Zac Sweat

Zac Sweat wrote a self-help book called Start with the Breadsticks six years after bankruptcy, a second divorce and jail time.

Sweat helps produce the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast, so he had been in the room for other people's episodes long before he sat down for his own. He and Brad Banyas flew to Los Angeles for a video and photo shoot, and somewhere in the planning Sweat mentioned in passing that he had written a book. Brad told him to bring it and read the whole thing on the plane. The hedge fund manager in the next seat asked to borrow it, then texted afterward to say it was good. Brad called Sweat the night before this episode to say he wanted to talk about it.

The book is built on 14 principles Sweat was already applying to his own life. Principle one is brutal truth, which he describes as standing in front of the mirror or looking at your bank account and saying out loud what you actually see. Principle five is to stop giving a fuck, by which he means noticing how many of your decisions were set for you by somebody else. Principle nine is that you cannot do awesome things unless you feel awesome. He started writing in Hawaii, moved back two years later, took a six month break and finished it in Georgia. Twenty publishers turned it down. He self published through Book Baby, hiring people to format it and illustrate it, and ordered a hundred hard copies because he wanted to give it away before he sold it.

The year before he called his mother from Hawaii to say he was writing a book, Sweat was at the tail end of a second divorce, in bankruptcy, with a couple of repossessed cars, addictions, jail time and money he was still borrowing. He was 35. He went through heavy therapy to take apart the belief system he had been running on since childhood, then started over as an online coach. Back in Georgia he helped start a therapeutic center working with what he calls super resistant teens, and spent two and a half years there learning to say hard things to somebody's face without softening them first. He is not a licensed therapist and says so before anyone has to ask.

Sweat is blunt about how little of the book is original. He names his online mentors inside it, Jim Rohn and Bob Proctor and Les Brown among them, and says his book is not saying anything different from Tony Robbins. What actually bothers him is finding used copies for sale on eBay. His mother Connie keeps hers out on the table at her place, perfectly brand new, never creased.