Jonathan Goodman is the founder of the Personal Trainer Development Center (PTDC), a global education company that has helped more than 200,000 professionals across 125 countries build sustainable, human-centered businesses. Over the past fifteen years, he has built and scaled multiple seven-figure companies while challenging conventional ideas about productivity, success, and growth.
Fitness was his testing ground; the lessons it produced now shape his work on habits, decision-making, and designing lives that function in the real world.
1) You’ve shared that Unhinged Habits grew out of your “8:4 seasonal way of living” and years of refusing to accept social and educational norms as a given. When you look back, what was the first moment you realized your life had drifted pretty far from what most people consider normal, and, for those unfamiliar with how you frame 8:4, how do you describe it to them?
In the winter of 2012, I ran away from the world to Hawaii. Before that, I was a full-time personal trainer in Toronto. In addition, I had self-published a book for personal trainers, started a blog, hosted a few events, had a couple of online products, and was doing affiliate promotions. I didn’t like what I was becoming. I recognized that I was very jealous of other people and very ego-driven. I was dating my girlfriend at the time, and looking back, I didn’t appreciate just how special she was. Spoiler alert: that girlfriend is now my wife, but we did break up for a period when I ran away to Hawaii.
I spent three months on the island of Oahu on the North Shore in a town called Laie, all by myself. I rented a room off Craigslist, and I would sometimes go four or five days without speaking to another human being. I didn’t know it at the time, but Laie is actually a Mormon town. In those three months, I shut down some of the websites I was running—six-pack workout-type things—and just spent a lot of time by myself figuring out what I wanted to do once that period was over.
I then moved to Maui for three months and started building back up. I decided to fulfill one of my rules for living, which was “get absolutely shredded,” take pictures, and never do it again. This training regimen and hiring a coach really focused my days there and gave me the scaffolding I needed. That whole trip was such an incredible time of transformation for me. By the time I came back to Toronto after six months, I was a different person. I was fundamentally different, and the only reason that happened was because I checked out of my life in order to check back in. Things happened to me when I was a personal trainer (as they happen to anybody in any job), and I went with them and let them adapt to who I was. But I never stopped to really think about it, and I found myself in this downward spiral. I needed to pause and reassess.
When I came home to Toronto afterwards, everybody was the same! I had gone through this incredible evolution, yet everybody was the same. My friends were still in relationships that weren’t serving them, still complaining about bosses they didn’t like, whatever. And that’s when I realized we need to build back in seasonality into our lives. It doesn’t have to be about escaping the world, like going to Hawaii, but we have to build back in these stops in order to check out so that we can check back into who we really are and who we really want to be for the next season of our life.
The idea with the 8-4 is to build back in seasons. The invention of the clock and the light bulb transformed natural time into artificial time. Before that, we had seasons: spring, summer, and fall of longer days, generally working harder—foraging, hunting, gathering. And then we had winter, when it was dark earlier. We spent it with our community, and we slept more. That’s the seasonality our bodies and minds are designed to crave.
With the light bulb, with the clock, with official time, we’re now in this never-ending season. And as a result, we never stop to take stock of what we’re doing and whether it’s serving us based on who we are today, not who we were when we agreed to do the thing. Nature abhors a vacuum. Humans are very good at addition; humans are terrible at subtraction. If we’re in a never-ending season, we’re going to be endlessly adding commitments, adding relationships, adding stuff to our homes, just buying stuff. So 8-4 is seasonality.
2) One of the promises of Unhinged Habits is to help the reader master the art of strategic subtraction. In a world where almost all personal and business systems are built accretively, and growth is celebrated, what does strategic subtraction look like?
There are three elements of subtraction we all need to consider in our lives: physical, mental, and identity.
When people think about physical minimalism, they generally think about the physical aspect of it—I don’t want to own many things, I need to clean up, I need to tidy up, etc. That’s undoubtedly important.
But then you get into mental. How good are you at making better decisions faster? I think it’s important to admit our ignorance towards just about everything in this world. Admit that we’re lost. Admit that we don’t really understand how things are working, because that’s the first step to being able to make better decisions faster. It’s also very important within the mental sphere of minimalism to be really keenly attuned to what our priority is for the season. That allows us to say yes to certain obligations that really serve us, the people we love, and the meaningful work we want to be doing—and confidently say no to everything else.
I love it when people say no to me. I gain a tremendous amount of respect when people say no to me. I like it when people say yes to me, but I gain respect for them when they say no to me (if it’s someone I like and have a relationship with). I actually lose a little bit of respect for them if they don’t answer me or if they commit to doing something and then don’t follow through. The reason for that is it’s a sign to me that this person has not figured out for themselves what’s important. So mental minimalism is second.
And then identity minimalism. What are the rules you take on? What are the commitments? Who are you? Are you a father first and foremost? Are you a business owner? Who are you committing to? What’s your identity?
3) One of the many things I enjoy about your work is that you have a bit of a contrarian view on incremental progress and argue that consistency can sometimes actually impede success. For instance, you write that “consistency is for the maintaining, intensity is for the gaining.” How do you help people discern when it is time to lean into an intense season versus when it is wiser to lean into the marginal gains of consistency?
Is it contrarian, though? Really? I don’t know a single person who’s ever benefited from transformative change in their business, in their health, in their relationships that hasn’t included some element of intensity. Even the guy who wrote the book on getting 1% better used multiple periods of unhinged intensity to get the book across the finish line, and then other periods of unhinged intensity to market that same book. I think what’s actually happened is that there are certain phrases that perform well on social media because they’re very simple, they’re very easy, they’re very nice—and because they perform well on social media, they get undue attention. How the world actually works and how we talk about it in short-form social media content are not the same thing.
Think of consistency as the reliable foundation that keeps you from sliding backward. Intensity is the force that propels you forward.
If there’s something that’s really important for you to build and make better right now—and it can only be one thing at a time—and you have the capacity, the only way to reset your baseline to a higher level of functioning is through intensity. Whether that’s closer relationships with the people you love, an improved physiological set point so your health is much better, or a fundamentally improved business, you have to commit to a season of intensity on that, and accept that the other priorities in your life will be put on maintenance. That’s the trade-off. It’s not nice necessarily, but it’s the truth. And that level of maintenance I would define as consistency.
4) Your book includes the Explorer’s Compass as a framework for breaking routine and rediscovering wonder in everyday life. For someone with a fairly fixed life, kids, a job with set hours, and a limited travel budget, what would an “Explorer’s Compass” week actually look like on the ground?
Depending on where you are, I break exploring up into three different risk spectrums: safe experiments, moderate challenges, and bold adventures.
Safe experiments are things like trying a new restaurant without checking reviews, or maybe taking a different route to work, or striking up a conversation with a stranger. Things that are outside of your routine. Moderate challenges might be traveling to a nearby town without detailed planning. You don’t have to get on a plane, but maybe for an afternoon on the weekend, you’re just going to a neighboring town without planning, without bringing your phone, and just exploring. Maybe you want to volunteer for a project at work outside of your expertise or volunteer in your community. And then there are bold adventures. These are things like solo travel to an unfamiliar country or committing to giving a public talk.
5) Let’s say someone wanted to run a 30-day experiment that captures the spirit of Unhinged Habits, something at the intersection of strategic subtraction, occasional unhinged intensity, and their own definition of a rich life. How could they set up an experiment to kick the tires and get some early momentum?
I like the idea of doing a micro-seasons approach. Let’s say you wanted to focus on some business venture for the next 30 days. Well, you could do any combination of making an agreement with your spouse that he or she is going to take on more of the parenting duties for those 30 days. Maybe you’ll get some additional support around the house in terms of cleaning and meals. Maybe you’ll get some extra childcare for those 30 days.
At the same time, you’re going to want to create an off-season checklist to handle your relationships so you still show up for your family the way you need to, and you’re consistently there for them. And what you’ll do for your health, appreciating that you’re not going to improve your health during this time, but you don’t want it to move backward. So, some baseline of workouts or something similar.
And then what you’ll do is set your schedule up so that your best hours of your week—obviously this changes depending on whether you have a traditional job or not—are committed to this business venture. You accept that the extra expense, if you’re able to afford any extra expense, is not manageable long-term, but it’s okay for the short term. And you don’t feel the guilt of the things you’re not doing. The problem is almost never in the gaining in one area; it’s in the perception of loss in others. And so when you have these off-season checklists, you don’t have this perception of loss in other areas.
