How Entrepreneurs Can Quit the Hustle Trap and Reclaim Their Time

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About The Guest

Stavros Michailidis is the Founder of Routine Rebel LLC, a company that helps entrepreneurs reclaim their time, energy, and purpose. He is also the President of the Board of Directors at Samvinas Corporation, where he leads governance, compliance, and strategic oversight. Before Routine Rebel, Stavros co-founded for-profit and nonprofit ventures and trained Fortune 500 leaders on innovation. 

About The Episode

Many entrepreneurs chase growth and achievement only to discover that success feels emptier than expected. How can you design a life you actually want to live? What would change if you measured success by well-being instead of volume of work?

 

According to entrepreneur and creativity expert Stavros Michailidis, this shift begins by redefining what success looks like. He suggests using simple personal metrics like quality of sleep and daily fulfillment to guide decisions, rather than relying solely on revenue goals. He also recommends regularly taking inventory of your emotional clarity, connection, play, and agency to pinpoint where life feels misaligned. These practices help entrepreneurs course-correct faster and build businesses that support their lives instead of consuming them.

 

In this episode of Lessons From The Leap, Ghazenfer Mansoor sits down with Stavros Michailidis, Founder of Routine Rebel LLC, to discuss how entrepreneurs can redefine success. Stavros shares how he learned to measure well-being over growth, why intentional time use transforms fulfillment, and how letting go of rigid outcomes can accelerate meaningful results.

What You Will Learn
Quotable Moments:
Action Steps:
  1. Prioritize well-being as a daily performance metric: Focusing on whether you feel rested, energized, and emotionally grounded helps you catch misalignment early. This prevents burnout and keeps your decisions rooted in clarity rather than overwhelm.
  2. Audit how you spend your time each week: Regularly reviewing whether your time aligns with what you value ensures life doesn’t default into routine. This empowers you to redesign your days with intention rather than habit.
  3. Identify the specific source of discomfort when you feel off: Pinpointing whether the issue is connection, health, play, finances, or purpose makes solutions more targeted. This shortens recovery time and replaces prolonged funks with quick, meaningful adjustments.
  4. Practice letting go of rigid outcomes: Releasing the need to control everything allows you to fully engage in the process and stay open to better opportunities. This shift turns confirmation bias into an ally, helping you notice what supports your goals.
  5. Create a protected space for reflection and creativity: Scheduling uninterrupted time — even a midweek pause — gives you room to imagine, plan, and reconnect with what matters. This dedicated space becomes the engine for long-term fulfillment and aligned growth.
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Episode Transcript:

[00:00:15] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Hello, and welcome to the Lessons from the Leap. I’m your host Ghazenfer Mansoor. On this show, I get to sit down with entrepreneurs, founders, and business leaders who talk about bold decisions, pivotal moments and innovative ideas that shape their journeys. 

This episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers. At technology rivers we bring innovation through technology and AI to solve real world industry problems. We do this in two ways. First, by helping businesses streamline and automate their operations.

And second, by partnering with startup founders, entrepreneurs, and product owners to create innovative software products from Saas platform to web and mobile apps. A big part of our focus is healthcare where we work with health tech companies to build secure and HIPAA compliant products. If you wanna learn more about us, head over to technology riverse.com and tell us more about your product.

Today we are joined by Stavros Michailidis. Stavros welcome to the show. Tell our audience, just give us your background, what have you achieved so far, and we can go from there.

[00:01:20] Stavros Michailidis: Hey, Ghazenfer, thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. My name is Stavros Michailidis.  I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life.

I actually just got off the phone with someone. I said, when did you know you were an entrepreneur? And he said, when I was six. And, I think I was about the same way. It never occurred to me that you could do anything else. So, lifelong entrepreneurs started, many companies failed a lot, succeeded some enough, I guess.

And I guess maybe some interesting things about me is I’m one of the few people in the world who has a degree in creativity and human creativity.  It’s kind of rare in the entrepreneurial community, and that really came from realizing that I tried to study business and I kind of said, yeah, this all kind of sounds logical and straightforward.

I tried to study other things, but when I discovered the field of creativity. It was kind of like I found my tribe, I found my home, I found the people who, who liked to do what I did, which was start things from scratch. And then once they were up and running and normalized,  you know, you kinda get bored if you’re a real creative and you wanna start something new from scratch.

So I really like things that have beginnings, middles, and ends, and,  and I’ve spent my life doing that.

[00:02:28] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Oh, thank you. Degree in creativity as you were talking, that reminded me of Steve Jobs who said. Because as he dropped the school I think he went, he took the course in Calligraphy and later he said that looking back, that course was probably the best he has ever done. 

And if he had not done that, Apple would not have been there. So sometimes these different degrees actually make us more unique and better.

[00:02:59] Stavros Michailidis: Yeah, I think so. I think so. Yeah. You, you study something that not everybody’s studying and so you have an edge.

I often think about that because I’m just guessing, but I would guess that if any one of us put 20 hours worth of work in learning something that we don’t normally know, we’d probably know more than 80% of the population on that topic. It probably does not take a lot of hours to learn more than 80% of the population.

And what happens when you do that and you pick different things? You end up learning a lot about a lot to a level higher than most people, and that makes you. I don’t know. Interesting, interested. I don’t, I don’t know, but I find that I’m always drawn to new topics that I know nothing about, and I can put about 20, 30 hours into learning something.

My son is that way too. He loves getting obsessed with new things. He finds a new thing, he gets obsessed. He really digs into it, gets his teeth wrapped around. Then he is onto the next thing. He’s onto a new thing. But so much of what keeps life interesting is learning new things.

[00:04:01] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Absolutely. I mean, and, and, and great insight. You’re right.  even a small reading, how much difference does it make? 

So I mean, if you look at how successful people, many of them, like how much do they read? Yeah, it seems a lot. But even reading 10 pages a day makes a huge difference. So you’re right on that.

[00:04:24] Stavros Michailidis: Yeah. You don’t need to be an expert, right? Like, I’m not saying the 20 hours will make you the world’s leading expert. But it’ll teach you more than, you know, four fifths of the people out there. And that’s quite a lot,  comparatively.

[00:04:36] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Absolutely, absolutely. Small, small things pile up. So, you described your mission as helping entrepreneurs design lives that serve them, not just their businesses. What inspired that shift in how you define success?

[00:04:52] Stavros Michailidis: Yeah, a great question. I think part of the entrepreneurial journey for me was starting these companies and I really had this creative desire to start new things. And somewhere along the line I feel that I would always sacrifice that creativity for making money or for the extrinsic for the decisions that we make in order to satisfy the business.

And somewhere in all of these businesses, I would end up losing myself for the business, or finding my place in the. In a situation where I just wasn’t happy, I had built a company that I didn’t like working in, and this had happened more than once. So I started to really shift and say, what is it that I really want?

How am I measuring success? And is my behavior lining up with what I want? And so I wanna spend more time with my family. I wanna spend more time with my kids. I wanna have love in my life. I wanna feel healthy. I wanna have vitality. I wanna feel wealthy.  I mean, for a long time I even would ask myself, I said, am I wealthy?

Like, I didn’t know how to answer that question because yes, there was a certain amount of money in the bank, but I didn’t feel wealthy.  and you know now I don’t even think money has much to do with wealth. I think it’s more of an attitude of how you feel about time.  Do I have clarity? Do I have growth?

Am I, you know, expanding? Am I learning? Do I play, do I have joy? Do I go on adventures? you know, do I have meaning in my life? Do I feel like my life matters? And, ultimately, like most entrepreneurs, do I have agency,  do I feel like I control, like I’m the author of my own life? Because I think so many of us as entrepreneurs, that’s the number one reason we go into starting businesses is ’cause we wanna control our own calendar, our own fate, our own time.

And I realized that I was sacrificing all these things for the business. I needed to rewrite that script. I needed to basically come from a place of saying, how do I satisfy those things rather than, how do I make a business that’s gonna make me a lot of money? And then later when I have a lot of money, then I’m gonna have the time to get all those things.

And I feel that that formula is a trap that a lot of us get into. And it’s very backwards. You have to make the time and the space for all of those things in the moment. And your business is one of them, but it’s not the only one.

[00:07:06] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Absolutely. Okay. And, and, and I, yeah,  I see that you talk about that measuring success differently. So what should we be measuring instead of just revenue and growth? 

[00:07:20] Stavros Michailidis: I’ll give you the very, very simple measure. Did I have a good night’s sleep last night? Did I have a good day right before I go to bed? If I feel good and I’m resting well. That me. For me, that means that whatever’s going on inside with all the complexity can really be simplified away to just am I well.

And I know when I’m not well, when I wake up and I’m like all, I don’t really wanna do what’s going on today, I don’t feel well rested. Or when I’m getting to bed and my mind is still racing and thinking about everything I still have to do, I know that I’m not in the moment. I know that I’m not well. I know that I need to address something.

Those buckets that I listed out before, those are usually what I try to address. Do I feel like a lack of connection is going on? Do I feel like I’m not healthy enough? Do I feel like I’m not playing enough? Do I feel like I am, you know, worried and anxious about money? So which of those things is it that’s really bugging me?

I then kind of identify it and that’s okay. What do I need to do about that to address that one issue and put it to bed? And it is hard. It is very, very hard. However, I’ve had a lot of years of practice and what’s happened with the many years of practice is the time between figuring out something’s not right and the fix is now only a couple of hours to a couple of days at worse.

Where earlier in my life, I could be in a funk for months and not get out of it and not know, you know what I mean? And so that practice of figuring out exactly what’s wrong and how do I satisfy that,  it gets easier with time. And, like most things in life, it requires effort and practice and dedication.

[00:09:05] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah. Cool, cool, cool.So Routine Rebel, It’s very intriguing name. Tell us more about it. Like so, and what does it represent for you personally and what does being a rebel mean in the entrepreneurial world? Yeah, and what does that community stand for? I know I’m asking a lot of those questions.

[00:09:27] Stavros Michailidis: I have a history of naming my companies  as oxymorons. So two things that are opposite each other kind of smooshed together.  I had a company called Innovation Bound which my brother now runs,  you know, no Innovation, which is the company that I have with two partners,  KNOW, by the way But, that’s a bit of an opposite. And then now routine Rebel.  

I think routine rebel can be interpreted two ways. One is rebelling against the routine, right? Just kind of breaking the status quo of doing the same thing the other day. And then the other one that it could be viewed as is, being a rebel continuously.

Unlike that your routine is being a rebel. And I think both of those. Are true for me. I think I have a love-hate relationship with my routine. When I reached, when I became a middle-aged man, there was nothing better than refining my routine. It became an art form. It’s like, well, if I leave here three minutes earlier and, and it’s eventually, I realized there was a bit of a sickness, but I do love to get a lot of things done.

Having a routine is one way to make sure that you’re getting a lot of things done and at the same time, if you’re living the same day over and over and over again, it gets a little boring and tedious. And so I also like to switch it up so I have a bit of a love hate relationship with my routine. I guess routine Rebel at its core is an invitation.

It’s an invitation to people to say, what are you doing with your time? And is that what you wanna be doing with your time? And if the answer is, what I’m doing with my time is phenomenal and I love it, then keep at it. There’s nothing much to change. Right. But if. The answer is, you know what? I don’t like how I’m using my time.

I don’t feel like I’m getting the fulfillment I want out of life with the way I’m using my time. I think that’s the opportunity to change what it is you do, because ultimately, if you’re complaining about the results in some way or form, you created those results. And even if you didn’t create them, you have to make it your responsibility to change your behavior if you hope to get different results.

So at the end of the day, it’s an extreme ownership of one’s self-satisfaction, self  quality of life, wellness.

[00:11:48] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah. Thanks for sharing. You also helped GoFund, the New York says Thank you Foundation, which supported disaster recovery efforts after 9/11. How did that experience shape your outlook on service and proper driven work?

[00:12:05] Stavros Michailidis: So the New York says Thank you Foundation was an effort started by a gentleman named Jeff Parness. And, I was actually running a construction company and Jeff was a former client and Jeff called me up and he said, I’m watching CNN with my son. And there’s a little girl and she’s in her Halloween costume.

And,  she doesn’t have a home. And so this was just to give you a timeframe, this was like maybe early November. So the fact that this little girl was still wearing her Halloween costume made his son, ask him the question, said, daddy, why is this girl still, you know, why, why is she still wearing her Halloween costume?

He said, well, her house burned down and this whole area there was these wildfires and a lot of people lost their house. And the little boy said, well, what if we send some toys and some clothes to our aunt who lives nearby? Can she give them to this little girl? And Jeff said to me, so Stavros, I told my son, we live in a building with 396 other families.

So I got a big old box and I put it in the lobby and I said, donations for the wildfire victims. And he goes, not only was this box full this morning, but there was another box next to it, and then another box next to it. And there’s just donations pouring all over the lobby. He said, I’m gonna drive this stuff.

I’m gonna put it in a truck and I’m gonna drive it across country. Do you wanna come with me? You have one hour to think about it. And then he hangs up on me and I immediately called him back and I said, if you give me a whole hour to think about this, surely the answer will be no. So I was like, let’s go.

And so I think it was maybe a day or two later, we got into a truck and a friend of mine happened to be walking by, going to work. And I said, Hey, do you wanna come with us? We’re doing it. He said, sure. So he, he like, called in and quit his job on the spot and got in the truck with us and we started driving this truck across country.

We made those donations. We picked up more stuff along the way. And then when we got there we asked, Jeff asked, he said, what is it that you guys really need? He said, well, all the kids are really bored, so we need some way to entertain the kids. So when we came back, Jeff went to the school that his kids were going to, and they collected donations from the school around toys and things like that.

And he took all those out. I think we made that trip together. We took the toys out and then we made another trip back where we started building homes. We started to rebuild homes. This was a while later, maybe six, seven months later. And what that ended up being is that the, on the anniversary of September 11th.

We would take New Yorkers first responders, fire firefighters, policemen. We would take them somewhere in the country to do disaster recovery. And the most beautiful thing happened is that first year we went, we built two homes, and then the next year we went to plant some trees. But everybody from that previous community wanted to come with us the next year.

So not only did we have the first responders from New York, but we also had the entire community. We affected the first year, and then the second year, those people then wanted to come to the third year. And over the course of many years. The community became very, very large. I think Jeff went on to spawn many other not-for-profits from that and, and did quite a lot of good and impact.

Had a lot of impact in this world. And I really just consider myself rather than co-founder, I would say I was really Jeff’s first follower. I was the first person who said, yeah, I’m not gonna think about this. Let’s just help and let’s just do it. And that resulted in me getting to be part of this journey and seeing it happen and,  and being involved in a not-for-profit which has its own You know, with time with not-for-profits, you have governance issues and you have those kinds of things. So I got exposure to that side of organizations,  as opposed to for-profit, which was also interesting education there on the side.

[00:15:51] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Wow. Very inspiring.  inspiring and many lessons out of that, especially I think I would take to that kid who actually suggested his dad that, okay, we should do that because that one motivation by that and one suggestion.

I think, and this also reminds me from a business perspective, we look at it like as we are looking at things, we don’t look at things straight. Many times, we have to look like what other problems or what other opportunities that may open up for you. I mean, in this case, obviously it’s, it’s a prolo how you, whether you make a nonprofit or whatever out of it, but somebody figured out, okay that wearing the costume in November was a different reason, and now there’s an opportunity to help those people. 

And secondly, I also picked up one thing from you like you said, if it gives me an hour, I probably, the answer would be no. Many time we see that, even my case, Berkeley, sometime you just make a decision move because the longer you wait more chances are that you will have other thoughts coming in, and then when you start comparing, it just doesn’t get things done. 

[00:17:12] Stavros Michailidis: When I started Routine Rebel,  culture was really important to me.  I guess I would say the biggest learning of all my entrepreneurial journeys is that at the end of the day, culture is what makes a company successful.

Culture is what makes a company pleasant to work in. And so, we sat down and we defined some core values and so, and then some supporting strategies. And,  and one of our strategies is delightfully named Send the Effing email, which is just to remind you that sometimes you just gotta take action.

There is no point in overthinking it. There’s no point in. Double guessing or trying to make it better. Just take the action and see what happens. And we gotta have that kind of courage sometimes,  in order to make things happen. And sometimes thinking gets in the way of that courage. Right? You overthink.

I’m very guilty of overthinking. I could do that all day long. So we all, having somebody remind me of having that cultural value and having one of my colleagues go, no, send the effing email. You know what I mean? It makes me kind of find that courage in that moment where maybe it’s hiding.

[00:18:23] Ghazenfer Mansoor: We are all guilty of that, so don’t feel bad.

So,  you also taught entrepreneurship at the University of South Florida, and you were known for hands-on approach. What did you want your students to learn?  to walk away with what textbook wouldn’t teach them?

[00:18:42] Stavros Michailidis: Yeah. Gee, I don’t know. Can you learn entrepreneurship from a textbook? What’s your, I mean, what’s your experience?

[00:18:51] Ghazenfer Mansoor: I don’t think so.

[00:18:54] Stavros Michailidis: I mean, there’s definitely terms you can learn, terms, you can learn what things are called. You can learn strategies, right? You can definitely learn strategies. So I think textbooks, and I mean books, podcasts, it doesn’t matter where you get your information from, but I think all of that can help you accelerate your journey.

It can help you learn from other people’s mistakes so that you don’t have to make them yourself firsthand. At the end of the day, I think entrepreneurship itself is a set of beliefs, a set of habits, a set of, it’s an attitude. And what I really wanted my students to believe was that it was possible that you can go and start a company.

Your only choice is not to go and get a job, right? You can, you can, you know, and especially while you’re in college, while your next three or four years are taken care of. That’s the time to try to build something to see if you can get something off the ground. And so I remember I taught,  I taught several classes.

One of them was called New Venture Creation, and the very first semester I taught new venture creation, I said, okay, as part of this class, we’re going to start businesses and we’re gonna split into teams of teams of four. And whichever team makes the most money is gonna get A’s. Whichever team gets the next post, and I was just like, your grades basically depended on how much money you make.

And these kids were in shock. They did not understand. Their grade would actually be dependent on a real world outcome, and they, they pushed back and they fought and  and at the end of the day, they did it. And a lot of them made money and a lot of them didn’t but they all learned really important lessons.

I didn’t fail anybody who gave it their honest best effort but there were winners. There were people who got A’s because they outperformed. And there were plenty of people who got Bs and C’s because they tried, they did what they can. And that’s very realistic to what happens in entrepreneurship is The results is the results and  and you can get better. 

I mean, some people are very, very good at getting great results with very little effort ’cause they have a lot of strategy and they have a lot of history and they have a lot of connections and some people it’s just luck. You just try really hard.

There is a lot of luck in entrepreneurship. You try really hard, you do everything right and you still don’t succeed. And that’s just part of the game.

[00:21:17] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yep. You have to make an effort. Yeah. And one also thing I realized that,  and it’s same for everybody. You gradually find yourself so many, I think with this opportunity, I’m sure there’ll be some people who didn’t think that they could be an entrepreneurial because you have certain natural skills.

But you never open it because you are pushed into that. And many people just go to schools to study something because there are more opportunities. Their parents are pushing them. Their circle is, but then realizing later on, okay, really that’s not what I really, how many people go back and reflect. So sometime these opportunities just give those people opportunity to open up and figure it out. Oh, this is something, I enjoy.

[00:22:07] Stavros Michailidis: I’m really proud that I’m still friends with many of those students and they are actual entrepreneurs running real businesses. There’s entrepreneurs in there who have had seven figure exits. There’s entrepreneurs in there who have failed and learned a lot and tried again, and new businesses, and there’s a lot of them in there that run businesses that are growing slowly and, and steadily.

So,  I think that’s what I’m proudest of, is those. Those kids, you know what I mean? Those young adults who went on to, to succeed, who actually made use of the knowledge. And I don’t think I really don’t think like a textbook. I gave them the right answer. Right? Like we’re saying that that’s not possible.

I think all I did was encourage them and give them the opportunity to experiment and prove for themselves, to themselves that they were able, they had it in them to, to do what needed to be, do, done. And so I’m very proud.

[00:22:59] Ghazenfer Mansoor: That’s entrepreneurship. Go figure it out. Yeah. Yeah. So if you could go back, go and give your young entrepreneurial self one piece of advice before all the ventures teaching and boards, what would it be?

[00:23:16] Stavros Michailidis: If I could give myself one piece of advice before when?

[00:23:22] Ghazenfer Mansoor: If you could give, yourself one piece of advice before all the ventures, teaching boards, activities that you’ve done, what it would be.

[00:23:33] Stavros Michailidis: I always find this question hard because at the highest level, I don’t think I would give myself any advice because I think it is just part of the process is the learning and, and just letting myself learn.

Like if I did it again, I’m sure it would be done a completely different way. I understand that 

[00:23:57] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So what would that lesson be?

[00:23:59] Stavros Michailidis: Right the so that’s what I’m saying is, is at the highest level. I wouldn’t give myself a lesson because I think you’d have to go and try again. But to make the question more satisfying, I would say to my young self, go and get as much deal flow experience as possible.

Go and work somewhere where you can see a lot of deals, whether that’s a venture capital firm or a PE firm, or a banking firm, or a law firm, or what. Go somewhere where you can see a lot of deal flow because at the end of the day, entrepreneurship is about making things happen and making deals and connecting dots.

And so much of the shortcomings that I had as an entrepreneur is that I had to. Learn a lot of those lessons while I was doing entrepreneurship, whereas if I had gone and spent five years just seeing lots of deals, I think I could have learned a lot from those and then applied them to myself and made less mistakes and learned faster.

It would’ve been a hard, I don’t think I would’ve taken my own advice because I was so impatient. To get to building companies that I don’t think I actually could have survived if I had gone somewhere. So that’s my advice and an admission that I probably wouldn’t have taken it myself either.

[00:25:22] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Okay. Okay, do you, do you read books? What’s one book or idea that changed your thinking about leadership? Or any new learning that you had recently. 

[00:25:39] Stavros Michailidis: Two books that I read recently that stand out to me were Die with Zero and 4,000 Weeks and maybe an interesting one, and they both have some similarities.

But maybe an interesting lesson learned from 4,000. Is that we, there’s, there’s so many things that are option optionality, I guess is what I’m after like money. All of these things have optionality with them where they can be infinitely transformed into whatever you want. And so your goal becomes to get them and you figure when you have enough of them, you can go and get whatever else it is that you want.

And I feel that that kind of distorts reality. I feel like that’s a formula for unhappiness and. I think those are some of the books that gave me permission to really embrace not pursuing money as a primary motive and being, I mean, I had already kind of embraced this approach, but. I think what these books did for me is they, they normalized it.

They took it from something that I just kind of felt, and I thought I knew somebody else had actually put words to those feelings and said, you know, you don’t, you don’t have to follow the standard advice. And take all your money and put it into a 401k and spend it one day and then leave, you know, an estate and do the following things for taxes.

And you don’t have to spend the first 40 years of your life doing X, Y, and Z. And so it’s okay to go completely out of order and, and do the things you want to do now. So even though I felt that way, these books helped me normalize it.  another good set of books. Are by Mickey Singer, the Surrender Experiment and the Untethered Soul.

I would read them in that order,  the surrender experiment’s, the story of his life, and he talks about how letting go and just kind of giving into the flows of life,  led him to have his success, which was a very inspiring read. Then followed by the Untethered Soul, I believe it’s called the Untethered Soul, which is a bit of his philosophy about how you get there.

I don’t know, I liked reading the story first ’cause that provided the inspiration and then the framework followed after. And that helped me kind of internalize it and make it my own a little bit and use it. But those are some practices that I, I really hold to, which is that you, it was the hardest, the hardest lesson for me to learn as an entrepreneur was to let go, let go of control.

And what did it for me is gratitude because I realized that 99.9% of the things that I was extremely grateful for in my life, I was not actually controlling, my health. My children like all of these, so much of what I was just lucky enough to be surrounded by was out of my control, and I would spend much more of my time.

Worrying about the very sliver, the small, tiny thing that I thought I had a lot of control over and I would be miserable. And so eventually gratitude and being grateful for those things gave way to just kinda let go and be like, okay, this isn’t how I want it, but there’s so many other things that are amazing, so let me let this go and see what happens. And what ended up happening was actually really amazing because I think, so I try to teach people. 

Five practices. One is talk to yourself, which is about getting to know yourself. It’s about self-reflection. The second practice is let go, which like I said, it was the hardest for me. The third practice is make things happen, which is almost the exact opposite, but something fundamentally shifts or something fundamentally shifted for me when I started to make things happen after I had let go, since I had let go of the outcome.

I could fully immerse myself in the journey, and my confirmation bias started to work for me rather than against me. So rather than seeing things that I’m like, this does not support what I want to do, I would start seeing the things that did support what I wanted to do. And I would be grateful for those, and I would acknowledge those things and I would say thank you.

And that behavior and that acknowledgement and that confirmation bias then started to bring more of those things. Because I started behaving a different way. I started thinking a different way. I started making decisions in a different way, and the more I let go and the more I kind of focused my intention on what I wanted to happen, the more it started to just kind of happen in life.

And, and you know, I mean, a lot of people use the word manifestation. I don’t believe in, like pure woo woo manifestation, but I do believe. If you set your sights on something and you let go of the outcome and you embrace the journey, and you are grateful for the things along the way, that sooner or later you get those things that you want.

And when you notice them and double down on them, it kind of compounds like interest compounds. And eventually you start creating the life you want because you are trying to make things happen after you’ve let go.  

Just to round it off. So the five practices are, talk to yourself. Let go, make things happen, connect with others. Because the real joy of life is when you have others to surround yourself with. And then keep it simple. ’cause we can make things very complicated, very, very quickly. And normally we don’t need most of that.

[00:31:08] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Thank you. Thank you. That those were really valuable. And I did read Die With Zero. I will check out these other books. So we have been talking to Stavros Michailidis. We have shared such valuable insights with us today. One last question before we wrap Stavros you’re starting a podcast. Tell us more about that. 

[00:31:36] Stavros Michailidis: So the podcast is called Wednesdays Off and it’s about taking Wednesdays off and I think,  I know a lot of entrepreneurs who take Wednesdays off and,  most of the most successful ones actually take Wednesdays off, and Wednesday seems to be this perfect day where you’ve gotten the week started, but it’s not quite at the end. And you have this space in the middle of the week that you can take for yourself.

And so for me Wednesdays for a long time have become the place in my life where I create what I want next. Sometimes it’s just time with my wife. Sometimes it’s just time at the gym. Sometimes it’s planning my next business or whatever it is. But that space on Wednesday is entirely for me in order to get more of what I want in life.

And, so the Wednesdays Off podcast people don’t have to take Wednesdays off. I can make an argument for why I think that’s a good day, but it’s, it’s basically to, it’s basically a podcast that will allow people to give themselves permission to pursue what they really want in life and. I wanna do that by focusing on a lot of the lies that we tell ourselves and the things that we believe to be true and the stories we tell ourselves.

And I wanna help people break those. And so I’m hoping to bring guests on that.  pick one of those areas, one of those lies, and then walk people through what are the patterns. How do you, you know, what is it that they, what’s the pain point that they’re gonna recognize? How are they actually creating that?

How is that becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy and they’re creating that pain point in their life? What’s that pattern look like? And then what is the permission they need both emotional and cognitive in order to get past that and it’ll give themselves permission to behave a different way. And then how do they start to implement that?

What’s the practice? How do they start to make that part of their life part of their journey? So if the Wednesday’s Off podcast is successful, it will have done that. It will have helped people redefine success and given themselves permission to behave a different way so that they can hopefully generate different results.

[00:33:38] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Absolutely. And we will release this on Wednesday so that people can read on, and listen to it on Wednesday. So where can people learn more about you and your work? Is LinkedIn the best place? Is there any other place you want people to go find you if they want to talk to you?

[00:33:59] Stavros Michailidis: The easiest to remember is probably routine rebel.com and there’s links there to, to everything else.

I am somewhat active on LinkedIn. I publish articles there about once a week.  I also have a substack with those articles and a newsletter. You can subscribe for either of those through the website. So I would say routine rebel.com is the best place to get started.

[00:34:21] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Awesome. Thank you very much Stavros

[00:34:23] It was great to have you on our show.

[00:34:26] Stavros Michailidis: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. It was lovely being on it.