Next Level You: Unpacking Peak Performance Methods With Alex Feinberg
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Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Financially Guest Podcast. My guest is Alex Feinberg. We're going to talk about peak performance systems for top performers. He's the founder of Insanely Addictive and Peak Performance. So he's a former professional athlete, hedge fund analyst, Google executive, early cryptocurrency investor.

And he's now a leader in the online space where they coach men on high performance. So a very interesting call. Welcome. Thanks. Thanks for coming out. Thank you very much, Richard. Excited to rock and roll. When did your drive to get yourself, let's say, to peak performance and other people around you start? Has it always been there or was it recently after you've done all these endeavors? No, I mean, I would say as a child, I was always extremely competitive.

As much as I loved winning, and I loved winning more than everybody who I grew up with, I hated losing. I hated seeing other people succeed more than me, and I wanted to do whatever I could from a work ethic standpoint to be as successful as I could possibly be. And I convinced myself at a young age that if I just worked harder than everybody else, I was going to be successful, and that

hypothesis was true, outworked everybody who I played baseball with through the high school level, was the first player in my high school in over a decade to play on the varsity team as a freshman, got recruited, scholarship offers to multiple schools, including Vanderbilt, where I went. And this fairytale imagination that I had about hard work equating to success didn't

become disproven until I set foot at Vanderbilt University and I realized that there were a lot of people who were not working as hard as me but were more successful than me. And hitting my head against the wall for years trying to figure out like why am I not succeeding the way I think I should be succeeding forced me to in

improve my mental models, you know, tear down and replace the scaffolding that I had built over the years I spent training to be an elite athlete and ultimately led to the creation of a lot of mental models that have allowed me to live a hyper-efficient life, which is sort of the key to being successful in multiple domain. Have to be able to connect dots that other people can't connect. You have to be able to

cut corners that other people think you cannot cut. You have to be able to prioritize things that other people overlook and overlook things that other people prioritize if you want to be successful in multiple domains. And I think my drive to be a peak performer has always existed. And as I've gotten older and older in life, you know, I have had the opportunity to display it and learn from it and

in almost everywhere I've ever been. So what's an example of like a really optimized day where most people would be like, oh my God, that's crazy. Well, hyper-optimized day starts with your priorities, right? So my priorities compared to most people, my priorities are, are,

around rest and recovery. And so, you know, I can benefit from creating my own schedule, but I'm still dependent on myself to build a business, ensure revenue comes in, ensure profits are there. But I perform better when I focus on the things that other people overlook and overlook on the things that other people focus on.

And so most people are fixated on how hard they can work. I'm fixated on how well I can rest and recover, because if I can rest and recover, then the quality of my work is going to be better than the next guy. Then the quality of my gym training is going to be better than it was the previous week. I will be able to get more done in less time if I am able to

rest and recover properly. So an ideal day for me includes seven hours of sleep. It includes some decaf coffee in the morning because decaf helps me sleep a lot better than caffeinated beverages do. It includes a workout that's challenging, but not so hard that I don't want to show up the next day. And it includes a

cognitively demanding work or discussions, but not so much that I feel exhausted by the end of the day because you have to be able to repeat what you do. Otherwise, it's not sustainable. And ultimately, your ability to form over multiple weeks, months and years is much more important than your ability to perform on a single day. So what does it mean to perform? What's your metrics for performance versus other people?

How fast can I run? How heavy can I lift? How much energy do I have? How do I look with my shirt off? What's my body fat? What's my resting metabolic rate? As well as how much money am I making and how much time am I able to spend on the things that I want to spend it on? How do I feel? Was today a day that I want to replicate multiple times over? Was today a day that I'd like to avoid repeating? Ultimately, the days that we have on Earth are finite and most people live in ways where they're trying to count down the time they have on Earth because it's quite painful or

unpleasant for them to go about their existence the way they do. And I would like to not live that way. So a successful day for me is one that I want to repeat. Yeah, that makes sense. So at what point did you start coaching people? Like, did you get to a high level of mastery with yourself and consistency where like most days you were very satisfied with what you did?

Then you went to coaching or how did this progress? Well, I got into coaching sort of by accident. I started working at a cryptocurrency exchange in 2018 after working at Google for six years. And I realized that if I didn't have a background in coding, which I didn't, the only way that I was going to have lasting power in the industry was if I built a social presence. And so Twitter was the most

prominent social media platform in crypto. And I decided that if I wanted to be employable, I needed to have at least 10,000 followers, you know, by 2023. And nobody was really following the crypto content that I was putting out. But I thought I had some interesting things to say around diet and fitness because I was doing that as a hobby. And

And turns out that suspicion was correct. I started posting about all of the delicious meals I was eating, including how I was able to eat all this awesome tasting stuff without counting calories or going hungry. And nobody really understood how I was able to do it all. But...

I was pretty adamant about posting regularly, explaining why I was choosing certain meats to put on my pizza, why I was constructing my tacos the way I was constructing them, why I was making my burgers the way I was making them. And I ended up building a following that exceeded my initial goals. And through COVID, you know, came to realize that a lot of these people relied on me, not just for fitness content, but for life content. And so I started out creating digital products, but that expanded into coaching offerings and

And where it is today is, you know, I work with a lot of high performing men on figuring out how they can use their time more effectively to be better versions of themselves or in fact, the best version of themselves. One that they haven't even seen over the last decade or so in all likelihood that combines the energy that they had when they were young with the financial opportunities that didn't exist until they were older. Because so many people, you know, they don't have energy by the time they get money. And when they have energy, they didn't have money.

And you can't really enjoy life unless you both have energy and money. Makes sense. So the coaching, what are people after when they first apply with you to coach? A lot of times people want to look better and feel better. And so a lot of the relationships that I start with executives on are first focused on getting them healthier, feeling better,

looking better with their shirts off. And through that multi-month process, they get to understand the frameworks that I put behind all of this. And they see me as an individual who isn't just capable and competent in the fitness sphere, but they start to understand why Google paid me to do internal consult, or why they paid me to do product partnerships, or why a cryptocurrency exchange paid me to build out their sales team.

And they start to ask me, you know, how do you apply your 145 IQ brain to the problems that I'm dealing with in my business? What do you think about, you know, the revenue expansion plan that I built out with my sales team? What do you think about the...

the mergers and acquisitions strategy that I'm considering over the next six to 12 months. And so I'm able to blend effectively management consulting with energy management, with health and fitness. And that's how we make executives perform at the level that they haven't performed

Ever. You know, like I look at like Warren Buffett and I have no idea how he, even leaving management in place, how does he run all these companies at Berkshire? How do people run multiple companies or Elon Musk or all of them? I have no idea how they could function like that. What I have found is that

very successful people are extremely adept at understanding what the highest leverage points of action are. And so imagine the world gives signals to everybody, but only a small percentage of people are competent in picking up what the signals are, right? So it's basically like magic

coded, where a few billionaires have figured out the systems and tools to understand what's going on, and nobody else can. Or those other people who can can't do anything about it. And so I think Elon Musk is incredibly good at figuring out when people are stealing money from him. He's incredibly good at isolating choke points and understanding what the choke point in a specific system is. And he's

He's very adept at allocating resources to unblocking specific choke points. And so you think about him like a doctor where, you know, if you're having a heart attack or you're having a stroke, you need to figure out where the blockage is. And if you can't figure out where the blockage is, you die. Elon Musk is like that with the companies that he's run. He runs. He is very smart at, you know, effectively running a company wide EKG, you know, a company wide program.

stress test and figure out, okay, these are the three areas that I need to dedicate six hours this week to fixing. And he can do that across seven different companies and still have time to run the Department of Government Efficiency for the time being. But what are they doing that other people aren't? How do they, so they're looking at the highest leverage point. They must be 80-20 and everything, I guess. And are they in meetings all day? Like how do they run all that stuff? No, they can't be in meetings all day. They are

are you could say 80-20. 80-20 is sort of an 80-20 way to explain it. I think if you're really smart, it's 95-5, right? Because, you know, Ricardian principles apply to the extreme, especially if you're very good at figuring out what is the highest leverage point that you can work on. So it could be, you know, we need to completely overall understand

our HR, right? You know, we're not communicating properly with our employees. Nobody knows what's going on. It takes people nine months to get ramped up when it should take three. How do we overall our communication strategy so that everybody knows what play we're running? These guys are, you know, it's like, what makes Bill Belichick an amazing coach? Well, I wouldn't be able to tell you everything about

unless I'm Bill Belichick. And even if I did tell you, you wouldn't understand unless you were nearly on Bill Belichick's level, because a lot of the things that he does, a lot of the things that geniuses do are counterintuitive to subgeniuses because they do a lot of things wrong, according to mainstream wisdom. But mainstream wisdom almost never has caught up with what the reality is of high performers at the head of the pack.

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What should they be looking at? I don't understand. What's the shifts? What should who be looking at? Well, you're saying that, I guess, the common way of looking at things, it seems counterintuitive how the performers... Let's talk specific. So give me a specific problem and we can troubleshoot it right now. Actually, at this point, it would come from you. Like, what's an example of the counterintuitive behavior that a high performer would exhibit that a medium level performer would say, that's not going to work? A lot of high performers work too hard.

And so they operate on five hours of sleep. They think that if they can work for 19 hours per day or if they can be awake and responsive to emails for 19 hours per day, they're going to maximize the output and minimize the slowdown of their organization. What they don't realize is that

if they're able to put their phone down two hours earlier and maybe sleep and get better rested sleep for an extra hour, you know, that jump from five hours of sleep to six hours of sleep allows you to be in a state of mind that makes your decisions more closely aligned with reality. And so the bets that you're making as a chief executive are going to be better, right? So it's like,

How do you make the most money at the poker table? Do you sit at the poker table for longer than everybody else? Because if you're making a certain amount of dollars per hour at the poker table, you could believe that the more hours you stay at the poker table, the more money you make. Or you could think, how can I be the most effective poker player for the number of hours

that I have mental stamina for. Maybe I only have mental stamina to play poker 13 hours per day. And when I try to play poker for 15 hours per day, I make less money than when I play poker for 13 hours per day. Unfortunately, unlike poker, business has more delayed response times. And so you can't exactly figure out

the connection between the inputs and the outputs for like, say, 90 days. And so the example would be if you were trying to figure out what the optimal rest strategy is for a poker game where you didn't see what the scoreboard said until approximately 90 days after the game concluded. And, you know,

And then you need to figure out how many hours per day should I be playing poker? Your intuition says as much as possible. That's how you got your seat at the table in the first place. But the reality is, no, you need to figure out how to play better. You need to figure out how to read the room better. You need to figure out when to bet. You need to figure out when to fold. And if you can figure all these things out, you realize that it's a lot easier to do those things when you're well rested, when you have a functional diet. I think it's going to be insane when we look back on

on 2025 in 10 or 20 years and find out that most executives don't have personal trainers or personal chefs. I think it's going to be exactly the way we look at athletes in the 80s when we find out that they smoked cigarettes and didn't work out, even though they had multi-million dollar contracts on the table. If you're an executive, it's your job to keep your brain performing at the highest level possible. You owe it to yourself, you owe it to your company, you owe it to your shareholders to do what's necessary to get your body and mind performing at their peak.

And that requires treating your body and mind somewhat like a professional athlete. Now, it doesn't mean you're going to be training six hours a day, three hours a day, but it does mean acknowledging that more is not better. Rested is better. Recovered is better. Good decisions are better than more decisions. Yeah, that makes sense. You have to get tired and you try to have

I made decisions. He knows what he'll do, but be arrested. Even if you make fewer decisions, you'll do better ones that works better. So what's involved in your peak performance program? Like what do you take people through the modules? Everything that I do with an individual is going to be specific for them. So from a high level, a lot of my foundational principles rely on getting people into the triple sevens club. So what do we need to do to get success?

somebody having three things simultaneously, seven figures liquid capital, seven hours of sleep, and the ability to run a seven-minute mile. The peak performers that I work with can do all of these things. And if you can do all of these things, you feel substantially better than if you can only do two of those things incredibly well. I guarantee if you take one person who has a seven-figure net worth and can run a seven-minute mile and sleep seven hours per day, that dude is much more optimistic, much more thrilled, and

to live life and is going to be growing his company at a faster rate than a guy who's sleeping five hours per night with an eight-figure net worth who can't run a mile continuously. So a lot of being a high performer is figuring out what are the specific blockers that you have that are preventing you from having a balanced approach to where you don't have a very obviously exposed weak link and you can perform it at a high level continuously.

in multiple domains that work synergistically and create a flywheel so that you're more motivated to continue putting the work in to succeed tomorrow. Yeah, makes sense. In terms of sleep, in terms of schedule, does the same schedule work for everybody or, you know, are they truly the night owls and larks and, you know, people that have very different schedules but same effectiveness? So different people are going to perform better at different times of the day, but I encourage most people to get their training done in the morning.

because very few people are going to sleep better training in the afternoon than the morning. Very few people are going to be more consistent with their workouts training in the afternoon than training in the morning. So unless you have like a stock market hours job living on the West Coast or something like that, I would strongly encourage you to train in the morning.

and try to align your workday with the, you know, your circadian rhythm with the sun. Your body is, we're not nocturnal people, right? You can work night shifts, excuse me. It is much less healthy for you to work night shifts. Yes, we want you to be creative. We want you to be able to approach work in a dreamlike state if that helps you. At the same time, there's core principles that everybody benefits from, almost everybody benefits from,

in terms of improving sleep and improving workout capacity. So most people should be eating protein-dominant real food. In fact, almost everybody. I can't imagine a person who should not be eating protein-dominant real food. You do this, you pair this with a functional training plan, all of a sudden you're looking and feeling better. Okay, great, you're looking and feeling better. What does that mean for your brain? Well, if you're rested, sleeping six, seven hours per night, all of a sudden the decisions you make are better, the time you're investing in results in more time saved down the road rather than more time lost.

And time savings compounds just like financial savings. And so the goal with everybody is to not just look at the financial decisions that they might be making, but look at the time investments that they're making and making sure that they're investing in areas that will pay them back with compound time interest. So I guess health comes first, clearing that away and then productivity can come or there's some people that are like, I don't care about that. I just want to be more productive. Like

Can they be without putting the pillars in place first? On a short term basis, you can be right. But for the most part, you know, there's going to be sprint seasons and there's going to be rest seasons or recovery seasons. And sometimes it's unavoidable. You know, you're not going to be able to sleep your seven hours per night if you have a launch coming up. And, you know, it is what it is. But maybe in a situation like that, I'm there to help somebody get five hours of sleep a night instead of three or four.

Right. Because most people can get behind five hours a night for two, three weeks and you'll be able to recover from that. You don't want to do it all the time. But a lot of what I do, I don't only teach people how to negotiate contracts better and negotiate business transactions better. I negotiate with my clients to figure out what I can get them to do that will get them marginally more effective than what they might have been considering investing on the fitness side because

because usually that's the first thing to go and you feel busy. Oh, I'm too busy to go to the gym. Oh, I'm too busy. I'm going to eat Chick-fil-A today. It's like, what happens if we put 15 minutes more into thinking what we're going to do here? No matter how busy you are, you brush your teeth every day, I assume. Well, the same thing should be true with meal planning. You should know where your protein is going to come from, right? So unless you're so busy that you're not brushing your teeth, you're also not too busy to know where your protein is going to come from. You're not too busy to walk while you're talking on phone calls, right? Basic movement.

Basic decisions will yield substantially better results than doing nothing at all, which is what most people are doing. What if you do something for an hour or two and you just feel fatigued and you're like, I don't want to do anything, you know, and you're also guilty about not doing stuff, you know? It depends how often you feel it. If you feel like that once or twice a week, maybe your body needs the rest. If you feel like that every day, it's because you're not doing enough, right? So it's always going to be situations...

Okay. So what do people experience when they're in your program, let's say in the first month? And what are later realizations? Like what are some early ones? What are some later ones? It depends on how overweight and how unhealthy they are when they come to me. So a lot of times with people who weigh, say, 250 pounds, it's not uncommon to see these guys lose 30, 35 pounds in six months.

with very, very basic lifestyle adjustments that don't require them to count calories or go hungry, tapping into their intuition. And then once I can gain the trust of them by basically making magic happen as they interpret it, like, oh, I didn't realize how easy it would be to do this thing that's been so elusive to me as an adult for such a long period of time. Then,

They want to know, OK, where can we apply these tools in other areas of my life? From a business standpoint, typically I can save an executive about three hours per week within four weeks. Three hours per week is 150 hours, right? That is a very meaningful amount of time for somebody who might be working, say, 2000 plus hours per year. You know, we're talking about seven and a half percent of your time that you're getting back.

If you're a high-performing executive, that could be a six-figure amount, right? And generally, I can get that time back for people within a few weeks by applying, you know, basic principles of modularization and, you know, hyper-efficient choke point identification within somebody's schedule. Are there different levels of the program or is it, you know, you're kind of tweaking and fixing what the high-performance seeker wants and then off they go or...

I want to do even more. Yeah. So I run group coaching and I run one-on-one coaching. Typically executives are going to be a little bit busy to join a group call. And so for them, I suggest one-on-one. We figure out a time that works for you and we will do the necessary meetings at the time that we

we can both arrange that allow you to perform. But for those who are a little bit more cost conscious, we can, you know, we can have more templated and templated kind of gets a bad reputation. But, you know, there's generalized principles that work for almost everybody. And we can focus on those if, you know, in a group setting. And oftentimes those work better because, you know, if

if people have accountability, a lot of times the process is easy. It's doing it. It's following through. Doing it's actually easy too, but it's having a community that holds you accountable and keeps you doing it that is much more likely to lead to success. And so if you have a community that's holding you accountable, you're much more likely to follow a basic system that has been proven to be successful with multiple people. You just got to figure out the environment that you got to be in to be as successful as you possibly can.

I just didn't know there was like this endless drive to keep making it better, better, better, better at work. They get some coaching. They're like, okay, that helped. And then they're back to their own world of trying to conquer their own world. Well, a lot of times type A individuals think they have something before they necessarily do. And so I like to work with people until I'm confident that

The systems that we have put into place are there. They're lodged in and they're not going to feed. So I'll check in with people, you know, hey, we had good success. We're still on the right track, right? And, you know, most of the time they are three months, six months down the line. Sometimes people regress. Sometimes they go away from me for a year, two years, and they come back. But the system works and you do it. You just got to make sure that you continue to do it no matter what life your way. What are the requirements to work with you? Should someone have a certain revenue amount or just they want to? What do they need to have in order to be successful?

successful with your program? Most of the people who I work with one-on-one, you know, they're making at least mid six figures per year or more. There's no requirement. You know, if I've had people at lower, lower salary amounts come and realize that it's worth the investment. And then the group

the group access is much more affordable. So, you know, most people who are making, you know, a low six figure amount can afford the group. So from a cost standpoint, you know, if you care about getting better, you know, I ask between your house or your body, which are you investing more in? Which do you plan on living in longer? If you're investing more in your house than your body, do you think that you can take it with you everywhere you go? Because your body and how you feel literally follows you everywhere you go. And then high performing men, right?

We got to have people who are competitive. We got to have people who want to get better. If you think you're going to get better just by showing up, nope, you got to do the work. And so individuals who are accountable, who want to be held accountable, who just want a game plan for do this and it will work and they're capable and they have a track record of doing that. I can work with those men and I can make them better. Yeah, no, that's great. Where can people go to apply and see the other requirements and the intake forms? You can go to feinbergsystems.com. That's F-E-I-N-B-E-R-G systems.com.

You can go to the upper right hand tab to learn more about performance coaching. Schedule a call, see if it's the right fit for you. And you can also follow me on social media, Alex Feinberg1 across all channels. You can see my video and written content. See if you vibe with it. And if you do, shoot me a DM, keep them open, and we can discuss what that might mean in your life.

One or two more questions. There was a book a couple years ago called Trillion Dollar Coach. I don't know if you read it or anything, but is there anything that came up in that book that you don't do? Is there any level above what you do or really that

that's it. You know, this big performance coaching was like the top thing you can do to change your life. Trillion dollar coach. The guy's name was Bill. What's his last name? Alan Eagle, Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg. No, but it's about Bill Campbell. Yeah. Bill's a smart guy. He's also not alive right now, but he was very, he was very successful at

understanding the environments that his executives needed to put themselves in and create to run effective game plans. So he was effectively like an offensive coordinator and he would go in and he would make sure that his teams, his businesses that he would work with, his quarterback was actually

running the same play that the receiver and the running back were running. And his background was actually as a football coach before he started coaching executives. And so, yes, there's definitely a coaching element to it. You got to make sure that everybody is on the same page. I have a little bit more of a sports playing background that I bring into the mix. So I have

I like to leverage narrative creation where I force my high-performing clients to create narratives in their mind that allow them to perform at the highest level possible, irrespective of if they are true or not. A lot of people will coach their clients into being extremely in touch with the reality, no matter how scary reality is. And I think there's a time and place for that, but there's also a time and place for...

viewing the world the way you need to view it to get the most out of yourself. And so that's where I differ a little bit from a lot of performance coaches. Now, some people will go even further down that path than I do. They're typically, you know, blowhards or con artists because they've not been able to do that successfully like I did when I was a professional athlete.

And so there's, you know, being successful and coaching people on performance choirs, keeping their eyes and ears to the ground where they're aware of reality, but also, you know, helping them be ignorant of reality. I was texting one of my, you know, one of my good friends who's a major league baseball player trying to get him out of a rut.

Right. And I need to tell him a narrative that he believes, but most importantly, is going to put him in the best position to succeed on the mound. And and that's what I do for my executives as well. We need to create narratives in your mind that have you excited to show up and have unwavering confidence in your ability to execute. Excellent.

Okay. So again, where can people go to apply? And we'll wrap up from there. Feinberg systems.com. Click the tab in the upper right hand corner to learn more about performance coaching or shoot me a direct message on any social media platform. Alex Feinberg one would be my handle Instagram, Twitter, or now known as X as well as LinkedIn YouTube as well, though I don't get DMS on YouTube.

No problem. Well, Alex, thank you so much for coming on the call. I appreciate it. You bet. Thank you so much for having me. If you like this podcast, please click the link in the description to subscribe and review us on iTunes. You've been listening to the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

If you like what you hear, be sure to review and subscribe to the Finding Genius Podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And want to be smarter than everybody else? Become a premium member at FindingGeniusPodcast.com. This podcast is for information only. No advice of any kind is being given. Any action you take or don't take as a result of listening is your sole responsibility. Consult professionals when advice is needed.