Originally Published on Substrand.
On this episode I sat down with Renat Gabitov (https://www.gabitov.com/), an entrepreneur, world traveler, and lifestyle engineer who’s on a mission to spark curiosity and adventure in people and businesses around the globe.
I’ve met a lot of people in my day, but Renat is one of the most fiery individuals I know. Fiery in a great sense, in that every single word he spits out is fuels with intention and passion. Everything he does is the same way. When he was 19 years old he wrote out his bucket list and started ticking them off, visiting over 70 countries, running with the bulls in Pamplona, skydiving, swimming with sharks, and kitesurfing with Richard Branson.
Sounds insane, and makes you wonder how someone can pull all this off at such a young age. On top of just plain spitting fire, Renat actually built a very meticulous process for optimizing his life... he calls it lifestyle engineering.
While he does a lot of stuff, and starts a lot of businesses, everything is driven by a very scientific approach to exploring who he is what he wants to do, and giving it a try.
He describes it as reverse engineering his life’s path, starting with different hypothesis around what he might like and believe, and giving them a try. Why not start everything with the assumption that we don’t know anything... and then go figure it out? This mindset keeps him relaxed, energized, and motivated to continuously learn, explore, and evolve as a human being.
This said, here’s a few specifics we hit on during this interview:
- How his intention to kite surf with Richard Branson manifested into reality
- Why he wrote a 40 page life manifesto for himself and open sources it to the world on google dogs
- Why life has no meaning and why this is a huge opportunity for us to create it
- What it’s like being a digital nomad and how Renat pulls it off in a healthy efficient way
- The future of humanity and our relationship with technology
This was one of the most energetic and upbeat interviews so far on the show, I have to say Renat's enthusiasm is very contagious. So beware, if you’re vulnerable to inspiring content this may just unlock a whole new world from within you.
Check out Renat's businesses here:
https://www.gabitov.com/
https://www.tevasamorir.com/
https://www.cmo.one/
https://www.lifestyle.engineering/
SHOW NOTES:
- Renat is currently learning Spanish
- He’s been to over 70 countries, he grew up living a nomadic lifestyle
- When getting to a new country he get’s all the basics lined up so he can focus his energies on more important things… need stability in some things in order to have flexibility and adventure in other areas in life
- Somewhere along the way from kids to adults we unlearn how to be curious and follow our kid-like interest
- Important to keep exploring things in new ways to keep life interesting
- Why do we only write bucket list items when we’re old?
- The biggest limitation from what’s possible is believing in ourselves
- Renat talks about how he met Richard Branson, and the power of incredible stories of people pursuing their curiosity to inspire
- Learning and growth are his main motivators in life, he also loves the feeling of freedom he gets from riding motorcycles and kitesurfing – these get him in the ultimate state of flow which triggers euphoria for him
- Renat talks about his 40 page life manifesto – and how he uses it to create and test hypotheses for the type of life he wants to live for himself
- The biggest hypothesis Renat is trying to test.. is what’s the meaning of life, or at least the meaning that he wants to create for himself – what he wants to dedicate his life to… the more he dives into each sector the better he understands if things align with him or not
- Renat’s mission – to empower people to be more curious and create more mission driven companies and individuals – who want to create change – if people allow themselves to be curious and love what they’re doing then the world will become a better place – he wants to see a passionate and loving world
- Renat talks about how much more access to information and ability to explore we have today than people in the past… right now we have more possibilities and can work from anywhere in the world, have super computers in our pockets, and we can see how others live… however this sort of connection and instant gratification can mess with our minds – meditation helps us to have this pause
- Renat believes in humans so much though that he thinks we’ll develop the ability to handle all of this new information and build healthier relationships with technology
- Why is humanity depressed despite the fact we have all this new technology to make life easier… perhaps it’s because now that littler things are being taken care of we’re looking to higher order questions like the meaning of life
- Renat talks about Lifestyle engineering and the scientific method behind designing a life of greatness and happiness
- Develop a hypothesis and test it, if the evidence proves it can’t be wrong then it turns into a theory…
- The process is analyze, design, and implement…
- Analyze: Asking yourself the question, what is it I love? What is it I think I want?
- Design: Design a plan to figure out if the hypothesis around what I might like is actually correct or not
- Implement: If you just analyze and design, and don’t do anything then nothing will work
- This is the same process that the most efficient systems in the world are based on… iteration and learning based on data
- What constitutes success though? It’s very personal. What makes life successful? What constitutes as a successful life? There are two things for Renat – happiness and fulfillment.
- Renat is not saying to do all the things that he’s done, this would be an intellectually lazy way to live, just going and replicating other people’s lives.
- People don’t allow themselves to go try things out out of fear of being judged
- For Renat, writing is one of the most rewarding things he does because it allows him to explore things intellectually and explore the internal infinite world
- Te vas a morir – brings thought leaders and celebrities to teach online courses on things they were able to figure out in their lives – bringing topics to the surface that school never really taught us
- For Renat productivity is a tool to help him do more of what he loves
- Technology is ‘a way for us to do something’
- Why Renat stopped using social media to experiment with his connections to other people and how he felt
- What connection means to Renat – his happiest moments come from having beautiful dinners cooking with his friends, creating co-living spaces with people he loves, plus he’s in the middle of building his company so staying off social keeps him engaged
- For Renat home is where people are, and being nomadic makes it complicated to have people you care about being around you, so he’s working on moving to two home bases – Barcelona and Los Angeles with his social circles and best friends
- Love is an emotion and the only way to feel it is through experiences
- One thing Renat is learning is how to express himself better through writing
- One thing Renat’s grateful for is shamelessly allow himself to enjoy ‘it’
- One thing Renat’s excited to create right now is more content that’s helpful for people – his whole life he’s been asking himself whether his stuff and opinions are good enough to share with the world and he never allowed himself to do it, so he’s excited to openly share, even simply for himself
- His messaage to all the listers is to GO AND FUCKING DO IT
.jpg)
