💪 Books and Biceps Issue 234

Special Q&A with Chef Robert Irvine on writing, lifting and...

Books & Biceps is the only weekly e-mail that combines reading recommendations, exclusive workouts, fascinating stories & more…

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BOOKS

I have something special for you this week. I’m not only recommending a great read, but we’ve also got a behind-the-scenes Q&A with the author, my buddy, a man who exemplifies both books and biceps, Chef Robert Irvine.

I’ve known Chef since way back in my days as a young writer for Men’s Health and Men’s Fitness and he was also kind enough to be interviewed for our Life of Dad book. He’s a great example of one of my favorite parts of being a writer - how you can interview someone, hit it off and then stay in touch over the years.

On another cool note, my friend Matt Tuthill co-authored this book. So when I recommend this one, you’re in good hands.

If you’ve only heard of Chef Robert Irvine from Restaurant: Impossible on the Food Network, then you know he’s jacked, runs businesses and makes great food. What you may not know is that he was in the UK’s Royal Navy, played rugby and grew up inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

When I got the new book, I asked if I could send 5 questions about his writing process, workouts and mindset to share with you all and he was game.

So please enjoy our interview below and don’t forget to grab the new book!

Overcoming Impossible: Learn to Lead, Build a Team, and Catapult Your Business to Success by Chef Robert Irvine with Matt Tuthill

Chef, you travel A TON. In fact, the first line of your new book is, "I live on the road." With that being said, where do you like to do your best writing/thinking? On the plane? Hotel lobbies? Coffee shops? Everyone is different. What's your favorite spot create and why?

The first thing I do whenever I get to a new city is get to the gym. Sometimes it’s just the hotel gym and that’s fine; it’ll do in a pinch. Usually, though, I like to find a real gym that’ll have some weights. I’ve always been pretty much an old-school body-part split guy, though I’ve got a new trainer who’s got me pushing weight sleds and doing a lot of conditioning work, but that’s another story.

All that said, the reason I’m telling you all of this is because my days tend to be so busy from dawn to dusk, that the gym has become my one true sanctuary. It’s the one place where I can truly be alone with my thoughts. More than that, though – and I write about this in the book – blood flow is crucial to work flow. That’s not just a catchy bit of pablum, it’s totally true.

The brain is an organ like any other, and just as your heart, liver, skin – every single system in your body – benefits from exercise, so does your brain. You’re flooding it with oxygen and nutrients, so it makes sense that you do get these little bursts of inspiration while you’re walking, running, pumping iron, whatever it is you like to do.

So if I get a great idea, I can open a notepad on the phone or better yet, just call or text the people I need to. For this book, that was my co-author Matt Tuthill. He – and everyone on my team – is very used to getting calls from me when I’m a little sweaty and out of breath. [Laughs]

Throughout the book, you use different shows and examples from dozens of episodes of Restaurant: Impossible. Do you jot down things in the moment on your phone or a notebook that you'll use later for a book? Or do you come up with the book examples and work backwards?

Look, there have been over 300 episodes of Restaurant: Impossible, and I lived them all. Mention an owner or a restaurant to me, and I will remember just about everything from that episode. I still keep in touch with a ton of the owners from Restaurant: Impossible. That said, I still needed the show’s incomparable executive producer Jill Littman and her team to do some research.

We put the chapter titles or themes in front of her and said, “What is the very best example of this theme?” And Jill and her team combed through 22 seasons of the show and said, “These are the episodes you ought to focus on.” So that’s how the Restaurant: Impossible case studies came to be.

Again, I have a great memory for this, but when you start asking me, “Who was the most stubborn?” or “Who had the worst accounting practices?” or anything like that, there are so many examples that come to mind that it becomes unwieldy. Because of that, at first the case studies covered a theme through a couple of different examples, but ultimately, I felt it would be easier for the reader to focus on one great case study for each theme, and I think the book is a lot better for it.

In any non-fiction book – and you know this better than anyone – research forms the backbone of that work. If you start trying to do it all from memory or personal experience – even though this book is somewhat like a professional memoir – it can get muddy, because even a great memory is selective.

I love the chapter, "It's not their job to get it. It's your job to sell it." As an example, you discuss a show you pitched that the network turned down, AKA, "taking an L"... How did you bounce back from that? How can others?

Thanks for saying that. I love that chapter, too. Broadly, I think it was important to have a warts-and-all approach to Overcoming Impossible. It doesn’t do anyone any good to only highlight the successes. You learn more from taking an L than you do from winning. Every coach knows that. Specifically with this example, it was important to include because I see so many young entrepreneurs, salespeople, even people in creative fields like yours where you have to pitch a publisher on a book idea, get extremely frustrated that people who pass on your pitch or don’t buy your product are being stiffs. I did that in the early days, too.

But in this mindset, it is the customer who is wrong. The customer is not using enough of their imagination to picture how great this thing is, maybe because they’re bored or they hear too many pitches and they’re just looking for the first opportunity to say no. And maybe that’s true!

But – and this is huge – when you employ the mindset that the recipient of the pitch is in the wrong, it takes all the onus off you, the salesman. It absolves you of the obligation to try harder, hone your pitch, or develop a better product. In short, it robs you of your power.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be in any situation where I’ve been robbed of my power, where I’m totally at the mercy of someone else opening up their wallet. Forget that. In every room I enter – even ones where they might be humoring me out of some sense of obligation – I go in with the mindset that I have all the power. When you get to the point where you can do that regularly – and it will happen if you do it enough – it totally changes the dynamic of those sales situations. No one wants to hear from a desperate salesman, but we have great regard for excellent salespeople. And excellent salespeople are really just great storytellers.

You have a great line in the book: "Posting pictures on social media is not a business!" I agree 100%. But how do you find that balance between keeping people informed of what you're up to...and doing the hard work?

That’s the key word: balance. It’s all about finding balance. What I see right now is a great imbalance where the desire to show off and post and say “look how great I am” is taking precedence over keeping your mouth shut and doing the work. It was inevitable because capturing people’s attention in this media environment is very difficult. If you’re not constantly posting about your business and your ongoing projects, I understand the feeling that can emerge from that; it can feel like you disappeared from the conversation.

So in the episode of Restaurant: Impossible where I said that to the co-owner, I was trying to get through to her that the quality of the establishment needed to come first. And in her case, it hadn’t. The food sucked and the place was depressing and filthy. But they had a lot of pretty Instagram pictures. If pretty Instagram pictures were enough to do the job, the business would not have been on the brink of collapse.

But here’s the great thing about the current landscape: if you do your job well enough, you won’t have to sing your own praises constantly. Your customers are going to do that. Customers who had a great time buying from you or eating at your establishment will become a massive workforce on your behalf, and they’ll give you something you could never get by posting constantly on your own: positive word of mouth. That’s the greatest PR in the whole world, worth more than anything you could say about yourself, and you can’t buy it. You can only get it by putting in the work and creating a great customer experience.

BICEPS

We've known each other for a while now and we've talked about training on the road. Since this newsletter is both Books & Biceps, what is your go-to workout when you're short on time? Do you have a hotel gym circuit you like? Go for a run? How do you make sure you get your pump in with such a busy schedule?

This is a funny one. On the one hand, you’re kind of asking the wrong guy because I almost always carve out an hour for myself or even a little bit more. If I am totally strapped for time, I’m not against getting a quick pump, but more often than not, if I only have a little bit of time, I put cardio first.

I’m 57 years old now. I still love to clang and bang with the iron, but at a certain point, health – particularly heart health - needs to come before fitness or, I guess, the aesthetic that younger folks might chase. I’ve always known that to be generally true, which is why all my workouts start with a good sweat on the elliptical before I go for the weights, but the point was really underscored for me in the early days of the pandemic when all the gyms were closed.

I was holed up in Tampa with my wife Gail, who’s quite the gym rat herself, and we just said, “OK, let’s get outside.” We started bike riding together for the first time in I don’t know how long. We took a situation that seemed at first to be really terrible and found the positive side of it. We weren’t just getting great workouts out of the experience, we were reconnecting with each other and with nature.

Getting out in the sun and fresh air, surrounded by trees and someone you love? Man, there’s really nothing better than that. I had to laugh when it dawned on me, because it’s so obvious, but it’s something that a hyper-focused gym rat might forget. We become so focused on how many sets, how much weight, how much time?

Man, if you’ve only got a little bit of time, don’t spend half of it driving to the gym. Just go outside and have some fun with your family or friends. It’s good for your body, even better for your mood, for your relationships, for your soul.

Phenomenal! Thanks, Chef!

Quick Flexes

I hope you all enjoyed that as much as I did. Chef is such an inspiring guy and I think you’ll get a lot from his book.

And in talking about exercising outside, I took this amazing shot running sprints in our neighborhood at dawn. I think the Museum of Modern Art calls it:

Sunrise Street Sprints.

Knocked out 20 x 100s and was rewarded with this:

Also, we took the kids for a long, humid hike this weekend and somewhere in the middle we came upon a giant mound of dirt. Naturally, my boy and I sprinted to the top and flexed for the occasion. Thought you’d all like this one:

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Have a great weekend! - Jon