388: How To Trick Yourself Into Achieving Your Financial Goals – Tips Backed By Science With Steve Chou

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You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I’m doing another solo episode to talk about rewiring your brain to make difficult changes in your life. And right now everyone is probably making New Year’s resolutions. So this episode is actually designed to make sure that you follow through with your 2022 goals. But before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode.

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Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

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I also want to thank Clavia, who’s also a sponsor of show. Now you’re working around the clock to build the business you’ve always imagined and do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but any way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business. And do ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubbies. Well, they do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change.

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These companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their information, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Now, Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s klaviyo.com slash my wife.

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And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell like how it is in a run entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast. Right now, it is the first week of January. And if history repeats itself, it’s going to be a time where I’ll receive an especially large number of inquiries on how to start an e-commerce business. And I also know, based on experience, that many of you are not going to follow through with your online business goals. Now, I’m not trying to be a pessimist. I’m just speaking based on personal experience. But this year,

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I want to put a stop to all the silly New Year’s resolutions. I want to make sure that you guys follow through. So in this episode, I’m going to show you my personal strategies on how to rewire your brain to make a difficult change in your life and follow through with it. And it’s worth mentioning here that there’s nothing special about me. I’m a human. We all have the same tendencies, but these strategies work even if you are lazy like I am. All right, so not too long ago.

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My wife and I, we were victims of a dreaded disease known as complacency. Now if you’ve never experienced this illness before, it is a condition where your days blend together, you never accomplish anything noteworthy, and you feel like you’re stuck on an endless treadmill. Now here was our typical day back then. We got up, we went to work, we came home, we ate dinner, we watched TV, we went to bed, we got up the next day, rinse and repeat for eternity.

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Now back then we had no purpose, we weren’t making that much money, and my wife hated her job. And on some days, I wondered whether I could tolerate living this way for 40 years or more before retirement. I remember consulting my dad for advice. Dad, is spending all day at work just a part of adulthood? Because it sucks. And my dad replied, well, why does it suck? And what have you tried to switch things up? And I said, nothing really. And here’s what my dad said to that.

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Well, you can’t expect life to be any different if you don’t change your behavior. Thanks, dad. I mean, shortly after this conversation, my wife and I decided to start a business together and it went nowhere. Even though we were super excited to get started, the zeal quickly started to fade and within a month, we were back to where we started, mental drudgery. Now here’s the thing, we are all capable of accomplishing great things in life, but we often just don’t follow through. Sometimes we suck ourselves out.

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Sometimes our motivations just start to fade. Sometimes we just can’t get started. And nine times out of 10, we do not change, not because we don’t have the ability to change, but we fail because we get in our own way. Now, even though my wife and I eventually went on to create $2 million businesses together, it actually required us to rewire our brain to make the necessary changes. So again, here are my strategies for getting off your butt and taking action backed by science, as well as my own personal experiences.

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All right, so strategy number one, find an excuse to get a fresh start. Now, right now, as I mentioned earlier, it just happens to be New Year’s, and New Year’s is well known for being that time where you magically cast away your bad habits and promise to make a change. Now, we all know that most New Year’s resolutions are destined to fail, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use this time to give yourself a much needed boost of motivation. And in fact, you should take a page out of Hallmark’s book and leverage any remotely special event

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as an excuse to take action. It’s my birthday. I’m gonna finally lose that weight. I’m stuck at home due to the pandemic. Time to start a YouTube channel. Now, speaking of YouTube, I actually dragged my feet for over five years because I couldn’t get myself to start a channel. But I actually used the pandemic as an excuse to launch. And today I have almost 70,000 subscribers as of this recording. Sometimes you just need to spark. It’s also important to meet new people to get a fresh perspective on your life.

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Now when you hang out with the same people, the same friends for years, you tend to revert back to old behaviors that are just hard to shake off. For example, here’s what my friends were saying back then when my wife and I first started our businesses. Steve’s just going through another one of his start your own business phases again and never lasts. Steve, you don’t even like writing. What makes you think you can create a blog? Steve, you hate putting yourself out there. YouTube is just never gonna work for you. Well, when you’re stuck in a rut, it’s actually quite surprising.

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how a few seemingly innocuous comments can negatively affect your motivation. So you want to start with a clean slate with some new friends, go to a conference like the Seller Summit, which is going to be this May. Interacting with people with whom you have zero history is actually quite liberating. The next thing that you want to do is remove all mental hurdles. Now, the problem with motivation and these New Year’s resolutions is that it never lasts. My chemistry teacher once told me that matter always gravitates towards

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higher entropy and lower energy, and it’s true with people too. Earlier, I mentioned that I put off starting a YouTube channel for nearly five years, and it wasn’t for the lack of desire. I just couldn’t keep it up. Every time I created a video, it would take me two hours to film and another six hours to edit. And because each video required eight hours of my time, and I wasn’t making any money for my channel, I started to dread the process, which eventually caused me to quit altogether. Willpower can only take you so far.

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And sometimes the best way to persevere is to just sit down and analyze why you keep failing. You have to figure out what is truly stopping you from taking action. Now, one reason I drag my feet with YouTube is because it took forever to set up my lights and my camera every time I needed to film a video. So to solve this problem, I put together a mini video studio in my office where I could easily push a button and just start filming right away. Now, the other reason I could not maintain my YouTube channel

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was because I hated editing my videos. I love filming, but editing literally sucked the life out of my soul. As a result, the solution to my YouTube problem was to just find a capable video editor. And ever since I found MJ, my current editor, big shout out to you MJ, I’ve been able to create one video per week for the last two years straight and I never missed a week. Once you get to the root of your problem, the rest just kind of works itself out and you can establish a sustainable routine. Now my next tip,

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is to always choose the more enjoyable path. Now, according to a study conducted by Iolette Fishback, the author of the bestselling book, How to Change, it’s much easier to choose an enjoyable path rather than a highly effective path when it comes to sustainable change. So for example, as I get older, I find it harder and harder to stay in shape and lose weight. And over the years, I’ve actually discovered that the most efficient way for me to lose weight is to go running. And by running for just 30 minutes,

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twice a week, I can easily shed 10 pounds within six months. Easy, as long as I maintain a reasonable diet. The problem here is that I hate running with a passion. So instead of running twice per week for 30 minutes, I actually spend two hours now playing ultimate and tennis instead. And even though ultimate and tennis requires, you know, roughly double the amount of time is running to lose the same amount of weight, I actually enjoy playing both sports. So as a result,

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staying in shape is much less of a chore. And according to Fishbox study, people tend to care more about instant gratification as opposed to long-term reward. So as a result, you are much less likely to maintain an unpleasant activity for a long period of time unless you can see immediate results. And people who pursue their goals in a fun way always stick with them longer. All here’s my next tip. Bundle difficult tasks with enjoyable activities.

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Now, finding pleasure with difficult tasks is all great and all, but sometimes it’s actually impossible to enjoy what you’re doing. So for example, I hate doing the accounting for my businesses. I hate writing product descriptions for the products that we sell. I actually hate lifting weights to build strength. And what I found at least is that making drastic changes to your life is rarely fun and more often than not, it sucks. I mean, it just sucks. I mean, there’s no real way to sugar coat it.

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But sometimes you can trick yourself into making hard tasks more tolerable by associating them with an activity you enjoy. So here’s an example. When I was young, my mom always took me to get ice cream at Swenson’s after a piano lesson. And even though I never really enjoyed piano, I always looked forward to getting a caramel turtleneck fudge cone with chocolate sprinkles afterwards. Now whenever I have to write product descriptions for Bumblebee linens, I actually snack on some of my favorite foods. Whenever I have to lift weights,

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I listen to my favorite music. Now, if you can bundle an unpleasant task with something that you love, the two activities often average out to something that’s much more tolerable. My next strategy is something that all of you should be doing, which is to join a mastermind group. Now, when my wife and I first started our business, we were lonely. We didn’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of, and we had no one to hold us accountable for our progress. Joining a mastermind group solved most of our problems.

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Now a mastermind group is a cohort of people with similar goals who meet on a regular basis to share ideas. And in our case, my wife and I formed a mastermind group to discuss e-commerce strategies and we met with our group about once per month. Now mastermind groups are great for the following reasons. One, your group will provide you with advice and insights that you never would have considered. You’ll get a confidence boost from helping other people with problems that you’ve already solved yourself. You’ll gain an accountability partner to make sure that you make forward progress.

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One time, my mastermind group helped me grow my business 42 % in just seven weeks. Now there’s also a hidden benefit of having a mastermind group that is actually rarely discussed. Now according to Eskris Winkler, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management, giving advice and teaching others will improve your own outcomes in life. And here’s what I discovered. I discovered that whenever I gave advice to the group, I was much more likely to follow through with my own words

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to avoid being hypocritical. And this goes true with the chorus too. Anytime I give a lesson, I make sure that I’m implementing that lesson very thoroughly with my own store.

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If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

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Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copywriting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

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And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show. The next tip to making a change is to create a flexible routine. Now, the best way to build a habit and make forward progress with your goals is to create a routine and a schedule. I don’t do anything whenever I feel like it. Instead, every task for my business is actually penciled in on my calendar at the beginning of the week. So for example,

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Mondays, I film a YouTube video and prepare a podcast for publication. Tuesdays, I create a lesson plan for my course. Wednesdays, I give office hours to my profitable online store course members. Thursday, I give office hours to my profitable audience course members. Friday, I work on my e-commerce store marketing and plan the following week. Saturday, I don’t do anything. Sunday, I write a blog post while my kids are in Russian math class. Now, for the most part, I work from 7.30 a.m. until noon on most weekdays.

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and work roughly 20 hours per week. However, it’s important to note that I never assign specific times to any of my tasks. Everything on my schedule is flexible with the stipulation that it must get done by the end of the week. And just a quick note, I actually used to assign specific time blocks to all my tasks, but I found that if I ever missed a particular time block, then I’d be much more inclined to just skip the task altogether. So I don’t recommend assigning specific time blocks to your tasks.

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All right, here’s another trick that I use to make sure I do something. This particular tactic is what I call task associations. Now a task association is a group of tasks that are lumped together in like an if-then fashion. If you guys are coders, you know what I’m talking about, an if-then statement. So for example, here’s a task association that I use to make sure that I do pull-ups every day. Whenever I go to the bathroom, I do five pull-ups. My pull-up bar is conveniently placed right outside of the bathroom.

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So I just quickly pumped them out every time after a bathroom break. Now, prior to implementing this task association, I can never get myself to do pull-ups, but now it’s easy and I don’t even think about it. When I gotta go to the bathroom, I do my pull-ups and that’s that. With my businesses, I actually make an effort to complete one business task every time I use my computer. So for example, whenever I use Facebook, I go down my business task list and just cross something off. The task could be something as simple as emailing someone back.

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but something always gets done and I make forward progress. Now these next two strategies for getting stuff done and making a change and rewiring your brain are a little bit more drastic. But one tactic that I’ve used in the past is to put money on the line. Now there’s a goal that I absolutely want to achieve, I will give $1,000 to a friend and tell him or her not to return my money until I’ve accomplished my objective. Now this is actually a scary and painful way to force yourself to take action, but it works.

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Everyone needs a kick in the butt and sometimes the best motivation is actually the fear of loss. Now, occasionally my business partner, Tony and I will make a bet that we have to do something embarrassing if we don’t meet our goals. But whatever you do, you got to choose something that genuinely inflicts pain or humiliation. Now this final tactic is something that I don’t necessarily recommend, but for some people it’s the only thing that works. And that’s to put yourself in a drastic situation.

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Basically, if I were to define what a drastic situation is, it’s basically putting yourself in a sink or swim situation. If you want to start a business, then quit your job cold turkey so you’re not making any money anymore. And the idea here is that through the sheer desperation of needing money, your brain will find a way to make things happen. Now, for my wife and I, we put ourselves in a life-changing situation when we decide to start a family. When my wife became pregnant with our first child, I was forced into responsibility. All of a sudden,

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I wanted to make life-changing money. I wanted to buy a home in a great school district. I wanted to spend all my time with my kids. Having a child rewired my brain to make a change. Now, I’m not telling you to go off and start a family now, but you have to figure out what strategy works for you. And as my dad once famously said, you can’t expect your life to get better if you continue down the exact same path. So use these nine techniques that I just described to take charge of your life.

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And I don’t want to hear about any more failed New Year’s resolutions from any of you guys. Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now, if you need me as an accountability partner, feel free to email me over at steveatmywifecoupterjob.com and tell me your goals for 2022. And then check back in with me at the end of the year or else I will publicly shame you on the podcast. Just kidding, but do email me. Feel free to email me your goals. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoupterjob.com slash episode 388.

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And once again, I want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifecoderjob.com slash KLABIYO. Once again, that’s mywifecoderjob.com slash KLABIYO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base.

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SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P O S T S C R I P T dot I O slash Steve. Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog and if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and they’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.