Most Important Lifestyle Habits Of Successful Founders

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:00)
Let's examine the facts.

**Michael Seibel** (0:01)
Yes.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:02)
Fact, fact, fact, fact. Great, you're fine.

**Michael Seibel** (0:06)
Yes.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:06)
However, sometimes we look at the facts, and you're not fine.

**Michael Seibel** (0:14)
This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell. In our last video, we talked about the setbacks that make founders feel like shit when running their startups.
And this time, we're going to talk about how to prevent these punches to the face, and how to take a punch and recover if you absolutely must.
So, Dalton, I think the cool way to think about this is a little bit like healthcare. There's preventative healthcare, and then there's, you know, treatment. So let's start with the preventative, and let's set the framework here. Like, a lot of times, founders get punched in the face as almost unforced errors. It's like a result of magical thinking or like other parts of their lives not being set up. And so here are things you can do to either reduce the number of punches that come or at least reduce their intensity because you have your other shit locked up. Does that make sense?

**Dalton Caldwell** (1:06)
Yeah, exactly. It's like, as we spoke to last time, you can't think that you're not going to have any setbacks and you're not going to, again, take some punches. It's going to happen to you 100%. The highs are high and the lows are low. And so rather than assuming you can be so smart that you will never have low lows, instead, plan ahead.
Put the infrastructure in place so that when you do have these big challenges or these low moments, you have the infrastructure set up that, you know, you plan ahead for it. I think that's a very good idea.

**Michael Seibel** (1:42)
So we were joking when we were talking about what to talk about in this video. A lot of these things could be put in the category of adulting. And it might turn out that if you want to be a founder of a very successful company, you might have to adult harder than the people around you.
In fact, it almost assuredly requires adulting harder than the people around you. Sometimes I think founders look at us and they're kind of like, well, you know, my roommates don't do this, so why do I have to? And it's like, well, your roommates aren't trying to build a billion dollar company, then they don't have to. But maybe you need to be better than the people around you to do something extraordinary.

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:23)
It's yet another thing that distances you from your peers. And if your whole thing in life is, I'm the same as my peers, and I'm the same as my roommates that have jobs at like big tech companies.
This is yet another way that you're gonna be isolated and different, and have to learn to love that, and not feel sad that when they're like, hey, we're gonna go pull another all-nighter, we're gonna go party Thursday, Friday, Saturday. You have to be cool with opting out of that. But if you think you can have it all...

**Michael Seibel** (2:57)
You can't.

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:57)
I don't know if you can have it all.

**Michael Seibel** (2:59)
You can't. We're here to ruin that have-it-all dream.
So, where I like to start is audit how you live.
Think about where you're waking up in the morning. Did you get enough sleep? Are you in a place that's a home? Are you living in a place that makes you more powerful or less powerful? Are you sacrificing, like, are you losing hit points at home? And if that's happening, man, that's unforced error, right? So that's who you're living with, what you're eating, do you have easy access to exercise?
Are you living in a place with a bunch of alcohol and drugs everywhere? Yeah, I'm not helping you. At the minimum, your home should be neutral. But I think for the most successful people, the home is actually a plus. The home is where they're making points, where they're winning points. And I think that a lot of founders in their early days don't understand how much they could be losing based on just how they're living.

**Dalton Caldwell** (4:03)
Yeah, I think almost from a clinician's perspective, when someone is having issues, the first thing you look at is sleep disruption, diet, and exercise. If you go look at research depression or anxiety and things, that's usually where the 80-20 solution is for a lot of folks that are struggling.
You look at their sleep patterns.
Are they sleeping okay? Are they eating okay? Are they getting exercise? Are they getting sun? All these sorts of things. And so if you don't have your house in order on those fronts, you are not, even if you don't currently have depression, you are not well situated to deal with really hard things that might happen to you, right?