Spirituality: Why a Daily Practice is Necessary with Troy Lavinia

[00:00:30] Hector: Fellas, what's going on? I hope this episode finds you well. And I hope this episode leaves you better than when it found you. I am honored and humbled to be a part of your journey and grateful that you're here, a part of mine. And today's episode is with Troy LaVigna. he's the founder of a community called daily S.

[00:00:49] Hector: O. S. and he is someone who's had success in business and sold the business and started another one. Talks a little bit about that journey, but someone who I look to and admire as a model for integrating everything right? I've talked a lot about the show about how. Yeah, in my twenties, I made a lot of money and blew a lot of money and I had this realization that money was not it.

[00:01:18] Hector: And so I swung back the other way and realized, went to family and relationships and, the spiritual side and all these sorts of things only to realize that there's. probably some sort of medium, right? There's some sort of middle. It's not either or, but there's some sort of and or both.

[00:01:35] Hector: Troy is someone who's really has laid out the path to that both model. And I'm excited to bring you not only his model and his mindset, but really him as a person because he's doing some great work in this world. So enough of me, y'all let's get into today's episode with Troy Lavinia.

[00:01:52] Hector: Troy, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here, my man.

[00:01:58] Troy: it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm excited about it.

[00:02:01] Hector: I'm gonna take a moment because I'm rushing from my last call. I'm, telling the guys who are listening, I'm seven minutes late to this call and there's so much shame that's building up, from this. And so I just want to release that. Troy has been so gracious enough to, be here.

[00:02:14] Hector: so I just want to take a moment to sink in To this conversation and I'm going to send it to you, Troy, take us to your world. we always like to start with these conversations with what's prescient or what's real because, on the outside where these men who are achieving growing andwe have these, sometimes these armors and shields that are out there that are sometimes necessary.

[00:02:33] Hector: But also, I like to start off with, maybe that wound or that scab or that thing that's poking pressing us that's real for us. Anything come to mind?

[00:02:41] Troy: just the regular challenges of growing a new business is always top of mind. Number one. And then the challenges of raising two kids middle school and elementary school and challenges of making it. 18 year old marriage work really well for you. So I think those are like my big three right now, and I don't think we have enough time to even scratch the surface on a lot of those.

[00:03:06] Troy: So I'm gonna let you steer and we can talk about it. Any of those things. And we can talk about what I'm doing with this community and how it might be helpful for your audience. Where do you want to go?

[00:03:17] Hector: I mentioned a little bit about the community in the intro that we recorded. so we're going to circle back to that for sure. Because that's been a, the daily SOS has been such a cool thing. what I think is important for guys to realize is that, part of the reason why we started the show is that You can take any of those one things being a better parent, being a better husband, being a better entrepreneur or business owner, and they're all their own.

[00:03:38] Hector: There's so many shows about those. But then we as men, I don't want to say expected, but we almost expect of ourselves to be able to put all of these together and to be crushing it at this level that we have in our head, I don't know if guys realize the challenge that is, I don't know if they're treating it with enough respect and reverence that, that, that kind of challenge comes with.

[00:04:01] Troy: I think that by reframing it a bit, if take a breath and close your eyes you set down as best as possible, any outside influences, which I try to kind of remove myself from as much as I can. so not looking at social media, not looking at what's going on in the world necessarily.

[00:04:17] Troy: And just think about, who am I? What are the five key areas of my life? And that's the question that everybody I talk to or everybody I've worked with, I ask them to think about because I think five is like a very manageable number. if your garden has five sections in it, you can make sure that you are a really great gardener.

[00:04:38] Troy: And you're giving enough love and attention to each of those five sections that they're growing. Nicely. and if you've got more than that, or if you haven't thought about that and prioritize them or you haven't prioritize them correctly, or you're neglecting any of those five, then that's when things start to get a little funky and get difficult.

[00:04:59] Troy: So I think that Being able to create your dream life is very doable, and I think that should be the expectation for us. I think we should keep the bar that high, and I think it just requires a tremendous amount of focus and discipline on the right things. And I think that's where a lot of people don't necessarily have the strategies.

[00:05:22] Troy: There's no playbook necessarily for doing that, but if I've got five key areas of life, for me, it's my spirituality, which is just my ability to give and receive love. And that's how I would define spirituality. But if I'm giving and receiving love and abundance, that's a good thing. I want to make sure I focus on that.

[00:05:41] Troy: Number two is my physical health. So like looking good and feeling good physically. Number three is my wife. Number four are my kids. Number five is whatever my creative pursuit is. So like for me, it's this business that I'm working on right now. Those are my five key things and I think it's totally reasonable to expect that I can give a little bit of love and attention at least mentally.

[00:06:02] Troy: And spiritually, from my heart to each of those things every day. And if I do that, then those five things are going to grow in tandem pretty nicely, and I'm going to be able to step into my garden every day and look around and it's going to be pretty abundant and beautiful. And it's only when I have.

[00:06:20] Troy: I haven't thought of it. If you haven't thought about that, and you're trying to nurture 20 things, or if you haven't thought about that, and you don't have those prioritized correctly, or if you've thought about it, but you're notconsistent, just a little bit of love and attention to each of the five.

[00:06:36] Troy: That's where we get ourselves in trouble as guys and just as humans in general. I think that the quest for the ideal life is a noble one. And we should all be in the ring, running the race, trying to accomplish that. And, the stuff that you're doing and the stuff that I think hopefully I'm doing are giving people the.

[00:06:56] Troy: knowledge and tools that they need to go on that journey. That quest for the ideal life for them.

[00:07:03] Hector: Yeah. At the risk of being a broken record, I talk a lot about what society is doing, and I have to catch myself because I don't want to sound like the broken record. That's always complaining. my point in doing it for the guys to help them to wake up and see.

[00:07:18] Hector: past the matrix, I actually just watched the first matrix again for the actual time as an adult where I'm coherent to what the story is actually about. And I hope that this show starts to wake people up because when you talk about those things, spiritual, physical.

[00:07:33] Hector: your relationships with your partner, parenting, if you look at them from what society is telling you to do when it comes to your spirituality, there's so much muck and there's so much. out there, right? So much noise when it comes to your health, so I guess my point in saying that is that it's unless you have an intention, unless you come at it with some real directive, if you're just taking what society gives you, or you're just taking the mandates that have been woven into society, that's not going to result in what you are describing what you're envisioning for yourself.

[00:08:08] Troy: Yeah, I think that's right. see it's a little bit of a pattern unfolding here potentially, right? So this first thing that you asked me about How can we possibly expect to live as great of a life has been put in front of us by the media and by social media etc. And I think like what I said just have to limit the number of things that you're willing to give attention to, right? Specifically, five things. And step one, for anybody listening to this, if we can give them 30 minutes to just get their ship in order.

[00:08:38] Troy: Step one, choose five key areas of life. And you could probably rattle them off. you're a thoughtful person. You could probably rattle off what yours are right now, without too much thought. And I think most people who are conscious enough to be listening to this podcast can probably come up with that.

[00:08:53] Troy: And maybe they just haven't consciously done that. So step one, come up with those five key areas. Step two, you're saying, well, how do you live your life in those five key areas as opposed to living the life that somebody else wants for you? Whether it's your parents or your old programming that you came with, because as adults, what the interesting thing that happens is that we realize at a certain point that we have all of these programs and preconceived notions inside of us that we're downloaded or uploaded into us without our consent necessarily.

[00:09:25] Troy: Just by being humans, we have survival programs and by being raised the way we were raised with a certain amount of trauma or a certain amount of adversity, et cetera, or just. The way that our parents thought we wake up as adults and start listening to podcasts like this and say, wait a second, I can live a life by design and don't necessarily need to live the life that was handed down to me, right?

[00:09:43] Troy: those ideas. And so I think it's great that their social media and parents and other influences out there. Because they give you a really nice idea of some of the things that you can pick and choose from to create that vision for yourself. But I think ultimately it's everyone's responsibility to come up with the vision that, really resonates with them.

[00:10:04] Troy: Because if I said choose five key areas of life, I've done this with hundreds of people at this point, the five key areas that you choose are almost never going to be the same. As anybody else in a group of 50 people, so that makes, what is important to you is very unique. And if I said, okay hector google and cut and paste a couple of photos of like things that Exemplify each of those five key areas, right?

[00:10:28] Troy: So for my health and fitness, maybe it's cristiano ronaldo with my face on it, right and for my business maybe it's Musk or whoever it is, not to sound too, I said, wrote anybody the wrong way, right? So I think it's up to us to come up with a vision and be very specific and bold in terms of what we want those five areas of our life to look like.

[00:10:49] Troy: And so if you choose step one, you choose five key areas of life, step two, cut and paste two or three pictures from the internet and put them into a Google doc that exemplify each of those five key areas. So maybe you have 10 to 15 pictures and. You just start looking at that on a regular basis. If you did nothing else, our subconscious minds are really powerful.

[00:11:10] Troy: And what you would start giving your love and attention to are things that looked a lot like that. And ultimately, then what happens is your self image would get rewired and you become that person inside to yourself. And then once you become that person inside to yourself, Which happens over a pretty short period of time, relatively speaking, then everything that you see is as that new person and all the thoughts that you have and all the decisions that you make and all the actions that you take are as that new person and how everyone else sees you as that new person.

[00:11:44] Troy: And so then it's a domino effect. Life starts to unfold for you that way, and before you know it, you don't really know exactly how it happened, but you end up having a life that looks a lot like those 10 or 15 pictures that you chose, and that's what I did for myself a few years back, and what I've been doing pretty continually for the past 10 or 15 years, and, I think everybody, the beauty of being a human is that we have the ability to do that for ourselves.

[00:12:10] Troy: We have the ability to, put a flag in the ground and say that this is the life that I'm meant to be living based on what's in my heart, and gosh darn it, I'm gonna, I'm gonna live it. yeah, I think it's important for us to answer your question directly. I think it's really important that everybody chooses What they want each area of their life to look like based on what rings true in their heart, not necessarily what an advertisement or a parent told them it should look like. And once it feels really good to you,you know, it like when you hit that tuning fork.

[00:12:41] Hector: perhaps is where I'm at in my life. And perhaps it's my innate pessimism that I've been trying to fight my whole life. what I will acknowledge is that once someone makes this commitment, there's usually what I found is there's some like beginner's luck that happens.

[00:12:54] Hector: there's something that, Ends up being like this divine sign, like I'm on the right track

[00:12:59] Hector: and the challenge

[00:13:00] Hector: is that right behind that is usually like this test or challenge or foe or like insert whatever it is and I think that two things have happened.

[00:13:12] Hector: The first is I've gotten that beginner's luck and then. I've started to reach that point of challenge and I go, Oh, this is not working. This wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. And so, squirrel or give up or whatever it is right at that moment to not pursue. And then the other side of it as I'm realizing more is that, okay, I got some evidence that something is here, and then expecting that foe or expecting that challenge, or at least to see it for what it is.

[00:13:37] Hector: in that moment and to give it its right place I just don't want the guys to leave here thinking. Okay. I've got my five keys. I'm going to create my vision board or a copy of pace and then all of a sudden get their dream shattered when it doesn't totally work out or to at least help them to see that if things are not easy right away, but that doesn't mean that we're not on the right track.

[00:13:59] Hector: I think a lot of, A lot of guys my age, millennial guys, we came up in the school system where if things were hard, it meant we were dumb. if we didn't get something like if we didn't get the subject right away or we had to study or work for it, it meant that we were dumb. And so the idea of effort or overcoming or persevering was just removed from the learning process.

[00:14:21] Hector: I feel like taking that now into our life. Thanks. Experiences and it's crippling us. Cause we're like, we're not meant for this person. We're not meant for this business. We're not meant to be in shape and that's, couldn't be farther from the truth.

[00:14:32] Troy: yeah. the scenario that you're painting is exactly right. it's the hero's journey, And, it's also a guy named George Leonard. Wrote an amazing book called mastery and it's like a three hour audio book. it must be like an 80 page book, right?

[00:14:47] Troy: Like not a very big book. So anybody who's listening, who's interested in pursuing something consistently and being good at it, check that out. But what you're saying is exactly right. the hero's journey or the master, the journey of mastery is, the very first thing is about just.

[00:15:04] Troy: Staking your claim on what's in your heart and saying, okay, like accepting the challenge because for most of us, it gets whispered in our ear for years before we decide that. We should pursue it. My guess is it's the same for you. If you're, you're hosting your own podcast now, you probably thought about it for quite a while before you started doing that.

[00:15:24] Troy: And before you started living the life of an entrepreneur. And there's a lot of people who are listening, who are probably in the corporate world, but meant to be entrepreneurs or creators. And, The first step is accepting that call to adventure and starting to make progress and moving forward.

[00:15:41] Troy: And what you said is exactly right. There's usually some beginners luck because you can look at it just like physical fitness as well. So if you were out of shape and you never went to the gym and I brought you into the gym and just gave you some basic exercises very quickly, you would probably lose a couple of pounds and you'd feel awesome, right? Then, after you got those beginner gains out of the way, you would hit a plateau. And it's the same thing with the master's journey or like whatever you're trying to be good at. Any of those five key areas of life that you chose to be great at, it's going to be the same thing. Guaranteed. You're going to focus on it.

[00:16:14] Troy: You're going to make some initial progress, maybe even more than expected, and you're going to get pretty excited, and then you're going to hit a plateau, and you're probably going to backslide a little bit as well, because the pain of realizing how little you know,relative to the journey that you're going on, starts to sink in.

[00:16:31] Troy: Pretty quickly, right? So if you haven't gone to the gym, then you don't know all that you don't know. And as you start going to the gym, you start making some progress. You feel really good about it. But then you also your progress stops pretty quickly. And then you also realize how much there is that you don't know.

[00:16:48] Troy: And that becomes. psychologically daunting. So that's the second phase of this journey is the backslide and plateau. And what's really important for people to understand is that's part of the journey. That's part of the master's journey and the hero's journey. And the goals that you set for yourself or the vision that you set for yourself. Really, the gold is in getting in the ring every day and taking a few steps forward and pursuing it. That is what gives you access to life energy and vitality. Not necessarily accomplishing what you're meant to accomplish. Or what you would like to accomplish. So seeing those pictures from your vision board actualize, that's not the juice. It seems like it is, but the juice is the process of creating a vision board or putting your name on a goal is important to you and getting in the ring every day and battling forward. That's what creates enthusiasm and excitement. And I can tell you this firsthand because I've worked with hundreds of people who have done this.

[00:17:51] Troy: And personally, what got me started is that I I've been an entrepreneur for 13 years and the gold ring was always to sell a business or have a liquidity event. And then I did, I sold a business in 18 months. We grew it from one person to 150 people without losing any employees.

[00:18:10] Troy: And I sold it for 50 million in 18 months. And that was without any outside investors or anything else. And so you would think that would make somebody pretty happy and excited. And it does for a minute. But then ultimately it's the creative process and the journey that is what creates the happiness.

[00:18:27] Troy: And I realized that really quickly. So step one, choose five key areas of life. Step two, get a good picture in your head of what you want those to look like that feels good to you in your heart. And don't worry about what anybody else says and what anybody else thinks those five key areas should look like for you.

[00:18:45] Troy: And then. Every day get up and give a little bit of love and attention to those five key areas of life and you can set goals or milestones along the way so that there's specific islands that you're heading towards on the journey, but just getting up every day and taking those steps forward is What is going to create a fulfilling life?

[00:19:08] Troy: and it's the progress that you make towards those goals that is going and the accomplishment of goals that's going to be exciting to you, not necessarily what you get as a result of it. but yeah, I think that's to be expected. Anytime you're moving forward with this, there's going to be challenges.

[00:19:23] Troy: I just did a lesson today in the huddle about the eyes of growth, like what are the specific things that you can expect to see when you start moving forward towards what you're trying to accomplish? Because there's specific kind of signs that you are growing and the pain that you're experiencing is pain of growth rather than pain of stagnation or any real fear that you have to be scared of.

[00:19:44] Hector: it's interesting that you bring this pain of growth you're talking about it. This, the concept of alchemy, is really what comes to mind. and there's the now famous popularized book of the alchemist, but I don't even know that people really understand it. even then I, to even go out and say that I understand it would be naive.

[00:20:02] Hector: but one thing that I'm learning about that is that. the age old kind of example was turning lead into gold, right? That's what people presumably thought that, alchemist did was being able to do that. And I think that perhaps that is possible. And perhaps that is one method of doing whatever, of reaching some spiritual level.

[00:20:21] Hector: But ability to do that with our experiences and the ability to take the coal of our life and to turn it into gold is, I think, yeah. Perhaps the thing that is more relevant and more resonant with people. And when you're talking about it, you're having this vision that we're putting on our vision board, or I use notion and have, these things there and that I look at often.

[00:20:40] Hector: And, it's the ability to take whatever is burning, in our hearts or in our bodies, and then to use that as fuel to turn that into these visions of these dreams And it's just it's coming to me now. So hopefully that. Articulation help somebody because that was mostly for me.

[00:20:56] Hector: and I think that you really captured that in a way that can help guys

[00:21:00] Troy: Oh, I think what you said is right. And I think it's the outer pursuit. And this is what the hero's journey is too. And I think it's what our lives are about and why the hero's journey and the stories, like Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, all of these stories resonate with us so much, especially so all of these stories resonate with us so much because it's about the outer journey.

[00:21:23] Troy: We see something in the outside world that appeals to us that we want to go after. But then it's about the inner. It really ultimately ends up being about the inner growth that we achieve as a byproduct of chasing The thing or striving toward the thing on the outside, so I think the goals and the outer pursuits are incredibly important because there are a lot of fun, frankly, and it's a lot better than not being accomplished.

[00:21:48] Troy: and mostly because setting those goals and striving towards them. And battling and moving forward. That's what a full life. And it's what makes you grow inside spiritually, what makes you grow, in your bravery and your capacity as a person and your capacity to create the life that you want.

[00:22:11] Troy: Yeah,

[00:22:12] Troy: it's about what the outside versus the inside. It's the lead versus the gold to, I think, to a certain extent.

[00:22:18] Hector: many people. What I really appreciate about where spirituality is headed is it seems like it's previously, there was a disconnect between spirituality and money, meaning that if you were spiritually, I don't even like to use this word, but like spiritually advanced in

[00:22:34] Troy: whatever that means that meant that there was a dissociation from money.

[00:22:38] Hector: And

[00:22:38] Hector: so

[00:22:39] Hector: had that idea. And I made a lot of money in my early twenties and spent some blue, a lot of money and. Because I made it all and then was looking for that happiness. And so I spent it trying to find it in a variety of different vices stupid decisions. so then I went hard the other way and I went, okay, so this money thing is not it.

[00:22:57] Hector: Maybe it's about family and maybe it's about relationships and maybe it's about, being home. And I swung hard the other way at the expense of my ambition and at the expense of my own. creativity or whatever. Yeah, my own growth. so now it's this calibration, right? And I'm wondering if that for you happened or how that calibration

[00:23:17] Troy: it's gotta be, yeah, like has to be a combination as far as I've understood so far, I'm 43. And I've been dedicated to, mindfulness, spirituality, that kind of stuff, and entrepreneurship pretty equally for the past 15 years. And I've read and thought about this as much as anybody that I know, and I've seeked, seeked a lot of people about this.

[00:23:45] Troy: The best that I can come up with is that it needs to be a balance of spiritual growth and creative growth. And one Without the other leads to unhappiness, ultimately. So spiritual growth, so that we don't sound too woo or funky, is very simple, I think. It's the idea, the belief, that there is some sort of higher power.

[00:24:12] Troy: And you could call it God, you could call it the divine, you could call it the life force, you could call it your intuition or the super conscious, going from, one side of the spectrum to the other, but there's something bigger than you. Some sort of infinite intelligence that you have access to that you're a part of that you can tap into and rely on, to heal, to grow, to build things, right?

[00:24:36] Troy: So that's one. And spiritual growth is your connection with that thing. And your capacity to give and receive love and abundance, right? let's make it that's how I would define spirituality. again, your connection with your higher power, however you conceive of it, and your ability to give and receive love and abundance.

[00:24:58] Troy: what's that pipe look like? How much love and abundance can I experience as a human? without breaking. I want to be able to experience a ton of love and abundance, right? That's spiritual growth. And creative growth is doing that thing, hearing and listening to what's in your heart, that voice that's saying you should have a podcast, or that voice that's saying you should write this book, people should hear this, or that voice that's saying Why are you doing this for that other person?

[00:25:28] Troy: You're really talented. You could do this for yourself, right? Listening to that voice and having the courage to put that out into the world. Whatever that voice is telling you, you should be doing, right? That's creative growth. So as far as I can tell, happiness and

[00:25:45] Troy: fulfillment

[00:25:46] Hector: spit out something that I think was brilliant, and I'm curious if it was thoughtful for just came from the divine here. But you said that spiritual connection can help you to heal, grow or build or create. I love.

[00:25:58] Hector: Categorizing things because in

[00:25:59] Troy: Yeah. Yeah. It's really the three thing, three things that you're, any of us are always looking to do at any given time is to heal or let go of something. To create something or build something or to get some sort of insight or direction. That's kind of it. Like organisms that seek to do those three things.

[00:26:20] Troy: And at our lowest we seek to do it just to perpetuate ourselves and humanity. And that would include Stealing and whatever it takes to survive Right at our lowest and at our highest, most enlightened involved, we do it to create what has been put in our heart. But really, those are the three things that you're trying to do at any given time, I think.

[00:26:42] Hector: is there an order? Do you feel like someone in order to create someone needs to heal? Like,is there a connection

[00:26:47] Hector: between the

[00:26:48] Troy: question. Yeah, I think that there is a connection and I think it's the same pipe. So imagine close your eyes if you're listening to this and you're not driving or pull over, close your eyes. Imagine that you are. A portal or a pipe from the divine above or behind or however you envision it.

[00:27:09] Troy: That is like the infinite source of life and love, like creative growth, life, energy, and love, and light. And you. Are this portal from the divine into this physical world. So I almost imagine it like a pipe in my torso. Sounds crazy. You think about it however you want. And the pipe from the divine through you in your awareness into the world carries three things.

[00:27:39] Troy: I think one is insight. Two is love and good energy. And three is Abundance, almost like stickiness, like the ability for things to coagulate around your thoughts. those are the three things that pipe contains. And I think as people, we want to be, our spirituality, quote unquote, is the degree to which that pipe is open.

[00:28:06] Troy: That is an incredibly practical thing. For anyone who is trying to create anything or enjoy life, and it has been dominated by religion and hocus pocus for thousands of years, and I think that what I'm really interested about in and excited about the way spirituality is going is that people seem to be awakening to what it really is and learning how to use it.

[00:28:34] Troy: In a really constructive and exciting way, because when I define it like that, it's almost this is like my bandwidth between universal growth and intelligence and what I bring into the world. that's pretty cool. that doesn't have anything to do with church. that's crazy, right?

[00:28:53] Troy: and if you read most of the original spiritual teachings across all of them, whether it's the Buddha or Muhammad or Jesus or Tony Robbins or Alcoholics Anonymous, they're all teaching like one or more aspects of the same thing. And it's cool to what I get jazzed about is like taking those principles and using them to Make our lives more fun and better and more abundant.

[00:29:18] Troy: Anyway, so spiritual and creative growth I think are both necessary because if you let go of the creative growth and you move to the mountains and you just practice talking to God all day, you're going to be unhappy eventually. And If you forget about your spirituality as we just defined it, and you just chase things outside, you're not going to be very good at chasing things outside.

[00:29:41] Troy: And it's going to be a lot more difficult than it needs to be. And you're going to get some of those things and realize that they don't make you happy. And so I think it requires both creative and spiritual growth on a consistent basis, or the pursuit of it at least, which I would call creative and spiritual fitness, really, the same way we pursue physical fitness, if we have physical fitness, spiritual fitness, and creative fitness, or money, like we're really, really good, and we're, firing on all cylinders.

[00:30:07] Troy: And if we're missing any of those three, then we're working on it. Duller than we should be.

[00:30:11] Hector: Talk to me about, I think spiritual and even physical fitness people can get an understanding of that. but I think creative fitness is a kind of a new concept. Can you,explore what that might look like?

[00:30:24] Troy: I would define creative growth as listening to what's in your heart and putting it out into the world. Assuming what's in your heart. Isn't crazy, like damaging to people, I know that before I started my company, there's two years where I was an employee, I was living the life of an employee, but I knew inside I was an entrepreneur.

[00:30:45] Troy: And most

[00:30:46] Hector: guys struggle with that Have you seen that in like in the people that you've worked with that, that guys seem to struggle with Putting out. if you were to say that to a manly man, to put out what's in your heart. Like

[00:30:58] Troy: or if you don't want to think, so like with any of these things, whether it's spiritual or creative, it's all just a matter of terminology and you can talk to people about it using whatever terminology they're most comfortable with, but it's all kind of the same stuff.So if I'm talking about spiritual growth, I could say God, love, etc.

[00:31:20] Troy: I want to feel love as much as possible. I want to feel happy and comforted and loved as much as possible. But if you wanted to talk to somebody else about it who wasn't seeing things from that perspective, you could just say passion or enthusiasm or excitement because those are the same things.

[00:31:36] Troy: And so it's the same thing with creative growth. You could say, I want to listen to what's in my heart. and put it out into the world. You could also say what is your gut? what's your intuition telling you? If you could wave a magic wand and do anything you wanted for the rest of your life and get paid for it, what would it be?

[00:31:52] Troy: Like it's the same thing. And having the courage to

[00:31:56] Hector: he said balls, by the way, we

[00:31:57] Hector: cuss

[00:31:58] Troy: having the courage. it's a man's show. Right? So having for anybody who's a bad listener, having the balls or the courage to say, actually, this is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life. And then actually taking steps every single day towards doing it, as opposed to just pushing it down And going back to work or going back to the lower life.

[00:32:21] Troy: That's less than what you're capable of living. That's creative growth. And that's different than spiritual growth. Spiritual growth is the capacity to create and creative growth is like utilizing that capacity.

[00:32:35] Hector: This has been a masterclass I look at as like practical spirituality. Maybe you have a

[00:32:40] Troy: I think

[00:32:41] Hector: Different or a better name for

[00:32:42] Troy: I think that's the exact right thing. And honestly, I think that I listened to a lot of the podcasts that you did and people have like incredible. mind is blown by the strategies and tactics that people have to accomplish certain things. and I was like, Oh man, like what we're talking about today fit into that?

[00:32:59] Troy: And I was like, I think this stuff underlies everything. Because if you are growing creatively and spiritually, you can use that. To aim it at whatever you want to aim at, whether it's a better relationship or a better physique or more money, et cetera. Like it's the same tools. it's the same power that you're employing to grow each of those things.

[00:33:20] Troy: that's why I get excited about it. To me, it's like the basic. Universal power that we all have that we're not utilizing as much as we should. It seems crazy, but it's just because of where we are as a humanity, right? Like certain people have realized these things and we just haven't prioritized it culturally.

[00:33:37] Troy: think about like sometimes. John F. Kennedy said in 1960, we're going to put a man on the moon, period, like full stop, right? It was a huge thing, right? I don't think we'd ever been to outer space at that point. And John F. Kennedy said, we're going to put a man on the moon.

[00:33:51] Troy: And then over the next nine years, they spent the equivalent of trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of people working in NASA to get people on the moon. And we did it just in the nick of time. within the decade. And it was, six years after he was passed away that happened. And if he would have said, we're going to figure out what happens when you die.

[00:34:11] Troy: Or we're going to figure out what God is, or we're going to figure out how things grow, or whatever it is, like any of these basic spiritual and growth creative questions, and we had spent as much time and energy and money on those questions. We may be a lot further along than we are today, but we've somehow deprioritized this.

[00:34:31] Troy: And I think once you understand it, you unlock a really tremendous amount of power, which is really fun to utilize in nice ways for everybody.

[00:34:40] Hector: This is so cool. And when I stumbled on your program, daily SOS, I really was drawn to the practicality of it. I mean, you've really made it like practical and although there, there perhaps are some woo woo concepts woven in, it's like, it's really for, for a guy to go in and get a result.

[00:34:58] Hector: So I'd love for you to share how that came to be. And then a little bit about what that's turned into as well.

[00:35:04] Troy: Yeah. quick backstory. I've been an entrepreneur, been in New York City for 20 years, been an entrepreneur for 13 years. And for the first six or seven years of entrepreneurship focused really on the external stuff, which is like business strategy tactics. like reading the e myth revisited and reading the goal and reading all of these other things and implementing those within the business and we had a certain amount of success.

[00:35:27] Troy: I was making a few million dollars a year and had a growing business. So I think by a lot of conventional metrics, it would have been considered really successful, but I wasn't as happy as I wanted to be. I wasn't feeling fulfilled with it. And it was also really challenging. Like it was just difficult.

[00:35:43] Troy: I felt like I was pulling people up a mountain, running the business with 30 or 40 people. And the seven years since then, I started to dive more into the subconscious mind, spirituality, creativity, and using those principles and understanding them and using them in my personal life to enjoy life more and to, Create a life that I liked a lot and also using them within my business in a non woo woo kind of way by putting in place systems that didn't mention anything about spirituality, but created like a loving growth oriented environment.

[00:36:16] Troy: And in my last business, we did that and It grew like wildfire and realize like the same universal life force that grows plants or that grows kids into adults can grow a business into something successful. If you understand the principles behind it, and I think we stumbled into it to a certain extent.

[00:36:37] Troy: But I think it was like my commitment to spirituality and creativity that allowed it. And so after we sold that business, I said, geez, I feel almost obligated to preach a bit in like a non preachy kind of way and in a secular way. as secular as possible because I'm not a religious person, but I believe it was like utilizing These spiritual and creative principles that allowed this business to grow so well.

[00:37:02] Troy: And so I wrote a book about it using the same principle. I sat down 20 minutes a day for three months and I wrote a 300 page book about the principles and daily practices that allowed me to be really happy and successful as a leader and allowed our company to grow so well. And then I thought, you know what?

[00:37:20] Troy: Now I've got this book. I think it's pretty good, but I don't have an audience. And I don't feel like spending a ton of time and energy to find a publisher. I think that seems antiquated when I can just use Kindle Direct and put this out on Amazon. So I said, all right, I'm going to just publish this thing myself.

[00:37:35] Troy: And if I really want to help millions of people, which is my goal, because I've made enough money at this point. Knock on wood, thank God that I don't need to worry about making money from this. That I should start a community or an online course or something because people read books all the time.

[00:37:51] Troy: More people have issues are that if I got 100, 000 people to read this book, that would be by all means an incredible outlier success. And if I got 100, 000 people to read it, maybe 10, 000 would finish it. And if I got 000 to finish it, maybe 1000 or 100 would actually implement anything that they learned because people don't utilize their information as well as they should.

[00:38:15] Troy: So why don't we just give people tools to implement this stuff? And so I created the community. And ultimately what it's come down to is like the best tool that we found is a daily huddle. for creative and spiritual fitness. So we get together 30 minutes every day on zoom at 11 a. m. Eastern time. We do a five minute body warm up where you're opening up your body and we do a 15 minute lesson about some sort of tool that you can use.

[00:38:43] Troy: That's very practical to create Something more easily or grow or heal and then we do a guided meditation, which actually takes you in and allows you to do a visualization or a surrender practice or something we call like a flow practice, like staying aligned with love rather than fear. So those are some of the biggest tools that we have.

[00:39:04] Troy: So we do a guided meditation for a few minutes and then we all hop. So it's 30 minutes a day. It's like spiritual. And creative workout and when people show up, they enjoy it and it's fun and they feel better and they shine a little bit brighter. In the world when they leave, which means that everything they touch grows a little bit better and they're happier and more fun people to be around.

[00:39:25] Troy: So that's what we're doing now. That's what it's become. It's just a 30 minute huddle every day.

[00:39:30] Hector: Yeah, we'll link all that stuff up. this has been such a fun conversation. Maybe you'll grace us with a round two. but Troy, if people want to find out about the program or get more connected with you online, where's the best place to go?

[00:39:41] Troy: Daily SOS dot com. Daily SOS, cry for help. Daily SOS dot com. the spiritual operating system is what it stood for because I feel like. Having these old programs that have been installed in your operating system don't necessarily serve you anymore. And if you change them slightly, you can be a lot more powerful.

[00:40:02] Troy: Just if you get a new operating system for your computer, everything runs a little bit better.

[00:40:07] Hector: Totally. totally.

[00:40:08] Troy: This is awesome. Thank you for having me. I love what you're doing. Like I said, I jammed out on like a bunch of the podcasts before I hopped on and it's so cool. what a toolkit for people to try to be better versions of themselves, which is why we're all here. So anytime you want to have me on, I'd love to come back.

[00:40:26] Troy: Do a meditation. I could do a meditation for the audience.

[00:40:30] Hector: we should, I think that would be fun. fellas, want to encourage you to go get connected with Troy and, we appreciate you being here sticking with us today. We'd love a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts, especially on Spotify. If you happen to be listening on Spotify, scroll up, there's like some stars that you can click.

[00:40:44] Hector: We'd love as many as you think that we're worth. and myself, my self worth would appreciate all of them, but, we would love a rating or review. And, if you know a guy who. Needs to hear this or a guy who's looking for some sort of operating system or maybe you're not sure, right?

[00:40:58] Hector: But you had a conversation, that they're looking for more, out of their life and they're just dealing with some stuff. Send this episode because I think that, when a guy reaches out, there's something that happens there. that's more than just the reach out. And so even if you don't send them the episode, just checking on a guy and ask them if they're good.

[00:41:13] Hector: It, it goes a long way, but, we appreciate you being part of the tribe. We'll see on the next one later, fellas.