How to plan an epic 2025, without setting goals | Jesse Itzler
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All right, it's the end of the year and forget New Year's resolutions. We have something much better. So in the next hour, Jesse Itzler is coming on and he has an entire process for planning a monster 2025. I don't want to play catch up. I want to attack.

Like now, I'm taking control and I'm dominating the year. Not other people taking it away from me. Jesse is an incredibly successful guy. He started Zico Coconut Water. He started a private jet company. He sold to Warren Buffett. He's an Emmy Award winning rapper. He's got four kids. He's an ultra marathoner. He lived with David Goggins. If you don't want to learn from this guy, something's wrong with you. You're broken inside. If everybody does the three things that we're going to talk about in 2025...

and does everything else the same. At the end of the year, if they see me in an airport, they're going to bear hug me. I just saw Sean Redding. Like, I, like, take notes. These are my golden nuggets from this episode. These are, you know, my pen dive halfway through. And now you added 20 winning habits. You're f***ing Jason Bourne. You're Jason Bourne. Jesse's amazing. He tells us this process that he's been doing for the past 25, 30 years. I'm pretty pumped about it, and I think he will be, too.

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I can be what I want to. I put my life on days off. On the road, let's travel. I'm glad to be back, man. I love your show. I love that you got me back as a repeat offender. So let me just start by saying that, you know, I love December.

I think December and January is our critical months for the 11 or 12 months that follow them. And as we head into the new year, you know, the first thing that I do, like any business in America, when we get to the end of the year, they close out the year. They have review sessions, what worked, what didn't work, you know, what was successful, what wasn't successful. They give themselves a grade, et cetera. And I found that, um,

A lot of people don't do that in their own personal lives. So I like to take a little inventory in December and just kind of have a little review process around how the year went and take inventory on my own personal year. But like no one taught me how to set up my life.

No one taught me how to deal with my emails and no one taught me how to schedule properly. I didn't take a class in school that like, hey, you're going to have four kids. You're going to get bombarded with emails from the school with all kinds of appointments and Zoom calls that we didn't have back then. And your calendar is going to fill up with other people's requests for your time. How do you want to deal with that so you have enough time to do things that you want to do?

and achieve the goals that you want to do within work and outside of work. No one taught me that. And then layering children and layering a wife that works in a business as an entrepreneur and like, how do you do that? So, you know, like I'm a product of trial and error. I tried a lot of stuff. I didn't grow up with a phone. I was scheduling everything on a paper calendar for literally 45 years of my life. Um, you know, and, um,

And I had to figure out like, well, as my life evolved, how to grow with it. So I have a pretty cool system. I'm happy to share it with you guys. It's worked really well. It's allowed me to, to balance a lot of things and get a lot of things done. And I think it's pretty simple. And I will preface it by saying that, um, you know, as you get older, how old are you guys? 35 and 36, right? Yeah. 36. All right. So you got another maybe decade before this hits, but it will hit and it's inevitable. Um,

As you get older, creating newness becomes really hard because you live in routine, you know, and like it gets very comfortable to be to live in routine. And really, I found that the only way to really guarantee that you create newness and newness is important. It's important to relationships.

It's important to your momentum and your enthusiasm and your success and your excitement towards things and your growth. The only way to create newness, I found, is to plan it or leave room to be spontaneous. So I become a really aggressive planner. And I feel like a lot of us play life on defense.

Our calendars fill up with other people's requests for time. Like I mentioned, Zoom calls, weddings, appointments, school stuff. And at the end of the year, you don't have a lot to show for it. What are the categories? I do family fitness finance fun. Do you have your own cute acronym for your categories? Well, I do my own individual personal audits for business with my teams. But then from my personal thing, adventure is a category for me.

I try to look through like, what kind of adventures did I have? Like I said, and we'll get into this in a minute. You know, you want to have something to show for all your hard work at the end of the year, not your zoom calls. I'm not like, yes, in October, I lit it up on zoom. I'm not doing that. I'm like, oh, I just, I just took a one-on-one trip with my daughter to New York city. I just got back. So stuff like that. I'm like really taking inventory on how much time did I spend with my kids?

You know, like what did I do well, what I do, what I have to work on in my role. Like I really, really do do that. And then I try to close out the year and I have a system for closing out the year. I'll share it with you guys really quickly. The first thing that I want to do is, and like the overall theme of closing out a year, and I think everyone should take a couple of hours to do this.

I think it builds momentum. And I think it gives you a little closure around the year, whether you had a great year or bad year. It gives you a fresh start for 2025, which I think is really, really important. And the theme is I want to come into the new year light.

I want to feel light and I want to get rid of all the email baggage, all the to-do lists, all this. I don't want to have a lot of carryover going into the new year. I want to kind of clean my hands and just be light. Now, this might sound ridiculous. It starts in my closet.

All right, so when I ran my company, The Hustle, I think we had something like 2 million subscribers. And we made money through advertising. We didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter because advertising in general is kind of a crappy business model. And so I remember sitting down and I'm like, what are all the different ways that I can make money off The Hustle that aren't advertising? And so to make sure that you don't make this mistake...

Sean, me, and the HubSpot team, we went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business. And we put it all together in a really cool document where we lay it all out along with our research. And we call it, very appropriately, we call it the Business Monetization Playbook. Go to the description of this episode and you're going to see a link to that Business Monetization Playbook. It's completely free. You just click the link and you can see it back to the episode.

I go through my closet. I look at all this stuff that's been hanging there for 12 months that I've never worn, you know, and I donate it. I get a big bag. If anything is a 50-50, do I want to keep it or don't want to keep it? I just say someone needs this more than me. It goes in the donate box. And I start to organize my closet. So when I walk in, I don't have a ton of decisions. You might see me wearing very, a shirt's very similar to this because I don't have a lot of options.

You know, I keep what I like. I get rid of what I don't like and I get super clean. My desk, I get rid of all the clutter on my desk. I want, I don't want to walk in and I got stacks of things I got to go through and bills and stuff. I get super clean on my desk, my emails.

I'm a big hit, delete and explode them all at the end of the year guy. But before I do that, I put things in files. I respond to the things that I owe an answer to. I delete the stuff that I don't need. Everything else goes into a folder and I try to go in net zero into 2025. That's really important. I don't want to come back from my vacation January one and be sitting with an inbox with 700 emails and just like, you know, just feel like I have to play catch up the

The first 30 days of the year. I don't want to play catch up. I want to attack. I want to attack. So I come in, I come in naked on my emails. I unsubscribe. I go through all the stuff that I have subscriptions to. I unsubscribe. I delete all the apps that I think use again, just trying to get light. You know, I get rid of all clear out all the apps. I clear out my cars.

make sure that I have no clutter in there. And I create files for 2025 where maybe I'm still a paper guy. So I keep records of my medical files. I know people have them on digitally, but I keep a paper file. I still get my bills, paper. I put them in files. But again, I have a system. So I'm not like playing catch up. And so I get super light on all that stuff. And then

I can't recommend this enough. I write handwritten letters to the 20 to 30 people that really impacted me or helped me. Even you guys, man, having me on, you know, you might get a thank you note. Thank there's a billion people in the world. Guys, thank you too for having me on your podcast. Like you thought of me.

Thank you. I write, I write, you know, a handwritten letter to my suppliers, my contractors, maybe a teacher, my son's coaches for football. I want to thank them this year, you know, um,

with no purpose other than really giving like a thank you. I've been doing this for 30 years. When I was 23 years old and I had no money and I was sleeping on 18 different couches, my entire marketing strategy was I wrote 10 handwritten letters a day and I mailed, I wrote 3,000 letters. I'm not even kidding. And I still to this day do that because it breaks through the clutter.

People remember it. People read their mail. They might not read their DMs, texts, slacks, and all that stuff, but they read their letters that come in the mail.

And there's a different intention. I took the time. I wrote it. I licked the envelope. I went to the mailbox. I put a stamp on it. I put it in there. Like, it comes with a lot of love, man. It's a lot different than hitting send on an email. Are you still doing all that? I'm not going to talk about anything I don't do. No, what I meant is I've, like, wanted to send letters to a lot of people, and then I'll be like,

But is there a service where I can just type it out and they mail it out for me? Yeah, it doesn't work that way. He's like, are you listening? No, I... Is the audio coming through? I do it. By the way, I send letters as well. But then I'll have a stack. I have like... A few years ago, I got some stationery and it feels good to write letters to people. But every once in a while, I'm like, I don't feel like writing this. Is there a service? And then I'm like, what the hell am I doing? And so I wasn't sure what you're doing. Yeah, you can't outsource it.

It can't outsource it. As a business owner, I've realized that you can't outsource soul. And the DNA of a business is the soul of the business, the heartbeat of a business. You can't outsource that. And customers feel soul. And your friends feel soul. And when you start outsourcing things that for hundreds of years humans have been doing themselves...

it loses a little bit. And I found that that two hour investment, how about this? Let's do an experiment for your listeners. Take 10 envelopes, 10, take 10 pieces of paper and take 20 minutes and write a thank you note or to your parents, to your kids, teachers, whoever saying, Hey, this year, I just want to thank you for investing so much time with my kids or whatever you want to write, lick the stamp, put it in an envelope and watch the return on investment.

Watch the return on investment. And I found that there's nothing quite like it. Now, that might sound ridiculous, hokey, but I've been doing it for 30 years and people still thank me. No one gets a letter from you like that and doesn't remember or hit you back.

there was a guy who came on by the way, and he held up, he was, he does the same thing. This guy, Guy Spear, he's value investor. And he held up, he goes, I do this, but he's like, why did I start? Because I went to the Berkshire Hathaway summit and,

and I went to this event, and then he goes, afterwards, here's what I got in the mail, and it was a letter. Warren Buffett had written him a letter, and it was two seconds. It was, Guy, thank you for coming. Really appreciate you being there. Sign, Warren. And he goes, if Warren Buffett is doing this, I can do this too. I get one from Coach K. I know you're a Duke guy. I get one from Coach K every year. Check this out. Look at this. Let me show you guys something. This is

All of these letters, all of these letters, and there's, I have boxes of these. All of these letters. Check this out. These are all letters that I got this year. I've read them all. I keep them all in this box. And at the end of the year, it's going in a thing. And then I'm starting a new box that's going to say 2025.

Because I've been talking about this for a long time. And, you know, I'm in a really unique spot. I'm in a business where people write me letters. You want to talk about finding your mission? Imagine waking up, going to your mailbox and to letters of people thanking you for, you know, sharing best practices or, you know, helping, whatever it is. What a gift. What a freaking gift.

If everybody does the three things that we're going to talk about in the next 20 minutes in 2025 and does everything else the same that they did in 2024, at the end of the year, if they see me in an airport, they're going to bear hug me.

Because they're going to be like, that was so easy. And I can't believe how much better my life just got. That's what we're going to cover. So the first thing is closing out the year, getting light, doing all those things to get light, writing handwritten letters. And then the other thing that I do is I try to identify what I want to fix going into next year. Because...

you know, like everybody wants to be a 10 out of 10. No one signed up to be an eight out of 10, the 80, you know, a B minus. Everybody wants to be as close to a 10 out of 10. But if you have certain things that are broken,

Even if you make a bazillion dollars and your business goes up 50% and you're crazy growth, you're never going to be a 10 out of 10. If like the marriage is broken, you know, something's wrong, whatever. So what I always tell people to do is imagine you guys had it. You guys can do this right now. Imagine you had a big blender.

And in the blender, you put all the buckets, Sam, that you were just talking about, all the buckets in your life into the blender. Your finances, your health, your weight, your relationships, where you live, like everything going on in your life, put it in a blender, shake it up. And then on a one to 10,

with 10 being like the ultimate in happiness and one being rock bottom, like again, what's your number? Your weight, your relationships, your work, your finances, you put it all in, you shake it. Are you a seven? Are you a five? You don't have to tell me. Are you an eight? Are you, like, what are you? Now, what I love about that exercise is immediately your brain goes to a 10 and

And then the two or three things that are bothering you pop in your head like crystal clear and take that number down. So maybe it was like, oh, my finances aren't there. Or like, I hate my job or things aren't great in my work. Whatever came into your head, those are the things you got to work on. They're not going to magically get better. You don't just like, oh, you know, like my relationship stinks. It doesn't like magically get better. You got to work on it. And did anything pop into your guy's head right away?

Yeah. So I put it all in the blender. I got to an eight and a half and right away you're right. I started at a 10 cause I'm, I'm happy. Right. And then I said, well, I do, the weight's got to come down a little bit. All right. The weight's got to come down a little bit. So that's, that's a point off. You're not want to have healthy habits that I'm proud of. And then the second one was, um,

You know, I think I'm really good at this content thing. I love making content, but I'm still spending way too much of my time in my businesses. And I really want to make that shift from operator to creator. And I've made good progress, but I'm not all the way where I want to be there. I had a six. I had a daughter and I'm loving being a father and she's fantastic. That's a 10. Finances, I did really well. That's a 10. But I'm bombarded with inbound messages and I don't have a system to where...

I'm saying no to 10 minutes at a time. The 10-minute time request and context switching is ruining my life, and it feels like I can't get in the flow. So I'm going to give it a six. Okay. A six overall? Yeah, because the context switching, I get so much joy being in the flow of something, and both a combination of lack of system and addiction to social media and text and all that shit, it's brought me down a whole bunch.

You know, two thoughts. One, when you're doing the exercise, there's no comparison against anybody else. So like, you know, if you are comfortable with the money you're making or whatever, you're not comparing yourself to Buffett. It's like, you know, I'm comfortable where I am. You're never going to win the comparison game because there's always going to be someone. So that's one thing just to think about. And then, you know, not to knock you at all, Sam, I think I was super honest of you. But like for anybody out there that was a six, if like if Mike's son comes home with a 60 on a test, it's an F.

Yeah, no, but I'm agreeing with you. Like it brought me down a lot. But the good thing is it's all fixable and you have to identify it. And like, look, I'm not here to be a therapist or preach. All I'm saying is knowing what those things that are that need a little bit of help. And if it's your weight, you know, then just in 2025, be like, you know what, man, everything's clicking. I'm going to address this. I'm just going to be a little bit. That's all, you know? So, but you have to, my point is for the listeners, like,

You've got to identify it because if you don't, it just keeps compounding. And then you're playing, it's just harder to like catch up when it's compounding. So you close out the year, you get light, you clean the closet, clean the desk, clean the cars, you email bankruptcy, you get the files, you write the handwritten letters, you give thanks, you do the blender exercise, you identify the two or three shifts I'm trying to make. Is that how you close out the year or is there anything else to that? It's like a personal review. Okay.

And just to make it super practical, are you like writing this down? Are you just thinking about it? Do you say it out loud? Do you do this with somebody else? Do you look at your calendar? How do you even go back to your, could you just give us like, if I wanted to sit down an hour after this, cause I'm so pumped after this episode, I'm wanting to go do this.

Can you just give me the, like, kind of the, a little more detailed instruction on how I would do it? Well, I get really excited about getting light. Like, you know, so I don't have to write anything down to clean out, to clean my closet and my desk and my emails. Like, that's all just something that, like, you know, you feel accomplished when you do that. Right.

We're doing all the other stuff anyway. We have businesses, we're doing all this, but you just feel really good about yourself. As far as like handwritten letters, I do make a list. I keep it every year of like kind of just, man, I just think about like what podcast for me,

Was I on who really went above and beyond for me this year or my kids or my family? You know, I had a, I went on a trip to Africa. We had a great tour guide. Um, I had a gentleman in Kenya that ran with me every day to, to like chaperone me through the jungle. I'm going to send him and like, just that kind of stuff. And I don't want anything for it. It just makes me feel good. And I know it probably makes them feel good. So I do all that. And then I, and then like, again,

You just took that exercise took 30 seconds to identify what we got to work on. And then I just make a mental, a mental note about it. Like, you know, I want to get better at it. This whole process we're talking about, it's like super fast. All right. So that's the first thing. The second thing I do is I have a planning system that I've been using that I, I swear by it's there's three steps. And this is what I was talking about. If you do these three things, uh,

You're going to bear hug me. Very simple. So the first thing that I do is there's an old Japanese ritual called the Misogi.

And we took the liberty to tweak the exact definition of it. But the way we look at it is the concept around a Misogi is every year you do one big year-defining thing. So again, at the end of the year, even though you're busy with all this stuff, you have one year-defining thing to really show for Misogi.

your time over the 365 days. So for example, like two years ago, and this is big, I rode my bike across America. Last year, I did rim to rim to rim with some friends. In 2015, I launched a book, Living With a Seal. 2017, I launched a company called 29 or 29. Like every year going back, literally like, you know,

20 years ago, I can name like the one thing that I did that was really, really year defying. So at the beginning of the year, I just, I might not have that idea. And that could be like, I'm going to launch a podcast. I'm going to quit smoking. I'm going to run my first marathon, you know, but like, what is that one thing that you're going to look back to someone says, Hey, how was your year? I was unbelievable, man. I rode my freaking bike across the country.

I ran the New York marathon this year. You know, I think that's really, really important. Now, a, it's important because like you want to have somebody to show for it, but D, um, I find when you have something on the calendar, a goal, something like that, you're something that you're working towards. Um, that's challenging. You, you show up

at work and at home, completely different. You show up completely different. A, if I'm running the New York Marathon, Sam, I now have to say no to the things that...

I don't have the time to get people because I got to train. I'm adding hours of training in. So now you have a vehicle to say no to things. But B, it's something that you're looking forward to. One of the books that I read this last year, I think it was Michael something Easter, maybe the comfort crisis. And he talked about the Misogi. I had one. It was a 50 mile race. And the Misogi was you have a 50% chance of failing. I ended up...

hurting my Achilles really badly. And I was like, fuck. So I failed. And it was awesome though to have something to look forward. I'm picking a new one now. Yeah, but you didn't fail, Sam. You just didn't finish. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was hard-ass work and it was awesome. It felt great to have that on the calendar. Yeah. But what you did was amazing. You're saying, I'm going to go double the longest run I've ever done in my life. Okay? I'm going to do an ultra marathon.

On top of everything I have going on, I'm going to challenge myself. It may or may not work. That's not an F. I mean, that's an A in adventure. You just didn't finish it. I mean, not everything we do is going to work. I've had businesses that have failed, races that I have DNFs. But I love that you put it on your calendar. Well, my kids, I have four kids, 15, 10, 10, and 9. All right? You know what they're talking about right now?

They're talking about that we're going skiing in two weeks. So they're going to school and I'm like, guys, two more weeks of school, then we're going skiing. Because that's on their calendar, it's helping them go through school focused, locked in because they know they're going to get this reward, winter vacation,

coming up. Adults are the same way. I'm willing to go work really hard if I know I have a vacation coming up or a race that I'm going to do or something that I'm excited about. So having one big year defining thing, really important. Do you know what yours is going to be for 25? I don't. I don't. And that's okay. But I know that I'm going to have one. And what it does is it also opens up my mind to adventure.

All right. So a while back, we had Gary Tan. He's the president of Y Combinator, which is the most successful incubator of all time. We had him on the podcast. And he said that the future of businesses is creator-led. And that's why I'm interested in the podcast, Creators Are Brands. Creators Are Brands explores how storytellers are building brands online. They're going to cover the entire creative process. They're going to talk about navigating brand partnerships. They're going to talk about what you need to know about growing your social media platforms. Everything you need to know on this topic.

Creators are brands is the pod. So check it out wherever you get your podcast. Again, it's called Creators are Brands with Tom Boyd. All right, back to the episode. Which Misogi do you look back on most fondly? If you look back, you know, 10 years or so. I did a race called Ultraman, which is a 6.2 mile open water swim, a 275 mile bike and a 52 mile run.

And I was insanely, I was going to defer to the following year, two weeks before the race, because I hadn't swam at all. I didn't have a wetsuit and the water was 57 degrees. So I called my friend who's a coach and I'm like, you know, listen, I haven't been training at all, zero. And there's no, I don't think I can do this. And I'm thinking about deferring, thinking he's going to be like, of course.

The fur trained so you don't get hurt. And he was like, absolutely not. The challenge is going to be, you know, if you train for a year, you're going to be able to do it. You have no idea if you're going to do it. Dude, a six, a six mile swim alone would take like three and a half hours, right? Or if you're a bad swimmer like me, five. But yeah. And also like 57 degree waters is, I did a marathon in 57 degree. It was horrible. Yeah.

or triathlon it was awful sam i showed up at the event and i jumped into the water the day before and my i i literally like my face hit the water and it was like you're like i'm out out i'm done it's like it's like it's like getting punched in the nose like for the first time when you want to box you're like this sucks dude i don't i don't want to do this but i finished it i finished it and um

You know, when I was going through this event, those kind of challenges, it's really important to break things into digestible bites. If you're starting a business, you want to put things into digestible bites. So when I started Marquee Jet, if they would have said, you need FFJs,

FAA approval, Department of Transportation approval, build the sales team, raise my, I'm like, well, I'm as a kiddie pool attendant for you. What are you talking about? I mean, what, what'd you say the first thing I needed was? FAA approval? Well, there's gotta be a lawyer that does that, specializes in that. Let me get, got that guy, got, what was the second thing we need? Like, so it was the same thing here. I got to swim 10, six miles, impossible. Can I swim to that, to the next, to the buoy?

Yes. Can I swim buoy to buoy? Yes. So let me just break this down into 40 buoy to buoy swims because I can run for seven minutes forever. So let me run for seven minutes, walk for three, and just repeat that cycle. And that's sort of how I attacked it.

In any event, we pick a Misogi. All right. So I don't know what mine is yet, Sean, for next year, but I know I'm going to have one. And just for the listeners, you know, just the notion of like, yeah, you know what? I want to have something on my calendar. Now you've like reprogrammed your brain to just be aware of adventure.

And that's already a step in the right direction if you're head down in work. The second thing I do is something that I've named after my friend Kevin. I call it Kevin's Rule. Kevin and I took our children, his daughter and my son. My son was eight at the time. I think his daughter was nine, to Mount Washington in the winter. It was crazy.

It was like minus 30 with the windshield. And we have a minus 40 sleeping bag. We're sleeping in the snow. It's insane. And we're camping out overnight. And I'm like, Kevin, he's a police officer in New York. I'm like, there's 8 billion people in the world. We're the only four people in the middle of Mount Washington, man. This is amazing. I'm like, you know, how often do you do stuff like this? And he lights up. He's like, oh, he's like every other month.

I'd do something one day or one weekend that I normally wouldn't have done. I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, instead of watching the Georgia football game, I'll take my kids fishing. I'll come to Mount Whitehouse, go visit my college friends. I'm like, well, why? He goes, well, if I can't take one day every eight weeks to do something, my work life is out of balance. But

If I do that, I'll have six little mini adventures a year. I'm like, yeah. He's like, well, how old are you? Well, if you're 35, Sean, you live to be, let's say you live to be 85. That's 50 years. If you do those two things I just said, you'll have 50 year defining things and 300 mini adventures. That's an insane life.

That's an insane life. At the end of the day, if I have 50 Ultraman kind of things and 300 mini adventures just because I managed my clock right, I won life. Do your mini adventures and your misogyny, do they stack to where it's like, well, I already did the Ultraman. What's the Ultra Ultraman? Are you trying to one-up them each time? Not at all. I'm just looking for things that...

that excite me. Um, so this actually this year I do have a, it's not challenging enough for me to consider it like a Masogi, but I'm going on a, a tour of the world's best saunas in Finland with 12 friends. So we're going for 10 days. We're hitting 30, 30 plus saunas over the course of 12 days in, in, in Finland. And, you know, so that is my, a big thing for 2025. Yeah.

Hey, real quick, if you're liking this episode with Jesse, you got to listen to the first one we did with him. It's the story of how he built his fortune, his first business, how he failed, and then ultimately a mentor stepped in and gave him some tough love, let's say, and turned his life around. He tells a story about how he started a private jet company, ended up selling that to Warren Buffett. There's a Matt Damon cameo in it. Crazy.

crazy stories from this guy. He also brainstormed business ideas of what he would do if he was young and needed to build a fortune from scratch again. So go check that out. It's episode number 504. You can either Google it or in the show notes below, we're going to put a link to it. And also at the end of this episode, we are giving away a few thousand dollars of his big ass calendar. The one that he uses to plan his 2025. We say the code at the end of this episode. So listen to that and then you can go and get one of those for free. All right, back to the episode.

So if I'm getting this right, the Misogi is more of a challenge, something that excites you, something that it's a big adventure. It's year defining and you have the, you'll get the fun of progress along the way. As you make progress, you'll get the anticipation and then you'll get the year defining a sense of accomplishment, whether you win or just you did it. And then the adventures are more about, is that just more about non-routine adventures?

So just kind of making sure you are not just every Saturday we go here, every Sunday we do this with my kids and just shaking up the routine with something fun. It doesn't have to be super challenging, but is that the right way to think about those? Absolutely. It's non-routine. It's planning adventure, planning newness. It's prioritizing yourself.

And it's not, it's, it's playing life on offense. It's not letting your calendar fill up. You know, look, if we just sit back, it's going to be weddings, meetings, conferences, appointments. And this is like, what do we do? What are we doing? How many of those things are, uh, Jesse by himself or with buddies or Jesse, like the family? Um, I love to, I love to do things with

with my friends and I love to do things with my family. I treat my family stuff differently. So I also plan family trips, but you know, I have the luxury of time. You know, people talk about rich and the first thing that comes into your head is like money, obviously. And that is important. And clearly that's an important part of being rich. But there are so many buckets of rich. Are you spiritually rich? Are you time rich?

I'm insanely time rich right now, which I think is the most important thing, especially in your 50s. I'm insanely time rich. So I have the luxury of doing things spontaneously when I want, et cetera. I'm spiritually rich. I'm socially rich.

If we did a little sidebar here, because the three of us are all lucky to be in a position where we don't have to work, we could just spend all year training for an MMA fight, an amateur MMA fight, or whatever it is. But I think a lot of people who listen to that may not be at that, they still have the job, they still have whatever, the day-to-day responsibilities. So could you take 30 seconds to sort of speak to how you would

Maybe, is there any difference in how you would approach it, you know, the misogynist of the adventures if somebody's not like, you know, financially free where their calendar is theirs to do whatever they want with? Listen, I have been doing this since my journey was insane. It was crazy. My 20s were spent on couches, friends, apartments, you know, um,

just trying to like figure it out, pay my rent, you know, all that stuff. But I was still so rich with adventure. Every year I would go to the Coney Island polar plunge on New Year's. You know what it costs? A subway token, subway token. You know what it costs to do the trip to Mount Washington with my kids? $18 to park. We live in a country that offers the most insane rivers

Mountains, national parks, oceans, hikes, streams, I mean, conferences. You could fill up your life with adventure. I should write a book, filling up your life on adventure for under $400 a year because you can do it.

Now, so, you know, I understand that obviously mine can be bigger and it's easier for me. And that's true. But, you know, I've been doing these things for a long time. I just took my son to the polar plunge at Lake Lanier here in Georgia. You know, there's just so much stuff that you could do that, again, is outside of the norm. You know, people think like you don't have to climb Mount Everest to feel like you've accomplished something.

You have to just get out there and do something that makes you proud of you. You know? There's a great story. Do you know Brene Brown? She has this great story she tells about her daughter going to a swim meet. And she was scared to do the swim meet. She was like, I'm not going to do well. I'm scared to even just swim, blah, blah, blah. And she talks about how her daughter...

After the swim meet, she lost the race. She maybe got like, you know, whatever. She didn't do so well. She got out. She was feeling kind of bummed. And Brene Brown's quote is like, you know, winning isn't always about getting first place. Sometimes winning is just getting off the block and getting wet.

And like, you know, you jumped off the blocks and you got wet. Like that's a huge win. You, you, you have become a more brave person by having done that. And I think there's, there's something to that. Cause you know, when I hear about the ultra marrow Ultraman races and stuff like that, I'm like, ah,

Yeah, that's so far from where I am. But at the same time, when I heard this Brene Brown quote about sometimes winning is just getting off the block and getting wet, that changed my perspective. I started doing a lot more stuff because I changed what winning meant. Also, Sean, I think a lot of people listen to this stuff and they're like, oh, Jesse's into fitness shit. And I'm also into weightlifting and things like that. And I think they say like, well, I need to go and do a marathon or a long race. That's not true. I think that you can do...

things that fit your interests significantly more because like he's got a hat that says all day running running your passion like i don't think you have to necessarily do something that falls into that endurance category or whatever is popular i wanted this year sam i want to go to one of those silent retreats where you sit in a dark room for two or three days but listen

We're going into a new year, all right? And I'm giving suggestions and I recognize that everyone is in a different, has a different dynamic. Time is different. Finances are different. But what I'd love to get out of this call is I just want to fire people up for the opportunity that we all have to have an incredible 2025. You know, go master something. Go learn a language. You know, go learn a certain skill. Go volunteer.

You know, do something that makes you proud of yourself at the end of 2025. Do something that makes you feel accomplished and proud of yourself at 2025. Now, I'm not saying go ride your bike across America just because I did that. No, not at all. But do something that you look back on the year and be like, this was amazing, you know? And I'm just saying that there's a lot of things that don't cost money if you're intentional, if you schedule it,

which we'll get to in a second, and you play a little bit of offense. So Masochi, Kevin's rule. The third thing that I do is very simple. You know, I found this works a lot better for me than New Year's resolutions and maybe different for other people. But rather than doing all these goals and stuff, which I never accomplish, I very simply, every quarter, I add a winning habit to my life. So for example, like I don't drink enough water.

I'm going to drink 100 ounces of water, you know, as a new habit. I'm never going to be late to a meeting. I'm going to add a 10 minute a day meditation practice. You know, I don't know. But like what habit did you add last quarter? This is crazy. But like, I'm so inflexible. And I found something on YouTube that was basically inflexible. You know, I can't even touch my knees.

You know, so I found something that's like five exercises you should do before you have a cup of coffee. Like first thing you do when you wake up. So I've been doing these five stretches. It takes six minutes pretty much every day. And, um, I can send you guys the link. They're really easy. So that, but my point is we, we are a product of winning habits, winning routines, and a winning mindset. That's what we all want. We want to have winning routines,

winning habits, and a winning mindset. And by layering in, imagine if you do that. Let's just say we took a five-year look on life. My life's going to radically change in five years. I have a 15-year-old son. He'll be at college.

My little boys now, they're going to be in high school. I like to look at things in five-year windows because if your parents are elderly, they might not be here in five years. Mine were five years ago. Mine aren't now. Your life changes frigging like this. Got to think about this stuff. And imagine in five years, you just did the three things that I said. You had five insane experiences.

You added 30 mini adventures that you wouldn't have had by taking six days of 365 a year. I mean, come on, man. And now you added 20 winning habits. You're fucking Jason Bourne. You're Jason Bourne. And this is not difficult. Well, so all this stuff, I'm like, this is badass. Okay, tell me how you plan it and how you actually put it in practice. You're saying like,

You're a product of your habits and things like that. What's the habit of planning and thinking of these things and actually getting them on the calendar or whatever? I don't know if people are listening to this audio or video, but this is my entire 2025.

If you're not on YouTube, he's holding up the big ass calendar. So, so I, as soon as I know I have something for me, I put it on my, on my calendar on paper. I write it down. Now there's a lot of research around writing it down versus putting it in your phone goals that are written down versus, you know, there's a ton of research around that. But as soon as I have any of these trips,

I put it down. I put all my big events for the year down immediately. Last day of school, first day of school. If you have kids, first day of camp, if they go to camp, last day of camp, spring break trips, date nights with my wife. I take a quarterly staycation or trip with my wife. My wife and I have our own little system. We have a date night once a week, Wednesdays. And then every quarter, we try to plan something together. Could be like, we're going to New York next week.

But it could be just, we're going to have an overnight staycation here. But we try to make sure we have four year date nights as much as we can, family dinners. And then the rest is just family trips. Did you travel a lot? I travel a lot, but I put it on my calendar because once it's in my calendar, now I have permission to say no.

I wish I could go to dinner with you guys, but I'm actually, I'm camping out with my kids that weekend. Like now I'm taking control and I'm dominating the year. Not other people taking it away from me. You can laugh about it, but I'm dead serious. I'm laughing because I think it's cool. You know that experiment where they take a jar and they're like, all right, you have these rocks and these sand. Put as much as you can in the jar. Right.

And basically if you put the sand in first, you can't put any of the rocks in, right? Because all the little meetings and appointments and Zoom calls and everything else takes up all the space versus if you put the rocks in first,

And then you could pour as much sand will fit all the way around it. That's basically kind of like the model of what you're doing. You're basically saying, I'm going to put all the shit I really want to be intentional about the life experiences. I'm going to remember with the people I care about. I'm going to put those on the calendar first, and then I'll let all the little knickknack appointments fill in around that where there's still space. And if I do it the other way, like most people do,

Where you say, yeah, like when I have time, then I'm going to do something great. And then they never have time and nothing ever happens. The rocks never get in. Exactly. And the reason why, guys, I like to have this on one big visual, like look at all 365 days on one page. The reason why I like to do that is, A, I'm visual. Like I need to see it. You know, we all kind of think in pictures and we think visually. But now two things. One, I can see where my gaps are.

I can see where my gaps are, where I have more time available and not. Two, I can track towards my goals so much better versus like if they live in my phone. And I use my phone for my appointments, Zoom calls, and all that stuff. But I don't like scrolling through it to be like, oh, my marathon, and I'm scrolling all the way to November. I like to see it like, oh, I have this many days.

It's like the roadmap is visual. So for, you know, to have it all on one big calendar is really helpful. And I'm super spontaneous. You know, I know that, look, if you don't plan it, it probably won't happen. So knowing that after being on earth for five and a half decades,

What do I do? I want to plan as much as I can. I want to get in front of it. So I sit with my wife. We sync up all of our stuff. You know, in 2025, we're going to, like I said, I'm going to Finland. We have a trip to Japan. We're going to Greece. You know, we have put all this down on our calendar. My 2025 is already mapped out and it's insane. All I have to do is follow the script. Now, yours might not be as, you know,

Wild is mine. But the point is, you control it and you can map out this incredible year. But are you picking those quarterly habits as well as those mini adventures? I'm not. I'm not. Because I'm open. I'm always listening to people. And when I had Marquee Jet, which is a company that I had, I started with my partner when I was, I don't know, 29, 30 years old. My dad owned the plumbing supply house.

I had no relationship with money. We never talked about it. I had no business experience. I didn't know shit. And all of a sudden, I had this private jet company. We're flying 3,000 of the who's who of pop culture, CEOs, top CEOs, athletes, entertainers, and I'm getting access to these people. And I'm really curious. I'm 30 years old. And any time I had a minute,

with anybody at the airport, if I was visiting a customer client, I would say to them, I want to know how they lived rich. You mentioned people here might not be, well, they might be one day. Who's going to tell them how to do? Where do you vacation? What do you do with your money? What time do you go to bed? How many newspapers do you read? I want to know it all. I want to know the best habits and routines and mindset from the best people on the planet. I became a sponge.

And I remember asking this guy, sitting down with this guy. I'm not going to say his first name is James. He was insanely wealthy. I'm 30. I'm like nothing. And I asked him, I said, James, how do you live rich? And he's like, he said to me, I read and you walk me through his, through his day and where he vacations and what he does with his money and how much gold he has buried in his backyard and all this shit. Never forgot it. One thing that he said to me, one thing he said to me, he goes, and I take three hours a day for myself.

And I'm like, I can never do that. There's no, no, it's cumulative. I'm like, well, what does that look like for you, James? He's like, oh, I might take a 30 minutes on in the morning. I might take a little time at lunch to read, go for a walk, work out, dah, dah, dah, dah. The end of the day, it's about three hours a day for myself. And I was like, since then, I'm like, and I was like, why?

And he was like, well, you know, if you check the U-Box, you show up as a parent, husband, CEO, boss, employee, so much better. You don't resent your wife or your husband or your partner for taking away time of the things you want to do. All this stuff. Long story short, I started taking two or three hours a day. Right after that meeting, I'm like, it works for him. I'm not going to wait till I have a bazillion dollars. I'm going to do it now.

So time-rich, something that we talked about earlier, doesn't mean you have to be rich to be time-rich. You have to be organized, scheduled, and allocated to prioritize you. And that's all I'm saying for 2025. You might say, Jesse, this is hokey pokey, fine. But all I'm telling you is carve out time for you to give you adventure, make you feel a comp. Work's always going to be there. It's always going to be there.

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On a week-to-week basis, do you make a list of your to-dos for the week before? Yeah. So I look at my week on Sunday night. I take it from my calendar and from my phone, and I put it on paper. I use a planner, but you can also just write a piece of paper, and I write down my day. It's like I can move things around, and then I can prepare better. I like to have a week-at-a-glance view of everything.

And then the last thing I would say, this is less like a little bonus thought for people, is remember when you were a kid and I don't know if your parents gave you vitamins. Did they give you vitamins when you were a kid, like before school? Yeah, Flintstones vitamins, for sure. Yeah, Flintstones, right? I had Flintstones vitamins as a kid. Yeah, it was like candy. I had like anti-Flintstone vitamins, but that would be podcast number three. The vitamins were like, you know, you take one vitamin and it had like,

You know, 500% of everything you needed in every category in like one little pill. And I was like, that's unbelievable. But, you know, you took your daily vitamins and it checked all the boxes. So I have my own version of this that I do, Sam and Sean, that works really well. So if you made a list, imagine you had all the time in the world. You could do whatever you wanted to do every day.

Well, how would you spend your day? Well, I know exactly what I would want to do. I love saunas. I love cold plunges. I love running, biking, swimming, and exercise. I love doing breath work. I love taking walks with my wife. I love playing with my kids. Like I'm very clear on what it is. By the way, no word I say after I say I love buying art, but I don't. Those are the things I love to do. They're very simple. I inherited that from a very simple man, my dad. Let's say I have 10 of those things on my list.

Okay. Those are my vitamins. Those are the things that make me strong that I need every day. I try to do two, take two or three of those vitamins. I can't do them all, but I try to do two or three. So today it's, we're recording this now it's one o'clock, but I've already gone for an hour run and I've taken an hour sauna. So of the three hours I allocate for myself,

I've already done that two of them. So like my day's good and I've taken two of my vitamins. So now when I show up for you guys, I'm all in. I'm not outsourcing like we talked about. I'm all in, you know, because I've checked me. I'm showing up so much better. That is so frigging important. And that's every day for me.

This is amazing. This is awesome. Is there, before I ask you my kind of, I have one burning question. Before I ask you my burning question, is there anything else in the planning, how to make a kick-ass defining 2025? Is there anything else we missed before we did that? Or were those the big ones? I think at like a high level, trying to get people to rethink

how they approach the new year. I think that, you know, just get started on those things. I mean, you might not have it all laid out. I don't have it all laid out yet, but put the stuff you want to do down first on a calendar or wherever you want to put it and build a year that you're super proud of. Because let me just say this, Sean, we don't get a lot of years. We don't get a lot of years and we don't know how many years we're going to get.

So shame on you if you waste 2025 because you want to like, oh, I'll just do it next the following year. Time doesn't work like that. You don't have the luxury of like, you don't dictate the pace. Sometimes the pace dictates you and circumstances change. And like, you know, everyone thinks like,

I guarantee you everybody here knows they're going to die that's listening to this. But I guarantee less than 1% of our listeners have their graveyard plot picked out because they don't think they're going to die anytime soon. They don't think that like your life could change like that. My life's been turned upside down. I have people that my friends are getting diagnosed with shit. You know, like it changes, man. You can go outside and someone could be texting and you get smacked. It just, it can go like that. You don't know.

So, you know, I'm 56 years old. The average American lives to be 78. I don't know. I'm not really good at math, but that's 22 years if I'm average. And, you know, I was on a lake this summer. I didn't see a lot of 78-year-old guys weightboarding. Like the years that you have to do an Ultraman. What do they say? I was just listening to something. They said, what, 63 is the shelf life of like

healthy years or something you know like it's insane so you it's also insane that you plan these you like well i'll get to it when i'm older but then when you're older it's like i don't want to fucking do that you know what i mean like uh you know i've always criticized actually warren buffett where he talks about like delayed gratification and things like this and i'm like dude you've been the man for years like you enjoy it enjoy that shit now like sometimes patience is actually i'm rich man you don't have to be rich to be time rich

That book that went kind of viral this year, last year, Die With Zero, talks about some of these principles. But he has a great story about one of them that he was talking about when he was in his 20s and he was on his career ladder climb. He was at some investment bank and his buddy who worked with him, they're kind of both 23 years old or whatever, was like, hey, dude, what if we just go to Europe backpacking for like, you know, six weeks? He's like, how are you going to get six weeks off? He's like, I'm not, I got to quit. And like, I hope I'll be able to get the job when I come back. But like, I'm going to do this trip.

And he was like, dude, you're crazy. That's like irresponsible. I'm going to do the responsible thing. And he didn't do that. And he told himself he would do it, you know, maybe next year or the year after that. Maybe some reason he'd be able to do it in the future. So, you know, he's like, as soon as he came back after six weeks, he didn't have the job back, but he met up with the guy. He's like, from the glow on this dude's face, I realized then I made a mistake. And he talks about how when he was 33, then 10 years later, he finally like took a career break. And he's like, went to Europe. He's like,

it's not so cool sleeping in a hostel when you're 33. You know, it's a different, he's like, I learned that some things you can't even just, it's not even just doing them later is worse. He's like, it's just not the same thing. Like that's a 23 year old trip. I didn't do it when I was 23. I did it when I was 33 or 34. And I had to have a whole different experience. There was no going back to that. I think it's really important to say yes to adventure and it's never the right time.

You know, like it's never going to be like, oh, I have eight days that are clean. You have to make it. You have to create that. You know, and I think that's a really important message. Like it's never the right time. You're always going to, I'm going to miss the basketball game. You know, there's always a sacrifice, but if you don't do it, you just, you know, you have regret. You just regret it. You just don't get it back.

Well, you said yes to an adventure. You're coming to our basketball camp with Mr. Beast. So we'll be seeing you in January for one of those. Jesse, thanks for coming on. And if you're listening to this, you made it to the end. You're fired up like I am. We're giving away a few thousand dollars of these calendars. So go to... Jesse, what's the site where people buy the calendar? I have the code here, but...

It's just jesseitzler.com. I think you can get it on my website. So go to jesseitzler.com and then use the code WIN2025. So WIN2025. First 100 people that go there from this podcast will get a free big-ass calendar. But if you didn't, just buy the thing and start planning your year. If you're not convinced at this point, something's wrong with you. I had so much fun on the first go-around.

Sam put me under the microscope a little bit. I loved it. That's his job, and I get it. You guys are awesome, man. I always get a lot of DMs about our first episode, so to get an invitation back,

was meant a lot to me, man. So, so you'll get a handwritten letter from me. I think people don't realize because, I mean, we host a lot of these and I think, um, people forget this, but like I saw Sean writing, like I like take notes. Um, like, I have like, just, these are my golden nuggets from this episode. These are, you know, my pen died halfway through. We appreciate you doing this. Thank you very much.

Until round three, Jesse, thank you. Thank you. Hey, Sean here. I want to take a minute to tell you a David Ogilvie story. One of the great ad men. He said, remember, the consumer is not a moron. She's your wife. You wouldn't lie to your own wife. So don't lie to mine. And I love that. You guys, you're my family. You're like my wife and I won't lie to you either. So I'll tell you the truth.

for every company I own right now, six companies, I use Mercury for all of them. So I'm proud to partner with Mercury because I use it for all of my banking needs across my personal account, my business accounts, and anytime I start a new company, it's my first move, I go open up a Mercury account. I'm very confident in recommending it because I actually use it, I've used it for years, it is the best product on the market.

So, if you want to be like me and 200,000 other ambitious founders, go to mercury.com and apply in minutes. And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC. All right, back to the episode.