Special Sunglasses Can Improve Your Sleep
Krisstina Wise interviews James Swanwick
You are at the intersection of wealth, health, and happiness. Welcome to the Wealthy Wellthy Life. This is the show about becoming wealthy without sacrificing your healthy. Each week, I interview a counter-cultural thought leader to bring you a unique millionaire mindset. I’m Krisstina Wise, bestselling author, millionaire coach, and your personal guide to money, health, and happiness.
Today, I tackle money wealth and health wealth with James Swanwick. James is a former anchor on ESPN Sportscenter. He’s the founder of the broadcasting company, Crocmedia, and the host of the top-ranking podcast, the James Swanwick Show. He’s been a successful print journalist of over 20 years, contributing to the likes of the Associated Press, ESPN, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney Daily Telegraph, and Loaded Magazine. He’s also authored the hit book, ‘Insider Journalism Secrets’, and he teaches a course on how to become a journalist where he instructs aspiring writers on how to find success. Most recently, he’s the creator of the 30 Day No Alcohol Challenge, an interesting detox program focusing on high performance. Finally, he’s the creator of the wildly successful product, Swannies, blue-light blocking glasses for improved performance and sleep. This was such a fun episode that truly touched on both the money and health side of the equation. If you’re ready to learn this week’s millionaire secret, you’ll want to read on. Enjoy.
Well, James, thank you for being here today. It’s so much fun. You and I met at the Bulletproof Conference, and you were there selling your Swannies and talking to everyone walking by with your great personality. It’s fun to be able to do this.
Well, thank you Krisstina. That’s very nice of you. You’ve made my mother very happy. She loves it when people speak glowingly about her son.
Well, and I loved it too because you’re so passionate about what you’re doing. Many people have their booths behind there waiting for people to come up to them, but you were right out in the crowd saying, “Hey, come over. Let me talk to you about what I’m doing. What do you think of the Bulletproof Conference?” You had so much energy and a really bold, fun personality. It was really great to meet you and I might not have really stepped up and talked to you otherwise.
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. Maybe we should do a whole thing on people skills and engaging with people instead of health stuff.
No kidding. I think you and I could go many different directions. Firstly, though, you have a really interesting story. You interviewed celebrities early on, and then you were an anchor for ESPN, you’re an athlete, and sort of a health nut. You’re an Aussie, so tell us a little bit about your journey. Where did you start and what got you to where you are now?
I’m Australian-American. I grew up in Brisbane, Australia. When I was 23, I left and went to London and I got a job as a sports journalist for Sky Sports, which is like the British equivalent of Fox Sports. I lived over there for four years and I did something really silly; I fell in love with a British woman who broke my heart. I was upset at the break-up, so I got on a plane and I flew to Los Angeles. This was September 30th, 2002.
I didn’t know whether I was going to turn left or right out of the airport. I ended up living in the Hermosa Beach Hostel for about $15 a night for about 90 nights. 90 days is as long as the American government gave me as a tourist on my tourist visa. Then I figured out a way to come back on a work visa and interview movie stars. I just cold called Warner Brothers, Fox, Sony, and said, “Hey, I want to interview movie stars and sell the articles and the interviews overseas. How do I do it?”. One of the studios taught me how to do it. I ended up interviewing Jack Nicholson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, all of those kinds of famous celebrities. It was a lot of fun.
I got a little bit too greedy, and in 2008, I built this PR company on Sunset Boulevard. I thought I was the king of the world. I was driving around in a cool car. But then, the financial crisis hit and I lost that business pretty quickly. Then I ran away to Argentina for six months to learn Spanish and lick my wounds from the financial crisis. Then, I came back and quit drinking. Not that I was drinking a lot anyway, I was just a social drinker. But I had decided to make some big changes.
I got my dream job hosting Sportscenter on ESPN for a couple years. In the last few years, I’ve very much gone down the path of being an entrepreneur in the health industry. I’m trying to create products that help a lot of people. I created a program called 30 Day No Alcohol Challenge, which teaches people how to reduce or quit alcohol, and then of course, a sleep company. Right now I’m wearing these blue-light blocking glasses.
So, that’s a quick little summary of how I got here and living in this wonderful country.
You have a few different brands and a podcast. You’re doing an amazing job getting the word out. Your brand is really focused, or appears to me, to be on peak performance. It’s this idea of peak performance, the health aspects, the motivation piece, which is all very philosophical and practical. From all of this work, what is your experience? What are some of the keys to peak performance? The Alpha Male, the different things you’re doing, what are you noticing differently about the peak performers you’re interviewing on your own podcast?
I’ve had the benefit of being able to interview some of the world’s most successful people. There are Hollywood movie stars that I’ve talked about, athletes like Tom Brady, David Beckham, Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant. From each person that I interviewed, I always ask them, “What’s your success habit? What’s another tip that you can give for peak performance?”. Some of the answers were not that exciting. They were just good, solid habits, and a habit is something that you do consistently.
I got to meet Elon Musk, the billionaire who owns Tesla, and Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox and 20th Century Fox and a few other things. All these people all say the same things. It’s just being consistent in good habits. Some of the things that I do, I’ll be happy to share a few of them that other people have brought onto me. But, from an emotional point of view, expressing gratitude every morning is huge.
I have a journal that I call ‘Five Minute Journal’. Some friends of mine created it. It asks me every day, “What are three things you’re grateful for?” and I just spend a couple minutes writing those things down, and I find that really gets me into peak performance state during the day. Before I go to sleep each night, I always get my exercise clothes ready. I put them on the floor at the end of my bed so when I wake up in the morning, they are the first thing I see. That visual cue makes me put the clothes on, which then ultimately sends me out the door to go and do exercise. That helps me to create the peak performance of regular exercise, if you like.
Then, when it comes to good food and nutrition, it’s a similar philosophy to seeing the clothes and the visual cue. For me, it’s like if I remove the visual cues, I’m less likely to eat crap foods. So, in my kitchen and my pantry, I’ve removed crackers, breads, processed foods, and anything that would not serve me. I just get it out of the house. I only have healthy foods. So when I’m hungry, I go to the fridge, and the only things I can eat are healthy foods.
It seems so simple, doesn’t it? It’s not like this big top secret thing reveal. It’s just basic simple stuff, but done repeatedly creates amazing habits, which ultimately leads to peak performance.
It’s funny. I have very similar practices. I have a journaling practice that starts with gratitude every day. I also put out my workout clothes in my closet and lay them there. I usually dress in my workout clothes every day. Regardless of what time I work out, I’m in my workout clothes, and I design my lifestyle so that I can wear workout clothes wherever I am. Just like you said, when I put on a dress because I have a certain meeting or something, I usually don’t work out that day. I hadn’t really thought about it, but you’re right. I have some of these similar cues and lifestyle designs that are conducive to better habits.
Something as simple as not buying junk foods and having them in the house sounds so simple, so why aren’t more people doing this? What is your observation with all the people that you coach?
The human mind is inherently lazy. It wants to protect itself. It doesn’t want to actually exert glucose in the brain. It wants to protect it because it’s in survival mode. It’s easy when you walk past a pizza place to go, “Ah, food. I’m going to go in there and eat pizza.” You don’t have to think about it. It’s easy when you’re paying for gas in the Chevron gas station to see the Kit Kat, the Snickers, the Doritos, and the Coca-Cola and think, “Oh, food. I’m in survival mode. Sugar gives me a dopamine and serotonin release.”. It’s very easy to just get that. It’s seemingly hard to create the self-discipline to not partake in that kind of food. We’re actually fighting against tens of thousands of years of evolution.
How do we fix that? How do we conquer that? It’s just creating good habits, and that is eliminating. If it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. For example, in my 30 Day No Alcohol Challenge Program, people who are social drinkers come in and join. They want to quit alcohol for 30 days, and then afterwards, they might go back and drink a little bit. But, for the most part, they’ve completely reduced their alcohol. I tell them instead of driving home past the liquor store every day after work, take a different route. Just don’t even go past it. If you’re going into a supermarket where, ordinarily, you would go clockwise around the supermarket and end up in front of the liquor stand or the wine stand, go counterclockwise. Go the other way and do not go down the aisle with the alcohol.
With those little things, you can set yourself up to win, or you can set yourself up to definitely not lose. It’s as simple as that. You don’t need to rely on brute willpower because you’re fighting against our own laziness. But, if you just set up little things, little techniques where you remove visual cues, you take a different route. Even with the gratitude diary, I deliberately place the gratitude journal on my kitchen table where I will sit and have a glass of water each morning. So, when I sit down, it’s there. I’m not having to like reach into a bookshelf to find it. There’s a visual cue, so I instinctively do it.
That’s why it’s hard, because we’re inherently lazy. But, once you just put those little structures in place, everything becomes a lot easier.
What you say there is so important, because it’s not that we’re bad people, or we’re not disciplined. It’s just biology that we’re fighting against; this stuff is ingrained. Once we realize that, we can use these techniques, or create cues, habits, or behaviors to interrupt that biology. We can actually lead the biology instead of caving to it.
We all have a reptilian part of the human brain, towards the back. It thinks about food, sex, fight or flight, and that’s pretty much it. That’s in our brains. We’re all walking around going, “Okay, I need food, I need water, I need to have sex, there’s danger so I’ve got to get out of the way.” That’s our reptilian brain.
But, of course, over tens of thousands of years, we’ve developed this neocortex, in the front of the brain, which is our ability to think. Things get in the way: we start to rationalize, we start to think, and that’s when we start to get into a few problems. It’s this constant fight between the reptilian part of the brain and then the logical thinking part of the brain. When we can understand that, and then we can just put little structures, just very simple little habits in place, or systems in place where we create good habits. Then we can start living whatever life we choose, really.
When you’re interviewing the Elon Musks of the world, are you hearing the same thing, that they’ve organized their life around some tools and some habits they use consistently?
Yeah, when I interviewed Rupert Murdoch, he just said, plain, flat-out, “Just create good habits. It’s what you do consistently that that’s the difference between success and failure.” It literally can be as simple as get enough sleep, eat well, express gratitude, get some sunlight, have a vision. That’s very clear. Have a vision for what you want, whether it’s in business, or health, or relationships. Let go of the outcome. So, trust the process but let go of the outcome.
For example, if you’re playing a basketball game, don’t think, “I’ve got to win. We’ve got to win this game, we’ve got to win this game.” No, just try and play each play in that game as well as you can. In fact, I interviewed Will Smith, the Hollywood actor. I was interviewing him for the film, ‘I Am Legend’, in 2007, and we were at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. He said to me, “If you want to build a wall, have the idea of the wall and then let it go. Don’t focus and obsess over building the wall. Focus on laying each brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid and then you will have a wall.”
But wait…there’s more?!
This post has been adapted from The WealthyWellthy Life podcast. Listen here for the full interview and story of James Swanwick and to download a PDF of this entire conversation.
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