me to some pretty key people, the ones that write a lot of the books that are used in the schools. And so I started attending those courses and then making friends with those people and then lecturing with those people, which was interesting. I’m standing on stage with Dr. Stuart McGill lecturing to 150 doctors, and to be a guest lecturer at Western Chiropractic.
And so this was all on the side, right? And I realized, and I was publishing content, like my thoughts on things, what was broken with the fitness industry, one of those topics very early. There’s two main ones that I saw. One was breathing and bracing, use of the diaphragm and the impact on the spine, and the second one was the foot. And I was putting this content out, and some people, I mean, it was changing their lives, like people, getting them back. I mean, I was just posting videos on YouTube, and I was getting this feedback. The other feedback I was getting in the industry is, “You’re crazy,” “You’re wrong.”
Steven Sashen:
Well, wait. So, about which part? The bracing part or the barefoot part, or both?
Chris Duffin:
Yes, both.
Steven Sashen:
Got it. Well, two things. First of all, are you planning to sleep at some point in the future? Because clearly you haven’t been.
Chris Duffin:
Actually I sleep a lot. We could dive into philosophy here maybe in a little bit. We talk about my views on achieving balance through extremes is a great discussion. Okay?
Steven Sashen:
Oh, yeah, we’ll definitely do that.
Chris Duffin:
Yes. And this is tied to that conversation, right? So I’m doing this stuff.
Steven Sashen:
So wait, hold that thought. I just want to tease this apart for people. So just highlight what you were saying about breathing and bracing as well as what you’re saying about bear feet, and then to give people a context for why people were saying that you were crazy.
Chris Duffin:
Yeah. So I was saying that what people are doing to approach squatting, deadlifting was intrinsically wrong. People were… The focus was this arch really hard, right? Brace, like lock down, flex your abdomen, arch super hard, push your butt back, and I’m going, “No, this is wrong.” Fundamentally, you’re actually putting yourself in a position where you’re weakening the structures, and you’re more likely to bend over and compromise the spine in flexion with heavy loads without getting the pelvic floor and the diaphragm aligned to each other in creating this pressure that’s created via an eccentric loading of the cavity outward first. And so it was a lot of position. It was counter to everybody big was speaking.
Steven Sashen:
So I want to pause there for a second. This has come up a couple of times, and I think you and I may have talked about this, about… I just blanked on her name because I’m horrible with names. The woman who does the Core360 belt, which basically was a similar idea. People have a misunderstanding about using a squat belt where they think it’s, “Oh, you need to pull everything because it’s pulling everything tight rather than it’s a queue.”
Chris Duffin:
You actually have to have it a little. So you need to be able to put two fingers between at least your belt and your belly because you need to… It’s for you to queue against. It’s creating… So when you eccentrically load the cavity, you’re getting a co-contraction by the thoracic lumbar musculature, the obliques, the abdominal, the rectus abdominis. All that is then co-contracting.
Now a belt is another outer sheath, but you need to be able to expand into it. And when you suck it down, now you cannot expand. And that is essentially how you create pressure. The little erectors are tiny, little muscles, and that’s not what you’re using to stabilize. What you’re using to stabilize is this pressure against all the organs that then are pressing outward, but also pressing inwards on the spine as well around that. Yeah. So I was being called crazy, but I was also being called crazy by a bunch of people that all had replaced hips and broken backs. And then myself-
Steven Sashen:
Don’t bore me with your success, Chris.
Chris Duffin:
Yeah. So this is in 2010. And so it was like nobody was having this like, “Diaphragmatic breathing? Chris, what kind of nonsense are you spitting out your mouth?” And then they started seeing my success. They started seeing the success of the athletes. I worked with people that’d been in pain trying to train that way in the past, and like, “Oh, all of a sudden I’m stronger and I have no pain? This is some voodoo magic.”
The other piece of that was, at this time, I started playing around with shoes. I think designs. God, I’ve got some in my YouTube channel from 2007 where I’d cut up and changed because I just didn’t like the approach. And eventually I just started promoting barefoot training, like no… in the gym, which I actually just did a video against yesterday, but it’s gotten a little out of hand. Hygiene in a public environment and, you know what, put some Xero shoes on, put on some Bearfoot shoes, get the effects of it, but don’t in an environment where somebody’s down on the ground and doing stuff on the floor. If it’s a public space, maybe I push it a little too far. Anyway, another topic, respect for other people. Some people are afraid of feet. Whole nother… Right?
But people were wearing the only heeled lifting shoes and wearing them for everything. And now the running movement had started to take place at that point, Vibram. The FiveFingers was coming out. Those things were starting to happen around that time. So this is 2010, 2012, as I’m starting to have these conversations and people are just like, “You’re just wrong.” And then it started to shift because it was happening in some of these other arenas, but in strength training, it was not a discussion. And so literally those conversations that I’ve had. And I say conversations because I’ve got lengthy instructional kind of videos and things that I have posted, recorded, that no one was having in the strength training community prior to the discussions of me putting out an hour-and-a-half lecture on foot mechanics and how this works.
And so it did pave the way for a lot of that. And so I promoted that for a long time, for six years before ever even getting into shoes, because I didn’t get into it to try to sell anything. People were like, “What’s the solution? What’s the solution?” And there wasn’t a lot of great options at that time. So that’s how that got started. So it’s really unique. I’m this guy who was a champion lifter, let’s say, an engineer and a creative, and also, by the time I was through this, probably 10 years of clinical continuing education. So I had this lens of neurology, developmental kinesiology, all these aspects. And so it’s this unique blend of looking at things a little differently.
And that’s where… So I had this going. I’m like, “I can’t do all these things. What’s got to give?” The only logical thing is my job because I know I’m going to chase… We’re getting to the balance of the extremes here is like consolidating the things that really tie to your values in your life. When I had a job and then I had my creativity being a big value of mine over here that I did extracurricular and my training, and all these is like, “How do I align this together so that I can chase things to an extreme but also create more time and space for my family?”
And so right now, I work harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, but I have more time for those things as well, because training is part of that. My creative expression through design is not extracurricular. It happens within my work, my community, the people I want to engage with. I create that culture and environment in the places and the companies that I create. And so it draws the people that become my friends, the things that I want to engage with.
And it’s also… The way I explain this is like… People tell you… If I tell somebody, “I want you to have the absolute perfect squat.” “Well, I got to start with just my body weight or just an empty bar, and they’ve just got to be perfect, right?” And I said, “No, I want you to put every last ounce, leave nothing, not an ounce of your soul, a gram of your soul left on the platform. Put it into that lift.” It’s like, “Oh, well, form goes. It’s out the window.” It’s like, “No, no, no, no, no. I want both of these things.” “Well, that doesn’t work.” “Yeah, it freaking does.”
And then actually, the only way that you can find that extreme is this beauty in the middle. Because if you don’t push the limits of load, you don’t know where you’re actually breaking down at, where you need to improve, what you need to revise, you can’t… Unless you put those edges, you’re sitting there practicing what looks like perfection, but you’re not doing the work of the things that make perfection. And if I’ve got any energy leaks, if I’ve got any waste of my movements and patterns, I’ve got lost there. I can’t actually be putting out the max.
And so that’s an example of this balance through extremes, and I think you can employ that in your life. People think everything’s work-life balance. If I take away from one, it has to… The only way of adding to one is taking away from the other. Is that really the case? I don’t always think so. And I think that you can find something if you really understand, and this is a driver. I know I don’t have to know all my values, but if I know some very specific ones and things that I just know that are part of my soul and I chase those, that’s going to start prioritizing things through attrition because the things that are less important start dropping away as well.
Steven Sashen:
I want to pause for a sec. That’s really interesting because… Well, for a couple of reasons. One, I have a friend… Do you know Ryan Lee?
Chris Duffin:
I don’t.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. So Ryan started a couple fitness companies, a couple physical product companies as well. Ryan is known for building a number of successful businesses, but also having a family, and he’s an athlete as well, so he never missed a kid’s game, no matter what. And many people talk about their business or either way, they don’t want to acknowledge that they’re making a choice that they want to spend their time on this thing. They’ll say, “Well, I wish I had more time for my family.” To which I say, “Bullshit, because if you really wanted that, if that was a priority, you would do that.”
There’s no question in my life with Lena and myself that, for me in particular, right now, the business is the priority. And we don’t have kids. We have a dog. So I get up early every morning to go for a walk with him, and the evenings often as well. So that’s a priority, because otherwise the house becomes a mess. And it’s also terribly fun. But people are often… They’ll often complain about the way they’re spending their time without acknowledging that it’s a choice.
Chris Duffin:
It’s a choice. And that’s a beautiful thing at life. It’s going to be painful and it’s going to be hard, but we’re choosing where those things are.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Chris Duffin:
We can sit there as a business owner. And you and I have had conversations on the side about the struggles of it, what it’s like to be an entrepreneur.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, what are you talking about? I never said it. Hold on. I never said anything other than it was effortless, takes no time, no stress, no risk, no reward.
Chris Duffin:
But we’re choosing not to be working in a corporate…
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Chris Duffin:
Right? And so we’re choosing that life.
Steven Sashen:
Absolutely.
Chris Duffin:
We’ve chosen that, and that’s a beautiful thing because there’s a lot that comes with that.
Steven Sashen:
Well, even more. I mean, this morning I said to some people on our team, “We got a couple of problems here with this part of our business, and I’m going to take full responsibility for it because I’ve been so busy that I didn’t have the bandwidth to pay attention to the fact that you guys weren’t calling me in for certain meetings that I really need to be in. So I’m not going to blame you for it. I dropped the ball. I didn’t see that. So for the next year, until that’s all back in shape, I need to be in every one of those meetings. I need to be part of every part of this development process and that aspect of the business to make sure it’s all on track.”
And ironically, the improvement that we’re talking about with my involvement is probably 5%. It’s some small thing. But from my perspective and from the perspective of the business itself, it’s a big thing. It’s like sometimes those little itty bits. It’s similar to what you’re saying about lifting. If you don’t really push it, you don’t know what’s going on. I’m not okay with things being okay. They need to be top of the line. We need to be… If at some point we’re doing something that’s so frightening to Nike or Reebok or Adidas or whomever that they’re going to come after us, we need to be better than them. We can’t judge ourself against the metrics for those companies. And happily, the people on our team are like, “Got it.” But the problem is, for the fun of it, because I got more people on my team than yours, is people always want to just go, “Ta-dah, here it is. Look at how well we did. And now you can relax.” Like, “Yeah, you’re not there yet.”
Chris Duffin:
No. Now we need to find the next piece. That’s good.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, we got to get a couple more pounds on the bar first, and you’re not there. And by the way, I just want to highlight that part of you don’t know until you push yourself. It’s a line that I have is like no one’s ever set a PR in practice. It’s only when the shit is ready to hit the fan do you find out who you really are. And to your point, if it all breaks down at that point, that’s not going to be good.
Chris Duffin:
I’ll put a pin in that, like you don’t know who you are until… For a second. But first I want to talk about the piece on the parenting that you mentioned.
Steven Sashen:
Mm-hmm. Please.
Chris Duffin:
So there’s a lot of people who say, “Hey, I don’t focus as much on my work. My family is the priority.” And they’re just like, “Everything is all about that.” And I a hundred percent agree with that, but there’s a point of like there’s a miss. When you get to the point where you have subjugated your life to your children first, what are you doing? Are you really going to set them up for success in life? Because all you’re showing them is that your life is only going to be around between the time you finish school and that period of like between that and when you have kids, because as soon as you have kids, you need to subjugate and quit chasing the things that are important to you and put on hold everything in your life. Do you want your kids to do that? Do you not want them to chase and try to accomplish the things that they want?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Well, what you’re saying is you’re not a helicopter parent. You’re parenting by not being a helicopter parent. But I’m curious, given that you… I’m going to say this for the fun of it, since you grew up as a feral child. And by the way, I’m dying to know what your parents did just for the fun of it. Come back to that in a sec. But given your feral child upbringing, what have you changed in the way you’re raising your kids, I mean, compared to that?
Chris Duffin:
Good question. So big thing for me is the end of the day, making sure that I’ve always got a stable environment, a center, a rock that they can rely on, and we’re not in a position that they’re wondering if they’re going to have a place to go home to, is it going to be cold? But at the same time, I am doing a lot of how I was raised, which is around creating independence, trying to guide through the process of letting them fail, to letting them fall down. Because if you provide and make sure that your child wins all the time, that they never fail, they never fall down, they never really build confidence because you have to… That’s how you build confidence in the long run is to be able to fail and then know I came back around. I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t smart enough, I wasn’t fast enough, I wasn’t whatever it was, but I figured out a way and I went back and attacked it. I worked harder, I studied more, I did whatever it was, and I came back and I was able to accomplish whatever the goal was.
And so the ability, and not just the ability, but the process of failing and overcoming that is something that you have to earn and only you can do that. And so putting those things in front of them, but still tempering, like you don’t want somebody to fail in a fashion of they’re going to drown, right? So there’s a balance. I don’t have all the answers. I’m not going to pretend to. But that’s the line that I try. And the other is just a little bit more guidance. I didn’t have a lot of general guidance on life, like how to navigate the world. My parents…
So to answer your question, my mother didn’t want to be part of society at all. There’s some things that happened in her upbringing with authority and other issues that she was very smart, top of her class of 1,500, was going to school to be a chemist, and just said, “I don’t want to be part of this.” And so she ended up in the mountains growing weed for a living. And so this is ’70s, early ’80s, and that’s why we were in this area. So there’s actually a documentary on the area.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Chris Duffin:
We were about 50 miles deeper and more remote. So if you ever… anybody reads or listens to my book, it’s great on Audible, by the way. I read it. And you have questions about the things that I’m describing, the police corruption, the human… You watch that documentary, and be like, “Oh, shit.” It’s as real as you can believe. It’s this, what was it, the Golden Triangle or whatever in Northern California at that time. Yeah, there’s people running around the mountains with machine guns and people disappearing. And I mean, it was wild time. And that’s where we were at. And that is not a place to raise your children. That’s not a life to raise your children with. We were taken by the state for a while. Like I said, there was a lot of bad stuff, essentially nearly every single type of trauma. When they list the eight types, yet I’ve lived them.
Steven Sashen:
Well, that’s an interesting question. So I’m always fascinated… This is going to be a nature-nurture question. Because I’m always fascinated by children who come out of challenging or traumatic situations and the ones who thrive and the ones who don’t. And people like to make simple explanations for this one, but I go, “The fact that if there’s five kids and one of them ends up going to Harvard, becoming a physician, and the other four were in the same situation and they became meth addicts or whatever,” I’m making up stories, “what is it about those?” Because it was… I mean, not exactly the same, one’s older, one’s younger, et cetera, et cetera, but fundamentally the same, and I just find that really interesting. And I have opinion about the nature-nurture thing. What’s your take on that? I mean, again, that was a crazy, crazy time.
Chris Duffin:
Well, my younger brother is living in a shack in the mountains in Northern California. I think he’s got a generator now. If he’s not there, he’s in prison. Back and forth between those. And my sisters, definitely there’s a reason I took over and took custody in that fashion. A lot of people I grew up with are dead-
Steven Sashen:
Didn’t make it. Yeah.
Chris Duffin:
… they’re in prison, they’re on drugs. And here’s my view, and I relate things a lot back to the basic framework of human development. If you walk into a gym, there’s some people that have a higher baseline level of resilience. Everybody walks in the gym, puts 135 on the bar, and you do 20 reps. And your first time in the gym, that’s going to absolutely destroy most people. And you keep going. Okay, now we’re going to do a… I’m trying to think of some of the Russian-like, high-frequency Bulgarian training. Just each people alive, those programs worked through attrition. They had a lot of athletes, and how they found success at the Olympics and so on was they found the ones that could survive, and everybody else fucking died.
Steven Sashen:
This is the same thing, just FYI.
Chris Duffin:
Everyone adapts to resilience, right?
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Chris Duffin:
So you impose stress, right? And we have a positive response. Before that there’s a downward, right? And if we impose too much too soon, it’ll continue on a downward trend. But everyone’s got a different baseline level to start with. And I think that I had a higher baseline level because if we keep hitting it too much, that is trauma. There’s other things, like it can be the base mental outlook. There’s a lot of things. But I think that there’s just a level of genetic and genetic lottery with a level of that resilience.
Now over time, I’ve learned how to manage that and use it and lever it through those principles of human development so that I’m pushing those limits and then keep stacking over time. And sometimes I push it too far and you got a little downward. That’s life. But you figure out how to upswing that again. Just like everybody walking in the gym the first time, everybody’s got a different baseline level. Yeah. What were you going to say about the-
Steven Sashen:
Well, just the running program at the University of Colorado was all success by attrition. And I actually remember when I was in college, I was at Duke, there were two women on the gymnastics team who had been coached by their parents and never worked out more than three days in a week and never had an injury. Then they come to college and they’re working out five, six days a week, injury, injury, injury, injury, injury, injury, injury, and could never convince the coach, “We’ve got to go back to three a week. We just can’t do it this way. We just couldn’t go there.”
Chris Duffin:
That program is a filtering process.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Chris Duffin:
We’re going to take 10,000 people and find the two freaks in there that can survive it and they’re going to make a shit ton of progress, and everybody else is by the wayside because they’re expendable.
Steven Sashen:
And here’s the irony. The irony is, it just occurred to me, it wasn’t just in athletics. This was the same thing going on for, I was a pre-med, same thing going on for the pre-meds. And in fact, at one point, after getting all the way through, so I’m taking advanced biology, advanced chemistry, advanced physics, advanced mathematics, and I came to the head of the chemistry department, because he just happened to be there when I had this realization, which was all these things tie together. At this level, you need every one of those to be able to explore the other ones. You need to understand the physics to understand the chemistry, and vice versa, for example.
And I said to him, “If you just taught it from the top down that way, showing the integration of these things where you have to learn the math to understand what you just saw in the fill in the blank, other discipline, that would just be utterly fascinating. And it would be so well-rounded, and you’d build just better people and better thinkers.” And I swear to God, this is what he said to me with this exact accent. “Well, then how would we weed out the pre-meds?” It was the saddest thing I ever heard.
Chris Duffin:
That’s pretty sad.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Chris Duffin:
But it’s the truth. And it’s got its roots. And it’s like you see that so often in very difficult and challenging environments because they don’t want to waste their time developing or spending the time with the others. And again, how much… It doesn’t matter to them. It’s like, “I need this subset over here.” It doesn’t matter what happens to everybody else that doesn’t make it. Their life’s destroyed. Their body’s destroyed. That’s why it’s very popular in the communist countries when it came to that because those people were expandable.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah. Now to come back to something I teased you about, so it seems somewhat clear to me now that one of the things that you prioritize is sleep.
Chris Duffin:
Yes. Yep. I sleep nine, 10 hours a night pretty much my whole life. It is fundamental, right? Because when it comes down to recovery, it doesn’t matter… If I’m pushing and burning the candle and I’m not able to be there and be at my best, it’s like… I don’t do 50 million things. Here’s a couple things and I’m going to do those world-class and I’m going to take that and accomplish that. And so learning how to cut out all the excess stuff in your life.
I use a lot of Japanese philosophy in my continuous improvement turnaround days. And there’s this process, it’s a shop floor, like manufacturing thing called 5S. And in that process, you basically remove everything from your workspace, everything you need. People freak out like, “No, I have to have this, this, this.” You pull all their toolbox. You pull everything. And then you slowly add back, okay, what’s just the thing that you need, and where is it in hands reach? And now, okay, the next thing. And then something goes wrong. Maybe we need to pull in a whole nother resource, maintenance or whatever to come in. But you’re not going to have all the… You have everything that you need right here, and you cut away all the fluff.
You cut away in your life, you will find that you do so much. We’re habits of this of like to feel like we’re accomplishing stuff, we’re knocking stuff off our checklist. We’ve got our bucket list of all the things that we want to… I fucking hate bucket lists. It’s like, “Oh, here’s a list of a million things.” That’s the wrong way to live life. What is the key shit that you love that make you the way that you want to live? I want to have an aspect of continuous learning. I want to have a sense of family or community. I want to have a creative outlet. I want to have challenge or competition. You shouldn’t have more than five to seven things. And everything that you do that’s key in your life should be a way that you’re expressing those. It’s not the freaking thing. It’s not the visiting the Great Wall of China, like travel or whatever. Like the experiences of other… That maybe one of your values. Yeah. And that could be any way. You didn’t make the Great Wall of China, but you did something else.
Like just with your career, okay, you wanted to play in the NFL and your knee got taken out, your life’s not over. What was it about that that were the drivers in your value system that you can express that in some other way? And so when you start looking at this stuff, you can really start comparing, like how much… “We just want to get shit done and feel like we’re doing things. And so we run around with our hair burning on fire. Yours is going to burn a lot more than mine, those big golden locks.” But we fill our time with things that make us feel like we’re getting a whole lot done, and you’re not really.
At the end of the day, did you actually take one step closer to that life and the place that you want, and the way that you want to live, to get to this North Star to even know what that North Star is? This perfect vision of where you want to be because, well, it doesn’t… You’re never going to get there, just that’s the definition of the North Star. But you can get one step closer every single day. And we get sidetracked and distracted with life, and we’re walking this way and we’re walking that way. And six months roll by, six years roll by, three decades roll by, and you look back and you’re like, “Fuck. I didn’t get anything done. I’m still at the same fucking spot. I’ve just been filling my life with shit, just tasks, tasks.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I love this idea of understanding what it is that motivates you for the thing that you’re doing because you might not be able to do that thing or accomplish that thing at the level that you hope. I mean, look, my personal thing, when I got back into sprinting, I had no idea. So I’m thinking, “I want to get good and I want to win races.” And then I met the guys who beat me. I will never beat them. These are former world champions, Olympians, et cetera. They hit the genetic lottery like there’s no tomorrow. I got five of the numbers. They got six of the numbers plus the Powerball. But to your point-
Chris Duffin:
Well, you don’t have to. What is it about it?
Steven Sashen:
… I love the competition. I love the comradery because we’re all insane that we’re working this hard for something where it just gets worse from this point. You don’t get faster once you’re over 60 something. But there’s so many things about it that are satisfying. And I’ve had this thought because I had shoulder surgery recently. I had eyeball surgery before that. I had blah, blah, blah. And so I thought, “Okay, well, if I wasn’t able to run, what would I do?” And there’s certain activities that I can’t do any longer because my body just can’t tolerate them very well. But literally, one is like… One thing that I always liked, I’ve never explored what it would be like to try and be a powerlifter in my weight class. Would I win? Absolutely not. Would it be really interesting? Absolutely.
Chris Duffin:
So here’s a thing where people make a lot of big misses is you’ll see people identify themselves with the things that they do. I am a powerlifter. I am a football player. And that’s why you see a lot of professional athletes get lost, depression-
Steven Sashen:
Well, it’s worse.
Chris Duffin:
… drugs.
Steven Sashen:
It’s much worse. It’s worse. They can’t compete anymore, then they try to come back because they don’t know who they are without it.
Chris Duffin:
They lost their sense of self. They don’t know why they did that. So they can’t move to the next thing. That is another iteration, the next evolution of that. Let me show you something. Can I share my screen?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, go for it. Now, for people who are not watching this, we will describe what Chris is showing. Okay? All right. Here you describe it because, holy crap, it’s more than I could do.
Chris Duffin:
This is an ouroboros. This is my framework for how I coach people on these concepts. But it’s the six stages of personal growth. And so it’s an infinity loop. So on the left side is a circle, on the right side is a circle, and the left side inside of it looks like a square root symbol. And in that square root, there’s six things, the six Ps, and this is the six stages of personal growth. You’ve got the precipice and then you’ve got the plunge, which is falling down into the square root symbol, the pit that’s in the bottom, the pull, and then the peak at the high end, and the plateau.
And so what this is just a framework for people to understand where you’re at in moments in life. And so the precipice is like this ability to recognize that you’ve got something scary in front of you. You know that the next step is stepping into the unknown. It’s going to be scary, it’s going to be problematic, it’s fraught with challenge. But you’ve got an idea of like, “If I get to the other side, I can see the peak. I can see this place that I want to be.” But you’ve got to be willing to step into that. And it could be starting a new business. It could be changing careers, going back to school, getting married, anything. But there’s also micro ones, too, and I’ll talk about that in a minute.
And you got the plunge, which is like this free fall. “Oh, shit, what am I doing?” You’ve got the pit. And a lot of this is… I’m not going to go through a big level of depth, but the pit is a really important one to understand, and that’s like… This is when you have taken a step, or life’s taken a step for you, because sometimes you get pushed over the edge, like shit comes at us. And this is why you need to develop resilience.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, hold on. Two things. For one, we’ll put a link to this in the show notes. But the other thing, yes, sometimes you just find yourself there. I got to tell you, when you said the precipice, you see something scary ahead. I don’t know if this is true of all entrepreneurs. It’s certainly true of me that people talk about taking risk with what I do, and I go, “I have no idea what you’re referring to. I just see what’s possible on the other end, and just go for it because I don’t have any concern about…”
Chris Duffin:
And that’s where you’ve developed the practice, and that’s where like doing micro cycles of these. So just like meso and micro cycles in training, you can prepare yourself for these events because they’re going to come at you in life. So not having… And you ever see people that walk up and can’t handle? It’s because they haven’t developed that resilience, and they don’t know how to respond, right? But the pit is like those ones where you’re just overwhelmed, like, “Oh my God, where the fuck am I going? My marriage is failing. My business is going under.” Whatever it is. You’ve got to change your framework. The shorter, the less time you spend in there, the better.
And so there’s a process that I use for those experiences as well. And it’s a three-step process of this recognizing like, “Oh, okay, I’m at the pit in my life. I’m here.” And accepting that is a really powerful thing. But then realizing, “Oh, not just accepting, I am going to purposely choose to celebrate this.” Yeah, celebrate because this is… When I write the action book of my life, this is going to be… When I get to the other side, I’m going to be so fucking proud of getting out of this and overcoming this. And the fact I’ve got this moment is going to be one I’m going to tell my grandkids about. Or maybe it’s something that is not a family share thing. I’ll just share it in my head. But it’s going to be… That’s why I’m going to be on my deathbed with no regrets because I fucking stepped into shit like this and I stepped out of it. And also-
Steven Sashen:
I want to ask you a question about that.
Chris Duffin:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Because this is something that comes up a lot with, let’s say, entrepreneurs or budding entrepreneurs, or actually even experienced people as well, where they’re in a pit and they think they’re going to be able to go into the pull phase and get to a peak and get to a plateau. But the reality is it’s not even… I’m trying to frame it in this way with a similar metaphor. They’re not in a pit. They’re in a something where, what, you’re going to have to give me a good word for, where the reality is you need to pull the ripcord on this one. I’ve watched too many entrepreneurs get so committed to their idea that they miss the glaring obvious lesson, which was cut bait.
Chris Duffin:
Yeah. And that’s part of it. So it’s like this is where understanding your values come in and going, “Okay, I’m going to use this pit as a learning moment, and I’m going to reframe and leverage my life and still take this experience and grow from that in a way. Because yeah, guess what? Duffin convinced me to start my own business and it fucking failed. God, fuck that guy.” I guarantee you’re going to be better off at the end of the day because you did. You needed to have that failure.
Steven Sashen:
Absolutely.
Chris Duffin:
You need to have that moment to be able to move to the next thing. Right?
Steven Sashen:
But the reason I highlight this is there are people… And you’re not doing this, but I wanted to highlight it. There’s so many people who make a living by trying to teach this idea that all you need to do is commit and blah, blah, blah, and it’s definitely going to succeed. You just need the right mindset and you just need to work a little harder. It’s like, no, no. Sometimes you got to look in the mirror and go, “Oops.”
Chris Duffin:
You are going to succeed.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Chris Duffin:
That task or action might not succeed. Right?
Steven Sashen:
Nice.
Chris Duffin:
And so that’s actually… We can’t get into it, but this whole right side is actually… It’s this mind-body spirit. It’s external factors, internal, so it’s… Anyway, sorry, it’s broken. So this outer wheel is a lot of process stuff. It’s the who, why, what, and how. So this outer piece is how. This is the planning, deploying, analyzing, adapting. So there’s a lot of depth in it. This is based on Hoshin Kanri philosophy around policy deployment. Basically strategic deployment. You’ll notice that it starts with momentum, the ability to step into a precipice, to use a story and values to then take the momentum to start creating a plan, including people in the plan.
But to be effective at this, and this is the piece that people miss and business strategy folks, is you’ve got to have good interpersonal skills, the ability to coach and mentor and lead. And so that’s the next. So this is how you do it, right? What you do is this outside, which is your tactical, strategic. How you do it is mastering influence and credibility, meaningful conflict resolution, coaching for results, communicating with intent. And then why you do it is the inner, and that’s understanding your values, your mind, body and spirit, which you develop through this same process. And so this is where you go, “God, I’m having trouble with being able to master meaningful conflict, and it’s killing my business and I’ve got big things, but I also got this hard conversation I need to have with my sister.”
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Chris Duffin:
Here’s a micro precipice to just step into that conversation and have it and grow and get used to being able to do that, and then move to the next step. So that’s why ouroboros is the infinity, because all this loops back in and on itself all the time. And the more that you grow the skills, the bigger you can move on the development cycle, the bigger things in life that you can tackle. But to develop the skills, you have to take micro cycles of stepping off the precipice over little things. So anyway, this is my framework that I use when I am working with folks.
Steven Sashen:
Well, here, I’ll synopsize it with something you said. This has to do with what you were saying about both yourself and about your kids. There’s a difference between confidence and competence. And most people think confidence is just a feeling that you should be able to muster, that’s going to be the thing that drives you or that allows you to move forward. But what really does it is the competence because you’ve lived through these things, and that is something… My experience is people who are competent at something don’t try to convince you that they are confident. In fact, the more competent they are, the more likely they’re going to say, “Could be. We’ll see. We’ll have to check it out,” rather than acting just…
The things that I’ve seen with entrepreneurs in particular, they have some business, does really well, they make a bunch of money. And then they think that the next time they have an idea that has that same feeling that the first one had, they go, “Oh, I’m really confident it’s going to work.” And then they lose all their money. And because they mistake the fact that the new thing they’re doing, they’re not competent there. The world has changed. Even if they are competent with the skills they had originally, the world around them has changed and that competence is irrelevant. And I’ve met some of these guys after, when they just launched their new multimillion dollar thing, and everyone is just kissing their butt because, “Hey, you’re back. And this must be a great idea because it’s you.” And I’m going, “Yeah, I hope you get a hobby and I hope that’s all somebody else’s money because you’re about to lose it all.”
Chris Duffin:
Yep, yep. They’re going to get humbled. And that needs to happen. That’s part of that cycle, but understanding that’s the framework and it’s not the idea, not the strategy. You’re going to use that stuff and that’s important, but these are the other components. And so that little graphic, I think is like 25 years of me thinking about this shit.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, when did you wake up in the middle of the night going, “Ooh, it’s like a square root symbol, and then, oh.” When did that happen?
Chris Duffin:
I told you how my design process works, doesn’t it? Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Chris Duffin:
Everything comes in the dream, and I wake up and it’s by my bed. Yeah. I had all these ideas and all the things because I used to teach the Hoshin Kanri. That’s how I did my turnaround stuff. And then I had a whole six-week course that I would teach for my leadership on leadership development and the process. And one night I’m like sitting there, I woke up and I’m like… I saw it all and it was moving in and out of each other and this, and I’m like… I’ve got the framework of actually how all this stuff works together. Because I would coach people independently on the different aspects of it, but now I can go, “Hey, this is where we’re at, and this is the piece. Now I want to pull this piece,” instead of like, “Oh, we need to work on this eight-week piece so I can get this little piece for you.” Now I can jump in anywhere with any of the leaders that I’m working with, with any of my companies. And so yeah, anyway, that’s…
Steven Sashen:
I hear-
Chris Duffin:
It’s not right.
Steven Sashen:
No, no.
Chris Duffin:
Nothing’s right. But it’s-
Steven Sashen:
It’s a model. It’s a useful model.
Chris Duffin:
It’s a model. It’s a model. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Because of the way you were describing how you saw it, I’ve got to ask you. I’ll tell you my thing and you can tell me if you’re similar. I’m just curious because I’ve never had this conversation with anybody. I can’t get anything done in a room where the ceiling is lower than 10 feet because I can’t… Because it’s like my ideas need to live up there somewhere. And if there’s something in the way physically, I can’t think.
I remember being at a restaurant with a bunch of people. We’re in a corner table and we’re coming up with all these creative ideas, and I happen to be sitting in the corner. “I got to get the hell out of the corner. I got to get in the middle of the room because I can’t… I don’t have enough room to think.” And they thought I was crazy. But do you have anything similar that kind of embodied whatever?
Chris Duffin:
By the way, I dug under my house to create a shop that was 12 feet tall. Why do you need to go that deep? Why don’t you go two feet less?
Steven Sashen:
Sounds like a yes.
Chris Duffin:
Take that as a yes. The height thing, no, but I create a lot of space for me to be creating other things. I can’t sit down and go, “Oh, I’m going to think of ideas on X.”
Steven Sashen:
Oh my God.
Chris Duffin:
It just doesn’t work.
Steven Sashen:
Dude, I’m doing a bunch of… Right now, we don’t have on our team… I’ve been trying… Well, anyway, I’m having meetings next week with a bunch of potential copywriters. And so in the meantime, I’m doing a lot of editing if I’m not actually writing the copy. In fact, the people who are doing it, I’m just editing their stuff and it’s a lot of editing often. And the other day I had to say, “I got to tell you, guys. I’m not a trained monkey. I can’t just do this on command. Even though it’s scheduled on our calendar for once or twice a week, I can’t guarantee that I’m going to be able to just churn it out. When it happens, it happens big and fast. So just FYI.”
Chris Duffin:
Yeah. So what I’ve gotten to is, one, making sure that I have time to just spend with my hands doing things, and not even related to business. And that starts, one, gets me more in a creative space. It doesn’t even happen then, but if I don’t have that time in my life, it’s not happening. But the other is when the ideas hit, everything else drops.
Steven Sashen:
Got to go. Yep.
Chris Duffin:
If I wake up late, I’m going to… When those things hit, everything else drops. I’m in the gym, I’m pencil… That is because that’s when the… I’ve got my most recent… This fucking design is going to fucking be amazing. But I saved it because my wife says I got to frame it in my office next to all my other beautiful prints, but it’s the inside of a pizza box.
Steven Sashen:
That’s hysterical.
Chris Duffin:
Because I’m sitting there, eating with the kids at dinner, and I’m just like, “I got it.” And I’ve just drawn it. And then I had paper cutouts of another box that I grabbed. And so I’ve got the greasy, folded-up pizza box with this amazing fucking product that’s going to be coming out in the next six months. And she’s like, “You got to frame the pizza box.” Right?
Steven Sashen:
That’s awesome.
Chris Duffin:
Greas
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