Yuri Elkaim | Embracing Healthy Habits That Can Shape Your Life From The Founder & CEO of Healthpreneur®

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Are you looking for ways to feel happier and more fulfilled? We are thrilled to have Yuri Elkaim with us, sharing his vision of a society where people enjoy good health, financial independence, and meaningful work. Listen in to this inspiring episode to know what it's like to live a life with purpose.

Key Takeaways From This Episode

• Tips and practices for the general public on proper nutrition

• 10 habits that will change your life and grow your business

• Unconventional ways to becoming the person you're capable of

• The unpopular truth about the hustle and why it’s “blocking” you from getting where you want in life

 Disclaimer: All information and views shared on the Live Greatly podcast & the Live greatly website are purely the opinions of the authors, and are not intended to provide medical advice or treatment recommendations. The contents of this podcast & website are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Always seek the guidance of your physician or other qualified health professional when you have any questions regarding your specific health, changes to diet and exercise, or any medical conditions.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

• The Strong60: Become The Person You're Capable Of Becoming

• reMarkable 2

• Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation by David J. Bland

About Yuri Elkaim

Yuri Elkaim is a New York Times bestselling author, former professional athlete, business strategist, and the founder and CEO of Healthpreneur®. His journey into health and business was inevitable. After dealing with a host of health issues as a teenager, he eventually lost all of his hair at 17 years old to an autoimmune condition. This, along with his passion for sports (which led him down the path of playing professional soccer in his early 20s), propelled him into the health and fitness field.

Yuri’s authentic and caring approach allowed him to build a successful online health empire that went to help more than 500,000 to better health while providing him the platform to write 3 bestselling books and share his message on major media outlets like Dr. Oz and The Doctors. In 2018, he sold this health business after 13 years at the helm. 

With Healthpreneur®, he and his world-class team of coaches help health professionals and coaches leverage the internet to turn their expertise into high 6- and 7-figure virtual practices that create transformative results for more people without the grind.

Connect with Yuri

• Website: HealthPreneur

• Facebook: Yuri Elkaim - Healthpreneur

• Instagram: @healthpreneur

• Youtube: HealthPreneur

Kristel Bauer, the Founder of Live Greatly, is on a mission to help people thrive personally and professionally. She is a corporate wellness expert, Integrative Medicine Fellow, Top Female Keynote Speaker, TEDx speaker & Physician Assistant experienced in Integrative Psychiatry and Functional Medicine. 

Follow her on:

• Instagram: @livegreatly_co

• Clubhouse: @livegreatly

• LinkedIn: Kristel Bauer

• Youtube: Live Greatly, Kristel Bauer

To Book Kristel as a speaker for your next event, click here.

Episode Transcript

Yuri (Teaser)

Every morning, I would wake up and write one page of gratitude, I call them gratitude goals. So what are the things I'm grateful that have already happened, that have not happened. What do I want my life to look like in a year but writing it as if it's already happened.

Kristel (Guest Intro)

If you're interested in learning healthy habits to support your overall wellbeing and your career, you're going to love today's episode with Yuri Elkaim. Yuri’s a New York times best-selling author of the all-day energy diet.

He was a former professional athlete and the founder and CEO of healthpreneur. Yuri had some significant health challenges when he was younger and he eventually lost all of his hair at the age of 17 due to an autoimmune condition. This led him down the path of wellness, health, and fitness. And he is going to be sharing with you 10 habits that will change your life and grow your business.

The daily 10. I'm really excited to chat with Yuri and to share some insights to support you. Let's jump right into it and welcome Yuri to the show. 

Yuri, super pumped to have you here. Thank you so much for joining me. 

Yuri:

Yeah, Kristel. Thank you. I'm excited to chat. It’s gonna be fun.

Kristel:

Amazing. Okay. So to start, I would love for you to introduce yourself and just share a little bit about what you're currently working on.

What is getting you excited these days? 

Yuri:

What's getting me excited these days is doing the boring work day in and day out. It's, it's just keeping things simple and really taking one step at a time towards our vision of helping a billion people on the planet. I don't know how that's going to happen, but I know that it's going to happen.

And that's really like our mission as a company Healthpreneur and that's what we want to do. We want to create a world in which every man, woman, and child has the opportunity to enjoy great health. Ideally financial freedom do work that they find meaningful and they get a lot of joy out of life. I don't know if that's going to happen ever, but that's kind of the vision that we're working towards that's why we exist. And I got into this whole space because as you can tell, I don't have any hair. I lost my hair when I was 17 to an autoimmune condition, that really kind of prompted me into the world of health and spent the next several years kind of exploring what was happening inside my body that that could have led to that.

So pursued studies in kinesiology. I played professional soccer, as well as the, like the human movement was a big passion of mine in sports from a young age. Then I went back to school to study holistic nutrition because even going through one of the top universities in the world and very like having no clue about nutrition in that process. I went back to school to get a more of a holistic approach to nutrition. And that was blown away by what I was learning. And it just changed my life. Like I believe in my hair, although it fell out again, years later when I got a tetanus booster, but we'll save that for another day, but it was just such a transformative experience that I thought, you know what?

I need to help more people with this message. And that's kind of whereI started to blend a lot of the in-person stuff I was doing with clients on the training and nutrition side. And after doing that for several years, decided to start a business online and disseminating that message to more and more people.

So that's kind of where it all started back in 2006 and then built that business up over many, many years. Eventually sold it after making many, many mistakes and suffering a lot along the way initially and a couple, I'd say about six years ago, noticing a lot of people in our space coming to me for business advice.

And I was like, you know what? I think there's a gap here and that's where healthcare started. And so it's always been about helping others. And then it's just morphed over time to helping health professionals build better businesses or collectively we can help our people kind of end suffering and really thrive in their lives.

So that's what I'm excited about. And just every single day, just getting a little bit better. So. 

Kristel: 

I love it. And I would love to talk a little bit about this nutrition piece because that's something I am really passionate about. And throughout my training, we really, first of all, I didn't really learn much about nutrition in my traditional medical training as a PA.

It was like, kind of brushed over, you know, it's like tell the patient to eat a healthy diet. Okay. Got it. Thumbs up. Excellent fruits and veggies. Good check mark. But then with my. Integrative medicine training. We really, really focused deeply on this and Dr. Andrew Weil, who was the head of the program I did, is a huge proponent for an anti-inflammatory diet.

And that's also something that I would use a lot in practice, but I'm curious with your experience and you also wrote books about this. You had your New York times bestselling book, which was your first book about diet. So what's your take? Like what do you recommend for the general public? Because I think it's hard to say like there's a one size fits all, but what are some like general tips, recommendations, practices that you like that you recommend.

Yuri:

Yeah. I mean the world of nutrition, the thing like having been in this space for so long, the deeper you dive into it, the more you realize you have no clue what's going on. Like, and you saw you had answers and you're like, maybe I don't have all the answers. And so I think that what I did was I've just explored everything.

So I started off when I went into nutrition school, like I had zero clue about nutrition. Like I would eat like a whole baguette by myself on a daily basis. Grew up on hotdogs and bagels, like the typical kind of standard American diet. Exactly. And when I started to learn about, oh, like eat more whole foods, I was like, huh, what a concept stuff like not in a box or a package, just eating more fruits and vegetables and stuff like that.

I was like, huh. So I actually start my first kind of step into the world. Figuring this stuff out was actually going raw vegan. And I did that for like six months. And that's like kind of the complete other end of the spectrum in terms of, I'd say hardcore, if you will. Um, but to be honest, I felt the best I've ever felt in my life.

Like it was such a game changer for me because I had grown up like the hair loss for me was the wake-up call. It was the after effect of years and years and years of extreme fatigue. So I used to tell people low energy, like consistent, low energy is a warning sign, that something kind of a little bit more dangerous is happening underneath that.

And that was my existence. When I was a teenager, I played soccer all the time, but to be honest, I was fit, but I was unhealthy. So I didn't realize like sleeping 12 hours a day is not normal. Like, like, huh. So when I went raw vegan, I was sleeping four or five, six, not maybe not four, but I'd say five to six hours a night.

And I was jumping out of bed in the morning. And I didn't even know what to do with myself. I was like, I have never felt this way in my life. So the energy was the first thing I noticed, and that was within like a week and then it just kept it sustained. And then, and then the hair started growing back. So my eyebrows and everything started going back and I was like, huh, this is interesting.

And I did that for six months and that's actually where my first book started was kind of this journey through plant based. But even during that process, I mean, I knew that that was not going to be a lifelong, sustainable thing for me. Like, so right now I'm not Ravi and any  close, but I went through many kind of journeys of, okay I did the Ravi thing for six months realized that I can only get so to nuts before I go crazy. And I like to have the occasional burger and I enjoy going out here and there. So I made the compromise to say, you know what, like I'm okay to make a bit of a trade-off, to say, I understand the fundamentals and principles and how I felt when I was eating whole foods. So my principle, my approach initially, was eat more plant-based foods more than in the raw states, but even on like, behind that, it was really about getting more alkalinity into the body. Right. A lot more greens in the body is as you mentioned inflammatory inflammatory acidosis, you know, they're kind of synonymous in some ways.

So the typical American Canadian diet is very acidic. It's very inflammatory. And so they eating more plant based foods or just whole foods in general, we can reduce that and just really enjoy a lot more improved health. So I started to become a little more liberal with my personal approach and I just kind of continued sharing that message.

And I said, Hey guys, like. I'm all for eating less gluten, but I'm not going to be the guy who's going to tell you it's black or whites. Like if you have a piece of bread, you might as well be dead, right? Like I'm not going to be that guy. Cause I enjoy the occasional pizza and stuff like that. And that's always been my approach.

And I understand that there are others who are a little more militant with their approach and that's fine. Right. That's just because maybe that's how they live their life. So I think whatever the message is, or I think the message is a reflection of a messenger. And for me, it was about just being true to myself and my journey and recognizing that people will resonate with that and some not.

And also recognizing that some people who started following me early on, notice a bit of a transition over 10 years to say like, Hey, I thought you were the wrong guy. I'm like, Hey dude, that was 10 years ago. That was a moment in my life. And I'm happy it happened, but I still do my best, eat a lot of plant based foods.

I'm less fanatical about it now, because the other thing that I realized is like, it's not what you eat, it's how you eat it. Right. It's like one of the things that really, that I noticed that I wasn't really aware of before this whole journey was, I was really amazed at how health conscious, not all, but some health conscious individuals for them, it was never enough like, oh, the salad is not organic?

And like, or they have this guilt and this shame, if it had something that wasn't perfect.

Kristel:

it's a fear, like the fear that it was too fatty.

Yuri:

Totally and like energetically, your body does not assimilate those foods from an energetic perspective. Like it puts your body into a state of stress, sympathetic, as opposed to parasympathetic all of that stuff doesn't allow you to digest and assimilate your foods properly. So I just thought and I lived in France when I played soccer and my parents are, are European as well. And I've always like when I was in Europe, like no one. I mean, not, I shouldn't say no one, but culturally it's less fussy. They enjoy food.

They spend an hour and a half having lunch and wine during the workday. For lunch, you know? And I'm like, they don't worry about it. They just enjoy it. And I think there's a huge aspect that we can as north Americans can learn from that is to say whether we're eating “the super healthy stuff for a pizza” is just enjoy the frigging thing.

Love it. Right. And don't. Kill yourself in the gym afterwards, because you feel guilty about what you ate. So that was a huge eye-opener for me, it was just like doing your best with the food choices you make and just enjoying what it is. And I think that's something to this day that I try to practice as much as possible.

Kristel:

I love that. I know I had, uh, some similarities in my journey where I used to be super, like, very regimented with my diet and I was vegan for a little bit. I've had a lot of the experimentation as well, and I've also gotten to the point where I'm just like, okay, here and there, more relaxed with it because in the health space, in the nutrition space, I think there is a little bit too much of that fear and it's coming at it from not necessarily an empowering place for people. So I really love the way that you phrased that. That was great. And I would love to just now go transition a little bit into what you're currently doing, and I know you have some recommendations for habits and the daily ten right? 10 daily habits that can change your life and help grow your business. And I would love to talk about that because I'm sure a lot of those listening are looking for ways to support themselves in the new year and beyond. 

Yuri:

So what I'm about to share this comes from this book, Strong 60. I actually wrote this at the beginning of 2021 I believe, can't even remember. Yeah. So about a year ago and I wrote this first and foremost for myself, but also my clients, because I wanted to hold myself accountable to doing things that made me uncomfortable because I'm a big believer that routine is great, but routine can also be a bit of a crux if you fall back into it.

And I think sometimes it's a really nice kickstart to the system for your business, by doing things that make you uncomfortable. So the strong 60 and these 10 daily habits were really built out of like, alright, dude, give yourself a challenge for the next 60 days. Do these 10 things every day and just see what happens.

So the 10 things were modifications and a couple additions based on stuff I've been doing for years in some way, shape or form. 

So number one is going to bed and waking up at the same time every day. I think that's been one of the principles that has made the biggest difference in my life. And I think it's probably the simplest thing most people can do to reestablish better homeostasis in their body.

So specifically I'm talking about go to bed before 10 and in this case, wake up before 6. So you go to bed before 10, you wake up before six that's easily, eight hours. So that's more than enough sleep. And the cool thing about going to bed earlier is that your body actually spends more time in deep sleep compared to if you went to bed at 12 or one in the morning, and you still got the eight hours. Studies have shown that we actually spend less time in deep sleep.

So going to bed earlier is really the first, most fundamental thing. If you want to have more energy and like this is seven days a week, 365 it’s fundamentals, that's the first thing.

Second thing is in this specific context is doing your most important stuff first thing in the morning, right? So pick, let's say three things you want to do.

Let's just say on the, in the course of a, for speaking entrepreneurs, what can you do to move the business forward? Identify three things. And ideally work on those as early in the day as possible. Now, when I was, and I think you also have to honor your journey in life, because for the longest time, my emo was wake up 3:48 in the morning and yeah, it was fine.

I wake up at about five now, so it's a little bit. But the first thing I would do is I wake up at 3: 48 and I've like literally jumped to my computer and get my most important work done. And I did that for many, many years. Cause I've got four kids. I'm like, if I can get this stuff done, the day is already won.

And I think something interesting happened during COVID, which was the premise behind this is really do the most important thing in your life is first thing in the morning. And for the longest time, It was really like business stuff. And then I had a few friends pass away during the past two years COVID not because of COVID, but it was kind of a thing that put them over the edge.

But the reality is like they were overweight. They ate poorly, they drank all the time. They smoked and it's like, it was a big wake up call and for me, it was a big motivation to reprioritize my health. So I said to myself, what's most important being alive or my business. It was pretty simple. Right. So I decided to shift that.

And first thing in the morning, what I do now is I just work every single day in some way, shape or form. So I just want to provide a bit of context because what I'm sharing here kind of evolves or has evolved as I've over the past little while. Yeah. So anyways, going back to that second habit is doing like three things in your business, three critical tasks that are going to move your business or your career forward.

Again, if you can do those earlier in the day, it's going to be better. 

Third thing, going back to the exercise component is a suggestion here's exercise for 90 minutes. I'm a big believer in move more, exercise less. So what I mean by that is there's no sense in sitting down 14 hours a day and then killing yourself from the gym in 30 minutes.

I think there was a lot more value in doing your best to stand, to walk around, to get some type of sweat on for 30 minutes a day. If you want to throw in some strength training, whether that's with weights or body resistance, I think that's a much healthier approach than thinking that a 30 minute lift is going to counteract a lifestyle of sedentarism.. So the exercise component is a daily habit we want to build, right? And it could be the whole approach here is strengthen, stretch and some sort of strengthen, stretch and sweat stories in three acids. And in some way, shape or form, you want to incorporate those throughout the week.

It doesn't have to be a sweat session every day, it could be yoga session one day strength session the next day, et cetera, but something to just move your body in a positive way. 

So the fourth thing is adding in a leader of green surge, four liters of water a day. And so if that's two gallons or one gallon or whatever that is, and one of those being a leader of greens, so I'm a big fan of alkalinity, et cetera.

So if you have a greens powder you enjoy, or if you enjoy making reduces, it's probably easier to make a leader water with greens powder, but greens are just going to like. And just makes me feel so much better. Right. So if you're eating 10 to 12 servings of vegetables a day, amazing, still on top of. Add in a leader, greens you'll feel amazing. So that's the fourth thing. 

Fifth thing is we want to be looking at kind of outside of ourselves, what is a message? So this is something that is very challenging for many of us is to send a message of gratitude to someone in your life. And so I'm not talking about like sending somebody a text and be like, Hey man, I appreciate you.

It's actually like sitting down and writing like a letter or a card. And when you do this for 60 days, you start to run out of people. It's really fascinating what happens. So I am naturally, I gravitate towards shooting a video cause that's just easier for me, but I really had to challenge myself and say, no, no, no, dude, like sit down and write this out.

Okay. And who would be the first person I write this to? And what I realized in this process was that I was writing to people that were a little bit less connected to me because it was easier, as opposed to writing to my mom or my kids. And I started to recognize that I was like, what's that all about?

Right. It's safer. It's easier, whatever. So when you do this for 60 days in a row, you start to run out of people that you can write this to. And in some cases you might be writing a gratitude message to the same person twice in the course of those 60 days. So the way I positioned this is write a message of gratitude or thanks to one person your life every day, and starting with the people closest to you.

It's going to be uncomfortable. It might be stuff you've never said, or haven't been holding back, but two things happened in that process. Number one is this is something that is completely unexpected for this person. They're just going to receive a random letter or card out of the blue with just like holy cow.

This is so meaningful for that person. And the second thing is you are going to feel amazing on a daily basis just by like extending thanks. I'm just by focusing on gratitude, you'll feel better, but you're also going to feel better because you're making other people feel better. And I think like, especially with everything that's gone on the past two years, If we can focus on the good, we're just going to feel good and we're going to see more good in our lives.

And I think that's probably the single easiest thing we can do on a daily basis. It seems easy, but there's usually some internal resistance, but if we do that, it's a game changer. So I don't know if that was the fifth or sixth, but I guess going back to some kind of personal stuff too, is spending 10 minutes a day.

Again, 10 is arbitrary could be 15, 20, 30, whatever you want. Visualizing, so medicating and visualizing. So I kind of put both of them together in the sense of I like to get, but I don't think there's one way to meditate, to be honest. I think it's, you know, some people like guided visualization and guided meditation.

Other people like to quiet their minds. The reason I put both of them together is I think there's a benefit to quieting the mind initially. And for me personally, again, this is really just, my process is I'll start off with a little five minutes of just quiet my mind. Just create some space. And then I kind of segue into visualization.

So I create the space in my mind. I just allow that blank canvas to be created. And then I start to visualize, what do I want my life to look like? What do I want this year to look like? What do I want this month, this week, this day to look like as if it's already happened. And I think visualization for me personally has been such a big tool that I've used over my life.

And it's just, it's incredible what happens when you have extreme clarity and conviction? Around what you want. And to start to see how that starts to unfold and come into your life. It's just incredible, but it's also very tough to manifest what you want in life. If you don't know what it is. And second, if you don't spend time, really clarify and crystallizing in your mind.

So every single day, whatever time that is, can be morning, lunch night, whatever is spending about 10 minutes in meditation to silence the mind and then a visualization, which is really creating the future you want as if it's already. Along those lines on a daily basis, another really, really great practice.

And again, how you organize these is really up to the individual, but one of the most powerful things that I have done is I have a, this tablet it's called remarkable. And it's like one of the best investments I've ever made. It's like an iPad, but not an iPad. It actually feels like you're already on paper.

There's no internet connection. So there's no distractions. And I use it as really my thinking pad. And so every morning I would wake up and write one page of gratitude. I call them gratitude goals. So what are the things I'm grateful that have already happened that have not happened? Right. So it's like, well, what do I want my life to look like in a year and again, but writing as if it's already happened. 

So this kind of, what I'll typically do is I'll write this out and then I'll go into my meditation visualization. So I've kind of planted the seed, I've created the foundation for what I want to create. Then I quiet my mind, close my eyes. Then I visualize that exact right thing and it just flows really nicely for me. 

So I do this every single morning and sometimes it's gratitude goals for stuff I want to have in the future. And it might be I'm right about the same thing for a week. Other days, it might be something I'm thinking about for that date, but it's just such a beautiful process.

I honestly think having that type of self reflection is one of the best personal development books you can have for yourself. Like all the other personal development books are great but I think there's a lot to be learned and benefited from taking time every day to introspect, reflect and do a little bit of writing.

And literally that takes me like, you know, five to 10 minutes. So that's the next practice, beyond that? Um, I have something called the, I the sort of be the eye, be sorry to be the common, the eye of the storm. So there's a lot of benefits. So one of the things that I wanted to do with this whole approach was how can I do things that are going to challenge me so that the rest of my life becomes seemingly easier. And one of the things that I started getting really excited about or learning about was cold immersion. So pies, plunges, cold baths, all that kind of stuff. And I'm not a DIY guy in the slightest, but I took on this little project about a year and a half ago at the time to turn a  chest freezer into a cold tub. And apparently those were supposed subculture online about how to do all this stuff. And I kind of went down the rabbit hole and did all that, put all the cocky in the seams and made it all work and got the filtration system set up. And I had this chest freezer set up in my garage and I was set to, I think it was 4.4 Celsius.

So I don't even know what that is in Fahrenheit, but maybe like 40, I think somewhere in that neighborhood. So as I was mentioning, I was waking up at 3 48 every morning. And the first thing I was doing was literally out of bed, right into the cool tub.Three minutes up to my neck and talk about the most uncomfortable thing to do first thing in the morning, like that was it. But I'll tell you, like it was such a game changer and I'm kind of a little bit disappointed cause we moved about a year ago. The setup that we have now is not as conducive to having that same chest freezer so we actually use it as a chest freezer now instead of punch, so kind of miss those immersions, but it was, so I call it the calm the eye of the storm, because when you were sitting in water that has ice floating in it, there are a lot of thing racing through your minds, like, get me out of this. I want this to stop. Why am I doing this, all this stuff? And so what I developed was how do I put myself in that situation and also teach myself how to breathe. And I would basically just use box breathing. So four seconds in, four seconds out and I can hold for a second for seconds.

And I would fixate a points on the wall. And I would just look at that to the best of my ability for three minutes as I'm breathing. And it is really tough to do that. But when you train yourself everyday, what I started to notice was I was a lot less reactive in my life. So I've got four boys. It can be pretty crazy at home.

I'm not the most patient parents we'll put it that way, but it helped me become a lot more Zen and more mindful because I trained myself how to deal with extreme discomfort. And that's why I called the calm in the eye of the storm. So I was able to transfer from that to different aspects of. And so now that I don't have the cold plunge, I basically do the same thing with a cold shower.

So after I worked out in the morning, I get into the shower wash off and I spend about three minutes under really cold water. And it's the same process. So trying to calm, my breathing, my mental state amongst all the chaos of being so uncomfortable. So I know I'm probably forgetting one or two in there, but I don't want to ramble on forever, but those are probably, yeah.

That was great. Just a great for me a morning routine. Most of those things kind of happen in the morning. And it's just like, it's just such a beautiful way to set up, uh, for me at least, uh, you know, for my day, for my life. And it's been very impactful for a lot of the people that have gone through this process as well. So yeah.

Kristel:

I love it. I love it. So for you listening, I challenge you to pick one thing. Just keep it simple, start with one thing that you can add to your day, to your routine. I know for me personally, like last night, I was up so much later than when I normally do. I was playing paddle, I hung out with friends after. I normally am in bed by 10. I didn't get to sleep till like 1230 and I woke up then at the same time and I was like, I can feel it like sleep. I feel like that routine that you said, go to bed, wake up same time. So critical, but there are so many good ones in there. So I challenge you to pick one thing to try that resonates with you, that will support you on your journey.

So this has been amazing and we are coming towards the end Yuri before we do anything else you want to add before we go into a quick wellness lightning round.

Yuri:

I mean, there's so much we could talk about, but yeah, I mean, this has been great. Um, I'll turn it back to you for the, for the lightning rounds.

Kristel:

Awesome. Okay. So first question that I have for you, you are on a deserted desert island and you can only bring three foods with you. You don't know how long you're going to be there for, you don't know if there's going to be any other food that you can find. What three foods would you bring?

Yuri:

Coconuts. Cause I think they're the most versatile food on the planet.

Thankfully. I think they'd probably be on the desert islands. If I could, I would bring wood oven pizza, which is my, I just love it. That's something I don't know if I want to ever really part ways with, and I would say the third thing. I don't even know if I'm going to give you a truthful answer here, but I would say somewhere along the lines of like papaya or mango, one of those two.

Kristel:

Yeah, that sounds really good. Okay. Second question. What is a book you've read recently that you would recommend?

Yuri:

Sitting on my desk? It's called actually this one right here. It's called Testing business ideas. Terrific book, pretty high level, but it's a very, very good book. If you're someone who and I've made a lot of mistakes in my business in life.

And it's like, if you want proof of concept before you go full endeavor, like full into something, it's got some really good frameworks for how to test ideas before plowing forward. 

Kristel:

Love it. Okay. Last question I have for you knowing what you know today, what advice would you have given to yourself from 10 years ago?

Yuri:

Um, get around amazing people and do it as much as possible. I'll do it sooner and pay to play. Pay for better friends was like, if I had to state it that way, put yourself in environments where you're surrounded by people who are at a higher level than you currently are. And I think this applies to sports, to business and health because we become a reflection of our environments.

And I think it's super important to the mistake I made very early on in business. I was trying to figure everything out by myself. And I was like, Hey man, if you don't have all the answers, if you're not where you want to be, it's cause you don't know something. So I think doing that earlier and being willing to invest in coaching, mentorship, whatever is, it always pays itself off in the long run.

Kristel:

Love it. Well, thank you so much Yuri. It's been amazing chatting. I really appreciate you taking some time with me today. 

Yuri:

Yeah. Thanks so much Kristel. It's been fun.