Durable Dad with Tommy Geary
The Durable Dad podcast gives men the skills and tools they need to be rock solid for their family, their work and their community.
Durable Dad with Tommy Geary
104: What NOT to Do
Sometimes the fastest way forward is by cutting back.
Highlights:
- The trap of piling on more goals when your plate is already full.
- Common “small negatives” that erode connection at home—screens, alcohol, quick yes’s, passive jabs.
- Why eliminating what drags you down works better than predicting what will lift you up.
- Insights from Tim Ferriss, Greg McKeown, and Nassim Taleb on the art of subtraction.
- Removing marriage habits that create distance and start opening space for real connection.
Takeaways:
- Stop adding goals when you’re overloaded—focus on cutting the obvious negatives first.
- Subtraction frees up energy, time, and presence in your work and family.
- “What you don’t do” can be the clearest path to growth.
When you think about what’s next in your life, start by asking: What don’t I want?
Stop Losing Your Temper Road Map
This roadmap will teach you how to have more patience.
To give your kids more time and attention.
Anger isn't your fault, but it is your responsibility.
Learn how to manage it so it doesn't get the best of you.
https://www.tommygcoaching.com/roadmap
This is the Durable Dad Podcast. I'm your host, Tommy Geary. This show is going to give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community, and most importantly, your family. All right, what's up? Episode 104. I am getting ready to go to Arizona with my colleague Craig and 13 other guys. Talked about the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim hike that we have been planning for a while and we've been training for for a while. And we're all meeting up. By the time you listen to this podcast, we will be in Phoenix. We'll be caravanning to Flagstaff to spend a night in an Airbnb together and then driving up to the Grand Canyon. And we're not doing rim to rim anymore because some fires on the North Rim shut the north side of the canyon down. But we've pivoted and we're still dropping into the canyon. We're going from the south rim down to the Colorado River, splash some of that Colorado water river in our face, and then hiking back up to the top of the South Rim. Still a big push. It's over 15 miles, it's over 4,500 invert. It's all coming together. Once we execute this one, we're already talking about what the next one is that we're going to do. So keep uh ear out for the next opportunity. We're going to do some type of adventure in May 2026. So put that on your calendar if you're interested. It's going to be another sweet one, some awesome location, some big push that we have to train for together. All right. Today on the podcast, the other day I was talking to a client. He was celebrating a win that he had. What that win was, his wife came up to him and told him, Hey, I was talking to our son, and he told me when he got home from school that he had an awesome morning with you when you told him that if anyone made fun of his shirt that you would come in and stick up for him, that that made his day and it made him feel really good. His son, I think he's in the second grade. When my client heard this from his wife, he was kind of caught off guard. He didn't know that that moment meant a lot. So he kind of laughed about it because he was just having a good time with his son. But it meant a lot to his son. So he was doing something right. And I got curious because when we have a win like that, this guy's goal, one of them, is to be a more present, engaged dad. So here's an example of being that engaged father. What was going right that morning that led to the win? And when I asked him, he said that he didn't check any work email that morning. A lot of the time he starts the day off checking work email, and then his mind is already gone from the house wanting to get to work and get shit done. And he didn't do that that morning. Solid win. What I want to pull from that, achieving our goals isn't about doing more. Sometimes achieving our goals is about doing less. It landed with me because a lot of the guys that I see have too many goals. They want to add a lot of positive things into their lives. But if we're already overloaded with responsibilities, if we already have a full plate, adding more can have negative consequences. We start telling ourselves we should be working out more, we should be reading more books, I should plan my day better. Adding those new habits, new goals, when we don't achieve them, they start building up as a weight that's dragging us down. We start feeling guilty about not doing all of it, feeling like we're failing, we're not doing enough. Instead of propelling us forward, these new goals, these new habits drag us down. They inhibit our progress. So this other approach is to eliminate the negative things in our life. We can be very clear on what is having a negative impact in our life. And the goals should be to eliminate those snacking, saying yes to things really quickly, drinking alcohol, emailing first thing in the morning, looking at our screens when we're at home instead of being with our family. All of these things, negative impact. We know that if we remove those, life would be feeling better. Being able to quit things that don't work is integral to being a winner. That's something from Tim Ferris's Four Hour Work Week. This Via Negativa, the blog article that I read, pulled a lot of things from the book Anti-Fragile by Nassim Nicholas Talib. Eliminating negative things out of our life is based on the principle that it's a lot easier to see what hurts us than to predict what's going to help us. So if you think about eating habits, it's pretty easy to see eating added sugar doesn't help us. It's not healthy for us. So we could remove that, which would be a lot easier than trying to figure out what's the right diet. Is it paleo? Is it slow carb? Is it a vegetarian diet? All those things that we would want to add into our life and find new recipes for. A lot more work, and we're not even sure which one's the right fit. But we remove added sugar or we start time constricting our eating or intermittent fasting, where we just don't eat for a certain number of times, removing the negative leads to better decisions. Our inherent understanding of the downside is stronger than our guesses about the upside. One of the areas I want you guys to think about is your relationship with your wife. A lot of the guys that I work with want to have a stronger connection with their wife, want their relationship to just feel easier. And sometimes we don't know what the hell that means. I want to listen better, I want to communicate better, I want to have more empathy. All right, those are all good things, but sometimes it's hard to start doing those things because we've never done them before. These abstract goals that we have are hard to achieve. But we do know what's not so great in our marriage, what the attributes are of a partner that's not all in or being connected, arguing over little things, taking things personally, making snarky, passive-aggressive comments about a recent purchase your wife made, or how she put the dishes in the dishwasher, or something she did parenting, those little comments, those little jabs, not attributes of a good husband. Or when your wife's struggling with something, we know that trying to fix every problem doesn't work. We know that trying to always be positive and look on the bright side doesn't always work. We know the negative things. So we want to start there. We want to start by removing those negative attributes. Now, I say all that, and you might be thinking that this is obvious. Those are attributes of a husband that I don't want to have, or I don't want to eat added sugar, or I don't want to look at my screens in the morning when I wake up. The negative things in our life are obvious. Removing them is still a goal, and goals aren't always easy to achieve. You're still gonna need to do some thought work, you're gonna need to break down old beliefs, old habits, old patterns to remove the negative. But the powerful part of this is that it's more motivating because you know it's gonna work. You know that subtracting these things are going to benefit your life, and you're not adding more to your plate. Your plate's already full. Let's take some off your plate before you start putting more things on. Sometimes what you don't do is just as important as what you do do. That's Greg McEwen from the book Essentialism. And I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of successful business people, successful authors, uh are writing about uh removing things from our life. Tim Ferris writes about elimination. His next book is gonna be called the No Book. Greg McEwen, Essentialism dump the many to focus on the few essential things. That's something like the subtitle there. I don't know exactly what it is. And then this guy wrote the Via Negativa blog. He pulled everything from a book, Anti-Fragile, talking about removing the negative things from our life. So, whatever you're working on right now, use subtraction as a strategy. Adding more has negative consequences. Subtracting, getting really clear on what you don't want in life will help pave the road for where you're headed, what growth looks like. All right, that's what I got for you guys today. Hope you have an awesome day, and I'll catch you next time.
