Most people don’t need more motivation. They need a different approach. Hosted by Gary Donia and Peter Brouillard, Different Life draws on years of experience helping people navigate pain, movement, recovery, and performance — but the conversation goes far beyond health alone.
We talk about:
• Strength training as a life skill
• Back pain, mobility, and injury recovery
• Pelvic floor health and durability
• Sleep, stress, hormones, and energy
• Performance and longevity over 40
• Discipline, habits, and identity shifts
• Parenting and modeling health
• Relationship-based healthcare
We discuss these not as isolated topics, but as part of a bigger question: What does it look like to live differently, not just try to live better?
If you feel stuck in patterns that no longer fit who you want to become, this show is for you. Because better often keeps you in the same cycles. Different changes your trajectory.
Gary Donia (00:00)
All right, Peter, we're back. Here we are. Yep. We're in a new location today. We got kicked out of our old one. We got kicked out. Before scheduling on our part. So we got relocated to a conference room somewhere in the building. We're like scavengers. Yeah. It's running around. It's a whole bunch of people walking by me and like these two morons like in there. I mean, the real issue is, is we clearly see too many people. Yeah. Yeah. And so we just have no home for this. That's problem. So we're running a business trying to help people with their overall physical health. And what we're really trying to do is do a podcast.
And it's pesky patients Yeah, they're in our way. They're ruining our fun. Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna try to show something to the camera here because on my phone. So I'm going to show it to the camera. Okay. Tell me if you can see it. Yeah, I see that. What is that? It says welcome back balloon excited stuff. Let's quickly get you set back up and back on track with lose it. Do you want to know what I see? When you look at that when I look at that.
You look at a very excited app that wants you to get back on track. No, I look at an app that's shaming me. It says, what's up loser? Welcome back. Haven't seen you in while. Here's your one red balloon. Maybe you need a little bit of shaming. It was awful. So I restarted Lose It as we discussed. I'm three days in. I'm like down four pounds of bloat. That's weird. Weird how that works. You're such a loser.
But yeah, so that's how it's going. But I told you that's what that stupid thing was going to do. Peter, I've been stuck at 220 for months. I don't know why. Maybe it's that candy drawer that you've been talking so much about with your clients as of late. The candy drawer has been coming up a bit more. You don't have one of those? I don't have one That's weird. You're the outlier. No, I'm not. I guarantee you. I guarantee you if you have 100 people in the room, less than 50 would have a candy drawer. Huh? I think so. I think we should take a poll.
That's gonna have to go out as a poll Anyway, well, that's the update. I'm doing it. Oh, you know why I hate it a little less this time? Because I can talk to it. So I don't have to type everything. And I don't have to scan all the barcodes. so one of the barriers in the past was, say I fell behind by a meal or two. You're busy throughout the day. You forget to do it. It would be a barrier to then have to think like, oh, okay, now I have to type in like,
10 different things, you know what I mean? To catch back up, that was annoying to me. And so then I'd be like, oh, screw it, I'm just not gonna do it today, just do it again tomorrow. You know how that goes. Yeah, you get out of the habit. So now, when that happens, before we came down here, for instance, I've been with clients all day, but I've had some snacks throughout the day. I had a banana, had a couple mints, I had coffee and a yogurt. And so right before I came down, I quickly pressed the app, it says, instead of like,
type it in and say it. And so you click that button, a little microphony thing opens up. And I just said those things. I said I had one small banana. You have to be specific. But I said I had one small banana. I had five mints. I had two 12 ounce coffees. didn't put any here. We use a little like flavoring. We don't use something that has like calories. So I just left that out. Or if it does, it's minuscule. then I said I had one Oikos yogurt. And then it automatically just
puts that all in there for me. so it's done. it literally took me two seconds. It was way more efficient. And so I'm more likely, definitely more likely to do that and be more consistent with the app because they made it easier for me. It's like one less pain point, you know? And you have to be beholden to the number or else you tend to just like drift off, correct? What do you mean? I mean, your health goals, right? So like, so if you don't want to be a bloated 220, and you want to be a svelte 210.
Then if you don't track you you tend to drift for me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not I'm not a good ⁓ Was a good maintainer. Yeah maintainer. It's just not my thing. So anyway, I'm doing it. So there you go Have you started to read yet? So I'm waiting for your list. So my excuse so I have the apps download you have the app So you did your thing you're waiting for me to give you the I'm just waiting for you to give me the books because like you're clear the extra What are you interested in? I mean, I know generally what you're interested in. But what are you interested in? I think at this point
I don't know. Let me get your advice on this. Should I have my downtime not be like productive? Like should my downtime be? I don't be yeah, you're still learning you like to learn stuff So you can still be productive like that I just wonder from like I wonder from like a stress perspective if like I just like there is some intentional downtime that you should give your brain
Yeah, so you're not constantly always on the thing I think when it comes to reading if you're gonna create a habit around it has to be things that you're genuinely interested in and if that just happens to be things that also are like this there's nothing wrong with being totally committed to like the work You know what I mean? Like yeah, I guess I'm just not a hundred percent sure on that So one I would recommend or after bat for you would be something called deep work by Cal Newport I think you would really like that book. It's a it talks a lot about ⁓ How do I identify the one thing?
and then really focus all of your attention on that one thing until it's done and then moving forward. There's more nuance to it than that, but a lot of people are easily distracted by, there's this idea that being busy is being productive and this book presents it very different, right? There's a difference between being busy and being productive. And deep work kind of helps you figure out how to do that. I think it's...
I love that book. think it's really good. Okay, so that's good It's on the on the lines of like the atomic habit type books, know these like self-help Productivity books, but like this is a different slant. Okay, so send me that first So I think that would be a good one I how long is an audio book in general is like six hours. It's question Yeah, it depends on the obviously the length of the book usually a few hours, you know Could you imagine being the person that reads the audiobook? It's that would seem boring unless you were the author
Yeah, if I had if I created a book I'd probably would want to read it and in fact like let's put it this way if I had an audience and I made a book Yeah, my audience would probably rather have me do the reading even if I wasn't professional Yeah, because it's me right as opposed to like some random do like hey, that's not the guy that said the words That's true. I could see that. Yeah Okay, so I'll send you that and then Go from there. All right. Perfect. All right today. We're gonna talk about how awesome lazy people are
It seems like the anti do you do you at all? relate to Being lazy like would you describe yourself as a lazy person? No, I have to engineer this is this is where this question of should I use my downtime as productive or not? I have to engineer laziness into my life Because it feels like if I my default is just to not stop Okay, and so what I then what I find if I never stop then I get overstressed and overworked but I
Like there's a difference between the way my brain operates when I'm like on something like on a task and when I'm intentionally like not doing that and I'm just a lot. I think I find that's helpful for me to reset. Okay. Would you describe me as a lazy person? No. So I self-describe as a lazy person. So I'm inherently lazy and I know this about myself by nature. By nature. I'm not. Yeah. And so so I really so I heard this concept not that long ago. I actually heard a quote.
And the quote was something that Bill Gates had said. And he famously said he'd rather hire a lazy person to do a hard job because they find the easiest way to do it. that's so funny. Right. And so, and then, and as you know, I read a lot of books and I listened to a lot of podcasts, especially about founders, you know, people who have founded great companies because I find them really fascinating, interesting. I like to learn little bits from them. Many, many of them describe themselves as lazy in, in a good light.
Like in, in like not as like I'm a loser, lazy kind of thing. And they view it as a positive thing. And because of that, that quote that built from Bill Gates, the same exact concept. And I think of my, when I heard that I go, that's me. It's basically this idea that lazy people have a way to, it doesn't mean you're not productive. Like I'm, I think I'm so I'm pretty productive person. I do a lot of things, right? But I find systems and ways to do that that are really efficient.
to allow me to do a lot so I can get back to being lazy. you're so funny. You just want to be as fast as possible? Yeah, but I still want it to be good. You know, I don't like the sacrifice quality. Yeah. So that's the difference. I feel like inherently lazy people. Well, my my stereotype of inherently lazy people is like they do a half ass job. they just want to get it done. You check the box, you do the thing. Right. And then it's done. So why do you think that you're different? Why do you think that you will?
go the extra mile because your personality as far as I've known you is to like, it's never really done. It's always just an iteration of improvement. Yeah. So how do you how do you parse that with being lazy and having that personality trait as well? Right. So I think the person you're describing is a person who's maybe lazy and also doesn't care. Right. Or maybe has is doing a thing that they don't want to be doing. Therefore, they're just like checking the box. Right. So for me, it's
The things I typically spend my time on at this point in my life are things that I really like care about. So, so this job, for instance, is one of those things, right? So when we work on things like the podcast or we're working on things for the, for the, for the business, I want, I, I give a shit about it. It doesn't mean I want to spend, you know, more energy than necessary to get it done and get it done. Laziness still is there, but you care. So you're still going to make sure it's.
done well, you just don't want to do more work than you have. Yeah, so like the quality still matters to me, right? And getting it done still matters to me. Like I'm not lazy in the sense of like, I'm just not gonna do I don't care if Peter wants me to do I think I'm not doing it right. Like I still want to be like I'm still a driven person. Right? I like to for things to go well, I want to help. In this case, I want to help grow the company. I want to have success. I want to do all the things that we've set our goals to do. I still view myself as that. However, my instinct is to like I could sit on the couch for hours.
and love and totally be happy doing that. Whereas like you could not, right. And so, but, but I still know and want to do all those other things. And so what I'm really, really good at, I think is creating systems that allow me like, for instance, your instinct is to create spreadsheets for things, right? That's your go-to. Like when you want to track something or do something or whatever, like do you default historically, that's the system that would work. That's what people did. And when I see a spreadsheet, I see like extra work.
That's probably not going to work over the long haul. And I try to find like a way like to get rid of that thing that is like creating extra work because I just don't believe that's, you know, work around things like that over the course of time. That's more energy and time than I want to give to that. And so I try to find like, okay, there's gotta be a better way. My mind always goes to there has to be a better way to accomplish this task more efficiently and quickly. And I think it goes to my evolutionary dominance.
You have evolutionary dominance. I think as humans, we had to figure out how to survive. I thought you meant you are evolutionarily dominant. Well, I mean, as a dominant human. But do think there's any credibility to that, to that concept of like we as a species were inherently lazy? Because, you know, for many, many millennia, we had to conserve energy, you know, that whole thing. Or do you think that's totally different than?
No, think in our evolutionary makeup, if you kind of again look back and you say, well, what were we like, you a hundred thousand years ago before technology, there's a lot of like really high active activity for a very small percentage of your day. And then a lot of like energy conservation for the rest of it. ⁓ probably, probably, mean, if the historians are true, if the anthropologists are true, there's a lot of laying around and then a lot of high activity and then, you know, yeah. So it would make sense that
A certain percentage of us would have that in us. Yeah. Now let me try to convince you that you're a lazy. Can I do it? Can you, can you, can you like, you know, play along? Um, that's certainly not my identity, but I'm open to new ideas. play along. Okay. I'm to give you four characteristics of lazy people from my research. Okay. Okay. And you tell me if you just do these things from any one of the four, if you're any of these things or do these particular things.
So lazy people build systems. Do you build systems? Not as well as you, but I try to. You try to. Your instinct is to try to build systems. You talk about it all the time. Number two, lazy people remove friction. So I'll give you some examples. They'll lay out their like gym clothes or their clothes for the day before, like the night before, right? They have the same breakfast every single day. They simplify their routines. I certainly simplify a lot of things. I make them routine.
Give me some examples of that. Yeah, so I just like my days look very similar because I've designed my days to be the thing that like facilitates my goals. So in the end, if like I'm used to the patterns of behavior, like so for instance, my breakfast is always the same. I wake up at the same time every morning, make the same breakfast. It's the same routine in the morning. at the same time. Go to bed at same time. It's very automatic for me, like the coming. So.
in that way, I crave routine. I don't know if I've ever thought of routine as being lazy. You're just answering the question. You're just answering the question. So you do all of those things. create these routines. You simplify your things so that the same thing, you food prep every week on the same day, go to bed at the same time. You do the same things before, but you have a very, you're one of the more routine based guys that I know, actually. So, okay.
So number three, lazy people value leverage. Define leverage. So some examples, they'd rather build once repeat and repeat forever. you build a system and repeat it forever. they prefer, this one says, I don't know where this came from, they prefer strength training three times a week over daily cardio. was like, well, that's, it's so weird, but it's like you, yeah. You win my training. So they like durable capability rather than hacks.
Like that kind of things, right? Like they like to build something. because hacks make more work in the long run. Correct. Yeah. So they're looking for the thing that is sustainable and durable over time. Yeah, of course. Right. So that's, and then the last one is lazy people avoid drama. Why would, why would that be? I I certainly, it's too much energy. It's like energy. It's like you're giving energy to something. You know how much energy goes into like a drama situation. Like getting involved. You and I talk about all the time. We completely stay out of like the nonsense.
All of the time. Like I'm not interested in that because it's energy. So therefore, Peter, guess there are four things. This is, feel like I'm trapped. You did this on purpose because you knew that the end of this was going to be, I would have to define myself as lazy. You stupid ass. This is rude. So, so, so based off of my research, which is diligent, I'm sure. Right. You, there was four traits of a lazy person or four things, characteristics, and you match all four. So what do you have to say for yourself?
Tell the people. Well, I think lazy is a pejorative. So we all when we think of lazy, we think of like there's a certain like trope that you think of as a human being. I don't think that's the types of lazy people that you're talking about. But I guess whatever. Fine. If you wanted to find me as lazy, according to this criteria, this is what you do. The greatest show of all time. I'm so happy people are going to really enjoy this. So so I would agree. So I think the problem with the word lazy is that we it's often used as like a negative.
We associated with a dude in his basement with Cheetos on his chest playing video games, right? And so the downside of lazy and again, just, you know, going back to research. So if you allow comfort to compound, right? So, so being on your couch for a couple hours turns into weeks of doing nothing, right? That's obviously bad.
Right, like even if you build great systems and you do all this stuff, right? Then you're depressed and your body's gonna fall apart You skip one workout that turns into skipping three that you know I mean so there is a downside to this sort of like, know You have to so so someone like me for instance who who I know and obviously joking about you You have you certainly meet some of those criteria, but your baseline is certainly not lazy you although you have some characteristics I have some characteristics of lazy people. What do you think about this? And I'll let you finish so
And I actually don't think this is a good thing. Sometimes it serves me. I tend to grind at an activity that's new to me because I want to like really experience it and learn a lot about it. But I know that also takes a lot of time and effort. Yeah, but I'm willing to do that because I believe on the back end of it, I'm going to be much better at it than like, if I took shortcuts, for instance, join saying, but I know that it takes a lot of time. There's only so much time in this world. So sometimes I think I direct it at
areas that are inefficient for my time to be spent on like tasks for instance. I'll just like, cause like, you know, as a business owner now there's a bazillion things to do forever and I never not have something to do. So sometimes I just have to like, like who can do this better and what can I give up as opposed to just like, like, you know, grind into it. So I'm working on that. That's sort of the busy culture, right? Yeah. I hate that. A lot of people are like, and then a lot of people wear that as it.
a badge of honor. I'm busy. I'm working 24 hours. That's bad. I actually, as a lazy person, I look at that and say, wow, what a waste of energy. It's going to kill you too. It's to grind you down. You're going to burn out. Yeah, you're going to. And I look at that and say, okay, there's ways for that to be better, right? There are ways for you to not grind yourself until you're exhausted and burnt out and all of those things. And I think as a person who
self defines as lazy. Like I would look at all of those things and say, well, what is the most efficient, quickest way to get these things done? Is it me? Is it somebody else? Is there way to batch these things? Is there a way to automate it? You know, there's so much automation in the world today. ⁓ is there a robot that can do it for me? You know, are these things good? You know, something as simple as like, say you're like reading your emails. I mean, you can train chat GPT to read and summarize all of your, all of your emails and prioritize them for you. Right. Or, or other agents, AI agents, you know,
So now like that doesn't have to be this thing that takes, you know, a whole bunch of your time. so, um, you know, I, I, saw a quote to, uh, or a statement when I was doing this that said, you know, basically, laziness without structure equals decay. Right. So, so I think my version of laziness has structure, lot of structure. Right. And I think for people like me, there's a lot of, you know, I would.
I don't know, use high achiever like patting myself on the back, but I would consider myself a relatively high achiever in terms of the amount of things that I can get done and still have time for laziness. In a given day. In any given day. Right. But I have to constantly fight against the urge to do nothing. Right. So there is that, that is hard for me at times. Like, you know, yesterday I drove home and I was supposed to go from here straight to the gym. Right. That was the plan. Halfway halfway to home. was like,
Or I could just go eat lunch because that would be great. Because Kaiden had the game, was supposed to have a game. So you went to Groton School? I was thinking, well, no, was, the game was away, but I was like, well, I'll just go eat lunch and let Bella out. And then I, then I'll go to the game. And is there really enough time? Meanwhile, the game wasn't until like five, I have plenty of time, but in my head I had all, you know, my laziness was taking over. So I went home and then his game got canceled. So now I had this like whole thing. was like, oh shit. Okay.
You lazy. Hey, you gotta go. Yeah. Like now I had no, like I literally had nothing. It was, it was say, I don't know, one o'clock or something. And I had nothing for the rest of the day. I go to bed at nine, eight hours, you know, if this sounds probably pathetic to some people, like what a loser. He's got nothing. So I was like, now I have like no excuse, you know? So then a friend of mine, I was talking to her on the phone and she was like, I'm going over to the Groton school because where our kids go to school, because the, girls hockey team has a game and it's their senior night.
And I was like, Oh, I should go to that instead of go to the should go to that instead of go to the gym. Cause I would rather go to that. In the end, I ended up going to the gym. Yeah. You're you're like on my shoulder being like, stop being lazy, but that's an example of where like my laziness, my instinct was sort of like, okay. I can kind of sit. I can either sit here and do nothing, but I felt guilty for that. So then I was trying to find other things that maybe were like better choices than the thing that was like the hard thing, you know, for me, is normal for you. is It's an everyday struggle.
Everyday struggle when it comes to like that kind of stuff now if it's like a new project at work or something like that That I'm super excited about like starting like I worked on that really I worked on like a news a new newsletter that we're gonna be doing Yeah, and when you so easy the podcast thing you just like hammered it for like yeah a week Mm-hmm. Yeah, I could work hours and hours and hours and that stuff Most of it's like happening on my couch. So so I like that so but I do like the concept of laziness like
With with structure which I think is what my life is like I create a lot of structure around my laziness so if we were to define it for For moving forward it would be trying to find the most efficient path ⁓ To get it to get something done so that you can still be productive and you still get to like relax Yeah, I think that that's a really healthy version because then you still get to live your life You still get to be productive in your life, but then you also I think I honestly believe like this chronic like work culture stress
is killing everybody. And I think that if you can get out of that and you can learn to actually intentionally relax, which I've been trying to do more, I make myself sit on the couch and like it my son Evan, he enjoys watching a show or whatever. I'll sit on the couch and watch a show with him. You even gone out to a couple of dinners recently. I'm telling you, I've been trying to intentionally pull back so that I can let my brain relax a little bit and I think it's helpful. I think it is helpful and I think
That for all of us, know, there's, there's probably people who are a lot like you, you know, and then there's people who are a lot like me. And then there's like the middle ground, right? Like trying to figure out like where that is, you know, so, so for me, in order to, to not let the laziness win, right? I have to remove decisions. Like pre commit to things, ⁓ and build an identity around like, okay, I am the type of person that like, that accomplishes these things. Like I'm known for being reliable and get motivated and.
and driven and that's what people know me as, even though my personality is something totally different in terms of what I really kind of want to do. Like I just want to conserve energy and survive for the human race, you know? But so I have to create all of our systems. I think just speaking to people out there who are like me and maybe struggle with that, I think some of the strategies around that are what we just talked about, right? Like, you know, having systems in place that allow you to achieve things.
Like, you know, for instance, every night I go through the same process. Like I actually lay out all of my stuff for the next day. Like I, I go through a process of putting out whatever I'm going to wear the next day. I do all that like ahead of time when I still have, like when I think about it in that moment, I'm up, moving around. I'm like, gotta do this now because there it's actually a barrier the next day to starting my day if I hadn't already done that. Right. And that's hard for me. And so I know for some people, like the thing with the gym and building habits around that, that can be a thing.
Or food, know, you know pre doing all that stuff And so I would say to overcome laziness one needs systems make sense, you know, and if you sure no I yeah, couldn't agree more at that otherwise you're just kind of languish and Everyone hates a I do nothing. So in the end, would you say that you agree that you're lazy? cuz I think that's all just to make you everybody I am lazy I think I think what I take away from it is that laziness isn't bad. Yeah that some people are just lazy some people are maybe not
But like you could still be a productive member of society and get a lot of structure right if you structure it right fine Very good something. never thought I would agree to yeah, yeah So lazy people are awesome. That's all that's all lazy people and Bill Gates said so so yeah, so you can't argue with that everybody all right That is the pod and talk to you later, bye