James Smith shares 3 rules for life
15:01 Share

You will be terrible the first time you do anything. The lessons are in the things that so many people are avoiding. Hey there, I'm Matt D'Avella and welcome to my short form podcast, Three Rules. Each episode, I ask a guest to share three rules that help them find success and happiness. Today, I'm joined by James Smith, personal trainer, content creator, and bestselling author of Not A Diet Book. His videos have been viewed hundreds of millions of times online, and he's here to share the rules that got him to where he is today.

James, rule number one, what do you got for me? All wins feel the same. To people listening to this, maybe seeking aspiration from what you've done, maybe what I've done, they seem to think that on a linear scale, hitting your silver play button is going to be amazing, but your gold play button, oh my God, even better. I don't think many creators talk about how numb they feel when they hit landmarks because we, to get to the point of success that you've experienced, I know for a fact that

that every time you've hit something really worth noting, you just disregard it and move the goalposts to the next one. And the kind of systems that we have in our mind for dopamine, any reward system we have in our brain, you don't get 10 times the amount, 15 times the amount as you go through life. And if anything, I kind of look back to earlier stages of my life and weirdly, I think that I was happier at 100K than I was at a million.

And I like to remind people that whatever they have in front of them, that every single, let's say you do an event and there's a hundred people there. When you then go to a thousand people, it's going to feel the same. When you get to a million people, it's going to feel the same. So enjoy those wins that are coming in front of you. And I suppose if we turn this into a fat loss perspective, people say, oh, I need to lose 10 kilograms. I'm like, oh, well, how about we try and lose one kilogram and do it 10 times? Don't deny yourself wins ahead of you because ultimately they are all going to feel the same. When you hit 10K, when you hit 100K,

Is it worthwhile to keep striving to be like, "Well, I want to hit a million," even though it's not going to feel great? How else can you be motivated? The thing is, for a start, people can feel that they're a long way away from where they want to go or where they want to be, and they can stop enjoying it now. For instance, let's look at Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

I sucked at white belt. I was terrible. But a blue belt was a little bit better. Purple belt, maybe a bit better. But when I look back at where I was at white belt, I still enjoyed every single session, even though I was incompetent and I was rubbish. And quite frankly, I was a danger to other training partners. I still enjoyed it. So the main point is to say to people that don't deny yourself the pleasure of enjoying today, because I think that some people are caught up with saying, I need to be miserable now because I'm not where I want to be.

And I wish someone had said that to me earlier on. Yeah, sure. Look forward to wins and don't make your life about it, especially not if you're going to deny yourself happiness now. Some people, for instance, work jobs they don't enjoy because they think that if they earn a certain amount of money or they get enough certain amount of savings or if they can get to a certain investment portfolio size, they will be happy. But if they spend the next 15 years in misery getting there, then they realize that when they do hit that half a million in savings or they do buy that million dollar house,

That's a pretty big bet if you're wrong. You have to be in it for the right reasons. And if you're in it just for the outcome, just for what might happen if you keep working at it, say you're building a YouTube channel, starting a podcast, like you're working at it because you want it to be this big thing.

Sure, there's this amount that there's this enough number that you need to figure out where it's like, is it what is actually going to make this a sustainable thing where I can continue to do this and make a living from it? But I think, yeah, if you keep stretching your goals and you keep moving the goalpost, then you're never going to be happy. And eventually, if you don't actually enjoy the process, it's going to make you miserable to keep doing it.

There's also a subset of this rule number one briefly where I love to distinguish happiness and pleasure So if I go get in the car, that's pleasure happiness is more so in good relationship with your partner maybe Good exercise routine waking up without hangover on a Sunday Pleasure is spending money you go in business for classes doing the things that you know having a big night out With your friends maybe going to a festival could be unprotected sex. I don't know whatever it is but

If you go to Southeast Asia or you go to Thailand, Indonesia, you see people that don't have pleasure, but they have an abundance of happiness. You look at them with broken flip-flops and a moped living in a hammock, go, fuck, you're happier than me. But they have happiness, maybe not quite so much pleasure. Whereas if you look at multimillionaires that are depressed, it's often because they don't distinguish the two and they try and fill their cup where they're seeking happiness with more pleasure. It's more cocaine, more nights out, more Louis Vuitton. And that's a bad place to be in. So when we say to people, hey, high paying job you don't like,

take a pay cut, start your own thing. You're actually saying let's trade some pleasure for happiness and we have so many examples in real life of people

You can remove almost all the pleasure from someone's life and they can still remain happy, but you cannot remove happiness from someone's life and fill it with pleasure. - Healthy or unhealthy, I feel like I need to constantly be creating or I will fall into a depression. So part of it, it's not even about the money, it is about being fulfilled by the work. And part of that is, of course, there's an excitement about launching a product and it doing really well. You don't wanna launch a product and then it fail and then be like, "Well, I guess I can't keep doing this anymore. "I guess I have to shut up shop."

But I do think that there's an element of like when you actually enjoy the process over the outcomes, like that's where happiness lies. - If I don't train today, I'm actually fine. My body could do with the rest. If I don't eat healthily today, I actually, I'm fine. I can eat a lot of junk food and still feel great. But if I don't do anything productive today, then I'm in a funk. Then I'm shit to be around. Then my missus is like, "You're all right." I'm like, "Yeah, I'm fine."

So productivity to me is actually probably one of those really integral parts of my day-to-day life that props up my mental health. And I think that when my son was born, it wasn't that I resented him, it was an adjustment. You're thinking before I would wake up, make sure my partner was happy, walk the dog, and then my time was my time to be chaotic, productive, creative.

Then suddenly, just as I get into a flow writing a script, I need to help my missus because my son shat himself and there's poo everywhere. And then I come back down and I'm stumped into my creative flow. And I'm thinking to myself, oh, you know, I'm in a funk now. Have I created this? Is it my situation? And yeah, it's difficult, like you say, if you get knocked out of that to find your way back in. I could not relate more. Rule number two, where are we going now? Polarization. So I think it's important that you don't try and appeal to everyone. So an example I use is,

You're at a family barbecue, maybe the first time you met your partner. You're in the garden and they're all talking about the Formula One and they're all saying, "Oh, Formula One this weekend, bloody Melbourne Grand Prix, mate. It's going on." You have to be honest with yourself and I just say, "Oh, do you know what? I think Formula One is shit." And maybe the majority of people at that barbecue would think you're a bit of an asshole, but maybe three or four guys would go, "Do you know what, James? I think it's shit as well. Do you want another beer?"

And I think rather than just nodding along and going along with everything, you need to stand your ground and be a contrarian in some sense to some things. You almost intentionally, if you're not pissing off 10% of the people online or wherever, your point isn't strong enough. If you can polarize to a subject, I did this the other day where I even said that people that use roll-on deodorant are weird people.

So for myself, I'm an aerosol type of guy. Yeah. And sometimes stick would be okay. But when people use the actual roll-on that you get on flights, it leaves you with a wet armpit. Yeah. And you can't put your t-shirt on. But that was probably my biggest engagement-basing comment that I've made in 2024. The world of people... I might as well have said something about Trump. It was crazy. Do you use roll-on, do you understand? I do.

I have, yeah. Not a big fan of it. It's funny. I actually use my wife's spray deodorant just because I'm lazy. It smells nicer. Yeah. And I think sometimes the women's scent is maybe more, it's got better effectiveness. That's my theory. Yeah. And why have two deodorants when you can have one? Exactly. That's a good minimalism. So I think it's really important that sometimes you do intentionally polarize people. You do say something. You do say,

Say you're doing a video on Coke Zero. You should poke at the fact that Pepsi Max is a disappointment in comparison. You should make a B story that if you go to a restaurant, you say, I can have a Coke Zero. They go, is Pepsi Max all right? No, it's not all right. It's inferior in every single way, but I will have one. Yes, please. We see it a lot online, especially with content creators, where they're polarizing for the sake of being polarizing. They make a hot take.

just to get views because that is what works. You know, when you have something and people even use it to the extreme of it, like where they're just completely making shit up just to get that rage bait. So where is that line? Definitely don't think about things that are like, you know, abortion rights or anything like that. There's a line, clear line. For me, it would be things like,

You know, I used to swear a lot in my content. Usually stemmed from me having three or 400 milligrams of caffeine beforehand. I'd have a sweat patch and I'd be swearing. That would come from the facts getting amped up. Then some people would say, stop swearing.

And I would realize that they're the type of people that I probably wouldn't get on with. And from a personal training background, when I began, when I tried to be professional and wore a polo shirt and had my iPad, I attracted the wrong people. When I started throwing a bit more in my content, the people that arrived were like, do you know what? You swear a lot, we're going to get on. And I sometimes joke and I say, if I try and polarize really hard, I end up with an audience, albeit smaller, people that I'd have a beer with. And I think it's important that you don't optimize the wrong audience. And I can sometimes tell that

When I've not been polarizing enough on my content, the people in there are wrong. And I can tell by the comments. Sometimes I go, "Oh, do you know what? If I had dropped a few more sea bombs in my last 10 videos, you wouldn't have been

here to do this. Yeah. Yeah. You would have tuned right out. And that's where, you know, if you have a newsletter, you send out an email, you will get unsubscribes every time. And in a lot of ways, that's a good thing. One, because you save money because you have to pay for the people that you email. I don't think a lot of people realize that, but then two, it's like they just weren't your audience. They weren't your people. You can't take that personally as well, because my, my churn rate has been wild on Instagram where for every two followers, again, I lose one.

So I gained 100,000, 50,000 are gone, which is pretty aggressive. But then at the same time, there are so many friends at school that I never spoke to again. I'm not bothered about it.

If someone was like, oh, you know, Jonathan, he used to be your best mate and now you haven't spoken in 20 years. I don't care. But yet when some random person on the internet followed you, then unfollowed you, you take it personally. I'm going to be back with the third and final rule in a moment. But first, one of the ways I'm supporting this podcast is through Patreon. By becoming a patron, you get access to the full unedited episodes of the show, which for this episode with James is a full 35 minutes. You strike me as somebody who genuinely does not care what people think.

Is that true? There are times where in the evening I feel a lot of guilt. I've made someone who is close to the center feel worse and that wasn't an objective. As a patron, you'll also get additional unused footage from my YouTube videos and access to a members-only area where you can ask me questions for my Patreon-exclusive AMA podcast.

And most importantly, you'll feel good knowing that you're supporting a creator you like. And really, what other incentive do you need? Simply go to patreon.com slash Matt D'Avella to support the show. That's patreon.com slash Matt D'Avella. There's a link down in the description below. Thanks for considering. Rule number three. What do you got? That you will be terrible the first time you do anything. And I think that

A really good exercise. I know people talk about this a lot. Whenever I see a YouTube channel killing it, crushing, love going back to the early videos. Love seeing how awful, disorganized, even the majority of them will unlist the ones they don't want people to see.

Jiu-jitsu, classic example again, terrible at white belt. Powerlifting, terrible when you begin. Every gold medal Olympian once couldn't do the thing they did, maybe bar running or speed walking. But the biggest issue is that people think there's natural born talent. And I, although there are differentiators maybe between IQ and intelligence and a few other things,

almost everything is a skill. Even before we start talking today, your ability to know the lights and the cameras and the ISO, the aperture, the f-stop, you will know everything about the room, the hues on the bulbs. This is self-learned stuff. Most other people maybe were learning other things, you were learning the thing that was right for you. And there is a real slow gradual improvement over time. And people just need to appreciate they're somewhere on that. The lessons are in the things that so many people are avoiding.

And if people would just appreciate they're gonna suck, they're gonna be shit. And I said, look, even if you bomb a video, no one's gonna see it because that's what bombing is. The algorithm's gonna know pretty soon this is shit because they're gonna look at the way that people interact with it. People just aren't willing to do that. And it annoys me even...

I still, I've been a personal trainer for 11 years. I went to a gym the other day to use a leg extension. I got on, it's a hamstring curl. I had to play it off as if I wanted to use that bit of equipment. - I guess I'm here now. This is what I'm doing. - Yeah, I was here and I was like, oh, this is a weird leg extension. I was like, oh, this is a seated hamstring curl. - How funny. - It still happens, but those mistakes just happen less common as time goes on. - What would you say to somebody who's just trying to get started out, they have zero skills,

but they wanna try something new, whether it's starting a podcast or a YouTube channel. - One, make sure they define what their own version of success looks like. Because even if, let's say you inherited a bit of money and you've got enough money to last you three to six months, if you can enjoy what you do on a daily basis, you might run out of money and end up going back to your old job, but just enjoy it. That can be your metric. You don't have to hit any benchmarks because you can still pay the bills. So if you can define what success is, do that. And number two, just be very clear about the problems that you solve, because in essence,

That's what content creation is. Actually being a creator is just a fancy way of saying problem solver. Whether it's entertainment, because someone's bored. Whether it's entertainment because someone is looking for an outlet of happiness and maybe your crass funny video or inappropriate jokes with your mates on a podcast is what relieves them of that. For me, whether it was evidence-based nutrition information, make sure you solve problems. And there's no way that you can partner a good understanding of problem solving

and the tenacity to put out good content, you don't do well. I just don't see that happening. Although I'm numb to so many parts of my business, and this probably be the closing statement on so much of what I've said today, I just see everything like a game and I enjoy playing games, whether it was Age of Empires 2, Call of Duty, whatever it is. The money things you will become numb to, the numbers you become numb to. If you can see it more of a score, like a video game that you turn up and play, where the benefit is that people actually

or in a net better position, the easier. Because yeah, for me, that's probably how I remain sane. James, thanks so much for doing this. If people want to learn more about you, where should we send them? If they search James Smith, they should find me. And if they don't, I haven't done my job well enough. If you want to get these rules summarized into a weekly newsletter, you can subscribe at mattdiavella.com slash three rules.