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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros Podcast, host Q Edmonds engages with Dr. Zain Hakeem, a physician specializing in longevity and quality of life. They explore the philosophical aspects of health, the importance of personal values, and the journey of self-discovery. Zain shares insights on how to define health, the crisis of meaning faced by successful individuals, and practical strategies for maintaining longevity. The conversation emphasizes the significance of mindset, personal fulfillment, and the art of living a meaningful life.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Zain Hakeem (00:00)
when you’re in the, the gritty partit doesn’t feel like an origin story. It just feels shitty. And so having that perspective that this is the origin story, This is how the legend is built, Gives you, notion of time that, hey,
When I’m on the other side of this, this is just going to be an amazing legend of how I got here. be the artist of your life. If your life is an art piece, make it a beautiful piece of art.
Quentin (01:57)
Hello everyone. Welcome to the real estate pros podcast. I’ll be your host Q Edmonds. And if you follow me enough, you know what I’m gonna say. I’m excited to be here. I say this sometimes as well is that now guests, they have a way of getting me excited. Once you really talk to them, find out what they’re about, just the things that they say just really excites you, really just gives you ready to learn more and to, you know, really just enjoy the journey of watching you to viewers.get to know them a little better and get to see things through their perspective. And so today it’s going to be a little bit different because the guest that we have, he is a physician and he specialized in longevity and quality of life. And I think for anybody that’s in real estate, anybody, investor, any way you work within real estate, we want longevity and we want good quality of life, right? But I love his approach.
because his approach is to me, he didn’t say this word, but I’m gonna say it holistically. He didn’t correct me once he saw a target from wrong, but just his approach is not a one fit all. It’s unique the way he think about things, even some of the things that he has in place is very unique. And so I’m not gonna go on too much longer talking because I really want you guys to get to know him. So I just want to introduce you to Mr. Zain Hakeem. Mr. Zain, how you doing today, sir?
Zain Hakeem (03:18)
I’m doing awesome, thanks for having me on. Great to see ya.Quentin (03:21)
absolutely, man. Thank you for just the talk that we had before we got on. And again, like I said, I’m excited for people to get to know about you. So let’s do this. I want you to kind of take us into your world, right? Let us know what your main focus is these days. Maybe if you want to even tell us a little bit of how you got into what you know, what you did, where that passion comes from. And if you want to tell them, you know, we usually say what markets are operating in, right?So if you want to tell them your own base, would love to do that. We would love for you to do that as well. But the is yours,
Zain Hakeem (03:54)
Fantastic, yeah. So I’m here in Austin, Texas. ⁓ You know, I’ve got my practice here, building that up. I’ll tell you where it came from. Actually, that’s a great place to start. Everybody loves an origin story, right? So when I was in med school, so I was a philosophy major and undergrad. And then I went to med school. In med school, one of the quotes that we used to hear a lot from the founder of our school was,the role of the physician is to find health, any idiot can find disease. And that really got me thinking, what do you mean health? And every time I asked that, again, coming from a philosophy background, the first thing is, what’s your definition? What do you mean by that? right? And so coming from that philosophy background, I was like, what do you mean health? How do you define health? And that got me thinking for years about that definition.
The definition I came to is that health is a lot like wealth. It’s a coin that you have to spend. Nobody’s getting out of this alive, right? And so what are you gonna spend your health on? You know every year that passes by, you spent it doing something, right? And so you know have this much health, and to me, the health is the capacity to do the thing that you think is worth doing.
If all you think is worth doing is sitting, watching TV, then you’re healthy enough. There’s no need to improve your health, right? Because you’re doing everything you want to do, right? Most people want more than that. Most people think that the path they’re on in life is more than just sitting, watching TV, right? And then you need more health in order to have the capacity to do those things that you think are worth doing. Now, this ties into the practice because…
The minute I say it’s the thing you think is worth doing, I have to ask you personally, what’s worth doing? What do you think is worth doing? Is that I don’t have kids, a lot of my patients do, right? So raising kids is not a big part of the thing that I think is worth doing right now at this point in my life. Hopefully it will be in the future, but it’s not right now. But for them, that’s a lot of what they’re caught up with. A lot of why they’re earning money, a lot of why they’re doing the work they’re doing is…
Quentin (06:46)
Yeah.Zain Hakeem (06:56)
to give their kids a quality of life. So my advice has to be directed toward, Hey, if I give you advice to go, work out, you know, 100 hours a week so that you have no time to spend with your kids, is that health? Right? It’s probably not. That’s probably anti-health. It’s less healthy because you’re not doing the thing that you think is worth doing. And so…That kind of was the origin story of this insight and got me started down a whole pathway of starting to talk to patients about their values and what they really find worthwhile. And I’ve got a whole system of conversation now to figure out for the individual what their values are and how to really optimize around that.
Quentin (07:39)
No, I love it, man. And I think that fits in so well with what we do talking to people that’s within real estate is because we have people that have special niches, right? We got wholesalers, brokers, realtors, investors. And sometimes you want to move across the asset plane. But what you’re talking about is you really have to sometimes sit with what makes you happy. What is what is your definition of health? Because sometimes you can chase something.and you’re not really healthy in the chasing. And sometimes you just have to be content in where you are and what you do. And I think, you know, to people that’s in real estate, maybe that’s something to think about is that sometimes you just have to sit and be good at what you are and be content at what you are. Because sometimes if you stretch yourself too far, you know how they say that bend don’t break. Sometimes you may wind up breaking. You may not be able to bend, you may wind up breaking. So I don’t know. mean, how do you feel about that Mr. Zane?
Zain Hakeem (08:31)
Yeah.No, think that’s well said and it’s an open question, right? So, you know, a lot of my patients, it’s an expensive practice, I’ll give you that, this is 25K a year, right? And so a lot of my patients are entrepreneurs that have exited, they sold their business for however million, million dollars, whatever. And a lot of what they face is, well, wait a minute, now I theoretically don’t have to work. And my whole life up until this moment was chasing the next dollar.
And now what am I supposed to do with myself? Right. And there’s a real crisis of meaning that they experience. And that’s a lot of what I speak to as well. What do you think is worth doing? What’s worth filling up your life? Why were you chasing that next dollar? What was the original point? Right. And I think a lot of times people lose track of why they were trying to do that in the first place was that, you know, to become, to feel secure. Was it to secure a life for their kids? Was it to
be hot enough to get a cute girl? Like what was the original reason, right? And so whatever the original reason was, you gotta kind of figure out, is that still applicable? Do you need more? Maybe you need more than $10 million for whatever that reason was. I don’t know. Maybe you wanted to run for president and 10 million is not enough. I don’t know. You know, like, like you gotta figure out what the real connection is for that individual to say, should you be content where you are? And you need to switch to paying attention to different things.
Or do you need to double down and keep chasing and keep going to a higher level? It’s not always one or the other. You got to figure out for the individual which it is.
Quentin (10:43)
Yeah. One of the things, and I’ve said it on plenty of podcasts now, one of the quotes that I live by that I heard from someone at a very, very tough point in my life, they made a statement. said, when you know who you are, you know what to do. Right. So when you know your why, when you have a good sense of, again, all these things you’re talking about, What, how is health defined for me? You know, even how success is defined for me.Zain Hakeem (10:59)
Hmm.Mm-hmm.
Quentin (11:10)
What is my why? What keeps me motivated? You’re very self-aware to say, hey, listen, kids maybe, but right now, this is not part of the why. And some people listening may say, that’s crazy. But then some people is like, no, that’s so smart. Like, why would you bring a kid in right now? You know they’re not gonna be your top priority. It makes no sense, right? And so when you know who you are, you know what to do. And when you can be centered on who you are.Zain Hakeem (11:13)
That’s right.That’s right.
Quentin (11:40)
whatever comes your way, you’re know how to address it. You’re gonna know how to attack it. You’re gonna know what’s the target. What’s gonna keep you motivated. And you can just be honest about it. And I have to make something up and then just make a disaster of, know, things in front when you knew just exactly who you were. You know what mean?Zain Hakeem (11:57)
Or even worse, you get what you aim for and it doesn’t hit for you. Well, you know, what happens, what happens when the dog catches the car? Right. It’s like, well, what do I do now? I got that 10 million and still empty inside. Well, that’s not, that’s not health. Right. And I mean, you said something really interesting there that, know, and, and I want to piggyback on that. One of my best friends actually was struggling, ⁓ with a new job change and this and that, and he wasn’t sure what to do.in various situations. And one of the things I kind of told him was very similar to the quote you said is, said, well, who do you want to be? Right? If you don’t know what to do, try to figure out who you want to be. And often that will let you know what, what your ideal self would be. And it’s so smart, Quentin, you jumped ahead into a part of the practice I don’t even usually talk about because it’s not as marketable.
Right? So I, I So,so I talk about depth meaning purpose connection. What I really mean secretly in the background is something Carl Jung, he was a famous Swiss psychologist, he used to talk about the concept of individuation, meaning becoming the most you that you can be, right? Fitting with the universe in the way that you fit with the universe, however that is, right?
Quentin (12:52)
Talk about it, yeah.Zain Hakeem (13:17)
And to me, becoming an individual, develop an identity is on three things. One is meaning and purpose. Why are you here? What are you pursuing? What are you doing? And I talk about that one the most because it’s the most popular of the things. The other one is values and ethics is what won’t you do? Where are your lines? And another one I like to talk about is are you trustworthy? People talk about that. That’s fine. Great. And here’s a deeperone.
If you’re
deep unconscious mind where another person, are you trustworthy to that person? Does your unconscious are you trustworthy to your own unconscious? That’s an interesting notion of values. And the third one I would say is trait expansion. I’m super introverted by nature. That’s how I was born, right? But I have learned to expand towards extraversion and thus I’m able to be more successful
because I have expanded my trait around my ability. If somebody is super organized, super on point, they, they would benefit. Their life will expand if they learn to tolerate a little messiness and they don’t insist on that. If someone’s super messy, their life will expand if they learn to organize a little bit. It’s the expansion around your natural traits and tendencies. So those three things are the deep aspect of the practice in terms of
how I’m defining health and how I’m looking at it. You jumped ahead, so I had had to, I to throw that in. You had the intuition of where that was going, but yeah, I usually mostly just talk about meaning and purpose.
Quentin (14:50)
and then here.Yeah,
man, I appreciate so much of what you said. So what so two things that that really helped center me. One is that I’m a human being and I’m not a human doing. And so we talk about being the best being version of you. Like, who do I want to be? Because that’s who I am. I’m a human being. When it comes down to it, I have to be more in order to do more. I can’t do more. It’s about to be more. got to be more in order to do more. And.
there’s a coach named Coach Lynch. wish I can remember his last name, but he has a saying that says, if you lie to yourself, you truly have nobody else you can trust. And so really being honest about who I want to be, who I am and radically accepting me. And if there are going to be changes, I can’t say it as eloquent as you said it, but there is, if, if, if I’m an introvert, there’s a, there’s a little bit of extrovert that I have to learn if I want to get to a certain place. You said it so eloquently, I can’t even.
over talk what you said, but you, said it perfectly right. And so me accepted, radically accepted who I am. But then once I know who I am, I’m not happy with that. Then who do I want to be? And then maybe I can accept a little bit more. And so this, I, I, listen, I’m gonna ask this question because I know we talking about, I love what we’re talking about, but also want to talk about your business as well, because you are going to business, you are going to practice, right? So what’s been the key.
Zain Hakeem (15:59)
That’s right.Yeah.
Sure. Sure.
Quentin (16:55)
to keeping that machine kind of running smoothly. What are some of your systems and strategies that you have in place that keep you out kind of like your out on the prize and keep you passionate and putting systems in place to kind of get to the goal you want to get to.Zain Hakeem (17:08)
Yeah, so I think one of the, so I’m a huge fan of the work of John Vervaeke He has a YouTube series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. ⁓ He’s a psychology professor and his philosophical work, I think really galvanizes me to, I consider him almost like a physicist who’s describing how things work. And I’m an engineer trying to say, well, how do we apply that to people’s lives? Right? And so that’s a lot of what I kind of perceive myself to be doing.I’m super excited about science and, you we talk here, you and I got to the deep waters here. But, you know, longevity matters, right? Like, you know, if we say, oh, hey, who do you want to be? What do you want to do? What’s the deep, you know, philosophy or whatever? Oh, but you’re going to die tomorrow. Well, I don’t have time, right? I don’t have time to do any of that. And so we need to have some idea of longevity and, and, and what are the things that are going to help you.
Quentin (17:56)
YeahZain Hakeem (18:04)
have that capacity for as long as possible. I think in the modern world, we’ve way over complicated that. People talk about blood work, biomarkers, this, that, the other. If you really look at the data, those things don’t move the needle on longevity or they move it very, very little, 1%, 2%. You know ⁓ I measure five biomarkers or five concepts, I would say, and those are really all you need and they’re not you know uh super rocket science. So, so I, IOne of the talks I give, I say, look, there’s, there’s six things you need to do to try to maximize your longevity or at least get most of it. The first five, nobody’s surprised by. The sixth one is the one where everybody trips and screws it up. And that’s where we get in trouble. So the first five, maintain a reasonably healthy body weight, exercise both strength and cardiovascular, maintain your social connections of all different kinds from intimate to distant.
and make sure your social world is in good order. Don’t smoke. And if you need to, manage your blood pressure. Right? Those are not rocket science. Nobody’s super confused about those. Number six is, and nothing else. Right? It’s these five and nothing else. So it’s not a supplement. It’s not the next blood work. It’s not the next thing. It’s these five, just that.
And the more you distract from these five by trying to do something else, the less benefit you get. And once you’ve done those five, you have to accept that there’s no further to go. There’s no, you’re gonna live as long as your genetics and, and soul are gonna live, however you wanna put that, if you’re a religious person or not, depending. but uh, you know however however, long you’re gonna live, you’re gonna live once you’ve done those five, and that’s it. then we’re talking, so that’s as long as you’re gonna get.
Quentin (19:47)
Yeah, Yeah.Zain Hakeem (19:56)
And then you talk about depth, meaning and purpose. so one of um if you’ll forgive a little bit of a story here. ⁓ So, so, so I love this story. It’s from Rory Sutherland. He’s a marketer. And he talks about the train that was built from England to France under the, in the channel, under the channel. And the original train took, I think it was like three hours and 30 minutes or something. Right.Quentin (20:03)
No, please, please.Zain Hakeem (20:23)
and they spent 6 billion pounds to make a faster train, redo the track so that it would go in, I think it was two hours and 50 minutes. So it was saved like 40 minutes on the trip, right? And he said, the problem is they could have spent, he jokes actually, he’s a great joke. He says, actually what they should have done is spent 1 billion pounds, hired the world supermodels to walk up and down the train serving Chateau-Petruze and people would be asking to slow the train down, right? SoMore seriously though, he says they didn’t put wifi on the train. You could have spent a minimum of money and put wifi on the train and people wouldn’t care about that 40 minutes. As long as I can do the work and browse the web and do whatever I wanna do, it’s, it’s because you didn’t put wifi that that 40 minutes is intolerable. Now, pretty quickly, if you wanna speed up from two hours and 50 minutes and get another 30 minutes less,
you’re have to spend exponentially more than six billion pounds. Now it’s gonna be 30 billion pounds to get another 30 minutes. And pretty soon you’re gonna hit the limits of physics, right? And you’re not gonna be able to go any faster. And so one of the things he talks about is engineer mindset tries to optimize the thing you can measure, which is the time. But in fact, what people care about, what you could 10X is the subjective experience, right? How do you measure? How do you measure,
Quentin (21:24)
Hmm.Zain Hakeem (21:46)
how much better your trip is with Wi-Fi versus without Wi-Fi. Maybe surveys or, I don’t know, but even that’s not gonna, the reality is with Wi-Fi, my trip is way better, 10X, easily, right? For way cheaper than speeding it up by 40 minutes, right? Because now I have three hours and 30 minutes of productivity instead of two hours and 50 minutes of non-productivity.Right? And so I would much rather a slower train that has wifi than a faster one without, but they didn’t account for that because they were just optimizing that metric. And I think people get that way about wealth as well. They get that way about money as well, they’re like chasing that neck. Well, how do I 10 X this measurable thing? And meanwhile, they’re miserable in their marriage or they’re miserable with their kids or they don’t have the relationship with the kids that they want or, or, or I’ve come across this actually more than I would have expected.
Quentin (22:26)
Mm-hmm.Zain Hakeem (22:44)
or secretly deep down when they were a kid, they always dreamed of making music. And what they really wanted was to be a musician. And I understand you wanna have secure life, you wanna make money. And now they got their $10 million, but they don’t know how to reawaken that artistic spirit that was really what they were about. I don’t know why I keep coming across that I’ve got at least three patients like that, where really in their heart of hearts, what they wanted was to be a musician and they went a different way to get security and that’s great.Quentin (23:05)
Yeah.Zain Hakeem (23:12)
But then they need to stop chasing more money because they need to reawaken their artistry. ⁓ So it’s just interesting when you really talk to people, what values can kind of come out and you realize, hey, yeah, you you got caught up in this thing and now it’s time to get off that track. You’ve got enough security. You’ve got enough for your forever. Right. I you’ve got $10 million. What do you need? Right. And so, you know, let’s move over to a different area.Quentin (23:17)
Mm.Yeah. Yeah.
Man, I could talk to you for so long. I’m gonna make a quick comment on what you just said, then I’m gonna ask you to kind of give us kind of some kind of remarks. man, what you said was so powerful, because there’s always a point in this podcast where I talk about the journey to success. Like so many podcasts want to talk about the success, they want to show the shiny object, but don’t want to show the journey to it. And your train analogy to me, it is the perfect analogy of the journey.
Zain Hakeem (23:46)
Sure.Quentin (24:12)
and the mindset in the journey. So instead of trying to go somewhere quicker, if you had Wi-Fi, I don’t even say the supermodels, right? Like your mindset is on something else. And so therefore the journey becomes much more tolerable. Matter of fact, it’d probably be a longer journey when you get there, you’d be like, we here already? Because your mind is preoccupied, right? And so when we’re in this entrepreneurship, investing, real estate, it’s all about the mindset.Zain Hakeem (24:20)
That’s right.That’s right. That’s right.
Quentin (24:40)
and enjoying the journey when you get to the destination. It’s about keeping your mind in a perspective and a set where you can enjoy the journey, whether it’s fast or short, because unfortunately you’re not the train conductor, right? You haven’t laid down the tracks. It’s like you’re getting on here and you don’t know how long it’s gonna take to get to the destination you wanna get to. It could be super fast or it could be super slow, but if you have your mindset, it’s sometimes not gonna feel fast or slow. It’s gonna be, got here exactly.when I got here, just based on the mindset. So with that being said, I want to give you the floor, just if there any, any last like inspiration or encouragement that you want to give to the audience, I would love for you to get that because you talking about mindset and I think this would be good for entrepreneurs to just listening in about the mindset. So I just want to give you the last quote, quote, some encouraging words.
Zain Hakeem (25:33)
Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, I think I’ll pick it back on kind of what you said. think when you’re on that journey,when you’re in the, the gritty part of that journey, right? One of my, this is actually not me. I borrowed this from one of my best friends. ⁓ He says, Hey, just build the legend. Right. And, and this is what you’re doing right now is you’re building the legend of Zain. Right. You’re building the legend of Quentin. So when you’re grinding that through,
And the reason I love that so much is, you we talked about love, we all love an origin story, right? But when you’re in that origin story, it doesn’t feel like an origin story. It just feels shitty. Right? And so having that perspective that this is the origin story, this is where I’m headed. This is how the legend is built, right? Gives you, I think this notion of time that, hey,
When I’m on the other side of this, this is just going to be an amazing legend of how I got here. There’s going to be an amazing origin story. And that itself leads to the next point is, and it’s just my phrasing, so it doesn’t apply to everybody, but the notice of being an artist of your life. If your life is an art piece, make it a beautiful piece of art. And that’s kind of my perspective on.
Quentin (26:55)
Zain, Man, I’ll tell you, could talk, bro, I could talk to you easily. When I say easily, another 30 minutes. Now that’s easily. I probably could talk to you for another hour, man, cause I even want to explore how you just keep bringing art into the conversation. And you know, we probably could go a whole, cause art the way, like how art impacts the world and how subjective art is, but how much.Zain Hakeem (27:00)
Absolutely, That’s right.we could go forever. For sure.
Quentin (27:20)
One person could put a value on art, and somebody else could put a total substantial amount of value on art, right? So we could just go all over the place. But I said that I was going let you have the last words. me calm down. Thank you, sir.Zain Hakeem (27:31)
No, that’s great.By the way, this is why all my visits are at least an hour long. So I realize I can’t schedule short visits because they’re all at least an hour. so that’s, yeah. Very good.
Quentin (27:36)
Exactly right, yeah, yeah.Absolutely. But listen, man,
I appreciate you. Listen, before we wrap, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate, schedule an appointment, like how can someone get in contact with you that wanted to connect with you?
Zain Hakeem (27:58)
Yeah, absolutely. my YouTube channel is out there, youtube.com/@riverrockmedical. riverrockmedical.com is my website. And of course, just honestly, feel free to reach out the letter Z like zebra @ riverrockmedical.com is my email address. And if somebody wants to collaborate or hop on, that’s that’s the best way of getting hold of.Quentin (28:20)
Absolutely. Well, listen, y’all heard him, Mr. Zain Hakeem. So I thank you so much. I thank you for your story. Thank you for your perspective. Thank you for your mindset. think even, I’m going say even a mind shift that I think some people are really going to get once listening to this episode. And so thank you for taking time out. This was a pleasure, sir.Zain Hakeem (28:39)
Truly my pleasure. I enjoyed it.Quentin (28:41)
Absolutely. So everyone, you know what I’m going say? You know you got value from this. And so just go ahead and subscribe. I keep telling you, we just going to keep bringing amazing people and having amazing conversations. I really want you all to call me out on it one day. Call me out on it if we did not deliver on just some amazing content, right? Be like, Quentin you was wrong. You’re not going to be able to say it. So just go ahead and subscribe. That way you can come back in because we’re going to continue just to bring amazing people up, just like Mr. Zain.And so Mr. Zain, I thank you again, sir, and listen to everyone else. We will see you on the next time.
