Boom, shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here, and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, with great shows like Being Boss. Today, we'll be focusing on five ways to lower stress and maintain peak performance during these unpredictable times. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Brian Lima on the mic.
Dr. Brian Lima is an award-winning cardiac surgeon who performed the first heart transplant on Long Island. He received degrees from Cornell, Duke University Medical Center, and Harvard Medical School, and is now a Wall Street Journal in USA Today, best-selling author of Heart to Beat. In today's Fire Nation, we'll be talking about lowering stress and maintaining peak performance.
Dr. Brian will share with us the heart way, and also how to stay healthy and enjoy a high quality of life, and so much more when we get back from thinking our sponsors. The HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business. Whether you're looking for marketing, sales service, or operational guidance, the HubSpot Podcast Network hosts have your back.
Listen, learn, and grow with the HubSpot Podcast Network at hubspot.com slash podcast network. Get your focus back, sleep better, and block out the unhealthy effects of blue lights with blue blocks, blue light blocking glasses. Get 20% off by going to bluelocks.com slash fire or enter code FIRE20 at checkout. That's B-L-U-B-L-O-X.com slash fire for 20% off or just use the code FIRE20.
Dr. Brian, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. So what's up, Fire Nation? One thing I would say that most people don't agree with is this whole idea of having to be, quote, well-rounded.
The fact of the matter is, I believe, honestly, that to be successful in whatever field, in whatever market, you really can't be all things to all people at all times. You have to focus. And so at the expense of other things, be it friends, excelling in your own health and physique, you know, to pursue your dreams and your goals and your career, they may have to come at the expense of other things because you put so much time and effort into it. And I know that's really not popular, but I know I can speak from a first-person experience that that's really the only way, I think, in most endeavors to really come out on top.
Well, I personally love that you use that word, focus. It's my favorite word. Follow one course until success. It's not follow 100 courses until success, because that's just not gonna happen.
It's follow one course, Fire Nation, until success. And Brian, let's be honest, you're an award-winning cardiac surgeon, so I have to ask, what made you put down that scalpel and pick up that pen? Why did you write the book, Heart to Beat? I felt like maybe a, just like a pen is mightier than a sword, maybe a pen is mightier than a scalpel in many ways.
I felt like I could impact many more lives. Of course, I love what I do. I wouldn't trade for anything. I love doing heart surgery and saving lives on that individual patient I'm operating on.
But I just felt this drive within me to get out there, this message that, you know, anything's possible. There's really a lot we can achieve. It's just, you know, you gotta put in time, you gotta put in work, you gotta focus. And I just had the sense that there really wasn't a lot of that going on out there.
I thought people were apathetic, listless, you know, without real true purpose. And I felt like I could really make an impact on a number of people by sharing my story about how I was able to get to where I got to. And so that's really why I thought I needed to get this story out. Now, you got the story out, and it's a Wall Street Journal and a USA Today bestselling book.
So I just have to say, you obviously hit a nerve. You obviously figured out something that people wanted to read about, wanted to hear about, wanted to learn about, because we are in these unpredictable times. So what advice do you give in this book and can you share right now about lowering stress while maintaining peak performance? Because, you know, a lot of us still want to be peak performers, but we also want to have lower stress.
I'm thinking, we want it all. Doctor, give it to us. Of course, sure. I think many of us, myself included, suffer from this wanting to conquer everything all at once and spinning our wheels.
So part of what I talk about in the book is my heartway approach, where if you think of what the heart does, is the heart does one thing really, really, really well and it just never stops doing it our whole lives. It's beating. It's just staying in our lives. And I feel like so many of us get so worked up and concerned and stressed about things that are beyond our control and we forget about the things that are directly right under our noses within our control that we could do.
And if we did that, if we just said, okay, look, there's these X, Y, Z factors that are beyond my control, but I have direct control over this and that. I'm going to focus on everything I have into it. And you'd be surprised how many doors open when you do that, how, you know, you start to develop this growth mindset, this optimistic, you know, view of life. And that's really the central message of the book.
Do knock out of the park what you have directly within your scope of influence and let the rest, you know, fall as it may. Let it fall as it may, Fire Nation. And one thing that I love that you did, just like the word focus, is follow one course till success. You developed the heart way, H-E-A-R-T.
Break down that acronym for us. So the heart way. So think of the heart again and what it does for us. So H, hard work.
Everything and anything that's worth doing that's going to achieve success starts with hard work. There's no way around that. E is being eager, having sort of a positive growth mindset outlook on things. A is being aligned with your moral compass, is with your overall purpose, being grounded and really concerning yourselves only with weighting matters and making sure that whatever you're doing day in, day out, it aligns well with your big plan.
R, of course, is being resolute, sticking with it, despite the failures along the way, getting back on the horse, you know, not giving up. And T, which was, for me, the final lesson, I think, which didn't really come along until older, when I was older, is thoughtfulness, being mindful, having that self-awareness of what it is that you're feeling, why you're feeling that way, how you're perceived by others, being empathetic, all those things is the last component of the heart way approach. And you combine all five of those elements, and I really think it's a recipe or blueprint, if you will, for a success, without a doubt. So I want to put the ball into your court for a second here.
Take one of those five, just choose any one, and let's dive a little bit deeper. Again, we're not going to go through in-depth all five. You also do that in the book, Hearts to Beat. But just pull out one now.
Let's go a little deeper in one of your favorites for whatever reason and kind of expound upon it for Fire Nation. Sure, so it's the simplest one. It's the first one. It's the foundational element of hard work.
And the reason why I believe that's obviously the one I selected, I think the most important of all of them, is because for a long time, but my hard work ethic was the equalizer. I refer to it in the book as artificial intelligence. Using your heart, your own just bare-knuckle strategy of just putting in the time, working harder than those around you. And you can make up for what you lack in natural talent and intellect, which is sheer hard work.
And I feel that's really been the core of my approach to academics and my career and achieving success. And I think that's above all else the most important element. Artificial intelligence. Love that, Fire Nation.
Thanks for sharing that. I mean, to me, that just kind of sums it all up in a great way. And we're going to be talking about some really important things Fire Nation coming up here, about how we can stay healthy and enjoy a high quality of life simultaneously. I mean, you know, those aren't mutually exclusive and a lot more.
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Learn more about how you can scale your company without scaling complexity at HubSpot.com. So Dr. Brian, we're back. I want to move into how the heart way became your personal life philosophy.
I mean, you obviously have developed this methodology, but how did it actually become your personal life philosophy day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month? It gonged on me during one of my heart transplant procedures and it was a miraculous moment when I was doing a heart transplant and as I was taking the old heart out of the recipient and passing it off, it began to spontaneously beat in my hands. And it was captured on video. It was the first heart transplant we did on Long Island.
So it was a big occasion, a lot of cameras, et cetera. And it just dawned on me at that moment, like, wow, I mean, this heart has just not given up. I mean, here it is in its last-ditch effort to try to keep going. And that's when it all clicked for me when I felt I was searching for unifying philosophy for how to explain what it was I wanted to get across.
How was it that I was able to start from nowhere, low-income family, immigrant family, and get to where I was? And I felt like that really captured it all in a heartbeat, right? And so that's kind of where it started and that's what really enabled me to put everything together and write this book. And once I had that concept in mind, then everything else fell in place as far as how it all worked together.
These various components, the five elements we discussed earlier. So let's talk about what I teased a little bit before the break here, which is staying healthy and enjoying a high quality of life. Like, what does that even look like? How is that even possible?
A lot of people like to compartmentalize things. Well, they factor, okay, heart health, being healthy, physically fit into one box, one bucket, and then emotional health, that emotional well-being into another bucket. But really, those are part of the same. They're one and the same.
If you are physically fit, if you take care of your heart, if you eat right, if you sleep the amount of time you're supposed to, that's going to lead to better emotional wellness, overall well-being. You're going to click better. You're going to be at a higher functional status. You're going to do better at work.
You're going to thrive in your personal and professional life. And I feel like that's why you can't put these things into compartments. It's all one and the same. It's taking care of your overall greater self, doing the right things for your physical and metaphysical heart.
Let's talk about the heart way and specifically heart to beat. What else do you really want Findation to know about this book? What they can learn, and the takeaways that they're going to have and who it's specifically for? So first and foremost, I want to emphasize that it's a book for anybody.
Anybody looking to, what I like to call it, kind of a jolt to the system, a call to arms to sort of abandon a passive life and really shoot for the stars and do what it was that that younger, you know, you wanted to do when you were asked as a kid, you know, what do you want to do when you grow up? Whatever that was, whatever that dream was that maybe has kind of gone by the wayside. I think this book is a way to reawaken those dreams that we've kind of buried along the way to not be afraid of failure. One of the things how to deal with the inevitable failures along the way and at the very end of the book, as we kind of alluded to it briefly, it does touch on heart health, which again, it's not really separate from our overall selves.
It's part of us. You can't really be the best version of yourself if you're also not physically in good form. So that's really in a nutshell what the book is about and what I hope it can do for others as I've kind of poured my heart and soul out into writing the book as well. So where do you want Fire Nation to go to learn more about this book and to make that investment?
On social media, it's BrianLimaMD is my handle. The book is available on Amazon or anywhere books are sold. You can also go to my website BrianLimaMD.com. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with and hello, you've been hanging out with BL and JLD today.
So keep up that heat and head over to EOFire.com just type Brian in the search bar. His show notes page will pop up with everything that we've been talking about today. Best show notes in the biz and Brian, I just want to say thank you brother for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.
Thanks my man, I appreciate it. Hey Fire Nation, today's value bomb content was brought to you by Brian and successful entrepreneurs and they accomplish big goals. That's why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you on accomplishing your number one goal in 100 days and we're talking step by step. So visit thefreedomjournal.com, use promo code podcast for a $15 discount as a thank you for listening to my podcast and I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side.
The HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business. Whether you're looking for marketing, sales service, or operational guidance, the HubSpot Podcast Network hosts have your back. Listen, learn, and grow with the HubSpot Podcast Network at hubspot.com slash podcast network. Get your focus back, sleep better, and block out the unhealthy effects of blue lights with blue blocks.
Blue light blocking glasses. Get 20% off by going to blueblocks.com slash fire or enter code fire20 at checkout. That's B-L-U-B-L-O-X dot com slash fire for 20% off or just use the code fire20.