Freedom from the Grind with Sagi Shrieber

In This Episode

• [02:22] – Sagi Shrieber’s origin story: from launching his design career in 2007 to becoming Fiverr’s first designer in 2011 and later scaling the design team at SimilarWeb.
• [07:33] – Breaking limiting beliefs: how they hold us back in life and business.
• [18:47] – The “Nine to Twelve Rule”: prioritizing morning time for mental fitness and productivity.
• [26:47] – Handling client demands without guilt: Sagi’s approach to self-acceptance and balance.
• [31:35] – Building resilience through mental fitness and consistent practice.
• [34:12] – How challenges build confidence, skills, and habits for long-term success.
• [38:17] – The “Card Theory”: a framework for career and business growth.
• [39:20] – How to connect with Sagi Shrieber: LinkedIn, podcast Commit First, and more.

Jump to Links and Resources

Sagi, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Thanks so much. Stephan, great to be here. 

So let’s first of all start with your origin story. How did you get to be an entrepreneur and an agency owner? How did you become an expert at brand building and marketing?

I mean, long story short, we’ll try to make it as short as possible, right? I mean, I’ve been in the designing kind of industry since 2007, when I just started, also in design school. In 2010, I began working with companies that are product-based, such as startups. And in 2011, I became the first designer at Fiverr. I was the first designer in the company, working with the founders on Fiverr, the platform. 

And then after that, I had my own startup. We were in an accelerator in UpWest Labs in Silicon Valley. Came back and got acquired by Similarweb. So I became the first designer at Similarweb, another big Israeli startup. We scaled rapidly, created an entire design system, and built the entire design team from scratch. So that was kind of like the way of building a career. But then I left. 

I was also a content creator, building my personal brand. I had two blogs, one in Hebrew and one in English, covering international design, as well as a blog and a podcast. And that podcast took off, and one day I just left, kind of like the tech world or my day job, to work as a podcast host full-time. It was an interesting, fun experience for about a year or so. And then, since then, kind of like entrepreneurship, building businesses. 

In 2020, I founded a design agency, which has become my primary business. I have a team of 15 people, and we’re working internationally with different clients, and also kind of invested in other businesses. And became co-founder, just recently, of an amazing business that helps personal branding for business owners, which one of my best friends is actually running. I’ve been a very happy customer for a while now. So when the opportunity came, I jumped on it, and that’s pretty much it. 

Awesome. And you’re also building apps, or at least working with a team on some apps. Tell me about affirmations.co. 

I’m a strong believer in mental fitness. Breaking limiting beliefs is the most impactful place to start.

Yeah. I have an app in the App Store. I mean, it was kind of like a side project to me. I wanted something for me from an affirmation standpoint. I’m big on personal development and on mental fitness. I think one of the biggest things for us as entrepreneurs is that we can break limiting beliefs and blockages.

I think limiting beliefs is one of the lowest-hanging fruit that we can take care of to elevate ourselves. And blockages are something, let’s say, more complex. It’s like past traumas and stuff like that that really affected our subconscious mind that we have to work with therapists on. But as entrepreneurs or marketers, whoever. Listening to this, like, we have ambitions, right? And we have where we want to go, so the places we want to go, like the far places that the mountains we want to conquer, those. 

I mean, we can build a vision and work with an amazing work ethic to get there. We can utilize business coaches and masterminds to explore various strategies for achieving our goals, such as reading books and listening to podcasts, as well as learning and working more effectively. However, eventually, you can only fly so high without breaking the chains and shedding the weights of past traumas and limiting beliefs. So I really believe in that. I’m really big on that as well. So therapists, I always work with a therapist like consciousness therapists and of different sorts, and then on the side of the limiting beliefs, they’re so easy with affirmation. 

So I created an app for affirmations. It’s called affirmations, and it’s on the App Store. It’s free, and basically, what you can do is just kind of download the app, set up widgets on your phone, push notifications, you know, and it reminds you of your affirmations. You can get inspired by others’ affirmations. It’s just something so simple. Alternatively, you can invite your friends to create affirmations and build on each other’s affirmations. You click a simple plus, and now it becomes your affirmation as well. So it’s kind of an easy way to get more ideas for affirmations as well. 

What are some of your affirmations? 

Well, I have different ones. I am actually in the app. You can manage lists. So I also manage my vision items in the app. So you have, like, lists of affirmations, and you have, I can, you know, open the app and kind of read it for you. 

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Yeah, that’d be great. 

So, regarding the lists, I manage a few lists here, because I manage lists of, like, let’s say, the business of waking up or before sleep. I have what’s called ask formations, which are kind of the way of asking questions instead of saying affirmations, which are kind of statements, and you ask questions. I have gratitude lists. I have a vision list for my yearly goals. 

I also have some deep-seated limiting beliefs, which I’ve noticed when I come across an affirmation that contradicts one of them. I can then read it and add it to the app. Now it becomes, you know, something that I see regularly. And have some prayers as well. So, yeah, let’s, let’s see a few. Why not?

So maybe start with the limiting beliefs. What are some limiting beliefs in your list?

Deep limiting beliefs? Sure. I mean, here’s one. I’m a magnet for positive experiences, and I tracked goodness and joy into my life.

Okay, so that’s the positive, but what was the limiting belief that caused you to create that affirmation?

This is not as much a deep, limiting belief that I’m not a magnet for positive experiences, but it comes from two things. I live in Israel, so we’re here experiencing war, and war is hard and creates a very negative experience. We’re surrounded by chaos. We’re surrounded by the news, which is super negative. 

We have an actual, really negative situation all over the world, and we’re getting hate. I’m getting hate because of Israel. Essentially, when I fall into a negative mindset, I tend to attract more negative experiences into my life. It’s just a kind of rule of nature when you’re putting energy, which is negative, because you got negative by watching something on the news or anything like that. The energy you put out is an energy that you get basically from experiences in your life.

It’s why, when you have a day that becomes a bad day, because one negative experience leads you to bad negative energy that attracts more negative, basically, it’s kind of your frequency. And so once you set the frequency like a radio station, something, an event you couldn’t control, sets it to a negative energy that’s within your control, to change it back to a positive one, then you will not have a bad day. But then once you do set it to a negative energy, you’ll find that a bad day happens one experience after another. It happens in a chain of events. 

My inner work has shown me that abundance is the ultimate truth.

So that’s one, I can tell you another one. So I am a creator, not a competitor. Abundance is the only truth and reality that comes from the work that I’ve done on myself. I can actually read it now, and I’m saying I’m so much better than I was. Like, I think this list I wrote, like, about, think, a year and a half ago, two years ago, and it’s such a thing. I felt like I’m competing in the market a lot. I was like, you know, more on the competitive side, like, “No, I’m a creator.” Once you’re in competition mode, it’s not healthy. You should be a creator. You should be in creation mode.

Yeah, because life isn’t a zero-sum game. Some people will imagine that to be, and then they create that reality for themselves. But in actuality, it’s not a competition. It’s a competition. You can create amazing things by working together with seeming competitors, and the one plus one equals three or four scenarios can oftentimes come about.

Yes, Stephan, massive financial gains are so low-hanging fruit to me; they come easily, and it’s completely okay. Now it’s an interesting thing. But what I found out with therapists, actually, with my therapist back then, is that we tracked back. Why I found it, I had a limiting belief, or a lot of limiting beliefs, but basically, like a really deep belief that to succeed in business, you have to work really, really, really hard. 

And then my therapist is like,” Do you actually really believe that, that you really have to work, really hard?” Like, and I’m like, “Yeah, look at all the people around us, like, they work really, really hard to achieve what they achieved”. And she’s like,” but did you find that things come to you really hard, that things don’t come easy to you?” And I’m like, “Yeah, nothing comes easy.” And she’s like, “well, could it be that because you believe that things don’t come easy. They just don’t like, that’s what you believe in. That’s the reality you create for yourself.” And I’m like, “yeah,” and, you know, we worked through that. And then I remember something that. 

Anyway, I recall something my grandmother once told me that helped create this belief. She installed this belief in me when I was, like, 20 years old, and she said something. And I love my grandmother to death. She’s such a good influencer in my life. The one thing she said, just one, you know, just requires one thing that someone you really love and believe in tells you that now you believe it. 

Success in business doesn’t always require endless hard work—that’s a limiting belief I had to unlearn.

But one thing she said was kind of like,” We the Shrieber will always work hard, but we’ll never be rich”. And I’m like, “Wow, I didn’t even remember.” She told me that you came in therapy, you know, like all the time. I recall that she told me that it was so clear to me, the sentence is engraved. It became engraved, kind of like in my subconscious. I now repel it. I don’t believe in that at all. 

So I worked really hard in the past year, or even, like, a year and a half, to believe that things don’t have to be hard, I mean, and that’s something that I really think I made progress in a lot, I don’t feel I need to. It’s kind of like Bruce Lee says, “Be water. We sometimes think things get hard, but if we believe that we’re water, and we don’t have to, we don’t have to be tough or anything like that.” It’s kind of like the masculine versus feminine energy, whatever. I really believe that you can have an easier life in the same games.

That’s really cool. Thank you for sharing that. What do you think of some of the limiting beliefs of our listener who is into marketing, maybe a business owner or entrepreneur? Take a guess at maybe what our listener might be struggling with, maybe not even without realizing it.

Here’s something that recently came up in my life with my therapist that I’d like to share. I wrote a post on LinkedIn as well. I just shared it yesterday, and I think it goes for a lot of people now. A lot of people working here are hard workers and have built their careers. And now, with AI coming into the game, there’s a lot of fear, the fear that we always had, that we actually had since COVID. I think I do believe that we had this fear of, like, losing everything. 

And some of us have lost everything before. If you’re an entrepreneur, you probably had some setbacks, and I had some, for sure. For instance, in 2017 and after, I tried to be a full-time podcaster, and I kind of failed. I lost everything. I was in debt, and then in 2019, again, I tried to make a business move, which cost me everything again, and I had to rebuild. And I never had that fear until 2017, and then I thought I had overcome it. Then, in 2019, I recall that it took me years to avoid getting a stomachache when the bank called. For instance, in 2022, I still experienced actual stomachaches when I saw a phone call from the bank. It could be about anything, any small, minor issue, but that creates a kind of trauma that you have to heal. 

I think with AI coming into the game and threatening all of our livelihoods nowadays, most people are fearing that they will lose it all. And it’s kind of like a foam on one end. And we see like, the death of marketing. Like, marketing is dead. You know, whatever, whatever your profession is. Fill in the blank. Your profession is now dead. AI will take over here, you know, and whatever might happen. So, what the therapist said to me was, “What do you actually fear?” I told her, “I’m actually afraid of losing it all. “

And she said,” Okay, but have you lost it all before?” And I said, “Yeah”. So she said, “What have you lost? List me like, how much were you in debt and what happened?” And I told her what happened, and she said, “People lost way more than that in their lives.” Come on, Sagi, but you know what? Let’s, for a second, look at what you lost, and you feel that you lost. Did you manage to get out of that tough spot? “And we’re like,’ yeah.’ Did you manage to rebuild and even become better?”. I’m like,” Yeah.” And she said, “Repeat after me.”

It was something along the lines of, “I’m afraid of losing it all because I’m afraid I will be a…” And then once she said that, she said, “fill in the blank.” I said, at the end of that, I said, “failure. I’m a failure. I’m afraid of being a failure to my wife, to my children, to my community, to myself. I’m just afraid of being a failure”. And she said, “Sagi, you can’t be a failure. I’ll explain to you why. Every time you fell into that tough spot, you managed to climb out, because you never stopped. It’s not because you didn’t fall or anything. You never quit, you never stopped, you always continued. And that’s what you do. I mean, do you believe it?” And she asked me, “Do you believe you can ever stop? “And I’m like, “No, nothing could stop me.”  Like, that’s a sure belief. I believe that. I believe I’ll never stop. She said, “Great. So if that is the thing that will get you through any hurdle, no matter what, then why are you afraid at all?”

You can’t fail if you don’t quit. You’ll simply find a new path and keep moving forward.

So I think that goes for anybody here. I’m like, if you never stop, how can you fail? You can’t. No matter what happens, AI will take over our jobs, whatever. Okay, will you stop? So think about it. What happens if AI now takes over your profession? Well, you’re not going to stop, all right, you’re going to find something else. You’re going to move. You’re going to, and especially, again, going back to the thing of being like water is like, “we’ll be okay, and we’ll find how to make things work.” 

And yeah, there are shitty situations in life that we cannot control, that at one point, the line between really shitty and extremely nothing, like, for instance, war and people losing their house and stuff. Even people who lost their houses in the Iranian war are okay. They lost just their house. Hopefully, if you lose life or you lose a loved one, that’s very terrible. I think a lot of pain is happening around this region here right now, not only in Israel, in Gaza, like, fully aware of the children you know over there, so afraid of the bombs. They don’t have shelters, so pain is everywhere, and really shitty situations do occur to some people in the world. 

But again, going back to career marketers, entrepreneurs, like, we’re afraid of some pretty simple things. Once we put things into perspective, we’re like, we’re never going to stop. So when we never could be a failure, you’re not going to be a failure unless you stop, if you quit, and then again, if you really quit for something, what do you do instead? You probably do something instead. You won’t just stop your life. As humans, we want to be productive. So that’s our kind of like, that’s our vision to always have productivity.

Yeah. Well, I think even deeper than that, it’s to find meaning and to live that meaning. So if your career or your business defines your meaning, that’s quite unfortunate, because that’s just something you do. In contrast, your life is about your being and your life path, your journey, your soul exploration, perhaps healing wounds or addressing personality defects, or whatever else you may be working on. And the money will come, it’ll go, but it’s not who you are. It’s not why you’re here.

Money comes and goes—it’s not your identity. Your life is defined by your being and your purpose.

I mean, definitely. I mean, and we have different kinds of visions for ourselves. I mean, I think it’s completely okay to find your meaning in your business and in endeavors as well, once you believe that this is the way for you to make an impact in the world. Fine. And again, I don’t want to take away from that, but I think going back to everything is productivity. We want to feel productive. We want to feel that we made progress. 

Nobody wants to kind of look back and say, “Oh, I’m in the same spot.” Everybody wants to say, “I want to feel I progressed somewhere in my life, in some aspects,” whatever. And I think one of the things that we fall short of, usually, as entrepreneurs, as marketers, is the happiness and well-being aspect of things, because we’re focused on business, marketing, monetization, and the pressure of life. So, mental fitness is something I’m really big on. I don’t want to be just rich at the end of the day. I want to be happy.

Yeah, it’s amazing. And so how do you bring this purpose, this meaning and this mission to your agency? Because when you’re working on somebody else’s project, somebody else’s mission, you kind of set yourself and your own mission aside to work on theirs, right, and build up their website or whatever, right, build an app for them, or whatever their project is.

For sure. I mean, I think it goes for everybody. I mean, probably a lot of the audience are serving other people, are in the service-based businesses, and even if you’re not, even if you’re like, in a software business or whatever, then you still are serving users, right? So you have work, and you have commitments, and you have deadlines, and you have collaboration that must happen with other people, and other people work at specific hours. Then you have to meet their expectations, and they have a lot of expectations. 

Email is a way for other people’s agendas to take over yours. Like, there are so many like things that are normalized these days, like WhatsApp, or, if you’re in the US, Voxer and whatever, and just texts that people send you, a text they expect, like, a DM, like they expect direct messages. It’s a direct response.

Yeah, they’re looking for those three dots that show that you’re typing something. It’s like, “Come on, let me have my dinner. But I’m at peace.”

Yeah, yeah. And you’re feeling right? You’re feeling kind of like, what do you feel when you don’t answer that direct message? 

Yeah, guilty. 

Guilt. Right? There are things that you need to understand, and they fall into three levels. So number one is understanding, right? You need to just understand. Okay, someone sent you a message. They think that you can be grateful for a second, but they actually want something from you. Thank you for reaching out; I appreciate your understanding. They wanted something from me. Great. 

Number two is acceptance. You can understand, but not accept, that now they’re messaging you in the middle of the night. Whatever, a client messages you at a time when you’re like, ‘ I understand, I need it right now. ‘ Still, it’s completely not right for you to actually send me a message at this time, like. So number two is like, you need to understand and accept. So if you accept it, you’re like, “Okay, I accept that. That person found it. This is the right time to send me a message, whatever.” 

To truly understand, accept, and uplift others, you must first do the same for yourself.

And then you have number three, which is like uplift now, like uplift them in your spirit. Say, “Okay, great.” You’re showing such a great work ethic for this time of day, sending me a message. Now it goes back to how you can actually respond. Now you respond by doing those three things for yourself. So number one, can you understand your position at the moment? Understanding is because the first three can create guilt if you don’t have the next three, which are yourself. So the next three are more important than the first three. 

The first three are easy to understand, right? Understand, accept and uplift. That way, you keep a positive mode, but you still will feel guilt if you don’t have the next three. Next three are understand, which is you need to understand yourself, like, right and like, I understand that I’m also right now eating dinner, Accept. I accept that this is like me putting myself first and uplifting others. Where do you go Sagi for eating dinner and actually caring about eating dinner and being present with your family? If I achieve those three and uplift myself, I will not be in my mind aggressive towards that person or feel guilty for that person. I would actually be in this position of strength to now answer this person politely, or actually not answer at all, and be okay with it. And I think this is what we all lack. 

We can probably understand the first three about the other person. Doing those three for us is the harder part. I think it’s when we need to practice more. I also need to practice more, right? But it goes back to a very first basic principle, do you first? And that’s something that I learned the hard way. And so it’s a way for me. I put myself first, always, and even if it’s in business, that means I’ll let other people down, and it’s okay for me. I’m okay, I do me, because if I do me, and I do those first three for myself, and I keep, you know, working on myself and growing my inner strength, my mental fitness, my spiritual being, when we grow as spiritual beings, we do work on ourselves.

By the way, it’s also physical. So I really believe also in the physical, then we can be in a position of strength, which is not strength as, like masculine strength. It’s just we’re aligned, we’re calm about things, and we don’t have guilt, or we don’t have these kinds of, like, bad feelings, and we can address any issue with more clarity and with precision and show up in a better way for others. 

Put yourself first, your family second, your business third. When you fill your own cup first, everyone else benefits from your overflow. Share on X

So, for instance, how does it translate into my life? For instance, as of 2021, I don’t work from 9 am to 12 noon. I don’t like taking meetings. It doesn’t mean I’m not in the office. Actually, most times I’m not. I’m working out in the morning. Usually, I get to the office or start working around 11. I do answer messages on my Slack and other platforms, usually in the mornings, as it’s typically administrative tasks that people reach out about. 

I delegate tasks when necessary or pass them along within my company. But I don’t take meetings. Everybody knows, don’t book with Sagi before 12. If you want to book at 11 am, you need to have his approval. It’s kind of a thing. Suppose I have a workshop, fine. I’ll let it go. I’m not so stiff about it, but I’m like, it’s my nine-to-12 12 club. That’s how I call it, and it’s time for me first before this whole day starts. 

If people wake up early, that’s also great. I’m just like, I have small children, so it started when I had my now five-year-old, who was very much a baby, and didn’t sleep well at night, so I needed sleep, and to prioritize sleep in my life. Then in the morning, you get the kids ready for school and stuff. So, for me, it wasn’t until 9 am that I was clear of all the kids, as they are in school, and I could start taking care of myself. And so that’s my morning routine kind of thing.

Putting yourself first isn’t selfish. It’s how you show up calm, centered, and fully present for others.

And doesn’t mean I work more. I actually worked less. But when you work out and you come to the office and are ready to roll, you can work like your day until, like, some days until 6 pm, Sundays until like 4 pm for me, and that’s how I grew my business, number one to seven figures, and number two, after that, growing that seven figure. Itt worked for me so far. And I can say it’s been about five years, almost, and it’s still working. 

Sometimes it feels like a stretch, but again, I prioritize myself, and I do those three things for myself, and now I’m way better off. And I guess it always goes for the macro and the micro, macro and micro, because micro is like even when my wife is maybe sometimes, you know, like calling the regular, I guess, phone calls that a lot of people have when they’re at work. The partners at home, the partner calls up and says, “Hey, where are you at? When are you coming home?” 

We have guilt directly, like, immediately. “And I can say that that’s a way that I also kind of work on stuff. When I can get that call from my wife, I understand her, I accept her, and I uplift her. Thank you. Like, if you were in a home right now with the kids in August, I wouldn’t be able to be in the office. You’re amazing. And then doing the three for myself. Like, I also accept that I understand my situation. I’ve worked to do. I accept that I have this work, and it’s very important for the house. That’s what brings food to the table. And I’m also building something, and it’s completely okay for me to feel even not bad about working, but to feel like play, that work is play, and number three is like, that’s such amazing that you know you have these businesses, and that you’re like, responsible for your work and for your clients work. 

And that’s maybe going back to your first question. When I work for others, it comes second after I do work for myself, and that’s how I try to think about things. It’s the Profit First mentality for paying yourself first. It’s doing business with other people. You make sure you’re good first in the deal. You don’t do deals that are not good for you. You put yourself first. Another will respect you for that, and you will be enjoying every single project with every single client way better when you know you’re taking care of yourself in that situation.

Yeah, that’s wise advice. It’s like putting your own oxygen mask on first, as they advise on airplanes, because if you pass out, you can’t help anybody else.

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Exactly, exactly. And that’s such a true thing. I think that kind of twisted, or kind of shifted my mind to start my 9 to 12 is actually a period where I had a terrible situation with business, like it was a very hard, tough time with business. I had one client who went bad and started, like, threatening me and stuff. And I had other things going on, which are really bad, including a lawsuit on my blog for a troll, not something that is like legit, an actual troll that sues people for a living, found a gap in some kind of, like, in the terms of services of the newsletter, and sued me for spam. 

So I was kind of protecting myself in court. And I was like, I was never at court. I was never in a situation like this before; the client has never gone bad in my life. My developer accidentally erased their entire database. And that’s a big, big mess up, right? And I took responsibility for that, for sure. I didn’t blame the developer; developers think someone I brought in is responsible, so I took full responsibility. Still, it was very tough to fix that situation, while you’re also battling in court, and so all these things were going wrong, and I had a baby, and I didn’t sleep well at home. And so, not sleeping well, working super hard, and I was proud of myself for being like a family-first entrepreneur. I always said “family first, family first, ” but then I heard hell, Elrod speak. Do you know how Elrod? The Miracle Morning?

Yeah, he was a guest on my other podcast, on my personal development show, Get Yourself Optimized.

That’s amazing. So, he’s amazing. And he obviously beat cancer. And after he beat cancer, he had a podcast where he said the thing that shifted for him is now putting himself first. It’s kind of in, not in the day-to-day, as much as it’s number one in your mind, in your values, and then he talked about the oxygen mask thing. 

And that’s for me, it’s so true. Suppose I don’t put myself first, above my family, because we usually put our family first. And we say, like we will sacrifice everything for our kids, and like we sacrifice everything, and that’s our mentality. A lot of people end up really sacrificing themselves. And once you sacrifice your own health, your own mental fitness, your own well-being, what do your kids have left? 

Sacrificing your health leaves your family with a depleted, unhappy version of you. Your well-being is a gift to them.

At best, they have an unhappy dad or mom, which is terrible for a role model and someone who’s not present with them. And at the worst, they actually lose you because you can use a lot. You can lose life because you’re getting sick because of your mental state. So I said I’m putting myself first, then my family. Number three, business. That’s how I prioritize everything.

That’s because you’re also modeling for your children how to be in the world. Not only are you bringing very little of yourself home after you’ve rung yourself out all day long, but you’re also modeling being that in the world so that they can replicate that in their adulthood.

Exactly. Yeah, that’s something I really, I’m really big on.

So you’re quite inspiring. Are you podcasting now? Do you do a lot of YouTube videos? Like, how do you get your message? And wisdom out into the world besides being on shows like this.

I mean, mostly it’s being on shows like this, and I also have my own podcast, .Commit First. You can search Commit First on Spotify. However, I don’t conduct many interviews. I just found really inspiring people to interview. I interviewed them. For instance, I just recently interviewed like a biohacker.

Which one?

His name is Alan Rafaeli. He’s not known. He’s under the radar, super smart, though he gave me such great advice that I took and actually implemented, like, getting a DNA test and blood work and stuff like that. And then I put everything in GPT. And also, it’s interesting stuff. But I really like podcasting. I listen to other people’s podcasts and my own podcast when I have the chance, but I don’t make as much content as before. I should definitely have a YouTube channel, where I share videos every once in a while, like I just did with the 75 Hard Challenge a year ago for the third time. So I shared a video about why I’m doing it for the third time.

Oh, you should explain 75 HARD for our listeners who aren’t familiar with it.

So, 75 hours, amazing. You haven’t heard about it. For anybody listening, it’s a challenge invented by Andy Frisella. He was an entrepreneur. Now, again, I love that he’s an entrepreneur because he’s a business owner, and he bootstrapped the business to multiple eight or nine figures, something crazy. And he’s a huge headquarters in the US. 

And anyway, he has a very popular podcast, and for himself, he invented this thing where he can keep track of his mental fitness. He calls it mental toughness. I don’t like to say mental toughness, I just don’t like the word tough as much anymore, because, again, when you say tough, things get hard or it’s masculine, right?

Right? Yeah, you attract that into your reality. Another way to frame it is in terms of resilience. But even that can attract more difficulty into your life, because what are you being resilient against? I like the concept of anti-fragile because it feels more uplifting and positive, and more like I’m growing and becoming a superhuman, rather than just withstanding a challenge.

Yeah, yeah, I love it too, and that’s why, yeah, I try to kind of like, adopt those things like, so I say mental fitness for me, because it’s fitness you can always practice. You can always go to the gym, but you can also work out in your mental and spiritual gym. The challenge is a very simple challenge. You set up five things every single day for consecutive 75 days, with the things you do being number one: two workouts a day. Each one has to be 45 minutes. They cannot be consecutive, meaning you have to separate at least three hours or something in between, and one has to be outside, no matter the weather. 

I prioritize myself first, my family second, and my business third. It’s the only way to ensure I can show up fully for all of them.

Now, I mean, here in Israel, it’s not such a big deal, sometimes very, very hot, but sometimes you might be living in a very snowy place, snowstorms and everything, like, don’t risk your lives. But he says, like, we have to do the things that other people don’t, that separate us from the bunch, from the crowd. 

So, 245-minute workouts can be yoga as well, or walking. It doesn’t have to be something like going to the gym, running, or similar activities. But 245-minute workouts a day. Number two is to read 10 pages of a book a day. You have to read 10 pages of a personal development book, something that will teach you something new. And then you have to, number three, drink a gallon of water, which sounds easy for some people. For me, that was the hardest thing, because, basically, not because of the drinking, but because of you peeing everywhere. I mean, for me, like going for a drive for like an hour to a client is a terrible thing. Was doing 75 hard. So you really have to, kind of like, manage the water intake and make sure it’s enough. And you actually now have to also manage your bathroom breaks. So that’s the water.

Number four. Find a diet that suits your goals and stick with it, no cheat meals and no cheat days for 75 days. Now that you have chosen a diet. I visited a sports nutritionist, and I received a personalized diet plan. So that’s number four. Number five, no alcohol, no junk, so you cannot drink alcohol at all. And also, it’s kind of like it goes the same with a diet, but basically, you don’t drink, you don’t just eat cake. You cannot cake as part of your diet, or something like ‘eat clean’. And that’s pretty much 75 HARD.

Tell me, what was the impact on your business?

So, yeah, I mean, so 75 HARD, one of the things I just had a realization about, also, a couple of days ago, I was reflecting on the podcast with  . He said something like, ‘It’s teaching his children to become the people who can set habits and skills in place to adopt them.’ So it’s interesting, right? We want to become those people who can create habits and skills, who create skills and habits, because if we do, then we can do everything. 

If we can build the skills and habits that we need for anything that we need, any situation we encounter in life, or anything we want to grow into, then we’re unbreakable. We’re like, unbeatable, right? We’ll always grow. And how do you create skills and habits? And I think it comes down to number one: you need the self-confidence that you can actually create skills and habits. And how do you get confidence, in general, regardless, putting skills and habits aside, what’s confidence? 

Confidence, a lot of the time, comes from something we have actually done and know that we can do for ourselves. We believe it. It comes from, for instance, before you rode a bike, you believed you could ride a bike because you saw other people doing it, meaning someone had done it before you. Now we can believe that we can do it as well, right? 

It’s a four-minute mile. 

Four-minute mile. Exactly. So when you see someone raising like an eight-figure company, you might believe that you can do it as well. It’s just really freaking hard. It will be way easier now for me, for instance, to create a seven-figure agency, because I’ve already done it. At the beginning, it was really hard. It was like a vision item of mine. I knew other people could do it. But the confidence, the real confidence, comes after we’ve already done something. And now you say, I can do it again. I can ride a bicycle again. Give me a bicycle any day, I’ll ride it. 

So that’s confidence. Now 75 HARD. The program requires you to do specific things, five times every single day, for 75 consecutive days. If you miss any one of those things, you go back to day one. So, you always have this kind of fear of missing out on one of the things. So, what you do is, if you finish those 75 days, and let’s say you fall on something like I did in the previous ones, I did it three times. So I fell a day, like 65, the second time. 

Oh no.

Day 65

The ‘Profit First’ principle applies beyond money. It’s about paying yourself first with your time, energy, and health.

I fell in the book. We were on a trip in the north of Israel with the whole family, and I just forgot to read. I started reading the book before we traveled north. I thought I checked it in my mind, woke up the next morning, and I’m like, I didn’t finish the 10 pages yesterday, and I went back to day one. That same day, restart. I could have drunk alcohol, eaten, you know, eaten up at the lobby of the hotel, like I could have done so many things like that day already to enjoy and take a break. I didn’t. I went back to day one. 

So the mental toughness or mental fitness that you develop from this thing is basically making you anti-fragile. You also become the one person who believes after 75 days that you’ve done it. Would you like it if I did this? If I drink one gallon of water, I have two exercises a day every single day. For 75 days, I’ve read 10 pages of a book. I can do anything. I can build any habit. I can develop any skill. I can do it. So, you develop confidence, and now you have the confidence to build great skills and habits. So this is what I really believe 75 Hard is, like, it’s a challenge. You do it once, it sucks at the beginning, at least, then you start enjoying it, and then it gets really hard towards the end, and then it’s done. 

But once you finish it, you have something with you that sticks with you for a lifetime. I mean, like, I wasn’t one of those people who used to walk with a jar all day. I do now, I don’t do 75 hard, but I drink way more. Now, how much does that affect my life? Just the trajectory of my life or my health. When I drink more water, like those kinds of things, I read more, and I work out more. Anyways, this is 75 hard. You can go and check it out on any for sale, or just check out my YouTube for the view on it. But yeah, that’s a challenge.

That’s awesome. So I know we’re out of time here. If we could maybe drop one last wisdom nugget for our listener, what would it be?

There’s one thing I call card theory. It’s something that we can open for a completely new podcast, but it’s the way for you to get ahead in your career and your business. It works for so many people. I really want to share with you. I don’t have time. But again, if you said one thing that really worked for others, that I can tell you, 100% say like, is amazing, and I would love to share it with you guys.

Find me on LinkedIn, send me a message. Connect with me. I’ll approve and send you a DM, and I’ll send you a document. I have one, and I think I also have a video. I’ll see if I can find the video and add it to the document. It’s amazing because it’s kind of like four pillars that once you work on each one of those, you have a bulletproof business, a bulletproof career, no matter if you’re an employee or have your own business. So 100% amazing.

All right. Well, thank you so much. And how does our listener get in touch with you? Besides LinkedIn, should we direct them to your website? If they want to hire you as a service provider, I’m not sure if you offer coaching or anything similar, but if they’re interested in working with you, where would they go? 

Sure. I mean, again, LinkedIn, I think, is the best place. Just connect with me on LinkedIn, send me a DM. That would be the one and true place. If you want to listen to some podcasts, you can find the first podcast on Spotify or iTunes, or any place where you find podcasts. I have 100-plus episodes over there with amazing entrepreneurs and, yeah, just send me a DM. Let me know that you like the show, like you know. Thanks so much, Stephan, for having me.

Yes, thank you, Sagi, and thank you, listener. Now go out there and apply some of what you learned so that you make the world a better place, and put your own oxygen mask on first. We’ll catch you in the next episode. I’m your host. Stephan Spencer, signing off. 

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Create positive affirmations to counter limiting beliefs. I may organize mine into different lists of affirmations—business, morning wake-up statements, gratitude, and deep limiting belief counters.

Practice the three-step framework for client demands. First, understand their position, accept their timing, and uplift their work ethic. Then – more importantly – understand my own situation, accept that I’m putting myself first, and uplift myself for maintaining boundaries.

Implement the 9 AM to 12 PM rule as my personal time before taking any meetings or client calls. Use this time for working out, personal development, or family responsibilities. 

Adopt the “me first” priority system. Restructure my values hierarchy to put myself first, family second, and business third. When I take care of my mental fitness, physical health, and spiritual well-being, I show up as a better role model and deliver higher-quality work for my clients.

Transform fear of AI by recognizing my resilience. When anxiety about AI replacing my profession arises, I ask myself: “Will I ever stop trying?” If the answer is no, then I cannot fail because failure only occurs when I quit. 

Instead of approaching challenges with masculine toughness, adopt Bruce Lee’s “be water” philosophy. When I believe things don’t have to be hard and that I can flow around obstacles rather than forcing through them, I create an easier path to the same results.

Examine family messages about money and success that may be limiting my growth. Working with a therapist to identify and reshape these inherited beliefs can unlock easier paths to prosperity.

Commit to 75 consecutive days of: two 45-minute workouts daily (one outdoors), reading 10 pages of personal development material, drinking one gallon of water, following a chosen diet with no cheat meals, and consuming no alcohol. This program builds unshakeable confidence in my ability to create any habit or skill because I’ve proven I can stick to difficult commitments.

When facing interpersonal conflicts or demanding situations, first understand the other person’s perspective, accept their position, and then uplift their efforts. Simultaneously, do the same three steps for myself. This dual approach maintains positive energy while protecting my boundaries.

Connect with Sagi Shrieber on LinkedIn, send him a direct message mentioning I heard this on Marketing Speak, and he’ll send me the complete document with a video explanation of the Card Theory — a four-pillar framework that creates a bulletproof business and career, whether I’m an employee or entrepreneur.

About Sagi Shrieber

Sagi Shrieber is a 7-figure creative business owner with a background in design and tech entrepreneurship, deeply passionate about personal development and mental fitness. He founded the design magazines and podcasts Pixel Perfect (Israel) and Hacking UI (International), and hosts the entrepreneur-focused show Mindful & Ruthless. A Shenkar graduate with 10 years in the industry, including 6 years designing digital products, Sagi co-founded three companies, with one acquired by SimilarWeb, where he directed design operations. He has worked with major companies like Fiverr and eBay, and currently leads an advanced digital product design course at 6B while mentoring startups for Google Launchpad.