Hi,

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine shared the link to an old interview with Rob Dyrdek on Lewis Howes’ School of Greatness podcast.

Despite being a few years old, it was genuinely one of the best interviews I’ve seen in a long time and put in perspective how artists and creators can better structure their careers and personal lives. I’ve been implementing a lot of the concepts discussed and without being dramatic, it’s been helping my life in ways I didn’t expect.

Let's get into it below.

This newsletter highlights:

Let's dive in ⬇️

For context, this past July, Lewis Howes re-released his interview with Rob Dyrdek on The School of Greatness in an episode called "How to Design a Life That Runs Without You". The conversation itself is from 2021 (the numbers below may be slightly outdated) but the ideas and frameworks are still super relevant.

While I was familiar with Rob Dyrdek from the shows Rob & Big, Fantasy Factory, and Ridiculousness, I hadn’t realized he built Dyrdek Machine - a venture studio with over 18 brands and +$550M in exits. As his personal and business life have become increasingly busy, he went all in on creating an operating system for his life to manage and balance everything.

That operating system is called Rhythm of Existence. It began in 2015 as a cadence of weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings that kept his companies moving forward. The concept ultimately evolved into an Excel spreadsheet that mapped every single hour of an entire year across four buckets, or "sub-rhythms":

His split ended up at roughly 30% life and family, 30% sleep, 30% work, and 10% health.

When I heard about it on the podcast, I’m not going to lie…my first thought was:

“This is fucking INSANE. Who does this?” lol.

But the more he spoke about it, the more I realized how brilliant it was. By physically writing and mapping out every single part of his life, he gave himself a complete view of:

One of the ways he makes it work is with a rule that he’ll never compromise family or health time. He’ll only compromise work.

The sheet then evolved into an 80-page document that acts as a Standard Operating Procedure for his entire life. It covers how his household orders groceries (no this is not a joke lol), how the nannies operate, travel, haircuts, meeting agendas, and weekly date nights with his wife. If there's a pipe leak in the house, the document literally lists the plumber’s contact information lol.

Apparently he built it in 2015 but didn't fully run it until 2019 because the assistants he'd hired couldn't operate it well enough, so he waited for the right chief of staff. It’s an interesting lesson that even he needed four years to grow into his own system. The document is so thorough, he could literally give it to his Chief of Staff / team and my guess is reduce 99% of the questions they might ask him.

He credits this process to helping him save tons of time, money, and energy.

For example, when filming Ridiculousness, a 10-hour shoot day used to result in two episodes. A few years later, after implementing this system, he was shooting six episodes between just 9am and 3pm. He was able to accomplish this by creating an operating system for his whole life that showed him where the inefficiences were.

Rob’s core belief for this is that our capacities as humans are limited. Life has a tendency to make us drained through decisions, stress, bad sleep, and poor diet. This whole system basically exists to protect and preserve our capacities for the things that matter.

I thought this part was also super interesting. For Ridiculousness, Rob stopped attending production meetings and instead formalized how he preferred scripts be sent to him. (It’s how two episodes in a 10-hour shoot day became six in just a few hours). By 2021, the show was producing about 250 episodes a year which is crazy output.

He has a three-option rule for anything that drains energy:

Optimization only comes after that. In his words, "greatness is found in optimization after you've automated." Every new project starts with one question: what's the path to automation or making it easier?

This is a little intense but every night, Rob scores his life, work, and health from 0 to 10 each, for a max of 30, and writes a reason for each score. He cross-checks those scores against habits like waking up early, meditating, the gym, and a clean diet.

The scores show what to fix.

“The output of your system is essentially the quality of your life."

Now…some of you might be reading this and thinking…

“Mike! Bro, c’mon. This guy has a chief of staff, two assistants, nannies, and a doctor who comes to his house. Must be nice."

To that I’d say…true. Very true. I won’t even argue with that lol. But…while Rob’s execution may not be relatable for the average person, his general concept and thesis is. It’s essentially mapping out the different parts of your life, career, business, etc to a T so you know exactly what’s going on.

Here’s a personal example:

A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who’s built up a super successful online business. He’s probably one of the biggest coaches in his field / niche and really mastered building an audience online, creating a funnel, and sales. He’s been doing it for +10 years and this past September was his highest revenue month yet.

When I was talking to him about the consulting I’ve been doing, I shared how fortunate and blessed I was that I’ve had a fair amount of inbound interest from people but have been still unpacking outbound and clients beyond what I currently have.

He then asked me how I was tracking everything:

I stared at him like he had 3 heads and 2 of them had just ripped off the third. Then I laughed and told him I wasn’t doing any of those things. I was just catching inbound interest and executing but genuinely couldn’t answer any of those questions. Looking back now, in a way, it’s kind of funny.

Basically, I had no system.

He explained that he operated the same way for a long time (many companies and businesses do) and only until recently did he put a fair amount of structure to it. He built a Standard Operating Procedure for his company and saw results immediately - he’s working smarter, faster, generating more revenue, helping more people, and having more fun.

I realized I needed to do the same thing and spent the last 2 weeks working on a blueprint that outlines every single step of my consulting and personal brand.

I wrote down every single step and micro step along with drafting the exact correspondance I plan on using. I almost never do this with anything but without exaggerating, it changed my life. It immediately showed me:

I had built my own Rhythm of Existence. It took me a long time (along with moments of wanting to bash my head against the wall writing out the boring stuff) but it worked. It gave me an unbelievable amount of clarity that I didn’t have before.

Here’s an example of how artists and creators can make their own:

1. Open a Google Doc and write down all of the different parts of your career as categories. For example:

2. Write out step by step how each category works. I would suggest writing this in excruciating detail. It’ll feel boring but it’s a great exercise. For example:

Making music

Shows

You can see where I’m going with this…

Breaking down your career into different components and literally writing down every single detail, how it gets done, how to scale it, and how it gets repeated.

You can keep it easy and do it in a Google Doc. Everyone has their own opinion on using AI, but if you use AI tools like Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, etc it can probably help you populate some of this and then you can go in and finalize.

My biggest takeaway is that there’s a way to design the system and stay organized while leaving room to be creative and flexible. This concept doesn’t just apply to artists and creators btw. It can apply to anyone looking to live a more fulfilling live or even just audit their existing day to day. How much time are they spending with family and friends, working, exercising, health.

It can really help put in perspective where time is being spent.

Thanks for reading, until next time.

P.S. If you're an independent artist, manager, or music company trying to get a release off the ground in the next few months, I'd love to help. Tell me what you're working on HERE.